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  • Sharpen Your Skills Before They Rust Away . . .

    Sharpen Your Skills Before They Rust Away . . .

    We all develop skills as we go through life and get older and more experienced. Some of those are of a more temporary or cyclic nature, and some are used daily and are at peak performance. Skills like coping with change, or a sudden occurrence, get used when needed and then left off the menu until they are needed again.

    Some are annual, like “How did I put these lights on this Christmas Tree last year?” And some need to be constantly honed or updated, in particular, computer skills. This is a tough one, and in an increasingly computerized world, those who don’t keep up will certainly be left behind to one degree or another.

    I’m not exempt from this phenomenon, either. Skills I learned about computers 20 or so years ago are long gone as they are obsolete, and certainly those learned 30 years ago are useless (try finding punch cards or teletype tapes today!). Modern computer skills in particular need to be practices and updated almost weekly in order to keep up to speed. Once I mastered the use of a server and printer, then the Internet and E-mail came along.

    Once I got the hang of those to some degree, albeit not mastery by any means, then texting, social media and ads came along, and a whole new set of skills was needed. There’s always something new coming along that needs to be learned and understood, but if you don’t make a conscious effort to find out about new developments, they won’t find you and you’ll get left behind. And nobody likes to be left behind.

    I have a theory that there’s a place in everyone’s life where that curiosity diminishes, and you stop making the effort to learn new skills. That date or age is different from person to person, and I suspect there are plateaus that each of use arrives at and must make a conscious decision to either surmount them and climb to the next level or stand pat on what we have and stay there. This date may be strongly influenced by the level of skill needed to maintain the status quo, and stay within our daily comfort zone. When the technology advances so far that it affects our daily functioning and pushes us out of our comfort zone, we are forced to learn new skills.

    Everyday things like banking, shopping, finding services and vendors to meet our needs, all have changed and computerized to the point where it’s difficult to interact with those businesses without some level of computer savvy. Even reading the daily paper is a very different experience than it was even three years ago. There are now lists of “most read stories on the Internet” and stories have links and the columnists and staff writers open themselves up to rebuttal by publishing an e-mail address – in the old days, you had to write to them care of the paper, and they could decide whether to acknowledge receipt and reply. You could just delete the e-mail, true, but that kind of direct access gives them immediate feedback on their work, and they can sense and even quantify the reaction to their efforts almost instantly compared to the week or so delay of years earlier.

    The moral of the story is that as soon as you lose curiosity, and stop learning new things, you are doomed to lose contact with a segment of our culture, and the more of those you lose, the more isolated and irrelevant you become, in the cultural scheme of things. AS in business, if you’re not moving forward, your dying, piece by piece. Maybe it’s time to return to some previously used skill and update it today – sign up for a class, go to a lecture, read a new publication, find a new book (e-book if you prefer) and keep that curiosity burning . . .

    If you liked this train of thought, or if it derailed yours . . . if you’d like more like this, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • When It Comes To Ads, Trust . . . But Verify

    When It Comes To Ads, Trust . . . But Verify

    One of a marketer’s biggest challenges is creating trust with a new audience. If a sector of your potential customer base has never heard of you, or you’re breaking into a new market in which you have no previous exposure or installed base, you need to create trust with that new audience immediately.

    Unfortunately, some more unscrupulous marketers using techniques that one could call questionably ethical at best, have raised the trust bar for consumers, making our job more difficult. The days when you could say practically anything on TV or radio or in print, and as long as you said it often enough, people would come to believe it, are long gone. The buying public has many more sources of information available to them, and many more ways to verify the information you’re presenting, including speedier access to friends and advisers, websites with reviews, and more.

    That makes it more difficult to present information in anything but an accurate light. It also means that if you do succeed in bamboozling the public with less than honest information or product claims, that fact, once revealed, will travel faster than ever before, and word will spread at a phenomenal rate about the deceptive practices.

