Carried Away End of Summer Business Tips (& Life Too)

get you summer on!

Before the lazy days of summer end, take a moment to assess where you are at this mid-year point, and embrace the last few weeks of summer. Here are 7 tips to get the most out of the season, and get ready to rule at Fall: 

• First and foremost, it’s SUMMER! Have you taken a vacation? Even if it is just an overnight or a quick weekend getaway or camping trip, make sure you take some time to celebrate the season so you can get back to work when the weather cools without feeling like you missed out.
• Give yourself time to enjoy the weather and summer activities: eat outside, go to a museum, treat yourself to ice cream or watermelon… anything that says summer. And take a moment to really enjoy it! Create a memory that you can call up when things get busy again. 

I ran over to the Conservatory of Flowers to see the rare Corpse Flower bloom!

• Allow your team (Family? Colleagues? Staff?) the time they deserve for summer as well. A few days away does more than you can quantify.
• Just as it is important to be present in the summer, it is a good idea to mark the end of summer as well. Have a bonfire! Or one last picnic or BBQ. Outdoor movie night? An office day at the ball park? Start a tradition that will help everyone transition to Fall. 
  eat this now :)

• Look ahead to the change in schedules that will happen soon. Are the kids starting different schools? Will staff members all return from vacation? Do your office hours change? Do you need to test out a new commute? Now is the time to make sure you have systems in place for Fall. Doing a few dry runs can’t hurt!
• Think about the Holidays. Every year I tell my clients to work on this well before they need to because there may be discounts available for early orders, plus there is time to try out new ideas. The earlier plans for holiday cards, promotions and parties can be solidified, the better. Don't be a part of the mad rush at the last minute!
• And finally, this is a good time to take a 1 day retreat to asses your business (& or life!) goals to make sure you are on track for the busy end of the year. It is just past the half-way point: not too late to turn things around if you need to. Write down your goals for the rest of the year and commit yourself to meeting them. A master at goal setting is Darren Hardy and you can find some of his worksheets here. I am also running end-of-summer specials on my most popular marketing packages. Contact me if I can help you!

Now what are you waiting for, get our there and summer it up! 

What NOT to do in 2018

It’s a new year, and a new opportunity to get yourself out there and meet your Best Client Ever, but how? Well, before you create your marketing plan for 2018, it is important to review what worked and what didn’t about the year that just ended. Things that worked go on the list for this coming year, and things that didn’t get scrapped. However, learn from those mistakes! Anything that doesn’t make it onto the list for 2018 is a learning opportunity. Once you identify a mistake, see it as a tool to open your eyes and force you to get creative and move forward with a new solution. Brainstorm around failures: Why didn’t it work? Can it be adjusted to be more effective? Was the timing off? Was the content wrong?  Finally, if you noticed mistakes made by others, make sure you don’t fall short in the same way. Remember: mistakes are not the end of the world, just opportunities to improve.  

Here are my top marketing mistakes, aka What Not to Do in 2018:

·         Unclear business concept

Akin to shops that offer knife sharpening, video rental and notary public, if you don’t have a clear and understandable business concept, there is no marketing in the world that can help you. Practice by lighting a match and saying what you do. Once your fingers are burned, you should have stopped! I use conceptual exercises to help my clients not get burned.

·         Send too many emails

Too many emails will irritate potential clients and alienate your loyal followers. Make sure you have a reason to blast, and create a schedule that keeps you front of mind but isn’t invasive. I often suggest something between once a week and once a quarter, depending on your business. MailChimp is my favorite service; legally you must use an email marketing service if you are sending bulk emails.

·         Have no web presence

You don’t need your own website to have web presence, so there really is no excuse. A Google My Business listing, a Yelp listing, a FaceBook business page, even an about.me page gives your followers a place to research you and lends credibility to your claim to be a business. Certain industries, such a real estate, offer their agents pages within the corporate website, so make use of that if it is offered.

·         DIY your website

Unless you have web skills, or are using the most basic 1 page template, I cannot recommend designing your own website. I had my own DIY website for many years, which looked terrible despite my many re-workings of it, and I finally grew so ashamed of it that I turned to a professional. (Lisa Erickson surprised me with a clean and simple design that caught the attention of a TV producer!) Don’t expect that a designer can “fix” your DIY either – like me, you may have created the equivalent of a permanently tangled ball of yarn. Take a deep breath and start fresh. The results will be worth it, and you don’t need to pay $20,000.

·         Use dated graphic design

If you were in business in the 90s and your graphics haven’t changed, we need to talk. I am not saying scrap everything, but subtle changes like different paper or ink colors can freshen your look without diluting your brand.

·         List your fax # on business cards

No fax numbers! And while we’re at it, brutally scrutinize all data included on your print collateral. You can delete almost everything but your name, title, company, email, web and phone. Social handles are useful, provided they are the same across platforms so you don’t need to list them out. Remember, your audience is sophisticated and so should your materials be.

