What are the best marketing methods for a small business?

I’m running our small web & design agency for almost two years now. There are many marketing methods I was considering and even tried out, however I’ve decided to concentrate on two of them only:

1) SEO - Search engine optimisation

2) Word of mouth - Client recommendations

I’ve looked at effectiveness of all other marketing methods we tried and I’ve came to a conclusion that the above two are the most effective by far.

Google brings thousands of highly targeted audience to our website every month. Those who like what they see, get in touch with us. Compare this to networking events where you have to attend on regular basis to first create connection and then maybe get a commission one day. How much time and energy this requires… Besides, most everyone knows a web design agency so the chances that they will need us one day are really tiny. Plus, and this brings me to another point, almost everyone knows someone who had their logo or website done by someone. And most of us will probably do the same thing if we needed new logo or new website: go and ask our friends if they could recommend anyone  for our project. If our friend was happy with the service he got from his supplier, he will most likely recommend that supplier to us.

And that is why my top marketing priority is customer satisfaction. Delivering work on time, on budget, providing excellent support, doing the extra mile. So that our customers are our best marketers.

Have you found the same to be true?

Steve Jobs’ product development philosophy

NC.: Where do great products come from?

JOBS: I think really great products come from melding two points of view—the technology point of view and the customer point of view. You need both. You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them—not something they’d want now.

INC.: You mean the technology is changing too fast.

JOBS: Yeah, and customers can’t anticipate what the technology can do. They won’t ask for things that they think are impossible. But the technology may be ahead of them. If you happen to mention something, they’ll say, “Of course, I’ll take that. Do you mean I can have that, too?” It sounds logical to ask customers what they want and then give it to them. But they rarely wind up getting what they really want that way.

Full article here.

The lifecycle of a business

In one of my previous articles, I expressed my admiration for Adobe (company behind the Creative Suite package - Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects) and how they keep reinventing their software packages.

The lifecycle of a business is something that keeps me busy thinking about. My strong desire is to create businesses that will be profitable, sustainable and will last for decades if not forever. I’m fascinated and obcessed by businesses who demonstrated the strength to overcome any economical, political and god-knows-what challenges and are still here. 100 years or longer. That’s very admirable. That’s a true business to me.

While thinking about what defines these businesses I came across Nancy Duarte presentations and I’ve picked up one key slide:

This is it! If a company is supposed to stay here for decades then it can’t just grow, it needs to reinvent itself regularly.

Employee revenge

Today we had a very funny incident at our agency. We used to work with marketing interns and their usual job responsibility was to write blog posts, update our company facebook, twitter account etc.

They would come to our office a few days per week and help us with the above.

We worked with three inters in total and all of them were excellent. These young graduates are very bright and resourceful. We usually work with them for a few months only as it is a pure internship position.

Today, however, one of them behaved in a quite shameful and inappropriate way.

She logged in to our company blog that she had an access to and deleted blog posts that she has written.

Why has she done so? From some reason she believes that she should be paid £30 for her travel expenses. When we told her to come in and discuss with us why she thinks we should pay her that and what for, she of course never did. Everyone is a hero over the emails. Why not to come in and talk to us face to face if she believes she’s right? I think I know the answer. Do you?

The whole incident is funny on one hand as we restored the blog articles immediately but it’s also totally unacceptable and disrespectful. I personally find this behaviour outrageous and am ready to report these attacks to the police and her current employer. What surprises me even more is why is she doing it? One would think she must really hate us for those £30 that are in dispute. 30 pounds!? It’s almost scary to watch such a dramatic change in her behaviour from one moment (working for us) to another (after she left).

Have you had similar stories with your employees?

One of my business gurus calls this “management training in practice”. You won’t be taught how to react to these situations when you do your MBA. One would have difficulties to make up such a story. It simply has to happen to you one day and you need to learn from it.

