In last week’s article, What’s a “Gatekeeper” and Why Do I Need to “Get Past” Them?, I outlined a strategy designed to enlist the gatekeeper’s cooperation and get you to the decision-maker. It goes like this:

Since gatekeepers can’t make marketing decisions, but they can say “no” to those selling it, give them something to which they can’t say “no”—such as more customers and increased revenue— or reveal a problem they didn’t know existed, in order to get them thinking: “Perhaps my boss needs to know about this …”

One commentator (“a gatekeeper”) said my example wouldn’t work on them—and proceeded to explain why. Yet, in reality, if I’d walked into that person’s business the day before, there’s a 60 percent chance it would have worked. Why am I so sure? Because one “Big Box” SEO company actually measured a number of different approaches to determine which was most effective. Their research revealed that this one in particular landed an appointment with the decision-maker six out of ten times.

One sure way to fail at prospecting is to believe anecdotal evidence as fact. Anecdotal evidence can come in the form of one person’s opinion—as in the example above—or as your own. Just because you think a particular approach will work or not doesn’t mean it will.

Regardless of how effective an approach is, no “technique” is 100 percent successful. Yet, we’d all like to think we’re the exception, that we’re not as readily persuaded or manipulated as the next guy (or gal). In his book, Influence: Science and Practice, psychology professor Robert Cialdini discovered there’s a huge disconnect between how people say they would react when someone was attempting to influence their behavior, and how people actually react.

For example, one control group was asked if they’d allow someone who requested to cut in front of them in line to do so simply based on their looks. Overwhelming, people denied that they’d make a decision on the other person’s attractiveness, or lack thereof.

But in a blind study using people of average looks and ones with “super model” good looks, the super models were allowed to cut far more often than the average-looking individuals. Other similar studies have shown that good-looking individuals obtained help more readily than the average-looking men and women. Clearly, the majority of people aren’t even aware of the factors that influence and persuade them. The truth is, each of us is more susceptible to being persuaded or manipulated than we’d like to believe.

People will always offer anecdotal evidence why a particular prospecting method doesn’t work. There’s even an entire industry that’s sprung up around the myth that “cold-calling is dead.” Yet, most of these voices have either a bias or an agenda. (And what better way to sell your “new and improved” prospecting sales program than to convince your audience that the “old way” no longer works.)

The only way to know what truly does and doesn’t work is by obtaining objective proof. And that requires testing your approach enough times to demonstrate whether it’s successful or not. There are many who scoff at tried-and-true sales and prospecting methods. But as one of the wiser members of SitePoint’s forums recently said, “Trivialize the value of sales at your own risk.”

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Do you list product or service features on your site? What about benefits?

If you’re going to communicate clearly with the audience for whatever it is you offer, you’ll need to understand the difference between these two concepts. Then you’ll need to be able to define them for your product and your audience.

Without this knowledge, your landing page or promo email is likely to read as a mishmash of Interesting Things About My Product. Whether or not they hit the mark for your audience will depend on chance.

But once you get these concepts—and they’re not exactly rocket science—you’ll be able to really speak to the people you want to reach.

Feature or benefit?

When you’re looking at your own (darn fine, I’m sure) handiwork and thinking about what it offers, it can be all too easy to get carried away.

It has this! It does that! It’s better than Brand X! It’s the first Y of its kind! It’s a game changer!

But which of these are features? And which are benefits? There are some pretty easy ways to tell.

Fact versus feeling

One way you can work out if something is a feature or a benefit is to ask yourself whether it’s a fact, or it’s a feeling.

“Compatible with iOS 6″ is a fact. There’s no feeling there. It’s a feature.

“Helps you keep up with friends” speaks to a feeling. We looked at this line when we reviewed the Flickr homepage. There, it was presented as an outcome of the comment and note functionality—or features—that Flickr provides.

If you find yourself falling down the “but it does help you keep up with friends! That’s a fact too!” rabbit hole, don’t think so literally about the terms.

The word “feelings” implies an emotional component that facts don’t have. How many people are going to get emotional about iOS compatibility? Few (none?). But most of us feel good about the idea of keeping up with our friends’ adventures.

Product versus audience

Another way to work out if something’s a feature or a benefit is to ask who has it: the product or the audience? Free phone credits are a feature of a phone plan. The credits are something the product has bundled with it.

But benefits are a function of a feature’s interaction with the audience. For parents buying the plan for their kids, free phone credits might mean peace of mind: they know little Betty can always call if she needs to, so she’ll never get stuck somewhere without a way to get home.

But for Betty, free phone credits may mean she stays better connected with her friends, and doesn’t miss any important gossip as she attempts to scale the social ladder at school.

This raises an important point: benefits can meet conscious needs (staying connected with friends) or subconscious needs (social maneuvering). So it’s important to know your audience and their needs up front. This will help you work out how to pitch the benefits of your service in a way that speaks to those particular people.

Features and benefits in action

Let’s use these two approaches together to try to decipher benefits from features in the real world.

We’ll take lumosity.com as an example. Here’s their brief service description, which I found on a landing page for their service (that is, not the homepage):

Okay, so what about these three points? What’s a benefit, and what’s a feature?

I’d say the first is a benefit, because it’s something the customer has, and the statement elicits a feeling.

The second two points are features, as they’re facts related to something the product has: it’s digital, and it offers tracking.

Getting creative

Further down that landing page we can see features and benefits presented in a different way. They’ve been separated, and the benefits are presented in the words of users, as testimonials.

The business owners I work with often feel that they need testimonials as a form of social proof, and they certainly achieve that goal.

But as this example shows, some well-chosen testimonials can translate features into user-relevant benefits, almost without you having to do a thing—except, of course, choosing examples that convey the precise benefits you want to promote.

How many features? How many benefits?

Now you can immediately tell a benefit from a feature. You can make a list of features for your product or service, and quickly translate each one into a benefit to your audience.

But which should you focus on in selling your product or service: features or benefits? How can you strike the right balance?

If you own the product, or you developed it, you probably think you have a gut feel for the right answers here. But in truth, you’re probably too close to your offering to see it as objectively as you need to.

Enter: Consumer Involvement Theory. This is a theory of customer behaviour that looks at a product and assesses how involved, and how emotional or rational, customers are when they’re deciding to buy it. For the full background, this article is concise but informative.

How can CIT help us? It lets us position our products within a matrix like this one:

Involvement refers to the complexity of the purchase. Buying a subscription to the average app probably rates pretty low on the scale of involvement—unless, as with some productivity apps, for example, users think their jobs depend on making the right choice.

For lumosity, I think involvement might be low to middling.

Emotional purchases are ones that we want to feel strongly about—purchases we buy into emotionally. Informational purchases tend to be more about gathering facts to rationally make the “best” choice.

For lumosity, I think the purchase is probably about health and (mental) fitness, so while we’re going to make a rational decision based on information, there’s no doubt we have an emotional investment in the decision at some level.

So a balance would need to be struck between benefits and features to sell the service, and this is what we see on the lumosity homepage.

Put the theory to work for you

Take a minute to work out where your offering fits on the matrix. This should give you an idea of how much you need to focus on benefits, and how much on features.

You might then allocate a percentage of your message to talk of benefits, and a percentage to features. Will it be 50/50? 75/25? Once you’ve worked that out, you can roughly apply that percentage split to your word counts, page layouts, and so on, to make sure you’re communicating what you need to in the way that best suits your audience.

