Question

Topic: Advertising/PR

You Have $150k For Advertising, What Do You Do?

Posted by Anonymous on 12/28/2008 at 11:11 AM ET 100 Points
Let's say you have a client with a local service business who has reached their ceiling in their market.

Let's say that the company has had less than 50% of their total client list buy in 2008.

Let's say that this amount of business is worth many millions of dollars a year.

How would you spend that money to get back in touch with "lost" customers. The company did 9 generic postcard mailings (with no segmentation, and against my advice) that was sent to new prospects as well as old.

I have control now, how should I hit that list?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by CarolBlaha on 12/28/2008 at 11:25 AM Member
    Is this B2B or B2C? I'd spend the 1st nickel on researching why those clients aren't coming back-- and what about the competition that drew them. When you know why and where you should go-- you will know how to target.

    Sell Well and Prosper tm
  • Posted on 12/28/2008 at 11:26 AM Member
    Before proceeding with advertising or decisions on how to hit the list, I would recommend trying to get some information from the list first:

    1 - Clients who purchased - satisfaction with your client versus with others, reasons for purchase, and ultimtely benefits they received from purchasing, reaction to marketing messages.

    2 - Clients who did not purchase - did they purchase from a competitor or did they "leave" the industry entirely, what benefits do they seek from purchasing, satisfaction with past purchases from client and competitors.

    These questions can be pursued using qualitatitive (exploratory, for example, interviews or focus groups) and quantitative (surveys) so that the client can develop marketing messages that will resonate strongly with current, past and potential clients. Then you can work on segmenting the list to determine who should receive which messages and how they should be delivered.

  • Posted on 12/28/2008 at 12:00 PM Author
    I am commencing contacting 50 of the "lost" customers after the holidays. I will then see if there is common reasons for not buying again.

    Thank you for the replies!

    p.s. this is for consumers
  • Posted by telemoxie on 12/28/2008 at 1:10 PM Member
    East 80s are consumers, not businesses, who had not done business with you. You say you hope to get in touch with them after the holidays. The most natural thing to do would be to pick up a phone and call them, but you might want to take a close look at the do not call rules before calling them.

    Most of my work is in business-to-business rather than business to consumer, and I've been out of the market for year. But it may be illegal for you to place a telephone call to these folks if they are on the do not call lists ( I am on the do not call list, I signed up the first day).

    Although there may be difficulties in doing so, I am a very big fan of having a third party such as yourself contact former customers and lost sales. Good luck.
  • Posted by wnelson on 12/28/2008 at 1:16 PM Accepted
    Paul,

    The analysis of the lost customers, as suggested above, is a great start. However, I'd take it back to the basics verifying their strategy, comprised of analysis and direction setting. If they haven't developed this fully already, here's what it would look like:

    Analysis
    1. Who are your customers (segmentation - how big is each segment)?
    2. What are their needs (by segment)?
    3. How does the competition satisfy those needs and more importantly, where do they miss?
    4. What are the customers' influencers (words and images that move them to a "buy" decision)?
    5. Where, by segment, do these customers go to find out more about your client's products and services (media forms)?
    6. Where do the competitors submit information for their consumers (media forms)?
    7. What are the competitors' strengths and weaknesses?
    8. What are the client's core competencies?
    9. How can the competition use these core competencies to meet the customers' needs (by segment) better than the competitors?
    10. What are the client's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?

    Direction Setting
    1. Using the SWOT, create strategies to
    2. use strengths where there are opportunities (S-O) to take advantage of "low hanging fruit"
    3. Use strengths where there are threats (S-T) to protect the company
    4. Identify weaknesses where they have threats (W-T) and create plans to sure up weaknesses because these could put the company out of business
    5. Look for weaknesses where there are opportunities (W-O) because these are future expansion opportunities
    6. Develop a brand strategy using the information on influencers
    7. Develop a product/service strategy, using the core competencies, to develop a plan to bring out products and services that meet customers' needs (by segment) better than the competitors do
    8. Develop a communications/message strategy to get the word out to customers using the information on influencers and needs

    With this information in hand, you can develop a marketing plan that follows the brand and communications/message strategy in the right media that the customers' use to find out about the products and services. If they have a plan already, look for the following elements:

    Goals
    What are you trying to achieve and by when? This may be market share, number of customers captured, revenue, profit, and so forth.

    Measurements
    How will you measure the activities to see if they are on track?

    Activities
    What activities are you going to do to reach the customers? These could be advertising in TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, bill boards or other mass media. Or direct mail, SEO and pay-per-click, telemarketing, direct sales, and so forth. There are a zoodle of marketing methods out there to choose from and the analysis helps guide you to the most effective ones.

    Action Plans
    Each activities has an action plan which identifies the three W's - Who's going to do What by When?

    Reviews
    Usually, three reviews take place:
    1. Weekly or as needed sooner than weekly, review the action plans
    2. Monthly, review the measurements for each activity versus goals to see if they are on track
    3. Quarterly (or at least yearly) review the overall analysis and strategy to see if anything has changed

    If, during the review, something is off track, realign the plan accordingly.

    Given this marketing process is in place, the answer to your question - How do I spend $150K effectively for my client - should fall out. Without it, we can only throw out ideas randomly at the wall and some may or may not stick. This would be a disservice to you and your client.

    I hope this helps.

    Wayde
  • Posted by CarolBlaha on 12/28/2008 at 1:39 PM Member
    You do not have to worry about the do not call rules-- you are not telemarketing. You can honestly begin your call with a "this is not a sales call". I think its a great idea and the best way to get the info you need. Before you call, sit and plan. If you just ask them "why aren't you buying" my experience is they won't have an answer. You are going to have to pull the answers out of them-- with good insightful questions
  • Posted on 12/29/2008 at 3:57 AM Member
    Well my advice is slightly different, I'm in the UK, so the reality might differ slightly, but:

    I would contact some university with a business school and give them a task of solving the problem or at least giving them specific tasks (like marketing research, then data analysis, then preparation of some plan, and finally implementation of the plan). It would rather fall into consultancy done by university, but if you get them to use students to do at least some of the tasks it'll save you lots of money and may bring lots of new ideas. Plus your business can put this into their CSR - working with community.

    Take care and good luck!
  • Posted on 12/29/2008 at 8:15 AM Author
    Wow, some great ideas to think about.

    thanks for the well thought out replies
  • Posted on 12/30/2008 at 4:31 AM Accepted
    There are three solutions to your problem.
    1. Research
    2. research
    3. research

    I would recommend prior to field research to do some self analysis. Is the product/service changed since it was a big success? Has the competition increased? (try to find out whether your market is growing or shrinking. If it is growing how’s your market share?)

    So if you market share is going down in a growing market you know that the problem lays in your product or brand image. Maybe your Unique selling proposition is not that unique after all. Maybe you customer service is less sensitive to people’s need, maybe the competition is giving people’s questions better answers…This you have to find out.

    Research for the sake of research will result in a lot of spam to customers. Try to minimize your quest. Focus on what is important.

    Hope this helps.

    D
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