The Art of No-Cost Marketing, Part 1 of 2

marketing essentials for entrepreneurs and business-folk, with Renzie Baluyut.

Marketing is something every single entrepreneur has to deal with. Particularly so if you're running the show all by yourself, and you have to wear all kinds of hats in the workplace.

The importance of marketing for small businesses and entrepreneurs? We talked about organic growth last week, the importance of building up and getting the most out of your customer base. Marketing helps you achieve just that. People need to know about your products and services, they need to try it out, and if they do like their experience with your brand, you'd definitely want them to keep coming back.

Usually, however, the challenge is this: most start-up companies and even small businesses have to deal with having a very limited marketing budget. Sometimes, with even no marketing budget at all.

Allow me to share with you some tips on how to come up with a modestly effective marketing campaign with hardly any money shelled out from your end.

The Art of No-Cost Marketing: Ten Tips To Jump Start your Cost-Effective Campaign.

For the first part of two on my no-cost marketing feature, let's focus on building and creating. Before you actually get the word out, you need to have a variety of marketing materials available for your target audience, should they decide to check you out to see if you're worth their while.

1. At the very least, start with a logo. Something that speaks about your company, or your products and services. Yes, you can have someone do this for you, but if you're handy enough with a PC, you can come up with a simple yet effective logo for yourself.

2. Have prepared written blurbs about your company, as well as whatever it is you're pushing at the moment. Write-ups about individual products or services are good, but also have something written up about the company. Take it a step further: figure out your mission, vision and philosophy, come up with a tagline, and even put together a short elevator pitch.

3. You will want business cards. Again, you can make some from home using a PC and a printer, and some board paper. Put your logo on it, the name of your brand, and most importantly, your contact details should potential customers want to reach you and do business with you.

4. Put up a simple website or a blog. These days, with so much free blogging services available online, you can come up with a simple, yet fully functional and interactive website for any customer to check out 24/7. In fact, these days, you simply *must* have a blog or a website. Put everything there: your logo and your blurbs, all the contact details you have, related news and updates, even pictures, video, and podcasts later on.

5. Create other useful things which visitors or potential customers can have for free: a free downloadable list of tips, or a guide to doing something better, a recipe booklet, essentially anything of value to your target market. Even better: produce useful and informative podcasts or videos. Maybe a sample of your product or your services. Get them to try you out and get into the habit of coming back for more.

6. Take pictures and video. You could have shots of your team in action, or you in an event- anything to highlight your products and services, and to show how other customers are having a positive experience with your brand.

7. Social media and social networks: go right ahead and put up your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages. Don't forget to fill these up with all kinds of useful things (see #5), so not only can your market try you out, they can even tell their friends about their experience with you. Take it a step further: go for Multiply as well, or a photo service such as Snapfish or Shutterfly, try out LinkedIn, or even touch base with potential fans of MySpace and Friendster.

8. Brochures and Flyers. Come up with handy print copies for your clientele. It could be a menu, or a list of products and services you could offer. Don't forget to put all your contact details, including your web address, and the URL's to all your social media services.

9. Come up with a media kit- this is most particularly useful for when you'll be doing all sorts of media placements or strategic partnerships and tie-ups later on. The point is to put everything you have about your company or your product/service line into one convenient kit for potential partners, sponsors, and even customers if you wish. Include samples, as well as your brochures and flyers, and pretty much anything else you'd feel putting in that kit.

10. Put together a database. Sure for now you can probably put together the emails of your more immediate friends and family, but in time as you gain more repeat business as well as more customers, you will find that having a customer database will help you with all kinds of marketing and promotional activities.

That's it for now. Part 2 of The Art of No-Cost Marketing Coming right up, as we talk about Getting The Word Around.

Photo courtesy of our friends over at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Cheers, everyone.

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A Message To Those In Traditional Media: Evolve Or Die

lessons in marketing and media, with Renzie Baluyut.

a former colleague of mine in the FM radio industry in Metro Manila shared this video he found on YouTube (thanks Vince!). It's a video by Holland Cooke, and it serves as a wake-up call to anyone who's worked in radio.

I suppose I was fortunate to have left the radio industry early enough to make a transition elsewhere. The Philippine radio industry has been in decline for quite some time now (let's not mince words here), and for many reasons. Sure a few stations are still able to turn out a profit, but the vast majority have been performing poorly for years.

And it just isn't radio. Print media has also been hard hit (do you remember the last time you actually bought a newspaper or magazine?). TV is even more cutthroat than ever. Heck, people hardly even use their TV anymore for the purpose of JUST watching TV (think downloaded content, DVDs, live streaming, DVRs, XBox, etc).

The Situation, For Real.

