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Category: Social Media

Is Social Media Working?

In one of my online communities the question was posed…

Is Social Media working or not working? Is it making anyone’s register’s ring?

The purpose behind the question was because of mixed reactions from businesses who have found success through Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. and those who haven’t.

Personally, I think the question missed the mark. I would have asked…

HOW is Social Media working for those of you who have found it successful?

No matter what the marketing medium, some will find success with it, others will not. The problem isn’t in the medium, but in how you use it. If you use it right, the rewards are there. So I would want to know how people are using it right.

My Facebook Experience
We have found Facebook to be a lot like networking. It is about building relationships with people by getting to know them and seeing if there are any mutual benefits to our relationship.

The one thing I have learned in my experience with Facebook is that I get far more response when I ask questions than when I send out announcements. I get far more interactions when I ask for opinions and advice than when I post information. And I get a far better opportunity to interact positively with my customers when they post comments than when I just throw info at them. Most importantly, that viral aspect of Social Media kicks in the more people I include in the conversation.

The one definite ROI that I have been able to track is that my fan base grows faster the more comments and conversations I get on a post.

Mutually Beneficial
The benefits of these conversations are HUGE! We get a chance to learn what our biggest fans are thinking. Sometimes we even learn stuff we didn’t know. Sometimes we get to answer questions they forgot to ask in the store. Sometimes we get to clear up misunderstandings.

Most importantly, we have conversations, back-and-forth conversations. And conversations lead to conversions.

Make Your Registers Ring
The best sales people know that the key to successful sales is conversation. As long as the customers keep talking you have more opportunities to solve their problems and sell them what they need. If you treat your Facebook and Twitter programs as conversation starters, not information spreaders, you’ll find that the info actually spreads faster and farther and the sales will result.

Social Media, like all other forms of marketing, works when it is done right. If all you do is post info and tell, tell, tell, you won’t get the kind of return you want. If you think of it as a two-way conversation where you ask more than you tell, then you are on your way to doing it right.

-Phil

Black Friday Deals – A How To

Okay, you’re gonna venture into the murky waters of Black Friday with some doorbuster specials at your retail store. You better know what you’re getting into. Do it right and you’ll see your registers ring. Do it wrong and you just might be borrowing trouble.

Here are some tips to help you navigate the seas of this retail extravaganza.

First answer this… Why are you having Black Friday doorbusters? Is it to draw traffic? Grow market share? Move out some slow sellers? Because your shopping center makes you?

Knowing this makes all the difference in the world.

Going After Market Share
If you’re trying to grow market share and draw in new traffic, you have to have a really good deal on a whole lot of good stuff. And you need to share that info with the whole marketplace, not just your fan base. Email and Facebook won’t help you grow traffic and market share. They are only preaching to the choir. You’re going to need a flier in the newspaper or an ad on radio or TV. And that deal better be a killer deal because you’re up against a whole bunch of killer deals from a whole bunch of deep-pocketed retailers.

Still not afraid? Good.

Now you need to make sure you have enough product to keep the momentum going. Run out of your best deals in the first few minutes and the rest of the day is sunk. You need to have enough merchandise to last the first couple of hours minimum, otherwise you’ll send away far more unhappy people than happy ones – not a good marketing plan this close to Christmas.

And lastly, you have to make sure your staff is ready for the challenge. Do you have traffic flow under control? Is everybody up to speed on the deals and how to ring them up? Is everybody okay with the new hours? (especially if you’re opening up extra early) Are they trained for dealing with unhappy customers, unruly customers? It’s a given that you’ll have at least one or two.

That’s a minimum of what it will take to attempt to grow market share on Black Friday. (And there’s no guarantee it will work. The competition is pretty savvy.)

Moving Out the Dogs
Maybe all you need to do is get some slow movers off the shelf, make those dogs bark. You can give the appearance of having a Black Friday type event without all the expense and risk, just by marking down some merchandise that you were probably going to mark down anyway.

First, this is a good day to start those markdowns. The Transactional Shoppers are out in force and looking for a deal. Second, you won’t have as many unhappy customers, seeing that it was older, closeout merchandise in the first place.

Plus, you can advertise that kind of sale purely to your fan base and make them feel even more special because they knew what was happening before the general public who has to show up Friday to see what is on sale.

Doing Nothing At All
Then again, you don’t have to do much of anything to make Black Friday special. Put out a pot of coffee for those early risers. Dress up the store in your best Christmas spirit. Make sure your shelves are fully stocked & straightened. Put your happiest smiling faces on the sales floor and let them do their magic.

