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Posts Tagged ‘small business marketing’

Death and Creative Small Business Marketing Strategies

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 19th, 2009 3 Comments

IT AIN’T YOUR GRAND-DAD’S FUNERAL. SIX FEET UNDER, NOT THE ONLY OPTION.

I’ve done some consulting work in the funeral industry, spoke at a national convention, and, while most are mired in the past, with very traditional, somber products and small business marketing strategies, there is growing movement of innovation and daring.

For example, “theme funerals” with themes like golf, NASCAR are happening; caskets sporting college logos and colors, NASCAR personalities, Gene Simmons markets a KISS Koffin, favorite NFL team logos and colors.

Now here’s the newest product, premiered at a previous year’s International Cemetery and Funeral Association Rock & Water Creations’ large, engraved, fake tree stumps and rocks you can put in your front yard, back yard, garden, etc., to provide a final resting place for the urn of ashes of your loved person or pet as well as a temporary resting place for folks taking a walk through your woods.
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A “New” Small Business Marketing Rules

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 16th, 2009 10 Comments

In the 1950’s, “credibility” was THE critical factor in advertising, and integrally, inextricably linked to being believed. In the 1990’s, they became distinctly separate component parts of an advertising or sales story, and it became possible to function with zero credibility if you had sufficient believability. In the new millennium, believability takes precedence (except for customers over age 55 or 60.)

I’ve been talking about this quite a bit for the last 10 years or more. To quickly review, “credibility” is typically illustrated with years in business; years in the community; the firm having been founded by grand-dad, a direct descendant from the Pilgrims; a photograph of the big building housing the firm; that sort of thing.

“Believability” used to require “credibility” as its foundation. But that rule is broken. Anyway, “believability” is presented with social proof or peer proof, such as testimonials; dramatic, easy to grasp physical demonstrations (even if rigged), being seen on TV, being used or patronized or endorsed by celebrities (even if they have no credibility), as well as via the convincing style of the presenter/presentation.
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Small Business Marketing Tip: Capitalize on the Tumbsuckers

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 15th, 2009 10 Comments

The Today Show featured a story on “mother-daughter bonding boot camp”, a group therapy business, where mother-daughter pairs pay to go and share stories, light candles, play games and work out their angst with 100 or so other mother-daughter pairs.

Seriously.

The last night they roast marshmallows; the final morning they light candles and say one meaningful word to each other.
The same day CNN carried a story about the newest, most pathetic trend: parents, predominately mothers, going with their college age and college grad children to their job interviews, waiting in the waiting rooms or, when possible even going into the interview with them and answering questions on their behalf.

I have previously written elsewhere about the popularity in particularly affluent communities of “baby sleep coaches” who camp out in the home to “coach” mommies on getting their babies to sleep.

“Thumb-sucking dependency” (the polar opposite of the virtue I celebrate: self-reliance) isn’t new in America. It’s just increasingly dominant.
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Avoid the “Monkey See, Monkey Do” Mentality in Your Small Business Marketing

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 8th, 2009 17 Comments

For years I’ve puzzled over – and never cease puzzling over – how people can have ‘the ways of success’ shown to them, visible to their naked eye, even pushed into their faces, and be told the principles behind what they are seeing, and still not copycat it, not do it, or even perversely do the opposite.

I’m a very open book – and I answer just about any and every question asked of me. In my various newsletters, I “reveal” everything I do to create continuing customer interest and involvement, foster retention, promote ascension, program good attitudes toward investing in resources, etc., etc.

It’s all right here out in the open. Side example: at a past Renegade Millionaire Retreat, over $70,000.00 of Glazer/Kennedy products were purchased at the “store” during the event with no “pitching” of any of the products.
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Unique Selling Proposition vs Dumb Slogans

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 6th, 2009 26 Comments

I was reading an extensive survey to measure the impact of advertising slogans. Among the slogans and advertising tag lines for 22 of the biggest U.S. advertisers, only 6 were recognized by more than 10% of the consumers surveyed.

In other words, not even 1 out of 10 consumers could correctly identify 90% of the slogans. 16 of the 22 advertisers had slogans no one knew – each spending more than 100-million dollars a year advertising them!

