Have you ever thought that running a business, especially a retail store, is a lot like dating? There you are in your store and in walks Mr. or Ms. “Right”, that ideal customer who simply loves your store and goes wild for your stuff.

You have a great time and Mr. or Ms. Right leaves the store, hopefully purchases in hand, and you think, That was great! I wonder when I’ll see him/her again?

Hmmmm? Too often, you just wait until they happen to show up another time. You can sit next to the phone and wait for it to ring, or you can take action!

Remember that guy who used to have his “little black book” with the names and phone numbers of lots of cute unattached girls? He always had a date. Here’s how to be that guy in the retail world:

When he met an attractive girl, the guy with the little black book probably said things like, “May I have your phone number so I can call you?” By doing that, he got permission to call, because if they gave him their number, they were probably interested, maybe even flattered that he’d asked.

You need to get permission to follow-up too. “Permission to Market” is something you want to achieve with every one of the ideal customers who enter your store—those people who you’ve identified as the ones who are most likely to be interested in the things you have to sell—in other words, your “target group”.

This shouldn’t be too difficult; after all, they already came into your store and bought something.

But even if they didn’t buy there’s no reason to think they might not buy at another time. Maintain contact. While you’re transacting with them, say, “Would you like to be on our VIP list and receive advance notice of specials and sales events?” …or “We love to keep in touch with our neighbours. Can we have your contact information?”

You might simply have your own little black book next to the cash and ask people to sign up. Lots of them will. Or better yet, start a database on your computer.

Now you’ve got permission to market to them, so start with a simple message thanking them for their business. You might add an extra, like a coupon good for a small gift with their next purchase—whatever you can afford. You want them to know you appreciate their business and are offering a value added service by staying in touch.

Next, send them an invitation to a special event at the store, a preview of new fashions, a demonstration of something that’s of interest, or an exclusive pre-sale VIP customer night. Anything you can come up with to make them feel special and get them back to the store.

But be careful, don’t pester the people on your list, space the messages out, perhaps than a month or six weeks apart. Be sure the emails have an “opt out” provision as a courtesy—most people will not use this.

You’re thinking, when am I going to find the time to do all this? Good question! The answer is: you automate the whole thing with contact software. Check out Master of the Moment— the Art of Follow-up Marketing on the download section of the Marketing Masters.ca website to learn more.

Just as in dating, if the chemistry is right, your goal is to further and build the relationship. Having ideal customers that you see often, can be a marriage made in heaven!

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Tags: customers, Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Elizabeth Walker, Ken Burgin, Marketing, retail
Posted on January 7th, 2010 | No Comments »

“Marketers can’t push products on people. They have to think like journalists and create a dialogue with their audience to earn a prospect’s trust,” notes Varju Luceno of Global Office Partners. “Many firms will need to reinvent their marketing in 2010.”

As you get ready to flip your calendar over for the new year, take some time to rethink your social media marketing system and goals, with the helpful tips in this new Mplans.com article: Why Your Company Needs a Social Media Marketing System in 2010.

Tags: Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Marketing, social media, Varju Luceno
Posted on December 17th, 2009 | No Comments »

“One of the best business-building tactics is to demonstrate your knowledge to a receptive audience,” say Marketing Masters Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker. “Public speaking is particularly effective if your business has a service or consulting component.”

In their recent article, ,Speak Up! Get out there and find an audience for what you do on Mplans.com, Burgin and Walker point out the hows and whys of business owners getting out into their target market communities and engaging in different forms of public speaking, e.g. demos or hands-on workshops.

Click here to read the entire Marketing Masters’ article.

Tags: Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Elizabeth Walker, Ken Burgin, Marketing, Marketing Masters, marketing tactics, public speaking
Posted on December 14th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

In a new article on Mplans.com, Fiona Friesen, president and founder of Glue, outlines why your business needs a Marketing Kit as part of your strategy to convert potential customers to loyal ideal clients.

1) It keeps your marketing efforts consistent
2) It tells customers why they need you
3) It keeps you on track
4) It keeps you flexible
5) It saves you time

Fiona Friesen is a certified Duct Tape Marketing Coach located in Calgary, AB, Canada.

Click here to read Fiona’s entire article.

Tags: Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Fiona Friesen, Marketing, marketing kit, marketing strategy
Posted on December 7th, 2009 | No Comments »

Presumably you, as a business owner, are devoting hours of work, lots of energy, and possibly a delayed or reduced salary to get your dream off the ground. This kind of commitment is assumed. The real test of your business mission (or better, your mantra) is the commitment of your customers and your employees.

