Adding Value: from Ticket Stubs to Car Mechanics

“Value.” That’s one of those often overused words that companies throw at their consumers in an attempt to make them feel better about opening their wallet.

Fast food chains used to have the “Dollar Menu.” Everywhere you went, you could find a backlit panel offering smaller hamburgers and small fries, each for $1. But it’s been replaced by the “Value Menu.” But what qualifies $1.49 instead of a $1.00 as a “good value?”

What does “value” mean to you as a consumer and to us as a business owner? By definition, “value” is “the regard that something is held to deserve” or “the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”

We can assign value to anything from a rare coin to a ticket stub that was from a special night.

At Adelsberger Marketing, our team strives to add value to your company. After all, it’s not worth hiring us if we don’t provide value.

There are several areas in my life in particular that I assign value to hiring a professional. When it comes to my vehicle, I could spend an entire weekend watching YouTube videos in order to diagnose the squeaking sound from a belt. I could even drive around town and find the part. And, with enough sweat-effort, I might even be able to put on the new belt. But it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. Fixing cars is not on the list of things I do well. Therefore, a trusted car mechanic is extremely valuable to me. I want my vehicle to run reliably so I depend on them to keep me on the road. They are experts which means they can diagnose and repair my car quicker, easier, and better than I could.

The same idea is true when it comes to how you communicate with your clients. You could put any old website together so that you can say you have a “web presence.” You could even create a Facebook page. But, when not properly utilized, neither are of much “value” to you. That’s where we come in. We take the tools you already have and improve on your business’ strengths.

We seek to bring value whether we are speaking at your event, designing a business card for you, or helping you launch something for the first time. If we provide you value, we know you will come back and you will tell your friends about us.

Over the next four blogs, we’re going to share four of our “tenets” of how we do business each day. It’s our hope that, through these four ideals, we will be able to better communicate to you how our team can add value to your business.

#freemarketingidea

From the Clinton Presidential Library when Renae and I visited in Summer 15.
From the Clinton Presidential Library when Renae and I visited in Summer 15.

 

Do you give anything away for free?

Maybe it’s a free upgrade to an order, maybe it’s a free white paper, maybe its a free consultation.

Why would you do that?

Free is the opportunity to create a reciprocal relationship. Free could be the chance to prove yourself.

So what could you give away for free? Probably something you have in abundance. The reason a lot of restaurants give away free drinks, is because they have a huge amount of syrup on hand and it costs them very little. But at the same time their profit margins on the drinks are huge. But if it leads to a purchase of a burger or pizza, they come out ahead. It also gives them a chance to make you a fan!

I have an over abundance of ideas. While in the gym the other day, I saw a commercial for CopperFit Compression products. It had Brett Farve playing flag football with the compression product. My brain immediately thought, what an amazing campaign idea: take submissions of people using CopperFit products to win a chance to play flag football with Brett Farve! So I tweeted it to them.

No one responded. I didnt expect them to. It didn’t cost me anything to tweet it and I didn’t lose anything by sharing that idea. But the upside could be huge. What if someone from Copper fit saw it and thought, “Hey, I like that idea!” and gave me a call. What if someone else say that idea and thought, “That guy has a great idea, I wonder what he could do for my brand.”.

It could lead to future business. Ideas are worthless if you do nothing with them. I am going to start sharing more of mine with #freemarketingidea.

Are you making videos yet?

If not, why not?

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Video is the hottest thing in marketing right now! This chart from Marketing Charts shows that most marketers put video at the top of the most effective content types!

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Video is the new standard of content for engagement. Don’t have a sweet video setup? Start with your smart phone. Smart phones these days take great video! One of the most important things is to just start!

Video is here to stay, so the question is: Are you making plans to make the best of it?

 

Social Media #Win or #Fail: Gillette

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This month in social media #win or #fail: Gillette Razors. I am classifying it is as a #FAIL (But Gillette if you are reading this and would like to discuss why its not, please send me a tweet @k_adelsberger)

(Also full disclosure, I have a beard and very rarely use my Schick razor to trim up my beard.)

