Over the past year, my son and I have been taking guitar lessons.  It’s been a great deal of fun, and at my age, it’s been a tough road.  My brain isn’t quite as nimble as my son’s (who is only 11), and I have a lot of things I have to un-learn before I can progress.

I was thinking about some marketing ideas and tasks the other day while practicing my guitar, and I realized there’s a lot of similarities between the marketing for a local business and learning to play the guitar.  Here’s what I discovered:

• The fundamentals are essential: With guitar, there are a number of fundamentals to learn as you progress.  The different pieces of the guitar, each string, the notes as you go up and down the frets, and chords.  Without learning these fundamentals, you’ll never progress to playing songs.  With marketing, you need to learn the fundamentals of turning the features of your products or services into benefits, who your ideal customer is, and proper positioning and branding.  If you can clearly articulate who you are, what you do, and who will most benefit from your product or service, you have the fundamentals of marketing your local business.

• Practice, practice, practice: My guitar instructor can always tell when I haven’t been practicing – I just haven’t progressed during the week.  So I end up wasting time getting back up to speed instead of learning new techniques.  Good marketing requires practice as well.  When you consistently write about your company, and do the things that need to be done on a daily or weekly basis – blog posts, press releases, responding to customer inquiries and complaints (and yes, I believe Customer Service is part of marketing) – then you’ll get better at honing your message and getting your point across to customers and prospects.

• A song is made up of notes and chords: When you play songs, you have to add a lot of elements to the mix – notes, chords, proper timing, lyrics, etc.   Your marketing needs to contain a mix of different elements to really “sing” (and I apologize for the wordplay – it was just too easy!).  Good copywriting forms the foundation of all your marketing, and to properly market your company, you need great website content, blog posts, public relations, signage, sales presentations, and events marketing.  All of these elements work together to push prospects along to customers and customers along to evangelists for  your business.

• You need to tune your instrument: As you play your guitar, it will eventually come out of tune, so you need to tune it back up.  You also need to re-check your marketing efforts to make sure you stay in tune.  Track your marketing campaigns and react to which things work and fix those that don’t.  Much like playing a guitar, there’s no fast rules in marketing that will work across every industry and with every demographic.  If you want your business marketing to succeed, you have to be ready to fine tune and continually watch your progress.

• Don’t be afraid to ask questions: Because the guitar is such a difficult instrument to learn (at least for me), I’m sometimes a little confused about a certain technique or music theory.  Instead of struggling along and trying not to look stupid, I always ask questions.  You probably didn’t get into your business to become a marketer.  Instead, you’re doing something you love or were trained to do, and you didn’t receive a lot of marketing instruction.  Today, there are tons of resources available for small businesses to help with their marketing questions (including this blog).  There are no dumb questions, and it’s certainly not smart to struggle when there are so many helpful resources online.

One final note (I just couldn’t resist)… Guitar is something that I understand will take me a while to become competent, let alone master.  And I may never get to the point of mastery.  But, I’m going to keep at it because it’s interesting, and I truly believe it will help me in other areas of my life, including persistence and keeping my brain nimble.

You’re not going to be a marketing expert on day one, or even day 360.  It’s an ongoing process, and with the increased pace of change today, there’s always something new to learn in your marketing journey.  Just keep an open mind and a sense of humor, as well as a lot of persistence, and you’ll see results for your business.

Good luck!

I just came across this video from Google about real-time search (and you’ll see what I mean after watching it):

With this new search feature, local businesses have even more incentive to get engaged with social media in the right way.  As soon as this goes live on Google on a large scale, people will be seeing what other consumers are talking about.  And you want to make sure when they talk about your business, it’s in a positive way.

Here are some tips that could help you get to the front of this new Google real-time search feature:

• Make it easy for your customers to interact with you in the social space.  Make sure they know about your Twitter and Facebook accounts (or get accounts if you don’t have them) and make an effort to keep content fresh and relevant.
• Offer exclusive benefits for interacting with your social media spaces.  You can provide special offers or discounts for following your Facebook fan page or re-tweeting a promotion on Twitter.  Make it relevant and fun, and don’t waste their time with heavy-handed promotions.
• Deliver outstanding, noteworthy customer service.  Every interaction you have with a customer offers the potential for social media interaction.  If you deliver customer service that makes them stand up and notice, they just may post on their Facebook account or Twitter it to their friends.
• Respond to customer complaints quickly.  In the social media ecosphere (I’m running out of names!), bad news travels very quickly.  Make sure you monitor your brand and try to make things right with disgruntled patrons.  Your interaction will be tracked and your response is critical.
• Have fun! This is the most critical part of a social media “strategy.”  Social media is different than other forms of marketing, and you need to have a more personal face when interacting.  Pretend you’re talking to someone in front of you, and a lot of the anxiety goes away.  Don’t be afraid to make fun of yourself and your business, and keep it lively.

