To Eleven Marketing

Promotion is a powerful short-term marketing tool. Developing a promotional plan requires strategic thinking and creativity. In many instances, marketers begin at the execution stage and randomly consider idea after idea without any thought as to the ends they are trying to achieve. The results can be costly, with a lot of time and effort being spent on developing promotion ideas that are inappropriate to your current market situation and competitive situation. The key is to establish promotion objectives and strategies first and then develop innovative, yet targeted, solutions

The purpose of promotion is to provide added incentive, encouraging the target market to perform some incremental behavior. The incremental behavior results in either increased short-term sales and/or an association with your business or its products. Promotions should be developed from the aspect that achieving the promotion’s objectives are not the end result, but instead are the means to implement marketing strategies to help achieve marketing objectives. What this means is that promotions can serve as a tool that is necessary to achieve your long-term goals.

The most basic method of incorporating promotion into your long-term plan is by using a trial-to-loyalty method of promotions. This is a method where the marketer takes the consumer through successive steps from trial to repeat purchase by using a disciplined long-term promotion plan. With each step the consumer is given less reinforcement or incentive to make a purchase, until finally the consumer makes purchases at full price and becomes a loyal, long-term customer. The primary incentive should be given to new customers with the secondary incentives given to repeat customers—the reason being that it takes a greater incentive to attract a new customer to make the initial purchase. Once the customer has tried the product and experienced the other non-tangible attributes of your business (i.e. level of customer service) each successive purchase should be due to these factors instead of due to a promotion. What you want to be doing during promotions is educating customers as to the quality of products and services you have to offer, and why they should purchase from you as opposed to your competition. It would follow then that preparing your business for any type of promotion is more important than the promotion itself in the long run.

Finally there are a few reminders of what not to do in your promotional planning. Don’t expect promotions to solve long-term sales declines or create customer loyalty, people will make the initial purchase for the sake of the promotion alone. Don’t overuse or develop a dependence on promotions. This could cause an erosion of your image and the value of the products you sell. Don’t run promotions because you did last year, think strategically and look ahead not behind. A promotion should not replace other tools of marketing, use promotion for its inherent strengths; don’t give deals unless you can be sure it is building your business.

I was talking to a local retailer recently about the popularity of social media marketing and what the fuss was all about.  She mentioned some success stories she had read about from businesses promoting themselves on twitter, and having great success, and talking to other small retailers who say they are cutting back on advertising and putting more of their efforts on places like facebook and twitter. My first thought is I feel sad.  It has been an unfortunate site over the years when you see these local retailers go out of business, and this type of marketing strategy will only get them there quicker.  I get what the attraction is – everybody is talking about social media marketing as the next great place to be, and….it is free.  Free and popular, what else would you ask for?  What these small businesses don’t understand though, is that the companies that are really successful in the social media circle are not using it as a replacement for the bread and butter marketing practices that got them where they are today, social media marketing is IN ADDITION TO your regular marketing.  The really good success stories you hear from national businesses was made possible because of the other marketing they have done.  First of all, if a small business signs up on twitter or facebook, they need to get followers (beyond family and friends they tell to sign up), and we mean volume of followers.  Just like any other marketing vehicle, this is a numbers game.  1% response would be great if you can get it – and you would be more likely to get 0.1% than 1%, which means you need 1000 followers to get 1 response.  The reason social media works better for the nation chains is they are able to build a large enough audience to get response.  The first thing they have that you don’t, is a national recognizable brand.  While twitter may be free,  a nationally recognized brand cost millions plus.  They also have resources to pour into social media – a team of college grads that sit in the office and post tweets and update facebook pages by the hour, again, now you are not so free anymore.

The bottom line though is that what makes social media work for other businesses are strong marketing practices behind it.  So the worst thing you could ever do, is use social media to replace your advertising, direct mail, etc, or god forbid, take down your website and replace it with a facebook page.  The purpose of facebook for businesses should be to drive more traffic to your website.  So when asked what I think of all the social media hype, my response is something like ” it is sadly inappropriate to offer a starving child dessert when he has had no dinner”

That is what social media is, the dessert, it is fun and it tastes good, but if you live on it alone, you will not be healthy – and not likely have a healthy bottom line.  So do you use it?  of course, it is free, but keep it its place – it is an extra marketing activity you use to supplement your traditional marketing practices, at least until you get more followers than Ashton Kutcher, then we’ll talk.

