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It Takes a Hand. The Five Fingers of Social Media

May 16, 2013 By Clare Price Leave a Comment

There is only one goal in social business – engage! You must be engaged with some aspect of your social communities every day. When we engage we hold out our hand to others in our community, looking for a connection and for a relationship, for business, friendship and fun.

Here are the five fingers that make up the outstretched hand of social media connections.

Engage. In social business, to engage means to be completely involved in the community continuously. When you are fully engaged in the community it becomes an integral part of your business activity, not just a sideline. The power of engagement is not just the connection or creating or participating in the experience, engagement means finding ways to make the experience easier and more enjoyable for everyone you are engaged with – friends, fans, followers, tribes, employees, team members and strategic partners.
Collaborate. It’s no secret that social media is all about community, sharing, caring, interaction and collaboration. This is a group effort. What is important for social marketing is that each social media community is different. Each has a different way of interacting, different values, a different voice. Knowing the differences and how to collaboratively engage with each community is critical to success.
Learn. We’ve all been told that social media is about sharing and listening. Very true. Having a successful social business also requires learning not just listening. That is, sharing, listening, then changing your behavior based on what’s been shared and heard, and acting on the information to make a difference to the community and improve your products and services. That’s learning the social media way.
Share. Hold nothing back. Freely share what you know, what you’ve learned and what you need. Share the best of what your business has to share. Share what others share with you. That’s the choice that we made with 5 Easy Pages. The heart of our system, all 5 pages, is available free on our Website.
Empower. Empower your company and everyone associated with it to be flexible, adaptable and agile so that you can take advantage of the speed of social media change and make better and faster decisions. Allow for decision-making throughout your team, not just at the top. Empower creativity for everyone.

When you and your team actively engage using these five fingers of social media, I’ve no doubt you will find an outstretched hand in return.

That’s my take, what’s yours? Please comment and let us know.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: Social Media Marketing, social media strategy

Why You Need a Plan – It’s Not What You Think

May 8, 2013 By Clare Price

Let’s skip the banalities (Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail; When you aim at nothing you hit it every time) and get right to the point.

Planning is good. Whatever you call it: business plan, strategic plan or marketing plan; planning is good.

Those who develop a plan do it for clarity, direction and focus. But wait! There’s more.

I like to think of planning as advanced decision making. Here’s what advanced decision making can do for your business.

Shorten the sales cycle. This applies to a marketing plan. A good marketing plan will bring customers to you who are pre-sold and ready to buy. That is the most important role marketing has – to make it easier for clients and customers to find what they need and find it from you.
Pre-Solve a problem. Business challenges and problems are never ending. A plan can anticipate issues, challenges, weaknesses and threats to your business and allow you to decide how you will handle them in advance so when they do occur they don’t throw you and your team off your game. Deciding on how you and your team are going to address an issue, solve a problem, circumvent a barrier – before you get there is a real recipe for success.
Reduce or eliminate team conflict and confusion. Team conflict can stop your business momentum dead in its tracks. Planning, especially in the collaborative, consensus-building way we use the 5 Easy Pages plans, gets issues on the table, elephants in the room and can get everyone on the same page – literally. By taking the time to create a plan that gets total buy in, your team can move forward faster, with higher success.
Eliminate distractions. It used to be the water cooler. Now its Facebook and Twitter or Pinterest. Whatever your favorite bright shiny object is, a plan with solid milestones and timelines built in can help you avoid it. Even better, a plan can help you avoid unnecessary spending on marketing and advertising that might look promising but doesn’t fit your goals.
Create and run your business systems. The best reason of all! To create and work a strategy or marketing plan is to lay a secure foundation for systematizing your business. Systems create efficiency. Being efficient keeps you focused and gives you more time for work, life or whatever it is that you want to do. Efficient systems, getting your business working like a well-oiled machine, will move a low-performing business or employee into a high performing one. Systems move a business from a plateau to the next level. Plans are the first step to a solid system.

The truth is none of us really want a plan. But we do want the BENEFITS a plan will give us – advanced decision making that enables higher, stronger more profitable performance from our business, ourselves and our employees.

