The listen and it’s gone forever summed it up for me. This is the issue with radio advertising. You’ve got to capture the audience attention and close the deal in an instant. It’s an almost impossible task, confirmed by small business owners I know that have spent a fortune in radio ads over the years, with almost nothing to show for it.

As mentioned in earlier, somewhat similar articles on traditional yellow pages advertising, the reason radio survives at all, could be the fact they have a skilled team of telemarketers or sales reps pushing it. If Radio, Yellow pages or printed classifieds were based upon actual sales results for their customers, they’re be dead in the water….

The other thing that helps radio (and Yellow) survive is that business owners, large and small, are inherently very slow to change their ways. In many markets much slower and more conservative than their own consumers who are often more online and mobile ‘savvy’.  Put simply, just because their existing radio ads aren’t actually working, does not mean they are looking to change things. Their internal business systems, people and processes are there to maintain the status quo. (There’s ample evidence of this sad fact across society – It’s our ‘fear of change’ at work).

Just show me the numbers!

Radio sales reps also spout out the numbers and stats just like eager Yellow pages reps. They mention these huge figures off some ten-year-old survey which sounds comforting, coming to the belief that there’s huge numbers of ‘listeners’ out there today, eagerly waiting for the next commercial ad break. Yeah, right…

But Radio will survive, in spite of itself

A recent analysis in the US has it that radio advertising, in spite of it’s ineffectiveness in terms of results, will continue to stay around 10% of media spend over the next few years. Local studies reveal similar trends here (read more)

Although sales skills and relationships are major factors, I think there’s also a ‘feel good’ factor here too for the paying advertiser and business owner. Just hearing their ad on air gives them a psychological boost. – We all like to hear about ourselves, right? And therefore happy to pay for it each month. It’s somehow ‘classier’ than print ads.

But the problem with radio as Seth mentioned, aside from the fact that it’s intrusive ‘push advertising’ that most consumers hate, is that for the listener, the message is fleeting.

Unless the individual has that exact need, the moment they just happen to be listening, it’s gone. Few will make a note of it for future reference. Some will think, that’s okay, I’ll Google it when I get home. But because the advertiser has no cross-channel marketing strategy in place, little useful comes up in a search result. (see page ref links for these tricks)

The worst, lease effective radio ads are those where the call to action is vague and/or hard to recall. Most seem to rely upon providing a phone number, which few people will remember or write down.

Certainly there are several things radio ad creatives could do to help, like sending clients to an easily remembered website address. Perhaps a directory off their own radio website would help if the client has no website or can’t easily alter it.

This, somewhat ironically, would also help the stations online profile and ad income stream.

Better still, have them use mobile text messaging to make the contact and have a record of the event. e.g. The radio ad could include “Text TOYS to 456 on your mobile for more details and chance to go into a prize draw” The text messaging system would automatically respond, sending through added information or website links at minimal cost. That link could theoretically go straight to the advertisers online store to purchase immediately via mobile, or capture their email address or Facebook details. The advertiser would also now have the customers phone number, from the initial contact, allowing instant follow-up. This is interactive advertising (and selling) at its best.

Sorry Small Business Owner – The old school ways win out

But these little tricks certainly won’t be covered or suggested by the ‘old-school’ radio sales rep or station manager. Like others who work in the agency, design or print sector, aside from the old telephone number, they dislike including other competing media channels as part of any client promotion. These third party ‘extras’ around the web and mobile would certainly boost end results and leads, but are also perceived as unnecessary ‘impediments’ to closing the ad sale (i.e. it’s a harder sell), needlessly delaying the reps sales commission.

On top of this, it’s all part of the established ad provider strategy. If you’re hooking up a client, make sure you get as much of his/her annual ad budget as possible. Make sure they don’t share it with someone else, especially another competing (often lower cost), media channel.

What may be good business for the client, is often not for the radio station, Yellow pages, newspaper or magazine publisher. This self-serving attitude will ensure that print, radio, TV and general advertising strategies will remain locked into the 80s for many years to come – A time when costly promotions were proudly displayed (or said), and the customer expected to pick up the phone.