Text Link advertising is a form of web site advertising with some popularity these last few years. Generally this involves “hard-coding” text link ads on high traffic, here in the hopes that this will improve your own search engine ranking, which will then result in more visitors to your web site. As the popularity of this form of advertising grew, businesses launched services to manage this for you, by setting up partnerships with many high traffic sites, then they sell you text links on their “network” of sites and they keep a percentage of the monthly fee.

This advertising stems from the fact that many search engines look at web sites that have a lot of other sites linking to their site as a credible form of evaluating the sites popularity. Of course, that’s not what is happening here. These sites are not linking to you because they think your site has content with value or that it’s popular, but because you are paying them to. Hence, the problem with this form of advertising, you are trying to cheat with your web site, in effect, get a higher ranking on the search engines than your site merits. What merits a good ranking? Content, both in quality and quantity. Your downfall of course is that if you had good content, in quantity and of quality, you likely wouldn’t need to be doing text link ads to begin with.

Purchasing text link ads on high traffic sites in the hopes that it will increase your own ranking is not the best use for your limited advertising dollars. Especially since this form of advertising generates very limited returns. This is how it works: Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo use specific algorithms to rank web sites. Search placement agencies figure out how the majors are ranking sites and then sell their services of improving your web site ranking on the major search engines, such as text link advertising on high traffic web sites. Of course, this is not sanctioned by the search engines themselves, as you are trying to fool them, which makes them less accurate. So what do they do? Change their algorithms, which makes the advertising you are doing completely worthless. So now you have to start over again with something different. And the cycle goes on and on and on. There is also a chance you could actually hurt your ranking, when you overdo it and a search engine notices you are trying to trick them .The search placement agencies don’t care about this because this means you will never leave as a customer, and they continue to make money. Some clues that they are not acting in your best interest and offering services with real “value”? I read on one paid placement web site a line that tries to sell you on their service: “search engine optimization, which every website needs for optimal search engine listings”. When the name of the service is defined by repeating the name of the service but rearranging the order of the words, then my guess is that the provider of that service is having a hard time coming up with any real value. One thing you will notice on all of these text link agencies is that they make no guarantee that your ranking will improve, and they readily admit search engines change their requirements from time to time (and without informing your agency of when or what the new rankings depend on).

So should you never invest in text link ads to try to improve your ranking? I would say do so as a last effort because you have everything else covered and still have advertising dollars left that you can’t find anything else to do with. We’ll assume since you’re doing text links you don’t have good content. The result? When you stop buying text links your results will go away. So unless you can afford to buy text link ads forever the benefit you are buying will not last. How long does it take to see results? At a minimum three to six months, but it could be longer.

Advertising should be an investment, not merely an expense. So instead of this endless cycle that gets you nowhere, take these same resources and invest in content. Content is an investment. It provides return in both the short and long term. It lasts forever. The money you spend on text links that last a month could be used to generate content that stays on your site as long as you own the site. Regardless of how the search engines change their formula, one thing never changes, that is that the sites with the most content or most relevant content get ranked higher than those with less. Search engines that cannot manage this will not stay around, since that is the one element their users demand: relevant search results.

Another reason to invest in content over text links is that it supports the basic marketing philosophy of satisfying customers’ needs. Potential customers visit your web site searching for content. If you invest in search engine ranking without content you disappoint them, and they are that much less likely to return or do business with you.. Even the idea that your products for sale count as content is only semi-plausible. One of the great successes of the Internet is it has made huge amount of information available to the general public, and traffic has grown so dramatically because consumers want this information. To plan to be successful in selling products online without having the corresponding information to go with it will never succeed in the long run, consumers are more informed now than ever. Consumers are demanding more before purchasing. Depth and breadth of content give consumers a reason to come back to your web site more frequently, and this builds brand loyalty, which is an incredible asset for your business.

This should make sense to you. If not, consider the high traffic sites you are buying text link ads on. How many do you think got to be high traffic sites from buying text links on other sites and how many got to be high traffic sites from their content? My guess is that the score is content 100%, text link ads zero.

Welcome to the To Eleven Marketing blog – where we talk about all things Marketing – web design, the latest CMS system, Search Engine Optimization, database marketing, 1 to 1 targeted direct marketing, and on and on.  If you have questions or comments, this is the place to leave them