marketing Archives - Page 13 of 21 by Mark Murnahan

The Best Marketing Strategy Ever!

In business, we all want the best marketing strategy ever. What often gets in the way are the tactics, and response to failed tactics, which cloud our strategy. Many companies will go through the motions of tactics such as social media sharing, SEO (search engine optimization), ad buys, and etcetera, and waste a lot of precious resources. Too often, the strategy is just out of reach, yet right under their nose. Going through the motions of tactics will not make it a strategy, regardless of how well you do it.

There are many pieces to a great marketing strategy, and bringing them all together can be tricky. I hope these ideas will inspire you, and help you in a good direction. Before you dismiss any of the points I will make, I want to explain that, although I am a marketer, I am not here to take a single dollar from your pocket. I will also share why I feel qualified to offer this assessment of the best marketing strategy ever. This really is for your benefit, so make no mistake about that.

I have been a marketing guy for my entire adult life. I started my first company just after I left school early at 15, and that was over 22 years ago. Even as a kid, I knew how important marketing would be in my business. I am pretty sure that you know this about your business as well, even when it is hard to implement. It is what puts the butts in the seats for your big show. Since my time as a zit-faced teenager, I have worked on marketing projects ranging from the tiny little spark when a company is at its inception, to the raging inferno that burns it down. I have started and stoked some big fires with my marketing. It took a lot of burning for me to uncover the biggest of all challenges, but here it is … I am going to help you put some fuel on your best marketing strategy.

I will break this down into some digestible segments for you, but be ready to spend some time and effort to discover how this applies to your business. It will be worth it.

Marketing Strategy Begins With Focused Desire

I remember a relatively early time in my business career (at age 15) when my stepfather gave me a book titled “How to Sell Anything to Anybody”. It was written by a Guinness World Record holding salesman named Joe Girard. Joe learned how to sell more cars than any retail car salesman, ever. He did not do this just as a car guy, but rather as a marketing guy. He figured out what people wanted, but before he could do that, he had to know what he wanted. In that book, there is a chapter titled “It All Begins With Want”, and in Joe’s case, it started as a bag of groceries for his family. I still clearly remember his message decades later. How do you like that example of marketing longevity? I still remembered it, even without double-checking it on Google.

This is a critical piece of your best marketing strategy: You must want it! The trouble for many people is how to define “it”. After all, if somebody asks you what you want the most from your work, don’t you stammer for just a moment and have a hard time coming up with something other than the typical cliches like financial security, world peace, happy family, good health, or whatever other first-glance wish that you can come up with?

I think the answer to what you really want is a huge challenge for many people, and many businesses. You are not alone in this dilemma, but in order to get it, you will need to develop a clearly defined answer to this question. It will require confidence, persistence, and moving beyond your comfort zone. It means putting complacence in the past, and pushing your marketing “go” button.

Wanting something and being able to define it is imperative. You must be passionate about it … whatever “it” is for you. You must love what you do, or uncover enough love for it to inspire the important work and sacrifices that will otherwise be neglected.

This brings up a point about professional marketers. An important task of marketing is to look at a company and find their passion. What is it that makes them worthy of their market share? What have they neglected that could make them better? What is missing that will reflect their passion and pass that passion along to the people they hope to gain as customers? What is their best value proposition? The questions relating to market growth are numerous, but they are hard to address without knowing the “want” of an organization and defining an overall purpose.

Marketing Beyond Visibility … Matching the Need

Visibility is the easiest and most common crutch to lean on for most companies in their marketing. In fact, it often surprises me to hear people express a sense of satisfaction in simply being visible. It is important, but when that visibility is not placed well, and with the right message, the visibility alone is not enough to drive responses. You can try to sell me knitting needles all day long, and it will not work.

If you want to develop a fanatical response to your marketing, be sure to make it useful. A great lesson can be taken from the character “Big Weld” from the animated movie “Robots”. Big Weld’s mantra was “Find a need, fill a need.”

Even if your product or service proves to meet all the logic which your research and development has come to embrace, it is not truly useful until the marketing matches the need, and solves the need. You must match your offering to the desires and needs of your purchasers.

You certainly need to make your marketing visible, but visibility is easier than making it useful in a way which resonates with buyers and helps them understand how it will benefit them.

There are a lot of ways to make things visible, and a unique slant on your market can be just the trick. Whether it is presented with humor, tragedy, assistance, or otherwise, making something visible is really not all that hard. It just takes a good look at what people in your market will receive favorably, and what they will have a propensity to act upon.

