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Tag: Marketing

Center On Customer Experience To Sell Out Events

We’ve long advised companies who want to be market leaders to adopt a customer-centric stance in their internal and marketing attitude. That advice has been well received, but often reluctantly implemented, due to the complexity and length of time involved in properly instituting a sea change in their organizations. While we admit, thoughtful and well-considered moves of this magnitude do not happen overnight, they can be implemented incrementally, and start showing results sooner than a cold start.

The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you – they’ve received their product, paid the invoice, shaken hands after the exit interview, whatever trigger ends an interaction cycle with your firm. Now, ponder for a second what happened, how was that customer feeling at that last few minutes of interaction? Were they thrilled to receive their product and can’t wait to use it, were they a little disappointed because it took longer than expected to arrive, or didn’t live up to the expectations you set for them, did they care at all, or did they just put it aside until a more convenient time?

If you’re a service provider, what feeling or sentiment preceded that last handshake or interaction (not counting the invoice, we’ll get to that in a moment)? Was it buoyant that they got what they needed from you, were they excited about the next time they worked with you, relieved they had gotten a good outcome without getting scalped, happy to be out of your clutches? Behind that smile and that handshake is a wide range of emotions and feelings that those clients or customers will carry with them for quite a while, and the next contact they have with you, including any further marketing or follow-up efforts, will trigger a somewhat milder version of that emotion, guiding their next response to you.

The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you

First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change. Now that you have some idea of where to start in examining your customer experience, backtrack through your engagement with that customer in your mind, go through the steps that lead up to that final feeling. Work it over logistically, reverse-chronologically, and see if there are any snags, bumps in the road, places where communication status dipped, where the customer might have felt anything negative, like abandonment, uncertainty, fear of the unknown, or experienced something negatively unexpected. Those are your trouble spots, and in the journey of customer experience, those are the places where you can negatively affect your customer relationship and their likelihood to return to you the next time they need something you offer.

First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change.

Even marketing can REALLY benefit from this process. Work through the attendee experience minute by minute. Review your program from the time the attendee hears about the event, what triggers them to register, what do they experience once they’ve registered, how often do they hear from you, what kinds of information do they receive from you, or what do they go searching for in your materials or online? How do they go about booking travel if any is required, do they look for a deal or the flight and hotel that most readily meets their limited schedule, or a combination of both? Do they stay in the host hotel to be “close to the action” or somewhere off-site to maintain privacy and corporate security?

What do they encounter upon arrival? How did they get there? What do they see first? Are they run down endless hallways before they encounter anyone officially connected with the event, or are they greeted by someone clearly in-the-know that they can ask questions of right away? Is there a place to “unburden” themselves, divesting their arms of coats, bags, luggage, umbrellas, etc, before they get a badge? Is everything conveniently located, and labeled in large, unambiguous letters with pictograms for international attendees?

Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom . . .

Work through the whole meeting, trying to empathize with the attendee from the time they see your first e-mail announcement until the time they get back to their place of origin, and include your post event survey if that goes out beyond the 24-hour post event mark. Now you have a basis for evaluating your customer experience from an attendee-centric point of view. Using that as a baseline, try and separate the logistical, intellectual experience from the emotional one. Tease out those feelings as the flow from one to another and try to envision an overall emotional response to the event, and connect the emotional changes to each major logistical challenge they face. You now have a roadmap to isolating the negative emotional contexts in your meeting and either mitigating them or eliminating them, to provide your attendee a positive customer experience end to end.

Now that you’ve done the ground work, how do you use that knowledge in your marketing efforts to attract more attendees the next time? Pull out the outreach materials you used to promote and raise awareness of that meeting, the elements that drove attendance. Do they highlight all the customer experiences and benefits you experienced mentally? Do they convey the emotional punch, the triggers to emotions you felt when you entered the meeting? Do they walk the attendee through what they will experience, show the benefits of those experiences, make it easy, painless and simple for them to experience them? Do they set accurate expectations for the attendee that you can always live up to in real life? If the answer to any of these is “no,” then those are the areas that need some work in your programming, planning and marketing efforts, to align the real experience with the “paper” version your espousing in your marketing efforts.

Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom – but once they enter your meeting venue, they are your responsibility, and taking that seriously can mean the difference between a one-time attendee and a lifetime cheerleader for your events. Pay special attention to the way they feel when they leave. Did they learn something valuable, did they meet someone important to their professional growth, did they learn something about a new subject or a different culture? What feeling are you leaving them with, what will they remember when they complete that online “satisfaction” survey? Hopefully the emotion won’t just be satisfaction, but something stronger and more positive – the one you planned to leave.