    This means that as marketers we have to dig deeper into the creativity well, work harder at crafting that real offer, work smarter at getting people’s attention, draw down on more ways to present different benefits in an appealing way to a more wary consumer. It’s not enough to just say it’s “better”, you have to explain why . . .

    For successful marketers, that means a high level of speed and adaptability, a higher level of selectivity in media choices, and a better understanding of the chosen audience, both psychologically and transactionally. And, now more than ever, reputation is your most valuable asset.

    Advertisers go to great lengths to make their offers sound as appealing as possible, to show their products in their most flattering light – and sometimes they go too far. If you hear a claim regarding a product or company that sounds too good to be true, it’s still a good bet that it shouldn’t be trusted. As our once-fearless leader Ronald Reagan noted, when dealing with the unknown, “Trust . . . but verify”!

    If you found this informational or inspirational, subscribe to this blog and receive more in your inbox weekly. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • Do Your Clients Know You, or Just What You’ve Reminded Them Of Recently?

    Do Your Clients Know You, or Just What You’ve Reminded Them Of Recently?

    Service businesses are funny things sometimes. Clients tend to pigeonhole your service firm based on what service you first performed for them. They rarely actually read the literature you leave behind, especially if it’s a referral, and they usually don’t go back and search it when another type of job arises, no matter how closely related to the first. So your first impression, your first engagement and your referrals tend to shape your brand for you in the customer’s mind, unless you steer it, expand it and broaden it on an almost continual basis.

    It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially for smaller firms, who may appear more limited than they are. I’m no exception to this unfortunately, although I try and avoid it if I can. I have one customer who only thinks of me in connection with trade show displays, because that was the first part of a multi-faceted strategy we recommended for them when entering into a new vertical market. Not that she doesn’t KNOW we offer a full range of marketing services, from strategic planning out to campaign execution and executive guidance, it’s just that I don’t reside in that part of her brain and I’m not connected to her other needs in a way that immediately comes to mind when they arise – I have to make a concerted effort to “remind” her that we are a full-service firm, so that we get connected in that way.

    How many of your customers or internal clients only think of you when they need or have a question about a very narrow range of elements, the one you did for them last, or first? It’s something you might want to explore, and you can test it pretty easily: Call them up and ask “Do you know that we also offer . . .” and see what the response is. Call under the auspices of keeping in touch, a good thing regardless, but hunt for that specific piece of data during the conversation. You might be surprised by the result.

    It may seem strange, but that’s just how the brain works – humans learned to survive by recognizing and remembering patterns, and noticing anything that breaks the pattern, like sensing movement in the brush created by a prey animal. Once a pattern is established, ala your firm performing a certain service, that pattern is retained and it’s difficult to change that perception.

    Here’s the fix: broaden your marketing efforts. Don’t go against brand, in fact if you’re a multi-service firm, this will strengthen that tenet of your brand. But highlight a different angle, a different aspect or subgroup of your offerings in a series of marketing launches – it’s like baiting a fishing line with different baits at different parts of the line – you increase the odds of catching something from the same pond. Even if you think you only offer one thing, and one of your brand characteristics is that you do one thing and do it the best of anyone, there are still different angles and facets of that “one thing” that you can use to “bait the hook” with. Try it, see if you don’t get the phone ringing with new business from old clients who “Didn’t know you offered that”.

    Did you find this interesting? Would you like to read more? Subscribe to this blog above – its FREE! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • Sometimes Business Growth Doesn’t Mean More Customers

    Sometimes Business Growth Doesn’t Mean More Customers

    In our daily consulting practice, we see the inside of businesses all over the country, and can make some fairly educated observations about how they run. Small businesses especially are having a tough time running smoothly, in a couple of aspects, operationally and financially.