N.B. The integration of online with offline advertising that provides real returns for business owners certainly seems a long way off. This article helps explain why is there so little consideration for the business owner, listener, or reader in today’s business advertising -  Why 90% of NZ businesses, agencies and advertisers appear reluctant to connect with consumers beyond yesterdays secular tools. Why a change for the better using lower cost, super-effective, new media and cross-channel tools is being held back…

Ref: Cynics sanctuary;  Changing the Channel;   Integrating Radio and Offline with Google Search

Here’s a youtube clip of how a new age 1-year-old views the world of print and magazines.

To promote his wisdom, Andrew recently started an iTunes and Youtube channel with some amazing tips and ideas for small business owners. Here’s one below.

Enjoy.

Call or email us at kevin@digitalmarketing,co.nz to learn more about Andrew’s strategies and how they can be applied locally.

Tri-messaging is marketing messages that are created, integrated and unleashed for email, social and mobile channels to stimulate engagement.

The graph Lyris provided, reminded us again of how marketing has dramatically changed. Again how the consumer, not the marketer or advertiser is in control. Business are now just participants, not drivers of marketing. Seth Godin and other gurus forecast all this long ago,

However this paper showed what digital marketing is really about today. Finding the best touchpoints where our customers are. Certainly it is around email, social websites and mobile.

Mobile is the most interesting element, since is can bring everything together. Modern iPhone and smartphones can do it all – Collect and send emails, monitor, view, even update blogs, facebook pages and twitter accounts at will, on the go. 

The other neat, emerging mobile phone marketing tool is text messaging and the use of business-defined keywords. These can be easily established for any business, allowing customers to ‘opt in’ to company specials, coupons or events. It’s not broadcast marketing or spam either. These are customer-requested, auto-response text messages providing quick information, coupons, even weblinks through to a mobile-optimised ‘mobi’ website, in realtime.  (Read more)

“Laptops are for old people”

It’s only a matter of time before smart retailers, restaurant owners, advertisers and marketers realise the sales potential on interacting with their customers through these channels, focused around mobile email, texts and mobile web. Forget clunky MS Outlook or IE/Firefox on a PC – As my friends teenage son told me, who’d ditched his PC for an Apple iTouch, “Laptops and PCs are just for you old people”.

P.S. For more on mobile marketing, keywords and mobi websites visit my mobile marketing website at www.quicksave.co.nz

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our organisations, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, says Dan Heath, the co-author of the new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems – the rational mind and the emotional mind – that compete for control:

• The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie.
• The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort-but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

For us natural entrepreneurs, (being around 8% of the population), change is normal and healthy. We actually thrive on it. However this is not the ‘normal’ human condition. Most people (92%) abhor change, even when the change can make a significant improvement in their lives or business results. We have internal and external ‘systems’ that always want to maintain the status quo.

This discussion isn’t about the management of the process once the initial decision is made. We have project managers and change management consultants that do that chore. No, this is how we get to the point of accepting the need for change in the first place. Dan Health is one of several who have examined all this. This new book should help us understand why we act as we do.

For those in sales and marketing, it’s essential reading… Order it here.

For frustrated salespeople that want another perspective on all this, read Sharon Drew Morgans book, Dirty Little secrets. However as Sharon notes, that fact that our best strike rate in sales is under 10% simply reinforces the fact that people aren’t good at change – Giving them features and benefits is seldom, if ever enough. We have to manage their buying process too.

Finally, the other hidden factor in all this seems to be around perceived risk when buying anything. It’s long been known that if a money-back guarantee or similar is included, sales often improve by up to 50%. This is especially vital for new products or services. With no other change, just lowering this risk factor can make a huge difference when selling….

However if you’re selling, there may be a bigger elephant in the room. Is it just the message,  or the fact that we’ve made a connection? If you’re in sales and working with established clients, the message or offer may not be important. It’s the connection and fact we’ve taken the time is the key – Relationship selling concepts come to mind. We’ve spoken a lot on this blog about the emotional factors when selling. An article on what new strategies to employ with email marketing being the most recent. (Read more) 

It perhaps emphasises the need to remain human when selling. Less of the old ‘hard sell’. Local guru Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics had an interesting observation on all this in his weekly podcast. Take a listen…

Why Connection Is Way More Important

Be sure to signup to his newsletters. Better still, buy his book, Brain Audit – Why Customers Buy

Radio, TV, banner ads, pay-per-click (PPC), magazine ads, billboards… There are dozens if not hundreds of marketing channels you can use to get your sales message across. [Many marketers forget this]. We don’t expect you to use all of them all of the time – but you should know what your options are. Test different channels and different channel combinations, and roll out with what is most effective for you and your organization.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that if a specific channel does not meet the return on investment (ROI) goal for your overall multi-channel marketing campaign it should be disregarded.

