What Does Successful Marketing and Advertising Look Like?

Having been educated and gained experienced in just about every category of marketing and advertising in the past 9 years as well as education and experience in business practices there has been this GAPING HOLE in my thought process as to why marketing and advertising is so subjective and can't seem to be defined. I've always thought, couldn't this be more objective and provide more evidence of its usefulness other than just making a cool design and hoping people like it? Or is that all there is to what I do?

After keeping silent for years as I took notes, observed, and learned I still had the disconnect and started to speak out about it. Part of this disconnect came from the reality of our economy tanking in 2001 and me trying to figure out why what I did was important to businesses that my work was being sold to. I don't ever want to have my head in the sand. Without this school of hard knocks and the dip in advertising over the past few years I might still be satisfied with the status quo. Unfortunately, a lot of business owners as well as advertising agencies DO have their head in the sand, even after they experienced 2001 when their sales dropped tremendously. But, businesses are slowly moving back to their old, costly, and ineffective ways of advertising because it's the only format that they understand. Then the parallel with the advertising industry itself and the millions of philosophies on what marketing and advertising actually provides, and what the goal should be. It's enough to make your head spin. And it makes me want to cuss and throw a tantrum and smack people who are feeding lies or those that just don't get it no matter how many times you tell them. I'm sure you are wondering, "How so?" Glad you asked.

There is so much BAD information out there that it's really hard to come up with the good. Most people in "marketing" say that advertising and marketing are separate entities from sales. These people have missed the point. Tell that to someone who needs sales for their company to survive. Tell them to spend $100k on brand awareness with the possibility, but no guarantee, of getting more people to recognize your brand (truth) when they actually tell you that you will get more prospects and sales (false). This is what you call guessing, a blind hope, with your head in the sand. I've seen people fall for it time and time again. I've even seen crafty sales executives throw in a "prize" for the owner that buys the most ad space. You know the prize right? A vacation trip to Tahiti. And how does a vacation trip provide more business prospects for them? Um, let me think, none. So, the client basically tossed $70,000 in the air hoping that his "ad campaign" will stick for him long enough to actually get some clients. The other $30,000 that was supposed to be invested in the campaign to get more clients in reality paid for his trip to Tahiti! What a great treat! And guess what they get after the campaign is over? Nothing. They don't have new trusted customers or even potential leads. Hmm. Well, that's odd right?

I've worked for these sales con-artists, they've been my boss. They've taken the lie themselves that they actually make a large difference in helping these business' sales. But, what's the point if it doesn't actually connect with individuals which in turn generates more prospects? Possibly converting to closes? Or maybe making sales pitches a little bit easier? Something? Can we track anything? Does this seem more difficult than we thought in the beginning? Anyone else see this at all? I will admit, there are a few companies like Coca-Cola, Aflac, Starbucks that are actually successful at building a brand and would say their investment has paid off, a little. For example, if an Aflac representative comes to your door and he hands you an Aflac duck when you open the door you aren't immediately pissed off that he's wasting your time. Any other insurance salesman would make you mad right off the bat but with Aflac you have a 2 second grace period on behalf of "the duck". Now, let me ask, how much did they spend to get that 2 second grace period? More money than anybody has ever seen except for Bill Gates. Certainly more money than most mid-level or small companies have the luxury to put forth. Are there smarter and more effective ways to get the same 2 second grace period or the same recognition in the marketplace AND actually help your business close a sale? Without a doubt, yes YES YES! I'm determined to continue moving closer and closer to that exact end. To be continued. Meanwhile, please cut off your crappy sales commercial that is interrupting everyone in the middle of a tv show that they wish they could be watching.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

Narrowly Define and Focus

All along your advertising, marketing, and sales should have been grouped together under the same direction of "getting new clients" focusing on a defined target market and pursuing prospective clients. This only works when all three avenues of creating clients lines up with how your business is defined. What is your core business and what is your strategy and goals to effectively target and reach prospects of your core business? First, what is your core business? Focus on the product or service that creates 70% of your business. Then, find the mediums of getting clients that create the most return. If you aren't getting any sort of true representation of what the medium is producing in regard to prospects or physical clients then you need to find out how you can know for sure. What is actually driving your business? You must know as much of a full answer to this question as possible in order to plan your resources (aka money) accordingly and get a great ROI.

