You should be very familiar with the concept of a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and have an effective USP worked out for your company, product or service.
Many times a good risk reversal" strategy can form the basis of a USP. "Risk reversal" means you take the risk of purchase away from the purchaser and put it on yourself. One of the most famous examples ever was Domino Pizza's promise that they would deliver your pizza in 30 minutes or less, or it would be free.
We do this with our two main services, website design and Internet Marketing. Our website design proposals offer unlimited versions or revisions on the site look, at no extra charge. No one else does that, so it is a big differentiation point. People love it because it takes risk off of them.
Our Internet Marketing programs are month-to-month, no commitment period required, which is unusual in this industry. Again, risk is minimized because if they aren't happy, or they suddenly can't afford it, they can just stop.
With both of these we promote them heavily in talking to proposals, in our letters and proposals.
And in both cases we can afford to do what we are saying.
With websites we have a development process that is almost certain to hit a home run with the client. With Internet Marketing, we have a scope of work and a system designed to get visible results, fast. So that has to be part of it.
Think about how you might apply this principle in your business.
The general formula of marketing AIDCA has as its final step, "Ask for Action."
A website - or any marketing item - will be much more successful if it asks for action and makes it easy for a prospect to do so.
Many people believe it is crass, rude, unethical or ineffective to say "buy now", "call today", or even enclose a return self-addressed envelope or offer incentives for immediate purchase. People make fund of TV direct marketing commercials "but's that's not all" as they offer you even one more extra if you call in the next 10 minutes.
You can have a visceral dislike for this kind of promotion, but the fact is, it works. And it doesn't really get people to buy who didn't want to, it just helps get them past their natural sales resistance.
The effectiveness of a website can be markedly increased by providing multiple calls to action such as information requests, newsletter sign-ups and the like.
Of course it can be overdone. But it's FAR more common to under-do it.
Every time we go into a new industry we find everyone imitating what everyone else is doing. All Lawyer's websites look the same. Here in Tampa Bay, the big money is being spent by attorneys on billboards, Yellow Pages ads and TV. Why? Someone started doing it, and kept doing it, so people guess it must be working.
So is this a good idea, because that way you meet people's expectations, or because someone must know what they are doing?
Here's what Jay Abraham (one of the great marketing gurus of recent times) has to say on this point:
"When you limit your business to doing things the same way every other competitor of yours does, you can only produce modest, incremental gains -- at best. At worst, you could easily lose ground."
(from "Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got".)
I agree. So it may be "safe", but is that good enough? If you are in trouble, or ambitious, the answer is no.
I've said this many times in many ways. It bears repeating because, other than the very definition and purpose of marketing, there is no more important principle in marketing.
For successful marketing, you have to put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers.
Look at things from where they sit. If you were them, what would you look at, what would you read, what would you believe?
What are your hopes, worries, concerns, dreams, problems?
What would reach you through the daily clutter of 3000 advertising messages, in the midst of already overwhelming demands on your time, in spite of all the past track of being burned on something that looked great?
What would make you stop and despite everything, say, "I'm going to check this out."
Answering that is the key to successful marketing.
Lacking that, even a huge marketing budget is no guarantee of success.
The battle has raged on for many decades: Creativity versus Metrics
Can you measure the results of marketing? Should you?
One would think this would be settled by now. How can anyone reasonably argue that the use of statistics to measure the effectiveness of marketing is a bad thing?
And yet, people still write and publish articles to that effect.
A lot of people will tell you in advertising (and sales) you need to exaggerate, be deceptive or trick your prospect into calling, walking into your store or buying. The idea is you can make it all good later, that people will never know the difference, or that otherwise it is worth the effort.
That if you tell the truth you can't get people's attention and you'll never get the business.
If you are going to plan your marketing or buy some marketing services, it would be wise to fit this within your overall business goals and strategy.
I was reminded of this when meeting with a businessman who was interested in an effective national Internet Marketing campaign for one of his product lines. It was a very realistic ambition, and he had the budget to do it.
What he didn't have was a realistic way of dealing with the influx of business that was going to result.
I've seen this more than once when a prospective client gets close to signing onto one of our programs, and is suddenly confronted with the thought: "What if this works?"
It's easy simply to have vague ambitions of building a billion dollar business or a million dollar retirement fund.
If you're serious about it, you need to take it to the nuts and bolts.
How big do you want to get? And how fast? is the nature of the first questions to ask.
Then, if you're really serious about it, you have to work out how realistically to get there from where you are.
Again, you can't base it on some vague dream of an investor with enough money to get it done.
I guess what I'm trying to say is pretty simple: "Folks, Get Real!"
Let's say you need to do something about your marketing. You don't have much of a budget. And you need to do something NOW.
That rules out formal surveys which are expensive and can take months to develop all needed data. It also means you really can't afford to have your marketing efforts fail, fail and fail again. It would be REALLY good if your first try was successful.
The thing is, if you have a going concern, you probably already have all the survey you need in what you can get from Sales.
If advertising is salesmanship in print, then take what works in your sales operation. Turn that into advertising and chances are it'll work.
If little old widowed ladies are your main customers, advertise in a way that reaches that demographic.
If no one comes to your office from more than 10 miles away, don't advertise beyond that radius.
If people tell you they keep coming back because your staff are so friendly, feature that prominently in your advertising copy and testimonial quotes. Use photos of your smiling staff.
This is not rocket science. But you do have to put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers, clients or patients. There's no better way to do that then a good inspection of what works for you in Sales.
I'm struck time and time again by the fact that nearly all marketing books and advice assume you have many tens of thousands to spend on marketing.
If you're just getting a business started, or have a struggling part-time business you want to take to the next level, that isn't always an option.
Of course well-funded startups with a few million dollars, it's a different story.
But for most people with a dream, talent, an idea and determination, some time - and little cash - it reminds me of the old advice about how to make a million dollars. "First, take a million dollars."
THIS is where most businesses falter. They never make it because they never get successful marketing going.
In trying times, many past successful businesses fail. They depended on word of mouth or the One Big Client. Or they had some kind of advertising that was working well enough for a booming economy.
They are in that same situation. Market or Die.
Is it hopeless? Far from it. But there are approaches doomed to failure:
1. "Hunker down and hope to ride it out." Cut back on expenses and pray the economy will upturn before you run out of money and credit.
2. "A lick and a promise." Decide to do something about it, but don't do the homework and often hard work necessary to develop a winning campaign, one that will work fast enough and on a budget you can manage.
These are shark infested waters. There are a zillion sharp dealers out there ready to promise the world, who sound great and will be happy to take your money. Likewise everyone has a brother-in-law or a friend of a friend who can build you a website for $300.
You CAN make it. You CAN get a successful marketing program going, one you can ride on up to prosperity and a cushy retirement. Just don't count on it being easy.
It's no news that TRUST is a huge factor in all marketing and sales.
It's important to realize that trust is not just a matter of YOUR name and brand, since you may not have a reputation at all with most potential buyers. They've never heard of you.
So you start out with a level of trust based on association. What is the trust level of your industry? or of the medium in which you are advertising?
People assume a used car salesman, or a congressman, can't be trusted.
On the other hand, if you start a bank, you are going to start out with a considerable amount of trust. People assume their money is going to be safe there even if they've never heard of you.
But don't try and promote a bank by email.
Email marketing to people who never heard of you is probably going to be a failure, even if you can get a legitimate list. The trust level is terrible, people know it is almost certainly some kind of scam.
One of the critical questions that has to be answered before you can do intelligent marketing, is who are you trying to reach?
This is called "target markets" "market segments" or "publics" and can include factors (in consumer marketing) such as age, gender, income level, location, etc.
One important point is that who you are trying to reach may not be the person who makes the decisions or is actually going to make the purchase.
This applies to both consumer marketing and business-to-business.
In the consumer world, you market toys to the kids, who then go to Mom demanding or asking for their very own (fill in the blank).
In business-to-business marketing, it may be the CEO or Purchasing Agent making the decision, signing the purchase order or writing the check. In many cases the decision is influenced, the purchase is initiated by, or virtually or actually decided by someone else.
Computer systems decisions are almost always strongly influenced by the IT Department.
You can often get a lot farther by marketing to the decision influencer than the decision maker. Sometimes you have to market to both.
Many businessmen, with no training or experience in marketing, are convinced they can handle their own marketing.
There are, I'm convinced, two big reasons for this:
1. Nearly everyone doing marketing as professionals, has no real training in marketing. Maybe they are artists, or programmers, or technically proficient in video editing or something. But they've never really studied marketing.
2. Most businessmen have been burned many times, purchasing what sounded good from people who claimed to be professionals and charged high prices.
Why then shouldn't people just decide to do it themselves?
And yet, marketing is a subject. There are things to know. There is no single text that has all the answers, and few that are 100% reliable, but there is a LOT of valuable info out there. Of course, sorting out what's true from what's not, and getting enough experience to gain a real command of the subject, can be rather expensive.
The only way you become a real expert is by actually doing things and seeing how it works out. And that's expensive both in time and money.
I wrote about branding last June. I have more to say.
"Brand" is what people think of your company, product or service. It isn't what YOU say it is. It's what your prospective customers say it is. To a great many people, Wal-Mart stands for low priced decent quality goods and items. Target's cachet is low-priced but better quality.
Branding is everything you do to establish or change that. It's also everything your competition or enemies do in the same vein. Unions for years have been attempting to re-brand Wal-Mart as "the giant company that's unfair to its workers and small businesses." To date they haven't succeeded, at least with most people.
"Brand identity" is everything that REMINDS people of your branding or of your brand.
There is to some degree, a continuous spectrum between branding and brand identity. A logo or color scheme is at one end. No one is going to get much of a concept of UPS, knowing that their color is brown. A logo does very little more than that. Sure, colors and logos should be CONSISTENT with your branding. But trying to lean on them to build a brand is a waste of time.
A slogan or tagline, on the other hand, can contribute to building a brand. Repeat it enough times and people will tend to think it is true. At the same time, it is weak compared to other methods of branding. SHOW people what you want them to think.
Barnum and Bailey Circus has been "The Greatest Show on Earth" for 150 years. But they also tell you the same thing throughout their shows. And the whole approach of their shows is a spectacular. They assume they are the greatest show on earth, as a starting point - not only in what they do but how they present it. And the shows do a great deal to live up to that slogan, which is really a claim and a promise.
Now let's take a contrary example. Verizon has evidently discovered (finally) that people think their customer service is hideously bad. Their answer? A marketing campaign to tell everyone how great their customer service is and how dedicated they are to providing great customer service.
Did they actually CHANGE something, to improve their service?
No.
So that's a campaign doomed to failure.
Ultimately, branding has to be based on truth.
The more truthiness, the better chance it has at success.
One of the buzz words of the last 10 years or so is "Permission Marketing", a concept invented (and title of a book) by Seth Godin. Godin became famous as one of the first people to make the Internet work in the business world.
Published in 1999, his book is interesting in part for what is NOT in it. Google (then still a small upstart) isn't even mentioned in the book.
But his basic idea is timeless and fascinating to me in the way it complements the Long Tail idea. Both are concepts empowered by technology. The Long Tail refers to getting rich selling a small amount to each of a lot of people, of a lot of products and/or in a lot of places.
That wouldn't have been profitable or perhaps not even possible before digital technology. Amazon.com sells millions of titles. It may sell only a handful per year of some of them. Impractical and a money-loser if they had to store them all in a warehouse.
"Permission Marketing" is the idea of taking a prospective customer through a series of small, personalized steps from first contact to sale to loyal customer. Automated responses and customized messages - easy things to do in the digital age - make it possible. This strategy potentially multiplies the effectiveness of your advertising many times over.
Both concepts are worth looking over. Though perfect for large, well-funded start-ups, these strategies can be applied in many smaller businesses too.
For example, do you have a good website, that really introduces your company and products to a visitor, and gives them actions they can take short of purchasing? If you do, your advertising can then primarily sell people on going to your website. Your website takes it from there.
It's a much more comfortable series of steps for many people, rather than going straight from ad to telephone.
We've documented a good website doubling the number of new patients a Doctor was getting. This is Permission Marketing at work.
It's one of the well-known facts of marketing that it usually takes repetition to get your message across.
The first time your ad runs or the postcard arrives, it probably doesn't even get noticed. Maybe the third or the ninth time it does.
That's important two ways. It tells you a "one-shot" ad campaign is almost certainly doomed to failure. So you need to plan for the long haul.
And it tells you that one of the points that needs to be settled is size of mailing or distribution of ad or marketing pieces, versus frequency of repetition.
In short, if you have a limited budget, is it better to get the same message in front of people more often, or to get it in front of more people?
Rosser Reeves in "Reality in Advertising" claims it is always better to reach more people. That may have been more true in 1960 than it is now (when the constant marketing barrage is incessant). But it has never been wholly true. That by the way, is probably the biggest error in what may be the best book on marketing ever written.
And there is no certain way to estimate in advance the optimum frequency versus reach ratio.
This is one more reason to test and measure. FIND OUT what the optimum frequency is to maximize the return on your marketing dollar.
There is a long tradition of copywriting going back to at least P.T. Barnum in the mid-19th century and certainly Claude Hopkins around the turn of the century (1900 that is, not 2000).
Certainly by the time this classic Underwood portable was manufactured in 1933, copywriting was a well developed mixture of art and science, as it is and should be today.
Sure, language has changed. but puffery (what I call "throwaway language") is still puffery and most that's where most ad copy falls - whether Superbowl ad or small business website. Still one sometimes sees (or hears) copy that sings.
It starts with a well-developed understanding of what it's like to stand in the shoes of the people you are trying to sell to.
(Yes, this typewriter is mine. A real beauty, and fully functional.)
Way back in the prehistoric days of 1960, Rosser Reeves wrote a book "Reality in Advertising" about what he learned in decades of running ad agencies.
In this book he introduced the term "U.S.P." or Unique Selling Proposition. In 1960, the idea was somewhat controversial. It has become an accepted, famous concept in marketing, though one rarely understood or well-used. Besides developing the concept, he described the three ways you can create, as well as pitfalls in creating a U.S.P.
When it has been well used, it has been responsible for some of the most successful campaigns in marketing history.
But there is a lot more to Rosser Reeves than that. What hardly anyone knows is what led to his development of the U.S.P. concept.
He took Claude Hopkins "test and measure" to a whole other level.
First of all, he broke down response into three key elements, each of which were itself measurable: Penetration, Usage Pull, and Life Expectancy.
Penetration is simply what percentage of the target market remember your product?
Usage Pull is how your campaign changes the percentage of them who actually USE the product. A bad campaign can actually reduce market share.
Finally, Life Expectancy is how Penetration and Usage Pull change over time after a campaign ends.
What it took to measure these and to see the change over time, was extensive surveying, repeated periodically. With the resources of a large ad agency, he was able to do exactly that, and, over time, to discover common elements of successful campaigns. And from that, we get the U.S.P.
In addition, he established a Copy Lab to test whether consumers got out of an ad, the U.S.P. he intended them to.
In the end, he pleaded, as did Claude Hopkins before him and Sergio Zyman since, to treat marketing as a science, not an art, and to take opinion out of it.
If more marketers paid attention to what he said, there would be a lot less wasted marketing out there. That his book is currently out-of-print tells you the lack.
A good start in understanding marketing is understanding definitions of key terms.
Advertising and marketing aren't the same thing.
Advertising is only a part of marketing. Marketing includes everything from conceiving of the product, through packaging, distribution, advertising, sales materials, etc. Any step in the process of getting a product (or service) to market and into the hands of a purchaser for their hard-earned money.
The reason marketing includes conception of product is because you can't sell ice to Eskimos or buggy whips to anyone. We see this every day, people come to us with a product or service they want to sell. The first questions should be "Does anyone want this? Can they be gotten to want it with an advertising budget we can afford? Will enough of them pay a high enough price that enables you to sell it at a profit?"
An amazing number of business are started where the answer to all three questions is a resounding "NO!"
The principle "Keep It Simple" very much applies to marketing.
The principle is most violated by trying to get over too many concepts or messages. They have 12 things they want to make sure people know in their Yellow Pages ad. They end up not getting any of them across.
Just ask yourself, of the campaigns you remember, what do you remember about them? One fact, one image, one slogan.
Volvo: safe Swedish made cars.
Crest: approved by the American Dental Association.
iPhone: there's an app for that.
That doesn't mean you can't cover a lot of points to support your main point. But there needs to be a single focus or main point or at best you dilute your efforts.
In the broadest sense, everything someone can spend their money on is competition. Money spent on your product or service is money that ISN'T being spent on something else. So it has to be appealing enough, needed enough or made to appear so, to win that horse race.
More narrowly, you're competing for attention against all other marketing, at least in that medium (that magazine, or on that store shelf, or in that trade show).
Finally, of course, you have your direct competitors. Other toy stores. Other accountants in your area. Other digital thermostats. Other charities.
