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.

I just launched a new blog about network marketing. Here’s the link:
http://www.NetworkMarketingHeroes.com.

I have become quite fascinated with the topic. Being a curious guy, my plan is simple yet rather grandiose: I am going to interview 52 successful network marketers in 2007, pick their brains and share this knowledge with my readers.

It’s not 2007 yet… and one interview is already there. It is with Robin J. Elliott, a worldwide Joint Venture expert.

Hop over to http://www.NetworkMarketingHeroes.com.
and take a listen.

Consider this my little Christmas gift.

Merry Christmas!

Whenever I turn on my TV or read the paper (happens very infrequently these days), it seems as if we (the collective “we”) are obsessed with our dietary choices. We count the calories, watch the trans fats, and load up on the proteins. And lest we forget the Omega 3, which is very good for us although nobody knows what exactly it is.

So what do our “purveyors of food” do? Let’s see:

- Farmers are pulling their hair out trying to make their produce more organic;

- Food manufacturers keep coming up with increasingly healthier additives;

- And the restaurateurs are tripping over themselves adding “healthy choice” items to their menus.

Heck, even the ever-so-ubiquitous Golden Arches, the traditional stronghold of His Majesty The Burger, are now becoming more known for their salads!

Question: If you are a restaurant, should you follow?

If you do, you will be just a number in a huge crowd of others competing for the same piece of the pie. Remember that in business you don’t get a reward for doing it the hard way (I’m paraphrasing the great Dan Kennedy here).

And if you go in the opposite direction, you may just corner the market.

The way Jon Basso of Heart Attack Grill in Tempe, AZ did.

At Heart Attack, you don’t get just a burger. You get a Double Bypass Burger. There is also a Triple Bypass, as well as the most monstrous of them all, Quadruple Bypass. It is brought to you by a “nurse”. Your vital signs are being monitored by a “doctor”. And when you’re done (done eating, that is) a “nurse” takes you to your car in a…wheelchair!

Heart Attack has been around for less than a year but has already deserved prominence on numerous news sites worldwide.

Jon claims to provide the “taste worth dying for”, but his and the Heart Attack’s fame has nothing to do with the quality of the burgers (I haven’t had one, but now I’m so sold I can’t even imagine them being not fantastic).

It’s all about the decision to not only do something different, but do the exact opposite of what everybody else is doing:

- If they switch to salads, Jon gives you a burger;

- If they serve smaller plates, Jon builds the biggest burger you’ve ever seen;

- If they promote healthy eating, Jon offers the “taste worth dying for”;

- If they are being serious, Jon turns it into a farce, compelte with “nurses”, “doctors”, wheelchairs, theme songs, and downloadable ringtones.

Once you get a business like this going, marketing is effortless. It just happens. Like a letter from the Office of the Attorney General of Arizona complaining Jon’s… ahem, “nurses” are not real nurses!

http://www.heartattackgrill.com/not_real_nurses.htm

Two things are for certain:

a) Whichever way this controvercy gets resolved, Heart Attack stands to benefit from it.

b) Next time I am in Tempe, I’m having a Double Bypass.

Scott Tucker, a debt management wizard from Chicago and a brilliant marketer, has a new title:

A GUY WHO’S GIRLFRIEND DUMPED HIM!

How many people would go public about that? Hardly any. But Scott is no regular guy. In every problem therein lies an opportunity.

Scott is stuck with 2 first-class round-trip tickets to Barcelona for HER birthday, with HER name on it. He decides to turn all this into a publicity stunt. Up goes a website to do a search for another girl with the same legal first and last names.

The result?

Scott Tucker is interviewed by and featured on:
- WQAD
- FOX 5
- Dallas News
- Forbes
- Quote.com
- US 99.5
- Market Watch
- The Seattle Times
- WGN9 Chicago
- WLS 890 AM
- KWQC TV
- WIBC 1070
- NBC5

and list goes on… and on… and on.

As the old adage goes, you need to make news, not the news releases.

Find out more about Scott’s campaign at http://www.FreeTripToBarcelona.com

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No I am not asking for a pledge or donation (hm, is it not the same thing?). All I ask of you is 30 seconds of your time to answer a few questions in Leesa’s survey about podcasting. Don’t worry if you don’t know what podcasting is and have never even heard the word. Just go to this link and cast your vote: Canadian Podcast Listeners Survey.