Category: Advertising

Using Radio To Get Customers to Your Web Site — 7 Proven Techniques

Many of my long-time customers are now, finally, using their web sites as selling tools. They often ask how they can most effectively drive prospects to their sites, and convert them to customers. Here are seven techniques, based on education and trial-and-error in the field:

1. Have one call to action in the ad — a command to visit your web site. Having both a phone number and a URL will hurt your results. If the listeners have to make a choice of actions, it gives them a reason to hesitate, and a significant percentage will do nothing at all. Copywriting guru Dan O’Day taught me this at a seminar, and my experience has confirmed it.

2. The success of your URL will depend to a large extent on how simple, and how memorable, the address is. You’ve got a better chance if it matches the company name exactly, or if it’s a natural expression of the value proposition. If there are hard-to-spell words, or people have to think about it at all, you’re in trouble.

3. Insist on “dot com”. “Dot net” or “dot biz”, or other suffixes, will lower your response because people remember Dot Com no matter what they actually heard.

4. If your URL is hard to remember or spell, consider using the radio station site as a “short cut”. Most stations promote their web sites heavily these days, so listeners are trained to go there already for news, entertainment, and contests. You can put a banner on the site, and then the call to action is to go to the station site and click on the banner. For example, “Go to K103 dot com and click on the VanderVeer Center logo.” CAUTION: banners are often sold in rotation. To get the results you need, you must make sure that the banner is up on the site 100% of the time.

5. Many stations have a search box on their web site. An alternative to the banner is to buy a keyword, and use that as your call to action. “Go to K103 dot com and type in the keyword ‘Botox’. That’s K103 dot com, keyword ‘Botox’.”

6. Make sure your site is set up to capture customer information for later follow-up. If people come to your site, read a few things, and leave, you may never get them back. Offer some value in return for their email address — a free report, coupon, or other premium that would convince them to tell you who they are.

7. Once you have the information, follow up quickly. Your prospect will find other things to think about if you let time go by. An email autoresponder can help you automate the process.

If you’re a Portland area business owner or manager, I can help you set all this up. After all, it’s what I do.

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Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.


The Gardenburger Mess — How Not to Handle a Crisis

It started last weekend, when small signs at Burgerville outlets notified customers that the chain was temporarily taking Gardenburgers off the menu. The story picked up steam when Burgerville placed a huge order with a small local meatless-patty manufacturer. Now, it’s exploded into public view as grocery giant Fred Meyer announces that it has pulled the product off its shelves.

From the outside, it appears that Kellogg, owner of Gardenburger, has done its best to keep the whole thing quiet. By attempting to sweep the issue under the rug, Kellogg has guaranteed an extra level of public attention — and done enormous unnecessary damage to Gardenburger’s reputation.

The story is still developing, but here’s how it looks right now:

1. More than a week ago, Burgerville workers unpacking the product noticed something they didn’t like. Burgerville officials contaced Kellogg, weren’t sastisfied with whatever they were told, and pulled the product. To its credit, Burgerville announced the change to its customers with signage at the stores.

2. A few days later, Burgerville announced that they would carry a different meatless burger — the first public indication that this problem might be a big one.

3. Later in the week, Kellogg announced a “voluntary withdrawal” of Gardenburgers, but refused to say why, beyond a vague statement that food safety was not an issue.

4. Kellogg apparently didn’t bother to mention any of this to the FDA. Charles Breen, the agency’s regional director, found out by reading about it in the Oregonian.

5. As of the time I write this, concerned customers who visit Gardenburger’s web site will find no information at all about the problem.

It is often the case (see Nixon, Richard) that when there’s bad news, a cover-up will make things much, much worse. Kellogg has lost their opportunity to have some control of the information flow.

This is in sharp contrast to Johnson & Johnson’s prompt and aggressive outreach following the Tylenol deaths of the early 80’s. Gardenburger should follow J & J’s playbook — tell the public exactly what the problem is and what they intend to do about it. The unnecessary damage they’re doing by remaining silent will haunt them for years.

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Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.


Not Even Cocktail Napkins Are Safe

It used to be you could escape the outside world by going to the bar. Then somebody put a neon “Budweiser” sign in the window, and another enterprising chap realized that the bathroom walls could be an advertising medium.

And now, “Welcome to Napkin Advertising.” So says Nap Ads. The bar owner gets free napkins, the advertiser gets drunk prospects, and the world gets just a little more cluttered.

The entrepreneur who would sketch out the next Microsoft on the back of a cocktail napkin? Fuhgeddiboutit.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

A Free Tool to Calculate Your Ad Budget

Courtesy of Roy Williams, The Wizard of Ads. Rather than just taking a set industry percentage or range, this method requires some actual thought, and some research on your part. Here’s the basic point of view:

The purpose of advertising is to increase the exposure of a business beyond what’s provided by its physical location. An extremely high Cost of Occupancy (rent) for a landmark location is often the least expensive advertising available. Businesses who save money by investing in weak locations always have to advertise much more heavily.

Find the calculator here, and an explanation of the thought process here.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

The Line Between Targeted and Creepy

Suzanne Obermire of RRW Consulting has a thoughtful post on the struggle to establish good boundaries in direct marketing. The issue in question is mobile marketing — delivering advertising to cell phones and other mobile devices.

When I take off my direct marketing hat and think about mobile marketing from a consumers’ perspective, it can be a little frightening. Marketers can know where I am at all times. Essentially, they can track me. It does seem like an invasion of my privacy…

Boy, howdy, does it ever. Speaking as a cranky old guy, I can say without equivocation that I don’t want ads on my cell phone. I don’t want personalized ads to show up in my email. I don’t want to be followed around.

But that may be generational — I grew up in an age of mass media, and mass advertising. I don’t mind commercials on the radio (in fact, I create them and sell them), or on television. Newspaper and magazine ads don’t bother me, either. There’s an implicit, decades-old contract at work: you deliver me news/music/entertainment, and I “pay” for it by putting up with your ads.

There are signs that the contract is breaking down on both sides — spam and greatly increased clutter on the advertiser’s side, TIVO on the consumer’s — and it’s not surprising that advertisers are looking for any technological advantage they can get.

To stay on the good side of the “creepy divide”, the key is going to be permission. Offer something of value to the consumer in return for permission to contact them.

My company is now involved in cell phone text-message advertising, but listeners must opt-in to get the messages, and can opt out easily at any time. I’m just finishing up a program with the Oregon Elections Division that starts with a contest: text the word “vote” to 81530 for a chance to win an Ipod Touch. When people enter the contest, they’re invited to sign up for text-message voter reminders on things like registration deadlines and the last day to put a ballot in the mail. You don’t have to get the reminders to enter the contest, and you can stop them at any time. More than three hundred people have chosen to get the reminders.

Asking permission cuts down on the number of people who will get our message. But it keeps us honest, and it forces us to make sure our messages are of value to the consumer. It’s one way to stay away from “creepy”.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.