How to grow your internet business without doing it all yourself

I’d love to think you’re going to read every last word of this book - I nearly broke into a sweat writing some of it - but if you want to get up and running as fast as possible then, esp

How to grow your internet business without doing it all yourself

by Paul Isaac

Paul Isaac is the founder of two digital marketing agencies and has marketed global brands the world over When yesterday’s digital marketing techniques stopped working, he and his company spent four years pioneering new ones which did

Born in the UK, he currently lives in the Netherlands and is still a frequent visitor to the UK, as well as the USA and Sweden where he has family He spends his days getting hands-on with marketing for his global clients and cycling enthusiastically across the flat Dutch countryside.

You can reach him at info@click-click-go.com

You’re a busy person Ever since all our labour saving devices like computers and mobile phones were invented, we somehow have a lot more work

I’d love to think you’re going to read every last word of this book - I nearly broke into a sweat writing some of it - but if you want to get up and running as fast as possible then, especially for you, I’ve including a Wrap Up section at the end of each chapter to give you the key points from that chapter You could read all of these Wrap Ups first, then go to the last chapter which is a quick How-To-Get-Started guide Then you’ll be off and running, making so much money you can afford the time to come back and read the rest of it

Before the internet bubble burst in 2001 there was a lot of talk about how traditional

businesses didn’t “get” the internet We don’t hear so much from those people any more The bubble burst, they were proved wrong The reason they were wrong was that they thought the new technology made the old basics obsolete

We’re going to be discussing a lot of very modern ways to do marketing in this book, but let’s not get lost People are still people and selling is still selling In the end, the internet

is just a channel, a new way for us to communicate with each other It may be a major channel which has disrupted commerce in a way not seen before in our lifetimes, but it’s still a channel And perspective matters

To keep that perspective, I’m going to be diving back into a work which was written in the fifth century B.C : The Art of War by the Chinese general Sun Tzū I chose this book because it’s out of copyright so I won’t have to pay royalties if I quote it Ha, ha No, not really I chose it because its principles of strategy apply equally well to business as to war These are the basics

Marketing ideas come and go, gee, if I only had a dollar for every new book on the subject that comes out But the basic principles endure The Art of War was written from a

I’ve seen an awful lot of companies violate this For example, they make a sales budget based on new business they will gain However, they never allowed that the competition

would probably come in and take some of their existing business from somewhere, in

other words, they did not allow for disadvantages If they had, they would have realised that they needed to target a lot more new business to meet their sales goals

Or, to give you another example, I’ve seen companies go after new business by competing

on price, and then be surprised when the competition lowered theirs in response This all sounds like common sense, but it gets ignored more often than you’d imagine

Chapter 1

They’re just not that into you

A few basic lessons in marketing

Marketing is easy? Not every struggling business owner would agree and so to explain this statement, I need to tell you a little about my story, but that’s okay, I like talking about myself

For more than ten years I worked at a billion dollar multinational electronics company Our complex products were designed by teams of highly qualified engineers using every tool in the modern design toolbox from Computer-Aided-Design and Project Management Software to Six Sigma quality systems

And then there was me No specific skills, couldn’t draw a new product design let alone manufacture one, dropped out of university, former semi-professional bass player,

sometime warehouse operative Probably if I honestly took my recognised professional skills, I could write them on a small set of cards and teach them to someone in an

afternoon

I felt most guilt about that, when reflecting on the benefits my team of product managers enjoyed: good salaries, better offices than the engineers, free access to senior management (although you might question if that was really a benefit had you ever met some of them), international travel and the best restaurant food

Oh yes, especially the international travel and great food! My personal favourites from that time included the week long sales conference at Phuket Beach, Thailand I had

arrived at the resort following a week in Shanghai and Singapore and had conveniently arranged to stay there in Thailand at the beach rather than in Singapore for the intervening weekend A top hotel in one of the world’s leading resorts, two days relaxing on the

beach, meals all-in and everything paid for by the company Working life doesn’t get much better than that

Or there was another trip I will never forget I found myself wearing a suit, carrying a small briefcase containing my laptop, standing in a small speedboat on a balmy late

September day as it took me across from a small village on the southern French coast to a resort island a few miles offshore This was something I had never planned for myself and would never have envisioned, but if this was my working life, then it wasn’t half bad

Now, I am not the world’s greatest drinker but I am a great connoisseur of good food and

There were still further benefits accruing to we marketers: company apparel and freebies

