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.

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.

In February, March, and April, our agency ran an ad campaign for one of our clients designed to see what media would send the most traffic to their web site.  We ran a three-month campaign on five radio stations and on a video network in six supermarkets covering approximately the same geographic area as the radio stations.

The advertiser was a furniture store offering an on-line gift certificate for $25 when anyone went to their web site and put in a key word unique to each media.  The objective was to:

1. Determine if people respond to these media
2. How well do the various radio stations and the video network perform
3. The cost per response from each media
4. Get people to subscribe to their e-news letter

One media we did not plan to test, but got tested anyway, was the Internet via Twitter and Facebook.  We thought this might happen when the radio stations realized we were tracking the responses from their stations.  We tracked the response using Google Analytics Event Tracking which told us every time anyone clicked on the Gift Certificate on the client’s site, and what keyword they used.

The stations we used were a Pop Music Station, An Adult Contemporary Station, A Country Station, a Talk Station and a Soft Rock/Easy Listening Station. On the first day, the Country and Soft Rock stations each sent one person to the site.  On the second day the Pop Music station sent 37 unique visitors, the Adult Contemporary sent four, the Country sent two more, the Soft Rock sent one more and the talk station sent one more, and the video network sent one visitor.

The sudden appearance of 37 visitors from one station in a matter of hours told us something else was going on.  So we opened our Tweet Deck™ to see if anyone Tweeted the key word information.  We found the Pop station’s morning personality did indeed tweet to his 133 followers at the time, to go to the client’s site and put in the key word for his station.  We then checked Facebook and found the same personality sent the same message to his approximately 1,300 Facebook followers at the time, but this time included a direct link to the client’s site.  We then checked Google’s source tracking and saw, of the 37 visitors they sent that day, 11 came directly from Facebook and three came directly from people at the station.  Since no direct link was included in the Twiiter message, we cannot determine how many of the other 23 hits were sent as a response to the radio spot or other sources.  But time will tell because we set the site up to allow each visitor to register only one time.

While it was nice of the Pop station personality to send all those people to the client’s site with Twitter and Facebook, and show us how powerful internet advertising is, it did not show us if running spots on his station was able to send any visitors.  It was interesting that the Soft Rock Station and the Talk Station which are sister stations to the Pop station only sent a total of three visitors the entire three months.

The Tally for February

By the end of February, the first month of our survey, this was the tally.

Pop station – 16*

Adult Contemporary – 7

Country Station – 7

Video Network – 3

Soft Rock Station – 2

Talk Station – 1

*In addition to the three visitors sent directly from people at the Pop station, 16 more hits came from people at that station in February for a total of 19 visits from people at the station.  We subtracted that along with the 11 hits from Facebook.  Of the remaining 16, we cannot determine how many of those were sent by the radio advertising or another source such as Twitter.

Here’s the Tally for March

Country Station – 7

Pop Station – 5*

Adult Contemporary – 4

Video Network – 2

Talk Station – 0

Easy Listening Station – 0

*Of 16 visitors for the Pop Station, Google showed us that 11 visitors came from people at the station leaving only five that are not necessarily suspect to rigging the results.

Here’s the Tally for April

Video Network – 7

Adult Contemporary – 2

Pop Station – 1*

Country Station – 0

Talk Station – 0

Easy Listening – 0

*Of the five total visitors, four came from people at the station, leaving 1 as the only visitor not necessarily suspect to rigging the result.

What did we learn?

We learned that the Internet has the ability to get a quick response at no financial cost.  But before you get excited, consider how many hours it takes to get 1,300 friends on Facebook and 133 followers on Twitter.  Then, once you get the friends and followers, what does it take to get the credibility or popularity to get them to respond? While it appears the Internet outperformed radio, radio can take credit for the large following and credibility of the Pop station personality.

In conclusion, there are many ways to build a large following.  But one effective way is to use mass media.  Since every person that put in a key word on our client’s site also signed up for the client’s e-news letter, the client ended up getting 139 new e-newsletter subscribers that he can reach out to again and again plus about 20 customers directly in the door to redeem the coupon they got.

