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Slide 1: g Easier! Making Everythin ™ 3rd Edition ing Kit arket M Learn to: • Plan and implement a successful marketing program from start to finish • Boost sales, attract new customers, and retain old customers using the latest marketing trends • Create winning promotions and campaigns • Improve your marketing efforts with sample plans, worksheets, and Web templates on CD Alexander Hiam Author of Marketing For Dummies
Slide 3: Marketing Kit FOR DUMmIES 3RD ‰ EDITION Author of Marketing For Dummies by Alexander Hiam
Slide 4: Marketing Kit For Dummies®, 3rd Edition Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc. 111 River St. Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com Copyright © 2009 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published simultaneously in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http:// www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/ or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES OR PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY SITUATION. THIS WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING LEGAL, ACCOUNTING, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED, THE SERVICES OF A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL PERSON SHOULD BE SOUGHT. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR THE AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING HEREFROM. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE IS REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE AUTHOR OR THE PUBLISHER ENDORSES THE INFORMATION THE ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE MAY PROVIDE OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT INTERNET WEBSITES LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND WHEN IT IS READ. For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002. For technical support, please visit www.wiley.com/techsupport. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Control Number: 2008942753 ISBN: 978-0-470-40115-6 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Slide 5: About the Author Alex Hiam is the best-selling author of Marketing For Dummies and The Portable MBA in Marketing, as well as numerous books on management and leadership. He is the founder of INSIGHTS for Training & Development, which provides management, customer service, and sales force training to client companies throughout the world. He also designs and publishes training materials and curricula used by the in-house training departments of many companies and government agencies. You can find descriptions of his firm’s marketing and sales products and services at www.insightsfor marketing.com. Alex gives keynote addresses on topics ranging from marketing for breakthrough performance to effective leadership in business to how to negotiate with sharks. He received his BA from Harvard, his MBA from U.C. Berkeley, and was a full-time faculty member of the U Mass Amherst business school when his children were younger. Now he devotes his time to consulting, speaking, and running his own firm, where he often gets the chance to apply the principles of “streetwise” marketing himself as well as write about them for his many readers. Alex’s marketing-related consulting and training work includes leading product and branding brainstorm sessions, consulting on business and marketing planning, helping to motivate salespeople, and performing communications audits for clients. When not at work, Alex sails his ketch, the Blue Moon, throughout the waters off the East Coast of the United States.
Slide 7: Dedication To the wonderful children who enrich my life and make me proud: Noelle, Eliot, Paul, and Sadie. And to Deirdre, the wonderful woman who makes it all worthwhile. Author’s Acknowledgments Thanks to my able staff and associates for all their contributions to this book and the Web site that supports it, especially to Stephanie Sousbies, who runs my business on a daily basis so that I don’t have to and can write books instead. Also, I offer many thanks to the great team of editors who I have worked with on this and earlier editions over the years, including Kathy Welton. Special thanks to Kelly Ewing, who helped make this edition clear and readable. A book like this takes a surprisingly large team to produce — see the upcoming publisher’s acknowledgments for additional members of the team. My thanks to you all. Finally, a word must be said about my readers. Thanks to all of you who have gotten in touch over the years to share your enthusiasm and great stories of marketing success! There are so many of you out there, working hard to bring about good results, often on a limited budget. Your creativity, hopefulness, and professionalism are the raw ingredients of great marketing. I hope your associates, employers, and customers appreciate all you do.
Slide 8: Publisher’s Acknowledgments We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our Dummies online registration form located at http://dummies.custhelp.com. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002. Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following: Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development Project Editor: Kelly Ewing (Previous Edition: Christina Guthrie) Acquisitions Editor: Stacy Kennedy Assistant Editor: Erin Calligan Mooney Editorial Program Coordinator: Joe Niesen General Reviewer: Laurie Boyce Media Development Assistant Project Manager: Jenny Swisher Media Development Associate Producer: Angie Denny Media Development Quality Assurance: Kit Malone Senior Editorial Manager: Jennifer Ehrlich Editorial Supervisor and Reprint Editor: Carmen Krikorian Editorial Assistant: Jennette ElNaggar Cover Photos: ©Comstock Images Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com) Composition Services Project Coordinator: Katie Key Layout and Graphics: Samantha Allen, Carl Byers, Melissa K. Jester, Christine Williams Proofreaders: Laura L. Bowman, John Greenough, Caitie Kelly Indexer: Broccoli Information Management Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies Kristin Ferguson-Wagstaffe, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies Ensley Eikenburg, Associate Publisher, Travel Kelly Regan, Editorial Director, Travel Publishing for Technology Dummies Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher, Dummies Technology/General User Composition Services Gerry Fahey, Vice President of Production Services Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Slide 9: Contents at a Glance Introduction ................................................................ 1 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs .... 7 Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing ........................................... 9 Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan ................................................... 29 Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact ............................................................ 59 Part II: Advertising Management and Design............... 77 Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns ..................................................... 79 Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads ................................................................................ 93 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising ................ 119 Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More .......................... 121 Chapter 7: Creating Eye-Catching Brochures, Catalogs, and Spec Sheets ............. 141 Chapter 8: Planning Coupons and Other Sales Promotions ..................................... 167 Chapter 9: Spreading the Word with Newsletters ..................................................... 181 Chapter 10: Taking Advantage of Publicity ................................................................ 205 Part IV: Honing Your Marketing Skills....................... 225 Chapter 11: The Customer Research Workshop ....................................................... 227 Chapter 12: The Creativity Workshop ........................................................................ 241 Chapter 13: Writing Well for Marketing and Sales ..................................................... 257 Part V: Sales and Service Success ............................. 291 Chapter 14: Mastering the Sales Process.................................................................... 293 Chapter 15: Closing the Sale ......................................................................................... 305 Chapter 16: The Sales Success Workshop .................................................................. 317 Part VI: The Part of Tens .......................................... 331 Chapter 17: Ten Great Marketing Strategies .............................................................. 333 Chapter 18: Ten Ways to Make Marketing Pay .......................................................... 339 Chapter 19: Ten Ways to Market on the Web ............................................................ 343 Appendix: About the CD ........................................... 349 Index ...................................................................... 355
Slide 11: Table of Contents Introduction........................................................................ 1 About This Book .............................................................................................. 1 Conventions Used in This Book ..................................................................... 2 What You’re Not to Read ................................................................................ 2 Foolish Assumptions ....................................................................................... 2 How This Book Is Organized .......................................................................... 3 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs ..................... 3 Part II: Advertising Management and Design ..................................... 3 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising ......................................... 4 Part IV: Honing Your Marketing Skills ................................................. 4 Part V: Sales and Service Success ........................................................ 4 Part VI: The Part of Tens ....................................................................... 4 Icons Used in This Book ................................................................................. 5 Where to Go from Here ................................................................................... 5 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs ............ 7 Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing . . . . . . . . . .9 Finding Your Marketing Zone......................................................................... 9 Pinpointing Your Top Three Sales and Marketing Tools ......................... 11 Adjusting for the Economic Cycle ............................................................... 13 Tightening up for tough times............................................................ 13 Taking advantage of a growth economy ........................................... 15 Marketing Smart to Avoid Costs and Risks ................................................ 16 Strengthening Your Marketing Skill-Set ...................................................... 17 Design, copywriting, creativity, and more........................................ 18 Artful persuasion: Sales skills to the fore ......................................... 18 Quick skill-building tricks and tips .................................................... 19 Designing Your Marketing Program ............................................................ 19 Product.................................................................................................. 21 Price ....................................................................................................... 21 Placement ............................................................................................. 21 Promotion ............................................................................................. 22 People .................................................................................................... 23 Profiting from the Five Ps ................................................................... 24 Exercising Your Marketing Imagination ..................................................... 25 Reframing Your Presentation....................................................................... 26 The Five-Minute Marketing Zone Plan ........................................................ 27 On the CD........................................................................................................ 28 Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 Auditing Your Marketing Activities ............................................................. 29 Evaluating your marketing focus ....................................................... 31 Evaluating your marketing scope ...................................................... 32 Auditing your marketing activities .................................................... 32
Slide 12: x Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition Analyzing your management and control ......................................... 33 Checking your creativity ..................................................................... 34 Using Audit Results to Focus Your Plan ..................................................... 35 Formatting Your Marketing Plan ................................................................. 37 Writing Your Marketing Plan the Easy Way ............................................... 39 Using the marketing plan template.................................................... 41 Gathering information before you start ............................................ 41 The outline used in the planning template ....................................... 43 Developing Your Marketing Strategy .......................................................... 44 Basing your strategies on your core brilliance ................................ 45 Deciding whether to adopt a new strategy or improve an old one ..................................................................... 45 Choosing your strategy ....................................................................... 47 Setting specific objectives for your strategies ................................. 51 Running Goal-Oriented Marketing Experiments ........................................ 54 Planning Benchmarks for Marketing Communications ............................ 54 On the CD........................................................................................................ 57 Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 Taking a Look at Low-Cost and No-Cost Marketing Ideas ........................ 59 Transit advertising .............................................................................. 59 Publicity ................................................................................................ 60 Viral marketing on MySpace or Facebook ........................................ 60 Low-cost display ads in online communities ................................... 61 Text messages — a new viral marketing frontier?........................... 62 The classic flier — tried, true, and free ............................................ 63 The informational booklet or brochure ............................................ 63 The informational Web page or blog ................................................. 64 Pay-per-click advertising (keyword ads) .......................................... 65 Widgets, gadgets, and the like............................................................ 66 Word of mouth or referral marketing................................................ 67 Events, parties, and charity fundraisers ........................................... 68 Better looking basics: Stationery, business cards, and brochures .................................................................................. 68 Asking for the business ....................................................................... 69 Harnessing the Power of Information ......................................................... 69 Exercising Creativity: Ideas Are Free! ......................................................... 71 Narrowing Your Focus to Cut Costs and Maximize Impact ..................... 73 Focusing your marketing message .................................................... 73 Focusing your marketing program .................................................... 74 On the CD........................................................................................................ 75 Part II: Advertising Management and Design ...................... 77 Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 A Practical Approach to Ad Budgets .......................................................... 79 Setting your ad budget ........................................................................ 80 Planning your ad campaign ................................................................ 82 Adjusting the ad budget for a B2B plan ............................................ 85
Slide 13: Table of Contents Tailoring Your Advertising Plan to a Specific Goal ................................... 86 Budgeting based on goals ................................................................... 88 Using an Advertising Objectives Worksheet .................................... 89 Preparing a month-by-month ad plan ............................................... 91 Staying flexible throughout the year ................................................. 91 On the CD........................................................................................................ 92 xi Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93 Following Do-It-Yourself Shortcuts.............................................................. 93 The tried-and-true visual appeal ad .................................................. 94 Some basic ad templates .................................................................... 97 Creating Ad Concepts for Fun and Profit.................................................. 102 The mood ad....................................................................................... 103 The wisdom ad ................................................................................... 108 Making an Impact by Using Visual Shortcuts........................................... 111 Using a beautiful landscape photo .................................................. 112 Portraying an attractive person ....................................................... 113 Inserting a humorous cartoon.......................................................... 113 Giving Postcard Marketing a Try ............................................................... 114 Using Web Pages as Ads ............................................................................. 116 On the CD...................................................................................................... 118 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising........................ 119 Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121 Who Are You? Establishing Brand Identity .............................................. 121 Managing the Presentation of Your Brand Name .................................... 123 “Selling” Your Business Cards ................................................................... 127 Making a good overall impression ................................................... 127 Deciding on design details ................................................................ 128 Who needs a printer when you have Word? .................................. 130 Designing Your Letterhead and Envelopes .............................................. 134 Conveying your image through paper and print ........................... 135 Keeping visual control in faxes and e-mails ................................... 136 Maintaining Your Identity on the Web...................................................... 137 On the CD...................................................................................................... 139 Chapter 7: Creating Eye-Catching Brochures, Catalogs, and Spec Sheets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 Considering Your Needs ............................................................................. 142 The simple one-page spec sheet or flier ......................................... 142 The multipage brochure ................................................................... 142 Catalogs and booklets ....................................................................... 144 Becoming a Brochure Wizard .................................................................... 144 Brochure design considerations ...................................................... 145 Paper characteristics ........................................................................ 149 Layout tips .......................................................................................... 149 Copy or print? .................................................................................... 153
Slide 14: xii Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition Color .................................................................................................... 154 Artwork ............................................................................................... 155 Photography ....................................................................................... 157 Clip art and stock photography ....................................................... 157 Crop and fold marks .......................................................................... 158 Making Digital Brochures ........................................................................... 158 Captivating Catalogs ................................................................................... 159 Design considerations ....................................................................... 160 Benchmark catalogs for your reference ......................................... 161 The list factor ..................................................................................... 162 Spectacular Spec Sheets ............................................................................. 163 Formatting your spec sheet.............................................................. 164 Ensuring that your spec sheet is up to snuff.................................. 165 Marketing with Booklets and Books.......................................................... 165 On the CD...................................................................................................... 166 Chapter 8: Planning Coupons and Other Sales Promotions . . . . . . . .167 The Importance of Profit ............................................................................ 167 How Promotions Affect Sales ..................................................................... 169 Planning Coupon Programs........................................................................ 170 The basics of coupon profitability analysis ................................... 171 Coupon profitability analysis step by step ..................................... 173 Testing multiple scenarios ............................................................... 177 Learning from experience ................................................................. 177 Ah, but did it work? ........................................................................... 178 Some Alternative Approaches to Sales Promotions ............................... 179 Offer free food .................................................................................... 179 Give gifts ............................................................................................. 179 Offer rewards for repeat business ................................................... 180 On the CD...................................................................................................... 180 Chapter 9: Spreading the Word with Newsletters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181 Why You Need a Newsletter....................................................................... 181 Examining the Elements of a Newsletter .................................................. 183 Masthead and nameplate .................................................................. 183 Modules ............................................................................................... 185 Articles ................................................................................................ 186 Headers (like this one) ...................................................................... 188 Type ..................................................................................................... 189 Columns .............................................................................................. 190 Leading and kerning .......................................................................... 190 Flow and readability .......................................................................... 191 Size ....................................................................................................... 193 Photos and artwork ........................................................................... 193 Templates for Desktop Publishing ............................................................ 194 Measuring Your Success............................................................................. 198 Saving a Tree: Electronic Newsletters ...................................................... 198 E-mailing a Portable Document Format (PDF) attachment .......... 199 E-mailing an HTML page.................................................................... 199 Sending hybrid e-mails ...................................................................... 199
Slide 15: Table of Contents Blogs instead of newsletters? ........................................................... 200 Mailing a CD ........................................................................................ 201 A Few Thoughts on Logos .......................................................................... 202 On the CD...................................................................................................... 203 xiii Chapter 10: Taking Advantage of Publicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .205 Understanding and Using Publicity ........................................................... 205 Publicity versus advertising ............................................................. 207 Publicity versus public relations ..................................................... 207 When to hire a pro ............................................................................. 207 Be newsworthy ................................................................................... 208 Developing a Media Kit ............................................................................... 210 Assembling your kit ........................................................................... 211 What about using your Web page as a media kit? ......................... 211 What’s the hook? ............................................................................... 211 The Press Release That’s Going to Get You Publicity ............................ 212 Getting a reporter to take notice ..................................................... 212 Making sure your release is “news ready”...................................... 214 Pitching Your Release to the Media .......................................................... 215 Including a cover letter ..................................................................... 216 Don’t forget to follow up! .................................................................. 216 Dealing with rejection ....................................................................... 217 Creating Your Mailing Lists ........................................................................ 218 Finding the names for your list ........................................................ 219 Opting to buy a list instead .............................................................. 219 Going Online: Web Publicity Tools............................................................ 220 Sending releases to your e-mail list ................................................. 220 Using Web press release services ................................................... 221 Multimedia e-releases........................................................................ 222 Keep e-releases short and sweet ..................................................... 223 On the CD...................................................................................................... 223 Part IV: Honing Your Marketing Skills .............................. 225 Chapter 11: The Customer Research Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227 Talking to Your Customers ........................................................................ 227 Auditing Your Customer Service ............................................................... 230 Performing a customer service review ........................................... 233 Using the audit template ................................................................... 234 Surveying successfully ...................................................................... 237 Analyzing the results ......................................................................... 237 Using Experimentation as a Research Technique ................................... 239 On the CD...................................................................................................... 240 Chapter 12: The Creativity Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .241 Creativity’s Impact on the Five Ps ............................................................. 241 Product innovations .......................................................................... 242 Pricing innovations ............................................................................ 243 Placement innovations ...................................................................... 244
Slide 16: xiv Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition Promotion innovations ..................................................................... 245 People innovations ............................................................................ 246 Being Creative but Also Practical .............................................................. 247 Harnessing your creativity for profit............................................... 247 Not getting carried away ................................................................... 248 Generating Creative Concepts ................................................................... 248 Revel in the irreverent ...................................................................... 249 Force yourself to develop alternatives ........................................... 250 Don’t overplan .................................................................................... 250 Identify your personal barriers and enablers ................................ 251 Incubate .............................................................................................. 252 Break it down ..................................................................................... 253 Compete .............................................................................................. 253 Record more of your own ideas ....................................................... 253 Look hard at your assumptions ....................................................... 254 Talk to ten successful people ........................................................... 254 Managing Creative Projects and Teams ................................................... 255 On the CD...................................................................................................... 256 Chapter 13: Writing Well for Marketing and Sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .257 Avoiding Power Words and Phrases ......................................................... 258 Writing Persuasively ................................................................................... 260 If you don’t want to write yourself .................................................. 260 Engaging and persuading your audience ........................................ 261 Straight facts or a little drama ......................................................... 262 Hybrid ads: Have your cake and eat it, too .................................... 265 Getting Serious about Testing Your Copy ................................................ 270 Checking your writing against screening criteria .......................... 270 Getting other people’s opinions ...................................................... 272 Creating options and picking a winner ........................................... 273 Evaluating for High Involvement ............................................................... 274 Interpreting Your Ad Research to Select or Refine a Design ................. 276 Designing for Stopping Power .................................................................... 278 Measuring stopping power ............................................................... 280 After you’ve gotten their attention .................................................. 281 Applying Great Writing to Your Web Site ................................................. 281 A Final Check: Auditing Your Marketing Communications .................... 283 Create an Ad on Steroids ............................................................................ 284 Obtaining and Using Customer Testimonials .......................................... 286 Asking for testimonials...................................................................... 286 Asking for specific testimonials ....................................................... 288 Processing the testimonial ............................................................... 288 Using customer videos and photos ................................................. 289 Explaining who the testimonial is from .......................................... 290 On the CD...................................................................................................... 290
Slide 17: Table of Contents xv Part V: Sales and Service Success .................................... 291 Chapter 14: Mastering the Sales Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .293 Walking through the Sales Process ........................................................... 293 Getting the Most Out of Your Contacts .................................................... 296 Gaining contacts ................................................................................ 297 Utilizing your call center ................................................................... 298 Exploring need-discovery techniques ............................................. 298 Making the Presentation ............................................................................. 302 Asking for the Business .............................................................................. 303 On the CD...................................................................................................... 304 Chapter 15: Closing the Sale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .305 Relying on Practice, Not Talent, to Close the Sale .................................. 305 Realizing That Closes Aren’t Only for Salespeople ................................. 306 Mastering Closing Techniques................................................................... 307 The direct close ................................................................................. 307 The trial close..................................................................................... 308 The wrap-up close ............................................................................. 310 The process close .............................................................................. 311 The analytical close ........................................................................... 312 The sales promotion close ............................................................... 314 The relationship-building close ....................................................... 315 Something Stinks! Passing the Prospect’s Smell Test ............................. 316 Chapter 16: The Sales Success Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .317 Improving the Flow of High-Quality Leads ............................................... 317 Beefing up your marketing program ............................................... 318 Getting creative when you still need more leads .......................... 319 Using Sales Collateral to Help Win ’Em Over ........................................... 320 Sticking with good collateral ............................................................ 321 Avoiding bad collateral ..................................................................... 321 Overcoming Sales Setbacks........................................................................ 323 The bounce-back factor .................................................................... 323 Retrained for success ........................................................................ 325 Taking a Flexible Approach ........................................................................ 327 Adjusting Your Interpersonal Style ........................................................... 328 Accommodating the introverted customer .................................... 328 Accommodating the logical customer ............................................ 329 Accommodating the creative, free-wheeling customer ................ 330 On the CD...................................................................................................... 330 Part VI: The Part of Tens ................................................. 331 Chapter 17: Ten Great Marketing Strategies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .333 Go for Market Share Now — and Worry About Raising Profits Next Year ...................................................................................... 333
Slide 18: xvi Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition Sponsor a Community Event ...................................................................... 334 Find the Right Trade Show ......................................................................... 334 Update the Benefits You Emphasize in Your Marketing Communications ...................................................................................... 335 Reward Large Purchasers........................................................................... 335 Tell Your Customers How You’re Saving Energy and Materials ........... 336 Allow Customers to Access You Easily .................................................... 336 Introduce Products or Services at a High Price and Then Cut Price with Volume ........................................................... 336 Let Prospects Test You Out ....................................................................... 337 Get Everyone Talking about You ............................................................... 337 Introduce a New Attraction Every Three Months ................................... 337 Chapter 18: Ten Ways to Make Marketing Pay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .339 Print It Yourself............................................................................................ 339 Do More PR................................................................................................... 340 Use More Distributors................................................................................. 340 Give More Product Away ............................................................................ 340 Edit ................................................................................................................ 340 Eat Out More ................................................................................................ 341 Slash Unproductive Programs ................................................................... 341 Invest More in Your Stars ........................................................................... 341 Stage Events ................................................................................................. 342 Control Product Costs ................................................................................ 342 Chapter 19: Ten Ways to Market on the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .343 Experiment with Virtual Brochures and Catalogs ................................... 343 Have a Well-Defined Objective ................................................................... 344 Use a Power Name ....................................................................................... 344 Be outrageous .................................................................................... 345 Be clear................................................................................................ 345 Be polymorphic .................................................................................. 345 Give Away Great Content............................................................................ 346 Minimize Your Load Time .......................................................................... 346 Create a Sense of Community .................................................................... 347 Hold Contests ............................................................................................... 347 Add a News Feature..................................................................................... 347 Take Advantage of Links ............................................................................. 348 Bid on Key Terms ........................................................................................ 348 Appendix: About the CD................................................... 349 System Requirements ................................................................................. 349 Using the CD ................................................................................................. 350 What You’ll Find on the CD ........................................................................ 350 Software .............................................................................................. 351 Chapter files........................................................................................ 351 Troubleshooting .......................................................................................... 354 Customer Care ............................................................................................. 354 Index.............................................................................. 355
Slide 19: Introduction hat can you do today to boost sales, attract new customers, and retain old customers? Well, for starters, you can read this book and make a commitment to work on your marketing program! In Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, I provide information, resources, and tools for the active marketer, salesperson, or manager. Furthermore, you get the benefit of an accompanying CD-ROM that’s chock-full of templates for making plans, sales projections, surveys, and coupon profitability analysis, to name just a few of the goodies I put on there for you. W About This Book Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, covers a wide range of subjects and offers a lot of help to anyone in business, including ✓ Simple, powerful templates and general rules for writing a marketing plan or ad campaign and budgeting your expenses ✓ A collection of advertising templates, brochure templates, and even templates for letterhead and business cards ✓ Insights on how to successfully close the sale through improved sales or marketing techniques ✓ A mini-library of professional photographic images for cost-saving designs ✓ Plenty of ideas, examples, tips, and templates to make your sales and marketing materials look great — and function well, too ✓ Neat marketing software I created to help you do the chores of good marketing quickly and well ✓ Plenty of hands-on tools and activities — many of which I borrowed from high-level corporate training events and workshops — to help you boost your own performance in sales and marketing I wrote Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, for all of you who want to take responsibility for any aspect of sales or marketing in your organization — whether that organization is a small one-person operation, a large multinational corporation, or a public sector or nonprofit organization.
Slide 20: 2 Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, focuses on helping readers communicate better with customers. Whether person-to-person, through a letter, the telephone, a brochure, a Web site, or any other medium, your customer communications play a vital role in the success of your business. I’ve cued up an immense amount of information, resources, and templates to help you improve your customer communications and your overall business image. Have a peek at the contents of the CD to see what I mean! (But be sure to use this valuable CD — just a peek won’t do — because using it correctly can make the difference between a profitable business and no business.) Conventions Used in This Book When reading this book, be aware of the following conventions: ✓ Web sites and e-mail addresses appear in monofont to help them stand out. ✓ Any information that’s helpful or interesting but not essential appears in sidebars, which are the gray-shaded boxes sprinkled throughout the book. ✓ Whenever I introduce a new term, I italicize it. ✓ CD files are numbered, with the first two digits designating the chapter they support and the next two digits indicating the order in which I refer to them in the chapter. What You’re Not to Read For those among you who just want to get down to business, you can safely skip the sidebars and still get all the info you need. Foolish Assumptions I hate to make assumptions about people I don’t know, but, dear reader, I did have to assume a few things about you when writing this book. Hopefully at least one of these assumptions applies to you: ✓ You’re a marketer, salesperson, or at least someone interested in marketing.
Slide 21: Introduction ✓ Your business isn’t as successful as you’d like it to be, and you want to know how you can fix that. ✓ You know what you need to do to improve your marketing program, but you want someone to walk you through the necessary planning and actions. ✓ Or maybe you aren’t sure what to do; you need to do some planning or develop a winning strategy. 3 How This Book Is Organized Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, consists of 19 chapters and a CD-ROM that has examples, templates, forms, and software organized to support and extend each chapter’s coverage. Here’s how I organized all this great information. Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Things go better when you have a plan in mind. In marketing, this plan can be as simple as a back-of-the-envelope program using the Five Ps (product, pricing, placement, promotions, and people), which I cover in Chapter 1. Or it can be as complex as a detailed, systematic audit of all marketing activities, followed by a carefully written plan and a spreadsheet-based budget to go with it. I cover all these options in Part I, and I include the templates needed to take the sting out of designing a good program that boosts sales and profits. In fact, this book’s planning templates are easier to use and more professional than any of the software programs I have evaluated — and those all cost a great deal more than this book. Part II: Advertising Management and Design Ads are often the key element of a marketing program, and in this part, I share insights, how-to tips, and tools to help you design winning ads for your campaign. Advertising needs to start with a good plan and affordable budget, which I cover in Chapter 4. Then you have to actually design hard-hitting ads that draw attention to your message and produce leads and sales. These challenges are covered in Chapter 5.
Slide 22: 4 Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising Advertising is costly. In this part, I show you how to get your message across and generate leads and sales in creative ways that cost less than traditional advertising. Sometimes something as simple as a really well-designed business card is the secret to winning business and boosting sales. Newsletters, publicity, catalogs, logos and letterhead, and other marketing elements may also boost your sales. Check out this part if you want to save money on expensive advertising or just to make sure that you’re doing these essentials as well as you can. Part IV: Honing Your Marketing Skills Some important skills are involved in doing good marketing. For example, you need to do market research to find out what customers want and how to sell better than your competitors do. And communicating well is obviously important in marketing, so I cover writing in this part as well. The star of this section is that secret ingredient that transforms ordinary marketing into the stuff of brilliant breakthroughs: creativity. I include a chapter that shares many of the techniques and tools from my firm’s corporate creativity workshops to help you make sure that you get that special leverage that only creativity can provide. Part V: Sales and Service Success Sales and marketing: That’s what people usually say, separating these two intertwined activities in an artificial way. I don’t really know where selling stops and marketing begins. In every successful business I’ve seen, the two activities work hand in glove to signal new customers to the door, serve current customers, and thank past customers for their business in such a way that they feel good about coming back again. So this part on how to do great sales is an important complement to the other parts of the book. Use it to make sure that you’re finding and closing as many good leads as you possibly can. Or use it to diagnose or improve any sales process, because there’s often room for improved performance. Part VI: The Part of Tens This part covers several topics that may give you winning ideas for your marketing program. Take a look at the collection of winning marketing strategies in Chapter 17 — maybe one of them will work for you! I also cover ways to
Slide 23: Introduction cut costs and increase the return of your marketing investment in this part. And last but definitely not least, I’ve collected simple ideas for using the Web to boost sales and leverage your marketing program. And don’t overlook the Appendix, which explains how to use the CD, or the CD itself. It’s attached to the inside back cover of this book. 5 Icons Used in This Book I occasionally use icons to flag certain passages. Here’s what the icons mean: This icon points out good ideas and shortcuts to make your life as a marketer easier. Any information that’s especially important and worth remembering gets this icon. This icon points out mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. Whatever you do, don’t skip these paragraphs! This icon highlights a method or approach that has been used successfully in real life. When you see this icon, you know that an accompanying example, form, or spreadsheet is available on the CD that comes with this book. Where to Go from Here The beauty of this book is that you can skip to any section or chapter as you desire. You can certainly read the book from cover to cover, but you don’t have to. Start with whatever topic is most important to you and don’t forget to use the accompanying tools on the CD. I encourage you to start using the ideas and tools from this book right away to improve your marketing and boost your sales. I also encourage you to tap into the supporting Web site, www.insightsformarketing.com, to take full advantage of all your resources as a reader of one of my books.