What kind of business would you have if your employees cared so much about what you do that they were willing to do this?

Employees at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, dance in a video to promote breast cancer awareness.

What kind of business would you have if your customers cared so much about what you’re offering that they were willing to do this?



Apple customers start lining up outside the store one week before the release of Apple’s 3G.

Or this?

Star Wars fan dad creates an AT-AT stroller for his son.

Your business is only as successful as your employees and customers make it. Give them something to get inspired by and excited about.

by Sara Prentice Manela
Editor
Palo Alto Software, Inc.

Tags: entrepreneurship, Marketing
Posted on December 2nd, 2009 | No Comments »

If you have ever read any books on marketing you are no doubt familiar with the 4 – “P’s” of Marketing – Product, Price, Place and Promotion.  When combined correctly, these 4 elements can have a tremendous impact on your bottom line, but NONE of them are anywhere near as effective as the never mentioned 5^th “P”.  Every company struggles with it, and most would confess it is what holds them back from achieving success in their marketing.  What is this elusive 5^th “P”?

Productivity

It’s all well and good to have a sound plan or system on paper, but it is another to put those plans into action and then to maintain those activities on a consistent basis.

Because so many business owners remain the key rainmaker for their organization and still carry out a ton of the work, non-time-sensitive activities, like marketing tend to fall to the wayside.

Let me ask you this.  If you were meeting with a new prospective customer to work on a sizable proposal, would you miss the meeting because the printer needs fixing or you have a ton of emails in your inbox?  Of course not!

It’s time to consider marketing your biggest client.  It does, after all, bring in more money than any other one activity, yet we constantly put it aside for less important issues. Want to make a big difference in your business?  Then start keeping your appointments with your marketing.  Here’s how you can harness the 5^th “P”

1. Make Appointments With Your Marketing – In your calendar, set aside consistent meetings with Mr. Marketing.  Try 1 hour a day at least 3 days a week for a start.  Now don’t break these appointments.
2. Minimize Distractions – Turn Notifications off on your Email, put your phone on Do Not Disturb, close the door to your office and remain productive for one hour.  After all if you were in a meeting with a client, you wouldn’t be answering emails, phone calls or questions from staff or family members!
3. Make a Priority List – I like to create a list in Excel and then next to each item I rank it first by priority (1 is high and 3 is low), and then by the amount of time it takes (.1hrs, 3 hours or 40 hours).  Now multiply these two columns and sort your task from those with the lowest to the highest.  For big tasks, you might want to break them down to smaller tasks so they get started and don’t remain too far down your list, especially if they are a high priority.
4. Create a Weekly Task List – of everything you want to accomplish that week so that when you sit down you know what it is you’re working on.
5. Too much on your plate? Then ask yourself, can you outsource this to someone else, and is it really that important right now.  Remove those items that others can do or that can be delayed with little detriment, to a later date.
6. Be Held Accountable – who do you have to hold you accountable on your marketing?  Face it – we all work best to hard deadlines.  Choose an accountability partner, or of course you can always enroll in one of our courses!

Cidnee Stephen is the owner of Strategies for Success – a marketing company that focuses on the needs of budget-minded small businesses and professional services. She has helped hundreds of small businesses get out of their peak and valley ruts to finally achieve that next vital level of success. Cidnee is also a sought-after speaker, writer and blogger on marketing topics that affect small businesses and B2B service based operations.

If you would like to build a system to reach those goals quicker, check out Cindee’s Speak for Leads & Expertise Program.

Tags: Cidnee Stephen, Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Marketing, news
Posted on November 3rd, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Guest post today by Cidnee Stephen of  Strategies for Success.

I love to write – creatively as well as for business. So last year I decided to take a course at a nearby college to learn how to hone this skill. I learned a very valuable lesson that REALLY should be the GOLDEN RULE for your marketing.

It’s always better to SHOW your audience than TELL them.

