9-9-9

No matter which political party you claim allegiance, watching the Republican presidential campaign has been intriguing. Truly high drama TV, I’ve found the debates way more entertaining than any of the fake reality shows broadcast regularly by the networks. Watching the candidates attack each other verbally without coming to blows is indeed a lesson in restraint (maybe the subject of a future blog topic).

By far, the most interesting occurrence to me has been the meteoric rise of Herman Cain with his “9-9-9 Plan.” Whether you think the plan is “bold” as Cain suggests or you think it lacks credibility, it’s hard to deny that this is the marketing process at it’s best. Originally, an advisor suggested the tax plan be called “the Optimal Tax,” but Cain nixed that moniker, settling for the now well-known 9-9-9. Successful marketing requires more than just a catchy name, but Cain’s background as a businessman has surely taught him a thing or two on how to sell an idea and elevate his status as a top tier contender.

For a moment, take a look at the products or services your business offers. Do they spark the same enthusiasm with your customers as the 9-9-9 Plan does among the Republican base? Love it or hate it, we’ve all heard about it by now – isn’t marketing supposed to bring about awareness? I contend that having a product that works is priority one, but selling it like Herman Cain, that’s how you bring in the big bucks.

Toot Your Horn the Right Way

I do a bit of reading and every once in a while I run across a book I think was written especially for someone like me. “Brag! The Art of Tooting Your Horn Without Blowing It” is a fantastic guide for self-promoting without being obnoxious. Written by Peggy Klaus, this gem, although written a few years ago, is chock full of practical advice for how to sell yourself under any circumstances.

Great for business owners as well as those gainfully employed, I enjoyed reading it so much, I finished it in one day. One notable section is the “Take 12″ Self-Evaluation. The author lists 12 thought provoking questions geared to help you present your best self in numerous situations.  Also, dear to my heart, is a chapter devoted to the business owner. With a little preparation, you can be ready to promote yourself or your products in 30 seconds or 30 minutes.

Whatever your vocation, if you want to excel, then you have to be able to tell others why you’re capable. Yet, being a braggart is a surefire way to send colleagues running for the hills. Take the time to discover how to toot your horn correctly. You’ll enjoy the benefits and better yet, still keep your friends!

Facebook is Having a Sale

Next week, according to an article in USA Today, Facebook is going to unveil a plan to offer $50 in advertising credits for up to 200,000 small businesses. The ads are the typical pay per click spots we have come to know – someone clicks on the ad and the advertiser pays a certain amount for each click. In the same way Google grew its revenue through business advertising, Facebook is hoping the credits will encourage small businesses on its service to take the plunge.

Facebook estimates that almost 1/3 of the country’s 30 million small businesses reach out to their customers through the network. And with the platform’s relational strong points and precise advertising targeting ability, sweetening the pot with $50 in credits makes for a compelling offer.

Does your business have a strong Facebook presence? Are you currently advertising on the network? This might be something worth considering. Before stepping up to the task, look at your activity and see what kind of traffic your fan page is drawing. A sale that’s really a good deal? — Can’t beat it.

Making Your Website Work Hard to Nurture Leads

I’m reading a terrific book on generating leads from your marketing efforts. The book is called Maximizing Lead Generation by Ruth P. Stevens and is available in print or for electronic readers. My reading last night covered chapter 9 on Lead Nurturing – keeping your leads interested as you hopefully move them from prospect to customer.

Nurturing your prospects is an important component in the lead generation process. Studies have shown that companies practicing lead nurturing activities (periodic emails, phone calls, catalog mailings, ebook downloads) have a greater potential to achieve higher revenues from marketing campaigns as well as increase the average size of customer orders.

When it comes to your website, there are plenty of opportunities to provide engaging experiences to visiting prospects. Here are a few ideas to help you nurture your leads:

1. Offer helpful information such as white papers to visitors
2. Add video to your site to demonstrate a product
3. If you hold periodic events, update event listings regularly on the site

Most important, keep the information FRESH. Change your offers so that no one activity has time to get stale.

Many businesses set up a website and think all the work is done. It’s all about engagement. Make your website work hard to keep the prospects (and customers) interested until they’re ready to purchase.