It all started one October morning, I opened up twitter and saw a promoted tweet from Gillette Razors. But it was not Gillette’s tweet it is was someone else’s: IMG_2595

 

The tweet from @jlkirbee was a really interesting. It read like ad copy but seemed to be posted from a real person. Here are a few quick take aways from this attempt at capitalizing on someones social media comments:

 

  1. Not written like a real person. It looks as if @jlkirbee is a real person. Active on Twitter, Medium and Facebook. Although Bas Collective does not have an online presence(I did send a request to interview him for this post but he did not respond). I am a big fan of testimonials for marketing. However, the tweet above is written like it was copy from a marketing person for a print ad.
    I think where the ad went astray was the shot at Harry’s and the “#power in #research”. These two lines cross over from customer preference to marketing effort. Now of course, @jlkirbee could have written this himself, but it looks like something written by Gillette. This make it appear to cross a line that the internet holds dear: honesty. Because of the way this tweet was worded and subsequently promoted by Gillette makes it appear to be fake. The internet responded in kind.
  2. IMG_2598 Gillette took it to far. Gillette reached out thanked @jilkirbee for the tweet. This was good social media marketing, respond and endorsing your customers. But when the tweet started to be sponsored on 10/9, the push back was palpable. People started taking shots at @jilkirbee and Gillette:
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3. Gillette opened itself up to competition. In fact Gillette exposed one of its customers up to a competitor because they promoted a tweet that featured them.

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Gillette took a sound idea for a strategy and failed on the execution. The strategy: find customers who like us enough to talk about us on social media and then leverage social media to promote that post. I think they took a misstep with the post that they promoted. I think the real winner here was Harry’s. The Harry’s customers came out and supported the brand and ultimately used the attack in their favor.

Harry’s was listening and replied to at least one of the tweets. Harry’s is doing smart online marketing with sponsoring podcasts and providing a product that is bringing real disruption to the market.

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How we got 7k organic reach…over night.

Great content is the king of the internet. But by defining it as great means that it is rare. Do not expect to make great content everyday but be ready to take advantage when you do.

Making great content is hard to do and it can be even more difficult depending on your industry. This video started with an amazing story and we put the time into make it a professional production to create a huge PR coup for a small non-profit. Madison County CASA is a charity that I support and I was recently hired through a grant to create a new website and video for them.

Lets take a look at a breakdown of the stats:

The video did really well initially on its own. The organic reach was great! People were sharing, liking, and commenting organically. The key was amazing content that gets people emotionally invested. Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.03.26 AMIn the first 24 hours the organic reach went up to 7,721! What amazing reach for a Facebook page with only 647 fans(before the video was posted). When I felt like the organic reach was starting to come off its highest point, I activated a $25 boost to fans and friends of fans of the CASA page.  As you can see below, as the organic reach dropped I used the boost to help increase its reach to the community.

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The result were 16,838 total reach with 6,753 of those being paid. Thats amazing! The difference: amazing content people wanted to see! Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.00.29 AM

Now lets dig into the video statistics. Of that 16,838 people who saw the post there were 7,052 people who watched the video. 17% of those reached with the post watched some of the video. Now we can see through the audience retention panel that very few made it very far into the video. But the vast majority that made it 45 seconds in, made it to the end of the video. 7.15% of the 7,052 people who watched it at all is: 504. 504 people watched the entire video!

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Now in our context, the video was nearly 6 minutes long. It was a time investment for our audience to watch. This video was designed more for presentations than social media viewing. The story was too long to fit into an ideal :30-1:30 video. I feel like the 504 is a great number for completing the video.

We can also learn from the Facebook stats that the average watch time was 42 seconds. I also know that that if they made it 1 minute in, almost all of those watchers made it the rest of the way through the video.

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What other measurable things did we get? The page gained 32 new likes and the post had 418 likes in total. 101 on the pages post and 317 on the shares of the original post. This is an impressive number. There were also 63 shares. People loved the content. The content is king!

All of these measurable point to a marketing win for a small nonprofit that just had the chance to get in front of 16,800 people for a very small amount of money!

 

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Facebook now has stock photos!

Facebook is making strides to be more friendly to advertisers. From the inclusion of a support staff for questions to increasingly opening more and more analytics and targeting options, Facebook is actively striving to make the experience better for advertisers.

One step they have taken is to add free stock photos for ads on their page. More than just stock photos, they are from ShutterStock, which is one of the premier providers of stock photos on the internet. Even if you have a photographer or imagery this might help in a pinch.

For example: While working on a recent ad for my business, the option was given to me to use “Free Stock Images”.

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They also preload some images they thought I might like based on my product.

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This is a great product upgrade for Facebook. But almost always, photos of your product and service will be better that stock photos.

 

 

Land Rover’s Storytelling on Instagram

Land Rover took creativity on Instagram to a new level recently. It uses Instagram in a way I have never see or thought of before. It uses the grid of all the photos to make its own image composite image. It took a lot of planning to pull off but when you go to either of their two accounts: Solitude in Sawtooth or Brotherhood of Wonderstone (click for the weblink but it looks better on your phone) you can scroll continuously down through a seem-less image story. Additionally  there are videos scattered throughout that have different tips for wilderness survival and fun. Beautiful job Land Rover!

