Nigel is a sales and marketing consultant, speaker and author. He has been helping several thousand enterprises to improve their sales and marketing results over the last 25 years.

Here Nigel shares with us his 10 step plan to increasing referrals for your business.

1.  Set specific targets. For example: three referrals a week. If you set targets for other parts of your business, why not set targets for referrals?

2.  Start a chain reaction. If you want more referrals – give more referrals. In Deepak Chopra’s book, ‘The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success’ (Bantam Press), he talks about the Law of Giving: “The universe operates through dynamic exchange…giving and receiving are different aspects of the flow of energy….and in our willingness to give that which we seek, we keep the abundance of the universe circulating in our lives.”

3.  Expand the ‘Reciprocity Factor’. Don’t make just one recommendation: make three.
This is only fair, isn’t it? After all, in business, you are not supposed to single source. Typically, companies get three quotes. You are being more helpful, by providing three options. On the one hand, you will be seen as impartial. On the other hand, you have tripled the ‘Reciprocity Factor’. By the way, where possible, ensure that you tell each supplier that you have recommended them.

4.  Mention to new customers that you will be asking them for referrals, as you get X% of your business by word of mouth. Also tell them that you will earn this by providing an outstanding service to them.

5.  Decide the precise words that you will use when you ask for a referral. Then write the words down. If you ask for referrals in person, you may get nervous – so the answer is to practice saying the words out loud. For example: “Tell me, who else do you know who might like to hear about us? We would like to send them a special introductory offer.” Alternatively, you can ask via an email / via your website.

6.  If you work in a team, train your colleagues in the ‘Art of Referrals’. Discuss referrals in team meetings, in order to remind them of the importance of this area.

7.  Thank your ‘Referrers’ (also known as advocates) personally. A nice idea is to send them a hand written ‘thank you’ note. It may also be appropriate to send them a gift.

8.  Keep records. In your CRM (Customer Relationship Management system), include a ‘flag’ for advocates. If they have done it once – they are likely to do it again.

9.  Make asking for referrals part of the way that you do business. One way of reminding people is within outbound emails, within the signature area.

10. Measure how many referrals you get each month, each quarter and each year. Remember that “What gets measured, gets done”.

If you have any sales, marketing or internet marketing questions, please ask via: www.marketingcompass.co.uk

Published courtesy of Nigel Temple

The rise of social media has been so rapid that it’s easy to feel left behind. And it’s not just a personal scene any more – many businesses are using sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to attract followers and fans.
If you run your own business, social media offers you the chance to spread the word about what you do. It enables you to build a reputation, forge new relationships and bring in new business.
But if you haven’t taken the plunge yet, you’re not alone. According to research by specialist SME insurer Hiscox (2012), only 57% of small businesses currently use social media to support their marketing efforts.
And research by The Neilsen Company has found that 53% of adults who engage in social networks are active followers of a brand.
It’s never too late to start – there are exciting opportunities for most businesses on social media.

The Sage guide offers advice on how to spread the word using social media, including:

• How social media can help your business
• Choosing the right channels for you and your business
• Balancing business and personal
• Finding your followers
• Reaching out to your customers

Download the guide (1.5MB pdf)

Pixlee
Best for: Creating photo albums

This service lets you crowd source thousands of user-generated photos and display them online in curated albums. Sign up for an account and create a photo album on your site or on Pixlee.com. You can invite customers to upload pictures directly to the album or via email, Instagram, and Twitter. Then, you can add the album to Facebook and Tumblr. Pixlee’s software will pick the best photos based on the photographer’s popularity, where the photos were taken, and other factors. You can log on to your Pixlee dashboard to see how many photos you’ve collected, how many views they have received, and other metrics. Cost: Starting at $500 a month

