Category: Portland advertising

Current Events Mean Marketing Opportunity — An Example

According to Nancy Gibbs in Time Magazine,

Trinity Place [a restaurant and bar in Manhattan’s Financial District] offers $3 drinks at happy hour any day the market goes down, with the slogan “Market Tanked? Get Tanked! — which ensures a lively crowd at the closing bell.”

This not only aligns the establishment’s marketing with something already on their customers’ minds — it also turns a negative into a potential positive. People who might otherwise hide their wallets after a bad day on Wall Street now have a built-in excuse to spend extra money.

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

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

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

The Call-to-Action: Make It Easy For the Prospect

When you deliver an advertising message to a group of prospects, you have a short period of time to convince that prospect to take action — pick up the phone, log onto a web site, or walk into a store. If they take the action and don’t get what you promised them, you’ve lost the opportunity to build a business relationship.

Today, I caught a hole in a client’s sales funnel — a disconnect in the call-to-action.

This new client is starting an advertising campaign on several radio stations, including mine on Monday. I wasn’t involved in creating the campaign; a competitor is doing that. The commercial we received on Friday afternoon drives prospects to a web site, with the ultimate goal of getting those prospects to attend an Open House.

Unfortunately, the information about the Open House wasn’t on the home page when I looked at it this morning. It was on another page on the site, but anyone coming to the site would have no way of knowing that. The danger, of course, was that even if the radio commercial “worked” — by getting people to log onto the site — it wouldn’t WORK unless looking at the site caused people to come to the Open House.

Prospects would have entered the sales funnel, and fallen out before buying.

The good news is that somebody did a little advance legwork, caught the disconnect, and notified the client. The client immediately made arrangements to fix the website, and all will be ready when the radio starts on Monday.

I’ll end with a little sales pitch: this is just one of the subjects covered in my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them, which you can still get at no charge by clicking here.

So, click here, already.

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

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

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Best Blow-Off I’ve Heard In a While

When one of your duties is to call complete strangers on the phone, you tend to hear a lot of excuses as to why now isn’t a good time to meet. After a while, the excuses all tend to sound the same.

I heard a new one this morning:

“I’m just killing snakes as fast as I can kill ’em, and the water’s rising.”

I think this meant he’s too busy to get together.

 

________________________________________________________________________

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

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

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

When People Walk Into Your Store

I spent part of this afternoon at an auto dealership. One of my radio stations had an appearance there (station van, tent, prizes).

I arrived about 15 minutes before the appearance was scheduled to start. Couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to be, so I parked the car and walked, slowly, all the way around the building, looking for someone to ask.

As near as anyone there could tell, I was a potential customer. But nobody approached me.

Finally I walked inside. Nobody even looked at me. So I  stuck my head in an office, and the person there came out and sent me in the right direction.

About an hour later I was at the station tent when a man walked up and asked what we were doing there. We explained that it was an appearance to try to draw some more customers to the store, and he told us that he’d come by to take a test drive.

“I can’t find anyone to help me”, he said, “so I’m going home.”

Our Marketing Director, Melissa Ives, told him to wait. She then marched up to the building, fetched a salesman, brought him to the station tent, and introduced him to the customer. If that customer bought anything today, Melissa will not receive a commission — but she should.

I write this in the middle of an unprecedented downturn in the auto business. The  dealers we work with have been moaning for months about a lack of traffic and low sales.

Meanwhile, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Portland, Oregon, a group of auto dealership employees paid no attention to at least two potential customers who walked onto their lot. I’m guessing that we weren’t the only ones who were ignored.

On Monday, the General Manager will look at his weekend sales figures and complain that the advertising isn’t working.

What happens when customers walk into your store? Are you sure?

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

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

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Selling On Your Voice Mail

This morning I made a phone call to J.R. Langlois, owner of The Safer Floor Store.  I got this voice mail greeting (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

Hi, this is J.R. at the Safer Floor Store. I can’t come to the phone because I’m helping my customers prevent injuries and avoid lawsuits. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.

There are two great lessons here:

1. J.R. knows that he’s not in the floor supply business — he’s in the injury-and-lawsuit-prevention business.

2. He recognizes that voice mail represents an opportunity — even when he’s away from the phone, he can deliver his sales message to anyone who calls.

I’ve had the same outgoing voice mail message on my phone for more than a decade. I changed  it this afternoon.

What’s the most effective voice mail message you’ve run into? Leave a comment below.

________________________________________________________________________

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

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

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.