·         Incoherent social content

I teach entire classes on social media, so this could be a post, or a book, in itself, but one principal to remember across any channel while doing any kind of post is to think about your Mission Statement and make sure that each piece of content is in alignment with what you say you do. If you are a modernist architect, for example, don’t post photos of a French country chateau, unless you are making a point. It’s all about strategy, people.

Now set aside a day (I know, impossible) or a few hours and really examine where you were last year and where you are going in 2018. Make a formal plan, even if it is a short evernote, and stick to it! I expect to hear, next January, that this was your best year ever. 

Carried Away with Pinterest (really)

my feed is 80s. so what. 

I don't know about you, but when Pinterest was new, I Really Got Into It. As in, 3am what-the-heck-am-I-doing-still-awake-rabbit-hole into it. I set up boards on everything I liked had ever heard of, carefully set my cover photo for each one, found all my friends on the platform, and pinned absolutely everything in the universe. I even got jealous of those uber-pinners who somehow had more time than I did and had huge massive boards filled with images I loved as well: 80s Benetton ads! 60s shoes! 70s kitchen design! James Bond! Brutalist Architecture! Supergraphics! Things I would buy online the next time I had a credit card near me after drinking 2 glasses of wine!

I set up secret boards which clients and co-workers and I used, slapping inspiration images into them faster than you could say Xerox. Our projects were going to rock harder than they ever had prior to the invention of this amazing online global magic bulletin board. Anything we'd ever heard of, we found an image of it, and pinned it. And pinned it, and pinned it and pinned it.

But slowly, Pinterest lost it's appeal. My eyes spun in my head if I scrolled the feed too long. I no longer cared it I didn't have as many pins in my Weird Foods of the 50s board, or if I didn't get to the "end" of my feed. And the notifications! I got sick of knowing that 7 people in Australia had liked or pinned the pin that I had ripped off from someone else anyway. I started to get sick of my phone pinging me because someone thought I might like some new Jell-O recipe. Diagnosis: Pinterest malaise.

I guess you can have too many cute 60s clothes :(

I turned off all notifications, and logged in only once a month or so when I needed graphics, or if a client was active on a collaborative board. The last time I checked, I had over 3,000 unread notifications. Delete! I became un-obsessed cold turkey. I advised my clients to skip Pinterest unless they were in the wedding industry, and when Huck, in an episode of Scandal, made fun of his out-of-touch girlfriend by saying that she "still used Pinterest", I guffawed and spit out a mouthful of popcorn. I bet you did too.

BUT THEN I attended Social Media Marketing World, where there were many sessions on using Pinterest for marketing. Confounded, I had to attend them (the best IMHO was by Kate Ahl of Simple Pin Media, who can actually help you if you want to work this platform for your business or blog) to discover why Pinterest was still relevant... and it turns out, it is, for several reasons, but one stands out above all others. And it is MASSIVE.

Here are 15 things you can do with Pinterest, and I saved the best for last:

1. Boost your Google ranking by having a presence there
2. Convert your kitchen DIY account to a business account with analytics and everything!
3. Learn which type of devices your audience follow - iPhone or Android or desktop
4. Sponsor posts just like on Facebook 
5. Beta test which images, colors, words perform best for your business
6. Create boards to showcase images of your work
7. Post text overlay images for your blog posts
8. Create photos optimized to this platform (735 x 1100 = vertical)
9. Sell directly on the platform (via shopify)
10. Shop directly on the platform (blue dots = shop the look) 
11. Observe trends / topics on the platform
12. Use Pinterest as a collaborative tool, which you can keep private
13. Save images by category of your choice (the original use)
14. Fnd things - Pinterest is a massive search engine!
15. Snap photos with the Lens tool on mobile for object identification

Wait, what? Number 15, hello... Get this: using your smart phone, you can snap a photo of ANYTHING right in front of you, or a photo in a magazine or a flower in the park or a car - ANYTHING - and the Lens tool (which was created in 2016 but just rolled out to all US users last month) will IDENTIFY it and send you keywords as well as related pins. Think Shazam for images... really. This technology has been around for a few years (hello, Google Glass!) but has never been used with the database of Pinterest behind it. THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING! Seriously, keep me away from the phone and credit card at the same time...I mean really.

in the LENS is my own mug, with keywords and suggestions detected by the app!

For the Lens feature alone, I downloaded the app to my phone, and went back in. ALL IN. (To find this feature, update your app on mobile. tap the search icon at the top of your home screen, then tap in the grey search box and you will see a red camera icon appear to the right. Click on this and the lens appears - tap inside the circle to capture anything IRL and see what the app gives you. If it isn't dead on, tap the + sign and tell it, which will better the functionality as it learns.) MAGIC.

So tell me, what are YOU doing on Pinterest at 3 am?