Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

New research shows consumers have a 45% higher recall of vanity 800 phone numbers than web addresses. The independent survey of 1,000 consumers tested recall of vanity 800 numbers and URLs in advertising, and uncovered consumers’ intended actions when visiting an advertiser’s web site. Study results suggest that advertisers will benefit from featuring a memorable toll-free number in addition to listing a web address in their advertising campaigns.

The majority of consumers surveyed cite “Research the Advertiser” and “Research the Competition” as their first steps when visiting an advertiser’s web site. An examination of multiple industries (auto, home improvement, education and health care) reveals that as many as 40% of consumers research an advertising company’s competition as their first step once they move on from an advertiser’s web site.

“The results suggest that advertisers who use their web sites as the exclusive consumer response tool risk losing potential customers right from the start, with about a fifth of consumers citing ‘research the competition’ as their first step. And, fewer than 10% state that they would communicate with the advertiser as their first step,” says Laura Noonan, Vice President of Marketing with 800response. “If companies aren’t including a phone number in their ads, then they are losing that valuable direct communication with consumers who are already beyond the research phase and ready to buy,” says Noonan.

Is online marketing an important part of your business?  If it is you understand better than anyone the important of strong regulations to ensure your ad is shown to the right audience.  Which makes this week exciting for you.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced the release for public comment of Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines, a major industry-wide initiative that provides clear, consistent definitions of metrics and sets standards for how to measure unique audience across different methodologies. The guidelines were released at the IAB’s annual Leadership Forum on Audience Measurement in New York City, where leaders of media companies, measurement companies and advertising agencies convened to gain insights on the evolution of audience measurement and where sessions will be devoted to a detailed review of the proposed guidelines.

“These guidelines represent an industry wide endorsement of clarity and transparency of methodologies and metrics, particularly around reach, a core metric used throughout the media world,” said Sherrill Mane, senior vice president, Industry Services of the IAB. “The driving force for marketers’ ongoing embrace of interactive media is the accountability that interactive provides and these guidelines will enhance that clarity and certainty.”

The gathering, reporting, and measurement of audience metrics has a material impact on interactive media buying decisions. Transparency into these methodologies and clear definitions of commonly used terms are critical to the ongoing growth of interactive media as marketers continue to allocate a larger portion of their budget to the platform.

The guidelines will address these key areas of audience measurement:

• Provide definitions of key industry metrics such as unique users, unique cookies, unique browsers, visits and time spent.
• Establish a framework for all measurement providers to have their methodologies audited, providing greater certainty for the industry.
• Foster greater accuracy and reliability of all forms of online audience measurement, whether based on server data, online panels or user registration.

“Audience size and composition are vital to planning interactive advertising campaigns,” said Lynn Gutstadt, Director of Corporate Research, CBS Interactive and a member of the IAB’s Audience Measurement Working Group. “Adoption of these guidelines by the interactive industry will give marketers, agencies and other stakeholders in the digital ecosystem greater certainty in the measurement of our audience.”

A key prerequisite to a successful marketing campaign is clearly understanding your customer’s buying behavior.  Today I wanted to examine how to market effectively for car dealerships.

One-third of dealership visitors who used an independent website did not call or send an email before they came to the store, a new dealership study found. The study explored the connection between online research activity and offline shopping behavior to understand how consumers use the internet for automotive buying decisions. It also identified the specific websites and website features that most encourage walk-in traffic.

“Tracking email and phone leads alone gives dealers an incomplete picture of how their internet initiatives perform. Now, for the first time, they can calculate the full return on their advertising investment and quantify the traffic and sales their online programs generate,” said Dennis Galbraith, of Cars.com. “More than any other source, the web connects dealers with in-market shoppers and encourages them to take direct action. Among dealership visitors who used Cars.com, half planned to purchase or lease a vehicle the same day they went to the store.”

This summer and fall, Cars.com and Synovate conducted in-dealership interviews with approximately 700 consumers at 16 stores in 11 East Coast, Midwest and Southern states. Each of the dealerships included in the analysis advertised its listings on Cars.com and AutoTrader.com.

According to the study, one-third of car buyers cited independent websites as a significant influencer affecting their decision to visit a dealership. More than half of shoppers surveyed used an independent website to view vehicle listings; of those, 82 percent visited Cars.com and its online partners. Independent websites were cited twice as often as search engine results and three times more than a dealership website. Competitive pricing, multiple pictures, sell copy and free vehicle history reports were among the online features that most influenced car buyers’ choice of dealership.

