SIAServices.net

We have all heard it in the past, if at first you don’t succeed try, try again. Well we have also heard that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sharon, an intelligent single mom, came rolling up to my Sacramento office in her beat up 1979 Toyota Corolla in 2006 after three years of barely making enough money in business to pay her home bills and nothing more to show for it. Before she came into my office I learned that her business was making power point presentations for businesses and had even won an award for her work. She sat down with every piece of paper she had that related to her business and in less than five minutes my office looked like someone opened a file cabinet and turned on a hurricane fan.

There were papers, folders, and receipts everywhere. She had even brought me her mileage log and CDs of different presentations she had done. I laughed as she told me that her rep told her to get everything together before she met with me. I guess some people have a very different definition of the word together.

One of the folders that caught my eye immediately was hand labeled “advertising” and was probably one of the thickest folders I had ever seen. I gravitated to it and made sure to lift with my knees not my back when picking it up. It was so thick that she had to industrial rubber bands on it holding the papers inside in.

Now one of the first things I do is a general overview of the company based on the advertising and marketing expenses and the annual sales of the company. In doing the math I saw that Sharon had pulled in slightly over 100k in sales on average in her past three years. Not bad for the type of company she had running out of her home. Then I painstakingly tallied everything she had spent on advertising throughout the life of her business, worked out to just over 250k in three years. That meant that Sharon was on average spending nearly 84% of everything that came in on just advertising and was living on just under 17k a year.

I pointed this out to Sharon and she threw back my first red flag. “You need to spend money to make money.” In addition she said that she knew if she didn’t spend the money advertising that her competition would.

Let me express to you why this is a warning sign for me. Statements such as those Sharon mentioned are often used by salespeople rather than marketers. Let’s be honest here; most advertising sales people know that statistics say you are going out of business within just a few years and their job is to get you to advertise with them as much as possible before your business flat lines and is declared dead by the county coroner. To this end, most sales people have their best interest mind, not yours.

Marketing, true marketing, knows that time is money and helps you to find the proper balance of the two to increase your likelihood of success. A proven marketer knows that it is their reputation that they are putting on the line when they help you market your company. To that end marketers may seem short, blunt, and sometimes downright rude, however their goal is to get the point across in any way that they can.

In looking at Sharon’s advertising versus monthly sales I found something very interesting. There was a year that she did not get her business in the yellow pages. “Yes, I missed the deadline because my graphic artist wasn’t able to finish my ad in time.” What caught my eye most about that was that it was also the year that she made more money than the other two. “Well since I didn’t have the ad I knew I had to go after more people myself and did a lot more door knocking and phone calls.” I showed Sharon that she hadn’t lost sales because of it but in all honesty, had the best performing year she had ever had. She just stared blankly and I sat in silence while the gears turned in her head. “So I saved twenty five thousand dollars a year by just not advertising in the yellow pages?” My nod was really just the assurance that her epiphany was correct.
Many people think that the yellow pages, print ads, and newspapers are the best returns for their advertising. I can’t tell you how many people I hear parroting back to me why they should be advertising on a specific radio station, or how they know the exact viewing audience of a certain television station. The truth is, unless you are carrying a huge profit margin and have more money than time, these forms of advertising just don’t work.
The yellow pages are a dying breed. You know that because most yellow page advertising employers are surprised if an employee lasts more than a year. Don’t get me wrong, yellow pages have their place. If you own a business that is emergency, situation, or impulse based, don’t turn a nose up to advertising in your local yellow pages. Locksmiths, electricians, and restaurants often still see a majority of their business coming in from their yellow page advertising. Mostly because in those situations it’s hard to check online for a locksmith when you can’t get in your house, so printed media is the way to go. However if you are running a business that doesn’t fall in that category, imagine the damage you could do putting that funding somewhere else.
First of all, mass media productions work on a dragnet principle. You throw a big enough net in the water and you are sure to eventually catch the kind of fish you are looking for. However, you don’t own the boat and you don’t reap the benefits from the other fish that are caught, only the fish that you are specifically looking for, then you have others who want the same fish as you.
I explained to Sharon that for her business, a solid web presence would be the better way to go and would not even cost one tenth of what she had spent. She took me to her website and it was a very basic website. Yes it was search engine friendly in the context that it was not a template website and contained some original text. What was surprising for me was that she had no samples, no testimonials, and no way for people to decide if her services were right for her. What wasn’t surprising was that she had done no business through her website.
Proper website optimization isn’t just about getting people to your site, but keeping them there as well. You have to juggle the balance of information and design to get people to come to your site and stay there. Yes you want people to call, but if your store, even your online one, doesn’t catch someone’s attention you are much less likely to generate a sale.
We sat down and drew up a new strategy for Sharon and her business which included a well designed site, pay per click campaign, and an aggressive search engine submission package. Within just a few months the calls started to trickle in and a few weeks she was so busy I didn’t hear from her.

The usual sad truth for me is that in my job I only see people when their business marriage is on the rocks. Once I get their relationship back on track with good principles and tools, I generally know little more about them than that their checks are still coming in or I see an order for them on it’s way past my office.

Sharon came to my office in her new Acura a couple of months ago to thank me for all of my help. She brought me a gift basket and a jeweled globe that proudly sits behind me in my office. I love marketing. I love it even more when someone listens and thanks me for the efforts I put in.

So if at first you don’t succeed try something different, it can’t be worse than the failure you just had.

SIAServices.net

We’ve all seen them. We type in www.Google.com (if it’s not already our homepage) and type in something that we are looking for. We click on a link with a promising description. We walk away to grab a drink while the site loads. We sit down and carefully put our Diet Pepsi on a coaster in the chaos which is our desktop and look up at the screen.
What we see makes our pupils expand and contract, positive there is an optical illusion there somewhere. Clashing colors, dead image links, gaudy design that couldn’t be louder if it wanted to. The design is so bad you just stare at it wondering where the punch line is. So much flashing your sure this site has claimed its fair share of epileptic browsers. You wonder how God himself could have allowed such an atrocity to be unleashed on the cyber world, clicking on your back button before your screen and retinas are permanently etched from the chaos on the monitor.

Another fun day for me. A customer comes in to pick up an order from their Account Manager. I make the mistake of asking them for a sample to use as a marketing tool. Once they learn I am a marketer they want to tell me how great they are and get my approval for what they have accomplished. Yes this may seem a little on the cocky side, but imagine being in my shoes for a second; You spend over a hundred thousand dollars to hone your trade, countless sleepless nights to stay on top of the market, and have won awards for your work. Then in someone walks showing you what they did and you smile at them like a kid explaining to you that the blue thing on the paper in crayon that looks like someone had convulsed mid stroke is a dragon.
That happens a lot for me. But in this case, the customer took it even further. Proceeding to follow me into my office he showed me his website for his landscaping company. He loved it, and I mean if he could take it to dinner he would, loved it. I quietly listened as he told me how proud he was of designing the site himself and all the effort he put into it. For a good ten minutes he painstakingly showed me how he made each button and got the crude flash to work. All the time I saw slow loading page after page of bad pictures, little text, and frames that had no business being there.
Then came the inevitable…..
The question you never want to ask me…..
“So what do you think?”
Damn.
How do you do it? How do you tell someone that the pictures of their son are the ugliest thing you have ever seen and that there should be a law against displaying him in public? How do you tell someone that it isn’t the dress that makes their butt look big, it’s the Doritos? At what point do you finally let someone know that they will never have a career in singing, dancing, or movies? Yet here I am, looking at a doe eyed thirty something year old contractor who is trying, yet failing, and asking me how his most important marketing tool looks to me, the guy who does nothing else for a living.
I often try to put the shoe on the other foot. How would he react if he came in my back yard and saw all my amateur attempts at trying to build a koi pond which is off level with a fountain pump that sprays off to the side? What would he think of the garden I built out of five gallon buckets with holes drilled in the base? If he saw the dead patched because of my faulty sprinklers, what would he say when I asked him the same question?
Anyone who knows me, knows what happens next on the outside, but I want to paint a picture of what is going on inside. It’s not easy being blunt, curt, and up front. But in marketing, sugarcoating just doesn’t get the message across.
If you see someone standing in the middle of a road with a bus barreling down on them because the driver is too busy flirting with the half attractive girl sitting behind him, you don’t waste time. You don’t ask the person if you can help them look for something or tell them the year, make and model of the bus, the speed at which it’s coming and how they may want to consider taking 6.2 steps to the southeast while avoiding a freshly dropped piece of gum that may plant itself at the base of their loafers.
No, if you are any kind of person you don’t do that at all.
You yell “BUS”
So guess what, I yelled BUS!!!
I watched his face drop as I tore into his site and everything that was wrong with it. I felt I was telling him the baby wasn’t his as I dove into the back end of his site and found no code to speak of. He slouched and looked slightly to the floor as I told him that he built his site to work for him, not his customers.
He sat there silent long enough for me to run through all the variables of what was about to happen. I am bigger than him, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. Is he going to walk out and never talk to his account manager again? I was trying to locate everything in my office that could be used as a weapon that wouldn’t cost too much money should it get broken. He looked up after thinking for several moments, talking to himself, possibly contemplating the same scenarios I was. Or at least, so I thought.
“You’re Right. What should I do?”
So we sat down and drew up a plan, as we went through detail after detail he wrote progressively faster. Once he saw the direction he should go he started a fire and was soon writing faster than he could think. Then he suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked up at me again, this time with much more clarity.
“Can you guys do this for me?”
“SIA Professional Services has been serving the greater Sacramento area for nearly 15 years. The company was built around my marketing. I’m pretty sure we can design your site for you.”
He asked what he was looking at pricewise. I think he was shocked when I told him I didn’t know. But he understood when I told him that I simply gave the suggestions and that his account manager would be able to write up his quote for him. His account manager, who was with me the whole time, got him a quote while we finished talking and once he finished up his next job, he came in, with credit card in hand.
Website Design is like automotive repair; yes there are some things you can do on your own. On the important jobs however, like your business, you need an expert before you and the family are flying off the side of cliff during a Sunday drive, causing you to remember what that spare nut you had left over went to now.
Just like mechanics, not all website designers are equal. When you go to a mechanic for major work do you just look for the cheapest place you can find to work on it if you care anything about your car or the contents. If you had a brand new Ford you would probably look to someone like Eric’s Automotive who specializes in your car rather than some mechanic who has more reports with the BBB than Enron. Yet, so many people are content to have substandard websites that either doesn’t tailor to their demographic, or doesn’t have the back end support to get it running right on the search engines.
Keep in mind that your website, much like everything else in your business should be designed with your target customer in mind. It isn’t a matter of what you like; it’s a matter of what they like. If you absorb this one thing, you will be better prepared than over half of the small businesses on the market today.
“You are not Your Target Demographic.”
If you came to you and offered you your products and services at your price would you use you??? Of course not. You would do the work yourself and save the money while getting your exact vision out. But you are hired by customers who either can’t or don’t want to do what you do. Rather they hire you to do it. You have to identify your key customer and try to see your business through their eyes.

You should not design your logo, your company, and especially your website to look appealing to you, but rather those you want to do business with you. If you have a restaurant that serves American BBQ and you are Korean, you should reflect on who you are wanting to serve and who will be your best demographic and match them. The feel of your website should be the same. What colors, what styles, what format best matches your potential customer’s preferences. Look at their websites and look at your competitors websites. Between these you should start to get an idea of what you want your business and your website to look like.

The bottom line question is this; How many customers do you have to lose to make a bad website too costly?

Joseph L. Zeleny
Chief Marketing Officer
SIA Professional Services

SIAServices.net

916-361-0792