Take a look at the chart below:

In this example, you are selling your product for $100. You had $85,000 to spend and your goal was to make $1.25 for every dollar you spent, or a return on investment of 125 percent.

You had tremendous success with your online efforts (endorsed e-mails, banner ads, and PPC campaigns). On your teleconference, your marketing efforts yielded a 90 percent ROI and lost $500. And on your direct-mail campaign, you produced only an 80 percent ROI, losing a whopping $10,000.

It has been our experience that customers who come in as a result of direct-mail efforts have a higher lifetime value.

Since two of your five channels lost a total of $10,500, are you going to cut them from your multi-channel campaign? Of course not. Those two channels brought in nearly 42 percent of your new customers. Customers you now have the opportunity to bond with and sell more products to. It has been our experience that customers who come in as a result of direct-mail efforts have a higher lifetime value. This means that the 400 new customers from your direct-mail campaign will most likely become your best customers. On top of all this, you’ve met your goal of 125 percent ROI on your overall campaign.

The idea is to subsidize some channels with the channels that have greater ROIs to produce incremental orders that can bring in additional revenues. The idea is to subsidize some channels with the channels that have greater ROIs to produce incremental orders that can bring in additional revenues.

Ed: This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a

P.S.  For those wanting to learn more about cross-channel marketing, MaryEllen has an amazing book on the topic entitled Changing the Channel. I read this over the Christmas break and it has to be one of the best, most objective and down-to-earth books on marketing I’ve found. Based on 20 years of real-world experience, not just theory. It’s a virtual case study on how a company achieved massive growth using direct response marketing, across multiple channels – Openly discussing what worked and what didn’t…

Every marketing student, entrepreneur and business owner should read this book

It covers must-know tricks on direct mail, email, search engines, telemarketing, social media, events, PR, print advertising, radio, TV and more. An easy-to-read book that puts it all into perspective – Something few marketing books or ‘experts’ do today, who all seem to have their own agendas and media biases.

This is the essential marketing handbook for any NZ business.

It can be purchased online from www.fishpond.co.nz

Here’s a short interview with MaryEllen

Much of this 1-hour interview was a reminder that marketing is failing us, seldom giving a good ROI. And based on Mark’s and many of his clients experiences, 95% of today’s ad agencies and marketers are image and brand-focused, still seeing ROI as relatively unimportant. (A recent UK survey seems to back this up) .

Click on the mp3 graphic below to listen to a 5 minute extract from the interview – Here Mark talks about a simple strategy that started the turnaround in sales for a large client in the finance sector. He then discusses a disturbing case with a smaller operation, that clearly demonstrates where many of us are failing.

Your Marketing Sucks. by Mark Stevens – Excerpt.

Marketing is not about spending money on such things as advertising, direct mail, and P.R. Those are just tools. Marketing is about growing your business–its revenues, profit, and valuation. If you saw someone open an office window and start tossing out handfuls of thousand-dollar bills, you would have every reason to think that he’s nuts. Yet that’s what happens in business day in and day out, as company after company wastes millions of dollars on spending camouflaged as marketing.

… Smart people do stupid things all the time when it comes to marketing. Since the art and science of marketing is not their core expertise, not surprisingly, their marketing is far less effective than they dream it will be. It’s a trap that is easy to fall into. Think of it this way. There is a Christmas-morning sense of excitement when you get your company’s new brochure with its pretty pictures or see yourself hawking homemade hickory furniture in a cable-TV ad. In the back of your mind, a little voice says, "We’re big-time. We’re on television. We have a beautiful brochure. We’re marketers. Wow!"

But hold it a minute. You know how they say, "Anyone can be a parent. Being a good parent is where the tricky part comes in." Well, a similar dynamic occurs with marketing. All you need to market your business is money. You don’t need an iota of creativity, smarts, experience, or savvy. No, all you need is a cheque book. And with that cheque book, you can buy ads up the kazoo, public relations that can make Donald Trump look like a recluse, brochures to fill warehouses, websites that would make Steven Spielberg envious.

