Marketing | TheMarketFarm.com

Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

A single metric to compare different publications

Monday, April 1st, 2013

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

Leave your comment »

Posted in Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing

Tags: advertising magazines marketing media newspaper

Your business card is not an ad

Friday, November 30th, 2012

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.

Small 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 does. They work because you hand them out to people who have already expressed an interest in what you do.

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 how you do it better (or differently) than others. 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

1 Comment »

Posted in Business, Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing, The sports-business connection

Tags: advertising marketing newspaper value proposition

The economics behind the media meltdown

Friday, September 21st, 2012

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

Leave your comment »

Posted in Business, Future of media

Tags: advertising B2B Business business to business content e-media economy facebook journalism magazines marketing media newspaper paid content social media

Names make news (2.0)

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Photo courtesy FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Two 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, and while it’s not the only rule I’ve lived by over the years, 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

Leave your comment »

Posted in Future of media, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing

Tags: blog citizen journalism content e-media facebook journalism magazines marketing media newspaper social media

First things first: What game are you playing?

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net (click image for linkback)

Strategy before execution. This should be simple.

But it’s human nature to jump right into doing stuff before sweating out the big questions.

For example, a couple prospective clients have put off small, closed-ended projects that I proposed to help them align operating strategy and marketing. This in turn would help them answer such daunting digital communications questions as how to deal with social media, and what capabilities does the website need to offer?

It’s my suspicion that what they’ll really learn is the organization doesn’t actually have a unifying operating strategy. But in both cases, the reason given for delaying the little strategy project is that they first have to devote all their attention to the big website project.

I understand that building a new website is daunting. But it’s even harder if you don’t know what purpose the new website is supposed to serve. It’s like getting ready to knock the ball in the hole without knowing whether you’re playing billiards or golf.

That’s why strategy always needs to come before execution. Strategy tells you what you’re trying to do. The website will help you do it. But only if you tackle them in the right order.

Leave your comment »

Posted in Business, Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Tags: Business business to business marketing social media social networking strategy value proposition

Advertisers will always go where the people are

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Alan Mutter, who calls himself the Newsosaur and whose opinions on the news business I deeply respect, points out that newspapers are now well into their sixth year of declines in advertising demand. In a recent blog post, he noted that annual newspaper sales hit $10.7 billion in 2006 – and now stand at $4.3 billion, about the same level as 1983. And they continue to drop.

While the drop in advertising isn’t new for newspapers, it hasn’t always been their No. 1 problem. Credit for that goes to the systemic and ongoing declines in circulation. Newspapers are simply less relevant across society than they once were.

But the dynamic behind shrinking advertising is different; it’s more like the experience of magazines – especially business-to-business – over the past decade.

I’ve written about the reasons behind the loss of advertising for magazines, and I’m not alone. The issue isn’t that advertising has ceased to work; I don’t believe that’s the case now, nor do I foresee the day when it is.

The issue is that other things now work better. And by other things, I really mean one other thing: social media.

First, more people are involved in social media than in any other media channel. If you lump together YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare and the thousands of other social media websites, day-to-day participation is as broad as any other media channel.

Further, in most cases participation is free – even for the marketers, at the most basic level.

Further still, results are always measurable.

The equation is really simple: Marketers who are pulling back on their traditional advertising are merely following the lead of other marketers. And those who are not actively involved in social media are negligent. Marketers need to be where the people are, so they simply aren’t going to ignore a media channel that has so quickly attracted a large percentage of the world’s population.

I could predict that advertising revenues are going to continue their decline for newspapers, because consumer advertisers are now discovering what business-to-business advertisers learned several years ago: With social media, you can (and should) become your own publisher – developing an audience and serving it with meaningful, interesting and helpful content.

That doesn’t mean newspapers, magazines or any other type of print media are doomed. But newspapers of the future will be very different than they were just six years ago. The sooner they figure out how to unhitch their fortunes from advertising, the better off they’ll be.

Leave your comment »

Posted in Future of media

Tags: advertising content facebook marketing media newspaper social media

So much to do that nothing gets done

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Many small business owners are not marketers. They’ll tell you as much.

People start their own business in order to do what they love and do well. Marketing becomes a necessary evil.

For many, writing is a chore. Or databases are a mystery. Or blogging takes too much time. Social media creates an uncomfortable blend between business and personal. Networking is superficial. Advertising is too expensive and doesn’t work quickly. Public relations is a crapshoot.

It’s altogether too time-consuming, too hard, too expensive. There’s so much marketing work to do that nothing gets done. And it’s easy to justify, because word-of-mouth is the thing that works the best anyway. But word-of-mouth isn’t real marketing; it’s luck. And while I’d rather be lucky the good, the real winners are both.

Aside from being under-capitalized, marketing paralysis may be the most common affliction among small businesses. There is a lot to know about marketing and too many easy reasons not to get started.

But marketing is now more accessible to small businesses than it’s ever been. Marketing rarely comes for free, but it’s possible to start marketing seriously without risking thousands of dollars like you had to do 10 years ago.

So here’s an idea: Try one thing. Instead of getting overwhelmed by all there is to learn about marketing, try choosing one marketing activity and focusing on it until you’re proficient – or at least comfortable.

What should you do first? I’d advise doing the activity that interests you most; you’re more likely to find the joy in mastering it.

But if you insist on being pointed in the right direction, swallow your pride and jump onto Facebook. Why? It’s a tool that can allow you to reach 1 out of 2 people in the United States – for free. If you coughed up $3 million to advertise on the Superbowl you wouldn’t reach that many people. Facebook is, simply, the largest media outlet in the world. And you can get started without spending a nickel.

What do you do on Facebook? Start by building a profile for your company, and then explore and experiment. We can discuss it in more detail another time. What’s important is that you do something. Anything.

Leave your comment »

Posted in Marketing Strategy

Tags: advertising marketing social media value proposition

« Older Entries