The 5th “P” of Marketing

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 5th “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 5th “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 5th “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!

ducttapemarketingbadgeCidnee 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.

Speak for Leads and Expertise

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?

_________________
ducttapemarketingbadgeCidnee 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.

Basic mistakes retailers make when times are tough

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.

firedThe 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.

ducttapemarketingbadgeKen 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/

Troubadour takes bad customer service to task. Song #2.

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

The 3/50 Project to save local businesses

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.

Take the 3-Step Buy Local Challenge

10 ways to market when cash is tight

A while  ago, Staples and Angus Reid released their latest “STAPLES Canada Small Business National Quarterly Index,”

dollarsignIt looks like we believe we are over the hump. 70 per cent of business owners expect at least some improvement to their business over the next six months (compared to 58 per cent in March 2009).

Now that you’re feeling better, get out there and make sure that your customers will come to you rather than your competition when they are ready to buy.

Chances are you are a little tight for cash, so here are 10 low-cost ways to market better we’ve worked out with help from Joanna L. Krotz, co-author of the “Microsoft Small Business Kit”. (If you haven’t already, check out Advice for Entrepreneurs at www.microsoft.com/canada.)

  • Stop servicing break-even customers. By now you know this is a theme with us. every second you spend with a customer who doesn’t help you make money you are short-changing those who do.
  • Make every customer feel special. Always add something to the purchase,whether it’s a hand-written note to a consumer or a recommendation on the latest greatest business book to a business customer.
  • Create business cards that prospects keep. How about a good-looking notepad with your contact info and tagline on every page? Or a free or low-cost trial offer on the back, real estate that’s valuable and often wasted.
  • Develop an electronic mailing list and send old-fashioned letters too. E-newsletters are cheap to send, but you can quickly stand out by occasionally sending personal, surface mail letters to customers and prospects too.Just make sure the letter delivers something customers want to read.
  • Boost your profile at point of sale, trade shows and conferences. You can quickly create your own signage, glossy postcards with your contact information, product news inserts or an event mini Web site even if you are not a software pro.
  • Combine business with pleasure — and charity. Spearhead an event, party or conference for a cause you care about. That puts you in the position of getting to know lots of people, and shows off your small business leadership skills.
  • Create a destination. Indigo Books & Music has its coffee bars. Ikea offers child-care centers and cafeterias. Steal this idea. Add a free advisory service. Add customer loyalty services, such as free delivery for second-time buyers.
  • Become an online expert. This is the “free sample” approach to bringing in business. Research active e-mail discussion lists and online bulletin boards that are relevant to your business and audience. Join several and start posting expert advice.
  • Court local media. Editorial features convey more credibility with prospective clients than paid advertising does. (Check our recent article on how to get PR.)
  • Finally, don’t let customers simply slip away. It costs a lot less to retain a disgruntled or inactive customer than to acquire a new one. Send a personalized e-mail (you can automate this process), inquiring whether all is well. For a customer who suffered a bad experience, pick up the phone, acknowledging the unpleasantness and ask if there’s anything you can do. A discount can’t hurt either.

Being kind to customers is the smartest low-cost marketing you can do.

ducttapemarketingbadgeKen 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/

Getting Closer to Your Customers

Today’s post is from John Wechsler, President of FormSpring. The company, which recently partnered with Email Center Pro, focuses on data collection and management through the use of Web-based forms. As a service, FormSpring ties together improved customer relationships with business success. Sounds very much like the Email Center Pro approach.

“What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”  This romantic view of the world espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson can be adapted to business to help us stop looking at past and future customers and focus some love and attention on our existing customers.  It is, for most of us, much less costly to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

Increasingly, an enterprise’s long-term viability will hinge on the strength of its relationships with its customers. So where do we start when it comes to getting closer to our customers?  Tim Berry, president of Palo Alto Software, suggests that “unless you are a new business without a customer base at all, your market research should begin with learning as much as possible about your present customers.” Berry goes on to advise that businesses learn the following about their customers:

•    Who are they?
•    How did they find you?
•    What do they like about you?
•    What don’t they like?

