Tag Archives: marketing

Owning up to misteaks

I am forced to admit that I am not perfect.

Within the last two weeks alone, I have:

  • Sent an email to a client invoicing the client…but failed to attach the actual invoice.
  • Contacted an opportunity, and (due to an editing error) referred to a DIFFERENT company instead of the opportunity’s company.

Obviously I am not eating my own wildebeest food (yes, I’m burned out on iguanas). While these were short missives which would have been significantly delayed if I had literally “slept on it,” I could have caught these errors if I had read my communications just ONE MORE TIME.

In the first case, the client alerted me to my mistake before I realized that I had made it. I have a good relationship with the client, so I just re-sent the message WITH the attached invoice and thanked the client for alerting me. I WAS paid.

In the second case, I had no previous relationship with the opportunity, so I couldn’t draw upon any goodwill. Perhaps I would have lucked out and the opportunity wouldn’t have caught my mistake…but I doubt it. I could have remained silent and just chalked it up as a loss, but I proactively apologized for the mistake. Perhaps I’ve lost the opportunity anyway, or damaged my chances severely, but it was the right thing to do.

Sometimes mistakes are intentional

I guess I could have used the excuse that I made the wrong company name mistake intentionally.

  • For example, the title of this post is an example of an intentional “misteak,” designed to grab the attention of the discerning reader.
  • And phishers and scammers often embed intentional mistakes in their pitches, figuring that if the reader completely ignores the intentional mistake, the reader is more likely to fall for the scam. Although I’m sure that this product (advertised in a game app) is NOT a scam, but is a perfectly legitimate product.

Actually, this mistake may have been TOO MUCH of a mistake. It took me several readings to figure out what “bad stars” was supposed to mean. (If you’re similarly confused, it’s supposed to be “bed starts.”) Then again, I’m not the target audience.

But I can’t think of a way to claim that I INTENTIONALLY messed up the opportunity’s company name. There goes that excuse.

Why to proactively own up to mistakes

Some people may have legitimate reasons for not revealing a mistake to someone else. Perhaps the person is a secret agent, and doesn’t want to let the enemy agent know that the information is incorrect. Or perhaps revelation of a mistake to a competitor could allow the competitor to take advantage of it.

But in most cases, you’re not a secret agent, and you’re not talking directly to a competitor. Therefore, it’s best to admit the mistake and not let it fester.

Laura Click of Blue Kite Marketing described an instance in which the company sent out an email but didn’t format the email correctly. As a result, their subscribers received a message that began:

Morning, <name>!

This was especially embarrassing to Blue Kite because it is a marketing firm, helping clients to better market their products and services. An error like this seems to suggest that Blue Kite doesn’t eat its own wildebeest food.

So Blue Kite Marketing sent a follow-up email. If you read the post that described the episode and included the text of the follow-up email, you will see that Blue Kite did the following:

  • Admitted the mistake.
  • Described how the mistake happened (without making excuses for it).
  • Noted that these mistakes can happen, even to seasoned marketers.
  • Apologized profusely.
  • Thanked the people who pointed out the error.
  • Used the episode as an opportunity to have the recipients update their profiles (“if you want to make doubly sure we know your name”).

The recipients appreciated Blue Kite Marketing’s honesty, and that email admitting the mistake resulted in tremendous engagement. As Blue Kite noted, an episode like this “builds trust and loyalty.”

Of course, apologizing for a mistake is not a guarantee that things will be better. We’ll never know, but perhaps one recipient was so incensed by the error that the person resolved never to do business with the company again. And in my case, I very well could have blown my opportunity by using the wrong company name.

But I still maintain that sincerely apologizing for a mistake is better than doing nothing at all.

And it could have been worse

But if I think about the two mistakes that I know that I made over the last two weeks, and all the mistakes that I DIDN’T know that I made over the last two weeks, and all of my other mistakes over the past few decades, they all pale in comparison to a mistake that I made about 15 years ago.