The day after Thanksgiving has always been a strong shopping day, and it wasn’t the discounts that always drove the traffic. Only in the last couple decades have we seen this day become the who-can-open-earlier-and-sell-it-cheaper event that it is. You don’t have to join that fray to be successful.

In fact, if you take the hands-off approach, make sure you staff your store stronger in the afternoon and evening, and be ready for another big rush Saturday. There are a lot of customers choosing not to fight the long lines Friday. To them, no deal is worth the hassles of long lines, unhappy people and early mornings. They’ll be out in force later and don’t want to deal with those been-up-since-three-don’t-bother-me sales people.

This Black Friday, whatever you decide to do, do it consciously and do it right!

Happy Thanksgiving!

-Phil

Sleep is the Great Eraser of the Mind

Note: Most of the stuff in this post I learned from Roy H. Williams. Please forgive me for stealing.

Okay, you’ve made one point, spoke to the heart, made it relevant, and didn’t look or sound like an ad. Yet, the needle isn’t moving. No one is remembering your message, let alone acting upon it. Why not?

Sleep.

Three Levels of Memory
Everything that happens throughout your day is put into electrical or Working Memory (think RAM like a computer). At the end of the day all of your Working Memory that wasn’t relevant or impactful is erased by sleep, including stuff only slightly relevant or impactful.

Declarative and Procedural Memory are chemical memories. These are stored in your brain (think hard drive). They come from repetition. Declarative is the memory of things you can recall if asked (your cousin’s phone number). Procedural is memory that comes without thinking (slamming your brake when a deer crosses the road)

Frequency is Key
With repetition, electrical Working Memory is converted to chemical Declarative memory, and as repetition continues, from Declarative to Procedural.

The amateur practices enough to get it right (declarative). The professional practices until he cannot do it wrong (procedural).

Hitting the Nail on the Head
Another way to think about it is the hammer and nail. If you hit a nail one time, it will make an impression in the wood. But then the big claw called sleep rips that nail out, leaving just a hole. If you put that nail in the same hole, however, and hit it again, the hole gets deeper. Keep putting the nail into the same hole and hit it over and over and eventually sleep will not be able to rip that nail out.

Some of you might argue that you can pound a nail in one stroke. Sure you can. How many of you know exactly where you were when you heard about 9/11? That happened only once, but the impact was big enough to push it directly into declarative memory (plus there was the added frequency of it being talked about for months on end).

Your ads will not be as impactful as a terrorist attack or space shuttle explosion.

The Magic Number
In advertising, the magic number is three. It takes the average person hearing/seeing an ad three times in seven days before it gets stored as Declarative Memory. And they must hear it three times every week until they need the product or service. And when I say “hear” I’m talking about actively engaged in the ad, not the subliminal effect of background noise.

To get that kind of frequency you need to put your message out there as often as possible. Whether you use TV, newspaper, radio, Facebook or Twitter, your success will be tied to the consistent and constant use of the medium every single day. Otherwise, you are just spending your advertising time and money foolishly.

-Phil

Field of Dreams

“If you build it, he will come.” -Shoeless Joe Jackson, Field of Dreams

Great movie. Bad advice for business.

Yet too many independents start out that way, thinking all they have to do is build a wonderful little shop and people will climb all over themselves to get in and give them money.

Roy H. Williams said, “If making a profit were easy, everyone would be doing it.” But not everyone is making a profit. Those who aren’t making a profit are closing their doors. And the first complaint out of their mouth is that they didn’t get enough traffic, followed quickly by the blame…

  • The downtown doesn’t have enough parking.
  • The Buy Local campaign didn’t advertise me enough.
  • The city didn’t support me.
  • The newspaper wouldn’t write a story about our opening.
  • There just aren’t enough people in the area.
  • No one knew about me because of the sign ordinance.
  • Unemployment is too high.
  • People are too cheap.

You know somebody who has made one of these statements. Heck, you probably have thought one or two of them.

Yet there are businesses thriving in hard-hit downtowns, thriving in high unemployment locales, thriving in spite of a lack of support from government, the newspaper, or a Buy Local campaign, thriving without coupons, discounts or cheap products.

You Have To Market Yourself
One of the biggest things they are doing differently is Marketing. Just building a store is not enough. We are over-retailed as it is. The most successful businesses are making a conscious choice to actively and creatively market themselves to the public. They are creating marketing messages, marketing plans, and mapping out new and unique ways to attract customers.

You Can Afford It
And it doesn’t cost as much as you think. There are many ways to advertise your business spending primarily time, not money. You can learn seven of them by downloading my FREE eBook Main Street Marketing on a Shoestring Budget.

And if you have the money to spend, before you drop a dime get to know how the different advertising mediums work with two more FREE eBooks – How Ads Work Part 1 and How Ads Work Part 2.

