One aspect of marketing that has become more popular is either an email or printed newsletter, that is published monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, or annually. The goals of a newsletter are pretty straight forward:
- Create customer retention and brand loyalty.
- Demonstrate your expertise in the field, and “lightly” educate your customers.
- Keep your company profile in the customer’s mind.
- Gain sales, whether immediate or long term.
Although the goals are obvious, the necessary steps to achieving them are often times nebulous. A newsletter is more than a simple list of articles stating what your company has done recently. In order to fully meet all of the objectives of a successful newsletter, you need to focus on both the content and the delivery. We’ll begin with the content. Simply stating the accomplishments of the company, or discussing every new product that has been developed, is only going to accomplish the first part of goal #2. And let’s face it, how many of your customers want to become experts in your field? You need to demonstrate your expertise, not make your customers experts. Therefore, a newsletter filled with technical jargon, that tries to make every reader fully understand every aspect of the business, is probably going to fail. In order to generate usable content, the focus must be on the customer, not on the products, or even on your business. If you think of your newsletter as an actual periodical or newspaper, you begin to see the entire picture. Consider the front of any magazine you have ever seen. The articles listed are about how the reader can change their life. “10 Great New Widgets That Will Improve Your Life!” “How Starlet X Lost 50 Pounds in a Week!” These articles are meant to help the reader in some way. They are more than simply product descriptions. The tricky part is making sure it does not come across as a sales pitch. If you are truly focused on the customer, you should be okay. In addition to your product, your newsletter should try to connect with the reader on a personal or emotional level. Does your company do good things for the community? Include an article about that. Once again, this doesn’t mean you should be generating a report on how wonderful you are. As an example, if your company recently gave money to a school, you could talk about the wonderful improvements made to the school. You don’t need to emphasize that they could do this based on your charitable donations; the fact that you are publishing the news alone tends to point that out. Newsletters can also focus some attention on the community in general. Has a local sports team done something wonderful recently? Make mention. Has a new restaurant opened in town, that you enjoy? Write them a review. Newsletters can positively focus on other local events, that will also lend readability to your publication and give your readers something they will enjoy reading. As far as delivery goes, your focus needs to be ease of use. For emailed newsletters, they must be accessible to all readers. Focusing your attention on clean coding, proper email etiquette, including proper titling, unsubscribe options, etc. It should be viewable as a website in addition to an email, for those who are using email services that are more restrictive. The ability to download the email as a file, and be read offline, is an additional feature. For more on email distribution, click here.In summary, your newsletter needs to be enjoyable to read. No one outside of your company wants to read a book about your company. However, if 50% of your newsletter is soft sales on your products, and 50% of your newsletter focuses on the community and things that will most likely interest your customer, based on your customer demographic, the chances of your newsletter being deleted or thrown away without being viewed is much lower.
I recently started a new exercise regime, along with a new diet. Have you read some of the diets that are out there right now? I came across one that is based on chocolate cake! It begins with what they called “Prep Week”, and all you eat, for a straight week, is chocolate cake. Then the real diet starts. Luckily, because by the end of that first week, you feel so sick, the thought of eating chocolate cake turns your stomach, and the act of actually eating it is sickening. Your body and your taste buds rejoice at the healthy varieties of foods. Never again will a plain salad taste so good!
I’m not going to go on that diet. It was interesting to read, however, and full of psychological reasons why it works, and how it keeps you off of junk food for a while.
Think for a moment about your marketing style, and current advertising structure. How often do you serve the same chocolate cake? Week in and week out, are you simply serving up the same exact ads, and hoping that your customer’s sweet tooth is still excited to see it?
If variety is the spice of life, perhaps your marketing needs a little spicing up.
One reason for adding in variety is to try and capture different customers. Geiko has its little lizard, and he tells you all about how 15 minutes can save you 15%. The company has a caveman who finds it insulting when you use him as the basis of comparing ease of use to his level of sophistication. Who can forget the man asking a rhetorical question that gets answered in another set of commercials, with bears doing what they do in the woods, and the little piggy screaming in the backseat on his way home. Or perhaps you remember the stack of money with the googly eyes fondly... There is a variety of style, which can potentially reach everyone. The brand message is not getting placed in stale commercials.
Of course, you need to keep the actual brand messaging the same every time. You don’t want to completely reinvent your company’s image every time you put out a new commercial. The rest of the ad should have content variations. This will allow you to continue to reach customers, and not just become white noise. The more out of the box the commercial, the more likely it can generate a buzz. Changing the buzz, in order to keep your customers talking about you, is the goal of advertising.
Even if your ad is brilliant, it needs to be relaxed for a while. I was pleased to see a Wendy’s commercial that features a man buying a retro t-shirt, which reads, “Where’s the beef?” Random people then read his shirt aloud as he walks down the street. I wouldn’t have been excited, and probably wouldn’t have noticed, if they hadn’t stopped this ad for 20 years. I can’t tell you what the last thing the Energizer bunny did, since he hasn’t changed his ways in a couple of decades.