Slide 24: 6 Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition And if you want even more information and advice about marketing principles, check out my other book Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition (Wiley). You certainly don’t need both books, but they do complement one another nicely, and there is virtually no overlap in their contents.
Slide 25: Part I Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs
Slide 26: I In this part . . . equip you with tools and ideas for improving your marketing and boosting your sales. I also share the secret of successful marketers — how they find their marketing zone, the formula that makes it easy to produce growth and control marketing costs. Then I help you control your marketing costs and develop your marketing plans. Need a marketing plan? Honestly, everybody does, but most people dread the challenge of creating one. Probably the best feature in this part is the template and instructions for preparing your own marketing plan in Chapter 2. I include a really cool set of templates: a Word file that you can customize for the text portion of your plan and Excel spreadsheet templates that you use for your sales projections and marketing budget. I must be out of my mind to give these things away (my competitors charge hundreds of dollars for template software like this), so take advantage of it before I come to my senses!
Slide 27: Chapter 1 Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing In This Chapter ▶ Finding the zone ▶ Committing to low-risk, flexible marketing methods ▶ Boosting your marketing skills ▶ Examining the Five Ps: Product, price, placement, promotion, and people ▶ Marketing with imagination ▶ Reaching your marketing zone M arketing can’t be reduced to formulas. Not completely. There is always a little magic in it. The magic comes from a mix of imagination, know-how, and experimentation. Gradually, as you work with these three powerful tools, you will develop your own formulas. Did I say marketing can’t be reduced to formulas? That isn’t entirely true. Your marketing — the specific methods you develop to boost your sales and improve your profits — will eventually crystallize into a tried-and-true formula that works for you. But this formula will be unique to your business, and you can’t copy it from anyone else. In this chapter, I help you work on your formula — the formula that will put you in your marketing zone with reliable results from an efficient, effective marketing program. The goal of this chapter is to put you in your marketing zone. Finding Your Marketing Zone Your marketing zone is the right combination of strategies and tactics to bring you all the business you need (see Figure 1-1). Finding your zone means exploring marketing options until you develop a formula that really works, a formula that you can rely on with only minor adjustments from time to time.
Slide 28: 10 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Primary marketing method Figure 1-1: The marketing zone model. Supportive marketing methods Businesses that are in their marketing zone are able to count on a healthy flow of sales, which allows them to be forward thinking. These businesses are covering the basics so that they can focus on what exciting new things to do next. For example, a dental practice has worked out, through several years of experimentation, a formula that is based on friendly service (from the person who greets you through the person who treats you), a good location, and regular customer contact via phone calls and postcards. These three elements constitute their marketing program. (The primary element of their marketing is their friendly service and great staff; the secondary elements are their location, calls, and mailings.) The practice knows how much it needs to spend to sustain this program and get consistent results. The business is profitable and successful. Now the practice can think about opening a branch office, or adding another dentist, or expanding into orthodonture, or any number of ideas that can grow the business beyond its current base. But until the dental practice had worked out its basic marketing formula and entered its marketing zone, starting any new initiatives would have been foolhardy. How do you know you’re in the zone? In your marketing zone, you should find that ✓ You get reasonably consistent results every time you use a marketing tool. For example, if you do a mailing, you should be able to predict within 10 percent how many responses you’ll get.
Slide 29: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing ✓ You operate in the black. Your marketing activities should return a profit. Successful marketing can be defined as any marketing that reliably returns more in profits than it costs to do. ✓ You should know what your top three to five marketing activities are and how to do them well. And you should probably be investing close to half of your marketing spending in the single most effective marketing activity. When you have satisfied these three requirements, you’ll know you’ve found your marketing zone. The searching is over! Now you just need to work on repeating the formula with small improvements and watch your sales and profits grow. No formula works forever. Eventually, you’ll begin to find that results are slipping or profits are shrinking. If performance deteriorates, you’ll need to search again. Perhaps it’s time to alter your formula and update your plans. Should a new lead marketing method replace your old one? Do you need to make a major change in one or more of your top five marketing tools? Take a close look and be prepared to spend time and effort revitalizing your zone if performance slips and you no longer can say “Yes” to the three indicators described in the preceding list. For example, Corporate Apparel Unlimited (CAU) of Anderson, Indiana, exemplifies a contemporary approach to selling customized clothing for team use and business promotions. Traditionally, such firms always used a color catalog as their primary marketing tool, with a call service center and smaller direct mail pieces in secondary place to support it. But when CAU started in 2000, it redefined the formula with a well-designed, informative, interactive Web site as its primary marketing tool. By now, most of its competitors have had to switch to the Web as their lead marketing tool, too. (See www.cauinc. com for a great example of how these products are now marketed.) 11 Pinpointing Your Top Three Sales and Marketing Tools If your business has been operating for a year or more, then you’re probably doing one or more marketing activities that work fairly well. Start by examining the methods that have been most productive for you so far and see whether you can refine them to make them work even better. Your past experience is your most powerful source of information about what your top marketing tools should be.
Slide 30: 12 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Next, take a calculated look at other businesses. Start with your most successful competitors (but don’t try to copy businesses that are more than three times your size, as their budget puts them in a different marketing class and you probably won’t be able to afford to use their formulas right now). A good idea is to search for a successful similar company in another region and then study what they do. This approach isn’t out and out copying; it’s benchmarking (or learning from others’ successful examples), which takes advantage of the fact that ideas are free and anyone can try them. Don’t copy the text or art of their marketing materials directly — those are copyrighted. Only benchmark general ideas — for example, if they use a large display ad in the Yellow Pages, try the same strategy with an ad of your own. After you’ve examined similar businesses for marketing ideas, take a look at dissimilar ones. Sometimes the best ideas come from outside your industry. For example, the owner of a small company that makes fishing lures was inspired by a friend who wrote a blog about business insurance and how to buy and use it. Nobody in the fishing equipment field was writing blogs, but obviously they were an up-and-coming marketing medium, so he started blogging and soon had more orders than he could fill. His blog became his lead marketing tool, and he supported it with a Web site, a traditional printed catalog, and a toll-free number for people who wanted to order by phone. This marketing zone formula worked well, and the business grew without high-cost, traditional marketing. His more traditional competitors advertised in magazines, but his unique formula worked just as well and cost much less. (See Chapter 9 for advice on using newsletters and blogs to grow your business.) Change your mix until you get a formula that is predictable and highly profitable. Often, when I look at marketing plans, I find myself suggesting that the current lead marketing tool be demoted to secondary status, and a new tool put in top place. Be willing to experiment until you find a lead marketing method that really pulls its weight. Here’s a great example of the search for a successful marketing formula: A friend of mine who owned a landscape firm was doing a mix of residential and commercial work for office buildings and stores. Her business struggled with marginal profits until a large, stable, profitable contract with a big office building pointed the way toward a lucrative marketing zone. Now she avoids residential customers and instead focuses on making sales calls to commercial property owners and managers who can commit to large annual contracts. She sells using a professional-looking sales binder with testimonial letters from customers and a detailed listing of service and price options. Gone are the small, low-profit accounts. Now she has a dozen annual contracts that support a staff of ten and provide a healthy profit. She pays her staff well and
Slide 31: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing hires reliable, stable people who deliver professional, consistent service. Trucks with her signs on them are often parked in front of upscale professional buildings, helping build her brand. She follows up all leads personally with a well-rehearsed office visit that often produces a new contract. Her goal is to add one to three new accounts each year — and so far, her simple marketing formula has met or exceeded that goal. (See Part V for how to make a professional sales call and close big accounts like she does.) 13 Adjusting for the Economic Cycle It would be nice if the marketing formula that worked last year would work perfectly this year, too. However, even a great marketing formula needs to be improved. New competitors, new tastes, and new technologies can outdate your products or antiquate your marketing message, pushing you out of your zone. Marketing is inherently creative for this reason (and that is what I love about it!). So you should anticipate and welcome changes. And if the economic cycle is shifting, then you really have to be on your guard because your marketing formula probably will need to change dramatically in order to keep ahead of the economy. Think of the economic cycle as the key to whether you should be playing defense or offense as you formulate your marketing game plan. Economic cycles are inevitable. If you adjust your marketing-zone formula accordingly, you’ll survive the tough times and grow in the good times, for an overall effect of faster growth and higher profits than the typical marketer who fails to adjust rapidly to changing economic weather. Tightening up for tough times The 2008 rise in energy and food prices created a lot of cost and price pressures on businesses. Restaurants found the cost of ingredients going up by 30 percent at the same time that customers were trying to cut their fuel use by avoiding drives to distant restaurants. Hotels and other travel businesses also suffered from the rising cost of travel by car or plane. Book sales, casino revenues, movie ticket sales, and many other categories declined. And because banks had way over-extended their credit-card and home mortgage lending in the earlier boom period, loans became extremely tight that year, too — which meant that consumers were cutting back on spending across the board, not just in areas effected by energy and food prices.
Slide 32: 14 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs What to do? These three steps help smart marketers get through that tough period and emerge stronger: 1. Control your own costs. Sales fall because your customers are trying to control their spending. If you don’t cut your costs more aggressively than they do, your profits will be squeezed. Renegotiate contracts whenever possible. Switch to lower-cost suppliers or ingredients. Lay off idle workers. Find ways to reduce your use of energy, even if it means doing your baking at night when electricity is cheapest or closing off part of your space and not heating it. Be a miser. Don’t make the mistake of waiting to see what happens. Take the lead in changing the rules of your business. 2. Change your offerings. The things people buy in good economic times are different from the things they buy in bad times, but people still buy. Figure out what you should be selling in a down economy by imagining that you’re starting a new business for this economy, using the assets of your old business as building blocks. For example, if you own a luxury restaurant, think about what kind of food establishment you can convert it to that will be profitable with a menu based on lower-priced ingredients, a smaller, less-highly-trained kitchen staff, and fewer wait-staff. As soon as you’ve worked out the details, print a new menu and make the changes. To hesitate is to lose money, so make those changes right away. You can always go back to the old formula next year or whenever the economy turns around. Ideas for adjusting your offering (if you’re a restaurant adjusting for a down economy) include smaller portions, less expensive ingredients or components, shorter-term contracts and options, and anything that reduces the price, risk, or upfront investment for your customers. Scaled-back offerings are considerate and appropriate in harder times. 3. Keep marketing! Don’t disappear from customer radar screens. Once you’ve controlled your costs and adjusted your offerings for the current situation, get back out there with modest, short-term investments in new signs and local newspaper ads, listings in Web directories, radio ads, a mailer, or whatever you think might work to reach gun-shy consumers. (See Part III for ways to promote your business without a big ad budget.) Increase your use of search-term ads (pay-per-click advertising) on Google and Yahoo! because these search engines target only those customers who are still shopping in spite of the bad economy. Even though sales are down, some people will buy. Be the visible, realistic choice for them, and you may even grow your business in the bad times — and emerge a stronger leader come the next economic boom. (See Chapter 19 for more ways to market on the Web.)
Slide 33: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing These three simple steps work pretty well for any business, so long as you’re capable of controlling costs and avoiding large losses. However, if you find your costs are out of control, and you’re bleeding money, consider a more radical response: Shut down, sell, or convert your business into something that can make money. Never go down with the ship! In every economic downturn, many businesses are too poorly prepared or too weak to survive. You can tell whether yours is one of them if it proves impossible to control your costs in spite of a month or two of hard effort. If so, stop bailing and bail out. However, most businesses can be adjusted to survive the downturn and emerge stronger (although perhaps smaller) when the economy recovers. Another word of warning: You have to use these three steps in order. If you try to fix all your problems with a new advertising campaign or other marketing gimmick (Step 3) before you’ve controlled costs (Step 1) and adjusted your offering for the current economy (Step 2), your marketing initiative will lose money and put you further behind. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! 15 Taking advantage of a growth economy What about when the pendulum swings the other way, and the economy starts to grow at an accelerated rate? This situation also requires adjustment. Marketers who continue to be conservative get passed by flashy new competitors. Here’s how to adjust to a growth economy after you’ve survived the downturn: 1. Pick your fastest-growing product or service and invest in it. Whatever seems to be sharing in the economic momentum should be promoted aggressively. Find new customers. Do more sales and marketing. Run more ads. Expand your territory. You need to grow sales in the easiest way possible, in order to start bringing in extra profits right away. Otherwise, you won’t accumulate the cash needed to invest in growing your business rapidly during the upturn. 2. Redesign your product line and pricing with the single-minded goal of raising the size of the average purchase. Add options and extras. Cross-sell with a special two-for-one or trial offer. Increase the size of your packages and offer a quantity incentive. Ideally, you should at least double the average sale during an economic boom. 3. Look for new products and/or customers. Expanding into new categories and territories is your next source of growth, after you’ve successfully leveraged your most promising product and doubled the size of the average purchase. Now is the time to innovate. Pick up a new line of products that seem exciting and different.
Slide 34: 16 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Go after an emerging group of customers with new tastes or needs. But don’t forget to keep your core business healthy and profitable (see Steps 1 and 2) because a profitable core business gives you the capacity to try exciting new growth ideas. Marketing Smart to Avoid Costs and Risks Marketing can be a dangerous game. I’ve seen many businesses commit to a marketing plan, only to find that the expected sales didn’t materialize and they ran out of cash. What happens if you use most of your marketing budget to buy a mailing list and print and mail a new catalog, but hardly any orders come in? This event happens all too often. As the author of books on marketing, I get requests for help from people who have made this kind of mistake every month. Here are some rules to keep you from blowing your marketing budget on things that don’t bring in a good return: ✓ Spend no more than 10 percent of your marketing budget on unproven ideas. If it hasn’t worked several times for you already, it’s unproven for you, no matter what others may say. You have to test it for your business before you admit it into your marketing zone. ✓ Test each marketing idea several times on a small scale before committing to a big buy or large run. You don’t know enough to draw firm conclusions until you’ve seen what happens with repetition. (A small Web site needs to bring orders before you invest in a big, expensive one.) ✓ Make sure the ad, mailing, Web directory, or other marketing tool reaches your customers. Many media buys sound great because they promise a big reach — large audience — but who cares? What matters is whether your good customers and prospects are in that audience. For example, if your customers don’t listen to public radio, avoid the temptation of sponsoring your local public radio station, even though it’s cheaper than buying ad time on commercial radio stations. ✓ Don’t try to imitate the big spenders. The Coca Cola brand is maintained in the public minds through millions of dollars of TV and outdoor advertising every day. Obviously, most businesses can’t afford to flood the world with their brand identity. Nor can they print glossy catalogs every month that look as fancy as the latest Victoria’s Secret mailing. These highly visible marketing role models are completely useless for 99.9 percent of my readers! Look for successful local marketing and advertising because successful small and mid-sized businesses offer the most practical and affordable benchmarks.
Slide 35: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing ✓ Collect junk mail. One person’s trash is another’s treasure. Many of the best marketing talents are busy writing postcards and pitch letters, designing coupons and special offers, or brainstorming new ways of making the outside of a mailing so intriguing that it actually gets read before it’s recycled. Learn from their work. Also, a lot of your junk mail is from local and small-scale marketers, and they’re your best sources of good ideas if you’re a small to mid-sized marketer, too. I keep a file drawer of hanging folders just for the latest junk mail, and I often browse through it for fresh ideas. I also keep a bookmark folder on my computer where I have links to interesting Web pages and blogs. When I need a new idea, I look for low-cost examples to fuel my marketing imagination. The bigger my file of examples, the more likely I am to come up with something that will do the trick at a modest cost. In addition to these risk-reducing marketing tips, I strongly recommend that you keep a close eye on cash flow. Sometimes marketers get new-idea fever: They get so excited about a new marketing concept that they gamble too much on its success. Don’t overspend on marketing! The best marketing budget is the one you can afford to lose if nothing goes the way you hoped and planned. Yes, that is a pessimistic statement, but it’s born of reality. For example, an expensive ad campaign may or may not work. If it produces few or no sales, you better make sure that you can survive to try another idea. My recommendation is that you spend your extra cash on your marketing. Don’t spend money that you have to earn back by the end of the month to pay the rent and electric bill. Nothing in marketing is guaranteed. Everything is a gamble. As you refine your formula and find your marketing zone, the risk goes down — but it never goes away completely. 17 Strengthening Your Marketing Skill-Set Some people are much better at marketing than others. You can continue to feel challenged in this arena, or you can commit to strengthening your skillset and becoming one of those all-too-rare expert marketers. Skilled marketers are rare because marketing requires a wide range of skills: creativity, problem-solving, communications, forecasting, research, budgeting, and pricing, plus technical knowledge of printing, the Web, database management, and more. Not to mention presentation and sales skills, customer service and service recovery skills, and the ability to shift rapidly from one of these skills to another . . . and another . . . and another. I think marketing is incredibly challenging and difficult, and I rarely meet anyone who is truly great at it.
Slide 36: 18 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs I do meet a lot of successful businesspeople who have one thing in common: an enthusiasm for strengthening their marketing skills. They’ve gradually gotten pretty good at the majority of these skills. To follow in their footsteps, you need to be willing to be an adult learner. Pick up a good book, learn a new software program, talk to someone who knows all about something you know nothing about — be open and interested, and you’ll expand your skillset, too. (I include a workshop-style section on marketing skills in Part IV of this book.) Design, copywriting, creativity, and more In this book, I help you work on a variety of marketing skills. Graphic design comes to the forefront in ad and business card design (see Chapter 6). Copywriting surfaces in Chapter 9 when I address blogging and newsletters and in Chapter 10 when I address publicity. Communication is so essential to good marketing that I also cover the basics of persuasive writing in Chapter 13. Research skills are invaluable to the marketer, and I share some of them (along with tools for your customer research) in Chapter 11. Creative thinking is perhaps the most important marketing skill of all, and I hope that the creative examples and ideas in every chapter of this book will help you power up your marketing imagination — but to be doubly sure, I include skill-building information in a miniworkshop on creativity in Chapter 12. Artful persuasion: Sales skills to the fore What is the most important marketing skill? Is it communicating? Thinking creatively? Researching new opportunities? Planning? Pricing? Wow, it sure is hard to decide, because so many skills are important. Some people would say that the single most important skill is salesmanship. I know a lot of excellent salespeople, and I know a lot of business owners and managers, but honestly, the two lists don’t really overlap. Most of the people who read my marketing books don’t feel very confident when they have to do sales. That is why I recommend studying Part V carefully. You have so many opportunities to use a little salesmanship — make sure that you have the skill-set needed to take advantage of every opportunity!
Slide 37: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing 19 Quick skill-building tricks and tips You have plenty of time to refine your skills, so I don’t go into depth on the topic now (Part IV goes into skill-development in depth). However, I want to pass on several skill-building tips that you can begin to practice right away, and that ought to improve your marketing performance even before you get to any of the later chapters: ✓ Say it in half the words. That advice means cutting the other half. Almost every letter, slogan, e-mail, ad headline, blog, product description, sales pitch, or Web page is too long. Discipline yourself to communicate succinctly. You’ll be amazed at the impact. ✓ Be concrete. Give examples. Quote satisfied customers. Give specific information (statistics, specifications). Let the facts do the selling for you. ✓ Know your customer. If you can describe your target customer very clearly, you’re probably ready to grow your sales. Too often, marketers have only a vague concept of who they need to reach and make a sale to. A lack of clarity about your target customer makes your entire marketing program poorly focused, which dooms it to low response rates and low profitability. ✓ Give your brand a winning personality and make everything consistent with it. Customers need to like your brand, so please try to imagine it as a person, and make sure that it goes to work each day with a cheerful demeanor and appropriate attire. Inconsistent, unappealing presentations are the bane of good marketing. Make sure that everything the customer sees (from a billing statement to a storefront) is appealing and consistent with the image you want to project. If you’re not already doing these four things well (and most marketers aren’t), then get to work on them right now. There is no time like the present for boosting your marketing skills — and your marketing results! Designing Your Marketing Program Your marketing program is the coordinated, thoughtfully designed set of activities that put you in your marketing zone. (For more on this topic, see the section “Finding Your Marketing Zone,” earlier in this chapter.) As you may recognize from Figure 1-1, earlier in this chapter, good marketing programs usually have a primary marketing method, supported by several strong secondary methods.
Slide 38: 20 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs In addition, good programs usually include a range of small activities that make up a learning foundation at the bottom of the pyramid. All together, these small foundation blocks should not add up to more than a fifth of your budget. They include basics like your business cards and telephones, as well as experiments with new marketing methods that may some day rise up to replace older methods in the base or top of your marketing pyramid. Your marketing program may consist of any one of the hundreds of things marketers do to spread the word about a brand or ask customers for a sale. It’s almost impossible to make a master list of all the possibilities. For example, think of how many options you have just for displaying an advertisement. You can place it in a consumer or trade magazine, a newspaper or newspaper insert, the phone book or other printed directories, Web pages with high traffic, bus and bus stop signs, highway billboards, airport posters and backlit displays, subway car posters, automobile signs and bumper stickers, sponsorship signs at sporting events, and so on. Which of the many of advertising options should be in your program? To make program design even tougher, many alternatives compete with advertising. You can mail postcards, free samples, catalogs, direct response sales letters, e-mails, or other communications directly to prospective customers. Hundreds of list brokers and printers are eager to design and deliver a direct response marketing piece for you, if you think this approach is a better use of your marketing buck than print advertising. Or what about the old saw that the three secrets of success in marketing are location, location, location? Maybe you need to emphasize having a storefront or accessible office or showroom in a good location, with plenty of appealing signage or window displays to draw customers in. Then again, perhaps all these marketing ideas are too costly, and customers would rather you keep it bare-bones and offer them a rock-bottom price instead. Speaking of price, what about coupons, discounts, and other special offers? You have lots of options in this area, too. It’s no wonder that most marketers throw up their hands and just do the same thing they did last year. Changing their marketing mix and planning a new program seems daunting. However, I promise you one thing is for certain: If you use the same program you did last year, you’ll get worse results. Marketing programs need to be studied and improved from year to year. The variety and complexity of choices makes getting organized and focused difficult. Fortunately, you can use the Five Ps to organize your thinking, decide what to do, and document and budget your program. The Five Ps stand for the five broad areas (product, price, placement, promotion, and people) you can look to for ways to boost sales or accomplish other marketing goals as you build customer commitment to your brilliant products, services, or brands. As you design your marketing program, decide which of the five Ps is most important for you right now. Rank them by importance so that you’ll know where to focus your efforts and spending.
Slide 39: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing For example, if you’re the inventor of a hot new product, then product is probably your No. 1 priority. You need to put the most resources into refining and producing the product because it’s the star of your program. To sell it, you probably should focus on giving away samples and getting people to test it. Then your product can sell itself. The following sections explore each of the Five Ps. 21 Product To marketers, product is what you sell, whether it’s a physical product or a service, idea, or even another person (like in politics) or yourself (like when you search for a new job). When you think about ways of changing your product offering to boost sales, you can look at anything from new or upgraded products to different packaging to added extras like services or warranties. And you can also think about ways to improve the quality of your product. After all, people want the best quality they can get, so any improvements in quality usually translate into gains in sales as well. Price To marketers, price is not only the list price or sticker price of a product, but it’s also any adjustments to that price, such as discounts and other price-oriented inducements to buy, including coupons, frequency rewards, quantity discounts, and free samples. Any such offers adjust the price the customer pays, with the goal of boosting sales. Price-based inducements to buy are generally termed sales promotions by marketers, just to confuse the issue hopelessly. As I delve further into this subject in Chapter 8, you’ll also find out how to use price-based promotions to boost your sales and attract new customers. (I also cover pricing in depth in the companion book, Marketing For Dummies.) Placement Placement is where and when you present your product to customers. You have many options as to how you place the product in both time and space. Whether you’re dealing with retail stores, catalogs, sales calls, Web pages, or 24-hour-a-day telephone services that can process customer orders, you’re dealing with that placement P.
Slide 40: 22 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs If you want a feel as to how valuable this P is to the marketing mix, just think about how valuable shelf placement at your local grocery store is to, say, Coke or Pepsi. Imagine what that placement is worth to the marketing of those products! Oh, by the way, marketers stretch a point by calling this third P “placement” because it’s more conventional to call it “distribution.” But that starts with a d, so it doesn’t sound as good. However, just remember that when people talk about distribution, they’re talking about placement, and vice versa. You’ll hear one more term that relates to placement: logistics. Logistics is the physical distribution of products — shipping and taking inventory, and all the fancy transportation and information technologies that you can harness to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your distribution processes. Logistics is another useful path to go down when you want to think about where products should be placed for easy purchase. Distribution concerns where and when products are offered for sale, whereas logistics addresses how they get there. These are related concerns, of course, so they both fall under the list of options when you want to think hard about placement. You can play around with either or both in your efforts to build a strong marketing program. For example, if you add distributors and enhance your Web site to offer online ordering, you’re boosting placement by enhancing both distribution and logistics to create more ways to get the product to customers. Some marketing programs place distributors in the primary spot at the top of their marketing zone pyramid. If you have something unique and can afford to sell at wholesale (at least 50 percent off the list price), then seriously consider finding distributors and letting them do the heavy lifting when it comes to finding customers and making sales. The more marketers, the better! Promotion Promotion is all the sales activities, advertising, publicity, special events, displays, signs, Web pages, and other communications designed to inform and persuade people about your product. I like to think of promotion as the face of marketing because it’s the part that reaches out to ask customers for their business. It ought to be a visible and friendly face because you can’t just tell people what to do and expect them to obey. Instead, promotion must find ways to attract prospective customers’ attention long enough to communicate something appealing about the product.
Slide 41: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing The goal of all promotions is to stimulate people to want to buy. Promotions need to be motivational. They also need to move people closer to a purchase. Sometimes a promotion’s goal is to move people all the way to a purchase. That’s what a so-called direct-response ad is supposed to do. A directresponse ad invites people to call, e-mail, fax, or mail in their orders right away. Many catalogs use this strategy. Readers are supposed to select some items, fill in their order forms, and mail them in with their credit-card numbers, for example. Other promotions do less. For example, a 30-second television spot may be designed only to make people remember and like a brand so that they’ll be a little more likely to buy it the next time they’re in a store where it’s sold. But all promotions work toward that ultimate sale in some way, and when you think about all the creative options for communicating with prospective customers, you should always be clear about what part of the customer’s movement toward purchase your promotion is supposed to accomplish. 23 People In most businesses, people are responsible for many aspects of product or service quality. The personal connection between your people and your customers and clients may be a powerful influence on referral marketing —where your customers serve as a sort of mini sales force for you. They refer others to you because they’ve had a positive relationship with your people. In many businesses, people are directly responsible for the customer contacts through personal sales and service. If your employees work directly with customers, then add training, recognition, and reward to your marketing program, because it will help to make those people positive and enthusiastic. You can find many connections between how employees feel and how customers feel. For example, I often work with companies where the salespeople or service people say that they’re frustrated because they have to deal with angry, uninformed, or otherwise difficult customers. If the employees feel this way about the customers, then, of course, they tend to be negative (impatient, curt) with customers, which makes the customers even more difficult. In my training and consulting work, I explore a variety of interesting techniques based on building the motivation of salespeople and other employees, improving communications with customers, and handling service problems and customer frustrations. (See Chapter 16 for some of the most important ways of improving customer service.) The people side of marketing is often the least visible — that’s why people aren’t traditionally included in the list of marketing Ps. But adding people to the list offers you another powerful lever for achieving your sales and marketing goals.