Pongr
Best for: Creating loyalty campaigns

Looking for ways to solicit user-generated images of your products? Pongr lets you create loyalty campaigns on its website. You dole out points to fans who submit images by emailing them to your Pongr address or submitting them with the service’s free iPhone or Android app. People can also accrue points for sharing images and cash them in for prizes that include gift cards and iPads. Your company’s Pongr page displays the images, a leader board, and a store for redeeming points for prizes. Cost:Free to create a photo gallery and campaign; $4,500 a month for premium services, including access to CRM data and customized landing pages

Stipple
Best for: Tagging photos

Use Stipple to tag photos of your products with a variety of information, including prices, maps, and links to your online store. When someone mouses over or touches the image, the information automatically appears. The data stays with images as they are shared across the Web. You can check your Stipple dashboard to see how many people have viewed the content and on which sites. You can also use Stipple to tag images for use in traditional online ad campaigns. Cost: Free for social-media campaigns with up to 1,000 engagements, then $250 a month and up

Curalate
Best for: Tracking analytics

Curalate helps track how other people use the product images from your company’s website, Pinterest account, or Instagram account. Go to your Curalate dashboard to see a variety of metrics, including which photos are driving the most traffic to your website and which ones are being shared the most on Pinterest and Instagram. The service also identifies your most influential customers and lets you respond to pins, repins, and comments about your images from your Curalate dashboard. You can also use Curalate to create promotions on Pinterest. Cost: Roughly $1,000 a month

Ok, so the prices aren’t really in the small business budget range, but with the free options to start with, you’ll get a flavour of what works and what’s achievable, if you find it is really helping to generate new business it might be the way to go with the marketing budget if it’s giving you great ROI.

As with any marketing you try, you have to take it seriously and really give it a go, do your homework, keep it up-to-date and make sure you record any sales it gets you to find out if it can pay off. Just kinda playing with it a little now and again is never going to be successful.

How can you possibly get a message across in such a small amount of space?

You can’t expect your business card to tell the whole story about your company. What you should expect it to do is present a professional image people will remember.

The colour, wording and texture of our business card have a lot to do with its appeal and its ability to convey your company image.

Use common sense when you are designing your business card.

If your business markets children’s toys and games, you might try using bright, primary colours and words written in child’s script. On the other hand, if you run a financial consulting service, then you want your business card to convey professionalism and reliability, so stick to traditional looks such as black printing on a grey, beige or white background.

Of course, professional designers claim entrepreneurs should not try to attempt designing a business card on their own, but many cash-strapped business owners have no other choice.

The best course of action: Look at all the business cards you receive, and emulate the cards that you like. You may have more leeway if you are in a creative business, such as party planning or retailing, but in general, keep the following tips in mind:

1. Use your logo as the basis. Make it the largest element on the card.
2. Keep it simple. Do not cram too much information on the card.
3. Do include the essentials, your name, title, company name, address, phone and fax numbers, and email and website addresses.
4. Make sure the typeface is easily readable.
5. Stick to one or two colours.

Once you’ve got business cards, make the most of them:

1. Always give people more than one card (so they can give it to others).
2. Include your card in all correspondence.
3. Carry cards with you at all times, in a card case so they’re clean and neat.

Business cards don’t have to be boring. If your industry allows for a little creative flair, here are some ideas to try:

1. Use 4-inch-by-7-inch cards that fold over (like a mini brochure), cards made of plastic or cards with photos on them.
2. Although they are more standard than standard business cards, cards in non-traditional shapes get attention. Try a teddy bear shape for a day-care service, for example, or a birthday cake for a party planner.
3. Textured paper can add to a card’s interest, as can coloured paper. In general, stay with lighter shades that enhance readability.
4. Thermography, a process that creates raised, shiny print, adds interest to a card. Embossing and foil stamping are two other printing processes that can give your card visual appeal.

Of course, you needn’t read statistics to understand email’s importance, you use it constantly to send sales pitches, apply for jobs, search for new business, and send friends a link to a new recipe.

If you can’t get people to respond to your messages, you’re probably doing something wrong, especially if your mother won’t read your emails.

Here are some tips on how to write the perfect email that gets the results you want.

