Stephen D. Gross

Now that the first decade of this century is over, small businesses are waking up to find themselves in a quandary trying to decide on traditional marketing versus online marketing and the means to finance either one.

Traditional Media Advertising and Marketing is often times out of the financial reach for most small business owners.  Even if they have the resources, small business owners get caught up in the need to justify and ensure a return on the investment of their time and hard earned dollars.  Traditional Media firms normally require an up front payment plus a long-term commitment before launching any campaign.  In addition, the charge for creative work is passed on as an addition expense to the media buying small business owner.

Internet or Online Marketing, more often than not, follows the same routine as Traditional Media firms in terms of financing the campaign and charging for creative.  The difference is that Online Marketing is typically far less expensive, much faster to launch, and easier to track and justify.  However, many online pay-per-click campaigns are launched by inexperienced marketing agents, and thus cost, and at times exhaust, their clients available budgets before a payback can be achieved.

Enter Social and Content Marketing.  These forms of Online Marketing can be seem elusive and untrackable for the small business owner.  Many times, the small business owners lack of understanding of the philosophy behind authority, trust, and communication keeps them from participating and committing financial resources towards this form of marketing.

Small business owners are looking for a low cost of entry solution for marketing for 2010.  The Internet can and will offer a pay-as-you-go alternative to the old fashion no-risk traditional media firm financial model.

Small Business owners seem poised and ready to commit the necessary dollars to get their business growing again.  However, they will only do so if the marketing channel is proven and offers a high opportunity for success and/or has some assurances built-in for controlling and tracking the marketing expenditures.

Brookstone Marketing Group has now released a marketing campaign that fits such a requirement, PayGo Marketing.  For more information concerning PayGo Online Marketing release click here.

What is your struggle with online marketing?  Leave a comment.

PayGo Online Marketing is a campaign offered by Brookstone Marketing Group.

One of the little known but highly recognized facts concerning a quality online presence is the effect on employee or staff attitudes and loyalty.

Did you know that the average age of an Internet searcher is over 35 years of age?  Did you also know that the age cycle is growing in both age directions?

To first analyze this phenomena you should first ask yourself these questions.  How good is the website presence of the company you work for or own?  Are they using the most up-to-date practices?  Would you promote the presence of your company to your friends?

In our experience, regarding small businesses, we have found that over 90% of small businesses have an online presence so poor that their staff is either not positively impressed enough to promote their own company website or are so unimpressed that it makes a negative impact on their impression and workplace attitudes.

The fact is that the average age of staffing for small business is under the age (less than 30) of the non-internet world.  In other words, the staff doesn’t remember or hasn’t been alive on this planet long enough to experience life without the use of the internet.

Most small business owners are older than their staff and therefore have trouble relating to an age group that depends on the Internet almost exclusively for information and knowledge.  Conversely, the staff looks upon the small business owner as a fossil and somewhat outdated if the business has a poor online presence.

In conclusion, over 90% of small businesses fail to make a good impression on their staff, can potentially foster a negative attitude, and fail to reap the benefits of word of mouth trust and marketing factors when they ignore their own online presence.

What is your opinion?  Leave a comment.

Please visit Brookstone Marketing Group for more information.

During a recent interview conducted by Kurt Vanderahand, posted on SocialMedia.org, Nick Ayres, New Media + Content Manager & Corporate Communications Manager, and Sarah Molinari, Corporate Communications Manager for The Home Depot discuss the basic media approach and online philosophy of their company.  Here is an excerpt of the interview.

4:22 — Nick: It’s easy to forget that we’re a relatively young company, and we’ve only been in business for about 30 years. We’re still learning as a business, frankly, how to best manage our business, not to mention social media.

4:24 — Nick: In our early days, we had a customer who came in to our store and wanted to return tires, but we didn’t sell tires. The cashier tried to tell the customer that they didn’t sell tires, but the customer swore he bought them there. The cashier called the manager, and he said to go ahead and take them back — and from then on kept the tires behind the customer service desk to remind the staff that they were there to serve customers. Nick says this mentality guides them in social media.

4:26 — Nick says we’ve all heard that you need to listen, and that their caveat to that is that you need to really be prepared to deal with those responses.

4:29 — When it comes to monitoring, Sarah stresses the importance on focusing on how to pull out the content that matters, and to figure out what insights you want to walk away with — because that will draw out what tools you use.

