Note: This is part of my new Follow Friday system where I I get a little more in depth with one follow friday each week. To learn more about what I am doing please click here.
Mike Ziarko
Mike is a stalker by nature. I met him at Sprouter. Then at Product Camp. Then at the Grasshopper launch party. I like to think he was following me just because it makes me popular. While technically we work in the same field and occasionally bid on the same contracts he is a nice guy who has seen the light and gone independent. As always, here is his speel:
I’ll try to keep this short so I don’t bore your readers too much (Thanks Mike). I work as a creative consultant with Full Voice Media (http://www.fullvoicemedia.com) – we help businesses find their voice online through effective design and marketing strategies (Alex’s note: Mike is good but I’m better. We compete, but are friends…..when I win). Most recently I took up blogging on my website Mike Ziarko Musing (http://www.mikeziarko.com) where I write about my interests in entrepreneurship, marketing and online business. Working with Full Voice Media has been an awesome experience because I really do enjoy talking with people about their businesses and figuring out ways that they can improve the way they represent themselves online.
I also dabble with internet marketing but my biggest dream is to launch a product and a true a web business/company of my own. My biggest inspirations are the ever-growing legion of ‘location-independent’ business people who exists on and offline who have successfully created sustainable lifestyle businesses – essentially allowing them to earn and live wherever they want. I enjoy have roots in Toronto but I aspire to live abroad and run a business from anywhere.
I studied I.T. at York University and graduated in 2005. After travelling throughout Europe for 2 months I returned to Canada and was eager to jump into the workforce. I got a job at IBM as an inside sales rep for IBM’s line of Information Management software. The job had a really steep learning curve – I had no real sales experience and selling database software was about as exciting as watching paint dry. I did however get to see some great cities while on business and in those days IBM was a lot looser with its expense and travel policies. After 3 years I needed a change so I thought I’d give working for a startup a try. I applied for a similar sales position at PlateSpin, a hot virtualization and disaster recovery software company that experiencing explosive growth. At the time of my joining the company had just been acquired by Novell, and I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end for PlateSpin.
In January of this year I left PlateSpin and decided to pull a 180 spin on my career. I’d always had a flair for entrepreneurship and business and I finally developed the courage to quit my job and start developing my business ideas. I met another entrepreneur on LinkedIn, Alec Hess, who had founded 2 web startups before the age of 25. We had a lot in common and had a lot of the same views about entrepreneurship. He was looking for someone with a sales background to work with clients, so I started working with him as a Creative consultant for his company Full Voice Media, a web design and online marketing company. That was only 4 months ago and its been an awesome ride ever since
It seems every startup wants to be the next Woot, Groupon or Gilt. For those who are confused these sites (and god knows how many more) provide heavily discounted brand name products usually on a time restricted basis i.e. one per day. Groupon is well known for providing 60%+ off local entertainment and dining whereas Gilt focuses on providing heavily discounted designer clothes once per day.
The Marketers love it
Every interview I hear talks about how these websites hit two major targets:
- They reduce risk of a customers first purchase and induce trial
- Previously out of reach products reach new demographics
On the surface it makes sense. If something is nearly free I am likely to try it. I can’t afford to regularly buy high street clothing but at 80% off it is now in my range. Sales are skyrocketing for manufacturers, designers and local retailers. Everybody is keen to jump on board and bargaining sites are popping up everywhere.
Where did common sense go?
I don’t doubt that as a local retailer bringing in hundreds of new customers gives me a chance to try out new deals. My problem is with the volume of deals now out there and the demographic who generally follow them. I can now find nearly anything for free. Those far my senior are using Groupon and Gilt with no effort. A large portion of those who use deal sites are professional deal hunters, that’s all they do.
As a marketer the first rule is to figure out who I want to target and reach them. Deal sites are getting so bloated that bar geographic location no further targeting is available. More importantly, let’s address the two key benefits:
They reduce risk of a customers first purchase and induce trial
Yes, they do. But filling my store with hundreds of irrelevant people is useless. Likewise for those professional bargain hunters, my chances of seeing them are low.
Previously out of reach products reach new demographics
Way to kill the brand image. You look cheap. I can understand brands with ageing demographics need to swap over but there are better ways. You are becoming the cheap brand. I’m a bargain hunter, I know that if a brand hits me up once I can probably get their merchandise a second time, and a third time at a discounted rate too. Now when I want to feel rich and powerful I go for brands that I know are not found heavily discounted online; I want the prestige of wasting my hard earned cash.
This does not mean bargain sites are bad
Curveball eh? I have applied bargain sites well to several of my customers brands to induce trial but you know what? We heavily researched and knew that the demographics we were hitting were exactly who we wanted and needed. Those demographics were very specific and don’t apply to everybody.
I simply don’t see bargain sites fitting every industry and every brand regardless as to whether it is last seasons stock. The bargain site bubble is looming, there are simply too many bargains and too many idiots cheapening their brands and giving away things near-free for no return.
