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3 local marketing best practices: Be seen, be known, be remembered

Success in marketing isn’t about finding the one thing that works; it’s about cultivating a range of activities that, cumulatively, bring in the customers you need. Some of the best activities cost little and exploit your own interests.

Here are examples from 3 Cleveland Heights businesses that do a good job at making themselves seen, known and remembered:

Community involvement: Every year on New Year’s Day, Tommy’s Restaurant hosts a fundraiser for HeightsArts. Owner Tommy Fello donates the food and the entire facility, and a handful of his key staffers donate their time to cook. But that’s just the most visible of many local causes the restaurant supports – usually by providing the food. The result: Samples of his food showing up all over town, an immense amount of goodwill and 40 years in business.

You can’t give away goods and services to everyone who asks, but if you pick good causes and make sure to get reasonable recognition for your support, you’ll work your way into the hearts of the people in the community – the very people your business exists to serve.

Leverage small partnerships: Not quite 2 years old, The Winespot has quickly evolved into more than a store. Through a partnership with the Cleveland Institute of Art, its walls showcase (and sell) student art. It hosts a couple “openings” a year to introduce the next round of artists. It also has a small seating area and a location appropriate for small music combos to perform.

Launching from that, owners Adam and Susan Fleisher have focused on extending the store’s productive hours by establishing it as a venue for special events – and offering corkage to allow customers to enjoy wine and beer purchases on premises.

Now they’ve added dinner to the mix; the store keeps menus on-hand from 5 nearby restaurants. You can buy a bottle of wine or beer, pay a corkage fee and call in a food order. The restaurants will bring the meal to you – no surcharge.

It’s not likely to be the most important source of business for anyone involved. But it’s clever, cheap and just different enough to bring in some incremental business for everyone.

Exploit undermarketed venues: Before opening Sweetie Fry’s storefront location, owner Keith Logan sold his craft-made ice cream from a portable food cart. Last fall – looking to keep the food cart busy – he tried to swing a deal to sell ice cream at Heights High football games.

While that proved unworkable, he and the school created a sponsorship program that brought in money for the athletic department and promoted Sweetie Fry during games. Several times throughout each home game, the PA announcer would ask a local trivia question. The prize? A certificate for free Sweetie Fry ice cream.

The contests were a hit. Sweetie Fry’s name became unforgettable among those in attendance. And a small business quickly earned and outsized reputation.

Each of these companies could serve as the source for more such examples, because all of them layer their marketing through multiple activities.

There’s bound to be something your business can do too that doesn’t cost much money, plays off your strengths and interests, delivers positive results and can be replicated for success. The trick is to find it.

Social media marketing: Where to start

Most business owners rightly feel they have better things to do than play around with social media.

At the same time, it’s not an exaggeration to say social media has revolutionized marketing. It allows any business to engage in “content marketing” – essentially developing its own audience at little or no cost, and engaging with them to drive interest in sales. To ignore this is to ignore the behavior of your customers and prospects.

But with so many social media outlets, it’s often hard to know where to get started or what to do next.

Every social media site has its own peculiarities and best practices. Learning the nuances of each, takes a certain amount of time and commitment. So I recommend getting involved in one platform at a time. Start with Facebook, for instance, and work it until you’re comfortable about how it adds value. Only then should you look to add another platform.

At the same time, understand that social media outlets are like ingredients in a sandwich. A piece of ham tastes good, but it’s not lunch until you put it between slices of bread and add tomato, cheese and mustard. With social media, you may need to layer 3 or 4 different sites before you have a program that actually drives revenue to your business.

As an example, most of my social media clients combined Facebook and Twitter – and in some cases a third relevant site – before they gained traction at building audience.

Here is a basic overview of the major social media outlets and what each one brings to your marketing. All are trying to find services you’ll pay for, but they can still be used effectively for free.

Facebook

What it’s for: The foundation of any social media marketing – particularly if your products/services are targeted to a consumer audience. Use it to aggregate an audience of people who are interested in what you sell or do.

Strengths: A billion users. Easy and low-cost advertising. Integrates with many other prominent social media outlets (i.e., when you post on Twitter, for example, it’s easy to have the Tweet automatically post to Facebook as well). Finally, the best adoption in mobile computing – allowing you to easily capitalize on the astoundingly fast migration to mobile devices.