March 3, 2016
Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

There is a lot of buzz among marketers about fostering customer engagement, building engagement with apps and websites, creating communities with blogs and social selling. It all sounds great on paper, we should all work together, share your purchases socially, everybody knows everything you do, everyone’s on your side, we’re all a village, cumbaya . . . But when you’re standing in the aisle at Wal-Mart deciding what frozen dinner brand or dog food to buy, I don’t feel that my level of engagement with Purina’s website is the deciding factor. Marketing is about raising awareness in a positive way to influence and drive SALES. I can be as engaged as can be with a brand, but if a similar product is in front of me, and they are largely the same, engagement doesn’t trump quality, availability and price, and the sale will go to the one who fits those three criteria the closest. Even with B2B sales, I’ve been “engaged” with a number of websites and businesses prospecting my business via e-mail and other devices, but haven’t actually bought anything from any of them – I’d score really high on their “engagement scale” algorithm, but they haven’t made a dime off of me, and may never do so.

Brand engagement is a long-term play. It needs to be tied to other awareness vehicles, timed promotions, backup media, and ongoing evolution of product benefit awareness in order to really be effective at driving sales. This is not a new idea, but it’s one which has risen to prominence recently along with the ubiquity of social media platforms, which provide the ability for person-to-person communication in a way heretofore not possible on the current scale. I can now tell thousands of people what I’m doing, what I’m interested in, what I’m buying, what I’m eating, cooking, enjoying, drinking, and more on a moment’s notice in real time. That means that if I’m sharing it with others, it’s boosting their awareness as well as my own for a particular product, service or item. That kind of organic, exponential awareness spread at that speed was unheard of just 15 years ago. Epidemiologists are familiar with the concept, but marketers only recently began to apply it to their efforts – indeed the term “going viral” is borrowed from the disease spread specialists, as information, or awareness, can spread a lightning speed unseen from the outside, like a virus.

Just because I’m aware of a product or service that I’ve engaged with it on the Internet, does not mean that when the time comes I’m actually going to make a purchase. It may increase the odds some, but as we learned with the recent Powerball drawing, odds need to be changed significantly with a supreme effort in order to really affect the outcome. Social media engagement or website engagement is like buying 100 lottery tickets instead of one. It seems like you’ve boosted your chances of winning by 100 fold, but in reality, those other 99 tickets didn’t even move the needle.

By all means, do A/B testing, make adjustments, formulate campaigns that include a mechanism for increasing engagement, but depending upon it to drive significant revenue could be a mistake. The basics of building ongoing awareness through media your audience utilizes, timing your efforts to coincide with that target’s needs or life-stage position, matching your demographics and psychographics and messaging to that of the prospective customer, are still the linchpins of successful marketing efforts, and enhancements and refinements to these, along with some boosts in awareness through effective promotion of specialty offers, benefit driven messaging, and creative imagery, will drive revenue upward on a consistent basis as the brand evolves and the audience grows. If you’ve got all those bases covered effectively, engagement is a nice to have, the icing on the cake, and a good set up for the upsell and cross sell to that customer base, due to the added time allowed for an opportunity to develop.

Unless I miss my guess, the folks dwelling on engagement (which is notoriously hard to measure with any accuracy) don’t have all the basics in place and need a buzz word and a crutch to help them explain why things on the sales side aren’t moving as far or as fast as expected.

Dwell on the basics of marketing, make sure all the right pieces are in place and working together efficiently, and keeping the pipeline full, then worry about engagement.

February 4, 2016
Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

The world of marketing is fraught with data, we’re drowning in it, awash in a sea of numbers, statistics, charts, graphs, analytic dashboards keeping track of minutia that has little bearing on the bigger picture of framing and positioning the thing we’re marketing in it’s best possible light to the best possible audience. What was once about words, pictures, images, headlines, ideas, insights and engagement has been reduced to a series of tactical, digital zig zags, trying to maximize return on a micro level, and hope it scales up and moves the corporate revenue needle.

Why?

Do It Yourself

One of the reasons that data has become so powerful (it always was, we just didn’t think it was cool to talk about it) is that not only is there a lot of it, but it’s easier to obtain and derive, and the costs are much lower, thanks to the Internet. In the bad old days, if you wanted to measure engagement or response, you had sales numbers (conversion), inbound phone call numbers (inquiry, “likes”), or account rep activity (lead gen inbound). Other than those in-house numbers, if you wanted to know more, you needed to dig much deeper, create a research study, engage a firm and have them do what they do and report back.