Slide 42: 24 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Profiting from the Five Ps I should tell you that the Four Ps is the first thing taught to students in a formal marketing class. It’s just like my list, except it leaves out the people (a big mistake in real-world marketing, if not at business schools). To profit from the Five Ps, use the list as a mental tool to think about these five broad ways of growing your business and boosting your sales. The Five Ps are just a starting point — the street signs along the road to a great marketing program — and to benefit from them, you have to explore the blocks they mark. One way you can profit from the Five Ps is to systematically look for weaknesses and strengths in each of the five areas: your product, pricing, placement, promotions, and personal connections with customers. CD0101 is a form you can use to do a quick planning exercise based on the Five Ps. Print a copy of it and sharpen your pencil, and your wits, to see whether you can brainstorm some ideas for improving your marketing program in one or more of the Five Ps’ areas. A good way to profit from your knowledge of the Five Ps is to do some creative thinking about each of the Five Ps every day. Stop and ask yourself these five simple, powerful questions and see whether you can find ways to build your sales by doing something new and creative in at least one of these vital marketing areas: ✓ What can you do to make your product more appealing? ✓ What can you do to make your product more accessible? ✓ What can you do to make your prices more appealing? ✓ What can you do to make your promotions more visible and persuasive? ✓ What can you do to make your human interactions with customers more friendly and helpful? Notice that these questions are open-ended. They don’t have right answers. Instead, they invite exploration and experimentation. They’re the kind of questions you can even ask your employees — and offer incentives for new ideas. These questions tease the imagination. That’s because a considerable amount of imagination is necessary to grow any business or boost the sales of any product. You won’t find any pat formulas that are guaranteed to work. Marketing isn’t like chemistry or algebra or bookkeeping: Marketing has no right answers — only the answers you invent, test, and develop. After much thinking and trying, you develop new and better formulas for yourself and your business; formulas that’ll give you pretty good results, at least for a time, and then you’ll have to update or replace them in order to keep sales flowing and growing.
Slide 43: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing 25 Exercising Your Marketing Imagination What’s marketing imagination? It’s the one term I wish everyone would associate with marketing if they remembered only one thing, because it’s even more important than the Five Ps. (See the section “Designing Your Marketing Program” for more on the Five Ps.) In fact, marketing imagination is the most important factor in marketing. Marketing imagination is creative questioning about everything and anything that may help boost sales and make for more satisfied customers. And marketing imagination is what drives growth and development in your business. Look at any successful business, and you find that it’s done innovative things and tried many new ideas. Business leaders are imaginative and willing, even eager, to try out new ideas and approaches. They have active marketing imaginations. Good marketing is creative marketing. Having marketing imagination is always seeking new and better ways, always looking to perfect all five Ps. Oddly, creativity is often left out of books and courses on marketing. People tend to think of advertising as creative, but they overlook the importance of creativity in all aspects of marketing. Yet a creative approach to your basic marketing strategy can also be very powerful. Think about the success of Ebay.com, the first company to offer virtual auctions that you can participate in from any computer in the world. I guarantee that you can innovate in your distribution and logistics in order to win more sales through placement, if you’re willing to be open-minded and inquisitive about your options. (For more on marketing strategies, see Chapter 3. For more on using the Web in your marketing, see Chapter 19.) Similarly, plenty of examples of creativity exist in pricing and product offerings. How many times does a business succeed by offering a new or different product selection? Here’s a simple example from the town where my offices are located. Quite a few gyms in the area compete for customers, and one of them recently made two simple changes: ✓ Product innovation: They introduced a new class on capoeira — a blend of martial arts and dance to Brazilian drums — featuring a high-energy workout that appeals to younger people who are looking for something new and exciting to do. ✓ Pricing: They advertised a first-class-free policy for the new capoeira class because they felt that people would really like it if they just tried it. The price promotion worked. It attracted a whole bunch of curious people, many who liked the free course so much that they signed up for ten more courses at full price. And some of them went on to become full members of the athletic club, using the weight machines and other services, too.
Slide 44: 26 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs This example illustrates two important points about the exercise of marketing imagination. The first point is that you don’t have to come up with something dramatically new. Sure, a patentable new invention might be a great product innovation. But in general, you can make plenty of progress simply by coming up with many small ideas. I’m not talking rocket science here. Anyone in business has enough intelligence, imagination, and funding to be a great marketer. And the second point is that you have to go out and try your ideas; try them in simple, easy ways that don’t expose you to excessive risks of failure. (For more on risks, see the section “Marketing Smart to Avoid Costs and Risks,” earlier in this chapter.) Great marketing arises from frequent cycles of thinking (or intuiting) and trying. You have an insight or idea. You think of ways to try it out. You test it in the real world and see what happens. You learn from how customers respond. Their responses fuel more imagining and planning, which then leads to more testing and trying. And so the process goes on in an endless loop driven by your marketing imagination but firmly rooted in the real world of customer opinion and action. What you want to remember about marketing imagination is that it’s not only creative, but it’s also experimental. Great marketers wear two hats — the hat of the artist and the hat of the scientist. A great marketer may have an “Ah ha!” experience in the shower one morning and show up at work thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do such and such?” By lunchtime, she’s changed hats and is carefully reviewing her options for trying out the idea. By the time she goes home, she’s already said to herself, “I think I’ve figured out how to safely test my cool new idea.” Reframing Your Presentation Every marketing program has a common theme — communications that present the product offering in a persuasive manner. Whether you rely on advertising, packaging, a brochure, catalogs, Web sites, signs, or even public relations (news coverage), you’re relying on the persuasive power of information. A great use for your creativity is to rewrite your marketing communications. Bump them up. Make them more persuasive. And before you start working on clever or humorous ad concepts like the expensive ads you see on national TV, I want to ask you to focus your creative communications more simply than that. Just try to get across a few compelling facts. Figure out what information you can share with prospects that will help convert them to purchasers. The better you support your information, the easier it is for people to take a chance and make a purchase.
Slide 45: Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing 27 The persuasive power of information I want to illustrate how to use information to pump up your marketing by introducing you to the sport of squash. This very fast-paced indoor racket sport is popular internationally, but not well known in the United States. However, my daughter and I happen to play it, and we both broke our rackets recently. You can’t walk into a typical U.S. sporting goods store and buy a good racket, so I went online to www.justsquash.com to shop and was interested in the new Feather Heavy Hitter racket. Why? Because, according to this Web site, the racket was recently used by three British Open winners. That fact gets a shopper’s attention. I should also add that the Feather (which is made by an entrepreneurial Los Angeles company founded by top squash players) costs $160, which is about 50 percent more than the last racket I bought. So before buying, I needed to feel confident that it was worth the higher price. I Googled the maker (www.feather sports.com) and followed the link to its news page (www.feathersports.com/news) where I quickly read stories about young winners who use the racket. For example, Karim Ali Fathi of Cairo, Egypt, won the British Open in the Under 15 category while playing with a Feather. A photograph on the Web page showed a handsome young man setting up for a mighty shot, his red and yellow Feather racket firmly in hand. I decided my 15-year-old daughter would be okay with the idea of playing with the same racket that he plays with. The manufacturing data on the Feather was also impressive: Reinforcement meshes of titanium and nickel and a frame of 100 percent carbon with a strung weight of 148 grams, which may mean little to you if you don’t play, but to a squash player it suggests high performance. I decided to run up the credit card and buy Feathers for both of us. I recommend the Feather if you want to win the game of squash. And I highly recommend harnessing the power of information if you want to win the game of marketing. What information can you assemble to make as strong a case for your product as Feather Sports does for its racket? Make your case clearly and well with a short list of impressive facts, and you’re sure to increase sales. You may even be able to raise your price. The Five-Minute Marketing Zone Plan This plan is a quick exercise that will help you design a winning marketing program. Do it now or wait and use it as the foundation for a more detailed planning process based on Chapter 2. It’s the perfect transition into that topic and chapter. Oh, but what, exactly, is “it”? Print the files labeled CD0102 and CD0103. The first is a worksheet for listing and analyzing all the marketing activities that are candidates for your marketing program. Use it to focus your search on the most appropriate and powerful marketing activities for your particular business. The second file is another worksheet, this one in the form of the marketing zone pyramid. Use it to create
Slide 46: 28 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs a sketch of your marketing program by filling in the blanks. This sketch will help you structure the plan by defining your primary marketing method or tool (which should receive roughly 40 percent of your marketing budget), your several secondary tools (which together should receive no more than 50 percent of your budget), and your tertiary options (which receive no more than 15 percent of your budget). It’s possible — and sometimes desirable — to do more detailed and laborious planning. However, the results from these quick worksheet exercises are often fairly good and can improve your focus and clarity about how to market your product. If you think these exercises have done the trick and you know enough now to forge ahead without more formal planning, be my guest. You can skip to later chapters that apply to your primary, secondary, and tertiary marketing tools. (Also keep in mind that you can find additional information in my companion book, Marketing For Dummies, and on the Web site I maintain for my readers at www.insightsformarketing.com.) Or if you want to be more thoughtful and careful about your planning, take your worksheet results and flip to Chapter 2. On the CD Check out the following items on the CD-ROM: ✓ Five Minute Marketing Plan (CD0101) ✓ Your Marketing Zone Program Worksheet (CD0102) ✓ Your Marketing Zone Planning Diagram (CD0103)
Slide 47: Chapter 2 Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan In This Chapter ▶ Analyzing your marketing activities ▶ Using a marketing audit to zero in on problem areas ▶ Focusing and formatting your marketing plan ▶ Designing your plan using a standard outline or the CD template ▶ Selecting your winning marketing strategy ▶ Learning from experience Y ou’re not going to believe all the great tools on the CD for this chapter. I can hardly believe them myself. The CD contains dozens of pages of templates, audit forms, and interactive forecasting, planning, and budgeting tools for you to use. The reason I put so many cool tools on the CD for marketing audits, plans, and budgets is that I get more questions about these topics than any others. Many readers wrestle with how to audit and improve a marketing program, and how to write a marketing plan and prepare a good budget. These tasks are difficult. The only way to make it relatively easy is to have someone walk you through the process, which is what I do in this chapter. Auditing Your Marketing Activities A marketing audit often identifies problems that are holding you back. It reviews everything that influences customer behavior and helps you identify hidden problems and opportunities. A marketing plan lays out your analysis of the situation in your market along with your strategies and how you’ll use the various elements of your marketing mix (such as advertising, your Web site, and pricing) to execute the strategy. It also has sales projections and a budget for your marketing spending.
Slide 48: 30 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs An audit is a great way to quickly find and work on weak areas in your marketing process. A marketing audit can also form the basis of your marketing plan. How? Well, if you take the audit, which you can find on the CD, and then make a list of the items that you scored a “No” on, this information can become a starting agenda for what to do in your next plan to improve your marketing performance and results. The editable Microsoft Word format marketing audit on your CD (filename CD0201) is divided into nine areas, each with a list of a dozen or more specific questions. The questions have Yes/No answers, which makes the audit quick and easy to complete. In case you find it difficult to open this file or you want a simpler, non-editable file format, you can print CD0202, which is the same audit saved as a PDF file. Use the printout of CD0202 to complete your audit in pencil. When you complete the audit (using either CD0201 or CD0202 depending on your preference for file formats), simply count the number of Yes answers in each section and divide by the number of questions to get your section scores. You may find it easier to calculate your scores manually by using Table 2-1. Alternatively, if you have access to Microsoft Excel, don’t score the audit manually. Instead, open file CD0203 and use the calculator it provides. Table 2-1 Activity Area A. Marketing focus B. Marketing scope C. Customer acquisition activities D. Information-gathering activities E. Marketing planning activities F. Communications activities G. Customer service activities H. Management and control I. Creativity Overall Score Calculation Marketing Audit Worksheet Formula # of yeses_____ ÷ 12 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 10 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 17 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 16 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 18 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 37 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 15 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 12 = # of yeses_____ ÷ 13 = Total # of yeses______ ÷ 150 = Profile Score _____ % _____ % _____ % _____ % _____ % _____ % _____ % _____ % _____ % _____ %
Slide 49: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan Obviously, a 100 percent score is the best. Any score less than 85 percent for a section indicates a weakness in an area that probably deserves close attention. After you convert all your section scores into percents, you can compare them and see which areas are lacking and deserve attention. Working on the one or two areas where your scores are lowest is a good idea because it gives you a helpful focus in your efforts and plans. After you take the marketing audit, you can analyze your results in each of the nine areas. You should make marketing decisions according to the Five Ps (by deciding what your product, pricing, placement, promotions, and people should be), as I show you in Chapter 1. But you should also monitor ongoing actions across the Five Ps by looking at activities in the nine areas of the marketing audit. You’ll probably notice that most of the sections of the marketing audit have questions about the Five Ps. That’s because you really need to take actions to help implement your marketing program across all the Ps. For example, your workers in information gathering need to keep you informed about competitor product development, customer reactions to your pricing and promotions, and so on. If you like having everything integrated into one big model, you can think of the audit as cutting across the Five Ps, and you can even build a big grid out of the two lists, if you want to. 31 Evaluating your marketing focus Part A of the marketing audit helps you evaluate your focus, which means how clearly and how well your marketing takes aim based on your strengths and opportunities. The following questions are just about the most important questions you can ask, and they need to have good, clear answers before you worry about any of the hundreds of details of your marketing program: ✓ Do you have specific growth goals to motivate and focus your marketing efforts? ✓ Do you have a clear strategy to help you achieve those growth goals? Don’t take action until you have a clear strategic focus to give your actions purpose and direction. You want your marketing program to be a wolf leaping forward, not a hundred scared rabbits hopping in all directions at once. Although 85 percent is a minimum score for passing the audit, you really want to get as close to 100 percent as possible on the focus section. Consider
Slide 50: 32 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs referring to the exercises and customer commitment worksheets in Chapter 1 to explore your strengths and weaknesses and to see how you can best build greater customer commitment in general and, more specifically, in each of the Five Ps (product, price, placement, promotion, and people). Evaluating your marketing scope Think of the scope of marketing as how broadly and aggressively you pursue customers and try to make sales. To win the great game of marketing, you have to first show up. Auditing your scope helps you figure out whether you’re showing up and pursuing sales in the markets and with the customers who matter to your success and on a large enough scale to achieve your goals and realize your potential. Don’t even think of skipping this section of the marketing audit. Saying that your marketing has to have enough scope to achieve the impact you want may sound simplistic or obvious, but in almost every company I visit that’s having problems with sales or marketing, I can trace at least some of the problems to the issue of scope. Thinking big isn’t enough — you have to act big, too. For example, many companies provide just one or a few products or services to their customers when offering a broader range would be easy — and helpful to the customers. Don’t limit your potential by offering just one product or service or in any of the other ways covered in Part B of the marketing audit. Take a look at the questions in this section of CD0201 and, if you answer No more than once or twice, rethink the way you’re approaching marketing. Ask yourself what you can do to think bigger and expand the scope of your marketing efforts. Maybe the solution is as simple as advertising to a larger geographic area or seeking new, larger, and more professional sales representatives or distributors. Aiming for the best customers in your market — the biggest purchasers or the ones who set the lead in buying trends and fashions — is important, too. Thinking big is an important part of marketing success. Auditing your marketing activities Parts C through G of the marketing audit look at many of the specific activities that you ought to be doing or having competent people do in order to have a really good marketing program. Depending on your business’s size and type, some activities may not be relevant to you, but most, if not all, of them are important. Take a good hard look at any No answers in these parts and try to introduce activities to fill in the gaps. (You can find lots of specifics about your marketing activities in this book.)
Slide 51: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan I divided the audit of marketing activities into multiple sections to reflect the reality that, in effective marketing programs, you need to be active in each of the following areas: ✓ Customer acquisition: Actively reaching out to attract and retain good customers ✓ Information gathering: Studying and tracking trends, listening to customer input, and conducting other activities that help you learn about your customers and market ✓ Planning: Organizing and coordinating the activities to give them focus ✓ Communications: Sending clear, well-targeted messages through multiple channels and media ✓ Customer service: Interacting with customers to make sure that their experience is rewarding and to encourage them to become ambassadors for your company, product, or service I’m a big believer in taking an activity-based approach to planning and managing your marketing. You can’t just talk and write about marketing, you have to do specific things to get any desirable results. All a marketing program or plan really comes down to is a set of actions that (hopefully) has a positive influence on sales and profits. So the section of the audit where you evaluate your marketing activities strikes at the very heart of your marketing and can quickly tell you whether your program is coming up short. 33 Analyzing your management and control Control is sometimes hard to achieve in marketing. Some businesses don’t really know what’s going on in their marketing because so many marketing activities can occur and customers can be so widespread and difficult to track. For these reasons, many companies waste time and money on their marketing and don’t even realize it. Writing everything down One of the first things you should do to control your marketing is document and record every action and expense. Keep good records and make careful lists. This concept may sound obvious, but keeping track of your marketing can be difficult to do. For example, my firm sells training materials and publications to companies directly for use in their training programs. We track our direct contacts with clients and know who buys and uses what. Or do we? We also work with multiple distributors and publishers who may sell our publications to companies, sometimes without our knowledge. And to make the situation more complicated, we also sell publications to consultants who then sell trainings based on our publications to companies. So a company can purchase one of our products in many ways.
Slide 52: 34 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs What all this means is that we don’t always know who’s using our products or which products they’ve tried and which they haven’t. That lack of control gets to be a problem when we want to send a letter promoting a specific product. We may send the letter to some companies that already use that product without our knowledge, which is a waste and makes us look disorganized. Even worse, we don’t have the names of all the companies that have used one of our products and thus would be especially receptive to a promotional letter. I’m gradually working on my firm’s business partners to get them to trade customer lists with me, but not all of them are willing to do so. Controlling something as simple as our own customer lists isn’t as easy as it sounds. If you have a big enough budget, you may want to explore customer relationship management (CRM) software. Most marketers may do better to build their own systems using available tools. If you have under a hundred customers, a file cabinet with a folder for each customer works pretty well. Alternatively, you can use an Excel spreadsheet with a row for each customer and add notes in the columns for each update on what they ask about or buy. Some marketers use their accounting software as the core of their customer database because they’re already capturing customer names, addresses, and orders in it. Even if you don’t have a fancy (and expensive) CRM system, you can and should track customer activity and compile notes about each customer. Keeping the communication lines open Another foundation of marketing control is what I think of as the human element, which encompasses how people are organized and how they divide the work and communicate about it. Make sure that you’ve clearly defined roles and goals — this element is fundamental to good marketing management. And ask lots of questions and share lots of information to keep the communications flowing. I bet you haven’t heard about all customer complaints or concerns — most marketing teams don’t. I also bet your company offers products that some of your customers don’t yet know about; this issue is also a common communication problem in marketing. Management and control are all about making sure that your company has an efficient, effective connection to your market. Checking your creativity The very idea of auditing your creativity may seem strange because audits and creativity sound like opposites. But because creativity is an essential component of your marketing success, you do need to manage it, just like any other important business activity or asset.
Slide 53: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan How do you know whether you’re being creative? Consider the following: ✓ Creativity means doing things differently and doing new things. If your marketing seems routine, tame, and overly familiar, it doesn’t pass the first creativity test: freshness. You really ought to try something new. ✓ Creativity equals originality. If you’re not leading the way with a new idea, method, or approach this year in your industry or market, then you’re not being very original. Yet you are a unique individual: Your company is like no other, your products have many minor differences, your employees have unique cultural and geographic roots, and so on. Tap into these differences to come up with original ideas and approaches. Try to make your marketing distinctive and special, not me-too and imitative. Why? Because the first person or company to try something new usually gets more money and success out of it than any imitators. When you weave creativity into your marketing, it gives your marketing activities more impact and helps your business grow. A dollar spent on a dull, typical ad, mailing, brochure, or Web site doesn’t have much impact. Any company, big or small, in today’s competitive market and unsure economy has to figure out how to maximize every dollar. However, if you have limited funds, then you really do care how much impact your marketing has. A creative approach can increase your marketing’s impact by 10 percent or more. That’s how powerful creativity is, so please give this last section of the audit (on CD0201) careful attention. If you need help making your marketing more creative, take a look at Chapter 12. I also offer additional creative tools and techniques at www.insightsformarketing.com in Portable Document Format (PDF) files that you can download and use for free. 35 Using Audit Results to Focus Your Plan When you look at your scores on all nine sections of the marketing audit, you’re able to see your audit profile, defined as the overall strengths and weaknesses from your audit. This profile is a useful planning tool. Use it to identify areas where you need to improve and areas where you have strengths you want to maintain and take advantage of. (If you haven’t completed the marketing audit, see the section “Auditing Your Marketing Activities,” earlier in this chapter, and the CD file CD0201.)
Slide 54: 36 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs One of my associates, Professor Charles Schewe of University of Massachusetts Amherst, used a version of this marketing audit to help executives from electric utilities look at their marketing functions. They all faced the challenge that their markets were opening up to competition for the first time due to deregulation. This challenge meant that these utilities could no longer take their customer base for granted. Of course, you probably haven’t been able to take your customers for granted. But wouldn’t having regulatory protection of your market area be nice? Ah, well, the days of regulated monopolies are ending, and even utility companies have to find out how to recruit and retain customers. The loss of regulatory protection of their customer base made the marketing audit a very powerful marketing tool for these electric utilities. The marketing audit was a real eye opener, to say the least: It revealed large areas of marketing in which the businesses simply weren’t active. In some of these organizations, the audit led to an agenda that required several years or more to complete. In your business, the results may be less radical than in the case of the electric companies, but I’m sure that your marketing audit can lead to an agenda of some sort. Marketing audits always seem to reveal some needs and generate a few good ideas for positive action. Being fully customer-oriented is hard, and creating and integrating effective marketing actions in all areas of your business is very hard to accomplish, too. So a great next step is to review the findings — especially in areas of particular weakness or strength — and develop agenda items that’ll help you better attract and retain customers. Immediately after completing your marketing audit, I recommend that you work up an action agenda based on your results. If you can’t come up with at least five high-priority actions for your agenda as a result of the audit, I’ll eat my marketing hat. But do put a good effort into it, because I’m rather attached to my marketing hat. I wear that hat quite often when running my own business! You can find a template on your CD (filename CD0204) for developing your marketing agenda based on the marketing audit you performed. Print it out and fill it in to help you turn your audit into action. Figure 2-1 shows you what a sample planning form looks like (although four more sample forms are on the CD, so you can develop a five-item agenda if you want).
Slide 55: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan 37 Agenda item #1 is to: Mini-plan for agenda item #1: Who should spearhead this action? By when should it be completed? What special resources might be needed? Other people? Money? $ Special expertise? Figure 2-1: A sample planning form. Special supplies/equipment? What should this action accomplish? Key objective: Formatting Your Marketing Plan This section offers two alternative outlines for marketing plans. You can design a marketing plan in many ways. No two plans are identical in their formats and structures because no two organizations are identical in their needs. Don’t be afraid to adapt planning outlines and templates to your own needs. In the next section, “Writing Your Marketing Plan the Easy Way,” I show you how to use the planning template on the CD. If you want to use my template, then you don’t need to worry about the format. I’ve already built a format into the template, so you can skip that section. However, if you’re writing a plan from scratch, you may find it helpful to look at the two outlines that follow. One of them may fit your planning needs.
Slide 56: 38 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Here’s an example of a plan outline used by a divisional manager at a large industrial chemicals company. It includes a good situation analysis, which makes it a strategic marketing plan. If you think you might need to change your strategy or basic approach, then choose this outline: A Sample Marketing Plan Situation Analysis Sales history Market profile Sales versus objective Factors influencing sales Profitability Factors affecting profitability Market Environment Growth rate Trends Changes in customer attitude Recent or anticipated competitor actions Government activity Problems and Opportunities Problem areas Opportunities Marketing and Profitability Objectives Sales Market profile Gross margin Marketing Strategy Marketing Programs Product Assumptions You may not need a detailed situation analysis and a strategic examination of problems and opportunities. Sometimes a simpler outline is fine. A different and simpler way to outline your plan is to base it on the Five Ps. A Five Ps’ plan is the format I have people use when I run a workshop or class on marketing plans:
Slide 57: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan A Five Ps Marketing Plan Situation Analysis (reporting on your customers, competitors, products, and results from the past period) Strategies and Actions (with Budgets and Timelines) for the Five Ps Products Placement Pricing Promotion People Budget Analysis Responsibilities (who will do what) After you choose an outline, then, of course, you have to start writing. This is when writer’s block (and panic) may set in. A good way to simplify the writing challenge is to convert one question into many. The starting question you have is probably, “What is my marketing plan for next year?” That’s too big a question to answer in one sitting. Try breaking it down into a bunch of easy questions, such as “Would a newsletter would be useful and interesting to our customers?” That question is very specific, and it’s one you can probably answer on your own with a little thought. If you decide that, yes, a newsletter may be appealing to your customers, then you can think about a bunch of even more specific questions, such as “How many people are on my mailing and e-mail lists?” and “Will I write the articles myself, or do I need to hire a writer or perhaps purchase the rights to reprint content?” By drilling down to specifics, you can turn a big, hard-toanswer question into a series of fairly easy, detail-oriented questions. Each specific question and answer fits into one of the sections of your outline and fills it out into a useful document. 39 Writing Your Marketing Plan the Easy Way What if you try to write your plan but end up with a lot of scribbled notes and no clear idea of how to complete it? Time for a template! This section walks you through the planning process using the planning template in CD0205. The advantage of a template like this one is that your plan is already half written — you just have to supply the details. The corresponding disadvantage, however, is that the outline and general approach are already decided for you, so you have less scope for individualizing the plan than if you write it yourself.