Times have changed. More than ever, advertising budgets are going towards internet spending. Everyone has the latest in portable music players, or at least wants to get that shiny new iPhone. Social media usage is off-the-charts. The shift has gone from radio-controlled content, to content users decide to put together.

And let's talk about user-generated content more a bit: with so many resources and tools readily available online, anyone with a little imagination and a great desire to share can have a podcast, a blog, or a video channel, and all kinds of people from all over the world can have access to it.

Anyone can be a DJ, announcer or commentator, from anywhere, anytime. Now that's on-demand, user-generated content for you.

The business of traditional media is in the toilet right now. Of course, traditional media companies will streamline, and some will even embrace the whole new media approach, but things will definitely get worse before they get better.

So when Holland Cooke says "Prepare to get fired."? He's actually right.

The Good News Is...

If any user anywhere has the power to get in on blogging, podcasting or viral video production, then that means you, as a media professional, can get into it as well.

In fact, while others are struggling to put out a piece of work online, you already have the skillsets to come up with something so much better. After all, you are a professional.

• Radio folk are not only great at public speaking, they can also write for an audience, and put digital editing skills to use as well. This can easily translate into podcasts, or blogs filled with lots of interesting content.
• Newspaper and magazine folk are even better at coming up with all kinds of stories and articles, and usually have access to information or personalities regular people can't get to. This definitely makes for even better content.
• TV folk look great in front of a camera, or can at least handle a camera so much better than most people. Add to that great storyboarding and editing, and you can easily make top-notch videos than anyone else can.
  

If you want a tip from me, I'd say look for opportunities to synergize and collaborate with others. You're probably kickass all by yourself, but think of how much more ass you'll all be kicking if you work together?

In Closing...

This is a new and exciting time, particularly for us traditional media folk. Holland Cooke has already pointed out how radio people can carve out a niche for themselves in this brave new world of new media and Web 2.0. And this pretty much applies to all our other colleagues in print and TV.

Take time to look for opportunites to learn and collaborate. Holland has even gone so far as to recommend some books to read, even gear you can plug into your PC/laptop to get you started.

All you have to do, really, is take a more active role in your evolution as a media professional.

On a personal note, consider this as an invitation to all of you, my colleagues in radio, print and TV. If for some reason you need my help or advice in anything related to blogging, podcasting, social media or internet marketing, I'll make myself readily available. If I can't help you, at least I'm sure I know people who can.

So are you ready to evolve for your own good?

Cheers, everyone!

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I Call It Social Media Overload

I didn't quite realize it at first, but it seems that you can actually have way too much social media on your hands.

I was recently updating my profile on MyBlogLog, a great tool for bloggers like myself, and there was a tab that was, harmlessly enough, asking you to enter all your other profiles on other social media sites, supposedly for the purpose of letting other bloggers know where you are online.

Looking at all the social media services to the left part of the screen, however, you can't help but feel overwhelmed by all the social media services present, or realize how far behind you lag in the social media scene, and therefore feel pressured to sign up for ALL those damned services.

At least, that's how I felt.

Taking a step back, however, it occurred to me that getting myself involved in each and every single social media service is a near-impossibility. Sure you can sign up for all of them, but can you nurture, develop and maintain communities in each and every single one?

The reality is, we probably have a few favorites- like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example. Two to three might actually be enough for most at any given time, I would imagine.

Then you probably have five to ten others you might visit in a week or a month: Flickr or Photobucket to upload and share new photos, read a few of your favorite blogs on Blogger or Wordpress, and listen to some music on Blip.fm.

And then you also have to consider the fact that more social networks, online communities and other social media services are being created every day (some would turn out to be more popular or useful than others, you might guess).

So don't get overwhelmed. Try out several services, if you like. But ultimately, stick to a few, particularly those you find most useful to your line of work, or your general lifestyle. Spread the word, and tell others all about it- as social media is really more fun with a lot more friends involved.

My Personal Favorites:

• Facebook.
• MyBlogLog.
• FriendFeed.
• Ning.
• Pageflakes.
  

Here is my attempt to keep track of, as well as categorize, the many social media services available online (at least, those that I know of).

Online Photo Services:

• Flickr.
• Picasa Web Albums.
• Photobucket.
• Snapfish.
  
• Shutterfly.
• SmugMug.
• Webshots.
• Zooomr.

Social Bookmarking:

• delicious.
• Digg.
  
• Furl.
• Ma.gnolia.
• StumbleUpon.
• Technorati.
  

Blogging Services:

• Blogger.
• Bloglines.
• Livejournal.
• TravelPod.
• Tumblr.
• Vox.
• Wordpress.
• Xanga.
  

