Are You Missing?

by Scott Howard | Oct 6, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

A decade ago, I took a break from working in radio to work full-time for a website development firm that had some cutting edge technology back in 2011.

My job was to find companies that needed website upgrades and introduce them to our platform so we could bring them into what was then the current version of the internet age.

A new website could cost $20,000 for a simple landing page up to well over 100 grand for an eCommerce site.

These days, you can hire a professional to build you nearly anything you need for under $50,000. I have a few connections that I trust to do the work for a tenth of that, depending on what your needs are.

Yet, I am amazed at the number of businesses that are missing online.

What do I mean by missing?

Well first off, I should be able to find you with a simple Google Search for your business name.

Google tries to be your friend by providing businesses with free listings so that when I am looking for you, I can find you.

And by find, I mean find your website, your location including directions, your phone number and whatever else would be appropriate.

Yet there are still too many businesses that seem to be ignoring the internet because they don’t show up when I Google them.

Similar circumstances with Facebook. Too many of you don’t exist.

Now I’m not a tech wizard nor am I a web designer, or even an expert in Search Engine Optimization anymore. Consider me your average potential customer who is just looking to connect with you or one of your competitors because I have a question that requires your expertise. Or maybe I have money to spend right now and I just need to connect with you and give you my money in exchange for the product or service you provide.

But you are missing when I ask my phone to find you, or my laptop to send me to your website.

To me, I find this shocking, that a business is still invisible online.

This violates one of the very basics of marketing. You need to be able to be found.

Stop ignoring this and either pay someone or do it yourself, but create a way for people like me to find you online.

Also, if you have not updated your website, or updated your social media this year, (or longer)… do it. Our whole world has gone through numerous changes since the pandemic began over 18 months ago and I’m sure your business has too. Update your hours, and other policies we need to know and want to know. Even if it’s back to business as usual, tell us that too.

One more tip and this is for you as an individual:

Don’t be missing online personally. You don’t have to create your own website like I did years ago, but you might want to. At the very least, get on social media. Create a LinkedIn profile, Go ahead and get on Facebook. Those two are the most important for adults who want to be found.

Sure, you can also use Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others but don’t ignore Facebook and LinkedIn because those are the two primary social media channels still for grown-ups.

Are you missing?

If you are, what are you missing?

And are you going to do something about it?

P.S.

Everything you just read I wrote on Sunday 10/3/21 and used as the script for this weeks podcast.

Then the next day, Monday 10/4/21 Facebook.com goes down. I mean for several hours, you cannot connect to Facebook and some of their other holdings like Instagram. Does this mean that you should NOT use Facebook?

No, it just means you should not use Facebook exclusively. As I am writing this on Monday afternoon and Facebook is still down, I have full confidence in Facebook coming back online. This is just an unfortunate hiccup that will cost them some money in lost revenue. However, for the businesses that only rely on Facebook or Instagram to be found online, this will have a much more serious impact.

Go back and read what I wrote in its entirety and then do it.

Brand Building in Dollars and Sense

by Scott Howard | 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.

Caring About Your Customers

by Scott Howard | Feb 10, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

If you want to earn a consumers business this year, you have to appeal to what matters most to them.

That statement is true if you are selling Land Rovers or if you are running a dollar store.

It’s also been a truth that has been around forever, but now I have a fresh set of data to help you navigate 2021.

It comes from a survey just released last month on MarketingCharts.com.

Do you know what tops the list?

Convenience and Safety. I’m willing to bet that before our pandemic, those two items wouldn’t be linked together and be a the top of the list. Sure, we’ve been steadily looking for ways to make our lives easier forever, so convenience would be pretty high on the list anytime, but coupled with the repeated and continuous warnings about our health and safety due to the virus, this is a new category of consideration that we need to keep in mind for many more months to come.

The idea of getting your groceries delivered to your doorstep was an option very few people were willing to spend the money on. Even curbside pickup was a concept that was still in its infancy a year ago for grocery shopping.

Sure we’ve been having pizza’s delivered to our door for decades. That concept was expanded awhile ago locally by a company called Waiter on the Way that would take your order over the phone from dozens of restaurants and deliver to you for a small charge. Of course this concept has since expanded with national companies now providing this service.

Ordering online with delivery of nearly anything has become the mainstay of Amazon’s retail operations for years. As consumers we knew that we could order online and buy stuff that would be delivered to our homes, or our cars, but the pandemic created the increased need perceived by consumers who were previously not even considering these conveniences, but now do it for safety’s sake.

My question to you, is what have you done this past year and what will you be doing in the months and years ahead to adapt to this trend?

Also on the list is the word Empathy. How do consumers feel about your company and the way you care about them? How do you manage this internally and externally? If you have a customer that leaves a less than 5 star review online, how do you respond? Are your marketing and branding messages conveying empathy and do you live up to those expectations? Time to clean this area of your business up because this relates to another item on the list.

Losing loyal customers. With all the changes in buying habits and the disruptions caused by the pandemic, this has also accelerated in the past year and will continue in 2021.

Two more items on the list go hand in hand.

