Jenny Schmitt bio:
Jenny-Rebecca Schmitt is a veteran public relations and marketing professional, trainer and sought-after public speaker. Her 15-year marketing and communications career includes experience in the fields of sports marketing, nonprofit marketing, healthcare communications, and public relations.
This week, while driving back from a social media conference I heard a radio ad from a furniture store offering a free tablet with a purchase of $999. It got me thinking back to the days when banks gave away toasters. Or to the current tchotchke giveaways that come in conference bags and in exhibit booths. While I wouldn’t mind a new tablet, or a new pen, or a light-up toy car, it’d make more sense if these giveaways were better tied to the value/message/benefits of the brand.Sure, an iPad giveaway might bring you traffic, it might get you RTs or tweets, or Facebook postings, it might get foot traffic to your booth or store, but what is the message you share and what is the longer term value?
Can you see the thought cloud: “Every time they use the tablet/pen/toy, they’ll think of us and that good feeling will transfer back to the brand and increase our sales.” If it sounds ridiculous, it is.
If you’re going to have an incentive item, a giveaway, find a way to make it meaningful, memorable, and valuable. Here’s a short list of ideas:
For a smartphone or tablet, preload your company’s app onto the tablet or load a welcome screen (can’t do that without corrupting the packaging, capture the email address and send an immediate email after winning and send them a value-add for the device).
For gift cards, either ask if they have a way to personalize the card, or add a company sticker but don’t stop there (there’s no value here yet). If it’s a coffee gift card, invite them to join you for an informal meeting. If it’s an iTunes card, send them your company’s playlist or the podcasts that you find valuable. If it’s an Amazon gift card, include a recommended reading list of books that you’ve found most valuable to your business.
Guess what? Your cheap booth giveaways, don’t have to be meaningless. Tie in a benefit of your product to the giveaway. For example, consider giving away a portion of the product, a small sample of what you sell. Imagine if Mercedes-Benz giveaways were a sample of the leather used in their cars that was a car key holder. Every time you put your current car keys away, every time you felt that leather, you’d be reminded of the aspiration to own a Mercedes.
I still can’t figure how banks ever tied value to toasters, and I can’t think of how I’ll feel like I got more value/quality after spending a grand at a furniture store by walking out with a new tablet in my hands.
One of the more raging debates and discourse you’ll hear in marketing and business circles is the value, the return on investment of social media. While there is no doubt that social media is a trend, but rather a distinct movement towards active consumerism, measuring the value to a company’s bottom line is much more complex. This week, the good folks over at MDG Advertising created a compelling and easy data visualization focused on the ROI of social media.
This last step is surely forgotten, after all you’re tired, busy and behind on lots of other things on your to-do list. But here’s the reason you WANT this step. If you don’t measure, you never really know how well or how poorly something is working.
In marketing, you want some form of measurement for every action you take. For example, did the radio ad at 10am work better or was the drive-time 5:30pm ad sending you more calls. Did you notice a rise in web traffic after you sent that email? Are you getting a better open rate of emails when you send on Tuesdays or Fridays? Now there are whole books and plenty of resources on how to measure. But guess what – you can measure it. Anyone can install Google Analytics on their website, it’s a free tool and does a very good job of telling you about web traffic (if that’s important to you). Even if you’re simply tracking one thing, measure it to your bottom line.
And to quote someone smarter than me, “If it’s not working, fail fast, learn the lesson, and move on.” I’ll add, and if it’s working keep at it.
As a final thought from this series: when in doubt repeat this slowly: focus on the why, what and who, before you ever get to the how.
Guess what? You know more than you think, it’s just that there is so much you can do, it may seem overwhelming. So let’s start with a few basic questions and get you to an action plan you can use.
First up, timing. Is your business seasonal or cyclical? If so, ramp up marketing efforts when it makes sense. No one advertises Christmas in March for a reason. But think of timing, when does it make the most sense to try to reach your customers. Here’s a good example of how not to plan timing – think of your college reaching out for a few dollars from you as an alum – now, you like them, you want to give, you know the value. But they call on a Sunday night at 6:30pm… wrong time and they lose you. Think about timing.
Next up, direct or indirect. Now you have two main options when taking action, you can reach people directly or indirectly. Think of it this way, do you want to ask them directly for their business or are they unavailable for direct access? If it’s a more direct approach, what does your target audience respond best to and when? What are 3 tactics you think can directly reach your audience and influence their purchase or sale? Is it radio ads? Twitter? Facebook? An online ad? An event sponsorship? A tradeshow? Email marketing? Of the 3 tactics you selected are you able to implement them well? If you can only send one tweet, don’t expect a run at your store. If you want radio but can’t afford to create a radio ad, well then you’ll need to find another tactic. But what if your customer isn’t available directly to you? Or what if you want to surround your customer with your brand? Indirect actions allow you to reach influencers that can help persuade your customers to take action. A good analogy? Direct is like you telling someone how great you are and asking them on a date. Indirect is getting all your friends to talk to them about how great you are and then they want you to ask for a date.
No matter what action you take, it’s called your “marketing mix” which is just our industry speak for the different ways you market to your target audiences.
To help you with this step, grab a piece of paper and a pen, you know old-school style. Now make divide it in thirds and write 30-days, 60-days, 90-days in each section. Now list what you CAN do realistically in the next 90 days.
This week, we’re on step three of modern marketing. It’s our short series on the basics of marketing that can help any business or brand assure they’re on track instead of following shiny new objects in the marketing world. This week? We’re on to defining key messages, the very core things you want people to know about you, your product or your service.
