Phone Etiquette!

Phone Etiquette!

by | Oct 14, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice

They say first impressions say a lot about your business. For many potential new customers, they first interact with or meet your business when they call on the phone.

In today’s tech-savvy society, it seems a machine rather than a human answers more phone calls to businesses. The entire process of answering company phones, from how quickly you respond to how you conclude the call and what is said in between, either with a live person or a voice recording, can determine whether potential customers choose to do business with you… or not!

There’s a saying that goes, “Little things mean a lot”.  Far too many businesses take answering the phone for granted. After all, what is so hard about answering the phone? However, having a set policy and procedure for answering the phone not only ensures the phone is answered the way you want it to be, but it also implies to ALL employees that you are a professional organization in ALL areas of your company.

With today’s business climate of limited and multi-tasking staff, there is often little time to answer the phones appropriately. In this case, a professional voicemail should be used in place of a live voice.  Just because a customer isn’t able to reach you does not mean they cannot be greeted with a message and feeling that creates a positive impression.

Remember that when someone calls your business they want something and it’s typically an answer to a question. In the 15 Rules to Phone Call Etiquette, Rule #5 is, “Take Notes”. Even if you use a voicemail system, ask the caller if they would prefer to leave a message or be sent to the person’s voicemail.  “Little things” do mean a lot!

Having a policy and set procedure on how you expect your phones to be answered is a small but important part of operating a professional business.

If you’d like to see the 15 Rules to Phone Call Etiquette, click here.

What I just shared was from my Sound ADvice email newsletter that subscribers receive nearly every Wednesday.  If you’d like a free subscription, drop me a note to Scott@ScLoHo.net

By the way, back in 2003 when I was starting my advertising career in Fort Wayne, I was invited to speak to a group of building contractors at their weekly breakfast meeting.  They thought I was going to pitch them on radio advertising but instead, I helped them with the way they converted leads to build trust over the phone and the advice I gave them was very similar to what I just shared with you.

These were small contractors, maybe two or three, perhaps just a solo entrepreneur and caller ID wasn’t standard on cell phones two decades ago.  I asked them, “What do you say when you answer your phone?” Most of them said, “Hello”.

My simple advice was to answer it professionally.

Hi, this is Gene from Gene’s plumbing, how can I help you?

This tells the caller that they’ve reached the right number and they are talking to the right person too.  6 months later I visited that group again and asked how many of them changed the way they answered the phone and what the results were.

Those that followed my advice saw an increase in business because they were converting more incoming calls or leads.

Even if you are not a business owner, try that with your own phone too.  If you call me, I’ll usually say my name and ask how I can help you.

This advice also applies to your voicemail message too.

Google is the Wrong Answer

Google is the Wrong Answer

by | Mar 21, 2023 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

I was in a meeting with a business owner this month and as we were doing our usual “Discovery” meeting, one of the questions that was asked was:

Where are your current customers coming from?

He answered, “Google”

Bzzzzzz.  Wrong answer.

Well, perhaps it was really the wrong question.

Google for advertising veterans is the new Yellow Pages.   

For those under the age of 45, before Google was launched last century in 1998 and became the top search engine about 5 years later, consumers would use the Yellow Pages section of a phone book to get the phone number to a business they wanted to call or visit.

Yellow Page ad salespeople trained their business customers to ask new people calling, “How did you get our number?” and a sizeable percent of the answers were the phone book.

I mean it made sense, the phone book is where I got the number, so technically the answer was correct.  This is how the Yellow Page ad salespeople sold ads, by “proving their worth” and getting the business owner to buy a bigger ad each year.  

In the old days of the phone book or today of Google and smart phones, the answer to the question is predictable.  If I’m in front of my laptop, I’ll Google it.  Otherwise, I’ll ask my phone, because I can search with my voice.  Siri, Alexa, and Hey Google are all similar current replacements for the both the phone book and laptop versions of Google.

Here’s why that’s the wrong question to ask if you are attempting to decide where your customers are coming from or where to invest your advertising dollars.

Google is the last step in a long series of steps that your new customer made to connect with you.  We call it the Zero Moment of Truth.  

All they need is the phone number, or if I’m searching from my phone, I don’t even need the actual number, I can call without even knowing the number.

The question you want to know is what are all the other influencing factors that prompted your customer to Google you?  Was it word of mouth from a friend?  Was it a 10 second video ad they had to watch before YouTube played a cat video?  Was it the radio ad, the endorsement from the podcast host?  The highway road sign they drive by daily or even the Pay Per Click Ad they saw when researching the kind of stuff you sell?