The moral of the article is, no matter how great your current ad campaign is, let it go. Get something new. If it was truly great, let it rest, and see what happens if you re-launch in a couple of years. Don’t simply serve chocolate cake every day for the rest of your business life. Sometimes, a little raspberry sorbet will hit the spot, instead.
And sometimes, the bland salad tastes great, after eating just junk for a week straight. Although the jury is still out on that one...
Written by Chris Gregoire
We could get out a dictionary, or check out our friends over at Wikipedia, and see what they think Customer Service is, but we think that it would be more fun to see what you think it is. We took a quick poll, and came up with a few of possible definitions:
- Great Customer service is best described as “The Customer is always Right!” Do what the customer wants.
- Doing what is best for the customer, no matter what. Sometimes, the customer is wrong, but letting them fail, just so you can say, “Well, we did what you told us to” is poor customer service.
- Be available to your customer whenever the customer needs you. Setting up call centers, answering email requests at any hour of the day, etc.
Of course, great customer service can vary, depending on the industry. What is considered great service in the restaurant industry may not be considered great service in the construction field. In order to market yourself to a customer base, you need to provide for the new and existing customer base excellent service. Otherwise, your marketing attempts will fall on deaf ears. Today, we’re looking for your answer. How would you describe “Great Customer Service”?
The title is obvious, right? You don’t sell in a vacuum. You have to pay attention to what your customers want, what’s going on in society right now, and what the trends are. Of course you must pay attention to seasonal changes, holiday schedules, and change accordingly. You must watch your competition, and make sure that if they are offering a sale or discount, you know what they are doing, so you can remain competitive. All of this is common sense.
The point of this article is to watch your third parties. Often times, we get so wrapped up in what we are doing versus our direct competition, that we forget that there are other businesses that are related to us, that are not really our direct competition, that can either adversely or positively affect our business.
My wife wants to “re-do” our dining room. Maybe I will get lucky, and it means she simply wants to paint it a different color. I like the idea of us spending only $30 on paint and rollers to “re-do” it ourselves... However, there’s a better chance that she wants to do some more expensive upgrades. Where to start? There’s two major changes she could want us to start with: the floor, or the furniture.
Does a furniture store consider a flooring business to be competition? Perhaps they should. They are both competing for the same dollar. As a customer, if I am on a limited budget, I must decide what to start with first. If I find a couch in my price range, that matches my existing carpet, the furniture store wins. If I find a carpet that accentuates my existing furniture, and changes the dynamic of the room, then maybe I’m done with just the floor...
We’ll leave my old dining room alone for a minute, and return back to the overall discussion. If businesses start to look not at who their direct competition is, but rather what businesses could have a positive or negative effect on the company income, there may be a way of creating relationships that would benefit both businesses. Those third party businesses, that don’t directly compete against you product for product, or service for service, could possibly be costing you business. Rather than trying to compete with them, if you had a symbiotic relationship, and could do some cross promotion, there’s a strong possibility of increasing your customer base, and being mutually beneficial.
Thinking about my dining room again, if we were to find out that we could save an additional 25% on the furniture from Merchant X if we buys the new flooring from Merchant Y, there’s a strong chance that we are going to spend more money overall. The two businesses win, and the customers win.
This type of marketing strategy can be hard to start. Networking may not be your thing. Work with your marketing team to figure out how to best begin these commensal business relationships.
Written by Chris Gregoire
Today’s free advice has to do with improving your search engine results. There’s a whole lot of things that go into how well your website is optimized for search engines, which is why there is a whole field of marketing devoted to helping your website achieve higher results. We’re going to focus on one piece of this today. One that your business needs for non-SEO reasons as well.
Take this QR code. If you scan it, it will bring your phone to a review for Davis Advertising. Now, there’s several different places we could review your business. We could have created a QR for Yelp, (Although Yelp doesn’t allow for mobile reviews, unless you go to a non-optimized site.) The problem with directing a customer to one of these specialty review sites is that in order for the customer to leave a review, the customer needs to be logged into that specific site. As not all customers are members on review sites, the odds of the customer getting through a review for you, and then taking the time to sign up to the service to actually leave the review, are slim.
That’s what makes the QR code above perfect. It asks the customer (you, if you scan it!) to leave a review on Google Places. Google scrapes other sites to get reviews, but also allows for customers to review directly on the Google Places page. With more than 50% of the smartphones sold being Android devices, and with many non-Android devices still being signed into at least one Google service, the chances are very high that the customer that scans this QR is already logged in as a Google User. That means no annoying login screens, or sign-up screens. It’s as simple as, click the number of stars, write the review, and get on with your life!
As we’ve discussed previously, word of mouth reviews are now living in your social media sites. Increasing the number of reviews that show up when customers are searching for your type of business increases the likelihood that new people will do business with you. On top of the fact that people do more business with existing, established businesses that have reviews about them, Google gives higher precedence to pages that have reviews. Active reviews increase your SEO, and make your website stand out more.
So, by using a QR code like the one found above, you can:
- Increase your SEO.
- Add reviews for your future customers.
- Show existing customers you care about what they think.
- Reach a more technology driven demographic.
For help creating your custom Google Review QR code, like the one above, contact us.
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