Marketing Manner

The big temptation is to send your marketing message to everyone. The more people who hear about you, the more clients you will get, right? Unfortunately, this is not the case. The most effective way to market your company is to direct your approach to a specific smaller group. Once you have found your niche in marketing, you find that your client lists will grow far faster then if you send a general message to everyone. Here is how to make that happen. Continue reading »

Gaining customers is often the hardest task for a start-up or growing business, but your lawn care business will easily prosper if you use some simple marketing techniques. For instance, using print and word of mouth to distribute your brand will increase the first time customer base for your lawn care business. After this, service and quality will keep the customer satisfied. Want to know more? Here are five marketing tips for successful marketing of a lawn care or landscaping business. 

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Marketing is tricky. While marketing efforts are supposed to be what turns your small business’s product into a household brand, marketing can also become a money drain if not conducted correctly. If you find yourself quickly sinking down the drain of inefficient marketing, turn your efforts around by following a few steps that will increase results, not increase your costs.
Trade More Expensive for More Effective
Any marketing that isn’t bringing in leads and making an impact on consumers needs to be eliminated. For instance, brochure printing and mailing to your most encouraging prospects or in response to direct inquiries are more promising rather than continuing to air lots of radio commercials that aren’t bringing in leads. Also, look at those areas in which you can increase exposure while cutting costs, for instance, a weekly email newsletter rather than monthly print newsletters.
Go After the Right Consumers
Don’t waste your valuable marketing dollars chasing those consumers who will never be interested in your products or services. Rather than sending your print brochures to everyone in town, reserve them for your target market. Instead of hanging print posters on every street corner, post them in the path of your intended audience.
Prepare a Better Message
Is your sales pitch all it can be? Does it really tell consumers why your product is the best, how it can solve their problems, make their life easier, and then some? If not, then you will need to revamp your message and print brochures and business cards and re-design your website to include this new approach. When making a purchase, customers don’t care about the history of your business and other irrelevant information. They want to know why they should be purchasing this product from you.
Use a Combination Approach
Limiting your marketing to only a few different media and materials will limit your results. Combine print brochures, email blasts, social networking, and more. Get creative and try some new methods of exposure. Accept speaking engagements, attend a trade show or two, hand out your print brochures during carnivals, if your target market will be there. Just remember to choose those marketing efforts that are bringing in new customers, otherwise your marketing will suck your pockets dry rather than increase revenue.
Commit to Daily Marketing Tasks
Write a portion of your newsletter. Send greeting cards to customers with birthdays this month. If you are the only one doing the marketing in your business, you may need to complete several tasks a day. What if you don’t have time to keep up with it all? Instead of hiring a new employee for marketing purposes, divide marketing tasks among current employees. Or, for less than hiring a marketing department, you can outsource your efforts to a marketing firm. You just need to decide which path will give you more for your marketing dollars.

I’m not sure whose idea it was for publishing and creative professionals to do work “on spec” before getting a job, but I’ll betcha it wasn’t a creative pro! It was probably a greedy CEO who didn’t want to pay for something that he might later regret. According to Answers.com, “spec” has been used to mean speculation since the 1700s. “On spec” describes “work, such as advertising that is done for a client without a contract or job order, for which the client will pay only if the work is to be used. When a job is done on speculation, the person doing the work takes the risk in the hope of making a profit, gaining a valuable credit, or for some other reason. In the advertising business, creative talent will often work on spec in order to establish a name in the industry.”

Why is it that anymore, it seems like the creative markets are the only ones expected to produce work on spec? Why can’t doctors or lawyers all take time to draw up plans for our wellness or our legal matters and then we just pick whoever’s got the best plan? Well heaven forbid we take up a doctor’s or lawyer’s valuable time! That’s horrible that some pros’ time is considered more valuable than others. We are all people. We all produce something that someone else wants or needs. We should get paid for that, even if we’re just asked for a sample. It’s our right!

Whenever I see a job that says it requires an unpaid, original sample, I always walk away. My time is too valuable for someone who’s not paying me to get! Someone I don’t even know for that matter! Who do these people think they are?

I know designers are upset; I’ve seen plenty of blogs about them being asked to create a design on spec for many clients. Some clients even come to expect it, it seems. It’s just a big scheme many times for companies to get free, fresh ideas from people whose work they never intended to use anyway.

