Wizard of Ads Clay Campbell

Moving up the needle in the consumers mind

On May 16th I said, “I do a lot of things in my own business to try to move up that needle in a persons mind. (The “who cares” needle)
In my mind I see it as advertising.”

I thought listing these things might be a great idea, especially if you have a very limited budget. I have implemented all these in my own business. They’ve helped us to increase ticket sales by over 200% in the past 5 years.
So here are some suggestions that would apply to a broad group of small businesses whether you have a plumbing supply business, or you’re a dentist, Roofing Contractor, Bank, Nursing Home, Computer Repair Services. Whatever. These ideas will be helpful.

· Sit down with an outside consultant. Do an uncovery.
· Look realistically at your strengths and your weaknesses and those of your competitors. Look carefully at your website then look at your competitors. You need a consultant because it’s hard to read the label when you’re on the inside of the bottle.
· Establish a realistic strategy and set goals for the next 12 months. Your growth through mass media advertising will depend exclusively on how many dollars you can spend. Decide how much of your business is repeat, referral, from your location, and advertising. Probably 90% comes from the first three! Be brutally honest.
· Establish a budget. How much can you realistically and consistatly spend to advertise and expose your business? Low side and high side. Be sure to include your cost of rent as part of your total cost of exposure.
· Advertise for the long-term not short-term. What is a quick fix for this month is usually not a good plan for the long haul.
· Advertising is just like exercising. Its best to do a little bit everyday and keep on doing it; month after month, year in year out. Start off small work up to what you feel fits your strategy, goals and plans.
· No small business has enough money to advertise effectively and get results using everything. McDonalds can do newspapers, radio stations, cable TV, direct mail, yellow pages, your local TV Channels ABC, NBC, Fox & CBS, Billboards and the Internet but not a small business. Pick something you can dominate. For the best “Bang for your Buck” email me.
· Establish a relationship with other business owners who would promote your business to their customers in return for you promoting their business to your customers. Lots of business owners will help you like that if you’ll ask them. Don’t be afraid to ask. Many will gladly help you. Even if you have very few customers at first and the trade is very lopsided.
· Keep a file of every customer!! If they give you a check or credit card. Get as much info from them as possible. At our business we get their name address ph # and email. This is an easy thing to do, but it’s also easy not to do. It’s not surprising to see a business fail if they fail to implement this simple idea.
· With the information you gather, send them a monthly newsletter. Give them information they would want to have. Not just an advertisement, or sale brochure, or some gimmic. Give them something useful. Something that when they see you at a ball game, church, or at a restaurant; they’d say to you, “Hey thanks for sending the___________ I really appreciate it.”
· If you can’t figure out what to send them, email me.
· Read 33 Ruthless Rules for Local Advertising by Michael Corbett
· Also read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Al Ries & Jack Trout
· And in my opinion the best book on marketing out there is the Wizard of Ads by Roy H. Williams
More later,
Clay

Clay is a writer of ad campaigns, dynamic speaker, business owner, and author of two books. His third book is in the works now. It’s called Get more Bang for your Buck OR How to Achieve Above Average Results from your Advertising Dollars For more info on Clay Campbell go to www.claycampbell.biz

Everything you do in business is advertising.

Everything you do in business is advertising.
Most small business owners, of which I am one, think of advertising as running ads in the newspaper or on radio, TV, yellow pages, direct mail, billboards and the Internet. But there are many other things I believe are advertising too.
Whether your last customer left happy, mad, or indifferent is advertising.
I’m talking about PEF.
Personal Experience Factor. The way a lady feels about you and your business after she has left to drive home. How a guy feels about your dealership after he has the new pickup truck sitting in his driveway.

I do a lot of things in my own business to try to move up that needle in a persons mind. (the “who cares” needle)
In my mind I see it as advertising. If Suzie Smith tells a friend: “Hey, you gotta read Clay’s new book it’s great!”
That’s better than me saying, “ Hey, you really should buy my new book. People say it’s great. We’re having a sale on them and we have a very limited supply.” ( If we run out, I’ll go out to the storage building, and bring in another very limited supply) :-)

Everyone can easily see my silly analogy with my book.