While you’re at it, prioritize your features and benefits on the basis of your product or service’s value proposition or USP.

Now you’ve got some nice lists of features and benefits, ordered by importance. And you know how much focus you need to give to each. The only question that’s left is: how will you present them?

As a specs list that lets users easily compare your offering against others?

As a customer or member video that shows the benefits one individual gained from your service—and inspires others to join?

Or something else? Let us know what’s most likely to suit your brand—and your audience—in the comments.

In my previous article, What Every Freelancer Should Know about Prospecting for New Business, I said that selling is easy but prospecting is hard. And by far, the most intimidating aspect of prospecting is when you have to interrupt a complete stranger and attempt to get him or her to agree to meet with you. But to get to that decision-maker, there’s another, all-powerful entity you must first confront …

The Gatekeeper.

Gatekeepers can’t make marketing decisions, but they can say “no” to those selling it, because it’s their job to protect their boss. That’s why opening with “Hi, I’m from [INSERT COMPANY NAME HERE]. I’m looking for the person who handles your marketing,” is generally a bad idea. If the gatekeeper is empowered to say “no” to sales people, why would you utter a phrase that immediately labels yourself as one?

Encountering resistance is natural part of prospecting, and you won’t get far selling your services if you’re not prepared to respond to it. But you can circumvent it entirely by treating the gatekeeper like he or she is the decision-maker.

Yes, you heard right. You see, in a typical prospecting call, three things must happen. You must:

1. Get to the decision-maker
2. Say something interesting
3. Ask for the appointment

But that three-step process doesn’t have to occur in that order. Suppose you “broke” the pattern like so:

1. Say something interesting
2. Get to the decision-maker
3. Ask for the appointment

But wait a minute, John. Treating the gatekeeper like the decision-maker makes no sense. Didn’t you say the gatekeeper has no authority to say “yes” to marketing or advertising? That’s right, I did.

But they don’t have the authority to say “no” either.

Let me be more specific. They don’t have the authority to say “no” to the end result of what you’re selling. Such as more customers, increased revenue, more effective online presence.

Treating the gatekeeper as the decision-maker disturbs their complacency. You need to put this thought into his or her head: “Perhaps my boss would want to know about this …” or “We laid off five people last month. Maybe we do need to improve sales …”

Working at AT&T, before I stumbled upon this, secretaries and receptionists would tell me, “We don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages.” (I often found out later that they did.) Even if I did manage to get to a decision-maker, the most common response I’d hear was “I’m not interested” or “We’re all set.”

Sales trainers refer to these as “objections” and teach you to “overcome” them. But, in reality, these rebuttals are resistance—you know, that knee-jerk reaction most of us have when we realize we’re being solicited. By acting like the gatekeeper is the decision maker, you can get past that by leveraging the fact that they have no power to say “no” to executive-level decisions that may affect the well-being of the company. Ironically, assuming the gatekeeper has the power to say “yes” actually takes away his or her power to tell you “no.”

This is known as a pattern interrupt. That’s when you interrupt that “knee-jerk” reaction (or pattern) with which gatekeepers are accustomed to responding to sales people. If you keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll keep getting what you’re getting—a “knee-jerk” response:

Hi, I’m from XYZ Web Design. I’m looking for the person who handles your marketing.

Umm, yeah. We’re all set, thanks.

But interrupting the pattern yields radically different results:

I noticed something about your website and I have a concern that you might be losing business to one of your closest competitors, without even knowing it.

Umm, let me get my boss …

Now you try.

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According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years. Included in the “Top 10 reasons” is “lack of sales” or, as a recent Forbes article described it: having no clear marketing funnel.

You need to develop a way to cost efficiently attracts leads, then convert some of them. This seems so basic, but hundreds of thousands of businesses start with no clear marketing funnel and then have to rely on luck or referrals to get customers in through the door.

A marketing funnel is the process that brings prospective buyers into your sales cycle and enables you to close a deal within a specific time frame. Unfortunately, there is no one “silver bullet” that magically drops prospects into your sales funnel. Effective marketing is more like a team than a shotgun. And a key player on that team ought to be hunter-style prospecting. (That’s when you head into the jungle to eat what you kill.)

Prospecting for new business can seem like a terrifying proposition, so if landing new or better-paying clients is not mission-critical, feel free to avoid it. But unless you’ve built up an existing base of repeat clients, or you generate sufficient word-of-mouth recommendations, prospecting for new business is essential to your survival.

Prospecting involves creating conversations that lead to sales. Having a great blog and social media activity is all well and good. But unless they create conversations that lead to a steady stream of sales, you might be hiding behind marketing to avoid selling. If your conversation is not designed to bring the other person into your sales cycle and close a deal within a specific time frame, it’s not prospecting.

Using an “Interest-Creating Remark” to Set Sales Appointments

Here’s what those confronted with the need to “sell” their services don’t like to hear: that prospecting requires interrupting people. In order for that interruption to create a conversation, you need an interest-creating remark as an opener. Here are three approaches:

Quote a Trend or Statistic

You can use trends or statistics to grab a prospect’s attention:

Trend: “Mobile search is projected to surpass desktop searches in less than two years.”
Statistic: “61 percent of mobile consumers will leave a site that’s not mobile-ready.”

The problem with using facts and figures is that they don’t “grab” like we expect they should. In order for a statistic or trend, to be effective, you need to take it one step further and disturb their complacency.

Disturb their Complacency

While trends or statistics make perfect sense to you and me, the typical business owner fails to make the connection between how that fact or figure affects his bottom line. You must “connect the dot” to address the other person’s unspoken response of “So what? Why should I care?” Go ahead, shake him up a bit.

I noticed something about your website and I have a concern that you might be losing business to one of your closest competitors.

How so?

You don’t have a mobile website, but XYZ Company does. 61 percent of consumers will abandon a non-mobile site for a competitor’s whose is. You might be losing business to XYZ, without even knowing it.

Offer a Solution to an Assumed Need

Two recent surveys have revealed the following about the typical small business owner:

• 76 percent of SMBs said “how to attract new customers” was their “top concern,” and 69 percent said it was “the #1 challenge” they face
• The average business owner works more than 50 hours a week and sleeps less than seven hours a night

From this, you can “assume” that many SMBs are highly-concerned about attracting new customers, but are too time-strapped to do it themselves. Marketing Pilgrim put it like this:

For the small business owner, it’s all about ROE – Return on Effort. They already have their hands full with the day to day running of their business, so there’s little time left over for anything else. If all a person has to do is say “run it again” when the newspaper calls about their ad, that beats the hours it will take to learn about Promoted Tweets on Twitter.

Based on the above, can you fill in the blanks for an effective interest-creating remark?

We help business owners who are concerned about _______________________, but don’t have _______________________. Is that something you need help with?

It’s not What You Say …

Over the years, I’ve become convinced that at least half (if not more) of your success lies in how you say it. A mediocre interest-creating remark delivered well will win out over an outstanding one delivered badly.

Now’s not the time to exude passion. So be charming, be likable, be casual—even nonchalant. Just don’t be intense. You’ll just freak the other person out. And freaked-out prospects usually don’t agree to an appointment.

At least in my experience.

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Many developer-business owners and entrepreneurs I speak to have fallen prey to the “this thing I built will sell itself” trap. Then they wonder why no one downloads their new product, or signs up to their new service. Then they call in a copywriter.

