Here is an idea that could help you bring back your old customers, increase your repeat business with your current customer base and help you find new customers in the future. It’s called the 2010 Marketing Workshop.
Building your own 2010 Marketing Workshop is not about a building a sales package. The goal of building your own workshop is to grow your business by helping local business owners understand how to advertise their business effectively with your company.
There is no shortage of powerful and compelling information you can use. The difficulty comes when you try to keep what you select down to a simple, easy to understand presentation. Here are four suggestions:
- The Four Compelling and Engaging Elements Every Advertisement Needs to Be Effective
- The Three Professional Ways to Set an Advertising Budget
- The Two Practical Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
- The Single Best Way We Know Of to Bring Back Old Customers, Increase Repeat Business and Find New Customers in the Future
The Four Compelling and Engaging Elements Every Advertisement Needs to Be Effective
There is a lot of badvertising on the Radio, really bad commercials that don’t do the advertiser or the Radio station any favors. Even if the schedule is consistent and has a good balance of reach and frequency, a poorly written commercial will doom the campaign to failure.
Assemble copywriting advice from well known professionals like the Wizard of Ads Roy Williams and Dan O’Day to build your module.
The first element is the single most important word to the consumer. The most important word isn’t sale or discount or even free. The most important word to the consumer is the word you.
A compelling and engaging commercial is not about the small business owner or their products or services. Compelling and engaging commercials are always about the customer. The customer wants to know “what’s in it for me?”
When the copywriter uses the word you in the script, they bring the consumer into the commercial because the commercial is about them, the consumer.
The second element is the felt need of the consumer. The felt need is something that the consumer feels. They think about it often. A good advertisement combines the word you and the felt need into the script early, in the first few seconds to grab the consumer’s attention.
The third element is the Call to Action element, a description of what the consumer needs to do to address their felt need.
The fourth element is the Return On Investment, what will the consumer get when they call or more importantly, how will their life be better after hiring the advertiser to satisfy the felt need.
The Three Professional Ways to Set an Advertising Budget
For most local business owners, setting an advertising budget and sticking with it can be one of the most difficult challenges to overcome. In many cases, that money you’re asking for is money they could be spending on themselves and their families. It’s money that is coming straight out of their pockets. There is a mental tug-of-war going on in the small business owner’s mind because on one hand they recognize the need to budget for advertising but on the other hand they see the immediate impact on their bottom line long before they see the results at the cash register.
Establishing an advertising budget based on a percentage of sales or profits is a very common technique. To help our prospects decide what percentages to use, give them a copy of the Schonfeld & Associates, Inc.'s annual Advertising Ratios & Budgets publication that you can download from the RAB web site.
In the unit-of-sale method a business owner sets aside a fixed sum for each unit of product to be sold. Car dealers use this method of advertising when they make advertising plans. The objective or task method of budgeting establishes a set amount of advertising for a specific project.
But offer the prospect a fourth way to set an advertising budget, The Easy Way to Achieve Reach and Frequency on Radio.
Even with all of the computer models and ratings data, it is very clear that a weekly schedule twenty and thirty commercials on one Radio station will come remarkably close to the best level of reach and frequency on the Radio station. If that price fits into the small business owner’s advertising budget, then it’s a good fit for their plans.
The Two Practical Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Over the past year, the number of local advertisers we have encountered who are postponing traditional advertising “until they redo their web site” has increased to problematic levels. Many companies are spending so much money on their electronic brochure they are disappearing from the local media landscape.
Download the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and distributed it to the workshop attendees. It is written in layman’s terms so the prospect can either use it themselves or pass it off to “their nephew who is programming their web site.”
But the emphasis of this module is the robust power of Radio to drive traffic to the local business owner’s web site. There is a story on MSNBC about How Apple Gets It Wrong. It’s a story about how Apple, the foremost technological innovator of our time, is a staunch user of traditional media. Apple doesn’t Tweet, they don’t FaceBook and they certainly don’t blog with their users.
The Single Best Way We Know Of to Bring Back Old Customers, Increase Repeat Business and Find New Customers in the Future
This is your sales presentation, consistent weekly advertising schedules with good frequency throughout the year. Once you lay out the educational aspects of your materials, you can make it easy for the customer to connect the dots to see that your proposal makes sense to them based on their new knowledge.
The goal of the 2010 Marketing Workshop is to increase business by conducting a professional workshop where attendees can learn more about how to do good advertising.
Prepare all of the materials in PDF format on a CD with a nice label. Call it the 2010 Marketing Toolbox. Throughout the presentation, hold up printed copies of the materials and repeatedly remind the attendees that they will their own personal copy of the 2010 Marketing Toolbox.
When you present your sales presentation at the end of the workshop, have all fifty two weeks of the New Year illustrated. This allowed the prospect to choose the stations and the weeks of the year where they wanted to advertise. Call this the 2010 Marketing Blueprint.
You will meet new prospects and make professional presentations, but your entire sales staff we become well trained on the materials, so much so that they can now present the 2010 Marketing Workshop in one-on-one meetings.
If you have any questions, please send me an email at Spike@SpikeSantee.com.
Talk to you soon.