That’s why I recommend you have a plan. You can start with a free download of the 5 Easy Pages Marketing System. If you want to go deeper, give us a call. We can help you get there.

photo credit: snigl3t via photopin cc

Filed Under: Business Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Strategy Tagged With: business strategy, marketing, marketing plans, marketing strategy, small business marketing, Strategic Planning

Vanquish Your Nemesis: What’s Stopping You?

April 23, 2013 By Clare Price

What’s haunting you? What’s sitting on your shoulder stopping you and holding you back from the success you are working so hard for?

Maybe, you say, I don’t have enough money or time or I can’t afford the people I really need to hire. All that may be true, but could it be there’s something else missing here?

I believe one of the worst evils small business owners face is the dreaded evil nemesis called — BURNOUT!

Of the five resources that business owners need to run a successful business: time, money, tools and talent, energy; I believe the most critical element is energy. Many of the small business evils we face on a daily basis like anxiety, fear, confusion, shiny ball syndrome, too much or too little work, can be traced to burnout.

Energy, passion and enthusiasm for doing what you’re doing can carry you through every other lack in your business including the twin evils of no time/no money.

With that in mind and with a recent burnout moment of my own for inspiration, I offer the following five steps in five days for reclaiming your energy and passion and expelling the evil nemesis of burnout.

REST. A very prolific blogger I know has one rule when he takes his family on their yearly vacation – no cell phones! They have one emergency phone which he keeps just in case, but the family rule is that when the car leaves the garage on vacation, cell phones are turned off for the duration. In our 24/7 world that’s pretty scary but just think of the benefits: Unplugging lets your body rest and your senses get in touch with the world outside digital space.

My first step, Day 1 in reclaiming your passion is one day of total complete rest. Do nothing for a day. Veg out. Have a pajama day. Whatever you call it, take one day and literally do nothing.

RELAX. For Day 2 of your passion revive, relax. Do things that relax you – read a book, get a massage, take a bubble bath, walk with friends or with pets, go shopping, eat chocolate. Experience the small pleasures you may have overlooked in trying to make sure that you drive your email inbox to zero and checked off every item on your “To Do” list.

REJUVENATE. After two days of rest and relaxation, Day 3 is all about action. Do something very active that you love to do or always wanted to try– ride a bike, play a sport, ride the rollercoaster. Go do something you’ve always wanted to do that you’ve never done before – like hang gliding, waterskiing or snowboarding. Get out there and grab pure fun with both hands.

REJOICE. Day 4 of our passion revive is all about celebrating. Celebrate your blessings. Celebrate everything that you’ve accomplished and achieved with your business so far. And don’t just think about product launches, revenue and profits, celebrate the clients and customers you’ve served and the friends and associates you’ve connected with along the way. Celebrate the way that you’ve changed your corner of the world, be it a little or a lot. Because you have! You can make a list to remember what you have to celebrate or better yet, create a video. Post it and let everyone know how grateful you are.

RESTORE. It’s Day 5 of our passion revive and it’s time to take back your business with a renewed vigor and fire. So today, spend some creative think time on where you want your business to go from here. I would encourage you to be very open to start with. Tools like a Vision Board or Mind Map are great resources for getting a visionary spark started. Envision what your business will look like six months or a year from now and write, draw or video what that looks and more importantly, what it feels like.

If that leads you to concrete goals, great, but it doesn’t have to. What your restoration day is about is getting excited about your business again and getting prepared to dive back in with enthusiasm.

This post is part of the Word Carnival series – each month, a series of brilliant people (and me, too) publish some thoughts around a collective topic. This month, the topic is: Vanquish Your Nemesis: A Guide to Conquering Small Biz Evils. Please visit the blog site and read all the carnie posts, you won’t be disappointed.

What’s your strategy from recovering from burnout? Or better yet avoiding it? Please comment and let us know.

Filed Under: Business Strategy, Strategy, Word Carnivals Tagged With: marketing, marketing plans, marketing strategy, small business marketing, word carnivals

Five Marketing Strategies You Can’t Live Without

April 12, 2013 By Clare Price

OK, maybe YOU can live without these five marketing strategies, but your business or association can’t.