A footnote. Only after the survey was almost over, we realized we could have recorded on each certificate, what key word was used to get the certificate.  This would have enabled us to see which media reached persons who would actually redeem the certificate. This is something we hope to do again soon and will include that information when we do.

I can only assume a lot of these businesses have decided they do not need a web site because they think people do not shop their products or service online.  Yet many of these businesses advertise heavily in traditional media.  Without a web site, their radio, newspaper, billboards or TV advertising is equivalent to dumping money into a black hole.  Remember most people visit businesses on line before they visit in person or even make a phone call.

The other major reason a web site is so important is for tracking your advertising.  With a web site using Google Analytics you can get tremendous insight into what advertising is working and what is not working.  If the internet as we know it today were around in the 1920’s, the famous saying by John Wanamaker which goes “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted — the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” would never have been said.

The analytics data provided by Google is invaluable to assessing the effectiveness of your advertising.

In the above snapshot of a Google Analytics dashboard, you can see how many people are visiting plus many other key statistics that can tell you how well your site is received and how well other advertising media is working.  The above sample shows peaks in the number of visits where email promotions ran.  Information such as bounce rate tells how many visitors looked at one page and left the site.  Factors such as bounce rate, pages/visit, and average time on site are just some factors that help you improve the performance of your site.

This analytics data also provides demographic information about your potential customers.

The above screen shot shows how people came to the site as well as what town they came from.  The source media shows how people found your site.  If you have links on other sites or you are advertising on web banners, when people click on those banners or links, it will log where that visit originated from.  If it says the source/medium is direct/(none) that means the visitor went directly to your site by typing your exact domain name into their browser.  This information along with the towns they are in can help you understand how your other advertising is performing.  If you run billboards and suddenly start seeing more hits coming from the town where that billboard is located, it is possible the billboard is driving people to your site.

I’ve just scratched the surface of what you can learn from Google Analytics.  But you have to have a web site to get this information.  Then you have to have a Google Analytics Account which is free.  And finally you have to have your site set up to communicate with your Google Analytics account which is very easy for your web master to set up for you.

Next, we’ll talk about reaching your customers through email marketing.  Email marketing is taking over many of the traditional media advertising methods.

Email Marketing Could Replace Mass Media Advertising For Many Businesses

If you are finding it harder and harder to see return on your traditional media advertising, you should try email marketing.  The great advantages of email marketing are:

• The ability to prevent waste of advertising on an audience that is not interested in your product
• The ability to know just how many of your emails arrived in the mailboxes
• The ability to see if the recipient opened the mail and who they are
• The ability to see how much time they spent looking at your email
• The ability to see the number of times they opened your mail or forwarded it to other people who opened it
• The ability to see if they clicked on any links in your email which gives you an idea of what specific things they are interested in
• The ability to drive recipients to your web site
• It is incredibly cheap, typically as little as $35 a month to send 1000 emails as often as you like and $75 a month to send 10,000.

The only real challenge is developing a list.  You can buy email lists, but they are expensive and very broad based which defeats the purpose of targeting people interested in your specific product or service.  Also, purchased lists contain very small segments of the markets, as most people do not agree to allow their emails to be shared when they give it to a trusted vendor.  The best way is to develop your list from traffic within your business or call people who you believe may be good target customers and ask if you can send them an email.  Other good ways are to gather emails from people you meet at trade shows, or on social Internet sites or other organizations such as the chamber of commerce.

We recommend you use a prominent email marketing service such as Mail Chimp or Constant Contact.  The reason being is that people have spam filters that will not let unknown emails come into their inbox.  However, most spam filters trust emails coming from trusted sources and large companies such as Mail Chimp and Constant Contact. These companies have ways of making sure their customers are mailing to willing recipients.  They also offer very simple and attractive templates that help you set up professional and easy to read mailings.  Finally, these companies offer all the systems to make sure anyone who wants to unsubscribe can do so easily and they provide all those powerful statistics mentioned above.