I know that newbies need to build up their portfolio, and when I was in college I did write for free. But, it was an internship and I knew I wasn’t going to get paid. I did get some good contacts from that internship though, as well as good experience. But, please, to all the creative pros out there: don’t do anything on spec! There are many more horror stories than there are success stories. And, the more people do work on spec, the less creative pros get paid down the road. Every time someone produces work for free, that lowers the bar for what is a decent wage. And that doesn’t exclude those that are doing work on spec; it’ll come back to you too. Our time is just as valuable as any other profession so treat it that way!

When you decide you need to redo your marketing strategy, what do you do first? I hope you create a detailed marketing plan. Fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants when marketing won’t get you very far. You’ll never know if your marketing strategies have been successful if you don’t have a plan in place to measure your efforts against. So how do you know if you’ve succeeded in meeting your plan’s goals? 

You need to create a marketing plan that includes measurable goals.

It doesn’t sound as hard or tedious as it sounds. The key to make something measurable is to add numbers. While you’re creating your marketing plan, make all of your goals, often referred to as objectives, specific and clear so that they can be easily measured.

Marketing Objectives
You need a “marketing objectives” section in your marketing plan, which is where you put to paper what you want your marketing plan to achieve in the coming year. Each marketing objective should include a description of what you what to accomplish along with numbers to give you something concrete to aim for. For instance, you can say you want to become one of the top selling baseball hat companies in the American marketplace by the end of the year. That’s a somewhat measureable goal by you looking at the marketplace at the end of the year, but it will be easier to measure if you add some numbers. Let’s say you want over 35% of the American baseball hat marketplace to belong to you. This is a much better goal because it’s measurable with numbers, meaning there won’t be any ambiguity of whether you met your goal.

Benchmarking
You can keep track of your results by including specific benchmarks in your plan. Examples of benchmarks could include “selling 500 widgets by the first quarter,” or “having 100 people visit our Web site to learn about the product by XX date.” Now, you could have said “having more people visit our Web site” but by adding a number and date to the benchmark, and the reason for visiting your Web site (which is measurable by seeing which pages of your site they visit), you’ve just made that benchmark measurable.

Now you’ve got an easy way to see if your marketing objective is being met, and if not, you’ll know you need to change your strategy. By adding a specific date, you can take action now rather than waiting until next year to figure out what you were doing wrong.

Keeping Track of Results
You need a way to track how well your marketing plan is working. Schedule monthly or quarterly meetings and spell out in writing what your definition of marketing success is. If one goal is to create a higher sell-thru rate, you’ll need to decide on a specific number that will constitute a success for sell-thru numbers by a certain date. If you don’t meet this specific objective when you get numbers back from the suppliers and stores, you’ll know you need to work with your packaging or advertising strategies.

Also write down how you intend to track sales and costs, and at what point will your marketing plan change? For instance, you might tweak your marketing plan if you lose 10% of customers in the first quarter. Marketing isn’t science – you can use whatever metrics you’d like to measure success. Just make sure you always measure and measure consistently.

A study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that when consumers see numbers, especially higher numbers that are related to a positive product experience, like higher mega pixels on a digital camera, they are more apt to buy that product.

The study, conducted at a Chinese university with students, found that there’s a gap between how we perceive an item based on experience and how we perceive an item based on what we know about it. For example, you might have a great digital camera that takes clear pictures, which in marketing jargon is called “hedonic preference,” which the study authors also defined as “liking.” But not only do you know your camera takes great pictures, you also know if it is 5 mega pixels, or 2 mega pixels (specifications). Both of these factors contribute to purchasing decisions – liking and specs, or numbers – and the authors tested students to see whether liking or specs contributed most to their buying decisions.

The study tested the students on five items: a digital camera, sesame oil, towels, cell phones and potato chips. I won’t go through the details of all, but I’ll go through their process for the digital camera to give you an idea of what they did, since their methodology was the same for each type of item.

The authors took a single 10-inch photo of Tiananmen Square, and used Photoshop to create one version that was sharper and one version that was more vivid. They told the students that the two photos were taken with different cameras, which the students were supposed to pretend were their two narrowed-down choices for purchase. The two models of camera were alike in all aspects, including price except for the sharpness and vividness. The authors told one group of students nothing else about the cameras, and the about 25 students liked, or would have purchased, the camera that had made the sharper image. But when the authors gave another group of students specs about the other (vivid) camera, their decisions were reversed from the first group. More than half picked the vivid photo’s camera. (The specs were the total number of dots, and another group was told the diagonal number of dots, much like how a TV is measured diagonally in inches.) The number of dots was made up for each group, but each group chose the “vivid” camera over the “sharp” camera, whereas the control group given no specs chose the “sharp” camera based on experience because there were no numbers presented.

