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.
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…
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.
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.
Odds are that you or one of your key staff excels at sales; Few businesses survive long, no matter how great their product, pricing, or service, without at least one strong rainmaker on the roster. If you could clone your Rainmaker several times — effectively doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your Rainmaking expertise — you’d probably be able to grow significantly. The problem, however, is this can be costly and sometimes it’s just impractical. Due to the specialization/experience required, training, the inevitable ramp-up phase, and the fact that many new hires don’t work out, sales is very difficult for most small businesses to expand and profitably grow to a meaningful scale.
Enter advertising, the tool that many businesses turn to increase revenue at a meaningful and profitable level. Advertising, when done right, is simply Mass-Selling. When it does the exact same things that a good Rainmaker does, advertising can actually ‘sell’ to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of prospective customers at once.
Many businesses that advertise (or used to) might argue that this is idealistic at best and wrong-headed at worst. They’ve tried advertising and it doesn’t deliver (at least to the scale that they’d expected). Having seen hundreds of small businesses experience significant growth through advertising, I’d argue that many of these unimpressed businesses simply don’t advertise the right way. If they’d thought of their advertising as mass-salesmanship, and actually applied the principles of strong one-on-one selling, they could have experienced much different results…
Most small and mid-sized local businesses have had to make all kinds of tough decisions since the Recession began. According to American Express, only 20% of these firms have been able operate profitably without major cut-backs in staff and operating capital.
Marketing is an obvious target for most budget cutting. The only problem with chopping the marketing budget is its damaging impact on sales. According to numerous studies over the last 80 years, firms that eliminate their marketing decline rapidly during tough times. Those that even cut back modestly lose significant market share to the few firms that don’t cut. They also tend to miss significant gains in the first 2-3 years of recovery.
So how do you make a tough budget decision that preserves your near-term viability without causing an even greater long-term problem? Simple: cut your marketing budget to the bone, but spend your remaining dollars to dominate an audience – no matter how small that audience may have to be. It’s a principle that smart advertisers have been using for decades, through good times and bad, but one that proves essential for every firm when funds run tight.
Ever heard the expression “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”?
How about “People buy from people that they like”?
These two ideas represent polar opposites of marketing strategies used today by many small and mid-sized businesses.
The IBM quote reflects the idea that a ‘big business image’ will make prospects more comfortable buying from you. This thinking leads to lots of letterhead, a shiny facade, and a highly ‘professionalized’ image. It also leads many companies to try to look like they think people think they should look. Sometimes this strategy works. But often, it creates an impersonal, sterile, and generic brand identity. Just the opposite of what makes people take notice of and appreciate a business.
On the other extreme is a simple formula for success: “be liked!” In today’s business environment, where authenticity and uniqueness tends to be rewarded (when all other things are equal) give this strategy a little extra thought. That’s where Wabi-sabi comes in.
What will you do to win more than your fair share of the Spring ’10 spending season: The 2nd busiest shopping season of the year? When it comes to gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Graduation events, there’s no right choice. The firms that market the best win the largest share. Even though there may be conventional “fail-safe” gifts for each occasion, it’s within the power of almost anybusiness to win an impressive share of this season’s gift spending.
According to the National Retail Federation, there will be about $87 of spring gift spending per 18+ consumers in your market (if there are 200,000 adults in your trade area, this is about $17 million).
How do you win? Tap into an emotion that drives your purchase.
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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