Every marketing activity that your business does should meet a specific strategy. There are five types of marketing strategies that you should use in marketing your business.

These are: continuous market presence, lead generation, personal relationship building, image building, and industry impact/exposure. These strategies drive both the reason and the results of your marketing activity.

Continuous Market Presence. These are marketing activities done on a regular consistent basis in the same format, publication, and/or to the same target audience. The strategy is to keep your brand and services in front of your prospects and customers with frequent, on-going exposure. Examples are: regular advertising in key publications, Websites, regular, scheduled direct mailings, eZINES or newsletters, public relations and Internet marketing programs.

Lead Generation. These are marketing activities targeted at generating leads and attracting more prospects. While all marketing activities should be aimed at generating leads, the programs and activities we refer to here are solely designed to generate leads. Examples are: telemarketing, mobile text marketing, direct and email promotions, trade shows, point of sale displays in stores, affiliate partnerships and online marketing campaigns.

Personal Relationship Building. These activities focus on contacts made through personal interaction including clubs, professional groups and organizations, school, church, and social activities. This also includes your past and present clients, and your referral network or system.

Brand Building. These activities are directed toward building your brand in the general market. These are the image activities that make people aware of your services, your brand, new programs etc. Regular image building activities are a key part of any branding campaign.

Brand image foundation—The first and most important image building activity is the development of your brand image foundation. A complete brand image foundation ensures that your image is delivered to your target market clearly and consistently though all of your contacts with clients and prospects. The brand image foundation ensures that you have consistency, clarity, and commitment to your brand through all your marketing activities, collateral, Website, and business products.

Maximum Impact Exposure. These activities are designed to create a big splash and/or a memorable event for your top clients. Examples of maximum impact actions are: client appreciation events (dinners, parties); business celebrations (new office, anniversaries), one time only events and/or major sponsorships like a charity or community event.

Every marketing activity that you plan should be tied to one of these strategies and be based on a well-designed marketing campaign.

One-off marketing activities, something done once just to see if it works, almost always fail. It might work and then again you could win the lottery or get hit by lightning too. I think you get what I’m saying.

How well are you using these five critical marketing strategies? Please comment and let us know.

Filed Under: Brand Strategy, Business Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Strategy Tagged With: brand strategy, business strategy, marketing strategy, Strategy

Drive More Customers to Your Brand – With Personality!

April 5, 2013 By Clare Price

Did you ever notice how some of the most boring companies have the best personalities? Insurance for one. We’ve got Flo for Progressive, the Geico Gecko, the Aflac Duck, and for baby boomers – Met Life and Peanuts.

Insurance is a heavily regulated industry and there’s not much product difference so personality is the way to go. It’s not just the national brands that drive business with personality, it can be local businesses too.

Some of the most creative branding I’ve seen around is from – Pest Control companies! With brands Highlander, trucks decked out in Scottish plaid, and Pegasus, the Flying Horse, they create a visual image that is hard to forget. My personal favorite in Placerville, CA is Koby Pest Control with the tagline, “Koby Kicks Ants.”

If you’re struggling to attract customers to your brand, to differentiate yourself from the competition, and get more visibility in your market, it’s time to do it — with personality.

Your brand personality represents the image and emotion of your brand – serious, funny, predictable, quirky.

Your brand personality represents the first and strongest emotion you want your customers, clients, prospects and the community to FEEL when they SEE your brand. This is where your color and typeface choices come into play.

There are three steps to expressing your brand personality. These are:

Your Emotional Connection. Your brand personality should express your organization persona and your organization culture.

Ask yourself and your team a few key questions, like:

What do we believe in – what are our core values?
What gets us and our customers excited about working with us?
What keeps them coming back?
What behaviors do we reward here?
What habits and behaviors do we discourage?

Your Visual Connection. This is your brand personality as represented by your visual brand: logo, colors and typestyles. That visual connection also needs to reflect your brand values. Graphic elements, colors and typestyles invoke specific emotions that should be considered in developing a brand personality that truly represents your brand.

