Jul/100
Traditional marketing v new marketing
There is still a great deal of confusion, particularly amongst business owners who consume little digital media or don’t participate in social networks, about the difference between traditional marketing and new media or social media marketing. Hopefully, the following examples will help to ignite debate around the distinction.
A traditional marketer will focus on broadcasting a message to the local area using newspapers, posters or flyers. The message will reach people who may or may not know your business and will talk about why they should become customers. He is fighting to capture the attention of the masses, regardless of whether they are likely to be interested in your business. A new media marketer will concentrate on creating a piece of online content (a photo, video, blog, podcast or similar), which is aligned with your business and which your target customers will find entertaining or interesting. She will distribute it through the online networks of existing customers and draw attention to it in several places online, where people can find it. She is building a bridge (as Brian Solis would call it) between consumers and your business’ online presence.
A traditional marketer will want to improve your product or service and will start by asking your customers to complete a questionnaire. Maybe even an online questionnaire. He is producing a structured piece of feedback that will help you to make improvements. A new marketer will make sure that communication channels are constantly open with your customers such that they feel comfortable posting a comments on your Facebook wall or via Twitter to let you know about a bad (or sometimes good) experience. This marketer will take time to monitor the digital channels for conversations about your business. She is providing a simple and convenient way for customers to talk to you when they have something to say.
A traditional marketer will seek to acquire new customers. He will place adverts in the local press, invest time and money in making your website appear at the top of Google ranking lists when people search for certain keywords and perhaps pay Google to make you appear at the top as a sponsored link. He is forcing your business into the offices and homes of local people. On the other hand, a new marketer will focus on engaging existing customers and getting them to talk to their friends about your business online. She will give them a reason to talk to their friends about you. This could be an engaging piece of online content that they will want to share with their friends. She is making it easy for local people, at least those who are interested, to find you.
Agree? Disagree? Like it or not, social media is important to your business. As a local business owner, the most important thing is that you do your homework and form an opinion. At the very least, join Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and see for yourself what all the talk is about.
Mar/100
Forget advertising. Grow by word of mouth alone.
Everyone knows it is great to have word of mouth but how do you make it happen? Conventional wisdom says that all you need to do is provide a good product or service and word of mouth will do the rest. The truth is that it is less straightforward than that and there are a few subtle issues to contend with.
Some people love to find new things and tell their friends about them. If your business is something new or different, you’ll need to seek out early adopters because many people don’t like change. Your effort to find early adopters is usually rewarded as these people love to tell everyone about the great new things they have discovered. A word of caution, though. If you expect people to change their buying habits for you, your product or service will need to be remarkable.
What if yours is the type of business people don’t talk about very much? How often have you raved about the wonders of your gynaecologist over dinner with your friends? Do you talk about contents insurance at the pub? Not every product or service can grow by word of mouth alone.
Can you make it any easier for people to talk about you? Think about how your customers communicate. Can you send an email or an SMS with a special offer that they will want to forward to their friends? How about creating a Facebook page for your business and posting news, events and offers there? When someone becomes a ‘fan’ of your Facebook page, their network of friends will be able to see that.
Let’s assume you have provided a great service, you have given people a reason to talk about you (maybe an incentive), you have made it easy for them to remember you (perhaps a branded box of matches to take home or an occasional email update), made it effortless for them to talk about you and you have identified your most influential customers, paying special attention to them. What next?
Well, what do you want them to say? Can you describe what is great or unique about your business in the few seconds of captive attention you would have if a prospect were travelling in an elevator with you? It’s not always obvious and big businesses spend thousands working out their ‘elevator pitch’. If you can’t, it’s very unlikely that your customers will be able to. If you think it could be hard for customers to ‘sell’ your business in a few words when they bump into a friend at the supermarket, do something about it. Come up with a strap-line for your business and make it visible in your premises, on your van or your business card.
