Let’s consider the new process (see diagram):

1. You have identified the target population you want to attract to your business.
2. You have designed a two step advertisement that invites people to your website to get the free report. (See Get Your FREE Report in the green box). Your ad is designed to attract people who are interested in your product but not ready to spend money yet. Instead of allowing them to pass-by you give them an opportunity to make  a small commitment that will not cost them money. They have to give you their name and email address in order to get the free gift. 
3. As soon as they give you their contact details you can cultivate them in your cultivation pool; you can now send them regular free tips giving them advice on your product/service until they are ready to take out the money and buy.

In order to use the cultivation pool you need to:

1. Agree that all people reading your ads are not ready to spend money today and that they must be brought into your cultivation pool.
2. Design all your promotional material so that it invites potential clients to your cultivation pool.
3. Create a blog/newsletter/auto-responder but you can also do it manually with a fax or answer machine.
4. Create free gifts, free reports and e-tips that you can publish on your blog from where it can be sent to your clients and potential clients.

May you cultivate those people who want to do business with you but who are not ready today. Because if you do they will not end up with your opposition.

Regards

Johan Horak

P.S. Coffee News South Africa local marketers provide a fully inclusive marketing solution for small businesses. Contact us today if  you want to take control of your marketing efforts using these ideas. Not only will we help you with the design of two step ads we will also create your cultivation pool and teach you how to use it.

P.P.S. Do you like cold calling? If you do then you are one of a few. If you don’t like cold calling then read how the cultivating pool (two step marketing) can help you become more effective when you cold calling.

How can you sell advertising with an off line marketing medium, like Coffee News, if your advertisers cannot measure the response they get? You may ask if it’s your job to teach them or even your job to worry about it…… because they advertise all over the show and they don’t measure anywhere.

I suppose nothing stops you from selling your services even if your advertisers don’t measure response. But when your advertisers start asking questions about distribution and poor response rates then it means they want out. They want to stop paying you. And it’s all because they have no way of knowing how to measure – and you have not told them how to measure either.

Before we get to the list of possible off line advertising measuring tools lets have a look at a few loop holes. Loops that are difficult to track off line.

When you measure off line advertising response rates you have many people who could potentially bypass any of the measuring control points, listed below. It’s therefore critical to create a measuring system that caters for this. 

How Do You Improve the Confidence And Integrity of the Measurement?

Well, this is a complicated story, which we only will touch now, but will discuss in detail in another post. The summary has two angles;

1. Give the responder (person reacting to the ad) a compelling reason to reveal the source where she saw the advertisement. This can be done by offering a free gift in exchange for the revelation (sounds like a line from a soapy). 
2. Have a system in place to collect the data, analyse that data and present the data in a useful form. 

Here’s A List of Ideas to Measure off Line Marketing Response Rates:

1. Generic Phone Number: This is a radical idea. Or should I say an idea to be expanded on by a marketing mind who wants to become the marketing hub for a community. You advertise a central (call centre) phone number on all ads. Depending on the size of your advertising business you receive the calls yourself or you ship it out to a professional call centre. When you get the call you do the entire ad source checking, and provide the caller number to the advertiser who will follow-up. This can be an added benefit service to your advertisers and if you package it well you may even get a premium rate. Read this story on becoming Yellow Pages for your community.
2. Fake Extension: Your advertiser includes a non existing telephone extension on the ad that relates to a specific advert or publication. The caller does not know this but the person answering the phone makes a note of the advertising referral.
3. Bogus Name: You advertise “Call Gerty for the special”, again  Gerty does not exist.  One suggestion from previous experience is using a contact name that helps the advertiser remember which source the lead came from. For instance for Newspapers you could use "Nate", for TV advertising you could use "Teresa", for magazines you could use "Molly" and for Coffee News you can use Cathy. That way there are less data errors because the first letter of the name helps people remember.
4. Promotional Code: Try using a promo code when people contact the advertiser. Example: "Mention Coffee News to receive X". Then use different promotion codes for different ads.  
5. Coupons: If you use coupons, put a coupon code in small print at the bottom. Same idea as above, count up the coupons which have different codes for different ads. If you do direct people to a website: Give different web addresses for different ads and then replicate the page you want the person to land on at that address. Ex: www.yourwebsite.com /coffeenews.html. Using your web analytics (Google Analytics is an excellent free option and highly recommended) you can get an idea of the response for each ad. This works well for print advertising, but also can be used in many different vehicles.  
6. Online Tags: Again, if you are using Google Analytics or a similar software and sending out any electronic communications, you can "tag" the links by hyper linking a URL which sends data as to the source, medium, and ad version. Check out Roirevolution’s analytics URL builder for an easy tool which will help you build the tags.
7. Questionnaires: If you use any customer response forms or customer service questionnaires: (Which can also benefit any e-mail marketing campaigns by helping to generate your e-mail lists.) Include a question on how they heard about your business. This is a tried and tested method: 
   • Train your first point(s) of contact to ask. I have seen this be incredibly effective, but it depends on the situation. Also, remember the follow up, if possible survey past contacts for customer service, and remember to include how they heard about you. Not as good as getting the info at point of contact, but can give an additional data point.
   • In the end however, the data is only as good as the analysis. A few suggestions:  Enter all of this information together in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. Personally, I really like Salesforce.com, but there are plenty options out there and even some good free open source solutions. At minimum, excel will do in a pinch. [For another simple and effective tool consider a blog with an integrated and automated newsletter.] 
   • Data is only as good as how you use it. Many people use data for reporting, but really successful marketers use data for optimization. i.e. Where do I put my ad spend? What copy worked and why? If I A/B split test headline 1 and headline 2, what works better? etc.
   • Be careful about data integrity. It is important to be honest with how accurate your data is… the worst thing that can come about is to have bad data direct your marketing efforts.

I sincerely hope that you found this post useful. If you did, please leave a comment and if you want to add to the list feel free to do so.

I want to thank one of my friends Nicholas DeGraff at Linked for his contribution to this article. Nicholas DeGraff is the Marketing Manager, Pacific Business Centers. He provided me with the great ideas; 3 to 7. 

Have fun

Johan Horak

Author: Johan Horak is the South Africa owner of www.SA.CoffeeNews-4u.com a small business opportunity publishing a newspaper in local neighbourhoods. They also provide a marketing consultancy and training service for business who wants to adopt online marketing techniques. Tel: 0860 COFFEE (0860 26 33 33)

One of the Coffee News Publisher received an email from an advertiser wanting to stop his ad in Coffee News.

The Coffee News Publisher:

I received the following from a computer repair company that started with me on April 3, using a version of the “Computers gone bad” ad that is in the ad exchange:

Martin,

The Advertiser:

I writing this letter to cancel my advertiser agreement, once the 4 months are up.  I signed the contract on 3/20/09, according to my paperwork. Although we get a few calls here or there, it’s just not worth the $160 a month (that’s my base rate for this edition). Most of the calls are just people asking for prices. So far (editors note – in just 5 weeks!) we only had two customers that brought in their computers. It seems most of the customers are from referrals and repeat customers. So on that wise (sic), after my 4 months are up, I no longer want to continue the advertising.

Signed by one of the owners.

The Coffee News Publisher:

I intend to go see this customer. My thoughts are that after only 5 weeks, they have had several calls and 2 sales. The sales should result in additional referrals and repeat business. I tell every advertiser that they may not get any response for 8-12 weeks at least. This looks like great response to me, considering they are a new advertiser, using an ad that is just starting to brand them. As to the calls, I would like to know how many is “a few calls here or there”.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but it looks to me like their ad is working well for them and that things are only going to get better. What other things might you suggest I say to them? I would appreciate anyone’s thoughts on this one.

Best Regards,

My Answer:

The Coffee News publisher is correct in saying that 2 sales in 5 weeks are not bad depending on the conversion cost or rather the long term income projected for each customer. The problems that I see are:

• Most businesses don’t know the long term the projected income per customer. If this advertiser gets two customers at $160 or $80 per customer and the long term profit per customer is $400 then the ad cost is not an issue. And we have not even calculated the referrals that a happy new client can bring this business.
• Many businesses are oblivious to the cultivation of relationships. They ignore the people they are doing business with, the people they have done business with and they have no way of creating trusting relationships with people who only make inquiries. 
• Most businesses advertise today and then expect the kiss on the first date.
• Most sellers of advertising, like Coffee News publishers, have no idea how to educate advertisers, how to lower advertisers inflated expectations regarding advertising response rates.
• Most off line advertisers cannot measure their response rates and therefore have no clue what their real response rate is. Their best measure of success is the wasteful number of copies distributed. 

I Believe We Can Learn Lots from Internet Marketing

Let’s compare the online approach with the traditional off line marketing approach.

• Online: The expert online marketers know that people are first searching for information. Therefore visitors arrive at their website, read but are not ready to buy and they move to the next website.

• Off Line: The same happens with the off line business. People see an ad and then phone to ask for more information. Again they are not ready to buy. They move on and then buy later when they are ready. From someone else?

• Online: The marketers quickly realised that potential paying clients get info from their website and then disappear. When the visitor has collected all the information he might purchase from the next guy. To improve their success rate online marketers only give you some of the information and then get you to exchange your name and email for more information. To entice potential clients the online marketers exchange free gifts (information) for the permission to educate them via blog/newsletter. This allows them to inform and then create a trusting relationship.

• Off Line: Let’s look at the computer guy, above, he provides info on costs but have no way of educating the potential client. He did not use the opportunity to ask for the name and email address to send the costs via email and then regular free computer tips via a blog/newsletter. Therefore the off line guy wasted money advertising because he does not have an automated tool to convert a potential customer into a paying customer.

• Online: As soon as person on the pre-sales newsletter decides to purchase he gets transferred to product/service newsletter dedicated to her purchase.

• Off Line: Most off line businesses have no way of cultivating relationships with people who bought from them. For example; as a Coffee News publisher you have potential advertisers, paying advertisers and past advertisers.

• Online guys talk about traffic and how many visitors convert into subscribers and then spenders.

• Off Line: Contacts need to be categorised, added to a relationship marketing tool and the conversions measured. (Off line businesses have the following different contacts; contacts interested in what’s on offer but not ready to buy, contacts already paying for a service/product and contacts who stopped paying for a product/service).

• Off Line: The Kiss On The First Date Mentality

The computer guy thinks he can advertise, get the girl responding to his ad today and get the kiss on the first date.
He’s smoking his socks. Ask me.

Our problem as off line marketers publishers are that we do not educate our users.

 
Coffee News publishers sell the ads/service/ to advertisers who think they know what advertising is all about. Some of them think that when they advertise people will immediately start running in to their shop and start queuing up for the kiss. It took a long time for me to get my first kiss. The first time I tried I got a smack. It’s only after I gave and gave and gave; did the girl trust me and I got my long awaited kiss ;-)

My Proposed Solution can be found here: 

What I did not include at the link above:

• If you advertise find a way to measure all responses.
• If you are selling advertising educate your advertisers and show them how to measure response.
• Decide how may many new paying customers (give the life of a customer) is enough to pay for the ad.
• Make it easy for people, who want to do business with you, to stick to you. And automate the process. 

It takes time before people part with money; they need to know you, like you and trust you. And we can do it with the right approach. Give them gifts (information) and then ask them for the kiss.

Image by Thai Jasmine via Flickr

Let me continue the topic that I discussed here:

And ask you a few questions on

Nurturing Of Your Off-Line Contacts:

• Do you make good use of your contacts?
• Do you turn your contacts into cash?
• Do you at least get a lead that you can turn into a sale later?
• Do you have an automated tool to communicate with these contacts?
• Do you have an automated tool that is working for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year?
• Do you know where you stand?

Whether your answer is "Yes", "No", or "Sometimes"…

Wouldn’t you agree with me, that it’s probably time you do something to improve your ability to turn your contacts into long term paying customers?

————————————————————
RULE: Are You Breaking This Rule?
————————————————————

You Always Add Your Contacts To Your Automated FREE Tips Database (=Blog Newsletter).

