The Branding Game.

We’re going to play a short game. You ready? You have to answer six questions. No peeking ahead!

1. If your cat scratched your finger, you would go to the bathroom and get a _____________.
2. If you were thirsty at work, you’d go to the _________________ and buy a soda.
3. On the way home from work, you need to stop at __________________ to buy a new tv.
4. I can’t start my day without going through the drive thru at _________________.
5. I need to load more music onto my _________________.
We’ll hold off on number 6 for a minute.

Now comes the fun part. I’m going to guess your answers. Now it is fair to say that I do not have any prior knowledge as to who is reading this right now, at this moment. I’ve always been a fan of magic tricks, but this is no magic trick. I am willing to bet that I have at least one of your answers correct. There is a very good chance that I have more than 3. Let’s see how close I came.

1. Band-aid
2. Coke machine
3. Best Buy
4. Dunkin Donuts
5. iPod

We tend to think in brands. For example, maybe for number 4, you said “Starbucks.” Possibly you said a different store than Best Buy for number 3. However,I am pretty sure that most people did not say:

1. Plastic adhesive strip
2. Vending machine
3. Electronics store
4. My local coffee shop
5. Personal mp3 portable device

Your company’s goal needs to be: Our product must become synonymous with our brand. There are whole sections of the country that call any soda “coke”. Can you imagine working for Pepsi, walking into an establishment, and having someone refer to the bottle of soda you are selling as, “Some of that Pepsi coke”? Ideally, you want your customers to stop referring to your product by its generic name, and refer to it only via your brand. What you need to figure out, for your specific product, is how to accomplish this feat. It is not the same for every product, and you need to spend some serious time looking into the demographics and psychographics surrounding your specific products.

I skipped question number six.

6. If I needed (what you’re selling) I’d pick up the phone and call ________________.

I sincerely hope that eventually, everyone asked this question will say your company’s name.

Could 5 Minutes of Free Time Result in a Raise?

This article explains how treating every job as though it is commission based, for simply 5 minutes a day, can result in more money, or at least better job security, no matter what your field, job title, or compensation package.

First of all, let us put ourselves into a sales field. Pretend for a moment you work in a furniture store, selling beds and making your living via commissioned sales. You can sell just about any brand you want, and have some control over the pricing of the beds. If you found out that a relative of yours went out and bought a bed from a local competitor, without giving you the option of earning a commission, you would feel annoyed, slighted, and hurt, correct? He or she awarded your commission check to someone else, and in turn chose not to help you make your next car payment. As a commissioned sales person, you would certainly do your very best to make sure that everyone in the world, not just your immediate friends and family, knew to talk to you if they were in the bed market. You would not just wait for people to show up at your store, and hope they bought a bed; you would actively market yourself to everyone that would listen. The commissioned sales person knows that there is a direct correlation between how many people know to come see him or her, and how much money he or she is going to make.

The difference between a commissioned sales job and a non-commissioned sales job is that the correlation is not always as visible between your job performance and your paycheck on Friday. Simply because the correlation is hard to see does not make it non-existent. This brings us to example number two. Our second example is one of a small business that is not commission based. Let’s pretend you worked as the manager in a small pizza shop, with two or three employees under you, and an owner who comes in for about 30 hours a week. You come to work, do your absolute best for 40 hours a week, and go home. When you clock out, you don’t think about pizza at all. You never tell anyone about the quality of the pizza, or the speed of your delivery, or anything about your business at all. When someone asks you what you do, you say, “I work at John’s Pizza,” and that is the end of the discussion.

You are just “Doing your job.”

If the pizza store goes under, and you no longer have a job, should you point at the owner and say, “You didn't take care of me. You failed me.” Maybe, but I would suggest that you also failed yourself. The reality of the situation is this: Everyone who works for a company, no matter what the industry or pay scale, is also responsible in part for the PR for that company.

I can already hear naysayers saying, “No sir! My job at my company is XXX. Let someone else worry about PR. That's what the guy in the suits at the corporate offices do.” That was true in the past, but we are now in the time of New Media, when all information is democratic. Anyone can write a review about a restaurant that can be seen by potentially millions of people. You no longer need to work solely for bon appetit to get published. One can simply go to Yelp.com to publish a restaurant review. So PR is no longer solely in the hands of your company's marketing department. Everyone now has the power, and I will go further and say the Responsibility, to be a part of the PR team.

