Turn up the volume....

Disco Bear.

Just because you've a small business and no huge marketing budget, that doesn't mean having a well thought out marketing strategy is optional.

I think of strategy as the overall plan of how you're getting from here to there. If you're climbing a mountain, you'd better have a route layed out or you're not likely to reach the top.

So it is with marketing.

It starts with knowing where you're at. Where is your business coming from? What are your strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities (known as SWOT)?

And where are you trying to get to? A realistic medium range goal (say a year, at most two into the future) works well for me.

What are your capabilities and resources to get something done?

Work out a plan, get it down in writing. Put it aside for a few days and look at it again. Have marketing-savvy friends look at it and offer suggestions.

Finalize it, put it into action. Take a look at it every week or month and make sure you are making progress on it.

Adjust it as needed. No strategy survives for a year or even six months without adjustment.

There are lots of ways to market. You maybe only need one or two pieces of the puzzle working well to take your business to the next level. But the wrong approach can be a complete wasted effort - time and money lost.

Think about it.

Product placement is really more PR than marketing. It's getting your product visible in TV shows, movies, catalog photos - anywhere it can be seen as simply being in use as part of the environment.

In case you think this is a new idea, it goes back to at least 1919 for movies and the 1800's for books.

The film The Island features at least 35 individual products including cars, bottled water, shoes, credit cards, beer and ice cream.

Here's some mind-blowing numbers to get an idea of how big a deal this is:

Jeep paid more than $10 million to appear in Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Toyota: Over $10 million for Terminator 3.

Mitsubishi: $25 million for 2 Fast 2 Furious.

One of the key things to know about what you're selling is where it's at in the "Product Life Cycle."

Every product or service - automobiles, computers, plumbing, baseball cards, marriage counseling - goes through a life cycle usually described as introduction, growth, maturity, decline.

The reason this is critical to know is marketing is VERY different at different stages.

For a brand new product - say, the Internet around 1993 - marketing is all about getting the word out. No one has ever heard of it, there is no demand or competition. Publicity is king in this phase, advertising is of little use.

During the growth phase, competition is jumping into the market. Marketing is huge in this phase, where the fight is for branding and market share. Establishing a new company in the arena is easy; all it takes is the bucks to advertise or a way to let people know you exist. Think websites around 1997. Nobody knew anything about it, just that they needed one. Anyone could call themselves a website designer and do well.

In the mature phase, brands are well established (or perhaps never established) but differentiation between existing brands is increasingly poor. More and more, consumers are either buying out of habit or purchasing on features, price, and convenience alone. In this stage, marketing for existing companies is important to retain your position. Establishing a new company requires either smart differentiation from competition, or is based on price and big budget advertising alone.

In the decline phase, the product is fully a commodity, meaning purchase is only on price, features and convenience, and the fight is over share in probably a declining size market. The ordinary desktop computer is in this stage. Marketing ROI is increasingly difficult as profit margins shrink. Revitalization of sales depends almost entirely on the development of a new sub-category or major innovation ("netbooks" for example).

Determining which stage your products or services are at is crucial. If you don't, you'll likely be missing the woods for the trees in strategizing your marketing.

Experienced Internet Marketers know that the keywords metatag is all-but-useless and has been for years.

Now Google has officially announced its demise.

In short: Google ignores it.

When doing Internet Marketing for a client we use it for exactly one thing: we look at competitor websites keyword tags to see what they think are important search terms.

That's it.

There are two ways I know of, to start a marketing campaign today and be getting new customers tomorrow.

Both require that you have a website to send people to.

One is click ads (pay-per-click, Google AdWords).

The other is with local listings. I have literally set up a client on Google Maps one day and had them get a call from a prospective customer the next day.

It may have escaped your attention that what you are trying to do with marketing is to motivate people.

"Motivate" as in "to get them to move."

You want ACTION.

It may be go to your website, click on the "buy now" button, phone in an order, email for more information, get in their car and drive to your store, put the item in their shopping cart or any one of a dozen other things, but it is always... ACTION.

Not thoughts or even decisions.

ACTION.

And what motivates action?

EMOTION.

If you aren't stirring people's feelings, you aren't marketing.

Sure, marketing can be very educational. But you're not running a classroom.

MOVE THEIR EMOTION and move THEM.

Cheddar I suppose....


More cheese sculptures.

"Buy Nows" and Sales are in some ways as low as it goes in marketing.

IF that's the only thing you have going for you.

Supermarket advertising is almost entirely devoted to promoting what's on sale. If you were already planning on buying cauliflower, maybe you'll go to Publix instead of Sweetbay. But there's otherwise little difference between one supermarket and another. And profit margins in that industry are abysmally low.

Nevertheless, Sales and especially "Buy Now"s are very useful, almost mandatory as part of an effective marketing campaign.