Weaknesses: Constantly changing. Noisy, commercial and often unpleasant to use. Takes commitment to feed it with content.

Nuance: Don’t use your personal page for business. Set up a business page; you’ll look more professional and once you have 30 “likes” it provides you with valuable data to improve your marketing – still for free.

LinkedIn

What it’s for: Social media networking specifically for business. If your products/services are targeted to a business audience, start here instead of Facebook.

Strengths: Many ways to find and engage relevant audience.

Weaknesses: Doesn’t integrate well with other social media. It’s also become so rich with features that it is becoming difficult to use. Further, some of the best features are now reserved for paid users.

Nuance: Despite the negatives, it’s still the largest and most robust business-to-business networking tool available. You’ll want both a personal page and a business page.

Twitter

What it’s for: Broadcasting headlines. Use it to let people know you have new content to share – whether it’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, your own website or anywhere else.

Strengths: The accepted standard for deploying brief messages. Also strong on mobile platforms.

Weaknesses: Low signal-to-noise ratio. You need a lot of followers here to count on your messages being seen.

Nuance: Because Tweets are so brief, you’ll want to shorten any website links that you broadcast with a free utility like tinyurl.com, bitly.com or goo.gl. Also, the fastest way to gain an audience is to automatically follow anyone who follows you. There are a number of tools that help with this, such as TwitterAutoFollowback (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) or Twollow.

YouTube

What it’s for: Everything video. If you’re going to use video, then you want to use YouTube. Even if a video is posted on your website, you should put a copy of it on YouTube as well for the visibility in search.

Strengths: The accepted standard for all things video.

Weaknesses: It’s not much good for anything else.

Nuance: If you’re going to post multiple videos, create a channel for your business and promote it on your website, other social media sites and in your marketing materials.

Slideshare

What it’s for: Posting presentations of all kinds. It’s owned by LinkedIn and integrates well with it.

Strengths: Easy to use and well-known in business-to-business environmenbts.

Weaknesses: Doesn’t integrate well with sites other than LinkedIn.

Nuance: Load it up with whatever presentations you have – technical materials, sales presentations, workshops and anything else you do. It’s surprising how much time people spend browsing through presentations once they’ve found the one they’re looking for. Also, upload presentations as PDFs to assure broadest accessibility to your information.

Google+

What it’s for: Even social media experts will tell you that they don’t really know what Google+ is best at. It’s intended as Google’s answer to Facebook. It is often appreciated for being less commercial and crowded than Facebook, but if you’re beginning a social media program, that can be a disadvantage. Facebook may be noisy, but it has tools designed to make marketing easy. Success on Google+ demands more sophistication in social media marketing.

Strengths: Google’s most powerful attribute is search, and the promise is that anything you post using Google+ will be easier to find on the world’s best-used search engine.

Weaknesses: No sense of place. Facebook is a destination. Google+ is a concept.

Pinterest

What it’s for: Creating online bulletin boards filled with images. If your product or service is visually oriented, use Pinterest to create relevant collections of photos and show them to your audience.

Strengths: Easy to use and integrates well with other sites. So you can feed content to Pinterest and have it automatically post to Facebook and Twitter.

Weaknesses: Typically viewed as a site for women, though that reputation is fading.

Nuance: Pinterest is a social platform in itself, and it wants you to gather followers. But you can use it to organize and display photos while focusing your “audience development” efforts on Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram

What it’s for: Very much like Pinterest. But it originated as a photo-enhancement app for smart phones and it maintains that heritage today. While Pinterest is about organizing collections of images, Instagram is more about taking, dressing up and sharing photos (and now, short videos).

Strengths: Integrates with other social media.

Weaknesses: How many different ways do you really need to take a picture or video?

Foursquare

What it’s for: Geographic social media; people check in to places they visit. By encouraging people to check in, you create visibility on the Foursquare network.

Strengths: Creates attention to storefront businesses that rely on heavy traffic.

Weaknesses: Not much buzz about it these days.

