Exploiting the ‘Best of the Heights Awards’

Nominations have begun for the 2013 Best of the Heights Awards. If  your business is located in Cleveland Heights or University Heights, this local recognition program provides an opportunity for free and low-cost marketing. Here’s how this year’s program works, and how to take advantage of it in your business:

How it works

The program is a little bit different this year. It’s being run in 2 rounds. First is an open nomination period running through June 15. Anybody can nominate any local business in any of 22 categories.

Companies receiving the most nominations in each category will  be named as finalists. Voting on finalists takes place in the second round (July 1-Aug. 31).

How to exploit it for your own good

1. Nominate yourself. There’s nothing wrong with self-promotion, and nobody will ever know you were the first person to nominate the business. Ballots require your name and contact information, but that isn’t shared publicly; it’s just to make sure the nominations are valid. Here’s a link to the online form.

2. Ask staff, family and friends to nominate you too, and tell then what category they should use.

3. Ask customers – also prompting the correct category. The very act of asking customers to nominate you puts them on your team and brings them closer to you. Here are ways to make it easy for them to nominate you:

  • Keep a supply of forms on your counter (you can photocopy them right out of the Heights Observer; we don’t mind). Present them nicely, in a basket with a sign and leave another clearly-marked basket for completed forms. You can mail them to the Observer all at once.
  • Use your website and e-mail communications to ask people to nominate your business. Provide a link directly to the online form in those communications to make it as easy as possible. This is a welcome opportunity to communicate with customers without asking them for money. You’ll be surprised at how many are happy to engage with you at this level.
  • Put a message on your company’s Facebook page and any other social media sites you use. Make it direct, something like: “Joe’s Eats” is excited to participate in this year’s Best of the Heights Awards. Help us get to the next round by nominating us in the “Best Bar, Pub or Tavern” category. Here’s a link to the nomination form: http://ht.ly/kChN7.”

4. Get your staff involved. Make sure everyone on your team knows this is a special initiative. Give each his or her own supply of forms (they can place their initials in a small spot in the corner) and offer a reasonable incentive – a cash bonus or gift certificate – to the staff member who brings in the most valid nominations.

5. Team up with friends in your business district. While you’re soliciting nominations, offer to suggest businesses in other categories if they’ll do the same for you.

6. If you are named a finalist, repeat the whole process in the second round.

7. If you’re a finalist or a winner, promote yourself. Put the honor into your advertising, on your letterhead template, in your e-mail communications, etc. Where appropriate, provide a link to the Heights Observer’s coverage of the winners (probably in October).

When all is said and done, the nominating process is a useful and refreshing way to promote your business. It engages your customers at a different level; it helps them think of your business not just for what it sells, but for how well it runs.

Even if your business is tiny or new and you think you have little chance of being named a finalist, the process is likely to strengthen some existing relationships and create new ones.

It might also reveal areas where you need to build up your marketing, such as building your Facebook network, or tidying up your customer database, or creating regular e-mail communications.

In the worst case, if you find people aren’t excited to nominate the business, you’ll have learned something important – and can begin looking for ways to improve the customer experience.

The Best of the Heights is designed to highlight and honor the many excellent independent businesses that are located here. But it’s also a platform for you to do  some honest self-promotion. I hope you’ll make time to do so.

 

 

A single metric to compare different publications

You’ve received quotes for advertising from two publications or websites; one wants to charge $150 and the other $350. How do you know which is the better deal?

Creating an apples-for-apples comparison between different publications is difficult because it involves so many variables.

The most common calculation for this job is cost-per-thousand (CPM), which measures the amount of money it takes to reach 1,000 people. You can use it for any medium – broadcast, print and online. (But it won’t hold up if you try to compare one medium against another).

Here’s the formula:

CPM = Rate/(Circulation x .001).

So if an ad costs $250 and the publication’s distribution is 8,000 copies, the CPM is $250/8, or $31.25.

