ASK THE EXPERTS
Posted on January 10, 2010 by SBarbalho
Every month, our team of marketing, operations, and strategy professionals put their heads together to answer a reader’s question about growing his/her small business. You can click here to submit your own question, and please feel free to join this discussion by adding your comments below
Rachel H., Stamford CT
Q: My staff and I put a lot of time into our website – it has a fantastic design, includes video testimonials, detailed pages about all of the services we provide, and have a very good page of Frequently Asked Questions. It’s so much better than our competitors’ sites that several are even starting to copy us. I get a lot of positive feedback from customers about the site so I know it does what we want it to do. The problem is that it doesn’t generate a lot of traffic. But the traffic it does get results in an email to us about 20% of the time, which I understand is a very high converting level. I have our www address on our direct mail pieces and very large print in the occasional newspaper ads that we run. I’ve had web programmers offer to do things (that I don’t fully understand) to make it show up more often in Yahoo and Google, but the bids are pretty expensive and I just don’t know if they will work. What do you recommend?
A: Rachel, it sounds like you’ve done a great job building your online presence. Most consumers appreciate the chance to learn more about you before they invest a lot of time in driving over for a visit. It not only helps them make brand choices – many people feel more confident and comfortable buying when they feel like they really know your business, and not just your product or service. Using video is a great thing to do, as this is the way consumers prefer consuming information on the web today.
Also, your high ‘conversion’ rate shows that you’re doing the 3 key things with your web site: 1) reaching the right people, 2) presenting them with a compelling idea or content, and 3) offering an easy way to act on their interest. Most businesses have conversion in the low single digits because they don’t get all three of those things right.
Not knowing exactly how many customers the site is producing, or what business you’re in (i.e what a new customer is worth), it’s hard to say whether investing tens of thousands (the typical cost) for Search Engine Optimization could be a profitable investment. In general, the economics of SEO can be very good for businesses with large national (or global) target markets but for local businesses, ROI from SEO can be more challenging.
But there are several things that we can recommend to you, based on best-practices used by our web-savvy clients:
First of all, you shouldn’t expect your site to get much traction from direct mail or even newspaper ads. There are two reasons for this: One, people don’t read them. The “open rates” for most direct mail are anywhere from 0.5-2%. And of those, the only people who read the ad are the folks who are actively looking for a business like yours (typically just a fraction of the market). Newspapers are read for news, not ads, among the dwindling population who still subscribe and read them. Unless you’re buying large color ads on a major section’s back page, your ad is pretty much invisible. Two, the marketing of web addresses has become so common, and the experience most consumers have had going to local business websites is so mediocre, that people are generally ignoring them unless they are the focal point of the ad. Just including them in a print ad is like printing your physical address. It’s important to do it, but no one pays attention to the address before they intend to shop you – it’s only after a need arises that they’ll want to know where you are (physically or on the web).
A great alternative to these media is radio: both terrestrial (over-the-air) and digital (stations streamed on the web). The reach of the terrestrial signal will get your message (your business branding) to a large number of local consumers, with greater frequency, and at a lower cost, than any other media. The digital option will reach fewer people (usually about 1/6 of the on-air station) but it has the advantage of allowing people to immediately respond to your ad with a mouse click. It will also be priced very affordably due to its smaller reach. Both radio options will get your message heard often enough to create lasting awareness – even among people who aren’t ready to buy your product. It will make you, as we like to say, ‘known before you are needed.’
Using a standard radio ad, these are benefits that accrue to your business, not specifically to your website. Because you feel that the website does a great job of converting potential interest, we strongly recommend using a specific type of radio commercial to support your online assets: make a commercial about the website instead of a commercial that simply mentions the website.
What does a website’s commercial sound like? Well, imagine that the website is the product/brand itself: Like most good commercials, start off with a statement or dialog that immediately grabs the consumer – maybe something about the problem that your business solves (by the way, your local Cumulus staff can help you with all this so I’ll keep it brief). As you move into the body of your commercial, make it absolutely clear what it is that you’re talking about – your URL.
It’s usually best to focus on one type of content per commercial (you can rotate several commercials on the air simultaneously with different content). Describe how the specific content answers the question/problem that you started the spot with. Whenever possible, tell people what makes that content authoritative and what makes it unique. Inject emotion into the ad if possible – use words that reference feelings, as these are often the most powerful levers in advertising. Reinforce why people use websites to scout new businesses – to learn about [topic] and [business name] from the comfort of their own office/den. Mention your URL several times, and if it’s not an easy URL to remember, ask them to Google [your business name] [city name] the next time they want to know more about [topic]. If your site contains social elements, user-generated content, or links to a blog, ask the listener to visit the site and join the online conversation.
As for what content you focus on, use your web site statistics to determine the most popular content and start with that. Also, go back to the customers who found your site useful and ask them why. You’ve proven that your website works – follow this success path as you market your site offline.
