Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business (14 page)

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Image Counts

Know who your customers are and build an image that meets their needs. Who are the customers? Do you know who they are? What do they want? Why are they looking for you? Customers looking for a residential plumber are most likely going to want what everyone wants: a good service that they can rely on that does not cost too much. In this case, if your web site looks
too slick, people might be scared off, thinking that your service would be too expensive. By targeting your image to the audience, you would build a site that is clean and functional and shows any industry affiliations you have.

This goes for you personally as well: always remember that image counts. That means that you may need to leave cutoff shorts and flip-flops on the floor at home waiting for your return, instead of wearing them to work. Even if you are not planning on meeting powerful contacts today, dress nicely. Get used to it. You can always tell when someone changes the way they dress for an important meeting. Their clothes don’t quite fit right and they will look uncomfortable. My advice: Dress for the position you want in your industry but may not have yet.

Also, any of your staff that comes in contact with your customer is the face of the business. When they are interacting with the customer, they are
you
by proxy and they represent the company. So hold them to the same standards that you hold yourself to.

Your place of business is also up for this scrutiny. As is your business vehicles, your business cards, and the on-hold music on your phone system. Is your business e-mail at Hotmail instead of your own business domain name? All of these things should match the brand image that you have built (or are building) for your business.

Takeaway:
Do an inventory of all of the things that actually touch your clients. Go through each and ask yourself if it is appropriate image-wise for the company you want to be today. Are they appropriate for the company you want to become in one year? In five years?

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If You Build It, They Will Come

In the movie
Field of Dreams
, actor Kevin Costner is informed by a spiritual messenger, “If you build it, [they] will come.”
²
In the story that follows, against any common sense, he proceeds to build a baseball field in the middle of nowhere—and is rewarded by throngs of visitors that congregate to take in and
enjoy his creation. In Hollywood, this is great storytelling. In business, this is a dangerous hallucination. Unfortunately this concept carries many entrepreneurs forward and draws them into a disappointing reality when they realize that building a web site or a product is not enough. It would be awful if you put all of yourself into throwing a party, and then nobody showed up. It happens in business all the time, but it doesn’t have to.

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²
The actual quote is “If you build it,
he
will come,” but using the word they better fits my story.

A part of any business plan should be the answer to the following question:

How are you going to connect with your target audience, convey the sales pitch, and convert enough of them to paying customers in a short enough time period to not only survive, but to thrive?

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Radicalize

You know your business better than anyone. You care about whether it does well. The uninformed public on the other hand does not know about your business. They don’t care about it at all.

Understand that the customer coming into contact with your marketing message is unmotivated. They are very likely to be in a passive state. A passive state means that they are not moved emotionally or physically from inaction or noncaring. As I will remind you throughout this book, much of what you do as a businessperson is to fight against this passivity, against this noncaring (see
Figure 3-2
).

Figure 3-2.
Bell curve distribution of consumer passivity to your messaging. Your job as a marketer is to push this curve to the right.

Ask yourself how you can push more people into the Love! category. Experiment with different kinds of messaging to accomplish this. At one business, we were trying to get people to talk about our brand on Twitter. My suggestion (which we did not use) was to have a contest where we put a banner at the top of our home page that said, “Twitter about us and win a water buffalo.” My team laughed at the idea—nobody had ever heard of a contest like that before. The unexpected can radicalize. Our audience (Twitter users) is mainly twenty- and thirtysomethings. This generation thrives on novelty, and the online set loves to have something to share with their friends on Facebook, their blogs, and Twitter. (The fine print of this contest would have been that the winner would have a water buffalo purchased on their behalf at www.heifer.org, a charity supporting rural families in Third World. This would have cost us about $250.)

Radicalize! Emotion is the best radicalizer. Anger. Love. Fear. Hate. Use these emotions to your advantage. We found on our real estate web site that our audience (females) responded better to our calls to action if we had a picture of a baby on the page. What does a baby have to do with a real estate site? Nothing, other than that our customers clicked more and stayed longer with our brand when we had babies on the site. Emotion sells, so use it.

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Never Ask Water to Climb a Ladder

Marketing staff at every company needs to compose messages that get customers to do what the company needs done. This will logically see the staff members starting a campaign or message or brochure by thinking about what they
want the customer to do
. The need is there behind what the marketer does: “We need people to buy swimming pools,” “we need people to ‘like’ us on Facebook,” “we need people to come to our web site and buy widgets.” What starts as a business need then manifests itself as a piece of marketing collateral—a message in a bottle sent out into the sea of commerce, hoping for a response back.