Speaking is a great way to do this, especially for those of you in service based businesses. Here are just a few of the key advantages of integrating this into your marketing:

• You have the opportunity to educate your target market in your area of expertise
• By demonstrating your expertise, you increase trust and credibility with attendees
• The content you create can be used in multiple other ways – articles, audio CD, teleseminar, webinar, report or book.
• You get to hone your public speaking skills and may find that you can even get paid to speak!
• Most importantly, you have the opportunity to attract more prospects to you and your business

Okay, so you know that speaking is for you. You do after all possess some public speaking ability. Maybe you have even done some talks already. If this is the case and you are finding that you STILL are not getting the leads you think you should, it could be because one or more of the following areas are not aligned.

• You are not presenting your subject in an appealing way or with a catchy title – Create at least 3 various topics to present. This allows the organizer to choose the one that is most appropriate for them. Research various topics that other speakers in your area of expertise use to give you inspiration in catchy titles and content.
• You are not attracting the RIGHT type of speaking engagements – Look for speaking engagements that have your qualified prospects in the audience. Don’t be afraid to ask about the audience or expected numbers. There is nothing worse than doing hours of preparation only to find a handful of people in the room when you are expecting 50!
• You are giving too little or too much away in your talk – you should be looking to explain why your topic is important to the attendee and what the key areas are they need to address. You are giving away too much if you start explaining HOW they address each area.
• You have no mechanisms in place to capture leads AFTER your talk - This is probably one of the biggest mistakes many speakers make. If you walk away after a talk HOPING that people will contact you, you are losing valuable control in your marketing system. Think of ways that you can contact them. Perhaps you can offer to send them the PowerPoint slides for your presentation or a special Trial of your product or services. By having a lead capture system in place you will be able to measure your results and implement a strong follow up campaign to move prospects closer to a sale.

How do you know you have been successful? That depends on your goals. I am looking to speak at least 20 times per year to an average audience of 50+ solopreneurs and business owners (so let me know if you are aware of such opportunities). At each event, I am looking to capture information on over 80% of them, and to close a minimum of $5000 in sales through each one (not on the day, but through my follow up campaign).

What are your goals?

_________________
Cidnee Stephen is the owner of Strategies for Success – a marketing company that focuses on the needs of budget minded small businesses and professional services.  She has helped hundreds of small businesses get out of their peak and valley ruts to finally achieve that next vital level of success.  Cidnee is also a sought after speaker, writer and blogger on marketing topics that affect small businesses and B2B service based operations.

If you would like to build a system to reach those goals quicker, check out Cindee’s Speak for Leads & Expertise Program.

Tags: Cindee Stephen, Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Marketing, marketing leads, news
Posted on October 20th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

There’s an old story in the ad business about a man who ran a hot dog stand. He did really well selling his hot dogs. One day, a customer mentioned, while adding mustard to his hot dog, that he felt there was an economic downturn looming. The hot dog stand owner decided he’d better prepare for the worst so he immediately fired his helper, switched to lower quality wieners and stopped advertising. Sure enough, business dropped off and he finally had to close down. “It’s a good thing I was prepared.” said the hot dog stand owner, as he signed his bankruptcy documents.

The fact is, that when times become tough, the first thing many business owners do is stop marketing, and lay off staff. This most likely means there will be fewer customers coming in and fewer people to serve the ones that do show up—a good recipe for disaster.

This is what the Brick found out recently. We’ve always thought of The Brick (“Nobody beats The Brick”) as more of a finance company than a furniture company, but it’s certainly true that between it, Leons and Chinese imports, furniture retailing has fundamentally changed in this country.

The sector is worth $17 billion dollars a year, but profits are thin and the market is highly fragmented. The Brick has about an 8% share, and lost a ton of money in both 2008 and 2009.

But rival Leons, while facing slowing store sales and profit declines, were still making money. How come? Because The Brick made some decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time, and nearly drove their business into the ground.

Look at what they did and see if you would have done the same thing. We bet most of you would—and we bet you would face the same bad results.

The Brick “saved” money by chopping advertising and laying off hundreds of sales staff. As a result, store traffic tanked. Fewer customers came into the store, and those who did come couldn’t find the help they needed, so they didn’t buy. Not enough commissioned professionals on the floor selling meant revenue dropped even lower.

Lax controls chewed up cash. Inventory did not match customer demand–too many items that didn’t move off the floor, too few of the high-demand items. The result: long delivery times that annoyed customers and kept them from coming back. And following that, problems with supplier credit, as inventory turns slowed and inventory costs rose.

New Brick CEO, Bill Gregson figures that only ten percent of the company’s troubles were due to the recession. The real culprits were the wrong stock in the showroom, no expert sales staff on the floor, no advertising to get customers in the door and lax inventory and supply chain controls.