Slide 58: 40 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Lucky for you, the planning template in CD0205 helps you produce a detailed, well-written plan. If you pull up the template and take a look at it, you’ll probably notice right away how detailed and lengthy the table of contents is. That’s because the table of contents reflects the specificity of the questions that the template raises for you to think about. I divided the plan into lots of very specific, small sections, so you never have to wing it and make up a lot of structure on your own. Instead, you always have specific, small chunks of thinking and writing to do — which is much more manageable. A marketing plan is really a collection of multiple smaller plans that have synergy between them. Each small plan is easier to write compared to a big plan, so I want you to take this one building block at a time. For example, if you look at the table of contents of the plan template in CD0205, you’ll see that the following subsection covers a plan for publishing a newsletter: Harnessing the Power of Newsletters Plans for Writing Our Newsletter Plans for Designing Our Newsletter Plans for Distributing Our Newsletter Schedule and Budget for Our Newsletter Expected Benefits This template is, obviously, a plan for a newsletter, with places to describe how you’ll produce and distribute it, a place to summarize the costs and timing of the project, and an end section to describe the benefits or returns from this newsletter plan (in terms of additional customer loyalty and orders, referrals from pass-along of the newsletter to new customers, and so on; the template guides you on how to fill in each section). Filling in a paragraph or two under each of these headings and working up some estimates for costs and benefits isn’t that difficult because a newsletter is a specific, discrete thing to think about and plan. At the end of the section on newsletters in CD0205, you’ll have bottom-line costs, the timing of those costs, and also a sense of when you may get what kinds of returns from your investment in a newsletter. You can use these figures as a basis for entering some numbers in the summary row in your overall marketing budget for your plan (using the Excel spreadsheet template on CD0206). And with the detail section of the plan to support that row of your budget, you can feel pretty good about the numbers you enter there. Build up your budget in CD0206 this way one line at a time as you do each of the smaller, easier-to-think-about mini-plans in each subsection of CD0205. From the details, the big picture emerges, and you’ll be pleasantly
Slide 59: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan surprised to find that the budget almost writes itself as you work through the plan. Similarly, the returns you predict from the newsletter can support a row in the Sales Projection Worksheet on CD0207. 41 Using the marketing plan template The best idea I’ve had in a long while was to make the marketing plan template (CD0205) rely on this book so that you can draw on each chapter as you write a corresponding section of your plan. In other words, this book becomes your master reference guide as you write your marketing plan. A marketing plan template based on this book is quite helpful and practical. If you need to add more topics to the template, I suggest getting a copy of the companion book to this one, Marketing For Dummies (Wiley), written by yours truly, to provide you with the support you need to cover subjects beyond the ones that I cover here. (I mention some sections of Marketing For Dummies as optional reference aids in parts of the marketing plan template.) But if your plan is like most of the ones that I’ve worked on over the years, you’ll probably find more than enough information in this book and the template to get you through a planning process and produce a serviceable draft of your plan. By the way, I walk you through the Excel spreadsheets that are also on your CD for doing sales projections and marketing budgets later in this chapter. Combining the spreadsheets (CD0206, CD0207) with the Word file of CD0205 gives you a complete and very detailed marketing plan. Gathering information before you start Before you even start customizing the template in CD0205, I recommend taking a little time to assemble your marketing information. Make sure that you have records of last year’s marketing activities, including expenses, and dig out all the sales records you can find. Also, if you have a little more time, use the audit and survey forms in the section “Auditing Your Marketing Activities,” earlier in this chapter, which provide good ideas and information that you can use as you work on your plan. In addition, you may want to do a little extra research to gather more information about your market. For example, you may want to do one or more of the following: ✓ Ask salespeople or distributors about their views of quality, trends, competition, and so on. ✓ Gather details of sales for the last year or more.
Slide 60: 42 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs ✓ Get breakdowns of sales by product, region, or other category. ✓ Get some general statistics on sales in your market or product category so that you can see what your market share is and whether you’re gaining or losing shares. ✓ Collect any information on where sales came from and which sales and marketing practices worked best in the last year or two. ✓ Get prices on printing, ad purchases, design services, or other costs you know you’ll need to include in your budget. ✓ Quiz some customers about the quality of your service or product and get their ideas and suggestions on how to improve it. ✓ Plan some sales promotions and work out projected costs and returns. Special offers are a great way to get customer attention and stimulate new customers to try your service or product. ✓ Collect cost and price information to use in budgets and projections. For example, what is the total cost for your company to deliver one unit of your product to a customer? What net price does the average customer pay after any discounts or special offers? And how do your prices and discounts compare to your competitors? ✓ Get information on any new products that you’ll be introducing during the plan’s period. ✓ Decide whether you want (and can afford) to hire a marketing consultant to coach you through the planning process. Or, if hiring a consultant is out of your reach, you can hire one to spend a day with you clarifying your strategy before you start writing. (Some ad agencies are also happy to help with general marketing planning, so you could ask local agencies for proposals, too.) Researching this shopping list of questions may occupy you for several days or more. Simply gathering the information needed to do a good plan is a serious undertaking. Fortunately, all this upfront work helps make the writing part much easier. Eventually, you have to roll up your sleeves and start writing. But don’t just stare at a blank page or screen. (I’m reminded of a quote from author Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.”) I want you to avoid writer’s block, anxiety, and the lack of structure that the blank-sheet-of-paper method provides! And I also want you to avoid the common mistake of making minor edits to last year’s plan (if you have one). That method doesn’t force you to rethink your marketing; it just creates something that fools you and others into believing that you’ve done real planning.
Slide 61: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan Instead, I want you to really write a plan because the writing process is also a thinking process, and coming up with good strategies and tactics takes a lot of thinking. But to make the writing process easier, I recommend following my template in CD0205. It includes detailed instructions for each section of your plan. 43 The outline used in the planning template CD0205 contains a Word file that I wrote as if I were laying out a professional marketing plan, with a title page, table of contents, headings for each section, and body copy. But instead of writing a specific plan for a client, I used the body copy to give you suggestions, examples, and tips for how to fill in your own details. The outline of this planning template is as follows: Introduction Part 1: Program Overview and Marketing Strategies Overview of Last Year’s Marketing Program Long-term Investments and Administrative and Overhead Costs Audit Results and Agenda Items Marketing Strategies Part 2: Information and Skills Required for the Plan Market Research Creative Concepts and Plans Guidelines for Written Marketing Communications Testimonials and Customer Stories Part 3: Advertising Management and Design Planning and Budgeting Our Ad Campaign Advertising Designs and Programs Part 4: Other Elements of Our Marketing Program Branding through Business Cards, Letterhead, and So On Brochures, Catalogs, and Spec Sheets Pricing, Coupons, and Other Promotions Harnessing the Power of Newsletters Media Coverage through Publicity Web Site Development and Promotion Trade Shows and Special Events
Slide 62: 44 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Part 5: Sales and Service Success Plans and Improvements for Our Sales Process Improving the Way We Close Our Sales Strategies for Dealing with Difficult Customers Sales Projections Part 6: Marketing Budget Overview of the Marketing Budget Marketing Budget and Spreadsheet Printouts The outline is detailed to give you a lot of structure, which is helpful when writing a plan. The most you have to create on your own is a paragraph or two per header. Also, you can incorporate many other forms on the CD (mostly Word and Excel files), described in other chapters of this book, directly into this planning template. Each time you use one of the other CD files, you’re taking a shortcut to completing your plan. I want you to use all the resources in this book as fully as you can during your planning process so that it’s as painless as possible! My philosophy is if you wanted to do it the hard way, you wouldn’t have bought this book, so I want to make your planning as easy as I can. Developing Your Marketing Strategy I don’t need to guide you through every section of the planning template on CD0205 because most of the sections have a chapter devoted to them elsewhere in this book. But the section on your marketing strategies doesn’t have its own chapter, so I discuss it here. In the strategy section of your marketing plan, you describe the big-picture thinking behind your plan. The latter parts of your plan get into all the specifics — the whats, whens, and hows. The strategy section is about the whys. Good thinking on the strategic level will make the rest of your plan much easier to write — and also much more profitable and effective! I have to tell you before you write the strategy section of your marketing plan that strategic planning is difficult. It’s the most difficult thing any marketer, manager, or executive ever has to do. If you hire an expert consultant to do strategic planning with you, expect to spend many long meetings discussing it over a period of months. You probably don’t have that kind of time today, however, so I will show you all the shortcuts I know. I can help you craft a
Slide 63: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan rough-and-ready set of marketing strategies in as little as a couple of hours, if you’re willing to focus hard on it for that long. If you have the time and funding to do a more formal planning process, by all means do, and use this section of your plan to summarize the results. But if you’re in a hurry, don’t skip the strategy section. Just follow my pointers and choose one strategy from my list, or perhaps (at the most) several strategies that seem to complement each other and fit your situation and opportunities well. 45 Basing your strategies on your core brilliance Strategies have to be based on your product’s genuine strengths: what I call strategic assets. The idea is simple and powerful: Get in touch with your best strengths — the thing(s) you can contribute to your market and to the world — and make sure that you base your strategies and plans on them. Think of your greatest strengths as the foundation of a lighthouse. Your strategies are the ground-level section of the structure. Later parts of your plan build higher, until your promotions at the top provide a beacon to draw customers into your anchorage. Your marketing plan has to be an integral structure, based on a solid foundation of strategic assets. One person’s or business’s winning strategy is another’s failure; the success of your strategy all depends on whether you have the right foundation for it! Deciding whether to adopt a new strategy or improve an old one If you simply need to improve upon and continue using an already-successful strategy, say that clearly in this section of your plan and shape the plan to improve the efficiency of the marketing program you used last year. If, however, you really need to shop for a new and better strategic approach, then say so now and realize that you first need to figure out what your effective strategic plan is before you can expect to optimize any program based on it. In other words, pick one of these basic orientations for your plan: ✓ Efficiency-oriented: Your plan should introduce a number of specific improvements on how you market your product but should not alter your basic strategy from last year. ✓ Effectiveness-oriented: Your plan needs to identify a major opportunity or problem (of the customers’) and describe a strategy to respond to it.
Slide 64: 46 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Take a minute to think about the distinction between perfecting the implementation of last year’s strategy and trying a new one. Which strategy you choose makes a big difference that will affect everything else about your plan! If you use last year’s strategy and just try to do it more efficiently, then you can plan to do things on a fairly big scale. For example, you can plan to do one big mailing a quarter (assuming that you do mailings — if not, imagine I’m talking about advertising, trade show booths, or whatever you do a lot of). But if you try some new strategy, don’t plan to do a few big marketing activities because you may fail at one or more of them and blow your marketing budget in a hurry. Instead, plan to test a lot of smaller mailings and other kinds of marketing. Do a lot of marketing activities on a small scale and build in enough repetition to give yourself opportunities to learn as you go. Improving your current marketing strategy When designing your plan’s strategy, the first choice you have to make is whether you have a pretty good overall strategy right now or not. If it is good and should continue to work for the next few years, then all you need to do in your plan is show how you’ll pursue that strategy efficiently. The main point of your plan is to do marketing like you did last year, but better. In that case, your strategy section can be short and sweet. Just describe the strategy and why you think it’s going to continue to work and then say that the main contribution of your plan is to improve the efficiency of marketing by making certain improvements to last year’s program. A marketing audit (see the section “Auditing Your Marketing Activities”) or your independent research can guide you to specific areas where improvements are likely to pay off. Mention those general areas briefly here, but save the details for later in the plan. Scrapping the old strategy and creating a new one If you feel that a new strategic direction or approach is needed or you want to try one because you see good opportunities, then your plan should be more effectiveness-oriented. You’re going to define a new strategy that, if it works, will bring you exciting new opportunities for sales, profits, and overall business growth. So the critical issue for your plan and your next year’s marketing program is whether you can you effectively achieve some new strategic vision and accomplish the new objectives that you set for that strategy. If you even achieve this new strategic vision halfway, you’ll probably be happy because doing something new isn’t easy. Your plan should be about making your overall marketing approach more effective through a change of strategies. Don’t worry about sweating every detail of your new strategy. Just try to prove that it works without losing money doing it. Next year, you can switch gears and design an efficiency-oriented plan that perfects this year’s more experimental one.
Slide 65: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan If you’re trying a new strategy and don’t have proven marketing formulas, you can’t write an efficiency-oriented plan. For example, if you don’t do mailings to purchased lists right now, then don’t say that you’re going to increase the response rate on mailings from 2.5 percent to 5.5 percent next year. Instead, plan on testing a variety of mailings and plan to have some of them fail (a less than 1 percent response rate) and hope to have one or two of them do pretty well (a 3 percent plus response rate). But you can’t guess which ones will fail and which ones will succeed. 47 Choosing your strategy If you’re sticking with your existing strategy, you still need to clearly articulate it in this section of your plan and explain why it’s so good that it can power your marketing for another year. If you’re pretty sure you need a new strategy, then use this section of the plan to say why and to elaborate on your decision. For example: “Our strategy is a ____________strategy. Specifically, we are planning to _______________________.” Can you easily fill in the blanks, or are you scratching your head? Most people find completing those two simple sentences difficult, but I can make it easier. In the following sections, I give you a master list of marketing strategies to choose from. You need to be using one (or possibly two or three, at the most) of these strategies in your marketing for the next year. Pick one strategy, and you’re ready to fill in the blank in the first sentence. The second sentence requires a bit more thinking on your part because it says how that strategy applies to your own situation and market. My notes about each strategy (described in the following sections) offer clues on how to customize that strategy to your own plan. By the way, I put the strategies in the order I want you to think about them; the easier ones are first. The farther you get into this list, the more difficult the implementation usually becomes. So all else being equal, I generally recommend using the easier ones. Reminder strategy The reminder strategy is a very simple communications-oriented strategy that reaches out to loyal, regular customers to remind them to make a replacement purchase. If you have a solid base of loyal customers who ought to continue purchasing regularly, this strategy is for you.
Slide 66: 48 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs You can implement this strategy fairly easily: Just make sure that you give your customers periodic reminders and perhaps small incentives or rewards so that they don’t forget your product and wander off to some competitor. Don’t forget: It costs ten times more money to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Simplicity strategy The simplicity strategy emphasizes ease and convenience for customers. Can you simplify the purchase and use of your product or service to such an extent that simplicity alone can be a major selling point? If so, seriously consider this strategy, but be committed to keeping things simple — simpler than the competition. Otherwise, you won’t have a durable advantage. If you use the simplicity strategy, follow through with simplifying steps in all Five Ps, not just in your promotional messages. Just saying that your company is easier and simpler to do business with isn’t much good — it really has to be! Quality strategy If you can figure out how to make a better-quality product or offer better service, by all means do it! The most durable and profitable strategy in marketing is to be better than the competition — in your customers’ eyes, not just your own. You can implement this quality strategy in many ways, such as by ✓ Making fewer errors ✓ Having better designs ✓ Offering more reliable or rapid delivery Pick one or two dimensions that your customers associate strongly with quality when they talk about your product category. Focus on these aspects and be prepared to redesign your business processes and your products to achieve noticeably better quality. The fields of Total Quality Management and Process Re-engineering are dedicated to the technical challenges of redesigning businesses so that businesses can truly offer better-quality products and services without incurring high costs or raising prices above what customers can afford. I’ve written about the art and science of Total Quality Management and filled whole books on the topic, so I won’t even try to cover it here. I just want you to recognize that you have to pursue this strategy seriously in every aspect of your business, not just in flashy advertisements or promotional claims!
Slide 67: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan Market share strategy The market share strategy is a straightforward effort to get a bigger piece of the market than your competitors. Size often matters in competition, so gaining on your competitors by using aggressive sales and marketing to get more customers or more sales dollars than they do in the next year can be a good strategy. You can be fairly careful and conservative when you use this strategy if you don’t need to gain a lot of market share quickly. If that’s the case, you may think of this strategy as being based on the basic efficiency orientation I describe in the section “Deciding whether to adopt a new strategy or improve an old one,” earlier in this chapter. Other times, your goal is to make significant progress in capturing market shares compared to competitors, even if you have to overspend on marketing and reduce your profit margin for a year or two. You can use this new strategic effort to achieve greater effectiveness by changing your position in the market. The prize is that, if you succeed in becoming one of the leaders in your market, you can hope for high profits in subsequent years as your payoff for investing in competitive growth now. 49 Positioning strategy The positioning strategy is designed to create or maintain a specific image (or position) in the customer’s and potential customer’s minds. This strategy is psychological, and it’s all about how people think and feel. It uses words, stories, and imagery to reach out to customers so that they form strong feelings or beliefs about your product. Often, this strategy looks at how customers perceive the competition because communicating your own unique position in the marketplace — and not a confusingly similar position — is best. To design a positioning strategy, you really need to find out what people think and what they care about. You can use the exercises (and surveys) in Chapter 1 to get a handle on how customers see the product category in general and what they specifically like most about your product, which is what you should build on when deciding how to position your product in their minds. In Chapter 1, I talk about the importance of being brilliant at what you do. In a positioning strategy, your goal is to communicate this brilliance in such a powerful way that you “own” that claim to brilliance and are strongly associated with it in customers’ minds. Clearly, this strategy is going to need a lot of brand-building and marketing communications in the implementation parts of your plan. (See Parts II and III for extensive how-to advice on branding and promotional communications.)
Slide 68: 50 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Product life cycle strategy The product life cycle strategy adjusts your marketing to the growth stage of an overall product category. Any product category goes through a broad life cycle, from early introduction through growth, to a slower-growing maturity and, eventually, to declining sales and death. Innovation drives this cycle: New products are invented and introduced, and then they catch on, eventually getting replaced by even newer products. As the cycle goes on, competition grows because the once-new product gradually becomes commonplace and easy for many competitors to make and sell. The most fun period in this life cycle is the growth phase. During this phase, the market is beginning to embrace the new product and its sales take off. And during that phase, becoming a star by achieving high sales and profit growth is easiest. You can use the life cycle strategy to refocus your efforts behind a rising star — a product or product line that you expect to experience fast growth in the next few years. Or you can use this strategy to adjust your expectations and refocus your efforts on competitive jockeying if you realize that your once-growing star is now fading and you don’t have a replacement. Either way, knowing where you are in the life cycle of your product category is helpful so that you can adjust your efforts and expectations accordingly — and seek a new product with growth potential if your main product is getting too old. Market segmentation strategy A segment of a market is simply a subgroup of customers with needs that make them special in some way. For example, if you sell breakfast cereals for adults instead of children, you’re targeting (that’s what marketers say) the adult cereal market. When you specialize in just one segment of a broader market, you can be more specific and helpful to your customers. A market segmentation strategy often requires a broader geographic area — perhaps even national or international — because your segment of people or businesses with special needs may be relatively rare. You may be using this strategy already, or you may decide to adopt it now as a way to compete more effectively in the market. Segmentation and specialization can be a great way to make yourself more valuable to certain customers, which allows you to outsell more generalized competitors within the target group or segment of customers. Market expansion strategy If you’re currently selling in a three-state area, a straightforward way to grow is to sell your product or services in two additional states. This strategy expands the size of your market. But to use this market expansion strategy,
Slide 69: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan you need to make sure that your new market area includes the right kinds of customers and that some new competitor won’t undercut your pricing or make entering the market in the new location difficult. After assessing the new territory, decide what the main challenges of entering the market there will be. Then base your marketing plan on what you must do to succeed in the new, bigger market you want to pursue. 51 Buzz strategy The idea behind the buzz strategy is to create excitement about something new, hot, fashionable, or trend setting. Implementing the buzz strategy isn’t as easy as it sounds — beware! However, sometimes a marketer has such a cool new idea that is so in synch with the times (and the current headlines) that it’s a natural for buzz marketing. If this strategy fits your product, put up cool or quirky YouTube videos, widgets, and blogs and post MySpace and Facebook pages. Plus send press releases to let the media know you’re a good exemplar of a hot new trend. Also, consider doing some public speaking or product demos on college campuses, demos at trade shows and fairs, or whatever else you can think of to shamelessly pursue attention. (If you have a product you can give out, give it to up-and-coming celebrities who are also eager to create buzz.) The window doesn’t stay open long, so hurry to make your mark before you’re no longer the new thing. If you aren’t totally cool and hip and leading some new fashion or trend, a buzz strategy is not for you. Lots of marketing pundits are excited about the idea of spreading the word through youth culture — but it’s a silly concept if your message is really just an advertisement in disguise. Kids aren’t that easily fooled! You better actually be cool if you want anyone to view your YouTube video, friend you on Facebook, or download your widget. Setting specific objectives for your strategies A strategic objective states something you hope that your business will accomplish in the next year as a result of pursuing a strategy. If you’re pursuing an expansion strategy, for example, you may set some goals for the number of new customers you want to acquire in each of the new territories. If you’re pursuing a positioning strategy, on the other hand, quantifying your success may be harder. You may have to do a survey at the end of the year to ask customers what they think and feel about your product. One objective may be to convince a significant percent of customers that your product is
Slide 70: 52 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs better, faster, more sophisticated — or whatever the positioning goal is — than your competition. A second objective may be to increase your sales by a certain percent as a result of communicating your special position in the market to prospective customers. Set specific objectives that flow from your strategy and that also reflect your resources, such as the number of salespeople or the amount of money you have to spend. Good objectives require you to stretch a bit — but not too much. They should energize and give a purpose to the rest of your marketing plan. For example, if your strategy is to gain market share and try to become one of the top three in your market, a good, energizing objective may be to increase your sales at twice the speed of the underlying growth rate in your market. (In other words, to grow twice as fast as the average competitor.) Trying to grow much faster than that may not be possible. You also use your strategic marketing objectives in your sales projections (use CD0207 for that). One of your objectives must always be about sales, and this objective drives your sales projections. Pick a rough sales objective now, but expect to adjust it as you work on the tactical parts of your plan. Marketing activity is needed to generate sales. However, marketing activity costs money and takes time and effort, so you have to make sure that the sales objective seems realistic before you finalize it. What are good marketing objectives? Whatever objectives you need to help you achieve your mission or growth goals. Your marketing objectives may be to ✓ Boost the performance of salespeople or distributors ✓ Change the way customers think of your offering (reposition) ✓ Cross-sell more products to existing customers ✓ Develop new channels of distribution (such as the Web) ✓ Educate customers about a new technology or process ✓ Expand into new geographic markets ✓ Fend off a competitor’s challenge ✓ Find new customers ✓ Generate more or better leads for the sales force ✓ Improve customer service ✓ Improve the distribution of existing products or services ✓ Increase the average order size ✓ Increase the perceived value of offerings to counter a trend toward price competition
Slide 71: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan ✓ Introduce new products or services ✓ Recruit new distributors or retailers ✓ Attract attention and create a buzz ✓ Reduce customer complaints If you go through this list checking those objectives that apply to your situation, you’ll probably come up with at least a few appropriate ones that you can use to guide your planning. If not, you can always make up some of your own. But make sure that you have clear objectives before you go into any planning process. 53 Avoiding random activity Planning exercises can easily turn into random listings of possibilities. The poor planners run out of insights, information, and time when they have to itemize the details of their marketing programs. Their thinking often goes like this: “What sorts of ads, mailings, or other marketing communications should we use? Hmmm. Dunno. Maybe we should just list a bunch, so we make sure that some advertising and mailings are included in the budget.” I guess that’s a planning process, but not a very intelligent one! You can take many actions to promote your product or service. Often, people just try one thing after another, hoping to see sales increase without any real idea of what may work, why, and how. I call this random marketing. It goes kind of like this: “Hey, we need to do something to get more sales. Let’s do some advertising.” Or maybe it goes like this: “Our competitors are offering coupons. Should we do some coupons, too?” And so on. What about trying some telemarketing? Or print advertising? Or even television or radio spots? Direct mail may be better. Hmmm. Lots of choices. But which should you try? Is it entirely a matter of blind experimentation? No. At least it better not be unless you have a lot of time and money to waste groping around in the marketing dark. Random marketing is like the old philosophical theory that if you put enough apes at enough typewriters for long enough, they’d eventually type a Shakespearean play by chance. Same with random marketing. Eventually, you might produce a winning program by chance. But you better be very patient! The only difference between the old ape-atthe-typewriter theory and the typical approach to marketing is that nobody is silly enough to actually try the ape experiment, whereas the majority of businesses try random marketing. And then people wonder why their plans don’t produce satisfactory results.
Slide 72: 54 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Running Goal-Oriented Marketing Experiments There’s always an important element of creative experimentation in any marketing or planning effort, but there’s not random experimentation. When you experiment, you need to have specific marketing goals and a rough idea of the kinds of marketing activities that may achieve those goals. Then you can focus your creative experimentation on finding out how to better achieve those marketing goals by refining your ideas until you have a unique approach that produces a winning marketing program. The formula you develop and continue refining through your marketing experiments is uniquely yours. No formula works for more than one organization; each business needs to find its own marketing zone. Yet your formula can and should rely on certain transferable elements — the fundamentals that hold up in all marketing programs. And the most easily transferable formulas have to do with marketing goals. Specifically, you need to know that certain kinds of marketing initiatives tend to be appropriate for certain kinds of marketing goals and not for others. You can use that information to help you define the basic structure of any marketing plan or program — and narrow down those apparently random choices — simply by picking one or a few marketing objectives. Then, focus on the marketing techniques that are most likely to help you achieve those objectives. Planning Benchmarks for Marketing Communications How much should you spend on marketing communications (MarCom) like advertising, the Web, mailings, telemarketing, or whatever you plan to use? Communicating with your market takes many forms in your plan and will probably be a major part of it. If you want to truly achieve your strategic objectives, you need to have a plan that communicates well and often. On the bottom of the spreadsheet in CD0205, I include a row that calculates your total MarCom spending by adding up any rows above it that involve spending on direct communications within your market. As you work on your plan, keep a close eye on this number and make sure that it’s a big enough percentage of your projected sales to actually give you a good shot at achieving those sales projections.
Slide 73: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan What’s a big enough percentage to spend on marketing communications? “As much as you can afford” is one philosophy, but sometimes it’s best to benchmark against industry norms rather than just maximize MarCom. If your company is an average size in your industry, then a spending level similar to the statistic from the industry closest to yours in Table 2-2 will probably keep you growing as fast as your competitors and the industry as a whole. To grow faster than your industry or to make up for being smaller than average, you probably need to allocate more money, perhaps even two to three times the average amount. 55 Table 2-2 Product or Service Services: Insurance Advertising Freight Cable/pay TV Nursing homes Hospitals Investment advice Personal services Services in general Products: Ice cream Furniture Clothing MarCom Spending as a Percentage of Sales Spending 0.6% 2.8% 1.2% 1.0% 3.4% 3.0% 6.8% 4.0% 2.5% 5.4% 5.0% 5.1% 0.8% 3.3% 4.5% 5.8% 9.4% 18% 2.5% 4.2% (continued) Auto parts/accessories Greeting cards Software Periodicals (newspapers/magazines/newsletters) Food products Toys Computer equipment Office supplies
Slide 74: 56 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Table 2-2 (continued) Product or Service Building supplies Retail stores: Watch stores Department stores Furniture stores Clothing stores Hotels/motels Insurance agencies Banks Stockbrokers Consumer electronics stores Variety stores Gift shops Grocery stores Restaurants/bars Retailers in general 15.7% 4.3% 9.0% 3.2% 3.9% 1.6% 3.8% 2.0% 3.8% 2.0% 4.5% 1.2% 4.4% 3.4% Spending 1.2% There’s no harm in violating these norms, but I do recommend thinking about how your company’s marketing communications expenses compare to others in your industry, and I want you to have a good reason in mind if you decide to be significantly different. For example, if you want to gain market share or grow your company’s sales, you probably have to outspend the averages. But if your plan produces numbers that are dramatically different than the norms and you don’t know why, then you really ought to go back and look to make sure that a good reason exists for the differences.
Slide 75: Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan 57 For more information . . . In this chapter, I queue up a number of tools, techniques, and benchmarks to help you with your marketing strategy and plan. Whether you just need to diagnose the situation or develop a full-blown plan, you should find plenty of guidelines in this chapter and its corresponding CD files. For more details on how to design and budget all the specifics of your plan, such as advertising campaigns, sales programs, and promotions, see the upcoming chapters that focus on each of these topics. Often, a chapter in this book directly corresponds to a section on the market planning template and a section on the budget template, too. In addition, you can find complementary coverage of marketing plans in my other book in this series, Marketing For Dummies, as well as in The Portable MBA in Marketing (Wiley), a book I co-authored with professor Charles Schewe of the business school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And, of course, I’ll continue posting helpful content and links on the Web site that supports my For Dummies books (www.insightsformarketing. com). I encourage you to seek additional resources as well. For example, William Cohen’s The Marketing Plan (Wiley), although written for classroom use, has a number of good examples of marketing plans that I recommend as benchmarks. And Kleppner’s Advertising Procedure is the classic text for marketing communications and advertising courses and a good general reference for planners (shop for a used, fairly recent edition on Amazon.com). In my experience, the more support and information you have on hand when undertaking a planning process, the better. On the CD Check out the following items on the CD-ROM: ✓ Editable Marketing Audit (CD0201), a Word document ✓ Marketing Audit (CD0202), a PDF format version of CD0201 ✓ Audit Score Form (CD0203), a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet ✓ Marketing Agenda (CD0204), a PDF format worksheet to use in a planning brainstorm session ✓ Marketing Plan Template (CD0205), an editable Microsoft Word file ✓ Marketing Budget Worksheet (CD0206), an editable Microsoft Excel template ✓ Sales Projection Worksheet (CD0207), an editable Microsoft Excel template
Slide 76: 58 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs
Slide 77: Chapter 3 Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact In This Chapter ▶ Considering low-cost ways to boost sales ▶ Stimulating word-of-mouth referrals ▶ Boosting impact by using persuasive information and creativity ▶ Increasing effectiveness by narrowing your focus I n this chapter, I review a variety of ideas, tips, and examples that may help you improve your marketing effectiveness and efficiency. This chapter is especially useful for people who are in a hurry to find something they can do that increases sales and profits. Sometimes you don’t need or want to do a full-blown audit and write a new plan (Chapter 2) and instead just want to look critically and creatively at your business to see whether you can do any “quick fixes” to help performance. Usually, you can! Taking a Look at Low-Cost and No-Cost Marketing Ideas You don’t need to spend a lot of money on marketing. However, if you look at most of the conventional options, you quickly find the dollars adding up. That’s why it is good to look at options you may not initially think about — and ones an ad agency may not think to mention to you. Transit advertising It generally costs between $50 and $500 per month to have your advertising poster displayed on a bus or at a bus-stop shelter, depending on the size of the city. Usually, the minimum time period for this outdoor ad is three months.
