How Bad Is It Out There?

Okay -- my apologies to those who have been waiting for another blog entry and waiting, and waiting. It’s been extremely busy at our firm and the blog has suffered. Wait until I get my quarterly objectives reviewed...my boss is going to take me to task.

However, I have been thinking about a statistic I came across lately and how it relates to marketing.

“The average American is exposed to 3,000 advertisements in a single day.”

Let that sink in. Does it sound high to you? Consider all the TV, print ads, direct mail, radio, outdoor, sponsorship, coupons, or banner ads you might come across in a single day. To me, the number sounds about right.

With that many ads, the generic advertising industry has succeeded in providing a potent anesthetic to the American people, making them numb to all of this advertising and in essence, rendering the advertising completely worthless.

How do we deal with this, as marketers and business owners? Let’s talk about that tomorrow.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Your Business Needs Rhythm

The people in your company need structure, and the business needs a flow or rhythm to its operation. Creating this rhythm helps your team feel comfortable about expectations and allows them to plan accordingly.

At our company, we huddle every morning at 9:15AM. That 15 minute meeting sets the expectation that everyone is in and ready to go at 9:15AM, each and every day. This meeting allows us to discuss the day’s tasks, set priorities and quickly deal with issues affecting client service. By 9:30AM, issues are resolved and everyone knows what they need to do that day.

At 3:00PM, we virtually huddle again to review our progress and make adjustments to the plan.

Every Friday, I meet with department heads to review the week’s performance, check our numbers and deal with bigger process-related issues. This gives the company chance to pause, look at our performance and make small weekly adjustments that impact performance immediately.

Finally, we have a company-wide meeting the first Friday of each month. This gives us a chance to rally the troops, discuss company issues, reward individual and team performance and discuss plans for the up coming month.

More importantly, the rhythms provide a framework for working the team, keeping them focused, and allowing continuous improvement to flow through the company. Try it…it might feel uncomfortable in the beginning, but I guarantee you will see the benefits within the first week or two.

Let me know how it goes.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Watch Your Numbers

Every business has numbers. These are the important metrics associated with your business that gives you a snapshot of the health of the business at anytime. We use the following numbers to keep tabs on our business.

• Total daily invoices
• Total daily cash in the bank
• Percent of monthly sales target
• Total number of projects in our shop
• Total number of active clients
• Average revenue of active projects
• Percent over last month’s average revenue of active projects
• Number of team tasks each day
• Percent of daily team tasks accomplished
• Number of new projects
• Number of projects completed

There are other metrics we look at daily, weekly, and monthly, but this should give you a good start in terms of creating some numbers for your business.

So, now that you have numbers, so what? What are you supposed to do with these numbers? Well, if we didn’t have them, how would we know whether the business is growing, stagnate, or declining? We could wait until the month is over and look at total sales vs. last year or the month before. Or we could wait until the year is over and look at the total year vs. last year.

The point is, without frequent numbers, your reviews would come too late. Monthly or annual reviews of the performance are too infrequent. If you want your business to grow, you have to look at the numbers daily, weekly, and monthly, so that you are able to make key adjustments before the month is over, identify issues quickly and make changes so you can still save the month. Each month is 1/12 of your entire year and important in and of itself. Manage your business so that you make each and every month.

Let me know if you need help creating your numbers. I am happy to help.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Building Your Team Takes Priority

My last blog entry was March 9^th. It appears that I might have lost a bit of my momentum. The fact is, I have been spending most of my time reviewing resumes, phone screening candidates, personally interviewing people, participating in candidate project sessions, checking references, and preparing offer letters.

I admit it -- this has been distracting me from my blog. But our company is obsessed with building the best team, and sticking to our hiring process helps us find the best candidates for our team. While this isn’t marketing or sales related, it’s worth talking about.

Creating strong hiring processes, sticking to those processes, and making sure you bring only the best people into your company is going to be one of the most important activities you do for your company.

I apologize for being less attentive to our loyal blog readers. All our readers know my goal has been to post every week day. Now that we have made some progress towards hiring key people for our firm, I promise to return to regular posts starting on Monday.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Running a Business is Like Coaching a Sports Team

I guess I needed a little break from blogging after posting a five part series on how much your marketing budget should be. Anyway, I am back with a commentary that’s a little off what I usually talk about, but nonetheless, relevant.

I coach boys' basketball, both 2^nd and 3^rd graders and a team of 6^th and 7^th graders. The differences are interesting, but perhaps more interesting is what I learn about management and leading team at Square 2 Marketing.