What’s the problem here? If you ask me, the strong focus on MVP among startups doesn’t help.

A minimum-viable-product focus sees your team working round the clock to ship something. They get to launch date, and realise they don’t really have any product information—collateral, if you will—to support that launch.

So they whack a signup or download page together, list their app in the App store and Play, and tweet about it. The MO is: build something that works, get it out there, and see if it flies.

But what’s the point of racing to launch an MVP if that’s all you’re going to do? An MVP might make business sense. What doesn’t is to follow it up with an MVW—a minimum viable website.

In this article, we’ll see how you can easily support your next product or service launch with a smart landing page—and without a copywriter if your launch budget won’t allow it.

Let’s take a look at a new, recently released app that’s close to home: SitePoint’s own podling.

An MVW in action

The website that accompanied the recent release of podling is really just a landing page with four words on it.

To find out anything about this service, you need to go offsite, to the podling page on the Apple store, where you get a brief description of the app, and a screen capture.

Many Apple app developers will argue that the page on the Apple store is the main game, and that the website doesn’t matter. But if you’re really going to grow your market beyond the first wave of innovators, you’ll need more than an Apple store page.

What’s an innovator? In any audience, there are five types of customers: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Only one of these groups—the risk-taking, tech-loving innovators—is going to bother downloading an app to find out what it does and work out how it can help them. And only a small portion will bother to do that. After all, there are plenty of apps out there. Why should they bother downloading yours?

So what’s the solution here? Do you need a full-blown website for your MVP? Well, no—but if you’re going to give your product or service the best chance of getting audience attention and uptake—an MVA (minimum viable audience), you might say—you’re going to need more than an MVW.

Let’s take a look at another example that ups the ante.

Instagram: basic, done well

The Instagram site does a pretty good job of presenting the app. While Instragram is not an MVP, this kind of website is achievable by any startup or small business.

Like podling’s, this landing page contains the brand name and a four-word tagline. It also has links to the Apple store and Play—to download pages that offer a range of screenshots and details about the app.

But Instragam has a couple of extra assets on its website.

The first is a little blurb, containing key words from the brand vocabulary, which is closely aligned with the category (photography) vocabulary: filters, share, post, and photos.

Why not introduce your new product or service with a quick, friendly elevator pitch? Sure, writing a quick, friendly elevator pitch that means something to users is easier said than done. But it is doable.

The other assets Instagram is using to promote downloads? Help content and a blog link.

Few startups have a blog to point users to at the launch of their product. That’s fine. Linking to your blog from your landing page once you have both assets is, I hope, a no-brainer.

But what about FAQs? Instagram calls this “Support” in its IA, but “Help Centre” at the source.

As Instagram has done, you might just link to your FAQs from your landing page footer. This:

• shows you care. The fact that you’ve got FAQs suggests that you care about your users, not just your glorious technology.
• shows that you understand users. You know that not everyone will want to sign up or download to find out about your offering. Your FAQs are free information for those who want it.
• shows that you’re serious. FAQs show you’re committed to your product or service. The fly-by-nighters wouldn’t bother to create FAQs, would they? No. But you have, because you’re building something bigger than an app—you’re building a business, and relationships with real people: your users.
• is not “in your face.” If users want more information, the reasoning goes, they’ll likely look around for it. If they don’t—if they’re happy to download—they won’t even notice you have FAQs. They’re there if you want them, and will probably go largely unnoticed if you don’t.

Note that your FAQs don’t need to be as extensive as these—you could just have a handful of key questions at launch, and build on them over time. No big deal.

Think about it: most of us know what Instagram is and does. Yet the business provides all this information. On the other hand, countless new-to-market apps with no authority or brand presence tell users next to nothing about themselves.

Don’t hope users will bother to download your app to find out what it does. That is no way to build a userbase.

Focus instead on providing them with access to all the content assets—all the information you have about your new product that may interest them. Use what you have to tell your product or service story.

No, users probably won’t need it all. But different users look for different pieces of information, and different types of reassurance. Your landing page needs to address as many of them as it can if your MVP is going to attract an MVA.

Going further

Okay, so to launch your MVP, you want a landing page that has:

• your brand name and tagline
• some information about what the product or service does for the user
• a sign up form or link to download as required
• a link to support or FAQs that provides more information for those who want it.

What if your product or service is a little more involved than Instagram? And what are you going to do with that demo video you stuck on YouTube so you could tweet it? What about that recommendation you got from an influencer in your industry?

Take a leaf out of Evernote’s book: they’ve smartly integrated these elements—along with selected FAQs and blog posts—into their landing page.

Evernote’s even gone so far as to include links to “Product Guides”, which detail the technical features of each release for each platform.

You might not have this level of user-friendly documentation. But let’s say you wrote a whitepaper or ebook that explains your offering to encourage people to sign up for your service. Could you include that as a permanently offered download from your product’s landing page?

Could you embed your YouTube demo? Could you add that great comment the industry pundit said about your brand as a featured quote?

The answers to these questions will depend on the nature of the content assets you have at your fingertips, and your audiences. And, of course, the goal isn’t just to jam a whole lot of stuff on your landing page.

But if you’re launching an MVP, and you have any content assets that could be presented to, or repurposed for, potential customers, take a look at them. See what’s worth including—and where there are information gaps that you need to fill.

“Lighter is better” … or is it?

One objection I hear to this position—in which you provide information on your new product or service, rather than expecting people to learn about it by using it—is that “it’s too much.”

“Too much information is overwhleming,” people say. “It’s a simple product! So simple! It doesn’t need a bunch of words around it. I’d rather let the app speak for itself.”

Newsflash: if your landing page doesn’t convince users to download your product or sign up for your service, it’s not going to get a chance to speak for itself.

Remember the Instagram example. You could hardly say there was too much information on that landing page.

When you’re launching a product or service, less information probably won’t mean more customers. Including, or linking to, carefully chosen, well-pitched supporting content on your landing page is the smarter way to sell your new product or service.

What does your product or service landing page look like? Does it use key words from your brand vocabulary? Does it provide users with enough information to pique their interest—and download or sign up? Let us know in the comments.

In my last article, I said that you can easily mimic the practices “Big Box” SEO companies have used to make themselves into such effective sales organizations. One of those practices is prospecting for new business.

Prospecting is contacting people with the sole intention of drumming up business immediately. Every industry has a predictable sales cycle—that is, the time required to take a client from first meeting to final handshake. The higher the cost and the more complex the sale, the more time involved. The sales cycle for a box of nails is around 30 seconds. For multi-million dollar enterprise application software, it’s more like 30 months. The goal of prospecting is to find someone who’s likely to buy your product or service within your typical sales cycle.

Because prospecting can be downright terrifying, it might be helpful to establish what prospecting is not—just in case you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that your current activities can be construed as such.

Prospecting is not Selling

Selling is easy. I love selling, even when the prospect doesn’t buy. Prospecting, on the other hand, is hard. Prospecting is finding someone to whom you can sell. Selling begins only after prospecting reaches a successful conclusion.

Prospecting is actually a form of marketing, which is why cold-calling is called tele-marketing not tele-selling. I make that distinction so you may realize that it’s entirely possible to have someone else do your prospecting, leaving you to do the selling.

Inbound Marketing is not Prospecting

Yellow Pages, paid or organic search, and blogs all help you be found when potential customers are in research or buying mode. Inbound marketing is when the buyer is seeking a seller. Prospecting is the exact opposite. It’s the seller seeking a buyer.

