In May, Nicole Martin of Pinpoint Marketing, from Great Kingshill, was recognised by British businesswoman, Jacqueline Gold CBE, for her success as a female entrepreneur, and awarded with a prestigious #WOW badge.

Pinpoint Marketing was one of three winners selected by Jacqueline after she entered ‘Women on Wednesday’ – a competition launched by Jacqueline in 2011 to celebrate the growing number of UK female entrepreneurs and businesswomen.

Women on Wednesday (#WOW) takes place every week and is run through Jacqueline’s Twitter page.  When selecting the winners, Jacqueline looks for businesses that are interesting, that have strong brand values and that she thinks have potential to grow and succeed in their industry. She looks for quality products and services, well designed websites and entrepreneurs who demonstrate good business acumen and who have spotted a gap in the market that meets the consumer’s needs.

Pinpoint Marketing’s ethos is to make marketing simple and to add value and support to local, small businesses looking to grow their business through cost effect marketing ideas and campaigns. We have been trading for 11 years and have helped many businesses in this time with strategy, planning, content, social media and much more. We genuinely love helping through our network of associates.

Jacqueline Gold says: “Pinpoint Marketing specialises in working with small businesses to provide realistic but effective marketing strategies to help companies grow. Nicole’s passion for providing an easy and simple marketing service and her friendly and personable demeanour sets her apart. I wish her every success in the future.

For me, #WOW is all about inspiring and celebrating female entrepreneurs. My vision is for women in the UK to come together, celebrate their strengths, skills and fantastic businesses, and do all that they can to inspire other women to realise their potential.  

The WOW community is a fantastic network which offers female entrepreneurs the opportunity to share advice, support each other, trade and most importantly celebrate their successes!” 

For more information about Women on Wednesday, please visit the website

According to the online dictionary I used, the word or concept of “entrepreneur” means “a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit” and the synonyms include businessman and businesswoman.

So can anyone be an entrepreneur? Are you one?

As a businesswoman myself, so I guess an entrepreneur (although for some reason I don’t often refer to myself as this! I mainly use the term business owner or small business) I have recently been learning about the world of business to empower and improve myself and I have been getting motivated by listening to podcasts from Karren Brady and Paul McKenna and the subject of being an entrepreneur or entrepreneurialism has come up a lot.

Our brains have a left and a right sides. The left side is responsible for controlling the right side of the body. The left also performs tasks that have to do with logic and the right performs tasks that have do with creativity and the arts.

So are all entrepreneurs creative only?

Is the typical or average entrepreneur reliant on their right side then? A lot of what I heard and read seems that the average entrepreneur is creative on their ideas, visualisation and so on but they don’t do detail. They use others/teams who are more left sided to make things happen like the strategy, the processes and so on. It makes sense to play to ones strengths.

This is of course just an observation and I’m sure there are many business woman and men who can and will be able to manage both. I think I am both in parts, but my predominant side is the left, logical side.

So when I say entrepreneur, who do you think of? Simon Cowell, Lord Sugar and Theo Paphitis? Jo Malone, Karren Brady and Kelly Hoppen? They may well call themselves shop keepers or TV execs or chair woman but essentially they all show and share the entrepreneurialism traits.

Listening to the podcasts I mentioned, other personality traits also seem to be shared by such business people and these include focus and determination, positive, driven and bright. They listen to others and take advice but don’t get put off or knocked back. They are go getters and the business world needs such people with such traits. Interestingly, I don’t think they are very money driven either. Money is the result yes, but not the why or the main reason they do what they do.

Entrepreneurs can work solo but also in teams. They make things happen using their teams, their ambition and their experience. After all we cannot be good at everything even if we are business owners/self employed so why not admit that and use others to help and support us and learn from.

How would you describe yourself? Is entrepreneur an overused word or one that should be used more?

Hope you enjoyed reading this …

I have been in marketing a long time now and I have been self employed for almost 11 years too, so I have had plenty of times and occasions to see simple and common mistakes made time after time. I will just hop up on my soap box and tell you some silly mistakes that I have seen made, and corrected, that once addresses and fixed, can make a difference to you, your business and your customers in a positive way.

1. Setting up social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Google my Business) and then leaving them dorment with no regular posts, photos, videos and so on
2. Having a newsletter sign-up box on your website but never sending an email newsletter out
3. Creating and printing marketing material that lacks important content eg phone number, special code, url, call to action and so on
4. Jumping head first into campaigns and starting up ideas but never completing anything or following up. Scattergun approach to marketing as it is known.
5. Creating and implementing campaigns without knowing the basics of why you are doing this, who you re aiming the messaging at and so on. This is like guesswork and assuming the client will put everything together
6. Not being organised and working on your marketing randomly or whenever there is time. No consistency or continuity will not lead to results and success
7. Not following up. If a potential new customer calls you or emails you or submits a form via your website and you do not follow up, this is a real wasted opportunity. It sounds crazy but it has happened. To the customer, it is like you can’t be bothered with them and they will simply go elsewhere to buy
8. Receiving some good news eg a new project, company anniversary, award win etc and then not telling anyone about it! No press release, no social media post, no radio interview, nothing! It is ok to be proud and shout about your achievements. If you don’t, no one else will
9. Not going networking. Staying in your home office or office and not getting there amongst suppliers or customers/potential customers can be fatal. Networking can help you grow, train and learn, but it can also get your name/your businesses name out there to those in the room and all their contacts! I recommended you Google #GirardsLawof250
10. Not having a content plan to showcase all of your products/services across all your marketing channels. To ensure all services are marketed equally and to enable content to be written and recycled for blog, website, minutes, social media, your monthly content plan will contain, for each medium, a template outlining ideas and draft wording.

