The Gilman Company Blog

Marketing Profile: The Unsuccessful Database Pimp

You’ve been pimping the same database for a years. Yes, you. You bounce thousands of messages every time. You’re not ICANN compliant and a good number of the messages you happen to get through never meet an eyeball, but go directly to one of the many black holes of marketing, this one called “Junk Mail.” You are an unsuccessful database pimp.

Although you may not technically be a “spammer,” you apply the same success ratio mentality as spammers. Every time you get a few thousand messages through, it does create a successful lead or two. When the successes get far and few between, as they always do, you dump more mildly relevant data into your database and keep on truckin’.

Fret not! There is hope. Here’s what you do. Establish a “permission marketing” approach. Commit to a more targeted approach to marketing. Segment your marketing campaign. More data is always better, but better data is always best.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Target Marketing: Who Are Your Customers Anyway?

Are your customers in a specific geographical area (country, state, city, zip code)? Are they of a specific age (children, teenagers, adults, seniors)? Are your customers women or men? Are they homebodies or do they paint the town? Who are those people!

Whether your annual marketing budget is $10K or $10M, your marketing should be focused on your best customer prospects. Show up where they’re at. Advertise in the publications they read. Donate to the charities they sympathize with. Partner with the companies that do well with them. Design ads that are visually appealing to them. Develop content in a tone that they’re accustomed to.

If you haven’t figured out where they are, how old they are, what they read, what they sympathize with, where they shop and what they like to see and read, you’re in bad shape. Before you spend those marketing dollars, go back to the drawing board.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Ritz-Carlton Fishes For New Customers: Capitalzing on Romance

How's this for an incentive to look at Ritz-Carlton Hotels for your wedding: a free wedding and a free three-night stay in the Caribbean and Mexico? All you have to do is book at least 25 rooms, something that a good amount of couples will do either way for a destination wedding. Why not get a free wedding and room while your at it?

This is a great example of connecting a product or service to an industry that has the same values and recognizes the same ideas. Here, it's romance, so why not expand the enterprise by focusing on the wedding industry, which is perfectly aligned and an idea like "Free" when it comes to weddings is especially compelling.

What ideas do your products and services embrace and what can you do to align with potential customers who embrace the same ideas? Next, how can you incentivize them to act.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Take One For The Team: Premium Parking and Other Perks

As adjustments and cuts take place, perhaps even layoffs, it's important that executives and other leaders communicate to employees that they too are team players, that executives are just as vested in dealing with the downturn as the rank and file. Even a token sacrifice like premium parking, first class air or another seemingly extravagant perk, one that employees will recognize, will go a long way with morale. The goal should be to do what you can to avoid or mitigate negative chatter about perks.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Aligning Costs with Revenues

Now that you've had a few months to settle in to 2009 and we're all brushing the dust from the onset of the economic downturn, you probably have a good idea of where your cash flow is at and what you can probably expect throughout the remainder of 2009.

If you're not already, this would be an excellent time to take a magnifying glass to your costs and revenues. Your cash flow could be one of the most critical elements of your ability to get to the other side of this downturn. Cash flow is about surviving. Profit and loss reports are about how well you happen to be doing. Look at all of you data in each of these areas closely.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Seth Chavez

iPhone Application Finds Cheap Gas

Many businesses, small to large, suffered due to the extraordinary gas prices in 2008. Now that a good amount of that pressure has eased, there's still nor reason for your company to spend more than it has to in energy/gas expenses.

If you or your staff happen to be iPhone users, a free iPhone application that tells you where you can find the best deals on gas is available. With "Cheap Gas!" You can sort locations based on zip code and you can quickly toggle search results based on distance or price. Selecting search results will show prices for different grades at the station selected and gives you the option to map the station using the the iPhone's built in GPS.

There are a few other gas price related applications in the Application Store. One thing to look for is the data source that each application uses. Some can be more up to date that others.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Quality vs. Quantity: Customer Service Call Centers

Logging calls might be a good measurement of how efficient your call center is, but are you really throwing money at your call center to support efficiency or is it to enhance the goodwill your company has with customers by providing great customer service?

Where does the value from your customer service investment go and where do you want it to go? Is picking up the phone enough? With your customer service investment, are you trying to address a quantity issue or a quality issue?

How well your customer service staff resolve a complaints is hard to measure empirically with call logs. One way to take a stab at this is by collecting data (electronically) on each call. For smaller organizations, a simple list of check boxes, perhaps in a spreadsheet, that will only take a few brief moments to complete will provide some added insight.

Also, training call center staff on how to effectively relate to customer service issues, especially the difficult ones, could make their jobs easier and less stressful. This will also enhance your return on customer service spending.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Location Location Location: Merchandising and Profit Margins

It may be that most of your customers don't come in to purchase your high margin products. That doesn't mean, however, that you can't effectively market your higher margin products with some basic merchandising strategies.

Why the milk is at the back of the store? Easy, right? Traditionally, milk is one of the lowest gross margin items in grocery stores.

Why is clothing the first thing you see when you enter a Target? Could this be because clothing is the highest margin product category that Target has?

Get a Gilman consultation.

Reducing Product Usage Costs

Does your product or service have ancillary costs, costs that your customers have to absorb just to use your product or service? The answer is probably yes. Whether it's the expense of time or a monetary expense, what can you do to limit that cost and how can you effectively market that added value?

A way to get to these usage cost reductions is assuming usage itself. Your product might meet one distinctive need, but will be be put to use in various ways, perhaps in an infinite variety of ways. What are the most likely suspects here?

This is where the "packaged deal" might come in. The packaged deal meets ancillary costs most of the time, but it doesn't work well as a product or it can't be marketed well as a product, right?

Get a Gilman consultation.

What Does "FREE" Mean?

"Free" as a marketing tool that has been around for...well...forever. But, what does it mean now? What goes on in the mind of consumers when "Free" gets into their heads? Probably a question you should consider before using "Free" as a marketing tool.

The first thing to understand is that everyone, absolutely everyone, knows that in any commercial context, "Free" is a bogus concept. It doesn't exist. Charity is free. Commercial organizations don't relate to consumers with charity. Businesses exist to make money and that's why "Free" is always suspect. There is always a commercial value to "Free", whether it's to lure eyeballs, get people through a door, or to sweeten up the pot. At the same time, using "Free" can be especially detrimental, because it's a value statement. Because of the economy of value, things that are free are not valuable. You probably experience several "Free" communications a day that don't catch your eye. This is why "Free" has to be marketed in a very tactful and sophisticated way.

EXAMPLE
National Pancake Day! IHOP advertises "Free" pancakes and merely suggests a donation to a children's charity. A very well executed "Free" campaign. It only happens once a year, IHOP doesn't give away free pancakes otherwise, proceeds go to charity, you get free pancakes one day of the year and there is no catch. The result, you're in an IHOP restaurant, IHOP is a good company because they support charity, you really do get something for Free, but you'll probably have a cup of coffee too (high margins on drinks) and IHOP is more likely to get you back before next year's free pancakes. It's a commercially productive marketing campaign that gets people through the door and creates lots of good will in IHOP every year. At the end of the day, this a very sophisticated use of "Free".

Get a Gilman consultation.