M & A Rainmaker

Which Business Networking Meeting is the best in Birmingham at the moment ??

I take a trip to the Grosvenor Casino on Rebecca Hyslop’s recommendation to try out this networking event and find it very interesting and professional

I have not been to a networking meeting for some time ( I think the last one was in Burton on Trent a couple of months ago ) and certainly the Business Biscotti meeting at the Grosvenor Casino on Broad Street in Birmingham was the first networking meeting that I have been to in Birmingham for a year or more.

I was introduced to Biscotti by Rebecca Hyslop of Push Media Marketing who runs a number of networking meetings in Birmingham.

I very rarely go to Casino’s so that was also a novelty to me( I think the last one was in Biarritz ).

I hoped that the meeting was going to be more fun than formal – obviously productive aswell – and knowing Rebecca I was pretty sure that it would be.

Online research prior to arriving at the Biscotti meeting indicated that although there was a website, social media activity appeared limited. The Biscotti name piqued my curiousity but I have only just found out that the name is based on the first meeting where Biscotti biscuits were made and served.

I parked in The Nautical Club just down the road and walked around to Broad Street and the entrance of the Grosvenor Casino.

The receptionist was absolutely lovely and I proffered photo id in order to get a Casino card. The receptionist phoned down for the Manager, Paul Bradford, to meet me.

I met him at the bottom of the stairs leading onto the Casino floor and he led me to the group that was assembled, chatting at the bar area.

With Rebecca, the receptionist and Paul I had definitely had a very professional and positive introduction to this networking meeting.

The first person that Paul, very kindly, introduced me to had actually seen me speaking at an event in Marco Pierre White’s recently – so that was a great start.That was Glenn Richardson of Photo Booth Hire.

A chat with someone else and then an introduction to someone who turned out to be with Mattioli Woods – where I am a client !!!! Bit of a surprise and an opportunity to praise them a bit – my account manager there has been brilliant actually.

I loved meeting next with Raphael from HNS Signs – a company that I had come across on twitter during #lichfieldlocal hour run by Sarah Morley. Raphael gave me his bosses card, Michelle Henry, and a lovely booklet promoting their work.

As I get into this post I am thinking about who I met, and what made them memorable and what contact information I came away with. Later on I will say who contacted me and how.

My primary interest is what people are doing online. Their ” Internet Presence ” as I call it. ( A combination of web/blogsite and social media accounts ).

I then met Personal Trainer John Wang ( 07795437716 ) who it turned out had seen me at a Market United Kingdom presentation. Someone at John’s gym was an Unfranchise Owner. ( Actually franchises were much in evidence in this meeting ).

Whilst sipping a glass of water Mike Bowden walked over to chat. ( I am grateful to Rebecca Hyslop for doing a tweet after the meeting that contained Mike’s contact details as well as other peoples ). As well as being a Life Coach Mike was a martial arts practitioner and I go to a Kick Boxing class at Burton Kick Boxing Academy with Chris Squirrel so we had something in common there.

On coming to chat to Rebecca ( and the lady from Best of Birmingham who kindly looked after my laptop bag and coat and another lady from Grosvenor Casino’s ) I got into a conversation with Tom West from Central Telecomms. and Richard Murphy from Bank House Corporate. My background is in Telecomms and M & A so this was an interesting conversation.

I decided to leave after that as it was Remembrance Day and I wanted to spend some time at The Nautical Club and The National Memorial Arboretum.

I should point out that I was given 6 business cards but I didn’t give out any as is my approach of late.

Tom West from Central Telecomms. was the first person to contact me ( by twitter and Linkedin ) and he didn’t have any of my details so I was most impressed with this response. Later on he sent me information on the company. Stellar responsiveness !!!!

Rebecca did a tweet after the event that included ( probably ) every person that had a twitter account that she knew who was at the meeting. This was very useful.

After connecting with people there I had a few conversations.

I also established email communications with Michelle and Raphael at HNS Signs – they just look so well sorted as a company.

All in all this was a great event with some great people at it and I would recommend to anyone ( as I am doing here ).

Dear M.D./C.E.O./Owner/Proprietor/Boss,

In letters 1 and 2 we have discussed why you need to put in place a Digital Marketing Strategy.

Let’s just say that all the ” old ways ” of marketing ( so called traditional marketing ) are not quite dead yet. Depending on your business many of them may still be relevant now and for some time but, for sure, the world is changing fast.

In the more recent world the company website was a sort of ” electronic brochure ” or ” presentation ” of your company. It was probably created by ” creatives ” ( graphic designers, marketing people ) or ” programmers ” ( software developers ). You referred people to your website by putting the web address ( url ) on your business cards ( along with your email address, phone and fax numbers ), brochures, mailshots, vans, lorries etc etc.