He’s figuring on a fast fix (their August long weekend sales were way up), by fixing inventory levels, hiring back the staff, running more ads and finding economies in some novel ways like holding inventory at the manufacturers rather than the Brick warehouses.

We are not saying you can’t find real economies by reviewing your staffing, inventory and advertising practices; in fact, much of what we do for our clients is to make these processes more efficient.

We are saying that it’s easy to “cut off your nose to spite your face” when you cut the very services that bring business in the door. Bottom line is: when the economy is bad is the time to increase your marketing and upgrade your service. Do so and you’ll be way ahead when the good times are back.

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca

blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Tags: Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Elizabeth Walker, Ken Burgin, Marketing, news, retail
Posted on September 22nd, 2009 | 2 Comments »

This past July I talked about how Dave Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube post had brought new strength and power to consumer complaints against corporations’ customer dis-service. The original song/video has had over 5 million views, and is now available on iTunes. This is an astounding amount of bad publicity, damaging mainstream media press coverage, and negative word-of-mouth marketing for United Airlines.

Yesterday, August 19, Huffington Post reported that troubadour Carroll has, as promised, released his second of three songs/videos about his year-long saga of trying to get United Airlines to pay for the repairs to his Taylor guitar, broken by UAL baggage handlers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

The lesson to learn here is that while the benefits of good customer service might take a while to become apparent, bad customer service gets noticed – talked about, and publicized – immediately, and widely, and repeatedly. Businesses spend trillions of dollars every year in all kinds of marketing programs and tactics to gain customers. And everyone claims that they understand the principle that it is easier and less expensive to keep a good customer than to constantly find new ones.

That said, then why do businesses persist in giving crappy customer care? Today’s media-savvy consumers cannot be brushed off as minor annoyances. They have global reach. As Carroll has shown, any positive results that a company might have been gained from all that marketing spend can be quickly negated in one stroke. Have you seen the United Breaks Guitars t-shirts people are wearing to the airports?

UAL will be spending marketing money on damage control for months to come. You and your business can avoid a similar image catastrophe by making positive, responsive, customer service an integral part of your marketing plan and business operations plan.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: customer care, customer service, Dave Carroll, Marketing
Posted on August 21st, 2009 | 2 Comments »

How much thought do you give to where your dollars are going when you buy a new pair of shoes or go out for a meal? With small local businesses struggling to compete against big box stores and corporate chains, it’s more important than ever to try to keep your money in your community.

That’s why we’re keeping an eye on a new, interesting “buy local” movement springing out of Minneapolis. The 3/50 Project aims to save “the brick and mortars our nation is built on.”

How are they going to save it? By encouraging consumers to pick three local businesses they’d really miss if they were to close down, then having them commit to spending $50 (combined) each month at those stores.

The 3/50 Project isn’t an “all or nothing” campaign that insists consumers stop shopping in chains or franchises. Instead, our message is about balance—of the money you currently spend each month, we simply ask you to redirect an affordable $50 back to the locally owned independent businesses that have been forgotten of late.

According to the website, 68 percent of every dollar spent in a locally-owned business returns to the local economy –  in the form of taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. By comparison, when you buy at a national chain, only 43 percent of that money stays local. That’s a significant amount of money that can easily be funneled back into a community.

Enlisting business supporters, consumers, and organizations to get behind the movement, the 3/50 Project has gone national with supporters across the country holding events and community projects.

Palo Alto Software has teamed up with Rick L’Amie of Moxie Marketing in Austin, Texas, to support one such event. Moxie issued aB2B challenge to Austin business owners to help other businesses in the city. Each business that takes part in the challenge will be entered into a drawing to win one of three copies of Marketing Plan Pro we’ve donated to the cause. Winners will also receive a free 30-Day Moxie Quick Start Coaching program.

If you happen to be located in Austin, click here to enter the 3-Step Buy Local Challenge. All you have to do is name three local businesses, describe why you like them (stories will be shared on Rick’s blog), and pledge to support them.

If you don’t live in Austin, consider taking part in the 3/50 Project by making sure to spend some of your hard earned dollars in the stores and businesses owned by your neighbors. They’ll thank you, and you’ll be doing something simple to help your local economy.

Tags: 3/50 project, Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Marketing, news, Small Business
Posted on August 6th, 2009 | No Comments »