Growing & Learning Archives - Page 10 of 23

:60 ticks marketing tip: Find your facts

November 2, 2007

American Factfinder is a great source for population, social, housing, economic and geographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Looking for average family income, racial mix or other data for a state, county or city?

Want to identify cities or counties with a high percentage of Spanish-speakers? You can find them here.

Want to choose which zip codes to send a direct mail into based on home values or mortgage amounts? You can find them here.

You can even look at business patterns by city, county, state or region, find the number of businesses by NAICS code and identify business size, payroll, number of employees and much more.

All totally free. Gotta love that.

Can we age out as marketers?

November 2, 2007

One of my favorite blog readers/commenters sent me an e-mail recently. He was seeking a little bit of advice and perhaps trying to find out if he was all alone in how he was feeling.

Well, I don't think he's all alone at all. He expressed a concern that has probably crossed most of our minds somewhere along the way.

Here's how he started the e-mail.

AM I GETTING TOO OLD? As a 43-year-old marketing director, how do I stay in touch with a target market of 18-30 year olds? As we get older, how we practice marketing and stay current?

I posted the rest of his e-mail over at Marketing Profs Daily Fix and we are in the middle of a very lively discussion about his/our universal question — how do I stay relevant?

Come over and jump into the conversation.

Are we becoming a world of snackers?

October 29, 2007

I’ve long said we’ve become a USA Today world. Bite-sized chunks of information, a pretty chart and we’re good.

I recently wrote about the power of downsizing how much information you try to cram into any marketing tactic. We’ve also talked about how being long-winded can hurt your effectiveness. And the value of offering bite-sized test drives to our prospects.

So, I was excited when Connie Reece tagged me on a meme that was started by Jeremiah Owyang. He asks the question — do you respect media snackers and if so, how?

So I’ll play along. Here’s where I think I am holding my own:

I write posts like the ones listed above, trying to not only walk the talk, but teach it.
I keep my blog posts short. (for the most part)
I write a weekly marketing column that tops off at 300 words.
I use solo visuals to help tell the story.
I use Twitter and other micromedia.

Here’s where I need to get even better:

Adding more categories so topic-specific readers can find content easier.
Introducing my readers to more resources for just in time searching.
Continuing to hone my messages down to their essence.

So, as the game is played…I tag David Armano, Chris Wilson, Tim Siedell, Gavin Heaton, Mark Goren and Doug Meacham.

Even if you weren’t tagged, feel free to jump in and play along. How are you modifying your communications to accommodate media snackers?

Marketing Resources — 10/25/07

October 24, 2007

As marketers, we are being pushed to know more about more things in more ways than ever before.

Today — we are literally stacking our education, experience in the business, acquired knowledge, personal experiences, interactions, observations and musings up like building blocks to create our portfolio of skills and abilities, in terms of marketing and branding.

The good news is that the information has never been more readily available. Books, podcasts, white papers, blogs, e-newsletters, webinars and the list just keeps going.

One of my goals for this blog is to be well, a resource for helping you find those resources. So from time to time, I’m going to give a nod to some good sources that I’ve stumbled upon.

Here are the offerings for this go around:

Resource #1:

Thanks to a post on the accenture blog about their new book CRM Transformation: Transforming Marketing, Sales and Service, I discovered Montgomery Research and their host of thought leadership white papers. Correlating to the accenture book — they have a section called The CRM Project.

There you can find white papers with titles like: Smart Enough Customer Decisions, Continuous Customer Dialogues (strategies for growth and loyalty) and Transform Customer Data into Profit. (Note: You do have to sign up to access these white papers, but it’s pretty painless.)

Resource #2:

Joseph Jaffe launches his new book, Join the Conversation, this week. Jaffe, best known for launching the conversational marketing company, crayon.

It makes sense that a man whose company specializes in community, dialogue and partnership would pen a book that spotlights how companies must adapt to the brave new world of the Internet, social media and networking, consumer-generated content, blogs, and podcasts by joining the rich, deep, and meaningful customer conversations already in progress.

