Your Supplier Wants To Help Pay For Your Advertising

Your Supplier Wants To Help Pay For Your Advertising

by | Nov 30, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice

All of your suppliers have a vested interest in your success, and most of them have access to extraordinary marketing funds and resources beyond traditional co-op to help you sell more of their products.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, it’s your chance to make a “Last Dash for Cash”.  Don’t think it’s too late. Millions of co-op dollars go unused every year. The main reason is that seldom does anyone ask for these funds! If you don’t access those funds, you are literally throwing money away, or worse yet, your competitors will scoop those funds and use them against you.

In our How to Leverage Your Suppliers’ Marketing Muscle, tactic number one is “Tender your Next Ad Campaign”. Present a written proposal for submissions for marketing support from all of your suppliers outlining your proposed advertising schedule and investment, along with any special displays, promotions, demonstrations, or other exposure the winning bidder will receive.

Many business owners believe their hands are tied to rigid manufacturers’ restrictions if they use manufacturers’ co-op advertising funds, but seldom is this the case.  The “squeaky wheel” oftentimes gets the grease!

If you are an appliance dealer, for example, and you sell GE and Whirlpool, your GE representative has a vested interest in you featuring GE versus Whirlpool in your ad. If you make a presentation to GE outlining the kind of campaign you propose to use to sell more GE products without using the standard GE script or ad copy that the manufacturer supplies, it will generally be approved by their office because they don’t want your campaign to feature their competitor.

Still, other businesses opt not to leverage their suppliers’ marketing muscle because it takes time and effort. In today’s competitive environment you need to take advantage of every competitive edge you can.

It may be too late in the year to go through the process of preparing and presenting a full-blown marketing campaign, but it’s not too late to simply ASK.

The old saying, “Ask and ye shall receive” still works, especially at the end of the year when manufacturers have unspent funds.

Make a Last Dash for your Cash and Good Luck!

Click here to retrieve our FREE How to Leverage Your Suppliers’ Marketing Muscle.
 
 
For the past several years, I have been working with a wholesaler that has created additional coop funding with their largest supplier and it pays for 50% of the advertising they do on my radio station in the form of product credits.  It’s really a no-brainer for the dealers to do this.
 
Another company that I work with has me submit scripts and get a approval number which takes just a couple of days and they also get free money for their advertising on WOWO.
 
Contact me and we’ll help you see what you qualify for in coop funds for the year ahead.!
ReOrganizing The WorkPlace

ReOrganizing The WorkPlace

by | Nov 2, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

In less than 2 months it will be 2022, nearly two years since the American Lifestyle was disrupted due to a mysterious virus we call Covid-19.

The pandemic and our response to it created a acceleration of certain changes that were happening but at a slower pace.  For example working from home created a boom for video conferencing and tele-meetings. Did you realize that Zoom was founded over a decade ago? It was one of those software companies that was just chugging along, took over 6 years to become profitable, and then it seemed like everyone discovered it in 2020 out of necessity.

I had been using it for a couple of years before that with a friend and client of mine for our weekly meetings with her team that were all across the country.

On-line shopping was something we had been doing with national companies like Amazon, E-bay and Zappos to name a few, but out of necessity, in 2020 if you were a small mom and pop or a local chain, you needed to create a way to sell your stuff besides coming into your brick and mortar store.

My wife and I did most of our grocery shopping online and still do some of it especially as the weather gets uglier.

That’s some of the consumer side, how about the business side of life?

It was announced that McDonald’s is going to take a Chicago experiment and make it a national innovation.  McDonald’s is partnering with IBM to automate the drive-thru experience.  We’ve already seen many fast food joints install kiosks to place and pay for your order when you go inside, and the popularity of mobile apps has surged in the past couple of years too.

This move of McDonald’s to eliminate the humans from the customer drive-thru experience is expected to actually create a better customer experience and help ease the worker shortages.

That’s the other side of this coin, a lack of people willing and able to fill the jobs has created the necessity for companies to find alternatives to the way things have always been done in the past.  I wonder what innovations are going on in your business or industry?  Drop me a line or comment and tell me.