The problem with Sales of course is when you aren't running one, sales go down. But many companies are always running some kind of sale or another.

A "Buy Now" isn't necessarily a discounted price. It's anything to motivate someone to purchase now as opposed to later. It's a conscious effort to overcome people's buying inertial. It's always easy to do nothing.

Extra goodies are a standard buy now in direct response marketing. Order in the next 15 minutes and get an extra CD for free, or free shipping or whatever. Of course these extras aren't really extra. They are built into the pricing.

Limited quantities available are a motivator if people believe it is going to sell out rapidly. Getting better seats or a lower numbered limited edition item work the same way.
Events such as holidays are a "Buy Now" all by themselves. Graduation or Valentine's Day comprise a hard deadline. You can't put off your Christmas shopping past December 24th.

There are many other ways to work a "Buy Now." You try to avoid ones that cost you money. Put on your thinking cap and see what you can come up with.

Marketing that already works to some degree will always be improved by the addition of a "Buy Now."

There's two ways of dealing with the rampant skepticism out there.

Either appeal to the small percentage of gullible people.

Or, in every aspect, every inch of your marketing, act to reassure and encourage your prospective buyers to overcome their well-justified skepticism.

Every. Aspect.

Every. Line.

REASSURE them. Assuage their fears.

STOKE their hopes, enthusiasms, desires, cravings, dreams.

Direct Mail isn't what it once was, mostly because it's gotten more expensive (thank you U.S. Postal Service) while at the same time response rates keep going down.

Nevertheless it works great for many people.

There are a few things you should know:

1. Sometimes people try and do small quantity mailings because of budgetary concerns, thinking if they send out half as many postcards, they'll get half the response. Not true. There's a volume below which you don't get LESS response. You get NO response. Unfortunately there's no certain way of predicting how much is enough. 5,000 is usually enough, less is a question mark.

2. Direct mail is mostly a TOMA tool. Top of Mind Awareness. Meaning you send out mailings again and again with the idea that WHEN they need what you are selling, yours is the first company they think of. Don't send out a mailing once and expect to get rich - or even necessarily to break even.

3. The single most important factor in direct mail is the list. It used to be said that the list is 40%. I've now seen it said the list is 65%.

The more specifically the list targets PRECISELY those most likely to buy what you are offering, the more likely your campaign will be successful.

This is one reason a business-to-business direct mail campaign is often very workable. It's often rather easy to target exactly the right prospects.

4. The first, biggest challenge in all direct mail is to get someone to read your piece. That includes getting them to open the envelope if you've mailed that way. This is one reason we love postcards. They are at least going to see your main image and probably your offer.

There's more, but you'd better wrap your wits around these issues if you want to run a successful direct mail campaign.

At Last! A competition for the worst advertising!

There are a few elements that are a part of nearly all successful marketing.

One of these is your guarantee.

Most companies have SOME kind of guarantee for their products or services.

But optimizing a guarantee is a thoughtful exercise. There are a couple of general rules:

1. The more impersonal the marketing or sales process, the more important is the guarantee. That's why you see companies using guarantees heavily online, to reassure potential customers. "Your satisfaction guaranteed or your money back." "No questions asked" are a couple of the common formulations.

2. The potential liabilities of a long or unrestricted guarantee are minimal. We've had clients offer a three year guarantee in an industry where 90 days is more usual. How many people do you think send in for a replacement even 6 months later? It's one in a thousand at most. Similar stats apply to the number of bozo returns on no-questions-asked guarantees.

We offer lifetime guarantees on some of our trade show display hardware AND art. Do you think that help closes sales, when our prices might be a bit higher than other companies? You better believe it!

So think about it.

Your guarantee can be a useful tool to reassure skittish prospects, and to differentiate you from your competitors.

I've said this in a lot of ways.

Let me just flat out say it.

Test.

Experiment.

Try things out.

In most areas of life and business you don't expect to get it right - or perfect - the first time.

The same is true of marketing.

Plan your marketing with this in mind.

Words fascinate me.

The word "clue" originally meant a ball-shaped mass, ultimately from a Sansksrit word meaning "ball." Then it meant a ball of yarn or thread. Then a thread as a guide through a maze. And finally its current meanings.

And then, of course, in modern idioms and usages such as "clueless" "get a clue" and "hit him with a clue-bat."

Fascinating.

Nothing has changed to slow the Yellow Pages continued slide into oblivion.

However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of their demise are premature.

It's true that Idearc, the company that handles the Verizon Yellow Pages books (and the online SuperPages.com), filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

It's also true that at the margins, Yellow Pages are less and less viable. More and more of our clients are yanking their ads, reducing their size or going in fewer books.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot of business being generated by Yellow Pages listings.

