With the Winter Olympics a few weeks behind us, I must ask: did you buy anything you saw advertised on TV during the Olympics solely because you saw it during the Olympics?

I vaguely remember car commercials: were they for Chevrolet? I don’t know because I didn’t buy a car due to its appearance on TV.

How about beer? There were lots of those commercials. Which brand? I don’t remember because I don’t drink beer.

Doesn’t Home Depot have lots of Olympic employees? I don’t care because Home Depot has failed me in the past. I love competitor Lowe’s.

Then there was that one movie preview I kept seeing. I think it was The Da Vinci Code. This one did look promising. I’ll have to add it to my list of movies to see.

Of the four commercials I can remember, I will most likely take action on one of them (the movie). Why is that? Because TV commercials are too broadly targeted.

Mass Media

As Seth Godin communicates in his book Purple Cow, mass marketing is useless. Companies spent millions of dollars on Olympic advertising and sponsorship to questionable financial benefit.

Brand Reinforcement

Commercials during the Olympics, while ineffective in swaying you to purchase new products, did hammer the companies’ brand into your head. This may just leave customers thinking: “oh, I already do business with company XYZ. That’s nice that they sponsored our Olympic team.”

Doing Good

You may say that sponsoring the Olympic team is a noble and charitable endeavor. Absolutely. Guy Kawasaki in his Art of the Start reminds us that we should give back to the community by being a Mensch. Give charitably because it is the right thing to do, not because you think you’ll gain business because of it!

Chick-fil-A restaurants know who hands over the money for meals. It isn’t the kid. It is the parent. Every time I’ve gone to Chick-fil-A, the kid’s meal boasts a book or educational toy.

Chick-fil-A’s website states the reasoning behind this fast food anomaly:

When it comes to our Kid’s Meals, the character we’re most interested in isn’t the cartoon kind. Nourishing hungry young minds and helping you promote healthy values for your child are the top priorities. Educational, character-building Kid’s Meal prizes help to bring grownups and kids together.

Recognize

Are you marketing to the wrong people? The decision to do business with you often comes down to a specific individual. Do you know who that person is? Chick-fil-A knows that parents make the decision to come to their restaurant. Do you know who is bringing their wallet to your business? Identify this person (or persons) and start focusing your efforts.

Show You Care About Customers

Chick-fil-A’s mantra for Kid’s Meals is everything a parent wants to hear:

• Nourishing hungry young minds
• Promote healthy values
• Educational
• Character-building
• Bring grownups and kids together

This directly targets the ones with the cash (parents) and encourages them to return to the business as return customers.

Strike a cord with your target customer by identifying your common beliefs, goals, and objectives. (Of course it also helps to have a great product.)

Find out what matters to this person and tailor your message to ease his or her pain. Understanding their situation will help you hone your marketing message.

Target Acquired

Make sure the decision makers are driving business to your business because you clearly explained and targeted the benefits of your service.

We recently traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina to visit with family. While driving around, I kept seeing buildings with no other markings but a simple sign: “BB&T.”

ob·fus·cate (defined by tfd.com)
1. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand
2. To render indistinct or dim; darken

What was BB&T? The rather nondescript buildings provided no clues as to their function or purpose. It turns out that BB&T is a bank. I didn’t find that out until I returned home and stumbled across an article on the Fool.com.

So if I had just moved to Raleigh and needed a bank I probably would have stopped by any of the other numerous financial institutions that actually had “bank” or “banking” on their marquee. It pays to clearly define your company and services!

Barrier to Entry

Hiding your company behind an acronym will not help you win new customers. Using an acronym goes against sound company naming conventions. When potential customers can’t tell what your company does, they’ll drive on by and do business with someone else.

Acronyms are Confusing

Unless an acronym is defined up-front, people will not necessarily know what you’re talking about. Even after an acronym has been explained, people will forget the meaning until they’ve seen it several times. Once an acronym has been used so much that it is commonplace (i.e. IBM or USA) it will become effective. Only then may individuals that have never had contact with you recognize your company by its acronym.

Explain Everything

If you are forced to use an acronym, explain it or supplement it with an explanation. If BB&T had used a sign with a subtitle like “banking - investments - loans, ” I would have known right away what they were about.

Don’t leave your potential customers guessing. Avoid acronyms and explain clearly (and for all to see) what your business can do for customers.

Part of the effort in sales and marketing your business includes convincing your prospects that they actually need the service or product you provide. I’m not just talking about buying from you. You need to convince them to buy it period.

Beckwith’s Selling the Invisible teaches that customers aren’t choosing between just you and your competition. They are choosing between you, your competition, and not buying at all. Customers may decide to do it themselves, delay their purchase, or forget it all together.

