Unlocking The Marketing Mystery

Unlocking The Marketing Mystery

by | Jul 21, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Have you ever thought about why your customers do the things they do and why they buy what they buy? 

How did they come to that conclusion?

When did they first hear of your business and when did they decide to consider doing business with you?

Subconsciously all of these questions are important and fall into what is known as the “Buying Cycle“ or the “Marketing Funnel”.  Buying decisions are influenced by two seemingly opposing forces: emotion, and logic.

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, known as the right and left brain.  The right brain (emotional side) is the creative and exciting side; it focuses on feelings and imagination while the left brain (logical side) uses logic, statistics, and rules and is more practical and boring.

For your marketing strategies to be effective, you must understand why people do what they do and why they think the way they think.  Effecting and influencing both parts of your prospects’ brains through what is known as the “Marketing Funnel” will increase your chances of turning prospects into customers.

The purpose of the Marketing Funnel is to move your prospect from unawareness of you to awareness, then on to preference, need, search, and purchase.

All buying influences begin at the top of the Marketing Funnel with the right side of the brain, the subconscious and emotional side of the thought process.  This is the time when they start to create an emotional connection with you. It’s long before they want or need your product or service.

When actual purchases occur at the bottom of the Marketing Funnel, your prospect’s thought process has moved from the subconscious and emotional right side of the brain to the more analytical and logical left side of the brain.  This is when they do their research. Typically, they only research those that they already have a positive emotional connection with.

Emotions are the powerful, even though often unrecognized, beginning to your customers’ perception of you. Once a prospect has certain feelings or emotions about you or your competitor, it is difficult to logically change their preferences or prejudices.

The perfect marketing strategy reaches and influences your customers’ and prospects’ emotional right brains before they are in the market and before they have entrenched opinions about you and your competitors.  Getting people to think of you and feel good about you is what advertising is intended to do.

But this “perfect plan” also needs to appeal to the logical and analytical left brain to help your prospects rationalize and justify their heartfelt purchase from you.

Strategically targeting emotions at the beginning of the Marketing Funnel, and logic at the purchase end of the funnel is the perfect dual approach to reaching and influencing your customers.

To learn more about why and how consumers make purchasing decisions and to see a  Marketing Funnel, click here. To discuss how to create and implement the perfect media mix, contact me and I’ll connect you with a member of my team.  Drop me a an email to Scott@WOWO.com 

And to get more marketing tips and insights like this delivered to you inbox every week, sign up for my Sound ADvice newsletter in the box below.

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Make It Personal

Make It Personal

by | Feb 18, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

“To Know You Is To…”

Most people can finish this statement, “To know you is to… LOVE You”!

In life, that statement may or may not always be true. However, in business, it is a prerequisite when trying to attract new customers, especially in today’s new media world. Subconsciously, people tend to do business with people they know.  It’s difficult for humans to buy from a stranger.  Not impossible, but more difficult.  Of course, this depends upon what type of product or service you are selling.

Ask yourself, would you rather purchase a vehicle from someone you are familiar with or a stranger?  Would you prefer to retain the services of an attorney with a well-known reputation or one you have never heard of?  Lastly, would you be more comfortable inviting a plumber into your home that you know, or have a stranger come to your home to repair your plumbing?

The truth is, most consumers need to understand who you are, what you stand for, and what your company’s reputation is before they’ll even CONSIDER doing business with you. This is even true when simply doing research or shopping online. In fact, research shows that people are far more apt to click on a business name they are familiar with. (Search Engine Journal; Nearly 70% of U.S. consumers said they look for a “known retailer” when deciding what search results to click on.)

My favorite used car guy sold his business. Actually shut it down and sold his lot.  I used to tell others about Dale and how my wife and I bought at least 6 cars from him.  We trusted him. One day, I asked Dale, “what car do you drive?” and a few days later I bought his personal car.  SInce he’s no longer in business, I’ve had to use a different method of buying cars and it still involves trust.  The last two cars and my next one are from dealerships I trust.  I actually have walked away from certain cars that cost less because I was weary of the dealership. This trust factor works with individual business people and with bigger businesses.  These dealerships are ones that put themselves out in the public eye with advertising and community involvement.

The trick is, how do you get people to know you before they need you?

More often than not, a series of consistent “soft steps” make that final hard step much easier. The familiarity and comfort you can build by being heard through a number of soft steps can dramatically improve your advertising results and closing ratios.

Tip #1 is… Stand for Something.  Knowing who you are is absolutely important, but it’s not enough.  Knowing what you stand for and what sets you apart from your competitors can and often times is the tiebreaker.

To see all Twelve Soft Tips to A Hard Sell, click here and contact me to see about how I can help set you apart and help make people understand that “To Know You Is to Love You!”

If you would like more Media and Marketing tips like this, Subscribe to my free Sound ADvice email newsletter that will land in you inbox most Wednesday mornings.  Just fill out the info in the box below.

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Do You Provide Meaningful Touches?

Do You Provide Meaningful Touches?

by | Aug 21, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Maintaining a good relationship with your customers is critical to your lasting success.

Roy H. Williams in his article on Advertising Oversimplified covered this:

  1. Most customers are repeat customers or referral customers. Mass media is the most efficient way to maintain top-of-mind awareness among these groups. In addition, it will bring you new, first-time customers.