Three of these much advertised slogans scored 0% recognition. 0%!

Take the test, see if you can name any of the big, dumb companies that match these slogans:

  1. We’re With You
  2. That Was Easy
  3. The Stuff Of Life

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Bill Glazer Shares 7 Small Business Marketing Tips About Offers

By: Bill Glazer on: September 23rd, 2009 11 Comments
  1. You should have one! Never, ever fail to make a specific offer or offers, and have a clear call to action. So much bad advertising fails to tell the reader/listener/viewer exactly what is expected of them, what to do next, and how to do it, in clear terms. Most ends vaguely: here’s where we are, here are our hours, here’s our phone number.
  2. Build an appealing offer. Most are very unexciting, plain vanilla. A strong offer inspires the prospect to rush – RUSH – to respond. Has him excited about everything he’s going to get.
  3. Tie the “here’s everything you get” part of the offer back to previously presented benefits. Don’t stop at listing products or services.

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Pity the Foolish Small Business Owner

By: Dan Kennedy on: September 22nd, 2009 10 Comments

Any moron can make money with new media where only little folks play.

But when the big, dumb, brand advertisers arrive – as they have in PPC advertising – the media cost skyrockets and that’s that. This should never be a sudden surprise – or a gradual one, either – to anybody with even small quantities of small business marketing knowledge, historical perspective and common sense.

The Big Lesson is what immature, under-priced media giveth, mature, over-priced media taketh away.

For a while, independent specialty retailers in jewelry, handbags, shoes, spicy foods, even electronics had this space to themselves, so search ads that popped up when someone typed “diamond necklace” or “DVD player” worked.

Now that BestBuy, Zales’ Jewelers, etc. have arrived in those categories, buying with little regard to direct ROI, the price per click on such ads has risen to unprofiable numbers. And that will continue to worsen as even bigger, dumber companies cheerfully pay more.
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How Gene Simmons Can Put Your Small Business Marketing On Autopilot

By: Bill Glazer on: September 17th, 2009 9 Comments

Celebrity P-O-W-E-R!

I first learned about the power of celebrity from Dan, but I really didn’t fully embrace it until I saw it with my own eyes. Dan has often used his client, Guthy-Renker, as an example of how they have become the ‘top dog’ in the infomercial world by using famous celebrities such as Victoria Principal, Jessica Simpson, and Sean John (a.k.a. P-Diddy).

Why is a celebrity so powerful? Think about it. What happens when you’re up late at night and you’re pushing the remote control button while watching TV and all of a sudden you arrive at a show where you see Jessica Simpson (or some other celebrity you recognize)? What do you do? It makes you stop channel surfing and say to yourself…what’s Jessica doing on at 2 AM in the morning?
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Hey….Don’t Forget Space Ads in Your Small Business Marketing

By: Bill Glazer on: September 17th, 2009 7 Comments

Let’s talk about newspaper and magazine advertising which is commonly referred to as “Space” advertising.

In many ways, this form of advertising is one of the harder media to make work in small business marketing. Mainly because it typically is a rather costly media and depending on the size of your transaction, it can be very difficult to earn a return on your investment (ROI).

Of course, ROI can vary between whether you are only looking at how much the ad costs verses how much in sales revenue it generated or how many new customers you acquired from the ad and what is their lifetime value to your business.
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3 Common Habits Of Successful Entrepreneurs

By: Bill Glazer on: September 14th, 2009 3 Comments

As you might imagine, with tens of thousands of GKIC Members and actually working first hand with nearly 200 people in Peak Performers, VIP-Mastermind, Info-MASTERMIND and my personal clients, I see a lot and learn a lot about Entrepreneurs. I was thinking the other day about the traits that the most successful ones have in common and I’ve identified the three most common ones.

HABIT #1: They READ a lot…especially books. In fact, when I first discovered “Planet Dan” way back in 1995 the first thing that I did when I figured out that this Direct Response stuff really works is to become a veracious reader. I first began with the classics like John Caples, Robert Collier, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert and of course everything Dan Kennedy wrote.
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