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Good Marketing Undone

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Don't let your good marketing be erased.

Don’t let your good marketing be erased.

I wrote this article a few years ago, before I took over the customer service team for Palo Alto Software. My perspective at the time was as a consumer. Looking back on it now, as the manager of my team, the glaring miss in this company’s story was the lack of training for their staff. Instead of clarifying the win-win benefits (supporting a local charity and getting more customers with a good sale), it appeared they left the interpretation completely on the shoulders of each staff member. Some got it (salesperson #2) and at least one didn’t (salesperson #1). Both left an impression on me, and as far as I’m concerned, the store was lucky. If not for salesperson #2, my experience would have been a lose-lose, and that would have been a shame.

With my team, I see my primary role is to empower them with the knowledge and the tools to handle different scenarios and deal with whatever comes up. This statement wasn’t as true in the beginning for me, but now more and more I embrace its meaning: ask forgiveness, not permission. If I’ve done my role correctly, they will be able to do theirs — provide solutions for our customers. If we have a miss, we can sit down and evaluate what did and didn’t work and think about what other options could be used in the future. It’s ongoing education for all of us.

This is a true story. But the names and certain key words have been removed; I’m not here to complain about a particular store.

An eye-catching advertisement

I like to read the newspaper while I’m eating breakfast (I spend the rest of my day reading online). Last Friday, as I was thumbing through, I saw an ad that caught my eye:

“One-day only! Wear (color) in support of (charity) and get 20% off any item in the store!”

Simple. Easy to understand. Some of the proceeds would go to a worthy cause. And a nice discount. I liked it. I already planned to be near the store location Friday evening; I was going to catch a movie with friends. All I had to do was change what I planned to wear to their chosen color. Hm…

If it had been just another work day, I had a couple of blouses which would have fit the requirement. But I was going out after work. I had planned what I was going to wear, and its main color was black. BUT, it had a small sequin flower in that special, required color. A very small sequin flower. Would it be enough? No way to know until I got there. And I had decided to go.

That was good marketing. It “found” me (they placed their ad in the local paper). It appealed to me (it was simple to do; I didn’t even have to cut out a coupon), and it had a feel-good connection (a charity I supported). I was now adjusting my plans so that I could go to the store first before the movie.

An awkward customer service experience

What happened? That great marketing strategy was almost undone by a salesperson with tunnel vision.

It’s now 6pm on Friday; the promotion will end in a couple of hours. I walk up to a salesperson in the department, mention that I saw the ad, say I realize I’m not wearing A LOT of (color), but wondered if it would be enough?

She could have made a joke (“Well, I’ll probably have to take a picture to show proof!”); she could have rolled her eyes, and then smiled and cheerfully rung up the sale. But the look on her face was clear — I had NOT fulfilled my part of the deal and she felt compelled to make a point about it. As it happened, another woman, wearing a complete outfit in said (color) was walking by. The salesperson grabbed the other woman’s arm, pulled her toward me, and explained that this was how she expected people to look for this promotion!

Not-so-great sales approach. Embarrass the customer into doing what? Running home to put on more (color)? Or running out of the store and down the mall to a competitor? At that moment, option 2 was tempting.

But I’m thicker skinned than that. So I put my items on the counter and she started to ring them up. Because I had bought sets (3 of one item), the computer used a different ‘sale’ price and the 20% discount wasn’t applied. She seemed relieved as she explained there was nothing she could do to change what the computer showed. She couldn’t give me the 20% discount. I’m starting to get irritated, but I have somewhere else to be. I’m deciding on my answer when I hear another voice behind me.

A positive resolution

Salesperson #2 calmly walks up to the register, explaining to #1 that, just because the computer didn’t automatically apply the 20% discount doesn’t mean it can’t, or shouldn’t, be corrected. She then goes on to explain the workaround (put in one item at a time and the 20% discount works beautifully). Finally, #2 reminds #1 that every sign in the department says the discount applies to all items. I love her! At this point I find my voice and half-joke about my small amount of (color) meeting the criteria. Salesperson #2 just smiles. She gets it.

The Ad Worked:
  • I came to the store
  • I acknowledged the ad was the reason I came to the store
  • I found clothes to buy
  • The promotion was ending soon

The moral? Good marketing can be undone if all the people on the front lines haven’t been trained to understand the real purpose of the promotion — to bring more people to the store to increase overall sales. In this case, the store made a sale and the charity received a portion from the sale.  Everyone was happy — except maybe salesperson #1.

The post Good Marketing Undone appeared first on Bplans Blog.


Shoestring Marketing Budget? Get Your Customers to Do It For You

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To survive as a business you need sales, and to generate sales you need marketing. It is for this reason that most businesses set aside a sizable chunk of money for advertising, but wouldn’t it be grand if you could generate sales by getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you? If you have a good reputation and a loyal clientele, you can save money on marketing campaigns by getting the people who already love your products to market them for you.

Get social to generate awareness

Digitally speaking, the most successful marketing campaigns are ones that go viral on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Multinational businesses have realized the value of social media, and are exploiting it relentlessly with marketing campaigns that cost a fraction of a regular advertising, and give far better results. The important thing here is to pull on strong emotions of the customer. Of course the more followers you have, the more successful your campaign will be.

Finding more followers

Samsung started a beautifully designed social media campaign to increase its number of followers on Facebook, using a simple contest in 2011. It was called “Like It, Reveal It, Win It.” They had a weekly product giveaway which Facebook users could win by liking the Samsung Facebook page, then revealing parts of the product image by sharing the contest with their friends. The more friends who participated in the contest, the faster the product images were revealed. The first person to reveal the image won the actual product. The efficacy of the campaign can be seen by the fact that Samsung increased its follower count by 12,000 during the very first week of the contest.

Boosting sales

McDonald’s happy meals may be their most successful cash cow, but after McDonald’s in Singapore decided to launch their special breakfast menu, the company came up with a great campaign to popularize it. First of all, they stressed how breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Then, they offered to instill the good habit of eating breakfast regularly by giving away free breakfast meals at certain stores. Clear Channel, a local television channel, partnered with McDonald’s to show dynamic advertising displays of local stores that were offering free breakfast meals. The ads showed the exact number of meals available, and provided a strong motivation for customers to head to a store close by to get their free meal. As the supplies were limited, customers often ended up buying extra breakfast meals for family members. The sales boost was tremendous.

The unique offer

Getting a true bargain can create a social buzz among the existing and potential customer base. This is the reason why Nike runs its recurring campaign called “The Chance.” It allows youngsters from around the world to win a place at the Nike Academy for a year, where they get to play soccer against the reserve teams of Premier League and other associated clubs. The campaign, which was first run in 2010, saw participants create more than 17,000 Facebook pages and had a reach of 5.5 million people. 28,000 player posts and 2,000 user made videos dominated YouTube, giving the Nike channel more than 3.4 million views. The exposure that Nike received as a brand was huge.

Being interactive is the key

The customer wants to participate in an active manner, and if your business can provide them with a platform, they will be happy to engage with it. Look at the “Coca Cola Happiness Machine,” a simple idea that generated tons of buzz for the company at minimal cost. The Happiness Machines were Coca Cola vending machines placed in numerous locations, giving out not only Coca Cola, but also things like pizza, flowers, and sandwiches. Some of them were tweaked to give away freebies to all customers. Others needed a specific action to be performed for a reward—for instance, with one machine in Singapore, you needed to hug the machine to get a free drink. In Belgium, you had to dance a happy jig to get your free cola. The actions and reactions were recorded in videos that were shared on YouTube. The footage earned the company millions of views and free publicity for the cost of a few drinks.

Besides the giants, it works for small businesses 

The marketing campaigns that have been brilliantly executed by multinational firms have all had unique, out of the box ideas that brought them great publicity at little cost and boosted sales. Digital marketing campaigns can work just as well for small businesses. For example, a local pizza place asked clients to post pictures of themselves enjoying pizza on the pizza joint’s Facebook page, and the photo with the most votes would win the contest. The prize was an “all you can eat pizza dinner” for a couple. The clients not only took innovative pictures showcasing the pizza brand, they got their friends (some not even in the same city) to like the photos as well. The exposure for the restaurant was huge.

Elements of social media to use for business marketing 

Concentration, focus, and observation are required to design a simple digital marketing campaign which will go viral. The big businesses may have a huge research team telling them just what to do, but small businesses can do just as well with their marketing campaign online.

