Enjoy Your Leftovers

Thanksgiving is over. Hopefully you enjoyed all the traditions. You had a great holiday feast. You watched your share of football. You survived Black Friday and maybe even Cyber Monday. And you maybe just finished eating all those leftovers.

Now it’s time for another holiday tradition involving leftovers – spending those “left over” marketing dollars before the end of the year. You know - those leftover dollars you’ll lose if you don't spend them by year-end. Here are some thoughts about consuming these "leftovers."

1. Don't do anything until you know you have authority to spend those dollars, even if you have budget. Organizational profitability requirements may prevent you from spending those dollars.

2. Don't spend just for the sake of spending. Figure out strategically how your money can be best spent. If you can't think of anything, don't spend the money.

3. Here are just a few things you can do:

a. Get all your online efforts for next year in line. Finalize your Website. Optimize it. Get your social media programs going. Get any videos done.

b. Instead of mailing your direct mail campaign just after Jan. 1, mail it just before Jan. 1 to expense the postage. But don't mail it too soon - you'll want it to hit after the first of the year.

c. Have any miscellaneous writing projects initiated in December.

d. Begin the process of initiating a market research project in December, and see how much of it you can pay for up front.

e. Prepay planned 2012 advertising expenditures. You might even be able to get a discount.

f. Talk to other providers about paying them in December with 2011 money, even if your schedule doesn't permit them to start working on a project until after the first of the year.

4. If you are a B2B company, try using this strategy with your clients. Have them commit to spend IT money, buy office supplies, whatever. It works.

What other ideas do you have? Leave them here.

“What Position’s Your Positioning In?”

That thought came to me the other day when I heard the old Kenny Rogers and the First Edition song “Just Dropped in (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).”

I’ve been helping a lot of clients with positioning lately, and was thinking about one of them when the song came on. So the transfer from condition to position was pretty fast and I thought: “hey, great title for a blog.”

I think the reason positioning is becoming so important is that organizations do not have a lot of money to spend, and they want to make sure the money they are spending is being spent correctly. That means understanding what positioning will resonate with their target markets.

Your position in the marketplace is how you want your target audiences to perceive you (as opposed to your brand, which is how they actually do perceive you; and if your positioning and brand are not in alignment, your organization is not in alignment).

So here is what you need to do to correctly establish your position:

1. Know why people want your category. What is the pain that drives them to buy the type of product or service you offer? Sometimes it is easy; “I want to reduce costs.” “I’m having a baby and I need an ob/gyn.” Sometimes it is not. For example, why do people want that room addition?
2. Know the purchase decision drivers. What motivates them to buy from one source vs. the other? There are many possible attributes, ranging from quality to convenience to price to expertise, etc.
3. Know why they do or do not buy from you. This gets right at their perception of you and the competition, and is essential in competitive positioning. It also is essential in aligning your positioning with your brand.

The only way I know of to answer these questions is to go out and ask your customers, your referrers, and prospects. To assume you know the answer is an invitation to failure. But once you know the answers, you can do all sorts of great things:

1. Create your positioning statement. According to Reis and Trout, your positioning statement should build upon your present strengths, search for a niche, or reposition the competition.
2. Rebrand your organization. (We just did this for a client, and the cool thing was the name did not come from one of the names we tested, but from a comment made by one of the people we talked with)
3. Develop a new tagline and logo, even if you do not rename your organization.

So, what position’s your positioning in?

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The other day, an architect client posted on his various social media sites an article on how to talk to an architect. It drew this response from another architect: “I think it would be better if some of us learned how to talk to our clients.”

Good point. Clearly sellers of products and services…be they doctors, financial advisors, car salesmen, architects or marketers, have to know how to talk with clients. Theoretically, it should be more important that we know how to talk with them than for them to know how to talk to us.

But then I got to thinking about the old Garbage In, Garbage Out line. You get garbage as input, you produce garbage as output.

If you receive garbage as input, whose fault is that? Yours! If your client does not know how to provide the right input, it is up to you as a professional to get it.

There are a variety of ways to help your clients give you the input you need. For example, you can provide them with tools. When I first start working with clients, I send them a document called “Let’s Play 20 (Marketing Questions).” Here is a link to an article outlining these questions. http://www.lsternmktg.com/wp_images/articles/20_Marketing_questions.pdf

The document asks a whole series of marketing questions that hopefully entice people to think about what it is they want to accomplish from a marketing perspective.

For very specific marketing projects, I, along with many others, ask clients to fill out creative briefs. These briefs address topics such as;

• Target market
• Positioning
• Core benefits
• Offer
• Desired tone
• Budget

This is not much different than a doctor taking a medical history or a financial advisor asking questions to build a financial profile and financial plan.

We also get input just by talking with people and knowing how to ask the right questions. Just the other day, we had a call with a client for a logo project. We had already conducted research and helped us decide on the name, tagline and positioning statement. But we still spent an hour on the phone with the client asking a series of questions. At the end of the conversation, we were confident that we had the information we needed to create a compelling logo.