In developing, testing and fine-tuning strategy, campaigns and marketing items, the wise marketer familiarizes himself with each of these echelons of competition. He knows that to succeed, he needs to be different, different in a positive way, but not so different as to be off-putting.
This applies to all marketing of anything, anywhere.
Went to the Addy Gallery last night. Addy's are the ad industry awards. Gallery night is like opening night at an art gallery (and in fact it was at the R.K.Bailey Studios at University of Tampa). But the exhibits are some of the submissions for the local (Tampa Bay) Addys.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
Once again, most of the best work was done by students. They turned out some posters that were completely ready for prime-time.
The two big elements of developing an effective marketing piece are 1. concept; 2. execution. Many of the student submissions made it on both points. My favorite was a poster for the Clearwater Jazz Holiday. Unusual and very effective use of color, great composition - everything tied together and said GREAT JAZZ.
The Good.
I can't say the same about the professional (agency) submissions.
Most of them, it's true, were well executed. That is to say, considerable talent went into the artistic elements - color scheme, arrangement of elements, etc. There was lots of eye catching work.
That wasn't true of all of them. There was one series of ad submissions which was so bad, it could have been turned out by an amateur using Publisher. I dunno, maybe it was. Someone's brother-in-law working as an in-house agency. I can't imagine any agency putting their name on work that bad. There were quite a few others that were seriously flawed from a design standpoint.
The Ugly.
But even the majority of submissions on display, once you got past the "ooh" and the "ah" of them, you look at what is the message they are getting across, really?
One campaign with lots of submissions was for the first hot sauce created by prison inmates. Really. And that was the whole point of the campaign. So let me get this straight.... I'm supposed to rush right out and buy this hot sauce because it was designed by felons?
The Bad.
Probably it'll win Best of Show and I'll have egg on my face.
It sometimes escapes copy writers and designers that a big part of marketing is telling people what to think.
That was something P.T. Barnum knew and knew well.
Knowing that, the trick is then deciding WHAT you want them to think and working out how to say it so it will be accepted or believed.
This isn't always difficult. Here's a simple, obvious example that is regularly violated.
Many websites have galleries of images, showing off the company's work. How often I've seen it that they have no captions or explanations. Pictures of kitchens. What am I looking at? What are the counter tops made of? Is this especially good work? Expensive, cheap or in between? Which style fits with what kind of decor or house?
Tell them what to think.
(This, by the way, is the entire story behind the dominance of oddball, hideous and boring work in Modern Art. A few Opinion Leaders tell everyone else what to think about some disgusting piece of idiocy. "A masterpiece!" says the Art Professor. And so a cow's skull under glass sells for $250,000.)
In doing marketing, one of the Big Things is knowing what is important and what is not.
For example, in direct mail, the mailing list is the single most important thing. You can do everything else right and have a lousy campaign if you are mailing to the wrong people.
In websites, navigation is hugely important. In most industries, testimonials are hugely important in your website, brochures and sales materials.
In e-commerce, getting traffic to the website is the crucial point that makes or breaks an online store. The store can be beautiful, you can have the greatest items in the world, store functionality can be fine-tuned, but if no one makes it to the website, that means nothing.
To authors and artists, publicity is king. Marketing is mostly a matter of distribution; once you're on Oprah, people need to be able to find your books and to be easily able to buy them.
What's important in marketing your products or services? It's worth thinking about.
In the world of small business, PR (Public Relations) and Marketing often get mobbed up, thought of as the same thing. Chiropractic offices often have PR assistants whose duties are more marketing than PR.
It's been said that PR sows the field, Marketing reaps. True enough but let's clarify. Public Relations includes all the actions to create and manage your reputation. But there are really two types of PR - corporate and product.
Corporate PR is all about the image of your company, having friends in high places, that kind of thing. Businesses promoting how green (environmentally friendly) they are, for example. That really doesn't do much to create sales. It just helps ensure no one is going to legislate your company out of existence, believe attacks on you in the papers, or raid your offices on a rumor.
Product PR is all about creating the kind of image that makes people want to buy. That of course very much includes publicity like Madonna wearing your T-shirt or being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly in a friendly fashion if you're an author.
Then marketing can come up behind that and make sure your product is easily available, use advertising to let people know where they can buy it, help crank up the word-of-mouth, and so on.
Al Ries wrote a great article on this back in the 70's called "Positioning in PR." In short, the ideal campaign strategy is run PR for a while, first. THEN do your marketing launch while you keep the publicity machine cranking away.
Notice that movie studios regularly pursue that strategy with their real blockbusters. You start hearing about the movie even one or two years before its release, long long before any advertising starts on it. If the buzz builds on it, that guarantees distribution (opening in lots of theaters). The advertising when it kicks in then finds millions of people saying to themselves "I've heard about that. It sounds good. Think I'll go see it."
By the way, movies had their best year ever in 2009 despite the economic downturn. So maybe there's a lesson to be learned.
The same principle can be applied in many many other industries.
For more than 20 years I made ads. One out of 50 probably ever made it out of the agency. Maybe one out of 500 ever made it on the air.
And again:
During my career I survived some 14 rounds of layoffs, downturns in the industry and the economy, takeover threats, IPOs, 16 creative directors, 13 CEOs, the demise of one great agency and the ongoing collapse
of another.
Not to beat a subject to death, but this is the start of a new decade. And things have sure changed. Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than data, 2000, versus data, now.
To cite a few examples:
--Percentage of U.S. households with a broadband connection in 2000: 6.3%
--Percentage of U.S. households with a broadband connection in 2008: 63%
--Number of e-mails sent per day in 2000: 12 billion
--Number of e-mails sent per day in 2009: 247 billion
The moral of the story (all my stories have morals)? If you are still operating the way you did 10 years ago, you are WAY out of date - and probably missing the boat.
Now that we've settled what "smart marketing" means in 2009, let's talk about what "aggressive marketing" means.
First of all, don't be shy. Don't be subtle. People are way too busy, too frantic, assaulted by too many messages to get subtleties.
Tell people what you have to offer that need or want. Tell them in plain English. Show them with layout and imagery that communicates the same message you are trying to get across in words.
Secondly, put your message out in a way that will be noticed. If you can only afford a little tiny ad - don't bother. Use a different medium that you can impinge with. If you can't afford to do 10000 11x6 postcards, don't do 4x6 postcards. Do fewer cards but do them big. And make sure the imagery on the face of the cards is really eyeball grabbing.
Finally, get the word out regularly and in volume. In 2010, a little bit of marketing doesn't go a long way. Make sure you are promoting in enough volume to bring in the amount of new business or leads you need or want to accomplish your goals. It's primary. If you don't do this, you may as well not get out of bed in the morning.
So there you have it. My predictions and business survival guide for 2010.
You're welcome. And have a great, best ever new year.
In the current economic scene, you DEFINITELY need to market. But you need to market SMART and AGGRESSIVELY.
What does it mean to market smartly in times like these?
Traditional methods of marketing for your industry may no longer be cost effective. The drift away from the Yellow Pages and from Direct Mail has only accelerated in most industries. But if you can get a very targeted list, Direct Mail can be incredibly effective.
Smart marketing means, more than ever, if your marketing isn't working, you need to do RESEARCH. Every marketing great from Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, etc. has written at length about the importance of research. Yet it is so neglected, especially in the small business world.
Research is about the most expensive thing you can do in marketing.... other than spending money on a campaign doomed to failure because you don't understand something critical about your target market (like who they are or what they want).
If you can't afford to hire a professional research firm, get creative and do it yourself. There are ways.
Smart marketing means don't commit all your eggs until your campaign has been tested and verified it works. THEN put the pedal to the metal. All marketing is experimental until it is proved out. Smart marketers test.
Part 2, Wherein I again drag out my trusty Crystal Ball.
What can we predict for marketing in 2010? Assume (as I expect) a slow recovery continuing pretty much throughout the year.
First of all, we can expect that marketing will be king. In short, the companies that market smartly and agressively, IF they also have good products and services that people DO need and want, AND if they have really sharp customer service and/or tech support, THOSE are the companies that will thrive.
Really, all of these factors will be necessary. People still want to buy things. But in an economy such as this they don't feel like they have to settle for anything less than great service.
People will spend money on frills, luxuries, wants rather than needs. Don't think that isn't the case.
But you've GOT to marketing sharply and agressively if you don't want to just hang on by a thread - or maybe go down with the ship.
We aren't done "culling the flock" so to speak. Many, many more weak businesses that made it to 2010 will be gone before 2011.
Companies that aren't willing to change, adapt, take advantage of the different scene and its opportunities, will continue to be in trouble in 2010. It is NOT business as usual in the marketing world. And it won't be again soon.
So what does it mean to market sharply and agressively? Stay tuned.
I've spoken before of the marketing chain. In short, there are many steps from someone who has never even heard of you, to a loyal, repeat customer who refers others.
Now, unless you are starting out brand new, you've got something going on already.
Let's also assume you DON'T have an unlimited budget.
Where do you spend your dollars?
That's what I mean by the sweet spot. What is going to get you the best return on your $.
There are two ways to approach this:
1. What is working right? IF you have something that is working well, if you can double that part of the chain, you'll double what comes out the other end of the pipeline - meaning customers. So find out - is it POSSIBLE to double that, and what would it cost. Since you have something already working, you can make a pretty good estimate of time and costs.
2. What is the WORST point in the chain? If you are getting lots of people to your web site, and you've verified they are qualified prospects, but from there they disappear, then your website is leaking like a sieve and chances are improving that will get a BIG improvement in leads and customers.
Estimating costs, time and return approaching from this direction is more of a question mark. Even though it may be wildly obvious what is wrong with the website (or whatever it is), how good it has to be to function well may be an educated guess.
So you see, this is not an area where you can have certainty in advance. But look at it both ways, see what looks like the easiest, cheapest, most productive fix - and if you only have the $ to do one thing, do that.
If you have the $ to do more than one, go for it. The alternative is trying a number of things one after the other, until one really works. REALLY works.
Crystal balls in marketing are in short supply, so better if you can try multiple approaches at once rather than perhaps lose months, even years trying different approaches until your marketing really takes off.
The two biggest reasons for unhappy clients are delays in getting the project done, and a design which the client doesn't like. The second can lead to the first since you might end up having to redo a design several times.
Marketing companies have several ways of dealing with this. One is to offer the client several "looks" at the start to choose from, hoping one will hit a home run. Another is to charge the client extra if it takes more than a certain number of tries or revisions before the client will sign off on it.
I had another idea. It's actually one of the things that separates us from most design firms.
I took problems in getting the client to sign off on a look, as an indictment of the development process. As a result, we've worked hard to refine the development process to make it as efficient as possible. We found, for example, that a conference call or meeting with the client and our designer was essential. That way, the designer had an opportunity to get a feel for what the client was looking for, straight from the horse's mouth.
Studying articles on marketing by L. Ron Hubbard, I found flaws in our design sequence. There is a natural sequence of development that if not followed can cause you to have to backup and redo steps, or end up with something the client spits at. We straightened it out.
The net result was a design development process that is relatively rapid and efficient, and almost sure to develop a "look" that is going to please the client, first time. Typically, there are some adjustments needed. It is rare for us to have to start over.
As a consequence we can offer as many versions or revisions of the look as necessary, at no extra charge.
Claude Hopkins, pretty much the inventor of modern advertising, was a developer of and major exponent of testing and measuring. He wrote a whole book on the subject, "Scientific Advertising", first published in 1923.
Sensible, right? Not very controversial, right?
Yet in 1999, Sergio Zyman (former head of Marketing at Coca-Cola) titles a book "The End of Marketing as We Know It" which is in considerable part about testing and measuring.
Justifying marketing as producing results is STILL a big topic of discussion in industry rags like "Ad Age."
If you are purchasing marketing realize you may have a job on your hands trying to determine how to, and then actually succeeding in collecting, the numbers necessary to measure the results.
It's not a trivial exercise. Let's take Internet Marketing. Everyone knows "search engine rankings." You want to be on page one on Google searches.
Yet that is only one of about eight different factors that affect the bottom line, which is that your Internet Marketing should generate qualified prospects or (for online stores) sales.
Just to name a couple of really obvious ones, let's say you DO get on page one on a Google search for certain search terms.
Are they the most important terms, in terms of volume of searches and relevance to what you are selling?
And what happens if they DO go to your website. Does it blow them away or blow them off?
So think about it. You have to have statistics that can be accurately collected and in a timely enough fashion to be useful. And they have to actually measure what you are trying to accomplish.
It isn't surprising if this takes quite some work. After all, even in the last few years, better statistics for baseball players were developed (by an amateur!) than those that had been used for the last 100 years.
But it is worthwhile.
Hopkins asserts that IF you test and measure, success in advertising is virtually guaranteed.
I've commented before on the chasm between marketing for small businesses versus marketing for Giant Corporations.
Most marketing texts are written for Fortune 500 companies and their vendors and agencies. Not that the material in them is wrong for small businesses, but a lot of it may not apply, and sometimes, it is hilarious.
Here's a perfect example, from "The Little Blue Book of Advertising":
"We all have a tendency to call the most expensive or most well-known vendors."
It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of simplicity in marketing.
Claude Hopkins practically invented modern copywriting. In "Scientific Advertising", he uses short sentences and simple words to lay out his philosophy of copywriting.
Short sentences, simple words, direct communication.
The famous UCA (Unique Competitive Advantage) or USP (Unique Selling Proposition) are what makes you, your product or service DIFFERENT (and valuable).
Good marketing differentiates publics. It's called market segmentation. How do all the people out there split up - by age, income, geography and so on - and which of them are the best prospects? How do you best approach different publics?
Slogans, logos, color schemes, all are as much about differentiating as anything else. The FIRST thing we do in designing a print ad is to look at the context / competition. For example, we recently designed a Yellow Pages ad for a dentist. When we examined other ads in last year's book, they were all red and blue. So our ad is green.
If you can't differentiate, you can't get noticed.
The best statement answer ever, about marketing during a recession. Sergio Zyman in "The End of Marketing as We Know it":
"When a market, or an economy, goes into a tailspin, the first thing you should do is resist the temptation to cut spending. Not only should you keep spending in times of turmoil in order to keep from losing customers, but you should also realize that times of turmoil are great growth opportunities.
"For one thing, when people are confused and don't know what to think, it's a great time for you to tell them. For another, most of your competitors will probably cut spending when things are unsettled, and that gives you the chance to increase your market share."
Usually, after a while, a marketing campaign becomes less and less effective.
When that's been going on long enough to clearly establish a trend, it becomes essential to DO SOMETHING before it really crashes and seriously affects sales.
Unfortunately the first tendency is often to decide that the market is saturated. Meaning that everyone has heard of your product and everyone who would buy it, already is buying or has bought it.
It's almost never true. In fact, in my years in marketing and the business world, I've never yet seen it true.
So what could be going on?
1. Maybe your campaign has run so long that people turn it off mentally. They see the ad or the commercial start to run and they go, "oh yeah, that." Time to develop new ads.
2. Perhaps the consuming public has shifted. Maybe what was the chief appeal which worked for years is no longer what's chief in their mind. They care less and less about how much it costs and more and more about how fast you answer the phone. A good survey will find out.
3. Maybe competition has gotten energetic and is stealing market share. It is always wise to pay attention to what your competition is up to. Sometimes they get clever.
4. Sometimes the marketing channel you are using goes out of fashion. One company's buying public wasn't reading industry magazines any more. So of course magazine ads were working less and less well.
This has been happening with the Yellow Pages over the last few years, in almost every type of business. Again, a survey will find it out.
There can be other explanations. The point is that "The Market is Saturated" isn't an explanation. It's an excuse. So when you see your marketing being less and less effective - poorer and poorer ROI (Return on Investment) - the first thing to do is NOT to decide what is happening.
The first thing to do is LOOK. Investigate. Research. Survey.
People would never buy a $2000 used car thinking they were getting something "just as good as a new Lexus."
They'd never buy a $25 clock radio at Wal-Mart thinking they were getting the equal of a $15,000 Bang & Olufsen system.
No one would spend $150 on a painting made in China, figuring it was the investment equivalent of an original Picasso.
What's my point? People do this sort of thing every day in purchasing websites.
Websites built on $50 templates, $39.95 off-the-shelf Content Management Systems, made in India for $395, or with do-it-yourself programs are NOT the equal of a custom designed, professionally built website. Not for the search engines and not for the visitor experience.
So why do people do it? I believe this is the fault of marketers themselves.
Most businessmen have spent big bucks repeatedly for websites (or other marketing services) that were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread and instead turned out to be more like moldy crusts. A big disappointment to say the least. Under-performers, delivered late and over-budget.
Marketing companies for decades have carefully explained to their clients that there is no way to measure the effectiveness of what they do.
Is it any wonder that people rebel? If you're going to waste money, it might as well be a small amount. Maybe you'll get lucky. Is it any wonder, given the abysmal track record of most marketers, that people take action into their own hands? They can't do any worse!
I'm not actually trying to convince you NOT to purchase our services.
