Were You Looking for This?

After what felt like the longest winter since Mastodons were the main snow-blowers, spring may actually arrive. I’m at my “writing window” overlooking a lake, where my workmates force me to stay put once a week until words actually appear. However,

A squadron of bumblebees keeps smashing their little pollen faces into the glass. I look around the room to see if there’s a little honeybee brothel behind me or something. Not one. So I assume they’re either trying to make the editorial or it just feels good. (I imagine there have been late-night antics when this might’ve seemed normal, or even encouraged.)

“Why we do what we do” is why I do what I do. My job is to “change behavior.” Should be your marketing’s job too: To move a customer from not calling you to calling. From leaving you to staying. From complaint to a glowing referral. Here’s how you do that.

People tend to think of marketing as some voodoo-laced experiment by hyper-creatives who cause people to start drooling as they withdraw their credit card. And basically, that IS the mission, except for one thing: The hyper-creatives have numbers to hit, which include ‘budget, time and units sold.’ If not, they find themselves a new job as, I don’t know, the next SEO expert.  

Where Marketing Fails

When a contractor hires ANY company for marketing service, buys ad time or space or does ANY promotion, the following is a very common seed of failure:

Neither the contractor nor the vendor has set clear goals or expectations. And when one or both sides do not “match up” to the undiscussed goal, things fall apart. YOU want marketing and advertising dollars to bring you fast, qualified leads, plus a great image, unshakable retention and a stream of referrals.

But that won’t happen in one ad, one time, on a shoestring budget. Contractors often give up inches from a breakthrough to try “something new.” Vendors – often too eager for a sale – don’t often explain the outcome nor the time it’ll take to reach it.

Return on Marketing Investment can include these “Behavior Changes” –

• Increase annual/seasonal lead count (online, offline, from service dept.)
• To increase searches by company name and NOT by trade. (Trade results are a crapshoot and NO ONE gets “lucky” on Google; it is orchestrated, formulaic; written about it here before.)
• Generate X% more referrals (higher closing ratio and higher ticket average)
• Increase average transaction size by X%
• Generate positive reviews from  X% of customer visits
• To generate X% of business from customer base

Just like those who create marketing, achieving your goals takes a budget, time and a realistic expectation of units sold. (The budget – which gives most contractors fits or causes paralysis – is why we’ve published a Budget Calculator every year for the past 14 years, changing according to emerging trends each year. Click to get yours.

Remember, the BIG goals of marketing and the ONLY ones you should be paying for are: 1. Get Noticed. 2. Get Customers. 3. Be Memorable.  That’s it. We get roughly 8,000 questions a week (but who’s counting!?) that begin with something like, “I was told I should , so how much should I spend on it?”  The answer?

NOT ONE DIME… unless it changes the behavior of YOUR target market to meet YOUR expectations. And those expectations are items 1-3 above, with actual numbers and dates attached. See? Simple.

The “WWIT” Factor of Wealth Diminishment

After spending 14 solid years doing ONLY contractor marketing (and 7 before that while I was pretending to learn it), you begin to notice trends. A big one is where contractors will actually follow a prescribed marketing path for a while, then want something “new, fresh, shiny” and take an abrupt detour to, as is often said, “…go in a different direction.” And a different direction they go, often toward a richly-promised return that is actually a marketing exploration that uses their Visa card for a flashlight.

It is at this point a contractor comes to the WWIT conclusion: “What was I thinking?”

“Popular” Is Not Always Profitable

Go with what works; invest in marketing trends, not fads.

We cautioned every year since 2009 that the HUGE market in Facebook was still a likely negative ROI due to the “we-hate-sales-and-selling” mentality from the top-down.  (Zuckerberg FINALLY conceded to better ad positioning since a ‘frozen’ $24 stock price was not making his life a party. It’s now hovering at $62-65.) Same with Twitter. The “goal” for social media then is NOT direct sales or leads, but lead-nurturing, relationships and referrals. Very different.

Thus, the method (in this one media) to change behavior is to be “advisory” 70% of the time (relationship) and promotional for 30% – and even then – only “introduce” an alluring topic that is linked to your site for the actual promotion. Tread lightly or get slammed socially. (This is why that ratio exists in the PowerSuite Marketing program.)

