Prioritize Your Marketing Budget by Using the Marketing Pyramid
Many companies know that not all customers equal, and yet, they market to all of their customers equally.
What I mean by not all customers are equal, is that not all customers’ business potential are equal. Some customers can bring you a few dollars worth of business while others can bring you hundreds of dollars of business. Marketing to these customers in the exact same way is not an effective plan.
So what is an effective marketing plan? The Marketing Pyramid, my friends.
What is the Marketing Pyramid?
Because all prospects are not equal, they should not all receive the same sized slice of your marketing pie. You need to spend the majority of your time and effort with the customers who are your best bets. Doing otherwise is just wasting your time and money.
The Marketing Pyramid is a tool that will help you decide how you should market to heavy, medium and light users through coupons, special offers, contests and other incentives. You build your pyramid from the ground up, spending more time and resources with the bottom tier, which is made up of your heavy, or primary prospects (A). The next tier is your medium, or secondary prospects (B). The top tier, and the smallest, in terms of time and resources spent, are your light, or tertiary prospects (C).
Determining your A, B and C Targets
You split your prospects into the three tiers based on their profit potential.
Your primaries (A) should make up 10% of your list. Your “A” prospects can include:
Current customers
Recent past customers (within the past six months)
Any hot leads from trade shows, Internet research, articles etc.
Recent referrals
Your secondaries (B) should make up 25% of your list. Your “B” prospects can include:
Somewhat recent customers – those who you’ve done business with between six months and a year ago
Somewhat recent referrals
Top targeted customers that you haven’t gotten a response from
Your tertiaries (C) should make up the rest of your list and should include:
- The rest of the targeted customers you haven’t gotten a response from
- Business cards, inquiries and other contacts
- Anybody else in your list that looks like they’d make a good potential client
Another way to categorize your targets into your pyramid is to estimate how many time you’ll close a deal with the type of prospect. A general rule to divide your list is:
A = 1 in 10 (or less) will close
B = 1 in 25 will close
C = 1 in 100 will close
Now that you know who’s in your pyramid, you can spend more time on the A’s, a little more time on the B’s and the least amount of time targeting the C’s. Generally, it’s recommended to contact the A’s 10 times per year; the B’s 4 times per year; and the C’s one time per year. If you mail out brochures or postcards, this is the number of times you should mail out your direct mail each year to balance your marketing costs with your marketing expenses.
Now you’ve got a prioritized list and you know just how much time and energy to expend on each group. Easy, right?
Creative Ways to Alter Your Marketing Message
If you’re finding yourself running into writer’s block or if you can’t come up with a new and innovative idea for your marketing materials, you might just need to tweak your thinking a bit. Below are five tips to help your right brain take over your marketing ideas and to pump out some creative ideas.
1. Change your question. If you change the question, you’re going to get a completely different answer and a different perspective on the goals of your marketing materials. If your question is “How do we to sell more products?”, you’ll craft your message in a way to sell your products focused on quantity. You might even lower your price to up the number of products out the door. However, if your question is “How do we bring in more profits?”, you might up your price or emphasize the quality of your product in your message.
2. Don’t use the first idea you think of. In the book A Whack on the Side of the Head, the author Roger von Oech says to take the time to think of a second, third or even 100th idea. When you’re trying to think of a new idea, the quality of your ideas don’t count in the brainstorming stage, it’s the quantity that’s important. The more ideas you have to pick from, the more likely you are to pick a great one.
3. Paint a press release. What would you use to paint a press release? Sounds odd, but thinking of combining two unrelated acts can give you a creative answer you never would have thought of otherwise. What about thinking of how you could dance out your billboard design? All of this may not give you a feasible idea, but it will get your creative juices flowing.
4. Talk to your product or service. That’s right – ask your product or service how it would like to be sold. This is a more mind-bending technique that might seem a little weird at first. But it can be valuable to think of how your product would answer the following questions: What are your strengths and weaknesses? Who can you help? Why should someone pick you over your competitors? Does it look best in catalog printing or should it be sold in person?
5. If your brain isn’t working, don’t force it. If your brainstorming session isn’t working, stop. Do something else for a while. Take a walk or do some exercise. That gets the blood flowing and your brain time to sort out ideas. Your subconscious will keep thinking and you might have your answer the next day. Take a break until the next day – there’s a good reason why people say to “sleep on it” – sleeping lets your subconscious brain work out problems that your conscious brain can’t during the day.
