Mavance, LLC

This article will go through the 5 W’s on BNI from my perspective. I joined a local BNI chapter three months ago. I am, by no means, a grizzled veteran. I thought it would be a good idea to get this article out there for business owners, independent agents, attorneys, CPAs or anyone else looking to grow a quality network over time.

In order, I’ll answer the 5 W’s in the following context:

• What is BNI?
• Why join BNI?
• Where are BNI chapters/where is an opening?
• Who joins BNI?
• When should I join BNI?

What is BNI?

Business Network International was found in 1985 by a guy named Ivan Misner. Misner wanted to create a system where professionals were accountable to each other for referrals. Misner’s story is told in a book provided upon joining called “Giver’s Gain”. The main point the book gets across is that the old adage it’s better to give than receive works for more than just gifts. By giving quality referrals and deserved testimonials to other members, you are actually building up your credibility.

One of the points Misner makes in his book is that only one member representing an area is allowed into the chapter. In other words, you will not have two Realtors or two web designers. Only one can join so it’s a first come first serve proposition. This works out well because it reduces internal competition.

While BNI is not the only game in town, it’s the best in my book. Sure, there’s others including LeTip and other local varieties including an email I received for a Professional Business Network in Warren, NJ. Of course, there’s always the local/county/regional Chambers of Commerce. Personally, BNI made sense the first time I visited. It’s very structured and goal orientated.

The structured BNI meeting I attend every Thursday between 7AM to 8:30AM goes something like this:

• 15 minutes of open networking
• 45 - 60 second commercials given by every member
• A report by the chapter VP going over referrals, “dance cards” (meetings with members outside of the BNI chapter meeting) and closed business attributed to the chapter
• 2 seven minute presentations by members on their businesses. With a chapter our size, we present roughly every six months.
• “I have” time. We share referral (or acknowledge them if already shared with the individual) and to give testimonials.

Why Join BNI?

BNI has a couple of advantages out of the box:

1. It increases the size of your sales force. Put simply - if one of the 40 members hears of an opportunity, there’s a very good chance you’ll hear of it as well.
2. It helps build your network immediate. Sure you have to build credibility and trust but it helps that you’re like someone else because you’re both members of a group.

Case in point: A startup/potential client needed assistance with finding a distributor. I asked my BNI group for help in finding distributors. Within 24 hours, I had emails from three BNI members with contact details.

Where are chapters/Where is an Opening?

BNI’s page contains a listing of all the chapters that you can use to find a BNI chapter near you. Each subpage is a little different so I cannot give you a link to find a chapter with an opening for your business type. However, I will give you a search page for New York City/Metro New Jersey. If you’re in New Jersey but outside of this area then check out the clickable map of New Jersey/Pennsylvania. Believe it or not, the web page has been the biggest annoyance so far - everything else just runs. Perhaps it’s due to the old school word of mouth networking.. don’t know why it’s not more clean cut!

Who Joins BNI?

In short - a wide swath of business people. Some members own their businesses while others are professionals or even employees at large companies. If you are customer facing, have a relationship manager role or are responsible in some or in whole part for sales, then BNI could be for you. As an example, our chapter, the Select Business Source in Westfield, NJ contains the following members (as of May 2008) :

• Accounting
• Appraisals - Residential Real Estate
• Attorney (Divorce)
• Attorney (Real Estate)
• Attorney (Employer Law)
• Banking - Commercial
• Business Brokerage
• Chiropractor
• Cleaning Services
• Commercial Banking
• Commercial Lending
• Computer Service
• Copiers & Office Software Solutions
• Credit Card Processing
• Custom Window Treatments
• Data Networking
• Divorce Attorney
• Financial Advisor
• Graphic Design
• Interior Design Consultant
• Insurance - Auto, Home & Commercial
• Insurance - Life, Health, Disability & Long Term Care
• Health, Nutrition & Lifestyle Counseling
• Heating/Cooling Systems
• Home & Building Inspection
• Human Resource Consultants
• Marketing & PR
• Merchant Processing Services
• Mortgage Services
• Moving & Storage
• Real Estate (Sales & Listings)
• Lawn Maintenance
• Legal Services (Real Estate)
• Printing Services (and direct)
• Printer Cartridges
• Sales & Management Training
• Signage/Trade Show Displays
• Telephone, Wireless & Internet
• Web Design & Hosting

Needless to say, it’s a pretty diverse group.

When Should You Join BNI?

A bit of a rhetorical question in my book. Perhaps as soon as possible?!? If you are dependent upon sales, or are a sales organization, do yourself a favor and visit a chapter. It doesn’t cost much (if any) to visit, and generally, you’ll be breakfast out of it as well.