It’s a simple calculation, and it lets you compare the rates of different publications with different circulation sizes.

But it has limitations.

For instance, it only works when comparing rates in the same media channel – print v. print or online v. online. That’s because the economics to produce different media – and the results they generate – are so different. Even when using it to compare two similar offers, be aware of these complications:

Ad size: CPM for a half-page ad will be higher than for a quarter page ad in the same publication.

Frequency. The more ads you buy, the lower the price will be for each. That means a single publication will have a different CPM for every ad unit and every frequency rate. The Heights Observer, which offers a pretty typical rate structure, has 60 different CPMs depending on the size of the ad and the number of insertions you buy.

Page size: Move vexing, a quarter-page ad in one publication (The Wall Street Journal, for instance) may be much larger than a quarter-page ad in another (i.e. Reader’s Digest).

That’s why it’s helpful to take CPM a step further – CPM per square inch (CPM/i²).  It’s the cost you pay for each square inch of space to reach 1,000 people. Here’s the formula:

CPM/(height x width)

This will get you closer to that apples-for-apples comparison between different publications. It’s still not perfect. The bigger the differences between two publications, the less relevant CPM/i² will be. But in such cases, it may be the only tangible link for comparing  disparate ad products.

So what’s the best way to use CPM and CPM/i² to make advertising decisions efficient and painless?

Step 1: Decide which publications you’re interested in, based on who they reach and how you feel they’ll work for you. Then look up or request their rates.

Step 2: After getting past the sticker shock, decide how much you want to spend per week, month or year. (Plan to advertise consistently over an extended period. It works best when treated as a long-term investment.)

Step 3: Select ad units in each publication that fit within your price range. Include any extra charges for color. If you can afford a full-page ad in one publication but only a small ad in another, that’s OK. CPM/i² should become a smaller part of your decision but it’s still instructive in your evaluation.

Step 4: Using the same frequency rate (i.e. if you use the 12x rate in one publication, use the closest thing to a 12x rate in every publication), calculate CPM/i².

Now you can evaluate the pricing with confidence, knowing this is as close as you’ll get to an apples-for-apples comparison.

In the end, CPM/i² is only one metric; it should never be the your only consideration. Such factors as a publication’s acceptance among readers, the relevance of its content and its customer-friendliness are at least as important.

Your gut may have to take you the rest of the way.  But you’ll know there is at least some science behind the decision.

Image courtesy of Suvro Datta/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

The need for local news

I think Seth Godin is brilliant and I love his blog. But he misses a pretty big point in this post:

Understanding local media

Essentially, he is saying that newspapers must now serve communities of special interests. (Right so far.)

But then he largely dismisses the special interest of a community based on geography.

Here’s the problem: Seth Godin’s brilliance is based on being outside the box. He is a wonder when it comes to seeing things from a different perspective and ignoring the comfort zone.

But when it comes to going home at night, most people want – no, demand – to be in the comfort zone; inside the box. They want to go to bed knowing the things that really matter are working well. Things like safety and recreation and family and comfort.

There are, of course, different ways to achieve that. One, for example, is to live in a gated community where people of different economic, ethnic or racial background have trouble getting in, and where a well-paid management company takes care of the rest.

But another is to live in a community more like mine, with sidewalks and shops and some level of interdependence among its members. Such a community is organic and only works when fragile balances are tended. Which, of course, means that its members feel invested in knowing what’s going on.

Most of our urban areas are surrounded by places like this. And in such places, people DO care about their neighborhoods. Local newspapers that truly foster a sense of this kind of community will continue to thrive in exactly the way Godin specifies. And they’ll do so by being more important than the newspapers that serve the distributed communities he describes. Because, unlike those newspapers – which serve the special interests that make us different – the local newspaper serves the thing that makes us all the same: The basic human yearning to live in groups.

Advertising 101: Frequency v. size v. color

If money were easy to come by, every ad would run in every issue as a full page. But a buck is hard to make and compromises are a fact of life.