Oftentimes a simple online survey is effective in letting customers know you care about them while also helping you learn a few things about your customers that will help you better serve them.

Traditionally one of the biggest challenges of getting so close to your customers has been purely logistical. This included: developing and designing a survey, printing and mailing it and compiling and analyzing the results. Any one of these tasks was difficult to manage “back in the day.”

Today the management barriers are largely removed. Online tools make it easier than ever to collect and manage data online.  There are no excuses for not understanding who your customers are, what they like and dislike, and what they think about your company.

When you’ve made the decision to start getting closer to your customers by using online surveys, it’s important to remember a few rules of the road.

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Super Simple)

When designing an online survey you want to keep it simple. Keep questions clear and answer choices easy to understand.  Spend time thinking about the flow of your survey. Do the questions progress in a logical and thoughtful manner? Once you think you’ve nailed it, take the survey yourself from the beginning.  You’ll probably see a few more things you can improve.

Make it easy for your customers to use

Make the exchange of information easy.  Keep required fields to a minimum so it’s easy for people to participate.  Be careful not to use unnecessary CAPTCHA (a challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer). The easier it is for someone to actually submit their information, the more you will learn and the better your customers will feel about interacting with you.

Make sure your forms are secure

Lock down information that you collect that is of a sensitive nature or could harm your customers if compromised. Use SSL for a secure browser connection (the URL will start with https://). Also, encrypt data stored in the database. Since your forms provider or IT department won’t be able to retrieve your data, don’t forget your password.  Finally, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a way to encrypt emails to ensure that only the intended recipient(s) see emails that are meant to be secure. Make sure to use PGP for email privacy if you are receiving notification emails of the submitted data.  It does not help you or your customers to make a secure connection online and encrypt data if you then send emails without the protection of encryption. Alternatively, don’t send the actual data via email, instead just send notices that a submission has been received and use the security of an SSL connection to log in and view or download your data.

In Summary

Making your contact forms, surveys and other online forms simple for the user to complete, easy to access and use, and secure are three steps towards building strong relationships with your customers. It’s best to take the initiative now to ask your customers what they think than to wait for your competitors to do it!  With this knowledge, you will be on your way to creating an environment that helps you achieve the maximum lifetime value of your customers.

formspringJohn Wechsler is president of Indianapolis-based FormSpring. With nearly 20 years of business experience including extensive startup experience, John is uniquely qualified to comment on many aspects of running startup, early-stage and high-growth organizations. John can be reached via email at john@formspring.com.

Cracking down on fake reviews.

The marketing potential of social media has been recognized since its inception. And, for just as long, there have been those people who are willing to manipulate that potential. One of those ways has been the posting of fake reviews. This involves filling blogs and sites full of ostensibly genuine, satisfied-customer-written reviews, extolling the excellence of a product or service, when in fact, the reviews are churned out in-house, or by a review-generating mill. Another is stuffing the ballot box, as it were, by sending a flood of fake good reviews to the review listings for your own product, or fake bad reviews lambasting a competitor’s, on retailer websites, such as Amazon.com.

In his Social Media Safety Warning post of 15 July, Andy Sernovitz reports in the Huffington Post on the New York Attorney General fining a company $300,000 for fake reviews.

[The company] employees published positive reviews and comments about the company to trick Web-browsing consumers into believing that satisfied customers were posting their own stories. These tactics constitute deceptive commercial practices, false advertising, and fraudulent and illegal conduct under New York and federal consumer protection law. The settlement marks a strike against the growing practice of “astroturfing,” in which employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to Web sites and Internet message boards about their own company.