Slide 78: 60 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Okay, it’s not free, I agree — it’s in the low hundreds to the low thousands, depending on the size of the audience. But it’s a fairly small commitment on your part for a lot of exposure, and if your message clicks with the public, you can expect a good return. (I recommend a direct response format, with a Web site and toll-free phone number right there on the ad.) An ad agency may direct you toward a local television ad, but that would cost ten times as much to create and place as a small-scale transit ad placement. The nice thing about marketing is that you always have alternatives that fit your budget. Publicity What if you want to spread the word throughout your city for free? That’s harder, but still not impossible. If you can think of an interesting news story about your product, people, or events, then you can put your time and energy into contacting local media and trying to generate some editorial coverage instead of advertising. (See Chapter 10 for details.) You may not be a “hard news” story unless something bad happens (and honestly, I’d rather have no publicity than to see a headline about a fire at my office building!). But it’s okay to be soft news. Local newspapers, radio stations, and news weeklies need a lot of filler stories with local or human interest. Here’s where you come in. Let them know about a recent accomplishment or happening or offer your expert advice for home or business owners. Publicity is free. I like free marketing. Don’t you? Viral marketing on MySpace or Facebook Here’s another example of how to get free marketing. I helped a friend who was a marketing manager for a wholesaler of hair-care products do some viral marketing. The company, The Hair Factory, supplies hair for weaves and wigs to salons and uses a traditional catalog as its primary marketing method, supported by a telephone order center and a Web catalog that can process orders, too. However, my friend wanted to find some creative ways to attract salon owners and build their customer base. For free. Hmmm. We had just done a series of photo shoots for the company’s catalog and Web site, which gave me an idea. I created a MySpace page featuring some of the more interesting and artistic photographs, and sent friend requests initially to the models — many
Slide 79: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact of whom were volunteers. They were so excited to see their model photos on MySpace that they told their friends about the page and soon more links were created. Gradually, salon owners got interested and picked up on the buzz — many of them had MySpace pages for their businesses, and they linked up to our page. You can use a similar strategy on Facebook. Schools are learning that it makes sense to create their own Facebook page and offer links to alums. Private high schools and colleges that do fundraising are able to identify and build communications channels to potential donors this way. In fact, many products and services can have their own Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, or other online community. I have Friend links on my personal MySpace page to a number of businesses, along with the real human friends that make up the bulk of my Friend list. For example, a local pizza shop friended me, and the owner seemed so nice and sincere that I accepted the link — and then went in to try the pizza. It was pretty good. Also, I have links to musical bands and other artists whose work I like and to some places that I like to visit or have good associations with (like the MySpace page for Harvard Square, which I feel friendly toward from my college years spent there). Almost everyone is open to the right marketing-oriented links, but won’t respond to obviously commercial and impersonal ones. It’s tricky, but you can create a vital page for your business and make friends in cyberspace. And yes, it’s completely free! I like free. Don’t you? 61 Low-cost display ads in online communities Insurance agencies seem to find www.friendster.com a great place to buy low-cost ads (which are displayed in a generously large right-hand column under the Suggestions header). The demographics of this online community favor auto insurance and other products for adults because members tend to be older than MySpace or Facebook members. MySpace is a much bigger community, but it skews toward younger people, so it’s better for consumer products than for business-to-business marketing or services oriented toward the middle-aged homeowner. Facebook is a young community, too, but every year, the average age of these online communities goes up by a year. Think about it. Soon, they’ll tap into a full range of consumers and offer as good demographics as any marketing medium!
Slide 80: 62 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs My advice to potential buyers of display ads on any of these pages is to visit the site, read their latest information about advertising options, and buy the cheapest, easiest entry-level ad. Test a message. See what happens. If you don’t get a good response, try adjusting the message. You can run a half-dozen inexpensive experimental ads and see whether something clicks. If not, you haven’t risked much of your budget. But if you find a formula that works, online communities are now so large that you can bump up the scale of your advertising and do some serious business on them. Text messages — a new viral marketing frontier? You’re a member of more online communities than you might think. I just got a text message on my phone that said, “Hi Everybody! I’m in a group show@ Gallery 51, 51 Church St, Montclair NJ reception Friday 6-9pm.” It’s from my friend James Adleman, a promising young painter. I own several large pieces by him, so it makes sense for him to include me in this informal news broadcast to all the phone numbers in his cell phone directory. Cell phone text messages are a very personal, informal medium, but for the right message (something your friends and acquaintances won’t mind hearing about), they’re a good way to do viral marketing. Check with your cellular telephone service provider to make sure that you have a plan with a cheap package rate for text messages; otherwise, they can be costly to send. Of course, your phone cannot by itself reach a very large audience — unless you can get people to pass the word along, or you can get lots of people to give you their cell phone numbers. The latter strategy is working on college campuses for the broadcasting of security messages. One of my sons was working out in the gym at Seton Hall University recently when news spread rapidly about a request from the campus security office to stay inside the building. Someone had been spotted on the edge of campus with a gun. Nothing bad happened and the person was quickly arrested, but it was a good test of the school’s new text message communications system. Thousands of people heard and shared the alert within a few minutes. If you want to tell people about a special marketing event like a one-day blowout sale at your store, you may not get quite as much compliance as a public safety message does. However, the news is still of potential interest to lots of people, and you may want to enlist the growing power of telephone text messages to help spread the word. Although I don’t know anyone who’s tried this trick yet, I’m sure that we’ll soon see special text message offers saying something like, “Bring your phone in with this message to receive an additional 20% off our storewide sale ’til 9 p.m. tonight!”
Slide 81: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact 63 The classic flier — tried, true, and free It costs just a few cents to make a photocopy on colorful paper, and the turnaround at most copy shops is under an hour. Fliers — single sheets designed to be put under windshield wipers and doors or stuck to public bulletin boards and other public spaces — are a great way to get the word out locally for almost nothing. Although some towns regulate fliers and will ticket you if you violate their rules, you can still distribute them in plenty of ways and in many places. Also, some stores (such as coffee shops, grocery stores, and convenience stores) have bulletin boards or other spots where they permit you to post approved notices. If you want to reach a local audience, a flier may be worthwhile. Simple is good: Copy your flier in one color and avoid complex designs. Select one or two simple, clean, easy-to-read fonts. Look at what others are posting in your area and try to make yours look a little more appealing and easy to read. Most fliers cram too much information onto the page. Design yours to be read in ten seconds or less, from a distance of 3 feet or more away. If you need to give a lot of information, refer to a Web site for followup or add a phone number for people to call. Keep it simple, and the classic flier will work far better. While it will cost you a minimal fee to print fliers, the great thing about them is that you pay nothing for the exposure. They’re placed in public spaces for free. Displaying advertising for free is very hard to do, so be grateful for this rare opportunity and treat it with respect. Appropriate (G-rated), friendly, professional-looking fliers are best and always be polite and respectful when looking for places to post or distribute them. The informational booklet or brochure Many marketers forget about the value of technical or special knowledge. People don’t want to be bothered with your sales pitch, but they sure love it when you offer to help them with their problem. And sometimes, the difference is just a matter of perception. For example, I recommended that a surf shop create a tall, thin brochure-like publication (which they published inexpensively at their local copy shop). The cover was a picture of a long board — an old-fashioned surf board — along with the title “How to Find and Care for Classic Boards.” The inside contained historical information about the long boards that once dominated the sport, tips about the different types and which ones are most usable or collectible today, plus care tips, a directory of places to find and trade used
Slide 82: 64 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs boards, profiles of the best early surfers and their boards, and other interesting information. The store’s name, address, logo, and product line (which includes a good selection of used long boards) are modestly relegated to the back cover, so as to give the piece the feel of a real booklet, not an advertisement or brochure. The result of this kind of marketing material is something that people would pay good money for if it were sold in a bookstore. If you give it away for free, it will be very popular indeed. A company in the lawn-and-yard-care business used a similar strategy: Recognizing that its clients were beginning to be concerned about chemical pesticides and herbicides, the company designed an informative booklet about organic lawns and how to care for them. The company gave it as a free gift to its current customers, and distributed it in local lawn and garden shops for a modest price. What a great way to establish your expertise and make yourself highly trustworthy in your local market! In another example, a tourist-oriented restaurant in a resort community on the coast of Maine had hired an artist to design an appealing tourist map, which was printed on its paper placemats. Customers liked the map and often asked for a clean placemat on their way out. I recommended taking the art and printing it on a foldout brochure, along with promotional information and coupons to encourage a visit to the restaurant. The brochure doesn’t have an advertising message on its cover. Instead, it says “Free Tourist Map and Coupons.” The local Chamber of Commerce offered rack space, and now the tourist map is attracting customers to the restaurant. Better to use it to draw them in than to give it to them as they go out. The informational Web page or blog Web sites are usually designed as if they’re interactive sale catalogs. However, the sites that have the biggest and most consistent traffic are usually ones that give away useful information and are less commercial in nature. Channel 22 News in Springfield, Massachusetts, uses its Web site to inform the community about a remarkable range of topics. The site has a place where you can sign up for a dating service, as well as a great page for checking the local weather. The Web site also has the best listings of snowday cancellations. It has informative content on how to install a hot tub or maintain a good lawn. It contains, really, just about everything. Getting married? Check the site for advice and tips. Looking for a perfect gift? Go to the site’s gift section — which, by the way, is a money-maker because local businesses purchase small display ads there. But most of the site is free content that exists purely to attract and retain visitors. The idea is to create a user base that is loyal to the site and the TV station that sponsors it.
Slide 83: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact I use a similar strategy for one of my own Web sites — in fact, the site that supports readers of my marketing books. If you go to www.insightsformarketing.com, you’ll see that the right half of the page features free articles you can download. The idea is to be an informative resource by giving away information about marketing, which ensures high traffic and decent visibility in search engines. I view it as a free way to build awareness of my books on marketing. Sure, I do give away information for free, but what does it cost me to post it on the Web? Almost nothing. My hosting charges are under a hundred dollars per year, so why not create a public resource? And all I want in return is some visibility. It’s a much cheaper way to build brand awareness about my books than any form of paid advertising or direct mail. Maybe you could do the same on your Web site. What special knowledge and information do you have that prospective customers might appreciate your sharing with them? If you’re an expert on something — anything — you might consider a blog. Once a week, a local owner of a garden center posts a new blog about some seasonal challenge for gardeners. In spring, the blog may contain tips on which shrubs to prune now and which ones to leave alone until after they flower. In fall, it might cover bulb planting and how to put your lawn to bed for the winter. Blogs are easy to create and post if you use a blog template and hosting service, such as the one offered by Google. You don’t need to do HTML programming. You just need to have some interesting and/or useful things to say. If you’re unfamiliar with this (completely free!) new medium, start reading other bloggers’ work and get a feel for it before designing your own. 65 Pay-per-click advertising (keyword ads) Pay-per-click advertising isn’t free, but it’s very economical and you can easily control your costs. You can turn it on or off depending on your budget and results. And you can keep fiddling with your selection of key terms, the price you bid for a click on a key term, and the phrase that pops up to promote your link. You need a Web page to link to, so if you don’t already have one, you will have to spend some money to create one. But Web pages don’t need to cost an arm and a leg. You can create your own simple one from an inexpensive template. (Google and many other companies offer them.) So even that requirement isn’t a major barrier to using pay-per-click advertising. I give you more information about how to use this powerful and inexpensive medium in Chapter 5. You can also go to the section of Google’s or Yahoo!’s Web site that explains how to use its key-term advertising services. Pay-per-click advertising isn’t rocket science, but it can help a marketing program take off.
Slide 84: 66 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Pay-per-click advertising for the dogs? Happy Hound is a daycare and boarding facility for dogs. Located in a warehouse in Oakland, California, it serves busy dog owners who drop off their pets on the way to work. The dogs have a great time playing in the warehouse. Suzanne Golter founded the business a few years ago and right away faced the classic entrepreneur’s marketing problem: How to attract customers economically and quickly enough to cover her overhead. Warehouse rent is expensive. She needed clients. She found her marketing zone after experimenting with a variety of advertising. Print ads in national magazines catering to pet owners were expensive and not local enough; they mostly reached people too far away to use her service. Newspaper advertising would have been better — more local — but it was also somewhat costly, and she felt her customers were too busy to read the newspaper. The best tool she found — now her primary marketing method — was Google AdWords, which allows you to create small ads that appear in response to appropriate key-term Web searches. You can choose the geographic area, so she only had to pay for ads that ran within driving distance of her facility. In the early days, 90 percent of Happy Hound’s business came from these simple, modestly priced Web ads. Now, of course, word of mouth from happy Happy Hound customers tends to bring in referrals, so the business doesn’t have to advertise as heavily. Once a local service business gets established, advertising probably should drop to secondary status and word-of-mouth referrals ought to become the primary source of new customers — assuming, of course, that service is good and people are happy enough to tell their friends and neighbors about the business. Widgets, gadgets, and the like You may hear excited marketing chatter about widgets. Widgets look like tiny square Web pages that sit in their own window on another Web page. Sometimes they’re obviously commercial. (eBay has widgets that show specific eBay listings and their status, for example.) Often, widgets are informative, entertaining, or fun. (Some of them are games, for example.) If you search on the Web, you can easily find a variety of companies offering software you can use to build your own widgets, which may be a good idea if you’re clever with your electronic fingers. If you come up with something that is really appealing, people may seek it out and put it on their home pages. Cool! More likely, however, is that widgets will become yet another kind of paid Web ad — more interactive and interesting than most, but sold as ad space by the same players you go to now for pay-per-click listings (especially
Slide 85: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact Yahoo! and Google, the latter of which is promoting widgets under the name Gadget Ads as I write, although it won’t surprise me if the name and details change as they work out the kinks in this new advertising medium). 67 Word of mouth or referral marketing If your service is good enough, all you need is one customer. This customer will be so impressed that he’ll tell others to give you a try. And they will tell others, who will tell others. And soon you’ll have more business than you need, without ever spending a dime on marketing. Your quality better be notable and your people skills flawless, or customers won’t talk you up. I once was hired by an industrial company that was owned by a brilliant chemist. His clients were other companies, mostly manufacturers. He had several dozen good customers, but wanted me to audit his marketing to see whether he could grow the business more rapidly. I set out to audit his marketing activities by asking whether I could meet his sales force. “We have no salespeople,” he said. I was surprised, but tried again. Could I review his mailings and print ads? “We don’t do any of that,” he admitted, looking somewhat embarrassed. Next I asked about trade shows and directories. No, none of that, either. A Web site? Um, sorry, but no. It turned out that this business was growing and making a profit with no marketing program at all. It had started with one loyal customer — a personal connection of the owner — and referrals had built it from there. I was amazed. This marketing was the simplest, cheapest program I had ever encountered. The trick to it was that the owner and his staff were extremely smart and helpful, and people really liked doing business with them. I finally threw up my hands and said I couldn’t help. I suggested he call his customers instead and let them know he was looking for some new business. They quickly spread the word, and soon he had as much new work as he could handle. I hope you can apply that story about the power of referrals to your own business. What can you do to make a more positive impression on each of your customers? How can you become their favorite vendor, service provider, or store? If you’re better than 90 percent of your competitors, word of mouth will naturally lift your sales and bring you new business. All you have to do is do your job well and make an effort to be friendly and likeable whenever you interact with customers.
Slide 86: 68 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Events, parties, and charity fundraisers New retail stores sometimes throw Grand Opening parties, which attract attention and draw in the curious. I like parties. They’re events, and people go to events. All you need is some helium-filled balloons, beverages, and finger foods on trays, and you can hold your own party. To pump it up, you can invite a local group of musicians to perform or tie into an art event. (If you let local artists display their travel or nature photos in your office or store, they’ll show up for the party with friends and family members.) Another good way to attract people and make your business visible is to offer space and support for a local charity to stage a fundraising or community event. Pick a charity that is compatible and of interest to your prospective customers, of course. Then let the enthusiasm draw a crowd. Soft-sell at events and parties to keep the event from feeling too commercial. It’s more than enough to get people to your place of business and let them meet you and your staff. Let them connect the dots later. I promise they’ll remember you. Sponsoring a local sports or charitable event is another way to make yourself visible in the community and to build goodwill. Mega-brands pursue these goals with multimillion-dollar TV and print ad campaigns, but the smaller and/or local marketer probably does better image building through events than through brand advertising. And the price is right — opportunities range from free to modest contributions or fees. And it feels great to see your company name on kids’ sports uniforms or on the list of hosts or sponsors of a local charity. Better looking basics: Stationery, business cards, and brochures I can’t believe how poorly most businesses dress! They may have expensive ad campaigns or flashy Web sites, but if their mailings and business cards are poorly designed or cheaply printed, they’re undermining their investment by not doing the basics well. Take a hard look at your business card. Does it really present you and your business in the best possible way? Does it say “Wow!” or does it just mumble? Please don’t ignore the cornerstones of business communication. Make sure that you always make a powerfully positive impression. See Chapters 6 and 7 if you want some how-to advice to bump up the impact of these low-cost but high-value marketing tools.
Slide 87: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact Another hidden problem in most marketing programs is a lack of consistency in image and presentation. If you don’t present your brand name and related information in a consistent manner, both visually and verbally, you’re not making the impact you ought to. Often, you can improve marketing response rates and boost sales just by reviewing the way you present your business in all existing formats, forums, and media. Go for a consistent impressive look, and good things will follow. 69 Asking for the business Another common marketing mistake is to fail to ask people to make a purchase. View every human interaction (whether in person, by phone, mail, or e-mail) as an opportunity to make a sale. It amazes me, when I consult, at how these opportunities are often wasted. Are you asking for the sale whenever possible, and using proper sales techniques when you ask? If not, check Part V of this book and look for ways to bump up your sales efforts. Maybe this point is obvious, but a sales call is, at least in the short term, free. Yes, I agree that if you staff up with salespeople who receive a salary and/ or commission, the sales staff isn’t free — but I’m talking about you or other staff sometimes popping your sales hat on and getting out there to make a few calls. That kind of marketing doesn’t entail paying commissions to salespeople or sales reps. It just involves your remembering to ask for their business on a regular basis. My theory is that everyone in the business ought to do a little friendly soft selling. Everyone needs sales, right? Well, then they can help you find them. Making sales is everyone’s responsibility. If you can instill that value, you can generate a lot of business that otherwise would be left unharvested. I could go on for many more pages on the subject of low-cost ways to boost sales and maximize marketing impact. In fact, I have! CD0301 is a printable tip sheet with a dozen ideas you can check out. Maybe one of them will work for your business. Have a look! Harnessing the Power of Information Information is usually free. Yet this commodity of the information age is rarely leveraged to full effect by marketers. I can’t believe how fluffy and insubstantial most marketing communications are. Open any piece of promotional mail or visit any business’s Web site to see what I mean. Do compelling, convincing, exciting, hard facts jump out at you? No? Well, they should. Powerfully presented information has the power to make your marketing communications much more effective.
Slide 88: 70 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs Here are some tips for pumping up your marketing communications with well-presented information: ✓ Select your strongest fact or argument and emphasize it consistently. ✓ Prune your writing down so that you make your point clearly and simply. ✓ Strengthen your main point with three or more supporting facts or arguments. ✓ Use a creative approach to make your main point so that people are not bored by it! Most ads are mediocre in their performance. They do okay, but they’re not stars. Same with sales letters, sales presentations, Web pages, and so on. Marketing is a lot like most other areas of human performance in that there is a dominant midrange of intermediate level performances, and not that many high-end examples. I bring up this point because of the cost impact it has. To illustrate the opportunity, I’m going to reach for the very first letter I find in the In Box on my desk. Hmmm. It’s an oversized white envelope bulkmailed to me from State Street, which I know is the latest brand name of a bank where I have some accounts. (My bank was acquired by a bigger bank, so my statement envelopes have taken on a new look recently.) Now, what does my marketing eye make of this mailing from State Street Bank? Well, for starters, it isn’t very attractive. The envelope looks like it is made of the cheapest possible paper, and it’s very plain and boring. No information appears on the front other than my address and the return address; the back is completely blank. Tearing it open, I find a folded set of pages that are labeled Account Statement and have technical information about my holdings. The only other information provided is, “For Account Inquiries Call 1-800-xxx-xxxx.” This mailing is a wasted marketing opportunity! Plenty of space is available on the envelope, as well as within it, to print informative content about what this bank’s other services may be, how it can help me, or what advice or tips it may have to make my financial life better and more secure. And what would it cost to add some of that information that could cement their relationship with customers and possibly cross-sell other services? Nothing. The mailing goes out every month anyway. The next envelope in my In Box is, I’m amused to see, another statement from another bank where I do business. I open it and find that, in addition to my statement information, the bank includes a couple sentences about various special accounts it offers and who is eligible for them, along with a customer relations number. That’s better! A little information can go a long way in the world of marketing.
Slide 89: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact Here are some questions to help you assemble hard-hitting facts that can bump up the impact of any marketing or advertising you do: ✓ What technical specifications or qualities can you mention in order to make your offering look as good as possible compared to the competition? ✓ What qualifications or experiences does your company or team bring to its work that might impress potential buyers? ✓ What special degrees, memberships, awards, or other honors have members of your team received? ✓ Who is already using your product or service? Get permission to name names or, better yet, ask for quotes or testimonials. ✓ What news coverage have you received that you could cite? Facts and evidence, such as product specs, expert recommendations, media coverage, or customer testimonials, have tremendous impact. They can increase the effectiveness of your marketing communications and thereby reduce the amount you have to spend on communicating. More effective equals lower cost. It’s a powerful equation. Take a look at your marketing and sales and see where you can add more evidence and information. 71 Exercising Creativity: Ideas Are Free! Creativity is the silver bullet of marketing programs. It can slay overspending and bring new life to your sales and profits. Maybe instead of searching for ways to cut costs or new media that are cheaper to use, you should go back to the drawing board and come up with some creative marketing concepts. It’s like minting money in your basement — except it’s completely legal. A candle retailer in Durham, North Carolina, wanted a print ad that reminded consumers that candlelight is nice for the dinner table. Instead of the obvious (a photograph of a nicely set table with a candelabra in the middle), the company went for a stark white ad showing nothing but a generic light bulb. If you look closely at the bulb, it has written on it, in dull black ink where the technical specs usually go (in a circle at the top), the message, “How romantic can a 60-watt dinner be?” Good question! It gets you thinking in a creative way about how to stage a romantic dinner — and whether you need to stop by Pinehurst Candles and pick up some tapers for your table. Creativity doesn’t have to be clever. In fact, headlines with clever puns are rarely as effective as the copywriter thinks they’re going to be. (Usually, the joke turns out to be on the marketer.) Creative concepts simply need to get the message across clearly and well. For example, a local insurance agency
Slide 90: 72 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs might have as its message that it doesn’t just sell business insurance, it provides the benefit of 40 years of experience and expertise to its clients. Great! Service and support can make the difference. But how do you communicate this message creatively enough that it grabs consumers’ attention and makes the point without your having to buy endless advertising and billboard space to repeat it? Okay, get creative. How about a visual image to make the point? I’m seeing a spokesperson, someone who looks helpful, sage, and business-like. This wise mentor-like insurance consultant is, hmmm, leaning over someone’s shoulder, pointing something out to him as he examines a complex document. The grateful customer is smiling, nodding, and saying, “Thanks. I was wondering how to control our rising insurance costs! This looks perfect!” Perhaps a high-quality posed photograph of this scene could be used in their ads and brochures? That idea is called a creative concept. I’m not boasting — it’s not really all that creative. Not compared to a Jackson Pollock canvas, for example. But it’s sufficiently creative to bring the message to life with words and imagery. Thinking visually is often a good approach when you want to harness the power of creativity to make your advertising more effective. Studies generally show that print ads that are between 1/4 and 3/4 art (a drawing, diagram, map, or photograph) have much more impact than ads that are mostly or all copy (words). You can use creativity in all media, not just in print ads. Pump up your Web site the same way you would a print ad — except use streaming video instead of static art. (See Chapter 5 for more on visual appeals.) Also, make sure that your brochures, logo, business cards, billing statements, and, in fact, all communications that reach customers or prospects are creative enough to draw the eye and attract attention. A dull speaker puts the audience to sleep. And dull marketing gets even less respect. By the way, that sentence uses a metaphor, and metaphors are a powerful creative tool for marketing. I will give you more tools and techniques for creativity in Chapter 12, but even if you don’t read that chapter right away, you can start to harness the power of creativity by using simple, powerful metaphors to bring your message home more effectively. Here’s an example: The Australian winery Wolf Blass wanted to convey the sense that it’s a bold leader in the industry. It decided to get this message across with a simple metaphor — the winery compared its brand to an eagle. The name “WOLF BLASS” is always shown in gold capital letters with a gold line drawing of an eagle spreading its wings directly above. The message is also reinforced with words — the tag line that always appears next to their logo reads, “Australian wine at its peak.”
Slide 91: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact Can you compare your brand, product, or service to a bird or animal? If so, then this visual may be a good way to get your message across. For example, the camel epitomizes sustainability because it can store and conserve water for its desert habitat. Perhaps a camel would be a good image to associate with a company that does energy audits and consults on green construction methods? See whether you can come up with a good metaphor for your marketing message. 73 Narrowing Your Focus to Cut Costs and Maximize Impact In Chapter 1, I introduce you to the concept of a marketing zone — the set of formulas that you develop for optimizing your marketing and making it reasonably predictable and reliable. I also share the important insight that good marketing needs to have a tight focus and not be spread too thin. When you find your zone and get your marketing program well tuned, you’ll discover that you’re focused in two ways: You know what your message is, and you know what your primary medium is for delivering it. This focus is the secret to economical marketing. It produces marketing programs that generate a lot of leads and sales from relatively little effort. Unfortunately, most marketing is not well focused on either of these areas. Or is that a fortunate thing? Maybe so, because it means you can follow an obvious path toward better performance and lower marketing costs. Focusing your marketing message What exactly is the benefit of your product or service? Why should people buy from you? If your answer varies or is lengthy, confusing, unconvincing, or uncertain, then you need to focus your message more sharply. I have to be brutally honest with you: I don’t think your message is clearly defined or communicated with sufficient consistency. I think your marketing communications lack focus. A lack of focus is a problem for 99 percent of my clients, so I imagine it could be for you, too. Take a look at any well-positioned consumer brand for inspiration on how to focus your message. They often are good examples of highly focused marketing that hits the same powerful positioning message over and over.