Nowhere is flippancy of media any more pronounced than in Local Listings, where daily “rule changes” put you in ongoing reaction mode to maintain your ranking. Up one day, down the next, what happened? Hard to change your market’s behavior based on rules that are adjusted behind closed doors, often for entertainment.

So we turned to places we can change behavior instead of respond to it: Online content (which pushes and maintains rank), videos, structured emails, traffic manipulation, DIRECT MAIL and any place we can “push” a message to a real, live, targeted audience. (I put Direct Mail in capital letters, since as our Coaching Members know, this media is making a HUGE comeback and getting terrific results. Use the Direct Response cards and letters as advised in last month’s coaching call.)

So, as you sit back, now one quarter of the way through the year, and begin to adjust your marketing plan, ask HOW to change the behavior in your market, at what price, and how soon?  Anything else is like those bumblebees: lots of noise, zero sting and causing a massive headache.

Adams Hudson

Print vs. Online Newsletters: Five Factors to Consider in Your Customer Mailings

Contractors who want to keep their customers understand the importance of staying in touch. After all, that’s how customers remember you, appreciate you and know to call you the next time they have a need. The tried-and-true way to keep this connection strong is the customer newsletter.

By getting your name in front of customers two to four times a year with helpful tips for the home, you’re building your relationship and your image. There’s no question about that. But the question that does keep coming up is this one: “Should our newsletter be sent through the mail or by email?” Adams Hudson, president of Hudson, Ink, a marketing firm that designs lead-generating marketing programs for contractors, points to five factors to help you evaluate:

Yes, the costs are different. Both email and print versions have the same upfront costs in concept development, article writing and product design. “From there, email edges out print in this category, obviously, because it doesn’t require physical materials and you save on printing and mailing. But some people stop at that fact alone when there are others to consider,” Hudson said.

People have to physically handle your print newsletter. Your customers have to decide what to do with your print mailing rather than leaving that decision to their inbox filters. And because there’s a chance they’ll place it on a counter or coffee table, they’re more likely to hold onto your newsletter – especially if they’ve noticed the coupons and want to save them for later use.

People are more likely to remember what they read. University researchers a few years back determined that readers who read The New York Times in print form remembered significantly more news stories as well as more points from those news stories than those who read the paper online. You can make the same case for your print newsletter.

You need a list either way. “If you’re sending newsletters to current customers, your data collection may be so superior that you have both physical and email addresses for everyone in your database. More power to you. But if you’re buying lists for certain markets, the physical addresses – with demographic breakdowns and such – tend to be better for targeting certain markets than email addresses,” Hudson said. Also, he added, email is affected by CAN-SPAM legislation, which requires you to offer everyone on your list an opt-out option. Direct mail doesn’t have that restriction.

If you want the relationships, resales, referrals and recurring revenue that come from retention marketing, visit www.customerretentionprogram.com or call 1-800-489-9099 for a free sample newsletter packet. And be sure to ask about the one factor that matters most…

You can balance both. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one or the other. You can double your retention marketing by integrating your print newsletter with an online newsletter portal.

-END-

My Last Seminar?

When we started Hudson Ink, I had no idea anyone would want me to give a seminar. It just never occurred to me. I figured I’d just write, design and test marketing pieces in hopes someone would eventually buy something. (Take note: this is called a “business plan”.)

Yet someone – who clearly had a recent speaker cancellation – asked me to speak. My first gig. Right after, and before the glow had worn off, a very seasoned consultant named Tom McCart said I’d uttered, “Um,” twenty-two times. I tried to answer him with, “Well, I tried to um…”. He interrupted: “Twenty three,” he said smiling. Never forgot that lesson.

After that, I attempted to improve by investing in all sorts of books, CDs, and webinar training (initially teleseminars from Tom Antion and John Childers, then Alex Mandossian, Fred Gleek, and Dan Kennedy – who helped forge the copywriting training, too. I needed help everywhere!). Yet, I never thought I’d be saying this…

Giving seminars has been THE #1 connection with clients. Seriously, this “dark horse” of a communication became a great client generator.

Often, speaking opened the door for on-site consulting, but this was time-intensive and – to me – far more expensive than expertise I could “package” (videos, CDs, DVDs, bound material, coaching). Plus, the travel schedule ate into time with my children, so I cancelled all on-site consulting in 2008.