We were more presenters than participants at the various regional sales and marketing meetings, yet we somehow still qualified for the T—shirts, pens, hats, kit bags, towels, whatever, that the attendees got Some of it I wore, while other items went fairly quickly

to charity shops and other good causes Even now, there must be entire third world

villages wearing clothes painted with our company logo You can see some of it in my resignation photo below

One last comment to end this annoying boasting To this day, I still haven’t managed to spend all the frequent flyer points I built up during that globetrotting phase of my life There are still several free holidays to go

Why then, were we spoiled like this, compared to the engineers who actually designed the products the company sold To this day I’m not totally sure Engineers are surely

of some of my “luxury” side benefits: I dressed purely in company items for my last day

as a wage slave

Figure 1.1 My last day as a wage slave

Let’s assume for a minute that engineers are more intelligent than marketing people It might well be true and I for one am prepared to let it slip by So if marketing is also

relatively easy to do, then why wouldn’t an engineer change career and get himself an easier life with more fringe benefits and a higher salary?

I believe the answer is that before you can do this simple job, you have to unlearn a whole lot of baggage and assumptions you’ve been making, since starting business life

In my globetrotting days, I was invited all over the world to make presentations at sales and marketing meetings My presentations mainly consisted of some good jokes and cool graphics held together by a vague smattering of content, so I didn’t consider them good value, but I was asked to go, so I went I mean, it was better than sitting behind a desk doing emails all day

What it also gave me was the opportunity to observe other people’s presentations, to write silly poems on the free notepads and to make the sort of philosophic observations about life that any bored person would do under such circumstances And the main conclusion I drew was that people are just way, way, way too much into their own product with no idea that others might not be anywhere near as enthusiastic about it as they are

If you are presenting your company to a customer or potential new customer, you can’t assume any level of interest at all They’re just not that into you They are already mired

in their own product or service, their work problems, their personal problems But

somewhere you taught yourself that they would automatically be focussed on the same thing you’re interested in and, frankly, you’re going to have to unlearn this delusion fast,

or you’ll never be able to do something as simple as marketing

At its most basic, marketing is about seeing things from the customer’s point of view If you are so caught up in your own then you will never do that You may think what I’m saying is obvious, but the reason I’m hammering it, is that it’s really a lot harder than it looks It was watching the worst presenters at these conferences I attended that really brought the lesson home to me

Exhibit one: This guy had such a complicated set of slides that he had to present it with his back to the audience, reading the text of his own slides off the screen because it was too much to remember what he’d written There’s nothing stranger than watching than a guy

In case you doubt, then I give you Exhibit Two This engineer put up a complicated slide consisting of a big table full of detail, much of which was difficult for me to understand, and I worked in the company and already knew his products Before anyone could even read it, he immediately started expanding on the table as though we had already studied it thoroughly and were familiar with all its detail It’s true he was talking to a room full of technical people, people who had a need for components like the ones we made But they weren’t people who went to work every day living and breathing every detail of what we did I’m sure they weren’t able to follow more than 10% of what he said

Where I am going with this is: In your sales pitches, in your literature, on your website, wherever you want to communicate to your customers, don’t start by assuming they’re even interested IF you assume they couldn’t give a fig, and start from there, then you’re more likely to actually get them to listen

Obviously I’m not the first person to have this theory There is an expression which came from engineering and which you’ll also find in some marketing books: KISS (Keep it simple stupid)

But others have said the same thing in different ways I really like the following guide to making a presentation, which apparently came from Aristotle:

The discipline of marketing research wasn’t invented for nothing It would seem like a no brainer that you should research a market before entering it, until you look at just how much selling and marketing is done on a hunch No research, just guess

So you’ve been in the business all your life? Unless you’re already at least a millionaire then there’s room to listen more to your customers, and quickly, before some upstart

comes in, understands the customers’ needs better than you and steals them away

In some respects, it’s understandable why this happens When we look at a product it seems obvious what people will like about it After all, those are the things we like, it seems impossible that others won’t like them too We forget how different people are So instead of surveying the public, we surveyed ourself And we’re not even in the target group

writing, his company is teetering on the edge of insolvency

competitors is probably testing already They are just inching their conversion

performance up day by day, finding cheaper customers, finding out what persuades the customers to buy, finding which product features get them excited In the end, you’re going to be up against a wall of customer insight that you’ll never be able to climb

For a long time I’ve believed that the very best way a company can market test a new product is just to somehow release a version of the product first, even if you can’t mass produce it yet Get it out there Then you’ll know how people will really react to it