There are plenty more social media platforms, but if you’re not already deep into social media, don’t go beyond what’s contained here. Pick an appropriate place to start and then get comfortable using it.

Social media doesn’t have to take over your life, but if you want people to know about your business, it should be at least a regular part of it.

A single metric to compare different publications

You’ve received quotes for advertising from two publications or websites; one wants to charge $150 and the other $350. How do you know which is the better deal?

Creating an apples-for-apples comparison between different publications is difficult because it involves so many variables.

The most common calculation for this job is cost-per-thousand (CPM), which measures the amount of money it takes to reach 1,000 people. You can use it for any medium – broadcast, print and online. (But it won’t hold up if you try to compare one medium against another).

Here’s the formula:

CPM = Rate/(Circulation x .001).

So if an ad costs $250 and the publication’s distribution is 8,000 copies, the CPM is $250/8, or $31.25.

It’s a simple calculation, and it lets you compare the rates of different publications with different circulation sizes.

But it has limitations.

For instance, it only works when comparing rates in the same media channel – print v. print or online v. online. That’s because the economics to produce different media – and the results they generate – are so different. Even when using it to compare two similar offers, be aware of these complications:

Ad size: CPM for a half-page ad will be higher than for a quarter page ad in the same publication.

Frequency. The more ads you buy, the lower the price will be for each. That means a single publication will have a different CPM for every ad unit and every frequency rate. The Heights Observer, which offers a pretty typical rate structure, has 60 different CPMs depending on the size of the ad and the number of insertions you buy.

Page size: Move vexing, a quarter-page ad in one publication (The Wall Street Journal, for instance) may be much larger than a quarter-page ad in another (i.e. Reader’s Digest).

That’s why it’s helpful to take CPM a step further – CPM per square inch (CPM/i²). It’s the cost you pay for each square inch of space to reach 1,000 people. Here’s the formula:

CPM/(height x width)

This will get you closer to that apples-for-apples comparison between different publications. It’s still not perfect. The bigger the differences between two publications, the less relevant CPM/i² will be. But in such cases, it may be the only tangible link for comparing disparate ad products.

So what’s the best way to use CPM and CPM/i² to make advertising decisions efficient and painless?

Step 1: Decide which publications you’re interested in, based on who they reach and how you feel they’ll work for you. Then look up or request their rates.

Step 2: After getting past the sticker shock, decide how much you want to spend per week, month or year. (Plan to advertise consistently over an extended period. It works best when treated as a long-term investment.)

Step 3: Select ad units in each publication that fit within your price range. Include any extra charges for color. If you can afford a full-page ad in one publication but only a small ad in another, that’s OK. CPM/i² should become a smaller part of your decision but it’s still instructive in your evaluation.

Step 4: Using the same frequency rate (i.e. if you use the 12x rate in one publication, use the closest thing to a 12x rate in every publication), calculate CPM/i².

Now you can evaluate the pricing with confidence, knowing this is as close as you’ll get to an apples-for-apples comparison.

In the end, CPM/i² is only one metric; it should never be the your only consideration. Such factors as a publication’s acceptance among readers, the relevance of its content and its customer-friendliness are at least as important.

Your gut may have to take you the rest of the way. But you’ll know there is at least some science behind the decision.

Image courtesy of Suvro Datta/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Advertising 101: Frequency v. size v. color

If money were easy to come by, every ad would run in every issue as a full page. But a buck is hard to make and compromises are a fact of life.

So what’s more important: running a big ad or running an ad often?

Advertising – any advertising, whether print, online or broadcast – works best through repetition. Look at it this way: You know that if you send a direct mail piece or a mass e-mail, only a small percentage of recipients will actually open it.

Advertising offers better percentages, but the concept is the same; 10,000 people may read a publication, but only some of them will notice any given ad.

Conventional wisdom in the media industry says it takes 7 impressions to attract a reader’s attention. I’ve never actually seen any research to support this. But I think I know where it comes from. I’ve been involved with research at various magazines over the years that indicated 10% to 20% of readers were able to positively identify whether a specific ad ran in the most recent issue. Larger ads generally increased reader recall.

From that you can conclude an ad needs to run 5-10 times before everyone in the publication’s circulation can be assumed to have noticed it.