Branding is massively important, and you should never dismiss the value of high-visibility within your market. Let’s be clear, though, that visibility alone is not the whole strategy. Getting closer to home and looking at yourself can emphasize points about marketing visibility. In this case, I want to point out that I have still not purchased a single Old Spice product even after watching the many humorous videos they have produced. Although they have over 167 million YouTube video views, their website traffic still only ranks a relatively few small notches above the one you are reading right now. Sure, you are more likely to buy deodorant from them than you are from me, but the point is that visibility is not everything. Their visibility alone was not able to put the fire in my veins and make me brand-loyal. The call to action failed. Perhaps they just didn’t reach me at the right time, which further emphasizes that exposure is only one part of a strategy.

Timing and Placing Your Marketing

If I saw the funny Old Spice videos while walking through the deodorant isle in the grocery store, I would probably have a quick sniff to see if I like their product. Actually, I kind of do like their product, and I remember my dad smelling like it. As a kid, I would splash it on just to smell like him. He was my hero, after all.

My wife does all of our shopping. I am really bad at shopping, because I buy into all of the marketing. In fact, my wife dreads sending me to the grocery store, because I always come home with stuff that, according to her, only I would buy. It is ironic, yes? The point is that timing and placement is important. If you want to reach my wife while she is making her shopping list, you need to know where she is, what she is putting on her list, and you need to catch her at the right time, to be sure that she lists your brand name. It must seem wildly complicated, right? Don’t worry, it is not as hard as it sounds.

Success in producing “the best marketing strategy ever” will require some careful market research, but this is an area which is likely a very weak spot for many of your competitors. Research is a significantly underestimated and underutilized area of marketing for many companies. The good news is that if you have your “want” in place, you will find this research much easier to handle. Market research is one of those areas where the sacrifices I mentioned earlier will come into play, because it can take a lot of effort to get it right.

Build in Consistency

An unsustainable marketing strategy can be worse than no strategy at all. A brand message without consistency can create business volume in unpredictable waves, and can also show the competition your weakness.

A consistent and sustainable marketing strategy will create a much steadier upward curve in your business. It will also become far more measurable, giving you the data you need to further grow your market.

Make Your Marketing Actionable

I addressed some requisite factors to the best marketing strategy, but much is lost without measurable action that provides a positive return on your investment. Reflecting back on the earlier topics, let’s consider this: If your “want” is well-defined, it will be easier to uncover the creativity to make your marketing useful and visible, and the fortitude to make it consistent. If you do not shortcut the research, you should really understand how to place your marketing with the right people. The next piece is the action.

What is the action you want? Oh, there I go again with the “want” notion, but I did express that it all starts with want, and it is the basis for all these other things.

You must have an actionable purpose to your marketing strategy. Otherwise, you will have a lot of lost efforts to account for.

Do you want somebody to make a purchase right now, or do you want them to help spread your brand because they think you are great enough to recommend to their friends? Whatever the case, this part should only come after all of the other pieces I have listed are in place. If the rest of the pieces are well-formed and in place, the action should be a natural conclusion. Since you have already given them confidence and reason to take action, be sure that you point out the action you want them to take.

Summary of The Best Marketing Strategy

I have had a lot of recent reflection on what my career in marketing boils down to, and what it has always really been about. I think I have a good answer to the burning question of “the best marketing strategy ever”, and it truly does all begin with what you want. Without focused desire, there is a lot of waste in marketing.

The best marketing strategies will come with a lot of passion. Caring, or lack of caring, is a huge determining factor to business success. I have witnessed it for over two decades, and I am not the only person who has expressed this notion. I would like to share what Gary Vaynerchuck said in his book, “Crush it!” He tells it well in this short video, and I recommend it!

If you do not have the passion, it is best to discover the people who do. That may mean asking people around you, and social media is great for this. It also may mean hiring a marketing professional to help you uncover the passion and guide you through all the other many elements for your best marketing strategy.

Here is another video worth a moment to consider.

Calling the Action

I said that I am not going to take a dollar from your pocket, and I meant it. I recently made a pact with myself to stop providing marketing consulting for clients by mid-2011. This is because I am far more fulfilled by long-term projects which often only come from working with the exclusivity of one company at a time. I simply do not get the same enjoyment by working on the ever-increasing number short-sighted projects thrown at me. I am following my “want” by moving into greater exclusivity and focus in my work. That is what I want, and I am passionate about it.