Status Updates and Microblogging:

• Plurk
• Twitter

Music-Oriented Social Networking:

• Last.fm.
• Blip.fm
• Pandora

Video Services (video hosting and sharing):

• Vimeo.
• YouTube.

Reviews:

• Yelp

Other Sites and Communities, many of which I haven't even checked out yet:

• ActiveRain. A good site for those in the business of real estate.
• Bebo.
• Brightkite.
• Disqus
• DOPPLR
• deviantART.
• eBay.
• Evite.
• Friendster. Particularly popular in the Philippines as well as the rest of Asia.
  
• Goodreads.
• Google Reader.
• IntenseDebate.
• Jaiku.
• Jumpcut.
• Kiva.
  
• LinkedIn. A good site to do networking with other professionals.
• Multiply.
  
• MySpace. Very popular in the United States, particularly among younger users.
  
• Netflix.
• OpenID.
• Plaxo.
• reddit.
• Second Life.
• Seesmic.
• Shelfari.
• Slideshare.
• The DJ List.
• 30 Boxes.
• ThisNext.
• Trulia.
• TypeKey.
• Upcoming.
• Wakoopa.
• Wink.
• Yahoo Answers.
• Yahoo Updates.
• Zillow.
• Zorpia.

I'd sure love to hear what your favorite social networks are, or which social networks you find most useful. Do you feel overwhelmed with all the social media services available online?

Cheers, everyone.

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5 Tips on Making an Event for Bloggers

As more and more businesses make use of buzz marketing to promote their products and services and try to get good word-of-mouth, we get to see all kinds of gimmicks and come-ons.

Some fail dismally in this task- as more educated consumers see right through the more obvious efforts to put pearls on swine. Others cross the ethical borderline, striving to gain positive exposure no matter the cost. And then there are some companies you just can't help but support, solely for the reason that their corporate values naturally align with your own.

Having been a media person for 14 years, and now as a denizen of the local blogosphere, I can say that I've seen all kinds of companies employ all kinds of marketing tactics to get a good review or two out there. Some good, some completely forgettable, and some just downright wrong.

Of course, if your company chooses to make use of new media- blogs, podcasts, social networks, viral videos, etc- as a means to promote your latest line of products and services, you want to be remembered the right way.

I was in a bloggers' event last week, and it made me think about writing the post you're now reading. Let me share with you a few insights I had with that experience.

The Kawayan Cove Experience

Just a few days ago, several bloggers (myself included), headed off for Kawayan Cove in Nasugbu, Batangas. Kawayan Cove is a 68-hectare exclusive seaside residential community, located in Nasugbu, Batangas, a town 2 hours south of Metro Manila famous for its white-sand beaches and resorts. Edge Properties invited some bloggers to come check it out, and you can read the details of our visit on this other post of mine on another blog, The Life & Times of The Renzie Man.

Whether I like it or not, the side of me that's all media-and-marketing can't help but pay attention to how promotional activities- like this particular event for bloggers- unfold and run its course. I've managed a number of similar events in the not-too-distant past, so I have a few observations myself.

Here are some things we learned from our Kawayan Cove visit:

1. Set the expectations straight. Naturally, when we were given the invitation to event, I already had some preconceived notions in my head: is it going to be a sales pitch? Those real estate open house events are usually boring! Wait- blogging about real estate IS boring!

But the invitation explained it all: it's a workshop for bloggers into digital photography. Just so happens it's set in Kawayan Cove. Bring your camera- you'll want to take lots of pictures. Bring extra clothes- you might want to hang by the beach.

The organizers did a pretty good job in setting the expectations straight, and sticking to it. It was pretty much everything they said it was going to be, then they surpassed themselves by executing their plans very well.

2. Preparation is key. In any given event, even your best-laid plans can go awry. In this case, who would've known it would be raining half the day? Nevertheless, there was a Plan B in place- the venue for the talk was moved to a more suitable location (from the ampitheater to the pavillion by Bamboo Beach), there were vehicles on hand to shuttle us from place to place, even sandals for those who didn't bring any.

You have to admire the kind of preparation any company makes to ensure the success of any event. It's all about covering all your bases. And allowing yourself to be flexible when the situation calls for it.

3. Play the part of the gracious host. It's all about creating new connections and encouraging long-term relationships. Make your guests comfortable, encourage mingling with other guests, make yourself available for Q&A's.

In the case of Kawayan Cove, the Puyat family were all there to show us around, share stories and tell us what we needed to know about the property. I'm sure they've done this dozens, maybe hundreds of times, yet there they were, taking time to have a chat with each and every one of us.