That’s what you should measure, and make it multiple choice because odds are it’s a combination of multiple influences that were the steps that lead to that final step of connecting with you because they Googled you.

Google is not the answer to your business success, it’s just the final step that connected them to you.

The Power of Planning Ahead

The Power of Planning Ahead

by | Sep 15, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

How far ahead do you plan?

Recently I was having coffee with a friend who was planning on a trip to Novi, Michigan to spend time with his wife’s family.  It was a day trip and he was noticeably stressed about it.

It was a spur of the moment thing that sounded like fun to his wife but he’s the kind of person who doesn’t like surprises and especially ones like this.

His in-laws moved to a new house recently and he had never been there.  He was going to be relying on GPS to be his navigator and get him and his family to their destination a few hours away.  He also didn’t know how long they would be staying.  He wanted it to be a day-trip but his wife was open to making it an overnighter if she was having fun.

This lack of planning was driving the husband nuts while his wife was clearly excited for a little adventure.

I’ve seen this type of thing play out in the business world too.  Some business owners love to fly by the seat of their pants and see what happens.  Others won’t make a move until every detail is thought out and prepared for.

Do you fall into one or the other of those two mindsets with your business?

There are problems with both.

The person that has to have everything planned out before they take any action can be so consumed with the planning that they never take action.  All they end up with is hours and hours and hours of planning that by the time they are ready to launch, their idea is outdated.

And the person who just goes out there and does stuff, can waste a lot of energy and effort going around in circles or chasing dreams and ideas that are simply not financially feasible or long term sustainable.

You really need a combination of the two extremes.  Planning and Launching go hand in hand.  Once you launch your business, then you make adjustments as you learn.

I call it tweaking.  Not twerking, that was a bad idea from a few years ago.

Tweaking is the adjustments to your original plan to make it better.

In the marketing world, I urge businesses to not use their phone number or street address in their radio ads.  That’s different from a few years ago, but now with the advances in our phone technology, I can ask my phone for directions or I can ask my phone to call any business I hear advertised on the radio.  

We may give a location like at the corner of Coliseum and Coldwater, but not the exact street address.  

One of the issues I saw occur in the past year is many business owners felt like they should do more short term planning and abandon long term planning because what if the economy takes a dump?  My answer is to create a couple of plans.

You need to have a long term strategic plan and also short term tactical plans.  They need to be in harmony with each other.  

Some of you are planning for 4th quarter which is just a few weeks away.  Some of you think you are being adventurous by starting your plans for the entire next year.

I’m in the middle of developing a two year plan with goals focused on what we want to achieve in 2022 and 2023.  It’s something I don’t think our company has done before, thinking two years down the road instead of just one.  At the end of 2020, I had a plan for 2021. 6 months later, I discovered a couple of things.

First off, we were on track to grow and reach the goals we wanted to achieve.

However I also discovered that we had only implemented half of what I planned.  

Those observations are being taken into consideration as I plan for the years ahead, because I already have the ideas to get us where we want to be at the end of 2023 since I still have ideas from this year to put into action.

What if you hate planning, or you’re just not very good at it?

Perhaps you need to bring in someone that can help with planning for your business future.  Sometimes it’s an outsider, sometimes it’s someone you already have working with you.

By the way, when it comes to planning your advertising and marketing, I have a team of professionals who know how to ask the right questions to help partner with you to create both a strategic plan and the tactics to make it happen.

Reach out to me, Scott@WOWO.com and we’ll help.

How Realistic Are Your Expectations?

How Realistic Are Your Expectations?

by | Jan 22, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Today I am am going to challenge your thinking about advertising and marketing.

We are going to talk about the expectations you have for your advertising and marketing.

It comes in different forms, depending on the lingo and verbage you use, but it comes down to one thing:

How Realistic Are Your Expectations?

Sometimes we look at the Return On Investment of advertising and come up with a formula.

Other times we look at the Gross Profit Margin as a way to calculate the success of an advertising campaign.

Some businesses use a % of last years sales as the amount of dollars that they will spend this year and think that is the magic formula.

Others go by the seat of their pants and will buy the bright shiny object that someone is selling that promises to make them rich.

Do you fall into any of these categories?

I admit that I have fallen into all of those categories both personally and professionally at times.