How Do You Present Yourself?
For those in the world of graphic designs, the time will eventually come to show your work to other people. This is going to be particularly true for those who are just starting out in the industry.
If you’re going in for a job interview and you have to bring in a number of your different design projects it can be a very nerve wracking experience. Really, for any kind of job that relies upon an artistic talent of any kind it can be difficult to let other people see and judge the work that you did.
This is an almost purely subjective thing that you’re handing to them. There is no definitive right or wrong way to do something like design. Sure, you can stand by the industry standards, but maybe people are going to be looking for something different. You might give them something different only for them to say they prefer what is already being done.
Each person has their own opinion on what looks good and what doesn’t. No single brochure design is going to be universally accepted as the best way for brochures to be done, just as no postcard design will always be able to get the sale.
There are really only two things you can do to help make meetings like these go a little smoother: be prepared and have thick enough skin to take whatever is said. The latter of the two is the hardest to manage, but the first can be accomplished with relative ease.
I’ve still seen plenty of people who don’t come prepared, though. This is the one thing you can make sure is done right, and yet many fail to do so.
The most obvious thing to me is making sure that you know what type of advertisements that they want to focus on, if they have one, and only bring in samples that reflect something similar to it.
People have come in before to a company that primarily uses brochures and all they brought were sample flyers. When informed that the company preferred brochures, the person exclaimed that they had some sample brochures already made up, they just hadn’t thought to bring them in.
Had they done the needed research it wouldn’t have ever come up. Figure out what a person is looking for, and make sure you have as close to an example of it as you can.
Presentation is another key aspect of it. Take the time and money to get a great presentation folder to hand to people. The way material is presented is just as much an artistic statement as the material that’s being presented.
It shows that you’re aware of how things are going to look when first handed to people. A presentation folder will look a lot better than a packet stuffed with your material.
If you do have a proper presentation it can help increase your confidence, and better your chances of getting the job.
Basic Copywriting for Non-Copywriters
If you’re an entrepreneur who has decided it’s time to take a crack at writing your own copy for your marketing materials, this article is a great learning tool to help you write that first great marketing piece. There are certain basics that are common to every great marketing piece, from postcards to brochures to your Web site.
Here’s a quick mini-lesson you’ll want to print out and use when you sit down to write your first marketing copy.
Lesson 1: Write directly to the person that will be reading the copy
Although you are marketing to the masses, each mass is made up of individuals. Other than grade school, people don’t read in unison with each other as a group. Ads are seen by only one person at a time. The individuals that make up your target market should share many similarities, so it shouldn’t be hard to write to that individual.
Imagine you have your best prospect sitting across from you at a table. What do you need to say to get that prospect to shake your hand and make a deal to buy your product, right then and there? This is how you should approach writing your marketing material – talk directly to the prospect. The most obvious way to talk directly to someone is to address her with the word “you.” Ask “Do you have XX problem?” Talk right to them.
Lesson 2: It’s not all about you
Don’t talk about yourself and your company in your advertising copy. Take out all of the “we” and “our” instances in your first draft and rewrite those sentences with “you” and “your.” For instance, the sentence “We can deliver our product in 24 hours” is more effective when rewritten to “You’ll receive your new product in 24 hours.” Using “you” and variations of the word is known as “outer-directed” language. You are indulging people in what they like to do best: watch out for themselves and try to get the best deal.
Lesson 3: Talk about benefits, rather than features
This is somewhat of an extension of Lesson 2. People pay attention to messages that tell them something they want to hear. They want to hear how a product or service can solve a problem for them or make their lives easier somehow. And with so many ads directed at people through all kinds of media – newspapers, magazines, television, billboards, the Internet – you need to grab people’s attention immediately before they move on to the next thing.
The best way to grab attention is to tout a benefit right off the bat – at the top of your flyer, on the front of your brochure, at the beginning of your TV commercial, etc. Use benefit-ridden headlines in all of your print materials and make those headlines bigger and a brighter color than the body copy (that’s the smaller copy).