Overview

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of advertising and marketing your products & services on the Net through search engines. Search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, receive a referral fee from you for the increase in traffic to your content. SEM is also referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC).

Why do it?

SEM is an effective way to draw traffic, and with it, customers to your site. The better your target your audience with your message, relevant keywords and great offers, the more likely you are to increase your revenue stream. Your goals for this increase in traffic may include:

1. Buy a product or service from you online.
2. Fill out a contact form for an offline sale.
3. Fill out a contact form so you can continue the conversation with the lead through targeted marketing (email/other direct methods).
4. become more educated on the products and services you provide.

How do you setup SEM campaigns?

You can hire a professional to do this for you or you can follow these steps:

1. Prepare your Target Content
2. Research Your Keywords
3. Setup and Launch your Campaign
4. Measure the Campaign’s effectiveness
5. Tweak the Campaign/Content
6. Repeat steps 4 & 5

As you can see from the steps above, this is not like a Ronco device - you don’t set it and forget it. You have to measure it and make changes. Ideally, you will have two (A/B) or more (Multivariate) ad tests . I’ll get into this a bit more later in the posting.

Prepare Your Target Content

Before you start your SEM/PPC campaign, you need to setup your targets. If someone were to click on your ad, what would you want them to do next? In other words, you’ve paid Google some money and you have a captive audience on your site.

Some suggestions on content:

• If you are looking at lead generation, make it easy for the audience to provide information to you. In other words, do not direct them to a page that does not have a contact form readily present. The more clicks required - the more chance you have in losing the customer.
• If you are looking at educating the lead, you will want to direct them to detailed product information. For example, on one of my campaigns, if someone comes through looking for web development then I will direct them to a custom web development page. This is much better than an overview of what services you provide.

If you are interested in learning more about content setup then I would suggest taking a look at a book by Tim Ash titled “Landing Page Optimization” (Amazon link). Ash does a great job helping you create landing pages and how to build a flexible landing page system to experiment on what works best.

Once you have your targeted content set, you need to research your keywords

Research Your Keywords

Now that you have set up your targets, you need to perform keyword research for your campaign. I found a post that may save some keystrokes here. The best tool in that posting is this page on SEO Book.

Setup and Launch Your Campaign

There are multiple offerings in this space including:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo! Marketing
• Microsoft AdCenter

What’s the big difference between the three? Google’s traffic is much great than the other two put together. The most recent numbers I could find peg Google’s search traffic at 60% vs. Yahoo’s 22% (as of December 2007). While being bigger isn’t necessarily better for the long run, the size helps you test out a message very quickly in front of a large audience.

From personal experience, another benefit is Google provides better geolocation ads. In other words, if you want to advertise to a specific area, Google has the knobs and levers to do this. Yahoo! is decent in this area but prefers you to use metropolitan areas and this may be too large for some small business to focus on. Case in point: the NYC metro area includes New Jersey, Connecticut and of course NYC/New York area. Unfortunately, if you happened to be in central New Jersey and had clients in your local area, in NYC and in Connecticut then you could be very annoyed with amount of transit time required.

MSN AdCenter promises the best geolocation services but I have not seen the results from experience. When I ran a personal campaign for my business on AdCenter to test it out, I found connections from Iran, India, Pakistan and 30 of the 50 states in the union. This may have been caused by a content network (and not the search itself.) Either way, I’d rather stick to Google, and secondarily, Yahoo! for my dollars.

I digress…. I’d suggest you sign up for Google AdWords first. If you want to try another program then feel free to do this once you’ve measured your base results then please experiment.

Sign Up for Google AdWords

When you sign up for Google AdWords, you are given a choice between the “Starter Edition” and “Standard Edition.” I would advise you to signup for the standard package out of the gate. While there’s a bit more complexity, you have more control over how your ads are displayed including ad scheduling hours and better geolocation options.

Creation of A Campaign

Once you have logged in to AdWords, you have multiple options for campaign creation. Google has expanded their offerings to include newspaper and radio advertising. That’s a bit out of scope so I’ll stick to the topic of SEM/PPC campaigns. For these campaigns, you can setup either a “keyword-targeted” or a “placement-targeted” campaign. For our purposes, we want to create a “keyword-targeted” campaign.

Base Settings for a Campaign:

Assuming you do not have any current campaigns you will need to setup a name for the campaign, the ad group, which language you will use and where the customers you want to target are located.

Creation of your first Ad:

Once you have these basic settings, you will be asked to create your first ad. The format is as follows:

• First line - Headline - limit of 25 characters.
• Second line - Part of call to action/additional information - 35 characters
• Third line - Continuation of your call to action/information - 35 characters
• Fourth line - Your display URL w/o the http:// - 35 characters
• Fifth line - Your Destination URL (hidden from customer - can contain whatever tracking URL you want to include.) - 1024 characters max

In my opinion, creating the ads is the most challenging aspect of SEM. You have to be concise but offer enough information or have a good enough offer to generate interest. It seems fairly easy until you start writing them - you’ll see!