Several years ago, I was caught up in being a first adopter when it came to tech.  It came to a screeching halt after I spent $800 bucks on a new phone that I really didn’t need, but it was the newest and the best for at least 30 days.

I returned that phone when reality hit and changed my ways back to my usual research based approach way of buying stuff and adopting stuff into my life.  I do the same for my clients too.

There’s an old saying in the advertising business:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

That quote is credited to John Wanamaker. He was a very successful United States merchant, religious leader and political figure, considered by some to be a “pioneer in marketing”. He opened one of the first and most successful department stores in the United States, which grew to 16 stores and eventually became part of Macy’s.  He’s been dead for nearly 100 years but that quote lives on.

During the 50 years that I’ve been living, businesses and marketers have been wrestling with figuring out which half of their advertising is wasted.  We have come up with various schemes to track the results or formulas like I mentioned to make us feel better but I’m going to challenge the entire notion that half of your advertising is wasted.

In some circles they divide the type of advertising you can do as direct advertising and brand building advertising.

The direct advertising people have used multiple methods to track their results including:

  1. A coupon that has a discount that consumers use and the business can track
  2. A special phone number that is only used in one form of advertising so any calls coming to that phone line is attributed to that ad
  3. A secret phrase that a customer says to get a special offer or special savings

These methods of direct advertising were being used in the John Wanamaker days in newspaper ads, and later phone book and direct mail ads.  Broadcast ads on radio and television have used them.  They were being used before the World Wide Web and internet advertising options came about 25 years ago.

Our lives are now connected with the smartphones that even the homeless population have.

The area of advertising and marketing that has continued to attract more and more businesses each year is still the bright and shiny world of online ads.

Radio, TV, and Print ad sales have either seen declines or remained steady in the past dozen years while those trying the digital marketing world continue to see double digit percentage growth.

Promises of, “we can target your ads to the right people and prove to you that your dollars are making you rich” and “we can track it all with pixels and our analytic dashboards”…  Sadly those are empty promises.

I know.

I have spent considerable time in this advertising and marketing world working from the inside out.  I know that the intentions of the digital marketers is good, but I also know that it falls short.  Way short of the promises.  Those promises were made to eliminate the wasted advertising and only spend money on the advertising that works.

Theoretically, it should work.  But in the real human world it falls short.

In my current position with WOWO radio, I have access to a whole host of online marketing options.  Our company, Federated Media, has invested a considerable amount of resources in time, people and money to create the division we call Federated Digital Solutions.

My first year with WOWO, I took a cautious approach and let my co-workers sell our Digital Solutions to their clients before I offered them to my advertising partners.  I wanted to see the success stories of what I could offer before I recommend them to my trusted ad partners. By year two, I started offering them and in years 3 and 4, more and more of my radio advertising clients were also using our online digital marketing solutions.  Some use our digital marketing without using WOWO radio.

Now that I’ve completed 5 full years at WOWO, I have several success stories in the digital ad world that I can share with you.

I must caution you: The value of Direct Marketing is overblown as it is not as easy to measure as the sellers claim and Branding by itself without giving a buyer an easy path to follow to make a purchase can be a waste.  It takes a combination of these two schools of thought to create a long term success.

Why?

Two reasons:

First off the measurement of Direct Marketing is actually flawed, sometimes given more credit that it deserves.  I have a WOWO Radio client that switched to a nationally known digital marketing company.  This national company broke their own rules regarding consistency for Name, Address, Phone number listing that is actually a common rule of thumb according to Google itself.  The rule of consistency is that you want your Name, Address and Phone Number to be the same, consistently all over the web including your own website.  This national company has hijacked my clients website to place a tracking phone number on the website and all other listings online that it can get its hands on.

What this means is that no matter what drove a customer to find my client, the phone number that they will find online is not the true business phone number, but the special tracking number.  And the national digital marketing company is claiming credit for any and all calls that come in on that special tracking number.

Also, if you do a deep dive into Google Analytics, which most people don’t, you will find all kinds of weird website traffic coming from spammers and bots.

Finally, and this is something I learned a couple years ago, there are limitations in the ability to track connections between secure and insecure websites and all those apps that we have on our phones that have paid ads on them? Google can’t track those either.

What was once the almighty gold standard in tracking your direct marketing online, is not really doing that great of a job.

That’s just the first reason.

Here’s the second.

We are human and direct marketing usually ignores the Human Relationship Marketing Principles that are impossible to accurately track.