Arguably the most important component of the email, the subject line is the deciding factor in whether your message is read or deleted. Additionally, using a spam tagline or lots of characters such as £££ can send it straight to the junk box.

The subject line needs to be truthful and informative and tempt the reader into wanting to know more about the content. In that case, strive to retain an air of mystery, but remain truthful. If your email has nothing to do with the subject line, the receipt will have a bad impression of you.

The salutation.
The start of the email sets the tone for the main body. In the opening words the reader is making a judgement about you and what you want, and whether they will continue to read. Seeming too formal or impersonal, or, conversely, unprofessional, can cast a negative impression. If you know the person’s name, address him or her personally; if not, use “Hi” rather than “To whom it may concern.” The latter is stuffy and formal. In business, especially in PR, you need to build relationships, so sounding friendly but professional is always a good approach.

The bit in the middle.
Long, waffling emails are a massive turn off to anyone, especially those who receive dozens or even hundreds of unsolicited emails a day. Even if the recipient opens your email, a page-long essay will probably inspire him or her to close out of it. No one has the time, or the interest, to read your life story. Keep your messages as short and concise as possible, and deliver information in a digestible way. Your purpose for writing needs to be clear and presented in a way that will appeal and relate to the recipient.

The ending.
Assuming the recipient sticks with your email to the end, the way you sign off is as important as the way you start. End your email by making clear what you would like the reader to do, but don’t do it in a commanding way. Phrases such as “I look forward to hearing from you” or “Please let me know your thoughts” invite a response and make it clear you would like to hear from them. But they are also casual enough to not sound threatening. Sign off with “many thanks” or “kind regards” or something similar and your name, including your first name. Rapport building isn’t achieved with Mr and Ms

Additionally, when relevant, include your professional Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Google+ accounts with your signature, especially when approaching someone who doesn’t know you. This way the person can have a better look at what you do, reinforcing your professionalism in his or her eyes.

Adverse weather has affected most of the UK recently – there’s some advice for businesses on dealing with the effects.

In marketing, industry experts outline the keys to marketing success in 2013. And we look at Government plans for a shake-up of the state pension; what will it mean for you in retirement?

Also in this issue we are giving away our ‘How to measuring business performance‘ guide for free.

While the profit and loss account shows important evidence of your financial results, there are other measurements that can provide alternative assessments of the business.

Using key performance indicators (KPIs) can give you greater insight into how your business is performing and help you in making better and more informed decisions. But you need to select indicators that are key to attaining your business objectives.
Download our free guide to learn the best ways to measure the performance of your business.

As you develop an action plan for your long-term growth strategy, you may have to disrupt the status quo.

We’re spending the first part of the new year aligning our organisation around our top priorities and long-term plans for growth. To do this, we must develop an action plan that supports the strategy. Easier said than done.

A good action plan may require disrupting existing routines and responsibilities. These disruptions, which our team may initially perceive as negative and be resistant to (who welcomes disruptive change?) may be vital for our strategy to succeed.

Going through this process over the years, we’ve learned a few tips about the best approach. Keep these three factors in mind as you develop your own strategic action plan:

Create a sense of urgency.

The more established an organisation, the harder it is to implement change and execute transformation. Therefore, it’s important to build momentum early in the process. Shifting course is no simple task in a legacy business. It requires an army-like crew moving together toward a common goal. Without this collective effort, the ship may fail to reach its destination or, even worse, sink under its own weight.

Don’t build a business on a “burning” platform.

Executing on growth plans or a new product offering may require creating a distinct business unit. This takes a lot of time, testing, and trial. It’s better to build it before the industry beats you to it. We’ve been working over the last year to build a cloud accountancy service, to access a larger market at a time when small businesses are looking to reduce their overheads, and increase customer efficiency and satisfaction. Because competitors are also preparing to enter this space, it’s wise to invest now in long-term strategies to stay ahead of our rivals.

Don’t be afraid to cannibalize your existing business.