Keyword Submission:

After you have submitted your ad, you are given the opportunity to add your keywords you grabbed during your previous research. You can be very specific in the match criteria (use [keyword] to match exact keyword only or “keyword phrase” to have the show up in the search string) of you can be very broad and not use brackets or quotes. The more precise you are, you may receive less traffic but it may be better traffic. It may be the type of traffic you’re willing to pay for.

You will also be asked how much you are willing to bid for the keyword. Google, and the other guys, will display your ad based on how much you are willing to click and how many time people click on your ad versus someone’s elses ad. This later is generally referred to as the “quality” of the ad in the SEM speak…

How Your Ad Will Show:

You may be willing to pay $10 for a keyword but someone will only rarely click on your ad because it does not appeal to customers as much as an ad where a competitor is willing to only pay $2 for an ad but they rank above your ad. In rough number it makes sense. If your ad only receives a Click Thru Rate (CTR) of 1% and the competitor receives a 10% CTR then it makes more sense for Google to run their ad and not yours.

This is the other reason why writing the ads is the hardest part - you need to write great copy.

One last setting.. Setup Ad Serving to Rotate So You Can Measure Your Ads:

I would recommend you create another ad for the ad group/campaign in Google AdWords and then verify your Ad Serving is set to Rotate and NOT Optimize. If you have the campaign set to optimize then you will not have a good testbed to experiment one ad against another. You can verify this under the Campaign setings- “Edit Campaign Setting Settings.”

Measure

For simple campaigns, it’s a good idea to throw out a couple of ads with different message to see which one sticks. All the providers provide measurement tools to help you figure this out. Under Google AdWords, for example, you can find this information under the “Campaign Summary” - <Specific Campaign You are Running> - <Specific Ad Group> - “Ad Variations”. You will generally want to give the Ads a couple of days to compare their effectiveness. If you change things too quickly then you may miss out on the copy that could have turned you into a billionaire.

As an added benefit of your PPC campaigns, you may notice additional traffic in your analytics package. (Side note: Google provides a free analytics package that is bundled with AdWords or can be used independently - click here for more details). This is not an uncommon experience. Some folks prefer to go to the display URL themselves by manually copying/pasting and others my be directed by others who have already visited. Within your web analytics program should allow you to drill down to find the source of the traffic. This is outside the scope of this article but I wanted to mention the other benefits of PPC campaigns from a marketing standpoint. Basically, the Internet billboard you posted using SEM provides multiple benefits..

Tweak

Ideally, you will want to rotate the ad not performing and replace this ad. I would suggest you not delete the Ad, rather pause it so you can always go back and review your experiments and their varying levels of success.

Repeat… until expiration (if any)

For folks newer to SEM/Internet Marketing, this may seem a bit odd. In the past, you may have sent out a direct mail that took a couple of weeks to author, proof and deliver to the printer. After the printer ran their batch run, someone went to the post office with a big bag of bulk delivery items. Then, in a few more days, your message was in the hands of your customer. If this is the world you are used to and want to know what it will take to change to the new world then I’d recommend you pick up Do It Wrong Quickly by Mike Moran. I reviewed it earlier in this blog here. Another advertising & marketing channel of interest to you may be e-Mail marketing. I’ll cover this in another post.

As always, your comments, questions and suggestions are welcome. Feel free to drop us a line by filling out our contact form.

Over the past three weeks, I have been reading five books. Yeah, I know it’s a no-no to read more than one non fiction book at a time… Anyhow, I finished the book this afternoon and really thought it was a top notch read. The author, Mike Moran, does a great job of helping the audience, present day marketers, understand how the direct marketing world has, and more importantly, is changing around them. The book is not a hands on howto book nor is it a book on theory. It provides a good mix of both extremes and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to gain a better understanding of Internet (Direct) Marketing.The rest of this review includes details of he book, a listing of the chapters and some takeaways from the book.

Book Information:

• Title: Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules (Amazon Link)
• Author: Mike Moran
• Publisher: IBM Press, 2007, Edition 1, 408 pages
• ISBNs: 0132255960 & 978-0132255967
• Overall Rating: 4.5/5

The Chapters

The book is broken down into three sections. The sections break down to: 1) theory 2) detailed information 3) how to implement and stay on top of things.

