The Marketing Plaza

Business and marketing always love acronyms. It’s the reason we have 3Ms, IBMs as brand names not to mention ROIs and KPIs in strategy discussions.*  Sometimes the names are used to mask an original identity, allowing a brand to move into a new era with a new persona. Other times acronyms are used as field jargon to make the presenter appear brilliant and in-the-know.  Other times, and less surreptitiously, the acronyms are just a quick shorthand for fast communications particularly in an increasing digital world limited by character counts. OMG, LOL!

Another use of acronyms is to help people remember things, particularly students studying for tests.  For middle schoolers trying to name the Great Lakes for a social studies test, the acronym HOMES helps them recall Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. Not all acronyms work for everyone, but one acronym does suffice for all marketing endeavors.  It takes you back to basics on the ABCs of Marketing – for Always Be Communicating.

There are great debates in the marketing world about what media to use when, and the value return of a broadcast spot on The Daily Show versus a Tweet on Twitter. With aplogies to Marshall McLuhan, the ABCs of marketing remind us that the medium is not the message. The message is the message  and whatever medium allows you to communicate consistently to the right audience is the right medium for you.

If the cost-effectiveness of a blog allows you to communicate more than a broadcast commercial, then a blog is your better bet.  In contrast, if you don’t have the wherewithal to blog and do have the funds to produce a broadcast spot and air it consistently, then the spot hits the spot for your needs.

Marketing plans by definition admit that there is no one solution for everyone, which is why plans need to be carefully crafted based on time, budget, resources, needs, mission and skill sets. But any plan that doesn’t account for the ABCs and gives you great one-time hits, is not a marketing plan at all.  If you are not communicating, you are not marketing.  It’s as basic as it gets; as basic as the ABCs.

*For those who don’t remember or are intimidated by jargon:
3M originally stood for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
IBM was International Business Machines
ROI is Return on Investment
KPI is Key Performance Indicator

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It’s a new year and a new decade.  No better time to take stock of your marketing commitments and make some serious resolutions. Here are 10 to consider for 2010.

1. Commit to some marketing.  Really, any marketing.  Doing no marketing is called “going black.”  Occasionally there are legitimate reasons to go black, but not now.  The goal for 2010 is to get into the “Black” on your balance sheet and income statement, and that doesn’t happen by going black in marketing.
2. Test something new. Same old, same old doesn’t work.  It’s time to break out and try a new marketing vehicle, be it Twitter or a billboard.  It doesn’t have to be a new fangled social media outlet, it just has to be something you haven’t tried before so you can test its effectiveness.
3. Re-test something old. If you stopped doing print ads because they stopped pulling for you, reconsider the medium with a changed message in a different publication. For instance, move from a trade magazine ad to a consumer newspaper ad, or stop a newspaper ad and move to a biz journal ad.  Don’t throw the baby out with bath water.  Print ads may still work, just in a different pub or with a different message or creative treatment.
4. Go social. Yes, it’s time to do something in the social media world. Create a personal Facebook page, create a Facebook business page, start a Twitter account on a topic of expertise, consider blogging.  Don’t do it all, just get a toe-hold so you’re in the game and can talk the talk.
5. Fish where the fish are. Take a fresh look at your intended audience or market.  Where do they congregate?  If your market is on Facebook, then that’s where you need to be, but if they are meeting regularly at a club hall or in the back of a restaurant every Tuesday, get old-fashioned and show your face at the real-live networking event.
6. Rethink your audience. If sales are flat, is there a new audience out there for your old product?  The classic example is Arm & Hammer’s baking soda being reintroduced as a refrigerator de-odorizer rather than just a baking ingredient.  Does your product have a new audience waiting to discover it for their own special needs?
7. Get back to benefits basics. Stop thinking about what your company or product does, and remember why it’s important to a customer.  What do you really provide? If it’s tires, are you providing reliable safety or wheels that define a personality, rather than just rubber that hits the road?  Remember Harley Davidson doesn’t sell motorcycles. They sell virility to men going through a mid-life crisis.
8. Get help. Marketing takes talent.  From writers to designers to media planners, don’t try to go it alone. You may need staff, but you likely just need an ongoing consultant, ad agency, or marketing service.  Get the help you need at the price you can afford. You can always trade up to full-time staff, or a more creative agency later. It’s more important to get started and learn what works and what doesn’t than wait for the perfect help to come your way, or for the day you can afford the fancy agency.
9. Start early. Marketing takes time. Brochures done on the spur of the moment rarely hit the mark. You want sustained sales not short-term sales. You don’t want to be a one-hit wonder.  Give yourself and your team time to get the message and tone right.  Start now, in January, but don’t look for results in February. Look for results by the half-year mark, year-end, and ever onward.
10. Stay on strategy. Marketing is like exercise. It only works if you continually work at it with a goal in mind and a strategy for getting there.  So don’t start marketing in January and quit by February.  Marketing is not a treadmill.  It ‘s a path to the future. You should never get off it.

If you want help with any step, feel free to call the strategists at Plaza Communications and Consulting Group (www.plazaconsultinggroup.com).  We’d love to help you start the year off right!  Happy New Year to all and Merry Marketing for a Prosperous New Year.