I just got my copy today and can’t wait to dig into it.

Are you deadline driven? Good.

October 20, 2007

People moan and groan about deadlines and the pressure that comes with them. But, that’s exactly why we should love them.

Here are some of the benefits of deadlines.

We get things done: If there’s no deadline, there’s no incentive to actually complete the task. You can stay in testing mode forever.

We don’t over-think: Over-thinking leads to the homogenizing of an idea. The more time a group (especially) has to think about an idea, project or action – they more they can worry it to non-existence. Sometimes, you just have to leap off the cliff.

People have to overcome their issues: Teams inherently have conflict. A deadline forces each teammate to determine which conflicts are actually worthy of addressing and which ones they just need to put aside to get the job done.

Things keep simmering: When I know I have a deadline looming, even when I am not actively working on the project, it’s simmering on a back burner Ideas bubble up to my consciousness and when I do sit down to get it done, I’m already halfway there.

What do you think? Are deadlines good or bad? How do they help or hurt your efforts?

Additional sales tips/lessons from readers

October 19, 2007

A week or so ago, I offered to have a drawing for a free copy of Jill Konrath’s excellent book, Selling to Big Companies. All you had to do was share in the comments or e-mail a sales lesson, tip or horror story we could learn from to be entered into the drawing.

We got a few entries via the comments but several more in e-mail. I thought I would share them with you and then announce the winner!

Without further ado….

My biggest sales mistake is when I don’t know enough about the company or the person I am meeting with. If I can’t talk about them and their challenges, then the only thing left to talk about is me and our product. Once we start going down that road, I know I am sunk.

In the late 90’s I was invited to travel to Tokyo and meet with the man who could open up the Japanese market to our company.

Having completed cordialities, we started our very formal meeting. After about 20 minutes of fact finding conversation from both sides, I asked him through his interpreter if our design firm could prepare a proposal for him and send it over for he and his staff to review.

In amazement we watched him look down at the table, ponder for a moment, slowly push his chair back and stand up. He bowed. Said nothing and walked out of the boardroom. The corporate interpreter said the meeting was over and thanked us for coming. We were in the elevator just as fast as she could bow and say goodbye. Our personal interpreter said that he would share with us at the bar what had happened.

It turned out that I had put him on the spot. By asking him my question, he was unable to answer it without total disgracing himself in front of us and his staff. I had asked him a question that he would ultimately have to take to his subordinates to discuss before it could be answered. So, he was now in a shameful position because he could not answer properly. The only way he could deal with the situation was leave! Meeting over.

I know this is probably been said a thousand times, but I get on the good side of the gatekeeper. She holds the key to where I want to get and she can make or break my efforts. I have found that you don’t have to get ridiculous. You just have to actually notice that they’re there and engage them in conversation. Most people treat them like they’re invisible.

Offer an guarantee. The reality is, most of us have an implied guarantee anyways. So why not make it explicit?

Ask open ended questions that require more than a yes or no. And then build off that answer, asking a more probing question. Get the prospect to tell you stories to illustrate their pain points. If I hear myself talking for more than 60 seconds or so, I know I need to ask a question and then shut up.

Do something they will remember and tell other people about. Odds are, they are talking to several vendors. You need to be the one they remember. Do something remarkable enough that you know they won’t be able to resist telling someone about it.

And the winner of the book — John Siberell, one of our e-mail entries. Congrats John. Watch for an e-mail from me!

Don’t forget that Jill is also throwing the sales conference that’s a not to be missed for women who want to take their sales skills to the next level. Minneapolis. November 5-6. You’ll learn enough within the first hour to cover the investment and more.

Now that we’ve decided blogs are potential PR engines…

October 15, 2007

Ah, the good old days. PR pros bombarded reporters, news directors and radio jocks with their pitches, releases, and freebies.

But it’s a new day my friends and suddenly PR firms, publishers and business owners have decided that blogs are as viable as the daily paper, when it comes to getting out the word about a new product, book or idea.

