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 All they end up with is hours and hours and hours of planning that by the time they are ready to launch, their idea is outdated.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.

Work From Home Tips

Work From Home Tips

by | Mar 31, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Preparing for WFH

If you google search “WFH”, you will learn that there are approximately 16 different acronyms for WFH. But due to our recent events, the two most recognizable are “Work from Home” or “Working from Home”. 

Before COVID-19, it was estimated that 8-million US employees worked from home regularly.  Today, that number has multiplied many times, and some say that it may be the “new normal”.

WFH sounds simple.  However, if it were, wouldn’t everyone be doing it? The fact is, it’s not simple. It’s not convenient. It’s not always feasible or the best situation, and by most standards, it’s not as productive as working in a normal office or work environment.  

Because of our current circumstances, today many business owners have either chosen to or have been forced to take the office home.  Whether you have already made the transition or are considering it, it’s imperative that you keep the days as normal and as productive as possible.

WFH comes with many distractions. Getting the most out of every hour and every day is critical, even if it’s a short-term situation.  To help you get the most out of your employees, I have a list of 8 rules for working at home.  Applying these rules in some shape and form will not only help you be fair to your employees but at the same time, keep them productive.

Rule #1 is Hold them Accountable.  While you don’t want them feeling untrusted, it’s only fair that you expect a good day’s work for a good day’s pay. 

Rule #2 is having them Set a Schedule.  WFH comes with many easy distractions. Having a set schedule will keep them on task and give them daily goals.  

Today’s technology (Google Hangout, Zoom, GoToMeeting, YouTube videos and many others), many of which are free, allows us to have face to face meetings and conversations.  Rule #6 is Start each Day Off with a Video Conference. Make this a positive experience. You might consider starting every morning with a short online meeting.  They can be brief with an agenda that looks something like this:  

1) Good Morning with a positive quote

2) Good news from yesterday (positive comments about customers or work situations, celebrate positive things that happened)

3) Challenges that they are facing by working at home or with customers, etc. 

4) Share positive ideas and comments (ways to improve – what they are thankful for)

5) Motivational or training videos

Everyone hopes that our current situation will be short-lived. In the meantime, if you would like to see all 8 Rules for Working From Home click here. We hope you find them helpful.

Stay Safe – Stay Healthy – Stay Strong!

What I just shared with you is from my weekly Sound ADvice email newsletter that is sent every Wednesday morning to people like you who request it.  Each week there are either some marketing tips, business tips or often some of both along with a link to get more details.

I lead a sales team for one of Federated Media’s radio stations in Fort Wayne Indiana.  Because we already had a hybrid Work From Home business model for our sales teams, some of what the WOWO Radio sales staff has been doing hasn’t changed.  However we are also tasked with having regular face to face in-person meetings with our advertising partners and prospective clients.  That has changed and we are working to adjust.  No, I’m not doing daily video sales meetings with our team because that would be too disruptive since we weren’t meeting daily in person previously.  Your business environment and set-up could be different. 

Behind the scenes, those of us in management are having twice weekly Zoom meetings to brainstorm with each other ideas and how to implement them.  We are living in the middle of history right now, like being in the middle of a movie and not knowing how it will end.

I do know this however:  The term Short-Term Pain for Long-Term Gain seems appropriate as we all make adjustments.   On the programming side of our radio operations, my afternoon talk show host, Pat Miller and our anchor of Fort Wayne’s Morning News, Kayla Blakeslee are both broadcasting from make-shift home studios.  We have limited staff coming to the radio station and we are closed to the public so prize winners are being mailed their winnings.

But life goes on.  We are launching new advertising campaigns for new advertising partners.  We are updating and adjusting the messages from our long time advertising partners and if you or your business wants to be on WOWO Radio, contact me.  Scott@WOWO.com is my email and we’ll get it done.

 

[wd_hustle id="sound-advice-sign-up" type="embedded"]

Avoid A Digital Disaster

Avoid A Digital Disaster

by | Sep 10, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

I walked in for my 1 o’clock meeting, and there was a strange kind of energy at their office.

I’m talking about energy in the air, the people were not their usual happy selves.

I asked if Doug was in and they pointed to his office and went back to their computer screens.

I climbed the steps to his office and he greets me and tells me what’s going on.

It turns out Facebook shut down his company Facebook page.

Now that may be no big deal to you and your company, but it was for Doug and his business.

If you are relying on some marketing platform like Facebook to keep your business alive, you are risking a Digital Disaster.