Connecting on Social Media is not Prospecting

While posting special offers on social media channels is a form of prospecting, doing so exclusively is the quickest route to being “unfollowed.” The primary purpose of social media is to establish relationships with your followers. Those may lead to sales, but social engagement cannot be called “prospecting” in the strictest sense of the word.

There are many ways to communicate with potential buyers. But unless the sole purpose of that communication is to bring the other person into your sales cycle and close a deal within a specific time frame, it’s not prospecting.

What Prospecting Is

Here are the activities I define as “prospecting”:

Cold-Calling

Cold-calling is using the phone in an attempt to set up a sales appointment with a decision-maker.

Cold-Canvassing

Cold-canvassing is cold-calling in person. Rather than trying to reach a decision-maker over the phone, you walk in.

Email Prospecting

While I don’t personally advocate it, you can use email to the same end. Sending unsolicited email is less effective than other prospecting methods and can land you on the wrong side of the law, if done wrong.

LinkedIn Prospecting

While prospecting on social media is generally frowned upon, LinkedIn is the exception to that rule. When done properly, LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for gaining new clients. The reason it’s so effective is that it allows you to target prospects who have a highly probability of needing what you sell. I’ve been prospected a number of times on LinkedIn and in many cases, it was something we were already in the market for.

To Prospect or Not to Prospect

A colleague recently shared with me that his business has changed from chasing new projects to managing long-term clients who pay to keep him within easy reach. But this doesn’t happen overnight. Here are some reasons you might engage in some or all of the prospecting methods I’m recommending.

• You’re just starting out and need clients right away
• You’re in a slump and need clients right away
• You’ve gotten lazy about your other marketing activities and need clients right away
• Your other marketing efforts have suddenly dried up and you need clients right away
• You’ve just lost your two largest clients and you need to replace that revenue right away
• You have too many cheapskate, over-demanding clients and you need to replace them with better-paying ones right away

Are you beginning to sense a common theme? I’ve had people comment that they’d rather quit their business and work for someone else than resort to cold-calling. Personally, I wish I’d learned to cold-call and prospect effectively before I decided to quit my web business.

How about you?

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In last week’s article, Competing against the “Big Box” SEOs, I said that, faced with declining revenue, traditional media outlets are adding digital to their offering. This means that some of your best clients are likely being approached by their radio, Yellow Pages, or newspaper rep—perhaps someone they’ve purchased advertising from for years—and being offered the very services you provide. Or ones you don’t.

Add companies like Reach Local and Yodle into the mix, and you’re up against some highly-experienced sales people who know how to prospect and close business. That’s not to say there’s no more room for the individual freelancer. But in the same manner that WalMart and Home Depot have displaced the neighborhood merchant and local hardware store, the same threat looms for the local freelancer.

So what tactics do these companies employ that makes them so successful? For starters, they no longer position themselves as “web design” companies because—let’s face it—businesses need more than that to succeed online today. So why are you still hanging onto that label?

No, most have evolved into some type of web or digital marketing agency, which includes both organic and paid search, display advertising, social media, and even reputation management. This means there’s always something to offer a potential client, regardless of whether he’s a beginning, intermediate, or super-savvy web marketer.

Armed with a full quiver, these reps will approach your clients by looking for a “hole” in their marketing armor. They won’t bother discussing how their h1’s and title tags aren’t properly optimized. Instead, they’ll zero in on something more basic, like how their website isn’t mobile-friendly, or that they don’t appear in the local search results and how those impact their bottom line.

When used properly, this becomes a powerful prospecting tool; and by far, the most effective tactic a “Big Box” SEO rep will employ is hunter-style prospecting.

What’s Hunter-Style Prospecting?

You’d think that today’s enlightened digital agency would rely exclusively on search and social media to find clients. While they most certainly do employ these methods, the standard fare for their sales teams are cold-calling and cold-canvassing.

If you think these methods are ineffective and “old school,” you’d be wrong. Traditional media reps have used both successfully for years, and the “enlightened” digital agency has followed suit. You see, these companies understand one important demographic regarding the typical SMB—that they’re extremely time-strapped. In fact, a recent survey revealed that the average business owner works more than 50 hours a week and sleeps less than seven hours a night.

This means that after a 10-hour day of scheduling service calls, maintaining his trucks, paying the bills, making sure his shop meets OSHA regulations, struggling to complying with the new health care laws, worrying about cash flow and wondering if he’ll make this week’s payroll, Fred the plumber has no time or inclination to think about his advertising or whose marketing blog he ought to be reading. Nor is he likely to follow any of them on Twitter.

The Big Box SEOs know that an old school cold-call or unexpected drop-in the quickest way to get on Fred’s radar. Sure, Fred may get mad and throw the rep out. But the best sales people know that with a powerful interest-creating remark, six out of ten “Freds” will agree to an appointment.

Many of you decided to sell your services because of your technical expertise. For me, that expertise was being a good front-end web designer. After teaming up with a business partner who was a programmer, we thought we had all we needed. But we soon realized that our success or failure hinged on how well we could market and sell, not how well we could design and code.

The good news is, you can adopt the principles and practices of the Big Box SEOs. By “principles” I mean that they have a well-oiled prospecting machine that drives new business. Do you? A typical rep for one of these companies may need to close five sales a week to meet quota. Multiply that by dozens of reps, and you begin to see how much business these companies must bring in to maintain and stay profitable. You, on the other hand, may only need to close two sales a month to make a good living.

By “practices” I’m referring to the specify tactics they employ. While cold-calling and cold-canvassing are effective, you may have a different method that brings in sufficient business. So long as you have one.

Do you?

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This past week, I was out of town attending a four-day sales training session. One of the trainers made the point that every organization that is serious about selling its products or services has developed a standardized sales process for its reps to follow. I’ve worked for enough of them to confirm this to be true.

Years back, when it came to selling advertising, the various media competed for wallet share. Yet many companies advertised in multiple channels, so it wasn’t a zero-sum game. That meant the Yellow Page rep could still sell advertising to a business that had invested heavily in radio, television, or even another Yellow Page directory, because they complemented one another.

All that’s changed, however. Faced with declining revenue, traditional media outlets are adding digital to their offering. So instead of competing with online media for ad dollars, Television, Radio, Yellow Pages, and Newspapers are competing directly with online media by offering the very same services.

This becomes a zero-sum game-changer, because now you’re up against some formidable companies, with a strong and experienced sales force. Yellow Page reps from companies like YP Interactive and SuperMedia are some of the best-trained sales people around. And they’re hard at work cold-calling and cold-canvassing your target market: the small- to medium-sized business.

What’s more, these small- to medium-sized businesses expect companies who provide marketing services to offer the full Monty, from search to social to local. Suddenly, being a mere “web designer”—or even an “SEO”—might make you seem antiquated.

The renowned Peter Drucker once said, “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” If you’re serious about building your business—even if that business will never employ anyone other than you—then you must get serious about creating and keeping customers. And the first part of that equation means prospecting and selling. After all, nothing happens until a sale is made.

How to Create a Customer

You may one day enjoy the luxury of obtaining all your business through word-of-mouth. But most companies do not start out that way (and those that do are the exception, not the rule). So until that day comes, you’ll have to engage in either or both methods of customer acquisition: prospecting and networking.

