Archive for business
Marketing Mistake #3 Not Testing Your Marketing Strategies
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the worst things a business owner can do is to fall in love with their product, service or marketing strategy. Oftentimes, a person spends so much time developing the “ideal” program or strategy, and they get so close to it, that their objectivity goes right out the window.
It’s important not to get blinded by how well you think your marketing efforts will pay off. Even with all the necessary research in place, nothing is certain. The real key is how the market responds to your efforts and offers.
Before you invest any significant amounts of time, money or effort in any marketing or promotional effort, it would be wise to test the effectiveness of your campaign. That way, if it doesn’t work the way you thought it would or should, you haven’t wasted unnecessary resources.
Here are a couple of examples to illustrate this point:
Let’s say that you want to do a direct mail campaign to 20,000 homes in a certain radius around your business. So, you rent the list of homeowners, print up the pieces, have someone stuff the envelopes, affix the postage and haul them down to the post office. Then you sit back and wait for the calls or orders to come in.
But after a couple of weeks, you look at your results and find that you have only received 19 responses. You quickly take out your calculator and figure up that you just pulled a whopping .00095 percent!
Doesn’t sound like a very good return on your investment, does it? Well, it’s not. But, sadly, that’s the way most businesses operate.
But now, let’s suppose that instead of all 20,000 pieces being identical, and mailed at the same time, you decided to only mail to 5,000 the first time. And, let’s say you came up with five different approaches or ideas.
Now you go to the printer, have 1,000 of each idea printed, and get them in the mail. After a couple of weeks, by monitoring the results, you notice that idea number three had the best response… 12 orders, or, .012 percent.
Not a great response, but far better than all the other letters combined. And, you’ve not only not spent a ton of money on your marketing campaign, but you haven’t tipped your hand to all your prospects with an ad that doesn’t work.
Now, let’s go back to the drawing board and fine-tune the letter that pulled the best response. Make the headline more attention-getting, the benefits the reader will gain more appealing, and the offer more attractive. Then, send it out to another 1,000 names.
This time, your letter pulls 47 responses. That’s a 4.7 percent response! Not bad in anyone’s book. And, you’ve only used 6,000 of your original 20,000 names. You still have 14,000 left.
You now have a “control” letter. By tweaking the letter again, you may find that it pulls even better. If it does, then this letter becomes the “control.”
Just because you rented 20,000 names, doesn’t mean you have to mail the same piece to all of them at the same time. That’s what most businesses do, and it’s why so many of them have given up on direct mail.
Once you have a letter that is pulling well, keep mailing is short runs, always trying to beat your control letter.
Do you see what has just happened? By monitoring the results and by testing your mailing you were able to turn a complete flop of a promotion into a huge success.
Your testing is never complete. Just because you’ve run a couple of different tests, doesn’t mean you stop testing. You should always be testing something different to see if you can beat your control.
For instance, suppose you’re doing a direct mailing to residences and want to know whether you should use an envelope with teaser copy, or a plain white envelope. The answer can be found by testing. Here’s one way you might do it:
Split your addresses into two groups; Group A and Group B. These can be arranged by zip codes.
Group A will consist of addresses in certain zips and Group B will have addresses in different zips.
Group A will have teaser copy on the envelope, and Group B will be in plain white envelopes.
It’s important that the contents of all envelopes be exactly the same. If the test is going to be accurately measured, you can only have one variable, and that variable in this case, is the different envelopes.
Now, when your responses or orders come in, simply keep track of the zip codes they came from and you’ll know very quickly which envelope pulls the best. (This is assuming, of course, that the various zip codes consist of similar demographics.)
Once you’ve determined which delivery system is best, you can go on and test other components of your mailer.
Some things that are worthy of testing are…
• Headlines
• Subheads
• Super-heads (or pre-heads)
• Body copy
• Bullet points or statements
• The offer
• Price
• Guarantee
• Return policy
• Whether or not to use graphics
• Which graphics pull best
• Drawings
• Objects
• Pictures of products
• Pictures of people
• Charts and tables, etc.