    Smaller businesses, especially service businesses like landscapers, technology companies, contractors painters and other building trades, are having trouble securing loans from local banks to use for working capital or expansion, new equipment, bigger crews, more workers. This type of business often has ebbs and flows in cash availability, either due to seasonality of their business or the size and nature of their work and their customers. Occasionally they need some extra capitol on a short term basis to make payroll and keep good people on the employee rolls until they are needed for the next big job. If they can’t get that extra money, they are forced to cut other staff, benefits or worse, close down temporarily. This up and down cycle, when not mitigated by some cash flow injections, can eventually destroy a small business, even one that is well managed.

    1)  Qualified Staff Shortage. Operationally, this cash flow issue changes the dynamic among the core of employees, and causes the other problem this type of business faces: scarcity of qualified staff and an employee pool too shallow. If the threat of being laid off comes repeatedly to the rank and file, word spreads in the industrial community and you will have a hard time recruiting good employees. The stress caused by the impending downsize can negatively affect productivity, loyalty and other critical areas of performance.

    2)  Reduced Risk Profile Stifles Growth. That lack of cash flow can also have a negative effect on management decisions as well. If you’re not sure you can fill that cash gap, but have receivables out there and the next big job is in the pipeline, management will still be reluctant to hire additional employees even when they’re needed. This reduces risk-taking, limits growth and expansion, and slows movement among the employees. Mentoring behavior slows or stops, training dries up, and the whole works can come to a virtual standstill, largely out of fear of that “big job gap”.

    3)  Know When To Let Go.  The third but highly overlooked issue for small businesses these days is making the transition from founder-lead, to goal-driven enterprise. Usually smaller businesses are started by a single individual, who has a skill or a talent. They are successful using those skills and the business grows. They hire some semi-skilled workers to help in specific areas, but the founder still acts as president, chief cook and bottle washer, wearing a huge number of hats on the managerial and administrative side, and still doing the principal work at the same time. If they get caught in this loop for very long, performance suffers, crucial but routine admin work often gets missed or lies fallow for long periods, customer service suffers and eventually work quality will suffer.

    The way to break the cycle is for the owner to know when it’s time to find a trusted team to run the jobs and they move over to take a more strategic role. Its a different skill set, but one that can be learned. Finding that team is becoming increasingly difficult, and this is one of the biggest single issues facing small businesses and impeding their growth. Advice for job-seekers out there – look at your skills and experiences and frame them in such a way as to make you attractive to someone seeking a clone of themselves – make yourself appear trustworthy and indispensable, and you’ll get hired in a second.

    Growth from within, building a team, creating a chain of command, putting in place a management structure and policies that foster growth, innovation, initiative and empowerment are just as valuable as building up the customer list, and are a form of growth on their own.

    If you found this valuable and would like to find out more, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Sometimes you want to go . . . where everybody knows your name

    Sometimes you want to go . . . where everybody knows your name

    Everybody wants to be wanted, or at least recognized. I have a few places where they know me on sight when I walk in the door, but that kind of permanence and stability has been rare, especially since I grew up outside the Nation’s Capitol, where there are very few “natives” and the population is extremely transient. Too, I went to a very large university in Boston, where much of the student population was composed of commuters, so the typical school experience was very different, more focused on studying and less on social life, especially after dark, when a majority of the student body left for their own homes in the suburbs.

    Business relationships are often like that, too: you meet, you greet, you follow up, maybe even work on a project or several, and then drift apart. Relationships like anything else have to be nurtured and tended to in order to survive and thrive. The relationship with your customers is just that way. It takes effort to nurture them and to keep customers aware of you and to keep your business top of mind.

    Marketing can do that for you, but it must be sincere, and it must at least appear as much as possible to be PERSONAL. Your customers are humans, whether it’s B-to-B or consumer market, and they deserve to be treated as such. Good marketing, especially direct mail copy, should appear to be written specifically to YOU. That DOESN’T mean you just use the word “you” a lot in the copy – there’s an art to it, and if you’re not feelin’ the art, have a pro write your copy for you – its worth it.

    Customer service is often as simple as answering a question quickly and accurately. It can go as far as going above and beyond and addressing a long-standing problem and turning that complaining customer into an evangelist.