Today, all the activity data, engagement activity, views, likes, dwell time, clicks, shares, conversions, and other forms of engagement signal are logged, categorized, organized and reported to you digitally on a minute-by-minute basis in real time, using inexpensive or free software. And it can all be accessed by anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

Prove It . . .

One other reason all this craziness over data is occurring is more corporate and has to do with economics. The marketing department has long been viewed as an expense, occasionally by the more enlightened as an investment, but only recently as having the potential to be a profit center. Marketers have always had the need to justify their existence pressed upon them, and we spend hours writing reports, dissecting response numbers and finding ways to make it look like the things we’re doing contribute directly to the company’s revenue and well-being. On some level, the more data we can present, the more attractive a case we can make for being provided, and spending, more money to do the things we know we need to do, but have to prove it to everyone else.

In the real world, using data to gauge performance, learning and improving returns, and making decisions based on data is really the main idea – but we’ve been doing that for years. The real trick is to properly select and vet the data you’re looking at and using to make those decisions. Just because a number represents a count of a certain behavior or response doesn’t make it a viable or useful piece of data – it may not scale, it may not apply across platforms or audiences, it may not be sustainable, it may be badly skewed by events you have no control over. But it is data, and therefore useful, right?

The other pitfall to all this data is that even if it is accurate, correct, vetted and sustainable, you need to find a way to convert that data to insight, and that insight into an action plan. You have to use the data to further the cause. Most data will tell you something on it’s own, but its not enough to go the distance. You need to step back, see the larger picture, put the data in context with other inputs you have proven already, and see if it flies.

Lies, Lies, All Lies!

Now we come to the lies part. Numbers and statistics can be manipulated to indicate almost any point of view, the insight comes in the interpretation. Averages tend to dilute or blunt insight, rather than amplify it. Statisticians have all sorts of tricks and formulas to manipulate data so that it can tell virtually any story you want – it’s all in the spin, how it’s presented. Even something as simple as college rankings, a long standing measure of the potential for success in leveraging education and brand to elevate one’s position in life in the long term, can be easily manipulated by marketers to tell a story that promotes the cause. If a college has slipped in the rankings from number three to number seven, is that slide an anomaly, is it due to something short term or environment that will reverse it self when conditions change? Even though that could be seen to represent a significant slide, it’s a virtual certainty that recruiters will be touting it as a “Top 10” college for years to come following the slide, hoping that nobody looks too closely at where within that top ten it falls.

Use It Right

The best use of all this data is to gain a clear understanding of the current position and level of success of your marketing efforts, establish a base line, relate it to growth, profitability, revenue growth, reach, market share or other commonly regarded metric, in order to use that baseline as a starting point for improvement going forward. If that happens, justification of added spending will be easily achieved, as activity can now be tied directly to results that impact everyone. Clicks and likes don’t pay the light bill or match the retirement funds, but if you can use data to show how you’re moving the needle, use it to improve performance by looking at the “right” metric, and make good decisions based on a few key data points, then that’s all the data you really need . . .

January 29, 2016
Is Your Business Card Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool?

Think about it: Every meeting you attend outside your company, every business function you attend, every group you join, even casual encounters at sporting events, concerts, classes and athletic competitions like races and charity bike-a-thons, the one thing you can use to conveniently provide your contact info and your business “story” to a new acquaintance is your business card. It carries your company brand, it carries your professional reputation, your phone number, e-mail address, website URL, physical address, even a level of achievement and professional status – that’s a lot of heavy lifting for a piece of card stock 2″ x 3.5″!

For small businesses, the many choices made in creating a business card are each vitally important to be sure it can carry all that weight effectively. Nice layout but thin, flimsy stock says I’m just starting but don’t have the resources to spring for the good stuff (sending a subliminal message that maybe I’m not concerned with other details of my company’s image, either). Standard white with black type might send the message that basic is good enough, I don’t care enough about appearances to even pay attention to subtle design cues and engagement that some color can create. Way colorful and “cartoony” might make it difficult for the recipient to grant your firm the importance and weight of consideration it deserves. Lots of type and images of you might come off as narcissistic if over done. Too “designy” might reduce the impression of seriousness and business acumen that goes behind your creative decisions. Type too small to read, too much information packed in illogical order, funny, multiple or odd type faces that make it difficult to read or absorb quickly, are all poor choices, and we’ve seen them all at one time or another. All these choices are critical to convey the message in just the right way that really makes you memorable, carries your brand effectively, and connects that person who receives it with the way you can somehow help them achieve their goals, no matter what they are. Like I said, a lot of pressure for a small scrap of paper . . .

