Chapter Twelve. Marketing for real people
Tell me what it is, why I’d want one, and how to get it. That’s all I give a damn about. If you can do that in a humorous, dramatic, or otherwise attention-grabbing way then, fine, knock yourself out. Please don’t talk to me in Latin, use obtuse images, or hit me with stuff that goes way over my head because I just don’t care enough about you or your product to bother trying to understand your clever rubbish.
In that one paragraph, you have all the rules of advertising you will ever need. Be clear, tell people what the benefit to them is, and then make it very easy for them to buy from you. Ad agencies argue that advertising is about building brands too. There is truth in this but, frankly, brand is built more powerfully by your shop, your people in it, and your store culture. Slick eye-candy advertising is simply not important.
Basic brands such as easyJet and Poundland tell you what they are for, why you would want to use them, and how to do business with them. Both those brands are sales heroes. Both are never going to win awards for the glossiness of their advertising. On the other hand, IKEA and Sainsbury’s do the same thing but with a bigger budget, and arguably greater creative finesse, but to the same effect.
Advertising made simple
Media commentator Charlie Brooker wrote in his Guardian blog:
Marketing is the art of associating products with ideas to bamboozle consumers. People in marketing often talk about the “personality” of a given product. A biscuit might be “reassuring and sensual”; a brand of shoe may exhibit “anarchic yet inquisitive” tendencies. Marketers have built their worldview on such thinking, despite it being precisely the sort of babble a madman might come up with following years alone in an isolated cottage, during which time he falls in love with a fork and decides the lightbulbs are conspiring against him.
And, of course, he’s right.
Beauty has its place
There is space for the beautiful—those breathtaking ads that force their way into your awareness. But these are very much the exception that rather proves the rule: You remember these because they are exceptional. Orange, the mobile phone network, has built a hugely successful brand without ever showing a picture of a telephone in its advertising (there was one, once, but Motorola was paying and forced the issue, but even then the phone featured was only shown as an x-ray image). You might think this goes against the simple doctrine I’ve outlined here. It doesn’t. Orange’s ads always tell you what they are for (mobile communications), they always focus on one clearly defined benefit at a time (say the joy of swapping pictures on a mobile), and then they put a great big phone number up on screen and suggest interested shoppers might like to call that to become an Orange customer.
Marketing things to make and do
Marketing is not a mythical black art; it is nothing more, or less, than a common sense framework: A framework into which ads and promotions can be fitted. Marketing theory is actually very simple. The skill, especially in the case of retail, is not in cleverly executing the practice of marketing but rather it is in trusting your gut feel to keep things simple. Marketing is about understanding who your customers are, where they can be found, what they want, and how much they will pay to satisfy those wants. That’s really kind of it.
This sets up a series of questions. Who are we selling to? How do we tell them about our product? What will they pay for it? Notice how these questions form a chain? The answer to the first informs the second which in turn sets up the third. Answering these questions can help you to make better decisions on promotions and on advertising.
Questions chain
1. Who wants to shop at a store like mine?
2. What is it they like about us?
3. Which products excite them?
4. What promotions do they like?
5. Where can I find these people?
6. What should I tell them?
You might want to go through these questions in a team meeting. Try to cover four or five main customer types separately. Each customer type looked at will create a slightly different thread. Use what you learn to select target audiences and to select the promotions you would like to put before them. The following pages list some of your options for reaching those audiences.
Reaching customers—using recent technology
So you’ve worked out what you want to say and to whom; the next step is to choose your medium, or mix of media to reach them. The web has become an incredibly cost-effective option—sometimes costing you little more than time. You need to exploit these online communication options fully. So let’s start with those:
Get a company page set-up, use it to talk about the store, great products, promotions, and anything else that you think your customers will be interested in but that is also relevant to what you sell. Make the page look good, research it by looking at pages of retail businesses you know and respect—look at your own Facebook friends and take note of the company pages they’ve “liked.”
Be prepared to take feedback directly on the page; it might hurt when that feedback is negative but it’s important. The great thing about gathering feedback through Facebook and Twitter is that you tend to hear about problems early and so you have an early opportunity to solve them—and to show publicly that you have listened and dealt with an issue.
Twitter can be daunting to the uninitiated—it looks like an absolute word-storm, but if thousands of other people can work it out, so can you. The best way to learn Twitter is to set up a personal account for yourself and, well, use it for a bit. Get to know the foibles and etiquette that way, without risking the store’s reputation.
Once you’re comfortable, set up an account for the store. Look at other popular retail brands on Twitter and see if you can work out what links them. You’ll find the great ones tend to have a character to them: They transcend bland corporatism and feature an interesting mix of celebration of great product, news, comments, and tips.
Foursquare
This is one of the leaders in what are called “location-aware social games.” It’s similar in some ways to the “places” feature on Facebook but is much more flexible. In short: Members use their smartphones to tag whatever location they are in at the actual time they are in it. So a customer can be standing in your store and use Foursquare to tell all their friends they’re there. Why would anyone bother to do that? It’s a good question—tools such as Foursquare might fail to persist but, so far, investors and users are backing them heavily. What it enables is for individual stores to add their details and reward members for visiting the store: You can link promotions and all sorts to your site. It’s free to do and Wetherspoons and Domino’s have been among the first in the UK to realize the commercial potential.
Amazon and eBay
For most store types, even if you have your own transactional website, it’s well worth also selling through Amazon Marketplace and eBay Stores. Both sites have astonishing reach and it doesn’t require a great deal of effort to list your kit on their sites.
Smartphone and Tablet apps
Bit more involved this one, in terms of both cost and commitment; but for many stores, a smartphone app is a winner—it offers the opportunity to become integrated into customers” regular routines, which is so valuable. If you think it’s worth doing then find yourself an expert—there are a number of app-developer matchmaking sites on the web.
YouTube/Vimeo
Make videos of staff celebrating product. Honest reviews, useful close-ups, relevant trivia—link to them from your website and Facebook page. Easy to do, customers love them, and they help build your character. Works best if the customer is then able to buy the featured product from you online but still worth doing if they can’t.
Your own website
Now, if you’re an Internet store then of course you’ve got this covered. But as I said at the start of the book, the disciplines of retail extend to whatever channel you sell through, and if you’re a bricks-and-mortar store then you almost certainly need a transactional website too—one that represents you well and that gives customers another way in which to do business with you. Don’t take this lightly—it’s not good enough to post a half-assed webpage written by your weird cousin Tim. You must consider how the site reflects on your business: You need to think about how to get stock and POS systems working with the site and you need to think about how you are going to fulfill orders. None of these are trivial concerns. The same care and investment you made on your physical shop needs to be clear in your website too.
Reaching customers—traditional methods
Radio
Radio is a great medium. It’s very cost-effective and you can paint any image you want with words. Often big and bold words work best. Plenty of stations will help you to create your ad. Each station will also be able to give you profiles of their listeners for each of their shows. This means you can choose to advertise only on those stations, and only during those shows, listened to by people who might actually want to shop with you. There are also lots of resources available for do-it-yourself radio advertisers, and that helps makes the medium very attractive.
The Radio Advertising Bureau exists “to guide national advertisers and their agencies toward effective advertising on Commercial Radio.” They won’t be able to advise you directly but their website is a fantastic mine of resources. Click on the truly heroic radio advert archive; all the inspiration you could ever want is there. The RAB’s web address is www.rab.co.uk.
TV
TV is undoubtedly a powerful advertising channel, but it’s expensive and it suffers a tendency to be somewhat scattergun in effect. Unless you can afford to advertise on TV lots then it’s unlikely that you will reach enough of your potential customers to make this medium pay. The Advertising Association, www.adassoc.org.uk, has some useful research on its site that you might want to take a look at if you’re considering TV. The channels themselves do offer advice and assistance to smaller advertisers, so it is worth asking about those services. Ask too about related discounted advertising packages.
Clear bold messages work best, and buy the largest portrait spot you can afford. Don’t do national if you are local. Don’t be seduced by glamorous graphics. A bold typographical treatment highlighting a great promotion accompanied by a shot of your product is more effective. And the old maxim of “less is more” absolutely applies.
Posters
Traditional large-format posters can act like a second storefront, but they are expensive. These days the sites available for placing an ad are almost without limit: everything from posters in bar bathrooms to the handles of gas pumps. JCDecaux is the largest independent outdoor media owner in the UK and worth talking to if you are interested in exploring posters. Their web address is www.jcdecaux.co.uk.
Catalogs
A catalog can be a single flyer or a 32-page color extravaganza. Never underestimate the power of catalogs. They provide you with huge scope to tell people about your fantastic deals and at the same time talk about why your store is a nice place to visit and to do business with. George Whalin, one of America’s most effective retail consultants, suggests that “if you have one item and just one page, that’s a catalog, start from there and build it over time.”
Catalogs are exciting because there is so much you can do with them. You can hand them out as flyers, you can put them into the local free papers, you can mail them to your customer database, and you can give them out to visitors to your store.
Consider how you might distribute your catalog. Piles in the store are fine; a stand outside is better. Having a colleague hand them out in the parking lot or up and down the street is always worth doing. Paying a delivery person to distribute catalogs door-to-door is useful too. Of course, this is also dependent on the type of catalog you have gone for. If yours is thick, heavy, and expensive then distribution will have to be more limited. Similarly, if you know that your customer falls into a very narrow interest group then you should consider distributing your catalog directly to them—a baby goods store might want to have its catalog in the waiting area of the local maternity ward for example.
