The Teckki Says

I recently resurrected a postcard campaign and prospected for the names personally. I gathered about two hundred or so names and addresses from various sources. I also checked the websites of these businesses to verify contacts and addresses. I pondered whether it was worth it, spending hours on this when the process of sending out a postcard, and possibly having it returned cost less than a dollar a name.

In that same week, I did a presentation on email marketing. I wasn't really sure that I wasn't putting this group to sleep until I mentioned that you cannot just put someone on a email list without explicitly asking for permission to do so, even if you know the person. Wow, did that get their attention! A very lively discussion ensued, because this had been done by several in the audience. We've all gotten email addresses from customers, business cards at an event, or from inquiries to our websites. From my understanding of the CAN-SPAM act, the federal law governing advertising to someone's email, you have to ask everyone you intend to market to via email. What this actually meant was why the discussion was so lively.

Both of these stories involved lists, marketing lists in particular, but there's more.

I got a call from my hosting provider regarding this very domain, betterwebdesignandgraphics.com, about driving more traffic to the site. His intention was to sell Search Engine Marketing. I turned him down for a couple of reasons.

First, I market the blog primarily through email marketing, which is how many of you get to this blog. Second, the blog has been submitted to the search engines, and it has been successful. So successful, in fact, that I get many comments from visitors. I also get a lot of spam, which shows up as email alerts waiting for me to approve posting. I have a policy that does not allow for postings to occur automatically. This policy keeps the value of the blog high in your eyes, allowing you to see only useful comments from others. The policy prevents needless exposure to advertising that I did not approve of beforehand, and especially have not been compensated for.

Because of the policy, I know who is on my list.

There are times when quantity is better. Those times are when the attention is focused primarily on you and what you are providing. Radio and TV come to mind, especially if the program focuses on what you do. The same is true if you are the subject a news article that discusses a topic in which you provide a solution for. Quantity not only helps, but it matters!

There are other times when quality is better. I ended up with a final mailing list of about 110 businesses, after getting down to approximately 150 from an earlier cut of the original list. For the sake of an argument, I would guess that I saved about a dollar or so a postcard, factoring in time, postage and materials, saving about $40? Was this worth the trouble? To answer that question without qualification, no, it wasn't.

But by evaluating nearly 150 websites, I also got better mailing information on at least a dozen more contacts, along with eliminating twenty or so names I actually had on the list that made the second round. Without the research, better than a third of that list I started out with was probably bad. I made some judgment calls on some others, but I have quality contact information.

Better yet, I know who is on my list.

I think that it is all to easy to create a list and send out a bunch of advertisements. If the cost is low, like it can be with postcards, email marketing and cold calling, unqualified lists require numbers to make them work. Not having a list to begin with requires even more numbers, as in the case where too many of you join social networking groups, try hard to make a make a thousand friends, and blast them with advertising. We also want Search Engines to do the job for us. Search Engines work, but the trick is not getting on the first page so much is having getting people to look for you. It helps to have a list.

Better yet, it's a good idea to know who's on your list.

The strength of a list will be illustrated in our feature article - Virtual Invitations, Concrete Acceptances, which is the feature article in a continuation of our series: Social Media, Are They Business Ready?

This is a multipart series on websites that will discuss what pages common to many websites should contain. This article discusses the Product Presentation.

Most websites sell something, whether they are goods, services or ideas. Far too many websites think the web is full of customers looking to buy from them exclusively. If your products and services aren't well presented, you might as well not have a website, because the effect on your sales will be about the same. You are not the only game in town,

Some website owners think that just getting up a site is all that matters, and just good enough will do. Presentation can become a casualty of many budgets, but I'll offer up proof of just how much it matters. Many of us have seen Walmart's print flyers, television commercials and website. You've probably also been in their stores. In my opinion, the presentation of the print, television and website advertisements are much better than the actual shopping experience in the stores. In the store, profoundly low pricing and immediate need overcomes my low expectations of positive shopping experience. Low pricing is their mantra, and bland product presentation, along with tight aisle space and a Spartan store layout, is emblematic of this. They do not replicate this on their website, because if the experience was the same, many visitors might shop elsewhere. They certainly need the reputation they've built up in the stores to make their website efforts work. However, their site presentation is not too far different from their rival Target Corp's website. They are both clean and non-cluttered, but in my opinion, Target's website reminds me a little more of their stores than Walmart's website remind me of theirs. If on the web, Target, Walmart and most online retailers are roughly competitive on price, what makes them different?

