Zenworkz Blog

12 Keys to Mindful Success

What you believe about yourself and your business will come true. Believing in your success is 80% of the battle won, with the other 20% being your skills, expertise, products or services that meet your ideal customers needs.

What may be preventing you from fulfilling your business potential grows out of your beliefs.

Here are 12 useful keys for developing a belief system for mindful success:

1. Develop authentic confidence!

2. Take ownership of the outcomes!

3. Clearly communicate your vision and talk about it!

4. Create a passion for learning and making mistakes!

5. Learn to be a team player to grow a successful business!

6. Learn to be systems-oriented – to produce consist results!

7. Dedicate yourself to your vision, purpose and goals!

8. Be grateful for what you have and be open to more!

9. Develop a positive outlook and generate optimism!

10. Tell people how excited you are to share your ideas!

11. Motivate yourself and lead by example!

12. Don’t be afraid of risks or of amazing financial success!

If you like what you find in this list, please share it with your friends to help us spread the idea.

Are these 12 keys working for you? Leave your comments below?

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to research their customer market; create their authentic marketing message; attract more ideal customers; and create a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012/2013. She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coaches customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshops on 6^th & 7^th June, 2012 or request distance coaching online –please contact me.

While you are visiting my website – subscribe for weekly e-News updates on all topics related to authentic marketing.

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Authentic Marketing / Engaging customers / Online Marketing / Relationship Marketing / Social Media — No comments
06
May 12

10 Tips for a Facebook Page Engagement Party

Increasing Business Page engagement can be compared to networking at a business function with customers; where you may know some well and others you would like to know better. To increase your engagement carry out the same tips on your Facebook Business Page, as you would at a business function.

Introduce yourself to someone new and listen actively to what they tell you.
Ask questions about what that person says to look for shared interests and opportunities to deepen the relationship.
Tell a funny or light hearted story that relates to their area of interest but check for responses to what you say.
Acknowledge the other person’s point of view and encourage more comment.
Provide some insights of value by listening to their interests and begin with them in mind.
Be entertaining, educational or inspirational depending on what you are able to find out about the other person.
Be true to yourself and authentic, don’t try to be an expert in someone else’s field.
Don’t dominate the conversation or try to sell yourself or your business.
Have a range of engaging tools in your kit bag – quotes, pictures, video, audio, and questions.
Show that your care about others, like and respond to what they say.

When you have done all that, invite others to join in the conversation, introduce your new friends, identify other influencers and move through your engagement cycle again.

If you like what you find in this list, please share it with your friends to help us all have a better engagement party.

Are these tips working for you? Leave your comments below?

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Attracting Customers / Customer Research / Integrated Marketing Strategy / Marketing 101 / Marketing Mix Strategies — No comments
29
Apr 12

The Secret of Pricing Products and Services

The secret of pricing is this knowledge: When the right customer sees your product or service in the right context – price will not be the primary element in their decision to buy!

Before you get to pricing your product or service have you considered all the other elements in the marketing mix (Product, Place, Promotion and People)? Finding out if there is a customer market is always a great place to start. It is surprising how many business’ don’t know enough about their preferred customer.

Do you know what your customer needs and do they want what you sell? Then, what is the right promotional context for your service or product – are you trying to sell coal to Newcastle? What are the prices of similar products and services; and how are you positioning your product and services in the marketplace?

Pricing is a psychological, emotional and confidence decision that you have to make, even before you consider the price your customer will be willing to pay.

The two questions you need to answer:

How much should I charge?
How much am I brave enough to charge?

For customers, when considering the benefits derived, what will they perceive as value for money? When people say they can’t afford your service or product, they haven’t truly seen the value. So, how are you communicating your value?

Here is a pricing vs value matrix to help you consider the right pricing strategy:

	Low Price	Medium Price	High Price
High Value	Give away pricing strategy.	Market penetration. Value for money pricing strategy.	Prestige & quality pricing strategy.
Medium Value	Sale strategy.	Price and value are in balance pricing strategy.	Overpriced: Commercial pricing strategy.
Low Value	Tourist trap strategy.	"Caveat emptor" pricing strategy.	The hit and run pricing strategy.

Attracting customers today is becoming more complex due to increasing choice, economic conditions and a more educated consumer who make informed decisions when it comes to purchasing almost everything. Customers also now have increasing service expectations.

