Marketing Rant

I am afraid that in the last post, I didn’t really give you an answer that would leave you happy and satisfied. You asked me about marketing media.

“Use what works,” said I.

“Huh?” said you.

No worries. I got an answer! (Now, please understand I’m not saying that this is the only medium you should use. I am just saying that this is the medium that attracts the most advertising dollars of them all, and the one that has it’s share growing year after year. )

Ok, I won’t keep you in suspence any longer.

The number one marketing medium is… (drumroll, please!)…

Direct Mail! (a.k.a. “junk mail” that I love so much and most people resent.)

“Direct mail? Says who?” and might ask.

Many people. AdAge, for example. And they have hard numbers to back it up. Just take a look at this chart (click on the picture to expand it):

The AdAge folks measured where advertisers spend their dollars, where they spent them last year, and where they spent them a year before. And from that, you get these charts.

These numbers really tell a story. Not one - many stories.

Notice how direct mail keeps carving out a bigger slice for itself every year? That’s because a lot of advertisers are starting to use direct reponse techniques, those that we teach our client at bizLeverage.

Direct reponse is not the same as direct mail. (You can create a great direct-respnse TV ad, and you can create a lousy image-centric direct mail piece.) But it is a lot easier to be smart, know your ratios and stay profitable when you use direct mail.

The Internet is the fastest growing medium. Why? Again, because more people realize that it’s an ultimate direct reponse medium, if you know how to use it.

And who’s the biggest loser? It’s TV advertising.

Did I hear you say “A-ha!”?

Thank you to all of you who sent me your BBQs (your Big Business Questions, that is). You got questions — we got answers.

Most of your questions revolved around two themes:

- What is the best marketing strategy to use in business today?

- What is the number one marketing medium to use?

The first question was easy to answer. The answer is this: direct reponse. Direct reponse marketing in all of its living forms. There were no two opinions in the group. Whether you do space advertising, Yellow Pages, Internet, TV, direct mail, or any other type of advertising, you need to use direct reponse techniques – always. Image advertising is a huge waste of money (and that’s your money we’re talking about).

Now, the second question did not draw a concensus: Everybody had their preferences and would present solid arguments as to why their favourite marketing medium was the best. I figured the right answer is to use what works for your business. The one-size-fits-all answer simply does not exist. Just find what works in your business and use it. As simple as that.

And speaking of BBQs (those with a grill), I’m going to use mine tomorrow, for the first time this season.

I have just a few minutes left before having to dash out and leave for the airport. I’m going to Phoenix, AZ this morning where I and 5 other business development and marketing consultants from different cities (some guys I met before and some I’ll see for the first time, but all are very able marketers) will spend 4 solid days brainstorming some cool marketing ideas and work on our clients.

Contrary to what what has become a good blogging tradition, you won’t see a “travelogue” here, because I won’t really have any time to see anything while down there. The schedule is simple: home – plane – hotel – business centre – hotel – plan – home. The goal is to lock ourselves in a room (not literally, but almost) for 4 straight days and accomplish as much as possible.

Last time we did it 8 months ago we had some real breakthroughs, so this is something I’ve been looking forward to doing again for quite awhile.

I have a special offer for you, the reader of this blog. Do you have a big burning business or marketing question that you’d like a panel of experts to answer? If so, send you question to this special email address: BigQuestion@bizLeverage.com. I will table it in Phoenix in front of these guys, we’ll come up with an answer, and I will post it on this blog.

See you in a week!

A friend of mine who is a fledgling real estate agent, has recently confided to me his thoughts on how he should be marketing himself. “Alex,” says he, “I think I need to advertise on the TV. See, paper advertising is dead.”

He was excited I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was making a mistake, and if I did he wouldn’t understand me then. (I simply imvited him to my marketing workshop and sent to him some information on other people in his industry whom he should model his business after.)

Now, his mistake wasn’t really about TV vs space advertising vs Yellow Pages vs whatever. The mistake was, he was starting in the wrong place! And so do many other entrepreneurs – both fledgling and veterans. Here’s what I mean.

The “Three M” marketing formula is:

Market -> Message -> Medium

Your starting point should always be defining who your prospective customers are (gender, age, profession, income, hobbies, family status, ethnic background, etc.) The better you define the market the greater your marketing (and business) success will be. Most importantly, all these people (or companies, if you’re b2b) should have common “pains” that you need to identify. That’s the first “M” in the formula.

The next step is the message. What do you say to this market? Which particular “pain” do you solve? That’s the second “M”.

And now only the third, and the last “M” is the medium. Which medium (or media) should you use to deliver your message to your target market in the most effective and efficient way? Whichever media you pick, the message should be constructed and delivered in such a way so as you could measure how much business – in dollars and cents – you get per each $100 spent on advertising in each medium.

Where most people get it wrong is they start with the medium whereas it really should be the last step in their marketing plan.

Don’t take this formula lightly. It’s simple to understand but requires work (== thinking) to actually follow it. It’s a lot easier to say “Oh, this medium is not working, let’s try that one.” 99 times out of 100, the medium is not the real problem. It’s either the market or the message. Or both!

Go back and do the homework. Don’t cut corners and business success will find you.

Promise.

P.S.: As for my friend, it’s been a couple of months since that conversation and he has never brought up this subject since. I think I can hear gears turning in his head.

I recently had a chance to visit the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. When we got there, the tour bus had already left, so all we could do was check out The Rocket Garden and the Shuttle prototype turned into an exposition.

I didn’t need a tour: There was something that blew me away without that tour. The old rockets.

