Posts Tagged Marketing
Posted on April 21, 2010 by Bill Hansen
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…
Posted on April 18, 2010 by Bill Hansen
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.
Posted on January 8, 2010 by Bill Hansen
All too often, our business cards are designed for utilitarian purposes: affordability and utilizing the artistic expertise that most small business owners have on-hand at the time. At the least, they help us distribute our contact information and at best, many show that we care enough about our work to invest in color printing and good paper stock. But ask yourself, does your card really say much about what makes your business
special in that critical first impression?
Whether it’s time to replace your depleted stock or you want to improve the direct impact on business that clever identity/marketing can provide, consider investing in a winning first (and hopefully, lasting) impression with a great business card this year. These eleven examples are extremely clever and several are quite expensive. But they show different uses of design, layout, materials, and manipulation that strongly reinforce the business’ brand. The one thing that they all share, beyond the stuff that goes into the card, is that a great deal of thought has gone into what the card means and tells us about the business. Hopefully, one or more will provide inspiration to get you started on your own winning design!
Posted on January 7, 2010 by Bill Hansen
With recent advances in search technology, your customers’ experiences can now be instantly in the public domain and, in many cases, magnified by the size and nature of social networks. This adds to the existing risks posed by sites that offer un-moderated ‘ratings’ of local businesses – many of which you may not even know exist.
If you don’t already, its time to start taking steps to manage your brand’s reputation online – at the very least, to find out if there are any reputation-killers lurking in the dark recesses of the web. For most businesses, this can be as simple as a doing a couple of quick searches each month, or setting up an automated Google Alert to do the searching for you. Other businesses may need to dedicate more effort to this issue; particularly ones that are active in social media, have high staff turnover, face very aggressive competitors, or who’ve had problems with product quality or customer service.
In this, the first of two posts on Reputation Management, we’ll cover why you should be concerned and how you can take steps to monitor what’s said about you or your business online. In the second post, we’ll focus on how to use this information, including strategies for remedying bad situations.
Posted on January 7, 2010 by Bill Hansen
According to several recent studies, 75-90% of small businesses get
no return on investments in web marketing via social networks. This, despite the fact that about 50% of small business owners spent over 100 hours last year engaged in social media marketing. In one recent survey conducted by
BizLaunch, owners were asked a very general question: ”What social media platforms have contributed to your sales?” The answers were pretty dismal:
- Facebook: 14%
- Linked-In: 7%
- Twitter: 5%
- Blogs: 4%
- YouTube: 1%
So what’s going on?
Posted on December 30, 2009 by The Growthwire Team
Wendy Harris, Team Harris Realty
2009 was a great year for Wendy Harris, of Team Harris Realty, despite the horrible macro environment for realty businesses. While many of her peers reacted to the real estate downturn by reducing or eliminating mass-marketing, Wendy moved in the opposite direction with spectacular results.
Wendy recently wrote to share her story: “Thanks to Cumulus radio, I outsold every resale Real Estate agent in Fayetteville and continue to increase my business!”
Wendy took advantage of radio’s unique ability to deeply inform potential clients as part of the mass-reach/high-frequency branding process. She differentiates her business with a unique listing proposition: a guarantee to sell the house at a specified price by a specified deadline and backs her guarantee by agreeing to buy the home if she doesn’t hit her goals. By breaking this concept down into several explanatory radio commercials she quickly communicated this program to anxious sellers. “The phones started ringing the first week I started.”
Posted on December 15, 2009 by Bill Hansen
For every charming gecko, memorable slogan, or unforgettable jingle, thousands of businesses advertise very effectively by being authentic, direct, and adhering to a couple of simple ideas. You don’t have to be a creative genius to use advertising effectively! Here’s the first in a series of simple tips to help you decide what to say, how to say it, and where you should say it. Focus on these practices and you’ll be off to a great start.
Do: Commit to your advertising or don’t do it at all. Advertising is very similar to exercise (for someone who has been out of shape for a while). You generally don’t see a lot of results at the start, just like you don’t see results after your first trips to the gym. In fact, the early experience may seem a little painful. But ad campaigns, just like your body, have to undergo a significant period of base-building — slowly, steadily building muscle and cardiovascular capacity (in the case of ads, awareness and familiarity) before you start to see obvious benefits. But just because you don’t see them, it doesn’t mean these benefits aren’t accruing! Once you’ve built that base, the results come faster and with less onerous effort. Eventually you’ll be looking forward to more. As most people who go through the process, and make exercise (and advertising) a regular part of their lives, will attest, the early sweat yields tangible benefits: it makes you look better, feel better, and live less stressfully. The same applies to advertising: once your base is built, steady advertising (consistent exposure and a consistent message) will yield stead results.
Don’t: Change your approach or worse, give up, after a few weeks (or even months) because you don’t see results. As long as you’re achieving decent frequency, and your message differentiates your brand in a relevant way, you will be building a base, just like with exercise. Once you do start to see results, don’t stop working. Just like at the gym, you can dial down the intensity a little, but when you stop building the muscle and cardio of your brand, you’ll quickly fall ‘out of shape’ and be right back where you started – and having to go through that whole miserable ramp-up period again!
For every charming gecko, memorable slogan, or unforgettable jingle, thousands of businesses advertise very effectively by being authentic, direct, and adhering to a couple of simple ideas. You don’t have to be a creative genius to use advertising effectively! Here’s the first in a series of simple tips to help you decide what to say, how to say it, and where you should say it. Focus on these practices and you’ll be off to a great start.
Posted on November 1, 2009 by Bill Hansen
After almost three decades in the marketing business there are still very few things that I’m comfortable generalizing about: for every rule that can’t be broken, there are always at least a hand full of exceptions that prove the axiom’s fallibility.
One exception is the importance of message frequency. In active communication, such as sales presentations, teaching, or parenting, it’s extremely rare to see something stick without repetition. No matter how clever, clear, or compelling, it’s extremely difficult to influence people’s behavior by saying something just once. In advertising, which is generally much less active (and often passive) communication, it is all but impossible to influence behavior with infrequent exposure.
This is a fact of marketing life. It’s not something new or something driven by today’s over-commercialized environment. It’s human nature. As proof, read the short story below – and note the date that it was first published.