I seem to have a thing for doing courses. I also love building communities, not just because I enjoy interacting but because they convert incredibly well when you play your cards right. Communities don’t have to be huge, I’ve steadily built this blog into a community and the discussions happen over here, Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook and more.
It seems every time I interact with a customer we talk about creating a community so I’ve decided to do a weekly blog series and create a blueprint for a small business owner to create a community. Where possible I’ll leverage my network and give you some real life examples too. It’s going to take a few posts but the end result will be worth it. A final word; I want this to be collaborative. Email, tweet and comment feedback on what I’ve missed, what you liked, didn’t like and what you would like to see more of. I do respond actively to feedback & criticism.
Week One: Introduction
Before we dive into the nitty gritty I thought it prudent to do a quick introduction on the three key areas and concepts that will make up the substance (and I take any excuse to make a pretty graph). No doubt the graph will expand and more will be introduced as we continue creating a blueprint. It was difficult to drill things down to only 3 steps but I feel everything else is easily encapsulated in these three.
Form a Community
You need something to identify leads and interact with people. Be it Search, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other digital concotion a community is an important first step. Within this step it is clearly important to identify Who you want to talk to, Why you want to talk to them, What you will say and How you will close them.
Some of the important stages in this step:
- Define target market, message and channels
- Begin design of Sales funnel
- Competitive Analysis: What is everybody else doing?
- What is my differentiator?
- Creating a content schedule
- Cultivating communities
Generate Leads
Now we have a community with some solid content. People are visiting, tweeting, liking, commenting, emailing or hitting us by search. What do we do next? Use our sales funnel to convert them. Not everybody who visits your page buys. Your competitors will be dropping by (whether they admit it or not is another thing), interested passers-by will say hello as well as those who may not buy in 12 months. The beauty of communities is once you create content there is a minute marginal cost of reaching new individuals.
Some of the things we will cover in this step are:
- Filling a sales funnel with real data
- Tactics to convert community members to leads
- Tactics to convert leads to sales
- What works and what doesn’t
- Creating a non-intrusive promotions schedule
Increase Conversions
Believe it or not, here is where most of my work as a Consultant comes from. Individuals have already created a Facebook Page, a Twitter or an Adwords campaign but do not feel they are seeing performance. Once you have real data it is important to sit down and look at what worked, what didn’t and what can be improved for next time. Perhaps our ‘buy it now’ box was not big enough or we lost 80% of our leads at one step. The data doesn’t lie and can potentially increase your sales by multiple percentage points next time around.
Some of the things we will cover:
- How to read analytics and identify important data
- How to act upon important data
- A/B Testing
- Re-starting campaigns
What did you think? Do you agree with my 3 key areas? Anything specific you would like to be covered? Drop me a comment below.
Note: This is part of my new Follow Friday system where I get a little more in depth with one follow friday each week. To learn more about what I am doing please click here.
Ian Redden
(Ian does not use Twitter much but is job hunting. Let’s force him into the Twitterverse and help him out)
Ian came to me as a referral from Shanta Nathwani (@TantienHime) who was my blogs first Follow Friday. He does really technical, high level computer security that I could never understand, has founded an ISP (internet company) and was kind of to buy me drinks on my birthday! As always, here is Ian’s speel:
I have been a self proclaimed ‘Computer Geek’ for as long as I can remember starting with my Grade 3 Science Fair project on programming my Commodore Amiga 1000 computer to speak. Eventually I received my Amateur Radio license (VA3IAN) with a strong fascination into electronics and communications. I would use my Father’s computer and connect to either FreeNet (at the University of Ottawa/Carleton), Internet Wormholes in Winnipeg/UK/Germany or have full conversations over the airwaves with countries I didn’t even knew existed yet.
At 18, I started my own Internet Service Provider business with my High School History teacher being my first customer. After Graduating High School, I worked in the Internet Business for several years supplying Internet Services via Dialup, Cable and eventually Wireless. Since the company was very small, using open source software such as Linux was a necessity and I have become extremely fluent.
Even though I have been tinkering with computers for most of my life, my first involvement in Information Security was much later. The Internet business that I was working in was constantly being attacked by nefarious individuals and not having any prior experience in security, I started to read about firewalls, intrusion prevention software as well as secure coding practices — I was hooked on network security. After several late nights of restoring servers from backups, I decided to learn everything I possibly could about Internet Security and eventually led me back to school.
After selling the Internet Business, I attended Sir Sandford Fleming College. Having graduated the Computer Security Investigations program at Sir Sandford Fleming College in Peterborough, I have been instructed in Digital Profiling, Digital Forensics, Criminology, Risk Management, and Systems Analyst and Design. My Internship (at the end of my schooling) was spent at Scotiabank where I was later hired full time as a Senior Security Analyst in Technical Security & Forensic Services department. Even though most of the projects I worked on at the bank are confidential — I can say that my work is still being used to ensure that your money is safe from electronic attacks and attackers.