…when the return on your investment isn’t there, there can be no arguing that your marketing sucks.

The problem is that if you are like most companies, all of that spending will result in a negative return on investment. Your marketing will cost you more profits than it brings in.  Why? Because in all likelihood, your marketing sucks.

…when the return on your investment isn’t there, there can be no arguing that your marketing sucks. This book tackles the problem head-on. It will help you

• Rid your company of spending camouflaged as marketing, and redirect your dollars to programs that deliver strong and measurable financial rewards. (If you get the Christmas glow too, that’s fine, but keep the ego-gratification stuff to yourself. We’re in pursuit of dollars here.)
• Stop overlooking simple but obvious ways of increasing sales and earnings. For example, you will be amazed to see how easy it is to sell additional products or services to existing clients. (We will be talking about that in detail later.)

To buy the book, click here

Persuasion architect guru Bryan Eisenburg of futurenow provides a nifty little online calculator which calculates your website or brochure effectiveness. (Click here). It looks at the we vs you words and determines how often you talk about yourself and how often you talk about the prospect.

Ref: It’s the Customer Stupid.

Making communications more personal and relevant, as well as more targeted and timely the key to profits

The international audit during 2008 of some 650 senior marketers revealed that making communications more personal and relevant, as well as more targeted and timely, was among the top strategies for realizing greater revenue and profitability from existing customers. Other leading strategies included addressing under-penetrated markets or new customer segments, as well as finding new ways to up-sell and cross-sell existing accounts.

The CMO study highlighted three key obstacles and deficiencies to overcome. This included:

• Lack of real-time data that captures across all customer touchpoints.
• Information not only being selectively gathered, but often inaccurate.
• Data restricted in its availability and use across the organization.

The core need for change  has been simmering for a while now. It started with that groundbreaking research by Romano and Broudy way back in 1999 who clearly established the benefits of  utilising client profiling and transactional data within marketing campaigns.

“It is inexplicable that the vast majority of marketers today are still struggling to source and extract meaningful insights from customer data at a behavioral, transactional and account value level,” noted CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May.

Hospitality and Retail have the biggest growth opportunities

An earlier Retail Trends Report in 2005 came to surprisingly similar conclusions to the CMO one. It concluded that retailers that take a customer-driven approach to marketing will be able to withstand the competition for dwindling discretionary income, and still have a productive and profitable. The key to success for small retailers is to identify their best customers, find potential niches to cater to, get to know what motivates customers and then interact as individually as possible.

Retail Trends Report suggests that retailers creating personal experiences and communications are those most likely to come out ahead. Personalising the selling experience and marketing messages will help to level the playing field between small and larger retailers.

According to Gary Wright, of Wright Marketing who specialise in retail strategies, "Technology today puts personalised communications within the reach of every retailer, regardless of size. With new database and digital press technology, small retailers can affordably engage in one-on-one communications which has been proven to significantly increase a customer’s brand loyalty and lifetime value."

when you communicate with a known customer, you are 5 times more likely to generate a response and a sale

Wright encourages retailers to explore database programmes and digital production opportunities that will merge customer data with promotional materials in order to produce personalised and highly relevant materials at a fraction of traditional printing costs. His report indicates that when you communicate with a known customer, you are 5 times more likely to generate a response and a sale. When you add customer-specific information from a database to that correspondence, the potential increase jumps to 13 times.

Loyalty marketing guru Rafi Albo knows all this well. He’s shown us in his own retail sector numerous examples that gained a 15-35% response / voucher redemption rate. Winston Marsh also provided some handy tips for small retailers where he touched upon the benefits of using the internet and email in innovative ways. Now, in 2009, we can add in mobile TXT messaging and QR barcodes.

The opportunities here for all retailers, restaurants and the hospitality sectors are immense, but like any marketing strategy, expert planning and execution is the key to success.  Call us on 027 244 4884 to discuss how we can together devise a retail marketing plan to suit your industry or market sector.

If you want more information on the Routes to Revenue study go to  the CMO web site at http://www.cmocouncil.org/index.asp.

Kevin Trye

Considering that many of these campaigns are extremely costly, should we tolerate such blatant wastefulness in these tough times?

What to do?

For some background, below we’ve an excerpt from an insightful article by expert media consultant Harvey Hirsch reminding us on how we market today, what’s going horribly wrong and ideas on how to fix it.