Some things can never be foreseen Stopping people on the street and asking what they think of a theoretical product is not the same as having the real thing in their hands But get the product out there and human creativity will go to work and find uses and

applications that were never dreamed of Or not, and it will fail

Texting is my favourite example of that When mobile phones were first launched no one, but no one, envisaged how much people would use them to send text messages But as we all know, it went huge No market test or trial is going to give you that

My point on this one, as I saw it, was to find a cheap way to get your product out there on the market, get lots of them out there, and see what works Hell, only something like one

in fifty product launches is a success Everyone knows which ones they were in hindsight, but in advance they thought it was all of them

The age of the internet blew this out the water If you have a product idea you can put up

a website, pay for some online advertising, hand make the first few products and watch what happens If it’s going to fail, let it fail fast, then get out and start working on the next one

Now that’s really listening to your customers

Once, I dimly remember, it was in the 1980s and desktop computers were an exciting pioneering field The British had a computer manufacturing industry which at that stage hadn’t been wiped out by first Silicon Valley - and later, China Amstrad Computers, founded by Alan Sugar who hosts the UK version of The Apprentice reality TV series, released their new model It had a revolutionary new design based on the latest processor and it was designed not to need the a fan A fan was standard in computers at the time It flopped People liked most things about the computer but a desktop computer should have

a fan Amstrad found room for an unnecessary fan, added it, and the product took off

There’s no accounting for customers, they’re awkward little bastards If they want

ketchup on their filet mignon, then break out the ketchup bottle before your competitors

do There are few chances to educate customers so that they ask for what you want them

to ask for Even if those chances come along, you still need to get them in the front door first and keep them around long enough until you’ve “re-educated” them And good luck with that

One last item on my list of the obvious things people miss: There are competitors out there

Every business knows that, but when they’re making sales plans, it’s an awful lot easier to just forget about them

You’ve thought carefully about the message that will bring people to your dental practice You’ve even surveyed a few people and they told you they want a skilled dentist that

won’t hurt them You write an advertising message which tells them this You run the ad

It fails

There were five other dentists in your town with the same message You were telling them what they wanted to hear, it’s just that you weren’t the only one they were hearing it from

So they had a choice, or the message sounded insincere to them because it didn’t seem to take much to get a dentist to say it

Here’s another message “We’ve opened a sushi restaurant and you can eat all you want for a low fixed price.” Six sushi restaurants opened in my town that year The person who crafted that message was probably sure it was a great idea which would bring people

in My heart goes out sometimes when I see that people have sunk their heart and soul into an enterprise that they completely believed in, but just isn’t that special to everyone else Even if you can get customers with a me-too message or product, your prices are going to be driven down to the limit of profitability or below

This is probably the reason my band didn’t make the big time Oh, did I mention I was in

a band when I was younger? We got through the doors of record companies (a feat in itself) but we never got signed, much to our disbelief We didn’t believe it because our music was as good as bands who’d made it I didn’t know enough then to know that “as good as” isn’t good enough When there are plenty of choices and an alternative already exists, then you’re own chances are mighty slim

There’s a whole book about this, one of my favourites, it’s called Positioning: The Battle For Your Minds I have a whole chapter about positioning later, but consider this for now:

“Today’s market is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past There are

just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.”

They said that in 1981, by the way Seems like a far off peaceful time compared to today’s world

So, before you run away with how brilliant your idea is, take a look at the competition If someone is already saying it, then you have to say something different or at least find a different way to say the same thing

From your customers’ point of view, it’s not all about you, it’s about them They’re just not that into you

• When you find out what your customers want, give it to them Even when you’re sure they’re wrong.

• And don’t do anything in isolation either There are competitors out there doing things which will interfere with your own plans You need to include that in your thinking

Chapter 2

The wild and wonderful things you could be doing with internet marketing …

This book makes the assumption that you’re a bit of a newbie in this field, or that you may know a bit about internet marketing, but have the feeling that you’re mostly missing out

on something And indeed you are

We live in one of the most exciting times ever for advertising and reaching the masses with your product, service, cause or whatever There’s so much going on that no one is doing it all and no one is doing it all right Every web innovation offers new possibilities that haven’t been thought of yet and even the possibilities that have been thought of might not be done yet in your in field, meaning you can just copy it straight over

Perhaps you’ve despaired once or twice, looking out there and seeing that all your

competition have websites with shopping carts and seem to be doing better than you Don’t worry, they may not be as good as you fear and for sure they don’t have it all

covered How’s their paid advertising? How much have they optimised their landing pages? Their site comes up on Google, but do the right pages come up? How well did their banner ads actually connect with what their customers were thinking?

