Tag Archives: Target Audience

Dec6

Unaccountable Marketing?

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Lois Geller

The other day, driving along I-95, I noticed a jewelry billboard. Young couple, nice ring, some hearts. It had a headline that said, “Love is in the air”. Nice enough, but I wondered who the advertiser was. I didn’t see a store name, a website, an address, nothing.

The next time I drove by, I looked for a store name. Lo and behold, there it was in dropout white type (on a gray background), small and off in a corner.

Why would anyone spend a ton of money on a billboard people can’t read?

And what ROI did they expect?

The ad looked okay, attractive even, but what good does that do when nobody knows who the advertiser is?

Lately, I’ve been paying more and more attention to this kind of thing- unaccountable marketing is a good way to describe it. Glamour magazine, has a lot of ads with no website, no phone number, no offer, and certainly no way to track results. Exposure is great, but how does anyone know if the investment was worthwhile? If you pulled the ad and saved the money, would it make a difference in sales?

Marketing should be about tracking results.

Unless the advertiser is extremely well known and has a gigantic budget, unaccountable marketing should not even exist. If you can’t track the results of your ad, then you should think twice before launching it.

Clients come to our agency, because they know that we are able to deliver results. It may take several tests of a marketing program before it becomes profitable, but in the end the client knows where their dollars have gone and their ROI.

Just like you keep your employees accountable; be sure to keep your marketing accountable, too.

Here are two things to remember about keeping your marketing “accountable”:

Try to track results. This can be so simple: It starts by engaging prospects then moving them to a landing page (or micro site). A specific phone number, email address, or QR code. That way you at least get some idea where your customers come from.

Creative is not everything. Yes, it’s great to have a cool looking ad, but it’s not the most important thing. If your customer can’t read it, it’s a wasted effort. Remember the 40-40-20 rule, a direct marketing principle that certainly applies here. Success is 40% offer, 40% list (or medium), and 20% is due to the creative. Our creative director tells me the real formula is 100-100-100. Everything has to be 100%.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, please comment below. I would be happy to hear what others have to say. Thanks!

Pinteresting

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Lois Geller

Pinteresting

Guest Blog Post from Rachel Rodriguez – LGMG Account Exec.

Pinterest is one of the newer kids on the block. It’s a virtual pin board for sharing images. With over 17 million users, the majority of whom are women, it has caught the attention of businesses. It’s barely two years old and it has already passed Bing, Twitter and Stumbleupon as a referral traffic site, and will soon pass Yahoo.

Pinterest’s unique demographic, 80% women between 23 and 54, half with children, are interested in fashion, interior design, crafts, gifts and leisure.

If this is your target audience Pinterest could be great for you. Here are 5 quick Pinterest tips to help you get started:

1. Pin, Re-Pin, Follow, Like, Comment. Repeat. Pinterest is very interactive and engaging. People want you to interact with them, so… interact!

2. Be original. About 80% of the content on Pinterest is a Re-Pin. As a business, you can be the source for the original pinning, and your unique images will be re-pinned.

3. Get people involved. Create competitions that involve people going on your website and pinning products or images on a board. That way you’ll get people interacting with your brand and leading to your website.

4. Tag you’re it! Tag your followers or other businesses on your posts to increase interactions. Make sure to put keywords in the descriptions of the images; it’ll help on searches and direct people to you.

5. Referrals, Referrals, Referrals. Every image you post should have a link to your website or blog. Pinterest is the 5th largest referral site! Use that to your advantage. You can use Google Analytics to track all the visits you get from Pinterest.

Hope this helps! Pinterest can be a great tool for business, especially when you have beautiful products and interesting images to share.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.
Guest Blog Post from Rachel Rodriguez
LGMG Account Exec.

The Power of A Great Letter

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Lois Geller

The Power of A Great Letter

People underestimate the power one great letter can have for their business. I’ve had several people call me or email me, to ask for my opinion on a direct mail campaign. Most of the time, they’re so worried about how it looks, that they don’t bother to really worry about the offer.

