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2013: Small business's year to thrive

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Or not.

My number one wish for 2013 is that we focus on the upside and keep a sharp eye out for potential opportunities, and new ways to do everything.

The most important thing I’d like to see is a return to predictability.

Sooner or later, we’re going to have to figure out the healthcare, tax and debt situations. At the moment, we’re not even close.

Predictability requires stability and we don’t have that right now. It is, as the King of Siam said to Anna, “a puzzlement” for many business planners unless they’re in the right industries, eldercare, for instance.

We all wish for more time, don’t we?

Our creative director is always telling me that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. For years, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Now I do.

We’re in the age of instant gratification and have been for a while.

I wish, that if we absolutely have to rush, we could also persuade the client to let us take the time to create a parallel program based on doing things the right way – planning, testing and rolling out winning ideas. Wanna bet on which approach would win in the long run?

And, oh, how I wish we could return to the personal.

In the 20+ years of our agency’s existence, we always relied on one simple fact: we can generate profitable responses from our clients’ prospects and customers.

The underpinnings are technical but the creative key, for us, has always been the letter, whether in email or snail mail.

We’ve seen response lifts of over 1,000% just through careful testing to find the right letter. And, most of the time, the right letter is personal. The two best approaches I’ve ever seen started with the same words “I don’t know how you feel about XXX, but I …

Charities and catalog marketers still have the letter just about right. Netflix and Amazon also do it very well. The challenge in a mass mailing is to make the letter appear to be a one-to-one communication, from one human being to another. It’s hard to do but it sure pays off when your writer nails it.

BTW, this kind of personal approach can work well in social media, too. Especially in social media, now that I think about it.

Can we please revisit strategy?

We jumped in early on to create websites that were not plain old brochureware, but instead were interactive and gave our clients the chance to begin relationships with prospects and customers.

It was similar to what we did in direct mail, only faster.

Then along came Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn …

We’ve been tweeting, posting, picturing and linkingIn for our clients so rapidly that it sometimes seems there aren’t enough hours in the day to answer the question “Why are we doing all this?

In 2013, I wish we could all step back a bit to figure out what business we’re in now.

In a way, it’s similar to the bad old days of sales (short term thinking) and marketing (long term thinking) departments being at war. That’s oversimplified but not all that far from reality.

I wish for the discipline to work only with collaborative clients.

We need to walk away from the others. They make us order takers and not smart marketers.  Last week we had a call from a jewelry manufacturer who wanted us to get them 10,000 Twitter followers and 3,000 Facebook Friends with no rationale on who they wanted or why and they weren’t interested in discussing it.

That’ll end in rancor, so I walked away, quickly.

And I hope we can stick to what we’re good at.

We need to understand our strengths, and to think more about what we enjoy doing.

When we’re having fun, and the orders are rolling in for clients, there’s a natural high. In order for that to happen, we need access to their database, their history, their offers and their margins.

We need to be partners again with our clients. China and India are offering all kinds of services and products that undercut our own costs of doing business. So we have to do things 100 times better, more efficiently and make our customers more loyal to our clients.

The -key to our success as an agency this year is to deliver superior value, transcend the clients’ expectations and still get our high response rates for programs.

It is a tall order with everything else going on but I think we’ll measure up. Wishing won’t make that happen though, so back to work.

Happy New Year!