There IS such as thing as PROFESSIONAL marketing.
The problem is telling when you've found it.
Unlike most industries, there's no easy simple way to tell.
If you go to a Lexus dealer, and buy a vehicle with 0 miles on the odometer, with Lexus on the nameplate, you know you are going to be getting a reliable, well-engineered prestige car.
If you buy World Series tickets from Ticketmaster, you know you won't be turned away at the ballpark because your tickets are fake.
This is a problem peculiar to service professions. How do you know if a lawyer is a good one? An accountant or a financial adviser.
Oh yeah, most financial advisers turned out to be incompetent.
Do what you have to, to establish you are dealing with competent, professional marketers.
I've repeatedly commented on the differences between marketing for large and small companies.
Here's one: large corporations can afford to waste millions of dollars on a failed marketing campaign. They can even deliberately launch, and promote with tens of millions of dollars, a new product with the intention of it failing. Sergio Zyman, formerly head of marketing for Coke, famous claims they did that with Tab Clear.
Small businessmen need their marketing to work. Every dollar is precious. More importantly, the business that doesn't materialize when a marketing campaign fails, can be the difference between life and death for a company, or between prosperity and hanging on by a thread.
Most marketing vendors DON'T deliver, or succeed only intermittently. They survive, even flourish based on a few notable successes, or on smoke and mirrors.
Is it any wonder that small businessmen are chronically frustrated and suspicious at any marketing company or scheme that comes their way?
And yet, you keep trying, don't you.
Because one thing successful small businessmen know: There is no choice. You HAVE to market.
And of course, that is why this blog (and my upcoming book), is called "Market or Die".
I've commented on the difficulty of surveying for pricing. One reason for that is pricing is not an absolute.
The only measure of value for a product or service is what someone is willing to pay for it. If you can change that, you can charge more.
It is one of the major jobs of marketing (and PR) to make people willing to spend more money for the same product or service.
Why do people pay $100 for a pair of designer jeans? Is the fabric so much better than a $20 pair you buy in Wal-Mart?
Why do flacks (Publicists) work their tails off to get your book on Oprah or Madonna to wear your hats? It isn't just the exposure. People will pay more for a product endorsed or used by a celebrity.
The easiest way to increase your bottom line is to raise your prices without reducing your sales volume.
"Easy?" you say. "We're in a recession!"
So What.
Get clever.
In almost every industry and business, there are opportunities being missed to enhance the value of products and services in the eyes of the prospective buyer.
In many businesses, the most neglected marketing resource is their own loyal customers.
I've written recently about referrals and word-of-mouth. But there are many non-traditional ways to utilize your customer base to help spread the word.
Here's one example. If you established a forum as part of your website, and let your customers as well as others post to it, you might:
1. Improve your search engine rankings because of the large quantity of content added to the site.
2. Your customers may evangelize about your products or customer service - building third party trust.
3. They may tell you about problems or desirable improvements.
4. Prospective customers might find answers to more of their questions, questions you may never have thought of or haven't had time to address with your website.
All this without you having to lift a finger, if the system is well-designed.
There are other ways to utilize them too. Software companies and consultants often sponsor webinars run by their clients. It doesn't get better than that.
This is worth thinking about. Not all ways to utilize a customer base, make sense for all businesses. But they do more often than you might think.
My recent post about social network marketing describes a useful way to think about this subject.
From advertising for the game "Battleship." Blow up of a corner of the image below. From a kinder, gentler time when war was Man's Work (even if it was a game) and Woman's Place Was In The Kitchen (Yes, ladies, I'm being sarcastic).
If you are doing any marketing or sales at all, you are in the business of building trust.
But who or what do people trust?
The following data is from Forrester Research based on a survey of online consumers.
Not surprisingly, a friend or acquaintance who has used the product, service or company ranks highest - trusted by 83%.
Reviews in newspapers, magazines or on TV are next, trusted by 75%.
But here's a surprise: The third most trusted source of information is a manufacturer's website, at 69%. Now, perhaps that doesn't translate fully to services sales, but it emphasizes the importance of having INFORMATION, lots of information on your website.
Expert reviews, consumer reviews, blogs and discussion boards all rank lower.
To continue yesterday's post, referrals are an extremely valuable source of new business.
First of all, they are nearly free. No expensive advertising. Maybe some staff time, maybe some rewards or commissions for referrals, maybe a sign in the office or a mailing or email blast to your customer base. If you're really ambitious, some kind of forum or user's group. That's about it.
Secondly, someone who comes to you through referral is MUCH more likely to turn into a customer. Why? People trust referrals WAY more than they trust advertising.
In almost every business, actions to encourage referrals have a better ROI (Return on Investment) than advertising. In fact, many businesses survive, even flourish on referrals and word of mouth alone.
Really, the only reason for advertising and promotions is when you can't get enough new business through referrals and word of mouth.
Tomorrow: So what are the statistics on trust? Which do people trust more, information on your website versus expert reviews? Be prepared for some surprises.
Everyone knows that referrals and word of mouth generate the best prospects. Ones where the trust is already well established and the sale is easy.
Given that fact it is amazing how few companies have vigorous programs to increase referrals and generate "buzz" about their company, products or services.
Let's carefully distinguish between these two things. "Referral" is a person telling another person about you and recommending you. I'll talk more about this tomorrow.
"Word of Mouth" is people talking about you. It isn't necessarily person-to-person. It isn't necessarily a recommendation. But it spreads awareness and helps to build a reputation.
People talk about a "buzz", they are referring to just that. There is NOTHING better than a buzz about one's product or service. This is so true that it is almost impossible for an author to get his first best seller any other way. That's why everyone wants their book mentioned by Oprah. Instant buzz, instant bestseller.
Not every business, product or service is amenable to creating a buzz. The fact is, many of them are just too ordinary to generate any excitement.
BUT you'd be surprised. Here's a great example from "Groundswell" an excellent book on the use of Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other "new social technologies".
Blendtec is a company that makes super-robust blenders. They did a series of videos using their blenders to grind up all sorts of things - an iPhone for example.
That spread across the Net like wildfire of course, and gave their sales a huge boost.
Of course, the most basic word of mouth is simply happy customers talking up your products or services. So you'd better make sure your customers ARE happy.
But it's worth sitting down and trying to come up with something, a bright idea and a way to spread it.
Realize it has got to be GOOD or it'll never get noticed. But it can be done. People are doing it every day.
The title is a bit of a gag. This post doesn't have anything to do with pesticides or sustainability. Or the presence of carbon atoms in the molecule (Marketing molecules? Hunh? Look it up) .
What I'm talking about is this: The best marketing is organic to the organization's philosophy and its operations.
In other words, you don't come up with a look, tagline, logo, copy only by reference to survey or what you think is going to appeal to the market. You have to start with who the company is, what they do, how people feel about their products or services, what the owner or founder or management is trying to accomplish, and what is called "company culture."
Yes, as with any art, you have to consider the reality of and what will appeal to the consuming public. Otherwise you die a starving, unknown artist. But all great art comes as much from the heart and soul of the creator as from the world around it.
Marketing that isn't organic to the entire company is always going to be at least a bit phony and impersonal and thereby less effective.
When you design a piece, it's always a good idea to step back before you finalize it and see if there is any crucial information missing.
Just today, I received a mailed postcard, and picked up a flyer at my gym. I'm interested in both of their offerings. Yet the information necessary to act is completely missing in one case, and vital information missing in the other.
What would you do with a postcard mailing for a new sandwich shop that didn't include its address, phone number or website?
Oh yes, and the place is called "Quicky's" thus violating one of the basic rules of naming. It left me thinking "Yes, I like quick service, but what's the name of the place?" I turned the card over twice before I realized that was the name.
If I wasn't interested in the marketing, it would have been in the garbage before then. After carefully studying the card, I found the only way to learn more was by going to the website "superguarantee.com".
I won't even tell you what happened when I TRIED to FIND the place on that website.
Puh-leeze.
The flyer from my gym was barely better than that. It promotes a new add-on service available by web, but while it gives the name of the service (which enabled me to find the website) it didn't give any information on how to sign up and whether it costs anything.
Unbelievable.
I guess that would be okay if it was intended only as a teaser, except the service is promoted as available NOW. Well, guess what, I want it NOW.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
No matter what you sell, or who you sell to, there are two words that should be the starting point of your branding.
This is as close to a universal as you'll find in marketing. We've verified it by market research in different industries and areas of the country and these always come out high on the list of what buyers care about.
Friendly and Professional. Professional and Friendly.
1. Friendly: Why would someone want to do business with someone who is unfriendly, cold or impersonal?
They wouldn't.
You may think that other factors such as price, convenience and product features, trump friendliness. In many cases, if everything about your company and it's offerings DOESN'T say "friendly", you'll never even get to the point of telling your prospect about your prices or what's special about your product. And you'd be amazed at how often someone will pay more because they liked you.
This isn't just consumer marketing either. After all, if you are selling to a business, you are really selling to individuals in that company, aren't you?
By the way: You can't fake being friendly. If you don't actually like people, don't go into business. And don't hire people who don't like people. But even if you and all your staff are the friendliest people on Earth, you can still have a website or other marketing that doesn't communicate it.
2. Professional: Who wants to purchase from an amateur? People want competence, quality, good service, prompt delivery as promised, and so on - everything that differentiates a professional from an amateur.
Whether or not your business is a profession - such as dentist or attorney - your practice or firm can communicate professionalism in every aspect. Or it may not.
Your office decor, the way the phone is answered, the look of your website - every point of contact between you and your prospective customers, clients or patients, either says "professional" or it doesn't.
Examine your company's touch points with the public. Do they all communicate that you are friendly and professional? If not, you have work to do.
Unfortunately there are quite a few businesses where laws or regulations severely limit or prohibit the use of testimonials. Dentists in most states are prohibited by their state boards from any promotion stating they are better than any other dentist. We can't have that!
SEC regulated activities (financial planners and investment funds for example) are also severely regulated in that regards.
Many states have laws requiring specifically worded notices when offering free or discounted items in advertising.
The U.S. federal CAN-SPAM law has requirements for any commercial email, such as including your company name and address.
Sending un-solicited faxes is a violation of federal law.
Telemarketing to home phone numbers on the "Do Not Call" registry is illegal.
Know the laws and regulations that apply to your marketing efforts.
One of the most powerful tools of marketing is third-party endorsements. This is anything coming from someone other than yourselves. It can speak to your effectiveness, professionalism, great customer service, fair-pricing or any other positive attribute. Sometimes all it communicates is their enthusiasm.
The point of course, it's not just you saying it. It's someone else and that enhances the credibility.
If you know your customers' buttons (what motivates them) endorsements that mention or refer to them are particularly effective. "Finally an auto dealer I can trust!" "I couldn't believe how low their prices were" "Thanks Joe for showing up on-time and doing a great job on my plumbing!"
One key to improving your marketing ROI (Return On Investment) is targeting. The more precisely your marketing is targeted to prospective buyers, the less money is wasted on people who aren't going to respond.
With almost any business, geography is a key factor in this.
For example, in our business, 90% of the prospects that find us on the Internet, and end up becoming clients, are located in Tampa Bay. So we run click ads only to the Tampa Bay metropolitan area.
The geographical point-of-diminishing-returns - where it is no longer cost effective to market - varies widely and wildly from industry to industry and in some cases within an industry and in different locales.
For example, for general dentistry, the vast majority of your patients are going to live or work within 10 or 15 minutes of your office. But in rural areas, that can increase. It can also increase if yours is a specialty practice, such as natural dentistry or high-end cosmetic work.
You can often find out where to concentrate your marketing simply by examining where, geographically, the bulk of your past customers come from.
It isn't that potentially you can't market or develop a market elsewhere. It is that would be experimental, maybe wishful thinking. The best first place to concentrate marketing to, is almost always where your customers have been coming from.
Effective marketing has to lead potential prospects through a series of baby steps.
Only with low priced items - within the so-called "discretionary spending" band, usually considered to be around $15 or less - can you go from informing a prospect of the existence of your product, all the way to a sale, all in one step.
Of course there are the exceptions. The NFL draftee who just got his signing bonus, walks into a Mercedes showroom, falls in love with an SLR Mclaren and plunks down the $500K on the spot.
That misses the much higher percentage who have to be walked up to purchasing bit by bit.
Any effort to improve your new business development efforts should involve a careful analysis of where this process can be improved. If a step is weak or missing, a large percentage of your prospects are going to be lost right there. Instead of making it to the top of the stairs, they'll end up in the basement. And you'll have wasted a lot of your marketing investment in "first contacts."
We call this the marketing chain because, like real-world chains, it is only as strong as its weakest link.
How much persistence does it take to succeed in a business venture?
As much as it takes.
The more brilliant you are, the more resources you have to get it off the ground, the luckier you are, the more you are in the right place at the right time with the right product or service, the faster it'll be.
But it always takes as long and as much as it takes.
If you have any other thought in mind, don't bother starting a business.
"Synergy" means two or more things working together to cause a bigger or better effect. It's "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" and it is very true in marketing.
So a direct mail campaign, ads in trade magazines, a website with good Search Engine Optimization, email broadcasts to prospects and clients, and a good trade show display, can add up to effective business-to-business marketing in a particular niche.
Door hangers, billboards and small ads in local papers, plus a good website, can add up to effective consumer marketing.
It's a major reason that we constantly preach consistency across all marketing materials, items and actions. Only if the prospect can recognize the different elements as coming from the same source do you get the synergistic effect.
Otherwise they are likely to tell you "oh yes, I saw one of your competitor's ads the other day" - when they are actually talking about your ad.
Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing, is a lousy writer. Also about half of what he says is filler and half the rest is baloney.
He does make important and valuable points. And his book, besides the catchy title, was a breakthrough book on small business marketing.
You've seen me write about differences between marketing at the Fortune 500 level and in the typical small business. That's what Guerilla Marketing is all about. It's about being fast and flexible, innovative and smart.
One thing he says that I disagree with and have disagreed with often: That the small businessman can't afford to guess wrong in his marketing.
The chances are small that anyone is going to hit a home run the first time at bat with their marketing. So let's not set an impossible goal.
The small businessman can't afford marketing that HAS to work.
If you have to get something working RIGHT NOW, you'd better do half a dozen things at a small level. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. See which of them works, then pour the coals on that.
It's common to have an approach that's highly reliable, but requires time and refinement. Internet marketing is like that. You take your best shot at the website design, construction and content, and at the search engines.
Then you spend anywhere from a couple of months to a year, tweaking things to a point where it is really humming. So best if you have some time to make it all work, not that you are going out of business if it doesn't succeed RIGHT NOW.
The choice really comes down to a small number of key factors:
1. Repetition. Only pick channels where you can afford enough repetition to get noticed. This is why television commercials are a bad idea for most small businesses.
2. Targeting. The more targeted a marketing channel is, to the market segment (particular people) you are trying to reach, the more cost effective it will usually be. The right trade show can get you almost 100% targeting - everyone attending is a prospective customer.
But if you're selling products aimed at deaf senior citizens, running a newspaper ad, you are paying for every copy of that newspaper that's going to someone who isn't deaf and isn't a senior.
3. Believability. Some marketing channels aren't going to be useful because the target market just won't believe a message coming to them in that fashion.
This isn't always what you would expect. We found for example that door hangers were a believable channel for delivering a message about non-traditional treatments for allergies.
Whereas ads in a Podiatry magazine were NOT a believable channel for a message about a new product for foot doctors. Their consideration was "it's just an ad."
4. Reach. It doesn't matter how many theoretical impressions you get if the people you are trying to reach aren't going to see them. You can mail postcards to Podiatrists till you go bankrupt. Which you will, because by survey, Podiatrists receptionists all have instructions to throw away all "junk mail."
Now that's easy isn't it?
Follow these four points and you'll be MUCH more likely to come up with an effective way to market your products or services.
What's going to happen in the marketing world over the next months and years?
Even the best don't get it right every time. When Al Ries made a bunch of predictions in 2002 on the future of the Internet, the word Google doesn't even appear (Google started in 1998). He also predicted that search engines would decline in importance.
Of course, he got a lot of other things right, such as the decline of print Yellow Pages and other printed catalogs and directories.
So. What's in store for us?
I predict it will be interesting.
(Is there a lesson in this? Of course: Stay alert.)
There is an enormous tendency for people to do what other people are doing in marketing.
There are several forces driving this, not the least of which is, an assumption that someone else knows what they are doing.
A lot of the time it just isn't so.
The fact that it is being done by a multi-billion dollar corporation doesn't mean it is even vaguely sensible.
There's another point.
If everyone is doing "A", how are you going to be noticed if you also do "A"?
The success of a Steve Jobs in repeatedly revitalizing Apple and launching blockbuster products, comes in part from NOT doing what everyone else is doing.
"But the highest form of strategic thinking is to first look at your situation with a cold eye." - Al Ries, "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding."
A lot of companies are in difficult economic, sales and marketing situations right now.