I recently spoke at the Coral Ridge Country Club in Ft. Lauderdale for a group of entrepreneurs, at an event called BIG Breakfast. When I explained to them, that 40% of the success of a direct mail campaign is the offer, they looked at me as if I had two heads. I continued on to tell them that another 40% is the list they’re mailing to, and the final 20% is the creative. What do most people spend their time on? Of course, the fun stuff… the creative.

A common problem we encounter is that most businesses don’t understand the science behind direct mail.

To a critical and untutored eye a great direct mail letter doesn’t look like much. It looks simple, which is much more difficult to achieve than something sophisticated – a word that in this context usually means corporate gobbledygook. The critic reading the direct mail letter is rarely a member of the target audience so, naturally, the letter doesn’t resonate.

If you’d like to read some great examples of how simple letters work very well, visit my recent Forbes article:

Hope you’ll pick up an idea or two for your own business. Let me know how it works out.

Lawyers’ Marketing in Social Media?

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Lois Geller

Lawyers’ Marketing in Social Media?

Our friend Margaret Grisdela is President of her own unique advertising agency, Legal Expert Connections, Inc., which specializes in marketing and business development for attorneys and law firms. She helps clients with online ads, brochure designs, and social media. (Yes! Lawyers tweet and write on walls, too!) We asked Margaret to shed some light on the world of legal marketing.

Q: Are there any restrictions for lawyers in their marketing?

Attorney advertising was actually illegal until 1977, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Bates v. The State Bar of Arizona, that attorneys could advertise their services. Attorneys are strictly regulated by their respective state bar associations. The Florida Bar is known to be one of the strictest in the country and requires that many ads be filed with the Bar for approval prior to or simultaneous with usage depending on the type of promotion.

Q: Are lawyers permitted to use testimonials?

It varies by state. Interestingly enough, an attorney can give a testimonial for another company (like a florist or accountant) and that is not subject to any restrictions.

Q: Do you find it difficult to market in an industry that some perceive negatively?

Not really. Legal marketing is similar to other industries in that you need to start with a goal, a clear message, a well-defined target audience, and the ability to measure results. Marketing is a process, not an event, so a lawyer should never stop marketing.

Q: How important is self-marketing to lawyers?

It’s essential! Attorneys who can’t build their own books of business are finding that they may be out of a job. My legal marketing book, Courting Your Clients, identifies the key steps attorneys need to take to get more business from current clients while attracting qualified new prospects.

Q: Do you ever recommend that lawyers “demarket” unqualified prospects?

Attorneys should not take every client that comes their way, and they have the right to refuse to offer services within ethical guidelines. On a related note, I always advise lawyers to fire their worst clients (also within ethical guidelines). Not every client is a good client!

Lawyers are heavy users of Facebook and that seemed out of character, so we asked:

Q: Tell us a bit about social media marketing for lawyers.

I call LinkedIn the safe form of social media, because it is easy to use and there are no expectations as to how often you need to participate. Since so many business people are on LinkedIn, the adoption rate for attorneys has been quite strong. Many attorneys are also on Twitter, Facebook or blogging, but in smaller percentages.

Q: What role do social media play in legal marketing now? And how has that changed?

Attorneys who market to consumers, like divorce attorneys or personal injury lawyers, have been early adopters of social media and all forms of Internet marketing. On Google AdWords, for example, the most popular legal keywords can go for $50-$70 per click! Sophisticated uses of social media include the use of videos, webinars, and online databases like SalesForce to attract qualified leads, capture the prospect’s contact info, and accelerate the sales process.

Q: What is the best way for lawyers to self-market in social media?

I advise clients to start with a blog and keep it up-to-date. They can then use their blog to automatically publish posts to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook using a service like HootSuite.

Margaret Grisdela

Agency website: www.legalexpertconnections.com
Contact Margaret via email mg@legalexpertconnections.com or call 1-866-417-7025. Margaret blogs at www.rainmakingclub.com

Do stories still sell in DM?