Your Brand Voice. Your brand voice expresses your brand personality in the way that you express your brand through the written and spoken word. The words you chose to use, how you express them, the attitude that you bring to your communication all work together to create your brand voice. Your brand voice is summed up in your slogan or tagline.

By taking the time to discover the truth behind these three elements for your company and brand, you will be able to drive your ideal customers to your brand and toward a long and profitable relationship for both of you.

Does your brand have personality? Please comment and let us know what brand personality means to you.

Filed Under: Brand Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: brand development, brand strategy, marketing, marketing strategy, small business marketing

What’s In Your Customer Bracket?

March 27, 2013 By Clare Price

March Madness is on! If you’re a basketball fan, I’m sure you have picked your bracket: Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight and Final Four. I know you are eagerly watching as the teams start eliminating each other toward the goal of winner takes all.

If you are a business owner, basketball fan or not, you need more than a basketball bracket, you need a Customer Bracket.

You may be asking, What the heck is a Customer Bracket?

A Customer Bracket is a chart or plan that does exactly the same thing a basketball bracket does except for its for choosing the right customers. It helps you eliminate distractions (and losers!) and zero in on the winner combination of customers that most need what you have to offer and who will choose your products and services over your competitors.

A Customer Bracket looks something like this.

Each step of the Customer Bracket is a process step that builds on the one before. It can be tempting to stop at the first step, shared interests, and start actively marketing your products and services. However, the downside is that you won’t have enough knowledge about your customers to create a strong relationship. Without deep knowledge about your customers’ values and motivations, your marketing activities will often fail.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the world’s biggest brands and best-selling products. They are spending millions to get to know you as intimately as possible so that they can offer you exactly what you want or need exactly when you want or need it. Don’t let the “big guys and gals” have all the fun!

By creating your own Customer Bracket, you can zero in on your best customers and win the biggest prize of all – a successful and growing business.

That’s my take, please comment and let me know: Do you have a Customer Bracket? If not, we can help you get one.

photo credit: gus_estrella via photopin cc

Filed Under: marketing plans, Marketing Strategy, Strategy Tagged With: marketing plans, marketing strategy, Strategic Planning, Strategy

Why You Aren’t Getting the Sales You Need

March 20, 2013 By Clare Price

Sales are the lifeblood of business growth – new sales, repeat sales, referral sales. If you aren’t getting all the sales you need, you are probably missing a key ingredient.

I recently watched a business coach triple her sales in less than 24 hours by tapping into a secret weapon she did not even know she had – her trusted customer network.

Do you have a trusted customer network?

Here’s one way to find out: Could you call 20 people in your network today and asked them to purchase a “special value priced” version of your product and have at least 25-50% of them say YES!

Even more telling, how quickly would they return your call?

If your answer is no, and they don’t immediately return your call, you need to build a trusted customer network. Here’s how to get started.

The Customer Trust Cycle

The customer trust cycle is an engagement cycle that kicks in once a customer has responded to your offer and indicated an interest in purchasing your product or service. Every new customer to your company will go through this cycle either in person with a representative or digitally through your landing page or Website.

The cycle begins with confidence. Your potential customer must have confidence in your company, product or service. You as the company representative either in person or digitally must have that same confidence in your ability to help the customer with their problem, pain or need.

Building that confidence takes time and commitment to developing a real relationship. You can make a fast transaction without it, but repeat sales and referral customers can’t exist without it.

The next step in the cycle is trust. The initial trust is situational, based on the first experience with your company. When that trust is affirmed with the customer or client by the product/service experience and reinforced by excellent customer service, the customer is willing to engage in a deeper relationship with your company which results in repeat sales and continuous on-going service. You may begin to get referrals at this stage.

The final stage in the cycle, the I KNOW YOU stage is the integration of confidence, trust and relationship to the level that the client has such a deep and positive connection with you and your company, they are willing to buy a new offer on the “spot” because they know you will always deliver on your promises.

At that point, you have developed a customer trust network and that is as good as gold to your business.