My only actionable request is that you share this with people who will appreciate it, and let them know that a guy named Murnahan is “for hire” and seeking that one company to feel passionate about enough to create the elements addressed here. I know what I want, and that is to enjoy my work marketing for a company with courage to grow. My passion slants toward the automotive and other gearhead-oriented industries where the people have motor oil in their veins and gasoline in their coffee, like me. I could market feminine hygiene products just fine, but I know what I want, and I know that I will find it.

I hope you will help me to create my best marketing strategy. In return, I am delighted to answer your questions, comments, and your telephone calls. I am always open to your brainstorms. Ring me up any time at *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE* (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*).

I have added very simple links below to help you with my call to action. Please share.

Thank you!

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Use Follow Through to Increase Your Influence

I realize upfront that a lot of people do not want to address the topic of the things they neglect to do. It is uncomfortable to think about all the tasks that we forget, or put off until another day. Even the mention of it will probably make a lot of people think I am looking right down my finger at them. Don’t worry, this is not a message of scorn, because you are not the only one who is guilty of that thing you know you should have done but hoped nobody would notice or remember your failure to follow through.

Have you ever been stood up? Maybe it was a date, a business meeting, a telephone call, or many other possible ways that somebody did not follow through with what they told you. Do you remember how that made you feel? I can tell you that it is one way to end up in my recycle bin, and I am not the only one who feels this way.

When people do not follow through on their words, it often becomes a personal matter. It is insulting. It can even strangely cause a sense of shame or guilt for the recipient, with thoughts like “Well, I guess I was not all that important to them.” More often, it will bring about a dismissal of the individual’s words, both past and present. It destroys trust, and in business, that is a tragic fate which often negates even the best marketing efforts.

This topic comes up in my business and personal life once in a while, and the person I discuss it with is my wife. We have operated businesses for decades, and we have each encountered liars, cheats, and thieves on multiple occasions. We have also encountered a lot of people who are not quite classified as horrible, but rather what we call “flakey”. You do not have to look very hard to find flakey people. They are the ones you look at with a cautious eye when they tell you something that will require them to take action beyond the moment at hand.

Losing Influence is Easy

There are a squillion examples of what I call “flakey”. I’ll give you a quick example, but it can be far more subtle. In this example, it is the customer who lost influence and trust. I make this point because it can go both ways, and we each determine our own individual influence which we carry everywhere we go.

My wife and I own a thriving cakes and confections business. Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections has become quite a hit in our town, and I have found that cakes are about the easiest thing to sell that I ever brought to market.

Somebody recently placed an order for custom cupcakes from Mad Eliza’s and expressed urgency to pick them up at a specific time on Halloween Day for a party he had scheduled. The time came and went, and that afternoon, my wife rang him on the telephone. He quickly blurted “I’ll call you back in just a minute.” Did he call? No. Did we have some nice Halloween-themed cupcakes to hand out to friends that day? Yes, we did, and people loved them.

Being “flakey” in this case involved a blatant lie, right? Well, probably, but we cannot be so sure. Maybe he was in a terrible accident with a hair dryer and a bathtub. We do not know the whole story, but what we do know is that the lack of follow through took this person down a few notches on our “listening scale”. This guy clearly lost influence. He may not ever need any influence, but what would it look like if I saw him in the waiting room of a friend’s business applying for a job? Stranger things have happened!

With the massive popularity of social media, there is an even more profound importance of doing what you say you will do. People talk about things they find distasteful. Although you may think that lacking the integrity to follow through on simple tasks may not be conversation-worthy, you can bet that if your name comes up, there will be significantly less excitement for somebody to say great things about you. If lack of follow-through becomes a common problem within your company, even with “insignificant” tasks, it can destroy your influence. In more extreme instances, you can end up looking horrible when somebody searches for your company name.

Increasing Influence is Easy, Too!

Trust is a tricky thing. I wrote about the topic of building trust a while back, and it included some good food for thought. The article was titled “Building Trust Comes First in Business, But How?“.

Influence has a lot to do with trust, but influence can also be relatively easy to build if you do what you say you will, even when it seems insignificant to you. Being consistent and always following through with even the “little things” can build up over time.

About a decade ago when my company, YourNew.com, was new, I asked my wife and business partner what made us different. I was trying to distill what would set us apart and make our company great. She had a nearly immediate and very definite answer. She told me “I can sum it up in a single word … Integrity!“ That has always stuck with me, and I think of it every time I tell somebody I will call them back, email something, meet for coffee, or anything else when there is an opportunity to let somebody down by not following through.

I am certainly not a saint, but I try really hard to make a priority of keeping my word, regardless how trivial a matter may seem to me. It may matter a lot to somebody else. I hope that you will try hard, too.