With all that going on, it’s usually best to leave the design, layout, and production choices to a design professional who has a reasonable portfolio of business identity work. That doesn’t mean your new sister-in-law who just graduated from art school can’t take a crack at it, depending on what type of business you’re starting or promoting, but her input should be able to stand on it’s merits, not on her attendance at Thanksgiving dinner. There are basic design tenets that should be adhered to when crafting an effective business card (and other identity materials), but those tenets leave a huge margin open for creativity and ingenuity! Don’t feel boxed in by convention, just give due weight to the experience of those who are successful at creating these little buggers.

For the money, business cards can be your most effective weapon in the battle for recognition, growth, brand awareness, new customer acquisition, and professional networking success. Its certainly the oldest, and most valuable dollar for dollar. Sure, digital elements are global, changeable, adaptable, mobile and modern, but the lowly business card travels further, gets kept longer, is more portable and shareable, carries more information and meta-information, more memorable tactility, and more engagement than a web banner ad URL could hope for on its best day!

Next time someone hands you their business card (hopefully you asked for it first), take a moment and study it, feel it, read both sides, absorb it for a moment, then look up and connect all that information with the person in front of you. Does it all hang together, is it “as expected”, or is it in jarring contrast to the person, company or position you’ve encountered in the person you’ve been speaking with? That jarring disconnect is to be avoided at all cost, as it reduces that attachment, that engagement, that connection and memorability that are the card’s main job. If the card looks and feels just like you’d expect after speaking with the person for a few minutes, observing and listening to them, then its a winner, and carries that person’s brand, their status, their stature, their ethos and of course, the way to continue the conversation later, perfectly packaged in one small fragment of wood pulp. Not bad for a few bucks and some thought . . .

January 13, 2016
Thinking IS Doing . . . Build More Contemplative Time Into Your Marketing for Increased Effectiveness

Lists – tick lists, To-Do lists, task lists, chores, check lists – successful people of all types and stripes are driven by lists, either as a way of measuring success, or of keeping your day, week, month, company, on track and focused on moving forward without forgetting anything. But what if we could spend less time focusing on knocking tasks off of a list and more time contemplating the more broad strokes of what marketing is about and what it’s supposed to accomplish. Would spending more time thinking and less time doing actually improve our results?

In a word – yes!

Studies coming out of Stanford, MIT, and University of Wisconsin indicate that deep meditation can actually change the physical structure and chemical behavior of the brain long term. Studies of gamma synchrony, the fast-firing of neurons in the brain that lead to a feeling of enlightenment or well-being, have shown that those who meditate or contemplate deeply and regularly can trigger this synchrony, which has also been associated with increased mental ability in in higher mathematics, enhanced creativity, at will through meditative techniques.

That’s great, but what does that have to do with Marketing?

Everything, if you think about it. A large portion of what the majority of people feel is marketing activity involves doing. Doing campaigns, researching and data gathering, hunting for lists, selecting images, writing and editing headlines, press releases and collateral, producing ads, commercials and websites – all doing. But those in the know have figured out that the big bucks really come in when you get paid for what you think, not what you do. Doing is the logical extension and the expression of thinking. They don’t call it doing leadership, it’s called thought-leadership, and for good reason. Taking time to think deeply about a subject or about a concept, idea, product, or technique leads to ways to express those ideas and thoughts in a way that influences others to see things your way – it’s the essence of marketing!

How much more successful might you be if you took an hour, or even thirty minutes, to do nothing else but think through your next campaign strategy, or to contemplate possible uses for your product, or think deeply about the customer experience you’re creating for buyers? Most of us are so busy doing, we don’t take time to think deeply about the actual purpose of what we’re trying to accomplish, of the consequences and ramifications of our actions, or how they affect others, or how they can be improved.

Deep thought, contemplation, and the training to focus those energies on a single element of our work, to trigger those fast-firing neurons and reach an altered consciousness state that can deliver new insights could be the most powerful tool in the arsenal, but most don’t know it exists, let alone take the time to stop doing, and learn how to use it to their advantage. I know, it all sounds a little geeky and a little off base from the central tenets of marketing, which typically are all about the “do” – but if a half hour spent thinking can improve your insights, and therefore your success rate, by even 20%, I’d say that the most valuable 30 minutes you’ll spend all week!

