Marketing Rant

Several times over the last year or so, I needed to go to my bank on the weekend to get some cash. Understandably, the bank would be closed and I’d have to use their ATM.

Now, the ATM’s there have a shelf, a little slab of plastic that is there for you to put your bag on or to have a convenient spot to slide the cheque into an envelope.

Long story short, a few times I’ve been there, there were little 2 1/2″ x 5″ fliers lying around on that shelf promoting “Mr PC Doctor”, who’s apparently a omni-dexterous technical genius capable of fixing your home P, removing virus and spyware, and even building a website.

No idea if he’s any good.

But the fact that his pamphlets find their way there with some uncanny regularity, I conclude that this little racket is profitable to his “little” business.

There are several interesting lessons that can be derived from this “doctor”:

1. Being able and willing to take certain risks is crucial to your success, especially if you’re a start-up.

2. You should not be “above” any marketing method or media. As long as you’re not flirting with the law, the only correct way to judge the viability of a particular medium is the profit you generate.

3. Action beats perfection. The first flier I got there was god-ugly, had 4 offers, wacky font types and colours, no pictures, and yet it was out there and was getting him some leads. The second and the third, and especially the fourth piece had a few mistakes but overall were quite good. He acted fast, learned from it, tweaked his ad, and kept improving his results. Lack of marketing knowledge or education notwithstanding.

I’ll try to scan those in and publish then in one of the future post. And I think I’ll call the guy to see if the bank caused any trouble for him like pressing littering charges.

Stay tuned.

Ok, let’s pick it up where we left it last time.

I think the “Restaurant Makeover” close is so great, because:

- When you are about to discuss your fees or your project budget, you prospect is on the defensive and is bracing up for a touch negotiation. And when you say, “What would happen if we didn’t come”, you immediately take their attention away from the money and make them focus on the problem they have. It’s no longer “about the money”. It’s a “do or die”.

- You get a yet another chance to confirm that they really are a good prospect for you. If they are happy with status quo, the best thing you can do is turn around and walk away. If, on the other hand, they start sobbing and drop on their knees begging you to help them, you know you’re in the right place.

- People buy on emotion and justify their purchase later by logic. You question requires a very emotional response and when it does, the deal is in the bag.

I can think of a several more (lesser) reasons why this close is powerful. It will work in almost any selling situation. The key is to use it in your business.

I most certainly will.

I was watching another episode of Restaurant Makeover today. If you’re not familiar with the show, they take a failing restaurant and send there a chef and designer, and then re-build the entire store in 6 days.

One of the key (and somewhat poignant) moments of the show is when the chef and the designer ask the owner to pony up cash (usually $15K, matched dollar-to-dollar by the show) for the project. Today I noticed that every time they talk money, the designer asks this brilliant question:

“If Restaurant Makeover didn’t come, what would’ve happened here?”

This line is brilliant in so many ways I think it’s worth of a separate post to talk about it.

Well, not me but my blog. Marketing Rant wasn’t good enough to be included in the BlogRush network.

Deservedly so: I have not been posting frequently enough over the last months. Which is about to change.

If anything, this unhappy incident re-affirms my trust in BlogRush and its ability to provide targeted quality traffic.

Marketing Rant will be back on the network… just give it a few weeks.

John, here I come!

If your computer has been plugged into the ‘Net over the last 3 days, this shouldn’t be news to you anymore. John Reese’s new creation became an instant hit with Internet marketers big and small.

It is called BlogRush and is a tool that offers an easy and free way to drive more traffic (and more targeted traffic) to your blog.

Obviously, John knows a thing or two about generating traffic. After all, he is Mr. Traffic Secrets. But I believe the popularity of the tool has little to do with his fame and a lot with how brilliantly simple and effective this little tool is.

It takes only a minute to create an account and add the BlogRush widget to your blog (you can see one on the right side of this one). Now what happens is that every time someone opens your blog, you earn a “syndication credit” that makes one of your recent posts to appear in the similar BlogRush widget on some other blog in the network.

Simple enough. But BlogRush doesn’t stop there and that’s what makes it unique and different from of syndication scenarios. You also earn credits off the blogs that you have referred to BlogRush. And also from the blogs that those bloggers have referred… and so on, 10 levels down!

They say all brilliant ideas are simple. I’m not sure if that’s always true but it certainly works in this case. The stampede of bloggers putting these little widgets on their blogs and the barrage of emails sent out to large lists, suggest that this tool is here to stay.

If you have a blog of any kind and on any platform (Blogger, WordPress, M-Type, TypePad or whatever you may have) adding BlogRush will provide some very important long-term benefits to your online projects.

Novotel Toronto Airport has a little problem: Too few people know where it’s located. They have been “under construction” for a good 5 years and have just recently re-opened. A relatively small hotel and bit off of the main “strip”, the mentioning of their name even to a cab driver demands of him a couple of minutes of concentrated thinking to remember how to get there.

Novotel Toronto Airport also has a huge advantage: Their marketing team who will use the marketing methods that other hotels would consider too “unorthodox” or too laborious.

Such as…
- offering a cold face cloth at the check in on a hot day;
- and putting fresh crisp apples on the counter for you;
- and placing the telephone in every room by the desk where the business traveler is more likely to need it and not by the bedside where you find it in most other hotels (yeah why is it that they always “park” your phone where you can’t reach it and the cord is never long enough?)
- etc, etc, etc.

Oh and they use joint ventures to bring in seminars and conventions and to spread the word out.

And they are… blogging! Right here: Novotel Toronto Airport Blog.

Good to see someone not entrapped in the “this stuff doesn’t work for my business” thinking so prevalent in the “old” industries like hospitality.