The customer trust network is developed from the first customer interaction or “touch” as we marketing types like to call it. Here’s a fun exercise from our 5 Easy Pages marketing workbook (Page 4) that you can use to test how well your marketing materials build or break the customer trust cycle.

Playing with the Customer Trust Cycle

For this exercise, please pull up one of your marketing pieces such as your current company brochure, sales or speaker sheet or Web home, product, service or sales landing page in digital, PDF, or print format.

Read through the copy in your example and match it to the cycle below based on the definitions provided.

Now, in the table below, please fill out the sentences from your marketing copy that best fit that stage of the cycle. Leave blank any stages where you believe your marketing copy does not fit.

STAGE	DEFINITION	MY EXAMPLE
Confidence	I believe that you will do what you say you will do.
Trust	I trust that I will get the results you are telling me I will get.
Relationship	I want to work with you.
I Know You	Through personal experience or through testimonials from others I know what my experience with you will feel/be like.
Sale	I see and accept your offer for your product or service.

This is a great exercise to repeat with all your primary marketing and sales materials: presentations, emails, opt in copy, landing pages, Websites, brochures, web ads, etc. to make sure you are building and reinforcing your customer trust network each step along the way.

Do you have a customer trust network experience that you’d like to share? Please COMMENT and let us know about it.

Filed Under: Business Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Strategy

Lean In – By Thinking Strategically

March 12, 2013 By Clare Price

In my circle of women business owners and entrepreneurs, Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In is all the rage. And yes, I do mean rage. As one exasperated woman entrepreneur said to me yesterday, “If I lean in any harder I’ll fall over!”

Therein lies the problem – and the heart of the controversy. You want me to do more? Are you kidding? I’m buried already!

It’s not that women aren’t working hard. Most of us are working very hard. It’s that we are working very hard at the wrong things. Women are doing the work without thinking strategically about the impact that their efforts are having on their businesses and their careers.

What I observed in my tech career at Sun Microsystems in its glory days of the 1990s, and then as a research director at Gartner, the global IT consulting firm, was that women worked very hard at every task they were given and expected that their efforts would be seen, noticed and rewarded. Sometimes they were right. More often they were disappointed.

Men, on the other hand, worked hard some things – the visible things, the things that would further their careers as managers or entrepreneurs or help them run their companies better. Men ignored (or delegated, often to the nearest woman) the things that needed to get done but were behind the scenes or that did not further their career.

Bottom line: The men were thinking strategically. The women were not.

I agree with Sheryl Sandberg’s premise that we as women need to Lean In, raise our hands, jump into opportunities that may only appear once — no matter how busy we are.

But that doesn’t mean leaning harder against the wheel we are already turning, it means thinking and acting strategically. Changing wheels! Strategically looking for ways to lead.

It means the following:

Know your end goal. You don’t need a five year plan, but you do need a five year goal. Decide where you want your business, life, company or association to be five years. Think about what you will have achieved for your business, family or community and know what it will take to get you there in terms of time, money, talent and energy and resources. Lead yourself and your team in the right direction.
Avoid the tyranny of the urgent. The women I know who are leaning in so hard they are about to fall over are letting the loudest voices and squeakiest wheels derail their plans and their time. They are thinking urgently not strategically. Evaluate those projects and tasks against your end goal. If that “critical” project is blocking your end goal, let it go even if it drops.
Delegate as much as possible and don’t wait until you’re burned out and buried. Delegate (or ignore-see #1) everything that you can as quickly as you can and focus on the strategic priorities.
Nurture and build important relationships. Too often in business, women invest time and energy only in the people they enjoy being with and avoid the people they don’t. Men, thinking strategically, are more willing to invest in relationships that will help them build their company or career and worry less about being buddies.
Don’t be afraid to “wing it.” The old adage, “Fake It till You Make It,” has taken more than one entrepreneur, company or nonprofit from back room to board room. Evaluate each opportunity presented to you on its own merits. Think strategically about what can be done without getting buried in the details of exactly how it will get done.