Scenario: You advertise in radio, tv, and internet and decide that you need to cut back advertising because the budget isn't there and you determine to cut back everything the same amount. Then try and rationalize this decision. Is this because you don't know which medium is most effective in reaching your target market? Is this because you consider brand awareness in a healthy dose of all advertising methods a good method for brand awareness? But how much is converting to sales? Maybe you knew the rate of return your advertising and marketing had 10 years ago but do you know the response you are receiving from your advertising choices now? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking on a consistent basis and know the answer AUTOMATICALLY. If you do not, you may be throwing money out the door, infact, you probably are.

Narrow focus on a core strategy that gets 70% of your business. This is 2 fold: First, draw in customers for a specific product or service. Example: If you're a car dealer but 70% of your sales is trucs, you need to focus on advertising to truck buyers. Get specific with who a truck buyer typically is. Differentiate yourself in this way. Narrowly define yourself to the public, give them an opportunity to respond. Then when they do, you can provide the other products or services you sell once you already have gained their trust and credibility.

Second, focus on "getting new clients" in mediums that get more reach, more frequency, and cost less to market to your target demographic.

What is available is changing rapidly. Do your homework or hire someone with experience and whose job it is to keep up with trends and learn what gives your company the greatest benefits for its investment dollars. Ever heard of value investing? This is value marketing. Same concept, different application. The market buys when everythig is going well and gets bad results. The market sells when everything is going down, which is the worst time to sell. Don't be a product of your emotions or of what the market says. Determine value by a strict standard of measuring the company's results. If you can't measure the results effectively, then get out and find something that you know the direct result of your efforts.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:
Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

No More Advertising "Crap Shoots"

If you own a company or know a company that spends over $50,000 annually in advertising and marketing, it's time for you to reconsider your advertising mediums and methods. You should be in a constant state of evaluating WHAT is REALLY driving sales and what isn't. It is time that we stop separating the categories of "sales", "marketing", and "advertising" and come to the conclusion that they SHOULD be under the same category of "Getting New Leads, Prospects, and Clients." There is more opportunity to measure ROI for advertising and marketing than ever before, so don’t settle for generic brand awareness campaigns in oversaturated advertising mediums while receiving no measurable results. There are TOO MANY OPPORTUNITIES, all you need is someone who understands how to identify and define who your target market is, how they respond, and the experience and education to think critically through the benefits and drawbacks to implement the most beneficial mix for your company.

Let me give an example, McDonalds spent millions of dollars on an advertising campaign recently just to “remind” people of their product. They don’t have a way to truly measure the actual results to know if their buyers came to get food because of the advertising or some other external factor. Since you aren't the size of McDonald's to be guessing with the results of your advertising, all the more reason for you to define what you are doing and how to best accomplish that. Why would someone listen to a sales pitch FROM YOU, the salesman? People are more skeptical of canned sales pitches and people promoting their own product because they are over exposed to people telling them how good they are. Generic brand awareness campaigns ARE NOT capturing your market anymore, they are a CRAP SHOOT. I suggest you cut out advertising all together and just go with sales OR work to make your advertising have a direct relationship with new prospects. Take advantage of the opportunity to re-evaluate and think strategically. Allow me the opportunity to share an advertising strategy with you that cuts out the “fluff” and “pie in the sky” mentality that the advertising industry has been giving you for years .

The evaluation is free. If you decide you like what I have to offer, I will provide you a template to go by or manage independently. That’s right, no extra costs to add me to your payroll. Secondly, this will require me to continue thinking strategically to produce measurable results to earn my keep.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:
Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

Racism or Bad Judgment, "Blink" Book Review

As marketers, we should seek to understand how people perceive things and so it's important to discuss Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. The book is centered around "snap judgments", judgments that are based on our stereotypes or preconceived ideas. Malcolm Gladwell convinces us with great examples that decisions made quickly can be as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

The book uses examples of psychologists with a small amount of information and data to explain a better estimate of quality through snap judgments of significant authentic relics over copies to marriages that end in divorce over those that stay together. Gladwell suggests that in some cases education is not more important than understanding. For example, in the marriage analysis you only have to listen to a few characters to pick out an individual’s pattern.