With the beginning of a new year I thought it timely to suggest my top five marketing New Year resolutions for 2009:

1. ROI, ROI, ROI! There may be some great sounding marketing tools coming out this year, just remember that the only thing that matters with a marketing campaign is that you make more money than you spend!
2. Stay true to your brand’s mission. Do you remember the reason you launched your company? Return to your roots and your clients / customers will thank you for it.
3. Create Raving Fans out of your customers. This can be accomplished by obsessively executing on what advertise.
4. Work ON your business instead of IN your business. It’s easy to get caught up in the fast to day issues of your company. However to truly develop your business into a thriving organization you will have to develop looking term strategies that fuel innovation and growth.
5. Always remember to not sweat the small stuff, and then remind yourself that it’s all small stuff.

Looking forward to 2009, more than a quarter of recently surveyed small business owners plan to spend more on advertising, and another 60% plan to spend about the same as in 2008.

The Ad-ology Small Business Marketing Outlook survey found that small business owners are cautiously optimistic going into 2009. While 25% stated they are fearful about the current economic situation and 58% are concerned, 83% expect 2009 sales to be up or about the same as 2008.

When broken down by media type, over half of small business advertisers plan to spend the same or more on the following: Online advertising (69%), Yellow Pages (54%), newspapers (51%), and direct mail (51%).

“Small business owners rely on advertising sales reps for guidance and are clearly looking for consultative partners in the advertising process,” said C. Lee Smith, president and CEO of Ad-ology Research. “They are more likely to purchase advertising from those that understand their business,” Smith said.

Other key findings from the survey:

• “Knows my company/line of business” is the top attribute small business owners look for in a media advertising sales rep. “Delivers what they promise” is the second most desirable attribute.
• 52% of small business owners surveyed agree with the statement “you can gain market share by marketing while your competitors are cutting back.”
• 74% believe their company “must be one of the first 2-3 that come to a customer’s mind” when they need what the small business owner is selling.
• More than half of respondents plan to spend the same or more time and money on their Web sites and email marketing in 2009.
• The majority of small businesses are not using other emerging media: 77% do not use online video, 83% do not podcast, and 82% do not use mobile advertising.

With the dawning of the new year, I thought it would be helpful to analyze one of the best tools that any small business has at its disposal: pre-existing customers.  During a down economy it is critical to take advantage of your email list since your clients typically gravitate to vendors that they have purchased previously from.  By staying at the forefront of their mind you will be able to ensure that when they are in need of services, you will be the first company they call.

“More and more small businesses rely on email marketing as one of the cornerstones of their growth strategy,” said Luc Vezina, Campaigner’s head of marketing. “We hope these New Year’s resolutions inspire more small businesses to get started with email marketing and help those already using it to get even better results in 2009.”

1. Clean your email list – Maintaining a clean list is a challenge for businesses of all sizes, especially small business owners who often don’t have dedicated staff to handle such tasks. Take the challenge and make 2009 the year to start clean by scrubbing your list before sending your first campaign of the New Year. You’ll improve your email marketing performance, your reputation and deliverability rates. The first step is make sure your unsubscribe requests are up-to-date.

2. Review what worked and didn’t last year – Take a close look at your 2008 email marketing successes and failures so you can repeat the winning campaigns and cut the under performers. Refresh your 2009 campaigns by combining elements of your most successful email marketing tactics to get even better results.

3. Make a 2009 email marketing plan – We’re all working so hard and running so fast, many of us are accustomed to leaving our email marketing campaigns to the last minute. A great way to improve email marketing effectiveness is to look at the calendar through your customer’s eyes. Ask yourself what business and seasonal cycles are most relevant to your target audiences, then create an email marketing campaign calendar mapped to those cycles. Putting in a few hours to plan out your top campaigns for the year will ensure that your email marketing campaigns are timely and relevant – something your customers always appreciate.

4. Use customer data in email campaigns – Many small businesses today use CRM and lead generation systems that are filled with rich customer data that can be integrated with your email marketing service to dramatically improve campaign results. You can also build more targeted, segmented lists based on customer data. Even if you don’t use a CRM system, you can still segment your lists based on purchasing data. You can also conduct a quick poll through your email marketing service to gather more information from your customers that will help you improve the targeting, relevance and timeliness of your campaigns.

5. Try something new – Challenge yourself in 2009 by trying something new in your email marketing campaigns. Embed a video file or podcast in your next campaign. Adding multimedia can make your campaigns more interactive and engaging. If you haven’t used A/B testing to gauge response to your campaigns, give it a whirl in 2009. You’ll be amazed at what you learn about your customers and how you can use that information to improve results and drive sales. Setting up automated trigger campaigns can also improve the timeliness and relevance of your email marketing campaigns. It might sound too complicated or time intensive, but a good email marketing service should have the tools and technologies to make it easy for you.

Here is to a prosperous and exciting 2009 from everyone here at the Vcorp Services team!

As if retailers did not have enough problems attracting consumers in a weak economic environment, a new research study from IHL Group says that retailers lose sales of at least one item to as many as 20% of consumers coming into their stores – leading many consumers to quit shopping with the retailer altogether.

