Yes anyone can create a video, but you need to ask yourself the real question:

What’s Your Goal?

Nowadays, there is information everywhere! TV ad’s, radio broadcasts, print, blogs, forums, newsletters, social media and, of course, video.

But videos shouldn’t be used to just sell things. A personalized video is your chance to tell people who you are and what you’re all about! Otherwise you’ll be just another ad. And trust me, the consumer knows when you’re trying to sell them something.

What Makes a Successful Video?

Successful videos are built on trust. You need to build trust before anyone will listen to you.

But how do we build trust in just a minute or two on screen?

According to Yasmin Nguyen, CEO and founder of ERL Media, “videos are tools to enhance trust for a brand”.

Here are Yasmin’s ABCs to build trust through videos:

1) Acknowledge your audience: Show that you care through relevant content. Use words and phrases that they will understand. Speak their language.

2) Be authentic: This isn’t the time to sell your product. This is the time to prove what your brand is about and how you’re different from everyone else. No room for error here, just be yourself and tell the truth.

3) Create meaningful content: Videos are easy to watch but also easy to forget. The goal here is to tell the story.  Focus on what you want your audience to remember and why it’s important to them. Without good content, people won’t listen.

These three fundamentals will help you get started building trust with your video audience, but it’s just the beginning. How do you build trust with your audience?

How do you provide authentic, valuable products to your customers?

If you’re lost in the woods, answering these 5 questions will help you build an authentic company your clients and customers value.

Each question builds off the previous one. Take some time finding the right answers and by the time you’re done you’ll have a solid understanding of where to take your business in 2013.

1. Why Am I in Business?

Putting food on the table is a good reason to have a job, but not a good reason to run your own business. Why are you doing what you do? Something else must gnaw at you. An inequity, a quixotic vision no one else sees yet, a fiery belief you can do it better than the rest.

Explaining why you’re in business to your clients, customers and the World is what builds a passionate and engaged audience.

“Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” – Steve Jobs

2. Who Do I Help?

Take a second to imagine your reason for being in business. Look around. Who are you serving, who is using your product/service?  Where do they life?  What clothes do they wear?  What did they do before your product/service came along?

Your business can’t exist in a vacuum.  Not even the most brilliant inventions or the most clever websites are for everyone.  Identifying who you can help will guide what you need to do to find new customers.

“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” – Seth Godin

3. Do I Solve a Problem?

How do you make people’s lives better? Do you improve their lives in a way they even care about?  A new flavor of gum might excite some people but pair that new flavor with improved dental health and you have a product that makes a difference.

If you’re not sure how you’re really helping your clients/customers, try asking them.  A simple ‘why do you like shopping here?’ or ‘why did you decide to work with me’ to one of your existing customers could start a discussion that gives you new insight in to the people you’re helping.

“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.” - Peter Drucker

4. Who Else is Working on My Problem?

You’re probably not the only person banging your head against your specific problem.  Finding others working on similar problems is a fantastic source of perspective and insight.  Allies can challenge your assumptions while helping you move towards your goals.

Allies, partners and friends can open doors and help you spot obstacles you didn’t even know existed.  Even when working something new, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants.  Take stock of your network and search out opportunities to grow it.

“A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.” – John D. Rockefeller

5. What 2012 Mistakes can I Avoid this Year?

It’s OK to make mistakes, just don’t keep making the same ones.  Reflect on 2012 and write a list of things that didn’t go so well.  With each of them write down what you wish you had known earlier.  Are there any common themes?  What assumptions caused these problems?

Changing your mindset opens new opportunities and possibilities you couldn’t perceive before.  While you don’t want to dwell on mistakes, you also don’t want to forget about them.  Review, reflect and revise.

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” – Henry Ford

You can’t prevent yourself from moving in to 2013 a little older having answers to these questions will make sure you’re a little wiser.

As an entrepreneur, Mickey started Liquid Gratitude to share her passion for beer and wine with the world.

Aside from the unique products and great customer service, Liquid Gratitude also uses local products from the Vancouver/Portland metro area, nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources.

An amazing business woman and a supporter of local businesses?

That’s right! And she really knows her gift baskets!

Mickey treats each and every one of her customers as if they were her only customer and Spot Color Studio experienced Mickey’s focus and attention to detail ourselves. She’s a fantastic business person and we enjoyed working with her.

Visit LiquidGratitude and the next time you think of giving wine or beer as gifts, think of Mickey.

You toss and turn, running through the millions of things you’d need to do to bring your business to life. Marketing, produciton, sales, setting up a corporation, getting a logo, hiring people. The list is endless and you’re fired up to get started. The US Small Business Association just released four new tools to help you find customers, find your niche, find help and even find out if the idea will fly.

1. SizeUp – Free Market Analysis

Knowing your competition is almost as important as knowing yourself. With SizeUp you can find out how many other people are selling similar products or services in your area, help you find advertising opportunities and benchmark yourself against the competition. It then provides tailored suggestions to help you grow.

It’s got a slick and easy to use interface: http://www.sba.gov/sizeup

2. Event Calendar

It’s dangerous to go alone. You can search events based on dates, location and distance from your zip code.

A quick search in the Portland area brings up three pages of results. The results are easy to read and provide as much information as you’d need.

http://www.sba.gov/events

3. Business Plan Creator

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the business plan can be a useful way to organize your thoughts on why you think your business will succeed and can help you find blind spots where your assumptions might not pan out.

http://www.sba.gov/business-plan/1

4. Small Business Size Standard Tool

A lot of federal contracts are designated to be filled by small businesses. Does your business fit the bill?

