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 came across an excellent post about the “Top Web Design Trends for Small Businesses in 2010” on the Small Business Trends website (strangely enough!).  In the post, Shashi Bellamkonda writes about what he believes will be the big trends for successful small businesses during 2010.  And, I feel like I’ve been ripped off!  But only because he is writing about most of the the things I believe are a must for any successful business as we transition into a world where offline advertising is quickly becoming ineffective and cost-prohibitive for small businesses.

Here’s a recap of the trends from Shashi (but you definitely need to go to the page and read the entire post):

• Find me on the Internet: Year of the Web presence - You need a website!  No matter what your business, if you can’t be found online, pretty soon you won’t be found offline.
• Low cost or no cost ways to get a web site increase – There are a ton of ways to get online without breaking the bank.  Now, you have no excuse to try the “do it yourself” method of putting up a website.
• Updating frequently. Realizing the power of a Blog as a business tool – There’s a reason I use WordPress for the sites I build, and it’s all about interactivity.  WordPress’ blog solution is great!
• Flashy out;  practical in- A good website is clean, easy-to-navigate, and professional.  Make sure you create your own, or work with a website company (I can recommend a good one!) that understands this.
• Personalized experience – This is one of the trends that I think may be a bit out of the reach of most small businesses, but you can certainly do some of this with some great web designers.
• Are you for real? – Establishing credibility is one of the best ways of getting new customers.  Use certifications, Better Business Bureau membership, professional associations, to establish credibility with customers and prospects.
• Do you know who is knocking on your web site door; Web Analytics are a crucial tool – There are all kinds of tools available – many for free – to help you track site visitors and more.
• Widgets and Apps – The reason I love WordPress so much is the astounding amount of outside developers that create widgets and apps to add functionality to your website.
• Can I call you now? Adding Interactivity to your website – Adding chat and calling options to your website is easier than ever, and visitors will start to expect to see more of this.
• More Multi-media will be added to web sites – With the tools available today, adding video, pictures, and audio to your site has never been easier, and is a great way to stand out in the crowd.
• Links links links – The Internet is built on links, and search engines love them.  Making sure you provide great content, and participate with other sites in your community, will really help out your site.

Take a few minutes to read the full post, and then spend a few more minutes jotting down ideas on how you can improve your existing website or start from the right plan if you need to build a new website.

It’s no secret that I love WordPress.  A lot.  I use WordPress as the Content Management System (CMS) for the sites I develop, including this site.  It’s stable, easy to use, and very flexible. Plus, with all the developers working on adding functionality to the system, there’s plugins for just about any business.  I just love WordPress!

Starting today, I’ve decided to do a weekly feature about WordPress.  I’ll discuss anything related to WordPress – general features, how to maximize your marketing using WordPress, interesting new plugins, and case studies of how other local businesses are using WordPress to power their web presence.  I’m going to call it “WordPress Wednesday” and I hope  you enjoy digesting the content as much as I enjoy generating it.

To start off, I wanted to talk about the latest version of WordPress, version 2.9, that just came out on December 19th.  You can view a short video of what’s included in this update here:

There’s some great new features in WordPress 2.9, but here are my favorites:

• Batch Upgrade: Now, you can upgrade all of your plugins at one time, instead of one at a time.  When you have a number of WordPress sites (I currently manage at least 13), upgrading individual plugins can be a time-consuming task.  Now it’s as simple as selecting all and clicking the Upgrade button.  It also checks the compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.
• Easier Video Embedding: WordPress has developed new functionality that lets you simply copy a link to a video into the WordPress editing window, and it automatically embed the video from popular video services like YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).  Very simple and easy.
• Built-In Image Editor: Adding images to a WordPress post or page just got easier with the new built-in image editor.  When you insert an image into the WordPress editor, you’ll now get the option to crop, edit, rotate, flip, or scale the image.  I’ve been adding images to most of my posts, and this will be a huge timesaver.

WordPress 2.9 is a tremendous continuation of the wonderful work that the folks at WordPress.org, and all the third-party developers, have been doing over the years.  Continual improvement and the ability to extend the software has made WordPress a top-notch website solution for any local business (or large business for that matter). Keep up the good work Matt, and thanks!

Since I’m on kind of a rock-and-roll kick this morning, I thought I’d give you a video from David Meerman Scott from his WebInkNow.com website.  It an interview he did with Jay Blakesburg, the long-time photographer for the Grateful Dead (now called simply The Dead).  In this nine minute video, David discusses with Jay how the band is at the forefront of using technology for their marketing.  Here’s the video:

Are you having a special event for your local business?  Why not hire a videographer or photographer to chronicle the event and then offer the photos or videos to attendees?  Give something back to the community and they will remember your business.