Your Marketing Mix: A Beginners Guide to Prospecting

The easiest thing for a marketing consultant to advise is a MIX of advertising/communications medium. "Multichannel" is not only necessary in today's environment but it just sounds so smart when you say it. The specific application, however, does need some consideration to be effective, so here are some suggestions that will hopefully put some meat on the bones of the multichannel strategy. Since there are a TON of options and situations, I'll just tackle one goal at a time starting with prospecting, or customer acquisition, and leave customer retention for another post.

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

Next, take a guess at how far someone will travel to get to your location and start with direct mail. If you're selling Pizzas or Coffee, it's almost a given that the sales generated by your offer will NOT immediately pay for the mailing so don't be misled. HOWEVER, with prospecting you have to think in terms of "lifetime value". If your sandwich shop provides a great first experience, then that one card might be responsible for hundreds of dollars worth of future sales. Once you build a customer base, then work on retaining your best customers through means that I'll discuss later. Speaking of your customers, you can glean valuable information by profiling or modeling your customer database and find new customers with uncanny accuracy. A database marketing company like InterDirect can help you there. One more easy prospecting tool for location-based retail is mailing to "new movers". Just think, is someone new to the neighborhood looking for a new favorite (grocery store, hardware store, hair salon, church, dentist, etc.)? Marriage-mail options like Advo and Val-pak are cheap options because they share the postage and production costs across (40-60?) companies but keep in mind that many people trash them or skim the contents so fast that your response rate is a fraction of solo-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

I'll discuss social media more later because I believe there is more to say concerning loyalty than prospecting. However, You can use social sites like Facebook, FourSquare and Yelp to get new customers provided your pages are positive and have a healthy fan base. One of my colleagues just took a weekend trip and exclusively ate at restaurants with which he had no experience. His decisions were based on a combination of location and reviews both easily found on yelp.com. Word-of-mouth is the best driver of new customers available because it is unbiased and the prospect has a good first opinion before they even walk in the door. Just make sure you are well reviewed, otherwise it works the other way around!

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.

Your Relevance Please

In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of great imagery in communications. This post is to discuss the importance of RELEVANCE. I wouldn't think it would need to be said but the image you use should not only tell a story, it should tell the right story.

First off, I don't want to make a habit of criticizing other people's work in this blog – there are others who already do a good job of this including the guys at emailcritic.com. That said, the following postcards are two recent examples from which we can learn something. The first is a postcard from KwikKopy about their Direct Mail services:

While the whole "message in a bottle" image is intriguing and really tells a story, it tells the opposite story that it should. The last time I put a message in a bottle was when I was stranded on an island with a professor, a movie star and a millionaire. We didn't care WHO got the message, in fact we sent hundreds of messages in bottles and coconuts and not one made it through. Also, the "on time" message is not supported by the pictured aquatic delivery method that even the USPS can outperform. I had hoped that the other side of this postcard would redeem itself by acknowledging the contrast and saying something like "Your customer swims in a sea of advertisements, don't just drop your message in a bottle and hope for the best. Hook 'em with Direct Mail that's sure to reel them in." ... but they didn't.

The second example is really clever. It has all the qualities that cause me to pause and read the little card. There's just one little problem: It's an ad for a stock photo library and it has NO PHOTOS.

Seriously, I like the ad. It's printed on a cool, seed-infused paper that grows when you plant it. It has clever copy to go with the whole growing/weeding/planting theme of the paper. But why, oh why, does a stock photography site use a big yellow box instead of a clever picture? They have thousands of pictures at their disposal, don't they have one picture of a Marigold? My takeaway from this is that I can send clever messages without having to pay for a single picture. It's bold and simple, colorful and clever and doesn't need a stock photo to succeed. Is that really what they want me to think?

So here's the deal. Think about what kind of story you want to tell with your ad. Work on the imagery in conjunction with the headlines and bullets. Make sure everything leads back to the call to action and that the creative doesn't take on a life of it's own going in an unintended direction. Consider running comps by people that are disconnected from your creative team: your receptionist, a friend or your kid's soccer coach and then take their comments to heart.

Feel free to comment on this or send me examples of your GOOD creative. That would be much more fun to review anyway.

Direct Marketing is Your Friend.

Direct marketers have a bad reputation as "junk mailers" and more recently "spammers". And to be fair, as an industry we bring it upon ourselves. When we succumb to the VP who constantly wants to send out more and more communications, we stuff inboxes full of unexpected, unwanted "junk" causing disdain and associating the brand with the money-grubbing nuisances that we are. Hey, just callin' it as I see it.

On the other hand ...

There are, on the other hand, direct marketers who have it right. Those wise marketers that make an effort to connect on a one-to-one basis. Those companies and agencies that spend as much time getting to know their current customers as they do finding new ones. Those advertisers are the friends of the people, the champions of real customer relationships, no matter whether their list is in the hundreds or the hundreds of thousands.

That's what this weekly blog is intended to be about. Observations about how some marketers are getting it right and how others are missing the mark. Tips on stepping back and taking in the broader picture of how the lifecycle of good direct strategies never ends, it just builds upon itself. If you have any questions about how to make your direct marketing better, or if you have an example that you'd like to share, please drop me an email.