Archive for July, 2010
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Are you getting what you pay for when it comes to marketing?
As U.S. and world economies bump along the bottom, customers repeatedly ask their marketing agencies (among other vendors) to do more with less. Our agency is no different.
Many clients have the perception that e-mail marketing, social media marketing and ‘guerilla’ marketing tactics are great ways to save money. And those channels should be considered a part of the marketing mix – but not solely on the basis of cost savings. For some clients a social media campaign may bear little fruit. You should view your marketing agency as your partner in achieving your sales goals. That’s how we have always worked with our clients. How can you be sure you are getting what you pay for? Here are 7 things to think about:
1) Be sure you can measure it. Aside from broadcast television/radio and magazine advertising most marketing channels today offer at least some ability to measure performance. Satellite radio and cable television offer better tracking capabilities than broadcast and these capabilities will only improve over time.
2) Set a realistic marketing budget. Your budget should be aligned with your sales goals, with a clear depiction of how a successful marketing campaign will be evaluated. Low/medium and out of the park scenarios should be included. I’ve seen far too many ‘budgets’ that are very small and totally out of line with their objectives; i.e. ”We want to sell $20 million worth of our product/service and we have a marketing budget of $100,000.“ How exactly is that supposed to work? Is 200 times your investment an achievable goal?
3) Be prepared that some tactics may not work. If you eschew all or most traditional marketing channels in favor of new media marketing, be prepared that they may not work. Sure it’s possible you will extend your marketing budget but also be sure that in ignoring traditional channels you have not ignored many current or potential customers who simply do not use social media.
4) Allow your expert partners to do their jobs. It sometimes seems that everyone wants to play art director or copywriter. Client-side ideas are very valuable (since who knows the product or service better than you?); but would you make tweaking suggestions to your doctor or attorney? Not likely. Marketing agencies are staffed with professionals, just like your doctor’s or lawyer’s offices. Years of training and experience have gone into their decision making processes.
5) Incentive based deals are acceptable for marketing agencies. For certain products – this may not be true. And an agency willing to take some of its final compensation on the back end still needs to be compensated along the way. But if you enter into a speculative deal it should be a deal you would want for yourself if the product truly excited you. “You win, they lose” is not a basis for a successful long term partnership.
6) Ask your marketing agency to provide prices for creation of different channel efforts. Remember you are the client. It’s not taboo to ask questions like: How much is a print ad? An email or survey? A direct mail package? An outdoor ad? A PURL campaign? Writing a broadcast or cable spot? Even knowing what setting a Facebook fan page or handling a twitter feed will cost is not out of bounds. If your agency is not willing to give you information like this you may want to look around.
7) Allow your marketing agency at least a year to leverage their understanding your business. Yes there are times when you will know relatively quickly that the fit is wrong. But all the time invested in bringing your agency up to speed will be lost if you change agencies like you change socks.
Don’t be hesitant in discussing your marketing budget with you marketing agency. Let them tell you what they feel can and cannot be done. Both parties will come out of that discussion with a much better idea of the expectations and deliverables.
The better question might be why haven’t I? The cable company that delivers our cable TV and internet service has been advertising a triple option to include cable phone service. You get to keep your telephone number (thanks to a government statute enacted several years ago) and the premise is that overall you will spend less by combining services. And this is certainly true in year one but subsequently it the gap closes a bit but overall it is still less expensive to have cable phone service than a traditional land line.
For years the argument against cable telephone service was that if the cable service went out – so would your phone service. And while all of us at my house had mobile service (spotty service due to where we live), emergency calls might be a problem from a mobile phone (turns out that’s not true).
Last week like many areas in the United States the Northeast was hit by severe thunderstorms and our area on Wednesday in Connecticut in particular. We lost power for nearly 24 hours and many people lost power for much longer than that. But we also lost our home landline phone service at the same time.