Slide 92: 74 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs And you don’t have to be a multibillion-dollar consumer products giant like Frito-Lay or Procter & Gamble to use this strategy. For example, the brand of bottled water called Pure Mountain Spring Water is, according to its Web site (puremountainspringwater.com), a fourth-generation family business that bottles water from a pristine reservoir on Cobb Mountain (in California’s Lake County). All its packaging says the same thing: Pure Mountain Spring Water. Its bills (to customers who have the water delivered to their homes and offices) also repeat the product’s claim to fame, because the company name, Pure Mountain Spring Water, is apparent on every communication. You can’t help but get the message. The marketing message is 100 percent clear, just like the water. No competing messages or confusion is allowed to cloud it. This water is. . . . Well, I don’t need to repeat that marketing message, as you already know it by heart. But do your customers and prospects know your message by heart? Think about it. Do something about it. To make sure that you’re focusing your message and basing it on a strong foundation of compelling evidence, open file CD0302 and take a look at the Message Pyramid, a simple way to diagram your message strategy. I filled it in for my example, Pure Mountain Spring Water, so that you can see how you can use this tool to clarify and focus a marketing message. Give it a try! Focusing your marketing program In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of a well-focused marketing program and diagram it as a pyramid. The idea is simple but powerful: At least a quarter of your effort and spending should be concentrated on the single most effective marketing activity, or your program will be too scattered and unfocused to be effective. When you figure out what the right focus is, your marketing runs smoothly and profitably, and you enter what I call your marketing zone. The reason you need to focus your marketing program on one primary method and several secondary methods is that this approach is the most cost-effective and efficient way to market. It is difficult to be noticed; it is hard to be heard. There is what marketers call “noise” in all the communications channels you’re using to try to reach prospective customers. Lots of information is competing for their attention. You have to focus your program if you want to rise above the background noise. For example, running a few 30-second radio ads a week probably won’t produce any significant impact, because people won’t really pay attention. You probably need to run a few dozen to get your message across, but you won’t be able to afford it if you’re also spending money on billboards, a direct mailing, several new Web sites, and an event at the same time you’re trying to hit the market with radio ads.
Slide 93: Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact If you lack tight focus, narrow your program and concentrate more effort and resources in one lead marketing method. I have a hunch you’ll see more bang for your marketing buck as soon as you identify the most productive marketing activities and focus your resources on them. Don’t get me wrong: You still need to have a lot of things going on at once in most marketing programs. Your business cards and letterhead need to look sharp and should use the same version of your logo and tag line as your latest catalog or Web page does. Your packaging should be carefully designed to maximize appeal (if you sell a packaged good). Your house list of customers needs a friendly mailing, telephone call, or e-mail at least once a month, and so on. You always have to juggle many activities and media, but you need to decide which are the most important — and be tough as nails about defending their dominance. Give your primary method between a third and a half of your attention and budget, or it won’t have enough fertilizer to grow healthy sales and profits for you. 75 On the CD Check out the following items on the CD-ROM: ✓ Tips for Boosting Sales (CD0301) ✓ The Message Pyramid (CD0302)
Slide 94: 76 Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs
Slide 95: Part II Advertising Management and Design
Slide 96: o you ever advertise? If not, I can honestly say that you better think about starting because there are few businesses that couldn’t benefit from well-designed, carefully placed advertising. If you do already use this powerful medium, then you no doubt know how expensive it can get and how hard designing an ad that really achieves its business objectives can be. Careful planning — which I show you how to do in Chapter 4 — is the answer to these problems. Ads can accomplish a lot of profitable objectives, but only if you clearly define them upfront and then design your campaign appropriately. Ads absolutely must be well designed. They need to look good, read well, sound great, catch the eye, make a lasting impression, and be the stuff of dinner conversation. In short, ads have to be powerful. In Chapter 5, I share my best ideas and techniques for building powerful ads that really make an impact on your customers and on your sales. Promise me that you’ll read it carefully and that you won’t ever run an ad that lacks power and punch. D In this part . . .
Slide 97: Chapter 4 Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns In This Chapter ▶ Calculating a practical average cost per ad ▶ Calculating your ad budget as a percentage of your overall sales ▶ Adjusting your budget based on gross profit ▶ Planning your ad campaign ▶ Preparing a budget that achieves high ad frequency ▶ Designing business-to-business ad plans and budgets ▶ Preparing an objective-and-task budget B efore you start designing specific ads, you really need to create an advertising plan. In this chapter, I help you plan how much you want to spend on advertising and how you ought to spend it. You can easily spend more money than you’ve imagined in your wildest dreams because ads can be very expensive — but please don’t! In this chapter, I show you how to set some practical limits on your advertising campaign to make sure that you’re laughing, not crying, all the way to the bank. A Practical Approach to Ad Budgets I feel like I need to start this chapter with a bold, flashing WARNING! sign in the middle of the road. If you’re approaching advertising as a midsized or small consumer business or as a midsized business that sells to other businesses (B2B), you have to proceed with special caution. Why? Because all the expert advice and conventional wisdom about advertising is based on what works for giant consumer brands.
Slide 98: 80 Part II: Advertising Management and Design I don’t know why all the advertising textbooks are based on what’s best for Sony, McDonald’s, Toyota, and Coca–Cola when most businesses need a very different approach, but that’s how it is. In this chapter, I break with tradition and show everyone else how they need to approach advertising. Your CD contains a White Paper I wrote titled Budgeting for Advertising: A Practical Approach (CD0401), which explores the difference between a corporate ad campaign for a chain of restaurants and a local ad campaign for a single family-owned restaurant. The corporate approach has several qualities that the local restaurant owner should be wary of: ✓ Large scale (multiple stores throughout a region or a country), which makes frequent, expensive TV ads practical and effective for the corporate marketer ✓ Deep pockets, which means that the corporate marketer can choose to invest in extra advertising without immediate payback ✓ A focus on expansion, which gives the corporate marketer more reason to invest in pure brand-building without the need for immediate sales and profits to show for it When you operate at a relatively small scale and want to make profits every year, you can’t just scale back the corporate advertising budget. Most businesses would need to spend their entire annual advertising budget to create just one high-quality, 30-second TV ad and run it a handful of times. That ad would be useless because you need to run ads many times in order to make an impact. The most important rule for practical small-business advertising is Use cheap ads so that you can run them frequently without going broke! Setting your ad budget Imagine that you’re the owner of a local restaurant — a steak house, a seafood joint, an upscale business lunch place, or whatever would be most successful in your local market. To start with, you need to consider your advertising plan in the context of the overall budget. Is the business profitable? If so, then some of that profit ought to be directed into advertising. Advertising is a business expense, so it comes out of pretax profits. If you can afford to put 5 percent of your gross sales into advertising without posting a loss, then plan to do so. If not — if you have a profitability problem — then stop worrying about advertising and start looking hard at your cost structure. Make necessary cuts first. Get the business at least to break even. If this means scaling back and reducing your payroll, moving to a smaller location with cheaper rent, or otherwise changing your business plan, then make these needed changes first.
Slide 99: Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns Advertising is powerful — but not powerful enough to dig you out of an unprofitable business model unless you have a lot of extra cash to invest and are sure that your business will be profitable if you increase the size of your customer base just a little more. Meeting these conditions isn’t easy. Often, when people try to spend their way out of a loss, they find they have to spend more on advertising than they had initially expected, and the losses get bigger and swamp them. Remember that you should be spending gross profits on advertising and making sure that the underlying business model is sustainable. With that caution in mind, I’m now going to show you how to budget and plan an annual ad campaign, using a local restaurant business as my working example. Table 4-1 shows the annual income statement for such a restaurant. (It’s a simplified budget, so please don’t use it as a template for doing your business accounting. See Accounting Workbook For Dummies by John A. Tracy and speak to your accountant if you don’t already have a budgeting process.) 81 Table 4-1 Goal: 10% growth, family-owned restaurant: Sales Food costs at 36% Packaging at 6% Labor at 25% Overhead at 20% Total Operating expenses Gross profit Advertising set at 5% of sales = Calculating a Percent-of-Sales Ad Budget Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 $1,366,770 $478,370 $68,339 $273,354 $259,686 $1,079,748 $287,022 $67,770 $1,503,447 $526,206 $75,172 $300,689 $285,655 $1,187,723 $315,724 $75,172 $1,653,792 $578,827 $82,690 $330,758 $314,220 $1,306,495 $347,296 $82,690 The two key lines in Table 4-1 for setting your ad budget are sales and gross profit. Total sales multiplied by 0.05 tells you what your 5 percent target is going to be. Gross profits tells you if you can afford to spend 5 percent of sales. In the case in Table 4-1, 5 percent of sales is considerably less than gross profits, so the ad budget is affordable and I would recommend investing in it in order to help the business achieve next year’s sales target of 10 percent growth. (Remember to adjust the percentages to reflect your own expenses.)
Slide 100: 82 Part II: Advertising Management and Design If the 5 percent goal isn’t affordable (gross profits are too low to cover it), you may be forced to reduce your ad budget. Be a pragmatist and cut back — that’s just how it goes. However, also make sure that you adjust your sales projections for the coming year, because less advertising means lower sales. And reducing your sales forecast will, of course, reduce your gross margin (because some expenses are fixed — meaning that they don’t vary with sales). Therefore, you also have to make some cost cuts in order to salvage your next year of business. Cut costs until you can project a healthier gross profit for next year. Don’t try to advertise your way out of a losing business plan — it takes more than advertising to succeed; it also takes firm financial management. Planning your ad campaign After you’re confident that you can afford to put at least a few percent of your sales into advertising, you’re ready to think about how to spend that budget. Here’s a simple, practical approach to planning your ad campaign: 1. Decide how many ads you need to place over the course of the year and pick a goal for this variable. For most businesses, the goal should be to run more than 100 ads per year. By number of ads, I’m referring to frequency of exposure. You can accomplish the same frequency with one ad, run 100 times, as with five ads, run 20 times each. Which is best? It will depend on how effective the first ad is and whether you need to replace it. You can work out such details later in your process, but for now, just focus on budgeting enough to run a high number of ads. If you’re uncertain about how many ads you need to run, don’t feel bad; this decision is tough, and even experts at big ad agencies have no hard and fast rules. However, keep in mind that major, big-budget ad campaigns try to expose prospective customers to ads very frequently — perhaps many times a day. (Witness the frequent repetition of TV ads.) If you’re a normal — that is to say, not a huge — business, you can’t do that. But what can you do? Can you at least expose people to your message once a week? How about two or three times a week? That may be an affordable goal. (After all, a single billboard can expose commuters to your message once every workday.) If high frequency proves not to be affordable for you, then narrow your focus to a smaller target market, which allows you to run ads that cost less because they reach a smaller audience. You’re better off reaching a small audience often than you are
Slide 101: Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns reaching a huge audience just a few times. It does take repetition to have an impact. And it takes repetition to make an impression. In fact, you really need to repeat your message frequently. Okay, you get the point! 2. Divide your overall budget by your frequency goal. This result tells you what your average ad ought to cost. If you buy ads the way big corporate advertisers do, you’ll blow your budget on overpriced ads and won’t be able to afford to repeat your message frequently. That’s why you need to do this simple math before you shop for ads. In the example of a restaurant with an ad budget of about $68,000, a frequency goal of at least 150 ad placements would mean that the average ad cost needs to be around $450 ($68,000 ÷ 150). 3. Armed with the knowledge from your analysis of what your total budget is and what your average ad cost ought to be, explore the options available to you in your local market. As you examine options, look for media that reach your customers well. For example, a newspaper that reaches the majority of homeowners in your city or town is a good place to advertise things homeowners buy, such as furniture, lawn care, or dinners out (when they get sick of cooking in). A national magazine on home remodeling isn’t as good a match for you if you have a local business, because many of its readers are outside your market area. Table 4-2 is an example of a spending plan based on a budget of $67,700 and an average ad cost of around $450 so that the business can run at least 150 separate ads over the course of the year. Actually, this plan will achieve considerably higher frequency — probably twice that much — because it includes some package buys. That’s fine. There’s no harm in exceeding your frequency goal — just make sure you don’t come in under it. In this example, I used ad prices for a typical small city, but pricing will vary depending on the size of the population in your local area. Contact your local media and ask for quotes or rate cards to get actual ad pricing. Most ads are sold by salespeople — real human beings who can talk to you on the phone, answer your questions, and sometimes even negotiate a good deal if you ask nicely. So don’t be shy. Spend a day or two calling and e-mailing to find out what the options are within your market area and price range. Keep in mind that the rate per ad should come down proportionately with the frequency. Also contact publications close to their closing date for insertion orders. Many times, they’re not at full capacity and are more willing to cut you a deal. 83
Slide 102: 84 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Table 4-2 Type of Advertisement Ad Plan and Budget for a Local Restaurant Cost* $50 $265 $2,000 $2,500 $300 Frequency 40 20 11 5 10 Total Cost $2,000 $5,300 $22,000 $12,500 $3,000 Daily newspaper 3 column inch display ad (40K circulation) Daily newspaper 9 column inch display ad Newspaper insert (color card) Internet radio ad package (through TargetSpot), monthly Google localized key term search advertising, monthly cap on costs of $300 Back of bus poster, monthly, per bus Sponsorship of weekend crafts fair, with signage on site plus radio mentions (estimated number of ads) ValPak single panel coupon in cooperative mailing to local households** Total*** Annual sales Ad budget as percent of sales $300 $5,500 36 21 $10,800 $5,500 $600 11 $6,600 154 $67,700 $1,366,770 5.0% Notes: * Cost adjusted for any quantity discounts. ** Does not include cost of redeeming coupons, which will depend on the nature of the offer. See Chapter 8. *** Total does not include package buy of radio spots, so actual frequency will be higher. A spreadsheet based on Table 4-2 is provided on your CD (file CD0402). None of the cells are locked, so you can edit it to fit your own ad plan. If you enter your annual sales in the correct cell, a formula will calculate the percent of sales your ad spending works out to, so you can keep adjusting your plan until you hit your percentage target.
Slide 103: Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns My budget for this family-owned restaurant is based on a mix of public advertising (bus posters and signs at an event), Friday and weekend newspaper display ads, experimental Web-radio ads, Google key term ads, plus a newspaper special insert and coupon mailings approximately once a month (see Table 4-2). The local market will be fairly well saturated with advertising. The marketing zone pyramid (see Chapter 1) for this business is based on using newspaper advertising as the primary method, with two other types of ads (event sponsorship, bus posters) in secondary supporting roles, plus by-mail coupons as the third supporting method. The Google keywords advertising and Web radio ads are somewhat experimental, as I’m imagining the restaurant is a traditional business. However, if either of them really makes an impact, I’d recommend giving them more of the budget next year and reducing the newspaper and bus advertising correspondingly. 85 Adjusting the ad budget for a B2B plan If you’re working on a B2B (business to business) marketing plan, you should use the same method and logic described in the preceding section, but should favor professional venues for your advertising instead of consumer-oriented ads. You won’t participate in a mailing of coupons to homes, but you’ll probably want to pay to be listed in online business directories. Similarly, you should substitute advertising in business and trade publications for the newspaper advertising. And you’ll probably spend less overall on advertising because you’ll want to budget something for personal selling, trade shows and exhibitions, or other business-oriented marketing activities. However, the same basic rule applies: Work up a budget that is pragmatic and sustainable because it’s funded out of your gross profits and make sure that you buy inexpensive ads so that you can afford to run them frequently. B2B ad plans take a secondary seat behind the sales plans if personal selling is important to the business. Your sales force ought to be paid largely on commission (to reduce your risk), and commissions can range from 10 to 25 percent depending on the industry and business. The high commissions mean the cost of sales is much higher than with advertising — but usually price and quantity make up for the high cost of sales in a B2B plan. If you’re budgeting sales force commissions plus overhead (which encompasses items such as sales collateral material and travel expenses), then you’re probably going to need to keep advertising to a more modest level — somewhere around 1 to 3 percent of sales.
Slide 104: 86 Part II: Advertising Management and Design To get started, I suggest you work up an ad plan based on 2.5 percent of gross sales and see what it looks like. Often, B2B marketers can get away with half as much advertising as consumer marketers, so you can start with this amount as your working assumption until you gain enough experience to know what your marketing zone formula actually is. Tailoring Your Advertising Plan to a Specific Goal The preceding section covers my modified version of a classic percent-ofsales budgeting process. The modifications I made had to do with keeping it in line with your profits, and making sure that you had realistic expectations about what types of ads you can afford given your scale of operations. Other than these adjustments, the method is quite common and traditional and many businesses have used it with success. Now I want to share an alternative method that is a bit more sophisticated, and may be worth the added trouble. If you want to dig into the differences between ad options and refine your plan based on which give you the best return on investment, you may want to use a more sophisticated method: the objective and task method of designing an ad plan and budget. This approach is common among large corporate advertisers instead of smaller businesses, but you certainly can use it — and you may want to at least take a look at the approach before finalizing your plans. You’re not advertising for the right reasons if you’re thinking things like ✓ “We do some advertising just to keep ourselves visible, but I don’t think it affects our sales.” ✓ “We try to match our competitors’ advertising because customers expect it.” ✓ “We’ve always done advertising; I don’t know if it really works, but we’re afraid of what might happen if we stop.” If you aren’t sure why you’re advertising or what you’ll accomplish with it, you may need to do a careful analysis of your situation and market and build a new advertising budget and plan based on your specific goals or objectives. Table 4-3 lists examples of objectives or goals that advertising can help you accomplish. To use a goal-based approach to advertising (also called objective-based or objective-and-task-based advertising), select a strategic goal such as one listed in Table 4-3.
Slide 105: Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns 87 Table 4-3 Goal Boost sales Generate calls Generate by-mail responses Introduce new product Switch customers from competing product Encourage word of mouth Examples of Ad Goals and Indicators Indicator Sales rise when and where the ad runs. The telephone rings off the hook in the week after the ad runs. Responses come in by mail in large numbers the week after the ad first runs. Requests for and press coverage of the new product increase significantly right after the ad appears. Sales go up next month as a result of switching. Current and past customers begin to talk, stimulating sales to people who say they “heard about you from someone they know.” Your sales grow faster than the leading competitors’ sales over the course of a year. You hear from multiple distributors who are interested in working with you. Sales grow gradually but definitely do grow, along with rapid improvements in image and enhanced reputation. You sell higher-priced products or find that you can raise your prices or no longer have to negotiate as many discounts. Your sales to the new group increase over the course of a year. You sell more of the new product to your current customer base during the year than you did last year. Monthly store traffic and sales figures increase. Increase your share of market Recruit new distributors Help build sales by building image or reputation Attract more upscale buyers Attract a different group of customers Cross-sell new product to current customers Get more shoppers to visit your store(s) After you have a clear goal or purpose for your advertising, identify appropriate indicators to track your success. Your sales figures are probably going to be an important measure, but profits may also be important, as well as more specific things, such as whether you succeed in raising your prices or increasing the average size of a sale. Think about what you want to accomplish and be prepared to measure it so that you can see whether you’re making progress toward your goal.
Slide 106: 88 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Notice that every objective in Table 4-3 links to a specific outcome that you can track to see whether you achieved the objective. If you see movement in the measure, then the ad is working toward its objective. If you don’t, then the ad isn’t working, and you need to improve it or scrap it in favor of a new design. The ultimate objective, of course, is to generate sales from your ads. For example, if you run an ad designed to get more people into your store, the ultimate objective is to increase sales in that store. So you need to measure the ad by its impact on sales, as well as on more specific and short-term measures, such as the number of people visiting a store. Also notice that I added a desired outcome in each of these descriptions of an advertising objective in Table 4-3. Each statement includes some whatto-do information and also some indicator of how you know whether it’s working. I want you to be this specific when you define your own advertising objectives. That way, you can create or purchase advertising that has a very clear purpose in mind, and then you’re able to watch its performance and see whether it’s doing what you said it ought to. One of the most fundamental rules of good management is that accountability is important — and advertising is certainly not above this accountability rule. Budgeting based on goals The concept of budgeting based on goals is simple: Decide what you want to accomplish and then design an ad campaign that will achieve your goals. It won’t work that way in reality, unfortunately, but it’s a great theory. If you can apply this idea even partially, it can strengthen your advertising budget and plan. Here’s how to budget based on goals: 1. Set your objective. For example, you may choose the goal of expanding the customer base for a local restaurant by attracting a business lunch crowd to supplement your traditionally busy dinner seating. 2. Clarify the gap between current and desired results. For example, a restaurant owner may decide to create a three-fold increase in lunchtime business, while sustaining the current level of dinner business. 3. Make a list of types of advertising that may be effective in achieving your goal. For example, you may decide to hire someone to drop off menus and coupons at office buildings in your area in order to encourage local employees to eat lunch at your restaurant.
Slide 107: Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns 4. Think about the scale of advertising needed to achieve your goal. Is the gap between your current sales and your goal a large one? If so, then you need to scale up your advertising in order to fill this gap. You’ll probably need to bump up your sales by a factor of 25 to 50 percent at a minimum. 5. Set a target for your overall budget that is appropriate to (proportional with) the scale of your goals. Don’t set your sights high and your budget low, or you’re bound to be disappointed. After you’ve gone thoughtfully through these steps, you’ll have a clearer idea of what might need to change in your approach to advertising. You’ll have some ideas about new and different types of ads and/or media to use, and you’ll have a general sense of whether your historic levels of advertising are appropriate or whether you need to bump up your budget in order to accomplish an ambitious goal. The strategic thinking involved in goal-based budgeting is especially helpful when you’re trying to achieve something new and different with your advertising. However, coming up with a specific budget level through this goal-based approach isn’t easy. I recommend starting with the more specific and practical percent-of-sales method described in the section “A Practical Approach to Ad Budgets” earlier in this chapter and then using a goal-based analysis to refine your budget and focus your approach to advertising. 89 Using an Advertising Objectives Worksheet While the goal-oriented approach is especially useful when you’re designing individual ads, writing an effective ad is a lot easier when you have a clear goal or objective in mind. For example, if I’m a B2B supplier of industrial machinery and my goal is to boost sales of my newest product, I need to remember this goal as I design ads. An ad that tells the history of my company may be impressive and confidence-inspiring, but it doesn’t address the goal of pushing the new product into the market. Instead, I ought to plan some show-and-tell ads that convince prospects that this new product is superior. I may also want to think about a special offer, such as a one-month free trial. These ideas are focused on the goal, so they make more sense than a general ad about my company. To help you give your ads a purposeful focus, I include an Advertising Objectives Worksheet on the CD (CD0403). Print multiple copies of it and use it for brainstorming as you think about what your ads should accomplish.
Slide 108: 90 Part II: Advertising Management and Design The worksheet in CD0403 forces you to design your ad campaign one ad at a time. Each ad should stand on its own as a goal-oriented plan that makes both strategic and economic sense. Use the worksheet to estimate the costs and results of each ad. Plan to run the ad and others like it enough times to achieve your overall objective. The worksheet keeps you honest by forcing you to make a reasonable estimate of what each ad can accomplish. Its bottom line is the sum of the impact of each individual ad or flight of ads. Adjust the mix of ads in your worksheet until you’re satisfied that you have a good selection of ads that achieves your goals efficiently (with a good return on your advertising investment). The Advertising Objectives Worksheet is a helpful tool for analyzing specific ads and for summing up their overall impact on your marketing program. For the sake of analysis, an ad means a specific advertisement run in a specific medium a specific number of times. So, in a budget for my own training-materials company, for example, I may define ad No. 1 as “4-x-4-inch ad on Conflict Assessment, three months in Training magazine.” And I may define ad No. 2 as “Direct-mail script #22, to house list with new catalog.” To keep track of these specifics, I write a clear description of each ad in the Description column of the spreadsheet. When you use the Advertising Objectives Worksheet on your computer, you’ll see (to the right of the Cost of Ad column) that the spreadsheet calculates the return on investment for each ad. If the result is 1, the ad breaks even, which means that its expected revenue-generating power is equal to its cost. If the result is above 1, you’re making a profit on the ad. If you aren’t sure which ads (combinations of a specific ad design and insertion in a medium of your choice) to use the most, then look at this column and repeat the ads with the highest returns on investment. If you aren’t sure what to enter under the Reach (number of prospects) column in the worksheet, ask whoever sells space or time in the advertising media of interest to you. Almost all media you buy ad space from will have statistics on whom they reach, and they almost always give away detailed profiles of audience or readership for free to anyone who’s interested in advertising with them. Note that the worksheet defines reach as the number of prospects, not just the number of warm bodies. Sometimes these numbers are the same; sometimes they aren’t. For example, if you’re promoting a product that mostly women buy, then you want to enter the number of women (your prospects in this case) who read a magazine into the Reach column, not the total number of people in the magazine’s readership.
Slide 109: Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns 91 Preparing a month-by-month ad plan The Advertising Objectives Worksheet can be helpful as you work up a list of advertising plans for the year. After you’ve done your research on ad options and prices and have thought about what sorts of ads you need to run and how many of them you need, you should have a pretty good list. (It’s never perfect — you’ll no doubt revise it many times as you see what results you achieve during the year.) With this preparation, you can return to your overall ad budget and prepare a more accurate and thoughtful version of it. You have two options now. You can go back to the simple ad budget format in CD0402 and revise it based on any insights your goal analysis gave you. Or if you want to create a more complex and detailed plan, you have the option of using the Advertising Budget Worksheets in CD0404. The Advertising Budget Worksheets in CD0404 are two linked Excel spreadsheets. The first spreadsheet (see Tab 1) asks you to enter spending levels per month for all the different types of ads you plan to run. (Leave some of the rows blank — nobody should use all the options in this worksheet at the same time!) After you fill in the monthly worksheet, Tab 2 will automatically produce a summary in the form of an annual budget. Handy, isn’t it? You may find as you use the worksheets in CD0404 that your monthly plans produce an overly expensive annual budget. Keep an eye on the bottom line total for the year and make sure that it’s reasonable. If you aren’t sure what a reasonable overall ad budget might be, see the section “Setting your ad budget,” earlier in this chapter, and set a percent-of-sales goal (roughly 5 percent for consumer marketing, roughly 2.5 percent for B2B marketing). Then review your goals and gaps and adjust accordingly. But don’t forget that you have to fund the ad plan, so it ought to be less than gross profits. If not, worry about your costs and come back to your ad budget later. Staying flexible throughout the year Sometimes I hear from readers who say something like, “Okay, I’ve created a detailed ad plan and budget, but I’m still not sure it’s right. How can I be certain I’ve done it correctly?” My answer usually shocks them. The fact is, you can’t be sure your budget and plan are correct. There are no certainties in advertising. That means you need to stay flexible, keep an eye on performance, and adjust your plan from time to time throughout the year.
Slide 110: 92 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Here are some ways you may want to adjust your plan: ✓ If sales are disappointingly low, consider cutting back on general brandbuilding ads while simultaneously increasing your sales promotions and direct response ads in the hope that they’ll quickly boost sales. ✓ If one of the ads you run doesn’t seem to be working, drop it from your budget and increase your spending on a more effective ad. ✓ If sales are higher than you expected and you’re unable to increase your capacity fast enough, cut back on your advertising and channel some of that money into hiring more people, ordering more materials, or whatever you need to do to meet demand. These examples are adjustments that marketers can make at any point during the year. Sometimes ad reps (the people who sell advertising space or time) try to lock you into big contracts by offering enticing discounts. But is the commitment worth the additional discount? Remember you’re trading flexibility for price. I favor flexibility, especially if I’m trying a new ad campaign and am not sure how it will go. But don’t forget that a few ads won’t be enough in any medium or ad venue to make an impact. Midsized and small businesses are always at a disadvantage because they can’t advertise at the high frequency that marketing giants can. Avoid spreading your ads too thin. Run at least a dozen ads in a row in the same place (for example, the same newspaper or Web site). So long as you think you’re getting a response, keep advertising in the same place. On the CD Check out the following items on the CD-ROM: ✓ Budgeting for Advertising: A Practical Approach (CD0401) ✓ Annual Advertising Budget and Plan (CD0402) ✓ Advertising Objectives Worksheet (CD0403) ✓ Monthly & Annual Advertising Budget Templates (CD0404)
Slide 111: Chapter 5 Shortcuts to Great Ads In This Chapter ▶ Using do-it-yourself ad templates ▶ Taking a look at creative ad concepts and examples ▶ Knowing how far you can go with desktop design ▶ Placing ads by mail ▶ Surfing for Web ad ideas and shortcuts imple, inexpensive approaches to ad design are best for most marketing plans, because the goal is to keep your design and prepress costs low. (I recommend you cap them at 5 percent of your ad budget.) That way, most of your advertising budget is spent on actually getting those ads out in front of potential buyers. If your ads aren’t award winners, that’s okay. Just make sure that they’re professional and simple enough that the message gets through loud and clear. And make them visually appealing because that’s usually the secret to noticeable, memorable ads. In this chapter, I help you conceive of good ads and mock them up or (in some cases) design them fully, using nothing fancier than a basic computer running Microsoft Word. Word has a decent and simple-to-use drawing toolbar, plus a lot of basic templates, and it can produce output in PDF format, which a growing number of printers and ad departments are happy to accept. S Following Do-It-Yourself Shortcuts One of my favorite ways to think about a new ad I need to design is to leaf through a copy of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, studying the ads and pulling out examples of ad layouts that I think may fit my needs. (I like looking in the Sunday Magazine because its advertising space is expensive, so I usually find a lot of carefully designed ads that inspire me. However, if I am designing a mailing, I prefer to go through the junk mail I receive for inspiration.)