The good news is that, for some types of businesses, such as restaurants and bars, word of mouth alone can bring great success as long as they pay attention to the subtle details. For others, they’ll need to think carefully about how to get people talking about them.
Jan/100
Email v Text
Which should you use for marketing your local business, email or SMS? Let’s take a look at the differences.
- Email is free to send, SMS isn’t.
- An email can be as long as you like, whereas an SMS is limited.
- An email can include pictures and images. Not an SMS.
- An SMS can be written and sent in minutes, whereas email requires time and money to be composed and sent properly.
- Most people read emails at home or in their office, whereas with SMS it’s wherever they happen to be when they get a text.
- Text messages get noticed instantly. Emails often don’t. Some people take days to notice a new email. Some emails are filtered into spam or junk folders, so never get read.
- Over 95% of texts are opened immediately versus around a quarter of emails.
Which is best depends on what you want to achieve.
If you want to say something to your customers that isn’t urgent and you want them to engage deeply with your message, then email is best for both you and your customers.
On the other hand, if you want to say something right away or you want certain people to be the first to know about something, there’s no doubt that SMS is best for you and those customers that want to be the first to know.
Is your salon looking very quiet next Monday through Wednesday? Why not send an SMS to the stay-at-home Mums in your address book and make them an offer they can’t refuse? Perhaps promote a luxury service rather than a standard cut, so that you don’t prevent them booking their usual monthly trim. What’s better, an empty salon or a busy one with customers paying half price for things they wouldn’t usually buy?
Jan/100
A resolution for 2010 – get permission!
This seems like an obvious point, but make sure that customers know what to expect when they agree to receive direct marketing from you. Are they consenting to email only, or also SMS? Are they opting in for special offers only or will they receive general news and updates about your business? The clearer this is, the more welcome your message will be, the greater chance of receiving a good response from customers. In this respect, people rarely welcome surprises.
Your aim should be for your customers to welcome and look forward to your marketing rather than to put up with it. If it is expected and welcomed by your customers, there is far more chance that it will influence them.
A list of your customers’ contact details is almost worthless unless you have captured their interest and gained their permission. If you have their interest and permission, you have a good chance of generating revenue with each piece of marketing you send.
Dec/090
Extend the Christmas rush into January
Many businesses, such as bars and restaurants, become extremely busy at Christmas time. They make far more money over Christmas and New Year than at any other time of year. They and their staff are completely flat out, their venues bursting at the seams. Then, very suddenly, it’s the 2nd of January and one of the year’s quietest periods commences.
What can be done to extend some of the seasonal rush past December into January and beyond?
For these types of businesses, the premises or venue is perhaps the most significant and costly business investment, as well as the most valuable. The value of a place of business is that it gives direct access to passing trade – prospects that can be converted to customers. A venue makes it possible to build sales from a standing start. Then, once the business is up and running, it provides the opportunity to build relationships with customers in person – something that many web-based businesses can only dream about.
Like any investment, it’s important to extract every bit of value from a place of business. If 8 out of every 10 people who walk into a shop are converted into regular customers, how long do you think it would be before that business would have to start turning people away or extending the shop to cope with the demand? A great problem to have!
This ideal scenario is altogether possible but it is not enough merely to engage with customers who walk in, although that is a great start. You also need to capture their details and preferences so that it is possible to reach out to them and entice them back in future. When you reach out to customers with a relevant and compelling reason to visit your business, some will respond. The more people you reach out to (always assuming a relevant and compelling offer), the more who will respond.
To start with, you need to seize every opportunity to collect your customers’ contact details and learn a little about them. There is no better opportunity than when they have chosen to walk into your premises. And, for the businesses in question, there in no other time of year when more people walk into their premises than at Christmas time.
Dec/090
The problem with doing nothing
There are many reasons why you should do nothing.
- I can’t use a discount to attract new customers because my existing customers will be upset.
- I can’t change my supplier because it will mean rewriting our menu.