• Part 1 (’That New Fangled Marketing”) - Chapter 1 - “They’re Doing Wonderful Things with Computers.” This chapter discusses the old marketing paradigms and how they have shifted.
• Part 1 - Chapter 2 - “New Wine in Old Bottles.” This chapter rights the ship and explains how newer marketing methods are similar to older ones - the main difference is - everything moves much faster.
• Part 1 - Chapter 3 - “Marketing is a Conversation.” This chapter discusses how permission marketing (see Seth Godin for more info here..) and new media formats are changing how marketers discuss products/services with customers.
• Part 2 (”That New Fangled Direct Marketing”) - Chapter 4 - “Going Over to the Dark Side.” This chapter is all about the conversion of customers.
• Part 2 - Chapter 5 - “The New Customer Relations.” This chapter discusses how to engage in the initial, and follow on, conversations with your customers.
• Part 2 - Chapter 6 - “Customers Vote with Their Mice.” You have to continue to experiment and understand motivations change. This chapter highlights how you can never rest on your laurels when it comes to marketing to your customers.
• Part 3 (’That New Fangled You”) - Chapter 7 - “This Doesn’t Work For Me.” As the author puts it: this chapter borderlines on self help. The chapter is all about him trying to help you (and most importantly your mindset.)
• Part 3 - Chapter 8 - “This Won’t Work Where I Work.” A chapter dedicated to organizational behavior. Anyone who has worked in a political environment will relate to this chapter. For some, this could mostly be skipped. If you decide to skip then I’d recommend you pick back up at page 287..
• Part 3 - Chapter 9 - “This Stuff Changes Too Fast.” This chapter prepares the marketer for new mediums to consider including cell phones/mobile web, virtual worlds (like Second Life) and social networks (like MySpace). This area is still developing so you need to keep up with these maturing markets. The author provides his blog as the site to keep up with the changing times. This is the only plug within the book (that I caught atleast..) but there’s more resources than just his blog. I’ll put in an entry with some resources at a later date.

Points from the Book:

• The Internet has changed Direct Marketing forever. Previously, you wrote copy, printed it up and sent/gave it to the customer. Your message was fixed for days/weeks and changes to the message cost $$$. With the web, this has all changed. Variations to the initial ads on web sites, blogs, search engine and email marketing channels can be changed quickly.
• It’s far easier to measure the effectiveness of marketing messages on the web then in old days of billboards, flyers and commercials.
• The author stresses a trial and error - do and measure - approach to your direct marketing campaigns.
• Using New Media techniques such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and vidcasts to reach a larger audience than standard web pages.
• Major site redesigns may not be the answer. Some tweaks over time is what you may need. The author later correlates this to a trend in project management - the move from big bang waterfall approaches to agile/iterative approaches.
• Establish conversations with customers. The old style of marketing and advertising is fast dying. Customers are not interested in being given messages from a faceless corporation. You need to interact with your customers. Those who chose not to will suffer the consequences.
• Allow your employees to talk with customers directly via web technologies. Sure, they might screw up but the level of authenticity added is worth the short term pain. The author, like others, suggests you establish blogging & communication guidelines.

In Summary…

• The message is clear - do not be afraid to make changes and measure them. However, you must have resource available to make the changes or outsource to a search marketing firm. The value will be seen - you must give it a chance.
• Analytics, and in a more complex environment, full blown Business Intelligence, packages are worth their weight in gold for measuring results. You could go the route of Urchin, Omniture/Hitbox/WebSideStory, WebTrends. Personally, I do not have a need for data mining/full reporting so I’m sticking with Google Analytics for the time being. It’s a good package to start with!

“Do It Wrong Quickly” is available at your local book store or read more reviews on my favorite e-retailer: Amazon (Link for Do It Wrong Quickly)

I have a few drafts in various states of completion on this site. I am not really sure how to start off this blog - what to say and what not to say so I’m going to post this and make a go of it!

Allow me to introduce myself and my company. My name is Kelly Hair and I work for Mavance, LLC. Mavance, LLC is a New Jersey single member Limited Liability Company I registered in February of 2007. Originally, I had intentions of becoming a real estate mogul and using this entity, along with others, to stockpile my properties. Well… times change!

Back in October 2007 and I received notice that my team’s services were no longer needed at big, global employer. The employer gave me 30 days to find another job within the company or receive severance. Ironically, I was excited by the news. It provided a ray of light I felt was missing for the last year/year and a half of my employment.

I did not try to find another role. Like many others, I shared the dream of starting a business and growing it. This was the final sign I needed to get moving on that dream. There were no more excuses. Oh, sure, I have a new son and my wife and I had bought a house a year earlier. Those excuses are not good enough to not pursue THE dream!

To be continued…..

Since this is my first post, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you what my other posts will include:

• Use of technology in business. WARNING: I’m a self professed geek and if you like this stuff then feel free to take a look at my geeky blog - QLVR (a mnemonic for the word clever.)
• Sales and Marketing
• Process management
• Lessons learned along the way