Just because we’re in the traditional advertising business doesn’t mean that we have a chip on our shoulder regarding social media. In fact, anything that helps local businesses grow is a good idea in our view.
But a study published this week raises serious questions about how Social Media is being used in retail: the finding suggest SM does much less for local retailers than many expected. The analytics firm ForeSee Results found that social media drove just 5% of visitors to retail Web sites. On the other hand, “promotional emails, search engine results, and [traditional] advertising are more influential,” it says.
In fact, the study found that more traditional marketing techniques not only generated more traffic, they also deliver better-quality customers. “Some of the most satisfied site visitors arrived at the site because of previous familiarity with a brand, promotional emails, word-of-mouth, and product review websites,” it says in its report. See the study details after the jump.
The Big Ideas:
We don’t disagree with this research. Social media is clearly still in it’s hype stage and there’s a lot of experimenting going on and a lot still to be done. But don’t write off social media. We’re still in the 2nd inning with this rapidly evolving platform and consumer expectations and norms are changing continously. Get out there, get comfortable in the space, and experiment. Get ideas from people half your age.
Social media is not ‘one thing.’ Different types may have different benefits to your business: watch them all. The goal of any local business shouldn’t be to just drive traffic to its web site. It should include building the brand, informing those that want to be informed, and improving its relationships with customers – and last but not least: driving store traffic! Yelp.com is social media that impacts expectations and perceptions. The Facebook ‘like’ button can influence thousands of people at a time. Same with ‘check-in’ sites like Foursquare.com. Group buying sites like Groupon are social and they can drive huge traffic spikes (just be careful how you use them). Even Google is building social into it’s index for search. Be broadly social, regardless of its immediate impact.
We strongly agree with one thing here: Email works. The problem with email is that it’s difficult/expensive to reach people outside of your own customer base, so it’s a tough putt for new customer acquisition. With strict ‘opt in’ laws, you run a big risk buying email addresses and many of those you can buy are long-since dormant. You can solve this problem by leveraging other people’s email lists. Start with your local media outlets. Our radio stations have listener email programs that you can usually use to get the message out to thousands of new prospects and ask for your own opt-ins. Consider more creative approaches, like partnering with another complimentary business to reach a broader base. Use traditional advertising to drive people to your site for a reason (a discount, gift, etc) and get them to register as a condition of taking the freebie. Even consider designing a promotion with a large local media co (radio is perfect), to use your advertising dollars to drive entries for contests and fun activities. Again, the goal here is to get them to register so you can communicate directly later. You don’t even need a website for this – your local station can drive it through theirs.
When budgets are tight, some businesses stop marketing and advertising. In fact, according to American Express Open, about 40% of SMB owners reported eliminating their ad budgets in 2009 due to economic uncertainty. Yet we know that this approach costs businesses much more over the long run (if they ever live that long). Still, if you don’t have the money, what are you going to do?
Take a cue from several of the businesses featured after the jump – they found creative ways to ‘partner’ with larger, complimentary businesses to get their names out there and their brands burnished, with relatively little hard cash invested.
Why would a larger business carry you on their back when they’re footing the bill? Good question. It all comes down to two things: 1) They can make a big brand seem more local/personal (small firms often have unique ties to the community that are based on heritage, know-how, and local flavor), 2) The larger business can use the services of a smaller partner directly to differentiate itself and attract broader traffic.
The Big Idea:
• Find a larger business – ideally a steady advertiser in a crowded, competitive field - and approach them with a great idea about how your well-liked product or service can help them differentiate their brand image or provide an incentive for consumers to traffic their location. We’ve seen winning combos as diverse as bakeries/coffee shops setting up house in auto service centers, high-fi/electronics businesses kitting-out the waiting areas of local car washes, retailers working with the local ASPCA, grocers with local vintners and specialty food purveyors, banks and credit unions with a host of companies that benefit from easy financing. The possibilities are endless
• If you’re a larger business, look for cool local firms that have strong connections to their communities. Businesses that have strong social networks, loyal customers who make regular purchases, etc. Have these firms set up shop in your location and drive their customers to YOU. Recently, we worked with an auto dealer who gave discount certificates to one of the premiere local restaurant groups to anyone who took a weekend test drive and awarded several drivers complimentary all-inclusive meals.
