Category: Market Strategy

Social media can grow entrepreneurs’ success rate by hundreds percents

On a Delta flight to San Diego, which is a long 21 hour trip trip to the Social Media Marketing World 2019 for the fifth year.

For me, the SMMW conference enables me to learn and understand where the world of social media is going. There are so many changes to watch and new ways to learn. Social media makes it possible to reach any human being (that uses a social network) directly. Never before on earth have there been channels and tools that enable direct connection between any two people around the world.

Let’s look backward for a minute, to 1986. This was the year I joined the world of marketing. Originally, I planned to study engineering, but the stars pointed me in a different direction.

How to find your biggest market opportunity?

This post is about one of the best-kept secrets in business success;

The technique to find more paying customers and achieve business success is not by convincing as many people as you can to buy your product or service;

it’s about finding those people who need your product or service most and will be the first to buy your product or service and through them, finding the shortest road to success.

100 episodes. And I never thought I would ever have my own company.

When you manage tens of millions of dollars in marketing budgets for the leading brands around the world, you are sure it’s the most influential position you can get.

A summary of 2 things I was wrong about, 1 thing I was right about, and 2 interesting questions:

I never considered having a podcast. I never considered writing a blog either.

It all started 11 years ago.

It was a month after I decided to leave my executive position as the VP of Marketing for Nokia in Israel. We managed to reach Nokia’s highest targets in terms of market share, brand preference (+160%), and brand loyalty (+127%). But we mainly managed to gain back the market leadership crown, which had been stolen from us in 2003.

My Conclusions after (almost) 100 podcasting episodes: The 3 most important tips to help you gain ongoing growth of paying customers and business success

We are about to REACH 100 episodes of the REACH OR MISS podcast.

And I can’t help but feel a bit sentimental about it.

I want to discuss why I started this podcast, and address the question: did I achieve at least some of the main objective that brought me to launch this podcast almost two years ago (March 20th 2017, to be exact).

I won’t tell the whole story now, just the main facts.

In January 2008, after 21 years of executive marketing positions in leading multinational and local brands, I founded a company aiming to help entrepreneurs and startup founders become successful by winning market category leadership using the right marketing and sales approach.

Are you an entrepreneur or a small business owner?

It’s not like someone can decide ‘You are an entrepreneur’, or ‘no, you are a small business owner’.

However from the last eleven years I’ve been working with entrepreneurs and startup founders I have noticed, there are three main differences:

At first, only startup founders were considered entrepreneurs. In time, a new type of entrepreneur evolved, who started small, aiming to earn money from the early stages, bring new ventures, and create a big difference in their field.

Today, this trend has gone a step further. It seems like everyone is leaving their ‘9 to 5’ jobs to open their own business and calling themselves entrepreneurs.

Brian Hart had only inbound customers from the first day of his entrepreneurial business

Brian Hart is my podcast guest this week.
I hadn’t known he was going to say that he’d never needed to look for customers when I invited him to be a guest on my show.
I invited him because I’d read several of his articles on Inc. Magazine, learned about him through Twitter and LinkedIn, and thought he could bring value to my podcast listeners – most of whom are entrepreneurs.

The marketing technocrats are the second biggest danger to your entrepreneurial business success. You are the first.

I remember my first days as NOKIA VP of Marketing for the Israeli market. I came to NOKIA after more than 18 years of executive marketing positions with leading brands and multimillion dollar budgets.

It was my first meeting with my internet manager – a new role in the marketing team. She looked at her reports and said: there were 335 thousand youth and young people viewing our last campaign.

As I said, eighteen years a marketing manager and VP for leading brands, spent millions of dollars on different marketing activities and ads, but I had never known exactly how many people actually saw the campaigns.

The Eight Golden Rules of Entrepreneurial Marketing* Part 2

This is the second part of the The Eight Golden Rules of Entrepreneurial

Part 2 – The Next Four Golden Rules
In the previous part, we defined the four most basic rules at the heart of customer focused market strategy. Any marketing success we have builds upon those basic rules.

The Eight Golden Rules of Entrepreneurial Marketing* Part 1

Entrepreneurs are aware of the need to maximize their company’s value (which is built on two foundations; the financial results [sales and profit] and its brand perception).

They also know that they have to market their startup and dedicate thought to the question of how to reach customers and make them want, seek out, use, and purchase the product. However, few entrepreneurs are aware of the fact that there are clear rules underlying marketing, in general, and the marketing of start-ups or entrepreneurial business, in particular. They also fail to realize that by following these rules, they will significantly increase their odds of making a quick breakthrough into the international market.

There are eight rules. The first four relate to the most basic questions of marketing a startup – the company’s market strategy. The last four relate to reaching the customers and motivating them to buy and use the product.

Is there any chance for entrepreneurs to succeed with a physical electronic product?

During my first 22 years of marketing and sales, I worked only with physical products, like food, suits, batteries, and mobile phones. Mainly, but not only, consumer products.

And then in 2008, I began working with startups and entrepreneurs, and shifted my focus to mainly software, systems, online platforms, and etc. There were very few consumer electronics products in the startup nation at that point.

How important are the name and logo for your entrepreneurial business, really?

I love the story of how Google chose their name. It shows an interesting process of naming a new startup or entrepreneurship.

How to choose the best name and logo for my business is one of the most asked questions among entrepreneurs and new business owners.

It makes sense. First, because this is what we do, right? When a new baby is born, the first thing we do is give them a name. The name differentiates us from every other person in the world -together with many other parameters- still; everything starts with the name.

SEO? Blog Content? PR? Email marketing? Social media presence? Trade shows? Webinars?

As an entrepreneur, how should you choose which marketing activities to focus on?
One of the startups I loved working with was B4UPay . I believed they would succeed and trusted the two founders to do good work. And they did. But then they closed the company. Much too early. For the wrong reasons.

And I was devastated because they did everything right… Almost!

The company closed because the cost per lead and cost per customer were too high, and they realized they weren’t able to be profitable. 

Finding the right marketing tools for specific audiences at different stages of the entrepreneurial company is challenging.