To buy from you they need to form an emotional connection with your business. This means you have to show them the person behind the business. People will buy from those that they know and trust – and from those who have created the right service and product in the right context for just for them.

I would love to hear of any experiences or advice you have to share?

Please feel free to leave a comment or question below.

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Authentic Message Creation / Customer Research / Relationship Marketing — No comments
24
Apr 12

How to Create a Unique & Authentic Marketing Message

Why should I buy from you?

In your journey to attract and keep new customers, unique and authentic messages work best. Today, a small business must understand and optimise every interaction with customers in a way that establishes positive, emotional responses to form meaningful relationships with you and your message. Getting the message right for what your business sells is important, because it provides the basis for your business relationship with your customers; and it answers the question foremost in every potential customer’s mind: Why should I buy from you? Over time, these customers will become your best marketing advocates and promoters.

Here are 3 tips to help you to create your authentic marketing message and grow your business:

Any authentic message must be simple: Put yourself in the shoes of potential customers and ask “Are my messages easy to understand? Do they motivate customers to purchase?” When constructing your authentic message, you need to first research your ideal target customers. Then visualise who they are and write directly to them.
Benefits – not features, will grab your targeted audience’s attention: Your customers want to hear a clear, simple message that demonstrates that you understand their situation – that you recognise the problem they wish to solve, or the outcome they wish to achieve. Followed by a specific offer or explanation how the benefits of your products or services will help them address their situation. A simple authentic message like this will be the single deciding factor for customers choosing you over someone else.
Tell your authentic story: Potential customers buy from people they know, like, and trust. Building trust begins with sharing the story of your business and the people behind it. Telling your authentic story helps both you and your prospective customers by:

Demonstrating your values, so you naturally attract customers who relate to you
Explaining why you do what you do, which helps prospective customers understand you and trust you
Sharing your unique persona, enabling customers to understand what you’ll be like to work or deal with

In today’s crowded marketplace, with new competitors emerging from around the world, distracted audiences, and almost saturation marketing of products and services; it is more important than ever to ensure that when you have the attention of a potential customer, you are able to offer a compelling and authentic reason for doing business with you.

Taking an authentic marketing approach, developing insights into your customers’ needs and wants, and understanding what motivates them requires effort and investment. Figuring out what you stand for and the core authentic message you present to your ideal target market as a brand is easier said than done, but is easier with the help of an Authentic Marketing Coach.

I’d love to hear your thoughts? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below.

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Authentic Marketing / Authentic Message Creation / Authentic Values / Branding / Online Marketing / Social Media / Trends / Uncategorized — No comments
15
Apr 12

Authentic Branding – the Future of Marketing?

As a forward thinking business, I consider what a marketing business might look like in the future? How to provide marketing services to smaller business in a fast moving technological marketplace.

I know that my customers are often overwhelmed by the choices available; the fear of missing out by not jumping on the “next new media thing”; and often lose sight of return on investment, whether it’s time or money.

Psychologist, Abraham Maslow formulated the “Hierarchy of Needs”, where he mapped human needs in a hierarchy; starting at the bottom with basic physiological needs of food, shelter, water and safety, and at the top with esteem, belonging and self-actualisation. This remains the strongest model we have for understanding what has meaning for customers and explaining what they do and why.

Today brands can no longer tap into satisfying basic needs without considering the higher needs of belonging and esteem. Customers respond to brands which match their values, aspirations and esteem. This is the future of marketing – it is about authentic communication and engagement; and this is where customers are now driving brands via social media platforms. Today it is the customer who will figure out what your business does and how they will let the world know about you!

Future Authentic Brand Marketing will utilise effective marketing psychology to create brand messages which begins with what you do that effortlessly connects with your customer. Authentic means not hiding from the customer or the public – it means being open and human; something that smaller business often excel in over their larger competitors.

Authentic brands that tap into satisfying basic and higher needs together, including elements of relationship, respect, support, and even happiness, will hook us because they will help to feed our social selves, the part that seeks connection and belonging as Maslow suggested.

Do you think that your brand meets these broad range of “needs” or do you love a brand that does? Please share your comments below?