All that is well and good. When it’s done right. But most often, I get e-mails like this:

Hello Drewsmarketingminute,
I found your site http://www.mclellanmarketing.com/ and I wanted to
know if you could Blog or write an article about XYZ (changed because I am a nice guy)! You can write your own article; alternatively you may use this recent press release below. You also take a look at the XYZ samples and information on our site at http://www.XYZ.com Thanks!

This guy has never read my blog. He found me on a list or technorati search. He didn’t use my actual name (unless I have become Drewsmarketingminute) and he insults my integrity, suggesting that I would just run his release verbatim.

I get several of these a day. I ignore several of these a day.

Ogilvy PR has the right idea. They’ve created a bloggers outreach code of ethics. I, and many other colleagues think they’ve got the right idea. I hope that all of us who live in the marketing world and may be pitching bloggers take note. If you want to reach out to a blogger…this would be a fine primer to study before you make that first contact.

We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.

We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.

We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.

Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.

If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.

We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.

In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.

We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.

We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.

You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)

If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.

If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.

Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

What do you think?

Dr. Marketer?

October 13, 2007

Sometimes, we get so caught up in discussing tactics or crunching numbers that we forget we’re in the human behavior business. At the very root of marketing is this reality:

Our job is to get people to do something. Believe something. Care about something. Our job is to affect human behavior. And to affect it, we must understand it.

I’m not saying we all need to run out and get our doctorate in psychiatry. But I am suggesting we’d better be avid students.

On any given day, a marketing professional might have to:

Understand what motivates a 33 year old suburban mom
Talk a client down from the figurative ledge because their boss is demanding instant results
Ask questions that get people to think in a new way
Write in a way that’s native and comforting to a person facing their death
Motivate employees to do superior work for a client who nitpicks and changes direction mid-stream
Take a furious customer from screaming to calm and feeling heard
Guide a group discussion to help a client unearth an uncomfortable truth about their company’s service
Figure out how and why three 19 year olds react completely differently to a new product
And so much more

I don’t believe a person can be successful in marketing if they don’t understand and care about how people tick.

Of course, the couch is optional.

What do you think? Am I placing too much importance on this aspect of marketing?

What is the most powerful selling tool?

October 3, 2007

This just in from the folks at Nielsen. No great shock (I don’t think) to see word of mouth topping the chart, in terms of effective selling tools. The power of a recommendation from a known/trusted source has long been the gold standard.

But what’s pretty interesting, and a big change from a few years ago, is the third highest item on the list. Opinions posted online.

So, what do you think? What does this say about blogging? Sites like epinion.com?

If you’re on the company side — what do you think it means for you and where you spend your resources? If you’re a consultant or agency-side pro — what do you think it means for you and for your clients?

By the way…this was an international survey. It covers 47 Markets: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Thailand, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, UAE, United Kingdom, US and Vietnam.

Whatever you do, don’t brush their butt

September 24, 2007

You know how we say that marketing isn't rocket science? Well, it isn't. But sometimes it is about the science of understanding your consumer. Paco Underhill, in his best selling book The Science of Shopping, identified a significant negative motivator for shoppers.

The butt brush. Yes, the butt brush.

According to research, a shopper, especially a woman shopper, is far less likely to buy something if her rear end is bumped or brushed, even lightly, by another customer, while they are both looking at a display.

The net result of this research is that stores need to be very aware of creating wide and clear aisles.

If you aren't in a retail business, how does this apply to you?

In every industry, there is the equivalent of the butt brush. Some little, seemingly insignificant factor, that makes your customer decide to shop or buy elsewhere. Something that just makes them a little uneasy.

Can you identify what it is for your business? If not, spend some time watching the shopping and buying patterns of your clients.

Look for clues. Or better yet, ask. A slight shift in your selling environment, materials, pitch or product may result in a measurable jump in sales.

Do you have a personal "butt brush" story? Something that turns you off as a consumer?

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