(A statistician could find about a dozen things wrong with this statement. And the research will vary widely depending on the publication, its audience, the number of pages and advertisements it contains, and a host of other factors. So please take it in the general spirit intended).

But just because people see your ad doesn’t mean they are currently interested in what you’re selling.

For instance, regardless of how large your ad is, you’re not likely to sell carpet to someone who’s renting an apartment month-to-month.

The more times an ad runs, the greater the number of people who have a chance to see it. Those who will be interested in your product or service are always a subset of that number.

But when that person buys a house and starts thinking about upgrading the floors, you want him to have noticed your ad in the past; you want him to go looking for your ad in the publication’s current issue.

Therefore, successful advertising isn’t just about getting noticed. It’s about 3 things:

Getting noticed
Being remembered
Being there at the right time

That’s why I recommend frequency as the higher priority in advertising. Frequency is a factor in all three things while size is only a factor in No. 1. I’d confidently predict better results over time for someone who runs a smaller ad in every issue than a larger ad sporadically.

Further, spending too much on an ad can harm its chances of success. How?

If you sell houses for a living, a single commission can pay for a year’s worth of large ads. Selling a home is a big deal involving big money, and a big ad to discuss it seems reasonable.

But if you sell haircuts or ice cream cones your ad needs to attract a lot of customers just to cover its cost. The larger the ad, the better it has to perform just to pay for itself.

If you run a hair salon, how many strangers on the street would you have to approach and talk to before one of them says, “I was just thinking of getting my hair done and I’m not satisfied with my current stylist. I’ll head over there right now.” Would it be 100? 200?

Run through the math: If a publication has 10,000 readers, perhaps 1,000 of them (1 in 10) will take note of your ad the first time it runs. If 1 in 200 decides at this particular moment to abandon her old hair salon and try yours, that means it would be unrealistic to expect more than 5 people to walk through the door as a result of the ad. What is a reasonable amount to spend for those 5 people? And because this is an inexact science, what’s a reasonable amount to spend if the first time the ad runs, it’s only 1? Or none? (As in the bottom of the pyramid in the graphic above.)

So be realistic about how much business the ad is going to bring in – especially in the first few months – and don’t sign up for more than you can afford to spend out of existing cash flow. And expect the results to improve gradually over time, until a steady flow of people tells you they’ve noticed your ad.

There are moments when these rules of thumb may not apply. For instance, if you’re promoting an event or have some other short-term message, then it’s most important that your ad gets noticed right away by as many people as possible. That’s when you want to buy a large ad and negotiate (or pay for) the best positioning you can get.

Color too plays a role. Spending extra as needed for color will help get your ad noticed – though it has a lesser impact than size. Also, color probably has more impact on the way your message is perceived than on whether it’s noticed at all.

The small business owners who tend to be happiest with their advertising are those who buy a smallish ad, spend time developing its look and its message, and then commit to running it month after month, year after year.

Advertising works. It’s not so much an expense as an investment. So invest wisely and consistently. Do it in a way that you can afford to give it time to work. If you do, it will make your business better.

Your business card is not an ad

Work boots are like soccer shoes in the sense that they both provide a protective covering for your feet. But if you play soccer or work in a steel plant, they are anything but interchangeable.

Your marketing materials are purpose built in the same way. A brochure isn’t interchangeable with a frequent buyer’s card any more than work boots are interchangeable with soccer cleats.

People who run their own small businesses are hard-working and busy. They typically seek to leverage time and money by applying one solution to as many problems as possible.

Many publications take advantage of that tendency by creating ads that are the same size as a standard business card. Business owners don’t have to think or spend to design an ad, and the publication gets a quick signature on a contract.

But just because it’s cheap and easy doesn’t mean it’s smart. In fact, it’s usually a waste of money. Business cards and advertisements are simply designed for different work.

The job of business cards is to make it easy for people to reach you. And that’s all they do. They work because you hand them out to people who have already expressed an interest in being able to contact you.

On the other hand, the job of an advertisement is to help people decide if they’re interested in what you do. It has to tell people what you do – and why you do it better or differently than others. It has to provide some call to action. It also may need to include a coupon or special offer of some kind to allow you to track results. And, of course, it must include at least a few critical bits of contact information.