Slide 112: 94 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Of course, you can’t just cut someone else’s brand name out of an ad and paste yours in. But you can get lots of starting ideas for different ways to communicate your message and achieve your advertising objective. (Make sure that you have a clear objective for your ad — something simple and persuasive to communicate.) The tried-and-true visual appeal ad If you look at a large number of print ads in any well-read consumer or professional magazine, you’ll begin to see some basic ad templates repeated over and over, each time with a fresh new combination of imagery and language. Most commonly, many consumer magazines run one- or two-page fullcolor ads featuring a striking or beautiful photograph with a simple headline that usually contains a play on words to help catch and hold attention (but you don’t have to have a cute headline — serious is fine, too). The ad always includes the brand name and the tag line explaining the brand’s basic brilliance and appeal. (If you don’t already have a clear statement of what makes your product or service compelling to buyers, think about that and write a simple, compelling, one-sentence description of why your brand is great.) At the bottom, the ad may have a sentence or two of explanatory copy. Figure 5-1 illustrates a basic layout sized for a full-page magazine ad. The basic visual ad template in Figure 5-1 works for almost everything — including clothing, automobiles, cosmetics, travel destinations, business services, and life insurance. Just vary the image and wording to fit your product (the illustration in Figure 5-1 would be good for a travel or tourism theme). The layout may work for you, and you can adapt it to a Web ad, brochure, postcard, or poster, too. To make a visual appeal ad, start by seeking a photograph (or other illustration such as the original oil painting by Harold Newton used in Figure 5-1) that is glue to the eye — and also make sure you can somehow relate the image to the essence of your appeal. For example, if you sell computer maintenance services to businesses, you might choose the message, “We keep you performing at your peak” and illustrate it with a beautiful photograph of a noble snow-covered mountain peak rising out of cloud-covered lowlands. But where will you find that stunning photo of a mountain peak? I thought you’d never ask! Go to stock photography Web sites (see the upcoming list) and rifle through them to see whether something strikes your fancy. Then use your headline to relate the image to your message. If you decide to use a stock photograph in your ad, contact the stock photography house directly to find out what it will charge for your intended usage. The cost typically ranges from as low as $100 to as high as $1,000, depending on what you have in mind. I usually budget $250 up front for a photo, because that amount seems to be about the average for my work in the past.
Slide 113: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads 95 Figure 5-1: A basic layout with headline, illustration, caption, body copy, and logo. You can view and license the rights to photographs at Web sites such as ✓ Jupiter Images: www.ablestock.com ✓ Corbis: www.corbis.com ✓ Comstock Images: www.comstock.com ✓ Photolibrary: www.photolibrary.com ✓ Getty Images: www.gettyimages.com ✓ Fotosearch Stock Photography: www.fotosearch.com ✓ iStockphoto: www.istock.com
Slide 114: 96 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Become a desktop publisher? Increasingly, entrepreneurial marketers are designing their own print ads and submitting them in the Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) output option that all graphic design programs, and even Microsoft Word, support. (You may bump into the term PDF/X, which refers to certain standards for how you save the PDF file so as to make it more printer-friendly. If you’re unsure of what the publication or printer requires, ask for instructions before you send the file or hire a prepress service bureau to prepare your file for submission.) Consult the people at the publication you want to advertise in (or the printer you want to hire to produce your brochure or catalog) to find out the easiest and most inexpensive way to submit your ad designs. But don’t let them talk you into buying an expensive new design program you don’t know how to use — just ask them whether they can accept PDF files from whatever program you already know how to use. Glossy monthly magazines may not accept a PDF file. Oops! For example, all the Condé Nast magazines (such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and Gourmet) require you to submit your ad as a TIFF/IT-P1 (Tagged Image File Format/Image Technology) file because the company’s digital printing processes work well with this format and errors are kept to a minimum. However, you, as a desktop publisher, can’t easily produce such a file. If asked for a specialized file format such as TIFF/IT, you’ll need to find a provider of prepress services. (You’re not alone in this need; most ad agencies and graphic designers contract out for prepress services, too.) Send your file in its normal format (for example, an Adobe Illustrator file when saved has a .ai extension; Photoshop files use .psd), and prepress services or a friendly local graphic designer will, for a modest fee, convert it to the TIFF/IT format the magazine requires (and also allow you to proof and correct it). Search the Web for “prepress services” for quick access to hundreds of companies that provide such services. Note that you can also ask a prepress service provider to help you with a PDF file so as to ensure the best possible color reproduction and avoid errors with your type. Many local and smaller publications (including some magazines and newspapers) offer design and prepress services to the advertiser — sometimes for free! Just give them the design concept, with the images and language you want included. To get you started, I include a library of photographs you can use for free as a buyer of this book. They’re in the folder labeled CD0501. Within this folder are several dozen varied images in high resolution JPEG format, which means they’re suitable for use in any magazine or newspaper or for the cover of a catalog, brochure, or postcard. This paragraph is your permission to use them. I took all these images (because I happen also to be a professional photographer), so I can give away the rights to my readers if I so choose. All I ask is that you include in small type the following line: Photo credit: © Alex Hiam. Have fun playing with words and images!
Slide 115: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads Lots of good photographs appear on the Web and in magazines and books. Use magazines like National Geographic or Life or do a Google search for images to look for the sort of image you want and then go to a stock photography company to find a high-resolution version for which you can purchase usage rights. But don’t try to use “found” photography in your ad unless you track down the owner and get written permission. Purchased photographs from the stock photography suppliers aren’t very expensive, but defending a copyright lawsuit is. And don’t forget the obvious: A good, clear photograph or drawing of your product is sometimes the best art for an ad. If you have a product that’s even slightly photogenic, maybe you can just use a photo of it and not bother with purchasing any other art. To take a photo of your product yourself, use a high-end digital SLR camera — borrow one if you don’t own one — and plenty of light. Professionals usually drape a white cloth under and behind the product, making sure that no obvious wrinkles appear, and then use two light sources, one from either side, a little to the front. Check for glare spots and move the lights or diffuse them through a screen of thin white cloth so that you don’t have white-outs on your product. If you’re using a photograph of an industrial or business-oriented product, surround it with white space (a white background cloth for photography will facilitate this) and then drop in arrows and text boxes to point out and describe three to six features that make the product useful and unique. A clear, clean, photo-based ad that emphasizes information and specifications is often the best approach for business-to-business sales. If you do want to include a beautiful image of a tropical beach (“Let us show you how to work less and spend more time on vacation”) or a mountain peak (“Here’s how to make sure your company reaches its peak performance zone”), keep the pretty picture and explanatory headline in the top third of the ad so that the product and its specifications can take up the bulk of the space. 97 Some basic ad templates The following sections offer you some basic designs that you can use as a starting point for your own ads. Each design is a fairly common type of ad that can work quite well when you drop in the appropriate words and images. If you have some ideas about what you want your ad to achieve, try laying it out in one or more of these templates to get a decent rough cut of a design quickly and easily. All the following templates are on the CD as Word files that you can copy and edit.
Slide 116: 98 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Image ad template CD0502 has a basic Word template similar to the ad shown in Figure 5-1, for laying out an ad designed to communicate your brand’s image to strengthen awareness and interest in your brand. If your objective is brand building, this format may work for you. Find a great image to help you show others what you think makes your brand appealing or special (see the list of Web sites in the previous section for sources of photos) and then tie the image to the brand with clean, simple language in your headline and copy. Many successful image ads use a central metaphor or simile tag line to connect the product to an unlikely object, place, or event, which may then become the central photograph or drawing in the ad. For example, a marketer of birthday or party supplies may want to say that her Instant Party Kit is “Like a Carnival in a Box.” With this simile in mind (this tag line is a simile because it uses “like” — otherwise it’s called a metaphor), you can visualize ad concepts, such as an illustration showing a Brazilian carnival scene, visible through the cracked-open lid of a plain brown cardboard box. (Figure 5-2 shows a simple line-art conception of this ad concept. I created it in a few minutes entirely in Word just to show you that you can do more designing than you might think with this ubiquitous program.) After you visualize such an image, how do you bring it to life in your ad? You need to track down a suitable photo from a stock photography house (see the earlier section “The tried-and-true visual appeal ad” for a list) and negotiate usage of it. This photo may cost a couple hundred dollars or more, so make sure that you like the photo and believe the ad will be valuable enough to justify the investment! Next, create a clean line drawing of a three-dimensional box with the lid cracked open and combine this with a sliver of your photo. How? You have several options: ✓ To do it yourself, use a drawing program on your computer (such as Adobe Illustrator or Canvas), or a photo-editing program, such as Photoshop, if you’re more familiar with one. ✓ Hire a graphic designer to create the visual for you if you don’t know how. Community colleges are a great source of aspiring graphic and Web designers who will work at a reasonable price because they need resume-building experience. ✓ Get a newspaper, magazine, or Web ad seller to do the graphic design for you for free, as part of their support services for advertisers. It’s always worth asking. To come up with a good comparison for a metaphor or simile image ad, start by naming one or more qualities of your product that you want to communicate in the ad. Next, brainstorm other things that exemplify these qualities. An
Slide 117: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads elephant represents a long memory, for example, so an auto mechanic service that maintains full service records in its database may want to use an image of an elephant sitting behind a service counter. The headline could be, “We Remember,” followed by body copy saying something like, “When did you last change your oil or charge your AC? What grade of oil got the best mileage in your car? Where did you put those snow tires? Do you still have any warranty benefits? What can you do when you lose your car keys while visiting Aunt Matilda, two states over? Whatever your problem, however foolish you think your question may be, don’t hesitate. . . . Call us. We remember!” 99 Figure 5-2: An example of a small print ad that uses a simple metaphor with a visual to catch reader attention. Okay, you get the idea. Now use these examples to come up with a comparison for your own ad campaign. Informative ad template CD0503 is a template for an ad that emphasizes information about the product. What are its important features or benefits? How does it work? If you have a good story about your product, this ad design allows you to tell it clearly and well (see Figure 5-3). You can lay out an informative ad in lots of ways. If you feel that the design in Figure 5-3 is a bit too technical, try the option in CD0504, which floats a series of product or usage photos around a column of simple explanatory copy.
Slide 118: 100 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Headline Goes Here (Make it informative, about some appealing fact) Small Headline Overview of product or service here here here here here here. More specific information here vfv dfsflkh sgsdg;j safdf jhk; dsgfdsl kfdsfmn. Product photo or usage illustration (color or black and white) Smaller Headline about important technical details that differentiate this offering from others and make it better. Text text wara afdas. Specifications: Figure 5-3: The informative ad template emphasizes information that helps the reader see why your offering is special. • detail 1 • detail 2 • detail 3 • detail 4 (Let this text lead to the smaller headline and additional details in the right-hand column.) Descriptive caption Detail photo or diagram What Customers Are Saying "testimonial" "testimonial" "testimonial" BRAND NAME Contact information here here here To design an effective informative ad, first make sure that you’re clear on what’s special and important about your product from your customer’s point of view and then select three or more facts that communicate this benefit convincingly. For example, if your service is faster than your competitors’, use facts like the following: ✓ Average response time for new service requests: 3.5 hours ✓ Winner of multiple industry awards for the quality and speed of our service ✓ Money-back guarantee if we take more than 24 hours to respond fully to your request These facts make the case in a compelling manner, and each supports the core claim to fame the ad is trying to communicate.
Slide 119: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads Don’t let your facts wander off topic, or you dilute the ad’s impact rather than strengthen it. 101 Call-to-action ad template Another option is to design your ad so that it asks the viewer to leap into action and request information or make a purchase right now. CD0505 and Figure 5-4 show a basic call-to-action ad template that you can use to stimulate leads or sales by adapting it to your product. Before you do, think hard about what incentives you can give the viewer to act immediately. Your objective is direct action, so you need to include some extra benefit or reason for them to act, beyond the basic benefits of your product or service. Main Headline (Short & Eye-Catching) Secondary headline (explanatory, draws reader in) Call to action in a short, clear opening paragraph saying exactly what you sell and why they should buy it right now. Supporting information giving benefits, testimonials, or other evidence to help close a sale or stimulate a visit to your Web site. Additional benefits or special offer associated with this ad to encourage them to take action immediately. Number to call. Small, short caption Illustrative photo or drawing, black and white or gray scale art Figure 5-4: A call-toaction ad asks the viewer to make a purchase right away. Company Name Here www.yourwebsite.com Toll-free phone number
Slide 120: 102 Part II: Advertising Management and Design You can ask the viewer to take action in a lot of ways, but these types of ads generally have several elements in common: ✓ A strong basic appeal with both emotional and intellectual reasons to choose the product or service ✓ Added incentives to buy right now, such as a special time-sensitive discount or free add-on product or service included in the offer ✓ Direct request or command to act; for example, to call a toll-free number or go to a Web site and enter a special code to take advantage of an offer ✓ Clear, frequent, and varied options for contacting you and placing an order or requesting more information Try to include plenty of options or choices in your ad because choices tend to increase the response rate. CD0506 is a template for a call-to-action ad that’s, in essence, a minicatalog, showing multiple products from which the viewer can select. Creating Ad Concepts for Fun and Profit The ad templates in the previous section are layouts that show you how to create an ad in two dimensions using text and images. But every good ad has an important third dimension: the conceptual dimension. Your ad needs to engage readers on the conceptual level by grabbing their attention, stimulating their senses, or engaging their creativity. It needs to make them think, feel, laugh, or maybe even cry. The conceptual dimension of advertising is what gives an ad power. A clean layout and design help the concept jump off the page or Web page and into the viewer’s mind, but only when you have a conceptual design for the ad in the first place. I’m going to take you beneath the surface of your ad to help you explore the conceptual dimension of your design. Some ads start with a basic objective and graphic design, whereas others may start with the concept and then let the form follow naturally. Designing ads is a creative job, so don’t feel you have to do it in any particular order. How do you find a great ad concept that will give your ad design that extra zing needed to really make it work? Creativity is a good source of conceptual design. Think of something special that’s easy and cheap to do, and you’ll have a high-impact ad for less.
Slide 121: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads Of course, that’s a tall creative order; otherwise, everyone would already be doing it. So I better give you some help. I have two cool ideas that aren’t overused. They’re adaptable general approaches that give your ad more stopping power and hold attention: ✓ In my first idea, I create ads that evoke a strong sense of mood by using words and/or an image associated with that mood. ✓ In my second idea, I create ads that communicate a mind-catching thought in the form of a wise quote. In the following sections, I show you how to use these two shortcut design concepts. They’re very flexible and adaptable. In fact, these concepts fit every business. You can easily adapt them to many media (that means you can use the same design concept for a brochure, Web page, catalog, postcard, or poster, as for your print ad). 103 The mood ad The premise of the mood ad design is that you can position your product or service in an appealing way by setting an emotional tone. You can accomplish the same goal in many ways — for example, a picture of a playful child conveys a happy, playful mood better than a thousand words. (By the way, the folder labeled CD0501 includes some photos of happy children you can use in your ads.) To design a mood ad, ask yourself this simple question: “How will our product or service make the customer feel?” Your answer gets at the emotional benefit you offer. Often, the feeling or mood conveyed by the ad is an important part of making the sale. Figure 5-5 contains an example of a mood ad for an insurance company (but please open CD0507 to see it in color). This ad combines an image of a gold pocket watch with the headline “Loyalty” set in a classic-looking type (Rockwell) to convey a mood of quiet reflection about traditions, heritage, and passing your values down to the next generation of your family. The goal of this ad is to capture the best mood for talking about life insurance — a topic that can be hard to broach without setting a mood first. This ad for Coulter Insurance illustrates several points of good ad design. First, it takes an indirect approach to asking for business because more straightforward pitches, such as, “You’re going to die and if it’s anytime soon, your family will be mighty ticked off at you if you haven’t bought a good life insurance plan,” don’t work very well. Also, the ad in Figure 5-5 not only sets a mood that makes talking about the subject of life insurance easier, but it
Slide 122: 104 Part II: Advertising Management and Design also creates an analogy between the prospective customer and the valuable antique gold watch: “Help them [referring to the prospective customer’s family] learn the value of loyalty by setting a fine example yourself” is a subtle call to action that is made palatable by the fine example of the valuable watch in the illustration. Also notice how the copy in the Coulter Insurance ad has been overlapped with the gray of the photograph and laid over a series of soft vertical lines to create a strong vertical design element that draws the eye from the watch to the words. This pull of the eye is an example of what designers call flow. The goal is to create enough visual tension and interest that the eye enters, then travels around, the ad in the order you’ve chosen. Figure 5-5: This ad uses an heirloom pocket watch and the word “Loyalty” to convey a mood that might get people thinking about buying life insurance (see CD0507 for color version).
Slide 123: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads In addition, the copy has been kept to a minimum, allowing the picture and headline to do most of the talking. Visual appeal is the key to success with almost all print and Web ad designs. (If you like the photograph of the watch, you can use it in your own ad — it’s in the folder labeled CD0501.) Figure 5-6 also uses a photograph to convey a mood, combined with a headline (which, in this case, appears below the photo in place of the traditional small caption). The ad uses a simple, obvious descriptor of how the customer is feeling: happy. But it adds a bit of intrigue with the idea of a “happy secret,” and the viewer wonders what this happy secret could be. It’s not explained fully (it’s good to challenge the imagination), but the secret must be found at Euphoria Day Spa. This design could be the basis of a magazine ad (in which case, you’d probably want to add the name and address, plus a small coupon or other call to action, at the bottom of it). Or it could be the front page of an elegant brochure or the front of a glossy card with services and rates listed on the reverse. If used for a brochure or card, you may want to carry over the theme by using a header, such as “Discover your own happy secrets,” on the next page to get the eye to flow into the listing of services. (By the way, this ad uses Humana Serif for the word “happy” to make it pop joyfully from the block lettering of the Bank Gothic type behind it.) Naming and illustrating a good mood, such as happy, loyal, or relaxed, is a simple way to give your ad power. Sometimes I have experimented by taking a word like “reliable” (to describe a business service, for example) and looking up synonyms, such as “dependable,” “careful,” and “trustworthy.” You can add these words to your design if you want — for example, a local moving company may have a photograph of one of their trucks with all these words around it, like a picture frame. This concept uses a word or words to evoke a strong feeling and to associate it with your product or service. I once used the mood ad concept to advertise a service plan for a company that sold capital equipment to businesses. Those at the company felt that their service plan offered better support than their competitors’ plans did and wanted to convey this advantage. The key word they felt captured their attitude toward customer support was “concern.” They were concerned about each customer and stayed in close touch with each one to make sure that everything went well. Figure 5-7 shows a basic layout concept for a serviceplan brochure that uses words to convey the feeling that the company stands behind each customer and takes a personal interest in his success. 105
Slide 124: 106 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Figure 5-6: This print ad or brochure cover conveys the mood of someone whose spa visit has left them feeling beautiful, relaxed, and selfconfident (see CD0508 for color version).
Slide 125: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads 107 erned cerned c othonh c c o un g tful i nvolv ed a vailab le -orie rvice interested empathetic considerate aware nted an se l hum na perso he lpf ul ap pr rthy te stwo tru ctful acc e es resp sib le th e op ria re Figure 5-7: This brochure cover expresses positive feelings associated with good service. SERVICE PLAN YOUR COMPANY NAME (AND LOGO) Your address and contact information Web site/e-mail address
Slide 126: 108 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Perhaps you want to create a mood ad of your own. Many possible feelings or meanings exist beyond the ones I illustrate here. And while I generally favor a strong visual image as the basis for ad design, there are exceptions to this rule. The brochure cover in Figure 5-7 makes do with creative use of text without a photo or other visual image. Can you design an ad or brochure that uses text to set the mood or define the character of your product or service? It is an interesting design challenge that might help you strengthen your understanding of your product’s appeal — and perhaps even create something strong enough that you can use it in your next campaign! Here are some thoughts to get you started: ✓ Wrap words around an illustration to frame it. ✓ List words in a long string to form unusual and powerful body copy or script. ✓ Ask a question and then let viewers answer it by checking boxes next to words (“Is your ISP reliable? If so, then surely you’d describe it as careful, trustworthy, stable, available, safe, unfailing, helpful, and supportive. What? Didn’t check all those boxes? Maybe you’d better send us an e-mail. That is, presuming your current service will let you.”) ✓ Make a collage of words or a string of words (like in the design for a brochure cover in Figure 5-7). ✓ Create a simple crossword puzzle of the words that describe your product. These design concepts all harness the power of the written word. Words are extraordinarily powerful: They can create a definite mood or feeling about your business or its product or service. The wisdom ad The wisdom ad is another simple-to-design, but potentially powerful, ad concept. The premise of the wisdom ad design (which you can use for any media from display ads to direct-mail letters, brochures, catalogs, and sales collateral) is that people like ads that give them the gift of wisdom. People value wisdom because it’s in short supply. So where can you find servings of wisdom to include in your ads? My strategy is to go to the classics. People always like a great quote from a master writer or thinker, so a wise thought from literature can give your ad stopping power and increase its value to readers.
Slide 127: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads Figure 5-8 shows an ad that uses a quote from a famous detective of Victorian-era stories, Sherlock Holmes. The ad is executed in simple black and white for inexpensive back pages of magazines or for newspapers. This style of ad replaces the traditional headline with a thought-provoking quote. (If you use short quotes and attribute them accurately to a famous author or fictional character, you don’t need to obtain reprint permissions. You can find thousands of quotes to choose from in any dictionary of quotations.) The ad in Figure 5-8 uses a quote to draw reader attention. Many people like such quotes and may even clip the ad just to help them remember the quote. A short message to the reader ties the quote into some positive attribute of the marketer’s offering. The approach used in Figure 5-8 is a lot easier than writing a compelling headline or coming up with an original hook. All you have to do is find your hook in the form of an appealing quote and then tie that quote in to your products or services. When you design an ad using a quote, pay attention to the little details that tighten the links from your offering to the quote. In Figure 5-8 I drew an easyto-recognize silhouette of Sherlock Holmes to add visual appeal, plus the reverse (white letters on dark field) phrase “We agree!” in large type to add another eye-catcher to the design. To further refine the design, I set all the copy in an old-fashioned-looking type called Baskerville, choosing the semibold option for its stronger lettering. You’d have to be an expert on type fonts, as well as a Sherlock Holmes buff, to realize I am making a subtle reference to the story about this Victorian-era detective called The Hound of the Baskervilles, but everyone will recognize that the type matches the general style of the illustration and quote. (For your creative inspiration, I include an editable Word file of the second ad on your CD as CD0508. You have my permission to use the illustration and copy for your own ad, if you wish.) As the two variants of the Sherlock Holmes ad illustrate, you can explore many options once you have a concept. I recommend trying multiple designs and layouts until you come up with one that really seems to work. Figure 5-9 shows another way to use a famous quote to draw attention and get people thinking about your offering. The ad uses a photo of a thoughtful young man whose eyes, you may notice, are looking downward toward the thought-provoking quote and the body copy about the online course offerings of the advertiser. The viewer tends to follow the gaze of the person in the photo to the headline, which makes viewer attention flow from the photo to the quote and then into the substance of the ad’s body copy. 109
Slide 128: 110 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Figure 5-8: Print ads relating the timeless quest for truth with the quest for better products.
Slide 129: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads 111 Figure 5-9: This ad uses another famous quote to draw the reader in. Making an Impact by Using Visual Shortcuts In the preceding sections, I share concepts and designs that start with an inspiration for advertising copy (or the written word), then add an illustration to support the text. However, sometimes it works better to start with a visual image (such as a photograph you really like), and then find words to support it. An ad based primarily on visual appeal can transform an ordinary marketing message into an extraordinary one. In the following sections, I look at strategies for creating powerful ads, catalogs, brochures, Web pages, or other marketing communications in a hurry or on a tight budget by using beautiful visuals.
Slide 130: 112 Part II: Advertising Management and Design If you want to make a big impact with a gorgeous photograph but need to work fast or are on a tight budget, you probably don’t want to hire a professional photographer. Your best bet in a hurry is stock photography, and you can find many vendors on the Web, so don’t be afraid to go shopping for a great image. (See “The tried-and-true visual appeal ad” in the beginning of this chapter for some links, or visit www.insightsformarketing.com for updated links.) Think about the visual appeal of your ad this way. Every year, people buy expensive calendars featuring fine photography and hang them up where they look at one image for a full month. These same people are routinely exposed to many hundreds of ads each day but do their best to ignore and forget them. What’s the difference between the calendar they pay for and treasure and the ads they ignore? One has beautiful photographs; one doesn’t. So if you want people to treasure your marketing communications instead of ignore them, try giving people what they want — something beautiful. Using a beautiful landscape photo My office has a pretty big library of books on marketing and advertising, and I just went through the indexes of a bunch of them looking for the word “beauty.” It’s not there. Go figure. What I figure is that most people aren’t designing their marketing materials (or even their products) to be beautiful. They’re trying to make ads effective, clever, informative, or persuasive, but not beautiful. So you can use a beauty-based appeal with the confidence that you won’t have a lot of competition in using this shortcut to great advertising. You can offer customers beauty in plenty of other ways, as well. You don’t have to confine yourself to photographs! A beautiful storefront, office space, or even an especially elegant business card can create an aesthetic impact that pleases and impresses prospects and customers. Yet how many of the spaces where businesses receive or serve customers are actually made to be truly beautiful? A flowering plant or small garden, a gorgeous painting, photo, or art poster, a fresh coat of paint, and a little trim — all are small investments in adding beauty to the customer’s world. Here’s an ad concept: Why not select a really attractive photo of a beautiful natural landscape? The headline can say, “Have a Great Day!” In the bottomright corner, you can put “Brought to you by . . .” and add your logo or company name, plus a short one- or two-sentence update on what you’re doing or any new upgrades or additions to your product line. Start this copy with “Now offering . . . ” or a similar phrase.
