Ad Talk 101 Blog

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When asked what made him so successful, Wayne Gretzky answered, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”  This is a great analogy for success in business.

More than ever today, the key to business success is to get ahead of the trend. Do not look at other experts, markets, and trends to see where you should be.  Look to where those experts, markets, and trends need to be in the future.

Here at Aim, we have always embraced new ideas and try to see what new ideas will be in demand in the future.  When we are confident in where to position our business in the future, we position ourselves there now.  This takes a leap of faith.  But now more than ever, future successes will go to the companies that are willing to take that leap.

Here are five trends in marketing that may help you see where you need to be today to be in the right place in the future:

1.     Less reading and more graphic, video and audio advertising – More and more, people do not want to read. From our experience and observations, as well as trends that we have followed over many years, it is clear that if people are given a choice of watching a video or reading a newspaper article, they will watch the video.  YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world just behind Google.  If people have the opportunity to listen to a book in audio or read it, more will be listening.

So where should you be with you advertising for the future?  Obviously, less printed word and more pictures, video and audio.

2.     Continued growth of social networking – When people talk about social networking, we usually think of the Internet.  But social networking has always been around in the form of in-person events such as chamber of commerce mixers, trade shows, trade association events, and municipal associations to name just a few. What is changing is not just the way we socialize, but also the importance of socializing.  People today are more cautious about who they do business with and who they get to know.

3.     Use of social media – So what can you do to increase your social reach? First, determine how social networking fits into your business objective. What is more effective: social networking on the Internet or in person? Just about any business should at least have a presence on Facebook. But traditional retail may not find Facebook as effective as in-person events like expositions and in-person promotions. Entertainment-type businesses such as restaurants, amusement parks, or bowling centers may find Facebook very powerful.  Finally, do not confuse social media with other types of Internet marketing. (Collaborative networks such as Wikipedia, blogs and micro blogs such as Twitter, or content communities such as Flicker and YouTube.)  These types of web sites offer a wide variety of ways to market beyond the social aspect.  You can learn more about marketing with these types of Internet sites at our blog at adtalk101.com

4.     Web site design simplified – We believe the most successful web sites will be the ones that are the simplest to use and easiest to find what you are looking for quickly. That’s how Yahoo beat Lycos, Alta Vista and Info Seek. Remember them? Then Google came along and beat Yahoo. Why? Compared to Yahoo, Google loaded faster and was easier to use because it took less effort to figure out how to start searching.  While Google has a ton of good stuff behind the home page, their main search page has almost nothing on it except two buttons: Google Search and I’m Feeling Lucky. Then at the top there is a very simple and easy to understand menu.  With mobile being the single fastest growing segment in the world of digital marketing, busy web sites with everything on the home page including the kitchen sink just will not fly.

If your web site is cluttered, consider simplifying it.  While you want as much relevant content as possible on your site, don’t try to cram it into too few pages.

5.     Spend Less on advertising and more on making your product unique – There was a day when all it took to build a business or increase your existing business was to have a good product or service and buy some ads in the newspaper, radio or TV.  But like Seth Godin explains in his book Purple Cow, it is often cheaper to do something remarkable with your business than to be ordinary and grow your business with traditional advertising.  He offers many examples of businesses that did something remarkable with their product or business, which enabled them to grow their businesses with less advertising.  The reason he gives is a remarkable product or business idea can be grown through a core audience of loyal customers who will spread the word for you.  You’ve heard word of mouth is the best form of advertising.  That certainly is true if it spreads fast enough.  Today, if you create a remarkable product or business, with the help of the Internet, it can be much more economical to spend more on the product or business model and less on traditional advertising methods.

So if you have a business, what can you do to be remarkable?  Ideas that you probably would have rejected because of cost may make sense when you consider the power of the idea, and how little you will need to spend to get it take off. Forty years ago, Hertz, and then Avis, built huge businesses using traditional media. Then Enterprise did something that made the operation of their business more expensive than Hertz and Avis…but it was remarkable. Enterprise Picks You Up. With very little advertising compared to what Hertz and Avis spent 40 years earlier, Enterprise in a very short time grew to three times the size of Hertz, which used to be the number one car rental company in the country.