Increasing Holidays (I Mean Sales)

I read an article in the Wall St. Journal recently that piqued my interest. The topic centered on techniques retailers use to invent “holidays” and special causes to encourage more sales. We’re all familiar with the practice. We have Back to School season, Mother’s Day shopping and the one we all dread in January, Cold and Flu season.

You can probably guess that these holidays are meant to drive impulse sales. However, did you know marketing data shows impulse buying has dropped to 15% of total purchases in 2010, down from 29% in 2008 (study from market research firm NPD Group), causing retailers to work harder to get those sales? The idea behind seasonal selling is valid because researchers found that customers will buy more if it’s a special occasion, especially if they’re buying for their children.

Some tricks of the trade include packaging products for the particular season, hence, red and green M&Ms during the holidays. Special in store displays gathering a collection of products appropriate for the season also help to spawn increases in sales.

As a small business, what are you doing to drive more sales? It’s obvious that stores don’t just wait for sales to come to them. Pharmaceutical companies use similar tactics by offering drugs to treat ailments we never heard of a few years ago. Can your business present more reasons for your clients to purchase? It may take a little thinking outside of the box, but have reason and people will buy. They’ll be happy you cured their “problem” and you’ll be happy you increased your sales.

Be a Cracker Barrel

This past weekend my husband and I drove down to North Carolina to visit our daughter and son-in-law (big ups to my son-in-law for receiving his M.Ed from Elon University on Saturday). Driving back home on I-85 Sunday morning, meant only one thing – we had to stop somewhere for breakfast. Traveling I-85 is a pretty common trip for us, so we settled on a Denny’s about 20 miles before we got to the Virginia state line. What luck! It wasn’t crowded at all. It seems as though we stopped in before the church crowd showed up.

Inside my husband and I started chatting with our waitress and we commented on how they weren’t too busy at the time. She agreed with us and said, up until recently, she worked at the nearby Cracker Barrel and they were always busy. That started a discussion on how many signs you see on the road directing travelers to Cracker Barrel. While, yes, you may see a sign here and there promoting Denny’s, but if there’s a Cracker Barrel within 10 miles, you’re bound to see at least two to three billboards saying it’s coming up in a couple of exits. It’s as if they’re saying, “Hold on. We know you’re hungry, but wait just a minute, you’re almost there.”

I thought about some business owners I meet occasionally that insist word of mouth marketing is all they need to keep their businesses running. Not to say word of mouth campaigns aren’t effective, but the operative word here is “campaign,” not merely hoping that others are spreading the word.

September is only a week away. Generally, activity picks up from now until we start getting ready for that jolly man in the big red suit. Don’t be a Denny’s and hope you bring in the business you want. Be a Cracker Barrel and make sure everyone knows you are here.

Even in July, Coolness Doesn’t Always Make For a Good Thing

On this hot July morning, I was all psyched to download the new Mac operating system, OS X Lion. I’m an Apple junkie to the core – I’ve got the phone, the pad and the book. So when I heard that Lion would transform my MacBook interface into something that looked like my iPad, well, I was ALL IN. What, there’s nothing cooler than being cool, right?

I had read the reviews from the big blogs. One article was entitled, “Mac OS X Lion: Yes, it’s worth the upgrade.” I even emailed that one to a few friends. So, this morning, just before I hit the button to get the party started, I thought to look at a few more reviews from the masses who had jumped in before me. Things still seemed ok, and then I saw it, “MS Office doesn’t work.” Whoa, that’s a problem. Apparently, since Apple no longer supports the PowerPC architecture, older programs meant to run on the Intel Macs are erased and no longer accessible. That gave me pause to step back a little. It’s not that I have to use Word, but I receive a ton of files from clients (and friends) that use Word. I’m not about to get into a conversion exercise each time someone sends me a document.

Which brings me to my point – Is being cooler cool when it isn’t exactly what you need? Not in my book. And to extrapolate, when you sell to your customers, what do they appreciate more, a product that really helps them or one that’s so awesome they’ll eventually find something to do with it?

Sometimes as business owners, in the effort to show clients we’re on the cutting edge, we get caught up on the latest and greatest and push those items on everyone we see. Understand first what need a client really has, then work to solve that problem. Later, with problem solved, they’ll be interested in being cooler than cool, especially on a hot day like today in the middle of July.

