Be a Cracker Barrel

This past weekend my husband and I drove down to North Carolina to visit our daughter and son-in-law (big ups to my son-in-law for receiving his M.Ed from Elon University on Saturday). Driving back home on I-85 Sunday morning, meant only one thing – we had to stop somewhere for breakfast. Traveling I-85 is a pretty common trip for us, so we settled on a Denny’s about 20 miles before we got to the Virginia state line. What luck! It wasn’t crowded at all. It seems as though we stopped in before the church crowd showed up.

Inside my husband and I started chatting with our waitress and we commented on how they weren’t too busy at the time. She agreed with us and said, up until recently, she worked at the nearby Cracker Barrel and they were always busy. That started a discussion on how many signs you see on the road directing travelers to Cracker Barrel. While, yes, you may see a sign here and there promoting Denny’s, but if there’s a Cracker Barrel within 10 miles, you’re bound to see at least two to three billboards saying it’s coming up in a couple of exits. It’s as if they’re saying, “Hold on. We know you’re hungry, but wait just a minute, you’re almost there.”

I thought about some business owners I meet occasionally that insist word of mouth marketing is all they need to keep their businesses running. Not to say word of mouth campaigns aren’t effective, but the operative word here is “campaign,” not merely hoping that others are spreading the word.

September is only a week away. Generally, activity picks up from now until we start getting ready for that jolly man in the big red suit. Don’t be a Denny’s and hope you bring in the business you want. Be a Cracker Barrel and make sure everyone knows you are here.

Even in July, Coolness Doesn’t Always Make For a Good Thing

On this hot July morning, I was all psyched to download the new Mac operating system, OS X Lion. I’m an Apple junkie to the core – I’ve got the phone, the pad and the book. So when I heard that Lion would transform my MacBook interface into something that looked like my iPad, well, I was ALL IN. What, there’s nothing cooler than being cool, right?

I had read the reviews from the big blogs. One article was entitled, “Mac OS X Lion: Yes, it’s worth the upgrade.” I even emailed that one to a few friends. So, this morning, just before I hit the button to get the party started, I thought to look at a few more reviews from the masses who had jumped in before me. Things still seemed ok, and then I saw it, “MS Office doesn’t work.” Whoa, that’s a problem. Apparently, since Apple no longer supports the PowerPC architecture, older programs meant to run on the Intel Macs are erased and no longer accessible. That gave me pause to step back a little. It’s not that I have to use Word, but I receive a ton of files from clients (and friends) that use Word. I’m not about to get into a conversion exercise each time someone sends me a document.

Which brings me to my point – Is being cooler cool when it isn’t exactly what you need? Not in my book. And to extrapolate, when you sell to your customers, what do they appreciate more, a product that really helps them or one that’s so awesome they’ll eventually find something to do with it?

Sometimes as business owners, in the effort to show clients we’re on the cutting edge, we get caught up on the latest and greatest and push those items on everyone we see. Understand first what need a client really has, then work to solve that problem. Later, with problem solved, they’ll be interested in being cooler than cool, especially on a hot day like today in the middle of July.

Why You Have to Give Customers What’s Promised

Last week I had the opportunity to take an awesome Caribbean cruise vacation with my family to Panama. Frankly, I can’t tell you what I enjoyed more, the time spent relaxing or the time spent with family – both were outstanding. With my children now adults and the recent addition of grandbaby, Noah, it’s rare that we’re all together in one place at the same time. Truly, it was a special week filled with wonderful memories.

The cruise was fabulous. No complaints about service, food or finding a nice shady place to sit and enjoy a book. Where I’m feeling a testy, though, centers around the entertainment. The featured show for the 4th of July holiday evening was listed in the daily itinerary as a special concert by Las Vegas impersonator of Stevie Wonder, Jerome Dabney. No problem there, sounded like we were in for a great performance. However, as the show started and the cruise director began hyping up the audience, he went on to say how this was a special performance, the only one of its kind for the 4th of July holiday on all of the cruise line’s ships. “Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome for you tonight, Stevie Wonder!!!” What? Could it be? The “real” Stevie Wonder singing before my eyes???

You know, to this day, I’m really not sure who we saw in concert. I was absolutely certain at the time it was the real Stevie. Others I spoke to thought the same thing. However, numerous calls to the ship’s front desk all yielded the same answer – it was an imposter. All I know for sure is I was annoyed with the cruise line for not specifically saying it was Jerome Dabney. After all, it was a holiday performance. Couldn’t it have been Stevie? I wouldn’t have screamed like a schoolgirl had I known it was a fake.

Make sure you’re completely honest in providing your customers the product or service you promised. A perfect relationship can be tarnished if your client’s expectations are misaligned with yours. As for me, I refused to let anything ruin my vacay. We all shared a huge laugh over the incident and my son-in-law will probably remind me of Jerome Dabney from now until kingdom come. . .He really did sound like Stevie.

Increase or Decrease Your Marketing – What Would You Do?