Fortunately mobile phones work well enough at our house to be a reliable back up. We have a small generator so we had limited power (no air-conditioning!), and still the phone was out and when we called AT & T told us we would have phone service back after the weekend on Tuesday (tomorrow).
That’s a week without home phone service folks. Since I rarely use the phone at home it was no real hardship for me (come to think of it only my wife really uses the phone at home) or our daughter. Tue result is we are going to dump our AT & T home phone service since the whole reason for keeping it turns out to not be valid.
It’s in keeping with the way telecommunication companies view phone service now with the majority of their focus being (and rightly so) on mobile service. Yet it still amazes me that AT & T could consider a residence without phone service for a week to be acceptable. It’s exceedingly obvious that they’ve given up that ship by their action – or inaction.
Our son has no landline where he lives in Florida – and I doubt he ever will nor will our daughter. People under 30 roll their eyes at the notion of a landline saying – ‘what for?’
So how about you? Do you still have landline phone service at home? Why?
Like many of us I find that there hardly is enough time in a ten (ok 13 sometimes) hour work day to get all the things done I need to get done. Fortunately I thrive on being busy and actually enjoy it. Yet the day to day pace can wear down even the strongest of resolves. Most days I have a list of several must do’s, while the remainder of the day is spent helping others around me both on the client side as well as team members.
Whether they are tasks or support type meetings most work days are filled with things that have to get done. Not enough time is spent thinking about what the most productive or important thing you could do next would be. The ‘Just do it’ mentality is pervasive and I think at times counter-productive.
In my case, this can go on for weeks at a time, particularly when I am traveling and out of the office more often than I am in the office. The weekend does offer time to catch up although this summer I have tried very hard to not be in the office much at all on the weekend. Every once in a while appointments move around or even drop out and I end up with a day in the office that is not overscheduled. I had one of those yesterday. It just sort of happened. I had planned to be around the office most of the day with just a couple of meetings but things broke differently than I planned and I actually found myself with some time to think about things that I wanted to do as opposed to things I had and needed to do.
One day can mean a lot in changing my outlook. Getting to the point where I don’t have things hanging over my head is a great place to be. Even if it only lasts for one day! It’s refreshing and even re-energizing. I’m also aware that it may not happen again for a long time (in my case I am guessing it might be a few months). But you never know and when that opportunity presents itself for a ‘day’ I will leap at and relish it. And I know I need to do it more often.
How about you? Do you ever get one of those thinking days? Would you like to? Do you think it is important and worthwhile?
If you live in a major city, (or even smaller town with a really hot restaurant) the process of making a reservation can be onerous, to say the least. As many of you know, in the top rooms, the experience can include having to call exactly 30 days in advance to secure a desired reservation date and time, (of course even doing this sometimes results in getting a 5:45 or 9:30 option for dining!) and then if you are lucky enough to reach a ‘reservationist’ (who comes up with these terms??) leave your credit card number to ‘secure’ the hallowed reservation.
But wait, there’s more. The day before or the day of someone from the restaurant (ok the reservationist – could you imagine telling your parents that’s your job?) calls you at the number you left and asks you to ‘please’ confirm. In fact if they leave you a voice mail you are then asked to call them back to confirm.
Understanding that there are people out there who are no-shows and that can really screw-up a restaurant, I get the idea that restaurants have a need to know who’s showing up and who’s not. But the system still used by most restaurants today is archaic and just bad. It does not serve the customer it serves the restaurant. Making the customer jump through hoops to obtain a reservation does not serve the customer at all and that’s ironic since restaurants are in the business of service right?
In recent years online reservation systems like OpenTable, Tablefinder, Blueskies, Rodeco ICT and Magellan (to name a few) have grown with OpenTable being the most well-known. It’s a good idea. You sign up for an ‘account’ that costs nothing. You log-in with your email and get points for making reservations at participating restaurants (yes multiple platforms means different restaurants are part of different systems).