Snap judgments are enormously quick relying on the thinnest slices of experience but they are also unconscious. The experiences and tests in the book suggest that what we think is free will is largely an illusion, that how well we think and act on the spur of the moment are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Marketers will find this information particularly useful. Gladwell tells a story about Ted Williams, the famous baseball star known for his hitting, who confidently suggested that he can look a ball onto a bat. But there is scientific evidence that this isn’t possible because it’s a three millisecond event. Ted was confronted about the evidence and honestly admitted, “Well, I guess it just seemed like I could do that.” Ted Williams, one of the best hitters ever could confidently explain but his actions didn’t match the explanation. This theory was defended in many different situations. Gladwell concludes,”We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we really don’t have an explanation for.”

Sometimes we make snap judgments that are more correct than we could after months of study. But there are also times when rapid cognition goes the other way.

A few key points:

First, Malcolm suggests “the key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” What a HUGE truth this is. I know I can apply this personally to my life. I believe the Bible also backs this thought up in Ecclesiastes 12: 12-13, "Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." In other words, God is suggesting that making education the focus over simply abiding in Him and looking to understand Him is an unneeded and never-ending weariness.

Second, Gladwell confronts our true ability to think without stereotypes. For example, Gladwell asks “how much of the ‘information’ in an audition is visual? Seventy or eighty percent? It’s mostly visual. An audition is supposed to be an exercise in listening.”

This book is a great call to action for justice without regard for race, creed, or any other potential stereotype that we may form. Rather than working to educate people about discrimination through affirmative action programs, awareness for gender bias, or teaching females to be more assertive in making cases for their own ability, Gladwell asks that we take a different approach. Let’s face it, you can’t go up to a classical composer and tell him that the reason he isn’t hiring women is that he is in the grip of some powerful, buried biases against women. Before, in this situation there would have been a long discussion about social discrimination. Our suggestions for change would be global and long-term. Most likely the only change that would really occur would be a younger, hopefully more open-minded composer would rise up in the future.

It encourages us to face our own stereotypes that are held deep within and work for practical problem solving. “Nationwide, the rate of drug admissions to state prison for black men is thirteen times greater than the rate for white men…In Illinois, the state with the highest black male drug offender admissions to prison, a black man is 57 times more likely to be sent to prison on drug charges than a white man.”

The crazy thing is that Gladwell suggests (and I agree) that the majority of people don’t intend to discriminate against others. But they do because we are subject to the biases that we carry in our brains that affect our behavior as much as opinions that we hold. Justice is SUPPOSED to be blind. It isn’t.

Rather than fixate on the person making the snap decision, we should examine the context-the unconscious circumstances-in which the snap decision was being made.

Blink is a great eye-opener and a must read. It will revolutionize they way you understand yourself and others and make proactive steps toward solving injustices in your own heart as well as being primed for those circumstances around you when justice needs to be served.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

How and When to Ask for Business...

This is a little different with every business but if you're a personal services business starting out with new connections, this is how I suggest you do it.

First, after you’ve developed a genuine connection with another person, and you have defined your business to where they understand the benefits to them, then you need an opportunity to ask them business questions. Ask them for a "business meeting" or "a time to meet and discuss business". This acknowledges to both parties that you are meeting to "help each other" specifically in business and opens the door for you to discuss, ask questions, determine problems, probe the problems and the successes of your friends business.

This is the same thing as asking them for their business. You're asking them for an opportunity to observe their needs. THEN, you can interpret if you can help or maybe you can direct them to someone who CAN help them. They also may not have a way for you to help them, but they may know someone else who who has been looking for what you provide.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

Measuring Marketing Programs

Taking a break from generating referrals blog, will be back. I feel a need to address measuring marketing...

It's important that you measure your marketing programs. First identify your KPI (Key Performance Indicators). Then you can develop a plan for getting as close to objective as possible in measuring your programs.

How you measure will differ based on the industry and the product. There are a lot of marketers that suggest that you should not measure marketing with sales, but I don't care what industry you are in, marketing and sales are at least indirectly related and should be measured similarly. Marketing is generating leads, prospects, and clients. Sales, is a part of marketing, or you might categorize marketing under sales depending on logistics, but they are related, and should work together. At minimum, there should be a way to measure the ease of sales with a good marketing program.

