Monthly Archives: October 2013

When You’re a Believer

Some broadcast account executives have a misguided understanding of why they conduct CNA’s, Customer Needs Analysis.
The purpose of a CNA goes beyond simply discovering your prospects’ unique competitive advantage and uncovering their objections so you can overcome those objections in your presentation.
The deepest purpose of your CNA is to uncover your prospects’ beliefs….their deeply held emotional beliefs. And once you’ve accomplished this, your mission is not to try to change those beliefs, but rather to find a way to make your proposal align with and compliment those beliefs.
Far too many reps try to counter their prospects’ objections with logical arguments when in reality they need to dig deeper to unveil the belief at the root of that objection. Emotions are seldom trumped by logic.
In fact, most people will only seek or accept the logic or reasoning that justifies their previously-held beliefs.
Marketing masters have developed the art of demonstrating how their proposal meshes perfectly with their clients’ beliefs.
Contact  [email protected]  to inquire how our Becoming a Master Questioner© Sales Workshop can help your group get to the root of their prospects’ beliefs and build sustainable long-term partnerships

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marketing Automation?

Have you seen the Jimmy Kimmel interviews where he asks people how they feel about “Obama Care” versus “The Affordable Health Care Act”?
When asked, interviewees who were opposed to Obama Care positioned it as “socialist” but were in favor of The Affordable Health Care Act. …. by the way, if you weren’t aware of it, “Obama Care” and “The Affordable Health Care Act”, are the same thing.
Opponents of the Affordable Health Care Act have skillfully and successfully labelled it “Obama Care.”
My point is, the words we choose have a powerful influence on the perceptions in the marketplace.
I, for one, have always been offended by the term Marketing Automation. I consider myself to be a pretty good marketer, but I have never seen marketing happen “automatically”.
“Automatic” is defined as “starting or functioning by itself” or “Started, operated, or regulated by a process or mechanism without human intervention.”
Wow….marketing with no need for human buyers or sellers?
Another term that irks me is “real time”…can someone explain to me what “artificial time” is or why anyone would use anything but real time?
Ahh… then there is,”new media.” How much longer can something on the internet, which originated in the late 1950’s, be called “new”?
Then there is “social media”, implying other media are not social, or are anti-social.
Where am I heading with this? Your choice of words is critical in influencing your clients and prospects. None of your prospects are in a hurry to buy anything labelled as old, traditional, or legacy media…..they all want the newest shiniest thing.
In our ‘Winning in the New Media Economy’ advertiser seminars, we are able to convert former print advertisers to a broadcast and online media mix with our careful choice of words.
Through a series of carefully chosen words, research and stories, we’re able to convince advertisers this is “The Electronic Age.” Anything broadcast or online is “electronic media”, and anything that involves cutting down trees, paying for pulp and paper mills, printing press operators and delivery people is “old media.”
We still have a few seminar dates available in 2014. Contact  [email protected]  to learn how we can help you to convert hundreds of thousands of local print budgets in your market to a powerful on-air online mix.

Why Marketers Need to Re-evaluate Radio, the World’s Most Popular Medium

Did you catch this important article in Advertising Age about the Radio Renaissance?

(Source: Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group, in Advertising Age, 10/01/13). It’s the Perfect Platform to Combine With Emerging Applications and Innovations
Over the past few years, digital marketers have been so focused on display, better ad-tech and creating experiences on the ever-expanding list of social platforms that we’ve managed to largely ignore a traditional medium that’s becoming increasingly sophisticated right under our noses (well, our ears): radio.
Radio is ripe for a renaissance. Major advances in up-to-the-minute distribution and segmentation, as well as innovation from the likes of Spotify, Pandora and Apple make radio — or radio-type service — a good bet to add scale to campaigns at efficient cost.
To better understand the opportunity, it helps to know the broader context. In the early 2000s, radio’s significance as a leading advertising channel started to wane — or at least the perception of it did — as attention, and then dollars, shifted to digital.
The result? Many bad jingles and poorly executed direct marketing. And while TV and digital may be advertisers’ media of choice when it comes to branding, it’s worth mentioning that radio retains its place as the most widely used mass-communication channel in the world. The 13,000 radio stations (about 8,800 FM, 5,000 AM) broadcasting across the U.S. together reach over 94% of the U.S. population 12 years and older each week.
Radio has also evolved a lot to compete with digital platforms like Pandora and iTunes. On-air jokes turn into trending topics, rare tracks are purchased at red lights and rural backchannels make Reddit’s front page. There’s an interesting media merge that needs to be explored.
As much as we talk about the phone being the second screen to TV and how our audience is multitasking, it’s more plausible to think about looking at your phone and listening to the radio at the same time. It’s also a lot more interactive than TV. You can call in to shows, do shout-outs, make requests — pretty interactive!
As formats like Vine, Instagram Video and Cinemagram show, even with zero time restraints, people still are attracted to digestible nibbles of content, a fact that should only make 10-, 15- and 30-second radio spots more enticing.
Our agency grew to appreciate this when producing a recent radio and digital campaign for the AdCouncil and Environmental Protection Agency. The initiative, which promotes preventative measures parents can take against asthma attacks, is delivered in a series of 30-second pop songs.
Another recent example was Little Caesars’ “Do Not Call,” an integrated radio and online campaign by Barton F. Graf 9000 that explored customer curiosity and reverse psychology, relying on radio to do a lot of the awareness legwork in the beginning.
And of course there was the popular “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign by McCann Australia, a cause-marketing effort — for preventing injuries on the country’s rail system — at the root of which was an original and catchy song.
The success of that campaign, which won McCann Melbourne a Grand Prix Radio Lion at Cannes, among several other awards, was proof positive that creatives need to reconsider radio as a medium for their clients, too.
Instead of radio being an advertising afterthought, it can be a pretty great source of inspiration. In the age of social media and composing tweets and six-second Vines, radio doesn’t seem quite so limiting.
And contrary to the production costs and time associated with TV, radio creative can be executed for a fraction of the cost and in a significantly faster timeframe, giving advertisers the flexibility and agility to adapt campaigns on the fly.
Finally, there’s a strong argument to be made on the metrics side, as broadcasters continue to develop credible audience-tracking metrics, in addition to products that support digital advertising and allow for increasingly targeted messaging and data collection.
Similar to the best digital campaigns, marketers are now able to tie metadata with GPS, enabling customized, targeted radio ads and content. And while this is obviously easier in digital radio, terrestrial radio is coming along.
While digital agencies have been focused on capturing the essence of every emerging platform, we may be missing opportunities to combine new platforms with existing ones. We’re in the business of investing in new ways of storytelling, so let’s reconsider the value of radio in the marketing mix.

