Steve Kownacki
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COW Coins
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Premiere Pro Coins
Forum Replies Created
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In my opinion, social marketing is a very real and increasingly vital part of an overall marketing plan. It does take an immense amount of time and diligence to keep up with it all. Overall it will add to your google rankings, and put your name in front of more potential customers. Even frequent posts on this site help that. When you are blogging and posting in social arenas, do what we (that’s we, all of us here) instruct our clients to do – “make the ask”. You have to tell people what they are to do next. Make it easy by having a purposeful signature on emails, a byline of services – “When you’re ready to jump into using video on your website, call us first!” The job of the web, emails, mailers, etc. is simply to get the phone to ring. You have to make the sale.
Even when I’m selling on ebay I tell them to look at my other auctions – people just don’t do that automatically. I even booked a job from an ebay sale because I made them aware we are a production company.
It’s more profitable to provide services to an existing customer than to attract a new one. Do you know your cost to attract a new client? Keep in touch with them. Ask them for referrals too.
Steve
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Do what you love, love what you do.
Nice post Bob, my first gig I was paid $5/hr for no more than 20 hours directing morning news where I directed, switched a Grass 300, ran Chyron and built graphics on the Ampex DVE/Stillstore. You couldn’t slack because the news goes on. I actually worked about 60 hours because I “got into trouble” like Bob. I learned cameras, audio, graphics – I produced most of the commercials and really never got paid (easy when you live at home). But I just love this business! I left after 16 months because I was one of 2 people that got a 50-cent raise. Seriously, $0.50. But I learned none the less.
Also keep in mind that what anybody is saying here is probably read by their employees, just as employees posts are probably read by bosses.
And finally, on the note about bosses, here’s a quip from my friend’s blog yesterday. He’s now (for 4 weeks) the CEO of a small company that outsources everything at the moment; he was formerly in marketing VP positions. Here’s what he says about becoming the “boss”:
I’m going to start this off with a note to my ex-bosses: I’m sorry.
For much of my career, I’ve had the privilege of operating at a level where I reported to Presidents and CEOs. And I now realize that mostly I was not sufficiently aware of just how much they were dealing with. I pushed and prodded and pestered to get Marketing addressed (probably not a bad thing – my job after all), but boy did I just not realize how many other things were swirling around. So to my former bosses… I apologize for that.
What makes me say that?
Well, I’m getting the full brunt of it myself. First we start with the S.O.B. – standard operational bull’dung’. (The Blake Edwards movie of that name is, incidentally, one of his best and most underappreciated efforts IMHO). I’m juggling cash flow, inventory turns, vendors, shipping expense and all the usual suspects of day-to-day operation.
On top of that, add the strategic. How do we get the message out and grow faster? How do we convey the product clearly and quickly to consumers? What’s the value proposition we offer and how do we express it? What should we do with packaging? New product? and, oh yeah… marketing.
I thought that pretty much summed up, at least what I tend to deal with, much of what a boss really handles. And someone earlier posted the financial risks and others. It’s a 24-hour mind thing.
Time to go make pretty pictures,
Steve
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He lost 10% of his effort in the last few posts.
Steve
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Man I’m old… when I do a seach for 2″ quad, all I get is results for Intel processors!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2%22_Quadruplex_videotape
Steve
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my 2¢ – mostly regurgitated from past posts and other sites:
1) Read the E-myth by Michael Gerber. https://www.e-myth.com/ A good tech does not always make a great biz owner.
2) You are constantly soft selling. Get people to like you first. Your mood, your personality, your skills all reflect your business – make sure it’s attracting your customer. I never sold anybody anything, I educate them why they should use video & what makes us different (what they should look for when choosing a video company). They basically convince themselves to use us.
3) Take care of your customer. Period. Get the coffee/beverages they like, make sure the right food is served, create the right atmosphere. People like to feel special – do that.
4) Create value. I never bought on price, I like to buy service. Do all the little stuff that takes any burden off the client. Anticipate their needs.
5) Ask for referrals.
6) Spend 64.7% of your time reading about biz development & marketing. You still need to learn video stuff, but that doesn’t bring in work. While this thread is great, you won’t learn enough today to have a magic wand. This stuff needed to be in place for years to easily weather so called bad economic times.
7) Never get discouraged.
8) Partner with another company (not in the legal sense) and become a bit of a specialist.
9) How many Thank You cards did you send out last week? I did 7. Nothing special, a box of simple cards from BJs for $8. But they were hand written, hand addressed. A single dub or a promo video. Didn’t matter, each one got a card.
10) Bob nailed it – you cannot be lazy. This stuff takes an immense amount of time, but ya gotta do it. Do enough business to hire somebody to do it for you, have your kids do it. There’s a solution for everything.
We are busy, mostly with repeat clients ’cause we take care of them. We make their lives easy. We too work our butts off, all that matters is the client leaves at the end of the day happy – they don’t need to know the hoops you had to go through to make it all happen – that’s your job.
Hopefully some of this makes sense. Time to count my piles of money. Hee hee. Steve
Steve
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Hey Walter, I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for the situation, maybe it’s something like this. Your insurance would cover anything you or your freelancer might encounter, but if you could prove the freelancer caused the damage, why should you have to pay in the form of rate increases.
I believe this is how it would go: Imagine a 3-vehicle accident where the guy in front of you (the client) stops, you (The contractor/vendor)stop safely, but the guy behind you (the independent contractor/freelancer) hits you and you subsequently hit the guy in front of you. You are responsible for damage to the 1st car because your car hit him. Your rate will go up because you caused the damage. However your insurance company will sue the driver behind you to recover damages – and your deductible and probably without increasing your since blame can be re-directed.
Steve
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Well whatta ya know! I gotta go get me a new bike!
After careful analyzation (read: Stella Artois) it must be the greater white space between the lines that makes it work for H-D…
Steve
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I think you’ve got something there! With ever-decreasing work forces, training who’s left is a tough job and humor & creativity make for good messages.
2 notes on the site: NOT A BIG FAN OF ALL CAPS. And till your videos are done, take out the TV thingy all together of put a graphic or pic in there telling me something else. Don’t let people know something is under construction, ’cause if I come there next week and it’s not fixed/updated, I think that’s how you’ll handle my project. (Although we all know the real reason is that we’re so busy with client stuff we couldn’t possibly have time to work on our own materials.)
Steve
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That’s some seriously nice stuff on http://www.doggicam.com! This camera & pan-tilt unit on Roker was about the size of your fist atop a post straight up his back like a 3/4″ conduit. I’m mostly interested in tiny size/weight of that setup.
Steve
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