Monday Morning Quick Tip – How Your Horsebiz Interviews People Can Affect Your Brand

A bad interview can have lasting consequences for your brand, from damaging word of mouth or social media messages to financial repercussions. Whether you’re a small operation or a large multi-national company, it makes sense to pay attention to how you’re treating potential team members during the interview process.

Monday Morning Quickie – Change Is The Only Constant

Greetings, my lovely and loyal readers! I’m now into Year Two of the No Biz Like Horsebiz blog, and Year Seven of writing about equine industry marketing…and while the subject matter is consistent, my how things have changed!

• Social media was hardly a blip on the radar screen back then
• What’s this gizmo called an iPhone?!
• Decent quality video (and photography) required costly equipment

And so on. So much has changed since I started sharing my marketing and PR knowledge and expertise with the horse world that I love, even my own methods of delivering information have changed dramatically. Who’d have thought I’d ever be called a ‘Twitter Badass?’

Way back then, I started writing about horsebiz marketing because I saw all the talented, knowledgeable horsemen & woman who weren’t succeeding because they were spending all their time and energy on the horse end, and not enough on the marketing end. I had the hope and the dream of inspiring horsebiz owners to improve their marketing, and the plan to teach them about tools they could cost-effectively use to do so.

I’m now seeing a lot more marketing folk travel down this same path, of helping horsebiz owners improve their marketing, which I love! A rising tide floats all boats, and when we’re all succeeding, the industry is succeeding and getting stronger as a result, with more people experiencing the joy of horses.

So, as I review my own work, and consider how to reach bigger audiences and have a bigger voice, I’d like to make a few changes to the Monday Morning Quickie. But first I want to learn about how YOU read and absorb the information, so I hope you’ll help me out by filling out the quick survey below.

The one thing that will change is the name – instead of ‘Monday Morning Quickie,’ going forward you’ll be greeted with the ‘Monday Morning Quick-Tip’ – too many people were finding this blog from a Google search on ‘quickies’ and I thought better to nip that in the bud. Not something I fully thought through when I named it, but lesson learned!

Many, many thanks to each of you that reads this blog, shares your thoughts and comments as part of the conversation, connects with me by Twitter or email, and joins me at events where I’ve been a speaker. I truly appreciate your support, and it helps me to hear how this blog serves you now, and can do so better in the future.

All the best,

Lisa Kemp

Please note: You can check all the boxes that apply. Thanks in advance for completing the survey!

Monday Morning Quickie – Watch Out TV, Here Comes The Web!

A recent study indicated that the Web was catching up to television in terms of influencing face-to-face conversations. While most equine businesses can’t advertise on TV due to the sheer cost involved, the Internet is a completely different story. What could this mean to the future of the horse industry?

While past surveys by The Keller Fay Group still showed TV was king when it came to influencing conversations about specific brands, their newest survey (with Yahoo!) shows the Internet poised to overtake television, according to an article by Jack Neff at Advertising Age magazine’s Web site.

The Internet gained three percentage points over last year, so that it now influences or prompts 15% of brand-related conversations compared to television’s 16%; the numbers are based on a survey conducted in January, 2010. Print media stayed constant at about 10%.

I recommend reading Neff’s article, since he shares details about specific numbers on various factors affecting this trend, and how they’ve changed over the past few years.

What does all this mean for the horse industry? These are all factors we need to be aware of, and factor into our marketing:

• Mobile devices are increasingly important, as are consumers aged 13 to 40
• While the players may change and evolve, social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) is here to stay and has a powerful effect
• Information needs to be available online 24/7, so that people can access, and share it with others, on their own schedule
• Developing an online presence and a strong brand identity is more important today than it’s ever been in the equestrian world

The Internet puts into our hands a very powerful communication tool, one that levels the playing field in terms of the horse industry’s ability to communicate to current and potential horse owners and compete against other recreational industries. The question is, how will we use it?

In A Perfect Horse World…

The wide world of horses and equine industry marketing is indeed vast, and I want to be sure I’m hitting the ‘sweet spots’ that my readers want. So, here are 11 quick questions about what you want, pick as many or as few as you like.

It’s all so I can give you interesting & useful equine biz marketing information, tips, tricks, and how-tos so you can market more effectively and spend less time figuring out how to make it all work for your horse biz. And spend more time doing what you love.

If you have specific comments or suggestions – please either submit a comment to this post, OR send me a private message via the Contact tab above. Thanks!

Monday Morning Quickie – Most Small Biz Looking For 2010 Growth

As reported today on MarketWatch (part of the Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network) a recent survey of small businesses indicated that 79% have a neutral-to-confident outlook when it comes to business growth for the rest of 2010. The results contain useful lessons for horse business owners, too.

A survey of almost 7,000 small businesses indicated that:

• They’re doing more with less
• They’re looking for new efficiencies to offset increased costs
• Many of them are anticipating growth in 2010

The 2010 Small Business Attitudes & Outlooks Survey was conducted by Constant Contact (which I’ve used for years for my own email marketing!) in collaboration with several other organizations focused on small businesses, including SCORE, the Association of Small Business Development Centers (ASBDC), and the American Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE).

____________________

If word of mouth is so important, how are

people finding out about your horse business?

____________________

Here’s what I find particularly interesting from a marketing point of view – while 90% of responses indicated that word of mouth was far and away their most important marketing tool, 43% have cut their marketing budget. My question is, how are people supposed to find out about your business, and talk about it, if you’re cutting back on spending in areas that help them know what you’re doing?

It’s also interesting that the study shows small businesses turning to social media and digital tools as a way to get the word out, presumably capitalizing on word of mouth and doing so in a low-cost way, using tools such as Facebook (51%), blogs (29%), LinkedIn (27%), and Twitter (26%).

Equine businesses can do this, too! Many online and social media tools are free or low-cost. They just need to fit with your overall marketing plan and strategy, reach your target markets, and be something you can maintain over time.

Studies have shown that businesses decreasing their marketing spending during economic downturns were at a disadvantage when things improved. Even with a small budget, there are ways you can market your horse business now, to best position yourself for the growth to come.