Your Mission Driven YMCA
June 25th, 2010
YMCA’s are one of our biggest clients and are a non-profit organization that is membership and program driven. Did you know the Y is one of the most recognized brands in the world? Did you know they are a non-profit? Have you ever been a member at a YMCA? What did being a member mean to you?
The YMCA HAS a fitness facility and pool, but the YMCA is NOT a gym. YMCA’s across the country have Mission’s such as: The XYZ YMCA is dedicated to promoting healthy spirit, mind, and body through programs and services grounded in Christian Heritage and the Core Values of Caring, Honesty, Respect and Responsibility.
How can the YMCA be JUST a gym with these types of missions? They can not! They are not! But why are most people looking at the YMCA as just a gym?
The YMCA is a membership and program driven non-profit organization. The YMCA’s across the country do amazing things for children, families, adults and community support, but you may not hear much about the miracles that happen every day inside the YMCA walls. You do not hear about these amazing stories because the Y has not been focused on telling you. They have been focused on letting you know they have a gym and a pool!
When they just promote the pool and fitness equipment that start to appear as a gym. Over time they lose part of the message and image of who they really are. Their marketing maybe deviating from their mission. We need to get the YMCA’s back to their roots!
Corporate America could take a lesson from the YMCA because of the dedication, passion and higher purpose their employees hold. Corporate America could take a few lessons from this level of dedication and commitment.
We have met many individuals who claim the YMCA saved their life! We want to help reconnect our communities, families and individuals back to understanding what the YMCA is REALLY about.
If you were ever a member, what did the Y mean to you?
Back to the MISSION!!!
Have a Party!!!!
May 25th, 2010
Events can be boring, formal, crap! Throw a PARTY!
I do not like going to dull, formal, stuffy events just to meet other dull, boring, stuffy people. I want to have fun on my time out of the office and meet exciting people that elevate my game and recharge my batteries. You can build these amazing relationships for your company by hosting and attending events (good ones). We have very busy schedules these days, so let’s make sure we are maximizing our time.
Currently, we are inundated with too much advertising, communications and marketing noise (like this blog!!! Run!) and it is hard for ads in traditional media to stick with someone anymore. There is only so much space available in our brains and I have enough difficulty trying to remember to take out the trash on Mondays so my wife doesn’t yell at me, let alone remember all the emails and phone calls I have to return. Stop, take a breath and slow life down to a pace that allows us to develop REAL IN-PERSON RELATIONSHIPS!!! Do you remember real relationship building, not on facebook or match.com or the thousands of other social sites?
Events are one huge way we can get directly in-front of customers. Many major marketing consulting firms are directing their clients to market to the “customer experience” as a means of building those in-person relationships. The customer experience is the active interaction between a potential customer and a company during an activity, event, or a time when people are socially interacting. For example: Every year the city of Boston hosts a festival/party on Earth Day and thousands of people show up to listen to music, hang out with friends and enjoy a great day…it is memorable. Big name bands, free give-aways, a party atmosphere makes it something sponsoring companies want to be part of to take advantage of the experience the attendee’s are having. This event develops a relationship with the attendees because of the fun, emotion and personal attachment to the special day. People remember that they had a great time and wait for the event the following year. This emotional attachment is the customer experience. Companies realize that there is an opportunity to be present or a sponsor of the event and have their company’s name associated with the emotions and fun happenings that people have during the day. This creates brand association which is people relating the experience they have at the event with the vendors being represented at the event.
Since the average customer is probably not going to come knocking at your front door to see how the company has progressed in the last quarter, it is important to directly interact with your customer and the general public.
Be an active force within your industrial niche. Any sort of event where people gather with a common interest in relation to your company’s targeted demographic is the perfect marketing opportunity for your business to gain awareness.
For example, if you were to publicize the opening of a new retail store specializing in selling running shoes, attending a local foot race and passing out free drinks with a coupon or flyer advertising certain shoes in your store would be an ideal way to connect with a target audience that has a higher probability of need.
Stop with the boring social gatherings and start sexing life up and become BOLD!!! Think of what is most memorable in your life? BOLD Things, Right? Blockbuster movie, an amazing date, a huge deal closed, etc. This is what we remember…the big stuff. So get event marketing working for you. It will build community, involvement, excitement, and memorable experienced attached to your business.
Tell us about the greatest event you have ever attended!
4 Steps to Marketing
March 25th, 2010
Marketing is risky and there are no sure things; I mean look at the guy that invented New Coke to replace Coke Classic. How did that go? Terrible! So they fired him, but they eventually realized that his ideas were very creative, although risky, and many were successful, so they hired him back. Risk needs to be managed and calculated. Here is what we do for our clients in planning their marketing:
Step 1: Define the overall objectives of the owner or CEO. We must know where the CEO of the company wants to guide the business otherwise we have to guess and increase the risk. If we can extrapolate that information as step one then we can deliver inline with the client’s plans for growth.
Step 2: Find out what is going on through research. Our clients have their opinions, we have ours and the opinions that really matter are those of the customer…so we ask’em. The customers can tell us the good, bad and ugly and from that we can determine what is working and what is not. We will also look to see how the competition is doing and assemble a positioning strategy that differentiates our clients in the market. Business is a game of survival and anyone that says otherwise has never owned a company before! Competition is inevitable so a plan is required.
We also utilize industry reports and research in our analysis as well to get a broad view of the landscape as a whole and try to discover key metrics of comparison and growth trends from the reports. These reports can help you compare your customer profile to industry average and fine tune or get corroborate data to support your demographics and target markets.
Step 3: Branding, Image and Communication are the next step. We wrote a blog about brand and image yesterday is you want so more detail, but in step 3 we are talking about communicating values. What are the values your customers look for in your product or service and what values is your branding and image communicating. For example, research was done with a large pool of mothers many years ago asking them “why do you brush your childrens teeth?” and researchers has to get through 4-6 layers of questioning to get to the “real” answer. When first asked they said “so their child would have clear teeth” and then they ask why is that important, and finally after rounds of questioning the final answer amoung many women was; “to look like a good mother”. Why is this important? If you are marketing to mother between the ages of 30-45 with children and you are promoting clean teeth, then you are going to dastically reduce the success of the advertising. If you market to the image of: “When you use my company’s tooth paste you are showing the world how much you as a mother cares about the dental health of your child”…
Research is vital before you can make any decisions.
Step 4: Plan, Execute and Track ROI. Put a plan in place to go after a target audience using: Media, PR, Events, Networking, Social Media, Advertising, Print, Internet, Direct Marketing, Cross Promotions, Alliances/Partnerships, Newsletters, and/or many other creative ways. You need to utilize the research in step 3 to be able to make educated decisions on where to market, how and to whom. Then define what the expected outcome of each marketing action should be and how to track your Return on Investment (ROI). This is very important because as the statistics of your marketing campaign performance start to generate it will dictate where you continue to spend your marketing dollars and where to stop spending. You do not want to waste money so track the ROI from what you do.
This in a nut shell is what we do in our marketing approach with clients. As part of step 4 we will also do something that is vital to making money which is to communicate the marketing initatives with the sales department to educate them on what is being done so they are prepared to talk about each with potential customers.
Happy hunting and best of success!
Hurry Up! Get Out There!
February 25th, 2010
We have seen to many businesses use the worst marketing tool possible…waiting! Assuming people will sprint in your doors every day to buy what ever it is you sell is a monster mistake.
Do not wait around cleaning and picking splinters out of your butt, get out of the office, pick up the phone, send 3 dozen emails, but please be proactive to getting customers. We are going to run you through the steps that worked out for our clients.
Step 1: Do the work to learn more about who your clients actually are and where to find them, and the who, what, when, where and why answers…these will help more than you can imagine.
Step 2: Make 1st contact – Send a letter, postcard and mailer. Everything should have a call to action.
Step 3: Time to……….COLD CALL! You want results, pick up the phone and follow up on your mailer. Remember to script it out and plan.
Step 4: Get a CRM tool to keep track of your customers to know when to make follow up calls, when to send emails, to note conversations, and to utilize for further marketing actions.
Let’s start with those simple 4 steps and see how you do. Happy hunting and email me for help…info@theoctopussolution.com
7 Steps to Highly Effective Marketing Alliances
January 25th, 2010
Knowing how to form marketing alliances effectively can be one of the most powerful weapons in your war chest. When would you ever want to go into the world of business alone? Don’t do it because it is a scary dog-eat-dog world out there and businesses can catapult growth by working together. Together we have strength in numbers and can be more powerful and spend less money doing so.
An example of a successful alliance was with one of our Chiropractic clients and the marketing alliance we formed for them in partnering with Curves. Curves is a workout facility that is for women who fit the target demographic of a Chiropractic office perfectly. We creatively came up with a method for Curves customers to get immediate benefit from the relationship by providing chair massages at local Curves to all of their customers, in exchange for the opportunity for our client to pitch them an exploratory visit to experience their Chiropractic services.