So what’s more important: running a big ad or running an ad often?

Advertising – any advertising, whether print, online or broadcast – works best through repetition. Look at it this way: You know that if you send a direct mail piece or a mass e-mail, only a small percentage of recipients will actually open it.

Advertising offers better percentages, but the concept is the same; 10,000 people may read a publication, but only some of them will notice any given ad.

Conventional wisdom in the media industry says it takes 7 impressions to attract a reader’s attention. I’ve never actually seen any research to support this. But I think I know where it comes from. I’ve been involved with research at various magazines over the years that indicated 10% to 20% of readers were able to positively identify whether a specific ad ran in the most recent issue. Larger ads generally increased reader recall.

From that you can conclude an ad needs to run 5-10 times before everyone in the publication’s circulation can be assumed to have noticed it.

(A statistician could find about a dozen things wrong with this statement. And the research will vary widely depending on the publication, its audience, the number of pages and advertisements it contains, and a host of other factors. So please take it in the general spirit intended).

But just because people see your ad doesn’t mean they are currently interested in what you’re selling.

For instance, regardless of how large your ad is, you’re not likely to sell carpet to someone who’s renting an apartment month-to-month.

The more times an ad runs, the greater the number of people who have a chance to see it. Those who will be interested in your product or service are always a subset of that number.

But when that person buys a house and starts thinking about upgrading the floors, you want him to have noticed your ad in the past; you want him to go looking for your ad in the publication’s current issue.

Therefore, successful advertising isn’t just about getting noticed. It’s about 3 things:

  1. Getting noticed
  2. Being remembered
  3. Being there at the right time

That’s why I recommend frequency as the higher priority in advertising. Frequency is a factor in all three things while size is only a factor in No. 1. I’d confidently predict better results over time for someone who runs a smaller ad in every issue than a larger ad sporadically.

Further, spending too much on an ad can harm its chances of success. How?

If you sell houses for a living, a single commission can pay for a year’s worth of large ads. Selling a home is a big deal involving big money, and a big ad to discuss it seems reasonable.

But if you sell haircuts or ice cream cones your ad needs to attract a lot of customers just to cover its cost. The larger the ad, the better it has to perform just to pay for itself.

If you run a hair salon, how many strangers on the street would you have to approach and talk to before one of them says, “I was just thinking of getting my hair done and I’m not satisfied with my current stylist. I’ll head over there right now.” Would it be 100? 200?

Run through the math: If a publication has 10,000 readers, perhaps 1,000 of them (1 in 10) will take note of your ad the first time it runs. If 1 in 200 decides at this particular moment to abandon her old hair salon and try yours, that means it would be unrealistic to expect more than 5 people to walk through the door as a result of the ad. What is a reasonable amount to spend for those 5 people? And because this is an inexact science, what’s a reasonable amount to spend if the first time the ad runs, it’s only 1? Or none? (As in the bottom of the pyramid in the graphic above.)

So be realistic about how much business the ad is going to bring in – especially in the first few months – and don’t sign up for more than you can afford to spend out of existing cash flow. And expect the results to improve gradually over time, until a steady flow of people tells you they’ve noticed your ad.

There are moments when these rules of thumb may not apply. For instance, if you’re promoting an event or have some other short-term message, then it’s most important that your ad gets noticed right away by as many people as possible. That’s when you want to buy a large ad and negotiate (or pay for) the best positioning you can get.

Color too plays a role. Spending extra as needed for color will help get your ad noticed – though it has a lesser impact than size. Also, color probably has more impact on the way your message is perceived than on whether it’s noticed at all.

The small business owners who tend to be happiest with their advertising are those who buy a smallish ad, spend time developing its look and its message, and then commit to running it month after month, year after year.

Advertising works. It’s not so much an expense as an investment. So invest wisely and consistently. Do it in a way that you can afford to give it time to work. If you do, it will make your business better. 