I hope these suggestions help you in the coming year.  Have a Great 2012.

There are lots of “how-to” articles and blogs on social media marketing. If it seems to you that most of them are geared toward big companies, you are not alone. Who else can wade through all the social media sites, understand how each one works, and figure out how to apply the best social media to market their business?

The biggest objection we’ve heard from businesses across Pennsylvania from Lancaster to Williamsport to The Poconos, is using social media takes too much time. Small business people have to wear too many hats, so they do not have the time to learn about all the types of social media, let alone maintain a social media marketing program.

Why do you need to have a social media marketing plan? Because it is the next stage of the digital age which has put the audience in control, making traditional advertising methods less relevant. So if you are not learning how to use social media, you will be at a big disadvantage.

How To Start

Choose the social media sites that make the most sense for your business. This is simpler than it might seem. While there are 201 social media sites listed on Wikipedia, for most businesses in smaller markets, most of them are not worth investing in. Retail businesses wanting to reach small geographic areas need social media sites that reach enough people in their area to be effective. Because the internet is world wide, you need to choose the sites with the largest user base. But first, let’s look at the types of social media sites. According to Kaplan and Haenlein of ESCP Europe, there are six different types of social media:

1. collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia),
2. blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter),
3. content communities (e.g. Youtube,),
4. social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn),
5. virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft), and
6. virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life, The Sims).

One social media type I think they missed is Location Based social media (e.g. Foursquare)

Now decide which types of the social media sites make most sense for you.

Wikipedia

Collaborative sites like Wikipedia may be a limited way to market since you can not advertise on it and it is very difficult to get a story on the site. One way we have been able to get on Wikipedia is by finding a way to be relevant to an existing story on Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia aside, let’s focus on the sites with enough users to be useful for small market businesses. At this point in time that would be Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Here are the approximate user bases for five of the top social media sites.

• Facebook – 700,000,000
• Youtube – 490,000,000
• Twitter – 200,000,000
• LinkedIn – 54,000,000
• Foursquare – 10,000,000

Facebook has about 80,000 to 90,000 user within 50 miles of Lewisburg, PA. Half of all Twitter users (about 100,000,000) are in the US. That’s about one third of the population. Since the LinkedIn world is focused on business people, 54,000 is a good number. I recently looked for the number of LinkedIn users within 50 miles of Lancaster, Williamsport and Scranton and found about 200,000.

Facebook

Not only does Facebook have the most users, it also has the most ways to touch and interact with the audience. You can buy advertising two ways. One way is with a Sponsored Ad. The other is with a Paid Story. A Sponsored Ad is one of those little square ads you see in the banner on the right. These ads can be seen by anyone on Facebook. One of the great powers of this form of advertising is the ability to reach a lot of people in small markets for very low cost, and the ability to target using the huge database of Facebook user profiles. A Paid Story can be seen only by friends and fans (fans are people who Like you on Facebook) in your news feed. In order to run Paid Stories you will need to install Facebook Insights. You can advertise to your friends or fans for free.

What is the difference between fans and friends? From a marketing viewpoint, the main difference is friends can write on your wall and you can write on your friends’ walls. Fans can write on your wall however you can not write on your friends’ walls. Why is this an important distinction? When you write on a friend’s wall, all of their friends can see it in their newsfeeds. That increases the reach of your communication times the number of friends your friend has. If you wrote on the wall of 20 friends and each of those friends had 250 friends, your communication would be seen by 5,000 people. Not only is this a pretty good sized number, but if you choose friends that are interested in what you posted, chances are a lot of their friends may be too. Fans only see what you write on your wall in their newsfeeds.

This is fundamental about Facebook for businesses. There are two types of accounts on Facebook: personal accounts and business accounts. Only personal accounts can have friends. Business accounts can only have fans. Businesses can not open personal accounts, so the objective of a business account is to build up a fan base. A fan base is like a mailing list. But on Facebook, you can reach out more often and in many different ways to stay in touch with your best customers and potential customers by appearing in their newsfeeds.

In order to get the advantage of having friends, some businesses create personal accounts for mascots or fictional characters that represent their businesses. This way they can reach out through their friends to potentially 25 million people. An amusement park can have an account for their mascot. A car dealer can have an account for their comical radio spokesperson. But one important thing to keep in mind if you write on walls for a business objective, you need to avoid selling and focus on having fun.

Youtube

Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world, second only to Google. Youtube is less a stand-alone social networking site than Facebook. It is best used along with other referring sites such as social media sites, company web sites, and mobile phone apps.

Twitter

Twitter is more of a news site, but has its uses for business. One of the best uses of Twitter is to build a reputation as an expert. How that works is people find you through various methods such as search engines like the Adobe Tweet Deck or Twitter’s search engine. If they like what you are tweeting, whether it is social or business information, they can choose to follow you. Once someone becomes a follower, they can see all your tweets just like your friends can see your Facebook posts. Another very popular use of Twitter is for employment advertising.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is much like Facebook, but focuses on business. It works much the same way as Facebook. Instead of a newsfeed, LinkedIn calls it an update. Instead of writing an update status on Facebook, you share an update on LinkedIn. I know some people who have had success with social marketing on LinkedIn to get jobs.

You also can buy advertising on LinkedIn. Purchasing ads on LinkedIn works very much the same as buying Sponsored Ads on Facebook. We have not yet experimented with LinkedIn Advertising, but I have read many favorable reviews on the internet. It makes sense for business to business advertising. We will let you know how it works out when we give it a try.

Everyone is talking about social media, but how many people are really working it? Although it is free to get on Facebook or Twitter, the problem with advertising through social media is time and making it work takes many man-hours. In fact, few small businesses have the time it takes to really make social media work.

When Facebook first started happening, one large company in the Harrisburg, PA area went on Facebook to start promoting and found their customers were posting negative comments about them. As the number of friends increased they found the need for a larger staff working full time to clean up the negative comments about their business.

Earlier this year a client we know began building a friends list. Within a very short time they had the maximum 5,000 friends and eventually as many as 200,000 fans.  It takes on person in the marketing department about two hours a day to work Facebook and a second person spends about an hour a day working Twitter. The time is spent first reviewing all the comments on their Facebook accounts. With 5,000 friends you may imagine, this can take some time. The next thing they do is post new comments talking about various things going on at the business, which are of interest to their friends and fan base. What do they get for all this work? Through Facebook they can get up to 200,000 impressions every two days. Not bad for working about ten hours a week.

There are over half a billion Facebook users and about 105 million Twitter users but Twitter is quickly growing and should become part of your social marketing strategy. News travels fast on Twitter and many of your customers use it to communicate daily. Download the Tweet Deck and start sorting and organizing your tweets!

Social Media - You need to be involved

You may have seen them in you favorite magazine, they are called two dimensional bar codes and look something like this:

QR Code for smart phones

A great way to give your printed direct mail piece some extra punch or bring any type of printed material to life is by placing one or more of these images within your printed piece.

Here’s how it works. You would need a smart phone to download an application designed to run on your particular phone (iPhone, Black Berry, Android). This application would be able to recognize the code using its camera lens and get the instructions from the code such as get a coupon, go to a web site or play a video.

AIM applied this technology to a direct mail piece in September. Although smart phones are just starting to take off in our area, we expect this concept to become widely used in the near future. To demonstrate, download the application for your particular phone here (iTunes app store or Android market) and load the application. Then launch the application. You’ll see the camera on your phone come on. Hold the phone over the image above so the camera can see it and line it up until the phone reads the image. Then, it will take you to one of our videos. You can now use this application whenever you see it in your favorite magazine or many other soon to be seen places.

If you’ve been following our blogs, you know our company is always aggressively looking for ways to improve and increase return on our clients’ investments. One of the most exciting new concepts is email marketing. You may have heard success stories from business people using email marketing or advertising companies like ours, who are offering the service. But this month we asked one of our clients to tell of the results he has seen since he began his Internet strategy employing email marketing.

Check out this video of Keith Phelps, General Manager of Country Farm and Home Gift and Garden Center in Mifflinburg, PA:

This is a great time to look seriously at all the new internet technology available and how it can be employed to market your business. If you are doing as much traditional media advertising as you did 10 or even 5 years ago, you are probably wasting a lot of money. The minimum Internet strategy for most businesses today should include the following:

• A good Internet site built by people who understand how to optimize for high rankings on search engines.
• A plan to build an email list of prosective and current customers
• An email marketing plan

Once you have a great website, email list and email marketing (E-Blast) plan, you can take it further by creating a blog page on your site and using social sites such as Twitter and Facebook to bring people to your site and find prospective new customers.

With the current economic downturn and digital initiatives changing all the rules, if you’re not planning your advertising a year ahead, this is the year you should start.

Start with a Review

First, review your advertising from the past year and determine what gave you enough results to consider doing it again.

Rule of thumb: If something is working, keep doing it until it stops!

If you are unable to determine with any certainty what worked, then assume nothing worked and make it a priority to determine how you are going to track your ads in the coming year.

How Can You Track Your Advertising?

There are many ways to track advertising. The accuracy of the tracking will depend on the form of advertising you are doing, the method, and your diligence.

Advertising such as billboards or radio are harder to track than direct mail, digital, and print. It is important to plan how you are going to track your advertising when you are deciding what media you intend to use. If you choose radio or billboard you will need to incorporate creativity to effectively track your results.

Here are some effective ways we have found to track mass media advertising, based on our experience working with advertisers in Central Pennsylvania and beyond:

1. Do a monthly drawing for a prize giveaway each month for at least a year to build data. Offer a prize like dinner for two at a nice restaurant. On the registration include a questioner such as what radio station have you listened to and what newspaper have you read in the past day or two. This is better than asking, “How did you hear about us” because people rarely remember. If over a period of three to six months you see a trend of more mentions for the media you are using, that is a good indication that media is working. This is also a great way to build a mail and email list.

2. Surveying with the right question may be all it takes, but you need to be diligent in asking. Sylvan Learning Center’s national call center asks the question “what made you call us today.” The key word is today. Since most advertising works after the message is delivered numerous times, it is likely the respondent will think back and remember the last time they were exposed to a Sylvan ad.

3. Ask your customers directly if they have seen or heard your ad in the specific media you are using. While some may consider this to be aided questioning, I believe the majority of people will not tell you they saw or heard your ad if they did not. But there is a possibility of the respondent telling you what they think you want to hear. So this method takes some intuition on the part of the surveyor.

4. Coupons are certainly a tried and true method. But consider that when you use coupons you are also testing the strength of the offer and any other part of your over-all marketing strategy. Your ad may reach a large audience but if the coupon is not suited to the product or service and if the audience and product are not well matched then it is likely no offer will get you results.

5. Compare records from one year to the next. Do this over a period of three or four years and you should begin to see trends that can be very good indicators as to the success of your advertising and your marketing plan. Keep daily records of:

a. The number of customers in the store
b. The number of sales
c. Where each customer lives
d. The average amount of each sale each month
e. Weather conditions
f. Competitive business activities
g. Internal operations such as employees off or other special situations

Choose Your Advertising Media

You will need a marketing strategy to help you determine what media to use. The marketing strategy will help determine factors such as the target market demographics, life styles, and geography. Many businesses are moving away from traditional mass media in favor of more targeted digital media. Some advertisers will get so excited about the results they get from advertising methods such as emails they will stop all other forms of advertising. Others will use powerful media such as email in moderation and use a media mix to reach out to new customers as well as targeting their existing customer bases.

Web Sites
One media everyone should use in some form or another is the Internet. Creating a basic web site is relatively cheap and easy to do. Plus it is becoming expected that all businesses have a presence on the Internet beyond a listing on the phone book pages. If a web site is not something your customers would use as a rule, you should still have one just for credibility and basic information.

That being said, your web site may or may not be an integral part of your advertising strategy. This will depend on your business model and how you determine to best attract customers. If your business is based on walk in customers like a quick lube business, your web site may not be a focus of your advertising effort. But if your quick lube offers on-line coupons or you want your customers to make appointments then your web site could then be a very important part of your advertising.

Traditional Media – A Few Things to Consider
Traditional media such as radio, cable, TV, billboard and newspaper are still the primary mass advertising media in Central Pennsylvania. Due to technology, consumer habits are changing. Time spent with traditional media is shrinking and the fractionalization of channels plus intrusive on-demand and digital video recorders are making these medias less attractive to advertisers. While billboard messages are limited, they can target audience geographically, and billboard is the only mass media not losing audience.

To preserve their value and compensate for loss of audience, radio stations in Central Pennsylvania have lowered rates… but buy with caution. Cheap is not always best. Stations package their strength with their weakness and 30 seconds is the new one-minute ad. Remember being creative is very hard to achieve in a small time frame. Some stations are also offering special rates if the advertiser runs at less premium time, so remember when you pay less you get less. The newspapers are also lowering rates, but like radio, you should be aware that low rates may also mean less return.

Rule of Thumb: Assume when media is offering a package, they offer it to solve their inventory problem, not your advertising objective.

New Media – Digital Media
There are many forms of new digital media. The most well know form is the e-blast or email marketing. This is a form of advertising almost any business can use cost effectively. We recommend you use one of the major companies providing e-mail marketing services such as Constant Contact or Mail Chimp. Without any computer skills, these companies make it easy to set up a great looking e-mail to send to your mailing list. Another huge advantage to e-blast is the ability to track. When you use one of the professional e-mail marketing companies they offer ways to see how many people actually click on your e-mails as well as other information. Never send an e-blast without an opt-out option.

Most of the new digital media you are hearing about are NOT MASS MEDIA. E-blasts are targeted marketing. Targeted marketing is always most efficient if you can zero in on your target New media such as social media services Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have not yet proven to be efficient due to the amount of time and effort needed to work the sites. Another new digital concept that has had a lot of notice this past year is text messaging. Again, this concept is still ahead of it’s time because the number of people using text messaging regularly is limited, especially here in Central Pennsylvania. Another problem with texting is it costs the user money. Very few people want to spend money to receive an advertising message. However, in time we believe as the cost comes down and more people adopt this method of communication, texting will become more viable.

There is one other form of new digital media that is actually somewhat of a cross between mass media and targeted media. Digital sign networks have the ability to reach audiences as large or larger than traditional mass media. At the same time digital signage can target audiences by location. This is sometimes referred to as place based advertising. If you want to reach tourists, advertising on a digital sign network located at a tourist destination has proven successful for many advertisers in Central Pennsylvania. Beware of the perception that people do not look at digital signs. This perception is being created by traditional media threatened by digital signage because of its ability to reach large audiences much cheaper. Plus, digital signage has the ability to be very flexible with the ability to program the ads on the video screens across networks instantaneously from one remote location. One other very powerful use of digital signage is at point of sale. It is widely known that point of sale advertising is effective because in most cases the best time to advertise to an audience is as close to the time when they are making purchase decisions. If you are a retailer or even a professional office such as a dentist, seriously consider how digital signage can increase your sales.

Media Mix
This year, we are recommending our clients learn how to utilize the best of all worlds with a media mix of new digital media and traditional media. Traditional mass media is and will probably always be, important to reach new customers. Once customers are developed, targeted media like e-mail comes into play.

How Much Should I Spend On Advertising?

There is no simple answer to this question. A good place to start is by looking at what advertisers in your industry spent last year as an average. You can see this information by downloading this document containing average advertising expenditures by most industries. This information will tell you if you are spending over or under the national average. If you are a new business or launching a new product or service, you will probably need to spend more. If you are established and have a good marketing plan with an efficient advertising program you may be able to spend less.

If you would like to know more about planning an advertising or marketing strategy, or would like a free one hour consultation on the subject, please contact AIM at 1-800-598-5038

As we approach the end of the year and begin planning for next year, many media outlets with packages and enticements will be approaching you for long-term commitments. The word package sounds nice because it sounds like you are getting something special. Packages are often presented as turn key advertising programs designed to make your advertising easier. But in most cases, packages are designed as a way for advertising media to fill unsold inventory and get long-term commitments.

The importance of Gathering Data to Make Media Decisions

The spring radio Arbitron is out! Arbitron is the official rating service of the radio industry. Has any radio station offered to show you the numbers? After all, wouldn’t you like to know what you are paying for? I understand it may not matter if you are sure you’re getting the results you need, but if you want to improve the effectiveness of your advertising, how can you do it without this data?
There was a time when the stations used to run to the advertisers with the new ratings, but they don’t do this anymore. This may be because many stations would have a hard time justifying their rates based on the ratings they are getting today. Demand to see the audience rating before you make that buying decision.

Have you ever seen a report on how many people are watching cable TV in your market? Probably not, especially if you live in the central or upper Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania. The reason is the numbers are so small most advertisers would not pay the rates cable TV is charging. How can you compare the value of cable to any other media without this important information?

Advertisers tell me their cable is working based on the fact that people mention seeing their ad. In most cases the people who see their ads are friends, neighbors and family. These people are more likely to see the ad because they know the advertiser. Even if they are not interested in the advertised message, the ad is relevant to them.

Traditional mass media such as radio and TV have always relied on the ability to reach relatively large audiences for relatively low cost. In the days when you could reach a lot of people cheap, targeting and recall did not matter as much as they now. In this economy smaller audience leaves less tolerance for the X factors.

The Internet solves a lot of these problems. The ability of Internet to track advertising results quickly and decisively makes it possible to target large numbers of very specific prospective customers, which will in turn increase your conversion rates. And, by the way, the Internet does it cheaper.

In conclusion if you’re planning your advertising today… get the facts. If the media is not showing you their ratings, you can be sure they are hiding them for a reason. Finally, plan on using more Internet related solutions where the audiences are growing and you have access to the most important tracking data.

What are they?

E-blasts can be anything from a newsletter to a basic call to action sales offer sent via e-mail to a list you’ve built. E-blasts are not necessarily free. While you could email to large numbers of people using a traditional email program at no charge, we recommend you either purchase a program to help you do your own e-blasts or sign up with a company that lets you use their service on-line. Both options make it easy with step by step instructions and templates. Whether you purchase your own software or use an on-line service, both make it easier to stay compliant with the CAN-SPAM act.

How It Works
You collect emails and build a list by soliciting current or potential customers for their e-mail address. Common ways of doing this is by offering discounts or valuable information via the e-blast. Most e-blast services offer reporting that tells you how many people opened your message and whether they acted upon the links within.

Why It Works
The valuable statistics in the reports allows you to tailor your message for best results and send it to the right people. By profiling your list you can segment it into sub-interest groups, targeting your customers even further. In the end, relevancy is what really makes the message work. You could run ads in front of thousands of people who will never notice it if there is nothing relevant to them. Running the same ad in front of a thousand people interested in the content and most, if not all will notice it.

In Closing
While it takes some up-front work to build an email list and write and design the e-blasts, this is something you should consider. E-blasts can provide immediate responses and results – something that few advertising methods can provide.