Don't despair.
We see businesses shutting their doors left and right. Just in the last couple of weeks, one of the larger printers in the area, Evatone, gave up the ghost.
What does that mean? Opportunities for others!
Like the man says, dealing with the current scene starts with a cold hard look at what exactly that scene is.
It usually takes hard work, smarts and persistence to thrive in a tough economy.
Many are doing it.
And hear is the plug: Effective marketing is usually a vital part of it.
I keep referring to the writings of Al Ries because the guy really is a marketing genius.
And he has a lot to say about names.
One point he makes over and over is that a name can doom a product or company.
If your name means or stands for one thing, but you are selling something else, you have no hope of getting people to buy into that.
We went through this with one client, handling a major situation by establishing a second name. They needed to retain their original name because that was still a huge part of their business, plus they were extremely well known in their immediate geographical area. The new, second name was related to the first, which made sense in this case.
Most of the time, where you have a going concern, and another, related business area or product to establish, the new name should be completely distinct from the first. People think they can translate the familiarity and popularity of the one product or business area into the other. It usually isn't true.
This is something that really needs to be carefully thought out. Ries gives numerous examples of disasters that have happened that way - and the successes are few. We applied this with a new, related venture for a client with an established business. The new name is unique, based on positioning surveys, and says what the product does.
The third type of situation is illustrated by another real company we know of. That company's name gives people (by survey, over 90%) a wrong impression of what the company is and does, but they have very little brand equity (less than 10% awareness in their target market).
There's no reason why they simply shouldn't abandon the current name and establish a new one that is more appropriate to what they do. Or, come up with a name that doesn't mean anything ("Smith and Associates") and use a tagline to say what they do. Either one would be better.
If you're marketing's a flop, you might start by looking at the name.
Probably the first thoughtful choice in marketing is a color scheme.
There are certain color basics which pretty much any graphic designer will handle well - which is to make sure the combination of colors used work together. This is easy because digital color palettes are so easily available and everyone knows about them.
But there are several other aspects to choosing a color combination which are equally important.
One is appropriateness. Primary colors (bright red, blue, yellow) work for material aimed at younger children - but not when targeting any other age group. Cool colors like blue and green don't work when you are trying to communicate excitement. Certain colors are associated with certain industries - like green with health care and with the environment.
But another consideration is so important that according to at least one marketing guru, it trumps appropriateness. That is, if you are #2 (or trying to be) in an area dominated by one main competitor, your color scheme should contrast with theirs. Likewise, if you have a fragmented competitive environment, but most of the competition are all using the same color scheme, it would probably pay off to use colors that are in sharp contrast to theirs.
Certain subjects I keep coming back to. One is the contrast between marketing for small businesses versus large corporations.
Most of the important books on marketing were written with large corporations in mind.
The small businessman is prey to every marketing shark that comes along, peddling smoke-and-mirrors. That's not just some new Internet marketing scheme. Look at the local commercials coming over cable TV. Most of them are blatantly terrible. They were produced by the cable companies or TV stations as part of some deal that sounded great, only $3000 a month for a year. The advertisers might as well have tied that $36,000 to a brick and tossed it in the Gulf.
You don't have to become a marketing expert yourself. But the average small businessman really does need to know more about the subject.
Al Ries, marketing god that he is, virtually all of his writing is addressed to how the world looks from where the large corporation CEO sits. You need to understand branding and positioning, and there's no better starting point than straight from the horse's mouth. But you have to understand how to apply it in your situation! It's not going to be the same.
The Guerilla Marketing books are terrific. If you haven't read any of Jay Levinson's books, they can be a real eye opener on how to market without a big budget.
And of course, read this blog.
The small businessman doesn't have to be a marketing sucker or a marketing failure.
ROI is a finance concept which is under-applied in the marketing world.
Money you spend on marketing should return more in profits (not just sales) than what you spend on it.
There are two reasons it's often a neglected concept:
1. It can be difficult to measure. For example, how do you determine ROI for a billboard, when it is just part of your marketing mix?
2. Incompetent marketers discourage metrics by exaggerating the problems of #1.
Yet there is no path to long-term growth and prosperity for a business, that doesn't involve cost-effective marketing, good product or service quality and smooth customer service and delivery.
I wanted to focus on one of the first things you need to consider when contemplating your marketing.
Size matters.
The entire approach to marketing depends on budget.
It also depends on the size of the market and your share of it.
Proctor & Gamble, with almost infinitely deep pockets, has a many times repeated pattern of success with new products. They don't trade on their name. They do heavy market research, then develop a positioning to exploit what they determine to be a hole in the market. That dictates the product name, ads, everything. They then test it all in a few representative areas, with heavy advertising expenditures. If it works out, or after refinement, they roll it out nationally - again with heavy exposure.
Now contrast that to the common small business situation. First of all, you don't have the budget. Secondly, you are probably competing in a business where there is no market leader to position yourselves against. Quick, name the three most well-known website design companies in your town. Or dentists.
So you can't and don't try to position yourselves in relation to competitors. You have to find something to compare to that makes sense, that will be immediately familiar to your prospective customers, is memorable and will instantly react on them with the desirable association. In that case, the position is often not "against" (as in "7-up, the Un-Cola" or "We're No.2, We Try Harder"), but is more often "like" what you are comparing to.
We're positioned using Mona Lisa - which expresses the aspects of class, beauty and unforgettableness we try and achieve with our work.
We positioned a client of ours, who sells computer backup and recovery software, with EMT's - the guys who roll out with lights flashing and sirens screaming when someone is having a heart attack.
Childish enthusiasm has a bad rep in the world of adults.
Yet almost everyone who has become a huge success is guilty of it.
Why else would someone try and try and try again until they succeed? And what else would make it fun to do so? "It's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game" may be an exaggeration but it has more than a grain of truth to it.
Because very rarely does someone strike it rich on the first try. There are many stories, how It took Edison 1000 tries to come up with a practical light bulb, Abraham Lincoln lost several elections, etc. etc.
It's true in marketing too!
It didn't work? So what! Get another idea! Try again! Enjoy yourself!
Good marketing is a collaboration between client and marketing vendor. The vendor knows marketing. The client knows his business, industry and customers.
In my experience, bad marketing has two sources:
1. Clients who don't know anything about marketing but insist on overriding the vendor's recommendations.
2. Marketing vendors who don't know anything about marketing.
Neither of these is on the endangered species list.
What's the first and easiest mistake most people make?
They look at what other people in their industry are doing and decide to do that too.
Whether it is the look of a website, the fact that your competitors are doing billboards, or the kind of slogan or tagline you use, this is rarely a good idea.
The fact is, the chances are small that what your competitors are doing is sensible.
We see this over and over again when we're working in an industry new to us. We survey what others in that field are doing. It is usual to find similarities that make no sense, aren't working and can only be credited to people imitating each other.
Hideously conflicting colors (classic car parts).
Overly complicated website navigation (zoo and aquarium websites).
Taglines that say nothing and do nothing for the business (almost anybody).
Direct mail invitations to free dinners (financial advisors).
Don't think that huge companies are immune to this kind of thing. There are reasons why General Motors went down the tubes - and those reasons have more to do with marketing idiocies than anything else.
Don't make yourself a victim of "me-too" marketing.
TLA is the abbreviation for "Three-Letter Abbreviation." Cute, because it's a TLA itself.
This post is about naming companies, products and services. It's a deep subject and one reason is because the same rules don't always apply - in fact, they can be exact opposites depending on whether you are trying to name something already very well known, a new product service or company, a brand new type of product, etc.
One pretty universal rule is don't use a TLA. Or a two or four letter abbreviation for that matter.
Ries and Trout in their classic "Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind" argue persuasively that the ONLY time a name abbreviation makes sense is when the product or company is already extremely well-known, the full-name is not abandoned and continues to makes sense, and the abbreviation is easier on the ears, shorter when spoken, and more memorable.
That's a lot of conditions. And I can think of an exception - 3M. But those are few and far between.
It works for "IBM." But you can think of the tons of cases where it hasn't worked out.
In this case, McDonald's heavy promotion of their McCafe launch has increased the amount of gourmet coffee being purchased, not just at McDonald's. It actually increased Starbucks same-store sales.
This is not an unusual story.
A rising tide raises all boats. You can't be the leader if there aren't any followers.
So, in case you aren't overdosed yet on cliches, "Bring it!"
One of the key metrics (statistics) used in the marketing world is "impressions." This it the (theoretical) number of eyeball-pairs (or pairs of ears) that are going to see (or hear) your marketing message.
That "theoretical" is there because you can't really know. One glossary gives the definition as the number of people who have the opportunity to see your ad. But do they?
You place an ad in a magazine that has a circulation of 250,000. Your ad is on page 32. How many of those 250,000 copies are ever opened to page 32?
5000 postcards go out to Dentists. How many of them are thrown away by the Front Desk, never get seen by the Office Manager let alone the Doctor?
The same applies to most forms of marketing. People go to get a snack during the TV commercials, never look up as they drive past the billboard.
One reason the Internet keeps rising in importance in the marketing world, its version of impressions is actually pretty accurate. If your stats program is properly designed, 2000 page views means that page was on someone's screen 2000 times.
"Properly designed" means it has to detect and eliminate from its count, visits by robots (search engines visiting the site to index it, plus various types of spammers and hackers). One problem with free stats programs is none of them do this well.
So take impressions as a raw number that has to be interpreted in order to judge its value. Of course that starts with are you reaching the correct public? You sell to companies with vehicle fleets. A mailing list of companies that own 5 or more vehicles, is going to be a lot more useful than one of any old company of any size.
An ad in a paid magazine will always get more actual views per thousand impressions, than a similar free magazine. Why? You're paying for it, you're likely to read more of it. Plus impressions in free magazines and newspapers are simply the number of copies printed, who knows if anyone ever even picks them all up.
Then there's placement. Two billboards may be located on the same stretch of road, and hence, get the same number of impressions. But one is located directly in Northbound drivers' line of sight. The other is way off angle for any driver.
An ad on the back cover of a magazine is going to be seen by a lot more people than one on an interior page, towards the back, with no article on the page or its opposite page. In fact, a back cover ad will often be seen by more people than the circulation, because someone doesn't necessarily have to read or even pick up the magazine to see the ad.
Oh yeah, and impressions can be falsified. I know of a magazine - no longer in existence, no surprise there - in which ads never seemed to produce results. Turns out the publisher was lying about the number of copies he was printing and distributing.
So impressions is a useful concept. But it's only a starting point.
In Pinellas and Hillsborough County, virtually all the billboards are owned by two companies, Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor. That becomes less true when you get into some of the outlying areas, such as going up US 19 into Pasco and Hernando Counties.
If you're looking for boards in Clearwater, for example, you have only two companies to call.
In other areas, sometimes the only way to find out who owns boards is to drive the area and note down names and phone numbers off of the boards.
An important term in billboard rental is "avails", short for "availables." The fact that a board has or hasn't got advertising on it tells you nothing about whether or not it is available next month or not till next year or whatever. So first narrow down where you want to be placed, then see what is available, then see if there's anything suitable for when you are looking to start your campaign, and at a price that makes sense.
Sometimes you get surprised. Don't try and rent a billboard in Springhill for example. There aren't any.
Also, you can't decide to advertise today and have a board up tomorrow. Your ad has to be designed, printed, and put up (which can't be done when its raining). So figure a minimum of 3 weeks from when you say "go" to when your board goes up.
We get a lot of calls for billboards, mainly because we show up high on search engine rankings in the Tampa Bay area.
Most of those calls are from people who have never done billboard advertising and are looking to find out some of the basics - what do they cost, what's the process, etc.
The first thing to know about billboards is they don't work well by themselves. Why? By their nature they can't get across a complete message.
Someone has to be able to grasp a billboard from a distance and very quickly. So the amount of material that can go on them is very limited. Traditionally, the rule is no more than 7 words and one image to a board. That's enough to get across a tagline or slogan and maybe contact info.
So you can only use them as part of an advertising campaign. Essentially, they are a reminder or reinforcer of what you are pushing with the rest of your advertising. They can, however, work extremely well as part of a well thought-out campaign.
Choosing the right location or locations is critical. As with all advertising, you want as much as possible to reach your target market and no one else. You are paying for impressions (number of people who drive past the billboard) whether they are potential buyers or not.
We love boards visible to drivers stopped at traffic lights, where traffic jams at rush hour, or placed on a curve so visible to drivers looking straight ahead.
You have to drive the locations to see what the placement is really like. The photos provided by the billboard owners don't always tell the tale. Maybe a tree grew out since they photographed the board and now half blocks the view (I didn't just make that up. We've seen that exact scenario more than once).
One big plus of billboards is the repetition factor is built in. Most people who drive past a billboard today are going to drive past it tomorrow and the next day or next week, because they go past it every time they go to work, or shopping, or to church.
Pricing also varies widely, depending on the size, placement, amount of traffic, etc. A bulletin (the largest boards, usually 48 feet long), extremely well placed on a busy Interstate, could go for upwards of $10,000 per month. A smaller board in an out of the way location could be $300 a month. This category also includes bus kiosk and bus bench signage - which can be very inexpensive.
If you have print, TV and/or radio advertising that's working, billboards can be a profitable addition to your marketing mix. It's worth considering.
Just as musicians don't much need record labels any more, authors don't much need publishers any more. It's that Internet that's made all the difference.
Even if you have a publisher, they probably aren't going to do much to market or publicize your book unless you are already a best-selling author or you are already famous.
If you self-publish, you definitely are going to have to market it yourself.
So how do you market a book? There is a successful pattern:
1. Build a good, professional website for the book that includes a picture of the cover, biographical info and photos of the author, reviews and one or more downloadable excerpts. The site then either has a store or sends people to Amazon.com, etc. to purchase.
2. Build traffic to the site through social networking and publicity.
Now that is a very simple formula, and I think, pretty obvious. The oddity is that few authors actually do it.
The fact is, CI is only a part of a broader subject - the marketing environment.
It is the height of folly to try and market something without studying the environment into which you are trying to market.
Besides the competition and what they are doing, it includes the potential target markets, and everything useful you can find out about them. It includes potential marketing channels, their pluses and minuses.
The amount of study you can do or must do varies. But I'll give you an example of an absolute minimum. If you are doing a Yellow Page ad, study last year's book, the section or possible sections into which your ad might go.
What other ads are running, and what do they look like, how big are they? What colors do they use? Do they use pictures of people? What buttons are they trying to push?
But also, if I run different sized ads, where can I expect them to be placed? What is the potential if I run two smaller ads instead of one larger one?
Another example. Planning a direct mail campaign to dentists, I had a dentist friend save two weeks worth of junk mail. Not just competitive junk mail, ALL junk mail. Then I knew what to do to get noticed amongst the garbage.
This is VERY fruitful in terms of improving the effectiveness of a marketing effort.
I long wondered who was the real genius between Al Ries and Jack Trout. In partnerships like that it is usually one or the other, not both.
Well, I've read some books Ries has written without Trout and they are all Gems.
Now I'm reading Jack Trout's "The New Positioning" and wow! The book is wall-to-wall psycho-babble. I'm having to read the book with a highlighter and mark the one sentence per page, on average, which isn't a complete waste of paper and ink. And my time.
A term used in several arts, including in marketing, is "voice." People refer to an "authentic voice", "consistent voice", "believable voice", etc.
This isn't just the sound of a person speaking. It is the tone, flavor, personality that comes across in written, spoken, or graphic communications. It is a part of branding.
If you are selling to rural Southerners, would you want to sound like a Harvard professor? Probably not. If you are selling Caribbean vacations, do you want to sound like a California surfer? I don't think so.
In spoken communications, It isn't just about accent. Choice of words and grammar are vital, both in written and spoken communications.
But it starts with determining what an appropriate voice would be.
That is a matter of appropriateness, believability, and domination.
1. What kind of voice is appropriate, both to the product or service being sold, the market it is being sold to, and other aspects of the branding?
2. What kind of voice would be most believable, delivering the message you are trying to get across.
3. What kind of voice tends to dominate in that market and for that type of product and service, meaning, it's communications tend to be taken as orders?
For example, in the U.S., an upper-class British accent, spelling, grammar and word choice tend to dominate. That's not true across the boards but it is surprisingly universal. I don't know why that is - but notice how often commercials use a British accented speaker. Funny, but in the U.K. it's the reverse - a brash American voice dominates.
Listen for the voice in marketing. I think you'll find it enlightening.
One of the challenges for small businesses is building a brand identity despite not having the budget to "do it right."
You could easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just on research and design. Just a logo design can cost that much!
The good news is that you can get a very usable brand identity on a relative shoestring. The challenge often comes at the other end - at the marketing company which has been hired perhaps to design and build a new website.
If the client doesn't have an established look to their materials, one that properly represents the company and does the job it needs to, then branding is going to be a part of that website project. That is true whether the client or even the designer is aware of it.
When you are establishing the look of a website, you are either creating a portion of that company's brand identity, or you are applying an existing brand identity to that particular instance. One or the other.