Do you have an example of follow through building your confidence in a person or a brand? Do you have examples of it destroying your confidence? Please share your thoughts.

Photo credit to DigiDi via Flickr

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SEO and Conversion: Increasing Website Traffic is Only Part of SEO

I write a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing. You expect that, and I am here to deliver. What I think a lot of people interested in SEO do not want to face is that SEO is a lot less about tricky technology issues, and a lot more about producing brilliant marketing.

The industry of SEO is ever-changing, but at the same time, many things are constant. For the largest part, the same things that mattered ten years ago still matter today. There have been many technical changes, but the technical aspects of SEO are not as individually important as some people may lead you to believe. The technology is really just a lot of little pieces which we fit together to assist the larger cause.

Early in the industry of SEO it became popular to chase information on the latest tricks to stay a step ahead of the search engines. Although there were cases when this became valuable, it seems pretty convenient that it is also used for confusing customers in order to seem more valuable. Many absurd yet popular myths about SEO such as meta tags still persist, even today.

There is value in understanding the technologies involved, but the truth is often less popular than myths. The truth is that search engine optimization and the value it represents is influenced a lot more by human response than by a computer. Giving people something which holds value to them has always been the most important part of SEO. This is the truth, and it is backed up with numbers.
Providing value to customers is not just a principle of good SEO, but marketing as a whole. When you give people something of value, they are more likely to share it with others. On the Internet, they often share it with links. In SEO, those links are like votes telling the search engines who should sit at the top as the “President”.

The Best SEO Trick Ever: Provide Value to Others

If you adhere to this one solid principle of providing value to others, your marketing will take a positive turn. A trick I have learned through two decades in the marketing business is that sometimes you must give until it hurts. Getting everything you want may not always work on the time frame you have set for yourself. I have often discovered that this challenge simply means that you are either not giving enough value, or you should have started sooner, and with better research.

Transforming a business from good to great is not simple. If it was simple, every business would have great results and everybody would win.

It is popular these days to award medals and ribbons to every kid in the race, but let’s face it … that will not translate well in the business world. We do not all get ribbons and medals.

Making the best of any market means knowing which people to reach and knowing what they want. It means knowing the customers’ needs and desires, and knowing the best way to solve them. When you take a close look, SEO starts to sound a lot like marketing, which is exactly what it is, but SEO is often viewed at as a technical trade. What many people are hesitant to understand is that SEO is more about producing great marketing in a very competitive atmosphere and less about geeky magic tricks. It requires an understanding of what people want, the unique ways they interact online versus offline, creating an appropriately compelling message, and being able to properly apply technology and mathematics.

SEO is a lot less about programming code and geek stuff than it is about people and psychology.

SEO Meets the Human Factor

The technologies surrounding SEO can help a lot, and increased website traffic is a great thing. I certainly love watching big numbers. I know that big numbers of website visitors will always impress my clients. They really want to see those new visitor statistics, because that is something they understand. What they have a harder time focusing on is that if those numbers do not inspire the conversion of lookers into buyers, or convert their brief message into a lasting one, most of the value is lost.

With any marketing message, there is a right group and a wrong group to deliver it to. It is easy to assume that if somebody performs a given search, they are the right audience for you. This is not always as simple as it seems, and often leads to spending a lot of time and money learning hard lessons. Taking a stronger approach to researching your market reminds me of something my father often advised, which is to “measure twice and cut once.”

Focusing on delivering the right message and presenting that message to the right people leads to higher conversion rates. The research to affect this result is in the top two most important roles of a search engine optimizer, second to getting out of bed.

Getting the research right is what tells us how to reach the right audience and what they will respond to favorably. It gives us the information we need to convert website visitors from lookers into buyers. Secondarily, it tells us how to bring more website traffic based on what people are searching for. Yes, bringing the people is secondary to knowing what they will want once they get there. Why should this concept be so difficult for smart people to grasp? Perhaps it is because they are blindsided by a lot of technical talk and SEO lies.

Educating a client on the importance of increasing conversion by producing a better message based on proper research may sound like an excuse to overlook the traffic numbers, right? This is not the case. More traffic is relatively simple to achieve, when you are actually providing high value based on good research.

The fascination with big numbers has created a culture of promoting valueless junk on the Internet aimed only at bloated traffic numbers. As the importance of traffic volume over traffic value grew roots early, many businesses overlooked doing the things that actually produce revenue. This misjudgment has lead many companies to underestimate the value of the Internet for their business growth. They may have hired SEO services which produced a huge volume of traffic, but then when it did not convert to revenue for the company, they lost faith. More often, they find that the SEO either did not really understand their role, or did not make a stand against the client’s preconceptions of the SEO being just a tech job. It is easy to see how these things could make a company stop trying.