A Marketer’s Tale

The airport parking company that I use in Austin has a shuttle bus that runs from the lot to the airport terminal. I got a good chuckle out of a poster that the company had plastered on the bus windows, which said the following: “Like us on Facebook. Plus us on Google. Follow us on Twitter.”

This makes sense doesn’t it? Let’s break it down:

• Somebody at the parking company has been tasked with the job of handling social media.
  
• That person’s boss has probably established some sense of the metrics in the space:
  likes, plusses
  , and
  follows
  .
  
• Since this is what the social media person is being measured on, she creates the sign as described and posts it in the bus.
  
• The irony is that she has herself missed the metaphorical bus with the marketing collateral that she just made.
  

So what’s wrong in this case? Simple: She is telling customers what her company wants them to do.

Why would any customer ever care what her company or her boss wants?
Why, why, why? I would not be surprised if out of 50,000 customers per month in those busses nationwide, not a single one
ever
responds to this poster as it is written.

The Problem

Simply asking customers to do what you want is like asking water to climb a ladder. (Which just doesn’t work.)

Customers are like water: Water passively courses along the path of least resistance, following its natural bias—which is to flow downhill.

A customer’s natural bias is to be unaffected by most messages, only noticing and following a few of the ones that satisfy their needs in some way. The key to getting some of your customers to do what you want is to bind your call to action (like me, buy me, visit me) to a benefit that they want a part of.

What She Should Have Done

Here’s what our marketer might have done differently:

1. Start with “why.” Under what circumstances would customers ever
   want
   to interact with messaging from her brand? What do they need? What are they interested in?
   
2. After identifying candidate whys, then you evaluate your resources and see how you can provide a solution to one or more of them. This is the process of building a value proposition around that why. The mantra here is, “Provide value. Provide value.”
   
3. Finally, follow up by attaching the desired actions (in this case,
   like
   ,
   plus
   , and
   follow
   ) to that value proposition.
   

How about these:

• “Get one free day of parking! Just ‘like’ us on Facebook to receive your coupon.” (Value plus desired action)
  
• “Love Hawaii? So do we! We are sending two lucky families to Oahu—just follow us on Twitter and we will enter you to win!” (Value plus desired action)
  
• “A lizard in a suitcase? The funniest travel stories ever told —only on our Facebook page.” (Value plus desired action)
  

By providing value, and arranging the message in such a way that customers who are interested in the value do what you are asking them to do, you greatly increase your chances of getting customer buy-in.

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Climbing the Mountain

How do you get enough customers to survive? To thrive? The answer is that you get them one at a time. As you acquire customer after customer, you will see a pattern emerging. This pattern is universal and consists of several stages. When looking back at the life cycle of a customer who has bought your product, you can identify the stages they went through to get from “knows nothing about you” to “spending money with you” to “repeat customer, spending money with you again and again.”

All of your customers are at some point completely ignorant about you. They don’t even know your name. As you can see in
Figure 3-3
, every potential customer for your business starts here. When you open your doors as a new startup, you will begin to reach out, advertise, and communicate to your potential customers. You will advertise, and push, push, push your message out to this group, and eventually, some of your potential customers will come to know who you are—recognizing your name when they see it or hear it (a miracle!).

This is a good start, but by itself will not make you money. Your customers have to understand your value proposition before they can possibly buy anything from you. Beyond that, they have to actually believe your pitch. Pushing, enticing, dragging, and pulling your potential customers through these stages eventually yields some people that will do the unthinkable. They will actually reach deep into their pocket, pull out their wallet, and
buy
. Once you have people buying your product or service, it is your highest duty to make sure that they are so thrilled, happy, and satisfied with the experience that they will come back to you again and again. This group, the repeat customer, is the most valuable group of people in your business world.

Figure 3-3.
This graph represents the underlying flow of customers responding to messaging and their understanding of a business.

For some businesses, this cycle is very fast. Going back to the pizza restaurant at the airport is an example. People are hungry and don’t know who you are at all until they see your sign. They know your name, see your menu, and see the pizza slices behind the counter. They know the details and feel the benefit (hungry, must eat, yum, looks good). So they buy.

Imagine how similar the same life cycle is for a car purchase. How about a home purchase? Now, how about
your
product or service? Run through the scenario of how your customers move through this pathway from ignorance to repeat customer. Look for the details; understand the gaps that might be there in the way you are trying to sell.