The new Google real-time search bears watching.  For those companies who have embraced social media and use it as a way to truly interact with their customers (or better yet, communities), real-time social media search could help boost traffic and deliver increased revenues.  And, it could be a lot of fun.

Are you passionate about your business?  Do you truly enjoy what you’re doing, and how you’re helping people?  Check out this video I found via Seth Godin’s blog:

John Nese of Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, CA loves soda pop, and his passion shows through in this video.  And John focuses on those customers who are looking for a new or different soda pop instead of the masses looking for a Coke or Pepsi.  When you bring a passion to your business, it makes it easier to find customers who will resonate with your mission and truly appreciate what you bring to the transaction.

Otherwise, you could be taking jobs that aren’t right for you and could impact your business negatively.

Watch the video… I guarantee it will make you smile (and crave a cucumber soda pop!).

In a recent post, I talked about warming up a list for my Quilting Business website.  Basically, I have not communicated with the list for quite some time, and I need to reengage the community to build a relationship before I start to sell any products or services to them.  I’m doing this with a combination of humble apologies, giving them some great free resources, and by answering some of their questions.

Answering questions is a great way to bond with a list.  Every time I’ve asked for input from any of my communities, there’s been a flurry of questions and comments.  It seems that there’s a lot of people out there with questions, and answering their questions is a wonderful way of:

• Bonding with the list: When you answer a real question from a real community member, it shows that you are engaged and want to interact on a more personal level.  When you answer a question submitted in the questioners own voice, and answered in your own voice, it shows a sincere commitment to the community.
• Creating new content: Answering questions can generate a lot of new content for your website.  Depending on how many questions you want to answer, and the size of your community, you can develop a LOT of content quickly.  And the content is targeted to your most influential members – those who will raise their hands and ask questions.
• Showing your expertise: When you successfully answer a question, with some style and knowledge, you show the community that you know what you’re talking about.  Good answers build credibility for you and your business, and can work almost like a testimonial in helping move browsers into buyers.
• Increasing search engine rankings: When you answer questions that are right in line with the subject of your website, then you are doing what Google and other search engines want – generating targeted content that will answer people’s search queries.

Any business that wants to build a rapport with their community can use this tactic.  If you have an email list, send out an email asking for questions.  Make sure you specify what you are looking for in the questions.  Here’s what I told my Quilting Business community about submitting questions:

1. Be Specific: Try to narrow your questions to just one specific topic, not a general question. For example, asking me “how do I start a quilting business?” is not a very specific question, but “how can I market online to my local area?” is much better.
2. Be Concise: Don’t send really long questions. If you need to cover quite a bit, break it down into multiple questions instead of a very long single question with too much detail.
3. Be On Topic: Please confine your questions to how you can start, manage, market, and run a quilting business. I really want to make the content on this site as targeted and useful as possible.
4. Be Interesting: And finally, try to make your question as interesting as possible. Think about how you can frame the question in such a way that other people would want to know the answer as well. That way, everyone wins.

You can make up your own suggestions depending on what you’re trying to achieve.  You may want to tailor your question submissions to a specific event or time of year.  For example, a pool supply company may want to have questions about how to close a pool in the Fall so they can provide good information and suggest some supplies that are needed (available at our store) for the pool closing.

The more information that people have about your business, the easier it is to make a decision to purchase from you.  When you take the time to answer a lot of basic questions, and provide excellent content that’s useful for browsers, you’re sure to convert some of those browsers into buyers.

What a great post by Mark Silver at the Heart of Business blog.  His post, “An Ode to Diapers: Finding What You’re Truly Passionate About,” offers some heartfelt advice about why you started your small business in the first place… to help some group of people.  Whether it’s an insurance company or being a plumber, at some point you realized that your skills could help someone who needed some kind of assistance they couldn’t provide themselves.

This really clicked with me since I just started up Life Is Local and the reason I started this site is to help small businesses do a better job of marketing, both online and offline.  To me, marketing is more than just something that needs to be done.  Marketing gets me jacked up and excited.  When I see a truly inventive marketing campaign, I think to myself, “How can I modify this to help out one of my friends?”

The Only Reason a Business Exists

As Mark puts it so eloquently in his post:

“The only reason a business exists as a business is to help certain someones solve a certain problem they can’t easily solve for themselves. That’s why people are willing to pay their time and money, because they get help.

It can be big help, like facing terminal cancer. It can be smaller help, like getting your house painted just the right combination of colors. Whatever it is, it’s worthwhile if it’s helping people and not harming others.”

Just like poopy diapers, sometimes the tasks you need to do in your business don’t get your heart pumping or make your soul sing.  There’s drudgery in any business, and even if you don’t enjoy doing the grunt work, you know at the end of the day that in order to keep helping people, you have to do some things you don’t particularly enjoy.  But, if you remember why you got into your business in the first place, perhaps changing that “poopy diaper” can be a little more tolerable.

Check out Mark’s “An Ode to Diapers” today.