The staff of Kawayan Cove was on hand to make sure we were well-attended to. From the welcome drinks, to the hearty lunch prepared for the group, even those nice little moist towels we got after the tour.

All that thoughtfulness and hospitality can only create a positive image of you and your company. For me, it shows how genuinely warm and welcoming the Puyat family is, and also how well Edge Properties trained their personnel. That's always a good thing in my book.

4. Provide lots of venues for interactivity. There were specially prepared food and drink arrangements, just for pictorial purposes, with Anton Diaz (of Our Awesome Planet) going around giving tips and pointers to all the bloggers, and the Puyat family sharing anecdotes about Kawayan Cove's history.

There was more than enough time to take pictures, work on a blog, do a podcast, or even shoot a viral video. Also lots of opportunities to walk around with fellow bloggers to compare notes and get to know them some more.

You want the interactivity because you want to give your bloggers a chance to soak up and appreciate the experience- in every way possible. It's good that they have a good experience about your products and services, and even better that you allow them to process all that information, and consider all aspects of whatever it is your promoting.

5. Content is still king. What makes your event so compellingly different from everybody else's? A promotional event like this gives your company an opportunity to create content relevant to your market. It doesn't have to be forced, nor does it have to be overly elaborate. It only has to be relevant and timely.

With all of Anton's experience as a photographer- he only stuck to what we wanted to hear: Travel and Food Photography for Bloggers. In fact, he only had ten or so slides, yet we already learned so much.

More importantly, we had the chance to put all his tips to practice for the rest of the afternoon as we toured the property. Two birds with one stone: not only do we get to appreciate the majesty of the natural beauty of Kawayan Cove, we also had a newfound appreciation for digital photography.

Bottom line: Make your event a memorable experience. For businesses who wish to tap blogs and bloggers as a means to promote their products, events, ideas or services, what they're really trying to accomplish is to get good online buzz- the kind of word-of-mouth that inspires the bloggers to tell their readers about their experiences, and share something unique about the activity.

As a blogger, The Kawayan Cove event was probably one of the best I've ever been to. I've learned a lot from it, made some new connections, and it gave me a fresh perspective on things (particularly on the topic of real estate, for me!).

As a media-and-marketing person, the activity was well-planned and equally well-executed. Businesses who plan on making use of blogs and bloggers would do well to learn from this exercise.

Cheers, everyone.

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Podcasting: Fun with Digital Audio and Video.

Technology today has come to a point that user-generated content is now a very easy and cost-effective effort. Anyone with a PC, an internet connection can have a blog these days. Got a digital camera? Put up a photo-blog! If you have basic audio-video equipment, you can have your own series of viral videos and podcasts, if you feel like it.

As a dude who's been in radio for the past 14 years, it's supposed to be a natural transition of sorts, going from a show on an actual FM radio station to doing something along the lines of New Media- specifically, a podcast.

According to Wikipedia:

A podcast is a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers. The term "podcast", like "broadcast", can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting. The term podcast should not be used to describe individual files. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.

These days, anyone can have his own radio show on the internet- you can say whatever you want, put whatever content you like, without the restrictions of having to deal with the management of a radio station. Heck, you don't even have to be connected with a radio station!

Whether you're just a regular dude with a desire to speak out and share your knowledge on particular subject matters, or a small business looking for a great new way to promote yourself, then you might want to consider podcasting- which is what I'm considering now.

I've been looking into having my own series of podcasts- and man, there are just so many things you can talk about! Just in the same way you can put up a blog on just about anything, really. Only that a podcast is media in spoken word format, usually on mp3, while a blog is written for all to read.

Here's what I have so far: my current favorite site is this really useful Podcasting News. I say it's a good place to start, for anyone who wants to at least listen to a few podcasts, just to have an idea. Since last Friday, I've been listening to a number of em- some good, some bad. Look to the sidebar on the left side of the Podcasting News website, and you can find some recommendations.

Also, on top of news in the world of podcasting, they also have features and resources to help you on your way. Definitely a great place to start, if you ask me.

Other great reads on podcasting:

• The Creative Commons' Legal Guide To Podcasting. Might as well make it legitimate, right?
• Podcast.net has a whole LOT of podcasts for you to go through. Pick a subject matter and give it a go! Alternately, you can check out Podcast Alley, or Pageflakes' Mother of all Podcasts.
• Another great site for beginning podcasters here, on K12 Handhelds. Also, check out O'Reilly while you're at it.
• If you have time, you may also want to check out Podcasting Tools for some more detailed info on gear, directories and even trade shows on podcasting.

So there you have it- hope this helps you as much as it does for me. Let me know how that podcasting project of yours comes along. I'll post the links to my own podcasts once I have enough content.

Cheers everyone!

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