P.S. Our Winning in the New Media Economy advertiser seminars can now partner with local digital experts in your market to persuade local advertisers to invest in radio as the driver to more success online. For more information, contact [email protected]

The Escape Hatch Myth

Selling in the business-to-business environment has changed dramatically from the old days when we were trained in the ABC’s of selling….Always Be Closing. Today, the ABC’s of selling are “Always Be Connecting”.
Remember when we were trained to not allow the prospect any escape hatches? We were to “always be closing!”  I can’t believe that ever really worked. Intelligent business owners can’t be manipulated.
Nowhere is the “always be connecting” mantra more important than on the phone. In old school sales training, we were trained to introduce ourselves and jump into our “elevator pitch”, not allowing any escape for our would-be prospect.
Today, our goal is to always get permission to continue by asking, “Is this a good time to connect?”
The old ABC closers would never allow such an escape, believing that as long as they didn’t hear “click…bzzzz” in their receiver, the prospect was listening to their blah, blah, blah. Are you kidding me?
When you don’t get permission or determine if this is an appropriate time for your call, your prospect may not hang up on you physically, but they certainly have mentally.
There is no point in trying to connect with someone who is preoccupied with other problems or who is texting or reading their emails while you’re babbling. Be courteous, be professional, and get permission to deliver your message. If you don’t get permission to continue, don’t think for a minute that just because you delivered your message, that it was received.
Busy business owners appreciate it when you respect their time enough to ask permission to talk to them.

P.S. don’t forget to ask when it would be an appropriate time to connect and make an appointment to do so.

 

Upside Down Marketing

Most of us have used a version of the marketing funnel to explain to our clients that buying decisions begin at an emotional or subconscious level, and as consumers get closer to the purchase end of the funnel they become conscious of the process and begin to search for facts which validates their emotional choice.
Even though we tell our prospects buying begins in the heart and is only rationalized in the head, we use an upside down funnel in our own marketing.
Most media account executives try to open the door with logic….rankers, ratings, research before winning the prospect emotionally.
Developing a strategy for each account that opens the door with laughter, tears or entertainment also works for selling your prospects.
YouTube can be one of your best tools for reaching your prospects at an emotional level.
With a little time and effort, you can find a short video that makes the point emotionally, that you’ve been trying to make with statistics and logic.
If you want to persuade a yellow pages advertiser that yellow pages are dead, for example, sending this link  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtrdhEog73w   to the video of Ellen DeGeneres slamming Yellow Pages will make your prospect laugh, and open the door for your logical follow up.
If you want to persuade a client they need better copy to make their advertising work, this link  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgi0t2ap-us  to a video that demonstrates the importance of choosing the right words in your ads will bring a tear to their eye, touching them emotionally.
Over the years I have built an old paper file full of jokes and stories I use in sales training workshops or send to prospects to make my points emotionally. Over the last few years I’ve started to build the same types of files with online stories, jokes and videos.
Each story, joke and video is filed by the point they make. They touch prospects emotionally, opening the door for my logical appeals.
Finding ways to use the same marketing funnel we tell our clients to use, with emotions at the beginning and logic at the end, can also serve you well.
This is just one of the strategies we use to open new prospects’ doors. You can contact [email protected] to inquire about our sales workshop for your broadcast association or annual corporate sales meeting to help increase your sales in 2014 and beyond.