It can also be inspiring to look at this from the aspect of how new technologies get

adopted The population varies in how open they are to any new thing Let me use a well known marketing graph to show you what I mean It groups the different stages in a

product’s life cycle according to how it gets adopted

If we look at web marketing, there are a few aspects which are well into the mainstream already, such as having a website itself Frankly, any business that doesn’t have a website these days is almost certainly in the Laggard category (There are some, mostly small businesses who either have no need for a website or who find the process of getting one built too daunting.)

However, many aspects of web marketing simply aren’t mainstream yet Some of them would be seen by web marketing professionals as a standard part of the tool kit, but not by the masses

✴ Change your mind about what you want to say in your promotion and then take just

a morning to update what your website accordingly, (and then just for the hell of it,

promotion.) After you’ve done that, quickly and easily run a test to find out if your customers actually react better to this new message than the old one

✴ Start a Kickstarter project so that your customers finance a product before you even invest a single cent in making it

That is absolutely not an exhaustive list, far from it Just some random thoughts I came up with on the fly

I’ve no doubt that every business can find new ways to promote themselves online where they would face very little competition

Not only are there these existing untapped opportunities, but there are also new ones

appearing all the time By my count, Google alone is making around twenty significant changes to their advertising platform every year I don’t see how any one person could ever keep up with all that, but it’s possible to know about them and to look for new

opportunities within it

Even more exciting, most of these changes are as open to smaller advertisers as they are to big-spending corporations In fact smaller companies are often more nimble, with simpler decision making processes than their bigger counterparts Because of this, whole

industries are getting upturned Amazon was once a small group of nobodies in the face

of huge established book chains, but Amazon understood online retail before the chains More recently, I personally ran into a situation concerning white goods in one of the

European markets, where the large retail chains were totally wrong footed by a smaller competitor with a smarter online strategy These larger chains pulled out of online

advertising altogether because they simply couldn’t compete Against the little guy!

There are many, many more examples

So if you’re at all worried that your business has been left behind, don’t be There is a world of opportunities out there if you do it smartly The aim of this book is to show you how that can be

In Chapter 5, after I go into a bit of detail about paid search advertising, I have a great example of setting up a whole business at practically no expense and testing an entire market before you ever need to seriously start investing money We are living in fantastic times for entrepreneurs

In the early years of the new millennium, the manufacturing company I worked at was going through a boom Our biggest market was the telecoms market, where we supplied all the major producers of telecoms network equipment That industry was growing at an insane rate and we were under strict orders from our customers to keep the parts coming Unfortunately for them, we had our production on allocation Allocation meant that we tried to give each customer a fair share of the parts we made There simply wasn’t enough capacity in this industry to produce all the components for which there was demand Our salesmen didn’t need to do any selling, but they did need to visit the customers to try and placate them about why we weren’t delivering more parts to them

Now, how many companies ever have that problem? Or this one: One of those customers came to us and asked us how much extra could they pay for the products so that we would ship more to them

While the company banked the money, the engineering and manufacturing teams worked

on a huge project to increase the production capacity This became the top focus of our management We designed new production machinery at a scale never dreamed of before

We even redesigned the products themselves just so that they could be produced more quickly One of my close colleagues told me that they were overlooking a major problem: there was no way we would ever be able to back the trucks up fast enough to take all the output away

These were heady times Yet it all made sense because the internet was rolling out and the amount of data traffic was growing exponentially Countries like China and India had to put a whole new infrastructure in from scratch New and faster telecoms and data network would be needed for this glorious future

In 2003 I personally saw these finished production machines for the first time They were

3 metres high and dwarfed every other production machine I’d seen anywhere in our

factories They were shining new and painted purple and lime green, masterpieces of engineering wired with the latest electronics And they were packed in crates to be hauled away, unused, and scrapped In just a few months the bottom had fallen out of the boom Our people were laid off in hundreds, factories were closed

The telecom market crashed like nothing else Most people were familiar at the time with the story of the internet crash, yet the telecom bubble destroyed more value and cost more jobs

I only mention this as a personal tail of how, when you are in the middle of it, it’s hard to tell the difference between a boom and a bubble This is a book about fantastic

opportunities in digital marketing These are times of great opportunity, but they may not last forever, so seize the day

Chapter 3