If nothing happens until a sale is made, then selling can’t take place without prospecting. Don’t confuse the two. Prospecting is simply finding qualified leads that may buy your product or service. Selling is everything that happens afterwards.

Networking is prospecting’s hipper, gentler younger brother. (And if you must throw social media and content marketing into the mix, that’s just networking via fiber-optic cable rather than face-to-face.)

The most serious among us will participate in both—because they know each has its strengths and weaknesses. Prospecting is fast but nerve-racking for the faint-of-heart. Networking is slow but can generate word-of-mouth gravity that pays dividends over the long haul. Prospecting is pay-per-click: instant ranking, but the leads dry up equally fast once the budget is spent. Networking is SEO: a long-term commitment that pays for itself over time. It’s no longer an either-or proposition. Your survival may hinge on doing both.

How to Keep a Customer

Keeping a customer is easy. Just make it impossible for them to leave. I don’t mean resorting to underhanded tactics like holding their domain name or source files hostage. Rather, ask yourself whether your business is designed to produce a one-time customer or a life-time client.

I said earlier that SMBs expect web companies to provide a full suite of marketing services. If you’ve pigeoned-holed yourself into the role of “web designer,” you’ve opened yourself up to your clients looking elsewhere for their other digital marketing needs. The concept of making the fourth sale first means anticipating your clients’ needs even before they know they have them.

Bear in mind that there’s a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Despite the popular notion, providing “outstanding customer service” is not the key to retaining clients. That’s the cost of entry, one that your competition can easily match.

Loyalty, on the other hand, is a completely different commodity. Loyalty is when your clients turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business with you.

Competing against the “Big Box” SEOs requires you to be as good, if not better, at client acquisition and retention as they are. Their greatest strength—their size—is also their greatest weakness. Do you know how to exploit it?

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Trade exhibits at conferences offer a deeply hands on and uniquely personal format for selling, buying and interaction between customers and sellers.

I mean this literally; there simply isn’t any typical situation in which suppliers can personally display what they’re offering to so many different people whose very business is related to exactly what these sellers are offering, and all in one single large space!

The same goes for the buyers: instead of browsing impersonal advertising or reviews online or shopping around to numerous physically separated stores, they can simply walk down a series of booths and ask all the questions they want while touching the product and tinkering with the services offered.

It’s the ultimate in “kicking the tires” before buying, and this is why trade exhibiting is such a great benefit to both sides of the market spectrum.

That said, we need to weigh in with some more details on exactly why both sellers and conference attendees/possible customers benefit from this uniquely arranged sales system, and also examine some of the costs and benefits for both.

But, wait. What does this have to do with web developers, designers and other web professionals?

Benefits and Costs to Web Products and Services Sellers

Sellers that enter trade exhibits and set up their kiosks can benefit enormously from the strategy. This may not apply across the board in all cases, but picking a conference that heavily leans towards your niche and signing up to attend can be a serious boost to sales and advertising technique.

Web developers and designers are among the first to concede that they derive great benefit from attending conferences. It’s where new techniques are revealed, industry trends are set and practitioners who barely get out of the office get the chance to catch up with each other. Many such conferences have trade exhibits attached.

But you should also consider conferences focused more on your prospective customers. If there’s a conference or convention that brings hundreds of people in a specific line of business into your town – and that line includes people you regard as prospective customers – it make sense to take the opportunity to pitch your products and services to them.

What better place to promote your brand new app that aggregates historical real estate sales results to deliver realistic forecasts for property prices than a conference of real estate agents?

Let’s talk about the costs and benefits.

Although typical costs for setting up a kiosk, paying the registration fees, advertising, travel and floor space rental can vary, you will almost certainly be spending a fairly large chunk of change. In terms of lead costs, simply identifying a lead can average $96 per head and closing a single sale can run a cost of up to $2000, averaged out. Overall, for a 20’x20’ piece of trade exhibit space, your total costs including everything can run from $8,000 at the lower end to roughly $25,000-$30,000 at the higher end.

Yes, it’s true, these are not budget figures that you or any seller should take lightly, especially when compared to some much cheaper forms of advertising, but the benefits still outweigh the costs.

Think of the cost for a single TV advertising spot, or a month’s worth of bidding for highly competitive PPC keywords in a program like Adwords. Both of these will easily cost you as much or more than attending a one to three day trade show exhibit, and yet neither ever lets you come into real contact with a single potential customer.

On the other hand, by getting motivated to really sell, getting creative with fully interactive sales presentations, customer service and full technological innovation, you can make your trade exhibit a heavy duty daily meeting point with dozens or even hundreds of potential buyers that are shopping right within your business niche; all of them, right there under the same roof. In achieving this, you can personally speak to them, build relationships and convincingly show exactly why your products and services are what they need to buy or subscribe to.

Pushing for long term client relationships and large-scale orders –something that the personal contact at trade shows is especially fertile for—can increase your revenues per lead enormously, giving you far more bang for your seemingly expensive dollars spent.

In addition, the hands on training that trade shows will give to your sales staff are unbeatable. Simply put, a group of sales personnel who learn to convince customers through the trial by fire that is one-on-one in-person marketing will quickly pick up a lot of skills they can take away and apply to all of your more conventional marketing and sales techniques.

Some Value Maximization Tips

Revenue gained from a trade show can be as variable as the costs, and the key to maximizing it lies in being strategic. When setting up your kiosk, you need to keep its layout in mind as well as understand its position relative to the entire conference floor layout.

The bottom line should consist of channeling visitors to your booth so that they are engaged with your staff and exhibits from the moment they approach. This means knowing what that physical approach point will be and focusing on it.

Furthermore, for maximum sales, you need to find ways of first grabbing your customers’ attention and then maintaining it through full engagement. To do the first, you have roughly 3 to 5 seconds by industry average. To do the second, more time is available but you need to strategize on moving things forward constantly.

Focus on simple clear messages, use plenty of graphics and get down to explaining exactly how you can help your customers as quickly as possible. Once you’ve been through this process and have your lead’s attention, you can focus more on their own questions and more detailed product discussion.

Finally, you’re a web based seller selling to web professionals. Take advantage of this by giving them a full menu of connectivity options right at your booth. Make sure that they can easily and quickly link to your online presence in the form of social media, email subscription and visiting your website. Also, give them the tools to do this on the spot with Wi Fi access and on the spot digital demonstrations of your products and services.

A Few Benefits to Trade Show Attendees

If you’re a trade exhibit attendee, or thinking of becoming one sometime soon, the benefits of sales conferences extend to you even more than they do to sellers. For one thing, your costs of attending are much lower while your possible gains are nearly limitless if you’re really searching for an online service or product solution to your professional needs.

In other words, going to a trade show and seriously examining what’s being offered can mean pure profit for your plans or your own business needs.

Sure, you’ll also be dealing with certain travel costs – especially if said trade show is in another city — but you’ll be really hard pressed to find a more interactive and information rich opportunity to really examine all the potential product and service solutions to your professional needs.

Whether it’s new software you need, new hardware you’re after or you want to hunt down a service solution that will make your own business easier to run, trade shows are where you can really look at all the angles of what your potential providers are offering. It’s definitely possible that some of these angles can land you a purchase that literally saves you thousands of dollars in professional costs or creates a whole new stream of benefits for your own projects.

Last week, I said if a prospect asks, “Why should I choose you?” you ought to respond with how you make your clients feel. There was a time, however, when I thought all clients cared about were results—and my website proudly proclaimed so. But when a professional copywriter looked it over, he told me, “All you talk about are ‘results, results,’ but where’s the story? Where’s the drama?” At the time, I had no clue what he was meant.