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing and educates businesses to think, create, engage and optimise their marketing effort. She coaches customers in Marketing Strategy, both off and online; and implementation. If you would like some free how-to marketing resources or to subscribe to free e-news about authentic marketing, please visit the website:

http://www.zenworkz.com/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect to the community on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Customer Research / Market Research / Marketing Analysis Tools — No comments
02
Apr 12

Debunking Marketing Research Myths

There are two myths that need to be debunked about Marketing Research: It’s expensive and it takes a long time.

Not today – The first phase of any professional market research is desk research – this is something anyone can do using the internet. For DIY researchers, the internet has two important sources of information:

The websites which companies, organisations and individuals have created to promote or communicate their products, services or views;
User groups that are made up of people who have an interest in a particular industry or subject.

There are tips that make searching the www easier and more targeted. I use Google Advanced Search – you can easily look at all their tips yourself but here’s a few that work well for internet market research:

By putting double quotes (“”) around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change.
The *, or wildcard, can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the * as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches.
Use the file type “PDF” because most research reports are large and are protected.
Set a date range e.g. not older then 12months – and then you get the latest reports, which is important in this fast moving market environment.
Finally, if you can’t find an industry report, pick and industry that services the same customer base and you will at least have some useful data about your customer segment.

What your desk research won’t tell you is “WHY they buy from you”? You can simply talk to your best (or worst) customers to ask them. My suggestion is that you draft a list of questions and ask the same questions of every customer, to provide better comparisons, but also to validate the data. Then you need to capture this information, if you have only a few customers – not so hard – but when you have hundreds – you should look at other survey methods.

There are many free online survey cloud options, ranging from Survey Monkey, SurveyGizmo to QuestionPro. The free service has restrictions but if you are just starting out, you will not need anything too sophisticated. The most important action is to start understanding your customer and market.

Tip 1: Look for a free package that provides a link to the survey and that way you can post your survey link on your social networks and email out to your customer or subscriber base – ensuring that you are getting feedback from connections that know you and your products and/or services.

Tip 2: If you want to improve survey response rates, offer an incentive prize that will be appealing to your audience!

It’s so important, I am going to say it again: The most important action you can take in your business, is to start understanding your customer and market. Good luck, and let me know how you are progressing?

Zenworkz Authentic Marketing has our own online survey tool, which is very sophisticated survey software. Thats why I like to help my customers get clear about what information they need to know; create a survey specific to their needs; provide all the administration of the survey emails or social media posting; and producing the reports – it’s not free but it is very cost, time and results effective. If you would like an obligation free quote – please email me: teresabassham@zenworkz.com

http://www.zenworkz.com/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Advertising / Attracting Customers / Authentic Values / Relationship Marketing / Social Media — No comments
25
Mar 12

How to Promote through an Authentic Story

As a marketing services provider, I know the benefits of promoting myself and my business, but that doesn’t make it any easier to step out of my comfort zone and actually do it. Culturally in Australia, we do tend to be a teeny bit critical about those who enthusiastically share their awesomeness; but we can learn to authentically self promote through telling a story about what we do, and why we do it and gain the benefits of self promotion.

The most compelling reason to try is that customers are going to be more motivated to buy from people they know, like, and trust. Building trust can begin with sharing the story of your business and the people behind it. The imminent change to Facebook Timeline will provide businesses with an improved platform for authentic story telling.

Telling your authentic story can help both you and your prospective customers by:

Demonstrating your values, so you naturally attract customers who relate to you,
Explaining why you do what you do, which helps prospective customers understand you and trust you,
Sharing your unique persona, enabling customers to understand what you’ll be like to work or deal with,
Clearly identifying your ideal customer, encouraging those that don’t fit to look elsewhere and those that do, to make contact.

As business owners, we owe it to ourselves to become better at communicating our story. We are all passionate about our business. We express love for our new project or idea or product. An authentic story simply links this passion with our unique persona to what we love doing, and a genuine joy becomes evident when we share our story.

Promoting yourself and sharing your story won’t always feel comfortable but to develop and grow, you won’t ever be comfortable. With a bit of practise, you’ll find your story telling skills starting to improve. Given the rapid changes happening with online video and social media, great story tellers will have a seriously big advantage over those that hide behind their computer screens.

If you are shy but have learned how to promote yourself with your story, please share your experiences below. Feel free to give yourself a bit of gratuitous self-promotion at the same time!

