Pitfalls of Pinpoint Targeting

Pitfalls of Pinpoint Targeting

A little of this and a little of that can work when making cookies in the kitchen.  But when it comes to marketing your business, having the correct “Media Mix” is crucial to capturing your immediate sales, and more importantly, your future sales and market share.

Digital media has made it possible to narrowly target, locate, and reach those precise prospects who are “ready to buy” today but many businesses have fallen victim to the pitfalls of micro-targeting.

People who only promote “micro-targeting” strategies suggest that advertising that reaches the broader market with mass media is a waste of time and money.  They claim that if you are not in the market to purchase today, you’re not worth talking to.

But here’s the thing…What if your competitor has been using mass media effectively to establish a brand and create a pre-need preference for their business over yours before the consumer is ready to buy? Waiting to reach your prospects until they are ready to buy can be too little too late.

The world’s largest advertiser Proctor and Gamble discovered this the hard way.  They learned that by targeting, or niche marketing, via digital and social platforms, they were not reaching their potential future customers.  Therefore, they were actually losing brand identity and ultimately market share.  They quickly re-adjusted their media mix to include even more traditional media (Radio/TV) which turned the tide and grew their sales. (No pun intended as Tide Detergent is a P&G product!)

Last year I was part of a radio masters sales summit conference in Cincinnati, Ohio and one of the presenters was the man who worked for Proctor and Gamble who saw the error of their ways and saved the company by returning to radio and TV.  He has since retired but he is a huge advocate for radio to build and sustain your brand image.

Human beings are stubborn animals. Reaching them when they are ready to buy is of little use, especially when they are biased towards your competitor or unfamiliar with you.

Conversely, if you have created a strong pre-need preference for your business, your competitors’ online and search efforts will be in vain.

Like cookies with added preservatives, the good ole’ traditional advertising (Radio/TV) is what makes your advertising investment last longer.  Of course, it’s not wrong to reach consumers when they are ready to buy, particularly if they are already familiar with you, trust you, and prefer you.

 

To see what the Advertising Research Foundation (a media-neutral organization) says about the right media ingredients, click here. If you would like to visit about your media mix, give me a call and we can visit.  I’ll bring the mixing bowl!

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No Quick Fix

No Quick Fix

One of the concerns that I sometimes hear when talking to a business owner about investing in an advertising campaign is how long it will take to get results.

Or a variation is the opposite…

Can we handle all the business we get if we start advertising with your radio station?

My friends, there is usually no quick fix.

Advertising is usually not like a faucet that you turn on and customers come rushing out to buy what you have right away.

It takes time.

How much time?

Depends on how many ads you place and how often they air and a few other important factors.

However to the untrained, it might seem like things are closer than they really are.

Last month my wife and I took a trip to Washington DC to see the Cherry Blossoms and sightsee and along with a memorable trip, I’ve also got material for a few blogposts and podcast episodes.

The first day of our arrival, after checking in to our hotel and enjoying dinner at a local Irish pub, we decided to walk over to the Capitol Building which I knew was about 3 or 4 blocks away.  We could see it from the Irish pub.

Then we glanced over towards the Washington Monument and decided to hike thru the National Mall to the Monument where there were more Cherry Trees and it was my intention to continue to the Jefferson Memorial.

However as we started the first part of our journey it was getting dusk and our perception of distance and the time it would take was off.  We did make it to the Washington Monument, but there was no way we were going to continue that night all the way to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on foot on Friday night.

A couple days later, with some pre-planning, I made arrangements for us to get a tour of the major sites of Washington DC that included transportation and from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the daylight that Sunday, we could see much more clearly the big picture of how far we were from the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building.

The lessons we learned about quick fixes:

  1. Plan ahead
  2. Understand the journey
  3. Know when to regroup and find a different method
  4. Dress appropriate for the journey

Those same lessons apply to marketing your business, even the last one about dressing appropriately.

Want help? Contact me.

Older and Wiser

Older and Wiser

Facts are facts, right?

Yes and no.

When you look at numbers or other facts, it’s often not enough to just look at the raw data.  We can learn so much more by digging deeper and being curious.

Curiosity is a term that came up in a recent conversation with a friend this year and we both agreed that it’s essential to understanding something and avoiding assumptions and dispelling certain biases.

I titled this article Older and Wiser because it’s often the experiences we go through that we learn from.  However there are exceptions to this concept of becoming Wiser as we get Older.

The thirst for knowledge that we have as kids can be squashed if too many grown-ups tell the kid to stop asking questions and just conform.  However conformity does not bring new and exciting ideas, it keeps us stuck in the past.

I know some people my age who are always wishing for the “good ole days” and while it’s fun and interesting to reminisce, it can hold you back if you’re not willing to also look at the future opportunities. I also have a bunch of grandkids and one in particular that I’m thinking about today has always had a thirst for knowledge.  This person has no limits to their learning and fortunately has grown-ups that support their curiosity.

As we age, some of our values change and today I’m specifically looking at relationships with brands and products and how we as consumers change.

Marketing Charts released this study that revealed generational differences in buying decisions. When asked, “which of the following are more important than price when making a purchasing decision, the options included:

  1. Quality
  2. Convenience
  3. Customer Service and Support
  4. Brand Reputation
  5. Brand’s Ethical Values
  6. Consistent Digital Experience

None of these 6 options scored higher than price for Gen Z and there is a sharp contrast between the older generations and Gen Z for Quality, Convenience, and Customer Service and Support.

The last option, Consistent Digital Experience is the only option that Gen Z outpaced the other generations.

It could be easy to assume that Gen Z only cares about buying cheap stuff on their phone, but let’s dig deeper.

From the study:

Perhaps price is more important to Gen Zers than other factors due to their financial situations: slightly more than half (53%) of Gen Z consumers say that the high cost of living is a barrier to their financial success, and fewer than half (48%) of Gen Zers would describe themselves as fully or mostly financially independent.

Gen Z is currently ages 18-26. and compared to older generations, they have the least amount of income, so it makes sense that the price of what they buy is going to be very important.  It’s not because they are Gen Z, it’s because of their life stage that they are more focused on prices than older people.  For the most part, as we get older, we eventually have more money to spend.  We also realize the value to buying good quality stuff instead of cheap disposable stuff.  As most of us become older and wiser, our priorities shift.

This leads me to a huge mistake too many businesses make in their advertising and marketing…  They put too much focus on cheap prices and not enough attention to what grown-ups really care about:

Quality.

Convenience.

Customer Service.

Brand Reputation.

If your advertising emphasis is all about price and deals, you are not communicating to me the real reason I want to buy in most cases.

Want help in creating a campaign that offers more than just cheap stuff?

Do you have the guts to do this?  (Most businesses don’t.)

Contact me and I’ll help.

 

Narrow Minded Marketing

Narrow Minded Marketing

The goal of your advertising should be to increase both your sales and your brand identity. But all too often we overly focus on analytics or demographics when creating our media plans.  Narrowly targeting often means you are missing the much larger population of people not in your core demographic.

As the “New Media” (digital and social) emerged, many businesses, large and small, made the move to these platforms believing that laser-focused targeting was the answer to their advertising dreams.

Wrong!  In fact, Tide, the #1 selling laundry detergent, found that while they were focusing on the people who fit their “typical profile”, they were missing the much larger target of those who were not using their product. In other words, they were eroding their brand’s awareness and missing the target of “new and future” users. Ultimately, their sales started to decline.

In a swift move, they moved the majority of their budget back to traditional media, and sales and brand identity rebounded.

In another example, it might not seem unreasonable for a baby-products retailer to target “women 18-49 with infants”, but according to the market research firm Scarborough, nearly half of those who bought infants’ clothing, roughly 47%, were from households without children.

The same research from Scarborough found that nearly a quarter of all women’s cosmetics and perfumes, 23.5%, were bought by men.

In Roy Williams’ Twelve Causes of Advertising Failure, #9 is Overconfidence in Qualitative Data. “In reality, saying the wrong thing has killed far more ad campaigns than reaching the wrong people. It is amazing how many people become the ‘Right People’ when you are saying the right thing.”

Being too narrow-minded and focusing on only the core audience is actually eroding your brand. Hundreds and thousands of people are not in the market for your product or service today, or even soon, but someday they will be.

Thinking beyond the traditional demographics your competitors are targeting with their advertising can help you reach untapped markets to increase your sales well into the future.

Click here to read how to reach and influence “purchasers” rather than “demographics”.
 