I came across an article today discussing the plight of the Washington State Tourism Board and how the state is essentially shutting it down and all its marketing functions, due to budget constraints. Sound familiar – a business deciding that product marketing has to be cut or eliminated because it’s too expensive?

The article went on to say that even though Washington State had made this decision, by contrast, the state of Michigan had taken the opposite view. Michigan, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, plans to spend about $25 million promoting its tourism industry. That figure is five times the amount it spent in 2005. Michigan figures for every $1 spent luring visitors to its state each year, the state receives $3.29 in tax revenue alone. Washington State doesn’t do badly either. Records from 2010 indicate that tourists to Washington spent over $15 billion. That’s a lot of money to risk losing if they stop promoting.

The U.S. Travel Association says about half of the states in the country are cutting their marketing budgets (e.g. New York, Arizona, Hawaii). Michigan, Alaska and Louisiana fall into the other half, which are increasing their promotional spending. As a small business owner, this example screams of the necessity of looking at marketing activity as an investment. When you want to “save money” by cutting your marketing budget, you run the risk of losing your customers to other businesses who are just as eager to increase their efforts to win over new clients. Now, what’s that saying about being penny wise and pound foolish?

YES! A Better Way to Use Email for Marketing

Small business owners love email as a marketing tool because it’s inexpensive, can be used as often as desired and the emails normally can be generated in-house, forgoing outside agency fees. That’s why we have so many e-blasts – one message sent to many without the expense of postage – how awesome is that?

However, businesses on the savvier side of the fence are noting that the one-batch-fits-all emails aren’t the most effective messages to send out to contact lists. Growing in popularity are email campaigns called “lifecycle email marketing” which employ an event-triggered strategy, automatically reaching out to prospects and clients at specific points in time.

For example, a company might send emails with product suggestions to online purchasers inviting them to buy more just after they’ve made a transaction. There are all sorts of event triggered messages – welcomes after website visits, prompts after shopping cart abandonment and notices of service alerts. Using these targeted messages has resulted in higher campaign performances than batch programs. Recent research showed that some lifecycle marketing programs experienced a 600% performance improvement over traditional email activity (Top Seven CRM Marketing Processes for 2011, Gartner, April 2011). Marketers cited some benefits of lifecycle marketing as being increased customer engagement, increased campaign performance and increased customer satisfaction and retention.

The news is good – using email, as one of your marketing tools is still a great idea. However, you can get a bigger bang for your buck through better targeting and crafting of your messages. Consider employing lifecycle email marketing as a means to get better responses and achieve higher sales for your business. Have any questions? Ask me, I can help you out.

Why It’s Imperative To Stay True to You

This morning, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that piqued my interest. The piece reported on how Target Corporation has lost some of its cachet with customers since the pre-recession days as the cool place to buy things for less. It seems that Target swayed from its message by emphasizing more value products and food items in its stores during a time when retailers all over were struggling to keep sales afloat. As a result, Target saw some of its “hip” patrons give way to be replaced by shoppers looking for bargains. Now Target is pressing to find customers to buy its higher profit discretionary items and scrambling to gain ground as other middle retailers like Kohl’s and J.C. Penney have found success in selling low-priced designer clothes as well.

Did Target do the wrong thing in changing its message during the downturn? That’s hard to answer, because there was certainly pressure for them to meet sales goals when the economy was falling. However, the take away I get from this story is the importance of knowing why people buy from you in the first place and remembering not to stray far from this reason – no matter what. Do people buy from you because you’re an “expert” in your field? Then keep focused on continually learning in order to stay ahead of the pack. Maybe customer service is your forte. Then, constantly find new ways to make your client experience better.

Customers remember what we do for them, but generally it’s only what we’ve done for them lately. Make sure each time a client has an interaction with your business it reinforces the reason why they buy from you. Yes, you may have to make tweaks for inconveniences like downturns and special situations, but by not deviating from your basic premise, you’ll have gained a customer for life.

Ready, Set, Action!

This didn’t begin as a marketing story, but it certainly has marketing implications. How about Stefanie Gordon, the young woman from Hoboken, NJ, who just so happened to be on a flight this morning when it passed through the vicinity of the Space Shuttle Endeavour launching in Florida? Stefanie, who was on her way to visit her parents in Palm Beach, saw the shuttle through the plane’s window and took some pictures and a video with her phone. After landing, she tweeted a couple of the photos and the video to her followers on Twitter. Those tweets took her from 1800 to over 3,000 followers in a matter of hours and landed her interviews with major media outlets. Read the story on Mashable.com.

Granted, our everyday lives are hardly this exciting. You never know, though, an interesting twist on how your product works or some out of the box service you’re beginning to offer may just pique the interest of some of your followers, friends and fans. And if you happen to unleash a BIG idea, well, if it could happen to Stefanie . . .

We all know the chances of having a post go viral on Twitter or YouTube is next to impossible. The point here is miracles sometimes happen, one, if you’re ready and, two, if you take action. Apparently, others took photos on the plane; however, Stefanie it seems was the only one that tweeted them out. Good job to the one that made it happen!!