Small Business Marketing

Brand marketing is facing a power-shift in today's marketplace.

Customers want to be part of a brand's direction and development. Listening to their expectations can determine your firm's level of success.

To take full advantage of today's market share, companies will need to "lose" control of their marketing strategy to ultimately gain it, by embracing this powerful dynamic of customer expectations.

Fifty years ago, there weren't the number of brands or media choices there are today. The market is filled with brands, sub-brands, cross-brands, and strategic-brand partnerships. Add to that list the ever-increasing media choices, including Internet marketing, and it's difficult to make a minor change to a brand that will affect top-line sales significantly.

Investing in cutting-edge, no-cost and low-cost promotional tools for branding ideas will allow you to market your company profitably. Consider these suggestions for energizing your brand in today's marketplace:

• Create uniqueness.

Uniqueness is a brand's No. 1 asset. The greater the brand uniqueness, the higher its score in market share. And those brands that create a unique brand category usually become the leaders.

What comes to mind when you consider: theme park, soft drink or overnight delivery? Most likely it is Disney, Coke and FedEx. They are the recognized leaders, though there are other brands in their categories.

Your brand's uniqueness can be determined by completing this sentence: Our (brand name) is the only (product category) that (does what).

• Replace repetition with interactive promotions.

A common branding strategy is repetition of the brand message to build awareness. This strategy is not as effective as interactive promotions.

For example, a 30-day trial use, a sample pack, an on-premise presentation or a portion of the service you offer are all effective interactive strategies. They allow customers to discover the benefits of your brand and move closer to making a purchase decision than the repetitious sales pitch provides.

• Replace outbound marketing with inbound branding.

Traditional methods of outbound marketing include telemarketing, voicemail campaigns, e-mails and direct marketing. These standard marketing strategies have become less effective because people use spam-ware, caller ID, firewall devices and the "circular file" to eliminate them.

Internet searches have become a primary source for obtaining product information. Popular Web sites such as Google and Yahoo are tapping the exploding volume of today's online buyer. To increase your potential customer base, consider using these methods:

1. Publish articles on Web sites that are relevant to your target audience.

2. Write book reviews on related topics for Web sites such as Amazon.com.

3. Publicize your brand on Web sites like prnewswire.com and prweb.com.

4. Increase your online identity with listings on LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Ziggs, Naymz and others.

• Replace monolithic marketing with customer-centric branding.

Don't be a follower. If you're trying to overtake a brand leader, don't emulate their strategies. Create your own. And let your strategy strike at the heart of what your key customers want. Of course, knowing what they want will be paramount to your success, so ask them.

• Don't plan for overnight success.

If someone offered me $10 million to help them launch a successful brand tomorrow, I'd tell them instead to give me $1 million and five years to make their brand successful. Understanding this dynamic of time, I'll bring home the bacon based on what prospective customers want.

Accepting and using this branding power-shift between you and your customer will allow you to involve their needs in your strategy and, in time, will establish your brand successfully. Their involvement offers them new reasons for becoming a loyal customer.

Guest column by Karen J. Bannan
 
How long was the subject line in your most recent e-mail marketing campaign?

You may not realize it, but the number of characters you use can positively or negatively impact the success of your campaign, according to a new white paper released by direct marketing agency Epsilon.

 

The white paper, "Rethinking the Relationship Between Subject Line Length and Email Performance: A New Perspective on Subject Line Design," details some of the more important considerations that marketers should be thinking about, said Kevin Mabley, the company's senior VP-strategic services.

 

Here are four tips you can use to boost your subject line prowess.

 

 

It would seem like this tip is a given, but take a look at the messages in your inbox. As you'll soon see, it's a strategy that few marketers embrace. The biggest problem is with ordering information. If you've only got 38 to 47 characters—the average number of characters that show up in the subject line of 57% of all U.S. e-mail recipients' e-mail programs—you need to put the most important information all the way to the left.

 

Use urgency and relevance as your guide. Is your offer or newsletter timely? Put that right up front. Also, make sure your brand is in the first few words. However, if your company has multiple brands or categories underneath its umbrella, lead with what's most recognizable and important to your customer.

 

 

Epsilon's research shows that shorter subject lines have higher click-through and open rates. Still, you don't want to go short for short's sake, Mabley said. Instead, you're looking to pack the most information you can into the smallest number of words.

And avoid words that have a sensationalist slant, such as "free" or "discount." "Don't just say '20% off your next purchase.' Your messages need to be rooted in your customers' expectations," Mabley said.

 

 

This is another common suggestion, but one that still isn't heeded as it should be, Mabley said. "At the minimum, you should be performing an A/B test on every message that goes out," he said. "The general rule is you can test 10% of your list in order to figure out which option is a better one."

 

This is how you're going to figure out if your front-loaded data should be the brand name or the actual benefit to the recipient, and it's something that may change on a day-to-day and message-to-message basis, he said.

 

Your messages should also go through a spam filter so you know, on a scale of 1 to 100, how likely it is that an ISP will consider your message to be spam, Mabley said.

 

 

This is something that's simple to do, and shows that you know who you are e-mailing and what they are looking for. "Whether you use their first or last name or their company's name, it makes it more personal and provides better reception," Mabley said.
 
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A slimmer email can lead to healthier results in 2009...
 
Many people enter into the new year with a personal goal of living a healthier lifestyle and shedding the unwanted pounds brought on by another season of holiday excess. The same commitment should also be applied to the messages being sent to your subscribers-messages that may have slowly packed on the pounds right under your nose without being noticed.

 

Emails tend to start off with very streamlined designs, making them easy to use and less likely to run into display errors in different email clients. However, as marketers reach a level of comfort with email marketing, and quality content continues to be developed, more and more of that content begins to find its way into their email communications.