“This company’s attempt to generate business by duping consumers was cynical, manipulative, and illegal,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “My office has and will continue to be on the forefront in protecting consumers against emerging fraud and deception, including ‘astroturfing,’ on the Internet.” —excerpted from the NY Attorney General Media Center

Sernovitz points out that this ruling now makes false reviews illegal. It’s no longer a gray area, open for broad interpretation. This is a boon for ethical social media marketers, businesses, and customers. It is now a time to rebuild trust and establish brand integrity.

Sernovitz lists six ways for businesses to market safely in social media:
1. Never pay for posts or reviews.
2. Stay away from fake-review or mass-blogging services.
3. Create a formal, public policy.
4. Train your team.
5. Bind your agencies.
6. Monitor.

A recommendation from a satisfied customer can be one of the most powerful marketing messages you can use. It is in your very best interest to collect them, and use them, but only if they are real!

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

But it’s just a box!

I’m fascinated by the hubbub that Tropicana created by changing their branding.

67495-tropicana-newHave you seen this?

A while back, Tropicana decided to change their boxes from the straw in the orange look to a new, cleaner looking box with a “crate and barrel glass” filled with juice on the edge of the box.

The move, as I read at the Daily Heller,  was pushed as a “historic integrated-marketing and advertising campaign… designed to reinforce the brand and product attributes” and “help consumers rediscover the health benefits they get from drinking America’s iconic orange-juice brand.” Wow, that’s a pretty big job for a simple box redesign.

What was the result of this “historic” push?
juicepackaging05
It lost money. Either because people didn’t recognize the branding anymore or were turned off by the “generic” look of the new box. Personally, I like the clean look of the new branding, but the thing that used to say Tropicana doesn’t say Tropicana to me anymore.  It says Orange Juice.

Maybe they should have talked with Naota Fukasawa who designed new fruit juice packaging meant to mimic the look and feel of the fruit inside.

Updating your packaging and by extension, your brand can be important to keep current in the fast moving world, but at what expense?

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager

Red Flags: Are Your Eyes Deceiving You?

When we begin to work with a new client, the first thing we do is review the current state of their business and do an “audit” of their general business health, and how their marketing is doing.

It’s a good time to keep our eyes open for “Red Flags”.

photo by Flickr user DRB62

photo by Flickr user DRB62

What’s a Red Flag? It’s something that looks too good to be true—a program or practice the client is investing in that we know just doesn’t work. It could be a belief, that our client is basing decisions on, which we have learned time and time again may not be valid.

Seeing Red Flags is based on experience. A plan that looks like it should work, often doesn’t. And therefore, we don’t get the results we want, or at worst, we fail spectacularly!
Here are some examples that start the Red Flags waving in our minds:

Red Flag – “I need to spend time with all of our customers.” 
We’ve had clients where only two percent of their customers match their Ideal Customer profile. In another case, 31 percent of a client’s business came from one percent of their customers. In yet another, one third of their customers were worth 300 percent more than the other two thirds. In these examples, 33 percent to 98 percent of executive time was actually being wasted. Let’s face it, all customers are not all created equal, and you must be clear about where to invest your valuable time.

Red Flag – “We don’t track our advertising response.” 
When we look at actual numbers and return on investment for advertising dollars spent, we often make some interesting observations. For instance: You spent $3,000 to get one new client that’s worth only  $1500. Ninety nine percent of the people you sent flyers to did not respond to them in any way. Your newsletter advertising got no responses or clickthroughs. If you don’t track what happens to your money, you won’t see where you are wasting it.

Red Flag – “Word of mouth is our best business-builder.” 
This is one we hear over and over again, and when we look at the situation more carefully we inevitably find the numbers don’t support the claim. For instance, actual referral sources only generated 15 percent of total income, and you can’t accurately predict when the business is going to come in. Referrals can be your best business-builder, but in the current economic climate, you must have a program in place to ensure you get the measurable results you need.

Have you heard any Red Flags flapping in the wind at your business lately?

ducttapemarketingbadgeKen 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/