The best part however is that you can then start searching for government contracts designed specifically for businesses like your own!

http://www.sba.gov/content/am-i-small-business-concern

Have you used any of these online resources? Which ones have been helpful? What other online resources would you suggest?

If you are in this situation then:

1) You probably never understood your target customer to begin with.

or

2) You probably didn’t know that your product was a big hit for someone else.

Well as business owners, you may want to ask yourself the question: “How well do I know my customers?”

What do I do?

Don’t panic, here’s the good news:

Sales: You are still making money! It was just a little different from what you had expected.

Opportunity: Ding-Ding-Ding! A new customer just came out of its shell. “Denzel” is buying your product. Why can’t we create better marketing towards our “Denzel” customers? Here are 3 easy ways to do that:

1. Reach out and talk to the “Denzel” customers and ask questions to get to know more about them. You can try having your in-store staff do most of this work.
2. Do some research on brands and other products that are popular for that “Denzel”. You can search on online forums and articles relating to this. Maybe you can introduce a new or different brand in your store!
3. Introduce a quick and easy 5-question online survey and have customers complete it for a discount towards their next purchase. Not only can this increase more sales, but you can also find out more about your “Denzel” customers.

It’s not too late if you are in this spot to still be successful.

The real question is…

How well do you want to know your customer?

]]> http://spotcolorstudio.com/uncategorized/ashton-vs-denzel-do-you-know-your-customers/feed/ 0 http://spotcolorstudio.com/clients/angela-todd-designs/ http://spotcolorstudio.com/clients/angela-todd-designs/#comments Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:58:39 +0000 admin http://spotcolorstudio.com/?p=2405 ...]]> Angela Todd is an amazing interior designer residing in Portland, Oregon. It was our pleasure to help Angela rebuild her website to create new and better ways to connect to her customers, and showcase her work. Not only is Angela an extremely talented designer, but she is also on top of it when it comes to social media and SEO skills. She provided us with a list of her keywords and phrases as well as expertly labeled all of her photos for increased Google ranking. Angela Todd Designs has one of the most resourceful and beautiful blogs that we have built. It was a privilege to work with Angela and her team to create a lovely new site.  Click here to check out the site, and to connect with Angela and her team the next time you have any interior design needs.  She is fantastic!

My husband, Brad Hagedorn, DMD, recently purchased the office from a retiring dentist and one of our first tasks was to get a web-presence up and running.  Knowing the power of technology as a source of information for those searching for a new healthcare provider, we knew that establishing an online presence was crucial to the strength of our new Cedar Mill business.

While typing in www.summitdentalhealth.com for the first time and watching our website appear was exhilarating, we quickly learned that the launch of this site onto the internet was simply the very beginning.

Here are the five things we did after we launched the site:

1. First and foremost, we continued to sift through the website with a fine toothed comb searching for mistakes that had gone unnoticed during the creation and editing process.
2. We then asked family members to do the same, knowing full well that the site needed fresh critical eyes.
3. Afterwards, we invited friends to cruise over the Summit website testing out its ease of use.
4. We reached out to all of our current patients introducing them to site and offering an incentive for anyone who was willing to submit a feedback through one of our new online forms, giving us an opportunity to test the form and how best to respond to the submissions.
5. Finally, we made an attempt to update our business information with the details and address of the new website in as many online business directories as we could think of.  A website that no one knows about was not going to be a website that received much traffic.

After the website we added social media through Facebook and Twitter.  Being new to social media, we dove in headfirst in hopes of making the appropriate information available for the right consumer.

As the weeks and months passed, we continued updating news at the office, adding blog posts about relevant topics for our patients and posting our latest promotions.  We came across a few bumps in the road too, reminding us to check more frequently to be sure there are no dead-end pages, that information is up to date and that all of our forms for patients to contact us are in working order.

Slowly the Summit Dental site is making its way up the list in Google keyword searches.  Being a small, new business owner, our budget for advertising is very limited.  We continue to work hard to keep our website fresh and improve the content to serve our current patients and increase the opportunity for future patients to come across Summit Dental.  The challenge is finding the time to devote to maintain the site and knowing what will be most the effective target keywords.

To answer the questions I posed in the title of this article, to launch a website and leave it unmanned would be no more effective than doing so with a NASA space shuttle.  Despite all the planning and hard work it takes to get it up and running, if a website is launched onto the worldwide web and left to float there to fend for itself, it will be serving little purpose and will most certainly not land where you want it to or accomplish the goals you have in mind.

Our website is a living document in need of care, maintenance, and direction for it to remain relevant and hopefully someday soon reaching our mission of achieving the number one spot on Google.

Jessica Hagedorn is the marketing director for Summit Dental.  She and her husband Brad Hagedorn, DMD, have been in the office since 2011.  You can visit their website at www.summitdentalhealth.com.

Many small business owners today still have trouble against the bigger guys.

Maybe you are low on cash, can’t hire the right manager, or you have no marketing team; the list can go on and on.

How do we fight against the big guys?

Know Your Enemy

Well how about if you knew what Nike was doing with their new running shoes?

The question is, how do I find out?

Here are 3 simple ways to help you learn more about whoever that “Nike” is.

1) Act as a customer and give them a call. Or better yet, visit their store like you were just a regular shopper. This can give you a better idea on how they treat their customers.

2) Visit their website weekly to see what they are up to. Are they coming out with a new product soon? Sign up for their weekly newsletters to see what they have been telling their customers. You may just find some useful stuff.

3) Connect with them on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. This may sound odd, right? Being “friends” with my rivals on Facebook? Well think about it. If you knew what they were up to, are you now in a better position for your company?

What other strategies have worked for you?