A Good Web Site and Email Marketing Plan – A Total Advertising Program

Once you have a good web site and a good email marketing plan, all your need to do is optimize your web site so your site appears high on search engines.  Getting your site to be at or near the top on search engines is called search engine optimization (SEO).  This is something that you may need help with from a web professional with because the search engines have complex, multi-faceted systems to determine how to rank sites.  Many of the rules change from time to time as people try to figure out how to game the system.  But, a well-designed site will have the right words in the right places on the site.  It will use other factors such as font size and font weight.  Another factor that will help improve ranking on search engines is the amount of presence your site has on the world wide web, either through links on other sites or mentions in stories on other sites and in blogs, just to name a few.  Another big factor is how often your site changes.  When you update something on your site, the search engines see this and that helps your ranking.  Finally, the more traffic your site gets, the higher it ranks on the search engines.

Although it can be very time consuming, it is possible to run a total advertising campaign effectively using only your web site and email marketing and without using any traditional media.

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

This is a big step, even for our small company, but the advantages are huge. Not only can working from home save money but also it could increase productivity. There are many studies proving the workspace employees work from directly effects productivity.

In addition to improving productivity by allowing the employee to work in a space they are comfortable in, they can save on the cost of time travel. I travel 15 miles a day to and from my office and at the end of the year that ads up to about $2,000 in gas and depreciation, as well as about two and a half hours of my time each week. One of our employees who travels forty three miles one way calculated staying at home would save him the equivalent of getting a 2.00 an hour raise. The company would save even more by closing our office in downtown Lewisburg when you consider utilities, taxes and insurance.

The problem many business owners will have to consider for this option is accountability. Sure, the employee may be more productive working from home, but they may also be distracted and shirk their duties because the boss isn’t there to watch over them. Accountability is a concern but the solution may be to set job performance standards based on goals rather than on time spent working.

Working from a virtual office is not for all business, but with a good working staff that has a good work ethic, today’s technology makes the virtual office a reality.

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.

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.

1. Determine what matters to consumers regarding advertising ethics
2. Recognize advertisers who demonstrate high ethical standards
3. Introduce a set of guiding principles for advertising ethics and how to apply them

The reason the AAF is finally showing such concern about the image of the industry is because advertisers are more aware of the problems. Due to the economy, businesses are scrutinizing their expenses more than ever. Advertising, being one of the more begrudging expenses is getting more than its share of scrutiny. Plus, as an intangible product, advertising is ripe for dishonest practitioners.

The first goal as stated above is misleading in itself. They do not define consumer which leads you to believe the concern is over our image with the general public. The consumers of advertising are advertisers, not food shoppers. Sure, we have to convince the public to buy a product, but we are not hired by the public. So who they are really talking about is the advertiser, not the general public.

The second stated goal sounds nice. But all it will do is create some sort of award event. How about creating an internal affairs committee where dishonest advertising people can be exposed to the advertisers, excuse me, the “consumer?”

The third goal is a joke. If advertising people are not being ethical, it isn’t because they don’t know what is ethical. There are some industry specific issues that may need some guidelines like ownership rights and maybe some new issues created by new media such as social marketing. But the real reason for the sudden concern is because advertisers are tired of widespread dishonesty in the advertising industry. I am sorry, but someone finally needs to say it.

In the thirty years I have worked in this industry I have worked hard to gain the trust and confidence of my clients. But in retrospect, I have been part of the problem too. I have seen many, many instances of dishonesty and did not expose it. Why? We like to consider advertising a profession. As a profession, it is considered unprofessional to knock, or sound like you are knocking others in the profession. We also had to work with some of the less professional people in the industry. So as a practical matter we had to get along. As a result, I have looked the other way in order get the job done as best I could for my clients and not to appear unprofessional.

Today it is a new world where the advertiser is less likely to automatically assume you are just knocking the competition. That may be because advertisers today have become more aware as they scrutinize their advertising and make their advertising suppliers become more accountable.
If you’ve followed our blogs, you know we have talked about questionably ethical practices in our industry before. It is too bad the AAF can’t find a way to make it professionally acceptable and practical to expose unethical practitioners.

Running an advertising agency in Central PA and selling advertising for 30 years I have seen it from all angles. One of the main reasons for this site is to educate advertisers which include exposing unethical practices. If you would like to discuss this subject further, please leave a comment below or feel free to contact me.