BWPrice's Marketing U

It's Really Not That Difficult - A Little Perspective to Begin 2012

I have a friend with metastatic breast cancer and they just found a recurrence. I have another friend who was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor right before Christmas. And I am following the cancer journey of this little 5 year old girl who has captured my heart. She is having a rough time.

Don't "the studies" say that by the middle of January, or at least by the end, that most of us will have abandoned our 2012 resolutions? Big deal. 

This post is not designed to help you keep those resolutions, nor is it meant to depress you (although I'm feeling a bit weighed down at the moment). In the three situations mentioned, 2012 resolutions likely involve staying alive. That makes many of our resolutions seem unimportant – certainly not worth all the time and energy spent talking or writing about them.

Therefore, I write this post to bring some perspective to the new year – for you and, I guess, really for me.

Since this is a marketing blog focused on professional service firms, let me share with you a secret that is not really that secret - marketing is not that difficult. There are countless marketing blogs dispensing "wisdom" which often makes the reader feel woefully inadequate or, at the very least, behind the curve. Let me assure you that you're fine and that you don't have to worry with much of what is written. Just remember these things: 

• Invest what you have to invest (both in time and money) to get good at what you do. This is the most important item on the list. The quality of your work is your greatest marketing edge.
• Pay attention to your clients. While not every client is created equal, the level of service you provide to your clients is your second most important marketing edge.
• Make sure you have a website with helpful content (besides your phone number and email address). Your website is your calling card and it's the first place prospects go to know more about you. Your website can be a source of business if it contains helpful content for people in your target markets.
• Network with your peers. Get to know others in your profession. Learn from them. In turn, educate them. Going it alone makes the journey exponentially harder.
• Figure out what development techniques you are good at and do those. There is no "one size fits all" for business development. Some people are networkers. Some are content developers. Some are speakers. Some are master technicians. Most are a combination of different things. Determine what you're good at and then get better. Don't try to be something you're not. Then, do what you're good at - again and again and again.
• Focus on what's important. Now, to put the five above in proper perspective. Our careers can give us great enjoyment and a sense of purpose – or they can be a weight around our neck (if yours is the latter, get a new career). Give back. Slow down. Deepen relationships with those in your life that value you and nurture you. Move on from those that always take and never give. In the process, take a hard look at yourself to determine if you're a giver or a taker. Be the former.
• Have faith in something besides yourself. Whether or not you believe in a higher power, we all come to the end of ourselves sooner or later. When you find yourself there, on what do you rely? 
• Keep it all in perspective. You are not your career, or the clothes you wear, or the car you drive. You are not defined by your family or lack thereof. Your LinkedIn profile is not the sum of who you are. The length of time we're on earth is but a breath. What will your legacy be? Spend more time thinking about this question and then doing something about it. Don't worry about that which, in the end, doesn't matter.

You may think the final three points don't have anything to do with marketing. You're wrong. In a professional service firm, people do business with people – not brands. Brands may get them in the door but it's the personal connection between service provider and client that is important. Basically, being a jerk is never a good business development strategy, nor a life strategy.  

So, see, it's not that difficult – in theory. In practice it can be damn hard. 

If you're a praying person, I would appreciate prayers for the three people mentioned above.

Let's see what 2012 brings.

"You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction."

Okay, I admit it. I do love distractions. It can be hard for me to focus but while it's sometimes difficult, it's not always difficult because I also LOVE checking things off my list - big, crazy, detail-oriented projects. 

What about you? Read 7 Things Highly Productive People Do (from Inc.) and let me know what works for you.

 

"Stress isn't the enemy in the workplace. Indeed, stress is the only means by which we can expand capacity...Our real enemy is the absence of intermittent renewal."

A great article from Harvard Business Review - How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. But will your partners or boss go for it?