Your goal here is message transference: what would you want a happy customer to say when people say, well, “who/what’s that?” Now a lot of folks fail at this point because they A) want to convey too much b) use technical language or jargon and 3) they write them as long as the Gettysburg Address. So think of it this way, if one of your customers shared what you do and what the value is, how might they say it? Or what would you put on the back of your business card? Think short sentences that convey a single point. E.g Let There Be Light, Just Do It, Quality is Job 1. Now these aren’t all supposed to be taglines, but many of them could be. But for you, focus on simple, short and action-verb centered on benefits.
And here’s why simple matters, the goal is message transference. You want your customers to start to use the messages you develop to talk about your business. And if you can’t remember them, all bets are on that your audience won’t either.
This week, we’re offering the second step out of five steps to modern marketing. Last week we covered defining your value, and this week, we’re moving on to defining your audience.
Hint: it’s not everybody.
Even if everybody would buy it, you can’t market to everyone. Trust me, you don’t have a budget big enough and there is no way to be effective at marketing to every single person on the planet. Or even every person in your community.
So start by asking who would be your best customers, the first people in the door. Or if you’ve already started, ask who your happiest customers are. You know more than you think – list out their age, education, geographic location, do they have kids, drive a car or take public transport, do most of them own houses, do most live within a radius of your store, or do most of your customers come from one industry. List out as many common characteristics as you can. If you want to reinforce this, send out a survey to your happiest or most frequent customers.
Now you may get different groups, different audiences, what then? Rank them by primary and secondary audiences. Your primary audience is the group who are most likely to buy or the most likely to create a long-term relationship with you. The secondary audience will still buy your product or service, they’re just a smaller group or need more efforts to make a purchase. Remember, you have to rank your resources to ensure you get the most for your marketing dollars – spend wisely with the audience most likely to buy.
After you get your audiences more clearly defined, take time now to create a customer map on paper – answer where does this group mainly work, play, pray, shop, socialize, and surf online? (Not sure, send a survey to your customers and ask). You’ll need this info for step 4, but it’s a good idea to map it out while you’re thinking of your customers now.
Here’s the deal: you want results for both your brand and your bottom line, but you’re stuck with where to get started. Since I work with a lot of emerging companies or new brand efforts, I get this question a lot. How do we get started? This month, we’re going to bring you 5 easy steps to the basics of modern marketing. Each step is designed to help you bring focus, clarity, direction and action to your marketing efforts.
And while we’re in the modern world and things move at the speed of lightening, be sure to work each step. If you skip one, we’ll let’s just say we’ll be bringing our wellies and helping you get unstuck.
Let’s get started.
Define your value
Seems simple right, but few companies every get to what the value is for their product or service. Start by defining what you do and focus on benefits to your customers. Keep it positive, non-technical and most importantly, convey one single thought. Next, ask how are you unique, what distinguishes you from another company? Answer the “why” – why would people buy your product or service and answer the “what” – what do I get for my money.
If you’re not sure about this, ask your customers – what do they get from your products or services? Sometimes we find our best answers by listening to our customers.
You’ve heard about Twitter right? You join about 87% of Americans who’ve heard of it, but maybe you’re part of the 93% who haven’t ventured to try it for personal or for business. While there are lots of case studies to show innovate ways to use Twitter and proof it leads to sales, you just don’t know how to start or if you should. You’re not alone.
We frequently present on Twitter for business. It’s so important to help people get started, especially businesses, that Twitter posts a Twitter for Business Guide on its homepage. But before you get there, let us help you with the first steps.
This presentation was given at Atlanta’s Freelancer’s Forum last week. While a lot of learning happened off the screen, these are the basic steps to get start in and understand more about the world’s most popular short-message platform.
We’ve been telling visual stories for nearly our entire careers. Why? Visual matters because most people are visual learners or can better recall a visual cue than a written one. When YouTube came around 5 years ago a whole new opportunity came up to tell that story directly to an audience – no media required. We’ve been on board every since.
Now wait, if someone tells you they can make a viral video for you, stop there. You (or your agency) can’t make a video viral, you can make it great. Only your audience, your customers, your fans, can take it viral. No matter, even if you think you have a tough product or service, there is always a visual story.
We’re sharing this new branded YouTube page from The Coca-Cola Company. It’s a soon-to-be-classic example (created by Sapient Nitro – deep talent over there) of just where video can take a customer. Coca-Cola a global leader in the refreshment category has taken the World Cup ritual (the on-field celebrations) and asked fans to share their own celebrations if they were playing on the field. Here’s why we think Coca-Cola succeeds:
1. It lets people (the fans) participate directly: send in video, artwork, photography (branded or not)
2. The content is seemingly new, refreshed, all the time and it’s easy to share
3. Coca-Cola can tie-in the campaign with actual events (note the videos with the branded banner)
4. The music is universally appealing, borrowing beats, harmonies from different cultures
5. For a global brand, the World Cup is a near-perfect opportunity to showcase its near-universal appeal
What videos do you think stand out as examples of a great visual story? What would you add?
Since we work with clients in the sports field, and our past includes work at the collegiate, Olympic, professional and amateur levels of sports, we frequently get asked about the best places to find a job in sports. While we could post all kinds of tips, info, networking musts and more about the world of sports, we’re going to keep this simple. Below are our top 10 online resources for job in the sports field:
