Do You Market to Your Employees?

Any customer service expert will tell you that every business has two sets of customers: the internal and the external. While most marketing efforts are directed towards external customers (the people who buy our goods and services), all too often, the internal customer (employees) is neglected or worse.

I tell everyone that the number 1 marketing tool any company has is their customer service. If a business does not offer an acceptable level of customer service, then all other marketing efforts and monies spent are wasted. That company will spend all its efforts replacing one-time or short-term customers instead of building and growing its customer base.

One of the ways that high levels of customer service can be attained and sustained is to treat employees as customers and market to them. Whatever the message regarding customer service is in the corporate culture, that is the way that employees should be treated. The Ritz Carlton used to have a motto about the demeanor of its employees: “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” That indicated that employees should never think of themselves as less than the guests in their hotel.ust as a business may have customer loyalty programs, how about instituting an employee loyalty program.

Companies where employees feel that they are an integral, respected and appreciated part of the work culture will be more productive. In addition, they will tend to stay with the company longer, cutting turnover rates – a tangible savings to employee-related expenses.

In other words, if you are not marketing to your employees, you are wasting an invaluable opportunity to grow your business.

If Your Mind Thinks You’re in July, then Your Marketing Is Suffering

I have a real issue with time. Ever since I started my business, I can’t remember what month I’m in. Today, for instance, I can’t figure out why it’s almost 100 degrees in October in San Diego.  OK, so it’s actually July and it does make sense, but, in my head, it’s somewhere between October and March!

Yes, I can read a calendar and I am not time disabled. I simply live my professional life three to six months out. Aside from the fact that I am carrying out the marketing plan for my company (Lev Promotions), I am also working on promotions, marketing plans, and marketing campaigns for my clients. Since marketing effectively means planning ahead, a good portion of my daily activities have to do with plans and actions that won’t come to fruition until three to six months from now.

My desk has three calendars on it – the calendar strip on my calendar that goes from July 2010 to June 2011, my 2010 desk calendar and my 2011 desk calendar. I’m not necessarily advocating this for everyone, but, when keeping track of my business and my clients’ marketing programs, it’s the only way I can see the big picture and the day-to-day. These don’t count the calendar on my Blackberry or the calendar in my ACT program, either!

So what does this mean for you? It means that, when you’re working on your marketing efforts, if you’re not looking at least three months out, you’re missing out on opportunities to promote your business more effectively and, possibly, at less cost! The marketing that you do today fills your pipeline of prospects for tomorrow which funnels into your sales of the day after that. If you don’t plan your marketing effectively, you will find that you are scrambling to keep up and your pipeline will slow down to a small drip, or worse.

Moral of the story, if your marketing mind is in October or later, your business will show the results. And, maybe you won’t feel that summer heat so much!

Marketing Plans: Etched in Stone or Just a Guideline

I recently did a quarterly review of Lev Promotions’ marketing plan for  2010 to see which tasks are being completed, which goals are being met and where we are not achieving what we need to be. Although I knew that our business was up this year over last year, I was surprised to see that we had hit or exceeded our marketing goals from January through June. This was a pleasant surprise, since I knew that not all of the tasks on the plan had been completed, or even started.

Why was I surprised? Although I knew that we’d been busy (I myself have been swamped with work and loving it!), I knew that we had opened up more avenues for marketing the company since last November. This, in my mind, became “busy work.” Yes, when we do it for our clients, it’s productive time, when it’s for Lev Promotions, it becomes “busy work” (see my blog from 03/05/10 for more on this aspect of business). I also knew that we had achieved or surpassed each month’s goal for new clients since January. What I failed to see was the repeat business being generated by new clients was significantly higher than we had ever seen before. In addition, I had failed to notice that our long-time clients were starting to place larger and more frequent orders.

By reviewing our marketing plan and really looking at the figures, I was able to determine where our new and existing marketing efforts were paying off and what we needed to tweak, cut back, or remove.

It is essential to realize that a marketing plan should be evaluated and rethought at least on a quarterly basis. As volatile as today’s economy is, it is absolutely essential that a marketing plan keeps up with what is happening in the real world. After all, a plan that was written in the third or fourth quarter of the previous year may be all but obsolete by the time you need to put parts of it into action 12 months later.

How Many Licks Does It Take to Get to the Center of a Tootsie Pop?

If you’re my age (no, I’m not saying!), you may remember that old cartoon ad? (I’ve actually seen it on TV again fairly recently.) Well, I may not be counting the number of licks, but I sure am aware of the number of “touches” it takes to close a sale in today’s world. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, I use “touch” to mean any type of contact with a customer or prospect – phone call, personal visit, e-mail, direct mail, playing together in a golf tournament, etc…

When I was taking marketing classes for my hospitality management degree, we were taught that it takes three to five touches to close a sale with a prospect. That was twenty years ago. In today’s world, 80% of sales are closed somewhere between the fifth and twelfth contact point; most taking place closer to the twelfth. Each year, these statistics go up.

Why, you ask?

Because we are constantly inundated with more and more ways to be connected. Between the phone, mail, in-person calls, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, text messaging and more, technology exposes us to more messages from more people than ever before. The more inundated with messages wer are, the more it takes to break through the clutter to get noticed.

What does this mean? If you want to make the sale, you can’t stop after the first, second or third touch. It can take months or years to get that return phone call or request for information. It took three years before one of my prospects contacted me for information about a promotional product. They have been one of my best clients now for the last five years!

Don’t be afraid to be somewhat aggressive in your pursuit of prospects; just don’t become a stalker or lose your professionalism and sense of courtesy. Set up a drip campaign to keep you front and center in the minds of your customers and prospects. (Not sure what a drip campaign is, contact me at rama@levpromotions.com for an explanation).

With perseverance and a good marketing outreach program, you can land those customers within thirteen touches! Go forth and sell!

Can leaving something at people’s doors be successful marketing?

A few weeks ago, I entered a post here about how turning down business can be effective marketing. I had just turned down a piece of business which would have entailed distributing flyers door-to-door for this prospect. The flyers were already printed up and ready to go. Lev Promotions’ only part in this piece would have been the physical distribution of the flyers. Why did I actually turn down this business? Because I did not believe that the way this marketing piece was designed and distributed would be effective. I was not willing to take this business’ money to help them carry out a marketing strategy that I thought would be microscopically successful at best.

Is this to say that I think that all door-to-door campaigns are doomed to be unsuccessful? Absolutely not! We have implemented programs for three different clients where something was left at people’s front door. In each of those cases, the response was far greater than the 1 – 2% average return you could hope to get on a general drop-off (it rivals an untargeted, direct mass mailing for response rate).

It always amazed me that, in the month after my house was painted, we had no less than six flyers from house painters left on our doorstep. The paint job was a good one and clearly no in need of so much as a touch-up. Yet six people thought that their information would be relevent to me. It wasn’t relevant enough to look past the type of service being offered and then it went right into recycling.

But, even in such a case as the house painter who simply has his/her staff deliver a flyer to the front door of every house in the neighborhood where they are currently working, there is one simple thing they can do to cut their costs and make their flyers more effective: target! What if they only approached homes that actually looked like they could use a paint job? They would distribute fewer flyers (lower costs) while probably getting about the same people to respond as if they put one on every door.

Not to mention that very few of these types of marketing flyers have anything on them past the features of the company. This is what we do, so use us. Sometimes they are messy or the contact information isn’t complete. At the very least, a well-designed, nicely printed flyer with complete contact information, a list of benefits and a call to action would up the ante on the response rate.

Of course, there are ways to make this flyer even more successful, but that is entirely dependent on the company, their goals, and their target market.

Buying Promotional Products Online vs. from a Promotional Products Consultant

It fascinates me the lengths people will go to to save a few dollars on a product that will bear their logo/message and will be distributed for marketing purposes. Take, for example, a recent request I received for pricing on mugs.  I lost the order to an online company that charged $0.50 more per mug on an order of 100 mugs. Now it looks like that company saved themselves about $50.00. That’s a nice savings, wouldn’t you say? Let’s look at what was involved with this $50.00 “savings.”

(This request came from an acquaintance of mine who I see on a regular basis. I would check in with him when I saw him to see how his order was proceeding. The numbers and facts below are directly from him.)

1) The person who was doing the research spent three hours online finding this mug instead of doing her normal job duties. She gets paid $10.00/hour. Total cost of research to the company: $30.00

2) When they placed the order, there were repeated problems with the “stock”  artwork provided by the online company causing the customer to spend a total of about 1-1/2 hours going back and forth over the artwork. Total cost of artwork issues to the customer: $15.00

3) Due to the artwork issues, the mugs that should have been delivered within three weeks took two months to get there. This wasn’t an order that was tied to a specific event, so a time-sensitive delivery was not a major issue. The customer, however, was holding off on launching a marketing campaign until the mugs arrived. Cost of delay in the launch: not completely knowable, but he was told by two prospects that they had just needed his type of services a month ago and went elsewhere because they didn’t know about him. Had he gotten both these accounts, he would have made at least $750 in immediate sales.

4) Because the online vendor doesn’t care where you are, they just want to make the sale, the mugs were shipped out of Florida. Now mugs are a heavy item to ship and the difference between shipping to a customer in San Diego from Southern California and shipping from Florida can be tremendous. In this case, the shipping cost from Florida cost the customer about $80.00. The cost of shipping the same mug from Los Angeles to San Diego: about $37.00. Cost difference: $43.00.

Even if we don’t count the labor cost involved in sourcing and ordering these mugs, the shipping difference alone left a total of $7.00 savings over going through a promotional products consultant who could have recommended a mug from a factory that was closer to the delivery point and would have dealt with any artwork or product issues that came up.

If the labor cost is added in, the customer actually spent: $88.00 more on this order. Plus the aggravation of dealing with the vendor over artwork issues and a delivery that was later than they wanted.

Which way do you think you’ll go next time you need a logo’d item to promote your business, organization or event.

Is Social Networking an Effective Marketing Medium?

I was recently asked to contribute an article to a local business publication. One of the suggestions was an article on the utilization of social networking as part of the marketing mix for small businesses. My first reaction was, “not my thing.”

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly use social networking sites (specifically Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) within my overall marketing mix. I think that these types of sites have a place and a certain role in almost any company’s marketing plan.

My problem is with those people who believe that social networking is the only marketing medium they need in order to be successful. Some of these people spend hours every week, or hours every day, doing nothing more than updating their profiles, looking for friends/connections and tweeting about something (or nothing). I’ve worked with some of these social networking addicts as clients. They’ve sworn up and down that their efforts have been very successful for them.

Sad to say, though, not one of my clients who thought they were running a successful marketing campaign solely through social networking was actually seeing any business. They considered their growing base of friends, contacts and followers to be a metric of success. If their marketing objective was to have a certain number of people in what I call their fan base, then, yes they were successful. If, however, the goal was to increase their customer base and revenues, then not one of them could point to a sale that had been generated from their fan base, unless it was from someone who was already a customer!

Now  I am sure that there are those few who have landed a great sale or client through their social networking efforts and nothing more. For the majority of us, however, social networking should be just one arm of a multi-pronged, comprehensive, integrated marketing campaign that further establishes our brand and allows us to get our message out to a greater number of people.

My greatest success from the three social networking sites I am on? Increased hits to my website (and three resultant sales) due to higher SEO rankings caused by mentions of and linkbacks to my company.

Branding Yourself for Profit

I just got back from a family trip to Disneyland and, as always, I am in awe of Disney’s ability to brand itself so well that people are lining up at the cash registers to buy their promotional products! What, you didn’t realize that every time you buy a Disney-branded item (whether it’s a souvenir from one of their theme parks, a character, a movie, or their cruise line) that you have just spent your hard-earned money to buy something that other companies give you for free? Talk about the magic of Disney!

Now this is not to say that every company out there will be able to, or deserves, that kind of loyalty and brand recognition; but, when a branded product sells because of the imprint then you know that their marketing is a success. In addition to Disney, Coca-Cola has proven successful at this. To some extent, even stores like Abercrombie have done this – after all, what exactly is decorative about just having the name Abercrombie printed across the front of a shirt – but there is a certain caché in owning and wearing such a shirt.

Many large, and even some smaller companies, have adopted promotional products to give and/or sell to their employees. This helps create corporate identity, employee loyalty and can even raise morale.

Of course, nothing speaks to branding success like people waiting 15 minutes or more in a line after midnight to purchase a Disneyland branded shirt, mug, or key chain! Although it may not be in every business’ grasp, every business owner/manager should strive to achieve the loyalty that this type of behavior shows from both customers and employees.

Turning down business – good marketing or not?

I had a potential client approach me this week enquiring about a door-to-door flyer delivery service. I had told him in a previous conversation that Lev Promotions has offered this service to our clients in the past, but it is not something we do on a regular basis. When he called me yesterday to find out what our rates are to delivery door hangers for his house painting company, I had several questions ready for him, but I never got past the first one: “Do you just need us to deliver door hangers that have already been produced, or are you looking for someone to help you creating them and then deliver them?” The answer was that they already had the door hangers and just needed them delivered. I said, “Thank you for the opportunity, but, this is not our area of expertise and I will recommend that you find a company that specializes in flyer delivery.”

Why would I turn down this piece of business? After all, it is money in the bank with very little effort on my part. Because I know that putting flyers or door hangers on people’s front doors, driveways, or windshields is not an effective way to market their business. It is no more effective than a mass mailing (with an average response rate of 1 – 2% – that’s response, not closure). In fact, it is more often less effective because people are irritated by these pieces of paper left for them to pick up and dispose of.  In all good conscience as a marketing consultant, I cannot advise or assist a client with a marketing program that I know is not effective.  If I were to take this business, I would turn Lev Promotions into a commodities provider, rather than a solutions source.

That’s not to say that it couldn’t be made effective, but that was not to be my role in this particular instance. If it had, their promotional piece would probably look different (I didn’t actually see it) and their distribution method would certainly play out differently. The ultimate results should be a greater response rate with a higher sales closure rate. That’s what my clients pay me for!

Marketing Planning – Saving Money and Making Money

As I am sending out my second round of self-promotions for 2010, it strikes me that I can never stress enough how important advance planning is to a successful marketing campaign. Not only does it allow for a complete, well-thought out plan with the opportunity for proper execution and follow-through, but, sometimes, it even allows for monetary savings.

Case in point, this second quarter self-promotion is a calendar, Post-It® Note Pad (yes the actual Post-It Note® brand) and a mini notepad. How did sending out a 2011 calendar in May save me money? Because the majority of stock design imprinted calendars are available at a lower price through the end of June. Prices go up in July as demand begins to increase. By September, many calendar styles are even low on stock or completely unavailable. By planning my calendar promotion in May, I’ve saved my company money and given my clients the opportunity to save money as well.

Are your marketing efforts costing you extra money because they are not planned out in advance, but just thrown together at the last minute? Maybe they’re not only costing you additional money in expenses, but also costing you in lost revenues because they look unplanned and, perhaps, even unprofessional. Planning ahead can save you money and make you money.