Portland marketing – Page 13 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

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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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.

The Great Twitter Challenge: A Review

The Great Portland – Vancouver Twitter Challenge is now history. When I started working on this, I wanted to see if Twitter could work as a marketing and promotions tool.

My conclusion: yes, but it’s not ready to play a major role in most companies’ marketing plans.

The negative: numbers, and tracking.

Numbers first — there just aren’t that many people using Twitter right now. Most of my co-workers don’t use it. To the best of my knowledge, none of my customers use it. And, based on the conversations I’ve had with them, they don’t see why they should. When I started promoting the contest, I saw a significant increase in the number of people following me — but I started with 40 followers, and wound up with 147. Until Twitter becomes much more widely used, it can’t be more than a tiny blip in a marketing campaign.

It’s also not particularly trackable. Although I know I had 147 followers, there was no way for me to tell how many of those 147 were actually looking when I sent out each question. There are no “page view” or “click-through” stats to examine.

In some cases, I’d get an answer back right away — the VanderVeer Center skin care products went in two minutes, as did the Oregon Athletic Club membership and the Portland Nursery stoneware pot. Other prizes took longer; in one case, I received an answer back two hours after sending out the question. All of this makes sense — if, say, twenty of the 147 were on Twitter at any given moment, and none of those twenty had any need for what I was offering at that moment, the question would be ignored. Which makes it like any other advertising medium.

The positive: the promotionwas easy to set up, and didn’t cost a dime. A Twitter account is free, and once I installed Tweetdeck (also free), it was simple to administer. I found nine local merchants who were delighted to provide some great prizes. It was also easy for people to enter. There were a few challenges in coming up with questions that I could communicate in 140 characters, but eventually I got the hang of it.

I don’t have access to the sponsors’ web stats, but I’m guessing they got some extra viewers, too — and some of those may turn into customers. I do know that this blog got nearly double its usual Friday traffic.

The network of people who know Phil Bernstein’s name has grown by 107 in the past ten days. That can’t be a bad thing.

If you participated in the contest, or just lurked as it went by on Twitter, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave me a comment below, or send me a tweet.

Special thanks to Tara Bloom for inspiring this. And thank you to Awakening Business Solutions, Green Lubrication Solutions, Market Accelerators, Maternitique, Organizers Northwest, Oregon Athletic Clubs, Portland Nursery, Shindaiwa, and VanderVeer Center for being part of the First Annual Great Portland – Vancouver Twitter Challenge.

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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.