4:32 – Sarah lays out the four buckets they use that involve themes like general commentary, customer comments, and employee comments.

4:33 — Sarah says they started very early on Twitter with deals on their website, and says they had some really great early followers who said they didn’t care about deals because those were already well published. They said they wanted to know about the people behind it all.

4:34 — Sarah explains how they really got going in Twitter during the hurricane season by letting followers know important details on things such as where to get supplies, what stores were open late, etc.

4:35 — Sarah says The Home Depot is not in a race to gain Twitter followers, and shows a chart highlighting steady, modest rise in Twitter followers over the past 20 weeks. She says the importance is developing relationships and connecting on a deeper level.

4:35 — In one example, Sarah shows how they reached out to someone on Twitter who was upset, and fixed the problem — and later, the customer reminded her followers of the great help she received.

4:36 — Sarah’s big point on listening: What are you looking for? Is it actionable stuff? How will you resolve it?

4:37 — Nick says video syndication is another area they spend a lot of time. They realized that people don’t just come to HomeDepot.com for videos, but they also go to YouTube and Google — and since syndicating content on these channels, they’ve had great results.

4:38 — Nick: It’s not just about YouTube. There are also sites out there, like 5 Minute, Howcast — and sites like this that are all about helpful videos that their target audience looks for. Nick recommends remembering the niche sites that the people you’re trying to reach might use.

4:39 — Nick: Really think about content based on what the customers are seeking. With your listening tools in place, you can find what your customers are looking for as well as how to get it to them.

4:40 — Nick: We didn’t do that much with internal blogs and wikis. Much of our stuff, was forward-facing. In retrospect, if we could have started over, we might have approached it differently, because we’re really having to dig down to find internal evangelists.

4:41 — Nick says it’s important to be remember that while you may have short-term wins, it’s really going to take a long time to develop relationships.

4:42 — Nick says you need to work past the reality that some folks just will never get social media. It’s important to work with them, as well as focusing on the people within your organization who do get it.

Q&A

Q: What would you say was the tipping point in getting senior management to realize that social media was important?

A: Sarah: We’re a very entrepreneurial brand, and if someone has an idea, our culture supports them. Nick: It’s probably been a series of moments, and probably around the time we helped with the hurricanes was when execs really saw how we could effectively use a new tool to help customers in real time — it really helped capture a lot of people’s imaginations.

Q: How do you handle staffing?

A: Sarah: It takes passionate people who are willing to do this — whether it’s between meetings or after hours. But also, we’ve had great success with our customer service team — and the idea overall of having our company focus on customer service is what’s helping us be successful. We’ve been able to take some people who were working on the phone who we’ve been able to take off the phone and help with social media outreach and response.

Q: Do you have a policy that allows employees to be online ambassadors for employees?

A: Sarah: It’s been great. We have folks on other teams that have approached us and said, “OK, we need to make some changes.” We’re excited to pilot an internal social collaboration tool, and that’s help some people warm up to the concept. Nick: We swing very dramatically from one direction to another on that issue, and what we focus on is what the bulk of customers expect from The Home Depot — and the reality is that as customers walk in to a store, they expect an associate to help. The last thing we want to do is block that for our associates who are trying to help customers online. We’ve got to think about how our policies at the corporate level affect our associates in the field.

Q: Are the training programs home-grown? Or are there resources out there we can look to?

A: Nick: It’s a mix of that. The Social Media Business Council is a great resource for that — and we’ve been able to leverage our peers for help on how to create these policies. But there’s also some stuff we have to do internally, and stuff we have to create on our own. There’s different degrees of training for say, someone in the marketing department vs. a store manager.

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The questions surrounding how to apply and what to say when using Social Media Marketing are growing exponentially. Many would see this as a signal of failure for people to understand in general the whole concept of community participation, branding and Internet sales.  However, I see it as a very strong indication of how the new phenomena of social marketing is gathering its well-deserved attention.

It has been recorded in history that any major change in society and/or business may take as long as 7-10 years to fully be understood and mature.  Over 50% of the US population continued to ride horses for an estimated 15 years after the first car was deemed road worthy — not to mention the fact that the roads weren’t fully modernized for over 30 years.

