Web 3.0 is Mobile, Are You In?

As I have discussed in many past blogs, we are seeing a major shift in how people access technology as more people move toward Smartphones. I see a world where business will be driven by the connectivity we all have with one another based on that little device that acts as an extended appendage for most of us.

We all have an internal desire to be connected. As I spend time with my family in Rochester, NY, I listen to the conversations of my nieces and hear their infatuation with the latest phone technology and getting a new or upgraded phone. At this point in their lives, they consider that to be a major accomplishment. Why is that? I would say it has to do with the knowing that they can share and connect more with their friends and the world around them.

If you think of this from a business perspective, you’ll see the opportunity to connect with your customers as well as their friends, which will create more business prospects. You can connect with your sales people on the road to update them on all your products, services, and even competitor products, so they can be more effective. People working on projects in the field can update software, coordinate with others, and access so much more information to get the job done.

Web 3.0 is mobile! Web 1.0 was about connectivity with the likes of Netscape, AOL, Google, and Yahoo, and Web 2.0 was all about social media with Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter. The main elements of Web 3.0 will be:

Real Time

Location-Aware

Ubiquitous (everywhere at the same time)

Sensors

Smaller Screens

The key for the 3.0 mobile world is real value for customers and real commerce for merchants.

At Efficience, we are building an infrastructure to help companies get a mobile platform up for themselves along with a strategy to make money using their mobile app.

I’ll have more on real examples of how consumers and merchants can be mobile in order to get real value in the next blog.

How are you using mobile to reach new customers and realize more business?




Price vs Value

As business owners, customers, and people, when we buy something, we like to think we are getting the same amount of value for the money we are spending. This is true if we spend $50, $500, or $5,000. We don’t care as much about the dollar amount as we care about the value. If we were only concerned about the price, we would all stay at $59 per night hotels, and obviously that doesn’t always happen. In fact, we will spend $100, $150, or $250 for a hotel to have a high-quality experience. After all, we don’t just want to sleep anywhere, right?

The same can be said for just about everything we buy. As a business, we must provide value relative to the cost of our product or service. This value is what would incentivize people to purchase from our business rather than another. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter if the cost is significantly higher than competitors because people know they are paying for the value. A customer’s reasoning behind a purchase is not always logical and can be based on emotions such as pride, vanity, competitiveness, fear and pleasure.

What elements of your business are appealing to customers and stimulate their desire to buy your product or service? Knowing this and working to increase awareness to one or more of these elements could increase the attraction, discussion, sharing and purchase.

At Efficience, we build custom websites for people that are looking to work with our experienced creative director, Tori Rose, to create a unique, visually appealing website that fits their specific brand. Other options are available for people to purchase an out-of-the-box website at a relatively lower cost. Sometimes, though, this option limits aesthetic qualities and functionality, but it still provides basic web presence. Some customers only value web presence, while others value an attractive and compelling site that resonates with specific emotions they want to connect with.

Is your company focusing more on value or price? How are your products or services providing value to your customers that is worth the price?




Effective Online Video Marketing

One of the benefits of being an Entrepreneur and being in EO is that you get to hang out with interesting people that are creating new and better ways of doing things that make the world a better place. I am in Grand Cayman with internet guru Ridgely Goldsborough who is doing some super cutting edge stuff online.  Take a look as I pick his brain on the special sauce that makes it all work:




Creating Your World Wide Rave

In the world of marketing, everyone wants exposure, and everyone wants us to see the uniqueness of what they offer. They come at us every way and any way possible to get us to notice them, until we’re blinded by the commotion and no longer pay attention to most of what they say.

So as someone with something to offer, how do you get people to notice you? What if you took another approach and shared information that helped them find you, and want to hear what you have to say?

What if you wrote an e-book that provided valuable content for people, and gave it away for free, without even requesting an email address? What if you started blogging and sharing your valuable experiences on your product or service knowledge in a completely open and forthcoming way, so as to give people the knowledge that they crave as well as find useful?

Do you think customers would find it useful to see videos of your experiences, product knowledge, real user testimonials, or even how you do what it is that you do?

David Meerman Scott talks in depth about this in his book Creating a World Wide Rave. He says that you can create a rave in whatever niche part of the world you are targeting, with the right approach. One example was the release of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studio’s Orlando. Instead of spending millions in advertising dollars, they chose 7 people to experience it firsthand. Those 7 people told tens of thousands of people, who spread the word until news and magazines were writing about it on their own, ultimately reaching an estimated 350 Million people about the new arrival.

Scott asks his audience “In the past month, when you needed information, did you do to the phonebook?” About 5% reply yes. Then he says “In the past month, when was the last time you needed info on a product or service and you Googled it?” This warranted 100% of the audience replying yes, and is representative of the rest of the world. When he asks how many people have recently watch a YouTube video, the response is the same, 100%.

With that said, what are you doing to increase your online ranking and awareness? Do you have keywords or phrases that you own in your industry? And if so, have you done anything to drive them to the top of search engines? Blogs, Ebooks, videos, white papers, and proper wording on your website all help in this area.

Given this insight what are you doing to increase your ranking and awareness online? Have you picked a key word or phrase that you want to own in your industry? If so, what are you doing to drive it to the top of search engines? Blogs, Ebooks, videos, white papers, and proper wording in your website will all help in this area.