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Is Shakespeare finally obsolete?  Is it no longer true that a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet?

In marketing, names are the brand, and not naming a company or product correctly can make the road to success all that much harder to travel. Given enough time, money and talent any name can become a household brand, but not everyone has the deep pockets of Apple, Google, Cher or Madonna.

In today’s hyper-connected world, naming protocols are all that more complicated and need to take into account Internet compatibilities among other things.  A new company, for instance, needs to be registered with the correct state authority, but if the corresponding name is not available as a url, even the best name can prove troublesome with online brand congruity.

Initials, once popular in the Fortune 500 realm, from IBM to ATT&T, are difficult for smaller companies.  Initials tent to be hard to remember, don’t help in SEO searches, and feel cold in the ever-funky social media world.  In the digital-sphere, better to have a name that means nothing such as Starbucks for coffee rather than initials that reek of corporate culture.

Unfortunately, small businesses, in particular, sometimes have to just get started with a less than perfect name and deal with the consequences later. But without the deep pockets of larger corporations, rebranding at a later date is not always an option.

The answer?  When starting up – get as  close to the perfect name as soon as possible, but don’t invest too much in it until you’ve completed your due diligence, which includes:

1. A check of state records in any state in which you think you’ll do business.
2. A check of available urls  in the .com arena.
3. A check of alternative url choices in the .com arena.
4. A review of similar names with minor misspellings.
5. A gut check on the look and feel of the name with not only company principals and close loved ones, but a decent designer.

It takes most people nine months, the full gestation period, to choose a name for a new baby.  Businesses frequently  launch in far less time, which can result in some odd or oddly uncreative names, frequently named after the business owner.  If you just want to send out an invoice, any name will do, but if you want to build a brand, get a marketing person on your team to give you a broader view of options.

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Marketing is a long-distance sport.  It’s meant to carry you over the finish line not just for today or tomorrow, but for the long term.  Unfortunately, many business owners look at Marketing as a sprint – a quick run to help when the team is down and sales are already challenged.

As in any great sport, practice and diligence is required long before the actual event or big race.  Marketing is not something that is pulled out at the last minute like a steroid drug.  Instead, it takes ongoing conditioning where a company continuing practices what it preaches, fine tunes its messages through self-examination and monitors itself against previous performances.

It’s the reason great marketing is consistent similar to a Michael Phelps swim relay.  It would be surprising for the swim not to go smoothly because he is consistent in his practicing, strokes, techniques and doing what it takes to efficiently cross the pool.

Most companies like most individuals have a hard time staying committed to a long-term routine for better health.  For people it’s frequently called exercise and good eating habits.  For companies, it involves marketing.

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No matter where I turn, I bump into Charles Darwin.  Today, a friend sent me a link to a New York Times article on how the publishing industry has been affected by evolution. Then, I stumbled on a SlideShare presentation by another Charles — Charlie Hoehn, a recent college graduate making his mark on the world.  He quoted Darwin while providing his peers with job hunting advice.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.  It’s the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin

Is your marketing Darwin proof?
Is your business?
Are you adaptable to change?

Really?  I kind of doubt it because change requires more than just changing tactics.

Today’s marketing pros have to be true Change Management artists.  I’ll continue to argue that the fundamentals of marketing remain the same, but the techniques have clearly changed.  One by one, clients are finally admitting they have to learn how to communicate in the social media age, and want to go from 0- 100 in Superhuman speed. It won’t work unless the companies fundamentally change the marketing behind the communications techniques not just the communications channels themselves.

A TV ad doesn’t work in print. A print ad doesn’t work on a billboard – -not without some changes. They are fundamentally different medium and require different approaches within a campaign. The same is true of social media. If you are planning on just repurposing existing material on a social media platform, abandon ship before you leave port. The tone, value and approach in social media are all inherently different from traditional mass market messaging.

I encourage you to enter the social media world.  Just don’t do it without changing yourself first – from the inside out.  That includes corporate culture, marketing plans, and studying a bit of Darwin and Marshall McCluhan. After all, the medium is still the message.

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Despite the obvious implication in Chris Anderson’s new business bestseller Free, there is no such thing as Free Marketing.  Not really.  I know CEOs and CFOs want low cost/no cost Marketing, but the saying “You get what you pay for,” is true across all marketing channels including social media.

On the surface, social media appears free. You can get a Twitter site or Facebook page for free. You can even set up a blog for free. But, consider this:

• Some blog services are free but limited. Free blog services don’t allow you to monitor stats to see how many visitors you may be attracting, or enter key words to maximize search.
• Facebook is free, but ads are not. If you are using Facebook for business, you should have a business page, be building a fan base, and considering targeted ads. I read somewhere that Starbucks, a leader in the use of a Facebook business page, has six people on its social media staff.  As of July 09, they were reported to have 3.5 million registered Facebook fans.  They may be closing stores, but they aren’t closing down Facebook pages anytime soon.
• Twitter is free, but your time isn’t. You have to post, research posts, and monitor inbox requests. Social media guru Guy Kawasaki has a team of 2-3 twitter ghost writers.  Ever wonder why?

