Being creative… in more ways than one

When someone will talk to me about creative, invariably the meaning gravitates toward the artistic or design aspects.  Meaning we’re talking about color, paper, headline, copy, white space and everything that associates with it.  When I think of creative, the first thing that occupies my brain matter is not the design, written word, etc., but the element of what I term “strategic creative.”

By no means am I dismissing the importance of the creative that grabs eyeballs and attention.  But my mind works from the initial standpoint of what direction will lead any creative development.  That’s where strategy comes in.  Too often in my experience, many will jump ahead and put 100% emphasis in what something will look like, either in print, broadcast, digital or whatever way the final messaging will look.  My thinking is that it’s probably because that’s the easiest.  It will be visual, something to look at and either approve, dislike to made to give the thumbs up with some edits and changes.

The strategic creative needs more attention.  Before any designer is brought in or any copywriter put to work, put just as much time into strategy, if not more, than when the professionals go to work on their Mac’s to whip up first drafts.  Pertinent questions need to be addressed. What is trying to be accomplished?  What is the audience target, if any?  What does the competition already say?  What can be measured in dollars and sense (not a misspelling, pun intended) compared to prior history? 

Marketers need to be strategically creative.  I would add that salespeople should also hold or develop the same trait.  Why?  It’s simple — customers look for solutions.  How can you solve anything if you cannot be a strategic thinker, aka strategic creative?

What to believe…

In reviewing recent articles, I see both sides of the coin, the good and the bad.  From a story predicting another banking crisis in 2012, this one worse than the one we have now, to how to survive the next depression (wait, there’s a depression coming?), I think we’ve had months of “predictive journalism” where anyone and everyone under the sun who can blog, report and/or write is offering their two cents worth on what might happen.

To me, it’s all about restoring consumer confidence.  People WILL NOT spend the big bucks unless they know they will continue to have their jobs, their benefits and their homes.  Or, there simply is too good a deal to pass up (be careful retailers, once you offer something so good, people will wait until you go that route again before they buy).  Until that happens, in my opinion we will continue to have trickles of “recovery,” followed by news that jobless claims rise or housing starts fall flat or decline.  One step forward, one or two steps back.

Meanwhile, check out some of the articles for yourself:

“The Stimulus is…. working?”:  http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2009/09/02/the-stimulus-is-working.aspx

“How to survive the next depression”:  http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/RaiseKids/how-to-survive-the-next-depression.aspx

All marketers should experience sales

What do I mean by that?  It’s simple — those of us who are marketers by trade, whether as a manager, in promotions, creative, product management, advertising or public relations, should walk in the shoes of our salespeople, either inside or outside.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have sales experience and find it extremely valuable when undertaking marketing roles and initiatives.  I draw on the “how can this be sold” philosophy and envision how either the product or service would be presented to the prospect.  More importantly, how will it fulfill a need the prospect would have?

Salespeople are classified into two primary categories:  hunters and farmers.  Hunters are the new business developers.  Farmers are the account managers, cultivating current business.  Each has their place with each position requiring certain skill sets and personal attributes.  I would suspect most marketers are more suited toward farming that hunting, but again, I said most, not all.  Hunting requires more time and a far thicker skin since a prospect’s door closes more often than it opens. 

But as a marketer, consider experiencing the sales process first-hand.  Even if it is accompanying a salesperson on a call, get a taste of what it’s like in the field.  You’ll be a better marketer for it.

Keep marketing!

One fatal mistake any business can make is to stop their marketing efforts, either dead cold or in a drastic reduction.  While the sales pipeline might be tighter (clogged, some would say), you still need to pump promotional dollars to keep your cash flow moving, pay expenses and frankly, survive.  This topic has been discussed for nearly a year and we saw what happened with advertising dollars starting in the fourth quarter of 2008.  They practically disappeard.

Be smart.  Stay the course to keep your business in a position to thrive when things improve.  As with my last post, it’s even more important now to track — and track accurately — what is driving business through your doors.  Treat  your marketing budiget as an investment, not an expense.  An investment should be monitored, with a close eye on its financial return.  You wouldn’t put money into say a mutual fund, and forget about it (or perhaps you did and lost your shirt or blouse several months ago), but instead, look at the numbers, up or down.  All financial advisors will tell you the same thing:  stay the course for the long term.  Your marketing budget should stay the same course and weather the long haul. 

Stay focused and plug away.  There are great opportunities out there to save on advertising and marketing costs as media companies deal with unsold inventory, air time and pages.  If you’ve tracked well, you can look to invest where the payback is best, and save money in the process.

How competitive are you willing to be?