For a list of topics that should be contemplated at greater length, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

January 8, 2016
Content, Shmontent – Providing Valuable Insights To Prospects Will Convert Them To Customers, No Matter What Form It Takes . . .

The top marketing buzzword for 2015 has got to be “Content,” surpassing “Big Data” from 2014. Everywhere you look online, in magazines or journals, webinars, conferences, you’ll run across tips, tricks, advice, approaches, models, templates, secrets and techniques on how to generate, improve, disseminate and offer content that will effectively convert inquiry to customer. It’s nearly ubiquitous, and clearly some content is better than others, and some is more appropriate than others, and some should never have been produced or disseminated at all.

My feeling is that content marketing is not new, it’s one of those tools in the bag that solid progressive marketers have latched onto because the pathways to delivery have gotten broader and easier. Content is essentially in the same genre as sampling programs, advertorials, forced free trials, and other marketing tools where the creator can put their knowledge of their industry on display, demonstrate quality or level of service, demonstrate their understanding of issues that affect their industry, and provide possible solutions at a lower engagement risk to the recipient than actually purchasing a product or service. It allows the creator or the distributor to shape their brand perception, elevate themselves to expert status, show thought leadership, and hold themselves out there as someone who offers solutions, not just gripes about the challenges facing their industry or line of business. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s a terrific way to accomplish the goal of building credibility and showing forward thought, but it’s not as shiny and new as the most recent generation of marketers would like to believe – the delivery system is new, but the model is not.

Pioneers in content marketing include John Deere corporation, who created a magazine featuring uses for it’s farm equipment in 1898, The Michelin Guide promoting travel and offering insights to travelers in 1900, and Jell-O salesmen offering housewives a recipe book featuring Jell-O as a key ingredient in 1904, and Betty Crocker cookbooks touting uses for their cake mixes in 1912 or so, and so on to the point where recent statistics show that 96% of corporations are using some sort of content marketing in their mix in 2014. The telling statistic in that same report is that, among respondents, only 21% of those using content marketing felt they could accurately track its ROI. I thought marketing was about testing, measuring, data-driven action that creates more efficient and cost-effective drivers of awareness and sales conversion . . .

Hopefully, content won’t be shown to be just the next big, shiny object marketers latch onto, use inappropriately until it loses it’s effectiveness or relevance, or until the next shiny object comes along.

To see how to do Content “right,” pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

December 10, 2015
It’s Not Too Late . . . Five Things You Can Do To Accelerate Your Holiday Promotions
As marketers, we’ve been trained to think ahead . . . way ahead. We’re used to thinking about New Year’s Eve marketing in June, Halloween promotions in March, Summer beach product releases in December, and so on. With retailers edging the calendar ever earlier for holiday promotions, the pressure is even stronger to start early and get those tinsel-oriented top lines working even earlier. If you haven’t planned your December holiday promotions by now, you’re so far behind the 8-ball, you may feel it’s impossible to recover. Here are five things you can do quickly enough to get you back in the game and make the holiday contribute to your Q4 results:
1. Crash the boards and pull together a real zinger of a holiday offer for one product – something so outrageous, no one can believe it. Make sure it’s tied to another product or service that’s been a little lagging this year, and use the popular part as a loss leader to drive additional sales. “Get a FREE 10lb bag of coffee ($35 value) when you buy our new jet-powered coffee maker for just $19.95.” Or, flip it – “Get our new jet-powered coffee maker FREE when you buy 10 lbs of our signature coffee” – this last falls under the rubric, “Give Away the Razors and Sell The Blades”. Either way, craft an enticing full image e-mail and shoot it to all your top buyers, with a intro line that says something along the lines of “Your Invited To Receive the Next ‘It’ Gift . . .” to boost your open rate.
2. Craft a full-page ad for the largest newspaper in each of your major markets, saying that in an effort to revive the non-commercial spirit of the holiday, you will not be running any ads during the holidays, and dare your competitors to do the same . . . with the right tone and imagery, this will be a winner this year in light of the Black Friday backlash we’re seeing among customers of major retailers and service providers.
3. Craft a survey for your best customers with a participation incentive that’s irresistible – enter a drawing for a chance to win a new Corvette, or something on that order of magnitude that relates to the products or services you offer – or winner can use the chance to donate the equivalent value to the charity of the winner’s choice. Keep the survey relatively short but make the questions reveal those really crucial details about your customers that you need to move forward next year. Launch the survey on social media, and have your PR team pitch the story – leading with the charity angle – to all the major editors and bloggers in your sphere of influence. Not only will it get lots of attention, the charity angle will undoubtedly boost participation and you’ll get a full sample set of responses on a critical piece of data you need next year. Win for everyone.
4. Donate a startlingly large number of your product or coupons for a free service you offer to our remaining troops still deployed in Afghanistan and surrounding countries who aren’t coming home for the holidays. 25,000 pairs of sneakers or $20 super strong waterproof phone covers sent to our troops with pics of them saying thanks for the holiday gift. Or if that’s not feasible, send a coupon for the product or service to their families here at home – they can use the support as well, and will appreciate the help.
5. Hold a contest to see which philanthropist can give away the largest amount of your product or service in 30 days. Pick the largest corporation or foundation in each of your markets and challenge them to see who can buy and donate the largest cash value of your products or services in those in need in the next thirty days, with the deadline being Christmas eve. Big PR push on this one to get the word out in time, and social media can help this one a great deal – put together a short video daring the wealthy to help those around them using your products or services.
These are all designed to move your product or service at a furious rate for a short period of time – they’re not necessarily designed to do that profitably, but most lead to additional sales of other items as a byproduct of the enhanced awareness of your brand, and that will likely keep you in the black in spite of the losing proposition of the initial marketing initiative. You’ve gotta spend to make, and these idea may spawn a few of your own that can be implemented quickly and effectively in your particular situation.