I was working for Motorola (pre-split) at the time, and if you know anything about Motorola, you know that Motorola is very big on process. Our little division at Motorola was working on achieving a particular Software Engineering Institute – Capability Maturity Model (SEI-CMM) assessment, and I was one of two people responsible for the Requirements Management Key Process Area (KPA). Our team would revise the division’s processes at times, and would announce these changes in release notes.

When I wrote the notes for a particular release, my notes made a reference to “qualtiy.”

Yes, that’s “tiy,” not “ity.”

Even <name> criticized me for that one.

Postscript

After I drafted this post, but before I published it, someone sent me a “God job” message.

But the message came with money, so I didn’t quibble.

While the contractors test the service providers, the service providers also test the contractors

When I wrote Bredemarket’s goals for 2021 (latest version here), my second goal was to pursue multiple income streams. This requires me to sign up with various middlepersons that marry service providers (such as Bredemarket) to contractors.

Or to TRY to sign up to such middlepersons.

I signed up with one such middleperson a month and a half ago, and never heard back from them. I had occasion to ask someone from the middleperson how long signup takes, and the person indicated that the process should complete within 10 business days. So I contacted the middleperson to see where my application stood, and waited…and waited…and eventually re-read the signup process instructions and realized that the middleperson only contacted SUCCESSFUL applicants. Non-successful applicants receive no response.

Anyway, there’s another middleperson that’s much better at these sorts of things, and I’m trying to solicit work from that service. Essentially you bid on jobs by providing a rate and a text-based technical proposal. After that you either hear from the potential contractor…or you don’t.

I began wondering if there was a way to increase my chances of hearing from the potential contractor.

As I was bidding on a content and social media strategy opportunity, I hit upon an idea.

After describing the service that I would provide, but before my call to action, I included the following section in my text proposal. (If you read my goal 2, you already know why I talk about iguanas.) Pay special attention to the last paragraph.

REFERENCE WEBSITES

If you’re contracting with someone to manage your company’s social media, you’re probably asking if I eat my own iguana food. (Dog food is boring.) Please check out my Bredemarket and Bredemarket-related online channels:

Website: https://bredemarket.com/

Blog: https://bredemarket.com/blog/

LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bredemarket/

LinkedIn identity showcase page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/bredemarket-identity-firm-services/

LinkedIn technology showcase page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/bredemarket-technology-firm-services/

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Bredemarket/

Professional Twitter account: https://twitter.com/jebredcal

Personal Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/johnebredehoft/

I do not have Pinterest, Snapchat, or TikTok accounts, and I have not posted YouTube videos in years.

Incidentally, if you check out the links above, one of them will specify the color of the iguana. Let me know if you see it.

I have no idea who the potential contractor is, but I’m hoping that he/she is an ex-IDEMIA employee who exhibits curiosity. If so, the person may click on the links to discover the color of the iguana.

If so, I could be really cruel and wait to reveal the iguana’s color until the very last link (Instagram).

But I’m a nice guy. The color of the iguana is being revealed right here, in the second link (the Bredemarket blog). THE COLOR OF THE IGUANA IS PURPLE. (Color purple. Geddit?)

Then again…perhaps I’ll specify a DIFFERENT iguana color in one, or more, of my OTHER social media channels.

There may be an entire army of multicolored iguanas waiting to be discovered.

Obviously I’m wondering if my potential contractor is curious. And I might be wondering if others are curious.

Have fun. (Goal 5.)

Positioning a sole proprietorship

I shared something on the Bredemarket LinkedIn page, and I also shared it on the Bredemarket Facebook page, but there are billions of people who don’t subscribe to either, so I thought I’d share it here too to VASTLY increase its reach.

“It” is an Andrea Olson article published this morning entitled “Why Positioning Is More Important Than Ever.” Olson believes that company positioning is mostly a lost art, and that some attempts to establish a unique company marketing position don’t really work in practice. For example, a Company X claim that it is “customer-focused” will only be effective if Company Y says that it is “not customer-focused.” (This doesn’t happen.)

I’m going to advance the hypothesis that it’s easier for very large companies and very small companies to establish unique market positions, but harder for medium sized firms.