“… This ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to marketing is so antiquated, so primitive, and generally so ineffective that when you add it up, it costs every company that employs it between $600 and $1,500 to generate a sales lead…

Americans [and NZer's] are assaulted over 4,000 times a day by media messages (that figure varies upward depending on who I consult with), and cutting through that clutter is all I am hired to do. And my first choice is always a 3-Dimensional, personalized and printed, full-color, emotionally charged, hand-assembled mailer, followed by a well-trained telemarketing person who sets up a live person-to-person 1:1 meeting. This is true multi-channel marketing…

Following these guidelines has allowed my clients to generate sales appointments for under $200 a piece. Not only have some of these programs generated over 50% response rates (we actually hit the 90% response rate recently), they have allowed our clients to trim non-productive marketing programs out of their budgets and actually plan for controlled growth, even in these economically uncertain times.

And here’s what I’ve learned.

The future of marketing is evolving into short run, personalized, well-targeted, “Coney Island” enhanced, B2B direct mail, versioned to go 3-deep into a prospective company with Information on Demand as an on-line back-up, handed off to a skilled telemarketing support team who’s only mission is to generate a face-to-face with a well-trained sales person. Using this system, not only can you baseline efficacy, you can actually predict expansion and growth.”

So, where to from here? A realisation that something has to change. Company owners and marketers need to investigate far better methodologies and strategies that make our messages more personalized and relevant to the recipient. To start demanding response rates that give a real return on investment, not just marketing for pure ‘branding’.

P.S. If your creative person or ad agency is struggling with these concepts (over 80% will initially oppose it), then send them along to one of our free seminars - Your business survival may depend upon it… Click here for details

Susan simply reconfirmed from an academic and ‘brain function’ viewpoint, what good marketers have known for many years – That many of our decision making process, including those around buying decisions, are triggered firstly by the unconscious mind. The rational, logical processes come in second.

She reminded us too of the three core things that drive us as a species. Fear, Food and Sex. Correctly incorporate one or more of these factors into your marketing campaigns and response rates are sure to rise. It also explained to me why good products, services and magazines around the healthy food industry continue to do well, even in tough times.

Her latest, highly readable book (check out here) discusses how all this can be used to make your websites better! This reminded me of the great work done by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg at www.futurenowinc.com They too focus upon the motivation and persuasion aspects of web design, specifically e-commerce sites.

Seth Godin has taught us much in this arena too, as does Rafi Albo who constantly emphasises the importance of emotion in high response campaigns. Again, it’s not brain surgery (pun intended).

However whether the marketing medium used is print, web or TV, the base principles will always remain the same. A great book.

Listen to the podcast [audio:http://www.digitalmarketing.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/NeuroWeb.mp3|titles=NeuroWeb]

It’s a tough time to be in advertising. Things don’t work like they used to. More media choices, more competition for the consumers gaze, time and attention. Just throwing more ‘out there’ doesn’t work like it did.

The Secret to Super-Effective Marketing with superb response rates is being able to migrate from this traditional mass market advertising model (i.e. ‘Spray and Hope’), to one that helps clients receive relevant, personalized one-to-one communication – Direct Mail pieces (paper or electronic) that are WANTED.

But adopting this new strategy brings many new challenges:

1. Most clients have not collected the right data, or any data, on their customers, and if they have it, they are reluctant to share it.
2. Companies that have successfully produced programs using new bells and whistles are not sharing their results for fear that their competition will learn how to catch up to them.
3. A majority of creative content providers (writers and designers at the agencies) are totally without any understanding of or how to write and design for variable, versioned pitches, let alone Web-print-to-Web programs, or database mining. (read this)
4. There is the commoditisation in the products offered by a majority of print providers, and how it affects content providers, like creative firms.

Although challenging, none of these issues are insurmountable. The blueprint for success, although not widely known, is there and well proven. And like all successful marketing or advertising campaigns, expert planning and execution is the key.

Today great success can come from building a connected community of followers, not just a brand – Finding products for your unique tribe of customers, instead of customers for your products.

sethgodin.mp3

Click on the audio mp3 icon to listen to Seth Godin

This is a short 5 min extract of an amazing gem-filled 50 minute interview with Seth by John Jantsch of DuctTapeMarketing where he introduces the concept of building a ‘Tribe’ to gain credibility and sales growth.

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