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing and educates businesses to think, create, engage and optimise their marketing effort. She coaches customers in Social Media Strategy and implementation. If you would like some assistance changing to Timeline for Facebook Pages, please contact her through her website: http://www.zenworkz.com/

Zenworkz Authentic Marketing publishes a weekly blog on small business marketing: http://www.zenworkz.com/blog/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Authentic Marketing / Online Marketing / Social Media — No comments
17
Mar 12

Are you ready for 30th March, 2012?

If you have a Facebook page for your business or a personal page, like it or not, the format will change to Timeline by March 30th 2012.

The major benefit for a smaller business is that this format moves from a seemingly random flow of information to an opportunity to tell the real story of your business. And that will be a good thing! Changes will occur to the Facebook Banner, About, Applications, Milestones, Highlights and Posts.

Milestones, when done well, will dramatically improve the value your page provides to fans and increase their interest in your brand.

Time is running out to make this transition smoothly – in a way that takes your fans on the journey with you and enhances your online reputation. It’s very important for you to think about and plan this transition and not just deal with when it arrives. Why? Because many of the format elements that you know now are changing and with a little bit of work – you can be prepared, so that the transition enhances their experience rather than frustrate fans.

The first important step is to select a Banner or a image based metaphor, that taps into the emotional and cognitive associations you want your fans to relate to your brand. This banner provides you with the perfect opportunity to create that unique look and emotionally compelling visual that “sells” your business and brand.

The next major change is to Applications tab, which have moved to the top of the page under the banner, right next to “About”. The first tab is photo’s and is the only tab that can not be moved from this position but all other tab boxes can now be moved in their order of preference. It’s wise to leave “Likes” on the top line because it does enhance your pages credibility. This gives you two more tab boxes get creative in your call to action – either “free stuff”; or subscribe to e-news; or your existing Welcome tab – which will not be lost in the change over. Importantly, you can no longer direct new fans to this Welcome tab from Facebook, but you can direct them to the tab from your website.

The next important change it to “About”, where you have an opportunity to create a short promotion about your business benefit and your link to your website or other marketing/sales channels. It needs to 90 characters long including your web link – now’s the time to be crystal clear about your offer and customer benefit. Note: if you have listed your business category as local, it will default to address and phone number, so you may need to change your category to create your fabulous “About” promotional statement.

Timeline provides you with the opportunity to create “milestones” in your business history and this enhances your authentic story, will dramatically improve content value for fans and gives fans more reasons to keep connecting with your page. You can tell fans Why and How you started your business, which can be forgotten down the track; but is a compelling reason to support you and your business growth.

There are two other changes to get used to: Highlight and Pin. Highlight enables you to expand a post to a whole page view which makes it great for posts with video and pictures. Pin enables you to “pin” a post to the top of your page for seven days, which is great for events, where you want the post to be prominent.

One change that is least liked, is that posts by your fans appear in a box, called “recent posts by others” but you can easily “share” the important posts, so that they will appear more prominently on your timeline.

One last tip, when you are building your new storyline and milestones, be careful of doing it all at once and spamming your fans with the changes. Most don’t like spamming and you could lose fans.

Have you changed to timeline for pages? Did you discover any useful tips not covered here – please share below.

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing and educates businesses to think, create, engage and optimise their marketing effort. She coaches customers in Social Media Strategy and implementation. If you would like some assistance changing to Timeline for Facebook Pages, please contact her through her website: http://www.zenworkz.com/

Zenworkz Authentic Marketing publishes a weekly blog on small business marketing: http://www.zenworkz.com/blog/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Authentic Marketing / Authentic Message Creation / Authentic Values / Branding / Customer Research / Marketing 101 / Marketing Plans — No comments
11
Mar 12

How to Discover Your Next Brilliant Career!

If you are brilliant, you will be one of only a handful of lucky people in Australia or across the world, who know intuitively what you’re destined for. For the vast majority of us, we need to take a more thoughtful path – one that requires deep thinking.

Coming up with a new business idea, of course, is the hard part, but I have methods for helping my customers, and it begins with telling the story of their life. The tool I use is a timeline, to help them express their values, experiences, insights, skills and abilities that are unique to them.

Your brilliant idea needs to be uniquely your own, so it makes sense that this journey begins by looking at the events that have shaped your life and made you who you are today. It may sound weird coming from a Marketer, but to discover your big new idea and what is unique about you, we don’t start with what the market wants from you, because the market only knows what they have seen. If you want a great example of this – think Steve Jobs and Apple!