Long story short for Doug is that he lost a lot but his business will recover, but it is expensive in time and money.

You may not be so fortunate.

By the way, the story I am telling is true, but Doug is not the business owners real name.

Let’s dig into the details and see how you can avoid losing your business.

Lesson Number ONE, when you name your business, register that name with the proper authorities. That’s usually at the city, county or state level. Depending on what your business does and what marketing you do, you may even need to trademark it which is at the federal level.

Doug’s business page on Facebook was shut down by Facebook because the name he had been using was trademarked by another company hundreds of miles away.  Doug was unaware of this conflict when he selected the name of his company and it wasn’t until that Monday morning that he became aware of the problem this could cause.

Doug used Facebook as his primary marketing and lead generator. His second most successful lead generator was my radio station, WOWO and it reality we married the two of them as a marketing tactic. 

Doug’s business is a home improvement company and everyday his team would be taking pictures of the transformations they did at peoples homes and sharing them on Facebook which worked when you put a considerable amount of money behind those Facebook posts like Doug did.  He spent double on Facebook what he spent with my radio station, otherwise we would have been his top lead source.

Anyway, the mistake Doug made was that he trusted Facebook.  When they took down his business page, they did without warning and all the hundreds of pictures and success stories were not just gone, but lost.

Lesson Number TWO is to Keep Everything Yourself.  Doug and his team deleted their copies of the pictures and posts once they were on Facebook. Doug now saves all those pictures in the cloud on a space he controls.  

By Wednesday, Doug had moved on and decided to rename his business.  This time he did a more thorough check for conflicts and once he was satisfied he contacted me with the new name.  It was easy for me to help him with his rebranding to our radio listeners, that’s part of the beauty of radio, we can make changes often within 24 hours.  That’s not the case for TV or print advertising.

Over the next few days, Doug started his Facebook marketing from scratch.  He had plenty of jobs that he could post and share pictures of, just like he did before, but the Thousands, yes THOUSANDS of people who were connected to his old Facebook business page, were all gone.  So once again he poured money into promoting those Facebook posts and was able to get things up to a satisfactory level of activity in about a week.  He had one handicap with Facebook marketing however.  He could not mention his old company name or he would risk being shut down again.

WOWO radio to the rescue.  The tactic that we used for Doug when he started with us is live endorsement ads and the call to action was to call them and also visit their Facebook Page.  For the first two weeks since the Facebook page was gone, we continued to promote the old name and phone number since Doug still has the old website up.

This week and for the rest of the month, the radio ads will do something that Doug could not do on Facebook. 

We are promoting the name change on the air.  Both names are mentioned as a transition.  This keeps the reputation and good will that Doug has built with our radio audience and we are also telling people to check out the work at the new company Facebook page.  The only reason I didn’t make the switch earlier is I needed Doug to have at least a dozen completed jobs as Facebook Posts so our listeners would see that this is the real thing.

I mentioned that this is an expensive lesson for Doug.  Besides the money spent to handle all of this mess on Facebook, he also needs to spend money fixing everything else online.  That includes a new website, new email addresses, getting Google reviews built up for the new company name for example.  There is also the hard costs of changing everything else with the old company name to the new name including quote forms, bank accounts, business cards, embroidered shirts for everyone on his team, vehicle wraps for their fleet and work trailers. New logo design, and the list goes on and on.  Did I mention he spent a few thousand on a radio jingle that is now worthless?

The only reason that Doug is not out of business today is he has deep pockets because this has been a good first year for his company.  Also he was not solely relying on Facebook to keep his business leads coming in.  His relationship with me and my team at WOWO Radio has made this painful lesson just a crash, but not a crash and burn.  

Please, there are ways to avoid a Digital Disaster, and I can help.  The earlier I get involved the more likely we can prevent this from happening.  Contact me: Scott@WOWO.com.  And you can also get free weekly Sound ADvice marketing tips by signing up for my newsletter in the box below.

 

[wd_hustle id="sound-advice-sign-up" type="embedded"]

Radio Advertising is Still A Great Deal in 2019

Radio Advertising is Still A Great Deal in 2019

by | Feb 5, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

At the end of last year, I saw a few reports on the state of media and marketing for 2019 and want to share some insight from others again.  Because, I can tell you plenty about the success of WOWO advertisers, but how about what others are using radio and other media to bring in business?