(Well, I wasn’t completely clueless. I did remember a famous perfume-maker once saying, “We don’t sell perfume, we sell romance.” But this is only web design we’re talking about, after all.)

Any good sales person or copywriter knows you don’t focus on features. Features are just facts, and facts only tell—they don’t sell. That’s where benefits enter the picture.

The benefit is how that feature improves the customer’s situation. A timer that turns my thermostat on at certain time is a feature. The benefit is that I won’t have to crawl out of a warm bed into a cold room at 6 AM when my alarm sounds.

Yet, unless an emotion is attached to it, a benefit can be as dry as a feature. When it comes to selling your services, you must get to the underlying buying motivation. In his book, Honest Selling, sales consultant Gill Wagner tells this story:

In 1998 I closed a $40,000 engagement at a bank. The CFO gave me the typical reasons his bank wanted to hire us, but, when we finally got the conversation to the bottom line, he said, “I’m tired of missing my son’s evening ballgames to manage this project.” Once I learned that was a bottom-line issue for him, I assured him that, if he hired us, I’d be the one working evenings, and he’d have time to watch his son play ball. (I even put that as an objective in the proposal I sent him to sign.)

When the CEO learned that ours was the highest bid submitted, he told the CFO to fire us and pick someone cheaper. I found out on the first day of the engagement that the CFO refused to do so and spent four hours arguing his point, until the CEO gave in. When I asked him why he fought so hard to keep us on the project, he said, “Because you’re the only one who promised me I’d make my son’s games.” I addressed his bottom line.

- Honest Selling, p.50

That “bottom line” was the client’s buying motive. And it had little to do with the technical issues an IT consultant could solve. Getting to the client’s buying motive requires the rest of the “features and benefits” story.

Feature: “What the Product Has”

What does the product have? What does it do? A hyperlink is a website feature that allows you to connect individual web pages to other web pages.

Advantage: “What the Feature Does”

What advantages do those features provide? In the case of a website, what behavior does a feature like the hyperlink cause the user to take? For the website owner, features can drive usage. So the Advantage is how his customer uses his site as a result of its features.

Benefit: “What the Advantage Means”

The hyperlink allows the user to move from page to page within the site. But what does that mean for your prospect? A benefit is the payoff or the value it provides to the prospect. Value must be aligned to your prospect’s goals. If his goal is to generate leads, then the features must be designed in such a way as to achieve that.

Motive: “What the Benefit Satisfies”

What needs, wants, and desires do the benefits satisfy? If the benefit is “generating leads,” what emotional need or desire does that satisfy?

The reason logic is so ineffective when selling is due to the physiology of the brain. The part of the brain that controls emotions also happens to be the part that controls decision-making. That’s why the Latin word we get the word emotion from means “to move out.”

emovere

It’s also where the word motivation comes from.

So if you’re looking to motivate your prospects to buy—or choose you over the competition—logic alone won’t get the job done. It’s not what you know that lands you the job. It’s how your prospect feels.

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Imagine owning a business. Not an eclectic restaurant Guy Fieri would visit, nor a store with an Apple-shaped logo where consumers line up in anticipation of your newest product release. But a mundane, average, uninteresting business. Like cleaning mildewed leaves out of clogged rain gutters. Or washing bird poop from second-story windows. In the Canadian winter.

Now imagine showing up to clean those rain gutters or wash those windows, and your customers asking if you’d mind posing to take some pictures with them. And when you do, they write a glowing review on Yelp about “what a good sport” you were.

Imagine amassing over 1,100 Facebook fans and more than 2,000 Twitter followers. And that CBS, ABC, MSNBC, Fox Business, Yahoo News, and Entrepreneur Magazine are clamoring to write feature stories about you.

And all you do is wash windows. And clean rain gutters. Oh, you also shovel snow from driveways.

Too good to be true, you say? But I haven’t told you the best part. You charge higher-than-average prices—and your customers don’t care.

A Marketer’s Dream Come True

Of all types of marketing, I love content marketing and the blogging, tweeting, and sharing that accompanies it. But I’ve also been skeptical about its value for the typical small business owner. Many products or services like window washing are mundane and uninteresting, or don’t require extensive research for a consumer to make a purchase decision. As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly interested in liking my lawn care company’s Facebook page or reading their blog. I just want a green, weed-free lawn.

So what would possess me follow a Vancouver-based window cleaning company whose nearest location is over 400 miles away?

We follow companies or brands that are interesting, exciting, clever, sexy, or funny. And we do so because of what it says about ourselves and how we want others to perceive us. But following my dentist on Facebook so I can check in when I get my teeth cleaned is none of the above.

Yet Vancouver-based window cleaning company, Men In Kilts, has taken the mundane and uninteresting and made it all that, and more. The concept is simple: dress your male employees in a kilt and a t-shirt that says “No Peeking,” then send them up a ladder to clean windows.

This unique concept provides a myriad of ways to promote yourself. Like rewarding customers for submitting photos of themselves in a kilt. Or organizing a flash mob in a local mall, with kilted men dancing Gangnam Style to raise awareness about prostate cancer, lifting their kilts to reveal boxers with the words “Get Checked” across the back.

According to their website, Men In Kilts started in 2002 with “just $500, a rusty old Honda, and one hand-sewn kilt.” Today, they’re Canada’s largest window and exterior cleaning company, with franchises launching in both Canada and the US. So what’s the takeaway for you and me? I’m not suggesting you show up in a kilt for your next client meeting, but here’s what we can all learn from our kilted fellow marketers.

Differentiation Doesn’t Happen in a Test Tube

One definition of differentiation is “making your product or brand stand out as a provider of unique value to customers in comparison with its competitors.” Conventional business wisdom says, “ask your customers.” Yet I doubt there’s a focus group on the planet that would’ve told you window cleaners in dressed in kilts is what they wanted.

Value is simply anything someone is willing to pay for—even something as intangible as interesting, exciting, clever, sexy, or funny. Remember what Zig Ziglar always said: People buy on emotion, then justify it with logic.

Niche, Target, Verticalize, or Die

Considering women are the largest purchaser of home services, I’m sure it’s not by chance they chose to be called Men in Kilts. Identifying and pursuing a target demographic, niche, or vertical market is a key factor in differentiating yourself. Steve Jobs said that focusing is about saying no and innovation comes from “saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.” Rather than limiting you, Targeting, Niching, or Verticalizing sharpens your focus.

Get a Personality—or a Kilt

The empowered consumer doesn’t want to do business with the uptight corporations of the past. Ones with personality and a social conscious are finding acceptance in today’s market. Don’t take yourself so serious and you’ll discover that customers are more accepting of your mistakes. Find a cause you believe in and get behind it, then dream up some clever ways to promote it (and yourself at the same time). If a bunch of Canadian window-washers in kilts can do it, so can you.

If not, you can always become a franchise owner. I wonder—are the kilts included?

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I’ve written previously about 11 common online video mistakes and then six steps to developing an effective video strategy. It’s time now to look at some of the mechanics of displaying videos on websites and how they might affect the choices you make.

Before we start, I’ll warn you: if you thought having to deal with Internet Explorer was your worst coding nightmare, think again.