To uncover what is unique about YOU, that will help you stand out in the market, you need to turn away from the market. What makes this paradoxical approach work, is that you will be able to identify a customer for any idea you come up with, again – think Apple.

For an aspiring entrepreneur, doing some form of creative exercises to discover your big idea is a quick way to improve your chances of launching a successful business. Where to start? Here are three exercises to help you:

Exercise 1 - Make a “mind map”

Start by taking a large piece of butcher’s paper, put the words “New Business or New Idea” in the center and create a collage of images, quotes, articles, your values, strengths, skills and other inspirations.

The idea behind this is that when you surround yourself with images of your intention – the successful business you want to create – your awareness and passion will grow. As your mind map evolves and becomes more focused, you will begin to recognise where your creativity, values, strengths and skills can be focused.

Exercise 2 - Research people who have achieved the success you seek

Study people who have been successful in the business area you want to pursue and who have similar values and passion. Study them, figure out how and why they are able to remain successful in these difficult economic times and then make plans to emulate some of their successful actions.

Exercise 3 – Create a plan or roadmap to get there

When you have gone through this creative process, the next step is to create a marketing plan. A marketing plan is a process that helps you evaluate your idea as a market offer; evaluates the target customer and marketplace; and prepares you for the many possibilities to achieve your new business success.

At what creative stage are you? Tell me about it below? Have you found that great idea? Do you need help with a Marketing Plan?

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to think deeply; create difference; engage customers; optimise marketing effort; and develop a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012. She runs DIY workshops in Northern NSW and coach customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshop or request distance coaching online – please contact us.

For more daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and like my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Subscribe to our weekly e-news for all technology, business and marketing articles, packaged for smaller businesses.

Please subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

Authentic Marketing / Branding / Marketing 101 / Marketing Analysis Tools / Niche Marketing — No comments
04
Mar 12

Misconceptions of Niche Marketing

With the explosion of choices available across the channels of media and the internet; businesses with limited time and budgets will be better served by defining their niche market, identifying their real customer and focussing their promotional efforts. Niche marketing is simply creating your own clearly defined market system. There are still many misconceptions about niche marketing.

Many business professionals do have difficulty coming to terms with the suggestion that appears to restrict the ways in which they promote their message to the marketplace. In choosing a niche market strategy, you will send the best, most authentic and most targeted message possible to a clearly defined customer segment; and vastly improve your reach and return on investment.

A good niche market is where you are:

Highly visible and easily accessible to the customers who will benefit from your services or products.
Employing the widest range of your talents, skills, and training (in your authentic and unique offer).
Clearly differentiated from competitors for your target customer.

The advantage of a highly targeted niche marketing strategy is not only attracting significantly more business but also provides richer opportunities for natural competitive advantage.

So how do you start to define a niche market? Knowing and working from your skills and strengths is essential for developing a niche marketing strategy. A simple Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis (SWOT) is a good starting point. There are probably several ways in which your skills and strengths can add value, and by looking at opportunities and threats in the relevant market industry, you will be able to can see natural matches. Therefore, developing a niche is a process of exploring several possibilities and gradually refining them.

The following questions may also help you:

Where do you consistently find people whose values match your own?
Where do you feel that you are most credible?
Where is there the greatest need or problem that your skills, strengths, services or products provide solution for?
Who are you drawn to and who are easy for you to serve?

The main concern is experiencing a level of anxiety that focusing on a niche will deprive you of needed business. What do you do if someone outside of your niche wants to consult you? That is a decision you take depending on an assessment of fit and your current working circumstances, but always bearing in mind that it must not divert you from time with your niche customer market. The point of a niche is not to confine you, but to create the “healthiest” market system for your business.

Have you been thinking of a niche marketing strategy and has this helped you? Please leave a comment below.

Do you have a niche marketing success story to share? Please leave your comments below.

About the author: Teresa Bassham, owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, is passionate about inspiring and educating small and medium business professionals to create their authentic marketing message, attract more ideal customers and create a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012. She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coach customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshops or request distance coaching online – please contact me.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

Zenworkz BlogAuthentic Marketing Coaching

12 Keys to Mindful Success

The Secret of Pricing Products and Services

How to Create a Unique & Authentic Marketing Message

Debunking Marketing Research Myths

How to Discover Your Next Brilliant Career!

Misconceptions of Niche Marketing

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