Everyone is Public Relations

Let's return to example two, for a moment. If you, the pizza manager, spent 5 minutes a day bringing in new business, and your business stayed open when the shop across the street closed, you would say that you had a hand in keeping your business open. I certainly would think that you had. I would think that if every one of your employees had an active role in keeping new business coming in the door, by taking 5 minutes a day, you could help the business grow enough so that the owner would be able to pay you better.

The best news is, you don't have to do anything you aren't already doing. I am not suggesting that you start cold calling people, and saying, “Come to my business! We will help you with XXXX product.” All I am suggesting is that you take an active role in your establishment's social media campaigns. Go onto your company's facebook page at night, when you are already on facebook anyway, and comment here or there as you the person, not you the employee. If your company has a blog, and you've read it, comment on it, even if anonymously. Follow your company's Twitter stream, and if they Tweet something you agree with, re-Tweet it. The more active your company's social media is, the easier it is to attract customers. The more customers, the more money the company makes. The more money the company makes, the more job security, and better chances of getting raises. That is why the answer to the question, “Could 5 minutes of your free time result in a raise?”is a resounding,

“YES.”

Part 2 – How Do I fill 5 New Channels with Information!?!

Now that we have discussed the WHO in Part 1, “Who Is Going to Run This Social Media Thing?” we need to discuss the HOW.
Congratulations for entering into the new media world. You now have a facebook account, a Twitter account, a YouTube account, a Flickr account, and a blogger account, as well as your traditional website. Now comes the tricky part; using them appropriately. You know who is going to run this part of your business. Now you need to know what type of information to put on each channel.
A major mistake that companies make is that they rush in and try to simply fill each channel. They take a medium that they have some comfort in, and try to force it to fit into the new Social Mediums. Let me give you an example.
An automotive dealership runs a print ad of a sale that is going on this weekend. They then take the image file, and connect it onto their webpage, under the “Specials” tab. On Twitter, they say, “Check out our specials! www.mysite.com/specials/todaysdate.jpg” On facebook, they write, “Check out our current specials!” and include the link to their specials page. On flickr, they upload the ad as a graphic. YouTube gets it as a single image set to the dealership’s world famous jingle “Hugo’s Yugo, Drive Away Today.” And lastly, so as to not ignore the blog account, they rewrite the ad, removing the images, with all of the fine print explained.
What the previous example showed is how to take an idea that works well in one medium and try to stuff it into as many other mediums as possible. A grilled chicken Caesar salad may make a great lunch, but most wouldn’t care for it for breakfast. Want to see the same base ad campaign oriented for each medium, rather than just cramming the same ad crammed into as many different channels as you can?
An automotive dealership runs a print ad of a sale that is going on this weekend. They then take the image file, and connect it onto their website, under the “Specials” tab. On Twitter, they say, “We are running a great promotion this weekend! Tweet #HUGOYOGO for added savings! http://Bit.ly/S45Fhaj3” (still provide the link, just don't make it so glaringly obvious) On facebook, they write, “Exciting things are happening this weekend. Do you see your next car here? Like this post and receive a free gift when you arrive!” and include the link to their specials page. On Flickr, they upload a new set, which showcases one vehicle that the ad is about. YouTube gets a flip camera recorded video of a walk around on the ad car, highlighting how wonderful a vehicle this is, and mentioning the excellent savings that are going on this weekend only. Lastly, on the blog account, there is an article explaining why now is the best time to purchase a vehicle, due to the fact that factory incentives for your brand typically run their highest in December, in order to clear the lots, turn the inventory, and make room for the influx of cars come February.
Just because facebook has a tool to automatically post everything you put on there to Twitter, it does not mean you have just taken out two birds with one stone. (Sorry Twitter Bluebird, pun not intended) Your material needs to be reformatted into the appropriate manner for each medium. The example used here is obviously a shortened version of how to reformat for Social Media, but it shows the point: Don’t simply regurgitate your printed ad into every possible channel out there.

Who Is Going to Run This Social Media Thing?

This is a two-part series, discussing two major questions that we are most often asked by companies trying to enter into this new era of Social Media. WHO and HOW.

Congratulations for entering into the new media world. You now have a Facebook, a Twitter, a Youtube, a Flickr, and blogger accounts, as well as your traditional website. Now comes the tricky part; using them appropriately. The very first question you must ask yourself is, "Who will become the Social Media mouthpiece?"