Honestly, we don’t know consciously why we buy one brand over another.  When we go to the store and are faced with a dozens of choices of cookies to buy, we already have narrowed it down in our minds to a small handful.

Certain brands of cookies are superior to me and that list could be totally different from your list of favorite cookies.  You make like peanut butter, I may like soft chocolate chips, and even with those two distinctly different options, each of us have a favorite in the category that we want.

This is due to branding.  We recognize the brand and our human emotions move us to grab the cookies that we want based on our own personal experiences, recommendations from friends and family, and yes, advertising messages.  Branding creates Top Of Mind Awareness, or TOMA which places one company or one cookie over another in our own personal preferences.  This is the Human Relationship side of the buying that direct marketing usually ignores.

That 50% of marketing that John Wanamaker wished he knew was wasted, wasn’t wasted at all.  It was probably building the Macy’s brand which has survived to this day.  Macy’s Thanksgiving day Parade which began two years after the death of Wanamaker has been one of their most successful branding marketing campaigns for more than 90 years.

Let’s wrap this up with this caveat. I know that with a lot of companies there is a lot of wasted money spent on advertising, but it’s usually not because they are investing in branding.

My offer to you is to help you evaluate your marketing and advertising and see where the true waste is.  Afterward, we can come up with recommendations for improvement and most importantly set realistic expectations.

Contact me.

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The Decline of Mass Media

The Decline of Mass Media

by | May 24, 2018 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, Uncategorized, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

As we head into the unofficial summer season of June, July and August, the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day, I want to address a headline I saw again and give you an insiders perspective on The Decline of Mass Media.

Why talk about it now?  Well, television viewing habits in years past were different during summer time, with the major networks showing summer reruns instead of new episodes.  But hang on because I’m getting ahead of myself.

What is mass media anyway?  Perhaps traditional media is a better term.  Television, Radio, Newspapers and Magazines are the traditional media that have been the mainstay since the 1950’s and before.

Newspapers are continuing to struggle.  Lay offs and shut downs have been occurring for nearly two decades, due to the rise of the internet. One story I read this month blamed the owners for cutting staffs.

The Denver Post cut the newsroom from 184 journalists to 99, according to the story. Other cuts at other newspapers were also harsh. 73 reporters down to 10 while another paper went 45 to 12 journalists. Locally in Fort Wayne, the afternoon paper ceased publication, and instead gets one sheet in the morning paper and an online edition.  I saw friends of mine in the newspaper business in town leave either on their own or due to cutbacks.   I was once tempted about 8 years ago to work for their online division but am grateful I stayed put.

The company I work, Federated Media sold the one newspaper they owned a couple years ago because it was nearly impossible to be profitable.

When I say the internet is the reason for the decline in print, it’s really a combination of things related to the internet.

Accessibility for one. 20 years ago most of us owned a desktop computer with a dial-up modem at home, if we had a home computer. 12 years ago laptops took over as the primary personal computer device.  And did you realize that the first iPhone debuted in 2007, ushering in the smartphone revolution?

Online Content is the other contributing factor. No need to wait for the morning paper to check the weather or the score.  Newspapers have tried to replace their dwindling subscriber numbers with paywall subscriptions, but the math doesn’t work.  If you don’t have the readers, the advertisers will also go away and the decline has been going on for too long.

Declines in the magazine publishing industry are similar.  What seems to have survived in print is specialized publications.  Smaller but targeted readership than mass media.

Another way the internet has changed the media is the television industry. The New York Times featured a story that I read online about the future of broadcasting: Why Traditional TV Is in Trouble.

Here’s a few quotes:

Ratings are on the decline, especially among young people, some of whom don’t even own televisions. It’s hard to keep up with the many devices and apps people now use to watch shows. And there is a host of material from Silicon Valley that is competing for viewers’ attention, including Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Netflix. It all adds up to a precarious situation for broadcast TV.

Advertising on TV has long been the best way for marketers to reach a large number of people at one time. And it is still a formidable medium. But cracks are showing.

and:

The hottest shows on TV networks — which command the highest ad prices — are attracting older viewers, which is a challenge for brands that want to reach millennials and teens. For instance, this season’s top-rated show, the revival of “Roseanne,” has a median viewer age of 52.9 years. The network show with the lowest median age is “Riverdale” on the CW, at 37.2.