 
Now I’ve worked in both mass media and niche media.  I’ve done mass appeal and hyper-targeted campaigns.  I would welcome the opportunity to review any advertising proposals that a typical ad salesperson presents to you to see exactly what the focus is and if it’s a good match for what you want to accomplish.
The Danger of Relying on Facebook

The Danger of Relying on Facebook

Last Tuesday, the world freaked out because of a glitch in the internet.

Specifically Facebook’s parent company Meta, and most of their affiliated social and internet related sites and features became inoperable starting around 10am eastern time.

I am actually writing this on Tuesday March 5th, two hours later and it’s still down on laptops, but currently working on my phone via the app.

The ramifications for the ordinary, everyday user is just an inconvenience.  I can live without Facebook, Instagram, Threads even though I post daily, it’s not like a primary source of marketing or making money for me personally.

However, for others, this kind of thing is costly.  Imagine not being able to do business because people could not reach you.  It will be interesting to see if there will be an estimate of the millions of dollars lost due to the Meta platforms being down for a few hours.  Considering the size of Facebook alone, I imagine over a billion dollars in lost revenue.  

I pulled some numbers from the website, The Social Sheperd that say there are over 3 Billion monthly Facebook users world-wide. 2 Billion people are on Facebook daily.  In the United States, over half the population has a Facebook account and 7 out of 10 Americans who use the internet are on Facebook too.   I have a couple of coworkers that fall into the category of internet users but not on Facebook.

From a business standpoint, I had a client a few years ago that lost at least a weeks worth of revenue what Facebook decided to shut down his business account.  He was spending $20,000 a month just on Facebook ads and getting a 4 to 1 return.  Fortunately he was able to scramble and rebrand his business and build it up again with money he had saved up, but many business people that place such a heavy emphasis on marketing platforms they can’t control are stuck when that platform fails like Facebook did

My advice has always been to create your own spot on the web, something you own.  Your own website, not just a social media page.  I know it’s tempting to just rely on the easy way but if it’s also a lazy way, you could be sunk.

One more success story to share with you, and this is about an HVAC company that has been around for 10 years without a website or social media.  I met with the owner recently because he is looking to invite WOWO radio listeners to become his customers.  I asked him the secret to his successful growth over the past decade without the usual online presence and it came down to having good relationships with a few key people in town that have kept him and his company busy.  The good old fashioned trusted word of mouth that you earn when you run your business right.

Now in order to invite our listeners to become his customers, he’s going to invest in a basic website which we can direct listeners to and will give his company credibility to those that don’t know him yet.

What about you?  Are you needing some guidance and help on how to market your business?  Contact me and let’s talk.

Reintroducing ScLoHo

Reintroducing ScLoHo

Last week, when I was recording the podcast version of my weekly update I mentioned briefly what a ScLoHo is. Today, that is the focus of both this article and podcast episode.

If this is the very first time you’ve listened to the Scott Howard Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast, welcome aboard.  If it’s the first time you’ve read an article I’ve published on this website, come on in.

Today I’m reintroducing myself, Scott Howard also known as ScLoHo.

I’ve been podcasting nearly every week since March 2017, so this is the beginning of my eighth year hosting a podcast.

I also checked my blogging history and I launched my first blog in 2004, 20 years ago.

The ScLoHo nickname began even before that as an email address because there are many Scott Howard’s out there and I needed something unique.

ScLoHo is a mash-up using the first two letters of my first name, Scott, first two letters of my middle name, Louis, and first two letters of my last name, Howard.

When you take those 6 letters and try and pronounce them, it becomes two syllables because there are only two vowels. Sclo (Sclow)- Ho (Hoe).

In 2004, I launched a couple of blogs, one was a personal blog, the other a media and marketing blog using Google’s old Blogger.com platform and eventually launched a few more blogs, all of them under the ScLoHo online persona.  At one point, for a couple of years, I was posting over 30 times a week on all of these blogs and this was not my fulltime job.  I was working for a group of radio stations from 2003 thru 2011 and blogging was just an unpaid side passion.

However, the ScLoHo name became pretty well known both locally and online.  I have used ScLoHo as a Twitter or X handle, along with nearly all my other social media profiles.  My personal email is @ScLoHo.net; I own the ScLoHo.com and .net domains and basically it use to be if you Googled ScLoHo, you’d find me.