The development of a website look is, in most cases, a large portion, even a majority of the cost of a professional website development project.
Developing a look is more than art. It's a thoughtful exercise in marketing.
It's also one of the huge differences between a bargain priced website and a professional development.
Professional developers think marketing. Others think art, or "I like the way that looks."
Back in the dark ages of marketing, the 1960's, a Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan coined the expression "The Medium is the Message." For whatever reason that caught on and he became famous for it.
There is more than a grain of truth to it - though it is grossly exaggerated.
In this age of cynicism, twice-burnt consumers, over-hype and under-deliver, and a gazillion marketing messages a day, believability becomes huge.
It used to be you could make a statement about your product or service, back it up with pictures, testimonials, etc., and you were off and running.
There are still places in the world where advertising like that works.
The U.S. isn't one of them.
You always have to ask, what does it take for what I'm saying to be believable, and believed?
An important part of that is the medium. We see this every day and in many ways:
Joe is supposedly a successful businessman but drives a beat up 10-year-old car.
Fred sends out an email about how he can make you a millionaire. The email comes from a gmail account (free email).
A marketing company is promoting their expertise with postcards that were built using clip art.
Such elements as the kind of paper your message is printed on, the marketing channel used, all come into play.
The moral of the story is put yourself in the shoes of the person you're trying to reach, and ask, what would it take for me to believe you? What would make me disbelieve you.
Continuing my theme of Marketing - Good or Bad, do you realize that the concept of America was originally sold back in the late 18th Century?
If it wasn't for the series of 85 articles called "The Federalist Papers", probably there would be no U.S.A. There was significant opposition to the Constitution, and it might otherwise never have been ratified.
Everyone in the marketing world knows a company can make money more easily with good marketing and bad products or services, than the other way around. It's the old "just because you have a better mousetrap doesn't mean the world will beat a path to your door."
Whereas clever marketers CAN sell ice to Eskimos.
BUT.
Good quality products or services, and customer service, ARE the starting point of effective marketing.
Part of effective marketing is sustainability. That means return-on-investment: your marketing isn't too expensive for what it produces.
It also means the company doesn't have to pull up stakes and open business in another state because the police are on your tail.
I know, I know, I'm a dreamer. After all, who ever heard of ethics in a marketer?
But, like many other marketing companies, at Fast Forward we have a list of who we won't do business with. Besides certain specific types of businesses, like gambling and adult sites, that includes any business whose "success" is based on ripping off their customers.
Do you realize that good marketing helps the economy? When I say "good marketing" I mean "as opposed to evil marketing." I also very much mean EFFECTIVE marketing -- that creates desire, is informative and reaches the right people.
It improves the standard of living because people are more likely to buy something that does the job, instead of a bad or overpriced product that wastes their money.
Companies with good marketing don't waste sales and marketing dollars and so can bring their prices down or deliver more for the money.
Finally, it makes people WANT things, so they are more likely to spend money, and more likely to work harder to make more money so they can afford that shiny Corvette or new dress....
All an economy is, is the exchange of goods and services for money. The faster that occurs, the better the economy. When people are unsure about the future, hold onto what money they have (as they are now), or their money is being wasted (as by governments), the economy slows down.
When people look to the future, when their dreams overcome their doubts, the economy cranks up.
Amongst the freedoms we should celebrate this July 4th are the Freedom to Market.
I've been posting a lot lately about branding and about logos because of a book I'm reading, "Building Brand Identity" which is a fantastically competent, textbook really.
The interesting thing is, having gone through 2/3 of the book, learning a great deal, I come to the last 1/3 of the book which consists of many examples, illustrated and described.
Wow.
Here you have fantastic skill applied to the development of brand identity. What the book doesn't cover is what that rests on: the definition of the brand and how the brand identity should express that. They only describe a process for getting agreement.
This is where the whole subject often goes completely off the rails. I mean, nowhere in sight.
Three out of four of the examples could be classed as sheer foolishness based on their philosophical premises. Many times the brand identities still work because they are aesthetic, distinctive, set the right tone, and have all the mechanical characteristics of good branding in terms of clarity and usability across a wide range of media and applications.
But not all.
And that's where it ends. The common sense that is.
These are companies that have spent a fortune on re-branding. Cingular when it was created by a merger spent $200 million on its new brand launch. Accenture (the new name for the consulting company half of Arthur Andersen when it split from the accounting company) spent $160 million launching their new brand.
And yet they are doing stupid, stupid things.
I saw this recently when I judged the Sizzle Awards (a national trade show marketing competition). Fortune 500 multi-national corporations were spending as much as $900,000 for trade shows and being beaten out by companies spending $20,000.
I guess if there's any point here it's being big and spending lots of money doesn't mean you are doing anything sensible or going to succeed.
But I guess we knew that from the recent examples of General Motors and Fannie Mae.
Not to speak of the Federal Government.
Just to end on a positive note, the flip side of that is: You don't have to spend a fortune to achieve sensible and successful things with your brand.
Since I'm feeling philosophical, what's your feeling towards Marketing? Good? Evil? Evil turned towards Good Ends? A Mixed Bag? None of the Above?
The answer, of course, is "Yes."
Every day you see marketing skill turned to peddling scams. Get-rich-quick schemes with no hint of ethics or hope of success. Pharmaceutical companies peddling harmful, useless drugs. Politicians selling bad ideas and themselves.
Every day you see marketing skill turned to spreading good ideas and useful or fun, products and services.
Disney World. Stores that sell the goods you need at reasonable prices. Kindness. A really good cup of coffee.
Every day you see ads that are cute, fun, informative or uplifting.
Other forms of art have been used to serve Good or Evil. The Nazi's used Wagner's music. Soviet Russia had skilled artists designing posters to promote how wonderful life was in the Soviet Union.
So don't condemn marketing if you see it used for Evil or simply the banal.
Condemn the person who is turning their talent to the dark side.
One of the great gurus of sales, Les Dane, talks about "the brick overcoat" of sales resistance. Most people in most purchasing decisions look for reasons NOT to buy. These manifest as various forms of sales resistance. You have to remove those bricks (objections) to get the sale.
There is however a flip side to this. Most people don't want to have to keep looking. They are busy, they don't have the time. They already picked you out as a likely source for the item or service and don't want to have to change their minds. So what do you do?
Don't Make Them Look Elsewhere.
I put it in that form because this is something you can very definitely do something about. Assume the viewpoint that if people are leaving your website without buying, in greater numbers than necessary, then you are driving them off.
Companies that specialize in Online Marketing Research do in-depth studies of factors that make a difference. It is not random, you can find out what matters, and you can make adjustments to improve it.
You have to systematically examine each aspect of your marketing and sales operation.
Isolate the points where you are scaring people off, not giving them enough reassurance, or reasons to buy or stay on your website or to continue to fill out the form.
Any change you make in these that improve your process has a cumulative effect that can rapidly add up to a huge difference in closes or sales.
If you have all the business you can handle, need or want, then you don't need marketing. You just need to buy more houses or cars or whatever.
If you are ambitious, struggling (or sinking), then you need to do something about it. Kind of obvious, but maybe not so obvious is WHAT to do about it.
Improving the quality, speed and efficiency of your product or service delivery, and of your customer service, is always a good idea.
Promoting to your existing clients / customers / patients for more work or for referrals is usually the cheapest way to get more business.
But if those aren't sufficient, now you are into marketing. And for many small businesses, that is a whole new territory.
Huge numbers of small businesses have NEVER had a working new business development model. One that is scalable (can be increased at will) and viable (doesn't cost too much to generate a new customer).
This is especially a situation in the current economy, where lots of people, out of work, are starting their own home-based businesses. And where many companies can no longer rely on their usual methods to get enough new business.
People often are surprised at what it takes to develop one and keep it going. It's frequently a lot of work, time and trials to get there. We're really good at it, but it still doesn't mean our first efforts always work well. Or maybe they are singles and not home runs.
The main point is to recognize when you really need to confront getting your marketing going, and then to work at it and keep working at it until you DO get it working.
I mean, it's not like there's a lot of alternatives. In many cases it's that, or hunker down and hope to ride out the economic downturn, or shut your business and (hopefully) go to work for someone else.
Good quality photography is a major element of effective marketing. It is also one of the lacks we frequently run into in developing marketing for new clients.
Take a look at a slick consumer magazine. Which ads make you stop and look? Almost 100%, it'll be the ones with stunning imagery. The photographers who shoot watches for consumer advertising get big bucks because they can make you just drool and pant for that Cartier or Piaget.
It's often less of an issue if you're selling services rather than products. But great photos of the staff and office are a big plus for, to give an example, marketing a dental office.
One of the problems in all this is "professional photographers." First of all, you have to get someone who specializes in the type of photography you need. Wedding photography, portraiture, product and architectural photography require four very different skill sets.
Photographers, I'm afraid, are a bit like lawyers. They are expensive and the fact that they make their living at it doesn't mean they know what they are doing. But a really good photographer who DOES know his way around the type of photographs you need is worth his weight in gold.
I mean, wouldn't it be valuable to have your prospective customers drooling over the thought of owning YOUR product or having your service?
That being said, a lot of the photography needed for marketing doesn't require high high skill. It isn't that hard to learn the basics of good photography. With digital cameras, you can try lots of shots to get one you can use. You can buy inexpensive kits online you can use for product photography.
So you don't necessarily have to spend a fortune to get the photography you need.
The main point is to realize the importance of the subject, and to have a system in place to get, validate, save and organize the good quality photographs you need - and will need in the future - for marketing purposes.
It's one of the finer points of judgment in marketing: How expensive should you look?
At the high end, the answer is always: As expensive as possible. Whether it's a Rolex watch, a Ferrari, a big yacht or a 12,500 square foot custom home, part of the reason they command the prices they do is because of how they look. By "look" I don't mean just the physical appearance of the actual product. I'm referring to all the aspects of branding. Usually no expense is spared not only on product design, but on marketing photographic quality, copy, public relations and other factors.
Usually it's better to look more expensive than you are. It enhances perceived value and makes it easier to sell at your actual price point. I think the Mazda Miata is a great example of that. It looks more expensive than it is, one of the reasons I'm sure dealers were actually selling it above MSRP when it first came out.
BUT, you can also turn off potential customers that way. They take a look at your website or your ad and decide they can't afford you. You never get the call. That's one reason real estate ads usually give an idea of pricing. They try to look incredibly pricey, then tell you "from the low 90's."
You can also look too cheap. Your real prospects never call because they assume your quality isn't up to what they are looking for or you don't have the features they want. The prospects you do attract are blown away by your prices.
How expensive do YOU look? Too expensive, too cheap, or just right?
Even the smallest of companies benefits from good branding.
One non-negotiable element of good branding is consistency.
That means at every instance where your business contacts potential customers - or even your own staff, vendors, etc. - your company, product or service has the same look and feel.
Most people understand that for your ads, direct mail and websites - that they should have a similar look, forward the same message, and so on.
But there are many others of these "touchpoints" . Here's one (certainly incomplete) list of such:
1. Websites
2. Corporate identity materials (letterhead, business cards, envelopes, etc.)
3. Brochures
4. Trade show displays
5. Ads (print, radio, TV, Internet)
6. Billboards
7. Signage
8. Vehicles
9. Office or store design and layout
10. Uniforms
11. Equipment
12. Product packaging
13. Sales materials (sell sheets, line cards, order forms, Powerpoint presentations, etc.)
14. Point-of-Purchase (POS) displays
15. Promotional items (hats, t-shirts, cups, buttons, coasters, refrigerator magnets, etc.)
16. Direct mail
17. Door hangers
18. Other Internet (directories, portals, search engine listings, blog postings, webinars, etc.)
Every one of these where you have a presence, can be turned to your advantage, often at no or little additional expense, by making sure brand consistency reigns.
The title of this blog is not just hyperbole (exaggeration), you know.
If you haven't gotten the idea yet, it is time to get a clue.
Serious marketing takes work. It is not done with "a lick and a promise."
Because you have a better mouse trap does not mean the world will beat a path to your door.
Because you've always done well doesn't mean it is automatic. General Motors is in bankruptcy court, the world's largest insurance company took billions of tax dollars to save it. The government isn't rushing to save us small businesses.
I'm not trying to paint a grim or hopeless picture. Far from it.
Given a good product or service, a commitment and the ability to deliver as promised what you sell, viable pricing and smooth handling of leads, you still have to generate prospects in sufficient quantity.
Every week I get emails and phone calls from marketing personnel looking for jobs. If I didn't otherwise know it, that would certainly tell me that not every company in the marketing world is thriving.
So why is Fast Forward Marketing doing just fine, despite the economic troubles?
We practice what we preach of course. Here's an example:
The vast majority of our business comes from Tampa Bay, and the vast majority of our new clients come to us from the Internet, and mainly from searches.
Currently, about 10% of visitors to our website from local searches turn into leads. That is a phenomenal, almost unbelievable percentage.
It took hundreds of hours of work over several months developing a new branding for our company, new look for our website, developing unique navigation, restructuring our site, rewriting copy, studying statistics on the site, making changes, etc. etc.
All of our marketing is aimed straight at the small percentage of businesses out there that are in our exact niche: Big enough to have a marketing budget, small enough to be hands on by people to whom the survival of their business matters. Too small for office politics to be a major barrier to getting anything done. Serious about getting professional, quality marketing. They know they don't know it all, and they are too small to have all the necessary talent in-house.
Those kinds of businessman call us up and just start gushing about our website and the samples of our work on it. The others? Who cares! There are more companies in our target market than we could possibly handle if they all found and called us today.
I judged the annual trade show marketing competition for Exhibitor magazine yesterday. There were four of us, all experienced trade show marketers, and submissions from companies of all sizes with projects that cost from $20,000 to $900,000.
Guess what? There was no correlation between how much they spent and how good the work was.
Most of the submissions, it was either a good idea poorly executed, or a poor idea in the first place.
The moral of the story of course is that it isn't the amount of money spent that makes for effective marketing (You CAN often make up for mediocre marketing just by throwing a lot of money at it).
A lot of times you can add clarity to a subject by adding terminology.
This is such a case.
"Brand" is what your product, service, or company means or stands for, hopefully in the minds of your market.
"Brand Identity" is everything that symbolizes that brand.
A logo is an example of brand identity. It doesn't establish your brand - though it can help. If skillfully done, it can come to symbolize that brand. When Starbucks was first starting out, their mermaid emblem didn't mean a thing to anyone except perhaps the owners of the company and the designer.
Now, hundreds of millions of people can see that logo and know immediately that this is a place where they can get a good, if pricey, cup of coffee.
Color scheme, tagline and other brand identity elements work similarly.
Nike's ads breathed life into "Just Do It!" - not the other way around - and made their famous "swish" logo stand for the same thing. That the logo fits the sentiment and the ads dramatized it, is a matter of integration and consistency - both essential if branding is going to work.
It's been said that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. From what I've read, that is an apt description of Walt Disney.
Clearly, Disney World is carrying on that tradition.
I spent the day at The Magic Kingdom, and the attention to detail is stunning. Art is everywhere.
I've described marketing as art in the service of sales. That's not completely true, of course. There's little of art to search engine optimization, for example.
It certainly describes every inch of Disney World. It's something else though. It's art in the service of a sense of magic. At The Magic Kingdom, we are all kids.
What I didn't say was that it is effective to include a break-out quote on all or nearly all pages of every marketing piece.
Every page of a brochure.
Every page of a website.
In ads.
On postcards and other direct mail pieces.
On trade show displays.
Can you overdo it? Possibly. In most cases I don't think I'd include more than one per page or side.
They are one of the best things you can do to build interest and credibility.
Ideally, as with other situations in using testimonials, you show the full name of the person, their job title, company name or location, and even a thumbnail picture of them. You can't always get an okay to do all that, so you do the best you can do.
Marketing exists at the intersection of two very different worlds.
The artist doesn't care how long it takes. He wants it to come out right. He is often far out, well beyond what most people will appreciate. In every age, artists have been attacked as radicals, subversive influences.
Business is much about getting along. You're providing people what they want, at prices they can afford. You have to be able to deliver at a price where you can make a profit. Speed and efficiency are hugely important.
Marketing isn't only about art. But it is a big part of it. When we design a website, my artist has to come up with a "look" that is pure art, even though at the service of a commercial purpose. It can't be done on a schedule. Luckily, we can at least tell the client "usually we will have something to look at in a week." That at least is something that can be understood.
Good marketing is a bit radical, edgy, subversive. Sometimes we have to tone down a campaign because it is a bit scary to the businessman who is, however, looking for the response good marketing produces.
I've said before that "boring" and "marketing" shouldn't appear in the same sentence.
Oops.
Well, I want to make the point even stronger.
Effective marketing gets noticed. It gets remembered. It stirs emotions. And people pass it around because it strikes a chord, they like it, they want to share it (goes viral).
You aren't going to achieve that with marketing that is ordinary, traditional, normal, acceptable to anyone.