As business owners, we become very proud of the products we have created or the services we provide. However, it’s important to innovate and constantly stay atop of customers’ needs and demands, evolving our products and services accordingly. Apple does this quite well-, when the iPhone first launched, there was some concern that it would cannibalize the existing iPod franchise. But Apple was willing to make that trade-off in exchange for a much bigger opportunity.

What actions have you taken to execute your growth strategies?

SaveDelete.com, a blog with tech and computer marketing tips and news, published a roundup earlier this year of the “Top 13 Infographics that Mock Infographics.” (Among them: the very meta data set “The Number of ‘Infographics’ I’ve Seen This Week” and “Infographs Are Ruining the Internet.”)

But, done right, infographics can be a powerful marketing tool. They’re easily shareable and portable, functioning as content party favours that allow your audience to repost the material on their own blog or site, thereby spreading your message for you.

So what’s an infographic? Exactly what it sounds like: Information expressed graphically, via drawings, pictures, maps, diagrams, charts or similar elements, all held together with a coherent visual theme and typically published as an image file. These days they are produced in both static and animated video forms.

This is not about self-promotion. The best infographics express rich, objective data in a way that’s more accessible and engaging than a dense spreadsheet or ho-hum pie chart. Generally they take one of four shapes: an illustration of the “state of” some sort of business sector or function; a checklist or resource; a compare-and-contrast study; or the evolution of a movement, demographic or industry.

Infographics should be concise, creative and educational, conveying a burst of data in an eye-catching, succinct, portable package. In a world where every brand has the ability to publish blogs and webinars and photos and research as part of its marketing effort, your own content has to be top-shelf; it must stand out from the sea of sameness and not waste a minute of a would-be customer’s precious time.

Consumers today are smarter, as they are looking for more points of information, more data about the decisions they’re making, infographics convey a lot in a concise, accessible format.

Infographics are inherently informative and visually engaging. They’re expertise in a blink.

Get in the Picture
Here are some resources for producing DIY infographics

many-eyes.com
With IBM Research’s Many Eyes tool, you can upload data and use it to produce shareable infographics in numerous formats.

google.com/publicdata
Google’s Public Data Explorer allows you to choose from neatly organized public data sets pulled from the U.S. Census Bureau and other providers.

infogr.am
Create infographics easily and relatively quickly at infogr.am using one of several predesigned templates that allow for customisation.

charts.hohli.com
Hohli is an online chart-builder that gives users the ability to create customizable Venn diagrams, bar graphs, scatter plots and other charts.

app.piktochart.com
Piktochart offers a free and paid DIY infographics tool with lots of fun, flexible templates.

create.visual.ly
Visual.ly is a showcase for data visualization and a great resource for those looking to share infographics. (It’s also a matchmaker for brands and infographic designers.) The “create” section has a DIY tool.

wordle.net
Part tool and part toy, Wordle allows you to generate a word cloud from any block of text. It’s a fun and colourful way to create a picture of how a brand or industry “looks” based on the language it uses.

Let’s Break it Down

Utility
The best infographics are entertaining, educational and intrinsically useful. Ask yourself: How will this help my audience? Will they find this applicable to their business? Will they be fascinated enough to spend a few minutes with it, then pass it around?

Data
Infographics should be based on fact, not opinion. So use credible data (as you should for all content, but it’s especially true here). Your ideas might emerge as part of that story, but credible infographics are rooted first in reality. If you are going to tell me what you think, give me a solid foundation for your reasoning. Your infographic should tease a larger story out of real fact, not feelings. What’s a credible source? A research report from a reputable analyst or industry association is a good source; a blog post, less so.

Story
The best infographics have a hypothesis and narrative at their core. That sounds high-minded, doesn’t it? But it just means that you need to home in on the key idea you want your data to express. Write a kind of thesis statement. Then outline the main data points you want to use that support your thesis.

