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October 26, 2008 By

Outsourcing: How to Read the Price Tag

Small business owners wear many hats: manager, buyer, accountant, you name it. It is impossible for one person to take care of everything, and the most commonly outsourced tasks revolve around marketing, branding and design. When first deciding to work with a professional, you are going to be looking at the price tag attached to the promised services. It may be shocking to some small business owners how much certain freelance or consulting services can cost, but there are ways to save.

Reading the Price Tag

Next time a consultant charges you $1000 a day, don’t fall over backwards. First consider the following: if you would hire a professional on a one year contract, the salary, taxes and benefits packages would amount to about $200.000 on average. Take into account the consultant only has a certain number of billable days a week, you are paying a premium for the flexibility of not hiring him on a full time basis. You end up saving on benefits, and you probably don’t have enough work to keep someone busy all year so hiring simply doesn’t make sense for your business.

Pricing is, or should be, based on what your best alternative is. In this case, your alternative is to hire someone for a longer term. Considering there are maybe about 236 billable days a year, you need to look at how much an employee costs you a day if you would hire him or her. Don’t just think salary; consider all other costs and expenses associated with an additional hire. You’ll see you still end up saving by hiring a professional for a short term.

How to Save on Freelancers

There are many freelancers who have ‘virtual networks.’ If you need copy writing services, design services, and printing, you could get all your services from the ‘same’ provider. Basically, a virtual network entails a connection between different freelancers who work together on multi-disciplinary projects. This way, they resemble a fully staffed advertising agency, but at a more attractive total price.

Like with anything, you could shop around for the best possible deal. What is important is to look beyond the price tag and see what a freelancer is made of: not everyone will be right for your project, and although price does play a role it isn’t everything.


What has your experience been with outsourcing? Have you looked for a freelancer only based on cost, or based on expertise?

File under: Marketing
October 14, 2008 By

How You can Learn From Pharmaceutical Branding

Although Yaro wrote about “selling benefits, not features” a while ago, his post is still among the most popular ones on Small Business Branding. For good reason: this is a strategy that has proven to be successful for millions of business owners.

When I first started implementing this same strategy for my clients, I tried to use the pharmaceutical industry as an example. Without a doubt, pharmaceuticals have you brand their products based on the benefits. Their benefits are basically their features. After all, few companies are using their product packaging as a branding-tool. Most of them have to rely on problem-solving based branding strategies.

Only a handful of doctors and scientists know, and care about, what is actually in the drug (features), what consumers care about is the result (benefits). Thanks to smart marketing, we all know how Cialis will change your life, and how aspirin can save your day. Most, but not all, pharmaceutical companies serve as a poster child for smart branding. They either sell benefits (Bayer Aspirin), or create inexplicable curiosity (Yasmin) without giving away any details. Both strategies work quite well, especially within the tight regulations that govern these campaigns.

Next time you are thinking of a marketing strategy, turn on your TV and look at a few pharma ads. It might help you think about your own product’s benefits, instead of focusing on its features.

File under: Branding
September 27, 2008 By

Good Branding Requires Great Business Etiquette

Branding a business should not only focus on a marketing strategy. Once you’ve selected your logo, ordered your letter head, and figured out an elevator-pitch it does not mean your job is done. Aside from maintaining your brand, there are a few important business strategies that do influence your brand, even though they are not often part of a marketing strategy.

Brand Your Promises

When you run a business, you are bound to make some form of promises to your (potential) customers. Whether you offer a rebate, better service, or a particular product, if you make a statement you owe it to your brand to stick to it. Even if it costs you a little extra money to keep these promises, it will pay off in the form of long term customers.

Recently, I’ve run into a problem in this area with a major phone provider. I contacted their business services department because I was interested in switching providers. The company I am switching to is rumored to be the best of all wireless-evils available in Canada, and being thoroughly fed up with the level of service I’ve been exposed to for the past four years, I decided it was time for a change.

Business services started out promising. I enjoyed speaking to the same rep every time I called in, and I had the option of emailing this individual as well. I felt there was some accountability and was thrilled about having some offers in writing. I preferred this option over dealing with conventional customer service, where every time you call offers and promises are changed depending on the knowledge or whim of the rep on the phone. Besides, regular customer service likely has most of their call center in Bangalore anyways. You can say what you like about outsourcing, but it does not take away my opinion that certain services do suffer dramatically when you expose part of a business to substandard language skills, and enormous cultural differences.