Medium sized firms often do not have an established presence in our minds. Let’s say that you’ve just moved to a new city and you’re deciding where you’re going to buy a car. How do you tell one car dealer from another? Does one of them have a better coffee machine in its customer lounge? Is one of them customer-focused?

The very large companies DO conjure images in our minds. On one level, there’s no huge difference between what Walmart sells, what Target sells, and what Kmart sells. But if you read the names “Walmart,” “Target,” and “Kmart,” positive and/or negative images immediately pop into your brain.

Which brings us to the very small companies, and the question that I asked on LinkedIn and Facebook—what is MY company’s unique market position?

This is something that I’m working on enunciating, both in public forums such as this one and in more private ones such as emails to potential clients. There are certain things about the Bredemarket offerings that are clearly NOT unique:

  • Many writing companies offer a specified number of review cycles to their clients.
  • Many writing companies offer experience in writing about biometric technology.
  • Many writing companies offer experience in writing proposals.

But there’s one advantage that very small companies (sole proprietorships) offer—the uniqueness of the sole proprietor. This uniqueness is sometimes difficult to convey, especially in the current pandemic environment. But it’s there.

Although it’s more difficult to convey if you’re one of a set of twins.

(Past illustrations) Standard text

(This past illustration describes something that I performed in my career, either for a Bredemarket client, for an employer, or as a volunteer. The entity for which I performed the work, or proposed to perform the work, is not listed for confidentiality reasons.)

PROBLEM

Companies need to respond to questions from their potential customers. Often the company crafts a specific response to each potential customer, even when multiple potential customers are asking the exact same questions.

SOLUTION

As many people already know, the solution is to create a database of standard text.

By John Willis Clark – http://www.ib.hu-berlin.de/~wumsta/Milkau/109-2.jpg: Fritz-Milkau-Dia-Sammlung, erstellt in der Photographischen Werkstatt der Preußischen Staatsbibliothek von 1926-1933originally from The Care of Books by John Willis Clark (Fig 94, p132), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135286

In some cases, companies can create standard text by adapting previous text submitted to potential customers in the past. In other cases, new text must be written. Once developed, the standard text can be stored in a dedicated database designed for this purpose, or it can simply be stored in a Microsoft Word document of officially approved responses.

RESULTS

I have created (or tried to create) a lot of standard text over the years.

For two companies, I was one of the people responsible for gathering standard text from subject matter experts (SMEs), or for writing new standard text myself. This standard text had to be reviewed with SMEs at regular intervals, and any necessary updates had to be incorporated.

For a third company, I was the SME responsible for reviewing and updating the standard text.

For a fourth company, I suggested that the company create standard text, but the company chose not to act on my suggestion.

For a fifth company, I was asked to create a simple database of standard text, addressing multiple markets for a particular product line.

And, of course, I’ve created standard text for my own company, suitable for repurposing in multiple formats.

What type of content? As Nathan Ellering notes, you have choices.

There is one similarity between Bredemarket’s clients (and potential clients) and Bredemarket itself.

  • My clients and potential clients need to generate content to increase the visibility of their firms.
  • I need to generate content to increase the visibility of Bredemarket.

Once a content creator has determined its strategy, the creator then needs to decide upon the type of content to execute that strategy. While the answer is sometimes blindingly obvious, sometimes the content creator ends up staring at the wall, wondering what to do next.

Today I found a way to jump-start that thinking process, when I ran across Nathan Ellering’s article entitled “105 Types of Content to Fill Up Your Editorial Calendar.”

Yes, 105 types. Even Buzzfeed couldn’t handle a listicle that long.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/listicle – Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

But if you don’t have the time to read all 105 of Ellering’s suggestions (I confess I haven’t read them all myself), how about just looking at one of the 105 types? For purposes of this post, I decided to choose one at random by selecting a number between 1 and 105. Thinking of ketchup, I figured I’d see what Ellering’s type 57 was.

It turns out it was “News Releases and Pitches,” with the goal of using the news release “to get coverage in influential publications.” I’ve actually pitched my freelancing experience and been quoted in an article, and now may be one of the best-known freelancers in Austria.

Or possibly not.