• Promote it. These partnerships typically work best when both partners use their respective marketing – and the practices that each does best – to get the word out in a syncronized way.
• Use a matchmaker. It can often be difficult to identify the right partner and make the initial approach to the right person at the right time. Unless you’re highly networked and have some experience designing cooperative marketing efforts, use your local media experts to get things started. Our radio sales teams usually have a deep knowledge about potential partners and relationships with the decision-makers themselves. Moreover, they can help advise you on creative, out-of-the-box ways to promote your partnership for optimal impact/minimal cost.
While it’s clear now that the country is gradually emerging from the economic crisis, the strength of individual regions and business sectors is still decidedly mixed. As small and mid-sized businesses look out into this environment, it can be tough to make critical and/or prudent decisions. No one wants to be the last business returning to market, and few are willing to be the first.
The Growthwire would like to help. We’re inviting the Growthwire community to take a 6-7 minute online survey to help other subscribers make more sense of what economic life is like on Main Street today, including strategies for growth in specific regions and business sectors. When compiled, the survey will help you, and businesses like yours, understand how local businesses are working through our current economic conditions and even finding growth opportunities.
All we need to make this happen is YOUR HELP. Please take a few minutes to contribute your views (all 100% anonymously) – we will post all data online and analyze specific trends in future Growthwire newsletters. We will mail you an invitation later this week, but if you’d like to take the survey now, you can find it at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BSZCN9J
Thanks in advance! We look forward to hearing from you and sharing your insights.
The book Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom should be on the short list of anyone who’s involved in brand-building. It reads like a good mystery novel, it’s based on very strong science, and it paints a very clear portrait of how physiological and psychological mechanisms in our brains drive brand preference. In fact, the science is so revealing that it’s ignited an online debate about the ethics of neuro-marketing: Is the stuff is so powerful that it’s not fair to consumers?
Chapter 8 is particularly fascinating. Here, we learn why our visual senses – what most of us probably think are the drivers of brand impact – are highly over-rated when it comes to remembering and choosing particular brands. What works better? Audio (as well as smell). Audio has the ability to mentally generate the visual images and, more importantly, powerful emotions associated with it.
While visual marketing tells consumers what something can, or should represent, this type of association is very abstract and doesn’t process well in the consumer brain. Sound, on the other hand, allows the individual to conjure an association that is already in the brain (i.e., personalizing the idea) which has much more impact. The research even shows how sound is engineered by companies and institutions to direct people’s behavior using our biological wiring and triggers. It makes you wonder why marketers spend so much energy trying to reach us through our eyes, instead of our ears… (more…)
While you may have some experience buying paper products, computer equipment, or even insurance for your small business at Sam’s Club, odds are you haven’t tried their newest service: small business lending.
With a lot of the government stimulus programs coming to an end, often without helping the liquidity crisis facing many small and medium sized businesses, retailers like Sam’s (A division of Walmart) are taking it upon themselves to help businesses finance growth. Call it over-the-counter stimulus plans. Sam’s lending service is built upon a standard SBA loan program, though the service streamlines the paperwork and approval process considerably (a significant deterrent for many businesses) and even discounts the loan application.
The program lends from $5,000 to $25,000, unsecured, at a low rate (7.5% at time of publication). Pre-approval is available online in minutes… To date, about 45% of its applicants have been approved. (more…)
We spend a lot of time thinking about ways to ‘make’ our product or business better. Don’t forget to think about how you can make people ‘think’ you’ve done the same. Here’s a wry presentation by IPA’s Rory Sutherland on the importance of brand’s intangibles…
Don’t worry, this is not a recommendation to wear a lampshade at your next social event. This post is about effective advertising. But since the social metaphor is on the table, let’s follow it for a minute to illustrate how you can save a lot in wasted marketing dollars and, instead, turn those dollars into a powerful investment.