They turned out to be so unexpectedly plain jane and low-tech. So… what’s the word… mundane. The gloss of a picture in the book comes off, and what’s left is a sheet of metal clumsily wrapped into a tube. I found it difficult to imagine them fly… Even more so to imagine someone crawl into that tin bucket called the cabin and fly these things.

Nonetheless, there they were, artifacts of the glorious past, a testament to the courageous epoch.

Now think about your marketing. Are you spending money on the looks? The only person that’s going to be impressed is you. Your customers won’t care. Are you trying to make it fancy or to make it work?

If you’re going to study ads, start with those plane jane all-text ones that trick you and make you think they are editorials. People who run these ads treat them as their sales force: if these ads don’t produce sales they get immediately pulled just like a sales person that doesn’t sell gets fired.

The gawky machines that helped the man conquer the space didn’t need to be slick. The ad that will help you conquer the market won’t be a slick one either.

Come to Living Well on March 1st to enjoy a fabulous dinner, network with other small business owners, and participate in an interactive workshop I will be doing afterwards. Click this link for details and registration: The 7 Key Profit Drivers. The venue is small, only fits 20 people or so. Register early if you want to get in.

…are chefs. Here’s what Geoffrey Johnson of www.enville.com writes in his Wine Loop (we’re friends enough for him to keep me on the circulation list, for which I’m eternally grateful):

“My thoughts on this are purely O Mourvédre, how I love thee. Liquid sunshine, extreme fruit, full in the mouth on a broad platform, supported by just enough tannins. The varietal Mourvédre does so well in Vin de pays d’Oc, a gem in their crown. I bought several cases of the previous vintage and wished I bought more, very short term cellaring potential. My advice, buy more than you think you will need, believe me, you will need it all, a gift from Baccus at only $11.95 per bottle.”

(Now I’m afraid he’s really going to kick me off the list!)

Wonderful, powerful copy. A carnival of metaphors. A parade of the imagery. (Last time I checked, the only fruit that goes into wine is grapes. And how the heck do you bottle “sunshine”?)

Hey, there is even a testimonial and a “call to action”, and Geoffrey isn’t even selling this stuff himself!

Such writing creates magic. People love magic. Good chefs are magicians when they craft those glorious edibles with their hands. Great chefs know how to weave some of this magic into their writing too.

Now, how do you write magic about your business?

I did a talk on measurable and quantifiable marketing for a Rotary Club in Durham this morning. In order to illustrate my points, I decided to prepare by going through my “swipe file”. My goal was to pick a couple of industries (I chose real estate and insurance) and find some good ads and some not so good ones and use them as my props.

Easier said then done.

For real estate, I had a couple of newspaper clippings of Craig Proctor’s “edumercials” or “advertorials” that look like an article but are specially crafted ads with an 800 number in the end to request a special report. I also had Craig’s little ad from the Yellow Pages.

As usual, bad ads weren’t a problem: There were plenty of them everywhere. No wonder Craig is such real estate dynamo! (By the way, if you’re in real estate, you’re just stupid if you don’t study what people like Craig do. Actually, you can be in any business and still get a truckload of million-dollar ideas just by dissecting this stuff!)

Onwards to insurance. My, oh my! I went through my local Yellow Pages, all other Yellow Pages books I had, the Richmond Hill directory, and a whole bunch of newspapers. Not a single ad worth the paper it’s printed on!

Here’s a template for a bad ad that they all follow invariably:

1. {Company name} Insurance Brokers [Inc. / Ltd]

2. [Established / Since] {Year}

3. Home, Auto, Life, Commercial, Industrial, Small Business

4. Quality [Personal] Service

5. Call [Us First] For A Free [No Obligation] Quote

6. {Telephone Number}

7. {Address}

I’m not kidding you: There were 6 of them on one page, all following the same wrong formula! After awhile, I was like “Guys, have some mercy!”

I couldn’t get even a single good one for my presentation! I had to mock it up myself.

In a situation like this even a lousy ad could work ok, as long as it is about as bad as every other one out there. Every ad is generating it’s share of leads because all ads are equally bad.

But if just one of these people decides to smarten up and creates an ad that is even half as good as it could ultimately be – he will simply wipe you out!

Don’t let that happen to you: It’s not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “when”. Smarten up yourself.

There is a classic story of a shampoo manufacturer who doubled his sales by making a little change to the usage instructions on the back of the bottle. All he did was adding one word in the end. Of course, you want to know what this magic word is, don’t you?

Well, it’s a blog, not a book where you don’t know who the killer is until the last chapter. So here it goes, that magic word:

“Repeat.”

Yes, all that guy did was this: Where it said “bluh, bluh, bluh…then rinse.”, he added “Repeat”. Just one word and his sales went through the roof!

Last week I was reminded of this story at the grocery store, of all places. I spotted a stack of boxes of mandarin oranges. Apparently, they came from someone who knew that old trick. The artwork on the boxes prominently displayed a fruit basket (they were smart not to put just mandarin oranges in there – you won’t want your child to eat a whole box of them), and here’s what’s written next to it:

“5 to 10 a day! Are you getting enough?”

Bravo! (I bought 3 boxes, and the mandarin oranges were outstanding, by the way.)

Not that blogging has ever been a part of some “underground” movement, but my spell checker never fails to smudge “blogging” with red stain.

A major breakthrough came in last month with the Merriam-Webster Dictionary announcing “blog” being the #1 most popular word that people look up. Here is a link for you to check it out for yourselves: http://www.m-w.com/info/04words.htm.

I guess it doesn’t get any more official that this. So “blogging” is now proper English. Congratulation to you bloggers! And if you’re not blogging for your business, you’re making it struggle for no good reason.

And maybe it’s about time I taught my old spell checker some new tricks too…