If your marketing can’t be segregated by zip codes, you can use specially coded coupons or response cards. Use different codes for different variables that you’re testing.
Or, you might use different telephone numbers or send them to landing pages within your website. Some businesses have the respondent ask for a specific person or department.
For instance, if they ask for “Susan,” you know they’re responding to one particular offer, and if they ask for “Heather,” they’re inquiring about the same offer but with a different variable being tested.
Such persons don’t really have to exist; you just use the names as codes to measure the responses.
When the phone is answered and the caller asks for “Susan,” you simply say, “I’m sorry, Susan is not available right now. May I help you?”
You told the truth. Susan isn’t available. And, you’re able to help them. What’s more, you’ve identified which offer the caller is responding to.
Testing is such an important part of any successful marketing effort that nothing should be rolled out in large amounts without first testing.
Just using this simple strategy can help you maximize your returns, minimize your costs in time, money and effort, and add significantly to your bottom line.
Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with your project so much that you can’t be objective. And don’t spend too much time trying to analyze and figure out why a particular thing works and why another doesn’t.
It really doesn’t matter why. What matters is what. Put small test runs out into the marketplace and let your customers tell you what works and what doesn’t.
The link below is a chart that can help you keep track of the variables you’re testing. In the first column, you write the item that’s being tested. (Envelope, headline, offer, etc.)
Description of Ad and Item Tested worksheet
In the second column, the “Key Code,” you place the method you’re using to identify which offer the respondent is responding to. (A person’s name, department number, color of the flyer, picture on a postcard, etc.)
The third column, “Cost of Ad,” is where you write how much the ad costs to run. Or, if you’re using direct mail, you’ll insert the total cost of the mailing, including printing, envelopes, stuffing, postage, etc.
20 Marketing Mistakes-#2 Failure To Monitor Your Results
Posted by: | CommentsResults. That’s all that counts in business. Results.
Any promotion worth putting your time, money and effort behind, is worth measuring how well it performs. Only by knowing what kinds of results a certain marketing effort produces, can you determine whether or not to run it again, or what you may need to do to change or tweak it in order to make it more effective.
It’s absolutely amazing how many business owners don’t understand this simple concept. They’ll let the salesperson from Yellow Pages, radio, TV, Newspaper, etc. sell them an ad and have their department layout the ad, then let the ad run with no way of knowing whether or not a prospect called or a customer was obtained as a result of that ad. The majority of businesses forget to put the website on these ads. The power of tracking is available with web stats from your website.
These type of ads has no “accountability” or “measurability.” So, next year, the same ad gets run, the same results are had, and the business owner continues to complain about how poor business is.
And the same thing happens with his or her newspaper ads, magazine ads, direct mail campaigns, Val-Pak marketing and every other type of marketing they do.
As an astute business person, you should never even consider running an ad or executing a mailing campaign or promotion without having some type of response mechanism to measure the results.
You wouldn’t think of ordering and paying for a product… any kind of product, and then not checking to see if you received it.
Yet, many business owners will run ads in their local radio, local TV, newspaper, magazines, Money Mailer, or Val-Pak, or send out a mailing and never even bother to see what kind of results the ad produced.
I know it’s crazy. But it happens every day. And millions of dollars are wasted because of it.
Some people even go so far as to say, “Well, my advertising isn’t to bring in customers right away. Its purpose is to keep our name in front of our prospects and create ‘top-of-mind-awareness’ so when they’re ready, they’ll remember me.”
Well, top of mind awareness is important. There’s no question about that. But you can’t afford to operate your business on “deferred results.”
Each of your ads and mailings must have a definite, targeted purpose. And each ad must be measured to see that it, in fact, does accomplish that purpose. We’ll talk more about this in a later section.
But for now, here’s a simple 4-step system you can set up to measure the results of each and every advertising or promotion campaign you run:
1. Put together an “Advertising and Promotion Results Analysis” book. A simple 3-ring binder works well for this.
2. On the inside of the binder, insert a few clear plastic “page protectors.”
3. Print up some copies of the “Advertising and Promotion Results Analysis” forms found on the next page, and insert one in each of the page protectors facing the back of the binder.