Women can Lean In, raise their hands to lead and take the prime seat at the power table that their hard work has earned them. If they think strategically and avoid the tyranny of the urgent.

You Go Girls! You’ve earned it.

Filed Under: Business Strategy, Strategy Tagged With: business strategy, marketing strategy, Strategic Planning, Strategy

Yes! Running a Business IS a Popularity Contest

February 26, 2013 By Clare Price

We all want to be popular. It’s a basic human need. And when we run our own business we want our businesses to be popular too! Being popular means new customers. Being popular means higher revenues and profits. Being popular makes business fun.

So is having a popular business just a crapshoot? Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t? Or is it all about hard work, nose to the grind stone, pedal to the metal until you achieve that level of popularity that lets you know you’ve made it?

I think it is all of those things — and more. There is a science to it. It is a process, I call it a Customer Response Cycle, of understanding how to present your company, products and services so that your customers respond positively over and over again and you (drum roll!) become popular.

Here’s the Customer Response Cycle that works for me and my clients.

Customer Response Cycle

The Customer Response Cycle includes the five Rs (recognition, recall, reach, reward, response); one A (awareness) and a P (permission).

The chart below illustrates how these seven factors work together.

From the customers’ point of view, they are defined as follows:

Awareness – I know you are out there. You are on my radar screen.
Recognition – I recognize you when I see you. I know what you do/offer.
Recall – I remember who you are. I think of your company, product or service without a specific memory jog or reminder. OR I know more about your company than just the name or logo. I remember a value or benefit that you have stated.
Reach – I am interested in what you have to offer. I am not ready to buy but I am seeking more information so I am reaching for you. I may check products on your Website and/or read customer reviews of your services. I may check in with friends to get their opinion of your company. I may sign up for your newsletter.
Permission – Because I have reached out for you and if I have given you my contact information, I have given you permission to contact me, to engage me in conversation and to give me a reason to take the next step to do business with you.
Reward – I need an incentive to do business with you. If the prospective customer has asked a question directly or opted in for your newsletter or blog, it’s time to reward them with something that lets them “try out” your product or service – a free level of usage or a free trial period are almost required today for every size business, as is a retail coupon, if appropriate.
Response – I will respond to your reward with my next move. That next move can be: stay connected but take no action; take action and engage to purchase; say no because this is not for me, or say not now and disengage because the product, service is not the right fit now. I might be back.

Notice how the customers’ relationship with and engagement with you shifts over time in the cycle as they get to know you and your company better. Each point in the cycle has a specific set of sales and marketing activities attached to it.

Understanding the elements of the Customer Response Cycle and applying them to your sales and marketing efforts will improve the popularity of your products and services every time.

This post is part of the Word Carnival series – each month, a series of brilliant people (and me, too) publish some thoughts around a collective topic. This month, the topic is: How to Love Your Business.

Please visit the Word Carnival blogsite and read all the carnie posts, you won’t be disappointed.

Filed Under: Business Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Strategy, Word Carnivals

It’s Not the Actions You Take, It’s the Decisions You Make

February 20, 2013 By Clare Price

Every day you and your team make 50 to 100 decisions or more about how to run your business and market your products and services. Each of these decisions has an impact on revenues, profits and productivity.

Good decision making is critical to business success. So how do you make them?

Is it gut feel, years of experience, fly by the seat or your pants or careful consideration of the pros and cons based on the plan you and your team are working? It matters!

Two Types of Decisions

I typically see two types of decisions: Proactive and Reactive. Proactive decisions are made with solid information and eye toward the future. Proactive decisions seek the best opportunities and ROI. Proactive decisions drive new markets and customer segments.

Reactive decisions respond to markets, customers and competitors. Reactive decisions put the company behind the proverbial eight ball.

Take Strategic Action

Here at 5 Easy Pages we espouse the philosophy of Taking Strategic Action which combines the best elements of strategic planning with the speed and agility that companies need to make proactive decisions.

We use a well-defined and proven five-step decision cycle to Take Strategic Action as shown in the chart below: Review, Rank, Rate, Record and Execute.