Write me and let me know if any of these appeal to you and if they were effective for your company. I’d love to hear from you . . .
November 30, 2015
Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

Every business out there has probably been approached about a sponsorship, or included sponsorship in their marketing mix in one form or another, especially those with a consumer sales focus. But how do you make the selection of which one’s might be the most effective long-term?

Careful selection of the events, products, and people you sponsor will allow you to activate that sponsorship to benefit fully from your association. In order to make a beneficial selection, you have to know your brand inside and out, and have a good handle on some of the more “outlying” characteristics that consumers have pinned to it – not just the ones you’re broadcasting about it. Some of those alternative characteristics can make for very solid sponsorships if you pick them carefully and engage fully with all the opportunities they offer.

Many businesses don’t engage fully with the opportunities they do select, and get less-than-optimal returns as a result. This is one situation where you really do get out what you put in. Don’t stop at the logo on the sign, that’s just the beginning. Here’s ten ways to maximize the return on a sponsorship opportunity, planned or impromptu:

For Event Sponsorships:

10) Make sure to provide adequate materials to the event hosts so that all participants receive something from you at the event. Don’t short the count on the collateral, the promotional items or the literature, because that one person who gets left out will carry that impression longer and to more people than all the rest combined.

9) Be sure your brand is represented adequately, accurately and repeatedly. You’ve purchased a certain level of exposure, and most event organizers will bend over backward to help you get it, but if you don’t speak up and remind them, you may not get everything you were promised. Check everything to be sure the brand is represented in the best possible light, and that it’s reproduced at an adequate size, color fidelity and resolution to do you some good – after all, you paid for it.

8) Even if you don’t have something already created, make sure you take advantage of every portion of the sponsorship package. Most sponsorships are multi-faceted, and usually multi-media. If you don’t have elements in use already for each medium, be it flash video, print collateral, sales sheets, logo files in every possible format, bios, soundbites, banner ads, animated gifs, promotional blurbs and items, signage, banners, and other typical elements to take advantage of the whole package of opportunities, create whatever it is you’re missing. You might be the only one of the sponsors who does, in which case, guess who’s going to be the most memorable?

7) Make sure the audience matches your efforts. Most brands have a broad range of demographic, psycho-graphic and geographic audiences it serves. Be sure the sponsorship you pick reaches at least a viable, sizable niche slice of your total target market. If not, it doesn’t make sense to participate.

6) Make your selection based on LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE, and not just acquisition cost. It may cost you $25 to reach, influence and close a new customer to buy your product once. But if the event sponsorship is a valid one, you not only close one sale, but in most cases (if you’re doing your retention efforts correctly), you’ve gained a long-term customer who will enact or refer multiple sales over the next few years. Once you factor that in, the numbers on ROI work much better.

5) Do your part of participate in the success of the event. Your name and your brand is now attached to this event. Do you part to promote it, get some mileage of your own out of your participation, fill the stands and pack the seats – it‘s to your benefit, it drives that many more people to view your participation, and bring you more customers.

