Cool New Business Idea: Sunday September 14 2008

 

Kid

In my research travels, I came across this:

Kideo (www.kideo.com) is a new product offering the parents of young children the ability to buy cartoons featuring their sons or daughters interacting with the likes of Spiderman and the Care Bears (selling for about $40). Along with the animated head shot of the child, the videos also feature the other cartoon characters talking to the child (by name) in the cartoon and their image is also on the product packaging. This concept is similar to that of http://www.flattenme.com where children can be featured in personalised, illustrated storybooks.

BTW, I have no commercial association with this product at all – my interest, as my book title below would suggest, is in uncovering great new business ideas around the world.

Have a great day.

Terry Kyle
Author/Editor
Small Business Ideas – 400 Latest & Greatest Small Business Ideas From Around The World
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Small Business Marketing: Brilliant Lessons From The Movie, “What Women Want”

Small Business Marketing: Brilliant Lessons From The Movie, “What Women Want”

The other night I was watching a DVD of Mel Gibson’s 2000 film, “What Women Want”, an entertaining enough ‘rom-com’, and it really resonated with a couple of things that information marketing guru Eben Pagan talked about recently.

Now for those unfamiliar with the film’s plot, basically a sexist guy (Mel) working in advertising in Chicago kind of semi-electrocutes himself and suddenly has the power to hear what women are thinking. As a result, he can then use his marketing messages to directly ‘tap into’ the thoughts of women.

Now I worked for a long time as a creative director in advertising in the past on accounts like IBM, Pepsi, Cadbury’s and Kellogg’s, so I’ll skip over the irrelevant comparisons with real-life advertising agencies.

But what WAS fascinating in the movie and VERY valuable to us marketers were certain brilliantly clarifying lessons:

Firstly, the film reminds us that customers’ buying behaviour is largely driven by irrational fears, frustrations, hopes and volatile emotions.

Is your business marketing working on that emotional impact level?

Virtually all advertising appeals to emotion instead of logic because emotions are far more powerful in influencing behaviour.

However, the trick that the film showed brilliantly in the climactic Nike pitch scene was just how SPECIFIC we have to be in addressing the fears, frustrations and emotional impulses of our target markets.

In my view, the film is must-see marketing training for that reason alone. Watch that scene and the ad itself which Gibson’s character narrates to see how specifically he addresses EXACTLY ‘what women want’.

But, you ask, how can we find out what these (often hidden) emotions and irrational fears are?

In my humble opinion, we have to be in constant dialogue with individuals precisely in our target market and constantly inviting new research ‘guinea pigs’ in order to find more out about “What My Buyers Want” and no, it won’t be a new car.

It will be usually be a SPECIFIC, deeply EMOTIONAL need, want or desire.

As Eben Pagan rightly says, most non-essential purchases are driven by emotion THEN rationalized by the logical part of the brain later.

The science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein put it another way: “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.”

People usually want to talk but you are looking for an especially frank, honest and blunt person who will tell you what’s REALLY going on with your target market. Though the marketing ‘inventor’ is unknown, Eben Pagan recommends building a whole composite ‘avatar’ with a whole life story of your typical customer or client mapped out.

Are you doing that with your marketing at the moment?

One conversation with a candid prospect could be worth a great deal of money to your business not only in what SPECIFIC marketing messages you are putting out, but also in NOT saying things that alienate or turn off your prospects.

It may sound a bit crazy – actually marketing is full of way crazier stuff than this – but IMAGINE what thoughts you would hear if you could overhear your prospects’ thoughts.

At their very psychological core, what common drives and specific thoughts exist among them?

Is it the desperate need for respect from their peers or superiority over them? A sense of power over their lives? The desire to be cool, accepted and popular? Even these are much too general and need a great deal more development on the SPECIFICS.

“What Women Want”. Check it out for a quick marketing refresher course.

Have a great day.

Terry Kyle
Author/Editor
400 Latest & Greatest Small Business Ideas From Around The World

“These are not just small business ideas, they are smart business ideas…you’ll learn a great deal from these words of wisdom.”

David Meerman Scott
Bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR

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Small Business SEO? Why SEO Is A Complete Waste Of Time For Your Small Business

Small Business Online Marketing WITHOUT SEO? Absolutely.

OK, put the guns down and hear me out BEFORE the public execution begins over such an outrageous statement.

Here’s why SEO could be a total waste of time for a small business or home business entrepreneur, namely, you:

Unless you have invented a time machine, time is finite.

Limited.

Valuable.

All of us entrepreneurs have so many demands on our time that some days we’re pretty clueless. So in this time-poor lifestyle, why should we allocate vast time (or even financial) resources to SEO and boosting our rank on Google?

Right about now, the SEO guys here are turning red with rage and phoning up hit men.

But let’s get real.

SEO is expensive. Often very expensive.

Most small business entrepreneurs simply do not have the time or financial resources to compete with bigger businesses who have full-time consultants or firms working constantly on their SEO to bump up their Google place a notch or two.