Every time you run an ad or promotion, put a copy of that ad or promotion in one of the page protectors facing the opposite direction of the Analysis form.
If you do this every time you run an advertisement, a promotion or a direct mail campaign…and you carefully analyze the results, you’ll quickly see which promotions are working, which ones need a little tweaking to improve them, and which ones you should discontinue as soon as possible. As your binder grows, make two additional binders.
In one binder place all your “A” ads and sales letters. That is, the ads that pulled the best. In another binder, place the ads and letters that produced marginal results, or at least broke even.
And in the third binder, put all the “losers.” The ads and letters that absolutely bombed.
Then, when you get ready to do another promotion or mailing, you’ll know which ads or letters you can depend on, or at least which ones you can model your next promotion after.
Now, regarding the third binder… well, stay away from the ads in that binder. Those ads have already proven that you won’t want to run them again.
But, the second binder… the one with the marginal or break even ads and letters. That’s one that you may want to experiment with. Look over the ads and see what may have gone wrong.
see attached PDF
Advertising and promotion tracking sheet
Just because those ads didn’t make as big a profit or get as big a response as you would have liked, is not necessarily a reason to dump them. Sometimes a little tweaking or adjusting can turn a mediocre ad into a real results-producer.
BUT… do this secondarily to using the ads and letters in the first binder. They’re already proven winners.
Do you see the advantage of doing this? By having a copy of the ad or promotion and the results it produced in a central place, it makes developing your next promotion so much easier. No more guessing. No more wonder.
You’ll not only save time, but if you can take a proven winner and make it a little better… pull a three-percent response rather than say, a two-percent response, the difference will all be profits to you.
Running the ad or promotion costs the same, whether it pulls two-percent or three-percent. But, that extra one-percent is a 50 percent increase in response rate. And that one-percent may mean the difference between a profit or a loss on that promotion.
Marketing Four hot strategies-conclusion
Posted by: | CommentsMarketing… effective marketing doesn’t have to be difficult to be productive.
But it must be done. If you fail to market, or if you market ineffectively, you can’t expect to remain in business very long, let alone grow your business. With the tremendous increases in technology, and labor and materials availability, more and more businesses are finding it difficult to maintain any type of competitive advantage because of their products or prices. For your business to prosper and grow, you need to aggressively engage in effective marketing practices.
If the products and services you offer to your customers and prospects are really worthy of their hard-earned money… if they really will provide a benefit to them… then you, as a business owner, owe it to yourself, your employees, your suppliers and your customers to learn as much as you can about the marketing strategies that work in today’s competitive business environment. You then have an obligation to see that as many people as possible take advantage of the wonderful benefits your products and services can provide for them. And, you have an obligation to do it as cost-effectively as possible so more people can afford them and so your business can remain in business to serve even more people. Now you’ve learned four strategies that can be implemented immediately and help you get on the road to making your business more successful and profitable. Study them. Tailor them to fit your operation. Then apply them. They won’t do you or anyone else any good unless you put them to work.
Finally, learn all you can about results-producing, lead-generation marketing. Become a student. Apply the concepts and strategies to your business, and watch it grow! If, for some reason you don’t have the time or desire to learn the latest marketing techniques, don’t just drop the ball. Your business and your customers are too important. Make sure you find a qualified consultant that can help you analyze your business, decide which strategies will work best for you, then set in motion a systematic plan that will help you skyrocket your business to the next level. These four strategies will start you on your way. Apply them in your business, and your competition won’t stand a chance!
Four Hot Marketing Strategies That Can Flood Your Business-Marketing Strategy #2
Posted by: | CommentsMarketing Strategy #2
Use the testimonials of other satisfied customers to help pre-sell your prospects.
Testimonials are one of the most powerful tools any business owner can use, but also one of the most under-utilized.