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Candidate Logos Part 2: Republicans (Part 2)

Even though the election is not until next fall, the presidential campaigns have kicked off. While this is super frustrating to many, including myself, one of the upsides is you get to see lots of important branding. In this series of posts I am going to be evaluating the top candidates logos. How do I determine the top candidates? I used this study by the Washington Post.  This will be a three post series. The first post will be dedicated to the Democrat candidates and the next two will be dedicated to the Republican candidates (because there are currently so very many of them). (Read about the Democrats Logos Here and the first half of the Republicans here.)

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Rand Paul:

Visual appeal- 8
Symbolism- 8
Execution- 8
Total-24
Rand Paul is a man on fire. He wants change and with this aggressive logo, I think he communicates that clearly. It works well in different colors and it is my favorite. Simple but effective.

 

 

 

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Mike Huckabee

Visual appeal- 6
Symbolism- 2
Execution- 5
Total-14
Nothing crazy going on here for Huckabee. If there is intentional symbolism here, I am completely missing it! Instead it looks like they selected some random abstract shapes and threw in a few stars. And the kerning between the K and A is way to close.

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Jeb Bush

Visual appeal- 8
Symbolism- 4
Execution- 8
Total-20
Well someone is clearly trying to avoid associating himself with his brother. The natural move in a family such as this would be to invoke the fame. This is the most light hearted of the republican logos. I think the choice of an exclamation point is setting him up for a alternate logo with an upside down exclamation point trying to court the Spanish speaking vote. Also what an interesting b.

 

 

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Scott Walker

Visual appeal- 8
Symbolism- 8
Execution- 8
Total-24
Probably the most creative inclusion of American Imagery this year. The block flag in place of the E strangely works for me. I think it would even be clear in one color. I feel like this candidate is a strong American loving candidate. Mission accomplished logo.

 

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Donald Trump

Visual appeal- 4
Symbolism- 2
Execution- 4
Total-10
Trump doesn’t need a creative logo. Everyone knows who he is. I think that has more to do with his poll ratings then his true popularity. But this logo is exceptionally plain, thus the low rating.

How do people learn about new products?

How do people learn about new products? Guess what? Word of Mouth still reigns supreme!

In a new great chart from Marketing Charts, the reasons why someone would buy a new product come out. A few notes: there are different countries in the mix here and age demographics are not shared. That being said we can learn a lot from these trends. Here are a few notes:

•Word of Mouth is the best way to gain new customers. While listening to ‘experts’ talk about a product dropped 11%, friends and family told me about it it only dropped 4%. A rejection of ‘experts’ is something that is growing strong in our generation due to the flood of facts we deal with everyday. For more issues and products its easy to google something and find an opposing fact (or pseudo-fact). This survey shows a drop in word of mouth but I think they are drawing a line between word of mouth and social media which as I explain in the next paragraph is not really that different.

• Social Media is growing and its really word of mouth for the next generation. Someone once said, “If billboards are fireworks, social media is a bonfire.” Fireworks are short bursts of entertainment and could describe many forms of advertising but social media is designed to allow a conversation to happen about your product or service. Social Media will increasingly be a tool that is used to sway’s peoples minds about a product because it is the word of mouth in the tech world we live in today. [bctt tweet=”Social Media will increasingly be a tool that is used to sway’s people because it is the word of mouth in the tech world. “]

•TV Ads are prominent but faced a huge drop and I suspect this will only continue. Traditional media is going to continue to suffer from a drop in power due to demographic changes and the adoption of technology. TV is going to become less and less powerful unless they do something about it’s viewership and data.  Here are some of my other thoughts about traditional media.
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All of this is great data for us to help improve our sales! Lets put it to use!

People love free shipping emails and other tips!

Marketing Charts recently released a great chart documenting what types of communicates lead to customer purchases. This is extremely helpful if you offer a product. Of course each businesses’s audience is different and will respond to things differently. One restaurant I work with responds well to amazing text deals but email can sometimes be a struggle.

Here is the chart:

Marketing Chart's Research

 

Some interesting notes from this research:

1. Retargeting is at the bottom of the list. I wonder if people artificially lowered this number because it creeps them out. But it is interesting that direct mail ranks higher on the list. I suppose it has a lot to do with the quality of the direct mail list you buy.

2. What is interesting is that the top three items are all emails! I love email marketing.  Email is a great form of permission marketing and its something businesses should always be thinking about, “How do we increase our permission base?”.

3. The Staggering drop off between two and three. Free shipping and discounts reign supreme here. I suspect this tactic will become more and more prominent as we increasingly stop buying things in brick and mortar locations and instead switch to online stores. Free shipping will be the gold standard and is already used by things like Amazon prime to attract consumers.