Doing It Themselves

When a customer is leaning toward simply doing the service solo, you need to step up and outline why you are the better choice in this situation. You may be able to:

• get it done more quickly than they could
• get it done for less money than they’d spend on their own
• produce a higher quality result
• provide a warranty on your work

So without belittling the customer, highlight all the benefits they’d gain by choosing you over doing the job themselves.

Delay Purchase

Sometimes customers just want to wait a little longer to make a purchase. You must persuade them to act today. Highlight:

• negative consequences of waiting
• all the benefits they’d get by having your product today
• the special limited time offer they must take advantage of today

You need to help them understand that they need to buy today so they can reap the benefits of your product/service and do it all for less money than if they came back later.

Forget It

When people decide to just throw in the towel and not buy from anyone you must focus your efforts on convincing them they really need your product. Identify the customer’s situation and problems and show them how you can solve their issues and make their life easier.

Customers may fall back to doing business with no one. Help them make a choice: you!

We recently stopped by a bookstore to buy some board books for our baby boy. While there, I noticed huge posters on the windows and hanging over DVD displays showcasing a World War II movie that interested me. However, the DVD was no where to be found.

Under the big posters hanging from the ceilings were shelves full of a completely different movie. Hundreds of copies of the same DVD that was in no way related to the WWII movie I saw advertised directly overhead.

Why promote a product that you don’t have? Leading customers on a wild goose chase may bring them into your store but will confuse and disorient them. Your employees will then have to waste time explaining the situation. Your potential customers may walk away empty handed.

Marketing Must Match Products

Help avoid customer confusion:

• Keep your advertising and marketing promotional material current and in sync with your product and service selections.
• If a product is unavailable, indicate clearly when it will be in stock and how a customer can purchase the item.
• Avoid stale displays, ads, or web pages. Constantly monitor these communications to ensure your customer is getting accurate information.

My wife and I pulled up to a Sonic drive-in for dinner the other day. She had seen the commercials for the mini banana split and that prompted us to pull over when we saw the Sonic. The big menu had a huge beautiful picture of the 99 cent banana split. After getting our food we were very surprised to see the great disparity between the picture and our desserts. We had half melted ice cream and the whole container was small enough to fit in our palm of my hand. When compared with our expectations, the item we ordered didn’t match the picture and was too small!

Product Descriptions

The words describing a product should accurately reflect reality. The tendency in marketing is to make something sound greater than the actual product. This works well for selling the product for the first time. However, if the customer finds the product or service to be vastly different from what was advertised, they will not return.

Product Imagery

A picture is worth a thousand words. We see glossy pictures of products everywhere. These are often doctored after the photo shoot or feature perfect specimens. Rarely, does the delivered product match the high standards of the sales poster. With photography, the customer has an image of the product already in mind when the product arrives. This creates immediate and obvious problems when there isn’t a match.

Take the Test

Take a fresh look at your marketing copy. Next, look over your product brochures and product images. Now, go look at your actual product. Do they match? When you look at your product do you start to laugh? Does it pale in comparison to what you previously saw and read? If so, you need to do one of two things:

• Change your advertising and marketing content to match your real product
• Improve your product and bring it up the high quality described and shown in your marketing materials

Both are tough to do but are well worth the effort. I’d vote for the latter. If your product or service was as wonderful as that glossy ad shows, you’ll have customers coming back in no time.

An article about marketing for eBay sellers offers this insightful statement:

By keeping customers informed about new deals, you stay in their minds and increase your chances of bringing in repeat business and creating loyal customers.

You have several opportunities to remind your customers that you are still around to help solve their problems:

• Television and Radio
• Direct Mail
• Email Newsletters
• Built-in Marketing

You most likely come in contact with the first two of these most often. By hearing a commercial or getting a reminder in the mail, your existing customer base may be prompted to return to you. Unfortunately, TV, radio, and direct mail may not be as personal as your customers would like. We’ve spoken before about quality email newsletters, so let’s turn our attention to the last point:

Built-in Marketing

Let’s call built-in marketing where your product or service includes up sell or marketing opportunities. By simply using your product, your customer is incentivized to return and do business with you again. There are many examples of this all around you:

• Magazines have postcards inside touting get deals on subscriptions
• The box of detergent you bought has a coupon on the package good towards your next purchase
• When you get your oil changed at the Quicky Oil Change Place, they’ll put a little sticker with their name in your car reminding you to come back after 3 months.

One of my favorite tools is 37Signal’s Backpack. This online organization tool gives a wonderful example of the built-in up sell. When you reach your limit on the number of pages you can have, they stick this little message on the screen:

They provide a subtle reminder that it is time to upgrade. They provide the method to upgrade, and they explain why it is worth your money. Built-in marketing at its finest. Always include those 3 key points in your built-in marketing: the reminder, the method, and why your customer should take action.