And by the way, speaking or consulting without replicatable product or program is NOT a business. It is a media, pure and simple. A business has a ‘tail’, a life after you, something that others – well-trained strangers if need be – can run.

*Note to contractors considering an eventual exit: think momentum that follows you, not extinguishes with you.

Since I only do 3 or 4 seminars per year now (by choice) we had to “rethink” how this valuable media could be leveraged. Hopefully, you’ll find the following interesting and applicable.

In the last few year, 3 big things happened:

1.      Live seminars remained… but changed. I get to meet and greet clients, prospects, families of each sometimes, and generally connect more intensely, with better results. At our recent Associated Equipment and ACCA national seminar, attendees got “compressed learning” (meaning handouts of DVDs, CDs, links to follow up training). Why? Because it is VERY hard to implement all you learn in a 90 minute seminar, so…

2.      Marketing Coaching emerged. Just like we all learn better among peers AND in one-on-one settings, the off-site coaching model has helped us reach hundreds of contractors monthly at a fee that pulverizes any other form of training. The first (and largest) of its kind, members get ongoing nudges, guidance, inspiration, and put up with me in our live group calls.

(*If you’re NOT in a Coaching program, I strongly urge you to consider. I am personally in 4 and consider this ongoing education of the highest order. You’re welcome to test-drive ours here.)

Then the world changed again with –

3.      Videos, Webinars, and YouTube. Now most anyone can have a media channel. We often record for members, put snippets on YouTube, links of same from Facebook, and use the traffic from that to gain more members.

Recently, we launched another training series of videos that 644 contractors signed up for. I couldn’t get that many contractors to a live event if I had nude dancers handing out $100 bills and Jell-O shots.

How this affects today’s ‘retail minded’ contractor

It’s about “positioning”. If you wrote and promoted a book and no other contractors did, you’d have a major positioning advantage. Or, if you were always the “face” of a charity, and others weren’t, you’d get all the feel-good positioning.  Conversely, if you were splashed on Dateline in a sting, you’d have THAT positioning.

Yet, this side of a chance brush with a writing career or publicity, how can you “force” positioning?

Look, I didn’t write books on contractor marketing as positioning, it just happened. Yet those other things above were intentional. (The books proved it.) Today’s media shift means YOU can CHOOSE your position, quite publicly and effectively, and you DO NOT need to do it the old-fashioned or super-slow way.

Too many contractors think “incrementally” in marketing. Such as, “I’ll send out Newsletters to ONLY my Agreement customers.” (Silly, since you presumably WANT all your customers to adopt agreements.) Or “I’ll drop radio and start blogging and social posting.” As if it were a trade-off. One for another.

Yet you can literally choose to move from incremental to exponential increase by creating a powerful “position” in your marketing that FORCES your audience to seek you and listen, as opposed to being “the call that came during dinner” or the “deletable email from some contractor.”

Instead of being a customer of the media, I encourage you to think:

You ARE the Media.

Your business’ social sites are NOT just “chit-chat” and silliness. Lord knows, don’t you dare “sell” on them. They are an awareness position.

YouTube is NOT for others. It’s for you. A series of educational short videos on preventive maintenance (appropriately tagged for your town and trade; call us we’ll explain) that are properly marketing you become your position. You could “own” this vast market in your town.

Email is NOT “just a convenience” for appointment updates and billing. It’s a monthly light tap on the door with something valuable to share, links to your site for more, or checkups on customers that gently ask for a referral. Position.

Reviews are NOT “chance happenings” hoping you won’t get filleted in public for a service mishap. They are events you can CONTROL by asking proper questions at the end of the service call and GENERATING a positive review – the more the merrier. Position.

Local Listing Rank is NOT “luck” that some other idiot who’s been in business for 30 minutes “happened” to outrank you. It was and is nearly formulaic, based on loaded content in your listing that is methodically updated by someone who knows what they’re doing.

I have more, but this is enough for now. (All the videos, emails, review generators have already been created here if you want to try them out.)

My last seminar – unlike seminars of old – didn’t end at curtain close or deposited check. It helped introduce contractors to other forms of training that won’t force them to fly hundreds of miles, sleep on a too-stiff mattress, and have 100% recall and implementation.

All exposure is media. All media is position. All position should be strategic.