Lesson 4: Keep it short
Good copywriters don’t use a longer word when a shorter one will do. And oftentimes, the shorter word is the more common word in a language so you lessen the risk of alienating anyone who might not know what a longer word means.
Get straight to the point and use words that evoke mental images or sounds. You won’t have more than 20 seconds on average for your marketing materials to be deemed worthy of further reading so you need to get as much info (meaning benefits) as you can in that short of space and time.
Lesson 5: Ask a question or give a command
Many marketing pieces open with a question to get people thinking. Questions intrigue people and get them engaged with your message. Including a command, like “Call now” persuades people to take action when they otherwise wouldn’t. Commanding people to do what you want them to in marketing copy is known as a “call to action.” You tell them what they should do next and make it as easy as possible for the reader to take that action.
6 Keys to Success for the Budding Salesperson
Many times, people are hired as salespeople, are given a manual to study, but are sent out to sell before they even have time to open the manual. Here’s a quick beginner’s course, or refresher course to those new to the sales arena.
1. If you want to succeed, you must believe in the product you’re selling. You might be the greatest actor in the world, but if you don’t believe in the product, it’ll still show through in your presentation. You might make little slips of language that tell people what you really think of the product, or when you’re using brochures to explain something, your tone of voice or body language might be saying something different, otherwise known as a Freudian slip. Freudian slips aren’t only slips in language, but can be physical too, like your body language.
2. Know your product from the inside-out. You need to know the benefits of your product, and who exactly the benefits are for. This means you need to adapt to whoever you are trying to sell to – the benefits of a cell phone to a senior citizen differs greatly from the benefits to a teenager. If you know all about your product’s benefits, you can change your pitch in an instant because it’s all right there in your head.
3. Remember who you are representing. You aren’t just representing the integrity of yourself, but also the company you work for. Whatever you do reflects back on the company. You do have some social responsibility in sales. Don’t say or do anything in front of a prospect that you wouldn’t do in front of your boss.
4. Don’t feel like you need your customers more than they need you. That kind of thinking creates an imbalance from the get-go. You’ll always be on the defensive, even when the prospect hasn’t said anything offensive. This mindset will affect how you present yourself and the product. Think in terms of you doing the consumer a favor – you’re clueing them in to this great product with all of these benefits that this person is now missing out on. Consumers need people like you to tell them how to make their lives easier – by buying your product.
5. Create an air of confidence by practicing your sales pitch. If you aren’t confident in your sales pitch, do something about it! The best thing you can do if you aren’t comfortable with yourself is to practice your presentation in front of a mirror. If you aren’t confident for another reason, like lack of knowledge about the product or industry, get out that manual you were given on your first day. Look at your company’s Web site. Google your product and industry. There’s an old saying that “knowledge equals power.” Well, knowledge also equals confidence!
6. Above all, make sure you listen. You need to converse with prospects, not just talk at them. By listening to what the other person is saying, you can head off any questions or doubts early on. If you just wait to talk, on the other hand, you won’t get anywhere, fast.
Know Your Strengths
“Well, if they’re big and you’re small, then you’re mobile and they’re slow,” Gene Hackman’s character says to Will Smith in the movie Enemy of the State. While in the context of the movie he’s talking about fighting in a war against a branch of the government, this same advice can apply just as easily to a business.
Sometimes a business can have its hands tied by its own success. I know all those huge businesses try to talk about how they’re really a family owned company that you can feel close to. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I have a little trouble taking that advice to heart when I know for a fact I’ll never actually see any of those family members who own the company. They’re off in a boardroom talking about the future of the company, not on the sales floor restocking the shelves.
But if I walk into a local comic book store, video rental store, even grocery store, I very well might see the owner on his knees putting products onto the shelves. No major company can match a feeling of connection something like that can achieve.
Ask yourself about this in relation to marketing. Okay, brochures. Using this form of marketing as an example I’ll go over some of the ways you can actually benefit from not being a big corporation.
Sure, you aren’t going to have the same kind of budget for your brochures. A major corporation can pump out far more color brochures in a matter of seconds than you could probably make in the span of a week, but that isn’t always the most important thing. A brochure is only worthwhile if it actually gets people interested in the company.
You have the ability to make a custom brochure unlike anything those huge companies can match. If you own a small business you’re closer to the people. You know what they want, and really you don’t have to advertise to as many different groups as they do.