Consumer Electronics stores are losing the most, with consumers saying that they leave the store without buying at least one item 21.2% of the time. Or put another way, these retailers are losing $1.35 for every customer that comes into their stores due to their level of out-of-stocks. Likewise, Warehouse Clubs lose $1.78 and Grocery stores lose $.68 in sales for every customer when consumers cannot buy that product or an adequate substitute.

“Retailers remain in denial when it comes to consumer’s perceptions of out-of-stocks,” says Greg Buzek, president of IHL Group, an analyst firm and consultancy that serves retailers and technology vendors. “Consumers don’t care why the product is not available. They come in with money to spend at the stores and have to leave either because the shelves are empty, there is no one to help get a locked item, or the staff simply cannot find the merchandise even though the computer system says they have it. Nine percent of all consumers in our study have simply stopped shopping at one or more retailers in the last 12 months due to the problem.”

Some key findings of the study include:

• Among Grocers, best in-stock performance is Safeway (14.7% of consumers experiencing out-of-stock of at least one item); worst are Food Lion and A&P (22.8%).
• For Home Improvement, the best performer is Ace Hardware (13.6%) which was slightly better than Lowe’s (14.1%). Worst performer in the category according to consumers is Menards, with 20.5% of their customers experiencing an out-of-stock of at least one item.
• For Consumer Electronics, Fry’s Electronics has the best in-stock position (13.1% percent of consumers experiencing out-of-stocks). OfficeMax is more than double this at 30.6%.
• Nearly one in 10 consumers of Sears/Kmart has stopped shopping their stores in the last year due to poor in-stock performance.
• Grocery customers leave stores not purchasing at least one item they planned to buy or a substitute product 16.6% of the time.
• Consumers aged 26-35 years of age experience out-of-stocks 11% more often than other age groups.

Enduring companies survive because employees throughout the firm, not just those in the executive suite, learn to keep an eye on how related industries are evolving. As reported in a recent issue of Stanford Knowledgebase, longevity comes not just from matching the competition but also from recognizing fundamental changes in how the game is played and moving strategically to stay ahead.

“The main capability you really have to deal with these dynamics is the strategy-making process,” said Robert A. Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who coauthored with Andrew S. Grove, Stanford lecturer, a recent study in the Strategic Management Journal. “If the entrepreneurial activity has to be driven from the top, then the middle and senior executives are not doing their jobs.”

Business competition is generally highly dynamic but plays out in a linear fashion, says Burgelman. For instance, in some industries companies compete by giving rebates. Once a rebate is offered, rival firms quickly match it—but “the fundamental equilibrium remains.”

Grove and Burgelman focus on nonlinear strategic dynamics that change the normative, economic, technological, and/or cognitive “rules” that govern how an industry functions. In the rebate example, a firm may come up with a novel manufacturing strategy that offers high quality at lower costs, while the rest of the industry continues to compete by giving higher and higher rebates, a tactic that weakens their capacity to match the new strategy. These firms fall farther and farther behind, and eventually will be ground down, said Burgelman. “The player with the new strategy is going to get stronger and stronger.”

Middle managers and senior executives need two crucial sets of skills—conceptual and political—to help their companies handle nonlinear dynamics, Burgelman said. They must recognize the strategic changes in their industry, develop proposals to overcome the competition, and educate upper management about why the changes are crucial. That requires middle managers and senior executives to get support of at least some of their peers to be reasonably sure of having enough support to see the strategic change through.

The authors use their framework of nonlinear strategic dynamics to examine 37 years at Intel, where Grove served as president, chairman, and chief executive officer, and today is senior advisor to executive management. It focuses primarily on four events:

An industry shift turned dynamic random access memory (DRAM) products, Intel’s core business during the 1970s, into a commodity, making large-scale precision manufacturing competence the key to winning. Intel lacked that competence.

In four successive generations of product, Intel tried to use its competencies in integrated circuit design and process technology to innovate products and compete against the Japanese. The efforts increasingly failed, and Intel fell farther and farther behind—a nonlinear strategic dynamic. In late 1984 Intel top management decided to exit the DRAM business.

By this time frontline leaders at Intel had developed the first microprocessor, which found application in several high-margin market niches, while the DRAM had become a low-margin product. Although top management remained unclear for some time about which strategic direction to pursue, microprocessors won out in the internal Intel competition for scarce manufacturing resources. In the early 1980s IBM’s personal computers—a major application for microprocessors—rapidly grew to prominence and Intel top management became ready to shift its core business from DRAMs into PC microprocessors.

Top management’s decision to make this shift was facilitated by another nonlinear strategic dynamic that played to Intel’s (and Microsoft’s) advantage. While IBM had not insisted on exclusivity when adopting Intel’s microprocessor for the PC, it had insisted on Intel cross-licensing its technology to other suppliers. This required Intel to essentially give away its microprocessor designs to competitors.