Improving SEO Conversion Means Great Marketing

What can you do to convert more website traffic from lookers into buyers? This is an old question that every good marketer faces. The best answer is usually in finding the right audience. It is always easier to sell a product or service if you are selling to the right audience.

It is commonly accepted that good search engine optimizers who have done their research will know how to get more links by providing useful and compelling content. This will create a lot of website traffic, but that does not always mean the money train is coming down the track. If they are trying to sell tractor tires to race car drivers, they may gain a lot of website traffic, but they will probably have a hard time selling tires.

Good SEO also know, which I suspect a lot of people do not realize about the business function of SEO, is that they must produce reasons for those website visitors to take action and convert into something valuable to the website owner. This may mean a sale, a sales lead, a subscriber, or whatever it is that provides value and purpose to the effort. The first step is knowing who those visitors are and what will compel them to take action. The common tragedy is to get the traffic and then try to figure out why people are not responding.

Traffic quality is an area where it seems that many SEO (the good ones) would like to concentrate on more, but they get their hands tied by the client. The client often looks to the SEO primarily for the purpose of driving more traffic, but then neglect the value an experienced SEO has as a marketer and not just as a part of a tech field. This can create a case where conversion is viewed as secondary to a primary goal of traffic, which is totally backward and often a fast track to failure.

What do you think?

Photo credit to landofnodstudios via Flickr

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Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness

I find that for a lot of people, Facebook marketing consists of creating a Facebook page (or worse, a Facebook profile) and gathering a few “fans” who will give them just enough inspiration to feel they are being productive. They will put the Facebook “f” on their website in order to appear more modern, and keep their fingers crossed hoping that somehow Facebook will increase their profits.

There is a lot of confusion about Facebook, and especially for small businesses. However, small business is not alone, and unleashing the real value of marketing using Facebook is elusive for many companies. Efforts are often just enough to keep the person signing the checks on board for another 30 days for more trial and error. Poor planning and lack of measurement are commonplace in social media marketing, but that is not an effective way to run a marketing campaign.

Facebook marketing is often looked at with an eye toward “trying it out” and keeping the risk low. It is challenging for many people to accept, but the risk should go down the more you put into it.

Facebook can be a great place to market your business. If performed well, it can also help you to gather a lot of really useful data to help your business outside of the Facebook platform. Let’s unwrap a true sense of how a Facebook marketing campaign could look. This is the dramatically abbreviated version, of course. I will break this down into steps as follows:

Facebook Marketing Step One: Your Facebook Page
Facebook Marketing Step Two: Customer Modeling
Facebook Marketing Step Three: Promoting Your Page
Facebook Marketing Step Four: Making Awesomeness

Skip around as you like. Some of this is for the novice, while some of it is less novice. In any case, I hope that you will find it to be useful information.

Facebook Marketing Step One: Your Facebook Page

There is a lot that you can do with a Facebook page. Of course, note that I said “page” and not “profile”. There is a huge difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook profile. More companies are figuring this out every day as their profiles are being deleted for breaking Facebook’s policy regarding using profiles for business.

Name your page well, fill out every field in the Facebook page setup, and seed it with enough information that your earliest fans will know why they should “Like” it other than just because you said they should.

Tip: While creating your Facebook page, roll these few words around in your head: inviting, interesting, creative, unique, different, informational, entertaining, humorous … or whatever will be attractive to the audience you seek.

Optional: If you have a good FBML (Facebook Markup Language) programmer and a designer worth a hoot, it will help. This is not critical, but can be very useful.

Facebook Marketing Step Two: Customer Modeling

The step of customer modeling is skipped so often that there should be little wonder why most Facebook marketing fails miserably. Lack of proper customer modeling is a cause for many marketing endeavors to fail, but this is especially true in the current world where “everybody is a marketer” as witnessed in abundance on Facebook. A large segment of Facebook marketing is not performed by a marketing professional, but rather a business owner or somebody with limited marketing experience.

One of the tragic pieces of information missing for the average person trying their hand at Facebook marketing is that marketing does not just mean shotgun blast advertising. To get the most out of marketing, we need to know answers to questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. We need to reach the right people or we waste credibility.

I don’t care how great your hamster skin purses are, I am not in the market. Marketing those purses to me is a huge waste of time.