The incident made me realise once again that every business needs to be seriously protected against failure and mean behaviour of its staff or suppliers.  In order to perform their job the employees often need serious powers (access to databases, passwords, keys to the office) and that can be easily misused. What I’ve noticed when reading similar stories from other entrepreneurs is that these employees often don’t realise they’re committing a criminal offence. One might suggest that if you treat employees nicely, you don’t have to worry about that. I would think so too before I started to run my own business and realised that you can try as hard as you can to be super nice but you won’t avoid these things from happening. The only solution seems to be to become super protective over your property (including intellectual) and think about what-if situations before they happen.

What a world we live in

The art of powerful presentations

During one of my weekend afternoons spent in the office I came across this inspirational presenter: Nancy Duarte.

I’ve been always personally very intrigued by the power of presentations. There is something about them. If done the right way, you can watch a theatrical performance by one of the leading thinkers while absorbing new information. Can anything get any better than that?

What Nancy does is taking presentations to yet another level. Similarly to Steve Jobs, she truly mastered the art of presentations.

If you have some 30 mins of spare time to dedicate to a bit of inspirational education, go and watch these videos. They’re worth it.

Industry-specific business awareness

How long does it take for you to be aware of the business aspects of your industry?

I’ve been working as a freelancer for over two years, one year as a web designer, I studied Multimedia and computing my whole life. Yet certain things become apparent to me only after running a web design agency for over a year now.

Running a business means thinking in terms of profit, growth, sustainability. Not colours, latest trends, coolest techniques. It’s a difficult and long process to alter thinking like that. The designer in me wants to deliver the best work every time. But is it sustainable? Can I grow the company simply on the principle of delivering the same top-quality treatment to all our clients? Maybe not every client wants the coolest website if they can’t afford it. Some clients just want a website. A website that will work, is SEO optimised, is easy to update and has a unique design.

And so we decided to roll a new pricing scheme for our clients to allow them to tailor the offer we give them according to their budget and preference. It will take some time to prepare all the materials and also test the concept but that’s the way forward as we perceive it now.

The longer I run a business in the web design industry the more I learn about client demands, expectations and general trends. The industry-specific business awareness is probably one of the most important assets of a business owner.

Would you agree?

Unforeseen events in business

When you run a business, there are risks involved all along.

Some of them you can predict and have to be prepared for. For example the weak months with little work, employee dropping out of work from day to day, illness etc.

Some of them, however, are less predictable and worse to manage.

We have uncontrollable riots going on in London right now. Our small team at Moove Agency has decided to stay and work from home today, just to be on the safe side. AND because we can.

We are fortunate enough to work in the digital industry and we make a full use of it. Everything is digital and easily accessible from anywhere. Virtually any of our employees can work remotely at any time with no preparation. This business approach and strategy has proven to be very useful once again today.

Is your business as flexible to fight the unforeseen events too?

WordPress + WordCamp 2011

Two weeks ago, I went down to Portsmouth to attend the annual WordPress conference WordCamp UK.

Since our agency specialises in WordPress development, we felt the need to attend such conference for several reason:

1) To see what is happening in the industry overall

2) To get inspiration for our new WordPress projects

3) To meet our competitors

4) To make ourselves more visible in the WordPress world

On the reflection, I have to say that all of the objective has been achieved and I had a truly great time at WordCamp in Portsmouth this year.

Some factual round up of the events/information that has been passed on is on our company blog.

WordPress conference - WordCamp UK

WordCamp UK starts tomorrow (16 – 17 July 2011).

WordCamp is the UK’s largest WordPress weekend conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organised events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

I will be there and tweeting from our Twitter account @MooveAgency.

Updated website, The Apprentice, WordCamp UK

Just a few updates from me on what I’ve been up to lately:

1. Launched an updated version of our website: www.mooveagency.com

We’ve updated homepage and portfolio page.

2. Apprentice - didn’t get to the next round

3. WordCamp this weekend