This strategy has generated impressive results for businesses in retail, professional services, home services, and healthcare, among others. In fact, the fastest-growing company who advertised with Cumulus in 2009 – a start up that generated almost $12 million in revenue it’s first year – used this strategy (radio advertising for its website) almost exclusively. The company didn’t have a store front, a general phone number, or a significant SEO budget. It drove this amazing growth by advertising its URL on radio exclusively.
So talk to your local radio pros. They can provide you with mp3′s of other web-focused campaigns and offer a wealth of creative services to help you avoid the expense of an independent creative agency or professional. We’re confident that you can significantly boost your site’s traffic, and increase your customer count, affordably and relatively quickly. Good luck Rachel. And let our readers know how your project works out!
Jon Whittaker, Owner of Jon David Salon
Q: I recently purchased advertising in our city’s lifestyle magazine that has a pretty large circulation. I purchased a full-page ad for September, which is a big month for my business. As part of my buy, the magazine came out and photographed my salon and even included it in their “What’s Hot” feature. I’ve got a great-looking space that photographed very well and included my exclusive product lines in the ad to set my salon apart from other smaller shops. I thought I had a great deal, and anticipated a lot of new traffic, but only got 3 new customers from the advertising – a big disappointment. What happened?
A: Jon, it sounds like you did almost everything right: your ad reached a large audience of target customers and the ad’s quality sounds like it served your brand well. The one thing that seems to be missing is probably the most important element in advertising: frequency. Your ad buy, which in the best case reached the circulation just once, was not sufficient to brand your business among new prospective customers – probably about 20-30% of the total readers (this is typical for most businesses, when you factor in people who are not satisfied with their existing service or are new to the area).
To win any of these prospects, three things need to happen: 1) they have to see your ad, 2) they must be influenced by its message, and 3) they must remember your brand to take action the next time they’re in need. This is asking a lot!
First, realize that only a fraction of your prospects are going to see the ad the first time it runs. You probably need to run your ad several months just to make sure that most of these readers see it at least once. On average, expect about 30% to see the typical ad in a single issue. Second, even though your ad may showcase the space and your offering, bear in mind that most consumers generally avoid ads and rarely read/think much about them unless they are actively searching for the product/service. It could be that photos and product info alone don’t do enough to change their minds (influence them) the first time they see your brand. Lets say (very generously) that your ad engaged about 30% of those seeing it.
And third, how many of those who saw the ad remembered it when it came time to take action? Since only a fraction of your market needed the service at the moment that they saw the ad, they had to remember your brand to act on it at a later time. Based on what we know about building mind share, it’s next to impossible to be remembered for any length of time after just one exposure: it takes considerable repetition to physically rewire a consumer’s mind to understand or believe something new/different. Ample research tells us that brand names and their points of differentiation need repeated exposure to make it into a consumer’s memory – even for just a short time. They need further repetition (and a lot of it) to remain in the consumer’s memory over any appreciable time.
Since you did not have frequency for your ad, you were only able to influence those in immediate need at the time of exposure. Because most get their haircut about once every 6 weeks, you could probably bet that about 15% of your true target audience (about 25% of all readers) was in need (within a week at least) at the time they saw your ad.
So when you do the math, are you surprised you only got three new customers? You start with about 25% of the circulation having need or potential interest in your ad, about 30% of those actually seeing your ad in that one-time publication, 30% of those being influenced, and a small number of those (15%) being interested enough to take immediate action. Based on these (very generous) assumptions, we’d expect your ad to have an effective impact on about .3% of the circulation. When you ad in other factors, such as your effective trade-radius and your salon’s target demographics (ethnicity, age, gender, stylistic leanings, etc), this one-third-of-one percent will be even further reduced!
Adding frequency to your campaign would probably significantly change these results. More people would be exposed to the ad (easily twice as much readership exposure), more of these would be influenced (again, probably twice as much with ample repetition), and most importantly, you would have an opportunity to be remembered by all potential readers, and not just those in immediate need. This could increase your results up to six-fold. Again, doing the math in this simplified scenario, your results from adding significant frequency could increase 2400%!
Of course, you’d have to commit to many, many months of advertising in this magazine to achieve the frequency needed to drive these results. This may not provide you with enough ROI to make it worth the effort.
Two recommendations: First, you’re always better off sacrificing some reach (the circulation size in this case) to achieve greater frequency and impact. Ask any experienced marketer, and you’ll find that it’s much more effective to reach 20 people 5 times than it is to reach 100 people 1 time. This may be hard to do with your magazine example because it probably doesn’t offer regional or other niche targeting options. Which brings us to the second recommendation…
Next time, pick a media that has an inherently lower cost and greater ability to achieve message frequency. Like radio. On average, it costs about 66% less to reach a thousand consumers on radio than it does with a local magazine (radio has far lower production/distribution cost), you can more easily select the size of your reach (audience size) on radio, and the medium is the gold-standard for advertising frequency due to the repetitive daily usage of radio listeners.
Good luck with your future marketing, whatever media you chose – just make sure that you get your message heard or seen often!