You pick the day and time, number of people in your party and the restaurant let’s you know what’s ‘available’. Sometimes what’s available is 5:45PM and 9:30PM. I wish I were hungry at these times since obviously I would always get what I wanted but alas my stomach, family and friends are not aligned with this concept. But many times you can get your exact time or something within 15 minutes of your time and that’s fine. Then you hit send and you are all set. A confirming email is sent to you and you are good to go. You are not automatically opted in to receive the restaurant’s emails (another good thing) but you may get a follow up email from the platform asking you about your dining experience which you can ignore which is what I do. The best thing is YOU DON’T HAVE TO MAKE A PHONE CALL TO REACH THE ‘RESERVATIONIST’ or anyone for that matter.
I have a good friend in the restaurant business who understands the need to have the platform but notes that it can backfire for the restaurant since if the user does not see the time they want they often will just move on to another restaurant without calling at all. If you called the restaurant it would go out of its way to try to accommodate you. Online reservations offer no chance of that.
The other day I made a reservation on OpenTable – got the time I wanted, the confirming email. And I could even invite my guests by sending them an email giving them the details – location, time etc. Cool!
But then something happened I did not like. The restaurant called the number I left to reconfirm and left me a voice mail. Considering I made the reservation 3 days prior WITHOUT CALLING, I now had to call them back to ‘confirm’. I was out of the office and did not have time to call so I tried to text them. That did not work as it was a land line. This is ridiculous! Why don’t the restaurants confirm (if they have to) either by email or leave a number that you could SMS text to? Hasn’t anyone thought of this?
Who wants to call a restaurant to reconfirm a reservation anyway? Anyone?
The worldwide recession appears to be stubbornly holding on and impacting so many people, Here in the United States the talk is all about job creation or lack of jobs in general. Companies that have reduced staff have been running lean for quite some time now. The results often are found in less than exemplary customer service.
I had a taste of that at Stop and Shop this past weekend. Walking in there on a Friday evening after 6PM the store was relatively empty. Having promised my daughter a lobster for dinner I had to pick up a couple of things as well as a couple of crustaceans. These days lobster is pretty inexpensive in the Northeastern U.S. with prices as low as $ 4 U.S/pound. Since a 1.25 lobster is a pretty decent size it hardly seemed like a luxury. At Stop & Shop the lobsters were actually $ 7.00/lb. At least that’s what the chalkboard read in the seafood area in the store.
However when I arrived in the seafood area there was nobody attending the area. And nobody was working anywhere nearby. I waited about five or ten minutes (seemed like 15), finally gave up and walked to the front of the store to ask if anyone could help me. I was first told nobody was working back there. Big news indeed. They offered to page someone which they did and I walked back to the seafood area. Another five minutes ensued but no sign of anyone.
I again walked to the front of the store and was again told that they would page someone. I pointed out that I had already seen that movie and did they want to sell me a lobster or not? They paged again and I again walked back to the seafood area. Finally I saw what appeared to be a manager type and I told him I had been waiting fifteen minutes to purchase a lobster. He again noted there was nobody back there. I am not making this up.
Pete, the manager offered to help me (ok maybe I was finally getting somewhere). After he scanned the area to be sure nobody was there but him he went behind the counter to the tank to (I hoped) fish out a couple of lobsters. But I could tell right away that this 6 foot 4 guy was not at all comfortable around the lobsters. So I offered to go back there myself to fish them out and put them in the bag. Looking incredibly relieved he quickly agreed and back I went. He stood pretty far away from me as I selected two of the 6 or 7 lobsters in the tank. I put them in the bags and then Pete did exactly the right thing. He told me he had no idea how to ring them up and for my trouble he was not going to charge me for the lobsters. I was both surprised and pleased.
The cash register attendant was a bit skeptical but when there wasn’t any tag on the bags he shrugged and checked me out.
So a big negative experience was turned into a positive experience and a story. Pete got it right and by extension Stop & Shop had a happy customer.
Good customer experiences come in many different forms.
How about you? Got any strange but true stories like that?