Week 2: Things are Happening

What’s a marketers’ favorite drink? Brand-y.

Hi, everyone! I’ve got good news and bad news.

Good News: this post is in fact shorter than last week’s!

Bad News: the puns are probably going to continue. 

What’s up this week?

My business search is in full swing. I’m looking for small businesses (in primarily the San Jose and Mountain View areas) and reaching out to see if I can interview them for 10-15 minutes. 

My plan has changed somewhat in terms of my search. My original plan was to cold-email or at least cold-reach-out-to as many businesses as I can. I figured that out of 200 businesses, I might get 8 or 10 interviews. However, I think it’ll be a much more effective use of my time to reach out to businesses that I or people I know have direct connections to. That way, I’ll be able to get a far higher yield. This does run the risk of me not diversifying my search enough and focusing on only a few types of businesses, but I think I should be fine in that regard since I’m searching by industry and ensuring I have an approximately-even split of the number of businesses I reach out to within each.

Why am I stalking these poor businesses anyway?

Over the last week, I’ve figured out the interview questions that’d probably be most effective in getting the information that I really want from businesses. Here they are:

What is the name of your business and can you give me a 30-second summary of what you do?

Approximately how much money do you spend on marketing (every month/year/per customer)? [I don’t know if they’ll be able to give me this information, but if a lot of them do it’ll be really useful to compare this metric across different businesses in different industries and with different levels of marketing success.]

Do you have any kind of formal ‘marketing strategy’? If so, what is it? [Not a lot of small businesses do. I want to understand the rationale behind businesses’ choices to have one/not have one, and whether they think it’s necessary or not.]

What mediums do you primarily use to market? (i.e. social media, TV, print, etc.) [On some of these, I can actually find out how many impressions/followers/views they have and use that as a comparison metric.]

-> How did you choose those?

Do you think you have effective ‘brand recognition’ among customers? [Do customers know of them because of their unique products/brand, or is their patronage mostly based on other factors like cost?] How do you know?

Do you have any kind of official marketing team? Why/why not? [Many can’t afford such. If they want one but can’t afford one, that’s a place where my solution can fill in the gaps of what that kind of team would typically achieve.]

Are you looking to grow your business or do you want to maintain it at the size it’s at right now? [The one business I already talked to actually does want to maintain, because they think that growth will take away from their brand and their quality. I suspect we’ll get a few more of these too.]

What do you think are your primary marketing challenges at the moment, and why is that the case? [Might as well hear it directly from them. A lot of businesses already know what their problems are!]

Is there some (existing or purely theoretical) resource or tool that you think would help you better hit marketing goals? [Who knows? Someone might give me an idea I end up running with.]

Anything actually interesting happening?

I’ve also made an email/text template that I use to reach out to businesses, and I’ve started sending out messages and making phone calls. My list of businesses I want to talk to continues to grow – it’s currently at 15-20 and will continue expanding. Next week, I start conducting interviews! I’m sure those’ll be fun.

If you’re reading this and have any suggestions for small businesses in the Bay Area that I should reach out to, I’d be happy to take them. You can let me know at maya.kamala.anjali@gmail.com!

Cheers.

~Maya