Marketing Info You May Have Missed

• The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Creating Social Media Buttons - Mashable - Useful and actionable info 
• Replace Meaningless Words with Meaningful Ones - Harvard Business Review - "Meaningful words stated in the declarative mood, assertively, and positively are more likely to beget meaningful actions." 
• LinkedIn "Company" Pages: An (Undervalued) Gem for Organizations of All Types - Social Media Today - Does your firm have a LinkedIn Company page?  
• Embarrassed About Being Embarrassed? Don't Be. Embrace Your Humanity - Nick Morgan - Great advice for those who use speaking engagements as a practice building tool  
• Answers to 31 Social Media Questions You're Too Shy to Ask - Hubspot - Do you know the answers to each question?  
• Five Common Strategy Mistakes - Harvard Business Review - A helpful reminder as we approach a new year  
• 7 Epic Marketing Uses of LinkedIn Answers - Hubspot - I got an idea or two from this post  

Happy Monday (Holiday Style)

Useful and Easy SEO Tool for Wordpress Blogs

You, dear reader, likely know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. We work hard to produce useful content for our target market(s), so we want that content to be found via an internet search. Yet search algorithms are always changing. That's why there are firms dedicated to nothing else but helping us with SEO.

However, if your firm is like most, you are not big enough to warrant these services. What do you do? You try your hardest to include tags as well as keywords in your content in an appropriate way. 

Yet, there is a tool to help. The Wordpress SEO Plugin by Yoast allows you to quickly optimize your content for search. There is a great summary of the tool at Blogging Your Passon. Per BYP:

Once you install this plugin, there will be a new feature added just below your content box inside WordPress. This is what allows you to quickly optimize your content.

For example, Let’s say I have chosen the keyword phrase “how to become a mechanic.” If someone uses that phrase to search in Google, then I want to be on the first page and get traffic. The phrase is actual used over 1,300+ times each month.

After I write or paste my content in WordPress, I scroll down to the WordPress SEO feature. It asks for my focus keyword, so I put in “how to become a mechanic.” Now the plugin will tell me either yes or no if my blog post is optimized for the search engines. You can then make some simple changes that the plugin suggests, and then hit publish. See the picture below for a better view.

There are many advanced features as well; however, most of us won't take advantage of them. Here is the list of features for the plugin:

1. Post titles and meta descriptions
2. Robots Meta configuration
3. Canonical
4. Breadcrumbs
5. Permalink clean up
6. XML Sitemaps
7. RSS enhancements
8. Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
9. Clean up head section

Told ya ... most of these we won't touch, yet the functionality described above is worth it. If you have a Wordpress blog, check out this tool.

"Marketing?" professionals would say, "we've got a girl down the hall who does something like that."

Bruce W. Marcus has written an article that professional service firm marketers and the fee-earners in those firms should read. Titled "Why Professional Services Marketing 3.0 Matters for Your Future - and What To Do About It," the article takes us back to Professional Services Marketing 1.0 (where some firms sadly still live) and the Bates decision (1977) which struck down the ethical rules that prohibited any promotional activity for legal and accounting firms.

Marcus asserts that the Bates decision created the beginnings of the marketing practices used today and it introduced the concept of competition as "the major driving force in not only developing new marketing practices, but in changing the nature of the professional firm itself."

In the early days after the Bates decision (and I would argue up until the 1990s), most accounting and law firms had not begun to adapt and the condescending line quoted in the title of this post was likely often said and heard. (An aside: I know professional service firm marketers today who have been heard such language - even been the subject of it.) These firms were, as Marcus puts it, in the 1.0 stage of professional service firm marketing. 

Stage 2.0 is "the growth and development of contemporary marketing" and Stage 3.0 is "the emerging marketing practice in which professionals fully participate in—and are even beginning to be the initiators of— the marketing process" which further accelerates the change in professional firms, according to Marcus.

Marcus notes that the evolutionary process from Stage 1.0 to Stage 3.0 results in change and that change, "particularly in a dynamic economic environment" makes it difficult to plan for the long-term. Yet, plan we must. He offers steps to planning for a 3.0 firm (or those heading towards 3.0). I have bolded the points that resonated most with me:

• Recognize that competition is one of the most important factors governing the contemporary practice. Anything you do should always be in a competitive context.
  