Easy ABC database marketing
Every store can, and must, build a customer database. Used sensibly they drive customers into your store like no other advertising tool can. You don’t need complex software to run them: Any database program such as Microsoft’s Access will do. You can even get by fine using just the contacts bit of the free program Outlook Express (again available from Microsoft) or on Google Mail. A card index will suffice in high-ticket selling situations where you are servicing a small number of prospect customers.
The best email marketing
How to do email database marketing really well
1. Always get permission; customers hate email spam and junk mail—it irritates them. They respond much better to expected messages, so long as these are relevant.
2. Make sure you actually have something to say, for example:
• Exclusive offer
• Hard-to-get item here in stock now
• End-of-line special bargain
• One-off event
• Exciting new line due in on date x
3. Start the email with all your headings—just titles with no additional body text, for example:
• Buy-one-get-one-free on all paperback fiction this weekend only
• New Dan Brown arrives in-store here on June 11—reserve your copy now
• David Beckham here signing his new autobiography on July 1
4. Remember: Time limits on offers always help to drive customers into action.
5. Then in the body of the email, below these headlines, you can expand on each subject. Try to keep words to a minimum: Just tell the story and then get out.
• Buy one-get-one-free on all paperback fiction this weekend only.
• Choose any two from our huge range of great titles and you get the cheapest free; that includes all of our current best-sellers as well as the full selection of classic fiction. Saturday and Sunday only—we’re looking forward to seeing you!
6. Remember: Close with details of your store including telephone numbers and opening times.
7. Sign it! Customers appreciate a personal touch.
8. Remember the rules: “Tell me what it is, tell me why I might want one, tell me how to get it.”
The Data Protection Act
If you are going to hold customers” data in a database, you must comply with the Data Protection Act 1998. Most retailers have notified that they wish to be registered under the Act. If you have done so, you are likely to be entitled to also use the data you hold for database marketing purposes. You must check though before moving on. If you are in a chain-store branch, the company may well have notified too but it can be tricky to find out. If you are lucky, the marketing team will find out for you and will help you with the small number of compliance issues involved. If you are less lucky and the marketing team gets all sloppy, then it may be worth considering notifying in the name of your individual store instead. Lots of clear advice on the whole process can be found at www.dataprotection.gov.uk/dpr/dpdoc.nsf.
One of the key aspects of the Data Protection Act is permission. When you ask for someone’s details, you must tell them that you will be holding these details in a database. You must also get their permission to send them things. Check on the www.dataprotection.gov.uk site for the latest advice on what to say and how to say it. Getting permission is good practice anyway—there is little point in taking someone’s address only to send them things they don’t want to see.
Postcards
Email is the nice, easy, and cheap way to begin database marketing. There is an excellent print alternative, though, that is still cost-effective, especially as a tool for announcing big promotions or sales or as invites to store events. Stores in the U.S. use postcard marketing campaigns very effectively.
The usual format is a large postcard where one side is given over to a full-color image and the other side is split into two halves. One of those halves is a space to put an address label and a stamp. The other half will then usually carry a coupon of some sort.
Local printers are plentiful, so get three price quotes and ask to see samples. Get a fixed-cost quote and some examples. Make sure you and the printer both understand exactly what it is that you want. Short print runs are ideal as this lets you over time send lots of different messages to individual targeted groups of customers.
Selecting prospects to send your cards to needs a bit of thought. You want to avoid wastage and to maximize your chances of success. All current and recent customers who could conceivably need to visit you again should be targeted. Think carefully, though: Writing to someone who bought a sofa from you last week to tell them you are offering 10% off sofas this week is always going to be a bad idea.
Think about your customers; do groups of them have particular things in common? Do you find yourself selling to people who all live in certain areas of town? Are your products related to their hobbies, or to their work? Are there any age groups that you seem to attract disproportionately? Looking at these factors will help you to identify other groups of people who are not your customers yet who are very much like your existing ones. These prospect groups are almost certainly worth talking to, and a postcard offer might just do the trick.
Andrea and the first number 35 store.
Source: Andrea Cohen
Keeping track—measurement
Any direct activity needs to be made measurable. You can do this easily by adding coded coupons to printed materials, and by asking email customers to quote a reference code when they come in. It doesn’t matter if the customer cannot remember the code, just that they tell you they want to take advantage of an offer you emailed to them.
Set up a basic Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to make tracking easy. Literally, just a few columns for the dates and then a few rows for the various promotions you are running. Then record the number of people responding, the total value of their purchases, and the margin earned on each transaction. At the end of each week, work out the total profit accounted for by your promotions. Then deduct from that the cost of the activity you ran. So long as you capture every relevant sale, then this is a crude but perfectly acceptable way to track how well each promotion is working for you.
You also need to take account of the discounts you gave to normal customers: People who would have bought from you regardless of the promotion. That is quite tricky and will often be down to your instinctive judgement. All the same, it is important because this number helps you to realistically appraise returns from your efforts.