- I can’t send marketing emails or SMSs to my customers because they might find it irritating.
Your job, if you wish to make a difference and grow, is this. Put to one side your comfort with the way thing are today. Then, find reasons why these activities do make sense. Not only why they make sense to you, but also to your staff and customers.
- Create a separate promotion exclusively for your existing customers. Perhaps an incentive to try a new or premium service.
- If you can’t easily change your menu, you are wide open to local competitors who might change their menus daily. Do yourself, your staff and your customers a favour by redesigning your menus to be more flexible.
- Get your customers’ permission to send them messages and make sure you send messages that are relevant and compelling.
The problem with doing nothing is that you are learning nothing. You’re not finding out what works and what doesn’t. The problem with learning nothing is that you are not moving towards the situation where your hard work generates more money.
Dec/090
Snail mail, email or SMS?
So you’ve decided that you want to communicate with your customers or try to reach some new ones. You’ve got something to say and you think that people will want to hear it.
What next? Do you put it in an envelope, write it in an email or text it? Once you have answered the following questions, you’ll have a good idea of which route to take.
- Who is your target audience and what form of communication are they likely to most appreciate and find convenient?
- Is your message an urgent one? Is it a last-minute offer or an exclusive deal, where your customers could miss out if they don’t get the message instantly?
- Does your message require a response and how would your audience most like to respond?
- Is your message simple or complex? Can it be said in 160 characters or does it require prose and pictures?
- Do you have an exclusive brand that requires your message to be delivered in a premium way?
- Is it essential for your customers to be moved by your communication? Email provides the ability to move people using the written word and images. Physical mail adds touch and smell to the experience.
- Do you have the time and resource to design a suitable email or hardcopy mail?
- Is cost a big factor?
As a general rule, your message shouldn’t inconvenience your customers. Whichever route you take, you will be interrupting their daily routine, so make sure the message is worthwhile.
If your message is more complex and requires you to tell a story, then email or snail mail is your best bet.
When the message has a clear and immediate selling point, such as an exclusive, last-minute offer, a text is impossible to beat for both you and your customers.
Nov/090
What to do when you find a gap in your local market
Marketing is not only about reaching prospects and customers and increasing sales. There’s a big chunk of marketing work to be done way before a local business opens. There are a number of questions to be answered. Is there a market? How big is it? Is there a gap?
Many local business people set out to exploit a gap in their local market. We have all come across such businesses. The fine-dining restaurant that aims to provide a unique gastronomic experience to a provincial population; the cocktail bar that intends to bring a uniquely sophisticated and cosmopolitan environment to the inhabitants of a suburban high street; the sandwich bar with a delivery service.
What is not always obvious at first, though, is that the gap needs to be huge – in fact, truly profound. Otherwise the light will not be worth the candle.
A gap is not, in itself, enough to make you money. Yes, when you fill a gap, you create something different and remarkable. But that is worth nothing unless enough people see it as remarkable enough to start spending enough of their money with you.
Are there a sufficient number of people with sufficient disposable income in your provincial town to fill your fine-dining restaurant not only at the weekends, but also during the week? Or will it crumple under the pressure of having to pay staff to serve a room that is almost empty from Monday to Thursday? Will your business really be so different that it will occupy its own category in the local market? Or will you find yourself competing with several other similar businesses in your local area, constantly fighting to attract customers, continually treading water?
Often, when a market gap exists and is exploited with skill such that a new, remarkable product or service is created, new demand is created at the same time. In other words, people that would not have previously bought that type of product or service suddenly appear on the scene. For an example of this, think of the huge increase in UK red wine consumption after the less stuffy, more accessible new world wines entered the UK. People that would not have bought red wine before suddenly started to do so. There had been a gap in the market for a more accessible red wine and that gap was exploited with skill.
So, before you invest your life savings into exploiting a gap in your local market, ask yourself if you can create new demand. If not, whose customers are you going to poach and how sure are you that they will be game?