First, you learn that everyone has a different learning style -- some people and some kids need to be shown how to do it, and others need to be told how to do it. Some people and some kids need tough love and others need pats on the back. Some are super-committed, showing up at every practice and working their hardest, and others only do the minimum to get by.

It’s also about putting the right people in the right positions and then designing the processes around them so that they are successful. If you had a team of shorter players, counting on rebounds might be a poor approach.

Either way, I get a kick our of seeing the kids excel and achieve success, and I love seeing the people at our company achieve success with our clients.

Think about your people as a team and see if your approach to coaching makes a difference in your team’s performance. Email me and let me know.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

How Much Should We Spend On Marketing? Pt.5

Part 5 in a Series of 5 – Expectations and Tracking

Okay. Before going forward, you have to promise that tracking the results of this program isn’t an option, it’s a requirement. Make any changes you need to make to your processes first. Give the receptionist a clipboard if you have to, but track your programs. Also, prospects equal leads…if you can't close them, don’t blame your marketing. People who raise their hands and ask for more info, a quote, a chance to talk with you -- these are prospects.

AdWords was our first program. For $300 a month, you should expect to get about 200 prospects over the course of the year. Keep in mind that every company and every industry is different; this is just a general benchmark to go on based on our experiences with our clients. Total Prospects = 200

Email was our second program. For just $200 for the year, you are going to talk to 500 businesses each month (assuming you don’t grow that list, which, of course, you will). The resulting 6,000 emails over the course of the year will lead to about 10 prospects per month, or 120 for the year. Do this twice a month and double your number of prospects. Total Prospects = 240

Direct mail is our third program. Doing a three part series twice a year gets you in front of 1,500 prospects 6 times a year. This would deliver about 20 prospects per mailing, or 120 for the year. Compare email and direct mail. Cost per prospect on direct mail is $100 and cost per prospect on email is $3.33. Don’t worry, it’s the mix that’s important and you need both. Total Prospects = 120

Public relations is our fourth program. Again, extremely inexpensive in the scheme of the program and probably worth a couple of prospects every time you get an article or mention in the local paper. Let’s put us down for 3 a month or 36 for the year. Total Prospects = 36

Public speaking is our final program. This is one of the best opportunities to generate prospects because you make an emotional connection with your prospects. Do these events 6 times a year, or once every two months, and from an audience of 50 attendees (reasonable response) you'll have 20 prospects, assuming your content and delivery is first rate. That’s another 120 prospects over the course of the year. Total Prospects = 120

So for just over $10,000, we created a marketing budget and plan that has the potential to generate over 700 prospects. Now you only need less than 300 prospects from your direct selling effort. If you have two or three sales people, that’s just 100 per person or less than 10 per month. So instead of 100 per month, now they only need 10. Any sales person who can’t find 10 qualified prospects shouldn’t be in sales.

Let me know how your planning went, and email me directly if you have any questions about how much you should be spending on your marketing programs.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

How Much Should We Spend On Marketing? Pt.4

Part 4 in a Series of 5 – More On The Math of Marketing

First, let me apologize for leaving all our readers in the lurch, waiting to read the final two installments in our series, “How much should we spend on marketing?”

So let’s finish up. When we last talked, we calculated that we needed about 1,000 prospects over the course of the year. Our next step is to create the marketing programs that will generate 1,000 prospects. Those programs will create our marketing budget and answer our question, “how much should we spend on marketing?”

1. If we assume you have a website, using an AdWords program is one way to generate new traffic to your website. If you are running the program yourself, expect to pay at least $10 a day for this program depending on your industry, so over a 12 month period, this marketing program will require an investment of about $3,600.
2. Email is another extremely efficient marketing program. Typically, it costs about 2 cents per email. Let’s assume an average internal list of both customers and prospects of around 500 names. This would cost about $200 for the year for a monthly email program.
3. Direct mail does a nice job supplementing the electronic marketing. Typically a series of three jumbo postcards mailed twice a year will cost around $6,000 for the year.
4. Public relations gets your name circulated among potential prospects. This is also a very inexpensive marketing program. With just a little work on your part, a program like this could cost as little as a $250 for the year.
5. Public speaking. If you provide a service or offer a special type of product you can position your company as a “thought leader” and offer your expertise as a speaker. This type of event usually free and can generate 10 to 20 prospects each time you do it.

So for just over $10,000 we created a marketing budget and plan that has the potential to generate 1,000 prospects. In the final installment, we will look at how many prospects we can expect from each program, how to track the programs, and when to make adjustments to the plan.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.