Whereas these mistakes are not gravely serious, in the grand scheme of things, they are still mistakes that need addressing in order to maintain professionalism and to keep up your brand and personal brand appearance. If you need help in correcting your mistakes or not making them in the first place, get in touch.

 

Have you asked people this question when networking or out and about? Has anyone asked you this question? If you run your own business then I imagine the answer is yes to both occasions. I certainly have.

Until reading the Go-Givers Sell More book my response to this question would be “marketing consultancy” or “marketing consultancy for small business”. Now I have read this book by Bob Burg and John David Mann, my response will be something along the lines of “I add value to small businesses and help them grow through marketing planning and campaigns”. Or perhaps include “saving time and money …”. Why this change of tact, according to the book sales are more about giving than selling. It is more about influencing, impacting and giving.

Another area that resonated with me, and something I told my pre-teen son about was the fact we cannot make a sale eg we cannot make a person do something. They can lead us, we can lead them but at the end of the day “people will do what people will do.” A simple yet powerful message don’t you think?

As you may know, as a long standing member and now chair of the Athena Network, I cannot praise and recommend networking enough to grow yourself and your business and to build a network and meet people. Not clients or prospects, but people. Don’t oversell and overpitch (read more about MacGuffin) but take time to listen and always always follow up. Networking is also a fabulous way to build up your reputation (the law of 250 by Joe Girard), especially if you ask an open and giving/value adding question like “How can I help you?”

The book also emphasises the giving aspect a lot. This is something I try to do, no actually I do DO this, for my clients. A recent testimonial I received echoed this and it said “Nicole is exceptional marketer outweighed only by her desire and willingness to refer within The Athena Network. She is always the first to follow up after meetings and is very much appreciated by all members. Everyone loves to work with Nicole and she treats every client as if they were her only client.” We can create value ourselves as the authors elude no and we don’t need to rely on others or external forces to do this for us. The aim is to PULL people in and not PUSH yourself out there to them, noy easy but do-able.

The 5 words to add value in this book are:

1. excellence
2. consistency
3. attention
4. empathy
5. appreciation

I am recommending wholely the Go-Giver sells more. Find out more here

William’s Fund has so far raised over £900,000 for Childhood cancer research and has set itself a target to reach £1 million by 2020!  William was only 2 years old when he was diagnosed with cancer, it was given various names, but his parents never found out the exact type of cancer William had.  He died aged 4yrs. Achieving the target of £1million will raise the team to the next level of research funding from larger bodies, which is why we need to reach it as soon as possible to secure our research team’s future.

The key to treatment of cancer, especially childhood cancer, lies in the diagnosis and without that the prognosis is poor. Childhood cancers behave in very different way to adult cancers; they respond differently to treatment and can be unpredictable in both positive and negative ways.  According to Cancer Research UK, there were 1756 new cases and 257 deaths from children’s cancers per year 2012-2014.

Where the money goes. Less than 4% of the National cancer research budget is spent on Childhood Cancer, a real poor relative to the big cancer research projects. We know radiotherapy & chemotherapy have a poor track record & nothing has changed in the treatment of childhood cancers in over 50yrs! We at William’s Fund now have forward thinking, innovative and highly respected researchers working to change this. The future does not lie with more chemotherapy but with newer less harmful and more successful treatments. William inspired us to start the fund raising in 2000 and we see this as a fitting tribute to him.

About Williams Fund. William’s Fund is a fundraising organisation based in GX, raising money for Childhood Cancer Research in Oxford. There are no administration costs, these are met by Johanna and Peter Dodd, there are no expenses paid out and the charity does not have any paid employees!

William’s Fund were established in 2000 as a home run organisation. Most of the monies raised to date has come from local residents, businesses and the community. William’s Fund has secured a place in the hearts of the local community. We are aware that to keep up with growth of the research facility going forward, we need to attract guaranteed funding on a larger scale in a shorter time frame. This will secure the momentum of this ground-breaking research and Dr Helen Townley’s future in Childhood Cancer Research. Despite being a skilled and highly sought-after researcher, Dr Townley is keen to stay within the Childhood Cancer sphere, she does however spend increasing amounts of valuable time seeking grants and funding. Annual running costs are in excess of £70k pa. with more investment needed. At our current rate of fundraising we are likely to have a shortfall of £50k against our target, as we reach 2020. Sponsorship and funding going forward would be most welcome to secure the future of this vital facility, one of very few researching Childhood Cancers.

It is not sufficient to assume that therapies for adults can simply be translated to paediatric cancers. Adults and children are known to have different tolerance and response to treatments. Cancer still remains the leading cause of death in children.

Please see the website www.williamsfund.co.uk