    I was the recipient of some tremendous customer service last night, at a business networking mixer, at the Intercontinental Hotel here in Baltimore. There is one place where they know me when I walk in the door, and this is it. Before I had gotten through the lobby into the bar proper, the top notch bartender, Elizabeth, had my “usual” beverage prepared for me, ready to go without me asking or even looking in her direction.

    Now in reality, I have only been a guest there about 6 times in the last year, but it’s always for the same event, the same time of day and the same day of the week, and our schedules collided on a regular basis – but she took the time and energy to remember after just a few small interactions who I was, what I looked like (winter and summer mind you, no identifying scarf or coat to help) what I liked to drink, and how I liked to get the evening started.

    Terrific! Kudos to Elizabeth for taking the initiative and providing outstanding service – and kudos to Arpad and the staff at the Intercontinental for realizing that sometimes employees need to be empowered to go above and beyond to REALLY please customers, and for allowing them the latitude to do it. I’m sure preparing a drink before the customer asks isn’t in the InterContinental’s policy book, but Elizabeth knew that I would be pleased and she was right. Thank you.

    Write about your good customer experiences here, be glad to pass them along . . .

    Did you find this interesting? If you’d like to read more like this about marketing, customer service, branding or other topics, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • E-Mail Effectiveness Boosted by Data Availability

    E-Mail Effectiveness Boosted by Data Availability

    How many e-mail messages do you get every day? How many do you really read? How many get discarded based on the sender alone? Note how the numbers indicate a trend?

    I receive at least 100 on most days, 80+ get discarded based on who sent them, even if it’s something I’ve signed up to receive! I just don’t have time . . . The other 20 go to the preview screen for a quick glance, and the top 10 of those get read and responded to that day at some point. Here’s 5 tips for making it to that Top 10:

    5) Make Sure Your Subject Line Has Some Relevance To Me. Aside from what the excellent spam filter dumps off, subject lines with words like NOW, FREE, TODAY float through here and the urgency is not as desperate as the author would like. Worse are the ones who feel that I need their software so badly and that it’s so present and ubiquitous in my mind space that you can open up with the inside jargon and terms you’ve coined in your dorm room right at the get-go, and I’ll know what you’re talking about – NOT RELEVANT.

    4) DON’T Waste My Time. If your subject line is intriguing enough for me to open in preview, be sure you’ve got something to say that I can understand at a glance – if I have to go to five links to get the info I need, we’re both wasting time – you by writing e-mails that are more complicated than they need to be, you might just as well send me the series of links with no text – the result is the same: DELETE.

    3) If You’ve Got a Good Headline, Don’t Bury it in the Image Art, Because I’ll Never See It. Thanks to the preview screen and firewall software, along with Microsoft’s inherent wisdom, anything with an image is held back until I purposely ask for it, to save me from intrusion and overuse of bandwidth. If you put your headline in the image, I see a blank white box – DELETE! Any hope you had of that long-worked-over and clever headline grabbing me are immediately gone.

    2)If You Can’t Use the Data You Have Correctly and Clean Your List Completely, DON’T USE IT! I get mail addressed to one of the many websites I have currently live, about various things, but they assume that putting the web address in the subject line will peak my interest, but the subject or offer have nothing to do with the website they’re using to “get to me”. My favorite is the Chinese granite counter top purveyors sending me offers of cheap product, thinking I’m a contractor or granite wholesaler, based on the name. The did a search for the word Granite and scattergunned an e-mail out to the whole results list – the Doctor says: DELETE

    1) If You Have My Name on Your List, Use it Correctly – Get Your Technology Act Together. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I get with the wrong gender, the use of both names in the wrong order “Dear Poulos, David” and other idiocy of technological laziness. Don’t let the ‘chines ruin your marketing program, proofread your list! Some simple data processing, at roughly $1 a name, all told, will avoid all this and make your list much more useful, to boot. Be a professional, spend a little money, and watch your response rates skyrocket! It’s my name, I’ve had it for decades, you don’t think I’m going to find it first and check that you’re legitimate by it’s use? DELETE!

