Category: Marketing

How a Shoe Store Owner Gets Free Facebook Advertising

I was meeting with the owner of an upscale ladies boutique in a southeastern state. Although the store sold all manner of women’s clothing, the largest revenue driver was shoes.

Apparently, ladies love shoes. Who knew?

The conversation had just turned to social media, and I asked the owner how effective the store Facebook page was as a marketing tool. “It’s okay, I guess,” he said. “But I found a much better way to use Facebook.”

He had my attention. I bit. “How do you do that?” I asked.

 “My customers all have cell phones, and just about all of them have a camera. Whenever a customer tries on a pair of shoes and decides to buy them, we ask if they’d like us to take their picture — with their phone. Women like to show off their new shoes, so most of them say yes.”

“Do they let you post those pictures on your Facebook page?” I asked.

“Some do, but I don’t really care about that,” he replied. “What makes this work is that as soon as they go home, they post that picture on their own Facebook page. And they usually mention that they got the shoes at my store.

That means that we just got a free Facebook ad, and it gets seen by 500 of my customer’s friends. Two or three times a week, someone will walk into my store and ask to try on a pair of shoes that their friend posted on Facebook.

All of this costs us nothing – we don’t even pay for the camera!”

The store owner has stumbled on a great way to use Facebook in its most effective form – to accelerate word-of-mouth. It’s a technique that can be used in a variety of consumer settings:

  • A furniture store can take pictures of a customer’s new couch, in the customer’s home.
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  • A car dealer can shoot a photo of a happy couple standing next to the new SUV they just bought.
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  • A window company can take pictures of a homeowner posing in front of her newly-installed windows.

The key is to take the picture with the customer’s phone, not yours.

Rather than begging people to “like” your Facebook page, you can intersect with existing consumer behavior. Happy customers love the show off the things they just bought… on Facebook.

Who knew?

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Want to email Phil Bernstein? Do it here.

If you like what you’re reading, there’s more! Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here. As a bonus, I’ll send you a copy of my newly-revised and expanded e-book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Advertising and How to Fix Them when you subscribe.

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Another Nail in the Yellow Pages Coffin

Recently a television Account Executive in Iowa brought me a copy of the local YellowBook – one of the two “major” phone directories in that part of the state. She showed me an ad that appears just inside the front cover.

The headline was “Directory Options”, and the first line read:

“To opt out of receiving a directory in the future, visit www.yellowpagesoptout.com”

The site is run by the Local Search Association (formerly the Yellow Pages Association, interestingly enough) in cooperation with the Association of Directory Publishers. Anyone in the community can go to the site, register, and tell the publishers not to send them any more phone directories.

Why do they do this? Because Yellow Page publishers are increasingly aware that a large and rapidly growing segment of the population doesn’t use the Yellow or White Pages, and doesn’t want them. Publishers are under attack from environmental groups, state legislatures and local governments all over the country. Laws have been proposed – and in some cases passed — that ban delivery of a phone directory to anyone who has not opted in. Under the circumstances, the publishers have decided that they would prefer to offer a mechanism for people to opt out, instead.

Until last week, I had never seen an ad for this service in the Yellow Pages itself. I wondered if a similar ad was in my own Yellow Pages at home, but I don’t have one anymore – these days, the books go right from my front porch to the recycling bin. I checked with the neighbors on either side of my house, and they didn’t keep theirs, either.*
So I went to the national website, plugged in my zip code, and found this.

I registered on the site, changed of the quantities to “0”and hit Submit. Soon after, I received an email telling me that my preferences would be sent to each publisher. It was fast, it was easy, and another small nail was driven into the Yellow Pages coffin.

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*PS: Eventually I found a copy of the Dex Yellow Pages at my local library (which also had a full set of World Book Encyclopedias). It took the clerk a few minutes to find the book. “Nobody asks for it anymore,” she said, pointing to a row of computers across the room. “They just go online.” On a page headlined Committed to Consumer Choice, the book featured both the national Yellow Pages Opt-Out site and their own “Select Your Dex” website.

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Want to email Phil Bernstein? Do it here.

If you like what you’re reading, there’s more! Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here. As a bonus, I’ll send you a copy of my newly-revised and expanded e-book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Advertising and How to Fix Them when you subscribe.

You can become a Facebook Fan of “Doctor” Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert  here.