After speaking with several companies, one mistake that many companies make is that they assign Social Media responsibilities to their IT department. Someone up the chain of command said, “Social Media is done on computers. IT works on computers all day. They should do Social Media!” No, they shouldn’t (necessarily.) That’s like saying, “My janitor cleans a toilet … He should become a plumber!” Most would consider this a silly statement. If you owned a major newspaper, you probably wouldn’t have all of your articles written by the paperboy. (I can hear IT people saying, “Thank you,” from here. You’re welcome.) The tools are simple enough to use, but need to be navigated by a well-versed individual that is aware of your company's current products, promotions, and services.

In order to fully understand who should be in charge of your Social Media, you must know which job responsibilities that individual or group will oversee. There are three major areas in Social Media - Advertising, Public Relations, and Customer Service, that need to be addressed in slightly different ways.

For example, your Advertising person is most likely focused on immediate results. They want analytics that show for the day after an ad was run, an influx of customers came in and bought the product. Social Media doesn’t typically work that way. Spotting trends in Social Media takes longer, and uses a completely different set of analytics.

The typical Public Relations Manager wants to always show your company in a good light, and would want to shut off any negativity that can come through the channels of Social Media. He would limit the amount of client submissions onto your sites, which is not the appropriate response in the Social Media world.

Your Customer Service person wants to solve any issues that arise, on a per-issue basis. Although this is certainly a part of Social Media, it is only a fraction of the total responsibility. Depending on the size of your company, there may be a small amount of customer issues that make it into cyberspace, and a Customer Service manager could miss the focus of the larger areas of Social Media.

Your social media strategist, champion, or whatever buzzword you like right now, should be someone who is able to blend these three roles. You want a percentage of PR, Advertising, and Customer Service, that truly understands your company and the demographic your company needs to reach.

Stay tuned for Part 2 – How Do I fill 5 New Channels with Information!?!

Multiply Your Brand Power

Today we are going to go back in time to third grade math class. The teacher started the lesson with a question, “What is 4 times 1?” She held up four fingers, and asked us how many. We all said, “Four!” This is not a trick question, although when I was a child, I thought it was. Then again, I also thought that adding or subtracting zero to or from any number was a waste of time as well. What do you have if you had four, and take away zero? My answer was, “You didn’t do anything. Don’t be silly.” Multiplying by one seemed to be the same waste. “If you take four fingers, and count it once, then you already did the work. Why point out you only counted it once? ” I guess I was a little too analytical in third grade. Now I’m older and wiser, and I realized why we had to learn the “1 x X = X” kind of math. It’s so that we can understand relationships.

If you are a relatively new or small company, chances are you have a small client base. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could piggy back on another company, and count its client base as your own? That would be some multiplication that you would get behind. Even my third grade self would have understood “X x 2 = 2X”. That’s where Cross Promotional Marketing come into play. Today we are going to focus on the power of doubling your audience.

Let’s start with the benefits from Cross Promotional Marketing. This is the short and sweet.

• Expands the customer base. Both your clients and their customers see the ads.
• Added credibility from a company with followers. If they are willing to work with you, why shouldn’t your potential customer?
• Potentially lower cost of advertising. It can be lower because you can shoulder it with your partner in the cross promotion.
• Added creativity. There’s no way to advertise lawn care with auto body work without getting a little creative.
  

A

Cross Promotional Marketing is not always mutually beneficial. Often times, one company gains a lot more than the other, and if the costs of doing this business are not aligned the right way, you could end up shouldering more cost, while the other business gains all the sales. It is important to understand the demographic of the audience that your new partner brings to the table. If I run a hair dressing establishment, it may be easier to partner with a pedicurist than a chainsaw salesman. How many of my clients need a chainsaw, versus how many of his clients need a haircut? This would probably not be the best relationship for both parties. And if you are trying to give haircuts with chainsaws…..

Sometimes, it makes sense to get a group of businesses together. Banks, insurance companies, and financial advisers often times make good brand partners. Most concert series have multiple businesses sharing the costs of the venue, so all benefit. Multiplying your brand power as a group sometimes makes sense. 3x, 4x, etc. The problem can arise if there are too many partners, and your message gets muted by all of the other brands involved.