If you plan to advertise, spend time thinking about how your ad must differ from your business card in order to really sell your product or service. If you’re not able to make that commitment, then find another way to invest in your business.

Because running a business card as an ad probably won’t generate results. But it will indicate that you ‘re someone who thinks it’s a good idea to play soccer in work boots.

Image courtesy of Luigi Diamanti/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The economics behind the media meltdown

What really happened that caused traditional media to shrink so much over the past decade – and why are so many still struggling to come back?
That’s the subject of this presentation, which I’ve given several times over the past few years.

Why the media meltdown from Bob Rosenbaum

Wants vs. needs? You’re selling both

Seth Godin, one of the best marketing bloggers I follow, says wants and needs are often confused. He writes:

That pays off for any marketer that has persuaded his market that they need what he sells. It backfires when those ‘needs’ are seen for what they actually are–luxuries.

I agree with Godin in both his point and his brevity. But in being admirably concise, he omits a noteworthy nuance. People are more eager to buy things they want than things they need. They’ll go to great lengths to pay the lowest price possible for actual needs – stuff like medicine, groceries, industrial consumables. But they’ll happily spend more on things they want – think wine, golf clubs, a redecorated office.

The point? While Seth Godin is correct that you’ll improve sales by persuading people you can fill a need, you’ll lubricate the sales process and increase pricing margins by convincing people that your product is also something they want.

As evidence, consider:

Dell v. Apple
Toyota Yaris v. Mini Cooper
Emerson audio equipment v. Bose

There’s a lesson for your marketing in that knowledge too.

Everybody’s a publisher now

I moved from the editorial side of the publishing business to the money side in 2000 and my timing couldn’t have been worse.

In my first month of selling advertising, it was my job to convince would-be advertisers why they should select my products as opposed to anybody else’s.

By the second month, I was answering a much more difficult question: Why they should advertise at all.

Even in 2000, at the height of the first internet bubble, marketers were figuring out how to use digital technology to disintermediate the media – in essence, becoming publishers themselves. That forever changed the nature of the publishing business and it led to my own nine-year journey that eventually resulted in my decision to leave the publishing industry behind.

Here’s just one piece of evidence: A blog from Alan Mutter, the self-proclaimed Newsosaur. He says big retailers have gone much further than disintermediating their former publishing partners; now they’re competing with newspapers by selling advertising on their own e-commerce sites.

Today, every company needs to think like a publisher. Here’s what that means:

Content: Publishers develop content that’s meaningful to their audience. For companies, this means creating content that’s useful to customers and prospects. In the business-to-business world, that shouldn’t be difficult. No matter what product or service you provide, you’re likely to have more technical expertise about it than any trade journal.

The challenge is purely cultural. Most companies rush to say what they want prospects to know. Those that are successful content marketers instead provide information prospects want to hear. There’s a difference; while the marketer’s first instinct is often to load up on features and benefits, the prospects are really looking for solutions. Business-to-business marketers who can figure out how to help prospects solve problems first will quickly gain permission from those prospects to provide judicious and thoughtful sales messages too.

Audience: Publishers spend a lot of resources to develop audiences for their content – and more important, for the advertising messages they carry. Companies now have the capability to develop their own audiences through social media, skilled distribution of valuable information, and dedication to keeping their contact databases current.

This isn’t magic. It’s not easy and it’s not free; the reason companies have been cutting back on advertising over the past decade is to divert funding to become successful publishers themselves. And those that do are succeeding in a world where target audiences play a more active role in the marketing process than they ever did in the heyday of newspapers and magazines.

The time has passed for revenue-enhancing digital products

A small B2B media company contacted me to talk about enhancing revenue by adding some new digital products to its portfolio. The company already offers a digital edition, business directory, email newsletters, web-seminars and a number of other digital B2B staples. Non-monetized but just as important, it has a reasonable Twitter following, a large group on LinkedIn and a Facebook page that is basically just a placeholder.

I’m sure there are more products the company could implement. It doesn’t have any mobile offerings to speak of, and its website represents first-generation internet thinking – a source of information but not of engagement and interaction. With a little bit of study and a few billable hours I could have made some recommendations.