This alliance was widely successful because it allowed our client exposure to hundreds of potential customers in their demographic pool and was a great method for establishing relationships in-person. It was a win-win for both companies because the Curves clients got value and our client got the opportunity to promote their company. The best part is that our client spent $0 for the alliance and was able to increase their revenue substantially.
This is a small example of the many marketing alliances that can be created. Many Fortune 500 companies are looking to tap into the small business customer pool because of the more intimate relationships we have with our customers. This fact gives us, the small business owners, leverage and opportunity to approach larger companies with ideas.
There are 7 Steps to follow when creating a marketing alliance:
Step 1 – Target
Step 2 – Partner Pool
Step 3 – Selection
Step 4 – Value Proposition
Step 5 – Alliance Proposal
Step 6 – Execution & Management
Step 7 – ROI Analysis
Step 1
You need a good understanding of who your customers are and have the ability to categorize them into some form of demographic(s). Simply worded: if 80% of your clients are men between the ages of 30-50 that live in the suburbs, then you can take that simple information into the next step of the process of locating another business or businesses to work with.
Step 2
Do some research and pull together a list of companies you think would be beneficial to work with. Your list should be long for the purpose of allowing yourself to find multiple candidates. Remember that we want to run honorable businesses, so if you are selecting two companies to put in that pool that are direct competitors you must make them aware of that issue if you decide to pick them both in the next step. Our advice would be to avoid picking direct competitors to work.
Step 3
Take the pool of potential marketing alliance businesses and start doing some research, which could be as simple as walking into one of their locations and speaking with a manager or downloading an annual report if they are a public company. In doing this you want to play the role of investigator to find out if their demographic closely matches yours. We are not looking for a perfect match here, just a high percentage which will help in making a decision. Select one or several that have the highest probability of your ideal customers being represented.
Step 4
If you did your homework in regards to the selection process then this step will be fun. Think of interesting, creative, bold and innovative ideas for how you can work together. Sometimes the more crazy the better. Now remember this is the value proposition step which means you need to create a balancing equation to this alliance. What ever you get out of the deal, the other side should be proposed something of similar value to demonstrate your interest in helping grow the other business too. If you don’t care about your partnering business then you looking to create transactions instead of relationships.
In the value proposition should be benchmarks, milestones, metrics, and forecasts to use as a measurement of success. Benchmark your past sales against future sales during the marketing alliance to see if there is growth. Create expected results based on a timeline so that you can see forward progress, such as setting deliverables alone a timeline and evaluating when reaching that timeline where you stand. Metrics will provide an analysis tool for you and your partner to use to compare sales, expenses, trends, etc. Forecasting should be done to project what the expected sales will be generated from this project and will be a key selling point in step 5.
Step 5
To this point you have a good understanding of your ideal customer, have assembled a pool of candidates, you individually researched those candidates to narrow them down further, you picked a few and have come up with excellent ways to work together; now you must propose the deal. This is where things get exciting because you have to call on a company, schedule time to meet with the CEO, pitch the deal and explore and entertain other ideas and options generated by the discussion. The only advice at this point is that you must demonstrate your willingness and care for the other business to be successful. Close the deal!
Some business partnerships sail on a good, old fashioned handshake, while others function on the inherent legality of pen and paper. Deciding whether or not you need a contract or a simple handshake is dependent open the amount of risk involved within the partnership. If part of the deal involves moving large quantities of money back and forth, you should have all roles and responsibilities dictated on paper. On the other hand, if the partnership simply involves the sharing of products or services, then a less formal agreement is appropriate.
Step 6
Your new partner just agreed to your deal, now what? You need to deliver! Did you make financial projections for the deal? Well you need to exceed those. Did you talk about the amount of time you would spend on the deal? Well time to deliver! You just made a deal that put your company’s reputation on the line to deliver something of value. Like making any deal it is critical to the long-term success of the relationship that you Follow Through.
Step7
After 30 days in the marketing alliance you need to review the positives and negatives to determine whether to continue with the relationship or not. Did the partnership help or hurt the growth of your company and your partners? The answer to these questions will inevitably dictate future plans with your alliance. This review process is important because it will allow you make improvements, if needed, within prospective alliances that could eventually propel your company to new levels of commerce.
We are in business to make money otherwise we are out of business living in a box. Conducting frequent Return-On-Investment (ROI) analysis will give you the on-going insight to the success of the alliance and show if you should continue to waste money. Make sure you are on target with regards to the benchmarks, milestones, metrics, and forecasts you created to monitor the project and look for warning signs or key indicators on an ongoing basis.
Now that you know the steps, comment with us about Strategic Marketing Alliances that have worked for You!!!