The acceleration of e-commerce and providing the best customer experience. The best way for a local company to compete with an online, out of town company is the customer experience angle. We want to shop local, make it easy for us to do that because there is an alternative. Better yet, have you added an e-commerce option for you local customers?

Looking for ideas on how to implement some of these ideas and concepts? Contact me and we can explore some options. Send an email to Scott@WOWO.com .

Is It Time To Fall Out Of Love With Digital Ads?

by Scott Howard | Jan 27, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

The whole magical world of digital advertising online.

For the past decade plus, I’ve seen study after study after study that talked about the shift in advertising from traditional ads to digital ads.

As a point of reference, traditional ads refer to radio and television broadcast ads, newspaper and any form of print including direct mail and phone books, also outdoor ads like roadside billboards and even in-store signage, etc. Digital ads are delivered digitally via the internet someway on webpages, apps, search engine marketing, you can even throw in search engine optimization.

Most of the predictions of double digit percentage increases in digital ad expenditures year over year have come true, just like the decrease in money spent on traditional ads have come true too.

But, has this shift in where companies advertise paid off?

According to a recent article in Forbes, the answer is either no, or not anymore, or no one knows.

There’s a lot of no’s in that last sentence. And that should concern you.

When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?

That’s the tile and here are some of the details from Forbes:

Proctor and Gamble was spending $200 million on digital advertising and turned it off. Result = no change in business outcome.

Chase Bank was serving their ads on 400,000 sites and cut it 99% to just 5,000 and saw no negative impact.

Uber was spending $120 million and stopped and saw no change too.

The Forbes article lists other examples big and small of businesses that either stopped their paid digital ads completely or shrunk the budget significantly and actually improved their business. They mention Facebook ads and Google Adwords along with other digital marketing activity and I believe I know the reason for this.

There’s a phrase called the “Zero Moment of Truth”. It’s the time when a consumer decides to make the purchase. The digital world likes to say they deliver buyers at that Zero Moment. Maybe or maybe not.

What if you need to buy a new hot water heater? That’s a purchase most people don’t plan for but when you wake up and need one, you don’t wait for days or weeks to decide to buy. You are suddenly at the Zero Moment of Truth when you are in the ice cold shower.

Your brain is going to immediately start by telling you the names of companies that you already know that could be your problem solver. Then your heart will kick in and screen out the companies you know but don’t trust.

How does your heart and brain know these things? Ideally it’s because you have been exposed to advertising and marketing way before your hot water heater died. And this is where certain forms of traditional media shine.

I call it intrusive media. Over 90% of the American population still listen to the radio every week. For my wife and I, we listen to the radio every time we are in the car which is at least 5 to 7 days a week. The radio stations we listen to have ads. Our brains hear those ads thru our ears and that reputation of hearing about a local business builds trust so our hearts are also impacted.

My parents never picked up the phone book as part of their casual reading routine, it was the Zero Moment of Truth when they grabbed the phone book if they didn’t know who to call, they’d flip open the Yellow Pages to search by business classification and see the ads for water heaters. Or if they already knew who they wanted to call, they would open the White Pages which was the alphabetical listing of people and businesses and get the number that way.

The digital revolution has replaced the phone book in multiple ways, hasn’t it…

So why are the digital ads that I mentioned at the beginning of this article not needed anymore? It’s because the impact has diminished. The brands that are using digital to get the sale at the Zero Moment of Truth already have Top of Mind Awareness and consumers would buy from them anyway.

That Top of Mind Awareness came from traditional media over the years, and has continued as those brands keep showing up on TV and radio.

I’ve got one more quote from the Forbes piece:

Digital marketing works; but the vast majority of impressions and clicks are from bot activity currently.

I’ve worked in the digital world and I’ve done some deep dives into the Google Analytics and unfortunately, it’s true. I can make you a promise that when you are listening to my radio station, WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana and we share with you the number of weekly listeners, those are real live people, like you and me, not bots.

Contact me for more info. Scott@WOWO.com.

Top of Google or Top of Mind

by Scott Howard | Dec 8, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice

In today’s changing media world, when it comes to your current customers and your future customers, is it more important to have Top of Mind Awareness or be at the top of the page on Google?

Of course, it’s great to be recognized by both customers and Google, but if your competition wins in your customers’ rankings, a good Google ranking for you won’t change their minds.

Study after study has proven that when searching on Google, people will click on a business that they “know” and are “familiar with” far more than clicking on a name they don’t know. In fact, 71% will click on a name they are familiar with before clicking on a name at the top of the page.

The purpose of advertising is to accomplish one of two things: sell products immediately or create brand awareness.

The best way to create brand awareness is to create stories that move customers from unawareness of you to awareness of you, and onto creating an emotional connection with your business or product, long before they need you. Then, and only then, can you be assured of having your name clicked on when they search for your product or service.

Einstein said, “Genius is making the complicated look simple.” Effective marketing need not be complicated.

A simple strategy of using broadcast to tell your story to create a pre-search preference for your business and using online to close the sale will create the revenue results you need to make your marketing more profitable.

Click here to receive our Ten Powerful Storytelling Tips to create stories that will have your customers choosing you when they search online.