Here are some ways small business owners can use social media to market their business, often using existing customers to do their marketing for them:

  • Learn who your clients are and what they want through market research. Next, use this information to pull on emotional triggers when you design your digital marketing campaign.
  • Get involved in local causes close to the heart of your customers. It could be a grudge basketball game between rival colleges, an annual sales fete, or a fundraiser for a worthy cause. Find something to associate your business with the event on social media, such as creating your own hash tag in association with the event on Twitter. Your business will gain exposure from the reflected publicity of the event.
  • Find clients who have social clout on Twitter and Facebook. Offer them freebies and they will tweet about it or post it on their timeline. This gets you great exposure online at a minimal cost.
  • Make videos—they are a powerful medium of social influence. Post plenty of them on your YouTube channel. Better still, have a contest where your customers make their own videos and tag your business.
  • Increase the online visibility of your business by ensuring that all social media sites feature your business page. If you can’t be seen, how can you expect to go viral? Think of different ways to stay in public memory. Marketing and advertising create a sustainable image in the mind of the customer, which brings them instant recall of your brand when they need to buy the product. By getting your customers to do your digital marketing, a business owner is assured that the brand is never far from the mind of the customer.

Have you used any of these creative marketing strategies in your business? Were they successful? Why or why not? Share your experience in the comments below. 

Does Your Business Have Swag?

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Promotional gear, goodies, swag—whatever you call it, items with your company name and logo are a great marketing tool. They provide a way to connect with customers, improve brand awareness, and help drive your sales up. Crane, a home appliance and wellness company, uses promotional gear to promote their brand and products at various events and trade shows. The company hands out free swag bags with lip balm, candy, magnets, and an informational card about the company.

Joe Grotto, the marketing and sales specialist for Crane, says promotional items have a direct impact on the company’s image and sales figures.

Joe Grotto, marketer with Crane, explains why the company uses promotional gear.

Joe Grotto, marketer with Crane, explains why the company uses promotional gear.

“The right product giveaways, coupled with educational material, can generate demand, leading consumers to make a purchase or push for your products to be added to store shelves,” he says. “The promotional items can help open new revenue channels and generate interest from new market segments.” Whether you plan to give out freebies at the next trade show you attend, or want to give your employees some logo-clad apparel to wear around and promote your business, the reasons to buy promotional gear are just as plentiful as the number of places you can purchase it. With Grotto’s help, we compiled a list of affordable places to buy promotional items for your company.

vistaprintVistaprint

You can order more than just business cards through Vistaprint. This popular online retailer offers educational material in all shapes and sizes. You can also order signs, banners, hats, tote bags, and small office supplies like pens, letter openers and mouse pads. If you’re looking for apparel, Vistaprint probably isn’t your best option, as its main focus is paper products and office supplies.

4imprint4imprint

4imprint is another online retailer, and you’ll find a bigger selection here. From stadium cushions to backpacks, there’s a lot to choose from. You can request free samples and get some assistance with artwork if needed.

logoupLogoUp

LogUp is a great place to get apparel. While they have all the knick-knack gear too, LogoUp excels at apparel, and offers a large variety of clothing options. From polo shirts to fleece jackets, everything you can think of is available. You can even order name brand clothing like Nike workout shirts or an Eddie Bauer jacket.

StaplesStaples

If you want to see and hold the gear before you buy it, you can check out a local office supply store like Staples. Most of their items are, not surprisingly, office items. However, there are a few t-shirts to choose from too. Some business owners prefer to buy from brick-and-mortar store like this, and similar office supply chains offer promotional items too.

A few things you should know before you buy:

  • The more you buy, the cheaper it is

When buying promotional gear, the price per item gets cheaper the more you buy. For example, on the Staples website, ball point pens are $1.79 each if you buy 250-499 pens, however, if you buy 500-999, the price goes down to $1.66.

  • Expect minimums

Most promotional retailers require you to make a minimum purchase. If you’re a small company, make sure whatever item you decide on is one that has a long shelf life. If you decide to buy 500 pens, they could be around for a while.

  • Expect a setup fee

In most cases, a set up fee will be tacked on to your bill. For example, with 4imprint you pay a $40 set up fee that covers one color and one location. It gets more expensive if you have a rainbow of colors in your logo, or if you want several places to be embroidered or stamped.

Where do you get your promotional gear? Share your favorite spot in the comments section below.

Episode 6: Cameron Hates Our YouTube Ad | The Bcast

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This week, we talk to Cameron about our LivePlan YouTube ad. Who is Cameron? Well, he hates our YouTube ad.

We also chat with our eCommerce expert, John Procopio, about what to do when you get negative customer feedback.

Listen to Episode 6:

Show notes:

Subscribe:

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Do you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show?
Tweet at us: @Bplans (include the hashtag #BCast)
Send us an email: Bcast@Bplans.com

Audio transcript:

Peter: All right, episode six. Going to shake up the format a little bit here. Folks who have gotten used to our normal article layout format here, it’s going to be a little bit different this time. I hope we don’t lose too many subscribers.

Jonathan: Yeah, actually, I think a lot of people might end up liking it. Maybe more? I don’t know.

Peter: Oh? Interesting. Good. Yeah, we’ve got a couple different guests today. One who’s going to tell us a little bit about the nature of advertising, give us some insight into how it happens in the YouTube space. From our company here, Palo Alto Software, we’ve got John. Then, a consumer of advertising and ordinary person, someone who has seen some of the ads that we put out there.

Jonathan: Yeah, and just to give a little bit of background around the story for today, we have a video for our software product called LivePlan. It’s kind of an explainer video. It shares what the tool is, the benefits of using it, all of that kind of stuff. We use it in our YouTube advertising, so we want to talk about that. Before we dive into all of that, I want to go ahead and play it for our listeners. Is that okay?

Peter: Is it okay with me?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Peter: Is it okay with them?

Jonathan: Here it comes.

Ad: You’re an entrepreneur, and you’re ready to start pitching your idea to lenders and investors. You know what they’re going to ask for: your business plan. You don’t have an MBA, you aren’t an accountant, and you aren’t getting into business to stay up all night crunching numbers. You need something that’s easy to use and that gives you a professional plan that you can really put into action. Welcome to LivePlan. With over five hundred sample business plans, covering virtually every industry, you’ll save hundreds of hours of work. You can collaborate securely and easily with partners, and if you need some outside help, there are expert instructions and video advice at every step, along with free customer support. You can also build a one-page visual snapshot for quick pitching and export it, so you can impress audiences anywhere, any time.

A business plan isn’t just something you create and then forget. With LivePlan, you can easily transition to setting goals and measuring progress, taking you from day one to year one and beyond. LivePlan even integrates with accounting software like QuickBooks and Xero, can handle multiple companies, and it’s helped more than two hundred and fifty thousand businesses get off the ground, fast. Research has shown that when businesses plan, they grow thirty percent faster than businesses that don’t plan. Let LivePlan help you maximize your business’s potential. Get started today with our sixty-day, risk-free, money-back guarantee. LivePlan: business planning, goal setting, and financial tracking made easy.

Peter: All right, so that’s what a video ad sounds like. If you could see it, that’s what it would look like.

Jonathan: It looks a lot better than it sounds. I don’t know. Yeah, so we’ve got John with us here to talk about why we made it, how we made it, and how it’s been performing on YouTube. With that, John, why don’t you talk to us about it?

John Procopio: Cool, happy to. Also happy to be a return guest on the podcast.

Jonathan: First ever recurring guest.

Peter: Yeah, first ever returning guest. Congratulations, John Procopio.

Jonathan: Welcome back.

Peter: Excellent.

John Procopio: Yeah. YouTube advertising is a great space. I think a billion users on YouTube, so kind of a lot of eyeballs. We had a video a year ago, that was Meet Susie video, if you’re interested you can check YouTube for that. It was that whiteboard video where you see a hand drawing things. Those were very in vogue and very …

Jonathan: Oh, yeah. Very popular.

John Procopio: … Productive for a while. Then we wanted to step that up, and give … Well, first, represent the product more, so we wanted to update the story of LivePlan. We enlisted the help of a firm and got started on that project to really tell the full story of the value proposition of LivePlan in ninety seconds. When we sat down with this company, it took about a month or two. The main point of the video was to actually use it on our website, so have it front and center. Someone comes to LivePlan.com, “Hey, what’s going on here?” They can just click the video. We found when we loaded this new video up, that our conversion, meaning the people who actually do the thing that we want them to do on the site, which is to sign up and become a customer, went up fifteen percent within two weeks.

Jonathan: Now, for somebody who doesn’t do this a lot, is fifteen percent a good number? Is it a bad number?

John Procopio: If you got a fifteen percent raise, would you be happy?

Jonathan: I’d be pretty happy with that, yeah, to be honest.

John Procopio: Yeah, we were excited to do that. Yeah, there’s not a lot of tests that give you that kind of bump.

Jonathan: Okay, awesome.

John Procopio: Then the thought was, “Well, we’ve got the video.” We actually used the Meet Susie video previously on YouTube. We work with an external digital ad agency, and through their help, we were able to get that YouTube ad, for that ad piped in YouTube ads.

Jonathan: Okay. Swapped out the new one instead of the old one.

Peter: That’s great. It’s pretty common these days for a technology company, a technology savvy company, to have the landing page, that is their home page, have a video that explains the basics of what they do. John’s saying, basically, he took that explainer video, that “Here’s what we are. Here’s what we do. Here’s our whole DNA,” and used it as an advertisement. What I think is interesting there is that that’s a little different from, I think, a lot of what traditional advertising really is. The video ad usually is fifteen, thirty or sixty seconds. You see it on television, it’s breaking up the content programming that you want to see.

YouTube has a couple different approaches. Number one, this is all pre-roll, which means it rolls before the content, not during the content that you’re watching. YouTube obviously has much shorter interval content in general, on average, so you’re viewing smaller segments, you’re getting the ad up front, and then you’re getting to the point where you’re watching the thing you wanted to watch originally anyway. Also, John’s ad is a summary of the product, and it shows you what the thing does. It doesn’t deliver some kind of joke, there’s not a lot of characters like you might see in a Progressive Insurance ad, it doesn’t have a cartoon gecko, all these kinds of things that have become the tradition in this video ad space. John, how does that apply to, more generally, like all those small businesses out there? It seems like getting your message across is the new way of delivering advertisement.

John Procopio: Yeah, absolutely. You’re touching on the overall branding concept. I think with this video we were really aiming at direct response, so explaining the value proposition, but it’s a short-term goal here. We really want to get in front of the customer, understand that we know who you are, we know where you are in your search right now, and we are the painkiller for the experience that you have right now.

Peter: John, wait a second. What do you mean, “We know who you are?” Because I think a lot of ears are pricked up right now about [crosstalk 00:07:40] …

Jonathan: That’s a little scary, privacy.

Peter: Yeah, people get a little worried about [crosstalk 00:07:43] …

John Procopio: I didn’t mean it in that sense. I just meant where you are in the lifeline of your business. It’s likely if you’re searching or you’re looking for terms around planning, the majority of our customers are in a certain stage of the business. The majority are also looking for funding. That’s what I meant by that, not in terms of following you around on the internet and such.

Peter: That’s great. We’ve got these ads running on YouTube. They are retargeting and targeting our audience that we think we want to reach. That’s really interesting. John, have you ever talked to anyone who’s seen those ads?

John Procopio: Not complete strangers, basically. Not anyone I don’t already know.

Jonathan: That comes along to me. I manage our social media for Bplans and LivePlan, and about a month ago, I got a tweet. The tweet was from somebody who was really not impressed with our YouTube ad. His name is Cameron, and he used some choice words for how angry he was about watching the video:

Cameron Reilly: “Dear @LivePlan, I swear, if I see your ad one more time on YouTube, I’m going to hunt you down. Every single video for weeks.”

Jonathan: I thought it would be fun to talk to him, to figure out what it was that bothered him about it, why he reached out to us to even tell us that it was bothering him. Cameron, we’re going to bring him on and have a chat.

Peter: Let’s absorb a negative reaction, and hopefully other folks can learn a little bit from this interaction that we’re going to have.

Jonathan: Yeah. I’m sure that we’ll have things to learn ourselves.

Peter: Interesting. I look forward to this.

Jonathan: Cool, all right.

Peter: You ready?

Jonathan: I’m ready.

Peter: We’re dialing in.

Jonathan: Cameron, can you just maybe introduce us to yourself? Tell us your name, where you’re from, and what you do?

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. My name is Cameron Reilly. I am the principle consultant and director of a marketing consulting firm, Motherlode. I’m also a podcaster. I’ve been podcasting for eleven years, one of the world’s first podcasters. I live in Brisbane, Australia.

Peter: That’s great.

Jonathan: Awesome. Welcome.

Peter: That explains the accent.

Jonathan: That explains, definitely, the accent.

Peter: All right. If we disagree with anything you say, we’ll also blame it on the Australia thing, right?

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Listen, I’m married to an American, so …

Peter: All right.

Jonathan: So you’re used to it.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, I’m used to her saying, “I didn’t understand anything you just said, so I’ll just assume I’m right.”

Jonathan: It’s convenient. It helps.

Cameron Reilly: It’s the basis of America’s foreign policy too, I think. “We don’t understand your accent, so we’re just going to assume that we’re in the right, here.”

Peter: All right, we’ll keep that in the final cut.

Jonathan: Yeah, definitely. Cameron, thanks for joining us. We wanted to give you a chance to tell us about your experience with our LivePlan ad on YouTube. Maybe walk us through it, can you remember the first time you saw the ad?

Cameron Reilly: I can’t, because after the first two hundred thousand times, I think I had some sort of neural dysfunction. This is going back a couple of months, but all I remember is that I saw your ad, and it’s a nice enough animated ad. I think I paid a slight bit of attention to it, because I am in a business where I’m often writing marketing plans and occasionally helping clients write business plans. I think I just bought some marketing plan software, which is probably why your ad targeted me, attached to me like a sucker fish. In the back of my head, I think when the first time I saw it, I thought, “Oh, well. I hadn’t heard about it before, and I might need it in the future. Good to know.” Targeting kind of works, I’m the right kind of guy for your package.

Jonathan: Okay, that’s good to know.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, but then I started to see it before every video. Maybe I’m exaggerating, because I wasn’t really keeping score, but it seemed like I saw it at the beginning of every video for a period of a couple of weeks. I watch a lot of YouTube videos. When a video is four minutes long and there’s a LivePlan ad for thirty seconds or something in the beginning of every one, very quickly, it started to annoy the hell out of me. I did what I do when people annoy me. I jumped on Twitter and said, “Stop annoying me or I’ll hunt you down,” I think is what I said on Twitter.

Jonathan: Those words were right. Yeah, “I’ll hunt you down.”

Cameron Reilly: To your credit, you guys replied back and helped me sort it out.

Jonathan: When you do send those tweets, are you hoping that somebody will respond? Are you using it just as a way to vent and express your frustration out into the ether? What would you expect from that?

Cameron Reilly: For a twenty-first century business, yeah, I do expect people to be listening and to respond. That happens more often than not, these days. Even with older cultured businesses in Australia, businesses that are very big, that have an oligarchy and dominate, they will respond, but usually but not do anything about it. Usually pay some sort of benign lip service. “Oh, we’re so sorry that you experienced X. Please call us on this number and we’ll try and do something about it.” Which, if I wanted to call you, I would have called you in the first place. If I’m talking to somebody from the company on Twitter, I expect you to be the customer service rep and to get it done and fix it, or at least tell me how to fix it on my end. I don’t want to be bumped through to somebody else. It should be one-touch customer service, I think, on Twitter and Facebook.

Nevertheless, and I think I’ve said this on Twitter and Facebook since then, it’s amazing what good customer service can do. This is something that, as a marketing guy, I talk to my clients about all the time and have been talking to them about this kind of stuff since the dawn of the social web. I don’t get it much from clients anymore these days, but if I go back six, seven years ago, when Facebook and Twitter were starting to become more popular, there was a lot of businesses that were concerned. “Oh, what happens if we have a presence on these things and somebody says something bad about us? What will we do?” I used to say to them all the time then, “You know what? That’s probably the best thing that can happen to you.” They would be like, “What? What? Why?”

I’d have to explain, well, for a start, if it doesn’t happen in public, it may not happen at all. You have unhappy customers that are just privately unhappy with you, and you never get to find out about it. It’s good if they give you that feedback. Also, if you engage them well, and the culture of the organization is mature enough that you accept the fact that from time to time you’re going to have unhappy customers, and your culture is mature enough that you are ready to acknowledge that and step up and do something about it to the best of your ability, of course you can’t always fix every problem, but you have the intention of “We want to try and make this right.” Then there’s almost no better form of marketing than to be able to do that in public.

I think it’s an absolute boon for businesses to have people complain in public, and then to step up and try and solve it in public, because you’re demonstrating in public, “Hey, this is the kind of company that we are. This is the kind of culture that we have.” I think that’s a terrific thing. Not only did you turn me around from literally wanting to hunt you down with Scud missiles to going, “All right, they’re a good bunch of guys, and girls probably. Okay, fair enough.”

John Procopio: This is John. Yeah, and as a business, we generally don’t look at oversaturating the market. The fun thing about our business is that people are in this specific part of their business cycle, and they’re looking to get this plan done, and so often people are going right to Google and typing in the keywords that they need help with. That’s the majority of the way we spend our ad spend. With YouTube, actually, we’re really only targeting people who have come through our site before, and really allow the data to tell us what the sweet spot is as far as how many impressions we should show. The target we were at, actually, when you were experiencing the ads, was three per day, but it sounds like there was a little bug in the machine, and you were actually seeing more than that.

Jonathan: Does that sound about right?

Cameron Reilly: Maybe I was only seeing three per day, but if I was watching three a day and it was your ad on every one of them, every day, I think that’s still going to annoy the hell out of me. I’ll tell you who else does a really bad job of this is Hulu.

Jonathan: Yeah, and it feels like a special kind of torture, because they make you pick which ad campaign you’re going to get. You’re like, “Okay, I know I’m pretty much signing up to watch eleven Hyundai ads. That’s awesome.”

Cameron Reilly: “Which kind of torture do you want, the water boarding or something stuck under your fingernails?” Again this is a big problem in marketing and advertising, generally. It’s just poorly thought through and poorly executed. The counter response is that people are getting better and better, as I said before, not only at fielding, but we’re building systems to hide your ads. I think the marketing industry, and advertising industry in general is doing a very, very poor job of fixing the culture of our industry and to build marketing campaigns and ads that are actually going to make people feel good about the brand rather than, “Oh my god, do I have to watch this again?”

Peter: A small business, even like ours, can be out there doing what seems like professional marketing with a good message, with a non-offensive ad, and overreach in some direction, unbeknownst to the small business owner themselves, and really aggravate that end user, that consumer, the person who they want to make their customer. I think there’s a lot of great lessons here. This isn’t just about YouTube. Apply this metaphor to everything that you’re doing out there, magazine ads, showing up at trade shows, everything, and just make sure to think about it. This is one of those great stories that I don’t think you’ll often get to hear.

John Procopio: Yeah, and the other point I think is hidden in this is always be testing. We look at numbers constantly, and we actually got Cameron’s feedback and we had a big discussion about it. We actually did dial back the ads, and we did some testing. We pulled it back to one per day and conversions went down by about the percentage, from three to one, about fifty to sixty percent. Right now, we’re in between one and three. We’re always testing these things and taking feedback to the nth degree.

Jonathan: Yeah, and it’s important to get feedback from people. Cameron, you talked about it, just when you hear back from somebody if it’s negative feedback, that’s not something to be afraid of. We could have just apologized to you and tried to fix it, and then left it there, but I think we’ve been able to benefit from having a longer conversation with you and hearing where you’re coming from and what your perspective is.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, look, and I want to congratulate you guys, seriously, for the way that you’ve dealt with the whole thing. It is impressive, even though it happens more often these days than it would have five or ten years ago, it’s always still impressive when you come across a business that has the maturity to say, “Oh, we screwed up. Great, come and tell us more about it, because we really want to learn.”

Jonathan: Cameron, before we let you go, I just wanted to ask for our listeners, if they wanted to find more of your work online, where can they go?

Cameron Reilly: The marketing business is Motherlode, L-O-D-E, .com.au. We do have clients all around the world, so if you’re looking, it doesn’t matter where you are, we can have a chat over Skype and help you out. If you want to listen to some funny history podcasts, I do Life Of Caesar, the linear story of Julius Caesar, but it’s not your usual history podcast. There’s a lot of bad jokes, a lot of swearing, a lot of contemporary politics and religion discussion and tying it back into ancient Rome, and quite a lot of cheesy seventies rock songs in there. That’s kind of a big deal. It’s a top one hundred podcast in US, Australia, UK and Canada, give or take, most days. Also, the life of Alexander the Great. I think the URL for that is AlexandertheGreat.live. Similar thing, but obviously on Alexander of Macedon. Give those a plug. I also have the Napoleon Bonaparte podcast …

Jonathan: No kidding?

Cameron Reilly: … That I did for several years [inaudible 00:21:11]. Considering that this week was the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, people should go and listen to all sixty episodes of that so you understand who Napoleon Bonaparte was and the important role he played in European history.

Jonathan: Yeah, it looks like people have a lot of listening to do.

Peter: Yeah, great.

Jonathan: Well, I think we’ve got what we need for the show, so thank you for joining us, Cameron.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, great. Thanks, guys.

Peter: Thank you.

Cameron Reilly: I had a great time.

Peter: Thanks for joining us.

Cameron Reilly: Cheers.

Peter: What can a small business take away from this? All small businesses need to get customers in the door, need to get clients, need to get people to engage with them. How does a small business start to think about advertising if they’ve never done it before? If you have been advertising for a long time, maybe in certain areas but not others, how do you start to rethink the work that you’re doing to reach those new customers, to engage with people that maybe would be interested in your product if only they knew about it?

Jonathan: One question that I have is, John, how many impressions do we get with our YouTube ads?

John Procopio: Again, it’s a small portion of our overall business. Maybe about a hundred thousand a week.

Jonathan: Okay, so one person having a problem with it, what does that tell you? Does it tell you that if one’s got a problem, does it mean that there’s a lot more that probably do too? How do you take that input?

John Procopio: Yeah. There’s rules of thumbs on those types of things. Even just the ratio of people that actually call customer support to report an issue is a similar way of thinking. I think with YouTube it’s interesting because it’s a very intimate platform, as opposed to banner ads where people, to Cameron’s point, are so acute at ignoring.

Jonathan: Yeah. Just something else to think about too is, from the social media aspect, not being afraid of people reaching out to you and saying something negative. Engage with it. Find out what the problem is. We actually have, on Bplans, a social media decision tree, or a response tree. You can analyze the social media post and decide how you should engage with it. Some, you legitimately just shouldn’t engage. You ignore, you let it go, and it’s fine to leave it sit, and it’s probably not going to come back to you. Just being proactive with it, figuring out how you should respond, and taking the appropriate steps.

John Procopio: I’m always amazed when I do a search and I find, whether it’s on social media or some even on a blog post, where there’s articles from the company that responded. Remember that these things live on forever.

Jonathan: Right.

John Procopio: It’s not just the here and now. Think about the long-term brand potential benefits, if you’re perceived as coming to the rescue and doing the right thing, that that’s going to have for your business long-term.

Peter: If we had to think about ways to make sure that any business won’t make Cameron angry at them, what would be your tip of the day, John?

John Procopio: Be thoughtful. Make sure you’re targeting the right audience. In this case, Cameron was probably not the perfect audience. That’s fine, that’s going to happen. Really work with partners that have similar audiences to yours, I think is a lesson. The closer you can align yourself, who’s already kind of gone through some of these, and maybe come up with cross promotional efforts, you can kind of get your feet wet in advertising without actually having to outlay a lot of costs. There’s also community events and stuff like that. You can kind of test the waters with some of these things before really going all in.

Jonathan: Okay, that’s great.

Peter: Jonathan, what do you recommend people do to not make Cameron angry at them?

Jonathan: To be honest, I don’t know if you’re ever going to be completely safe from not making Cameron angry. I think if you’re in the business long enough, if you want some longevity for your business, chances are, somewhere along the way, either you’re going to make a legitimate mistake or somebody’s going to perceive that you’ve made a mistake and tell you about it. What you do, is you have an appropriate response. You talk to Cameron. You have the conversation, and you figure out if there’s something that you need to change about what you’re doing or if you just take that input and learn how you should do your next advertising campaign.

Peter: That’s awesome. People out there, if you’ve ever run into a Cameron …

John Procopio: Embrace him.

Peter: … Embrace him. If you’ve got stories to share, tweet with us, hashtag with us, send us some hashtags over Facebooks.

Jonathan: Yeah, you could send us …

Peter: How do you do that?

Jonathan: … You could send us your story by email, Bcast@Bplans.com, or you can send a tweet to us @Bplans. You could use the hashtag Bcast if you want, and we’d still pick that up. Yeah, we’d love to hear your stories of maybe a time that you worked with a customer to figure out something that went wrong, or maybe what you would have done differently in our situation.

If you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, send us an email at Bcast@Bplans.com or send us a tweet @Bplans.

The Bcast is brought to you by Palo Alto Software, makers of Bplans.com and LivePlan.

Are You Wasting Your Marketing Budget?

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No matter what size your company is, your marketing budget is likely never as high as you would like it to be. It’s a precious commodity; your investment into your own company stock. You need it to perform. You need it to help grow your company.

The question is, are you using it effectively? Do you even know if it’s working? In other words, are you needlessly wasting your marketing dollars?

Hear more about market research with Peter and Jonathan on the twelfth episode of The Bcast, Bplan’s official podcast:
Click here to subscribe to The Bcast on iTunes »

Earlier this year, Adobe took a closer look at how well companies were doing in measuring the effectiveness of their marketing. It probably comes as no surprise that most of us aren’t doing a great job. Here are couple of staggering statistics Adobe shared:

  • Only 8 percent of companies say they can determine ROI from their social media.
  • 21 percent of companies consider themselves effective at measuring mobile ROI.
  • 40 percent of marketing departments think their companies’ marketing is ineffective.
  • 50 percent of B2B companies find it difficult to attribute marketing activity directly to revenue results.

Do you feel the same way? If so, here are some suggestions to help you not only better track the effectiveness of those marketing dollars, but also make a positive impact to your bottom line.

Create a marketing scorecard

One of my favorite adages is, “it’s hard to know if you’ve won the game if you don’t keep score.” Creating a scorecard can be as easy as creating your own Excel spreadsheet, or as elaborate as using marketing dashboards provided through your CRM or conversion software.

Here are is the type of data that you should be tracking:

  • General Google Analytics statistics—like unique visitors, time on the site, bounce rate, and source
  • Ecommerce statistics—money generated by source, by campaign, by ad, and so on
  • Online goal statistics—email submissions and downloads by source, by campaign, by ad
  • Phone tracking software, to track people who are viewing your site from their smartphones—by source, by campaign, by ad
  • Phone tracking without software—keeping track of queries, and asking not only if they came from your website, but what did they search, did they use Google or Bing? Do they recall if it was an ad or an organic listing?
  • Social media—number of followers, number you’re following, number of visits to the site from social media
  • Referrals—record the name of the referral not just the word “referral”
  • Offline marketing initiatives—if sending to the website, try to use an original url so you can track responsiveness better; if phoning, then see phone tracking above
  • Newsletter and other subscribers (like eBook downloads, for example)
  • Summarize—number of leads (subscribers), number of inquiries, number moved into nurturing stages (proposals, follow up campaigns), new sales and repeat sales (if tied to marketing and if not, these shouldn’t be included in your marketing ROI except to help you determine the long term value of the client)

This may seem like a lot, but if you invest in setting up your Google analytics properly to track eCommerce conversion, or goals like forms and phone tracking, a lot of the online numbers will be looked after for you.

Set time in your calendar (or an assistant’s, if you have one) to add these in monthly to your scorecard and review the results. Seeing the numbers month to month helps you to make changes more quickly and see where the increases are happening.

Determine how much you are willing to spend

So you have all these great numbers. Now what?

As with any budget, they only work if you have set the guidelines. Here are some goals you should be looking to set.

  • Lifetime value of a client. If your business works on long term or repeat customers, marketing should be based on the long term value of the client and not just the first sale.
  • Some people prefer to track Gross Revenue, instead of (or along with) the lifetime value of the client. Others track Net Revenue (less Cost of Goods sold) or work off Net Income (less expenses).
  • Acquisition Cost of a New Customer. This is the key number that is often overlooked. How much are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer? Some people will spend the entire amount of the first sale because the lifetime value of the customer is very high. Others will use a percentage of the first sale. There is no right or wrong answer here—you can certainly look at your historic information or industry averages to help you decide. But you need to answer this question. It not only helps with measuring ROI, but it is extremely helpful in determining a basic marketing budget (number of new customers in a year times acquisition cost).
  • Cost Per Lead. This is important because it helps to compare the costs of each marketing campaign you are running and whether any of them are getting out of hand. This allows you to make revisions quicker before a marketing initiative has a huge impact on your bottom line in a negative way. Typically, this number is determined by taking your acquisition cost of a new customer and dividing it by the average inquiries it takes to close a sale. For example if acquisition cost for a customer is $100, but you believe it takes three leads to close a sale, cost per lead could be set between $30-$35.
  • Marketing costs. You will need to determine what you are going to include in your marketing costs. Some people only track actual costs of the campaign. Others include longer term investments like website development or graphic design. Still others include staff time or their own time. Make sure your accounting system is set up to track what you want to include in this expense category. Your accountant may be able to help you determine what you should include.

Measure your ROI

When measuring your return on investment, either measure monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually; depending on the level of marketing activities and sales for your company, you need to have an in-depth look at what is and isn’t producing results.

Here are some suggestions as to what you should be looking at: 

Your marketing scorecard:

  • Are you seeing overall increases as well as specific increases from one area?
  • Are you seeing any anomalies (something has either increased or decreased by a large amount, in which case you’ll want to dig into these)?
  • Are you seeing some progress in soft metrics (by these, I mean activities that could have potential down the road—social media followers, visitors to the site, eBook downloads, email subscribers)?

Leads:

  • Are you seeing an increase in leads?
  • Where are they coming from?
  • Is the cost per lead on track?
  • Are the leads converting?
  • If leads are converting, which campaign(s) are converting the best?
  • How many leads is it taking to convert to a sale?
  • If different than what you expected, can you work out the new cost per lead?

Sales:

  • Are you seeing an increase in sales?
  • Where are they coming from?
  • Is your acquisition cost on track?
  • Which campaign(s) have been contributing the most in terms of sales?

Marketing costs:

  • Are these on track?
  • Have you spent more or less than expected in any area?
  • Where do you want to make changes based on the previous period’s performance?

Does this seem overwhelming? That’s because it is, to some degree.

Of course, for smaller companies, it’s easier to answer these questions than it is for larger companies. However, if you want to be as effective as you can be with that precious marketing budget, then it’s all worth it. The results might even surprise you!

Do you track your return on investment for marketing campaigns? If so, what have you learned from tracking your marketing metrics?

Tired of Bland, Boring Facebook Ads? How to Create an Engaging Facebook Ad Campaign

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Facebook tends to be a very challenging platform for marketers. Think about how competitive the Facebook News Feed is: You’re not only competing against other ads for the user’s attention, you’re also competing against the user’s friends and family.

Essentially, for your ads to be effective, users have to find them as interesting as the things posted by their own loved ones. Obviously that’s no small feat, so to successfully advertise on Facebook, you’re going to have to get creative.

The 20 percent rule

Facebook has a rule that the overlaid text on News Feed ads can’t take up more than 20 percent of the image. If you want to use a quote or a special deal to market your product, most of the words will have to go into the text box above the image. Reserve the image portion of the ad for an intriguing photo and some minimal, eye-catching text. For example, the overlaid text might say “Click for more info” or “Save 50 percent,” but you can’t use it to explain your product in any detail.

You’re better off keeping product descriptions and details onsite for search engine optimization. Facebook ads aren’t like TV commercials where you have the time to win over customers by conveying all the details of your product.

They’re more like highway billboards—users are scrolling past at 55 miles per hour, and the purpose of your ad is to grab their attention so they get off on your exit.

Get personal and grab their attention

Facebook_ADFacebook ads generally perform best when you incorporate a specific call to action with a touch of humor or controversy.

For example, imagine you’re trying to sell shoes targeted at young women. So, for example, your ad’s image could be a crossed-out pair of bright rubber clown shoes next to the shoes you’re trying to sell.

The status box of the ad could say, “FACT: Up to 99 percent of women have ruined an outfit by wearing totally ugly shoes. Check out our selection and be part of the other one percent.”

In flashy letters, the image could be overlaid with the text, “Click here to help end the ugly shoe epidemic.”

The above example accomplishes a few things. Bright rubber clown shoes are unusual and eye-catching enough that many users would stop scrolling to see what the ad is about. After glancing at the clown shoes their eyes would be naturally drawn to the real product.

The text makes a humorously critical statement that the audience can relate to: They’ve probably seen plenty of their peers (not to mention strangers and celebrities) wearing shoes that they thought were ugly.

It uses topical political terms that most young internet users are familiar with (“the 99 percent” versus “the one percent”), and it comically exaggerates the issue of wearing ugly shoes as if it were a national crisis. Users would be compelled to click the ad because they’ve been humored, plus they’d want to be part of the “cause” that the ad is advocating.

In more general terms, your ad has to be unique and eye-catching enough to truly stand out in Facebook’s News Feed. Internet users are bombarded with ads on practically every page they visit, so they’ve been conditioned to filter standard product placements out of their attention.

The text portion of your ad has to give users something they can relate to, rather than simply stating facts like pricing or product specifications. The call to action has to compel them to react on a personal level.

Inspire discussion and engagement

EngageIn addition to generating conversions, compelling ads that inspire an emotional response in your users will also spark discussions. If you make users feel something on a personal level, they’ll be much more likely to engage in your sponsored posts.

They’ll write their feelings in the comments, they’ll tag their friends, and they’ll share the post on their own timelines. Every time they interact with your post, their friends will see the interactions in their activity feeds, and your ad will be projected to a much larger audience.

Famous quotes work well for that reason. Incorporate a well-known quote that represents your brand and users will be much more likely to tag their friends in order to share the quote with them.

Another method is to incorporate topical references to pop culture. To continue with the shoe store example above, you might post a picture of Beyoncé from a recent red carpet event with the caption, “We think Beyoncé’s dress would go better with our heels. Share if you agree.” Even users who don’t agree will be compelled to express their disagreement in the comments, and they’ll be inadvertently promoting your ad in the process.

It definitely takes a bit of trial and error to figure out the best way to engage your brand’s unique audience on Facebook. However, you can’t simply rely on bland advertisements and product placements if you want your business to go viral. You have to figure out how your customers think, and use that knowledge to get your ads inside their heads.

What has your experience been with Facebook ads? 

How to Keep Discounts from Killing Your Business [Part 1]

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Offering sales and discounts is a great way to bring in extra business and promote loyalty from your customers. But, have you thought about some of the legal issues that might arise if you put on a sale or provide coupons or vouchers to your customers?

What about if you want to send your customers a newsletter in the mail with a coupon that they can cut out, or an email newsletter alerting them to a bargain opportunity?

There are a number of laws around the world that you must always make sure you comply with whenever you are contacting your customers, particularly advertising laws, privacy laws, and anti-spam laws. These topics will be covered in three articles; this article is Part I, which will cover advertising your products. Part II will cover privacy laws, and Part III will cover anti-spam legislation and marketing.

First, let’s look at all types of advertising and sale offers to your customers, and the advertising laws that you need to comply with.

Advertising your products

Some common ways of advertising discounts are:

  • Advertising sales in store
  • Offering coupons to customers or distributing coupons in your local area
  • Emailing and posting newsletters or sales flyers
  • Radio and TV advertising
  • Internet advertising

I will be focusing on advertising in-store, coupons, newsletters, and sales flyers.

Advertising in store is one of the most common ways of alerting your customers to a sale, by displaying large signs reading something like “20% off all merino tees!” or “Buy one get one free!”

Here’s an example of the types of signs I mean:

Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 3.42.56 PM

Signs in-store alert your customers that a sale is going on.

Offering coupons is also common, and they may be printed on the back of receipts (at your store or at a partner store), sent to customers, or printed and left on tables in public areas near your store. Here’s an image of what receipt coupons typically look like:

Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 1.45.33 PM

Supermarket receipt coupons via Media Life Magazine

Finally, emailing and posting newsletters or sales flyers is becoming an increasingly common advertising method, particularly if you run both an offline and online business.

Emailing and posting will be covered in Part III of this article.

What kind of laws apply here?

No matter which method of advertising you are using, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that you are not misleading any of your customers, or inadvertently using false advertising tactics. An obvious example is that you can’t release a coupon that says “30% off anything in store” that actually only applies to specific items.

A commonly used sales tactic is to mark prices up, and then mark them down again to original price and say that the items are “on sale.” Class action lawsuits are currently pending against Kohl’s and J.C. Penney, accused of deceiving customers by selling products at regular prices but calling it a “sale.”

The Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing notes this type of pricing as “deceptive.” The guide states:

“Where the former price is genuine, the bargain being advertised is a true one. If, on the other hand, the former price being advertised is not bona fide but fictitious—for example, where an artificial, inflated price was established for the purpose of enabling the subsequent offer of a large reduction—the ‘bargain’ being advertised is a false one; the purchaser is not receiving the unusual value he expects.”

Comparative advertising

Comparative advertising is a another common way to advertise products, such as “We have the best towels on the market!”

However, despite this practice being widespread, there are some legal pitfalls you need to be careful of, and you need to make sure not to deceive your customers with this type of advertising.

The two main types of comparative advertising that are generally viewed by the law as deceptive are incomplete comparison and inconsistent comparison.

Incomplete comparison is when the advertiser uses the term “better” or “best,” without listing the ways in which their product is being compared with others (such as quality, price, resilience). For example, an advertisement that claims “Our medicine is better at curing colds” could mean “better” than not taking any medicine at all, rather than better than competitors as many consumers may assume.

Inconsistent comparison is where a product is compared with many others, but only compared in the categories where that product wins. For example, “Our Nut Bar X is more convenient than Nut Bar A, cheaper than Nut Bar B, and healthier than Nut Bar C!”

But, what the consumer doesn’t know is that Nut Bar A is the least convenient of all the brands (so of course Nut Bar X is more convenient), or that Nut Bar B is the most expensive (so of course Nut Bar X is cheaper), and Nut Bar C is the least healthy. But overall, the best choice for the consumer may be the more expensive but very healthy and convenient Nut Bar B, while Nut Bar X is just “average” in all qualities. The advertisement makes it seem like Nut Bar X is the best, when it is actually just better than the worst Nut Bar in each category.

This is what I mean by comparative advertising:

Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 1.46.04 PM

Image via Verizon

While this advertisement was able to be published in the U.S., it could be considered potentially deceptive under legislation in other countries. This is because it only compares Verizon to AT&T in one category (3G coverage), and does not compare the two providers in all categories, such as price, 3G coverage, available plans, customer service, or ratings. AT&T may be the better option for a consumer when looking at the whole picture, not just coverage.

So what can I do to comply?

These deceptive advertising practices are known as false advertising, and are illegal in most countries. If you don’t check the wording of your advertisements carefully, it may leave you open to fines from regulatory bodies (such as the FTC in the U.S. or the Advertising Standards Authority and the Institute of Sales Promotion in the U.K.) or class actions from consumers.

Make sure that your advertisements always display a fair and accurate price, don’t use deceptive sales tactics, and ensure that you check over the wording of all comparative advertisements carefully. Ensure that someone outside of your marketing team looks at your advertisements (for an independent point of view), or if you are working alone, ask a friend or business partner to cast their eye over things for potentially misleading terms.

With the above tips on advertising, you should be able to ensure that you comply with all laws when you are sharing your deals and products with your customers.

Always make sure that you don’t unintentionally mislead your customers in any way or use deceptive advertising practices, and always have an independent person check over your proposed adverts just in case.

Now that you’re aware of some of the main advertising pitfalls to look out for, the next installments in this series will look at some of the legal issues that arise when you send coupons, advertisements, or sale notifications to customers by mail or email.

Part II of this article will cover privacy issues when you collect customer information. Then, Part III will look at marketing (by email and post) as well as applicable anti-spam legislation.

How do you avoid accidentally misleading customers with your advertising? Do you always make sure you have someone look over your advertisements? 

How to Keep Discounts from Killing Your Business [Part 2]

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Now that we’ve looked at advertising in Part 1, it’s time to consider the situations in which you may be directly contacting your customers to advertise or market your products, and collecting their information to do so.

Collecting customer information will be done in different ways online and offline, and has a number of different legal and privacy issues tied up in it that you need to consider. Let’s take a look.

Privacy issues when collecting customer information

Most countries around the world have some kind of privacy legislation in place that governs how you should collect personal information, store it, and protect it. These laws also usually set out what you need to tell your customers when you are collecting their information, such as the fact that you are collecting information, what you are collecting, and what you will do with that information.

Let’s examine a couple of pieces of legislation, from the U.S. and from the U.K.

So, what is the law?

The U.S. doesn’t have an overarching privacy law like many other countries, but they do have specific privacy legislation that applies to areas such as health information privacy (HIPAA) and protecting the private information of children (COPPA).

However, another piece of legislation, the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003, requires that your privacy policy on your website must outline:

  • The types of data gathered,
  • How the data may be shared with other parties,
  • The process your customer can follow to review and make changes to the data you have on them, and
  • The policy’s effective date and a description of any changes since then.

If you run an online store and are based in the U.S., it is highly likely that you have Californian customers over the internet, so it pays to comply with the Californian state law. If you have international users, you may also need to comply with E.U. and U.K. law, as well as the laws in other countries where you anticipate you may have customers.

The U.K. follows what is called the EU Data Protection Directive 1995, which sets out seven principles of data collection:

  • Notice: Users should be given notice when their data is being collected
  • Purpose: Data should only be used for what you say you will use it for
  • Consent: User data should not be shared without your users’ consent
  • Security: Collected data should be kept secure
  • Disclosure: Users should be informed about who is collecting their data
  • Access: Users should be allowed to access their data and make corrections to any inaccurate data
  • Accountability: Users should have a method available to them to hold data collectors accountable for not following the above principles

Now, let’s look at how to comply with these laws in practice, both offline and online.

Offline data collection

In store, one of the main ways in which you might collect data is by asking your customers to sign up for a membership club or loyalty program.

Some of the information you might usually collect through a loyalty program could be customer name, mailing address, email address, cellphone number, or even their date of birth. This is all “personal information” for the purposes of most privacy legislation around the world.

To make sure that you comply with the privacy legislation in the U.K., make sure that you have a privacy policy for your business that your customers can access. In the U.S., while there is no privacy legislation that covers this kind of collection, it gives your customers confidence if you have policies in place to protect their personal information.

A privacy policy is a legal statement that explains how customer or user data is collected, used, managed, and disclosed. The privacy policy also explains to the customer how their privacy and personal information will be protected.

Your privacy policy should outline:

  • What information you are collecting;
  • Why you are collecting it;
  • What you will use the information for;
  • How you will keep the information secure;
  • When you might release the information, and to whom;
  • How your customers can amend or correct the information you hold on them; and
  • What dispute resolution procedures are in place if there is a disagreement.

Online data collection

One of the most important legal steps you need to take when you set up a branch of your business online is to include a privacy policy on your website.

Your privacy policy on your website, like your offline policy, needs to contain the types of information listed above. As well as that information, some of the unique types of information that you may collect online (that you wouldn’t collect offline) are:

  • customer’s internet domain;
  • IP address;
  • when your website was accessed;
  • type of browser and operating system used;
  • pages visited; and
  • what site the customer came from.

Web forms will also be collecting user data, and if you use something like Google Analytics, even more data will be gathered behind the scenes.

You need to make sure that your privacy policy, whether online or offline, covers every type of information listed above, and is updated whenever anything changes.

Gaining customer agreement to your privacy policy

Both online and offline there are two ways of gaining agreement to your privacy policy: express agreement and implied agreement. Online, these are known as clickwrap (express agreement) and browsewrap (implied agreement).

Implied agreement in a physical store is gained by displaying your policies in prominent places, such as on the counter or on the door of your shop. This is usually sufficient for a legal agreement to be made between you and your customers, as long as you make sure that the policies are displayed in places where they will be brought to your customers’ attention and they will have plenty of opportunities to read them.

Express agreement is a stronger method of agreement, as it would be where your customer has explicitly signed or ticked a box saying “I agree to the privacy policy.” To implement this in practice, ask your customers to fill out a membership or loyalty form when they sign up with your store, rather than just taking their information. On the form you can ask them to tick a box or sign to say that they agree to your privacy policy.

Online, a browsewrap (implied agreement) method is commonly used by most websites. You have probably seen many websites displaying small links at the bottom of their pages to their Terms and their Privacy Policy. Here’s a visual example of what I mean:

Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 11.33.37 AM

You can see in the Art.com footer that Privacy Policy and Terms of Use are in small writing that is very difficult to see.

Unlike the implied agreement in your physical store, browsewrap methods like this are usually not enough online.

For a browsewrap method to be legally binding online, you need to display your policies prominently and frequently, which means that you can’t just put small links down the bottom. For this method to be effective, you could put the link at the top of the page and highlight it in bold, or with red text to draw your customer’s attention to it. It should also be displayed on every page that the customer visits.

For greater legal protection online, make sure that you use a clickwrap method. A clickwrap method is where you use a tick box (at the end of a web form or when the customer makes a user account), or have a statement above any user account Submit button saying “By clicking Submit you agree to our Privacy Policy and store Terms and Conditions.”

Here’s an example from YouTube of what I mean by using a tick box:

Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 11.33.59 AM

Here’s another example where you can see the clickwrap method is being used with a submit button:

Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 11.35.00 AM

Conclusion

In Part 1, we looked at advertising and how to ensure that you don’t inadvertently mislead your customers. Now, we’ve covered how to get their consent for gathering their information, and how to make sure that you comply with privacy laws and get agreement to your privacy policy.

At TermsFeed, we’ve set up free PDF templates that you can use to get started with a privacy policy agreement if you need to.

Next, Part 3 of this article looks at contacting your customers by email or post.

Does your website use the browsewrap or the clickwrap method? 


The Anatomy of a Promotion: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Successful Company Literature

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I’ll never forget my first client, shouting at me in frustration, “C’mon! It shouldn’t be this hard to make a decent advert! Anyone can do it!”

Twenty years down the line and hundreds of marketing promotions later, I’m no longer frustrating people so much because I’ve learned to take apart the meat and bones of promotions to better understand how to produce effective ads and literature.

But can anyone do it? I’m not sure I agree with my old client on that one, but there are certainly some message and design commonalities that can be taken apart and looked at in order to build successful marketing collateral.

Whether you’re a rookie designer or a client looking for some sound design and copy advice, this guide can help you understand the anatomy of your promotions and how each one should be built within tried-and-tested parameters.

1. The heart of a promotion: The headline

Giving life to your promotion

Your headline is a critical part of your promotion. It is the heartbeat that gives it life and meaning.

A headline can be as obvious as the word “sale” or simply your product name. It is all about context. Why make it complicated on the cover of a brochure or sell sheet? But then again, why make it super-generic on the headline of a magazine ad that you want to get noticed?

Be effective rather than clever

A headline can be funny, clever, inspirational, seductive, and so on. But what it can’t be is unrelated to your product and business message. There’s an awful habit that many businesses fall into of trying to lever in puns or well-known phrases—a belief born from reading too many tabloid papers.

If you’re able to use clever wordplay to get your point across then that’s great. But trying to “be clever” should never be your motivation for writing a headline.

Don’t use humor for the sake of it (and avoid the dreaded “pun”)

Here is a comparison of actual headlines for similar products with very different treatments:

“Regardless of the right to bear arms, we in no way condone the right to bear feet.”

In my opinion, this headline for Kenneth Cole shoes (above) leaves the viewer wondering: What’s being sold here? What point is being made? How can this information be acted upon?

In view of the fact that this ad was also trying to somewhat make a social statement, it just seems like the wrong place for a “pun” and the whole thing results in a confusing statement with forced humor.

“Metro Shoes back-to-school sale—happy feet make happy people!”

At first glance, this headline (above) could be viewed as fairly unremarkable. However, this headline for Metro Shoes is doing its job because it’s clearly defining a message and a purpose for this piece of promotional literature.

A headline should tell the viewer:

  • Who you are
  • What you’re selling
  • What problem you’re solving

Headline examples

Here are just a few examples of headline strategies that you can adopt for your own business.

  • Scare the viewer: “A little mistake that cost the farmer $3,000 a year!”
  • Ease the viewer: “Good mornings follow a good Nytol.”
  • Impel the viewer: “Nothing hurts more than sitting on a couch.”
  • Intrigue the viewer: “How does the man who drives the snowplow drive to the snowplow?”
  • Inspire the viewer: “Don’t dream of winning. Train for it.”
  • Humor the viewer: “An English ale so authentic it’ll make your teeth crooked.”

2. The brain of a promotion: The copy

Be smart about writing your body copy. Whether you’re writing a paragraph for an ad or an entire brochure, the body copy should reflect your business’s brain and voice. Don’t just cut and paste a copy style; know who you are and who you’re talking to.

If you’re advertising a tech business, you need to sound informed and intelligent; however, if you own an events business, sounding “techy” rather than fun and upbeat is clearly the wrong approach.

Have a plan for your copy

  • Think before you write: consider what you have to offer and write down the features—and more importantly, the benefits of your products and services
  • Know your audience: be clear about who you’re talking to and adopt the voice of your copy accordingly
  •  Use simple words when you can: be natural but intelligent, and avoid marketing lingo
  • Never write passively: don’t say “we try to provide the best service” when you can say “we provide the best service”
  • Tell a story:
    • Introduce yourself
    • Tell people what you’re offering—not just on the surface, but what you really offer as a result of your product or service
    • Tell people why you’re offering it
  • Give people a firm conclusion: offer a takeaway from your story

Take action from the start

Describe the benefits customers get from your business as soon as possible. The benefit is really what customers are after; is it cheaper, is it faster, is it newer, will it make my hair grow back?

Split your copy into subheadings

Don’t write in long paragraphs. Make your paragraphs short and sweet and make sure each paragraph has a subheading to help organize your copy into an easy-to-follow story.

When people read your promotion, the subheadings should give a great summary of what you’re offering without the need to read each paragraph.

Bullets and other tricks are your friends

Don’t be afraid of bullets or itemized info. Summarized lists of features and highlights are a quick and effective way of drawing attention to major benefits while giving the viewer easily digestible information.

If you can put a complex piece of info in a simple data graph or graphic, then do so. A picture can say more in one second than an entire paragraph or even page of copy.

Include a call-to-action (CTA)

Don’t ever forget what you want people to do with the promotion you’re offering. Getting customers to do what you want is a bit like herding cats!

People have short attention spans and getting them to see your phone number, redeem your coupon, link to your web address, or visit your store is far more important than getting them to read any of your body copy.

Make your call-to-action easily seen and build in motivation as to why the reader should take that action. The following CTAs are just a few examples of commonly used CTA verbiage:

  • Call now at
  • Join the party at
  • Discover the secret at
  • See how we did it
  • Make a difference at
  • Go to our website
  • Sign up for free at
  • Indulge yourself now at
  • Call now to speak to a success expert
  • Like free prizes? Like us on Facebook!
  • Find your own style at

3. The body of a promotion: The design

The design of your promotion is not only what makes it attractive, it’s also what helps the viewer make sense of the information you’re presenting. It’s the meat of your literature that fills out the bare bones of an idea.

Design harmony

It’s imperative that you understand the relationship between words and images. Before you even start your design, consider the following:

  • Never use an image because it looks “nice”—every image you use in an ad, brochure, or other promotion needs to relate to a headline or a piece of information that you’re presenting
  • It’s all in the composition—have a visual plan of where your copy will sit and where the related images will best complement these info points
  • On brochures and other literature in which there are a lot of copy points, consider adding captions underneath each image
  • Use color blocking, different font styles, and other tricks—treat copy as another aspect of your design that needs design attention
  • Make every block of text readable—although it depends on the font and the reader, as a rule, each section of body copy should be at least 10 point in font weight with image captions no less that 7 point

Harmonize your promotion to include both images and copy. Think of your images and copy running down the beach, hand-in-hand together! They are supposed to be a team that works in unison.

Breakdown of company promotion that illustrates how each component is presented clearly to the viewer, with each design element working harmoniously.

Rule of threes

If you’ve never heard of this term, the rule of threes is a great composition guide to consider for every page of literature you produce. It’s a great rule to follow that allows you to design in a way that naturally conforms to the way a viewer sees and follows visual information.

By splitting your page into three vertical or horizontal sections, you can create a layout that has natural structure and eye-flow.

 Various rule of three layouts that include a completed wireframe with a headline, copy, and images laid out within the three block grid pattern.


Various rule of three layouts that include a completed wireframe with a headline, copy, and images laid out within the three block grid pattern.

Every promotion is different, but whether it’s a brochure, sell sheet, flyer, or advertisement, it needs to have a powerful structure and a strong message to effectively support your business.

The Real Reason Your FaceBook Ads Aren’t Working

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Facebook browser open on laptop on deskFacebook boasts over a billion users that spend an average of 40 minutes a day on the platform. Facebook ads allow you to target all of these users—but they only work if done correctly. Are you spending time and money on Facebook ads and not seeing the results you want? You’re not the only one, and there are some common mistakes you can address that will improve your results.

Targeting

This is typically where most Facebook ads fail. You’re not focusing on the right audience, or you’re being too specific or too broad with your current one. You might even be making these costly errors. For example, are you targeting:

All languages

Is your ad copy in English? If so, you want to make sure you’re filtering for English speakers only, so potential viewers actually understand your ad. Facebook’s default is to target all languages. This can be a major money pit, especially if you’re optimizing for impressions—people seeing your ad won’t necessarily understand it!

Broad keywords

Let’s say you sell expensive goods. Your first instinct might be to hone in on people who are interested in other expensive things like Mercedes, Louis Vuitton or high-rise condos.

Here’s the catch: there are plenty of people who like those things, but they might not necessarily be able to afford them or be able to afford your similar products. Try choosing people who have buying behaviors that would fit your ideal customer, as opposed to interests.

National audiences

While this isn’t necessarily the best approach for every campaign, local targeting is often overlooked. With Facebook ads, the more accurate and specific you can be, the more high quality leads you will get. The potential reach of a national audience is enticing, but the quality of an audience that size is often lacking.

If it makes sense for you to go after people who live in your area, do it! It might make sense for you to focus your spend on a national audience if you ship your products or if they’re available digitally. Otherwise, local is the way to go. You might see fewer clicks to your site, but sales and qualified leads will increase.

One attribute

Understand your buyer persona. Where are they hanging out online? What products do they buy when they go to the grocery store? Are they married or single? Facebook Audiences provides that information, which allows you to reach potential customers much more accurately.

Try adjusting to include attributes of the whole person, not just one specific hobby or interest. For example, if you have an art gallery and want to reach people who are interested in art, try the targeting whole person of your ideal buyer. Maybe that means targeting males between the ages of 30-50 who make an income of over $100,000, have above average spending habits, and who are into art.

Leave it at that and don’t get any more specific on the interests (i.e. adding the interests of fine art or competitor’s galleries). This will allow Facebook to cleverly target those users who are similar to your ideal buyer—you’re selling yourself short when you just focus on one piece of the person.

A/B testing

Each of your ads is probably geared toward a different potential audience; instead of guessing and relying on your gut to choose wording or images, try testing a few. This is known as A/B testing, you’re comparing ad A to ad B.

The key to useful A/B testing is making each ad exactly the same except for the one piece you want to test, like the background color. If you change several attributes, you won’t be able to tell which one made the difference when you’re ready to design your next round of ads.

I typically play around with A/B testing when it comes down to the copy or description of the ad. Try out asking questions, creating intrigue, or educating viewers with different ad copy. Facebook will take whichever one is performing the best and start displaying it more. You can then go in your Ads Manager and shut off the other ads and let the best one shine!

Using A/B testing takes the guesswork out of your ad creation. You won’t be wasting time and money on ads that aren’t performing as well as they could be with different copy.

Ad optimization

Facebook has built-in ad optimization tools that you can select from when you’re creating a new campaign. These tools correspond with different marketing objectives. Are you trying to drive people to your website to purchase something? Or maybe you’re trying to garner brand awareness? Currently, Facebook boasts 11 different campaign objectives.

You want to make sure you’re choosing the best objective for your marketing goals. This not only will ensure that you’re reaching the right people, but your ad’s success will be measured by objective-specific metrics.

Below are some of the most common objectives:

Traffic

Choose this consideration if you’re looking to grab people from your Facebook ad and send them to your website. You might be looking to get them to sign up for your email list or even make a purchase. You will be able to track the success of your ads by installing your Facebook Pixel.

Brand awareness

You want people to recognize your brand and associate it with your industry. Facebook will focus on showing your ad to people who are more likely to be interested in it—viewers will see your ad up to two times every five days.

They then measure how many people are likely to remember your brand (after two days have passed) because of the ad; this is known as ad recall and is the metric used to measure success in this type of campaign.

Local awareness

Does your business thrive on in-store interactions? Get potential customers off Facebook and into your store with the local awareness objective. These ads showcase a CTA like “call now” or “get directions.” This objective cuts out your website as the middleman and allows viewers to access your information straight from the ad.

Reach

This objective works nicely when you’re trying to reach as many people as possible with your ad. You might choose this if you’re having an event and want a lot of people to be familiar with it and attend. This objective charges per impression—so you will pay for the number of people that see the ad as opposed to the number of viewers that click on it.

Engagement

This consideration is best used for post engagements (post comments, likes, shares, and clicks), page likes, event responses, or offer claims. If you’re looking to do any of those things, this objective will give you optimal results. Note that Facebook will show your ad to people who are most likely to interact with your ad to increase its engagement.

Boosting ads

Facebook offers boosting as an easily accessible option; however, only use this option if you’re looking to get more likes or comments. If you’re looking for any other outcome, do not boost.

Facebook Ads Manager and Audiences has a plethora of data that you can delve into and use to your advantage to target potential customers. Make sure you’re using your time and money wisely by avoiding the common mistakes above.





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