Social Media Marketing has only been in real world existence for roughly 1-2 years and we are already experiencing a tidal wave of small business interest.

The idea of having a real-time method to brand your business and at the same time promote a special event or product launch is not an easy concept to mentally digest. We are all accustomed to traditional means of separating sales from marketing and marketing from advertising.

A branding or marketing campaign will take at least 3 months to get any meaningful data right? Wrong!  The Internet allows a business the opportunity to bundle Sales, Marketing and Advertising in a cohesive fashion.  This cohesion tremendously advances the time element of the campaign and permits almost real-time feedback.  The best advantage is the low cost of entry into the marketplace.

The single biggest issue, for this new way of marketing and advertising, going forward is trying to tear down the linear thinking process involved with traditional marketing.  Thinking outside the box will provide the small business owner the opportunity to vastly broaden their scope of potential customer base.  Instead of thinking of directly targeting people who ride bicycles, if you sell bicycles, a business owner might begin a social media campaign centered on low impact ways of exercising or maybe even how to get to work without spending money on gas.

The real advantages with using Social Media Marketing aren’t found with identifying one target market and hammering on it until its dead.  The answer is to apply both horizontal and vertical approaches to marketing penetration and use the information gained to further advance the growth of your business.

Visit our website for more information: Brookstone Marketing Group

Success starts with a beginning!

One of the most common questions we receive from prospects is how to use the Internet to get new customer leads flowing without exhausting their valuable time. The answer is very simple; let the Internet perform the heavy lifting by setting up an online automated lead capture campaign.

A lot of the prospect hesitancy apparent with this approach is the “need for greed” or “control everything” old style of sales tactics. The need to have ones hands in everything worked a lot better when the Internet wasn’t yet mature and money was flowing like a fire hoes.

In today’s competitive environment the ultimate goal is make every possible use of your available time.  Outsourcing the common daily and weekly tasks associated with lead nurturing not only frees up valuable time but actually increases closing ratios by as much as 4-10 times.

An automated lead capture campaign is the beginning of this valuable sales funnel tool.  Our email drip marketing campaigns are designed to use the leads obtained from online marketing and nurture them into a future customer buying decision.  No muss, no fuss.  You are free to run your business or take some vacation time…

It really is as simple as it sounds.  Devote as little as 1 hour per month with the Brookstone team and let our system do the rest. The best part comes when your website jingles, your phone rings, and your door swings with new customers.

Our online campaigns are designed to combine the tremendous powers of the Internet with your existing or new website, online sales page, telephone, and many other forms of traditional advertising.  Our sales representatives are ready to assist you today to determine the right campaign to rapidly increase your sales leads.

Visit Brookstone Marketing Group for help today!

I recently had a discussion with one of our Independent Sales Representatives about the many styles of sales approaches used by the most successful career minded sales professionals.  It became very apparent that we all seem to forget “why” we are doing things and get too caught up in the “how”.   Can you imagine if we approached all things in the same manner?

For instance, what if we constantly examined “how” TV spokespersons do their job and instead of relying on the “why”.  ”Why” allows us to listen and understand their intent and message.  The “How” would bog us down with unimportant useless facts about what type of camera, microphone, etc. they were using to broadcast their message.

The same holds true in the everyday lives of professional sales people.  The urge and habit seems to be to get caught up in the “how” instead of focusing on the “why”.  For Brookstone, the habit would be to talk to customers about how PPC, Social Marketing, Blogging and more actually works.  We get caught in the never ending loop of trying to over-educate the customer on how things work.

Obviously the lesson here is to remind ourselves that our real goal is to not spend hours on end trying to teach and therefore convince the customer that our products and services really work.  Doing so can come across as a lack of confidence in our own products and campaigns we have to offer.  Concentrating on the “why” we do what we do and “why” the customer should make the decision to employ us for their advertising and marketing will reap them and us far greater rewards.

The “why” allows us to share and convey the benefits of working with Brookstone.  The “why” is what we concentrate on when we raise our children, get gas in our car, mow the lawn, or even drink coffee.  The “how” in life may be more suited for biologist, scientists, and geologists.

Finally, using the “why” allows us to accept failure, get past no’s, and react positively to negative influence.  So if we all keep track of the “why” more often we will stay extremely positive, well balanced, and reap the benefits of successful accomplishment of our everyday goals.