Testimonials are not limited to any one type of advertising or promotional media. Websites, Television ads, radio announcements, newspaper layouts and infomercials all make use of testimonials.
Your own clients are some of the best sources of endorsement you could possibly want. Especially if they are known to those you are marketing to, or if they have something else in common… perhaps they live in the same town, have similar businesses, belong to the same organization or association, etc.
There are really only three reasons people don’t buy from you.
1. They have no use for your product or service.
2. They can’t afford your product or service.
3. You haven’t developed the level of trust, credibility, and believability they need in you to do business with you.
There’s not much you can do if a prospect can’t use or pay for your services. But there is a lot you can do to help wipe away the underlying layers of skepticism they bring to the relationship and establish the trust level they need to say “Okay” to your offer.
People don’t like to be the first to do anything… especially if it involves parting with their hard-earned money. And, they don’t like to be manipulated. The sales world is full of hype and promotion, and oftentimes, false and misleading promotion.
If your customer or prospect can see that others have done what they are being asked to do, or that others are currently doing it, they tend to feel more safe, and will be more likely to participate. But you first have to relieve any nervousness they may have of being “taken.”
Testimonials are not difficult to get. One of the most effective ways is to send users of your products or services a questionnaire or evaluation form that asks for their feedback on how they’ve benefited from using the product or service.
The questions should be in “open-ended” form, and ask for them to write their feelings about their experience with your product or the service they received from you, and not just for “yes” or “no” answers.
Another effective method is to call your clients on the telephone and record the conversation (with their permission, of course).
Then you can transcribe the parts you want to use, and send a copy to them for their approval and authorization.
Often, after a brief warm up conversation, people will forget the tape is running, open up and give you all kinds of good, useable information that can be edited for use as a testimonial.
Using testimonials is one of the most effective ways you can eliminate fear, increase the believability and credibility of your offer, and add to the number of sales or inquiries to your advertisements or promotions. Whatever you do, don’t overlook this important and valuable tool!
Four Hot Marketing Strategies That Can Flood Your Business Part 2
Posted by: | CommentsThe process of getting people to do business with you is called “marketing.” Unfortunately for many businesses, this process, as critical as it is to the success of the business, is one of the tools business owner’s least understands.
Marketing… effective marketing… the kind that produces inquiries about your offer, adds customers and increases your profits, is not just a matter of placing a online banners, pay per click advertisement, couple of ads in the newspaper or sending out some mailings.
And it’s not creating a beautiful brochure that describes the company, the president and the products and services offered by your business.
Results-producing marketing… the kind you want for your business… is a combined and coordinated effort of a number of factors.
But what about the economy? Doesn’t that have something to do with how a business approaches marketing?
It certainly does, there’s no question about it. The economy, and how it’s performing, does have a real impact on businesses and how they should approach their marketing efforts. And here’s where a lot of businesses get in trouble.
When the economy is down, most businesses stop, or drastically slow down their marketing efforts.
Then, without new customers coming on board, existing customers making repeat or additional purchases, and past customers returning, the company’s business drops off even further.
Fewer customers making purchases automatically translates into less profits. Less profits, of course, means less available funds for marketing, and before you know it, a vicious cycle develops with a downward trend.
When times are tough, is not the time to cut back on your marketing efforts. Sure other businesses do it. But people still have the need or the want for your products and services.
So, when other businesses are cutting back, that’s the ideal time for you to forge ahead, and increase your marketing efforts. It’s the one time you will have the least competition for your customer’s attention.
On the other hand, when times are good… when the economy is booming, good marketing… effective marketing can blow the socks off your competition.
Why?
Because your competition doesn’t understand the difference between the marketing they’ve always used, and high-impact marketing that’s accountable and that produces results. And if they keep on doing the kind of marketing they’ve always done, and you move on to more effective types of marketing, they don’t stand a chance.
Marketing can consist of many forms. Some involve money, some involve personnel and some involve a certain commitment of time. Some work well in good economic times, and others work better in a down economy.