Have you ever gone to a party or networking event and found yourself locked in a one-way conversation with someone that spent 20-30 minutes going on and on about themselves? It’s a pretty miserable experience, particularly if politeness, politics, or family relation prevented you from bolting. It certainly didn’t leave you wanting to learn more about or interact more with that person. We’ll use this as our definition of ‘boring.’
Now, if you hold your marketing up to the same standard, would this fit our definition of boring? It’s a fair question because 70-80% of the advertising you notice on local TV, print, online, or radio (and ALL that you don’t notice) fit this description. These ads are boring because they focus mainly on the advertiser, and not the end-user. Just more blah, blah, blah about things consumers don’t care about. No one except the lonely people watching informercials want to hear about what a business is selling. For the most part, these boring messages are a waste of marketing dollars. If you want to communicate with a consumer, make your communication about that consumer. Her problem. Her felt need. (more…)
There’s a free software tool available to small and medium sized businesses (SMB) today that can quickly transform your business into a savvy, high ROI digital marketing operation. This tool was originally created to help some of the world’s most sophisticated web marketers and ecommerce sites understand who was using their websites, opening targeted communication, and interacting with different parts of the operation. It allows these firms to actually track individuals, their interests, and their response to differing marketing exposure – a web marketer’s dream.
Until recently, this type of solution has only been available to larger companies that had enough electronic marketing and web-based activity to merit the monthly investment. The good news is that this is no longer the case.
One of the leading providers of lead management software, Loopfuse, is now offering a free version of their solution (it’s called FreeView) to businesses that focus on lead and customer groups of fewer than 2500 people – in other words, the average local business like yours. Should you give it a try? Answer these 3 questions to find out: (more…)
Ad avoidance is a major problem for anyone in the marketing field. We buy, schedule, and target our media under the assumption that it’s going to get noticed. But often it does not. 60-70% of television ads can now be bypassed by DVR. Only 1/2% to 2% of direct mail is opened. According to scientific studies, over 80% of internet ad units are purposefully avoided.
Radio, on the other hand, is only ignored about 8% of the time*, but that’s not what this is about. This post is about making simple changes to your advertising or marketing approach to vastly increase the likelihood that your audience actually pays attention to your message.
Yes, consumers will pay attention to ads. Many do today, even with the tools that they have to easily avoid them. But only the ads that speak to them, and that’s the key – the ad actually has to make the consumer think that it’s about them, not just the company that’s advertising. Here are four basic things (and one advanced technique) that you can use immediately to improve your connection with, and therefore your engagement to, your target audience. (more…)
As most of you know, Twitter is a free social media platform. Its users micro-blog everything from what they ate for lunch to news articles that they’d like others to see and share. Users express themselves in short 140 character broadcasts to designated groups of “followers” (Tweets), which can be read and passed virally through the Twitter site, mobile devices, and a number of 3rd party applications. In the last months, The Growthwire has received a lot of questions about the use of Twitter for local businesses. Most of these questions come from people who clearly see Twitter’s value as a social and a customer-service/relationship tool, but are uncertain about Twitter’s usefulness for customer acquisition.
Our honest answer is that we don’t know the answer yet.
The platform obviously has many evangelists, some of whom say it’s a great acquisition tool. We’re not entirely convinced that these anecdotes are objective or applicable to the average local business. Most of the more thoughtful discussions note that even if it does ‘work,’ it’s probably not for everyone. The most common challenges appear to be: 1) It requires a lot of work and a broader social media strategy to use effectively, 2) Its potential decreases significantly as the geography of its use narrows (i.e. global, virtual companies like Dell will get more ROI than the small brick and mortar/local market computer shop), 3) Despite all the talk and awareness, only about 11% of the US is using the service (compared to 40% for Facebook), and 4) A lot of Twitter activity is now the cultivation of mass-follower lists to facilitate spam advertising.
Maybe we’re jaded – we’ve been through several major cycles of internet hype to date… So instead of trying to tell you what’s going on, we’ll simply ask. Read on to take our one-question poll and see links where you can learn more about Twitter. (more…)
Just because we’re in the traditional advertising business doesn’t mean that we have a chip on our shoulder regarding social media. In fact, anything that helps local businesses grow is a good idea in our view.
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