And by the way, when dealing with data, less is more: Don’t try to cram too much into an infographic. Distil the essence of your message; if you still have more to say on the subject, link to a full report for more information. Cisco did this well with its video on cloud computing, “Consider the Cupcake,” which used a baking analogy to forecast the predicted enormity of cloud computing in 2015. Cisco had a lot to say on the topic, so it linked to a landing page that allowed visitors who wanted to drill down to download an entire research report on the subject.

Logical sequence
Lay out the narrative with an eye toward information architecture. This means organising your information in a way that flows logically, without undue complexity. Create an outline that highlights your key ideas in a narrative form. Most people skip this phase and go straight to design. But mapping is the critical step to creating an infographic that tells a meaningful story and doesn’t read as a jumble of numbers and drawings. Do this outline stage first, then get out the paint.

Great design
Awesome infographics use colour, typography, illustrations, animation, video, charts and text to convey their data story. Hiring a design agency is one option. But there are resources for DIYers as well.

Need some inspiration? Go to Pinterest.com and search “infographics.” I’ll warn you now: The boatload you’ll find there borders on overwhelming.

Quality control
Make sure your infographic is error-free. If I had a pound for every infographic I’ve seen that contains a typo or a math error, I would be driving a Roller. Check and double-check figures, source lines and text. If your infographic gets toted over to other blogs and embedded there (as you hope it will), you want it to look professional.

Promotion
The goal, as ever, is to drive attention to and interest in your brand. So be sure to cover the basics: The best infographics are outfitted with social bling to allow visitors to easily share them on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook, and with some string of code that allows them to be embedded on other sites, with a link back to you.

Remember to include a call to action in the infographic as well, but nothing too complicated. Try a stay-in-touch approach, like ‘sign up for future updates’ or ‘get the full report here’ vs something time or sales specific, like a free trial offer. That’s because an infographic can have a long shelf life, and you want yours to make the most of it.

Or, they do put thought and effort into planning for market research, promotion and positioning, and then never follow through on their great ideas.

One problem is that most entrepreneurs don’t have marketing experience. They may be skilled tradesmen, savvy financial advisers or talented writers, expert in the niche they plan to build their business around, but they’re not marketers. Some don’t realise that executing a solid marketing strategy is essential to any venture’s success. Others know it’s important but don’t know where to begin.

Here’s why it’s so important: No matter how ingenious your product or service, no one will find it if they don’t know it’s there.

The marketing component of your business plan should include a budget for time, if you plan to tackle the job yourself, and money. You need a timetable and a professional website that attracts visitors and makes it easy for them to learn more about you, your product or service, and equally easy to purchase what you’re selling.

Here are some other points to consider as you’re developing your marketing plan:

• What is my message? Your message needs to be more than “My product is great.” What’s the problem it solves? If you’re a professional, what’s the value you and your service offer? How are you different from your competition?

• Who is my audience? Unless you have a niche product, consider your potential audience in terms of ever-expanding ripples. For instance, a collapsible coffeepot may be just the thing for a college student’s tiny dorm room. That’s your initial target audience. But his parents and grandparents, who are helping outfit that dorm room, might also be audiences. If they’ve downsized their living quarters, they might just want one for themselves, too. It also could be great for campers, boaters, anyone living in a small space.

• Which are the appropriate media outlets for a public-relations campaign? Social media is great for niche products because online forums build communities around common interests. Daytime TV talk shows tend to have audiences with lots of women. Most newspaper readers are now 55 or older. Once you have decided who your audience is, figure out what they’re watching, listening to, reading and doing online, then customise your message for that medium and audience.

• What’s your budget? When you’ve answered these questions, you should be able to determine how much marketing you can do yourself, and how much you’ll need help with. If you’re handling it yourself, budget for the time it will take to do things like keeping your website active with fresh blog posts, posting content on social media and developing pitches to get print, radio or TV interested. If you plan to pay a professional for marketing services, use your marketing plan to explore the costs and timetable, and budget accordingly.

Whether you’re launching a dream or re-evaluating your existing business, it all starts with a solid plan. Marketing should be fundamental part of that plan. It’s delivers customers to the business, so it can’t be an afterthought.