Nov/090
Go get em Tiger
Are you a passive marketer or an active marketer? Do you go out and get customers or do you let them find you?
Being passive means waiting for people to walk past your shop, find you in an online directory or search engine, be told about you by friends, come across your advert in the local paper. This is less effort than being an active marketer because you simply pay some money and then hope customers find you.
Once you have some customers, you automatically have the opportunity to become an active marketer. Being active means reaching out to your customers and bringing them back to you again and again using methods such as direct mail, email or SMS. This requires some effort.
Firstly, you’ll need to collect the details of every customer you meet. But shouldn’t you be doing that anyway? You have invested money in premises, equipment, advertising or other things to get those customers in the first place, so surely you must keep in touch to make the most of your investment? Otherwise, wouldn’t it be like buying a box of matches and throwing the whole box away after using just one match? Just as a box will provide you with many matches after the first one, many customers will potentially buy from you several times. That is, unless you let them forget about you.
Secondly, you’ll need to keep customers interested by sending offers that they find compelling. There must always be something in it for them. Yes, it may cost you something to make offers compelling but you are building long-term sales potential, which is no less important than any of your other expenses. If you do this, you will be rewarded with a good response rate each time you actively reach out to your customers.
This is when active marketing really starts to pay. If customers have given you permission to contact them and you have learnt enough about them to send compelling offers, such that you always get a significant response to a campaign, you have effectively built a money-making machine. You have the power to generate sales whenever business is slow, when you have a special event or when you launch a new product. In fact, any time you like.
Nov/090
Should you reduce prices to sell more?
That’s such a huge question that I’m already regretting trying to answer it. As always on Local Marketer, I’ll focus on how this question relates to local businesses.
First of all, raise your hands if your local business is so busy that you don’t have the time or capacity to serve more customers than you already have. Ok, the lucky few with their hands raised can stop reading now – this question doesn’t apply to you guys. Your homework is to find a nice way to raise your prices.
For those still reading, how did you set your current prices? Probably by looking at your competitors, right? If your product or service is a commodity, such that your product is very similar to your competitors’, then there’s not much room to play with pricing as customers can easily get the same thing elsewhere.
However, if there is room for you to add value, perhaps in a way that your competitors don’t, then customers might be willing to pay you more than they do your competitors. Don’t assume that lowering your prices will bring you more business over the long term. Your customers may not be sensitive to your prices.
Alas, for the vast majority of products and services, consumers are sensitive to prices, particularly with the economy as it is today. If you are thinking of lowering price for the long term, you need to consider whether your new prices allow room for profit. Assuming that your number of sales does not increase immediately when you lower prices, how much less money would you make per month and how long can you afford to wait for the increase in sales? If you work that out beforehand, you’ll know how long you can afford to run the experiment for. If your sales volume eventually increases enough to grow your profit, you’ve succeeded. If not, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board.
Of course, the most common type of price reductions are the temporary ones – sales, promotions, last-minute deals and special offers. If you execute them cleverly and selectively, then they can be a great way to generate business in the short term. Although, if you have regular customers, don’t offer them a discount on a service or product that they have bought from you every month for years, such as a standard haircut – you’ll make less money and those customers won’t become more loyal. Perhaps offer those people a discount on a head massage or colour treatment, so that the offer leads to an up-sell.
The truth is that for many local companies, the ability to generate extra business at short notice is essential to survival. To fill un-booked restaurant tables, empty seats, vacant appointments, available time and unused seasonal or perishable stock amongst other things. If this applies to your business, make sure you know how to run temporary offers with style and acquire the tools to execute them quickly at the last minute. Nowadays, mobile marketing and SMS in particular is the best way for local businesses to execute time-sensitive promotions cost effectively.
And don’t kid yourself that your business is too posh or your customers are too wealthy for promotions and special offers. Most people love to save money, particularly those who have been successful in acquiring it.
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