So don’t trash the idea of sending clients an article on how best to talk with you. The bottom line is: knowing how to talk to your clients includes helping them to talk to you to eliminate the garbage.

How do you educate your clients on how to talk to you?

Facebook Ads: Annoying or of Value?

I just logged onto my personal Facebook page. I saw the following ads.

• Netflix – makes sense because I list movies as an activity
• Website inviting me to connect with other people from my high school graduating class
• American English concert – understandable because I “like” the Beatles

I didn’t click on any of them, but I did not mind them either. I am frankly a little puzzled about some of the vitriolic comments about Facebook ads. Basically, advertisers can direct ads to people on Facebook based upon the content the users themselves post: profiles, wall posts, status updates, etc. The advertiser does not know the identities of specific individuals who are exposed to the ads. Yet one person described Facebook’s approach in the Chicago Tribune as “a stealth digital surveillance apparatus.” Really? Maybe the Defense Department, CIA or Jack Bauer’s CTU should talk with Facebook.

This person then is quoted as saying: “Facebook users should be cautious about whether the social network giant ultimately has their best interests at heart.”

Get real. In February, more than one-third of all online ads were placed on Facebook. There is a simple reason for that. Facebook has more than 600 million users. Advertisers go where the people are. Advertisers can also target Facebook messages based upon profiles, wall posts, status updates, etc. The key is: advertisers are leveraging information the people themselves are putting out there. There is no prying. There is no stealth.

There is another reason more brands are advertising on Facebook. It works. One of the great things about Facebook advertising, and most online advertising for that matter, is that you can track results. You can track clickthroughs, and often tie them back to actual purchases. We have done some Facebook advertising. Some of it has worked, some of it has not. But we know.

I actually do not mind getting ads on Facebook. Most of the ads I am served are relevant to my interests and activities. I will occasionally click on them, especially if it a deal to a restaurant or retail outlook I like. Those I am not interested in I ignore. But to those of you out there who are offended when you go onto your Facebook page and see advertising, I offer these alternatives.

1. Stop using Facebook. Sure, you will deprive yourself of the many benefits, but at least you won’t be exposed to those “annoying” ads. Of course, if you don’t like to see any ads online, stop going online altogether.
2. You could limit what you post on Facebook. But that probably will not substantially reduce the number of ads you see. It just means advertisers will have less information about you, and the ads you receive will be less relevant to you.
3. Best advice. If you don’t like the ads, ignore them. Maybe operate on the assumption that if everybody ignores the ads, brands will stop advertising. But don’t bet on it.

What are your thoughts? Do you find Facebook ads annoying? Do you respond to ads on Facebook? When and why?

Solve this problem, and you can solve the healthcare problem

Americans love apples. And fortunately, there are plenty of apples to go around. But what if there weren’t?

Let’s assume the average American eats an apple a day (it is actually nowhere near that, but let’s keep it simple). Then let’s say American apple growers produce exactly that amount. Supply equals demand, equilibrium pricing, everybody is happy.

Now let’s complicate things.

First, let’s assume as people get older, they need to eat more apples. So there is greater demand for apples. Unfortunately, apple growers cannot physically produce more apples than they do now. Anybody that has taken high school economics can tell you that if supply stays flat and demand increases, prices must go up.

While apple growers cannot increase the number of apples they produce, they can improve the quality of apples, which makes people healthier and enables them to live longer. That increases the demand even more, causing prices to go even higher.

So what do we do in this state of disequilibrium, now that the price of apples has risen so much that many people cannot afford it? Well, you could try to do a few things.

First, you could focus on demand and tell people they can’t have all the apples they want. But people think eating apples is a right, and you should not ration apples.

So, second, let’s focus on supply. You could try to increase supply by getting more people to grow apples. But people don’t want to become apple growers, because there are big barriers to entry like education and insurance. Then once you become an apple producer, the cost of the supplies needed to grow apples, the cost of paying people to work in orchards, and shipping costs keep going up. Plus, because they are afraid of getting sued, apple growers are doing things they really do not think they need to do to ensure the quality of apples, but do just to avoid lawsuits.

Third, you could raise prices, but subsidize the cost of apples for people. People would pay middlemen money so that they could get apples whenever they wanted. The amount of money people would pay would depend on how many apples they wanted, and what kind of apples. These middlemen would then pay the apple growers.

Unfortunately, the apple growers still have to pay for labor, supplies, insurance and shipping. Those prices keep going up, so they have to raise prices to the middlemen. The middlemen also have their own business to run and salaries (some say exorbitant) to pay. So the middlemen raise prices to consumers. Soon it would get to the point that people could not even afford to pay the middlemen, so they could not get apples.

At the same time, these middlemen now have huge buying power, so they can actually force the apple growers to provide the apples at sharply discounted prices. So the apple growers are faced with increasing costs, barriers to entry, and now reduced revenues. Clearly, no motivation for people to become apple growers, even though there is clearly a demand for more apples.

That is the core of this hypothetical apple problem (sorry about that). What is your solution? If you can figure this out, congratulations, because you have also solved the healthcare problem.