I'm not saying you have to be shocking and violate everyone's idea of what is right, good and okay.
I'm saying good marketing is at least a bit out there, edgy, and startling.
Just to prove I'm not hobby-horsing, here's the flip side of my post of the other day.
The fact is, marketers are FAR more likely to omit vital information from their items than the other way around.
Especially in a down economy, consumers and potential clients become more picky. In fact, that's almost the definition of a recession.... a period of time when people don't spend as freely. Money doesn't flow as freely and everything slows down.
It is more the job of the marketer and the PR to do something about it, than anyone else.
And how do you do that? It has to be a mixture of steak AND sizzle.
I've read two reports recently of surveys that found consumers feel advertising doesn't give them enough information.
How many times have you seen an ad or gone to a website and ended up wondering what they were even selling? Let alone why you should be interested in buying it?
For years, Blimpy's (a chain of sandwich shops) ran radio ads that didn't even mention they sold sandwiches. We were already all supposed to know that?
Of course that is pretty extreme.
There is a whole strain of marketing that runs to very lengthy copy - "the sales letter." You just keep reading and reading until you buy because they just keep giving you more and more reasons to buy. It's very effective in direct mail and certain types of websites.
So, strike a balance. YES, in most marketing situations you need to leave important questions unanswered. NO that doesn't mean you don't tell the potential buyer as much as you can within the limits of space, budget and effective design.
I've written quite a bit about the subject of budgets and marketing.
To make intelligent decisions about marketing, you have to have a budget in mind. There's a big difference between how you promote if you have a $1 million budget versus if you only have $1,000 to spend.
It should go without saying, but unfortunately, it needs not only to be said, but stressed:
Wishful thinking doesn't make $1000 do the job of $3000.
Or $10000.
It's easiest to engage in wishful thinking with website design, because there is always a cheaper way to get a website done.
But you aren't going to get a professional website for an amateur price.
When you are spending money on marketing, it is important to assess how much you really need to spend for something. There are lots of sharks out there surfing the marketing waters for easy pickings.
Of course, most of them aren't charging too much for something. They are charging for something worthless.
But, beyond that, you can pay way too much for marketing products and services.
It isn't hard to sort this out.
The point is to face reality and don't try and explain it away. Instead, adapt.
If you don't have the money to do A properly, don't do a lousy job of A. Figure out what the "B" is that you CAN afford, and do that.
If you can't afford to paying the going rate for a Mercedes, don't pay 1/3 the usual price because "it's a great deal."
The same study found that TV does work for the heaviest spenders.
Why? It takes a LOT of money to make an impact with television. Otherwise your advertising just gets lost in the weeds.
Well done, well-placed infomercials work. Otherwise, skip the TV unless you can spend enough to where it seems to people like your ads are on the air all the time.
Otherwise TV is vanity advertising. It's cool and makes you feel good -- and that's about all the good it does.
A vital piece of know-how that applies to all marketing everywhere:
Don't answer all their questions.
If your advertising or website tells them everything there is to know, why should they bother contacting you? You never get a chance to talk to and close a prospect. They either call up ready to buy, or you never hear from them.
Yes, especially a website should have a lot of information on it. But that information is really there only to satisfy three requirements:
1. So they can be reasonably sure what you are offering is what they are looking for.
2. To provide the back-up for your benefits claims ("features and benefits"), and otherwise build credibility.
3. To save time in sales cycles by providing answers to questions you are having to answer over-and-over.
If you tell the prospect TOO much, you are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The baby in this case being a reach - someone contacting you, by phone or email or a reply card or walking into your store.
In short, there is a point where marketing ends off and sales begins.
There are a couple of exceptions:
An online store includes the sales process as well as the marketing process - so you had better leave no question unanswered (other than "just how delighted AM I going to be with my purchase" or "Exactly how am I going to word my letter of endorsement back to the company").
With retail marketing of products well known to the consumer, there isn't anything much to tell in your advertising other than your price, that you have the product in stock, your address and hours of operation. In this case, the selling has already been done (the consumer is a loyal user of Blando brand fruit juice, the only question is when and where and how much will they buy).
Otherwise, your marketing is always a careful calculation of what to tell and what not to tell the prospective customer.
Here's the bad news: Many businesses will disappear over the course of this downturn.
Here's the good news: Many businesses will grow over the course of this downturn. Many individuals will become millionaires. Many successful businesses will start up and even come to dominate their industry.
There is however, a major lesson to be learned in regards to how to be part of the "good news": You need to stay alert and make frequent adjustments.
Two or three years ago in most industries you could confidently plot out a marketing strategy and stick to it knowing you could run it with perhaps minor adjustments for a year or longer.
The sales and marketing environment is now changing so rapidly it it is necessary to review the scene every few weeks.
We have charted five major changes in customer behavior since the start of the year alone. From "things are getting back to normal" to "we're all going to die" to "I've got to do something, anything" to "I'd better hang on to my money" to "we're all going to die!" to "I'd REALLY better watch what I spend."
So: Stay alert and don't give up. There's always a way to deal with the changes. Sure, it's not easy. But what worthwhile thing is?
An issue that comes up repeatedly when a company is considering changing its logo:
What about the expense of redoing everything (shirts, truck signs, business cards, etc. etc.) with the new logo?
That can turn a relatively minor redesign into a major expense.
The answer is two-fold:
1. A logo redesign should rarely be revolutionary. Almost always it should be evolutionary. That means the new logo is recognizably just a new version of the old logo.
You see this very commonly in consumer products. Pepsi's new logo is an example.
Which takes me to the second point.
2. If your new logo is recognizably a version, modernization or upgrade of your current logo, you DON'T have to change everything all at once.
Pepsi for example is not using their new logo everywhere and in everything, at least as yet.
So you do your redesign, and, over time, you get it into use. When the shirts wear out, you replace them with shirts using the new logo. When you need to reprint the brochure, it gets the new logo. And so on.
This is VERY workable and it is critical. Most people are discouraged from needed logo redesigns by this exact issue.
Don't be discouraged. A new logo can be a great upgrade of one's marketing.
In an earlier post, I touched briefly on the subject of categories in regards to branding.
It is a very important point and deserves its own discussion.
Al Reis discusses this at length in his "22 Immutable Laws of Marketing."
The best way by far to brand your product is as the first product in a new category. In other words, you don't tell people you are BETTER than the competition. Basically, you are establishing that there is no competition.
Of course for that to work you have to come up with a new category that your product actually does fit in. And that has to be something that is inherently desirable to your potential customers.
So it can take quite a bit of work to figure that out. But when you do, it can drive your whole marketing effort and cause a huge increase in sales.
Apple branded the iPhone as a new category of cell phone.
The IBM PC, Lite Beer, 7-up (the UnCola), Ben & Jerry's (super-premium ice cream) are all examples of this.
Of course, if you have a rather generic product, if you are a small company with perhaps only vaguely defined competition, you've got your work cut out for you.
Sometimes you need to "re-brand" a product or company.
We had a client whose business had so evolved that the company name no longer described what they did. It was inhibiting sales because people would go "Oh, they're just a ______" and they'd never even get a chance to prove they could do the job.
Most of the time re-branding is a mistake and destructive.
Recently five top consumer brands re-branded themselves in an effort to deal with dropping sales. One of the five cost the company 20% of their sales before they went back to their old packaging.
Here's another topic of importance I've somehow never blogged about.
This is the subject of short, punchy phrases used in branding a company, in quickly communicating something you want the public to know about your company or product or service.
Let me start by defining these two terms the way I use them, since they are mostly used interchangeably. I use them differently because there are two different things that need to be accomplished.
I use "tagline" to mean a short phrase, not necessarily memorable, that summarizes what you do. Usually it is attached to a logo.
You don't see this very often.
And yet it is often necessary. If you don't tell people what you do or sell, are they supposed to guess? Or do you leave them wondering for a while? Many company names don't answer the question. What does "CSX" do?
Yet that is the FIRST question people ask.
When someone goes to a website, they arrive with a series of questions. The first question is, does this company or website offer what I'm looking for?
Does this website sell reproductions of early 20th century door hardware?
Can I find out here how many pounds to a kilogram?
Is this a source for information on rheumatoid arthritis?
The first thing they want to know is NOT that you are "family friendly" or "trusted by all mankind." Trusted for what?
When I use the word "slogan" I'm referring to the second type of branding phrase.
Slogans are supposed to be memorable and they need to position the company or product. If people remember only one thing about your ad, it is supposed to be the slogan:
The Un-Cola
We Try Harde.
When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight
For the people
I believe keeping these two concepts in mind can greatly improve most companies' marketing.
The marketing world is changing. It used to be that accountability was a little known concept and the big ad agencies got fat on their 15% agency discounts.
That is and has been changing to such a degree that Al Ries, one of the greatest marketing minds of the modern era, is pushing back. His latest article in Ad Age complains that marketers are putting too much emphasis on the numbers.
I take his point. There will always be a large element of creativity and artistic sense to marketing.
That doesn't mean it's a bad thing that the trend continues towards metrics (statistics) as a measure of marketing effectiveness.
For too long, marketing companies and ad agencies could get away with smoke and mirrors and claims that their results CAN'T be measured.
One way or another, a marketing company should be able to demonstrate that what they are doing is effective and worthwhile.
A while ago, in a post about picking website URLs, I said your URL shouldn't be a generic description of what you do. I gave the examples "Yahoo" or "Google" is better than "searchengine.com".
Why is that and how far does that principle apply?
It applies widely.
If your name is descriptive of an existing category of products or services, you minimize the chance of establishing a brand or even having anyone remember your name. Your name is already owned by the category and probably by a particular brand in that category!
To take this to an extreme, imagine GM coming out with a new small car called "The Small Car."
Actually.... Do you remember a car called the GLC (Great Little Car)?
I didn't think so.
There actually was such a car. I can't remember who made it. And I just tried searching to find out and found nothing except pages about Hondas, Mazdas, etc.
See the point?
Now one of the important considerations in this is "existing category of products or services."
So Google and Yahoo - since there already was such a thing as a search engine - were smart to name their services as they did. And all the search engines with descriptive names like "searchsite" and "sitesearch" and whatever.... are nowhere.
On the other hand, when IBM came out with the PC, there was barely such a thing as a personal computer. Do note however that IBM doesn't even make PCs any more.
I've mentioned viral marketing but I haven't really talked about it.
Three weeks ago, Susan Boyle was an unknown, middle-aged Scots homemaker.
Her video on YouTube has now been seen 64 million times.
How did this happen?
FIrst, she was on TV on "Britain's Got Talent."
Someone put the video of her performance on YouTube.
People were excited and started telling each other about her and sending the link to the video.
Now, what do you think that is worth to Susan Boyle and anyone wanting to use her to market something? Millions? Tens of Millions?
This example contains all the essential elements of viral marketing:
1. You have to START with something that people are going to get excited and tell each other about. No matter what you do, if you don't have something that is going to create a buzz, it's not going to buy you any beans.
That's what viral marketing is - viral meaning spreading in the same way a virus does, person-to-person, and like a virus, one infected person can become millions. This is the plus side of what computer viruses are the negative - the incredible power of the Internet to rapidly disseminate something.
2. You have to jump start awareness of that something. This is usually done through publicity. TV or radio or magazines or newspapers pick it up for the same reason - it's cool, it's fun, it's bizarre, it's exciting.
3. You have to have a way it can be easily spread by email or twitter or Facebook, etc. That usually means a link to a video or website.
Marketing to businesses is a very different beast from marketing to consumers.
One difference is the possibility of in many cases obtaining very targeted lists.
If you know who you're targeting, list brokers can very often come up with a list that very precisely matches it:
companies with 1-5 servers
marketing vice-presidents of florida companies
podiatric practices in urban areas
real estate brokers with 5 or more agents
and so on.
Another difference is there is no "do not call list" for businesses. That means you can effectively telemarket to businesses.
This makes for a killer combination I've seen work time and time again:
1. Targeted mailings repeated to a very precise market.
2. Telemarketing to the same companies.
It requires a well-oiled machine for this to work well, but the two - mailings and calls - work together. The mailings (usually postcards, sometimes interspersed with other pieces) remind people of the calls and vice versa.
One key element is the mailings repetition. Don't do a one-time mailing and expect a result. You have to mail over and over to the same businesses.
Another important aspect of marketing I've never discussed at length.
Positioning was a marketing concept developed by one of the true gurus of modern marketing, Al Reis, in response to the tremendous over-exposure to marketing messages we're bombarded with every day.
That's estimated at some 3000 ads a day. With that much noise, how are you to get someone ever to stop and get your message?
Reis and his then partner Jack Trout discussed this at length in their classic "The Positioning Era" published in 1972.
In the "old days" marketing consisted of talking about the features and benefits of your product, maybe using "image" to sell your product (the Marlboro Man). But by 1971, even the greatest guru of pre-1970's marketing, David Ogilvy, was acknowledging that wasn't enough.
The answer was and is positioning.
So what is positioning? Reis and Trout define it as "what the advertising does for the product in the prospect's mind."
If you associate your product with a certain concept, you can get that concept across in the second or few seconds you've got, instead of trying to explain it and losing the reader, viewer or visitor.
To people who don't fully get the concept, positioning is often reduced to a rank. This is the classic "We're #2, We Try Harder" campaign of Avis. But notice even there it isn't JUST that Avis is #2, it is the concept of the underdog working hard to get on top.
An even better example is the famous "7-Up, The Un-Cola" campaign. That positioned 7-Up as "not a Cola" so anytime someone didn't want Coke or Pepsi they'd think 7-Up. That was a tremendously successful campaign.
Good positioning can multiply the effectiveness of all of your marketing.
It was in an ad I saw on weather.com. So you know someone spent a LOT of money placing that ad there (weather.com is one of the 10 most visited news websites on the Internet).
This is an attempt at positioning - to try and give someone an instant idea of what the product is or does.
What do YOU think of when someone says "botox for your hair"?
If you're in business, chances are you've been ripped off by convincing salesmen peddling marketing schemes that sounded great, from companies that seem and should be trustworthy.
We hear the horror stories every day:
1. The health care practitioner who spent $30,000 over a one year period on TV advertising. He was sold the program by one of the major local cable companies, who also produced the ad for him. It should have been good, right? That $30,000 bought him exactly one new patient.
2. The friend of a friend who provided a "search engine friendly" website which not only didn't get him high rankings.... it was almost impossible to find his website with a search.
3. The website developer who took the client's payment, then six weeks later delivered a website without ever consulting with the client as to whether they liked the look being developed. Then refused to make any changes without being paid more.
4. The hosting service that suddenly went out of business, taking the company's website down and with no copy of the site to put it back up elsewhere.
It goes on and on.
Of course, it is not only the small businesses that are often served badly by marketing companies. Just look at some of the junk marketing campaigns put on for Fortune 500 companies at a cost of millions of dollars. Don't tell me you haven't laughed at the stupidity of some of these ads!
So what's a person to do? Surely it should be possible to buy good honest marketing at a reasonable price!
Of course it is. But, in my view, MOST marketing companies are incompetent. So you are going to have to wade through a fair amount of BS to find what you are looking for.
It helps to have endorsements, proof of results and samples of the company's work in a similar situation to yours.
Ultimately, your own familiarity with marketing principles and a good healthy skepticism are the best guarantees of getting what you pay for in marketing.
As a marketing agency, we get calls every week from people peddling the latest get-rich-quick marketing scheme. Most of them never make it out of the starting block with us. They don't pass the smell test.
Every once in a while I discover a REALLY BASIC point I've never blogged on.
Here's one.
YOU CAN'T MARKET IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHO YOU ARE TRYING TO REACH.
In case this is not completely obvious, let me give you an exaggerated instance. If you don't know what country you are marketing to, how will you know what language your copy should be in? You end up with an advertisement in Russian running in a French magazine.
How can you decide what a marketing item should look like, what you should say, even what venue to use to get your message out, if you haven't determined who your target market is?
You can't.
Now when I say you need to know who your target market is, that starts with demographics:
Podiatrists located in major metropolitan areas
Teenage girls from middle-income families
Napoleon Dynamite fans
Businesses with 100-2000 offices in the U.S.
That's far from the end of it: What are their likes and dislikes? What do they read? What kinds of searches do they do online? Who do they trust?
If you can't answer those kinds of questions, some market research is in order.
But the first question that has to be answered is: WHO are you trying to reach and influence to buy your product or service.
"Throwaway copy" is a term we use here for copy that is completely ineffective. It might as well not be there.
It's "throwaway" because it produces the same response in a reader that most junk mail does.
What makes copy throwaway material? Most amateur copywriters write what they THINK copy is supposed to be like, usually imitating someone else. It's trite and B-O-R-I-N-G. It doesn't speak to the people you are trying to sell.
It's like the classic Far Side cartoon of what a dog gets out of a human's lecture. The only word they hear is their name.
Every time I see a mission statement on a website or in a brochure or on the wall of a waiting room, I cringe.