To make a long story short, my initial contact with my new wireless provider amounted to a spontaneous $100 rebate offer for switching, and a few other perks. No expiry date was mentioned in the email offering this. However, when I was ready to go ahead and purchase a $400 phone, as well as commit to a three year plan, the $100 rebate was suddenly no longer available. Allegedly, there was some mystical expiry date to the offer, which was never mentioned. Instead of fighting the issue, I decided to first call conventional customer service. After two failed attempts, where someone claimed a voice plan I wanted is not available, I finally spoke to someone within North America, who was competent enough to honor the $100 rebate after all. Of course I had to close the deal before it would be gone again by the next time I’d call.

How Service Reflects on Your Brand

What does this story tell you about this company’s brand? The start was promising, but then the business services rep started to crawl back on her initial offers, in a rather rude way too, I was less than impressed. Even if there would have been an expiry date, the fact she forgot to mention it means the company should take responsibility for the promise. Simply saying to a potential customer that she ‘lost a great opportunity already’ is not the most productive statement to reign in another three-year contract.

Although you may think customer service is not part of your brand, it actually should be. Consistency, keeping promises and maintaining great service reflects on your brand. In this case, I was dealing with Canada’s “most reliable network”. Take a guess at how reliable I still think this company is..

File under: Branding, Business
July 27, 2007 By

The Problem with Entrepreneurial Branding

When an entrepreneur brands his or her product, business or concept, inadvertently the entrepreneur himself often becomes associated with that brand. After all, Bill Gates equals Microsoft, and Steve Jobs is synonymous with Apple computers. This is not really a problem, until the entrepreneur in question considers a new and unrelated start-up. This is not entirely unlikely, after all: we are familiar with the “serial entrepreneur” concept. However, do we being the customer take that entrepreneur seriously when they start company number 2? Imagine Bill Gates starting a fashion line? While movie stars seem to pull it off, it doesn’t mean we can look like we can “do it all”.

I recently ran into a wall of disbelief when I announced to be developing a new business. Friends know me as a writer and communications/marketing strategist, so this new idea came as a shock. To me it was interesting to see that I had branded myself sufficiently well to cause this reaction. People have associated me with pen and paper for years, and I will probably (thankfully) never shake that “brand image”. However, it does open a new area of potential problems: how does one market a new business while operating under an existing label?
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File under: Branding, Business, Personal Branding
July 5, 2007 By

Can I Have Your Attention Please?

Although you may never say this it is obviously expected when you, a business owner/CEO, hires a marketing/branding professional. Of course the advertising firm has more than one client, but you should still expect them to make sure the right people spend enough attention developing your ads/strategies/campaigns.

Any elephant in its niche (think AT&T, Compaq, Quiznos, etc) will also hire the Rolls Royce of marketing agencies. In other words, the agency with 500 employees where representatives, not teams, from each company meet and discuss the project at hand.

What is the problem? You may, or may not, ask. The problem is that, as a business, you have no control or grip over the attention your project is getting, or who is working on it. You will not even know if a monkey is taking care of the creative design. Although most agencies employ good writers, it is not uncommon for a project to be edited by non-editors or pass by an account manager who “revamps” the logo design.

The point I am trying to make is simple:
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File under: Branding, Marketing
March 12, 2007 By

Convince me in Five Words or Less!

We all know what an elevator pitch is, right? For those who are now ready to Google the term, it is a small “talk” you prepare to convince a more powerful individual that you are great. Now, really this just means that you either convince your boss of your many accomplishments (to get a promotion down the line) or a potential client that you are “the one” for them.

Elevator pitches are not just for individuals employed by large companies who have to come up with a useful thing to say when riding the elevator with a CEO. It is imperative that you come up with something significant to say, to anyone! You never know who would be a next client or customer, and it all depends on how you say it.

This became blatantly clear when I attended a large convention last week. It was the second year I went, and while last year I was not fully convinced yet of what I could do for these people, this year I had a perfect pitch in mind.

I’ll actually tell you what I said, and how I could have said it if I wanted a 0% response:

[Read more...]

File under: Branding, Marketing
February 21, 2007 By

A Hosting Company with a Twist

SiteProPlusI just received a sponsored review request from a company I did not previously know: SiteProPlus Website Design. I decided to browse the site and see what they are are offering their customers.

I’d like to take this opportunity and point out a few of this site’s benefits I’ve noticed when looking at their services. Here is my review of SiteProPlus:

When loading the website it looks like yet another hosting company offering web design services. However, after a second or so it is impossible to miss the “free design” promise on the home page. SiteProPlus offers to design your site for free, without any obligation to the client. This means that you do not actually have to host the site with them if you change your mind after seeing the site. I can see this solution being beneficial for busy professionals who need a presence of the Internet and want a well designed site without any hassle.

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File under: Reviews
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