Wal-Mart isn’t just in one state or one city. They have to appease the mid-west as well as the northeast, and these are not similar people we’re talking about. This isn’t even taking into account all those other countries Wal-Mart deals with. You’re able to personally know and talk to the people you’re marketing to. You can know exactly what you need to do to appeal to them.
And really, creating a strong brochure design is a lot easier these days than it used to be for the small business owner. Do you have Adobe Photo Shop on your computer? That’s all you need to get started on some great looking brochures.
Just remember that what can appear like a weakness can really be an asset if you know how to properly wield it. You have a mobility the big business will never be able to match. Use it to your advantage.
Maximizing Your Brochure Effectiveness
Think Like a Customer
If you were a customer, what kind of brochure would make you take notice? Keep that in mind when you are designing brochures for your business. If you try to think like a customer, you might just find new ways to market yourself.
Use Enticing Information
The front of the brochure is where you need to convince the reader that he needs to look inside. Don’t be afraid to use some non business stuff there. For instance, you can say something like, “Coldplay’s new record just broke the record for downloads,” to try to interest the reader. Of course, you have to be able to tie that in to your company in some way, or else the customer will see right through your ploy.
Keep it Organized
Keep your brochures nice and neat. Don’t let them get too cluttered or text heavy. And if your brochures are quite long, you might want to include a table of contents to help readers find what interests them.
Information is Key
Don’t forget to include information about your company or product, or both. Your brochure cannot be completely full of enticing information without including something of substance. If it is, it will not generate any profit for you.
Throw in Something Valuable
Try to include something that will make the reader consider keeping the brochure. This can be information that does not deal directly with your company, but relates to it indirectly. The point is just to provide something that is valuable outside of the marketing aspect.
Think Outside the Box
You do not necessarily have to print a conventional brochure. Be willing to use some unique techniques to really get the customer’s attention. Change the shape of your brochures, or use a bold color (only if your business is not serious in nature). You could use humor extensively on your brochures, or anything else that will make them stand out from the thousands of others out there.
Use Story Techniques
Try to put the reader of your brochures in a relaxed mood. Try to take them away into a different world, of sorts. Use storytelling techniques to change the customer’s frame of mind as they read your brochures.
Focus on the Needs
The bottom line of any sales pitch is that you need to tell the customer what you can do for him. As early as you can in your brochures, tell the readers how you can solve a problem that they have, or fill a need that they suffer from.
The Call to Action
This is a vital part of any advertisement. You need to tell the customer exactly how to act, and why he needs to do so in a hurry.
The Different Types of Brochures
Not every brochure is the same. There are several different types of brochures, each of which has a different purpose in life. To be specific, there are 5 types of brochure. You should become familiar with each so you can produce the right kind for your company.
Here is a rundown of each type to help you plan your next brochure project.
1. Support Brochures
If you give presentations as part of your sales approach, you may want to print some support brochures. These brochures are designed to help you get your message across. You should design these brochures to coincide with your presentation, so that the participants can follow along as you speak to them. This can be a tremendously effective technique, because if reinforces the things that you are telling them.
2. Direct Mailing Brochures
This is a very different type of brochure that you send directly to a prospective customer. Obviously, this type of brochure will not be meant to accompany a sales presentation. Instead, you will design this brochure to introduce your company to a customer, and tell him why your company is the best at what you do. You need to tell them a little about your product, and how much care and detail you put into creating it.
3. Response Brochures
When someone shows interest in your product or service, you should have some information to give to him. That is where this type of brochure comes in. Design a brochure that drives home the best features of your company, like why you are better than any other similar type of business. You will be giving this brochure to someone who is already interested in you, so design it to close the sale.
4. Check out Brochures
Putting brochures next to the check out area of your store is a good way to bring customers back for repeat business. Make sure you put a really enticing headline on these brochures, because it will take a little extra to make these customers (who have already bought something) look more closely at your information.
5. Drop Off Brochures
There will be times when you are around a lot of potential customers, but you can’t speak to them. That is a good time to have some drop off brochures at your disposal. These are different from response brochures, because they are not necessarily for people who have shown interest. They are simply there to pass out to a mass of people that you cannot communicate with directly at the time. These brochures should be designed as sales tools; you need them to persuade people that they need the product or service that you provide. Of all the types of brochures, these are probably the least effective, because you are usually giving them to people who know little about you and may have no interest in your services.