Any web developer who wants to (or has to) ride what is an increasingly popular wave of interest in online video has to figure out the best way to embed this type of content to ensure that it’s playable on as many devices and browsers as possible.

Clients can be demanding when it comes to video, too, and they might not understand just how difficult coding a self-hosted video into a webpage really is.

Here are some principles to keep in mind when you’re considering whether and how to embed videos in your web development projects. We’ll start with the simple way to do it.

The Simple Way to Embed Videos

In my personal opinion, the absolute easiest way (and best way) to embed videos on your clients’ websites is to host them with YouTube. I’m sure this won’t come as any surprise, as most people use YouTube for their video hosting/embedding needs these days but there really is a good reason for this: it’s easy. YouTube does all the work for you.

Here’s a few reasons why embedding YouTube videos is your best option:

It Works on All Browsers and Devices

When hosting video content yourself and/or using a self-hosted video player, the biggest hassle is ensuring that the video works on all devices. YouTube takes away this problem as they’ve done all the hard work for you. Their videos play on PCs, tablets and Smartphones (including the iPhone and iPad) and basically all browsers. All you need to do is copy and paste an embed code. Simple.

There’s No Cost

Hosting video yourself can be expensive (well, expensive for your client) as you’re going to have to make sure you’ve got a fast server and adequate bandwidth to support a good user experience. The time saved by using YouTube (rather than self-hosting) will also decrease development costs for the client.

People Trust YouTube

Effectively, 99% of people who use the web will have come across YouTube videos, either on its own site or embedded on a site like yours. Because of this repeated exposure, people  trust it. Strangely, I think using YouTube’s branded player actually increases the visitors’ trust in your/your client’s website.

What If I Can’t Use YouTube?

Obviously, YouTube does have a few drawbacks (e.g. limited rich snippets abilities, forced YouTube branding etc) and in some cases, clients are going to request that you do self-host the video and video player.

If this is the case, here’s a few guidelines to help you through the development process.

1 – Don’t Use a Flash Video Player (if you can help it)

A few years ago, Flash was massive; people were creating Flash games, uploading Flash videos and even creating entire websites in Flash (much to the dismay of SEOs around the world).

These days, it’s a completely different story, almost entirely thanks to Apple.

For whatever reason, Apple hates Flash and therefore, they don’t allow Flash content to be viewed at all on their iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad devices. They also don’t pre-install Flash on many of their Mac computers either.

With these Apple devices making up a huge chunk of the mobile market, you need to keep this fact in mind when it comes to coding your websites. As a web developer in the modern world, you need to be optimixing for mobile devices (unless your client has specified – for whatever reason – that this isn’t a requirement) and therefore, you really shouldn’t be bothering with Flash video players at all.

It’s not just Apple devices, though. Microsoft is also limiting the functionality of Flash on their latest Windows 8 operating system within the don’t-call-it-Metro interface. Although Windows 8 currently doesn’t make up much of the market, it will do soon as new PCs will soon come preinstalled with Windows 8 as standard. So, it makes sense to prepare for it now.

The bottom line is that Flash just isn’t the way to go anymore, at least not for videos. Flash is slowly being replaced by newer technology (e.g. HTML5) so it makes sense to primarily opt for this style of video player instead.

What’s more, there’s been countless times when I’ve personally viewed content through generic self-hosted Flash players on a PC and found the performance to be poor. This is not something you want your clients (or more importantly, your clients’ website visitors) to have to deal with.

2 – Do Use a HTML5 Video Player

At this stage, you might be wondering what you should be using if you shouldn’t use Flash and, basically, the answer is a HTML5 video player.

To cut a long story short, HTML5 is the future of the web. Many of you will already be coding in HTML5 and many sites are now using HTML5 to play web videos. Even YouTube is currently experimenting with (and perfecting) a HTML5 video player.

One thing to note is that there are limitations with HTML5 players; notably that some versions of Firefox and Opera require the video to be in the WebM format in order to play it through a HTML5 player. Firefox and Opera between have quite a large market share (approximately 23% in January) when it comes to PC users so it’s important to ensure that your video plays correctly in these browser.

One thing you can do is to use a HTML5 player as a Flash fallback (i.e. it will be used if Flash isn’t supported). This way, you can ensure that your videos play on virtually all devices and browsers.

3 – Use WebM or H.264 Codec

Another thing that you really need to think about when hosting video yourself is the file format of your video. When you upload a video to YouTube or another video sharing site, you generally don’t have to worry about this as YouTube does all the work for you (i.e. converts it to the optimum format etc) but when hosting it yourself and using a self-hosted video player, it needs to take priority.

The main reason you need to get the format of your video right is because some video formats can comprise much larger files than others. Although internet speeds around the world are getting faster, they are still pretty poor in some areas, including some parts of the US and the UK. For example, I’m in the UK living just 10 miles away from a major city and my average speed is 2mbps. At this speed, it would take me approximately 4 minutes to fully stream a 48mb video file meaning that if video files are too large (i.e. in a low compression format), it’s going to hinder my user experience.

H.264 and WebM are great formats as they generally retain high video quality even when highly compressed. H.264 is currently the standard web video format but, as I mentioned previously, there are issues with this format and certain browsers when used with a HTML5 video player so in some instances, WebM may need to be used.

At the moment, H.264 and WebM are going through a similar process to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray a few years back. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla and many other companies have all taken a particular “side” and therefore are making it quite difficult for web developers. You can read more about which companies are supporting which formats with regard to HTML5 video here.

Conclusion

Developing a website with video content is certainly no easy task and although the points raised in this post need to be taken on board, it’s important to remember that ultimately, your clients’ goals and priorities should drive your decision.

If you’re designing and developing a landing page for a large, well-known client and need to embed a sales video, it might be important that the video features their branding. They might also have the budget to host the video themselves and pay for the added development costs without any problems. In this case, self-hosting is the way to go.

However, if you’re developing a website for a relatively small business, YouTube offers an inexpensive video hosting solution that is going to keep costs down for your client and make your life easier as a developer.

It doesn’t take much Googling to reach the conclusion that video marketing is expected to be one of the biggest online marketing trends in the coming year.

As companies start to realise they need an effective content marketing strategy in order to be successful online, video marketing will become more and more popular. It isn’t only with large businesses: SMEs are also part of this trend.

The problem is that so many business owners are jumping into the world of online video without enough planning – they are simply getting their video produced, uploading it to YouTube, embedding it on their site and expecting magic to happen.

Unfortunately, it really isn’t this simple and without creating an effective strategy, it’s likely that your online video will fail to generate a significant return-on-investment. In my last article, I wrote about 11 common online video mistakes, so to build on that I’ve created a six-step guide that will help you avoid those mistakes.

The Key is to Work Backwards

Rather than heading straight into the production process, you need to start by deciding what you want your video to achieve and then work backwards.

Defining  aspects such as your target audience, end-goals and budget before production is of paramount importance in creating a successful online video.

If you’re running a multi-national corporation with a huge video production budget, doing all this is pretty straightforward: just hire a leading advertising agency to create the concept and then a video production company to make that idea work. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have such a large budget so if you’re looking to do things yourself, follow these steps.

1 – Decide What You Want to Achieve

Most businesses are now viewing online video as something that they simply need to have in order to stay in the game. Many will see their competitors producing online videos and quickly come to the conclusion that they also need to have one – often without stopping to think what the aim of their particular video might be.