Here are four usable marketing efforts that work well in any economic climate. These strategies can be put to work in your business today, and help move your business forward regardless of the economy or your available financial resources.
Four Hot Marketing Strategies That Can Flood Your Business Part 3
Posted by: | CommentsMarketing Strategy #1
“Do what you do so well, that when others see you do it, they want to see you do it again, and will bring others to see you do it.”
That quote comes from Walt Disney. It was the strategy he used for marketing Disneyland, and he said it could apply to any business, regardless of what that business sold or offered.
Broken down to its individual components, it means this:
“Do what you do….” That’s what you do… not what anyone else does. It’s important that you do the things you (or your business) does the best. While it’s okay to emulate other successful businesses and copy some of the traits that made them successful, you should adopt those traits, add your own personality and adapt them to your business.
Do what you do… “so well….” That means excellence…not mediocrity. If you’re going to do something in business, do it with excellence. No longer is it possible to maintain…long-term, a competitive advantage because of your product or the price you charge. We live in a “me-too” world, where your customers can buy the same or very similar products to what you offer from any number of other suppliers for the same or less money. You must do what you do very well.
“…when others see you do it….” “Others” means your customers…the people who buy your products and/or services. When they see you do what you do (or buy what you sell, or deal with your company)… they,
“…want to see you do it again….” We call that, “repeat business.” Your offer was so good, or the way you dealt with your customers was so unique, that they want to come back for more… to see you do it again. Not only that, but they will…
“…bring others to see you do it.” That’s called “referral business.” When your customers like what you do and bring others to experience it, that business costs you nothing in hard marketing costs. It’s a result of word-of-mouth. It’s a personal endorsement of your products or services from a satisfied user. That’s the sincerest form of flattery, and the best form of advertising you can get.
You’re not trying to “meet” your customer’s expectations… you want to “exceed” them… to give them more than what they expected. Similar products and services can all be expected to perform in similar fashion. But when it comes to the attention, care and service we receive, we all have our perceptions of what “good” means.
Keep in your mind a balance scale. On one side of the scale mentally put the dollar amount you charge for your products and services.
On the other side of the scale, your service. Make sure that the “service” of the scale always outweighs the “price” side. Be sure you always give more service than the customer perceives they should be getting from their transaction with you.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself that will help you determine how well you’re doing:
• Do I offer the best quality product or service I possibly can?
• What can I do to improve it?
• What is the best benefit to my customers that each of my products or services have to offer?
• How can I better convey that to my customers?
• What can I offer my customer above and beyond the product or service they purchased?
• Do my customers trust the advice and suggestions they get from my staff, and do they feel comfortable dealing with us?
• Why should they do business with my establishment instead of any and all options they have, including doing nothing?
• Would I purchase this product or service if I were in the market for it?
• Would I purchase it from my company if I didn’t own, or work for the company?
• Would I feel comfortable referring my friends, relatives and associates to this company?
The answers to these questions can help you determine where you need to make changes that will benefit both you and your customers, and add substantially to your bottom line.
Four Hot Marketing Strategies That Can Flood Your Business Part 1
Posted by: | CommentsFour Hot Marketing Strategies, No Matter What Condition The Economy Is In
The bottom line of all businesses is to make a profit. That’s why a business exists in the first place. It sounds nice for someone to say that the reason they’re in business is to help other people, or to provide some needed service, but in the end the real bottom line is that the business owner wants and needs to realize a profit on his or her investment.
Profits are what drive businesses and allow them to provide more goods and services, create more jobs and expand the economy. Profits are what allow the philanthropist to continue giving and providing relief and humanitarian service to others.
There are many factors that affect profits, not the least of which is customers purchasing goods and services provided by the business. Without customers making purchases, there simply would not be a business.
If a business expects to remain in business for any length of time, or to grow, the business owner must master the skill of getting customers to do business with them.
That includes new customers… those with whom they have never done business before; current or existing customers… those who patronize the business regularly; and past customers…those who have done business before, but may have taken their business elsewhere.