Design Basics: Posters
Above all else, the goal of the poster is quite simple: you want people to look at it longer than they will any of your print ads. Sure, this goes for almost any kind of advertisement, but your poster is going to embrace this mentality like no other form of advertisement will for the simple fact that, unlike all your other print ads, posters are way bigger.
Remember this also: people don’t take posters home with them, they don’t stuff them in their pocket, and they don’t look at them from the comfort of their home. A poster is only going to be seen at the location you put it and it needs to convey its entire message as fast as it can, because people won’t be looking at that poster for very long.
The question I ask now and I’m sure a lot of people are thinking is how do you get the most out of your posters then? Even more than that, why even bother to use them if they have such a limited scope of effectiveness?
The charm of large format posters is that they can grab someone like no other kind of advertisement can. Every other form of advertising simply takes more time or can’t stack up when it comes to the quality of the image.
Take for example a postcard or flyer. Now, like a poster, both are going to grab someone’s eye right away and both don’t have room to really say too much. But both are going to be on lower quality paper and both aren’t going to be able to support the kind of visual flare a color poster can achieve.
Think about photo poster printing. A poster can support a high quality picture unlike anything a flyer would lay claim to. This is what will really make someone look over at your poster. It’s always the picture that grabs my eye first, and your poster stands as the best style of advertising to get that high quality image out there.
Given that you know people aren’t going to tear your poster down and take it home with them, or you hope they won’t, you need to make sure you can tell them what you have to say as quickly as possible.
Get to the point and only focus on the point. Is it a sale? Tell them that and be done with it. Maybe you have a grand opening or new product release. This is the key point of your poster and all you should have to worry about mentioning.
The more your poster has to say the less likely it is people will care enough to read it all. I’ve seen all sorts of posters that only have six or seven words on them total. I can tell you this, I read everything those posters had to say. The more complicated your poster starts to get the less likely it is people will bother reading any of it.
I’ve designed many posters myself using all sorts of different designing programs. With a program like CorelDRAW you can pump out some truly marvelous looking posters from the comfort of your own home.
Design Basics: Flyers
Compared to other forms of advertising, designing flyers should be a breeze, right? After all, the flyer is one of the most basic forms of advertising there is. You have a single sheet of paper to worry about and nothing else.
I won’t try to claim that a flyer is as complicated as a brochure to design, but there are some important details to be aware of before you go off and start designing them yourself.
These days I see a lot of flyers I just know people are making at home using something like QuarkXpress. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but I think you’ll be better served knowing more about flyer design before you go off and start making your own.
The first and most important thing about a flyer is the primary message you’re trying to convey. If your goal is to make some nightclub flyers than you want to decide what it is about the nightclub that you think will be your best selling point.
Let’s say you have a certain night that has great drink specials. This is the main point you want people to be aware of, which means this should be the biggest thing on your flyer. You want to grab people’s attention right away before they can throw that flyer on the ground, and we all know that’s what most people are going to do.
I see a lot of flyers that seem to have no particular point it emphasizes. Nothing is bigger than the rest, and so nothing really jumps out at me. Those are the flyers I drop in the first trash can I happen to pass.
A flyer needs to jump out and grab a person’s eyes. It needs to make sure they don’t look at anything else until they’re done looking at your flyer. Whether your flyer is for a nightclub or your plan on making some business flyers, you have to make sure your selling point is prominent.
Along with a strong message you need to have some strong visuals. A person is likely to see the image before they see the message, so give them something they’ll stop to look at. You could go for the extreme out of the ordinary kinds of images or the more colorful, flashy look. What you plan on selling will be what will decide the best kind of image to pair up with your message. Only you can know what that is.
And of course, make sure you have plenty of flyers made up. The cost to print flyers is cheap compared to almost any other form of advertising. Take advantage of it to get as many flyers as you can. The more people you hand them to the more opportunities you’ll have to find those people who will take your message to heart.
If you want to design your own flyer, by all means, go right ahead, just be aware of what all goes into them rather than waste your time on something people like me will just dump in the trash.