Presentation and Expectation Builds Reputation

This brings me back to your website – Pictures can be worth a thousand words, and a thousand dollars. I look at thousands of pictures a year, many from clients. I can get technical, but your eyes know the difference between poorly taken pictures and professional ones. If you plan to sell a thousand widgets at $10 a piece, is it too much to ask for you to spend $500 for a better picture so that the widgets to look better? Is it too much to ask you to spend $125 for a professional writer to produce a great description for a necklace that you want to sell 10 at $500 a pop? Should your customers have to find better written descriptions of merchandise on your competitor’s website, making them wonder if you are selling the exact same product for $50 less? Wouldn't this be better than the $85 you spent on the cheesy yellow and red flashing banner that says "hurry, only two left?"

Is it too much to ask that the services be explained, perhaps backed up by testimonials of REAL customers, rather than self-serving proclamations stating, "I am cheaper than 'competitor.com?'"

The web is all about visuals. The "Low Price Leader" recognizes this, your customers do, and so should you.

Sometimes you get more than a morning jolt when you stop by the coffee shop, although I drink decaf. I did get more than the high octane shot most of you get, and I want to share it with you. A friend stopped by my table, and we talked, among other things, about marketing.

My questions started on the topic of surviving the current recession, knowing that this friend had been through several. He’s been in business over twenty five years, so he's seen downturns in a number of flavors. The jury appears to be in, and the verdict looks like he will survive this one also.

Many of you have heard these before. However, in a downturn, the panic button gets pushed more often, so it's nice to be reminded. Here are the five tidbits I gathered from our conversation:

(1). Contact your customers. Look particularly at those customers you acquired from the last recession until just before this one. If you've been in business for less than five years, this will be everyone you’ve done business with. Rekindle and/or reinforce those relationships

(2). Find out what works. This is easy because right now, almost nothing seems like it does. All editorializing aside, someone is still buying from you, or contributing to your cause. What works with your marketing right now? What types of mail or samples gets kept, what gets thrown in the garbage? Now is the time to ask.

(3). Redeploy your workforce. You will find out just how good your hires are in this climate. If there is less work, there is more time to do other things, like calling current customers, or making sales calls. This is the time to make your organization more customer–focused by perhaps engaging with customers personally.

(4). Set your limits. Not every business survives a downturn, and yours may be one that doesn't. Know this beforehand, so you are not losing the business, your house and personal possessions, your family and everything else because you think the last quarter in the slot machine is going to hit big. For instance, you may have to adjust customer payment patterns, just know what your limits are there, too.

(5). Cut strategically. No where does the reflexive budget cut ax wield so recklessly in many companies as in downturns. All of those "25% cuts across the board" mandates may sound good at department meetings, but if your heart, brain, legs and arms are the heads of those departments, mandates like this will get you one dead person. I like the way my friend phrased this – first make the personal cut, then make the personnel cut.

One of my favorites is to get out of the office. Isolation only solves one problem I know of, and that is to focus on a problem where you need to cut out interruptions and clutter. Holding your face in your hands, while lamenting a poor economy, is not that kind of problem. Besides, you never know who you will see in a coffee shop. It might be someone who could give you five great marketing ideas!

Have you looked at your website on a cellphone, computer screen and gaming console? The Internet is becoming the common pipe delivering information to viewing screens of all sizes, meaning that you have to consider presentations for each format. This has profound implications of how businesses will purchase advertising, and even how advertising is prepared.

The ad world is still diversified where there are many mediums in which you can advertise on. Print advertising, while it continues to evolve to digital, still has requirements in terms of size and color to make ads fit onto its medium. The same is true with billboards, radio, television, websites and direct mail. As someone who produces content, I often have to produce multiple versions for clients who plan on using a number of different mediums.