The movie is wonderful. But it is just a movie. In real life the quote is:

If you Market it, they will come.

-Phil

How Long is Your Shoestring?

The term “Shoestring Budget” dates back far enough that no one really knows who or how it got started. Some say it’s because shoestrings are so low to the ground and your budget is really low. Some say it’s because shoestrings are so cheap that they’re all you can afford. Some say it’s because broken shoelaces were used to tie together all your other belongings, meager that they were. One theory I liked was in reference to shoestring gamblers, gamblers without a lot of money who played low stakes games.

Regardless of it’s origin, most independent retailers have a Shoestring Budget when it comes to your marketing. And most of your marketing is a gamble, spending X hoping to get Y in return.

On Monday I did a presentation at the Michigan Downtown Conference called Main Street Marketing on a Shoestring Budget.

The notes for that presentation are now downloadable in the Freebies section of www.PhilsForum.com.

Those of you who want to learn the truth behind Word-of-Mouth Advertising, how to use Social Media properly, or would like a way to turn all those requests for donations into actual business for your store will download this document.

Those of you who want to learn an easy way to turn your customers into fans, a simple way to draw traffic at only $2.50 per new customer (guaranteed), or want to learn how to meet people that can make a difference in your business will download this document.

Those of you who want to learn two techniques that will strengthen all the businesses on your Main Street at once will download this document.

The rest of you can continue to gamble with your shoestrings. But I’m betting that a lot of you are going to download this document and pass it along to your friends (strongly encouraged).

Did I tell you it’s FREE?

-Phil

Don’t Eat the Tea!

My friend, Joel, told an interesting story about Tea in England.

Apparently, it was quite expensive and only for the very rich at first.

As Joel tells it…
One woman in the south took a full pound of her expensive cache and sent it to her sister in the north, telling her how marvelous it was. Her sister boiled it, dumped the black liquid off and served it like a vegetable. She wrote back about how terrible it was.

She’d prepared it like a vegetable, which she understood, instead of seeing it for what it was: something entirely new.

Joel used this story to illustrate how some people are approaching the new social media tools with the same old ideas of what advertising is and are eating their tea.

How do you like your tea?
I would argue you can apply the same lesson to all types of advertising. For every advertising medium I show you, you can point to someone who told you how they used that medium and it didn’t work. Or maybe you used it and it didn’t work. All because you (or they) didn’t brew it properly.

That is the purpose behind the FREE eBook How Ads Work Part 1. I want to give you some insight into how to brew your advertising the right way. I’ve eaten the vegetables and brewed the tea, so I know what tastes better.

If you want your advertising to leave a better taste in your mouth, start with the eBook, then email me with your questions. When done right, it’s a sweet tea!

-Phil

Free or Priceless?

I’m going out on a limb with my next two Freebies – How Ads Work Part 1 and Part 2.

Pablo Picasso is credited with saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

Much of the information in these two eBooks is stuff I stole from Roy H. Williams, aka The Wizard of Ads, especially the mind-blowing Advertising Performance Equation (APE) in Part 2. It will totally transform the way you look at advertising. (I hope he doesn’t mind.)

Part 1 guides you through some of the same discussions I’ve done here – showing you HOW the different mediums work – now all condensed in one single document. Most sales reps in advertising know how to sell their products, just not how to use them. This guide will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of each medium so you’ll know more than your reps. Plus, as a bonus, I dispel some of the most common myths of advertising and share with you the Wizard’s definition of Transactional and Relational Customers – probably the single greatest business concept I learned at Wizard Academy.

Part 2 includes the APE, plus a bunch of ad examples that have a strong impact. Although the ads are copyrighted, the techniques they use are simple enough for you to steal for your own use.

Best of all, both eBooks are completely FREE! You are encouraged not only to download them, but to share them. Send them to all your friends in the industry. Copy them to your Shop Local campaigns. Distribute them to anyone you know who needs help in advertising. Believe me, we all benefit when advertising improves.

You know why most ads don’t work? Because most people don’t know how ads work. These eBooks are your starting point to making your ads work for you.

-Phil

PS Use these two in conjunction with Understanding Your Brand and you will be light years ahead of your competition in understanding advertising and making it work for you. Think of it as a Master’s Degree without the time or expense (or the outdated info most colleges still teach).

How Much Marketing Does it Take?

Here are some of the ways I have decided to market my new book…

  • Face-to-Face Sales – I do speaking engagements all around the country and get opportunities to sell my book one at a time to attendees. Plus, I sell it in my store. And I always have a few copies with me wherever I go (sold two at a recent birthday party!)
  • Web Marketing – I have it for sale on my website
  • Blog Marketing – Yeah, this is the fourth time I’ve talked about it to you.
  • YouTube – already one video review online about the book, more coming…
  • Facebook – The book has it’s own page, positive reviews starting to come in.
  • Friend Blogging – I have given away a few free copies to influential friends who have blogged about it or at least given it some link love (one of those links increased my blog traffic by a factor of 15!)
  • Direct to Buying Groups – There are retail buying groups made up of independent retailers to whom I am reaching out.
  • Radio – I already did one radio interview, working on setting up more
  • TV – Ditto
  • Newsprint – I will be profiled soon in the local paper as a local author, working on getting profiled in other papers, too.
  • Human Resource Professors – this is tougher nut for me to crack, but I am working on making contact with HR Professors to try to get this book into their hands and into their classrooms
  • Human Resource Professionals – I have been following HR groups on LinkedIn, posting where applicable, getting involved in discussions, and getting to know other people there. Soon I will be enlisting their help in spreading the word.

As you can see from this list, there is a lot I am doing to market one tiny little book on Hiring & Training.

How does this apply to your business? Simple. All of the above marketing techniques are basically free. They only cost me time and a few free books. If you don’t have enough business, then you have enough time to get cranking on any one of them. (Yes, they are all applicable to your business – email me if you can’t see how.)

-Phil

New Freebie for Non-Profits

I’ve just posted a new eBook in the Freebies section of my website titled Non-Profit Marketing on a Shoestring Budget.

It’s my notes from the presentation I gave yesterday to the Jackson Non-Profit Support Network about simple ways non-profits can improve their marketing without spending a ton of money.

Thanks, Regina, for the opportunity to speak to your group. They are doing important work and I was glad to have this opportunity to support them.

If you’re in a non-profit or know someone running a non-profit, click here to see what I said.

-Phil

PS Printing more than one copy – or distributing the free eBooks electronically – is not only legal, but is actively encouraged. Please share the documents in the Freebies Section with anyone you think would benefit. Pass them along to coworkers, colleagues and friends with my blessing. You may also reprint the text in your own writings as long as you credit the author (me:-).

The 3/50 Project – Are You On Board?

Cinda Baxter had a good idea. A really good idea. An idea that sprouted wings only seconds after she hit “publish” on her blog.

Pick 3 local retailers you would really miss if they closed. Spend $50 in those stores this month. Repeat.

It’s The 3/50 Project and it all started with a blog post on March 30th, 2009. Now, less than a full year later, The 3/50 Project is an international juggernaut with over 17,000 independent retailers registered at her website, over 53,000 fans on Facebook, and a boatload of resources you can download for FREE to help promote your fellow independents.

Cinda came to Jackson last Wednesday night to talk about the project and how it can help promote local Jackson businesses. She gave us the history behind the idea and a laundry list of great ways to bring this positive message to our community.

Ideas like this cross promotion between retail stores and restaurants…

Spend $50 in any/all of these select retail stores this month, get a $10 gift certificate to any of the following restaurants for next month (and vice versa)


Ideas like this window display…

Write on this card 3 locally owned businesses you would miss if they closed. Sign your name at the bottom. We’ll post your card in the window with all the other cards and you’ll be entered to win one of three $50 gift certificates.

(Think of the impact such a display would cause – the reinforcement to the person who wrote the card of supporting those businesses, plus an easy way to cross promote your customers’ favorite businesses to other customers.)

Ideas like this way to create evangelists for your store…

Attach five $5 gift certificates to a 3/50 Project flier with your customer’s name on the back and give to her with instructions for her to pass 4 of those gift certificates on to her friends. Tell her that for every gift certificate that comes back she’ll get entered in a drawing to win a monthly prize.

(Do you think that would get some new business in your store? Of course it would!)

And many more ideas.

It was a fabulous presentation. Unfortunately only about 15 Jackson business owners were in the paltry audience to hear such a message. But then again, 15 is a start. And we have to start somewhere.

Do you think you could round up 15 local businesses to start some sort of cross promotion in your town? Do you think you could benefit from a campaign that encourages people to think about their favorite local stores? Are you one of the favorites? Will you be in the top 3 on someone’s list? (If not, we need to talk. I might be able to help you.)

Do yourself a favor and go to The 3/50 Project. Read all about it. Sign up. Download the freebies. Promote yourself and your local retailers. To steal a phrase from my fellow blogger Jay H. Heyman, it’s a good idea, it’s a really good idea.

-Phil

PS I got to meet Cinda Baxter after the presentation. We had a wonderful conversation sharing ideas. What incredible energy and passion she has for local retailers. I’m a fan. I’ve added her blog to my must-read list. You should too!