The authors had the same types of groups for each of the other four items, and each time, the groups that were given the specs said they would purchase whichever item had the higher specs. The authors conclude with some advice to marketers and consumers: marketers, if your product doesn’t have some kind of numeric measure attached to it, try to find one and include the number in your marketing message. Consumers, don’t get too hooked on numbers and make your purchasing decisions based on experience.

When you’re first starting out in your business, it’s easy to jump at whatever advertising opportunities come your way. Discount magazine ad? Sign me up! Free month of radio ads when you buy one month? Where do I sign?

But you have to research all advertising opportunities. If the medium doesn’t have your target audience or doesn’t have the reach you need and want for the money you’re shelling out, then it’s just a waste of money. Not all advertising is good advertising.

Guidelines When Considering Advertising Opportunities
1. Don’t advertise in a newspaper, magazine or other medium that you haven’t read with your own two eyes. No one knows your product like you do, not even your well-intentioned family member.

2. Ask the advertiser for a complete media kit. If they don’t have a media kit, that’s a huge red flag that you do not want to do business with this advertiser. Ask for a sample copy of the publication and circulation numbers. The media kit should also include articles about the company, published elsewhere than their internal newsletter; a fact sheet on the company; and ideally, testimonials from others who have advertised with the company.

3. Don’t buy radio time in the form of ads or as a special guest unless you listen to the radio station yourself and you know it and its audience. Some people pay for radio time, thinking that they can become a radio talk show expert or add that title to their resume. The cost for all that radio time to become an “expert” is not worth it.

4. When you order a mailing list from a list broker, be sure to stipulate that you require 95 percent accuracy of addresses that are deliverable. Some addresses are naturally going to be old or incorrect, but the majority should be deliverable. Make it a condition of your contract that you’ll get your money back if only 94 percent or less of your direct mail pieces are deliverable. Be sure to get this in writing beforehand so you have a leg to stand on if it happens. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book – a list broker claims to have thousands of names in your target audience, but then only a hundred people actually get your ad. Don’t fall for it!

5. If a product review site asks for your ad, and then promises a review, run away. Your review and ad shouldn’t appear in the same issue, no matter what the salesperson says. People can see right through this and will think that your product was only reviewed because you bought ad space (and essentially, it’s true in this scam).

And finally, make sure to get everything in writing. It’s easy to let a salesperson sweep your thoughts away to a magical land of your product flying off the shelf once people see your new ad, but be sure you read all the fine print before signing your name.

I hate to admit it, but it takes me a while to try new things online. Twitter’s been mainstream for about a year and a half now, and I just joined last month. I guess you could say I like to wait until new technology has been test-driven before I try it. I just got a Prius, and I’ve wanted one for a few years now, but I wanted to wait until Toyota worked out all the bugs in it. I don’t want to get into an accident due to something that wasn’t known until my accident! Yes, I know that’s a bit overdramatic for social networking sites like Twitter, but I stand by my analogy.  

I say Twitter’s been “mainstream” because it actually started as a research project by San Francisco start-up Obvious in 2006. It was first used only by employees to communicate with each other. In April 2007, Obvious spun off what would become “Twitter.” Anyhoo, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users read other people’s updates on what they’re doing or what they’re thinking, in real time. These updates are known as tweets, and they’re short messages of up to 140 characters.

Micro-blogging differs from traditional blogging due to the limited space of 140 characters. Micro-blogs can include short messages about personal matters, commentary to another person, how someone is feeling or it can just be a link dump. Here are three more just like Twitter.

Pownce
Another social networking and micro-blogging site is Pownce. Twitter is by far the most popular micro-blogging site, but Pownce has its fair share of users. The difference is that Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events and links with people you already know. This site debuted in January 2008.

Pownce has been called “Twitter on steroids,” and employees like it over Twitter because it has discussion-tracking capabilities. Pownce was started by Digg.com founder Kevin Rose along with three other developers.

Plurk
Another site you might want to check out if you don’t care for Twitter is Plurk.com. It references itself as a “social journal for your life.” Instead of tweets, your updates are called plurks, and are limited to 140 characters, which is the max for micro-blogging.

Plurk is still a newbie compared to Twitter; it launched in May 2008. That means I’m going to wait to check it out and let others be the guinea pigs. The nice thing about Plurk is that you can share video, images and other media.

Spoink
Spoink is another competitor, founded in 2007. Spoink’s big feature is enabling users to podcast by phone from anywhere as well as post photos, video, audio and text. You stay in touch with people through podcasts, really, more so than text.