 

It can start with something as simple as a sidebar, or additional space for images. As the months go on, additional content accumulates on your email template, and soon it hardly resembles the streamlined communication vehicle it once was.

 

Think this might be the case with your own email? Ask yourself a few questions:

 

What am I trying to communicate?
Trying to communicate more than two or three main ideas in an email is difficult in light of how quickly most email recipients sift through their inboxes. Identify the one idea, if you could only choose one, that you would want recipients to take away from your email-is it the first thing you notice on your test message? If not, consider moving or eliminating excess content.

 

Am I overloading?
Giving visitors to your website a variety of options is fine, but an excessive number of links and linked images on an email can make it difficult and frustrating to engage with. Many marketers rely on emails to drive traffic to their sites, but the amount of clicks an email receives has much less to do with the number of available links than the relevance of those links. Also, too many links on an email increases the chances of frustrating site visitors who wait for a page to load only to realize they clicked on the wrong link in your message-an easy mistake to make with several links in close proximity.

 

Where can I make changes?
Some content on your emails will be non-negotiable, but be mindful of including any non-essential elements. For example, a large graphic about an event could have a negative impact if it's the first thing a recipient sees. In this case, the recipient may believe the event is the focus of the message-even if that is not the case-and could abandon the message due to lack of interest in the event. Scaling the graphic down, or simply using stylized text to promote it, would slim down the message and make sure the recipients' focus is on your products, editorial, or whatever else you consider to be the key takeaway (see #1 above).

 

One common email element not likely to be eliminated by any marketer is advertising space, but there is no greater contributor to a bloated-looking email than a slew of rotating banner ads. At the very least make sure clearly defined borders separate advertising from your own content, and avoid using any unnecessary images of your own, which can contribute to the cramped appearance.

The tendency of emails to become inflated stems from marketers' desire to communicate as much information as possible with their subscribers. While this desire is perfectly understandable, it does not always take into account the user-experience of those who will be receiving the messages.

 

It's a good thing to have more ideas than can fit onto one email-for your subscribers' sake, try not to overload your messages. One idea on an email can still get great results, but only if your recipients can find it.
 

 

Five things every small business must do to survive this recession
Guest column by Bryan Jennewein

Many small businesses fall into the trap of spending little or nothing during challenging economic times. But there are proven strategies for not only surviving, but also growing during recession. Here are five easy ways to make sure your business comes out ahead.

Understand who your customers truly are
Understanding your customers is easy – just talk to them. Don't have the time? Then use a tool like infoUSA.com's Advanced Customer Cloner. Simply upload a list of your best customers, and it kicks out a list of people just like them – even if your customers are businesses. You can even order a report that describes these best customers for a small fee. It's smart investments like this that help prevent the kinds of costly mistakes of less successful businesses.

You have to spend money to make money
We've all heard the age-old mantra, "you've got to spend money to make money," and yet we continually resist doing it. If you're in business, then people need to know you're in business, which means you have to communicate with not only your current customers, but also potential customers. This communication costs money. Many call it "marketing dollars," while I call it common sense. Committing to spending money is difficult – especially when you don't see consistent returns. When you stop spending money on marketing, you only compound the problem. This vicious cycle will only help your business close its doors for good.

Use your money wisely
Now that you've committed to spending money, do so with a plan and a way to measure success. Do everything you can to understand how many dollars you're making for every dollar you're spending. Try a smart direct mail campaign, with a professionally designed mail piece that will get it the attention it deserves instead of a trip to the garbage can. Make sure you include a unique 800# or offer, so you can record these new customers when they buy. Understanding success is easy - just add up all the sales you made from your campaign, factor in future sales from new customers, and subtract the cost of the campaign itself. Or, for even more cost control, try email marketing. It's a very inexpensive way to reach a lot of people. Typically, your response rate is lower, but because you can reach more people, a lot of times these campaigns see more success than their direct mail counterparts – and you don't even have to pay for the stamp!

Craft your message carefully
Think about these three things when planning your campaign:
Hook them with a great offer or special deal.
Reinforce the value of your product or service.
Issue a call-to-action.

Get their attention, tell them why they need you, and tell them directly and specifically what to do. Your message might be something like "Seasonal Discount – 50% OFF of the best baked goods in town, baked fresh every morning by Mama Louisa herself! Bring this coupon when you stop by our store in the Old Market. Visit us today!" And keep some extra coupons on hand in the store. When a customer uses a coupon, just jot down the amount of the order. At the end of the first month, see how well your campaign did by totaling up all of your new business.
Create customer loyalty
Keep giving your customers what they want, learn from what they don't, and look to them for ideas on what else you might be able to provide. This is the key to marketing smarter: a lifelong customer. It's the customer that you've built an emotional connection to in addition to being merely useful. This customer will come to you first every time. This is perhaps the best investment of your marketing dollars, because you've spent money to acquire them once, and they keep buying time and time again. 

This smart marketing tidbit came across my desk from Joan Stewart, aka the Publicity Hound:

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One of the most valuable tips I learned is that the onslaught of emails I'm receiving from business people offering cut-rate prices on their products and services is, for them, the quickest way to the poor house. In fact, raising prices, even in a meltdown economy, is one of the fastest ways to success.

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Why is this so smart? Well, because Joan agree with me on this point. I'm not ashamed to share with you that for 2009, I've just raised my speaking fee. And not by a little - by a lot. Specifically, it's up by 33%. And it wasn't low to start with.

 

What are YOU doing to raise yourself above the competition - both literally with pricing and in other more customer-centric ways?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.
~Bill Vaughan

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
~Bill Vaughan

Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits.
~Author Unknown

A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.
~Author Unknown

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
~Benjamin Franklin