No Matter How You Slice It, It’s All Marketing |  |
- No Matter How You Slice It, It’s All Marketing
- Founder of Radius Intelligence, Darian Shirazi: Sales Intelligence Comes to Small Business
- If We Had A Sled This Could Be Fun
- Are You Hiring For Your Small Business?
| No Matter How You Slice It, It’s All Marketing Posted: 04 May 2012 11:30 AM PDT New channels. Updated tools. Social media standards. Television commercials and print advertising. Regardless of the tool or the medium, it's all marketing. The job is still the same — to get and keep attention. To establish and grow the relationship. To expose and increase the understanding of what you have and why it matters to your audience.
It's all marketing. After reading Lisa Barone's article about how email remains king for promotional messaging and reviewing the new survey from ExactTarget that she referenced, I am left with one key thought (the same one I had before reviewing the survey):
This is what I mean. Launching a FaceBook page is not a marketing fix for your company — it's just a first step, as is any other marketing medium. According to the ExactTarget survey, email is the preferred channel for personal written communication as well as permission-based promotional messages. But you can't just take that and run with it. What age range do you serve? How is your message packaged and delivered? How urgent and how interesting is your message? All of these questions should impact your marketing behavior. There is a place for email marketing, text messaging, post cards through the mail, Facebook Fan Pages and commercials. But ultimately it's about the marketing mix based your audience and your message. Quick Take Away Email is far from dead. And while direct mail is not as popular as it used to be — it has its place. According to the survey email and direct mail may be a great way to:
At the end of the day, it's always about focused effort. Instead of spreading yourself thin with a little bit of effort in every marketing outlet that you hear about, consider email marketing as a base for communicating with your customers and then add from there.
From Small Business Trends |
| Founder of Radius Intelligence, Darian Shirazi: Sales Intelligence Comes to Small Business Posted: 04 May 2012 08:30 AM PDT If you’ve ever attempted to acquire contact information or background data about a specific company or small business for sales prospecting and were unable to do so, there’s finally some good news for you. Darian Shirazi, Founder of Radius Intelligence, joins Brent Leary to share his solution and break down those obstacles. * * * * *
Darian Shirazi: I have been in the internet business for quite some time. I have worked with eBay, Facebook and a bunch of different startups. My interests are really around big data and technology solutions. Small Business Trends: How difficult is it to get good quality information on small businesses? Darian Shirazi: The challenges that a lot of companies have had in the past is that they don't really understand or are not able to predict how difficult it is to acquire data about small businesses. You really notice that of the data sources out there, the ones about small businesses are not really complete, and they don't have a lot of useful data. They don't have a lot of social data or data on how well the business is doing, who the owner is, who works there and basically the presences across various sites like Yelp, CitySearch, OpenTable, etc. To get this data you really have to build technology that can do something called named resolutions. What that means is you can basically identify business names in text. So if a news article gets written about a specific business, the technology is able to identify when the news article mentions the business name. Same goes for views, tweets, social data or any piece of content. The program automatically identifies business names in free form text. This is something that we spent a couple of years on. It is really tough to do well and is something that most companies spend most of their time researching. The only companies that really do it well are Google, a few small startups and us. Small Business Trends: So just how much information do you have on small businesses? Darian Shirazi: We track 15 million small business in the United States in real time and we have more than half a billion pieces of data right now. We are adding about 10 to 30 million of pieces of data per month, depending on the month and the amount of new data we can find. The data types are social data, government data, people data, business listing metadata, daily deals, news articles and reviews. We have hundreds of thousands of sources that we track on real time. We do our best to make sure that everything is always fresh. Small Business Trends: You also stated you have a lot of localized information? Darian Shirazi: We have targeted a lot of really interesting local data sources and the reason why is because businesses get mentioned in articles that are on local blogs. Whether someone really likes a specific dog grooming company or dog grooming business. Or does not like the specific dog grooming business that might be written in the local blog more so than any other sources. Small Business Trends: You mentioned in a previous conversation there are around 10 millions sales people that are actively trying to do business with very small businesses? What is the biggest challenge you hear from them? Darian Shirazi: The biggest challenge is really just