  2. Your plan to stay in touch with your customers through social media and email blasts is based on the assumption that your customer is willing to open, read, listen to, or watch what you have to say. Is this actually happening? And if not, why not? (HINT: The Subject Line gets people to open it. The content, itself, gets people to share it.)

I get direct mail pieces from a couple realtors and other business people I know and I also get some emails but most of them get deleted or tossed without being read.

I even have a weekly marketing email you can subscribe to free using the form below for Sound ADvice.  

As business people we are told that we need to be doing something to maintain that connection, but is what you are doing the right thing for your individual customers?

Even if you are doing the right number of “touches” with your email or direct mail…

Are they meaningful to the people on the receiving end?

I’m not suggesting you drop everything you are currently doing unless you see no value in it at all.

I am suggesting that you also add a personal touch, the kind that is not “mass media”.

Every once in a while, I will contact some of my advertising partners with a note, a phone call or an article that would be of interest to them.

When I did this with a Financial Planner friend of mine, she asked me how I found the article I sent her because it’s from a publication written specifically for people in her field, not the general public.  I told her my research secrets and she got a greater understanding of how I am looking out for her interests, not just selling her advertising.

Like I said, I don’t recommend stopping all your mass media advertising and only focusing on personalized one-at-a-time marketing; that proved disastrous for an old friend of mine who thought word of mouth alone would be the way to go.  He had to shut his doors after he tried that experiment and his business had a 25 year history.

Do both.

Mass media reaches both your current and future customers.  Personalized messaging can be used to retain that relationship.

Want help? Contact me: Scott@WOWO.com

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Are You Creating Happiness?

Are You Creating Happiness?

by | Aug 14, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

We’re going to cover three of the 20 points of Roy H. Williams Advertising Oversimplified:

  1. Regardless of how you win them, it is costly to win a first-time customer. Getting that customer to come back a second, third, or fiftieth time is cheap and easy if they had a good experience the first time.

  2. Advertising is a tax we pay for not being remarkable. So be remarkable! This is what generates word-of-mouth. You’ve got to impress your customer. If you don’t, your competitor will.

  3. Companies that celebrate their victories have happy employees. So find things to celebrate. Happy employees create happy customers.

Did you notice the common theme of Happiness in those three tips?

Advertising is the paid form of connecting and inviting people to spend money with you. It’s what you do with that connection that determines the value you get from that advertising.

It used to be that in order to be noticed, you had to be remarkable.  Standards have been lowered because overall service in many fields has declined.  If you go thru the drive thru and they give you the correct food and charge the right amount in a reasonable amount of time, that can now be considered a win because of the number of places that can’t do those three things at once.

Keeping your customers is also a win.  Do you know the Lifetime Value of A Customer in your business?

It can be eye-opening and I can help you figure this out.  It is well worth the exercise.

It all boils down to having the right front-line employees.  No amount of marketing and advertising can fix a bad business and a bad business is often a people issue starting with the inside operations.

If you allow me to help you with this, I’ll be glad to.  Contact me: Scott@WOWO.com

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Let WOWO Radio Tell Your Story

Let WOWO Radio Tell Your Story

by | May 21, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Let Someone Else Say It for You

When you spend money on advertising, you obviously want to say positive things about your business, and you want to brand your business in a credible way. 

While most business owners don’t want to brag, at least publicly, bragging or boasting about your business is exactly what you should be doing! 

When it comes to advertising, especially the digital and social media of today, to say consumers are skeptical is an understatement.  Today’s consumers question nearly everything they see on the internet and the trust factor increases only slightly more when it comes to traditional media unless there is something extra that creates trust.  I’ll have more on that in a moment.

Consumers will always be leery of the claims you make in your advertising.  Understanding how to get them to or make them less leery is key to getting them to open their trust. 

In this environment where skeptics are comparing your claims to your competitors, it’s increasingly important that you build “validators” into your branding.

One validator can be to use third party quotes or research to validate your branding claims. Referrals or recommendations from others can go a long way towards making your advertised claims more credible. 

That is the something extra I offer to my advertising partners on WOWO radio.  It comes in a couple of different forms.

Start with the foundation of trust that WOWO radio has built over decades including more than 20 as a news and talk radio formated station.

Back when I was a kid, WOWO had legendary radio icon Bob Sievers as their morning show host and if Bob told you something, you believed him. 

Today we have our morning news host Kayla and afternoon talk show host Pat along with our weekend hosts Rob and Rick who all do personal endorsement ads.  They are priced at a premium and they work.  In April, I had a new advertising partner with Pat Miller that tracked 35 WOWO leads for the month.  To put that in perspective, the average job this company does is around $4,000 or more.  They only spent $2000 and well, you can do the math to see how profitable it has been for them.

Along with the full fledged live 60 second personal endorsement ads, another option I have is live news, weather, traffic and sports sponsorships.  These are about 10 seconds long and businesses get an implied endorsement from the news person or show host.

Even regular recorded ads have a stronger impact on WOWO than other stations I work for and it is because of the format and characteristics of the audience. With a music format, listeners perceive anything but music to be an irritant. But with our news and talk format, WOWO listeners are paying closer attention to the talking and that includes the commercials.

I have other advertising partners that use third party and customer testimonials in their ads and that works well too.  What is the best tactic for your business?  I don’t know but let’s sit down and brainstorm.  Contact me with an email at Scott@WOWO.com

I also have a bonus article from my Sound ADvice Marketing tips Newsletter.

Click here to read the Eight Ways to Validate Your Advertised Claims.

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