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Category Archives: Marketing

The Value Of An Ethical Business

So, this is going to be a controversial posting. I wonder what you think about the morality of your behaviour when you choose to change professional advisors? I don't mean the professional ethical rules, but the morals of how you do it. And how should the professional advisor react? Here is a story of how a client of mine decided they wanted to change accountants. Read through the circumstances, and then tell me what you would have done. (more…)...
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How To Create A “Brand” For Your Small Business

"Your brand" is talked a lot about these days, but what is your "brand"? Your brand is not your logo. Coca-Cola is not about the logo or even the shape of the bottle. It includes all you feel when you think about Coke - fun, young, outdoors. Apple is not about the backlit macintosh apple with a bite out of it, it is all that it entails - design quality, Steve Jobs, the whole ecosphere of physical and software design surrounding tech. Everything about your business must align with the brand - the way you and your team behave, how you appear to customers, the business' values, the business' model, the messages it gives out and even the look and feel of marketing and ads. And yes, at the end, your logo needs to reflect and represent all that. (more…)...
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Four Steps To Simplify Your Message

Do you want to explain difficult facts to clients? Do you want to get a sales message across? The first few seconds of any interaction is critical, whether you know the other person or not. This is particularly important in any business interaction today where people's time seem so limited, people seem so aware of "that sales pitch" coming and are ready to tune off. Today's SMS and social media world seem to do nothing but ready for us to listen to tweets. If you want to put your business message across, whether it is advice, technical information or a sales pitch you need to tune yourself and your communication to that frequency which is most clear. I have found that the best way to do this is to use four simple steps in any business communication. First, meet people where they are, in order to take people to where you want them to go. If you want someone to understand your message, you need to understand what they care about. They may care about cost, or they may care about ease of use, or indeed they may care about something human like not being embarrassed. Understand their hot buttons, and acknowledge it before you go...
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Change your business model with great care!

Businesses who decide to change the way they do business need to be careful of unintended consequences. They need to think of the effects to the customer first, but also to the not so obvious stakeholder groups.
For example businesses that generate significant business through referral networks need to be careful how any changes affect their referral base and not just their customers.
In some imagined country, the leading provider of accounting software to SME's is a company called Record Your Amazing Business or Ryab. Knowing that SME's made purchasing decisions about accounting software based on their accountants' opinions, Ryab provided their software free to all public accounting firms. These firms could use multiple copies of the software on a single free license as long as they used it on their own entities - clients would have to buy their own licenses, and accountants even received commissions on these sales to clients.
This was an extremely successful referral strategy to get the product in front of the ultimate customer. In short time, accountants played with the software, found it easy to use, used it in their own companies and personal business affairs and in doing so got to understand how to use it...
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OTS Management