Over your head?

Are you over your head? Starting a business is hard and only a few try it. Be proud of what you are doing because you're one of the few to go after their dreams.

There is not one right way of doing things, be creative and have fun.

Happy Entrepreneurship

www.unthink.me

Business Consultation

Introduction to the new Public Relations

I have recently read several blog posts, on sites that I don't see worth mentioning, that speak about how Public Relations (PR) is not marketing and how everything you thought you know about marketing is now obsolete. Most of these articles being published are coming from people who call themselves "Gurus" but have no real application, and so their message about how you should forget about PR, press releases, billboards, blogs and should invest in API's and pay per clicks. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. 

Public Relations is the new Marketing and actually shifts the entire industry into a sort of Reputation Management paradigm.

If you want to have a successful business you should avoid API's, pay per clicks and even paid for leads for email generation because depending on these tactics means that you must continue to grow your budget for this purposes as you grow versus having an organic growth that allows for more profits regardless of your sales increase; here are some new rules for the new Marketing + Public Relations Era = Reputation Management. 

Marketing is not about advertising anymore.

A new generation of multibillion dollar brands like Facebook, Twitter, AirBnb, Evernote, and countless others - they have figured out how to spend very little on marketing with a higher success rate than most companies who hire public relation experts and advertising campaigns. They engage their consumers with almost free services out there available to them and available to you!  Here are some new rules that will save you money and generate more sales online and offline: 

1. Website - KISS IT (Keep It Simple Stupid) Your website should not be crowded. 

2. Blogs are your new best friends- commit to sharing your companies growth stories, customer success stories, how your brand mitigated a catastrophe, your recipes or product hack ideas, suggestions on how to save money, scavenger hunts, etc. 

ENGAGE YOUR CLIENTS. 

3. Customers are now Clients. Treat them each time like they are your neighbors and you expect to see them every single day- make the best impression you can. 

4. Look for strategic partnerships with other legitimate websites that are relevant to your clients and provide a "backlink" in your website, have them do the same. 

(backlinks help Google determine who is more relevant and legitimate than others" 

5. Take a survey with questions that will help you find out who is your typical customers and write a short story about them - where they come from, what he/she likes, if they go to school what do they study, who their friends might be- based on this one persona story develop the content for your website, ads, and even the way your store, packaging and brand looks. 

Always aim for the highest customer service you can deliver.

If you can target the specific persona of your clients, you will be able to tap into his/her interests outside of when they are not in your website or store such as hobbies, what their friends might like, what he/she might gift for a birthday, how often they might buy something, etc.. ultimately helping you target your words towards him/her to buy more often and little by little all your customers can be a off-form of the same persona you sell to. 

Happy Selling
Humberto Valle, Strategist
www.unthink.me

STOP HIRING SEO SERVICES AND IMPROVE PAGE RANKING

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a method used to make any website easily and organically findable through Google. ( I refer to only Google because I love their products and because other search sites wish they were Google, so if they ever catch up this would apply to them anyway.) SEO is something every business owner must consider Whether you own a brick and mortar store or an internet business you must play by the rules because you can actually be punished by trying to trick the system, Google’s complex algorithm.

STOP HIRING SEO SERVICES

You have seen them, there are many who sell you promises of becoming the top search result for a price and many of you write them blank checks for it to then eventually realize is only a short lived result. I  have encountered many “SEO experts” and website owners who claimed to have cracked Google’s algorithm and a few honest experts who will assure that you will not be able to sustain long term high ranking with SEO services.

INSTEAD your goal should be the same as Google’s:  How do I make sure that a website, my website, is considered legitimate by search engines and by those searching?

Imagine a website being the same as your brick and mortar store… When picking a location you consider things like foot traffic, accessibility, nearby businesses and competitors as well as the demographics of the community…A website is the exact same thing just on digital format and the same way you build exposure and community of customers for a brick and mortar store is the same as for a website, focus on community engagement.  

Improve your SEO (page ranking) in Google by doing things like:

      1.  Creating multiple YouTube videos for your business, and describe them with what you would expect a search to type as title (maximum of 3 minutes)

      2.  Brevity- in marketing this is key. 140 characters in Twitter is too long, aim for 110. Put your business in Google maps with specific descriptions. Same goes for Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ (always sign off with a link to your site in each post)

      3. Add full length descriptions to images used in your site. Visits to any website often result from the “images” results rather than text results, but they are ranked the same.

      4. Create blogs only if you are willing and able to commit.

      5. Engage with your readers and thank them for their engagement and or lessons learned from them.

      6.  Constantly update your website with key words and relevant  information.

      7. Have relationships with other business, particularly websites that are also legitimate and have a link to your site in theirs as well as from yours to them.

      8.  Don’t jam too many keywords in your website’s content, instead sprinkle key words throughout your different platforms.

      9. Be creative for mundane efforts, when hiring use sites like OppenUp.com rather than Monster.com.

      10. Use Facebook not as social marketing platform but as a free, public and easily found micro-blog page used only for customer complaints. (this sounds weird but it works, make your problem solving and ordinary business troubles public as marketing for  your company culture)

Maintain a highly effective website that generates you sales by committing to relevance and community engagement, not get SEO rich quick schemes.

Happy Marketing 

Humberto Valle (www.unthink.me)

customer vs. client - is there a difference?

I attended a lunch presentation last week covering the first steps of building the content and path for your business plan. I loved it, I think it had great material but there was one thing that a lot of the audience members kept bringing up and I didn’t see the presenter react to it at all or correct those asking about attaining customers as a business and consultants asking for clients. What’s the difference?

Well there used to be a marginal difference a many years ago when a front store would simply consider a buyer a customer and that was the relationship you could always expect.. You buy something and as soon as you exchange valuables the transaction is over, whether you knew the customer personally or not they were your customers. Clients where reserved to more professional on-going services where transactions were not as simple as a simple one time exchange.

 

That changed since the creation of the world wide web.

 

Ever since the creation of instant messaging, global online data consumption successful businesses have adopted the concept of building client relationships for their stores and services.

A client is someone who has done their research on you and your products and services, someone who has asked for referrals, scoped the place, checked out the quality of what you do, and has somehow been exposed to your brand, someone who deserves your honesty and engagement. A client is someone who has ongoing buying relationship from you. Does this describe a customer? Yes it does. The difference is social media. A customer who uses social media for referrals, validation and build their confidence that they made the right choice in buying from you rather than someone else, they are your ongoing clients and without them you have no business.

 

When you start seeing your customers as clients your business will definitely benefit in form of increased sales and overall satisfaction.

Darwin is wrong

Life is not about finding yourself is about reclaiming who you are meant to be. #unthink 

-Humberto Valle #unthink

www.unthink.me