The company I work for is making some adjustments. Federated Media is a privately owned company with a dozen radio stations in Northern Indiana along with a digital division.  I worked for one of our Fort Wayne Indiana radio stations on the air in my 20’s and then came back 30 years later to join the Local Advertising Sales Team for WOWO radio.  In 2020, I took over as the General Sales Manager of WOWO.

Before I returned to Federated Media, they did some restructuring of their Fort Wayne radio division which created some efficiencies in their operations and also set us up for success for the 2020 pandemic a dozen years later.  One of those changes was the elimination of an office or assigned workspace for the local advertising sales people.  We were doing work from home long before it was the thing to do in 2020.  When people asked me about my job, I would tell them about the flexibility of my work schedule and say, “I only go to the office 2 hours a week”.  One hour for our weekly sales team meetings and the other hour was for a one-on one meeting with my boss.

When I moved into management, I did have an office, but for about 3 months in the spring of 2020, I was also working from my home office again.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Federated Media is going to begin moving into a new larger office space that we recently purchased.  The past 3 years, Federated Media Fort Wayne has been operating from two buildings and this new place will bring us back together under one roof.  However, I noticed in the planning for the new floor plan, we are not creating offices or cubicles for the local sales people because we simple don’t need them.  Currently there are 15, and in the year ahead we will expand to 20 local advertising sales people in Fort Wayne, and they will continue to have the same freedom to come to the office for about two hours a week most weeks.

By the way, I am hiring for a couple of qualified people to join my team.  Email Scott@WOWO.com for details.

What about your workplace?  What kind of reorganization are you doing?

The Value of a Single Customer

The Value of a Single Customer

by | Jul 21, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice

When a person walks through the doors of your business, in-person or online, and purchases something from you for the first time, at that moment, they become your customer, your patient, or your client.

The question is, what is the value of that individual to your business or practice?  Is it the amount of profit from this one-time purchase or, is it the potential lifetime value they create?

Most experts will tell you that the cost to acquire a new customer is ten times more than what it costs to keep them.

With that said, most successful business owners have a well thought out advertising plan, or at minimum, an advertising budget intended to acquire and attract “new” customers, but very few have a plan to keep their “current” customers, patients, or clients.

Since we agree that keeping them is far less expensive than acquiring them, understanding the true Lifetime Customer Value should be enough to persuade you to at least consider implementing a plan to keep them.

There are 4 factors we need to consider when calculating a “Lifetime Customer Value”:

1) Average profit per individual sale including upsells and add-ons

2) # of purchases per year

3) # of years they will remain a customer

4) Word-of-Mouth – average # of people they persuade to do business with you

Paid media advertising is the best way to acquire new customers. Word-of-Mouth advertising is the best way to multiply your customers, and over-the-top customer service is the best way to ensure your customers become repeat customers.

Understanding the “Lifetime Value” of your customers will inspire you to create a strategic plan to serve each customer with more passion.

Click here to get our Lifetime Customer Value Worksheet to help you calculate the LCV of your customers.
 
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Brand Building in Dollars and Sense

Brand Building in Dollars and Sense

by | Jun 30, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Did you notice the title of this article has a play on words?

Or did you think it was just a typo?

Brand Building in Dollars and Sense with the word Sense spelled not like the cents we use to refer to money but as sense, as it makes sense or common sense which people say isn’t common anymore.  I wonder if my grandparents said that too back in their day.

Anyway, I was reading a couple of different online articles, one from Roy H. Williams, the self proclaimed Wizard of Ads.  Roy is a couple years older than me, and has created quite a reputation for media and marketing over the past few decades.  He has a free weekly email called the Monday Morning Memo that I subscribe to and if you click on the picture in the email, you travel thru the rabbit hole created for that week.  It’s an interesting journey most weeks.

On Monday June 21st, as I traveled thru the rabbit hole of the Monday Morning Memo, Roy shares the story of a client of his.  I’m quoting Roy here:

One of my clients asked me to explain our marketing strategy to a guy from a private equity firm that is hoping to buy a chunk of my client’s company for a few hundred million dollars.