Why You Have to Give Customers What’s Promised

Last week I had the opportunity to take an awesome Caribbean cruise vacation with my family to Panama. Frankly, I can’t tell you what I enjoyed more, the time spent relaxing or the time spent with family – both were outstanding. With my children now adults and the recent addition of grandbaby, Noah, it’s rare that we’re all together in one place at the same time. Truly, it was a special week filled with wonderful memories.

The cruise was fabulous. No complaints about service, food or finding a nice shady place to sit and enjoy a book. Where I’m feeling a testy, though, centers around the entertainment. The featured show for the 4th of July holiday evening was listed in the daily itinerary as a special concert by Las Vegas impersonator of Stevie Wonder, Jerome Dabney. No problem there, sounded like we were in for a great performance. However, as the show started and the cruise director began hyping up the audience, he went on to say how this was a special performance, the only one of its kind for the 4th of July holiday on all of the cruise line’s ships. “Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome for you tonight, Stevie Wonder!!!” What? Could it be? The “real” Stevie Wonder singing before my eyes???

You know, to this day, I’m really not sure who we saw in concert. I was absolutely certain at the time it was the real Stevie. Others I spoke to thought the same thing. However, numerous calls to the ship’s front desk all yielded the same answer – it was an imposter. All I know for sure is I was annoyed with the cruise line for not specifically saying it was Jerome Dabney. After all, it was a holiday performance. Couldn’t it have been Stevie? I wouldn’t have screamed like a schoolgirl had I known it was a fake.

Make sure you’re completely honest in providing your customers the product or service you promised. A perfect relationship can be tarnished if your client’s expectations are misaligned with yours. As for me, I refused to let anything ruin my vacay. We all shared a huge laugh over the incident and my son-in-law will probably remind me of Jerome Dabney from now until kingdom come. . .He really did sound like Stevie.

Increase or Decrease Your Marketing – What Would You Do?

I came across an article today discussing the plight of the Washington State Tourism Board and how the state is essentially shutting it down and all its marketing functions, due to budget constraints. Sound familiar – a business deciding that product marketing has to be cut or eliminated because it’s too expensive?

The article went on to say that even though Washington State had made this decision, by contrast, the state of Michigan had taken the opposite view. Michigan, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, plans to spend about $25 million promoting its tourism industry. That figure is five times the amount it spent in 2005. Michigan figures for every $1 spent luring visitors to its state each year, the state receives $3.29 in tax revenue alone. Washington State doesn’t do badly either. Records from 2010 indicate that tourists to Washington spent over $15 billion. That’s a lot of money to risk losing if they stop promoting.

The U.S. Travel Association says about half of the states in the country are cutting their marketing budgets (e.g. New York, Arizona, Hawaii). Michigan, Alaska and Louisiana fall into the other half, which are increasing their promotional spending. As a small business owner, this example screams of the necessity of looking at marketing activity as an investment. When you want to “save money” by cutting your marketing budget, you run the risk of losing your customers to other businesses who are just as eager to increase their efforts to win over new clients. Now, what’s that saying about being penny wise and pound foolish?

YES! A Better Way to Use Email for Marketing

Small business owners love email as a marketing tool because it’s inexpensive, can be used as often as desired and the emails normally can be generated in-house, forgoing outside agency fees. That’s why we have so many e-blasts – one message sent to many without the expense of postage – how awesome is that?

However, businesses on the savvier side of the fence are noting that the one-batch-fits-all emails aren’t the most effective messages to send out to contact lists. Growing in popularity are email campaigns called “lifecycle email marketing” which employ an event-triggered strategy, automatically reaching out to prospects and clients at specific points in time.

For example, a company might send emails with product suggestions to online purchasers inviting them to buy more just after they’ve made a transaction. There are all sorts of event triggered messages – welcomes after website visits, prompts after shopping cart abandonment and notices of service alerts. Using these targeted messages has resulted in higher campaign performances than batch programs. Recent research showed that some lifecycle marketing programs experienced a 600% performance improvement over traditional email activity (Top Seven CRM Marketing Processes for 2011, Gartner, April 2011). Marketers cited some benefits of lifecycle marketing as being increased customer engagement, increased campaign performance and increased customer satisfaction and retention.

The news is good – using email, as one of your marketing tools is still a great idea. However, you can get a bigger bang for your buck through better targeting and crafting of your messages. Consider employing lifecycle email marketing as a means to get better responses and achieve higher sales for your business. Have any questions? Ask me, I can help you out.