Traditional marketing methods are getting more diluted by sheer numbers and competition from other ads. They're getting ignored more by unwilling and uninterested customers. People are used to businesses telling others about how good they are. Why not build some marketing programs to make it easier and more EXCITING for someone ELSE to spread the word. When you begin "paying" your refers they become what Seth Godin calls a "sneezer". You want to stay away from this as much as possible. I'm not saying you shouldn't give incentives. But, are they more interested in the value of your company or the value of the monetary incentive? Focus on the first, and diminish the second as much as possible. There are LOTS of ways to do this and should be explored more as the ROI for marketing grows smaller.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

How to Define Your Business to Generate Referrals

Define your business: benefits, not features. Solutions, not tools. Example, in this era, production is not where the value is. Production can be outsourced. Ideas and solutions are where the real benefit is. You provide ideas that produce results. The production is a marginal part of the equation. The idea and the focus is what gives value to your clients. So, provide benefits in the form of a solution or idea.

For example, James Smith is an accountant. When his new friend, Bob, asks James what he does for a living, James does not say, “I’m an accountant”. This is a very “loose” benefit but what makes it a bad definition is it is a tool, not a solution. More specifics are needed. If James is a tax accountant that works with businesses, James’ defining his business should sound more like this, “I provide tax relief for business customers” or “I work to give companies the greatest tax return possible”. This is something that Bob can immediately relate to and understand the value behind what James does. Solutions and benefits. If you provide a product, it gets a little more tricky, but the idea is the same. For instance, you don’t “sell a new board game for kids under 12”, instead, you "provide a board game that allows young kids to use math equations while having fun”. This provides a solution for people to grasp and love about the product. This is a product that has benefits and a great idea to go with it.

Once you have had an opportunity to define the business, then you must look at when and how to ask for business. This will be explained in the next blog.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

Networking: How to Get Referrals

Networking is about mutually beneficial relationships. If you plan to register at a Chamber of Commerce organization or any other organization for "networking" and go to two events and hand out a business card or two and expect to get business, you're going to be disappointed. You could even go for years and not get the contacts you need. You need relationships of value, people who know you and trust you. This is going to start with the people who know you or know your parents. This is not multi-level marketing, this is real life. Outside of this, you need to be ready for opportunities, make a good and strong first impression, and find a reason for a second meeting. The truth of the matter is, people sell to who they like.

You might wonder, what is the fine line between being a "walking sales pitch" and a friend? How do you distinguish the two? But, if you ask that question, you are missing the point. The point is, you are a friend and you give. Take notice if they give back. One way to gauge if the person that you're talking with understands the concept of mutually benefitting one another [you could also call it, others-oriented] is to ask them how they are doing or another general question. Do they answer the question and return the question to you or do they sit and stare and expect you to do all the asking? You know the people I'm talking about. This is a strong sign that this person doesn't understand the first thing about being a friend. This person is a "ministry" and not a beneficial relationship. Ministry is serving others without expecting a return. This is a good thing but goes in a different category. If you want business any time soon it's probably going to be better to find people who believe in mutually benefitting relationships. In some cases, you may need to try harder to gain friendship, but if a person can't carry a simple give and take conversation, then you need to consider this one a ministry. Move on to those that actually care about getting to know you. Some of you may turn me off for saying that, but it's the truth. I'm not saying be phony or rude, but I am saying, don't waste your time looking for something where you aren't going to get it.

So, you can join an organization if you would like. But, if you don't harness the organization to gain relationships and build credibility and trust, then you are wasting your time.

If you have trouble meeting people, then, you are going to continue not having business. From my experience and study of excellent networkers, the majority of networking is learned. But, the main part is: give. Give a lot. When you meet someone, how can you give to them. Then, and only then, will you get something of real value in return. The second thing is appreciation. Do you appreciate others? For example, do you remember people's names or information that they tell you when you meet them? Work on these for effective networking. Make them a priority.

The next blog will be about how to define your business. Because, when you get to a mutually beneficial relationships status, you need to be ready to communicate this well when the opportunity comes.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.