Interestingly there were some people who knew me as ScLoHo and others who only knew me as Scott.  In the  summer of 2010, I was walking at the Tincaps baseball game, taking a lab around the stadium, when a group of friends from an advertising agency saw me and shouted my name.  Except, some yelled ScLoHo, and the others shouted Scott.

In 2011, I left radio for 10 months and worked for a website development company where a friend of my challenged me to merge the two and launched the ScottHoward.me website.  The dot me domain was not due to my ego, it’s because both the dot com and dot net domains were taken by other Scott Howard’s.

I imported over a thousand stories to this website from my blogs and eventually scaled down my updates from several a day to one a day to once a week.  The only time I’ve done less than a weekly update was a few months in 2022 and 2023 when my duties at the radio stations as a sales manager overseeing 4 stations and 8 salespeople needed my attention more than this. At the time, I also figured after 300 podcasts and over 1500 articles, I pretty much had shared everything there was to know and media and marketing.  I did monthly updates.  My focus was to help my team grow and to take the spotlight off me and on them.

However at the end of last summer, things changed.  I decided to step back from management and rehire myself as a member of the WOWO radio sales team.  With that change, I decided to return to weekly updates and to get back out in the community again instead of behind the scenes like I had been doing for nearly 4 years as a manager.

What’s my backstory?  Well first of all I never wanted to do sales.

In high school, my first venture into radio was on the air.  After graduation, I was on the air at radio stations full time in Marion and Kokomo Indiana and then returned to my hometown of Fort Wayne and was on the air at WMEE.  WMEE has always been owned by Federated Media and in the 1980’s WOWO was our competition, owned by another company.  WOWO was the big dog, the radio station that had the highest ratings and most listeners for decades.  However in the early 80’s I was part of the WMEE air team that finally beat WOWO and became the most listened to radio station according to the ratings.

Next stop was back to Kokomo and Indianapolis before taking my growing family to Detroit.  Up until I moved to Michigan at the ripe old age of 26 with 10 years of on-air experience, I had only voiced radio commercials, but never wrote and produced advertising campaigns.  The company I joined in Detroit was different and awakened a curiosity in me to figure out how to communicate and motivate people with a radio commercial to spend their money with a particular business.  I learned how to create ad campaigns that were distinct and unique, and most importantly, created top of mind awareness of a business so that consumers would eventually need them, those businesses were already Top Of Mind.

While in Detroit at Crawford Broadcasting and station WMUZ, I grew our production department, did a stint as fill-in host and eventually hosted the morning show for awhile and also took my first advertising sales position.

In my mid-30’s, we moved my family back to Indiana, I returned to working on the radio at WFWI in Fort Wayne and then took a hiatus and worked outside of media.  Finally in 2003, it was back to radio full-time for good, all most.  Eight and a half successful years with a group of Ft. Wayne radio stations, followed by full time at a website development company, another radio station and as the Social Media Guru for a multimillion dollar eCommerce company and then back to Federated Media in 2013.

Nearly 30 years between my first time with Fed Med as a WMEE Disc Jockey to my current position on the WOWO Sales Team.  I also spent close to 4 years as the General Sales Manager of WOWO and a year on an interim basis as sales manager of 3 other stations.

I’ve been a guest speaker with Huntington University a couple of times, Ivy Tech Fort Wayne, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and this year will be making my second appearance speaking at Trine University.

I’ve worked with over a hundred companies and organizations and consulted around a thousand in both formal and casual settings to help them become better with their media, marketing, public relations and internal sales and marketing.  Just in my 10+ years with WOWO have won a few achievement awards, called Feddies for Federated Media and even my own website won a best of contest by a competing media outlet.  Awards are nice, but what really motivates me is to have the opportunity to help others and share the wisdom and knowledge I’ve picked up over the last few decades and I’m continuing to learn as a life-long student.

Teaching, Training, Motivating and Encouraging has been a lot of what I do.  Helping people make wise spending decisions with their advertising and marketing is my bread and butter.  Being a dad, husband and grandparent keeps me grounded as well as my Christian faith.

There’s a philosophy about marketing and advertising that I call using Human Relationship Principles that I’ll review in the near future, but for now, you now know a lot more about this Scott Howard aka ScLoHo then you did 10 minutes ago.