The  TV networks will be able to survive by reinventing themselves much like radio stations did when television became a media force last century.  But the local TV stations?  My advice if you want to reach anyone younger than Baby Boomers, good luck.  All of my kids are in their 30’s and none of them are watching broadcast TV, some don’t even own a television.  They get their video content online. Even my wife and I watch just as much video content on something other than a TV or if we do, often it’s days later and the local ads are not even seen.

 

So what is taking the place of traditional broadcast TV as a mass media?

Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, to name a few. Alternatives to cable like Sling, Hulu and Roku. These are all offering the best of both worlds for advertisers.  You get to reach people watching video content but you get to target your ads to specific audiences, one of the technical marvels of the internet.

Here’s a quote from a newsletter I received from Google:

More than half of 18 to 49-year-olds in the U.S. either don’t watch a lot of TV or do not subscribe to TV. But that doesn’t mean TV content and TV screens are on their way out. In fact, the TV screen is the fastest growing screen for YouTube content, with 70% growth in the last two years.

Let me address the radio broadcasting industry too.  It was the first broadcast mass media and WOWO radio, the station I work for is over 90 years old.  There are two categories of traditional broadcast radio stations these days, and I’m not talking about AM and FM. The two categories I am referring to are talk based programming and music based programming.

Radio broadcasting started out with network radio shows from NBC, CBS, ABC and the Mutual Broadcasting System and eventually they evolved to what we have today.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, there are 37 radio stations within close  listening range.  Some are duplicates of the same programming on different signals, like WOWO 1190 AM is the same as WOWO 107.5 FM, so let’s say there are 25 separate and individual choices.  This is also a way of targeting your advertising.  The best local radio stations keep an emphasis on local content, stuff you can’t get by listening to Spotify or Pandora.

Federated Media has 6 stations in Fort Wayne, four are music based, two are talk. I work for the talk stations, WOWO and our ESPN affiliated station.  Both offer a combination of local and national programs.  There are specific characteristics of WOWO listeners that help me determine if advertising on WOWO would be a good idea.  Want to reach grown-ups? Let’s talk.  Want to reach teenagers? I’ll connect you with someone who works for one of our music stations.

Not all radio stations and radio broadcasting companies are the same. Overall radio listenership has remained pretty steady for the past decade.  Over 90% of everyone age 12 and older listens every week.  However smart radio stations and companies are staying ahead of the trends that we see going on around us.

For years, radio stations like WOWO offered a way for you to listen via the internet.  Go to WOWO.com and click on the listen now tab and you can stream WOWO on your computer.  There are plenty of apps that offer access to radio stations like WOWO, and some people listen to WOWO via the WOWO app itself.

2018 however is the break thru year for Alexa and Google Home smart speaker systems.  We are seeing a resurgence in radio listening simply by telling the smart speakers to play WOWO and poof, there’s Pat Miller in the afternoon or Charly Butcher in the morning, in your kitchen, just like 40 years ago when I was a kid and my parents had clock radios in their house.

One last way radio stations like WOWO are staying on top of the trends is podcasting.  WOWO and our other Federated Media stations share both content from our live shows online in podcast form,  but also we have some podcast only shows that are available via iTunes or what ever your favorite podcasting player is.  Podcasting is huge and we can connect businesses to podcast listeners too.

The title of this today was The Decline Of Mass Media. As I’ve laid out what’s going on in print and broadcasting in response to the web connected world we live in, I hope you see as I do, these are exciting times.  The traditional mass medias that are adapting are going to done fine while the others struggle and will be a mere shadow of their former selves.

Fortunately,  I get to work with a company that continues to be on the leading edge and I get to offer advertising and marketing solutions that work using WOWO radio and our digital marketing division of Federated Media.

Want to see how I can help your business grow this year and next?  Contact me.

One final piece that I’m going to share because it was posted on LinkedIn by Ben Saurer, WOWO radio’s General Sales Manager that demonstrates how WOWO truly is a leader.  Ben’s job is to hire, coach and lead an advertising sales team.  Quite frankly, most media companies struggle with this, but as you will see, WOWO is different, in a good way.  Here’s what an excerpt from what Ben wrote:

All my people earn above the industry average. Client retention is high. Everyone on my staff is generating more revenue than last year. We’ve had ZERO sales staff turnover in 2+ years while having our market’s largest sales staff. People perform and like working here.

Remember the story I shared about the newspapers cutting their staffs to try and save themselves from going under?  Completely different story here at WOWO.