4) If the package doesn’t fit, ask for what you want. Most event organizers want the sponsorship to benefit you, so that you’ll repeat or extend your participation and become an evangelist for their event. They want to make you happy, and will negotiate in good faith if you have an alternative proposal to present. If you don’t ask, they won’t likely offer what you want. The tough part is accepting and using the valuations attached to each element. Most often it pays to just make the best overall deal you can, and work it to the fullest.

3) Pick events that make interaction logical. A mountain bike company sponsoring a swimming event doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that same company sponsoring an off-road bike race makes perfect sense. That’s not to say that you can’t sponsor an event outside your industry, you just have to be selective so that the audience can easily make the connection between your brand and the activity they‘re engaged in at the moment.

2) Make the sponsorship an integral part of your strategy, even if it isn’t. Plan your sponsorships to work with your product’s sales curve, either to boost the top or fill in the troughs, seasonally or geographically. If you’re expanding your service or delivery area, work events on the fringes of your current area to make the expansion more organic. If you sell primarily in the summer, work the earlier and earlier events, or later into the fall to extend your season and broaden your exposure.

l) Don’t select more sponsorships or pick more events than you can fully support. The up-front cost is just the tip of the iceberg, and once you add manpower hours, staff training, brand monitoring time, collateral and participation costs, and follow-up and activation costs, it’s easy to get overextended, and not give a full effort to anything, a recipe for failure. Make an honest commitment to the right mix of events and participate fully for the greatest benefit.

Making smart selections when choosing a sponsorship is a combination of art and science, and the basis is really knowing your market, knowing your brand intimately, and using some common sense with an audience perspective. Sponsorship can be a strong part of your marketing mix, if you make the right choices and work them to the fullest.

If you found these tips helpful and would like to read more, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

November 13, 2015
Is Advertising Dead?

Marketers, retailers and their agencies have been relying on advertising and it’s relatively high cost and low return to drive revenue for 75 years or more. Is the time of the ad behind us? Will banner ads and social media posts fill the void? Somehow, I think not . . .

When we approach small businesses about increasing or even originating their marketing budget, their first thing they tend to think of is “Are we doing new ads, they didn’t work too well the last time” and the ears turn off and the eyes glaze over and the rest of the conversation is spent educating them on the value of other forms of marketing. Marketing and advertising have become so irretrievably intertwined in the minds of small business executives, that any conversation about one inevitably drives toward the other. While frustrating to our consultants, it tells us something about the perception that “only big companies can afford advertising,” which seems to pervade the landscape. With 500 cable TV channels, unending YouTube channels, and enough niche and general interest blogs and print publications to choose from, anyone can advertise. But can they afford to advertise in enough places enough times to break through the clutter and actually reach a select audience often enough and well enough to effect sales? That’s the real question.

One element that will forever dog traditional advertising is accountability. No agency exec actually went into a meeting with a client and honestly said, “These ads that ran 60 times last week on all three networks and the Superstations, gave you directly a 5% uptick in product sales” – doesn’t happen, no matter how much they try. They talk around the results, talk about branding support, about number of impressions, audience reach and Q score of the spokesmen in the ad, but direct, 1-to-1 sales accountability ascribed to specific ads is the white Rhino of the advertising establishment – it’s been bandied about, but no validated sightings can be found in the literature.

So with no direct accountability, why is something you can’t accurately measure, that costs a fortune, that can’t be tied back to the top or bottom lines, so hard to let go of? Perhaps because nothing else has come along that gives retail products the visibility, the bragging rights – “did you see our new spot on American Idol last night?” – and the complicit permission from the media outlets and media industries to charge based on demand, like a bushel of corn, driving both media and agency revenue ever skyward, that can replace TV ads. Social Media doesn’t do that, Search Engines don’t do that, E-mail campaigns don’t do that. Nobody ever turned to their neighbor at a barbeque and said “Hey, Bill, did you see that great e-mail from Purel yesterday?”

Until something highly visible, ubiquitous to each household, device agnostic, easily monetized and publicly recognized comes along to replace it, advertising is here to stay. It’s utility may shift, it’s usage wax and wane with budgetary support and be temporarily dampened by the next shiny new thing that comes along, but I dont’ think it will disappear altogether any time soon, no matter what the digital pundits say . . .

April 24, 2015
Customer Service is Still Your Best Marketing Weapon

I’ve traveled all over the country for years for business and personal reasons, and have a Louis-Vuitton sized trunk full of travel nightmare stories as a result, most involving air travel, but not all. I have also had some wonderful experiences, largely due to the people I’ve met or interacted with along the way.