People are spending more time with media than ever before, says MarketingCharts’ newly-released 5th annual “US Media Audience Demographics” report, a data-driven resource that can aid marketers in their strategic decision-making. The study sizes up the media landscape, then delves into the age, income, and racial/ethnic composition of several media types across 3 sections: traditional; digital; and social media.

Starting with Traditional Media:

  1. The broadcast TV audience is slowly graying, but it’s the cable TV audience that may be getting there more quickly, says the report.

  2. Terrestrial radio stands apart from other traditional media in its appeal to middle-aged adults and to those in the mid-to-high income range.

  3. For the first time, fewer than half of US adults read a print newspaper on a weekly basis.

Regarding Digital Media which I take includes internet based media including video and websites:

  1. Almost half of online TV program viewers are ages 18-34.

  2. Although digital media types tend to attract younger audiences, people ages 55-64 are actually above the online average in visits to magazine and newspaper websites.

Social Media gets it’s own category in this report with these observations:

  1. Snapchat may be thought of primarily as a youth-oriented platform, but its appeal with higher-income adults is also notable.

  2. Closely following Snapchat in a tilt towards youth, is Instagram.

While this kind of data is interesting and for folks like me who work in and study these medias, I urge you to not try and figure out how to apply this on your own to your business.

Another study I was reading regarding TV viewing from Nielsen, the television ratings and research company.  They listed the top network TV shows and one of my favorites, NCIS was in the top 10, # 4 actually last year with over 16 million viewers.  But of those 16 million, nearly 7 million are not watching it when it airs on Tuesdays on CBS.  They are time shifting, watching on demand.  This means that if you were to advertise on your local broadcast station, over 40% of the regular NCIS fans are not going to see your ad on Tuesday night.

These are just consumer behaviors, not marketing effectiveness which isn’t the same thing.  I am here to help, just ask.

And have you signed up for a new newsletter that I am offering,  called Sound ADvice?  Once a week, it will arrive in your email and be filled with  30 seconds of marketing Sound ADvice on how to make this year your best yet.

[wd_hustle id="sound-advice-sign-up" type="embedded"]
Seconds Matter

Seconds Matter

by | Jan 29, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Since the beginning of time, it’s been known that you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression. The debate is …. how long do you have to make that impression? 

Studies vary, but if you are applying for a job, a story in Psychological Science suggests it’s as little as 1/10 of a second.  Other studies indicate that you have up to 7 seconds.  Regardless of whose opinion you trust, the answer is still …not very long! 

Your advertising message faces the same challenge. What your ads say and how they are delivered in the first few seconds dictates whether your potential customers will tune-in or tune-out to your message. I’m not saying physically change the channel, although that can happen too, but mentally pay attention, or mentally listen to your message 

Reporters and authors have long known that the headline and the first sentence is what dictates whether the reader tunes-in and continues on with the rest of the story, or tunes-out. In an effort to develop the all-important “creative hook” at the top of your ads on websites, many headlines end up with more “creative” than “hook”.  

I recommend you carefully consider the first few seconds of every ad, blog, text, email or post that you create.

Here is a bonus tip.  Often times, you will find the best line of an ad or letter, or the best words/sentence are in the middle.  When you find it, move it to the first line, or use it as the headline. 

And this goes well beyond your advertising messages.  These days I see an increase in complaints about customer service issues.  There are a few reasons behind this. 

First off, we have a shortage of available employees.  Unemployment numbers in the United States statistically say we are at full employment.  In other words, all the good employable people have jobs and in order for a company to get employees, they have to lower their standards.  Maybe.  In some cases they simply need to examine their hiring policies.  

It used to be that being convicted of a felony, any felony, prevented you from employment.  Now companies are amending that restriction to exclude non-violent offenders from being banned for consideration. Most banks will still not hire a convicted bank robber however.

But the other reason for businesses getting low marks on customer service has to do with focus and attention of those in the customer service industry.  Technology has invaded every aspect of our lives that it is common place for everyone under the age of 40 to continually check their phones for messages, even when they are working.  This creates tension when you are having a face to face conversation and they interrupt to reply to a text.

I’m not limiting this to the under 40 crowd either.  I saw it happening when I got my hair cut the other day, and I admit that I’ve been guilty of it too.

Seconds Matter not just in the first impression, but every opportunity to make an impression.  It’s part of your overall marketing. 

By the way, the first part of today’s article on first impressions was included in a new free marketing newsletter that you can subscribe to, Sound ADvice. Just follow the link below or send me a note to Scott@WOWO.com.

[wd_hustle id="sound-advice-sign-up" type="embedded"]