When Warren Buffet speaks, people listen.

Recently I happened to catch Warren Buffet on TV talking about how leaders should set business priorities.

Buffet was saying that you should run your business like it’s a family business–one that you are going to hold onto for 100 years, and the #1 thing you should think about is how to build a sustainable competitive advantage, like building “like a moat around your castle.”

If you look back to medieval times, moats were excavated around castles as part of the defensive system–an obstacle immediately outside the walls–and usually they were filled with water.

A good moat made it difficult for your enemy to access your walls with siege weapons, such as towers and battering rams, which needed to be brought up against a wall to work effectively. A water-filled moat made it impossible for your enemy to dig tunnels under your fortifications in order to effect a collapse of the defenses. A good moat protected your castle and everything in it.

The wider your moat, the longer you can protect your profits. The deeper your moat, the more profitable you are.

“Understanding your customers” is key to building a good moat

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The biggest mistake people make when it comes to Google Adwords is to create one ad, send it to the home page of your website, and choose all the keywords that Google Adwords suggests.

That’s a great way to go through your entire budget fast with zero results.

The trick to getting higher higher response on pay-per-click ads is to create a separate landing page for each of your top keywords in three easy (but time-consuming) steps.

3 Easy Steps to Better Pay-Per-Click Results

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One of the most challenging and most commonly misunderstood components of successful business-to-business marketing is lead generation and nurturing (or ‘demand generation and management’).

Starting with how you generate inquiries through the challenging hand-off and follow-up by your sales force, and most importantly how you measure the results, this ”discipline” sees more wasted money, more missed opportunities, and more downright mistakes than any other area in business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales.

Now that some of the more traditional direct mail disciplines (multivariate testing, A/B splits) are being used on the Internet (web design, email marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, landing page optimization, social media, web 2.0), it has made the the demand generation and management process more complex and more difficult than ever. 

Why Lead Generation is so important

But this really presents businesses the greatest opportunity for three reasons:

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Once you’ve established a unique identity, you need to create a web presence that works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with an offer that engages your prospects and prompts them to contact you.

How do you get your prospects to engage with you? Top search engine rankings are nice, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re not converting traffic into inquiries, and inquries into sales.

Here’s the secret: “It’s not about you.”

Most websites are guilty of the biggest strategic copywriting blunder

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Direct Marketing Old Timers will tell you that the success or failure of any marketing program is attributable to:

• 40% the list,
• 40% the offer, and
• 20% for everything else , i.e., copy, creative, timing, etc.

If you’re not getting the response you think you should be getting, look at the offer first.

The strategic process in old-fashioned Direct Marketing is matching up the right list with the right offer… segmenting the list into micro-segments (or “splits”), and tailoring specialized offers to make the offer more relevant. 

The 3R’s: It’s not Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, but…

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Marketers the world over, with much greater resources than you or I, have worked relentlessly, and have spent millions and millions of dollars, so that their products and services can be seen and heard in an overcrowded marketplace.

So how is a small business with limited resources supposed to compete with companies that have much greater resources and greater budget?

The secret is positioning: “It’s not what you do to your product, or how you market it, it’s how you position your product in your customer’s mind.”

Don’t bet the farm on changing someone’s mind

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