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NFL Referee Edition: Marketing Ripped From the Headlines

Here’s a terrific example of a medical practice capitalizing on current events:

A Green Bay Lasik doctor is offering free lasik surgery to the replacement referees who blew the “touchdown” call at the end of the Packers/Seahawks game. Dr. Christopher Smith of Optivision Eye Care in Appleton told WFRV-TV, “The referees obviously had some vision issues, so we decided we could help them with that.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that none of the referees are going to accept the offer. But it will get Optivision an enormous amount of free publicity, both locally and nationally.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Want to email Phil Bernstein? Do it here.

If you like what you’re reading, there’s more! Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here. As a bonus, I’ll send you a copy of my newly-revised and expanded e-book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Advertising and How to Fix Them when you subscribe.

You can become a Facebook Fan of “Doctor” Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert  here.

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What a Nigerian Prince Can Teach You About Marketing

If you have an email address, you have undoubtedly received several variations of the “Nigerian scam” over the years. This is a message purporting to be from someone representing a high official in that African nation. There is a big pot of money hidden somewhere, and they need your help in getting it out of the country. They also need your Social Security and bank account numbers.

Since you read Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog, you are certainly too smart to respond to something like that. I know that, and you know that.

But here’s something that may surprise you: according to Roger Dooley at the Neuromarketing Blog, the scammers don’t want you to respond. In fact, they deliberately make the message so ridiculous that you will make fun of it and then delete it.

The reason? Smart people are a waste of their time. Citing a a study by Microsoft Cybercrime Researcher Cormac Herley, Dooley puts it this way:

For the scammers to make money, they will ultimately have to convince their targets to wire them money and perhaps even travel to Africa. Needless to say, these are steps that few prospects will find appealing. Even gullible targets will get suspicious as the demands increase, and most will drop out of the process. And each prospect requires individual attention in the form of emails, replies, phone calls, etc…

This labor-intensive process means that if more potential skeptics are knocked out of the conversion funnel at the outset, the density of potential victims goes up in the smaller pool of prospects. The scammer wastes less time and can convert more victims to maximize profit. Even if a few good prospects are lost by by using a less plausible pitch, the higher density of victims in the final pool makes the entire process more profitable. As Herley notes,

“By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.”

 The lesson for you as a (presumably) honest businessperson is this: it might make sense for you to attract fewer prospects rather than more prospects. Here’s why:

Every customer interaction has at least some marginal cost. There is the time that your staff spends talking to each customer on the phone or in person – time they could be spending on something else. There’s the cost of brochures, postage, gasoline, paper… the list goes on.

Any of this time or material spent on a customer who doesn’t buy is wasted.

Rather than trying to attract the widest possible audience, Dooley recommends that you consider shrinking your sales funnel and focusing your resources on the people most likely to buy from you.

Jim Doyle, owner of the marketing consulting firm Jim Doyle and Associates (and my boss) puts it this way: “The scarcer your resources, the more narrow should be your focus.”

For best results, take a lesson from “Chief Oyinbolowo Eko” and “Barrister Mike Okoye, lawyer to Mrs. Mariam Abacha”: ignore the people who are not predisposed to buy, and focus your scarce resources on people who look like, act like, and think like the people who do business with you now.

Want to email Phil Bernstein? Do it here.

If you like what you’re reading, there’s more! Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here. As a bonus, I’ll send you a copy of my newly-revised and expanded e-book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Advertising and How to Fix Them when you subscribe.

You can become a Facebook Fan of “Doctor” Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert  here.

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No Escape: Guess Where Advertisers Will Find You Now?

Advertising on men’s room walls is not uncommon. But Michigan’s Office of Highway Safety Planning has moved their messaging just a little bit lower. According to the Detroit News, Michigan officials are distributing 400 Interactive Urinal Communicators — in layman’s language, talking urinal cakes — to 200 bars and restaurants throughout the state.

If you are a guy in Michigan, it’ll work like this: After you’ve done your best to process the advertising  coming at you from the neon signs, napkins, coasters, your visit to the bathroom  will activate the following message:

Listen up. That’s right, I’m talking to you. Had a few drinks? Maybe a few too many? Then do yourself and everyone else a favor: Call a sober friend or a cab. Oh, and don’t forget to wash your hands.

The cakes are produced by a company called Wizmark.

If you are an advertiser trying to deliver your pitch to a male, bar-visiting target, you are now competing with this. Bon appetit!

Where is the strangest place you’ve encountered advertising?

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

Like what you’re reading? There’s more! Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here. As a bonus, I’ll send you a copy of my newly-revised and expanded e-book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Advertising and How to Fix Them when you subscribe.

Become a Facebook Fan of “Doctor” Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert  here.

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