Any company that does business in a local area should be seriously considering this marketing channel.

A lot of the reason for poor response is lousy ads. Don't let the Yellow Pages company design your ad. If their people were talented they wouldn't be working for the Yellow Pages companies. Spend the few hundred bucks to get a design that really works.

When we are going to do a YP ad design, one of the first things we do is look at last year's book, at the section their ad will go in, to see what their competitors are doing. Then we design a distinctive ad that stands out by color and imagery from others in their category.

Unless it is a really tiny ad, it should have people in it. The eye is drawn to images of people.

The next big thing is a headline that stops people. Of course there is a great deal to writing a good headline.

There's more, but if you get those points in your ad, you'll be ahead of 90% of your competitor's ads.

While location is not the three most important things in marketing, it is important.

I've written about geographical location for one's marketing efforts, about billboard location and referred to the importance of location for your trade show booth.

How about location for your office or store?

Of course convenience for your prospective customers is huge. That's not only in terms of time and distance from where they live and work, but easy access from highway exits, left turn lanes, parking, etc.

But store or office location is also a MARKETING point.

To give a favorite example, a client of mine had a stained glass door and window business. It was located on a very busy road, which thousands of commuters used to go to and from work every day. It was also a few hundred feet back from a light where traffic would back up for blocks at rush hour. The owner put a lot of work into their window displays, including paying for keeping them lit up at night.

Year in and year out, 30% of their business came from people who would walk in saying "I've been driving by for years and now I need a new door."

Another example of the way location itself can pay off is the trend towards competing businesses to be located near each other. You see this in auto dealerships where within a few blocks of each other, you can see many many different makes. So people will drive from farther away than usual, knowing they can go from one dealer to another, comparing looks, prices and features until they find what they want.

I know a place where three jewelry store chains all have branches located within about one block of each other. I guarantee they each benefit from the others' proximity.

I do my business banking at one bank, personal at another. They have branches right across the street from each other, 5 blocks from my office. Convenient!

Interesting, eh?

What 20 top websites looked like when they first started.

Amazing how little some have changed.

The vast bulk of my postings address marketing for new business development - all the actions to introduce your products or services to people who have never heard of you or never purchased from you. In short, to get new customers, clients or patients.

But what about your existing and past customers?

The fact is, in many businesses, the low hanging fruit for marketing is people who have previously bought from you.

Marketing efforts should really be directed to both groups. If you don't market to your existing customer base, you're wasting a lot of the effort it took to get them as customers in the first place.

And if you don't continue to market for new customers, you'll eventually run out of customers. People move, close their businesses, die, get wooed away by your competition. There's always attrition going on in a customer base.

Each group should have its own campaigns and approach. What works and what you need to do to market to existing customers is usually very different from marketing for new customers.

The emphasis may be different at different times. Right now, many businesses are finding it harder to bring in new customers and are surviving by servicing their existing customers like never before.

Sustainability is a hot concept these days.

We shouldn't be doing things to the environment that we can't continue because they consume resources and don't renew them. The lumber industry these days is sustainable; they plant as many trees as they cut. Oil is not sustainable though how soon we'll start to run out is highly controversial.

Another word for the same thing is viability: the capability of something to continue on, to survive on its own.

In finance it's what's known as a positive ROI - Return on Investment. More dollars gotten back than dollars invested.

It's an important concept for marketing as well.

A sustainable marketing effort has to cost less than the marginal net profit from the sales resulting. In short, if your marketing costs $1,000, and generates an additional $5,000 in sales, which cost $4,000 in cost of goods, labor, sales commissions, etc. etc., you've only broken even.

You need to do at least a couple dollars better than that to be able to continue a marketing effort indefinitely.

In the short term, "big bang" marketing efforts often are launched knowing they are probably not going to pay for themselves. That is done to jump start something. It's also done knowing you don't intend to continue it. Usually you then scale it back to something you can afford on an ongoing basis.

If this seems like beating the obvious to death, I can't tell you how many times I've dealt with small business owners who have NOT made a computation like this in planning their marketing efforts.

To expand, you have to develop a sustainable marketing program that is also scalable - meaning it can be increased in size.

You have to be able to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts. That can be difficult. But it's essential.

Otherwise the more you spend on your marketing, the faster you go broke.

These three search engines have the vast majority of all searches done in the U.S., over 90%.

(Bing is the search engine formerly known as Live, and before that, MSN. Microsoft's search engine.)

Google is around 2/3 of all searches, Yahoo around 15%, Bing a few percent.

Here's the results of an actual "blind test" (meaning which search engine they were actually using was hidden from them):

Google vs Bing vs Yahoor.

Google wins, though not decisively. Bing and Yahoo almost tie (so much for what a new and better thing is Bing).