Identifying your goals is a hugely important step as failure to do so will make the video production process much harder. Here are a few thing you might want to achieve:

• increase brand awareness
• increase landing page conversion rates (this informative video from DropBox does this well)
• educate potential customers about your business
• educate potential customers about the market (i.e. why they might need services similar to yours)
• build trust

You may have slightly different goals to these, but the important thing to remember is that you must identify them as they define the overall style and content of your video. For example, a video that increases brand awareness (like this one) will probably have a different style to a video that increases landing page conversion rates like the one from DropBox.

If you’re struggling to identify your goals, keep it simple. You just need to figure out what is likely to bring the most revenue for your business (as this should be any business’s end goal – online or offline). If you think building trust will lead to an influx of customers, opt for this. If you think you’d have more customers if they understood your business better, opt for an informative video.

2 – Identify the Target Audience

This is a hugely important factor that a lot of businesses (big and small) often forget or get wrong. So many businesses try to make their online videos far too generic and often, this can backfire, leading to a video that doesn’t effectively appeal to any target audience at all.

Often, the target audience for a video is anyone that may be a potential customer, so think about whether these people are:

• predominantly male or female
• young or old
• customers or clients (i.e. general public or business-minded customers)

Your target audience will have a dramatic effect on the content of your video and the style in which it’s produced so it’s important to identify them.

3 – Budgeting

Creating a video that achieves your goals and effectively engages your target audience would be an easy process if money was no object but unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

The reason it’s important to decide your budget at this point is because your concept may or may not be limited by it. There’s no point moving onto the next stage and creating a hugely ambitious, expensive concept if you aren’t going to be able to afford to produce it.

Video production costs can vary quite a lot depending on concept but for most short web videos, you’ll be looking at a minimum of $1,000 – $10,000 unless you hire a freelancer. A viral concept will often be considerably more if there are locations, actors and lengthy production schedules involved.

The important thing is that you define a budget at this point and stick to it.

4 – Idea/Concept Creation

Essentially, your video is the vehicle that drives potential customers to the next part of your sales funnel. Creating a successful concept for your video defines whether or not this process happens effectively.

In order to create a successful concept, you need to keep in mind your target audience and end-goals. It’s possible that your online video might have quite an elaborate concept, especially if the idea of the video is to raise brand awareness as, often, these kind of videos are more “ad-like”. It’s also possible that it might be quite straightforward. For example, it might be a simple explainer video with the aim of informing the visitor so that they are more inclined to make a purchase.

A good example of this done correctly is the DollarShaveClub.com viral video (view it here). Not only did they effectively identify their target audience (almost any adult male) but they also kept their goal of raising brand awareness in mind throughout. The video is informative but not boring and the fact that it’s funny led to thousands of people sharing it on social networks, increasing brand awareness even further.

Sure, not every concept will be this elaborate and if you have a particularly low budget, then it shouldn’t be this elaborate either. You may just want a simple video that builds trust, but the point is your concept is defined by your target audience and end-goals.

5 – Production

Only at this stage should you seriously start thinking about who is going to produce your video. Because you now know what you want your video to achieve, who the audience is, what your budget is and hopefully what the concept will be, you can target your search for a video production company more effectively.

Always search for companies that specialize in your particular video style. For example, if you’ve got a viral concept, hire a company that has a proven track record of producing effective viral videos. If you want a corporate style video produced, choose a company that specializes in this style.

No matter what style your video is, you need to ensure that it’s high quality, well-produced, consistent with your brand and not too lengthy (otherwise it may alienate your audience).

6 – Distribution

So, you’ve created your video and it looks great. Now what? Surprisingly, this is where a lot of businesses ‘slip up’ which is unfortunate as they’re often so close to success.

Once you’ve produced your video, you only need one thing: viewers. As a bare minimum, you should embed your video on a relevant page of your website and upload to YouTube as it has a huge audience and it’s free. You should also consider uploading to other video sharing websites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion as this will only increase visibility.

Remember, your video is an embeddable piece of content which makes it extremely shareable. Try to share your video on social networking websites so it gains traction. You can do this by posting a YouTube link on Facebook/Twitter and other social networks. You can share it on your blog and forums by copying and pasting the YouTube embed code.

Try and think outside the box, as the more ground you can gain for your video initially, the more chance it has of being a success (especially if it’s a viral video concept).

Conclusion

By working to the steps outlined in this post, you can ensure that you never lose track of why you’re producing a video in the first place.

This will help you produce something that your target audience will love and that has a much better chance of being successful online.

In a recent SitePoint article, Why Track Your Hours in Real Time?, Kelly Drill gives some compelling reasons why you ought to track your time as you work—such as measuring productivity and accurately estimating project costs. These are key metrics to observe. But as Admiral Ackbar realized when he came out of hyperspace and exclaimed, “It’s a trap!”, time-tracking can deceive you into using its results as the basis for setting your prices.

Calculating hours spent tells you if you’re making a profit or if you’d be better off working a McJob. But costing is an internal function that has no bearing on the value you create or what a client is willing to pay for that value.

Tim Williams, founder of Ignition Consulting Group, whose mission is to help professional service firms become more valuable and relevant to their clients, admonishes agencies to “stop costing and start pricing.”

Costing, according to Williams, is a science. But pricing is an art—one that needs to be a “core competency” of every business. Determining the value your work will create requires that you use value factors, not just cost factors, to price your services. Five key value factors relevant to our discussion are:

1. Financial Impact: What is the economic value to the client of a successful outcome?
2. Strategic Importance: Is this of strategic value to the client organization, or is this a tactical assignment?
3. Value Horizon: Will this help create long-term value for the client or brand?
4. Unique Qualifications: Are you uniquely qualified to complete this assignment?
5. Degree of Risk Sharing: Are you willing to take risk in some way?

Lets’s examine the first two, in reverse order:

Strategic Importance

“Is this of strategic value to the client organization, or is this a tactical assignment?”

In the humorous comic, How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell, what begins as a high-level, strategic redesign concludes with the designer becoming “a cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing, and instant messaging.” Sadly, many projects start out this way.

Which is why it’s important to ask the right questions—including, “Is this project mission-critical or a back-burner issue?” If your prospect doesn’t perceive your services as strategic or mission-critical, you need to figure out how to change that perception or be prepared to move on.

Strategic thinking is creating the vision; whereas tactical thinking is its implementation. Unfortunately, most client’s vision is very small (“Please redesign my website so I’m not embarrassed by it”). That leaves you with two choices: take a tactical assignment and be a client-controlled cursor inside Photoshop; or add strategic value by taking the client up 30,000 feet to gain a broader perspective of what’s possible. This might mean expanding your offering, because as the web has evolved, it’s harder to be an expert in everything your client might need.

Financial Impact

“What is the economic value to the client of a successful outcome?”

It didn’t take me long to figure out that positioning myself as a “web designer” was a liability. I’d done so because it’s what I was good at. But I came to realize that a website has little economic value. It’s online marketing in the form of paid or organic search, and social, local, mobile, or email marketing that drives buyers to the client’s website and financially impacts their bottom line. Building a website is merely a tactical assignment. Which is why clients never seem willing to pay your asking price. Or turn to crowdsourced design.

Strategic importance is driven by financial realities. Vision doesn’t keep the lights on. Having a “financial impact” means increasing revenue or decreasing expenses. Helping your client accomplish that is the first step to creating value.

Next week, I’ll talk about the remaining Key Value Factors in The Art of Pricing.

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