NO ONE CARES.
If you are going to sell people or even interest them, you have to talk about what they care about. Not what YOU care about.
So put yourself in your prospects' shoes. What would interest you?
I don't know if he really said it, but it is a perfect sentiment for these times: ?€?I was asked what I thought about the recession. I thought about it and decided not to take part.?€? - Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, in 1980.
Desperation is not a good basis for marketing decisions.
In the last weeks I've seen many signs of desperation.
I get calls and emails from people desperately seeking ways to make money with no clear idea of what to do and no budget.
I've also been contacted by many people promoting the latest fishy get-rich-quick schemes, hoping to take advantage of desperate or terrified businessmen.
Sometimes one person manages to fit in both groups. They joined some fishy get-rich-quick networking marketing scheme and are now desperately trying to get others to join so they can make some free money.
Guess what folks:
We aren't all going to die. We are not going into a depression. The economy has contracted by 2%. That's two percent. Unemployment has increased by 3-4%. That's three or four percent.
If your business is struggling, the first thing you need to do is greatly increase your marketing. So don't get desperate! Get busy!
This is so true that there is a recent strain of marketing that seeks to make people angry or disgusted. The philosophy is that at least they'll remember you.
Well, at least it's an emotion. But, of course, what you are really trying to do is stir positive emotions towards what you are trying to sell.
If you can do that, you can create response. Logic, rational arguments, facts, can support your marketing but they aren't the heart of it.
The old saying is you're selling the sizzle, not the steak.
I received a piece of stupid-tising (short for stupid advertising) in the mail today.
It was promoting a commercial real estate company and the face of the card was covered with little thumbnails showing the wide variety of property the company had available for lease.
Phooey.
How are all those little thumbnails supposed to capture people's attention? They won't!
This is just one manifestation of the idea that "to get more business, offer a larger variety of things. Spread out. Diversify."
Nope.
To get more business, focus.
There is far more joy in being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.
The other day, the band broke on my nice old Seiko watch. I went to my local jeweler. That jeweler sells watches, diamonds, sterling, crystal. Do you know how many 17mm watch bands they had in stock (let alone one that matched my watch)?
None.
Where did I go to find a replacement?
Watchbands.com. They had an exact match, proven by model number and four photographs.
A few years ago, Jay Levinson published a book, "Guerilla Marketing." It was a great name because it expresses the idea of marketing on limited resources.
Marketing is very different if you are a Proctor and Gamble with billion dollar marketing budgets and household name products.
For the rest of us, effective marketing is about how to get enough new business to survive or expand - without going broke doing so.
It is about being smart and it is about ROI - Return on Investment.
Fortune 500 companies will spend tens of millions of dollars on a marketing campaign, not to bring in business but simply to ward off competition.
Most of us can't afford that luxury.
And yet, we do have to market. Unless you are getting all the business you want and need through repeat customers, word-of-mouth and referral, you have to market.
For most of us, the question is not "To Market or Not To Market." It is how to market effectively.
Your available marketing budget is always a factor in answering that question.
There's a principle for writing press releases that applies to a great many forms of writing.
You write in a sort of a pyramid with the point at the top or beginning.
At the start of the article, press release or whatever it is, you state all the most important points, briefly.
You then expand on these.
You get the most important things in first, least important towards the end.
That way, if someone doesn't read the whole thing (or, in the case of a press release, if they only publish the first part of it), they at least get the most important points you were trying to get across.
I was at a meeting today and another business person was telling me how horrible the economy is and it is all doom and gloom. I cut her off and walked away.
There are MANY examples of businesses that are doing well. Here's one - a giant corporation, General Mills:
I've said before that clarity and simplicity in copywriting are important.
Just to pound the point home.
AFTER I've finished writing something, I go back through it and look for ways to make it shorter without losing the idea.
Take out words that don't contribute.
Use shorter, Anglo-Saxon words in preference to Latin and Greek. "Walk" don't "perambulate."
Rephrase to shorten.
Break sentences up into shorter sentences. Make paragraphs short.
If you have a lot to say, you can say it at length. You can repeat yourself to drive a point home. But the fewer and shorter words to deliver the same idea, the punchier it will be - and the more people will get the message.
For clarity in your marketing, it is important to understand the various pieces of the marketing puzzle, where your weaknesses are, and what your immediate and longer term goals are in regards to these pieces.
When I say "pieces of the puzzle", I'm referring to the marketing chain - the various steps from "someone never heard of you" to "a confirmed repeat customer client or patient".
This is similar to what is often called the "promotional mix" - which misses the point that it is actually a sequence of actions, any one of which if sorely lacking can torpedo all your marketing efforts.
I was reminded of this, talking to a prospect whose marketing goals do not include lead generation. He sells to government agencies, who put projects out to bid. His problem is to make sure he is allowed to bid on a project and that the agencies are properly impressed by his qualifications and experience.
The usual classification of the "promotional mix" is advertising, sales promotion, personal sales, and public relations. I categorize things a bit differently:
Despite the way he was savaged for it, last year when one politician said the state of the economy was in part a matter of the mind - he was speaking truth.
A recession is a slowdown in the economy. What does that mean? People (whether as individuals or businesses) are spending money less freely. Less is being spent, less is being bought.
People are laid off, they have less money to spend, businesses go under, less money is spent.
A vicious cycle but entirely a mental one to the degree that it is driven by confidence - the expectation that someone will obtain more money to replace what they have now, so it is okay to spend it.
The media and many politicians are doing such a wonderful job of driving down expectations. So what can we, the common people, do to thrive personally and to help turn the economy around?
As Albert Einstein put it, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
The tech support "ID10T error" - the user is an idiot - won't wash in marketing.
If your website loses visitors like a sieve; if people glance at your postcards, look momentarily puzzled, then throw them away, the problem is NOT that your prospects are too dumb.
I regularly get calls from people who are wasting time and money trying to sell something.
It's a waste because they are trying to sell something no one wants, because it isn't properly packaged, or they just don't have enough money to get sales off the ground.
Byrd's Law #44: You can't market something that can't be marketed.
Let's take these points up one at a time:
1. No one wants it. History (and bankruptcy courts) are littered with the bones of bad ideas. Huge corporations aren't immune to this. The Ford Edsel. Classic Coke. And so on. The FIRST step of marketing is making sure you are selling something that people want. How do you do that? Most of the time people test new product ideas by trying to sell the product. Two years and tens of thousands of dollars (or millions) later, they give up - and usually STILL don't know it was because no one wanted it.
If you don't have clear and convincing evidence that people want what you are planning on selling, you need marketing research. Is anyone else selling it? Does it fill an actual need or desire? And so on, are the questions to ask.
2. Packaging. It can be a great idea but that doesn't mean it is being offered in a form (or place) where people will buy it. We had a client with an idea for an insurance related product. It sounded good but it was brand-new, untested, so we recommended a survey. That survey found the product to be something that people really did want - BUT THEY WEREN'T WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. They thought it should be a free service provided by insurance agents. So that made it a useful value-added product which could perhaps be sold to insurance agents - but don't waste your time trying to sell it to the general public.
Maybe something won't fly on a pay-in-full up front basis but will work on "12 low monthly payments."
Maybe people in Detroit won't buy it but people in Jakarta will. Or it can be sold online but not in retail stores.
Again, if you don't know the answer, some homework is in order.
3. Marketing budget and resources. There are plenty of great ideas, products that people want, that are properly packaged for sale - but where the seller doesn't have the budget to get it off the ground. We find this regularly with online stores. A very rough rule of thum is one sale for every 100 visitors. If an online store is going to be successful, you have to get a LOT of visitors to the site.
How are you going to do that? You can put a lot of time into learning Internet Marketing and doing it yourself, or maybe you or a friend is a genius at publicity. Otherwise you are probably going to have to pay someone thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars, to get your site noticed.
I've seen a company on a shoe-string budget launch a good idea that would take a marketing budget MINIMALLY in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range to work. Game over.
Again the question is how do you know? This isn't rocket science. A lot of the time just asking the questions is enough - because the answers are obvious.
It is really common sense overcoming wishful thinking.
The chief benefit of good branding is it multiplies the effectiveness of all of your marketing efforts.
This is primarily a matter of consistency.
That means the various elements of your branding must be consistent one with the other. A color scheme that communicates "excitement" doesn't go with a branding that is overall about bringing peace and comfort. (More about branding elements later.)
It also means that your branding must be brought to bear in all your marketing, so that you have consistency of image and message throughout your marketing efforts. All your marketing items must be consistent with each other and over time. Whether it is letterhead, on-hold messages, website, print ads, billboards, TV commercials, direct mail - only by consistency of one with the other do you get your various efforts reinforcing each other.
I haven't talked a lot about "branding" - a concept important to effective marketing.
You see the golden arches, you know there's a McDonald's there. But you also know a bunch of other things. You know what is going to be on the menu (mostly; in Europe they serve beer), that it will be low priced. You know with minor variations what things are going to taste like (the McDonald's in Sweden use more ketchup on the burgers).
That's branding.
If you are going to build a brand you have to decide what your company or product is and what it means, and you then have to be consistent in communicating that.
BMW has been "the ultimate driving machine" for over 30 years.
There are several elements to effective branding. We'll take them up in some detail over the next couple of days.
One marketing topic little known outside the marketing world is the subject of marketing channels.
We are talking about what medium is used to get your message out. Yellow Pages is a marketing channel. Direct mail is one. Magazine ads. And so on.
Choice of marketing channel is partially dictated by budget since, as I've talked about a bit, some channels require a big budget to make any impact at all. A $3,000 per month budget for TV won't cause 1/10th the effect of a $30,000 TV budget. It probably won't generate any leads at all.
Sometimes your marketing piece creates a different effect than you had envisioned. You may not notice the branches seemingly growing out of someone's head or the accidental obscene reference. Other people will.
So: It is always a good idea to step back and take a fresh look at something before it goes online or is sent to the printer.
A followup to my post about marketing being communication.
You always aim to reach as many people as possible with your marketing efforts, given budget and other constraints.
You are never going to reach everybody. In fact, you are never going to please everybody.
The effort to try and suit everyone can be destructive.
It doesn't matter how easy you make navigating your site, or how clear you make the checkout process in an online store. SOMEBODY is going to get confused and not be able to figure it out.
If you load up your site too much with instructions, notices, warnings, etc. etc. etc. you just end up annoying the average visitor.
I can't tell you how many times a client customer service has contacted me because someone had a problem with their site, only to find on investigating that the site was perfectly fine, but someone was so drunk or so illiterate they were unable to find the huge, flashing button that said "click here to check out."
It's like the famous story about the person calling tech support because they couldn't find the "any" key on their keyboard.
To many people marketing is a mysterious thing. I think marketing professionals sometimes foster that idea. After all, if we are the keepers of secrets, you have to come to us for answers.
But the fundamental of marketing is very simple. It's all about communication.
That's all.
You are attempting to communicate in bulk, to potential buyers of your products or services, and you are doing so normally in a situation where you aren't talking live to them.
The difficulties really come from these two factors. You're talking to more than one person, so you are trying to craft a communication that reaches as many people as possible. And when I say "reach" I don't just mean, they are in the same room as your communication. I mean they receive, understand, "get it."
Since you aren't talking to them live, you can't see their reaction, you can't receive their questions... .you have to anticipate what will happen at their end and deal with it so as to create the ultimate desired response - such as an interested phone call from a qualified prospect.
Some marketers try to apply psychological principles to their marketing.
If you looked into it, you'd find that was behind some of the stupidest, most absurd marketing you've ever seen.
Interestingly this seems to be most used in the so-called "vice" industries - cigarettes, gambling, porn and hard liquor advertising.
I recall seeing a billboard advertising a brand of cigarettes that didn't have the name nor a picture of the package or logo of the brand on it. It showed an idyllic wintery scene. The colors matched the colors of the brand.
I guess you were supposed to look at the billboard and assocate their brand colors with peace and calm or something and therefore buy the brand the next time you went to buy smokes.
Right.
Don't try to use psychology in marketing. It doesn't work.
If you are going to do effective marketing you should be aware of fads and trends and the difference between them.
Marketing fads occur when people imitate other marketing efforts because they think they are working or just don't know what else to do. We see this where whole industries all have a similar look to their websites. When we first did an automotive parts industry website, we surveyed other sites. Almost all of them were done in hideously clashing primary colors. That's a fad.
The nice thing about a fad is that all you have to do to stand out from the crowd is to do something sensible instead.
That is very different from trends. The kind of thing that makes narrow ties look old-fashioned makes almost any website done 3 or more years ago look out-of-date. Technology does this as well as design ideas that catch hold.
A cell phone from the early 1990's looks out-of-date not only because technology has made them much smaller but because the kind of look that says "high tech" has changed.
Following a fad is like following the lemmings over the cliff and into the sea. Following the latest trends can make you look hip and can contribute to achieving the marketing result you seek.
People are attracted to aesthetics (beauty) regardless of any other factor in your marketing.
It's simple. People like beautiful things better than ugly, or even just plain things.
Beautiful women, starry skies, mountain vistas, a laughing child, a car that looks like it's ready to leap into the sky and pass light speed - people LIKE these things.
All by themselves, they create an attraction. That makes it more likely someone will read your piece and will have a favorable impression of it. They are more likely to hold on to the business card or brochure, to bookmark the website, to remember your message.
This may be "sensible" or not. But, like celebrity endorsements, it works.
A lot of times beauty is the only thing a marketing item has going for it. There's a lot more to marketing, but it's a good start.
If you can provide case studies that illustrate the experiences of others with similar situations to your prospects, that becomes a tremendous selling point. It is no longer theoretical whether you can help them.
The two keys to making this work well are:
1. Specific details, including where possible, actual statistics, before and after pictures, images of products, etc. Make it real!
2. Enough different case studies so most visitors will find one similar to them - and well organized on your website or in your sales materials so it is easy to find.
Another favorite excuse for marketing failure is "You can't measure the effectiveness of a marketing piece."
I love that. It justifies spending tons of client's money on stupid ideas, bad copy, poor placement, etc.
And it is a lie, lie, lie.
Anyone peddling this load of horse-pucky is trying to cover up their own incompetence.
Of course one of the great things about Internet Marketing is the ease with which effectiveness can be measured. Visits to a website either happen or they don't. Sophisticated web analytics programs can tell you who your visitors are, where they came from and what they did when they got there - just about anything short of Social Security number and location of birth marks.
The effectiveness of direct mail and other direct marketing efforts is just as measurable. Count the number of phone calls or business reply cards you got. Where's the mystery there?
It may not be as easy to measure the effectiveness of a new brochure or print ad, if there is other marketing going on. That doesn't mean it can't be done.
And it MUST be done. How else do you know if your marketing dollar is worth it?
Which of course is the point of anyone who discounts the possibility of measuring marketing effecdtiveness.
Over the years I've heard several excuses for failed marketing.
One of my favorites is "the market is saturated." That is supposed to mean that pretty much everyone who would need or want the product or service has heard of it or already owns it. So naturally the marketing is getting less and less effective.
Effective marketing takes a prospective buyer through a series of small steps, links from "never heard of you" to "ready to talk seriously about buying." (Actually marketing begins with conceiving of a product or service that people will want or need... but that's a tale for another day.)
If you start out with 100% as the potential, at every step you are losing some portion of the potential buying public. Perhaps only 1/1000th of a percent are making it to the end. That's an awful lot of wasted prospects.
If you improve any link in the chain, you increase that percentage. If you then handle them well, you end up with more sales.
If you list out each of these steps for your business, you'll probably spot one or more places where your marketing is weak. If you improve the weakest link, you can get a huge improvement in your marketing.
Even if your marketing is already excellent, if you systematically improve EVERY link in the marketing chain, even by only 10% each, you'd probably double your leads.
One of the great mysteries of effective marketing, to most people, is how to write copy that works.
It's true there is a great deal of skill and experience that goes into copywriting. There's a famous story in the marketing world, about one of the greatest ad writers of all time. A client, admiring an ad, asked him how long it took to write it? "Twenty years," he said. "Twenty years."
However, that doesn't mean there aren't some simple things you can learn to make your own marketing more effective. If you are going to write your own copy, or to assess the copy an agency or marketing copy creates for you, follow these rules:
Technical or professional marketing requires a different approach.
Technical buyers, professional buyers, engineers and the like, you can turn these types off by emphasizing benefits over specifications.
Professional technical buyers WANT specs. They want to compare your product's attributes with other competing products.
Do they still want benefits? Of course. But you need more emphasis on the technical specs and features if you want to win them over.
That doesn't mean emotion doesn't play a role in their purchases. And while the emotion is more likely to be connected to such things as on-time delivery, tech support, reliability and pricing, that doesn't mean aesthetics doesn't play a role.
All other things being equal, a portable heart-rate monitor with a slick looking case is going to sell better than one with a plain gray functional look to it.
Marketing to be effective often includes an offer.