It’s 2013; get a website already

If you ask a room-full of small business owners whether they have a website, a surprisingly large number will look you straight in the eye and say, “I don’t need one.”

This group tends to include some of the smallest businesses, like handymen, gutter cleaners and house painters. But it also includes a surprising number of businesses with higher overhead and more at stake: mechanics, limousine services, even some restaurants and retailers.

But today, a website is like a telephone and a business card: You shouldn’t even think of doing business without one.

Why you need a website

According to Pew Research, one out of three people who own cell phones use them to access the internet to decide whether to visit a business. That doesn’t include the larger number of people who use computers and tablets for the same purpose. Are these all people you don’t want as customers?

For the smallest businesses, a website can act as an extra set of hands – providing information without you having to stop work to answer the phone. It also puts you on equal footing with larger competitors. Finally, in an era when fewer and fewer people use phone books, it may be the best way to make sure people can find you.

Even the simplest website can present your business as organized and serious; it broadcasts that you want people to find you and learn about you. Not having a website says the opposite: that your business is marginal or indifferent.

Here are the most common reasons small-business owners tell me they don’t have a website – along with some push-back.

I get all my business by word-of-mouth: That will likely be the case even with a website. But people who are referred to you may still want to see your website before making a call. You’ll never know how much business you didn’t get because such people discovered you don’t have one.

Most of my customers are older and don’t use the Internet: Are they so old that they’re likely to die before you? If so, the younger customers you’ll need to replace them are more likely to use the Web to pre-qualify businesses like yours.

All my customers are local; I don’t need a website to reach people in Idaho: If a website reaches people in Idaho, it’s reaching more people close to home, because Google and all the other major search engines now use geographic location in determining search results. Reaching people outside your geographic area may not be the goal of your website, but when it happens, it doesn’t cost more and it doesn’t hurt anything.

I don’t have anything to put on a website: In my experience, this is the real reason many people never get around to building a website. When pushed to make a case why anyone should do business with them, they freeze. Organizing the description and value of your business can make your brain ache, but it’s critically important – and not just for your website.

I don’t have time and I don’t have the money for someone to do it for me: If you thought it was important, you would have made time.

Building a simple site

Lots of small businesses have integrated the Internet with their day-to-day operations by building feature-rich websites with blogs and appointment-schedulers and other add-ons. This can be invaluable, but it also costs more money and requires someone to maintain and update content.

You don’t have to do this. A website does not have to change the way you do business. It doesn’t need to have state-of-the-art social media integration. It doesn’t need to be optimized to show up at the top of search engine rankings. There’s nothing wrong with a simple website that provides basic information and seldom changes.

Three things are required to build your first website: A domain name; a hosting service and a simple drag-and-drop platform on which to build your website. All three should cost around $100 a year, and the large hosting services like GoDaddy and 1&1 provide everything you need in one place (and you’ll enjoy it about as much as a trip to Walmart on Dec. 24). If you’re unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the process, ask for help from a friend who has already been through it; it’ll cost you a six-pack.

The harder job for most people is figuring out what to put on the website. So make it simple. I suggest starting with just 4 pages:

Home: The introductory landing page that provides basic information about what your business does and who it serves.

Services: A page that goes into a little detail about what you offer. It doesn’t have to say much – just a list of the things you do.

About: A page that provides background about you and the business; use the same stuff that you say to prospective customers when trying to close a sale or deal with them.

Contact: It’s enough if you provide an e-mail address and phone number. Also include your mailing address – in case somebody wants to send you a check some day.

After the website is up and running, you may decide to add one or two more pages:

  • Testimonials from customers
  • A gallery of photos, if appropriate, of work you’ve done

One warning: Don’t illustrate your website with photos that you “scrape” from other websites or from Google Images. Most of these are copyrighted, require a license and royalties. If you need photos, try FreeDigitalPhotos.net or Stock.xchng, where photos really are free to use as long as you follow their guidelines.