What I propose is a marketing model quite different and one that I hope gives you back some time and money.

At heart, I’m a guerrilla marketer driven by cost-effective (including time, not just money) results-driven tactics and strategies and to be blunt, I’m too technically illiterate to appreciate a lot of the nuances of say, H1, H2 and H3 codes.

There’s a simple saying in our business: sell what is already selling.

Let’s apply this to your SEO-less online marketing.

Rather than spending months or years (time is money) on optimising everything about your page, devouring every latest SEO trick and building hundreds of quality backlinks, instead make sure that your fine-tuned marketing messages constantly appear on sites that Google ALREADY loves.

When your messages appear on some of these sites, Google will put it on Page 1 in UNDER TWENTY MINUTES.

And you have time to go out and enjoy a movie rather than buying another SEO book.

And yes, I think you MUST use a paused Adwords account to find out exact long search phrases in your niche to use as titles and content in your messages.

But that’s very different to constant SEO development of your own website/s.

If you want to find these Google-loved sites where your messages MUST appear, go to alexa dot com and check the top 100/500. Work out where you can get your messages seen ON THESE SITES and indexed rapidly and high on Google.

For example, I get incredible Page 1 Google results from a site that is in the 8,000s on Alexa – all WITHOUT a penny spent on SEO. One in the Alexa 300s is phenomenal.

Google ALREADY loves these sites and doesn’t care much for mine but I don’t care. Because my messages are on those sites! And I keep them there.

Those sites are among the biggest traffic drivers to my poorly-SEOd site. And they’re free to place messages there.

No PPC either – all free.

Don’t even get me started on Pay-Per-Click!

Now imagine if you have great marketing messages appearing on TWENTY of these Google-loved sites a day.

This will give you far more IMMEDIATE and FREE traffic than wasting years of your life on SEO-ing YOUR site to death.

Of course, you MUST have YOUR landing pages properly tested and sorted when the traffic does come from these other Google-friendly sites but you have optimised it for PEOPLE, targeted prospects, not a Google robot that changes its mind constantly about Quality Score!

See what I mean? After all, did you find this article on my website?

So there we are.

Let the vengeful fists of SEO fury come now.

Nonetheless, I hope this helps your small business journey because I know how important succeeding in it is to you.

On an unrelated matter, I came across this cool axiom from Jim Rohn today: “Your personal income rarely exceeds your personal development.”

Hard to argue with the J-Bird there.

Have a great day.

Terry Kyle
Author/Editor
400 Latest & Greatest Small Business Ideas From Around The World
www.Latest-Business-Ideas.com
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http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Terry_Kyle
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Business-Ideas-Latest-Greatest/dp/0955898900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216981155&sr=8-1

Small Business ‘X-Factor’? Try These 3 Ideas To ‘Branson’ Your Business

In our increasingly competitive marketplace, it seems to me that adding the ‘X-Factor’ or unique ‘star power’ to our businesses is pretty important if they are to grow.

But how?

From my own advertising agency background, I believe that it can be done in (at least) three ways:

1. ‘Branson Your Business’ – Richard Branson has a business persona that is extremely positive, fun, gregarious, generous and one that suggests he sees the world as a place of abundance where anything is possible (even space passenger flights!) rather than as a place of scarcity where there is hardly anything good and just many aggravations. He is completely extroverted and enthusiastic in approaching, talking to and connecting with everyone he meets. These attributes are a great model to follow.

2. Stardom by association – if your business has one or more well known clients, promote that fact. Some catering company vans that I often see around my neighbourhood here have the slogan under their company name, “Supplier to Virgin Atlantic”. The fact is that if your business is associated with ‘big name players’, it implies that you or your business is a heavyweight, has credibility and should be taken seriously. The point is not to merely have one or more ‘name’ clients but to actually feature that association in your business marketing materials e.g. through their logos on your brochures or website. When I used to hire personnel in advertising, I was always far more influenced by who a candidate had worked for rather than one who told me that they were “hard working” or other tired descriptions (which were probably true).

3. Creating a buzz around your business – a business that is up to date, hungry to try new ideas and a sense that there is ‘always something happening’ is quite contagious. Staff should be switched ON, know their stuff backwards and not be time-wasting gossipers. I believe that this sense of ‘something happenin’ here’ is often based on the tempo of the buying experience, the faster and more efficient it feels (depending on the business), the greater the buzz or ‘vibe’ in a business – this is particularly true in many retail businesses. Places where staff are busy, active and seem like they don’t have enough time to do all that needs doing (within reason) are usually much more enticing than those with a snoozing guy behind the counter reading ‘The Sun.’ In short, a business should have the identity of an expert ‘do-er’ not a lazy ‘snoozer’.

I do of course appreciate that these ideas are much easier to apply in some businesses than others.

More thoughts on this over at my site at http://www.latest-business-ideas.com

Best regards
Terry Kyle
Author/Editor
“400 Latest & Greatest Small Business Ideas From Around The World“

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