Cross Promotion can liven up your marketing strategy, and if done correctly, can really benefit your customer base in some incredible ways. It can show that you care about your customers outside of just your establishment, and that you want them to get the best deal everywhere. The pitfalls typically cannot hurt your clients or customers at all, but you can end up taking it on the chin, if you are not aware of the demographic you are trying to reach, or if your marketing campaign favors one business over another, with evenly distributed costs. The easiest way to make sure you are in the right place is to work with an advertising consultant, to make sure everything stays even.

Detailed Look at 2 Common Email Mistakes

If I asked you, on average, how many emails from your personal email box you deleted without opening them first, what would you say the number is? I can tell you, I probably average around 50 a day. That’s mostly due to the fact that I get a lot of straight advertisements sent to me from companies that I haven’t done business with in years, and that send me almost daily updates on any small change in any of their product line. I also get about a dozen or so from computer applications that I installed and disliked, and whose unsubscribe process is too complicated for me to do from my Smartphone.

It has been proven, if you can stay in someone’s face long enough, then you have a good chance of them returning to you to do business. That’s what we’ve been told for years, and there’s lots of evidence to support this. At this point, I can think of a flower service that I probably won’t use in the future, but if I do need them, I’ll finally open one of their emails that they send on that day. For all I know, they could have been trying to bill me for the last two years, since I stopped reading their email about that long ago. It hits my phone, and is deleted within 5 seconds or so of me noticing it. Is your goal to be this company?

Then there are the companies that email me “20% savings TODAY ONLY” at least twice a week. I had better open these emails, the sale ends today! On my way home from work, I recently tried buying something from one of these emails, but when I arrived at the store and tried to get my 20% off, the clerk had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. He told me that I had to buy it online for those savings. I whipped out my phone, and lo and behold, he was correct! It said it in 4pt writing, sideways up the side of one of the graphics. Somewhere inside of me, the thrifty gene I inherited from my peasant ancestors awoke, so I put down the item I was intending to buy, as well as the other three I picked up impulsively while wandering around the store, and went home to buy it at 20% off. On the way home, my phone rang, and I was asked to get supper going. I got home, and cooked an asparagus and chicken carbonara dish that couldn’t be beat. A closet culinary expert I may be, but cleaning up afterwards requires hard work, since I am also the live in dishwasher. Once the dishes were done and put away, I was tired, and went to the living room to watch a little tv after a hard day of work. Guess who didn’t get 20% off online? However, the good news is, I saved around 170%, since I didn’t buy the original item, or any of the impulse things that I really didn’t need but would have bought anyways. I really didn’t need it, but since it was a good deal, and I’m an impulsive person, they almost had me. Is your goal to be this company?

Both of these examples highlight common mistakes that are found in email blast marketing. For example number one: Your goal is to stay current in your customer’s mind, so that if they need you, they know where to look. With that being said, a little discretion goes a long way. Multiple emails a day are more likely to turn your customer to your competitor than they are to attract them to your business. Think about it this way. If I buy $100.00 worth of product from you, and you email me 2 times a day, I’m scared to know how many emails you’ll send me if I buy $300.00 worth of product.

For example number two: The real world always trumps cyberspace. I can understand some exclusivity when you are talking about visiting a location. However, sales that exist only in cyberspace are potentially hazardous to your real business. Why would you want your customer only buying online? If nothing happens until someone gets excited is true, why would you want all of the excitement outside of your establishment? Run as many campaigns as you can via email, social media, etc, but have them always point towards your best place to capture multiple sales.

As a side note for example 2: A sense of urgency is important. I remember talking with an automotive dealership owner, several years ago, before I was in the advertising industry, and asking how he can get away with putting, “Biggest sale of the season” in the paper week after week. He said it was because the average car shopper only looked in the paper for a week or two before making a purchase. He understood that with that medium, people weren’t going to read the ad unless they were actively looking for his product. When an email comes in, I read two things, the sender and the subject, and so if every time I see your name, I see “Sale, TODAY ONLY” I’m forced to “shop for” your product every day. And I start to see that trend, which makes me start to see that you build up a ton of fake urgency.

If either of these look too familiar, do yourself a favor, and contact us, today.

Strengthening Your Social Media, Part 3

This is the final part of this series. Enjoy the final two steps to strengthening your social media!

Step 5- Redefine ROI.