  
• Recognize that change is inevitable—you can't escape it and still thrive in today's business environment.
  
  
• Recognize the difference between long- and short-term planning. Many of the likely business circumstances are foreseeable in the short term—less so in the long term, which is why long-term planning rarely works out. There are too many random and unforeseeable events that alter plans.
  
  
• Recognize that the key factor in planning is not "What kind of firm do we want to be," but how much you understand about the market for your services. (One of the factors in the recent rash of firm mergers involves law and accounting firms too deeply immersed in a declining industry.) For a manufacturer, long-term planning involves the market as well, but also plant construction and transportation, neither of which looms large in legal or accounting practice.
  
  
• Go as deeply as possible into your clients' business and industries. Look for trends. Read the trade journals and attend industry organizations and conferences. Don't guess. Try to know.
  
  
• Competitive intelligence is crucial in a competitive environment. Innovation is not imitation; it's improvement over what others are doing.
  
  
• Understand that successful marketing is client-based strategy, not a collection of marketing skills and mechanics routinely applied, and that it is client-focused, not firm-focused. "This is what I'm selling" is not the same as selling from a clear understanding of client needs.
  
  
• Understand that change is not an event—it's a process. Its future is rooted in its past, which is why understanding its past is important for understanding its future. Nor is it always a straight line—it's opportunistic. It's responsive to a changing environment, so pay attention to your profession's and your market's environments.

Marcus says it best when he wraps up the article:

Today, there are firms still in 1.0 and firms thundering forward in 3.0. The 3.0 firm is the one that is most likely to survive the future.

This is all part of his new book, Professional Services Marketing 3.0, which I hope to be reading soon.

How to Spot a Liar (Ted Talks Video)

Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting, talks about how to spot a liar. It is an interesting talk.

Her bio:

Social media expert Pamela Meyer can tell when you’re lying. If it’s not your words that give you away, it’s your posture, eyes, breathing rate, fidgets, and a host of other indicators. Worse, we are all lied to up to 200 times a day, she says, from the white lies that allow society to function smoothly to the devastating duplicities that bring down corporations and break up families. Working with a team of researchers over several years, Meyer, who is CEO of social networking company Simpatico Networks, collected and reviewed most of the research on deception that has been published, from such fields as law-enforcement, military, psychology and espionage. She then became an expert herself, receiving advanced training in deception detection, including multiple courses of advanced training in interrogation, microexpression analysis, statement analysis, behavior and body language interpretation, and emotion recognition. Her research is synthetized in her bestselling book Liespotting.

"Professionals Rehearse. Amateurs Jump the Couch" (Part 2)

I am a regular contributor to the American Society of Appraiser's Business Valuation E-Letter. My latest column (Issue 15-39, September 28, 2011) originally appeared as a blog post here. For the article, I added to the original post by fleshing out the featured story and then admitting to my own guilt. Read the whole thing to find out what I'm talking about.

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Happy Monday

... as we slide into another week ...

via Reddit

 

An Internet Tool to Drown Out All That Background Noise

If you like white noise, there is SimplyNoise for you. It provides a choice of "white noise," "pink noise," and "brown noise." I'm working with it today and like it. 

A Creative Law Student and a Thought-Provoking Presentation about Presentations

Peter "Deuce" Bradshaw, a student at Stetson University College of Law, begins this presentation with "... So ... while sitting through a Trusts & Estates lecture, I started feeling annoyed. Because I was being hit in the face with information And then an analogy happened ..."

I love the ideas in this presentation and understand all too well that feeling of annoyance. If you are interested in taking your presentations to the next level, view this Slideshare and think.

I hope Mr. Bradshaw continues to bring his creativity to the practice of law. 

Designing Information: Making it Immersive

View more presentations from Deuce Bradshaw