If the website was found by a Google search on ” your company name” then everything looked good. Or did it ??

The problem is that unless you are a really famous/well known company then people will not search on your company name. They are more likely to search for a product or service which they hope will then lead them to some information and then the best company to supply that product or service.

If say you needed help with your swimming pool in Staffordshire you might Google

” Swimming pool repairs Staffordshire “.

When I did this I got a load of Google maps results ( N.B. !! ), a load of yell.com results ( N.B. ), a company that said it was Staffordshire based but was obviously in Essex !  and one

http://www.leisurelinespas.co.uk/index.asp

that had good information and was in Shropshire – ok,  close enough 😉

This brings us to the first point in the Digital Marketing strategy:

That you must know what you want to be found and known for – your products, your services, your advice and your philosophy – and your website ( and associated blogsite ) must be found by Google for those search terms.

To borrow from my friends at HubSpot the overall mantra is to:

1. Be found ( for relevant search terms )

2. Convert ( visitors into leads )

3. Analyse ( where you got your visitors from and how )

Find-Convert-Analyse.

The second point is that there is very little point in investing time and effort in a Digital Marketing Strategy unless you know where you started ( how many visitors/leads/sales you are getting at the moment – your baseline ) and how you are are progressing in your efforts.

Over time we will suggest that you do many things to drive traffic ( visitors ) to your website e.g. write blogposts, do Internet PR, start and run Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin pages on top of ensuring that you are found for relevant terms but what you must do is to understand what is working and what is not.

Typically your website will have a level of visitors who are finding you directly ( they know your url ) or indirectly ( they know your name and type it into google or they have typed in a search term that has resulted in them finding your website or blogsite ). You will add to this base traffic with referrals from e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or another website or wherever.

You want to know what works ??

Did you get more visitors ( leads and sales ) from blogging, posting on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin ??

Which blogs/posts/Tweets worked and which ones didn’t ???

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2011/07/05/letter-from-marketing-no-4/

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2011/06/28/letter-from-marketing-no-2/

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2011/06/22/letter-from-marketing-no-1/

Over Christmas and New Year I have been thinking about the history of marketing and in particular the growth of what is known as push/pull marketing . When Googling both subjects Wikipedia provided some interesting information here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_marketing

and here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push–pull_strategy

and in particular it provided the following ” Timeline of Innovation ” which was interesting because I was trying to build up a picture of how we have marketed historically, what technologies we have used and which are ” Push ” and which are ” Pull “. 

Timeline of innovation

• 1450: Gutenberg’s metal movable type, leading eventually to mass-production of flyers and brochures
• 1730s: emergence of magazines (a future vector of niche marketing)
• 1836: first paid advertising in a newspaper (in France)
• 1839: posters on private property banned in London
• 1864: earliest recorded use of the telegraph for mass unsolicited spam
• 1867: earliest recorded billboard rentals
• 1880s: early examples of trademarks as branding
• 1905: the University of Pennsylvania offered a course in “The Marketing of Products”^[4]
• 1908: Harvard Business School opens
• 1922: radio advertising commences
• 1940s: electronic computers developed
• 1941: first recorded use of television advertising
• 1950s: systematization of telemarketing
• 1970s: E-commerce invented
• 1980s: development of database marketing as precursor to CRM^[5]
• 1980s: emergence of relationship marketing
• 1980s: emergence of computer-oriented spam
• 1984: introduction of guerrilla marketing
• 1985: desktop publishing democratizes the production of print-advertising
• 1991: Integrated marketing communications gains academic status ^[6]
• 1990s CRM and IMC (in various guises and names) gain dominance in promotions and marketing planning^[7],^[8]
• 1995-2001: the Dot-com bubble temporarily re-defines^{[citation needed]} the future of marketing
• 1996: identification of viral marketing
• 2000s: Integrated marketing gains acceptance and in 2002 its first dedicated academic research centre^[9],^[10

Although Wikipedia talks about marketing emerging as a discipline in the 1900’s it was clear to me that marketing was going on long before the 1900’s and this is also clear from the above timeline.

As this article says

http://technorati.com/business/article/the-new-push-pull-marketing/

Push/Pull Marketing itself has been somewhat redefined or understood by marketers over time into something that is pretty simple – some types of marketing are about pushing information to the potential customer and some are about the information being pulled by the potential customer. This is my definition aswell.

What I was curious about was what historically we had done ?? Pulled information or had information pushed ??

I was thinking back to the days when ” business ” was a shop, place of manufacture or an office. It seemed to me that in those times the place itself ” Pulled ” customers – you could argue that thier very presence was ” Pushing ” but I don’t think so. Whilst some businesses may have monopolised the supply of goods or services in a particular area the potential customer essentially visited these premises of thier own free will – much like they now visit websites on the Internet.

