Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Dear Allan,

I feel your pain and I know you've asked this question before.
Based on your comments from your previous question, the
following sites might be helpful:

www.ooyes.net/prices

www.designquote.net/html/dq_estimate_wizard.cfm

www.imageworksstudio.com/

Good luck.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

agorman,

thanks for a quick reply.

Omaha Steaks (great brand, great positioning strategy, $320 million annual sales)

Legal Seafoods (never heard of them, $40 million annual sales)

Colorado Prime (very small business, unknown sales, division of Suburban Foods)

One number cause of failure for a small business launch - under capitalization.

First question in budgeting process - How much is our capitalization?

In my opinion, your fourth year sales goal of $10 million in sales is below your start up capitalization requirements. Of course there are many successful companies that started with shoestring budget, and your company could be one of them. But I do not think you will get the in depth quality information you are seeking from the "no charge" responses on these marketing advise sites or from free access information found from google searches. I would seek the counsel of a senior adviser who worked on the Omaha Steaks account or the like.

not what you wanted to hear, but I think it's a business reality.

Steve

Have you checked Marketing Sherpa? They have tons of reports, case studies, how-tos, etc. from actual campaigns.

It costs $397 to join, but there's a free trial.

https://www.marketingsherpa.com

Jodi

Dear Agorman,

We have an enormous amount of experience in the online sales business.

there is only one way to JUSTIFY an online budget, it is called ROI.

The fantastic thing about the internet is that you only need to bring a small number of visitors to test conversions and ROI so you initial investment is small.

Here are the steps when launching a new product.

1. Build the online retail site :)) make sure the payment facility works etc. :) Keep it very simple at first because you need to test conversions before throwing the kitchen sink at it.

Make sure that you have good tracking tags in ALL pages (you can start with a free Google Analytics and upgrade to a more commercial service later).

2. Spend $500 on Google and bring some traffic.

3. Analyse exactly what the traffic did, where it went what it bought etc.

4. make adjustments on the design, ad campaigns etc. according to your results.

5. try another $500 and test again.

If things are looking good, then slowly ramp up your expenditure on the ads. If not, do more testing at $500 a time until you get conversions to a level where business is profitable.

It is really as simple as that and this is why the internet is so amazing compared with traditional marketing campaigns where it is so hard to measure ROI.

In e-retail, we can have results in as little as a few hours and we can make the needed changes accordingly just as fast.

If after 2 weeks of trying to find ROI you discover that you can't, then you have NO business :)) but at least you only invested a few thousand dollars.

If returns are looking good then you can only improve daily after that - just keep tweaking your ad campaigns, tweaking your landing pages and sales pitch, tweaking your prices and offers until you reach the optimum balance.

Don't forget your follow up email campaigns. Be sure that ALL initial visitors are leaving an opted in email address and be sure to have regular campaigns. Sales from these follow up campaigns will eventually be 50% of your whole business. (in other words doubling your ROI).

Good luck.

Matthew

Dear Alan

I used my free subscriptions to a couple of client’s (Large Market Research Organisations) websites, and despite being able to access UK, European and Global reports costing from £550 to about £6000 in the premium food market and food retail (Internet in particular) I was left with a profound need to re-iterate your Homer Simpson comment of “No – Duh!” I can’t be rude about these people as they are significant clients in CRM and forecasting for us, but even I could give them instructions on how to state the bleeding obvious when it comes to analysing possible food sales strategies both on-line and the future consumer sales prospects.

Sure, the market is growing at 16% in the US (plus or minus just about anything you can think of), which is nice to know, but as a new entrant, you are only going to get between 0% and 100% of the market for your products and grab between 0% and 16% of the growth in the market depending upon, er, approximately everything you can think of, do, make and jump up and down about.

So you can’t buy a report which fits your stated requirements, for any money and that’s from the MD of one of Europe’s biggest market research – a vendor of published specialist reports. I’m meeting up with Martin Sorrel shortly, so I’ll ask him as well, but that will be too late for this question.

What gives me some hope for you is that whilst no-one was aware of any report which even came close to what you want, 3 of my contacts (One client, one pal and one colleague in marketing) offered to quote you for doing the work. That means that you can probably do it yourself if you can get guidance or if you are analytical enough to direct yourself through the work and brave enough to wander down some blind alleys. It might take time, but it could be quite lucrative for you as a research project and doubly lucrative because presumable you would be able to implement the findings as a programme on their behalf.

What makes me a little worried for you doing it is that when these guys say they could do this work, their confidence is based on a knowledge of the techniques needed, the availability of staff to crunch numbers and analyse data and ready access to a pool of industry insiders who will answer their questions. Oh yes, they also know which questions to ask.

If you have these skills in-house, fine; go and do it. If not, use this site to assemble an ad-hoc team to work on the project.

Lastly several people have brushed on costs and ROI and so on. You haven’t even started to cover the variable, constraints, time-scales or numerical objectives here, but it is fairly easy to set down the broad parameters of desired turnover, profit, break-even, spend per aspect of the marketing mix and therefore the critical values to be achieved for all aspects of a campaign.

If you do the numbers, all the rest of the parameters which will frame the acceptable cost for the work you need to carry out will fall into place. If you start from the other end, with questions about what kind of template you should use and work on a procedural and technology driven process to generate your objectives, you and your client will vanish down a very large hole called unstructured ad-hoc market development.

Best wishes on this – it sounds to be a wonderful opportunity about which you obviously have a good overview but need to understand the pitfalls, strategy and then the tactics needed to run the programme.

Steve Alker
Xspirt (Site under upgrade)