An offer is anything intended to get the potential buyer to act NOW, not postpone action. That is one of the major barriers to overcome in all marketing: to get immediate action.
If the prospect doesn't act now, when he has just finished reading, seeing or hearing your pitch, what are the chances he'll act later, after he's cooled off, objections come to mind, his wife yelled at him, the traffic cop gave him a ticket and he just found out what happened to his stock portfolio today?
The first words a person sees or hears in your ad, article, brochure, direct mail piece or web page are hugely important.
This is the point where you get the person's interest. Or not.
This is the second huge barrier you have to overcome to achieve effective marketing (the first is getting noticed at all). If you get the person's interest, they are going to read or listen to the next line. If you don't, they are gone.
You know this from your own experience. The average American is exposed to over 3,000 marketing messages per day. How many of them do you pay attention to? A handful at most I'm sure.
And which ones are they? The ones that say something to indicate this is or might be of interest or importance TO YOU.
It is often (but not always) true that when people buy something - whether as consumers or for business - that they are doing so to solve a problem.
With some types of products and services this is more true than others. It is almost always true in health care. It probably isn't true in toy sales, but maybe a mother is buying a toy to get her child to shut up - in which case "our toy will occupy your 3 to 5 year old for hours" could be a great selling point.
If you have a product or service that is basically a solution to a problem, then starting out by selling the problem works in more than one way:
First of all, it at once selects out someone who has that problem. That leads to headlines like
Homeowners! Over your head in debt?
You don't leave it at that but work your copy and imagery to make the reader / visitor / viewer / listener painfully aware of the problem.
Last year 500,000 US homeowners declared bankruptcy. This year those numbers are predicted to skyrocket to over 2 million!
Are you constantly upset by debt collection phone calls?
Possibly they've been trying to ignore their problem. You don't want to let them do that. Once you've adequately brought home the depth of their difficulty, you've got them more ready to listen to a solution:
We can provide cash for the equity in your home in less than 36 hours. Call today!
Of course this is an obvious example, but you'd be surprised at the variety of products and services this works for. It's worth considering when planning your marketing strategy.
The bigger ticket the item, the more it takes to sell it.
That would seem obvious, but it is a point frequently missed. The reverse is also true. You better not get into a lengthy explanation in marketing a $5 item! People will take one look at it and either buy or not.
With very expensive items, you'd better plan on a very extensive website, one which answers every possible question and objection, provides full data on every possible feature and benefit, and provides tons of confidence builders (video testimonials are great in that kind of situation). Sales aids should be equally extensive.
You also in that situation need to provide multiple methods of contact and make contact very easy.
Finally, you need to provide a gradient to purchase, such as newsletter signups, introductory trials, and so on. Give them a reason (one that is valid FOR THEM) to provide their contact information.
There's an old saying in sales and marketing, "sell the sizzle, not the steak."
You're selling time shares in Hawaiian condos. Talk about the features, pricing, etc., or the practical benefits, you are selling the steak.
Talking about romantic hideaways in paradise sells the sizzle.
In consumer marketing, and even to a degree in business-to-business marketing, the sizzle sells. That doesn't mean you ignore the features and benefits.
But look at any auto commercial and you'll see a heavy emphasis on sizzle - and how many autos would sell without that?
Look for the romance, beauty or drama in your product and promote that with your marketing copy and imagery.
People often buy on emotion and justify it with logic. That really comes to the fore with "image sales." Some products are easier to sell when you emphasize their image, the status or glamor of owning them.
A man may explain the reason he bought a new, expensive Mercedes as "You know these things are really built with precision. They're quality cars that will last for a lot of miles?€¦ blah, blah."
But we all know he REALLY bought it because owning a Mercedes means you're well-off.
People who buy a Rolls Royce don't care about its various features and benefits. They are interested in the image of class, wealth, status, etc. that goes along with the $400,000 price tag
The whole woman's fashion industry runs that way, explaining why someone will pay $1000 for a Prada handbag.
Prada is so snooty it is almost impossible to buy something in their online store. You have to read their conditions of sale, attest to being over 21, if you make a mistake you get dumped back to the beginning.
You would never market most products that way. They could care less! It just contributes to their image.
A website, or any marketing, has to reach your potential customers - make them wake up and take notice.
Not put them to sleep.
How do you do that?
One of the main ways - it applies mainly to consumer sales - is with FEATURES and BENEFITS.
If you're selling a fancy cell phone to a certain public, are you really selling them high-tech gadgetry? Or are you selling benefits such as convenience, ease-of-use, time saved, etc.? People ?€“ especially consumers - buy benefits ("What's in it for me?").
They're not really buying the feature that the phone can store up to 750 phone numbers. What they're buying is convenience.
Stored phone numbers save time when dialing. So convenience and time saved are the benefits to the customer. That is what they get out of this purchase.
Your website should always turn product or services features into benefits.
Like this:
"Because this phone has a speaker-phone, voice calling and stores up to 750 numbers, you can call anyone and everyone hands-free."
You tell them the features to give the benefits credibility, but it is the benefits that you are really selling.
Features have to do with products. Benefits relate to people.
Features involve logic. Benefits involve emotions.
So, don't put your customers to sleep by chanting off a laundry list of product features. Instead, create want and desire by emphasizing people benefits.
I still think there's a lot of truth in it, truth that is very applicable to the current economic scene.
Certainly for many the current situation is a crisis!
But for those with guts and the wits to see them, opportunities are - and will be - plentiful.
It is well known that recessions are a good time to start a company. Why? The competition is likely to be struggling. And potential buyers will be open to new solutions that better serve their (now changed) needs.
IF you intend to thrive and survive - if you would rather be on the "opportunity" side of things - then marketing is going to be an important element of it.
If you are just planning on laying down and hoping for the best, well then, don't call me.
People often think the best use of their marketing dollar is to go after new markets.
Most of the time you are better off trying for a bigger share or better ROI (Return on Investment) from your top, most productive, best market segment (type of customer), or best-selling product or products.
There's actually a simple mathematical formula involved. A larger share of a bigger pie gives more of an increase than an equally larger share of a smaller pie.
And if you are talking a new market, you often have no idea how big that pie is - or how to get your hands on it. Why experiment when greener pastures are right around the corner? The grass is often greenest on your side of the fence (I can mix metaphors with the best of them).
Amazingly, I discovered I've never written a post specifically about testimonials.
I guess it is time to let the secret out.
One of the biggest reasons for marketing failure is so "Doh!" it should be called the "Homer Simpson Marketing Error."
That is not using testimonials effectively or even not using them at all.
You wouldn't believe (maybe you would) how often someone comes to me to get a website or brochure redesigned and it either has NO testimonials or few testimonials.
As told in "Guerilla Marketing" by Jay Conrad Levinson, a survey of 5,000 shoppers was once conducted by a marketing research firm to determine why people shopped where they did.
Here's what the surveyors discovered. The prime reason -- not the only reason but the PRIME reason why people shop where they do and buy what they do from whom they do?€¦ boils down to one word: CONFIDENCE.
Customers or clients want to have confidence that what they purchase will perform as claimed and that the store or manufacturer or service provider will stand behind their product or service.
People need to have a certain amount of confidence to even call you up, email you to inquire, or walk into your store. So your marketing has to have as one of its prime goals, building confidence.
There are many ways to accomplish this:
1. "Third-party endorsements" are the most important. That includes testimonials, awards, newspaper and magazine articles, TV and radio interviews.
2. Actually seeing the product or service in action helps greatly.
3. The correct image for your marketing materials is vital. If your website, brochure, ad or other items don't look professional, that's two strikes against you.
4. Anything that demonstrates or asserts your expertise in an area is a confidence builder. That includes degrees and certifications, descriptions of your background and experience
5. Case Studies are great - especially with graphs or charts that demonstrate results.
6. "White papers" - whether by yourselves or others - build credibility as objective evaluations of the scene.
7. Repetition and continuity build confidence. Seeing the same logo over and over, people eventually decide you must be okay because you've been around so long and seem familiar to them.
Whatever else you do, if you don't have the prospect's confidence, you won't get a lead or a sale. So build confidence!
We like to talk about the marketing chain. That's all the series of smaller or larger actions from a prospective customer never having heard of you, all the way through to being a regular client, customer or patient.
The percentage of customers you end up with at the end is a compilation of the percentage you DON'T lose at each step of the way.
A good website lies somewhere in the middle of that chain.
Byrd's Law #93: The worst sin in marketing is to be boring.
The only thing I have to add is: Boring to the people you are trying to reach! If you are selling fast cars, it is perfectly okay to be boring to little old ladies.
And the only thing I have to add to that is: The only way to know if what you are thinking is going to be boring, is to put yourself in the shoes of the person you are trying to influence.
Something that needs to be repeated from time-to-time.
Deceptive advertising is so common one might get the idea that is okay or effective.
Of course it can be effective in the short term. "There's a sucker born every minute" is all too true. Outside of the moral and ethical issues involved, it is not effective in the long term. Eventually bad word-of-mouth, lawsuits, etc. etc. catch up with you.
Almost all marketing has a visual (graphic) element to it. And it is the first thing that has to work because if the visual element doesn't grab someone's eyeballs, you aren't going to get a chance to get your message across. So this is important!
Of course, a lot of times this is the only thing a marketing piece does right. We've all seen ads which made us go "WoW!" and the next day you couldn't remember what brand was being promoted. But that's no excuse for or reason not to get this right.
THEN make sure your headline interests people and the rest of your copy is compelling and really speaks to the person you are trying to reach.
Since I'm sure all of you have money to burn and are looking for ways to waste money, I thought I'd help you out.
I'll limit this to "How to Waste Marketing Money" since that's what I'm an expert on. You'll have to go to other sources to find out how to waste money buying clothes, jewelry or shopping for computers.
Today, let's talk about how to waste money on a Click Ad campaign.
I've written before about the first element of successful marketing: volume. There is no such thing as successful marketing that doesn't involve a volume of "impressions" - a technical term for the number of eyeball pairs you are (potentially) reaching with your marketing.
But let's say you ARE getting a volume of reach with your marketing, and little to no response? Here's a short checklist of the BIG REASONS why:
It's a great day in America when a black man can be elected President.
What made it happen was brilliant marketing. Marketing Guys have been writing articles and talking about the Obama campaign for months - and will undoubtedly do so for years to come.
This article by Al Ries, one of the true gurus of modern-day marketing, is the best I've seen yet on the subject. Here are lessons for all of us to learn:
"Business Development" is the most common name for that portion of a company responsible for bringing in new customers, clients or patients.
If you are ambitious, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is getting Business Development working. This is FAR more of a task than people think, if they've always gotten their new business from word of mouth, referral.
Everyone wishes they could get all the new business they want that way. Of course the best prospects come by word of mouth. They are already half sold.
But it just doesn't work that way.
I first ran into this working with Dentists. They would all complain about the quality of the new patients that advertisting brought in. To which I can only say, "Yes. And your point?" because that is the way it is going to be.
At the risk of being incredibly obvious I'm going to list a few of the Big Rules for Business Development:
1. Business Development requires Wholesale, not Retail reach out. By this I mean you aren't going to succeed sending out a few hundred post cards or a few dozen letters. Think in large numbers and low percentages. That is just how it works.
2. A large percentage of prospects you generate through advertising are going to be unqualified. That is just the way it is.
3. Your first effort to develop a workable means of bringing in new business is probably going to fail. Your sixth may fail. No matter how smart you are, unless you have just rivers of money to throw at it, trial by error is a part of developing Business Development.
4. You haven't really arrived until you have a method of generating a volume of prospects which is cost effective (you make a profit off the new customers even when you take the cost of the marketing into account).
5. You haven't really arrived until you have a method of generating a volume of prospects which is scalable (you can increase the number of prospects as much as you want just by spending more on it).
When you do reach that point, it will all be worth it, because now you can start thinking about BMW's and vacations in Aspen - or retirement or buying that office building....
In any industry there are many marketing niches, defined by WHAT you sell and WHO you sell it to.
Sometimes business owners think they will be losing out on a lot of potential business - if they narrow their target market or what they are selling.
The opposite is almost always true. There is usually plenty of business even in a relatively narrow niche. By concentrating, you can get much more specific in your marketing. That is usually what people are looking for - someone who SPECIALIZES.
There are many reasons for doing market research?€¦
To establish WHO your target market is.
Surprisingly, many businesses never do this and simply go on ?€?coping and hoping.?€? They try to promote to anyone and everyone instead of finding out what identifiable market segment would give them the best bang for their buck.
I mean you wouldn?€™t want to try and sell Hyundai?€™s in Beverly Hills. Or the obvious classic, refrigerators to Eskimos.
To make sure the message you are putting out is working for you.
Hiring a new marketing company or launching a new marketing campaign can be about as scary as taking off from a short runway - with a cliff at the end of it.
You're putting your all into it and you sure hope you get enough lift before you run out of runway.
It is a rare company that can afford to spend the money necessary for an effective marketing campaign, only to have it fail.
So I wanted to reassure you.
First of all, I am NOT going to propose anything which I don't think is going to do the job for you.
Then all of us - myself, Pat our Art Director, and Vanessa, our Client Relations and Market Research Director, are PERSONALLY committed to making sure that we do a great and timely job of delivering to you.
Good marketing is often a balancing act between being old and b-o-r-i-n-g and being SO new and different as to be incomprehensible, confusing or scary.
Occasionally I get a call from someone who wants to conquer the world for $9.95. Or, to give a real example, to make their brand a household name on a budget of $1000 a month.
This is known as having champagne taste with a beer budget.
If you are doing marketing, you should be planning a campaign - not just isolated pieces or actions. That's how you make the most out of your marketing effort.
But early on in your planning, you need to have a pretty good idea of what your budget is going to be.
Unless you have an essentially unlimited budget, your choice of what media or methods to use will be heavily influenced by how much you can afford to spend.
Why?
Let me give you an example. A new client came to us complaining that he had spent $30,000 on advertising in the previous year with no result.
Turns out, almost the entirety of his budget went into TV commercials. $30,000 on cable translates to about 2 ads a day, spread across several channels.
But it takes repetition to get results in mass media advertising. With that meager exposure, probably no one even noticed their ads!
That same $30,000 put into, for example, online advertising, could have gotten them tons of business.
Of course, by then, he couldn't afford to spend another $30,000. But, knowing his budget, we got good results running a large, full-color, back page ad in a magazine with a very small circulation but one very highly targeted to potential customers of theirs.
When your marketing isn't working well it's time to stop and take a long look at what's wrong. As a wise man once said, when you've been beating your head against a wall for a while, it only makes sense to stop before it (your head) gets soft and squishy.
For many businesses, the best mailing list or customer database they will ever have is their own customer list. Yet time after time, we see businesses wasting this most valuable asset. They waste it by not keeping it in good shape, not mailing to it, not staying in communication with their current and former customers.
If you are in a business where you could be getting repeat business from former customers, and you are not contacting these people on some sort of regular schedule, then you are losing out on a lot of traffic and potential income. Failing to stay in communication with former clients, customers, patients, is a fatal flaw in far too many businesses and practices. Fact. And it's usually cheaper to get back an old customer than it is to create a new one. Of course, you need to create new customers and continue doing business with a good portion of the "old" ones if you really want to boost income and profits.
We sometimes hear from business owners that the positioning they would like to get in the minds of their customers has already been taken by another business. However, we often find that this is not true. In many cases that "other business" appears to "own" a certain position, when in fact it does not. How can this be? Because they are not capitalizing on their supposed position.
Preemptive positioning means that you preempt the position, even when others "appear" to be ensconced in that position already. Let's say that five business were competing in a certain geographical area for the same customers. And let's say those businesses all had online stores where people could place their orders over the internet. But what if none of those businesses were really pushing their online stores? They were just sort of up there online, with little or no traffic coming in.
One of those stores could decided to "own" the online position by really beefing up their online store, announcing their store loudly and clearly through their marketing and promotional efforts, and so on. They create a great online guarantee of customer satisfaction, make their website user-friendly and easy to navigate, provided useful information, on and on.
Bottom line, they end up owning the online "position," even though the other businesses also have online stores. The other businesses, if they eventually wake up and scramble to get their online act together will be perceived as "me-toos." Followers, not leaders.
Now this is a rather crude and off-the-top example of preemptive positioning. I'm sleepy this morning and it was the best I could come up with. But you get the idea. Before you decide that another business already "owns" a certain position in your industry that you wished you had, make sure that it's a fact that they do.
Sometimes you just assume it, because you know about certain aspects of their operations. Maybe they should own that position you covet, but, in fact, they don't because they are not capitalizing on it. You can then preempt them by grabbing that position and making it your own through effective marketing and PR channels.
Why are we harping on this USP thing again? Because many business owners still don't get it. If you do not have a USP, you have nothing to differentiate yourself from other competitors or similar businesses. So you do not give your potential customers a good reason to deal with you instead of the other "me-too" businesses out there. If there's no difference, they might as well throw darts to decide who to give their business to.
