THINKing

Guerrilla Time

Tougher economic times often generate great guerrilla marketing ideas. Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term guerrilla marketing, which I define as low-cost, creative and typically self-implemented public relations techniques.

Here are a few thoughts that might spawn some ideas for your own business.

- When you can’t get in to see a prospect, try clipping half a $20 bill in a note to her. You get 20 minutes of her time and she gets the rest of the $20 when the meeting is over.

- Prior to a trade show, visit the town’s largest taxi company, and tell them to alert drivers you will have secret shoppers riding in taxis. If the taxi driver mentions your company and booth number to your secret shopper, the driver gets $100. Invest a little money on the show’s first day, and get the buzz started.

- Hire college students during the trade show to go to the airport dressed as chauffeurs. They hold up hand-lettered signs that contain the company name, and repeat the name of the company as people come by. Work the terminals where flights from your best markets come in. Go here to read more about trade show marketing.

- Retailers tend to overreact to a few consumer phone calls. So, take advantage of this if you are trying to get your new product on the shelf. Recruit a few friends to call the retailer in question and ask if they have your new product in stock. This works particularly well if you have some recent media coverage the caller can cite.

- Technology is making hand-written notes a thing of the past. Take the time to jot a short note to customers and thank them for their business. You’ll be surprised by the kind of goodwill and repeat business this old-fashioned tactic can generate.

Are you using guerrilla marketing? What are you doing? How is it working?

bookmark to:

Hidden Gems

I was checking out the statistics for my blog recently and found a number of excellent posts had had very little traffic. So, here is our first edition of Hidden Gems that will resurrect these overlooked posts:

Brand Euthanasia

Fighting For The Middle Ground

Client Media Relations Misconceptions

How Is Your Personal Brand Batting Average?

The Elasticity Of Truth 

Let me know what you think of these gems, please.

bookmark to:

What’s The Frequency?

The more things change, some say, the more things stay the same. When it comes to marketing, I tend to agree. Consider the following list of how advertising frequency equates to advertising effectiveness. Thomas Smith, a 19th Century London businessman, wrote this in 1885:

* The first time a man looks at an advertisement, he does not see it.

* The second time, he does not notice it.

* The third time, he is conscious of its existence.

* The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it before.

* The fifth time, he reads it.

* The sixth time, he turns up his nose at it.

* The seventh time, he reads it through and says, “Oh brother!”

* The eighth time, he says, “Here’s that confounded thing again!”

* The ninth time, he wonders if it amounts to anything.

* The tenth time, he asks his neighbor if he has tried it.

* The eleventh time, he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.

* The twelfth time, he thinks it must be a good thing.

* The thirteenth time, he thinks perhaps it might be worth something.

* The fourteenth time, he remembers wanting such a thing a long time.

* The fifteenth time, he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.

* The sixteenth time, he thinks he will buy it some day.

* The seventeenth time, he makes a memorandum to buy it.

* The eighteenth time, he swears at his poverty.

* The nineteenth time, he counts his money carefully.

* The twentieth time he sees the ad, he buys what it is offering.

bookmark to:

Twittering Journalists Update

Hey, I’ve had a lot of interest lately from journalists wanting to be added to the My Creative Team Twittering Journalist Wiki. A lot of new ones have been added and I’ve made the wiki a little more portable. Now, there is a downloadable Word file containing all the journalists and media outlets in the wiki. I typically update this file monthly, so check back often.

If you have journalists or media outlets to add to the list, send them along to me: harry at my-creativeteam (dot) com.

bookmark to:

Use The Neglected Weapons In Your Marketing Arsenal

Business marketers have a lot of weapons in their arsenals but they often overlook some very important ones. So, let’s do a quick inventory.

Of course, you already have a company name, a positioning statement, logo, stationery, business cards and a website.
Right?

The next thing I suggest is an employee survey. Ask them about what’s happening where the company meets the customer. Find out how employees feel about the company. A recent survey shows that employee attitudes have a huge impact upon a company’s bottom line. Motivated employees provide great service, and great service can separate you from your competitors.

Next, develop a customer retention program. It costs five times more to develop a new customer as it does to keep an old one. E-newsletters are an essential part of my customer retention program and should be a part of yours too.

Finally, here is a random list of other items that can be considered part of your marketing arsenal.

- your reputation

- advertising

- consultations, demonstrations, seminars, samples

- community involvement, cause marketing, philanthropy

- media contacts, bylined articles, op-ed pieces

- guest speaking program

- great working environment

- employee training & development program

- networking, referrals

- contests

- customer surveys

- special events

If your time for marketing related tasks is limited, take some advice from my marketing mentor: pick three things from above and do them right.

Are you using any of the neglected weapons? Tell us about it.

bookmark to:

Why Coupons?

We talked recently about using online coupons to spur consumer action. Now, let’s take a look at a company which is using coupons strategically and successfully.

I talked with Jim Deitzel (@rubbermaid) and Lauren Spahr (@rubbermaidtwo) about how Rubbermaid’s organizational products line is using coupons.

It turns out, Rubbermaid is no Johnny-Come-Lately to the online coupon. The company has used them for about four years, initially placing them on the company website. Recently, with some tweaking to the program, redemptions have increased. Part of that, say Deitzel and Spahr, is due to greater reach offered by News America’s online coupon service, Smart Source.