But I’m sure that there are a ton of the 105 types of content that I haven’t created. At present I have no use for type 10, for example. But I plan to review Ellering’s article the next time that I’m stuck for ideas.

And perhaps you’ll find it helpful yourself.

(For those following along at home, this post itself is type 11, where the “product” is Ellering’s post itself.)

3 ways Bredemarket can help your business, the mid-October 2020 edition

There are a number of ways that writers can grab readers’ attention, and one of those is via the list post. They’ve been around for over a decade, and they’re still popular. Why? Because they grab the reader’s attention.

So I thought I’d use the list post format to talk about Bredemarket’s current focuses in contracts, as well as in pitches and proposals to potential clients. Perhaps your business can use one of these three services, or perhaps you can use two or three of them. (I just wrote a proposal this week that included all three of the services listed below, as well as some other things.)

In preparation for this post, I reviewed Ali Hale’s 2008 ProBlogger post “10 Steps to the Perfect List Post.” (You see what Hale did there.)

One: Have Bredemarket write your 400 to 600 word text

I’ve previously talked about why you may want to have someone else write your blog post, your Facebook post, your LinkedIn post, or any other short text. (Advance warning: this “list post” is going to have some little lists in it…)

Regardless of the reason, Bredemarket can assist you in creating that content that you need. Via a collaborative process, Bredemarket will work with your business to craft the text that you need, and provide you with the final text at the end of the contract. The entire process can be completed in 15 calendar days or less, often much less (one of my clients and I completed one blog post in less than 3 days). Bredemarket’s goal is not to get the job done quickly, but to get the job done correctly.

For more details on the process, see the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service.

Two: Have Bredemarket write your 2800 to 3200 word text

Longer text is used for deliverables such as white papers; longer thought pieces; detailed company, product or service descriptions; lengthy customer testimonials; or other items.

The reasons for having Bredemarket write your longer text are similar to the reasons for having Bredemarket write your shorter text, but the process is a little more detailed.

Because these deliverables are more complex, more work is needed at the beginning of the process, and more time is needed for the reviews. Therefore, the process for a longer text piece can take as long as 49 calendar days, although again it can often be completed much more quickly. Again, the goal is to deliver the correct text to the client.

For more details on the process, see the Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service.

Three: Have Bredemarket examine your website and social media accounts

Perhaps you don’t need text for your website or social media accounts. Perhaps you need a checkup on these properties.

Ever since I started Bredemarket, I’ve been examining the web pages and social media accounts for a number of companies, including my own. And a number of times, I’ve run across some errors.

  • Perhaps the text on the site uses the wrong word to describe something.
  • Or perhaps a link doesn’t work.
  • Or perhaps one part of the site says one thing, while another part says a totally different thing.
  • Or perhaps the contents of the site are old. (A site that brags about Windows 7 compatibility, or a site with a 2019 copyright date, is not the site of a thought leader.)

Or perhaps the collection of sites doesn’t have any obvious errors, but exhibits missed opportunities. One company posted some excellent content on one of its social media channels, but failed to cross-post the content to its other social media channels, or to the website itself. Therefore, most potential customers were unaware of the great content from the company.

Bredemarket’s methodology for a website/social media checkup is simple, but thorough. The two major steps are

  • for Bredemarket and the client to agree on the scope of the checkup (for example, should the checkup include the personal LinkedIn page of the company CEO?), and then
  • for Bredemarket to examine six factors as part of the checkup.

While you’re waiting for me to write my list post about six critical items in a website/social media checkup, you can cheat and read the list yourself in my description of the Bredemarket 404 Web/Social Media Checkup.

Incidentally, I can’t quote the length of this service, because the length depends upon the number of pages to check, the percentage of those pages that require a more detailed (rather than cursory) check, and whether there are PDFs or other documents on those pages that also require examination.

Can your business use any of these services?

Now Bredemarket provides other services (you can say that I have a whole…um, list of them), but right now (mid-October) these three services seem to be the most popular. Like I said, I recently proposed all three of them to a single client.