It also occurred to me that Word of Mouth ( WoM ) was very important to the business owner and I will assume that these owners adopted mainly a pull approach as they met with various potential customers at Church, the alehouse or other local meetings. They could well have been rather pushy people but I like to think not !

I could also imagine them sending business and personal letters ( although I could not quite imagine a mailshot by stagecoach !! ), keeping records of clients names and addresses ( a database ) and perhaps even giving people ” flyers ” or  putting up ” posters ” .

” Flyers ” and ” posters ” sounds like ” Push ” marketing to me and it was interesting to tie this in with the first item in the timeline – mass ( machine ) produced  flyers and brochures. Then we have the emergence of magazines in the 1700’s and newspaper advertising in the 1800’s.

Clearly there were posters everywhere for them to be banned on private property in 1839 and ” Flyposting ” (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyposting ) has been a problem from then until now.

In the 1860’s we have the emergence of the postcard ( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/DSphotosea6G1.htm ). Advertising on postcards was allowed from 1872.

So, in the late 1800’s we have push marketing using leaflets and posters and advertising on postcards and in magazines and newspapers. This continues to this day !!

How fascinating to see that at the same time we have the use of the Telegraph ( http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/telegraph.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph ) for the first case of unsolicited spam !!! So we ( mostly Americans ) have been suffering from Spam since 1864 !!!! and there we were thinking that it was a 21st Century plague !!

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s we have the concept of ” wired ” and ” wireless ” communications emerging with morse code over wireless signals giving way to voice radio and the first case of radio advertising in 1922 and morse over wired communications ( 1864 ) giving way successively to telex, the telephone and computers up to the 1940’s.

At the same time television advertising first starts in 1941.

We now see the various strands of Technology,Media and Telecommunications ( T.M.T.) being formed with Television,Radio and Newspapers/magazines normally described as ” media “. Media is defined as various means of communications such as Televison,Radio and Newspapers. 

Also forming are the strands of Voice, Video and Data where Voice emerges from the ” wired ” strand that begins with the cables laid for Morse transmission and Data develops from computers and Local Area Networks ( LANs ) to Wide Area Networks ( WANs ) that utilise the ” Voice ” infrastructure initially ( until Internet Protocol – IP  lines become available ). Video used seperate networks and protocols for a long time.

Mobile phone networks are an offshoot of wireless radio networks developing from about the 1950’s to First Generation phones in the 1970’s and Second Generation in the 1990’s.

Another development from ” wired ” communications was video conferencing that worked initially over the ” voice ” networks and then later over the IP networks.

The Internet and the Internet Protocol has become the great converger. All forms of communication, voice,video,data,wireless and mobile utilise the Internet now, wholly or partially.

It is quite clear that we have an almost insatiable desire to connect to one another, to communicate and to obtain or access information. No surprise then that Googles Mission statement is ” to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

It is also clear that what initially starts as a means of people communicating or of providing information or entertainment becomes a means of marketing pretty quickly. e.g. printing presses lead to posters and leaflets being produced; wired telegraph quickly led to spam being sent; wireless radio quickly had advertising as did TV; telephones were quickly used for telemarketing; computers and email again produced spam; Internet websites ( and Internet search engines ) carried advertising and mobile phones began to be used for SMS adverts and more spam.

It is quite amusing that in the first instance some people resist or just don’t believe the technologies mentioned will become important or main stream  ( e.g. telephones,computers,mobile phones     ) and then we resist or don’t believe that they will be used for marketing. It is quite clear that any and every form of communication provides the potential for marketing use and more than likely will be.

Looking at some of the current technology options we can determine if or to what extent they are used for push or pull marketing:

Telephone – originally a communications device , tele( push ) marketing has been going on since 1950’s, can be “pull” when used to take calls ?? 

Fax – originally a comms device, fax-spamming ( push )  widespread, not interactive though.

Video conferencing – communications and “pull” eg webinars ??

Computer based email – comms. and computer based spam ( push )

Video ( TV ) – informational, entertainment, adverts are push but you can ignore them and some are so good they are watchworthy ! & we have such channel choice and programme control now..

Video ( eg YouTube ) – entertainment, pull marketing

Radio ( Terrestrial ) – informational, entertainment, adverts are push – can be annoying. Programme control.

Radio ( Internet ) – better ?

Mobile phone – originally comms. SMS spamming but not excessive ( networks control ? ), Internet access widens scope.

Newspapers/Mags ( Offline ) – dying ?? adverts are push but non-invasive ??