The strategy behind using coupons is fourfold:

- Augment offline coupons

- Attract website traffic

- Acquire email addresses

- Add value to email club membership

The online program is a real value, according to Deitzel. He says FSI (free standing inserts or paper coupon) programs can cost into the six digits, whereas a very strong online program can be implemented for around $20,000. Now, this doesn’t mean small companies can’t take advantage of online couponing if they don’t have $20,000 to spend. They can develop their own coupons and send them out via a house email list.

Are you using online coupons? I’d like to hear about it.

bookmark to:

Coupon, Get Your Coupon

Marketers have long known the power of a coupon, and they are rapidly discovering how much more powerful an online coupon can be than a paper one. Emarketer reports that US retailers are moving rapidly toward the online coupon to help out during the recession because they have discovered that they perform better than paper in terms of redemption,

Although studies show that most Americans still get their coupons from a paper source, online coupons have posted a 140% growth rate over 2007’s previous high. Coupon processor, Inmar, says that recessions always boost coupon use. Data from Comscore regarding online search backs this up.

And Americans, resilient as they are, are seeking ways to save money, as evidenced by the increase in the number of searches for “coupons” (up 161 percent to 19.9 million) and “discount” (up 26 percent to 7.9 million).

If you are going to use coupons, you have to be careful. Quizno’s got into a kerfuffle when a number of its franchisees refused to accept coupons for the chains one million free subs campaign.

Here are a few coupon sites you may want to know about to help out your own wallet. Coupons, CouponCraze, Coupon Album, and Fat Wallet.

Are you using coupons? What is your strategy? How are they performing? I’ll follow up on this post later with comments from retailers and manufacturers who are using coupons effectively.

bookmark to:

Social Nets vs. Email

A new Nielsen study shows that social networks have overtaken email as the most popular online activity. Says a story in Adweek,

Active reach in what Nielsen defines as “member communities” now exceeds e-mail participation by 67 percent to 65 percent. What’s more, the reach of social networking and blogging venues is growing at twice the rate of other large drivers of Internet use such as portals, e-mail and search.

No real surprise there. Email is maturing. It has settled into its niche as an excellent longer-form instantaneous communication tool.

How mature? Friend Mark Harrison and I were discussing this recently. Email has become so mature that spam has decreased in our inboxes. Now, we’re starting to see spam infiltrate social media. When spam arrives, so has your medium. You can learn a lot from spammers. But that is a topic for another day.

Eventually, every medium finds its place. Radio didn’t kill newspaper and magazines. TV didn’t kill radio. The web didn’t kill everything else. I’m still a believer in the power of email, as I’ve said on numerous occasions.

Email is a superb customer retention tool. I think its effectiveness in acquiring new customers is suspect. Smart businesses use email to keep customers informed, reinforce their brand and to drive traffic to stores or their online presence. In 2008, the average return on investment for email was $45 for every $1 spent for an ROI of 4,400%. Sounds like email is working to me.

The best marketers have figured out how to integrate all the communication vehicles. Remember, there is a time and season for all things. Do it right and you win.

bookmark to:

Pithy Pitches

Your painstakingly crafted email pitch is completely customized and ready to send to the in box of that carefully targeted reporter. There it goes! Did you hear that? That was your email pitch being deleted.

Here’s why: You didn’t spend more time on the subject line than you did on the email body. Ragan has a feature entitled Email subject lines in eight words or less that provides some good examples of subject lines that worked. One of my favorites was,

“Colorado: Help bring a cow into the world”: This kind of subject line is hard to resist—and Greg Morton, group director of PR for Praco PR in Denver, was counting on just that reaction when he penned this subject line for his client, the Colorado Tourism Office.

In a previous post, THINKing provided Six Tips For Perfect Email Media Pitches. One of the primary tips,

Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare could have been giving media relations tips when he penned this gem several hundred years ago. If you can’t get to the point in your subject line in 10 words or less, you need to work on your message. Keep the subject line short and to the point, and include the time frame if it is important to the pitch.

Burrelle’sLuce has a tip sheet on the topic that you may want to register to receive.

What are you waiting for? Start pitching.

bookmark to:

Twitter: Time Waster Or Cool Tool?

Liberal newspaper columnist, Leonard Pitts, today says he won’t Twitter. Ever. Works for me. The only thing Pitts and I agree on in this particular case is in his column’s last line:

I will never Twitter you. In the first place, you have better things to do. In the second, I am not that interesting.

It’s not just liberal Pitts. I heard our local Libertarian radio host this morning disparaging Twitter, too. They don’t get it. They condemn it because some people misuse it to broadcast the banal aspects of their lives. Hey, movies, telephones, newspapers, TV, email, blogs, all communication tools have been misused at some point in time.

And, they condemn it because they don’t take the time to figure it out. Luddites!

Scott Hepburn has an excellent response to Pitts’ screed. Hepburn says,

Yes, Mr. Pitts, some people actually accomplish things via Twitter. We’re growing businesses, finding jobs, raising money for charity, planning conferences and engaging in ethics debates.

I’m going to help out the Luddites. Sometime back we took a look at the tactical business use of Twitter, and we provided a list of the top 8 links on the business value of Twitter.

I welcome your thoughts on Twitter. Is it just a fad for broadcasting the banal, or does it have real value?

bookmark to: