“Without promotion something terrible happens… Nothing!”
~P.T. Barnum

When P.T. Barnum spoke about promotion, he was most likely using the word as a verb.  When I speak of promotions, I mean it as a noun.  It’s a planned and coordinated event meant to sell a specific product or service for a limited time and that meets a seasonally relevant consumer need.

Promotions, when done well, are an effective way for you to market your business or products and services.  I’m not talking about promotions where you drop the prices on your existing products significantly, or when you have a blowout sale to move stale inventory.  Instead I mean a well-planned, seasonally relevant focus on themes or solutions wrapped around your products that your customers will take note of and value, and that prospects will be enticed to try for the first time.

With that in mind, here are nine benefits of running a well-planned sales promotion:

1. Creates differentiation – When you launch a new product or ask customers to engage with your business in a new way, this sets you apart from your competition.  Promotion planning compels you to identify something new or different that offers value to your customers;
2. Creates new content and communication opportunities  – One of the easiest way to create new content for your customers is to create news.  Promotions are news.  News is content;
3. Creates upsell and cross sell opportunities  – When you package or bundle products around a theme or solution, you can often generate sales of multiple items rather than a single item.  When you focus on creating added value to your regular assortment, you can charge premium prices;
4. Drives customer decision making – Limited availability offers can create a sense of scarcity in your customers that get them to act.  When combined with new content that helps customers clearly see the benefits of what you are promoting, you can create compelling reasons to buy now.  If you can add sampling of your promotional item to the mix, you'll create a lot of reasons for customers to buy;
5. Creates word-of-mouth opportunities – If you operate a retail store, your regular customers are almost always in a routine to buy from you.  Promotions can often get your regular customers a new reason to be surprised and delighted by your business which gets them to talk about you  to their friends;
6. Creates training opportunities for your staff – Like regular customers, your retail sales staff (or any employees who have direct contact with customers), can fall into a routine and lose the enthusiasm in their voice.  Promotions gives you a chance to to train, prepare and reengage them in what’s new in your business;
7. Creates company focus on marketing – Developing a promotion calendar forces you to plan for new marketing programs focused at specific times of year.  If you don’t have a dedicated marketing team doing this for you already, creating a promotions mentality will get you marketing with more frequency and give you more experience to build on;
8. Creates testing opportunities  – Maybe you have ideas that you think customers will like but are unsure of the outcome.  Promotions give you a limited time window to test new ideas and new products and to measure them.  This will help you figure out whether they warrant additional investment of time and money to make them permanent products or services;
9. Grows revenue – As I like to say, Ka-Ching!  This is the lifeblood of your business.  Sales promotions are a great way to build year-over-year and month-over-month revenue growth.
    

What are other benefits you think of around sales promotions?
 

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
~Jane Austen
 

Let’s say you’ve put up a new menu board to help you introduce new lunch items but you don’t have time to make up new brochures that explain the products in detail, or room on the menu to describe them in more depth?  Or what if you put up a new display of art products and you want to give customers ideas of how they can use them to create new projects, but you don’t have the space to include finished project samples or a How-To guide?  QR codes are a possible solution for you.

QR codes are a form of barcode that stores far more information than the traditional bar codes you are used to seeing on grocery store products, for instance.  QR is short for Quick Response, and the codes were developed to make it easier for people to obtain more information than is immediately available than other means such as having to write down a website URL.   QR codes were invented by a subsidiary of Toyota in 1994 and have been used extensively in Japan and South Korea, but are just now starting to emerge as a more common marketing tool in the U.S. [NOTE:  The QR code above is to a youtube video showing various applications in Japan].

QR code generators are free to use.  Just visit a site such as Kaywa.com or goqr.me, drop in a destination URL and the image will be created for you.  You can then place it anywhere your customer can see it and scan it.   

Here’s an example of how Office Max is using QR codes to deliver its customers more content than it’s able to share at the point-of-purchase.  My critique and recommendations follow the pictures.

I was buying a poster board and found it in this display of paper, pens, stencils and other related items under the Project Idea Center. 

The display had a call to action of “Get Inspired with the Poster Idea Gallery App.”  It instructed me how to get inspired as follows:

Here’s How:
1.    Use a QR reader on your smart phone
2.    Take a snapshot of this code
3.    Get instant project ideas

For additional project supplies and ideas, visit our art supplies section or artskills.com/officemax

The code took me to an Office Max sponsored subdomain of the website artskills.com, which is positioned as “Easier. Faster. Better Posters.” and which is targeted to students and teachers who want to make posters.

Critique
Consumer insights – I walked into Office Max with the purpose of buying poster board.  I am not very artistic, so I was interested in getting new ideas of how to design a poster (without messing it up and ultimately throwing the poster board away and having to start over), and in learning more information that would have given me some confidence that I could execute my project successfully.   In this respect, the QR code was effectively used to lead me to seek additional content.

Call to Action – “Get Inspired” is an effective emotional trigger.  In retrospect, what I would have liked to have seen was clarity around who this call to action is appropriate for.  Leading a marketing professional to a website tailored to school teachers and students was ultimately a waste of my time.

Landing Page – In my humble opinion (IMHO), the promise of quick response falls down here in this example.  I don’t know how difficult it would be to quickly get me to an inspirational example of a poster idea that I could create (perhaps images of different finished projects that made me go “Wow, I can do that?!”), but having to navigate through four different screens before I see any samples just felt excruciatingly difficult, and ultimately, I did not end at a solution that was anywhere near where I wanted to be.  Even if I were a teacher or student, I would have given up trying to find inspiration and just made do with what I had.

One other critique, which may or may not be a commonly encountered one is that the landing pages were only optimized for mobile.  While it is critical for the customer who opens the website in the store (and with her mobile phone), there will be some who email or text the link to themselves (or others) with the intent of opening it and doing research when they get home.  The images I shared above were taken from my laptop at home and looked paltry and again, uninspiring.

Summary
While consumers in the U.S. have not fully embraced the idea and practice of scanning barcodes in stores, I do believe that it will become more common in the not too distant future.  After all, it provides benefits to both the consumer, who is seeking more information about products and solutions, and for marketers, who are able to be a resource that provides it.  QR codes allow for you to easily share more content to your customers.

I believe there are a lot of ways to test using QR codes for little or no cost aside from the planning, content development and preparation.

As with all content, however, its value is only derived in its usefulness to your customer in solving her problems or in making her more successful.  In this Office Max Poster Idea Gallery example, I’d say it mostly wasn’t.

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.”
~Harold Wilson
 

In 1972, a 42 year old man by the name of Maurice was attending a dinner party in Manhattan when he struck up a conversation with another man whose family owned movie theaters.  Maurice, always the curious type, asked the man how the family business was doing.  The man answered rather bluntly: “TV is ruining us.  People just don’t go to the movies the way they used to.”  He said the theater was lucky to have 120 people attending a movie that held 1,200 seats. 

Perhaps this man was merely resigned to the inevitable: that industries come, and industries go, and that larger forces such as new technologies, more competition, lower cost alternatives and changing demographic forces conspire to reduce demand for a the products and services of many industries, and ultimately decimate established businesses over time.

Maurice, on the other hand, was surprised to hear this man’s claims.  It was Manhattan, after all, a dense borough of 1.5 million people.  And so he set out to undertake his own form of guerilla-style market research.  After all, he was always the curious type.

• He visited several movies and counted the house.  It was generally small;
• He observed who was attending movies.  It was mainly younger people in their 20’s and 30’s;
• He began creating storytelling scenarios about these moviegoers to try to understand what motivated them.  He concluded that there would always be a small group of avid moviegoers;
• He then asked if there was a small group of avid moviegoers, what was keeping them away from any given movie?  This was his “a-ha” moment.  He reasoned that thousands of people were attending movies on any given night, but they don’t attend a specific theater because they prefer to see a different movie being shown that night.

If movies are the product a movie theater sells, then another way to frame this problem is that the product assortment is too narrow to attract a broader set of customers.

In his book, Secrets From an Inventor’s Notebook, Maurice Kanbar writes:

Instead of concentrating on increasing the number of customers for one film, why not increase the number of offerings?  Without requiring any more ticket takers, concession-stand workers or projectionists, you could easily multiply your profit.  And instead of complaining about your shrinking audience, you’d be giving that audience more viewing choices and a novel atmosphere.

After some testing of the idea, one of the first multiplex movie theaters was born as Quad Cinema.  Quad Cinema was profitable since opening in October, 1972 and is still operating today.

By framing the problem not in terms of external changes, but rather  in terms of what opportunities the movie theater operator was missing to serve more customers, he found a solution to broaden its appeal, attract more customers and build a growth business in what at the time was a dying industry.

With little or more than an opening question based on an underlying disbelief that the status quo made sense, a deep level of curiosity and the skills of observation and storytelling, Kanbar was able to apply an outside perspective to a single movie theater and reinvent an existing industry.

Have you ever asked for an outside perspective to help transform your business?
 

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
~George S. Patton

Sometimes all it takes to create a powerful marketing program is to think up new ways to deliver benefits to your customers.   In the event that you don’t have enough time to think this week, I’m offering you 5 new marketing ideas you can implement with just a bit of time, some basic communication efforts and no out-of-pocket spending.  Sure, you may need to offer a discount here and there, but if you learn something from doing any of these 5 ideas, it will be worth it.

My objectives with these ideas are that they help increase foot traffic, increase loyalty, increase word-of-mouth, or some combination of any of the above.  With each idea, I’ll tell you why it will be beneficial to your retail store, give you an example (or two) of how others have done something similar, and a mention few things you need to think about to implement without significant problems springing up.

Create a card asking customers for online reviews

Why?  It will help your search engine performance.  Increasing your online reviews is being increasingly recognized by Google and other search engines as important content that searchers value.  If some information has value to the searcher, then you can bet your bottom dollar that Google will find a way to capture that relevance in its search results.
Example:  I helped one of my clients get established on Google Places, yelp, tripadvisor and other relevant directories.  Now it plans to hand out a variation of this card to customers after completing their transactions.  Easy peasy!

Create a combo product that provides a customer discount over buying items separately

Why?  Increasing your average transaction amount is a great way to increase your overall revenue.  Yes, you will reduce your margin a bit, but if you combine the products into a solution that makes sense for your customer, you will start to train them to spend more in your store each visit.  Then your register will sound sweeter when it goes Ka-Ching!
Example:  The classic example is of a Happy Meal, or any other fast food combo.  When I worked for Clorox, we’d sometimes bundle two different scents of Pine-Sol into a combo pack.  If you have a café, you could create a breakfast special that includes a large coffee and a pastry.  Or if you have a deli, sandwich + chips + a beverage.  If you have a women’s boutique, maybe it’s a handbag and hat ensemble.  Get creative!

Create a customer photo contest

Why?  It allows your proudest customers to showcase their talents, and if you pick your theme right, your products.  It will also most likely result in you having lots of pictures of happy customers to share and reuse on your website, in marketing materials, or just displayed in your store.  After all, a picture tells a thousand words.
Example:  Pizza Orgasmica, a chain in San Francisco, hangs framed photos of customers and has a gallery on its website of customers who share pictures of them wearing branded t-shirts from around the world.  George’s Music in Berwyn Pennsylvania is running a photo contest though its Facebook page and asking fans and customers to “Post a pic of you and your instrument to our Wall.”

Bypass Groupon and announce your own group offer on your Facebook page

Why?   Your Facebook fans will see the offer, but they will probably have to round up non-Facebook fans to bring in a group to your store.  New customers introduced by current customers is a win-win for everybody.
Example:    Tropisueno, a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco, has a standing group offer of free drinks for the person who brings in 5 additional friends.  If you own or manage a restaurant, my recommendation is to announce a specific day and specific time frame when this offer can be redeemed (such as Happy Hour) so you can fill seats that normally are unoccupied.

Tweet a secret word that customers have to share in order to get a discount or t-shirt (with purchase of course)

Why?  It keeps your customers engaged in your twitter feed, gets them more deeply involved in what you have to say through gaming mechanisms, and if you announce a secret word on random days, does not become a predictable way to get regular freebies (after all, people who only buy for free don’t help you make money).
Example:  Cold Fusion Gelato Store in Newport, RI

What downsides or challenges do you see about implementing any of these ideas?

 

“In a world of ever-accelerating change, innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.”
~Skarzynski & Gibson in Innovation to the Core

Thinking is about imagining possibilities, of asking why and why not, of generating options for how to market your business.
Doing is about selecting options already identified and launching them the best you can.

Thinking is hard.  By thinking I don’t mean staring into a cup of coffee, or calling a meeting once a year to hold a brainstorming session.  I mean a committed process that systematically generates hundreds, if not thousands of ideas inspired by employees from all areas of the business, from suppliers, from investors, from partners, from customers, from fans, from different industries and even from competitors.  It’s colliding ideas that on the surface are not related, and in doing so, creating aha! moments, or an adrenaline rush associated with epiphany or serendipity.  It’s a journey that could include challenging orthodoxies, identifying discontinuities, figuring out how to apply organizational strengths in new areas and identifying deep consumer insights and unmet needs.
Doing is relatively easy.  There’s no shortage of ineffective marketing that each of us are exposed to every day.

Thinking helps you solve problems that nobody else thinks to solve that lead to breakthroughs and game-changing opportunities.  It’s the future.  It’s innovation. It’s growth and it’s success.
Doing helps you solve problems everybody has and helps you support current customers and employees.  It’s the here and now.  It’s generating cash flow and paying salaries.  It’s business as usual.

Both thinking and doing are necessary.

But do you have the right balance?

Are you sure?

“Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.”
~Carol P. Christ
 

Diageo is a global liquor and spirits giant.

An orthodoxy is a widely held belief about what drives success for a company or for an industry.  For instance, you (or your management) may believe that:

• to grow your business means that you have to do so at the expense of your competition (grow market share);
• to maximize sales, you need to own the major holidays, events, or usage occasions;
• men are the purchase decision makers for your products at retail.

An orthodoxy is just a fancy term for prevailing wisdom, and it’s usually rooted in past experience.   After all, leaders of businesses, be them marketing leaders or not, usually gain their positions of influence through delivering past results.

But what would happen if you turned the words “past experience” into a negative?  Perhaps you’d call it a dogma.  Then what you would have is a “established belief or doctrine…[that] is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioner or believers.”

What then happens when some heretic within the company (our outside the company) suggests that you challenge the beliefs you and the industry hold so sacredly, or better yet, gains information that refutes them?  What happens when you gain information that suggests that the world is changing, or has changed right before your eyes?

What happens is that you unlock a new world of opportunity and you get to innovate!

Diageo is a $14 billion global company that owns and markets many of the #1 alcohol brands within various segments.  It’s brand lineup is staggeringly impressive:  Smirnoff is the #1 vodka in the world, Johnnie Walker is the #1 whisky, Jose Cuervo the #1 tequilla, Bailey’s the #1 liqueur,  and Guinness the #1 stout.  

Diageo Expects Sales Growth After Focusing on Shoppers

Rather than resting on its laurels as the undisputed industry leader, 3 years ago, Diageo embarked on a mission to better understand who buys these products, why they buy them, and just as importantly, what stops them from buying them.  It created a shopper marketing team that set out to deepen its understanding of consumer shopping behavior.

Generating new consumer insights is not the only way to challenge your orthodoxies, but it’s a foundational marketing practice that often will.

So what did Diageo learn that were assuredly “aha” moments within the company?

• Women are the primary shoppers for spirits and liquors, not men, as had been assumed;
• People buy spirits and liquor for special occasions, but they define special occasions much more broadly and frequently than holiday and birthday celebrations, as had been assumed.  Informal, spontaneous group events such as dinners, porch parties, or backyard grilling were just as likely to drive purchase occasions;
• Many people are intimidated to buy spirits and liquors because they don’t have a go-to repertoire of cocktail recipes.  They don’t know what complimentary products they would need to be able to serve a cocktail to a friend or guest;
• Beyond the consumer insights, Diageo also learned to better understand its retailer’s needs in selling and marketing its products, that they were willing to partner to sell the category, rather than to assume its dominant position allowed it to assert is clout.

These new insights then led to a wide variety of programs that were tested with its retail partners and validated in market.  They include:

• Supplementing big holiday events where spirits and liquor are traditionally purchased with more year-round marketing;
• Development of programs to educated and take away the intimidation factor, such as “Simply Cocktails” which is a display and merchandising area where consumers are given options in how much complexity they are willing to use in order to create a cocktail;
• Diageo has increased the tools available to retailers to help them succeed in this category.  For instance, they provide food pairing and cocktail suggestion ideas that many consumers seek before they begin a shopping trip and when they visit the retailers’ website.   Additionally, retailers have the option of customizing the displays or using their own nomenclature, and selecting merchandising modules that fit their store size.

So what have been the results?

• Diageo says that it’s seeing double digit growth in its brand sales;
• It also says that it’s growing overall category sales, which its retail partners no doubt care about more;
• Presumably, as reflected in more sales, consumers are realizing the benefits of these programs, and ultimately, when you make your consumers happy, they reward you with sales.

Marketing has been changing rapidly as consumers gain greater control of the messages they are willing to listen to, in their ability find the information that’s important to them, and then to spread ideas and information through social media and word of mouth. 

Are you learning from your target customers how you can connect with them in more valuable ways, and in doing so, being open to challenging your own orthodoxies? 

 

“Strategy is doing the right things. Tactics is doing things right.” ~various attributions, including Peter Drucker and paraphrased from Sun Tzu I recently posted a series of slides from prominent social media thought-leaders as to why social media is not a retail marketing strategy. The point was not to diminish the potential value of social media or inbound marketing, for there are considerable benefits to be realized. Rather, my point was to assert that the use of social media and inbound marketing tactics can benefit tremendously by being used to support general marketing strategies and online content strategies. Starting your marketing efforts with well thought out strategies will help you manage limited resources, help you understand what’s driving success and failure, and accelerate success by unlocking the creativity that exists within your organization.

Goals, strategies and tactics

Before you can speak intelligently about the differences between strategies and tactics, you first need to start with the purpose of having strategies and tactics.  The biggest reason is to help you achieve a goal. A goal is a specific result that your business needs to achieve in order to sustain itself, usually through revenue growth or expense reduction, but also sometimes in terms of market share or cash flow.  A goal is more often than not a financial measure, should be your measure of what success looks like, and it should be S.M.A.R.T.  (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-bound).  Often, multiple goals are established to reflect the various ways a business can succeed. For example, let’s say you operate a chain of grocery stores.  The following could be goals for you to achieve:

• Grow meat department sales by 20% by Fiscal Year End 2011;
• Increase average purchase value from $75.00 to $85.00 by Fiscal Year End 2011;
• Increase the purchase frequency of shoppers from every 10 days to every 8 days by Fiscal Year End 2011.

I’ve previously written about how you can frame your thinking around ways to grow revenue. Strategies are statements of how you will achieve your goals. They are high level ideas, usually long term in nature, that set the direction and scope of a business to achieve its goals. In military language, “divide and conquer” is a strategy that is likely to be in place over the course of a military campaign. “Paratroopers secure the airport” is a tactic that is likely to happen once as part of the way a force divides and conquers. Great marketing strategies are focused on delivering benefits or in meeting the needs of its customers, and are often based upon information, research, trends, and insights generated through the analysis of markets, customers, non-customers and competitors. How are you going to get your target customer to spend money with you?  What benefits are you going to deliver to them? Just saying that you will use social media or inbound marketing isn't going to be a sufficient reason for you to persuade and succeed. Philip Kotler from Kellogg Business School has recently said that the role of marketing is to C.C.D.V.T.P (Create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit).   Creating value for a target market requires you to understand what the target market values, so in essence, a strategy is a connection between your goals and delivering a value, or a value proposition, to a customer.  A value proposition is defined as “a powerful emotion evoking statement that validates a customer’s unmet need and instills confidence that this unmet need till be totally satisfied (by you and your company).” I always advocate that businesses craft strategy statements using following the formula as it connects a goal to a value delivered to a target: Returning to our grocery chain example, the following could be strategies to achieve one of the previously stated goals:

• Grow meat department sales by creating smaller package sizes to meet the weekly cooking needs of single (unmarried) shoppers [who frequently eat at restaurants]; or
• Grow meat department sales by creating a line of ready-to-cook entrees to address the time constraints of busy moms; or
• Grow meat department sales by offering butchering classes to educate “foodie” customers on unusually found cuts of meat;

Presumably these strategies would have evolved from a deep understanding of various buyer personas, but the point is that now you have some overarching themes around which to build your marketing tactics and this is where your marketing creativity can begin to flourish, where you can start dedicating resources to developing online content around these strategies and themes, and gain the benefits of social media such as establishing authority, credibility and trust. So then what are tactics? Simply stated, a tactic is an action you take to execute a strategy. Examples are TV advertising, newspaper advertising, retail promotions, a website page, a banner ad campaign, a sampling program, etc.  Without the context of a strategy, in and of themselves they lack meaning as to how they will benefit your business. Getting back to our grocery store example, some tactical ways you could support the strategy to grow meat department sales by creating smaller package sizes to meet the weekly cooking needs of single (unmarried) shoppers could be:

• Advertise in weekly advertising circular;
• Put up shelf talkers or signs in the meat department;
• Run a retail promotion;
• Publish a single serve recipe book;
• Sponsor a speed dating event;
• Run a co-promotion with a brand of wine;
• Create an email newsletter;
• Create online content around the shopping and lifestyle needs of the single customer;

I want to highlight this last idea because I believe it brings me full circle to the point about social media not being a strategy, but it does highlight how social media or inbound marketing could be used to deliver a compelling series of messages to a strategically identified customer segment around a well-researched need. Without the context around who you are talking to, what needs, wants, dreams and desires they have, and how you can address those needs, wants, dreams and desires, social media will be underutilized by you and your business and the limited resources you dedicate to it will likely fail to help you achieve the business goals that will sustain you. As Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman say in their book “Content Rules:

That’s precisely the point of creating killer content – to convert browsers into buyers and customers into regulars or (better yet) rabid fans, ambassadors, and advocates. You do that by deepening your relationship with them, over time, by repeatedly and consistently creating content that they care about and want to share freely with their friends or colleagues, and by encouraging them to engage with you and to sign up for things you publish, (like an email newsletter or a webinar) or to download a whitepaper or ebook.

In order to use social media and inbound marketing to accomplish this, you need to start with customer-centric strategies.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.  Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." ~Sun Tzu Social media is a strategy no more than a telephone is a strategy. Social media facilitates conversation: between you and your customers, you and your prospects, you and your competitors, even you and your employees and you and me.  But conversations don’t pay your rent, don’t pay your employee salaries, don’t pay for your marketing expenses, and don’t make your cash register go Ka-Ching! I’ve been wanting to write about this subject for months, but I always filter myself and suffer from comparison to what I’ve read other smarter, more well established experts write on the subject.  So rather than try to say something different, I’ve decided to compile some of my favorite words of wisdom from others on the subject. Paul Isakson, Founding Partner at Thinkers & Makers, LLC  @paulisakson Jeremiah Owyang, Partner of Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group  @jowyang Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs @chrisbrogan Mike Volpe, VP Marketing Hubspot  @MVOLPE Brian Solis, founder & principal of FutureWorks  @briansolis Adam Broitman, Partner and Ringleader at Circ.us    @adambroitman From Find the Risk vs Reward Balance in Social Media, Gerardo A. Dada & Greg Stahovec

What are you doing to convert your fans and followers into customers?

If you need help integrating your social media efforts into a strategic plan, schedule a FREE 30 minute consultation with me.

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” ~ Woody Allen Let’s say you own a café in San Francisco.  What if a prospect showed up at your store and neither you nor your staff was there to greet her, wasn’t there to let her sample your seasonal products such as a peppermint mocha or eggnog muffin, wasn’t there to entice her with 30 minutes of tranquility over a cup of tea and a new magazine?  This prospect showed a specific interest in what you have to sell by showing up at your door and yet you weren’t around to learn of the opportunity let alone capitalize upon it. Now what if that same prospect jumped online and entered the search term ‘San Francisco Chestnut Street Café’ because she planned to do some holiday shopping in the Marina District?  Or even more tellingly, was on Chestnut Street using her mobile phone to search for a nearby café?  Are you showing up in this case? If you haven't claimed your business listing at Google Places, you may not be showing up for the online prospect. Not only are shoppers looking online for where to shop with increasing frequency, but the 800 pound  gorilla in the search world, Google, with its estimated 83% search engine market share has recently made a number of changes to its search results and display (called SERP for search engine results page) by announcing Google Place Search which in many cases places a greater emphasis than before on returning local search results. In order to take advantage of these changes, you need to claim your business listing at Google Places.  For now, this is a great opportunity for locally owned retailers to improve their chances of attracting prospects by being found within relevant search terms and business category descriptions. If you have not yet claimed your Google Places business listing, or if you have but have not tricked it out yet, let’s look at some data to understand why it’s important to do so. Prospects are looking for your services online A recent study about online search behavior sheds compelling data on how most of your prospects are looking for your store’s services. Local Search Usage Study: Bridging The Caps, From Search to Sales was published in September, 2010 and it “attempts to understand how consumers use and value search engines, print and Internet Yellow Pages, local-search sites, emerging media and more.” According to this study, “the majority of local-business searches are conducted online, with 70 percent of consumers citing online sites as their primary sources.  That is up seven percentage points from 2009.”  Furthermore, “search engines comprise more than 60 percent of the online-search market share.” If 70% of consumers are looking for you online, and the majority of these people are using search engines to do so, then it’s critical that you make sure you can be found on Google. Google has made changes to its search results that place greater importance on local listings Google claims that 20% of all searches are for a local business.  Additionally, with the rapid growth of smart mobile phones, some estimate that as many as 20% of all online searches will be from a mobile phone by 2012.  Google is setting itself up to capitalize on this growth.  As a result, it’s launched Google Places search.   Google states: “Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when we predict you’re looking for local information.”  What happens with its results after it shifts into Places search? Some of the key changes in the results pages are now:

• Local results now fill the page and are highlighted and more obvious than general organic search results
• Results for business include links to both reviews and to the business’ Google Places page
• Results for businesses include photos and in some cases, snippets of your customer reviews
• There are a lot more links to click on within each listing to allow for comparison shopping
• A clickable local area map with more shopping options appears to the right of these results
• Paid ads on the top of the page (which some speculate are Google Boost ads) are more prominent than before

With the addition of links to reviews, inclusion of partial reviews and of photos, and to some degree the enhanced placement of paid Boost ads at the top of the page, it appears as if not only has Google made it a prerequisite for you to claim your Places page, but it has created a potentially more competitive landscape in attracting attention from your prospects.   After all, Google wants to deliver the most relevant and helpful information and links to consumers. And I suspect that just as was the case with the differences between organic and paid search, local businesses will have the opportunity to improve its search results through organic methods or through paid methods. After claiming your listing, the next obvious opportunity is to improve your listing in ways that can separate you from the competition.  Whether this is by buying a Boost ad or adding better pictures or adding video to your listing or adding Google Tags to your listing or working to improve your customer reviews. Go claim your listing now.  This simple, free act may provide you with more positive results than anything else you do today.

“When people expect me to go right, I'll go left. I'm unpredictable." ~Paula Abdul Mutt Lange may be one of the most accomplished music song writers and producers you have never heard of.  He’s helped create the success of bands such as AC/DC with Back in Black  (approximately 22 million U.S. copies sold), Def Leppard with Pyromania (over 10 million U.S. copies sold) and of his former wife, Shania Twain with Come On Over (over 20 million U.S. copies sold). If Mutt Lange were a content developer for your company, I bet he’d be worth his weight in gold in helping create remarkably sticky stories, videos and music. While I am not an expert on his production techniques and since “he has not given an interview of any kind for decades,” what I’ve recognized about him is that he’s has mastered using the unexpected.   While there are many techniques he’s used to success, my two favorite examples are: He starts songs with unusual sound combinations that grab your attention:

• Any rock music listener immediately knows the introduction to Hell’s Bells with its tolling church bell (a church bell in a hard rock song?!?);
• Any country & western listener immediately knows the introduction to Man I Feel Like a Woman! with its sing-song keyboard intro  + “Shania’s call “Let’s go girls” then cutting into an electric guitar pulse (a pulsing electric guitar in a C&W song?!?);
• And of course the introduction to Rock of Ages with it’s gibberish “gunter glieben glauchen globen”) followed by a cow bell overlayed with a funky drum beat (a cow bell and a funky drum beat in a hard rock song?!?)

He uses a call and response technique  that draws the listener in to participate

• Rock of Ages:  rock on / (rock on!) … What do you want? / (What do you want?!);
• Loverboy’s Lovin’ Every Minute Of It:  Ready (Ready!)-Aim (Aim!)-Fire

And almost without exception, the successful songs where he demonstrates these techniques end up sounding FUN and easily surprise and delight the listener. Part of the fun also stems from the fact that heavy rockers such as AC/DC and Def Leppard have been convinced to take a risk with their sound and to break from a style that was common, expected, and what every other band in their genre was producing.  In doing so, they produce content (e.g., music) that gets noticed, that gets commented on, and that in the equivalent of their days, went viral. Roy Williams has written about the concept of surprising Broca’s Area in his book “Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads." In short, Williams states that Broca’s Area is a sort of gatekeeper of the brain’s information gathering function.  Broca's area anticipates the predictable and the only way to pass and gain attention is from the use of surprising and attention grabbing words and sounds. The good news for you and me is that there are a wide range of successful people and businesses we can emulate.  These content developers take seemingly mundane activities and turn them on their ear to create unexpected, and often, remarkable content that their fans and loyal customers soak up and pass along to their friends.  For example: •    Southwest Airline uses unexpected speeches to provide safety instructions ; •    Seth Godin writes business management books that use peculiar language such as “lizard brain,” “linchpin,” “meatball sundae”  and “purple cow;” •    Dyson makes vacuums that look like robotic equipment ; •    Humphry Slocombe, an ice cream shop in San Francisco,  gives its flavors names such as Government Cheese, Foie Gras, Collaborative Evil Ale, Skull Splitter Root Beer, and Secret Breakfast (made from bourbon and cornflakes). Where are the touch points with your customers that they’ve come to expect a routine from you, and how can you deliver some unexpected fun?  If you're a retailer, you can do something as simple, yet powerful, as changing your menu design and layout.  You’d be amazed at how few of your regular customers bother to look at it anymore and how much you can change behavior significantly (upsell, cross-sell?) by featuring new items or delivering new messaging. Using the unexpected to create surprise in the products you create, the names you give them, the titles you give to your blog posts, heck, even the ways in which you answer the phone, may feel risky to you.   And to some degree they are.   If you were to conduct market research to see if some of these changes are well received, you may get terrible purchase interest scores and decide that it’s not a smart idea, not brand consistent, not worth the risk. But then again, if you keep doing the same things that your competitors do, you’re not really very different, are you?

Why not experiment, test, and measure the introduction of a little surprise in your content?  You and your customers might have a little more fun.