If you could use one of these three services, you can fill out the “Request Information” form at the bottom of each service description (Bredemarket 400, Bredemarket 2800, or Bredemarket 404), or you can contact me in one of the following ways:

My plans for NASCAR sponsorship, with a comment about websites

Could Bredemarket (eventually) become an auto racing sponsor?

In case it’s not obvious, I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with the names for the various Bredemarket services that I offer, While Bredemarket 404 is my obvious favorite name (I’ll explain why later), I found myself thinking about Bredemarket 400 this afternoon. (That’s my Short Writing Service, if you need text for a blog post or something similar.) And the thought struck me:

“Bredemarket 400” sounds like an auto race.

Now auto racing is not confined to the Southeastern United States and various European locations. In fact, there’s a speedway not too far from Bredemarket, in Fontana, California.

View of Auto Club Speedway from center of the grandstand. By Lvi56 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11463414

This particular speedway already has a sponsor, and I don’t think that Bredemarket can outbid the Auto Club to secure that sponsorship.

At least not today.

But if Bredemarket grows enough, and I decide to become a big name in the auto racing industry, I’d better start doing my research.

Bredemarket research into the auto racing industry, by looking at one website

So I decided to check the website of one of the big names in the auto racing industry. I won’t name the company whose website I checked, but I will mention in passing that I grew up in the Washington, DC area, and am a lifelong fan of the Washington Re- … I mean the Washington Football Team.

So I got to “website X,” and the first thing that I noticed on the website was…the logo of a corporate sponsor for website X. Not surprising, if you know anything about auto racing.

The next item was a special announcement that tours of the company’s facility were suspended due to COVID-19, and that requests for autographs from the owner of the company had also been suspended.

Now that the preliminaries were out of the way, I figured I’d get to the introductory text for website X—the text that explained what the company was about, and who this guy was whose name was prominently featured in the company name. Why would anyone want to get autographs from a company CEO? I, of course, knew WHY this person was so famous, but there are probably a number of racing fans who have never heard of the company owner. Obviously the website should explain this, right?

Um, no. The website X home page had a bunch of stuff, but nothing that explained what the company was.

So I checked the menu, figuring that there would be an “About” section, presumably as the first menu item.

“About” was the last menu item. I would have put it first, but at least it was there.

So I went to the “About” page, figuring that I would finally see the story of the company and of its famous owner.

The first thing on the “About” page was a button. If you clicked the button, you would find out the name of the owner of the company and a list of its championship years.

Thanks.

I scrolled down the “About” page, and the next thing that I saw was the address of the facility and the hours during which it could be visited.

Wait a minute, I thought to myself. The home page said that the facility could NOT be visited, and now this page is saying to go ahead and come on down?

The rest of the “About” page wasn’t much better. The Frequently Asked Questions are apparently infrequently updated, since they reference (again) the times that the facility is open, an announcement of an event that occurred a week ago, the ability to get autographs from the company owner at one of his personal appearances, and other outdated information.

How can a website be improved?

Some of you already know where this post is headed. For those who don’t, ask yourself the following question:

Isn’t there a way for a company to check its web site and its other social media outlets to make sure that everything is correct, up to date, and synchronized?

I’m glad you asked that question, because one of the services that Bredemarket provides is the aforementioned Bredemarket 404 Web/Social Media Checkup. The number 404, of course, comes from the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) code “404 Not Found,” although the Bredemarket service looks at much more than missing web pages.

As part of the Bredemarket 404 service, I agree with the client on the web pages, social media accounts, and (optionally) downloadable documents that Bredemarket will examine. The examination itself includes the following:

  • Broken links
  • Outdated information
  • Other text and image errors
  • Synchronization between the web page and the social media accounts
  • Content synchronization between the web page and the social media accounts
  • Hidden web pages that still exist
  • Other items desired by the client

It’s a useful checkup to see where your website and social media accounts stand, allowing your company to take action, fix problems, and improve your marketing outreach. If your company doesn’t have the time to perform the checkup yourself, let Bredemarket do it.

Contact Bredemarket and we can discuss next steps.

On managing customer relationships as a sole proprietor

The intriguing part about running your own business is that you have to perform ALL of the business functions, including sales. Bredemarket does not have access to an expert commissioned sales staff; it just has access to me. (There is a separate third party service that looks up work for me, but even there I have to perform the sales function.)

