Signage
source: mediaandcommunitybuilding.wordpress.com
When you open your doors for the first time your only preset "customers" are your Mom, the babysitter and the guy who lives next door. No one else knows about your business and you have to get the word out. If you are a bricks and mortar retailer that appeals to the general public, pick the low hanging fruit by focusing on your location. Signage is priority one. If you are on a busy street, balloons and a banner might do but if you are (even slightly) off the beaten path, you may need to invest in outdoor advertising (billboard) if your audience is broad enough and you can afford the outlay. Try using a guy with a sandwich board, it seems a little hokey to me, but you have to admit it gets attention and is much cheaper than a 40" billboard.Direct Mail
Many companies are not location dependent, such as businesses-to-business operations and online retailers, so different strategies apply for them. Since there are so many more considerations in B2B, I'll give one suggestion to anyone new to direct marketing. All businesses are categorized with a NAICS and/or an SIC code. A good list provider can help you find people to contact using these codes. My suggestion is to start with pretty broad categories and re-mail to the subcategories that are the best responders. Your list could be pretty small and segmented, so beware of making assumptions based on small numbers.
Social Media
Public Relations, Events and Viral
PR can be a tough nut to crack but if you have something truly new and exciting, employ a PR consultant to help you get the word out. An article in the local newspaper is free but it's worth paying someone who knows the environment to actually write the press release and contact the appropriate news outlets. But let's face it, post grand-opening, most retailers don't have anything truly newsworthy to say, so we have to create the buzz through an event or a clever "viral" application. There are companies that are experienced in this type of marketing such as The Black Sheep Agency. One look at their site and their blog will give you an idea of the out-of-the-box things that can attract attention to your business or brand. With luck, you may be able to make some impact by yourself at virtually no cost through the unpredictable world of YouTube. If you are able to create a video that has the right amount of creativity and hit the web at just the right time, you just might be able to associate millions of people with your brand but with 24 hours of video being uploaded every minute your chances are better at a Vegas roulette table. My suggestions here are:1. Have fun but don't disrespect your brand.
2. Make it applicable to your brand.
3. Be aware of other creators' copyrights.
4. Be thick skinned when it comes to comments.
Print and Media
There are a lot of options to cover here, so I'll just suggest that you track your sales as best as you can with coded coupons or specific URL/phone numbers. You can target with most media/print by location, so look at that option. B2B applications can take advantage of the many industry newsletters/magazines which, by the way, are often open to guest contributors, giving exposure and credibility at the same time.SEO/PPC
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising are the last prospecting tool that I'll discuss (finally!). Simply put, when someone is searching for a product/service online, you want them to find your site first. You can spend a lot of money on these 2 categories, so here are some suggestions:1. SEO - Write your website with your customer in mind. What terms will they use to find your products? DON'T try to "rig" the search results by putting popular terms buried in your pages. All your copy should read in a friendly manner and be truly relevant.
2. SEO - Name your pages and create your headlines based on the most important copy on the page. A page named "aboutus.html" will have less impact than "the_barbecue_experts.html" provided it really is for a barbecue restaurant.
3. SEO - Solicit relevant links from other sites back to your own. If you support the local little league, make sure your listing links to your site. Write articles for other newsletters that can list you as an expert and allow a link.
4. PPC - spend time thinking of as many search terms as you can that would bring legitimate clicks to your site. You could spend $10 on one click from "Atlanta bookstore" or $10 on 10 clicks from "Independent book resources in Atlanta," "Atlanta indie books," "support your local Atlanta bookstore" etc. Don't be tempted to bid your entire day's budget on one click. Web surfers are generally flaky with an incredibly short attention span so you are playing the numbers-game hoping to convert only a percentage of the clickers.
5. PPC - Make sure your ad links to the right page on your site. Feel free to send the searcher right to the appropriate page so they don't have to search around for whatever they are looking for. This requires the creation of multiple ads.
6. PPC - use web analytics to make sure that most of your clicks are spending time on your site. If not, review the search term and ad to make sure they aren't misleading.
There is so much here, I almost feel I should apologize for being so verbose and yet not covering all the options. If you have comments about all the things I left out, feel free to weigh-in below. If you have specific questions, you are welcome to drop me a line. I look forward to hearing from you.
By the way, did you notice I didn't even MENTION email? We send TONS of email every month but I shun using email for prospecting. Sending an email to someone out of the blue is spam no matter how you slice it. I recently worked with a company that did it and the costs per customer were high.
ReplyDeleteSince I am the colleague you mentioned when talking about yelp, I will only address that point at the moment. At one point in time not so long ago, I would have been considered a naysayer towards yelp and social media to an extent of all sorts.
ReplyDeleteTo begin, I spend what I would consider a large amount of time in Galveston over the year. The problem I run into, is I arrive at 5:00 am and stop at Whataburger, but I leave Galveston smelling and looking like I just took a bath in a bait bucket. Because my time is occupied with fishing, I rarely have the time to explore different restaurants and local flavor. This is where Yelp.com came into the forefront of using social media as a tool for me as a consumer.
I am still new to it, but over the course of a weekend, I strictly used Yelp.com to find top user rated eateries with nothing less than 4 stars in a very local area. As a consumer and in past circumstances it was tough and time consuming to find new places that weren’t a waste of cash. In general, you had to go by word of mouth through your normal network of friends, or ask around. The brilliance with using a social media site like Yelp, Places, Where, Urbanspoon, Foursquare, etc., is that you are able to access a network of people with opinions that you may never be able to experience otherwise.
To me, it seems like a no brainer on the business side to embrace this social marketing. For instance, the first place I ate when I made it go Galveston was called “Gumbo Bar”. Of course they had a high rating, but what was even more impressive, was that they had obviously taken images of food, and filled in their company profile on Yelp. For me, I had everything I needed to make a decision, and I can tell you it was a good one. When we sat down, I noticed the level that they had embraced this form of social media, since they had a callout to their Yelp page on the wall.
To me, it seems like the in store comment cards should go the way of the dodo, and be replace with a “please review us on our preferred social media page”. Of course this is great if you are OK with the quality of your product, but at the same time you could use the feedback to improve and address negative feedback.
Since the ratings are generated by users who have visited a place, that should be incentive enough for a business to keep the masses happy. My biggest complaint as a consumer, is that I never know if I am on the correct social media site or app. It seems like a new one pops up daily, and who has the time to embrace them all? My recommendation to a business would be to tackle as many as they can, or hire someone to do it for them because chances are there are a varied number of consumers looking at their page on each site.
Agreed! It is surprising that more restaurants don't solicit online reviews.
ReplyDelete