Slide 131: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads Keep the ad copy minimal and let the beautiful photo be your gift to customers and prospects. Don’t clutter your photo with too many advertising messages, either. A beautiful ad achieves the objectives of burnishing your brand image and generating goodwill among customers and prospects, and both of these objectives can help you close sales and retain customers later on. 113 Portraying an attractive person People look at other people. We’re socially oriented; we can’t help it. In particular, photos of people playing, laughing, and having fun tend to attract viewers. Also, photos of children and babies are naturally attractive. And handsome or attractive people tend to draw and hold attention. (The ads in Figures 5-6 and 5-9 take advantage of the eye appeal of a photo of an interesting person.) But don’t make the mistake of thinking that a sexy, provocative-looking model will sell your product. Sexy images aren’t very effective in advertising unless your product actually offers sex appeal. So go ahead and look for sexy photos if you’re selling cosmetics or lingerie, but for most marketing needs, stick with photos that are interesting, but not overly sexy. One way to use the natural appeal of people is to have a head-and-shoulders photo of an interesting or attractive person, using her as your spokesperson for your print ad. The spokesperson can say something in first person, like “I’m glad I switched to (name of your company or brand).” Placing that message in a bold headline, over an interesting, animated face, draws most viewers down to the copy to see why the person is happy she switched to your product. Another classic concept is to have models using the product rather than just showing the product by itself. People bring ads to life. Whenever possible, include photos of interesting people to draw the eye and engage the viewer. Inserting a humorous cartoon Humorous cartoons clipped out of newspapers or magazines cover many office bulletin boards and home refrigerators. People like a good cartoon. So another simple way to attract viewers to your print ad is to include a good cartoon.
Slide 132: 114 Part II: Advertising Management and Design This idea is easier than it sounds. Web sites like Cartoon Bank (cartoon bank.com), cartoonist Randy Glassbergen’s site (www.glasbergen.com), Pritchett Cartoons (www.pritchettcartoons.com), cartoonist Carol Simpson’s site (www.carolsim.com), and cartoonist Ted Goff’s site (www. newslettercartoons.com) cue up thousands of humorous cartoons and give you the option of licensing them for professional use in an ad, newsletter, mailing, e-mail, blog, or Web page. Have a look. You just need to think of some way to relate your product or service to a humorous cartoon, and you have yourself a great ad concept! Giving Postcard Marketing a Try The old-fashioned postcard is an interesting option for advertisers to consider. If you have or can buy a good mailing list of prospective customers, then a color postcard may be the cheapest and easiest way to get your ad message out. Designing a postcard is a lot like designing a print ad, except that the photo is on one side (often along with a headline), and the body copy is on the other side. If you’ve already designed some good ads, you can easily adapt them to the postcard medium. And lots of templates and services can help make designing and mailing a postcard easy. Figure 5-10 shows a simple postcard designed to be sent to homeowners to promote a heating and air-conditioning company’s spring cleaning special offer. CD0509 shows you this postcard in color, and CD0510 is a Word template for both the front and back of the postcard. The back is important because it contains the details of your offer — but notice how I keep the copy short and simple in the template. You should assume that the reader will only give the text a quick glance. If you want to minimize design time, you can find plenty of postcard templates online. Type “postcard marketing” or “postcard templates” into your search engine and see what comes up. Firms such as Postcard Mania (www.post cardmania.com) offer one-stop shopping for postcard designs (including the art), plus printing and mailing services, although usually you have to provide the mailing list. If you don’t have a list, you can buy one — search the key term “mailing lists,” and you’ll be amazed at the number of companies offering names and addresses for use in marketing! Some of the postcard marketing firms, including Postcard Mania, offer mailing lists along with design, printing, and mailing, so they’re truly one-stop shops. And because these companies specialize in postcards, their designs are better than average.
Slide 133: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads 115 Figure 5-10: This postcard design is best appreciated in full color; see CD0509. A good postcard needs to be visually appealing and bold, and to have interesting and useful information — but not too much information. Keep it simple! The standard postcard (which takes a postcard stamp in the United States) is 4.25 x 6 inches, which isn’t a lot of space for a marketing message. Yet it can economically communicate a single, timely message and is more likely to be
Slide 134: 116 Part II: Advertising Management and Design read than most mailings because the message is right there on the outside and the recipient doesn’t have to open it. For these reasons I recommend postcard mailings at least a few times a year for most businesses. You can print postcards in small quantities, but you get a much better price if you have them offset printed by the thousands. Figure around $300 per 5,000 postcards from high-volume postcard printers, such as Postcard Mania. That’s just the printing costs for a big box of them. Now you need to mail them. It takes a long time to hand-address and stamp 5,000 cards, so if you have anywhere near that many good names and addresses, consider contracting out for the mailing services, too. Postcard stamps (for 4.25-x-6-inch postcards) are set in the United States at about two-thirds the cost of a regular first class letter stamp. At time of writing, they cost $0.27 (but not for long!). To mail 5,000 postcards, the cost (at time of writing) would be $1,350. However, if you pay for a mailing list plus mailing services, you add another 15 to 20 cents per card. I’m going to call it an extra 24 cents to hedge against stamp inflation and estimate that a mailing of 5,000 postcards will cost you about $2,500 if you contract the entire project out. That’s 50 cents per postcard, delivered to a purchased list. Not bad! However, you don’t actually need to mail all 5,000 cards unless you can obtain 5,000 good names and addresses. Remember that your base price just for the printing is a few hundred dollars, so you can just as well mail a couple hundred by hand to your own house list, give out another hundred cards to customers and prospects, and save the rest for next year. And the year after. . . . Using Web Pages as Ads You don’t necessarily have to confine your ads to the printed page. Think broadly about your choices and don’t be intimidated by the prospect of designing ads for viewing on a computer screen instead of a printed page. Many companies are springing up to offer simple ad templates for Web advertising. Some of these companies are resellers of Google products, which leads me to ask, why not just go straight to Google? For example AdReady (www. adready.com) offers an easy interface for creating ads, which may speed the effort for someone unfamiliar with Google products. On the other hand, if you’re willing to do a bit more work, you probably can build the same ads directly on the Google site.
Slide 135: Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads So buyer beware — you may not be getting quite as much as you think you are when you open an account that promises free ad templates and great Web advertising results. Make sure that you like the templates and support you’re receiving and that the pricing isn’t too much higher than Google’s base prices. You can get an almost instant Web site up and running in myriad ways, so you really need to think of Web sites as an easy way to post a highly interactive, content-rich advertisement. Marketers are eventually going to see Web sites as fluid, frequently changing, powerful advertisements. You may as well get ahead of the curve and start putting up Web sites to help communicate your advertising messages. There is no reason on earth for your Web presence to be confined to one central, static “corporate site” when Web space is unlimited and lots of Web traffic exists. For example, if you are in the heating and air-conditioning business, you certainly need (and probably already have) a Web page with a domain name based on your company name. This central corporate Web site is like a brochure describing your business — who you are, what you do, what your credentials are, what your happy customers say. (Yes, be sure to include testimonials on your central Web site — see Chapter 14 for how-to details.) However, this corporate Web site should just be the spoke of your Web marketing wheel. You should use pay-per-click advertising on Google and Yahoo! to direct local searches to your Web site, plus the occasional paid ad or directory listing on high-traffic sites that reach your customer base. And then you should consider specialized Web sites and/or blogs that relate to research topics of interest to your customers, such as ✓ How to reduce energy costs and usage for existing home or office heating and AC systems (complete with a downloadable audit form bearing your company logo and contact information) ✓ How to prepare your AC and/or heating equipment for the off season ✓ Spring cleaning for AC, including how to get ready for a summer of fresh, clean air (and why better quality air is also more economical to the homeowner) These topics sound like good article topics for a magazine, don’t they? That’s the idea. You can create a Web page or blog that is essentially an interesting, informative article for homeowners (Google and other vendors offer simple templates; check them out!). Homeowners have an interest in such topics, and they’ll search out your content and study it (assuming that you do your homework and give them informative, useful content, illustrated with photos from your own job sites to make it visually appealing, too). 117
Slide 136: 118 Part II: Advertising Management and Design Keep informative topic-oriented Web sites from looking overtly like corporate Web pages or promotional pieces. Present your content like editorial content, but, of course, give credit and a link to your business. For example, a “Sponsored by COMPANY NAME” and a Web link and phone number for more information could be visible at both the top and bottom of each page. Don’t forget to look to other sources for content as well. Whether or not you write it, being the source of useful information is key. Look to other vendors and businesses and credit them when you use their content. (Don’t forget to ask permission first.) If you want to do these editorial Web pages in-house, consider using any of the widely available Web page templates from vendors such as Register.com (www.register.com, my personal favorite). It offers do-it-yourself sites, build-it-for-me sites, hosting, and other needed services at modest prices. Yahoo! and Google also support the do-it-yourself Web designer with reasonable products. And a growing number of easy-to-use Web store templates can get you up and running quickly — see Register.com’s ProStores and check out PayPal (www.paypal.com) for other easy and inexpensive ecommerce options. On the CD Check out the following items on the CD-ROM: ✓ A library of photos for design use (CD0501) ✓ An image ad template (CD0502) ✓ Informative ad templates (CD0503 and CD0504) ✓ Call-to-action ad templates (CD0505 and CD0506) ✓ Insurance company ad (CD0507) ✓ Sherlock Holmes ad template (CD0508) ✓ Postcard design sample (CD0509) ✓ Postcard front and back templates (CD0510)
Slide 137: Part III Power Alternatives to Advertising
Slide 138: A In this part . . . ds are powerful, but they aren’t the only way to attract business. Other elements of your marketing communications are vital, too. In this part, I show you how to present your brand identity consistently in everything you do, starting with the basics of business cards, letterhead, e-mails, and faxes. I also explore the important new topic of presenting your brand on the Web, and I guide you through the rewarding challenges of designing effective brochures, blogs, and press releases.
Slide 139: Chapter 6 Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More In This Chapter ▶ Clarifying your brand identity ▶ Designing your business name and logo ▶ Creating a successful business card, letterhead, envelopes, and e-mails ▶ Strengthening your presence on Web sites and blogs hen presenting themselves at arm’s length through marketing materials, people are far, far less professional. Try to keep in mind that your business card, letter, brochure, catalog, or other materials represent you to potential customers. Most businesspeople tend to impose a lower standard on these materials than they would on themselves if they were there in person. But in truth, an even higher standard is necessary and appropriate. Why? Because you aren’t there to make your case. And if you have sub-par materials, people will assume that you don’t take your business seriously enough to invest in good collateral. In this chapter, I show you how to take a close look at how your brand looks, starting with an examination of the brand identity and then making sure that your business cards, stationery, labels, envelopes or boxes, faxes, and e-mails all convey your identity clearly and well. W Who Are You? Establishing Brand Identity Who are you? Your name and face are instantly recognizable to anyone who knows you. People who don’t know you can easily begin to recognize you from your unique combination of name, face, and voice. You have a clear identity as a human being — so clear that telling you apart from anyone else on the planet is easy.
Slide 140: 122 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising Well, maybe I’m exaggerating. If your name is John Smith, then you may not be too distinctive by name alone. But add your face to the name, and now you’re truly unique. People are expected to be unique and easy to identify. It’s confusing and even upsetting when someone doesn’t look like a unique individual. No one wants clones running around — they seem creepy. I should know: I’m a twin. When I stop to get a cup of coffee at the general store in the small town where my brother lives, I usually create social chaos. People come up to me and say hello, and I have no idea what to say back. Or they look at me quizzically, turn away, and then look back, not quite sure whether they know me or not. You want to make sure that your product or service is so clearly identifiable and so well known that you never have such problems in your marketplace. To evaluate the strength of your corporate identity, consider the following questions: ✓ Does your letterhead look unique, and is it easy to identify at a distance, like from across the room? ✓ What adjectives would someone use to describe your company if she could work from only a copy of your letterhead? ✓ Does your logo look more attractive and professional than your competitors’ logos? ✓ Does everything you send through the mail, fax, and e-mail show your logo and identifying information in a clean, consistent, and attractive manner? ✓ Do you include your corporate identity (logo, name, and so on) on all packaging and products in an appealing and consistent way? ✓ Do you and all other representatives of your company carry attractive business cards in a proper case to give out whenever you have an appropriate opportunity? ✓ Do your e-mails include your corporate logo, name, and contact information consistent with your letterhead and business cards? ✓ Is your identity (your name, logo, and overall look and feel, or brand personality) consistent on the Web as well as in printed material and signage? These questions help you identify immediate issues or opportunities in how you present your identity to the world. Marketing is in the eyes of the beholder, so you must make sure that everyone interacting with your firm or any of its products, services, publications, Web pages, ads, or other marketing materials sees your unique identity clearly and fully.
Slide 141: Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More The best-looking logos, the most appealing names, and the strongest presentations of identity are usually associated with winning companies and brands. Like it or not, appearances matter. I always urge my clients to make sure that they look like the company they want to be, not the company they were three years ago when they last ordered stationery. There is no harm in updating your logo and materials, and you often have much to gain. Don’t be afraid to change the way you present your business or brands. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I ask you to take a close look at some of the most important elements in your public presentation of your marketing identity. 123 Managing the Presentation of Your Brand Name Whether you’re selling your business or a specific product, your name and logo are key. Coca–Cola has a striking identity: The brand is easy to recognize anywhere, any time. The Coca–Cola Company writes its name in a distinct way that makes its name into a logo design, and it always has color. Plus, the company puts its name everywhere in a clear, consistent manner so that consumers can’t possibly forget it. Nike uses another strategy. The company doesn’t always write its name the same, but it always has the distinctive swoosh logo nearby. The swoosh brands every product the company designs and also appears on the company’s letterhead, business cards, and Web pages, giving the company one of the best-known brands in the universe. Are you as clear and consistent as Coke or Nike in the way you present your business name or brand identity? Hmmm. Maybe not. In this chapter, I help you work on that. Close your eyes for a moment and try to visualize the logo or name of your local telephone company, bank, cable TV company, and local taxi company. How many of these logos and names pop right to mind, appearing clearly and easily in your mind? Not all of them, I bet. Depending on where you live, maybe one or two logos or names are so well designed and consistently portrayed that you can actually visualize them instantly without a hint or other aid. (Bank of America has a particularly strong brand identity, and the company is careful to always use the same strong blue and red in its signs and printed materials to help make it instantly recognizable.)
Slide 142: 124 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising Assessing your identity Take some time to make sure that your marketing identity looks really good. A good marketing identity is one that ✓ Makes a strong, positive impression on all who see it. ✓ Portrays you, your firm, service, or brand as you aspire for it to be. This way, as your business grows and achieves higher levels of success in the future, it will grow into, not out of, your logo and look. ✓ Is highly memorable and easy to recognize, even from a great distance. ✓ Is consistently displayed wherever you have an opportunity to do so. To pump up your identity, give your company, product, or service a clear, clean, visual signature. Always write your company’s, product’s, or service’s name the same way. This means using the same type. Pick a font and style you like and stick with it (see Figure 6-1). If you don’t know how to design a great signature or logo, hire a graphic designer who can show you a portfolio of really impressive logo and identity work. If you insist on a do-it-yourself logo in order to save money, here’s the shortest and simplest set of instructions for creating your own: 1. Finalize your name’s appearance. If your business name presentation varies, choose one version and stick with it from now on. For example, Valley Landscape Services, sometimes known as The Connecticut Valley Landscape Service or CT Valley Landscapes, should choose one clear, simple version of their name, such as Valley Landscapes. Step 1. Choose a favorite font Optima Extra Black Step 2. Use it consistently ntenance ting and mai for expert plan helle CT 30079 Your source New Roc 99 Elm Street, 777-9901 800- Anna Belden, 99 Elm Stree t New Rochelle CT 30079 800-777-9901 Landscape Desi gner Copperplate Gothic Bold www.valleyland scap es.org Figure 6-1: Selecting a consistent font for your brand name. Tekton Bold 800-777-9901 www.valleylandscapes.org
Slide 143: Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More 2. Use Word’s library of fonts or the sample sheet at your local printer to choose a typeface you like for your name. Avoid highly unusual, fanciful, or hard-to-read types. If you aren’t sure which you like best, print a sample sheet of several of your favorites (see Figure 6-1) and sleep on the decision overnight. 3. Select a simple, clean, small visual image or symbol if you want to add a visual element to your identity. Pick clean black line art. Sources include • Your local print shop • Dover Publications (www.doverpublications.com), which offers CDs and books of copyright-free line art; search for clip art and copyright-free images in this publisher’s catalog • Online services such as Stock Photo (www.stockphoto.com) Or just use the first letters from your name to create a simple logo. Figure 6-2 combines a very simple image of a tree (which I drew in a few minutes with Word’s drawing toolbar, using three triangles, a rectangle, and a circle) with the first letters of the company name to make a distinct symbol that you can combine with the name for better recognition and recall (see Figure 6-2). 125 Figure 6-2: A clean, memorable identity for use on stationery and signs. 4. Make sure that your name and image are unique. Yes, you do need to avoid using a name and image that resemble another business logo. Check your region’s phone directories, do a Google search, and also check that your name and design aren’t already trademarked. (In the United States, go to www.uspto.gov/main, click Trademarks and then click Search TM database to do a free search.) If somebody else is already using the same name and/or a similar design, revise yours to something that is unique. (At date of writing, I see that nobody else is using Valley Landscapes, so this design is in the clear.)
Slide 144: 126 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising 5. Pick a smaller, less bold version of your logo type, or a simpler, more common type (such as Helvetica or Times), to use for your address, phone number, Web address, and e-mail. 6. Work up one to several standard arrangements of your logo (name and graphic elements). How will you lay your name and graphic element out on business stationery, business cards, magnetic signs for your vehicles, and the banner of your Web site’s home page? (See the upcoming sections “Selling Your Business Cards and Designing Your Letterhead and Envelopes.”) Also, will you want a colorful version of your identity for places where color printing is easy? The Valley Landscapes design in Figure 6-2 would look great in forest green, wouldn’t it? But I’d confine the green to the name and logo and use plain old black ink for the address and contact information to keep it simple. To bump it up another level, you can try versions with several colors — but usually this experimentation gets overly complicated. Complex is bad when it comes to logos. Think about the power of the Coca–Cola identity. If Coca–Cola needs only red and white, then I think Valley Landscapes can get away with using only green and white, don’t you? If you’re visual yourself and willing to fool around for an hour or two in whatever drawing or design program you have access to (or just make do with the Drawing tab in Word), you can create a wonderful variety of identities in a hurry. Most such programs have libraries of line art; even Word has a rich variety of symbols in some of its fonts. Figure 6-3 is a simple logo design I made entirely using Word’s text boxes and fonts. (To appreciate the use of color, see CD0601 for a viewable PDF of this logo.) Figure 6-3: A simple identity using widely available typestyles and symbols. Business Name Bringing the world to your doorstep If I wanted to make this design my official logo for my business, I would either print all my cards and stationery on a good in-house laser printer or hire a designer to take my design concept and work it up a bit for me. Or maybe I’d
Slide 145: Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More just bring it to a print shop and ask them to finalize it for me. Many printing shops offer free or almost-free design services as a way to get you to give them your order, and bringing them a strong design concept is the best way to ensure that they give you back something that really works for you. The technical editor for this book, who is a professional designer, explained to me why it’s helpful to pass your logo concept on to an expert for finalization. I’m going to share her note with you because it shows how much is involved if you really want a high-end, professional logo: “When I design a logo for someone, I am keeping in mind every intended use for that logo. Will they be putting it on a tradeshow banner, maybe embroidering a polo shirt? Designing a logo for these uses requires a professional that can supply several file formats, one of which had better be an .eps file that is scalable. Not to mention, the font should be converted to outlines so there is no room for error (such as a substituted font) when your logo is reprinted somewhere. It is understandable that someone may start with a homegrown logo, but they had better invest in doing it right for the long-haul very soon.” 127 “Selling” Your Business Cards Your business card is often the first contact someone has with you or your business. Sometimes your business card is the only marketing communication that a prospect has, so you want to make sure that it follows the rules of good marketing communications by building both emotional and rational involvement. That means it needs to communicate the information that a prospect needs to figure out what products or services you have and how he can contact you easily. Also, make sure that it contains your Web address. Making a good overall impression Don’t forget that your business card has to appeal to prospects on a basic emotional or intuitive level, too. Imagine someone looking through a pile of cards that includes many competitors of yours. Why would a prospect choose yours? What about your card makes it call out to people? A strong logo and clean design are a good start. Basically, your card needs to make a powerful, positive, personal impression. However, most cards don’t. Most are quite dull. Even the ones that are clean and professional generally emphasize information and ignore the need to make an impression.
Slide 146: 128 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising To make a good overall impression, strive for a sophisticated, professional image — with something different, such as a better-quality paper, a more beautiful logo, an unusual vertical layout, a useful fact or inspirational quote printed on the back, or an attractive use of color to highlight your company name or logo. Above all, focus on a well-presented company name and logo. Hold on! Just because you want to make a powerful, personal impression with your card, don’t do anything crazy. You don’t want to make a negative impression! An overly colorful, flashy card with a photograph plus gold-, red-, and green-colored print is not the way to attract attention. Keep the design clean and professional. Deciding on design details When designing your business cards, remember that you want your card to make a good impression and to include enough information so that contacting you is easy. But at the same time, you don’t want to overload it with so much information that the card is confusing. CD0602 illustrates four ways to lay out a standard business card, each of which is clean, simple, and eyecatching. Even though business cards are small, you can design them in lots of creative ways. It really comes down to what you like and what fits your business image best. The standard size for business cards in the United States is 2 x 31/2 inches. Businesses traditionally use printers to make business cards and stationery. They have their cards offset printed (printed from a plate in ink on a large printing press), as opposed to photocopied, largely because printing is more durable when handled a lot. Now you also have the choice of desktop publishing your own business cards and stationery, so I cover both options for you. Choosing flat or raised ink if using a printer You can get business cards printed in either flat ink or raised ink. Flat-ink printing is just the standard printing. In raised-ink printing, the printer uses an ink, dusts it with a plastic powder, and heats it in an oven that melts and expands the powder, giving the type a raised look and feel. Almost all printers offer both types of printing for business cards, and the choice you make is largely one of taste. Personally, I don’t like the look and feel of raised cards, but many people prefer them. Here’s my favorite, if you want serious elegance: Ask your printer to help you find a specialist who will make a die (metal stamp) of your logo and have it embossed (so that it sticks up a little bit) on your card, along with flat-ink
Slide 147: Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More printing of the business name, tag line, and your name and contact information. Embossing takes longer to make and is considerably more expensive, but it really stands out. 129 Setting your margins for the printer You need to design only one master version of your business card, and the printer will take it from there. Most printers are happy to accept a PDF file produced by Word or any of the desktop graphic design programs. Whatever you use, make sure that you keep the print from being too close to the margin. Printers like to have space from the edge of the design to the edge of the paper. The amount of space needed varies from printer to printer — anywhere from 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch. To be safe, leave 1/4 inch in all directions (see Figure 6-4) because paper can sometimes shift from side to side when going through the press, and this amount of space ensures that the cutter won’t clip off any text that’s too close to the edge of the card. ¼ inch ¼ inch Noelle Paul, Chief Botanist Figure 6-4: Don’t let your card design get too close to the edge of the card. 108 Spring Hill Road Sprucetown, CT 77707 (686) 444-9876 www.valleylandscapes.org Sustainable gardening for every yard Pondering paper stock Have the printer print your business cards on a heavy paper, such as #65 cover stock. Also, use matching (lighter but similar looking) paper for your stationery and envelopes so that people will see them as part of a clearly defined professional presentation and image (see Figure 6-5). Some papers differ in weight but match in color and finish, so you can easily match your cards with the lighter paper of your letterhead. Some printers offer package discounts on letterhead, envelopes, and cards when you order them together, so getting them all printed at the same time is often cost-effective.
Slide 148: 130 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising John Smith President 12 Acme St. Anytown, ID 12345 123/456-7890 12 Acme St. • Anytown, ID 12345 John Smith President EMail: info@bfox.com Figure 6-5: Use clear rules about logo, type, and layout so that all materials look similar. 12 Acme St. Smithville, OH 12345 123/456-7890 Fax 123/456-0001 Who needs a printer when you have Word? Most people don’t realize that Word software includes a number of serviceable business card templates. These templates are cleverly hidden away in the Label Tools area (look under Tools➪Labels), but they’re easy to find once you know what you’re looking for. Here’s how to design your own business card on the Microsoft Office software that almost certainly is running on your computer right now (If not, borrow somebody’s computer that has this software.): 1. Choose Tools➪Labels. In some versions, you must choose Tools➪Letters and Mailings➪ Envelopes and Labels.
Slide 149: Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More 2. Click Options in the Labels dialog box. 3. Choose a business card option from the lengthy menu and click OK. I recommend starting with the first one, 5371 Business Card, because it’s a clean and simple standard to work with. Word returns you to the Labels dialog box and automatically fills in the details of your selection. Your cursor is positioned for you to enter your name and address information to create a 2-x-5-inch table-like page with your choice of copy (words in the size and font style of your choice) on each card. 4. After you type the lines of text you want on the card, highlight each line in turn and choose a type style and size. Forget about any art. You can’t paste a logo or other art into a dialog box because Word won’t allow it (for reasons beyond me — why the heck not?!?). So you’ll have to wait on your graphics. 5. Proof your text and then click OK. A new Word file opens with a page full of business cards, set up to match Avery 10 business card sheets, which you can buy at any decent stationery or office-supply store. Once you have built this file of ten identical business cards on a single sheet, you can manipulate and save it just like any Word file. Click and drag or insert art (including a logo design, if you have one). Manipulate the text as needed. Then print, and you’re in business. To print the cards yourself, use Avery business card stock unless you want to run your own card stock through your printer and then measure and cut your own cards by hand. You can do this process all yourself, but it takes a sharp paper cutter and some patience, and the Avery products are so easy to use that they’re worth the extra cost. I recommend the cards on a peel-off back over the perforated ones — the latter just don’t look very professional. To get the cards made up for you, just take a CD with the template file to your local copy shop and find out what the employees can do for you. (If they don’t take Word files, you can generate a PDF file out of Word and give them that.) Every shop is different, and some shops have their own business card software and want to reset the design, so talk to them and do whatever seems reasonable and within your budget. But please stick to your design convictions. Don’t let them talk you into a boring, generic, stock design. Promise? Good! However, if the print shop you work with is willing to give you a quote on designing and printing cards based on your design, by all means let it quote this service. If it’s affordable, and you need lots of cards, then I recommend letting the print shop take over. Do-it-yourself cards are great when you have no printing budget, but at some point, you’ll want to upgrade to professionally designed and printed cards. 131
Slide 150: 132 Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising When you have trouble . . . If you have trouble opening the Word template in CD0603, go directly to www.avery. com, click find a Template, click Templates for Microsoft Word, and do a search for the cards you’ve purchased by product number or just select Business card wide, ten per sheet, for the generic template in which you can enter your text. To print a PDF of your formatted template, click the PDF button in Word or choose Print➪ PDF in the Print Dialog Box and then Save as PDF. If this process doesn’t work, search “save as PDF” in your Word Help. There is a lot of variation in the versions of the Word program, but this function is somewhere in yours — don’t worry! To see what a business card template produced in Word looks like, see CD0603. You can print on Avery card stock directly from this Word file, or you can print it as a PDF to create a file that your local print shop can work from. The lines indicating the dimensions of individual cards won’t show up on the PDF (see CD0604 for an example), so you can either add some trim lines in the margins or ask your print shop to work with the file and set it up however they prefer. Here are some additional sources of online information and templates for designing your own business cards: ✓ VistaPrint (www.vistaprint.com) offers colorful card designs to which you simply add your text. The prices are low because the company uses digital laser printing. It’s not a bad way to get starter cards if you don’t have the time or skill to develop your own logo and look quite yet. ✓ Microsoft Office Online (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ templates) gives you access to a huge variety of designs that you can quickly download and adapt to your needs in Word. ✓ PrintingForLess.com (www.printingforless.com) is a one-stop shop where you can select a template, add your text, and place an order for as many cards as you need. Templates for brochures, stationery, catalogs, and many other printed products are available, so it’s easy to choose a semi-custom look that is consistent across all these products — but only if you continue to shop with this company. ✓ Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/office/ buscards.html) offers a page of good quality card templates maintained by Hewlett-Packard (which makes many of the printers used for desktop publishing of marketing materials). All you have to do is double-click the card you like and the file downloads to your desktop. You can then open and edit it in Word and print it using the Avery business card paper specified on the site. These templates are easy to use and allow you much more design control than the template pages maintained by printers.