I don’t have anything against Google, per se, but its AdWords program is getting worse. People just aren’t making more than beans off of most of their AdWords ads. When it first started it was easy, but now it’s gotten complicated and people aren’t clicking as much as they used to. And what about those people who don’t even know that they need your product, much less know that they need to search for it? Those people aren’t even aware of your Google ad.

Depending on what kind of business you have, AdWords may just not be right for you. You can do all your homework and research your customer and targeting that customer. You can even make sure that customer needs your product. You can create awesome marketing materials and an eye-catching Web site, but AdWords won’t help if your target customer doesn’t know your product even exists!

Yep, that’s a big problem (understatement of the year, I know!).

If Google AdWords isn’t working for you, then it’s time to get back to basics, or traditional advertising methods. Why? Because Google AdWords targets people who know what they are looking for and many people don’t know what they’re looking for because they don’t realize a solution exists. That’s where traditional advertising comes in – it reaches the people who don’t know there’s a solution for them out there.

Direct mail – this is a great choice when you have a very targeted consumer, especially a targeted regional consumer. Even if people throw away direct mail as junk mail, they at least look at a postcard or brochure to see who sent it. And, the fact is, many people read their “junk mail.” A 2006 U.S. Postal Service survey found that 80 percent of people skim direct mail. A letter may not work in this case, but if you have a solution right out in the open on a postcard, who’s not going to look? And if the consumer doesn’t even know there is a solution, you’re the first one to reach out to them!

TV ads – more people may be watching TV on the Internet, but not everyone is. Many people can’t afford to buy a nice big 30-inch computer monitor to watch “their” shows on. And many people still have “their” shows that they watch every week without fail.

Billboards – who doesn’t drive to work? Not very many people. And even those that work out of their homes or don’t work at all have to drive somewhere eventually. That’s why billboards won’t ever stop working. Until people can zap themselves from place to place, billboards will be a great way to reach thousands of local consumers.

Magazine and newspaper ads – Although the circulation numbers have gone down for each of these mediums, they’re still pretty good. And research has shown that Web site visits go up after advertising the URL in a magazine or newspaper ad. That means people are still reading and these ads still work.

If you aren’t getting the response you want from Google AdWords or any other type of Internet advertising, give it a break and try traditional again. Everything from handing out business cards to hanging flyers counts. It doesn’t have to be expensive or high tech to be effective advertising.

So the average number of Web pages Google had available to index in 1998 was about 25 million. As of summer 2008, do you know how many unique Web pages Google had available to index? A record-breaking 1 trillion unique Web pages. That’s right 1 trillion.

Also, 65,000 new videos are added to YouTube on a daily basis.

In 2005 (the most recent year available), almost 40 billion product catalogs were published. That equals 134 catalogs for every person in the United States. Who needs that many catalogs?

The American Association of Advertising Agencies says people are only able to absorb, at most, 100 ads per day out of the 2,000 to 3,000 we are exposed to.

And, people just don’t trust advertisers. In an old Gallup poll from 1998 that rated honesty and ethical standards against a range of professions, advertising pros were near the bottom of the list, between lawyers and car salespeople. Ouch. 

So who do people trust? “‘Word-of-mouth’ [is] the most powerful selling tool…78 percent of consumers say they trust the recommendation of other consumers.” – Nielsen, Trust in Advertising, 2007 Global Consumer Survey Report. This is especially true of the young generation of 14-24 year olds. This age group spends more than 16 hours online (that’s more than they spend watching TV!). They also like to send IMs – 56 percent say they spend more than an hour each day texting or instant messaging. A full 25 percent prefer social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace than actually hanging out in real life with their friends. And, finally, 96 percent use a social networking site every day.

That means their friends mean more to them and have more communication with them than your ads ever could.

What does this mean for you?

You need to get on the social networking sites and fast.

According to a Prospectiv survey conducted in early 2008, 87 percent of those polled (800 users of social networking sites) felt that targeted ads on social networking sites didn’t match their preferences. This means that you actually have to put some thought into the ads you use on social networking sites. Using blogs and reviews might actually work better in the long run than just advertising on these sites. By actually creating a relationship with people, you’ll earn their trust.

The ads that did work on social networking sites were one-off coupons and discount offers from brands and products that users already purchase. Take the time to really target your ads by using technology that lets you read more about the user. Knowing their occupation or interests is key to getting a targeted ad that will get a click-thru.

By getting on social networking sites as a user and an advertiser, you’ll create memorability and trust. By users repeatedly seeing your ads, they’ll be more likely to click on them.