While the economy continues to lag in getting to or even begin to recover, corporations and business owners who want to keep their share of the customer’s wallet or make a bold move to gain market share from their competitors need to make a decision, if they haven’t done so already, on how competitive they are going to be in the marketplace.  Experience shows that customers, either consumers or B2B, will respond to strong offers and opportunities for savings (either actual or implied). 

Most will consider “strong” to be a price discount or sale.  How long can we go is one train of thought.  I always recommend looking at other ways of packaging or bundling offers to avoid the price reduction.  Looking at premiums, free services, extended free warranties or another method that keeps the product price intact is more favorable and protects margin.

Whichever strong offer is created, the length of time for the offer is critical.  Don’t drag it out!  Keep it focused, brief and concise.  This generates a call to action, i.e. getting a prospective customer to make a call, place an order over the Web or drive to the location to shop. 

Experiment with different offers.  Keep them fresh.  Don’t overuse them — I wouldn’t repeat an offer more than a maximum of once per quarter.  Keep track of what offers drive response and sales, and what channels generate the most sales, the most profitable sales AND the least overall response.

Measure the profitability and margins.  Better business intelligence helps you effectively manage your marketing efforts.  Develop, test, track and revise as necessary.

Compete to win.  Customers expect it.  They will expect it for a long time, even after the economy begins to turn around.

What information should I capture from a sale?

Over a few cocktails recently, a friend of a friend joined us at our table for some pleasantries.  Eventually the conversation turned toward business and the general state of the economy.  This friend-friend was talking about his retail store, a hobby shop of sorts, and something he had read recently about the importance for retailers to capture sales information in order to sell more to those customers.

He said it never dawned on him to think about tracking information, relying instead on a consistent media schedule to drive traffic to his store and hoping for word-of-mouth referrals for additional buyers.  Fortunately, I gave him a few pointers and I thought, hey I’m going to share this on my blog.  So here goes.

There are different pieces of information you should and can record on buyers.  The most elementary are their name and address.  With the advent of new technology and marketing tools, recording their email address will allow you to communicate with them frequently for a low monetary investment.  The caveat to remember is being clear to the customer that their email address will not be used for anything other than communications from your business.  Period.

With name and address information at least, add the sales-related information such as a product, or at least product category, along with the date of the sale, the dollar amount and perhaps other information such as method of payment.  Think of this process as continuing to build a snapshot of what comprises your customer base.  The most important piece of data to make every effort to capture is the SOURCE OF THE SALE!  If you are a business owner, retailer or not, with marketing expenditures, one major focus of your operation is to identify what ads, offers, prices or merchandise drove response and generated sales.  If you don’t, it’s like putting money into an investment and hoping it pays off but you don’t monitor its returns.  For some of us, we know how that turned out, don’t we?

Much of this information is already stored in your point-of-sale system in your store.  However, it may not be readily available if the POS system does not allow access to this data in a way that you can use it to analyze your customers.  If not, start building your database with every single piece of sales paper you might have, even that information that may be older, say back two to three years.  Take a software program such as Microsoft Access (some will even use Excel) to enter in customer sales information.  The time and effort is well worth it because as your build your file, you’ll be uncovering opportunities to sell more product to those people who already have an affinity for your store. 

Look to capture this information:

Name/Address/City/State/Zip/Phone
Gender
Email
Product Purchased
Dollars Spent
Sale Date
Payment Method
Source of Sale

When you start your customer file, you will begin to identify multi-buyers, those people who have purchased either multiple times from you or bought more than one product, or both.  You’ll see the geographic areas that are producing sales.  You’ll know your average sales ticket and have a better idea of what products sell, and perhaps when, if they have a seasonality to them.

The more you know, the better you can market your business.  Capture data, build your database and educate yourself on who your customers are and where they come from.  Education pays dividends!

Acquisition or Retention?

As a marketer, in most of my experience, the focus is on acquiring new customer, new sales or new revenue streams.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but we need to slow down, focus and plan on how we increase overall revenues.

I look at marketing from a simplistic point of view.  From there, I can build up to a plan based on market, product, service, niche or any other factors that come into play.  Simply put, there are two market segments in which anyone can sell:  new customers or current customers.  Acquisition and retention.

If you are an experienced marketer, you know the story.  Retaining and selling more to your current customer base should be less expensive and more profitable.  Acquisition programs will cost more, usually have less response and slimmer GPM’s.  However, in my experience, more focus is placed on acquisition because businesses will sometimes think that once a customer has purchased, they will purchase again on their own and there is no need to focus marketing or sales efforts on them.

WRONG!