Don’t worry about all the other fragments of knowledge you hear about building a good website. They all have their time and place. But for you, it’s enough to establish your online presence and then get back to business. You’ll be glad you did.

 

Your business card is not an ad

Work boots are like soccer shoes in the sense that they both provide a protective covering for your feet. But if you play soccer or work in a steel plant, they are anything but interchangeable.

Your marketing materials are purpose built in the same way. A brochure isn’t interchangeable with a frequent buyer’s card any more than work boots are interchangeable with soccer cleats.

People who run their own small businesses are hard-working and busy. They typically seek to leverage time and money by applying one solution to as many problems as possible.

Many publications take advantage of that tendency by creating ads that are the same size as a standard business card. Business owners don’t have to think or spend to design an ad, and the publication gets a quick signature on a contract.

But just because it’s cheap and easy doesn’t mean it’s smart. In fact, it’s usually a waste of money. Business cards and advertisements are simply designed for different work.

The job of business cards is to make it easy for people to reach you. And that’s all they do. They work because you hand them out to people who have already expressed an interest in being able to contact you.

On the other hand, the job of an advertisement is to help people decide if they’re interested in what you do. It has to tell people what you do – and why you do it better or differently than others. It has to provide some call to action. It also may need to include a coupon or special offer of some kind to allow you to track results. And, of course, it must include at least a few critical bits of contact information.

If you plan to advertise, spend time thinking about how your ad must differ from your business card in order to really sell your product or service. If you’re not able to make that commitment, then find another way to invest in your business.

Because running a business card as an ad probably won’t generate results. But it will indicate that you ‘re someone who thinks it’s a good idea to play soccer in work boots.

Image courtesy of Luigi Diamanti/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The economics behind the media meltdown

What really happened that caused traditional media to shrink so much over the past decade – and why are so many still struggling to come back?
That’s the subject of this presentation, which I’ve given several times over the past few years.

 

Why the media meltdown from Bob Rosenbaum

Names make news (2.0)

reading paper_graur razvan ionut_freedigitalphotosTwo years out of college, as a young reporter for a business weekly in Upstate New York, I met the crusty old publisher of the Pacific Business News – a business journal in Honolulu. I didn’t like him much. I was idealistic and ready to change the world. I was living in the snow belt and learning how businesses work. I was reporting on Michael Milken (a Master of the Universe, the junk-bond king, deal-maker supreme) and leveraged buyouts. I was writing about how empires were made, how old cities were rebuilt, how capitalism made the world turn.

This old guy, meanwhile, was living in paradise and frustratingly pragmatic. Standing before a room full of wide-eyed people like me, he was asked to dispense some advice to us young guns. After something like 50 years in business, you know what he came up with?
“Names make news,” he said. That was it.
To look at his newspaper was to understand how this pedestrian philosophy played out in the real world. While it has been updated over the past 25 years to get ahead of changing times, the product I saw that day was gray and cheap. Articles were short, reading as if written by flacks and hacks. Every person’s name that was mentioned – there were a lot of them – was bold-faced. Some articles seemed concocted for the specific purpose of highlighting a large roster of names.
I was unimpressed. I promptly forgot that old publisher’s name and promised myself I’d forget his tired old advice too.
What I discounted was his experience. He’d been running the same publication for something like 50 years. It’s possible, I now realize, he had learned and discarded many other truths along the way – distilling his success into one rule of thumb that fostered success for his product in his market at his time.
Names make news.
I never did manage to forget that advice. While it’s not the only rule I’ve lived by over the years, I’ve had many occasions to apply it, and it has never failed me.
It came back in a rush this morning when Seth Godin’s most recent blog post came through my e-mail. Seth is a marketing guru; he dispenses more good advice in a week than many of us dispense in a lifetime.
Seth’s advice on the subject doesn’t come across like that of a crusty old publisher marking time in Hawaii. It’s contemporary, directed at social media marketers, online journalists, bloggers – would-be masters of the new digital universe.
But it’s equally concise and to the point. When people look at photo albums, he says, they go directly to pictures of themselves.
He writes:
Knowing that, the question is: how often are you featuring the photo, name, needs or wants of your customers where everyone (or at least the person you’re catering to) can see them?
So listen up Internet 2.0ers. Your self-indulgent rants, your complex business models, your highly-designed user experiences are all well and good. But as media change, some things don’t. Names make news. They always have and they always will.

Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut; FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Make sure value-added really adds value

Value-added is the currency of the new economy. The idea is this: You do business by giving people what they pay for, but you gain and retain customers by adding a little something extra on top.

When the Eat ‘n Park restaurant chain gives each child a free Smiley cookie after dinner, that’s value-added. When UPS and FedEx provide tracking numbers so you can follow the progress of your package, that’s value added.

But beware of providing value-added that fails to add value. That can actually harm your business.

Here’s an example from the business-to-business world: On behalf of a client, I recently placed some small advertisements with a local media outlet. Ever since, I have received a weekly e-mail letting me know that my online customer profile has been established and that if I fill it out I will receive a free listing in some under-explained and over-complicated online system. They call it value-added; I call it extra work with dubious benefit for which I won’t be paid. But ignoring it leaves me with the inescapable knowledge that maybe – though not likely – I am shorting my client on some meaningful opportunity.

Here’s another, from the business-to-consumer world: The pharmacy placed four automated calls to my house the other day.

One was important; it directed my daughter to call the store about a question on a prescription she had transferred from another location. Over the next few hours she called several times and nobody ever answered the phone. In the end, she drove to the store and waited in a long line to speak to the overwhelmed pharmacist.

While she was there, I asked her to pick up another family member’s prescription that had been submitted electronically the previous day by the doctor. Not only wasn’t that prescription ready, nobody in the pharmacy could find any evidence it had ever come in. But 20 minutes after my daughter got back home, another robo-call arrived to announce the prescription was ready.

That phone call was intended to be value-added, but instead, it emphasized that the pharmacy is understaffed and has flawed processes – resulting in the inconvenience of another trip to the store.

By the time I returned home, there were yet two more calls – “courtesy” reminders that it was time to refill some maintenance medications.

I never asked for these reminders. In my household, we have a better reminder system: When the pill bottle is close to empty, it’s time to reorder. But the pharmacy decided its calls would add value, and opted us in to receive them.

I’m sure there is a way to change the settings for these automated calls. But why should that be my job? I didn’t ask for all this value-added in the first place. Aside from the momentary pharmaceutical chaos in my household, we’re basically healthy and view our business with the drug store as a transactional necessity.

This, of course, is what the pharmacy corporation hopes to change. By offering all this value-added service, it hopes to turn our transactions into a relationship.

It’s having the opposite effect; rather than figuring out how to change my preferences, I simply seethe in the background while the answering machine records each call.

The lesson is this: If you’re going to offer value added, make sure it really adds value. Otherwise you’re just spending money on something that actually harms your business.

Wants vs. needs? You’re selling both

Seth Godin, one of the best marketing bloggers I follow, says wants and needs are often confused. He writes:

That pays off for any marketer that has persuaded his market that they need what he sells. It backfires when those ‘needs’ are seen for what they actually are–luxuries.

I agree with Godin in both his point and his brevity. But in being admirably concise, he omits a noteworthy nuance. People are more eager to buy things they want than things they need. They’ll go to great lengths to pay the lowest price possible for actual needs – stuff like medicine, groceries, industrial consumables. But they’ll happily spend more on things they want – think wine, golf clubs, a redecorated office.

The point? While Seth Godin is correct that you’ll improve sales by persuading people you can fill a need, you’ll lubricate the sales process and increase pricing margins by convincing people that your product is also something they want.

As evidence, consider:

  • Dell v. Apple
  • Toyota Yaris v. Mini Cooper
  • Emerson audio equipment v. Bose

There’s a lesson for your marketing in that knowledge too.