Speaking of Twitter, according to WACO (the World Advertising Research Center, not the city in Texas), earlier this year Dell computer reported that it generated $3 million in sales through microblogging services, and that’s after it had to recover from previously  bad press in the blogosphere!  That kind of revenue potential deserves some investment, wouldn’t you say?

A Marketing Truth: Media costs. We always knew it costs money to take out a TV ad. Why do we suddenly think other marketing channels are free?  There are hard costs and soft costs, but getting your message in front of the right people is a science that takes talent, effort, staff time, creativity, and execution according to plan.  That science, by the way, is  called Marketing.

Another Truth: Planning Saves Time and Money. There are ever-increasing low cost (ahem free) channels for getting your message out to the right people, but the cacophony of choices means you need to wisely invest your time and resources on those outlets that maximize your positioning.  Guess what?  That’s what an executed Marketing Plan is!

Bottom line: Make sure you have the resources at your disposal to make the right choices, keep your messaging consistent in your chosen medium, and measure response.  It takes time, effort and potentially staff resources unless you really want to do it all.  But your time is valuable isn’t it?  I assume you’re “not free.”

P.S. I’m currently working my way through Anderson’s Free. It’s a must read for all business and marketing types. Lot’s of good food for thought.  In keeping with the spirit of the book, I took it out for free from the library.

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What excites you about your business?
What is exciting about your business?
What would make a client excited about your business?

These are three similar but very different questions.  If you can’t answer them, you’re not ready to market your business. Let’s take them in order.

1. What excites you about your business is your passion. This should be “why” you’re in business and has only a little to do with marketing.  A great marketing person can take your passion and turn it into a campaign, but that would be a residual bonus.  Your passion is your reason for being in business. Don’t confuse it with a marketing message. If you choose to make it part of a marketing message, do it consciously and for a good marketing reason.
2. What is exciting about your business is the value add it provides to your customers, consumers or clients.  It’s why they want to do business with you.  This should be a key part of your marketing message, but not a headline. This is a key benefit that people receive for being aligned with you.
3. What would make a client excited about your business?  Well, now we’re into serious marketing — how to reach a prospect and turn him or her into a client!  This takes some research, listening, intuitive understanding of how customers engage with you, and pure objectivity.  Here’s where Voice of the Customer research can really be beneficial.  You may think that a customer values your on-time delivery, when what they really value is your special sauce (if you’re a pizza place), your special gloss coating (if you’re a photo house), or your local take on the news (if you’re a regional newspaper).  In each case, I can guarantee that on-time delivery is important, but it may not be the key reason current clients do business with you, would recommend you to others, or future clients might be inclined to give you a first or second look.

Don’t wait to ponder these three questions.  Start asking employees, key customers, and anyone else you happen to meet during the course of the next day what they find exciting about what they do, what you do, and what they think others would value in doing business with you.  You might be surprised by some of the answers.

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Marketing has always been about reaching the right people  It the olden days, gosh — what … 12 years ago?–  it was still about mass marketing — reaching the masses.  Then, along came Pepper & Rogers and everything was about 1:1 –get to one person at at time with a personalized message and make them feel special.  Was Rogers related to Mr. Rogers perchance? I think not. That Rogers cared about neighborhoods.

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Procrastination is good for marketing.  It may not seem so at first glance, but if you delve deeper, you’ll see it’s so. Marketing people are usually manic, running around getting things done and meeting deadlines, so they are not generally considered procrastinators.  But, here’s the truth: Great marketers do procrastinate.

If you’re a fan of CBS Sunday Morning you may have seen the Fast Draw team.  They do illustrations of difficult concepts to help enlighten us visual learners about whatever they feel is important. On Sunday, April 12, they illustrated the concept of procrastination.  Here’s what I learned:  the word is derived from Latin where pro means “forward” and crastinus means “belonging to tomorrow.”

Marketing is about looking towards tomorrow.  If you wait to think about marketing until a product is done, it’s too late. Great marketing occurs early in the process long before the next product, service or great idea is a reality. Marketing believes that tomorrow will come as will the great next thing, and to be ready for it —  we must dream more about and prepare for tomorrow, or procrastinate.

If you ask most marketing people why they never get to the important stuff, it’s because they’re busy meeting a tight deadline today.  They are getting things done rather than determining what needs to be done to better position a company.  Now, this post may seem directly opposed to my previous post “Active Tense,”  but it’s not. In that post, I noted that Marketing is about getting something done. The real key, however, is to think and plan and do the best thing.

Notice I didn’t say the “right thing.”  If you wait too long to determine the right thing, you may not do anything at all.  That’s not procrastination, which implies you’ll just do it  later. That’s downright quitting and doing nothing. Unfortunately, that’s the state of most small business marketing. Instead, consider procrastinating and having a marketing team, plan and program in place and working within the next three months. You’ll be happy you did and you’ll be amazed at what the future may look like.

*reprinted with permission from original post on InsideMarketing.org, 4/27/09, Rhona Bronson, NAPL

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