Here’s what I told them instead: The opportunity to increase revenue by adding digital products has largely passed, and simply adding new products will probably hurt the business by:

spreading the editorial staff even thinner;
raising digital development costs;
over-running the sales force’s competence;
stressing customers, who don’t have more money to spend on new products and will be forced to decide which products to support and which to ignore.

In essence, trying to invigorate the company by adding more digital products is just going to lead to more fatigue for everyone – and at best provide only incremental revenue gains.

The real opportunity – and the only real option – is to use digital tools to increase the organization’s footprint and prominence.

Here’s the argument:

In B2B media, ad revenue and unit yields have been stagnant for a decade, and there is no reason to think that’s going to change for the better. As hard costs continue to rise, print circulations have been on a forced retreat. Publications that have maintained controlled circulation levels are doing so by cutting in other areas or – more likely – by winning market share and profits from other, lesser competitors. Neither is sustainable.

Given that it’s not economical to add print readers, the real value of a digital strategy is to present the brand to new people – either by expanding outside the magazine’s traditional market (taking a step upstream, toward the advertisers’ suppliers, for example) or its traditional geography (i.e. international).

That doesn’t mean simply launching a digital or iPad edition. These are passive – cool media in Marshall McLuhan’s lexicon.

But extended audiences demand hot media. They need to be actively engaged; they need learn for themselves how a media brand is valuable to them. Engagement at that level means creating a different kind of relationship based on interaction with community, expansiveness of content, and flexibility in the way content is applied. These are the strengths of digital tools – when those tools are skillfully and strategically applied.

In the real world, it probably means a pretty significant website overhaul and, more significantly, redeployment of staff and restructuring of sales compensation.

Editors have to stop thinking in terms transferring knowledge from experts to the readers – instead becoming moment-to-moment conduits for peer-to-peer communication. Less like network news anchors and more like a highly specialized cruise directors.

Sales strategy has to evolve too. It’s less about products and more about platform – how the media brand provides a fluid and organic conduit between the advertiser and the market.

These are not small changes to make, and this is not a short-term project. But it represents the difference between relevance, growth and prosperity on one hand; and retreat into a niche position or extinction on the other.

Advertisers will always go where the people are

Alan Mutter, who calls himself the Newsosaur and whose opinions on the news business I deeply respect, points out that newspapers are now well into their sixth year of declines in advertising demand. In a recent blog post, he noted that annual newspaper sales hit $10.7 billion in 2006 – and now stand at $4.3 billion, about the same level as 1983. And they continue to drop.

While the drop in advertising isn’t new for newspapers, it hasn’t always been their No. 1 problem. Credit for that goes to the systemic and ongoing declines in circulation. Newspapers are simply less relevant across society than they once were.

But the dynamic behind shrinking advertising is different; it’s more like the experience of magazines – especially business-to-business – over the past decade.

I’ve written about the reasons behind the loss of advertising for magazines, and I’m not alone. The issue isn’t that advertising has ceased to work; I don’t believe that’s the case now, nor do I foresee the day when it is.

The issue is that other things now work better. And by other things, I really mean one other thing: social media.

First, more people are involved in social media than in any other media channel. If you lump together YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare and the thousands of other social media websites, day-to-day participation is as broad as any other media channel.

Further, in most cases participation is free – even for the marketers, at the most basic level.

Further still, results are always measurable.

The equation is really simple: Marketers who are pulling back on their traditional advertising are merely following the lead of other marketers. And those who are not actively involved in social media are negligent. Marketers need to be where the people are, so they simply aren’t going to ignore a media channel that has so quickly attracted a large percentage of the world’s population.

I could predict that advertising revenues are going to continue their decline for newspapers, because consumer advertisers are now discovering what business-to-business advertisers learned several years ago: With social media, you can (and should) become your own publisher – developing an audience and serving it with meaningful, interesting and helpful content.

That doesn’t mean newspapers, magazines or any other type of print media are doomed. But newspapers of the future will be very different than they were just six years ago. The sooner they figure out how to unhitch their fortunes from advertising, the better off they’ll be.