When I developed my checklist of all of the things that I needed to do to start Bredemarket (latest checkoff – my City of Ontario business license has formally been approved), one of the items on the list was to obtain access to a customer relationship management (CRM) system. This would provide me with two benefits:

  • First, I could obviously track sales and marketing activities in the CRM.
  • Second, I could tell potential clients that I had SEVERAL HOURS of CRM administration experience. (Impressive, huh?)

Seriously, I I did have limited access to Salesforce and another CRM in one of my previous jobs, but never to the level of configuring the thing to meet my needs. Now I would have my chance, and learn a little bit in the process.

Actually, I had already been performing CRM in a not-so-elegant way. I’m using a Microsoft Excel workbook to track my contacts for my effort to gain full-time employment, and I was also listing contracting conversations in that same workbook. But when I decided to separate my efforts to obtain full-time employment from my contracting efforts, it also made sense to separate the contracting CRM data and move the Bredemarket tracking to a REAL CRM.

I ended up selecting the free version of HubSpot to use as Bredemarket’s CRM. (For those of you who have seen references to Mailchimp on my home page, that is for a separate mailing list not associated with the CRM.) I configured some essential items, linked to other services, entered a list of contacts with whom I had spoken over the last couple of months, and then prepared my “Announcing Bredemarket” email and the list of contacts who would receive it.

By the time I had prepared my list, and edited my email, it was already early afternoon Pacific Daylight Time. Now I had to start thinking about WHEN I would send the email. I seemed to recall that mornings were the recommended time to send emails, and I confirmed my understanding by reading this CoSchedule blog post. (10am appears to be the sweet spot.) But CoSchedule also linked to a WordStream post that included some of the same advice, but then said:

That’s the Advice. Now Ignore It.

-Megan Marrs

Two facts about the list for this mailing are relevant.

  • This was not an email list that I had purchased. This was a list of people whom I had interacted with personally over the last few months, often after they were finished with their work for the day. If they received the email at 10am, they might wait to read it until the evening anyway.
  • Many of these “recommended email times” studies do not account for the fact that emails are sent to multiple time zones. While I was sending my email from the Pacific Daylight Time zone, some recipients were in the Central Daylight Time and Eastern Daylight Time zones, and one recipient was in the Central European Summer Time zone.

So after some more re-edits of the email, I decided that there was no need to wait until tomorrow morning to send it. So I sent it at 4:45 pm Pacific Daylight Time. (For those keeping score, that’s 01h45 in Central Europe.) I figured that a few people might read the email that evening, and that the rest would see it when they opened their inbox the next morning.

As HubSpot send the email to the recipients, HubSpot started churning its data.

  • Most of the emails were delivered immediately (one remained in a “Sent” status for a while and wasn’t delivered for a few hours).
  • People started opening the emails.
  • People started clicking on the links to the emails.
  • People started sending email responses.

This is all old hat to people who HAVE been CRM administrators, but to me it was all novel.

Now I could get really fancy and look at advanced analytics, but for my purposes I just needed to know the basics. I’ll show you an example – I included one of my own email accounts on the mailing list, and here is the information that HubSpot provided for the delivery to that email address.

I had several clickable links in the email, and HubSpot told me which of those links my alter ego clicked, and the time that they were clicked.

In addition to viewing individual activity, you can view summary activity for all of the recipients. Even if you’re not performing complex Tableau analyses of the data, the summaries can show you some basic things. For me, one key metric is the Unsubscribe metric – the percentage of those people who never want to receive an email from Bredemarket again. The heat map of the email displays the percentage of clicks on various links, including the Unsubscribe link. I am happy to report that as of right now – 16 hours after I sent the email – my unsubscribe rate is 0%.

So I’ve gone from minimal exposure to a CRM to a basic understanding of what a CRM can do. Hopefully I can use this to serve my potential Bredemarket clients better.

Now I just wish that I had used a CRM for my full-time employment search from day one. Maybe I’d be off of COBRA by now.