Find ways to invite your customers to return and do more business with you via the very product or service you just sold them. If you sell a quality product with built-in marketing, your customers will return without you having to chase them down and do additional work.

Take a look at your products or services. Can you add some built-in marketing?

Each of your customers is different. However, the odds are that they share characteristics that can group them into certain segments. According to Fool.com, Best Buy

… identifies key customer groups within the trade area of each store and tailors the merchandise assortment and service offerings to those customers’ individual needs.

The company divided its customers into five groups.

the affluent professional looking for the latest technology with top-notch service, time-starved suburban moms, small-business customers looking for integrated solutions, the family man who wants proven technology, and the early-adopter social customer.

Characterize your customers

Think about your customers. Do they easily fall into different segments? Maybe you could group them by:

• frequency of purchase
• purchase amount
• level of service provided
• types of products purchased

Depending on your business, there are numerous ways you can segment your customers. By taking the time to evaluate your customer base and identify recurring characteristics, you can gather valuable information to improve your bottom line.

Customize your service

Once you’ve identified in which segments your customers belong, you need to develop a strategy to improve sales in each of these categories. This is essential because as we know, current customers are your best prospects. If one of your segments is the one-time purchaser, think about how you can incentivize the customer to return for more. For larger more frequent clients, how can you make doing business with your company so easy that they’d be crazy to go somewhere else?

What kind of customers do you have? Don’t know? You’d better find out before your competition does!

The Cosmetic Site reminds us of six essential things you need to master to make your company successful.

Positioning

It is crucial that you do some homework to find out just how you are, and could be, perceived and how to turn this perception into something positive, distinctive and emotionally relevant to your audiences.

We’ve mentioned before that you need to put on your customer hat to understand your customers’ needs. Take a step outside of your office and see how others look at your company. Does the outward perception reflect the inside reality?

Packaging

Good packaging conveys who you are and why a customer should choose you. It should clearly convey your “personality”Â? and also the benefits your product or service offers.

This comes down to keeping up your appearance and clearly communicating your services to customers. If your message isn’t clear, your potential customers will never know that they should be doing business with you.

Promotion

Revisit your selling message to ensure it clearly articulates who your audience is, what problem you can solve and the solution you can offer.

Clear and concise communication is the key to gaining your customer’s business. You need to find out what they need and then outline how you can solve their problems.

Persistence

Once you’ve made a commitment to your core marketing message, avoid wavering from it. … Changing your tune confuses your audience about who you are and often does more harm than good.

Would you recognize Target without the bull’s eye? How about Nike without the swoosh? When your brand starts clicking, don’t change it for changes sake. Keep what works and rework what doesn’t.

Persuasiveness

Train yourself and your staff to understand how your brand addresses needs, and whenever you speak about your brand, be clear on how it can help the right prospects.

Performance

Make a commitment to delivering everything you promise and you’ll create loyal, repeat customers.

This is absolutely essential to a successful business. You must set the proper expectations with your clients and then deliver! I’ve had recent problems with Office Depot not delivering on their promises. This has severely undermined my confidence in that company. If you fail to deliver what you promise, you’ll scare away your current customers and many potential prospects.

Work on these 6 P’s of marketing and your return customer base will surely grow.

I received this little gem in my weekly newsletter from MarketingSherpa.com:

Lesson #5. Current customers equal best customers

Marketers seem to want to disprove this fact. They look at the
people who aren’t buying and think, “Look at all that potential!”

But … a company’s best prospects are their best [current] customers.

Don’t forget your current customers

We’ve talked about building customer relationships before. However, you’ll never fortify these bonds if you forget all about your existing customer base. Your current clients are those that got you to where you are today. They trust you enough to remain faithful to your company and continue to give you money. Don’t forget them!

Turn your customers into return customers

Since your existing customers already are familiar with your business and services they have one less barrier to overcome before spending more money with you. Odds are they already trust you and if they have been satisfied so far with your service, they can easily be converted into return customers. Maybe you can sell them the same service or product again. Or if the opportunity exists, you can up sell them to a new product or service you are offering.

In my web design business, I’ve had several clients for years that trust me explicitly with their sites. In their eyes, I am the expert and they will usually accept the advice I offer them even if that means that they’ll need to pay me a little more money. Since I am familiar with their businesses and needs, it is easier to see where the potential lies. I present them with solutions and turn my clients into return customers.

Take a look at your customer base. Do any of your current clients need another product or service you offer? Remember that repeat customers drive profitability and get to work!