Figure 1: The Decision Cycle

Here’s the magic behind the Strategic Action Decision Cycle. Today I’m offering the quick and dirty overview of the decision cycle. I’ll be providing a more comprehensive view in future posts. Scroll down to see the decision cycle in action for Internet marketing.

Step #1 Review. The review phase is used to take stock of where your company or organization is in regards to the opportunity or action you are considering, and to assess how well the action fits into your overall goals and strategies.

Whether it’s an immediate decision, short-term or long-term planning, every decision can benefit from this process. The more you practice it, the more adapt you’ll be at well-considered decision-making.

These three simple questions will help frame the review process:

Where are we now?
Where do we stand in comparison to our industry, market and competitors?
How will taking this action move us closer to our ultimate goals?

Step #2 Rank. Decision making is all about prioritizing. Step #2, the ranking step is all about deciding the order of your actions based on how important they are to the business or team. Effective ranking is not about doing the most urgent things first, it is about doing the highest priority things first.

Because priority often depends on business climate, ranking can be based on many factors, including:

Market Impact
Competitive Impact
Customer Impact
Product or Service Impact
Biggest bang for the buck – income and profit
Cost reduction
Team talent and resources
Deadline or budget constraints
Executive management or board of director mandates
Government rules and regulations

In fact, before you rank an action, it may make sense to rank the previous business factors and then align the factor to the anticipated action. That will allow your team to create a priority ranking that best fits your current environment.

Step #3 Rate. After you rank the value of the action, Step #3 in the decision cycle is to RATE how well your team, organization, product or service is already doing in that area. At 5 Easy Pages, we typically use a 1 (low) to 10 (high).

In the Web/Internet Marketing example, below, the strategic need is to increase Internet marketing activity. There are 10 things the company can do. It only has the resources for three, the decision cycle lets the team review the options based on how well the company or organization is doing in each of these areas.

The three focus areas should be based on the actions that have the highest priority and where the company, team or organization most needs to improve.

For example, if Email or Content Marketing is a high priority and the team already scores high in rating its current success, Email marketing may not be the area to focus on. Instead, it may make more sense to focus resources on an area that is a high priority but that needs more improvement.

Here’s a quick rule of thumb:

RANK	RATE
Three or below – Low priority	Three or below – Poor. Needs Immediate Attention
Four to 7 – Mid Priority	Four to 7 – OK. Secondary Focus
8 to 10 – High Priority	8 to 10 – Great. Back Burner

Once you have chosen your key focus areas, Step #4 of the decision cycle is to record the activities.

Step #4 Record. Create a set of strategies and activities around the action step that will lead to success. In the Internet Marketing example below, Email marketing is a high priority that the company is doing poorly. An immediate change in strategy and activity is needed.

Step #5 Execute. The final step in the decision cycle is to take action, plan a strategy, develop a set of activities, engage and execute to make the change. Or to put it bluntly – Just getter done.

Following this 5-step decision cycle will allow your company, team or organization to take strategic action in every scenario you face. Or at least it works for us.

What about you and your team? Please log on and let us know what decision process works best for you.

Figure 2: Web/Internet Marketing Activity Decision Table

ACTION	REVIEW/ASSESS THE VALUE	RANK (Priority from 1=LOW, 10=high)	RATE (Current Success from 1=LOW, 10=high)	RECORD (What To Do Next)
Email	Connect to customers; do business, sales, promotion.	9	3
Mobile	Apps, mobile viewing.
Advertising	Promotion through Web ads; Google Adwords etc.
Competitive Research	Websites, reputation tools, Google alerts, analytics, etc.
Content Marketing	Guest blogs, articles, content curation, eBooks and free stuff.
Linkage	Connect to bigger sites or partners; list build.
Videos	Video promotions; V-logs, V-mail.
Blog	Establish authority, promote, list build.
Website Traffic Analysis and Reporting	Know the traffic coming to your site, where they go, how look they stay.
Search Engine Optimization	Get found on the Web.

Filed Under: Brand Strategy, Business Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Strategy Tagged With: brand strategy, marketing, marketing strategy, Strategic Planning, Strategy