If you don’t get the sale ask for permission to send them the free tips. All your marketing material should have your online free tips address. Always invite readers of your marketing material, to subscribe to your free online tips.

—————————————————————————
UNLOCK The Power Of Free Automated Tips
—————————————————————————

That’s when you do the physical work once and let the automation do the rest of the relationship cultivation. 

The freedom of working when and where you want – having your own business – is not as free when you have to revisit a contact over and over because you did not get the business.

Can you imagine the great feeling when a customer who have said no when you made the first contact, phones three months later, asking you to sign them up.

You will know that feeling too as soon as you have an automated and FREE Tips newsletter.

————————————————
BUT HERE’S THE PROBLEM…
————————————————

Many new small business owners end up not freeing themselves from a job, but just trading their old job and old boss for a new job and boss that are more demanding, take more time, and are far less tolerant.

That’s because the businesses they set up, don’t work towards auto pilot status. (I am not saying you will ever achieve 100% Auto Pilot Status BUT …doing more auto stuff is possible and marketing can be automated.)

If you don’t convert the contacts you make into paying customers; you won’t build the business you were hoping to build.

So many are under this false impression that "if I only had more contacts" marketing problems would go away.

But guess what?

That’s only true IF you have an automated follow up tool helping you nurture relationships.

Always have an automated nurturing tool and ensure that it is performing well.

If you are a small business owner then you must not fool around; use the internet to automate your marketing efforts today and work towards Auto Pilot Status. 

P.S. If you want to learn how to use a blog effectively for off line marketing take action.

P.P.S. If you agree or don’t agree please feel free to tell me so ;-)

I have been reading a lot lately on marketing. And specifically on how off line marketers, like Coffee News owners, can promote Coffee News. And every time I revisit the online marketing experts I am reminded of this obvious truth (adapted for off line):

Off Line Business people don’t convert the contacts they make into paying customers. Therefore they don’t build the business that they were hoping to build.

 

So many are under this false impression that "if they only had more contacts" all their marketing problems would go away.

Your off-line marketing problems will not go away until you decide to adopt internet marketing ideas. But let’s start at the beginning.

The questions Off-line marketers need to ask themselves:

• What am I doing with the contacts I make? Everyday I may see ten or twenty people, I tell them about my business but they don’t commit. And I walk away until next time. Why do I have to do it over and over again?

• Do I have a system to follow-up with them?

• When a contact say no do I walk away? -  The contact only said no " today". This does not mean she will still say no in a week or three months time. But do you have a system to follow up?

• If contact stops using my services do I walk away? - Many of the people I know who focus their marketing efforts off-line just walk away because they are either ignorant or they just don’t care.

• If a client has a long term contract with my do I make contact only when I collect the money? -  Again, many of us walk away and only make contact to collect our fee, because off-line marketers don’t have a system to automate follow up.

Let me get back to the statement above and make you a promise:

Business people can convert the contacts they make into pay customers if they have an automated follow up system. Therefore they can build the business that they were hoping to build. 

How do you automate your follow ups?

1. You get your self a marketing blog. It’s free. Or I can set one up for you at R3 000 ($350) with all the marketing tools that you’ll need and I’ll teach you how to use it. 
2. Integrate a product like feedburner (it’s free) to send your published articles to your newsletter subscribers. This will allow people to subscribe to your updates via email or RSS. I use Aweber because it allows me more freedom to add subscribers. You can test drive it here.
3. You start publishing tips on your blog related to you business and the software you use will email as you publish.
4. When you make contact with anyone invite them to join your free tips newsletter
5. Even if they say no to your business proposal they cannot, really, say no to your free tips newsletter. And if you do the tips well you may just sign them up in the near future.
6. When they already do business with you your free tips will reinforce their reason for investing with you and they will be less likely to stop paying you…
7. And if they stopped doing business with you these tips may just get them back when they are ready again. 

Never again will you be under this false impression that "if only you had more contacts" that all you marketing problems would go away. No. Because you are now cultivating relationships with your contacts.

Good Luck My Off Line Marketing Friends

P.S. Get your off line marketing blog professional setup today and start cultivating long term relationships.