    Now you know what it takes to get past my barriers. Now it’s up to you to produce technologically savvy, legal and smart e-mail messages if you want to reach me effectively and make me a customer – Good Luck!

    If you found this valuable and would like to read more like this, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Old-School Marketing Can Still Be Effective – If the Math Is Right . . .

    Old-School Marketing Can Still Be Effective – If the Math Is Right . . .

    I just received a living anachronism in my mailbox today – a local vendor card deck.

    This format used to be much more popular, and was often used for B-to-B lead generation 20-40 years ago. If you’re younger and aren’t familiar with these, they are a package of roughly 3″x5″ lightweight cards, printed front and back, packaged up in shrink wrap like a candy bar, with one card acting as the “host” or sponsor and carrying the address block. Each card is a two-sided ad for a different local business, often themed around a group of industries or services pitched to a specific target group. For instance, if I were a deck publisher, and I was creating a deck to send to a list of recently changed addresses, I would likely target new movers by including paid ad cards from a roofer, a cleaning service, a painting company, a landscaper, paving contractor, pool company, lawn service, gutter sales and cleaning, chimney sweeps and other services that people moving into a new home or a new neighborhood might need.

    This one appeared to be pitched not to new movers, but homeowners in general, as it is addressed to me or “Current Occupant” and contained cards from a fence contractor, a counter top company, a landscaper, a pool company, and several others surrounding home ownership and renovation.

    I picked out maybe three vendors that were relevant to my life and my needs, and pitched the rest. The Host card offered a packaged up bundle of prizes by combining offers from three of the vendors, including a restaurant, a pool builder and an interior design firm. The offer isn’t very explicit, but the slug line offers FREE dinner for two, and drives you to a website that will inevitably explain how these three go together to help me win a free dinner for two at the restaurant.

    This format has lost popularity over the years, but at one time was quite lucrative. I know of direct mail publishers who churned out an industry-specific B-to-B deck every quarter, and went on vacation for two months until the next one needed to be put together. Once the ads are sold on a long-term one- or two-year contract, it’s just assemble, print, package, mail. Pretty simple, but the list maintenance was pretty high, in order to keep response levels up and advertisers happy and coming back, and the level of detail to get a larger deck produced correctly is pretty high – it’s like printing a magazine with no editorial and no binding.

    With the advent of local look-up directories on the Internet, such decks as the one in my hand are anachronistic at best, but they must pull and make economic sense to the advertiser, or they wouldn’t exist. Kudos to the publisher for making the math work for them and for keeping this format alive.

    If you’ve seen something in your mailbox that was unexpected, let us know, we’d love to hear about it . . .

    Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • Top Talent Will Out – Brand Power Is A Fine Thing

    Top Talent Will Out – Brand Power Is A Fine Thing

    I just received an e-mail promotion for Disney Institute corporate training and executive growth coaching – called “D-Thinking your Organization”. In keeping with the Disney brand of old, it’s professional, well-done, creative and deceptively simple. It shows an image of two executives (presumably) with large cardboard cartons on their head, sort of sparring in the hallway – ostensibly thinking “inside-the-box”.

    Disney execs have long been revered for their creativity and resourcefulness, and more importantly for instilling the company culture in their employees so deeply that it affects the rest of their lives in a very positive way. I’ve seen a couple of them speak and it’s mesmerizing to hear their stories of how their customer-oriented service-excessive culture affects the lives of employees and customers alike. Tremendous stories of how good-will on the part of one person in a very minor role in the company affects a customer in a profound way to the point where they become eternal evangelists for the brand. This is the nirvana all brand managers seek, and they have found it, achieved it, and kept it alive after the loss of the founder many years ago.