Because of the broad access to the Intel microprocessors, independent software vendors increasingly wrote their applications based on the Intel architecture, increasing its value. PC users wanted to continue to use their old software on their new machines, fueling a virtuous circle for backward and forward compatibility. As Intel (and Microsoft) ultimately controlled compatibility, the company was able to radically change the game by insisting that it become the sole source provider of Intel microprocessors. Intel’s market share and profitability grew dramatically.

Strategic change does not always have such a positive effect on an industry. In the late 1980s the workstation market settled on using machines based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture that looked like it might migrate into the PC market segment. Even some within Intel were convinced that the RISC would eventually wipe out the complex instruction set computing system (CISC) that Intel used for its microprocessors. Through an autonomous strategic initiative of one young engineering manager, Intel also developed a RISC microprocessor. However, it became clear that new architecture would not be able to deliver on a 10X advantage over Intel’s CISC architecture. Intel’s leadership eventually decided that unless Intel itself pushed the new RISC it didn’t represent a paradigm shift after all and went back to what Grove called “vectoring everybody at Intel” behind the CISC architecture.

“Many times, these initiatives will not pan out,” Burgelman said, but it was still crucial for Intel to develop a RISC processor. If Intel had ignored it and RISC had won, Intel would have been at a huge competitive disadvantage.

Geographic diversity sometimes encourages autonomous strategic initiatives that may have nonlinear strategic effects. An Intel team in Israel designed and developed a new microprocessor—called Banias at the time—that demanded less energy and had easier-to-use wireless capability rather than emphasizing ever more “speed”—Intel’s typical performance focus. The Banias processor became a core building block of an innovative “mobility platform” called Centrino, now used in most laptop computers to allow users to be almost continuously connected to the Internet. Through Centrino, Intel was again able to set in motion a nonlinear strategic dynamic that gave it stronger and stronger market share and profitability in the fast-growing mobility market segment.

Having the team in Israel placed it far away from the faster-faster-faster mantra of Silicon Valley. “If the idea of trading off clock speed for die area had come up at headquarters,” Burgelman said, “it probably would have been killed right away.”

Another element crucial to maintain a company’s capacity to cope with and/or capitalize on potential nonlinear strategic change is often cold, hard cash. The authors point out that in spite of sharply declining revenue and profit during the technology slump of the early 2000s, Intel’s board of directors let top management keep enough cash reserves for one year of research and development and one generation of capital investments. That offered enough resources to fully pursue existing opportunities through heavy capital and technology investments, and a time buffer to decide on strategic direction.

According to the results of a new survey from SAS, companies that have better customer experience management capabilities, along with a strong customer orientation, enjoy a decisive competitive advantage.  Over 150 senior executives from leading U.S. corporations were polled to gauge their customer experience management capabilities in the first annual Customer Experience Maturity Monitor study. The results are now available by viewing an American Marketing Association Video Discussion “Multi-Channel Mayhem: Tapping the Customer Experience for Competitive Advantage”. Some key findings:

• Among companies reporting high customer-experience maturity, 81 percent reported outperforming their competition.
• Companies that reported outperforming competitors also reported higher future investment plans in customer experience capabilities.
• Although 76 percent of respondents reported that they motivate employees to treat customers fairly, only 62 percent provide the right tools and training to earn customer trust.
• While 76 percent reported that customer trust is tied to the financial success of the business, only 60 percent consider how a proposed action increases or decreases customer trust when making decisions.
• Most companies want to focus on enhancing the customer experience but are pressured for short-term results. Only 42 percent of respondents agree that their company can do what is right, despite the pressure to make current-period numbers.

“As the 4-P’s of marketing – product, price, place and promotion – become increasingly tactical, this study confirms that more companies are embracing the 3-I’s of marketing – customer insight, interaction and improvement – as the key to growing long-term profitable customers. However, there is room for improvement,” said Jeff Gilleland, Global Strategist for Customer Intelligence Solutions at SAS.

“Companies are doing a good job gathering customer data but are falling short at creating proprietary insight from it,” observed Gilleland. “You can’t manage the customer experience if you don’t know what your customer is likely to buy next or if they are going to attrite. Of the companies we surveyed, only 39 percent rate their capabilities as “good” or “excellent” in predicting a customer’s likelihood to purchase, cancel or leave. Looking around the curve and predicting future outcomes is where the value of customer insight lies.”

Some 60 percent of respondents report treating customers differently, based on an understanding of individual needs. “That’s important,” added Gilleland. “Needs represent the “why” behind the “buy”. Knowing individual customer needs enables a company to craft more relevant customer experiences to improve loyalty.”