When we were retained 7 years ago, the company was bringing in barely $9m a year. Using radio as our primary driver of new business, we did nearly $250m in 2020 and are tracking to surpass $300m in 2021.

Did you catch that? In 7 years this company grew from 9 million in sales to over 300 million dollars this year and advertising on the radio is the primary driver of new business.

Here’s more of Roy’s story:

The private equity guy suggested that we should redirect our radio budget to online advertising because, “no one listens to the radio anymore.”

Now Roy goes into a lengthy and detailed explanation of how radio ratings work and how they know from the ratings service that the private equity dude is wrong.  Then he decides to use not just statistics, but the real life example of this particular company.

“The objective of a radio campaign is to become the name the listener thinks of immediately and feels the best about whenever they need what we sell. Today’s ads aren’t meant to sell customers today. Today’s ads are just one more tap of the hammer as we drive our message into their minds. We want to achieve automatic, involuntary recall. Scientists call it ‘procedural memory.’”

And here’s where it gets really good.  Roy asks the companies online marketing manager about the traffic they get to their website and she tells them there are just 10 search strings that make up most of the traffic to their website.  The top 9 all include the name of the business. That is what the radio ads are doing… Branding the name of the business so when a potential customer needs the product or service, they Google the name of the company to get their contact information.

That last search string that drives people to their website amounts to just 5% of their website clicks.  It uses a more generic search string that doesn’t include the company name.

Roy Williams continues:

So without the name recognition and goodwill built through radio, we would have done only 12-and-a-half million dollars last year instead of 250 million dollars.

That’s some real dollars there and it makes a lot of sense, right?

Don’t just take my word or the words of Roy H. Williams, the Wizard of Ads.  I also read about the benefits of branding from an article published in June from Nielsen that uses the classic buying funnel example.

WHEN IT COMES TO BRAND BUILDING, AWARENESS IS CRITICAL

The title of the article and the information point out why what Roy was saying works. Targeted online ads may be one of the ways that companies get traffic to their website, but unless their is familiarity of the company or product, we are not likely going to click on it.  This familiarity is  what brand building does and it’s at the top of the buying funnel.

This Upper Funnel Marketing is actually the foundation that will drive future sales because the future buyer is aware of the company before they have a need.  60% to 80% or more of your radio ads in most cases should focus on Upper Funnel Marketing.  You may never need to spend money on the Lower Funnel Marketing which is the conversion stage because if we as marketers do our jobs building the brand reputations, the consumers will actually convert themselves when they have the need or want.

Want to know more about building your brand and growing your business for the future, not just this months sale?  Contact me, Scott Howard.  Drop me a note to Scott@WOWO.com.

 

Lasting Change in Consumer Habits

Lasting Change in Consumer Habits

by | Apr 24, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom

2020 was a year of change for multiple reasons including Covid, the Black Lives Matter movement and political division at an increased level.

The consequences of 2020 is that consumers habits have changed, some at an accelerated rate due to the way we had to adapt last year. Video conferencing was slowly becoming an option, but when it became the norm because we were not allowed to meet in person, that, my friends is an example of what I am referring to.

One of my top salesperson loves the video option because it saves her time traveling and I know that while we are slowly returning to more in-person meetings, video is still going to be a viable and acceptable option.

And there’s more…

Marketing Charts reports:

The vast majority (78%) of consumers have come to prefer online shopping for specific items over the course of the past 6 months, according to a Cheetah Digital report [download page] on the digital consumer trends that are set to outlast the pandemic.

Kroger, Meijer and Walmart are the major grocery stores where I live and we switched to ordering online and then picking up at a designated time for nearly a year.

Yes, Amazon benefited from the online shopping boom but other local stores learned to adapt and provided curbside pick-up or carry-out only to adjust to the restrictions imposed by safety precautions of the pandemic.

Climate change, political posturing and convenience seem to be big factors according to the report.

What about you and your business… what have you done in the past year that you are going to continue doing in 2021 and beyond?

I’d love to hear from you, drop me a line or leave a comment.  Or if you would like some help and guidance, ask.  My email is Scott @WOWO.com