    The point is that the e-mail promotion, a medium that many so-called marketing gurus have determined is of limited value for corporate marketing due to saturation of the audience, lack of permanence and a host of other reasons, worked – it reached a potential customer, a qualified prospect (me) and got my attention to the point where I not only read the whole thing, but studied the image, analyzed the copy and the headline, and filed it rather than deleting it. So much for gurus.

    The Disney brand extends to every facet of their business, and promotion is no exception. They always manage to be tasteful, honest, transparent and relevant, while being effective in showing their creativity and expertise, in subtle, understated ways. When they undertake something, it’s done RIGHT. Occasionally that means they’re a little behind the curve in terms of time or adoption of technology, but when they get there, all the bugs are worked out, they maximize the medium’s potential, and put it to best use for their purposes. Kudos.

    If you want to see how effective your brand is, or test it to see if it’s functioning as well as Walt Disney’s, request my recent article, “Brand Assessment Tools You Can Use Today” in the comment box below and I’ll send you a copy if you leave me your e-mail address.

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    Be sure to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    There was a time, not too long ago, where marketing pundits and other “experts” were saying that E-mail had run it’s course as a marketing media vehicle, that it was stale, that it’s open rate was too low, that the spam filters and firewalls had made it nearly impossible to get good results with e-mail marketing.

    Now those same pundits (of whom I was not one) are having to eat their words as major marketers are singing the praises of a well-crafted, simple e-mail to your hottest, most worked on lists. As usual, it’s the message, not the medium that counts, and a well-crafted effective anything will always beat the schlocky, hacky, abusive e-mail campaigns that desensitized audiences and killed response rates based on misuse and abuse of the medium and therefore the audience.

    As always, it comes down to personal approaches, real, workmanlike copy, free of typos, grammatical redundancy, slang and other silliness that kill credibility. E-mail is still mail, and it’s still sent to a single address, which means there’s a person on the other end. Simply write with that person in mind, on a one-to-one basis, and suddenly watch open rates soar, response rates double or triple, and sales shoot skyward.

    Never mind all the gimmicks, bells and whistles. I know of one marketer that sends out plain text stuff that nets him phenomenal response rates – not a photo to be seen, not even a logo, just good effective copy, real headlines that resonate with the audience – his secret? He writes to his Grandmother in his mind – if the offer is clear enough for her to understand, if the copy clean enough that she won’t cringe (Grandma was a Jr. High English teacher), if the intent clear enough and the benefits plain enough for her to like it, he’s got a winner. Yes, he primarily markets to an older audience – but these days unless you work for Disney, who doesn’t? Not a bad acid test – can your latest missive pass it?

    Keep it simple and keep it direct – speak to a specific person – if you personalize, be sure to get their name and gender correct, otherwise don’t bother. Nothing will kill response quicker than the feeling that you didn’t even care enough to send the right message – it’s like reading someone else’s mail, and it creeps people out.

    Keep the file small, keep the message simple – huge files still give viewers trouble, big images still get caught in spam filters and firewall screeners. The trend in design these days is to make the whole e-mail an image or series of images – and my browser is set to make me actually request these image files in order to view them – why make me work to see your information? It would have to be a heck of a headline to make me click three more times and wait for them to load, when I can simply hit “delete”.

    A well-researched list is still the key to success with E-mail. Most rented lists under perform, as e-mail addresses change more frequently than physical addresses. A self-selected list is best – based on a web login, or a previous response, or an inquiry, something you can verify and be sure is “opt-in” work very well – permission marketing is still king!

    Frequency is something you can debate all day, but suffice to say if you irritate your audience, your response will drop, and often less is more. I’d rather hear from you 4 times a year with relevant info than 8 or 12 times with fluff and nonsense. Save it for the good stuff, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to put together the mechanics of an e-mail, it might as well be a good one . . .

    Send me a copy of the worst e-mail you’ve received recently, and I’ll send it back to you with an analysis – FREE.

    If you found this useful and valuable, share it with your colleagues, and be sure and let me know by subscribing to this blog, above. Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”