Recently I was traveling for business and collected a huge, whale of a tale to add to my collection. I was going to Chicago for a meeting, landing in our favorite Midwestern hub airport, for just a few hours, and then intended to return home that afternoon, both on, notably enough, United airlines.

Now, as a matter of full disclosure, I have traveled to Chicago on United for years, and have had only a handful of bad experiences, most were minor in nature. I’ve recently had friends and relatives traveling for pleasure take United and experienced horrific treatment, unconscionable delays, poor service and extended travails and battles with management. I can’t count those as part of my story-luggage, but I should have kept them in mind when booking this particular trip.

I boarded at BWI, on time, with no significant incident (beyond being treated like a criminal by TSA, but that’s another story for another day). Flight arrived at O’Hare without incident, but promptly upon hitting the ground, the ordeal began. Apparently, FAA regulations (and I haven’t looked this up), prohibit planes from entering the ramp area if there is any lightning within five miles of the airport. This was news to me, having taxied and deplaned in some horrific storms in the past without incident or mishap, and having been on planes that were struck by lightning. Their feeling was that sitting on the pavement fifty feet away from the building was safe, but not fifty feet closer to the building. Is the pavement different?

After 40 minutes of delay waiting for the lightning to move a little further away, we deplaned and I went on my way to my meeting.

My return flight was scheduled to board at 7:48 PM that same day. At 1:46 PM I get an e-mail from United saying my flight was cancelled, and that I had been re-booked on a flight at 11:48. . . AM the following morning, that connected through Newark airport and would have me arriving at home at approximately 6:30 PM, nearly 20 hours after my initial arrival time! I had no room, no luggage, no anything for an overnight stay, including a charging cable for my phone. No one bothered to call and ask if this booking was satisfactory to me, or even possible!

Rather than try to negotiate this issue through a swiftly expiring mobile device, I called my office and had someone book me on another, available, direct, one-way flight leaving at 9 PM that evening, but landing at DCA, 90 minutes away from my destination airport where my car was parked, at my own expense. I figured I could grab a light-rail train and get to the other airport and pick up my car, and drive home from there – total delay time roughly 5 hours – not a tragedy by any stretch, especially compared to waiting until the next day.

I received a total of 8 e-mail messages from United, alerting me to delays, cancellations and re-bookings as the fluid situation changed, all caused by a little rain in the center of the country. In the end, my original flight had been cancelled and re-booked three times, and my arrival time had extended until 6 PM on Friday, for what was intended to be a quick two hour meeting and return the same afternoon. My one-way flight, when it eventually took off, left at 10:30 PM, got me to DCA at 2AM local time, and left me with an additional 90 minutes of driving to get home, arriving at roughly 4 AM, 23 hours after I had set off on my journey.

The following day, I drove back to BWI to pick up my car, and stopped in to the terminal to try and untangle the thicket of cancellations, re-bookings and ticket changes. The ticket agent I spoke with had no power to take any action to refund or cancel my still existing flight, despite the obvious fact that I clearly wasn’t going to be on the flight from Chicago if I was standing in front of her in Baltimore! She called a supervisor of some sort, who after no less than 6 re-tellings, however inaccurate, of my story, agreed to refund my expense for the half of the original flight I wasn’t going to use. They refused to acknowledge any responsibility for the delay, the need to purchase an additional ticket, or to refund the price of the newly purchased ticket, any meals, or the two hotel rooms I had booked, based on their poor track record of flights actually leaving the airport that day, one of which got used by a colleague trying to do the same thing I was – get out of Chicago! No one seemed the least bit remorseful, apologetic or even willing to recognize that there had been a problem.

Now the marketing moral of the story. If they had treated me like a person, disclosed information about the nature and duration of the problem, asked how I would have liked it handled, admitted that they had not fulfilled their end of the contract, or wanted in any way to treat me like a valued customer, I wouldn’t have written this, and then sent the link around the world, spreading the negative story globally for all potential flyers to see and read. Not only will my experience preclude me from flying on their airline again the foreseeable future, but I will tell this story to anyone who will listen and try and persuade them to do the same. I’m now a REVERSE EVANGELIST for their company, the exact opposite of what their corporate branding and marketing department has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve. All it would have taken was one person from the company to send me a message saying, “we’re sorry you were inconvenienced, call this number and we’ll see what we can do to help you out.” For the lack of that sentiment, a customer, and possibly many others, was lost. For lack of customers, an airline was lost.

Good luck, United.

April 8, 2015