Any company should have strategies that address both acquisition and retention.  Acquisition should be analyzed from a geographic, demographic and behavioral aspect.  If you are B2B, you can still analyze in much the same way, substituting demographic and behavioral with SIC codes and additional industry category and business size data.  Retention focus should be placed on how a current customer is determined (i.e. when was the last time they ordered) and if not current, how far back do the “non-actives” go in the order history? 

With additional data being included in these strategies, and that will depend upon the depth and accuracy of your customer and order files, extensive strategies, and ones that can be closely tracked, can be planned and put into motion to sell more to customers, whether they are current buyers or past.  Companies should never ignore a buyer and hope that because they bought once, they will buy again.

Acquire, retain and grow.  If an organization knows how much it cost to acquire a customer and what it needs to do, if anything, to retain and grow in order to make that customer profitable, they are on the fast track to effective, sustainable and successful marketing efforts.  Retention efforts, in particular, are now even more lucrative with the additional technology tools and platforms from which dialogue and interactions can be achieved at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.

Never stop growing by acquiring; but remember to treat the current buyers with kid gloves.  After all, they’ve already spent money with you — they deserve special treatment.

Let’s talk media!

I know today the hot buttons for marketers revolve around the new technologies available to market products and services.  Whether it’s using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any number of social media and networking sites, something struck me this past weekend — and struck me more than once that I thought it deserved a post.

In flicking through channels (reminding of the Bruce Springsteen song about having 57 channels and nothing’s on), I saw various television commercials (called “spots” within the industry) in which brands and companies were enticing viewers to sign up, usually via text, for some incentive, freebie or other promotional premium.  While this isn’t any huge revelation, what I did find ironic is that even as things have been painted grim, even dire, for traditional media (newspapers, TV and radio in particular), they are still part of the marketing mix for the new age of connecting with customers, both new and current.

It made me wonder how well our digital age would fare if traditional media went away.  How would even those services connect with the masses if its message could not be broadcast or mass marketed?

My point is that as marketers, we should care about the state of affairs for traditional media.  I don’t want to see them go the way of the dinosaur.  Most people don’t realize that newspapers, and in particular the local newsrooms and national/international news bureaus, are the biggest news gathering entities in the world.  Without the fourth estate, how will we get our news?  Better yet, what mechanism is going to keep government and business in check?  Will we see an increase in closed-door policies where many decisions are made in secret?

As consumer marketers, I don’t believe we can do our jobs effectively if we do not have the traditional media available to us sometime in the future.  Business-to-business could carry on, but could CPG companies like Proctor & Gamble, retail giants such as Walmart or Target, move the product they do now without their commercials and circulars?  Sure, they can put them on their website and do.  You can have your credit card in hand and buy.  But the traditional media, in my opinion, needs to survive, even thrive, for us as professionals who are charged with brand management, sales revenue and net profit to continue to have non-digital options at our fingertips.

Then, we can continue to integrate, making each piece of the marketing puzzle fit.

What do you think?

Scott

Exploring the world of blogging!

Well the time has come for this career veteran to start his very own blog.  I suppose this is the best time to share a little about myself.

I’m a career veteran of over 25 years in marketing.  As I think about the profession, I can’t think of anything that I haven’t been directly involved in, managed or directed.  Sales…business development… marketing plans… direct marketing…. analysis… creative development…public relations…. sales promotions… online marketing… printing…. media.  I have ran just about the entire gamut, rather than someone who has concentrated on one aspect, say corporate sales or a public relations executive.

The advantage, in my book, is that I am multi-faceted and well-rounded.  If there is a downside, yes I suppose it is not being able to say I’ve been an advertising manager for 15 years.  I always thought avoiding a particular title or slot would be a good thing.  Hopefully, I’m still right about that.

Most recently, I worked for a retail franchise company that has struggled, as has many, through a difficult economy that presented challenges long before fall, 2008.  It started at least 12-18 months earlier, possibly tracing back to the beginning of 2007.  It was, and still is, a great group of people who work very hard in circumstances where each individual wears many hats.  It is about as lean and mean as an organization can get.

Unfortunately, I lost my retail marketing/advertising position on May 15.  Rather than agonize over it, I’ve chosen to forge ahead, particularly in this new world of social media.  Here, you will find thoughts and opinions, mixed in with links that I find relevant, interesting and hopefullly thought-provoking.  If you visit, hopefully you find what I post to be something that  you will want to visit again and again, post, share and provide your own opinions.

I look forward to connecting with the world, in whatever size and shape that may be.  I’m a rookie blogger, but I hope that I’ll get better at it as I do more of it.  On-the-job training perhaps?  Learning by doing?  It sounds like being a parent for the first time.  I suppose starting a blog is like giving birth.  Isn’t it?

Scott