Customer modeling involves creativity, analytic thinking, and data. If you do not have the data to tell you who, what, where, when, how, and why people will respond to your marketing, you need to create it. Without knowing how to reach the right people with the right information, you may as well skip all the rest, because your time and money will largely be wasted. Worse yet, it can damage your brand value.

Think of how much you enjoy  receiving badly targeted advertising for things you would never purchase and then consider how much people will enjoy it coming from you.

Fortunately, there are reliable ways to get your hands on this data you so badly need. If you are certain that you already have a good handle on customer modeling, move on to the next step. If not, don’t worry, I will get back to this, so move to the next step anyway.

Facebook Marketing Step Three: Promoting Your Page

An easy first approach to promoting a Facebook page is to suggest it to all of your Facebook friends. Sure, that makes sense, and if they actually like you, there is a better chance they will “Like” your page. This is fine, and I recommend it, but often not a really good target demographic for your business. Besides, don’t all of your friends already know what you do for a living?

A common hope is that you will have something so brilliant and earth-shaking that some of those friends will buy from you, and when their friends see that they “Like” your Facebook page, that it will spread massively and the whole population of Facebook will come swarming and buy everything you offer for sale. Yes, that sounds awesome, right? Rub a lamp! It does not work this way, and if you tried it, you probably already know this is the case.

Your Facebook friends, although surely a great group of people, are often not as passionate about what you sell as you are.

An effective alternative is to use carefully targeted Facebook advertising to reach a specific audience. I am going to provide an example of how to reach specific people, and also how to use the information you gain from it.

Mark’s Example: Let’s say I am trying to sell Smart Slate interactive whiteboards. No, I do not sell these, and I have no stake in the market. I chose this, because I wrote about it as another example a while back. This is just an example to explain targeting using Facebook advertising to build a better marketing strategy.

What do I know about the Smart Slate market off the top of my head? I know that they are used in a lot of classrooms. I also know that schools have a hard time budgeting for them. I actually know this because my kids’ school has had fundraisers to buy them. So, in this case, I may want to test my Facebook ads with teachers and other school related interests. Why do I want to connect with teachers? I will explain that more in Step Four.

Since I am only going to sell these items in a specific region, I only want to target specific areas. I could choose to target anything from a worldwide audience to only my specific city. For the example, I will use my state of Kansas, and the surrounding states of Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma. Now, in order to target teachers in my target area, I will go to create an ad on Facebook and see what kind of a target I can come up with. It will look something like this screenshot:

Notice that this brings the selected audience down in size but it is still far from being targeted. It still leaves me with 8,578,280 people age 18 and older who live in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma or Colorado. That is far too broad, and it could look like selling hamster skin purses at a college fraternity party. I am not out to waste time and money. I want more customers.

Next, I will set some demographic details. In this example, I will target young teachers who may be more interested in technology, so I am using 30-40 year old college graduates who have specified interests in their Facebook profiles as follows: teaching; teacher; elementary teacher; teaching resources; or teachers. Note that Facebook helped me by suggesting interests. Here is what it looks like:

Now I have an estimated reach of 44,480 people who live in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma or Colorado between the ages of 30 and 40 who graduated from college and like teaching, teacher, elementary teacher, teaching resources or teachers. This is looking better, but there is still a lot of potential for fine-tuning. This simply gives me a starting point for one of several ads I may want to use for testing my audience. In other test ads, I may want to broaden or narrow the age range and condense or expand my target based on demographics.

Once I have run the ads for a couple weeks, I will want to give careful attention to who responded. Facebook will report this information to me, and tell me what other common interests my responding test audience have. Who knows, I may find that a lot of my respondents also love hamster skin purses. If so, you can bet I am going to use that information in my other marketing efforts, as well as how I address my new pals on my Facebook page. I will use this information in my blogging and search engine optimization, as well as other online and offline efforts.

Do you remember that customer modeling that I mentioned? Information like this is what helps you to understand your model customer and stop wasting time and marketing dollars.

Facebook advertising is not where you will make a squillion sales and is not the entire campaign. It is just one tactic within the overall strategy of the campaign (see “Social Media Tactics Without Social Media Strategy Fails“).

Facebook ads are often best used for building brand awareness and bringing in those Facebook fans who will “Like” your page so that you can communicate with them. I said communicate … not just promote your latest special or badger them with flavorless advertisements. Provide them with value in whatever way you can. This is another step, and I will get to it, but mark my words: “Provide them with value!”

Something really great about Facebook advertising is the potential for segmentation. You can target an audience based on very specific interests that they have expressed with their “Likes and Interests”. This is not guesswork, and the segmentation possibilities are quite useful.

