TeamBlog

In the difficult and changing economy we seem to have allowed our businesses to become stagnated in respect to conversions of prospects to customers.

We tend to hold back our advertising and marketing efforts by using the age old, “I don’t have the budget for marketing… its all I can do to survive…. ” and add to that the additional “…. with what I have!” added to the end of the “it’s all I can do….”

Lets take a look at that approach. First, we had suspects, those businesses or consumers of our services that we believed could use our products and services. In economies past, we would send letters, meet them at trade shows, E-mail and fax them, and in affect reach out to them in any way we could. If the service provider was larger, then they would use television and radio media as well.

Each of those avenues cost budget dollars, and in most cases the same dollars as we have in place today. So, why then do we clam up, get afraid, and stop marketing? What do we think will naturally happen to our business growth? Why would we think that we would or could “survive” on the existing base of customers when we would not have even considered that 5 years ago?

Lets discuss how we can move from an economical induced stagnation to an economically induced expansion; of course we will assume that we cannot change the national economy, but we WILL change our internal and possibly the local economy (our household and neighborhood maybe).

First, we must allow ourselves to believe in our abilities to gather suspects, convert them to prospects (that is the easy part) and then into customers (consumers of our products and services). As some famous advertisers said in the past, and I do believe they’re survived, “Just Do It!” Simply get out the pencil (or keyboard in most modern situations) and write your next advertising campaign plan. Don’t expend days on this effort, spend at most two 2 hour sessions. Outline it. Consider the following guideline.

1. Define which product or service you will focus on. Be careful to not allow your focus to become expansive and/or blurred.  Stick with ONE product or service. Trying to advertise a bizarre of products and services really becomes a shopping expedition where the buyer just cannot make a decision, and they won’t for you either.
2. Define the distribution media and size: The quickest lowest cost method is e-mail of course.  But, you will be in a pool of multi-millions a day.  I like to compare this to finding a humming bird in a flock of sparrows – your advertisement  being the humming bird of course!  But, I must admit that done properly, your advertisement can be the eagle in the flock.  I will discuss the details of e-mailing as an eagle at a later point.
3. Write the advertisement/design the ad copy: Be cognizant of the content from all angles; verbage, images, spacing, etc.  Your advertisement must be 1st and foremost, pleasing to the eye in your distribution media. You have a split second to capture the mind of the future customer – I know most people say you have 2-3 seconds to capture a prospects eye.  Well if you have placed the ad and if the prospect came upon it, they will fly past in a split second unless it is visually pleasing or visually appalling (most of us do not want to use the second).  Your copy must capture the suspects MIND immediately after their eye.  Keep that in mind when creating the copy.
4. Determine who you will market to: This can be the difficult part for many small businesses and larger businesses that do not have a customer relationship manager (CRM) and all businesses that do not understand the databases they currently possess.  Gather your data in a database or spreadsheet if that is all you have. If you are having difficulty understanding where you get data from within your business, check out the following article, it may help you understand where your gold is today.
5. Determine how you will measure success: This may be one of the most important steps in the process.  Not for results but for your own feeling of accomplishment.  You need to know when you have succeeded in what you have set out to accomplish.  Don’t just assume increased revenues will give you the satisfaction of achievement; allowing that will just set in place a bad habit that will eventually implode upon you.  Define exactly what should be the 1st, 2nd, and final result you are desiring.
   For example:
   • Succeess is a click on my ad to my website (you will need to have specific landing pages)
   • Success is a phone call to my company about product X or service Y (you will need to inquire on incoming calls as to how the client found you)
   • Success is an appointment set for new product Z (you will need to ask how the client heard of your product)
     
6. Measure: Measure your success points as described in #5.  Depending on your success points you will need to create or have specific benchmarks.  Determine the benchmarks in #5 and create a measurement gathering place to record specifics. Keep in mind that you may have others in your organization involved in the measurements so make sure it is easy for them to provide the data to the measurement system.  Maybe a CRM?  Which one you might ask, check this link for more information on what to look for.
7. Re-distribute (a follow up message): After a defined time period for responses to occur you will want to gather the measurement data and determine a redistribution scheme.  In looking at the response data, you will want to segregate a number of facts.  In our example above, ask yourself  “did we increase our web page hits more or did we get more phone calls in?”  Be careful on this one, I would suggest that an inbound phone call is worth 100-200 webpage hits.  So, for each phone call directly recieved as a result of an e-mail campaign give it a weight of 200 hits.  Design a followup message to accentuate the best of the two response mechanisms.  This redistribution should push toward the conversion goal. Remember what you really want is a suspect to prospect conversion with the e-mail.  Your job on the phone is more valuable – it is prospect to customer conversion.  Customers are what drives growth of your business.
8. Measure the responses: Again in the same manner but add the additional level of prospect to customer conversion over time.  Your goal at this point should be to capture new customers in an effective manner for both the prospect and your team.
9. Repeat until satisfied……… OR more appropriately until the effectiveness drops by 25%.  Effectiveness in this case means the hits/distribution drop by 25%.  Remember we have converted phone calls in (directly related to a distribution of our message) to hits by the 100-200 factor.

To wrap up, we as business owners small, medium and larger must continue to build our customer base in the tough times as we did in the good times.  We have the same tools as we did in the past, we have the same need as we did in the past, we should execute with the same gusto as we did in the past.  Those businesses that marketed in the past did it for the same reason as they would today.  They did it to sustain a solid business.  In this difficult economy we must market for the same reason: to build a solid business.  As we slow down our marketing efforts, we immediately slow down inbound prospects and therefore our revenues and ultimately our ability to survive as businesses.  Do not get stagnate – market, market, market like you did in years past.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 9:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.