prioritizing leads and knowing which leads to go after. They are trying to get more intelligent about certain things but, all in all, they are having trouble prioritizing leads for local sales forces. In our situation, we really are trying to help these local sales forces identify, understand and prioritize small business leads. Small Business Trends: So how do those kinds of people use your services? How easy is it for them to find and then follow that information? Darian Shirazi: It is very easy. You literally go into Salesforce.com and find our ad and immediately start generating new leads off of our service. You can prioritize leads and import data directly into Salesforce, which is particularly useful. Being able to import data is a big deal and you can use it inside of other CRM applications. For sales people who don't use CRM, which there are a lot of small business sellers that don't use the typical “bells and whistles” in systems like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, they can use the product as a standalone. They can go to Radius.com and get an account. Small Business Trends: You are able to get contact level information on these folks that work at small businesses? Darian Shirazi: For some businesses, yes. We are working on getting it for every business. The government data that we have acquired has all of the owner names, mailing addresses and those kinds of things that we have for a good number of businesses. We have phone numbers and other contact info for most of the other businesses. Actually, phone numbers for every business. But other contact information depends on the business itself. Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about your service? Darian Shirazi: Check out the product and sign up for a free trial at RadiusIntel.com or RadiusIntelligence.com. Brent shares a few of his impressions of Radius’ offering on his blog as well. This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
From Small Business Trends This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| If We Had A Sled This Could Be Fun Posted: 04 May 2012 05:30 AM PDT
Regular readers of Small Business Trends know I love a good graph cartoon. There’s almost no end of fun things you can do with the shape of a graph, which is actually where the idea for this cartoon came from. I was talking with my wife about putting together a book of graph themed cartoons (graph-ic novel?) and I commented that the downward trending graphs are by far the most fun. And then the idea for what would make a bad looking graph fun for the characters in a cartoon hit me and this cartoon was born. It’s one of the more meta routes to a cartoon I’ve had, but I’m always just thankful that ideas keep coming, no matter where they come from. From Small Business Trends |
| Are You Hiring For Your Small Business? Posted: 04 May 2012 02:30 AM PDT Are you hiring for your small business? If you’re like other small business owners, your hiring may have slowed a bit last month. Here are some of the reasons and some additional information on the state of small business hiring. Hiring SlowsMajority of small businesses aren’t hiring anytime soon. It seems that, despite positive signs in the economy, small businesses will be staying cautious. Is your business being careful about moving forward with new hires? Sacramento Bee Putting small business hiring within a bigger context. Hiring in general is slower than it has been in seven months across the job creation spectrum. The small business slowdown is part of that larger picture. Los Angeles Times Inside the IssueWhat April’s slow down is all about. Check this report from the National Federation of Independent Business about small business hiring numbers for April. Why has hiring slowed among smaller firms? Reuters Why are owners so reluctant? We know hiring numbers are not what some were expecting last month. So what’s behind all this timidness? Is there a reason entrepreneurs aren’t priming this particular pump? Mercury News The Real DealSmall businesses are creating jobs. Don’t be fooled. While a hiring slow down is cause for concern, there is some context that should be added. Small businesses haven’t stopped creating jobs, but the numbers must be seen from a broader perspective. The Street Data behind bad hiring numbers. There’s no one reason why small business hiring is in a slump. But all these factors together are taking their toll. Do you see your own business’s story here? The Washington Post The Broader PerspectiveStill hiring faster than the big boys. It’s important to remember that while small businesses aren’t creating jobs as quickly as some might like, they’re still filling more positions than their big business rivals. Entrepreneur Hiring is down, but not everywhere. Though both small business hiring and size of payroll suffered a drop in April, it turns out that result was not seen everywhere. Are some communities and some businesses bucking the trend? Phoenix Business Journal Where We AreNobody’s given up yet. The good news is that slower hiring rates have nothing to do with small business optimism or stability. Small companies are bouncing back, even if they aren’t hiring as fast as some had hoped. Inc.com Hiring halted by real concerns. Lack of access to credit heads the list of reasons small businesses aren’t hiring as much as might have been expected. What factors are holding back your hiring and job creation plans? eWeek From Small Business Trends |
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