For a good read about using the data from Facebook advertising, read an article by a friend of mine, Tommy Walker, titled “How To Use Inception Marketing on Your Blog“.

Facebook Marketing Step Four: Making Awesomeness

This is tricky for a lot of people. What are the keys to making awesomeness? A lot of it comes with experience. Awesomeness requires continual effort, so it should not be seen as just a quick fix. Marketing talent is not just inherited. It takes practice and patience.

In the case of my example in Step Three of reaching teachers with a message about Smart Slates, I want to learn from them. I want them to teach me their challenges, and learn how I can help them to afford my products. I want to learn what they have found useful about the products. I want to hear their success stories of school fundraisers which worked well. I want to help other teachers to find better ways to get my products into their classrooms. If I do this well, and if I am really useful to them, I will have a lot better chance of selling more Smart Slates in their school district. Plus, I will connect with a good number of teachers who may be more willing to relay my brand name to others.

Now, doesn’t this start to look more like a strategy than just advertising? This is what I mean by creating awesomeness. Doing things different from the rest and making a useful impact in some way.

Listen to the people on your Facebook page, and give them reasons to talk to you. Give them what they want. If you have done your customer modeling well, you have the information you need about what they will respond to. Use this information well, and use it for their benefit and not just your own.

If you have restaurant, ask them what their favorite menu item is, and how you could make it even better. Ask them reasons they like you and how you can improve. Have fun with them and post a challenge to see if anybody can eat the whole thing.
If you sell engine blocks, start a Facebook discussion and ask them if they have any engine replacement tips to share with others. Find out if they love auto racing, and what kind. Get them to post photos of the cars they are putting those engine blocks in. Learn if there are other performance auto parts they need.
If you sell Smart Slates, provide helpful tips for teachers or information for running a successful school fundraiser. Learn from the teachers.
If you sell cars … well, don’t get me started about car dealers using Facebook. That is another blog article, and I already wrote it.

I think you get my point. Just don’t act like a stereotypical car salesman!

You can do this all alone, or you may choose to enlist the assistance of an experienced marketer. In either case, it is best to pay attention and keep your eyes wide open to the possibilities. Marketing is a whole lot more than just shouting into a crowd and hoping for results. Applying good principles of marketing to the right people and with a better message can provide measurable benefits to a company.

This is a lot more targeted, measurable, and useful than other marketing tools such as the once-popular television advertising. I mean, just look at what television is doing these days.

WIBW Channel 13 Jim Ogle Facebook Dog Poop-Talk — WIBW Channel 13 Jim Ogle's Facebook Dog Poop-Talk

Performance Auto Parts Marketing Exercise

Performance auto parts may not be on your agenda to buy, or to sell, but the automotive performance parts industry can still provide the basis for a useful marketing exercise. If you follow this exercise, I ask that you look for ways it can be related back to your industry, whether that is automotive-related or astrophysics.

Challenges of the Performance Auto Parts Industry

The performance auto parts industry, including an astonishing number of retailers, manufacturers, engineers, wholesalers, and users of automotive performance parts have each had a pretty hard time over the past couple years. The economy tanked, gas prices skyrocketed, and the world has tried to become more eco-friendly. The significance of these direct blows to the performance auto parts market makes it a great example of the importance of marketing.

Any of these challenges could single-handedly crush a small or shaky organization, but together, they have created havoc that puts gray hair and wrinkles on business owners. For those who are left while competitors drop off the RADAR, the market gets a little stronger. This creates an opportunity to generate brand loyalty from customers of fallen competitors, and use market failures to increase market share. Without addressing market share, a company will often be just a little closer to falling off the RADAR themselves.

Imagine for a moment that you are in the business of selling performance auto parts. The thought of having heavy financial interest in this market would send a lot of business people screaming and running for the exit, but not you. You are fearless, and you are in it for the long haul. Sure, it is largely a scared market with bad influences from many angles, but you are up to the challenges of looking long-term and setting a course to success. You want the kind of success that uses the lows to come out stronger than before.

Let us think about this as an exercise to stretch our minds and discover new success. I will be your partner in this example, and together we will do some thinking about how to keep our make-believe performance auto parts business bringing in the customers and giving them reasons to tell their friends about us. We need customers, but how will we reach them, and what will we do to place ourselves ahead of the competition? Come on, partner … we are in this together, so let’s get to thinking.

This will require a lot of ongoing work, but I will offer some ideas to get us started.

Maybe We Should Blog About Our Performance Auto Parts

Blogging is popular, and it can bring in a whole lot of valuable website traffic and build brand awareness, but what can we blog about? How much can we really say about fuel injectors, turbochargers, and race-tuned suspension parts? Wouldn’t that get pretty boring?