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Lois Geller

Do stories still sell in DM?

They sure do!

Here are a couple of examples, one from The
J. Peterman Company catalog and one from a Circus Sarasota fundraising effort.

Until late last year, Circus Sarasota sent out a basic letter in an envelope to raise money for its community outreach program. It did okay. This year, the circus stuck with the letter idea but disguised it in a brochure format. It worked better.

The blind headline in quotes got the brochure opened. Curiosity can work, especially double curiosity. What was the odd red thing on a string just above the headline?

Inside, the letter starts with a “Dear Friend,” opening but the reader’s eye will ignore that for a while because it is drawn to a ’50s-style photograph of a twinkly-eyed woman smiling at the camera and wearing a red clown’s nose. Her name was Annie.

Annie was rummaging through her purse looking for the red clown nose she got from the great folks at Circus Sarasota.

Annie had Alzheimer’s and her daughter (her name is Jill) had just picked her up from a day program. When Annie started rummaging in her purse, Jill asked her what she was looking for. “I’ll know when I find it, dear.”

So now we know what the image and headline on the cover mean and we get happily into the story.

Circus Sarasota people had shown up at Annie’s day program and a clown gave her the red nose as a souvenir. Annie put it in her purse and remembered she had something in there that she wanted to show Jill but she couldn’t describe it. Eventually she found it and put it on her own nose and when Jill looked over they both cracked up.

Nice story and it leads the reader through to a polite “ask” at the end of the brochure/letter.

The J. Peterman Catalog

I’ve loved this thing for years even though I’m not really in the target audience any more.

The Peterman Owner’s Manual No. 80 (Fall 2010) – that’s what they call their catalog – sat on my desk for a while and when I picked it up this morning, the copy grabbed me immediately and I started thinking of all the people I know who are in the target audience. Gifts?

What I like most about the catalog is that just about every item in it has a story. For instance, the copy for Holly’s Party Skirt starts off with this:

The invitation came.
Birthday.
Come to dance. Dress casual.
You knew this was the skinny jeans, five-inch heels crowd … and so on.

On another page, the copy for Woody Guthrie style jeans opened with this:

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. He called it the “singiest, square dancingest, drinkingest, yellingest, preachingest, walkingest, talkingest, laughingest, cryingest, shootingest, fist fightingest, bleedingest, gamblingest, gun, club and razor carryingest of our ranch towns.”

People who live in a town like that need a tough pair of jeans so the Woody Guthrie jeans would certainly endure the harsh environment of Greenwich, Connecticut.

We’ve had a lot of success spinning yarns in direct mail. Writing to anglers (people who like to go fishing), we started a letter with “I don’t know how you feel about standing in the middle of a fast moving stream, but I …” and carried on from there. The reader was hooked, if you’ll excuse a very bad pun.

Test it yourself. Just be friendly, use easy language and work the product into your yarn somehow. And don’t forget to ask for the order. Let me know how it works out for you.

The Johnson & Wales Univ. Challenge 2

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Lois Geller

The Johnson & Wales Univ. Challenge 2

While JWU Challenge Part 1 works on a jewelry campaign, another group of students will be working on a program for one of our clients, a Retirement Seminar company that helps people prepare to transition their lives from busy and white-collar driven to an ideal retirement lifestyle.

The company will run their first seminar in February, in Miami.

Before then, the students’ challenge is to create a marketing plan involving social media and mobile marketing to generate reservations. Out of state people are part of the target audience; fortunately convincing people up north to visit Miami in February isn’t all that hard.

The general idea is that students will begin building relationships with prospects while guiding them to the client’s free downloadable book, then through a series of intermediary products, and, finally, to the seminar.

By the end of 10 weeks the students will be judged on their final presentations. They will have to share the results of their efforts and the progress they have made with their programs. This will be fun: college students marketing to geezers.

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