The Holy Grail of software development is to write once, run everywhere (on all types of computing devices). This failed primarily because Microsoft, king of the PC world, wanted to rule this environment, and indirectly, all of the devices running the Windows operating system. No one owns the Internet, so the rules are dictated by all of us, the users. We dictate in mass by the types of devices we use, and the amount of information we access. Device makers, content producers and medium providers are left to play catch-up.

As more money goes to the Internet for advertising, your advertising providers will have to deal with a greater number of devices, and not all devices are created equally, or simply. Who is in the best positions to handle this? Ad Agencies, who already develop multiple media strategies for their clients. Who is the least? Advertising medium providers, such as print, radio and television, and many web development companies, among others.

What makes this such a problem is that many of us bypass ad agencies in favor of going directly to the medium provider. It’s a matter of economics. You have to have a sizable organization to absorb the expense of having someone else design campaigns for multiple mediums. But most advertising medium providers, such as print, are set up for those who choose to bypass agencies, so they have in-house staff, specifically orientated to THEIR medium. Everyone knows how to use Photoshop, but print people specialize in the print aspects of Photoshop, video people specialize in the video aspects of Photoshop, and so on. As clients began to understand and consider the number of devices their information will show up on, they will depend on firms that can do it all, and it won’t be media companies selling ad space for their own mediums.

For those that think this problem is relatively far off, I only need to offer up the Apple iPhone as an example. Apple has sold approximately 30 million of these phones in 2-1/2 years, and you can assume the majority are still active. It's a given you can browse the web on these phones, and your target market may well have them. However, if you have one of those gorgeously animated sites powered by Adobe's Flash product (most animated sites do since this is the industry standard), you can forget about the iPhone, because they won’t see it. If Flash programming is your website firm's only expertise, they may not be able to make the accommodation for differences in devices.

This could leave you holding a very big bag of air, waiting to pop with the release of each new hot technology.

Why do larger companies devote huge resources and budgets to marketing?

They are either trying to protect their turf or gain market share.

Why do smaller companies believe that they can market on shoestring budgets to successfully advertise?

It's all we have.

I think that we were smarter when our enterprises were farming, fishing and hunting. There was an obvious connection between resources and yield. Bigger and better land (or water space) meant more production capability, thus more yield. If you had more land, you could plant more crops, or graze more animals. If you had a bigger boat and net, you could fish deeper into the lake and catch more. In order to obtain more, you clearly had to start with more.

Today's wisdom says that technology can equalize advantages. As a small company, I want to believe that. As one trying to grow larger, I know that this wisdom is flawed.

Web development is rife with marketing magic. Some of the claims of web marketing, with all flash and pizazz are something right out of Hollywood. The problem comes when customers realize that they’ve been to the movies.

I think it is a good time to be realistic about our marketing capabilities and resources, and if we can reach our targets on the cheap. For too long, we have believed that we can look like something we are not, and accomplish things we cannot.

There is a saying that 80% of all advertising dollars are wasted, but no one knows part the 80% is. In understanding this, we have to face up to realizing that if we think it takes "x" dollars to effectively reach our target market, the 80% rule says that we have to spend five times that amount to ensure that we do in fact reach it. For all of those who have tediously crafted their marketing budgets down to the penny, you are going to have to add four more shoestrings.

I'll offer an example to demonstrate proof of this. If you are reading this post, you are one out of every four persons on my email list who have read any part of the email. My stats are slightly higher than the average, but the mix is not always the same. While the percentage of readers remain fairly constant, the fact that you are reading this post doesn’t mean you have read the last issue post, nor guarantees that you will read the next issue’s post. In line with the rule, 75 – 80% of you don't read my newsletters at any given time, and I won't know who has until after I've sent the notices out.

So, make your budgets, set your targets and craft your campaigns. Then multiply the amount of resources you’ll need by five. You may realize that you have to purchase a pair of loafers to go with those shoestrings.