You can choose to look at Social Media’s ROI in traditional ways, and you will decide that social media is a waste of time, relatively soon. That’s because you are not listing a singular ad, to see how much traffic is driven by that one ad. Let’s pretend you are throwing a large party this weekend, with over 100 guests. You invite 110 people, and 100 show. They stay for a couple of hours, and leave. Immediately after they leave, can you tell how successful the party was? You may try to judge by how much food or beverage consumption happened. You may try to gauge by how dirty the place is. But really, the only way to find out is to wait. See how many people you know are talking about the party a week from now. Was your party the party that all people use to define other gatherings? That’s how social media works. You do not have an immediate response. A successful social media campaign has customers that show up, mentioning ads you did months ago, and you are left wondering, “Where did these people come from?”

That’s not to say you cannot accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaign. It just means you need to change your analytics. One highly effective method is to judge how much traffic is happening at any time on your social sites that you did nothing to encourage. If people are visiting your social media sites, and you didn’t do anything to encourage them to visit at that moment, via some promotion, they are probably also buying from your store. There are ways of measuring ROI, but they are more long term, since they depend on social timing, not business timing.

One of the quickest ways of monitoring your ROI comes from Step 6.

Step 6- Have Watchful Eyes - Monitor Everywhere

“No news is good news” is not true. “Any press is good press” is a little more accurate. But only if you are working on monitoring every single thing anyone is saying about you. Imagine you are an automotive dealer. And a customer, waiting in your service area, tweets, “Could Imaginary Dealership waste any more of my time!!!” If you aren’t monitoring for this, you are sunk. This message is going out across cyberspace, to possibly thousands of potential customers. Now, imagine you are the same dealership, and you see that message, and immediately tweet back, “Let me fix it, right now. Come to the service desk.” And you fix the issue. And then you tweet, “All set?” to which the customer replies, “yes, thank you Imaginary Dealership!” Now there is a conversation out there, in cyberspace, going out to potentially thousands of customers, that you will do anything you can to help your people immediately. Capitalize on complaints publicly. Showing you are human and make mistakes doesn’t hurt your credibility. Fixing errors immediately, and going above and beyond to make things right builds customer satisfaction just as quickly as does doing it right the first time.

Let’s go out of the world of the internet for a minute. Have you ever been in a restaurant, where something came back not right? And you complained, and the manager came over immediately, fixed the problem, and gave you something for free, like dessert? Did you go back to the restaurant in the future? I know that this has happened to me, and I always went back at least once. Now, if every time I go, there’s something that gets done poorly, then the manager can give me free dessert for life, and I’m not going back. However, when the first error happened, and it was quickly addressed, corrected and I was compensated for their mistake, it cemented a positive experience in my mind.

How do you effectively monitor the entire world? You really can’t. But you can try. I’ve looked on a lot of facebook pages, and seen the comment sections blocked, or monitored. When I’ve asked the business owner why this is, I’ve been told that they do not want negative things written about them on their own site. My response is always, “So, you’d prefer negative things written about you on sites you don’t know about?” Stuffing your fingers in your ears, and singing, “La la la la la, I can’t hear your complaints!” probably wouldn’t help your business if you did it in front of a customer when he or she has an issue. The same is true when you shut down avenues where customers can communicate. Your goal for facebook should be that if someone wants to complain about you, they come right to your site to do it. That way you can address the issue, and fix the customer’s problem right away.

The same is not quite true for Twitter. If you aren’t constantly searching Twitter, looking for your name, you don’t know if someone is complaining. It is a different climate on Twitter. Whereas people go to facebook to have conversations, people typically are on Twitter just to express. So they aren’t going to aim their complaints at you personally, which means you have to go find those complaints. Then follow the complainers, and see if you can start a conversation. Many times, you will use their profile on Twitter to find ways to communicate with them through other channels where a dialogue is easier to complete.

You have people that watch your location to make sure that there are not disgruntled customers roaming the store, complaining loudly to other potential buyers. You need to have people watching the internet to make sure there aren’t people doing the same thing. If you can capture a negative experience, and turn a customer around publicly, and sell that customer, there is proof positive of ROI. As one car dealership I worked with stated, “It was real easy to see the ROI when we had a displeased service customer, Tweeting, ‘I’m never working with (dealership) again! I hate this car, and I hate this place!’ and by monitoring social media, we stopped trying to fix the car, and sold her a new one. That’s powerful. Now we have a happy customer, we sold a car, and we have her positive press on Twitter instead of negatives.”