Scott’s latest release, Real Time Marketing, discusses using current events to push out your message. In the Fortune Growth Summit he discussed how Oakley sent $190 sunglasses to all the miners in Chile and one firm estimated that it was worth 43 million in comparable advertising dollars. This is thinking in real time, and it works.

Are you doing what is necessary to allow your potential customers to have the informative information that helps them know you are the best choice for their needs? What current events could you use to drive traffic and awareness of you? Check out this Interview with David Meerman Scott.




A Lesson in Listening

There are times when you have to make business decisions that are painful. Those decisions are often accompanied by the feeling that your work, effort, worry, and money have all been a waste.

For 4 years now, my partner Rich and I have owned a franchise of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. These franchises have been successful all over North America, and we wanted to bring it to Knoxville. The founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK is a fellow EO member that I met in 2001. For 4 years I watched the business grow and become successful before we bought the rights to the Knoxville market.

We launched with excitement and did all the right things that the other franchises did to be successful. We hung out door hangers, we did waves (guys in blue wigs next to trucks waving creating attention), we put out signs and tried a lot of the usual marketing programs. So what happened?

A year before we entered the market, a competitor did, and they captured the mind share of the local market place. We found that when people saw us, they usually thought of the competitor (the marketplace was trying to tell us something). As you can imagine, this was not good for business. We thought we could break past this with a national TV advertisement that the franchisor was going to start but they never did. Not long after, the real estate recession came, and paying to have your junk taken away was discretionary and could be delayed or simply done yourself (2nd time the marketplace tried to tell us something).

So what were we to do? Even after we cut back on manpower, we still were accumulating debt and had to make the decision to stop the bleeding. We did, and last week we shut down the business. We finally listened to the marketplace! This week Microsoft shut down the Kin Family of mobile phones after only two months. The marketplace had spoken, and they listened.

Lesson learned. We had the real life lesson that this business was not core to our focus and our purpose. Rich and I both work in our software company. The junk business was about an opportunity to make money, and that was it. As we all travel the business path, we continually have to make decisions that might be wrong. I have learned to accept this truth, brush it off, and keep going.

Key Lessons Learned:

  • Follow your passion
  • Keep a laser like focus

Swami Vivekananda




Our Marketing Revolution Continues

I previously wrote about our efforts to improve our marketing material, to stop talking so much about ourselves and start talking about how to solve our clients’ pains.  A company called Square2Marketing (writers of Reality Marketing Revolution)has been helping us make these changes, and that over time I would update on the progress.  The time has come for an update…

Our website is the first major change we’ve made.  It is still a work in progress, but we’ve taken some huge strides towards where we want to be.  We’ve defined the most common pains of our clients and have really focused on addressing those pains on the website, starting right on the home page.  We are continuing to build content that will be more informative to our potential clients, which is key.  I think of it like having a storefront with a big sign in the window:  if no one that sees the sign bothers to come in and look around or do business, does it do any good to have the sign?

At efficience.us, we point out the pains that our clients face and the solutions we have for those pains.  Providing information and education around these pains like we’ve done right on the home page (see below) is a huge focus point.  This is followed up inside the site with our “remarkables”, or unique solutions for solving those pains.EfficienceHP

Offering valuable, interesting information online for free, aka No Risk Offers, allows us to get our content out to people that are interested in what we have to offer.  At the same time we are building an email base of potential clients that we can market to with things such as educational webinars, lunch & learns, videos and Facebook.   Having 50 highly qualified potential clients is much more beneficial than 200 that would not likely use your services.  Knowing who your potential clients are makes it easy to stay in front of them by sending out monthly datasheets, newsletters, or industry stats…keeping them reminded of you and informed.

This is all part of the marketing plan that we’re working on, adding more remarkable content as we go.  We migrated my blog to our website a while ago, we have added the blogs of team members, and will soon be adding an Efficience blog that we will all contribute to.  We are really happy with the changes we’ve made so far and excited about the additional changes coming.  I’ll keep you posted on the evolution of our marketing strategy and how these changes are working to help our business.




How much pain do you show?

Does your marketing material talk about you? Does it emphasize what you offer, why you are so great, and what sets you apart from competition? Do you notice a trend here? It’s all about YOU. I know our website is all about us. I also know that, if we want to truly relate to our clients, then it can’t be all about you. Why? Because as impolite as it might sound….potential clients don’t care about you! They care about themselves, their pains, and how to fix them.

Are you going to be the one that helps them? Probably not, unless you can show them that you understand their pains and you know how to fix them. Can you really define the pain that your clients experience when they seek you out, and talk about it as if you’ve been in their shoes? Can you talk to them about what would alleviate those pains, without it being a sales pitch? When you are seeking a product or service and you’re browsing the web, aren’t you more inclined to stop and read about something you can identify with? Something that relates to you and your experiences…

I’d heard similar theories time and time again, but didn’t take it into account when we designed and wrote the content for our website. Had I read Reality Marketing Revolution just a few short years ago, it may have been a different story. We’re now in the process of revamping our website, based off what we’ve learned from this intuitive book written by Michael Lieberman and Eric Keiles (a fellow EO Member). These guys put this into a process for approaching your marketing plan that resonated with me. It’s clear, it makes sense, and it’s obvious. We know the pains our clients’ experience, and we know how to help them. Now Eric is going to help us demonstrate that in a better way.