Websites – in general pull ??? e.g. forums, directories, social networks, instant messaging, click to chat, click to call etc

Printed media ( Posters,flyers,postcards,snailmailshots ) – definately a lot of push in here !! ( but posters and postcards are pretty passive ?)

Word of Mouth – pull.

 So, what, historically was the situation with regard to push/pull marketing and what is it now ??

It seems to me that despite there being many push marketing applications today there are lots of pull marketing ones. Historically we might say that we used to meet or find people or businesses and then we would communicate with them and then perhaps do business with them. So it was historically a pull dominated situation. 

It seems to me that we are increasingly returning to our origins in that ( particularly with the advent of the Internet ) we find people and suppliers, we communicate with them and then ( maybe ?  ) we buy from them.  

Although there are still many types of push marketing utilised ( e.g. telemarketing ) some forms of push marketing have been so modified that they are fairly innocuous ( television advertising ) and even enjoyed whilst most Internet based marketing ( excluding e.g. spam email ) is pull based. It is also true to say that spammers are already at work in, for example,  social networks so the tradition established with telegraph networks in 1864 is still prominent.  

I am always searching for ways to describe how new media marketing works to the business people that I talk to.

My latest thought was that you could describe it’s implementation as a sort of whirlpool effect where your potential customers are out on the calm sea and you want to catch thier attention at  the outer influence of the whirlpool and then draw them gently in and then steadily down towards you – the supplier of products, services or information.

One of the main features of this type of marketing is that it is about ” Pull Marketing ” and not ” Push Marketing “. You are drawing potential clients very gently into the whirlpool and not pushing them in !!

We live in an increasingly self service world: We like to be in charge of who we buy from and deal with and we don’t much like things being pushed at us or people being pushy.

The numbers of people using the Internet to find what they want are increasing all the time. The types of things that they search for are growing all the time.

The old ways of marketing are not necessarily dead but they are suffering from a terminal disease.

Traditional ( Push ) marketing is still happening – advertising, PR, mailshots, telemarketing – it’s all still going on and it’s all still effective to some extent but more and more and every day Internet and Word of Mouth Marketing ( accelerated by the Internet ) are rising to the ascendancy.

I also think that in catching peoples attention at the periphery of the new media whirlpool you think more about people’s problems, needs, desires, objectives and questions and you lead them gently to solutions, fulfillment, destinations and answers. There is tremendous subtlety, patience, intelligence, kindness and humour in this new media whirlpool approach. Generally speaking the ladies are good at it because they often have these traits in spades. It is natural for them to deal with people in that way.

Thinking about the old Features, Advantages, Benefits sales approach you are again thinking about the potential benefits and advantages to people rather than hitting them with almost meaningless features.

You certainly need to have thought through what your core offerings are and who your target markets are. However then, you need to think laterally about what people might be thinking about or searching the Internet for and what might strike a chord with your target market. Definately you need to put yourself in the mind of the person who might be your client.

So, the way that you might attract people at the very edges of your whirlpool might be by posting a video on YouTube. Maybe something funny or shocking or maybe something informative. You might also post thoughts and useful information in  your blog. You might post a Press Release on an Internet Press Release site. ( By the way all the time that you are doing these things you have at the back of your mind the key words and phrases that your target market will be using to find someone like you ). You post things on Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter and again some are funny, some light hearted, some are informative and some are serious. Of course you still try to get into various publications and press ( many of these have online variants now ).  You list on relevant directories. You publish white papers ( as you did before ). You make your products and services clear ( as you did before ). You maintain a clear and consistent brand ( as you did before ).

Floating out at the edges of the whirlpool each of things are having thier own effect in terms of attracting peoples attention and drawing them closer to you. The YouTube video gets it’s own YouTube audience but also signposts the way back to you or your company. The blogs, PR’s, Social Networks etc all do the same.

Each of these things link back to your main website and to your email, phone number, fax number and ultimately to you.

Literally as people come within the sphere of your whirlpool the current gets steadier and stronger. Not in an unpleasant or imposing way but in a friendly and helpful way.

By the time they meet you they know quite a bit about you. They know what you believe, what you stand for and what you believe. They have, to some extent, a relationship with you.  They may even have exchanged Facebook messages with you briefly before they have spoken to you.

Then we consider that when there was only Traditional Sales and Marketing we always did our best to empathise with our potential clients – to make our advertising relevant; to make our telemarketing about creating a relationship; to tailor our mailshots and letters to our target audience; to have our salespeople ask questions and listen.

It always was and is about walking in thier shoes and understanding how they they think and feel and what they are likely to want and need. It is just that now we have this amazing thing called the Internet to communicate with our potential customers in words, pictures and videos.