Is Advertising Dead?

I've read in many places where "Advertising is Dead."

• Scripting.com
• Logic + Emotion Blog
  
• Marketing Profs
• Media Biz Blog
• TechCrunch.com
• Social Media Today

But, according to BrandWeek, at a recent conference, top marketing executives begged to differ. Sure, advertising spending is down. But:

All of the panelists said marketing and advertising are more important than ever to their organizations.

A big theme that emerged from the panel: it's time to rethink, recalibrate, and innovate. With spending going to more and more places, measuring results becomes more important (and more difficult) than ever.

How are you changing your marketing and advertising to reflect the new economy? How are you measuring results?

Adding Value: the Pet Sitter

The recession has led many revenue hungry organizations to cut prices.

It's not a good idea. It commoditizes their products and/or services, reduces their margins, and can attract the wrong customers/clients.

So, what's an entrepreneur to do? Add value.

But: how can you add value to what you're selling without adding to your costs?

I blogged earlier about how a remodeling contractor did it.

Just the other day, I came across another example.

We'd hired Amber from Alpha Pet Care to take care of our doggies and kitties while we took our summer vacation.

Like many pet owners, we worry about our pets while we're away and want to know that they're being well cared for.

Amber not only took great care of our pets, she took several digital photos of them!

The photos cost her nothing, gave us something we valued, and showed us how much fun our pets had while we were on vacation.

How can you add value to what you're selling?

How's Your Email Campaign Going?

If you're marketing with email, you probably have information on things like open rates, bounce rates, and click-throughs.

Would you like to know how you're doing compared to others in your industry? Thanks to Constant Contact, you can!

Take a look and see how you're doing!

Creating your Value Proposition

I'm working with a friend of mine on her value proposition. Your "Value Proposition" is your answer to the question of why should I buy from you?

It's pretty easy to come up with an answer, but much harder to come up with an answer that is unique, powerful, and resonant with your target audience.

Like many entrepreneurs, she had many, many thoughts in answer to the question. For her to get control of her own process, I suggested she write stuff down.

In no particular order, she's writing about:

• Her target audience: what they're like, how they live, and what their clients/customers want and need.
• What makes her different.
• Projects: the kinds she wants, and the kinds she wants to avoid.
  
• Emotions: what she wants her clients to feel like at the beginning and end of engagements.
• Results: how her company has created value for its clients.
  

She wants to clarify, edit, and otherwise perfect her language as she writes. I encouraged her not to: better to create for now.

Critiquing will be next!

So... why should I buy from you?

Dell's Twitter Success Story

There are a lot of twitter success stories out there. Google the phrase and you'll get pages and pages of results.

The problem is, most of the results people are raving about are something other than revenues.

Today, however, Jack Mixner pointed me to an article referencing Dell's claim to have generated $3,000,000 using twitter.

Holy cow, that got my attention! Good for Dell!

But what about 'tweens?

Is there a revenue-boosting story you've heard about small to mid-sized companies boosting revenues with twitter? Who were they? How'd they do it?

Getting Attention Old School Style

Getting attention, I often write, is the hardest part of marketing.

Many companies focus on new-school "Web 2.0" techniques: search engine optimization, social media, and the like. Those are all good, and they work.

But old school works too: big visuals capture attention like nobody's business.

We recently created this poster for an event coming to Bixby Knolls in Long Beach. It's 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide and grabs your eyeballs as you walk by. It expresses action, excitement and power in a way that doesn't come across on the video screen.

We printed 500 for just a little over $2 each. How does that cost stack up to what you might spend on SEO or PPC advertising?

Thanks to Tom Daniels for allowing us to use his illustration.

ConAgra Follows Our Design Lead

ConAgra has a new logo. Interestingly, given a similar set of design criteria, we came up with the same "smiley face" concept for Stephan Insurance Services.

Here's what ConAgra Corporate Communications VP Teresa Paulsen said the company wanted from the new logo:

We wanted to make sure it was uncomplicated, that it felt approachable, so there is a sense of happiness and simplicity there, but it also was important to us that it felt fresh.

Well. If she was looking for Fresh!, she could have found it right here!

And probably a lot cheaper. Anyway, here is the new ConAgra smiley-logo, for your consideration:

Book Review: Precision Selling

Entrepreneurs know that selling is a core part of everything we do in business. If you’re like me, you’ve seen books, seminars, and web sites claiming to contain the secrets of sales success.

Here’s my problem with most of them: they’re old-school, and many of the key techniques they pitch don’t work, and haven’t for years. With Precision Selling, author Patrick McClure explains how to succeed at selling in today’s world.

Because there are so many ways to be successful in sales, it’s not always easy to know which activities pay off. McClure brings ruthless clarity to the issue, however, and then directs us (with some enthusiasm) to toss the time-wasters.

I believe the hardest part of selling is finding qualified prospects. Once you’ve found a group of people who need what you want, every other part of selling becomes much, much easier.

McClure breaks down the process for finding qualified prospects in a way that you’ll be able to apply to your own organization.

Old school selling says find the customer's pain and sell to that pain. McClure points out that strategy’s “critical flaw. Most potential customers have no idea what their pain is, and even if they did know it, they'd be reluctant to share it with an outsider.” (p. 119)

Old school sales training says sell the benefits (not the features). McClure says sell value in the eyes of the prospect, and illustrates how to find it.

He also brings a “new school” approach to networking, explaining how to build and maintain your network so that you can use it to reach the people you need to close business.

In Closing

The book uses a subtitle of “21 Winning Strategies to Achieve Peak Performance,” but that’s something of misnomer. The book presents an overall approach to sales that is broken into many interrelated components.

You won’t use everything in his book, in all likelihood.

But if you use enough of it, I'll bet you’ll sell more stuff.