I am stunned by how many people I speak to who think of a blog in terms of simply reaching immediate customers, and neglect the blog’s contribution toward building a brand and creating a community of loyal readers. Many companies neglect blogging, because it all starts to seem like work, and they do not recognize the many benefits. So, if you don’t care about or understand all of the other valuable reasons to blog, just consider the enormous link building potential that will help your website rank better for more “performance auto parts” related search phrases.

Something we should perhaps consider is not just blogging about fuel injectors, turbochargers, and race-tuned suspension parts, but rather things like auto racing, race car drivers, automotive events, car maintenance, and a variety of other things car lovers are interested in. Maybe we could do a series of automotive performance “how-to” articles along with diagrams and YouTube videos. Maybe we could publish something about the American Le Mans Series Michelin Green X Challenge and how it is improving eco-friendly race technology. We could discuss how it affects consumers, now and into the future. Maybe we can create something interesting, informative, entertaining, or otherwise useful to our market influencers.

The racing industry and performance automotive engineers do great works to improve “greenness” of the automotive industry. If we get really creative, maybe we can even find some ways to grow our brand recognition for pointing out the good … and even great things our industry is doing to help people, economy, and our planet.

It is starting to seem like there could be a whole lot more reasons to blog than we thought. It seems like a good time to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog” and keep the thinking cap on.

Do Facebook Users Like Performance Auto Parts?

The fact that over five hundred million people are using Facebook seems to indicate that Facebook is useful for reaching people. With half a billion people, there is sure to be a race fan, race car driver, racing team, automotive engineer, ecologist, popular automotive blogger, or speed junkie in there somewhere who would like our company. There must be something there for us!

A mistake many companies will make is trying to pitch a deal to people instead of creating a reason for people to know and like their “performance auto parts”, and the people and culture of the organization. It is wise to note that name recognition always comes with an attached mental image. A sales pitch usually leaves little or no image at all.

See reason number 5 in 7 Reasons Your Marketing Sucks.

On the surface, it seems that nobody in our market is doing so great at reaching the Facebook speed junkies. Does this mean Facebook is not a good tool for building a community? After all, it is not working for most of the others in the performance auto parts industry. Maybe it is a waste of time.

Upon a closer inspection, it seems that this is largely because nobody is making significant creative efforts. Most of the performance auto parts people I found are only trying to advertise their performance parts like a bad used car salesman and do very little to create a genuine interest in their brand from people who purchase or influence the purchase of performance auto parts. It seems that since spewing advertisements fails so miserably for the majority of companies, many of the Facebook pages I saw have not been updated much.

Now, doesn’t this start to seem like an opportunity for us, or would we rather let other people’s failures of strategic planning and marketing creativity dictate our success? No? That is what I thought, my fearless performance auto parts selling partner … we are in it for the long haul, and that is why we will win the hearts and minds of Facebook. Let us go there and do something brilliant!

Automotive Performance Meets Twitter

Should we use Twitter to communicate with customers, potential customers, and market influencers? It seems like it may be just a big waste of time. Who is going to do that tweeting, and what will they tweet about? What if they tweet the wrong thing and make us look bad?

Have you ever looked at the competition to see just how terrible their marketing is? It is a pretty good place to find ways you may be missing the mark with potential customers. Sometimes it is a good idea to see what people are doing in some other random industry, because then it is even easier to be critical.

Maybe we should do some Twitter searches to see what others in the performance auto parts industry have to say, or what people are saying about them. Who knows, maybe we can pick up some good information and ideas as spectators. Then, maybe we can find an angle to help us build our market and find out what people like. I suppose that may be worth a shot, what do you think, partner? Should we see what Twitter is talking about and think about ways we could do better?

What Do I know About Performance Auto Parts?

I know that it can be hard to think outside of your own four walls, but with a little exercise, it can provide great benefit to your marketing. Most people, and most organizations do not have a really spectacular plan to improve their market. When you do, you can come out ahead, but it means that you have to try harder than them. You have to think differently than them.

I hope that giving a little thought to the performance auto parts industry will be helpful to you, whether it is actually your industry or not. I suppose I could be wrong with my automotive industry suggestions and analogies. Although, considering how many performance automotive parts suppliers’ logos I have put on brand new Corvettes, it would be a shame if I was wrong. 😉

YourNew.com Racing Corvette Z06: Driver Mark Aaron Murnahan

NOTE: There are winners and losers in every industry. Marketing is often the biggest determining factor.

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