It’s a little tougher to see, in your own business. Is it better for me to leave your car dealership and say, “They really treated me fair and gave me a fair price for my trade-in? They let me take the car Friday evening. I brought it back Monday morning and they asked me if liked that one or did I want to take another one home to try it out?”
I’ve never dealt with such nice people before. They sent my wife and I a dozen red roses a week after I bought it with a note that said: ‘Thank you for buying your vehicle from us’.
A month after I bought it I got a real nice hand written note from the sales person that said: “Thank you again for buying your vehicle from me. If you send a friend or relative to me that buys a vehicle, we’ll buy you dinner at the restaurant of your choice here in town. Just write your name on my card and give it to them. Here are a few of my cards.”

Then, you won’t believe this… it wasn’t even mentioned at the time of the sale. I got this email from the dealership that said:
As a way of showing our appreciation to you we are going to give you an oil lube and filter change and a free inspection every three months for the next year… FREE!!!
And remember if you don’t have time to bring it in, we’ll send a service technician to you to pick up your vehicle and return it to you after the free inspection and oil change. All at no Charge!! Can you believe that??? I’ll buy my next car there I guarantee it!!

It seems to me, that’s better than shouting loudly and endlessly on the radio TV and Newspapers over and over: “We’re having a really really big sale! Prices will never be this low again. We’re selling these at our cost! Now is the best time to buy… Hurry on down. Come see us for the lowest prices in town! It’s the biggest sale of the year! ( Does anyone anywhere believe the BS when a business is advertising they’re having the biggest sale of the year?” Instead, why not just try to find out what people want then give it to them?

If a business advertises great service then you go in to that business and get great service you will feel you got what you expected and you will feel even with that business when you leave. You’ll feel like you got for what you paid for. We’re all like that. You only become a raving fan or give terrific word of mouth advertising when you get something really great or the business performed in some way that WASN’T expected. So when you leave, you’re feeling like you got way more than what you paid for. You go tell everyone how great the food was, how tremendous the movie was, how you bought it at an auction and it was worth $5000 and you got it for 150 bucks.
For example:
I bought an engine on ebay that's worth about $5000 for my 1978 280ce. I paid $79 for it. I’ve told about 10,000 people about it so far.
More later
Clay

Clay is a writer of ad campaigns, a business owner, and author of two books. His third book is in the works now. It’s called Get more Bang for your Buck OR How to Achieve Above Average Results from your Advertising Dollars For more info on Clay Campbell go to www.claycampbell.biz

Learn to do it right, by doing it wrong first?

Learning about search engine optimization and turning visitors into customers on your website will make the difference between making money and making none online.
I understand that language real well. I had a business that went broke in 1979 when Jimmy Carter was president and interest rates we at 19%. I remember it well.

The way I see it ignorance is: simply not knowing the facts. (“Officer I didn’t know the speed limit through here was 55mph.”)
Stupidity is: knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway. (“I knew I shouldn’t have been going 85 mph in a 55 mph but I was really running late.”)

Now if you’re trying to make money with your business online then by not knowing the language, what to do and not to do, you are ignorant like I was. After you learn the language and what to do, you have knowledge. If you ignore that knowledge; then that is stupidity.
You and I can be well educated and be very intelligent about some subjects and very unaware (or ignorant) about others. It’s that way with everyone. I’ve never met anyone who knew everything. We’ve all probably met someone who thought they did.

One of my sons asked me once, “Dad, where does wisdom come from?”
I said, “Well it appears to me, when you don’t know the facts about something harmful, stupid or dangerous; then you go out and do it. Then you have problems, get hurt, or you get in trouble. Next you realize you shouldn’t have done that.
Then in the future when some one you know is about to do this dangerous, foolish, or harmful thing, you say: ‘I don’t think you should do that. Here’s why…’ That is wisdom.”

Such is the story of my life. I learn how to do it right by doing it wrong first. I have written two books on that subject. Having been in advertising and marketing since 1983, and owned several small businesses, I know that to be true with other small business owners.
When trying to do more business through advertising or with website, my advice is: get some professional advice and also learn all you can about it yourself.
The very first thing is to have a plan. What do you want the website to do? Do you want to sell products or services or just give information? What is your budget? How much can you spend?
If you have a small business like mine, you might not be able to spend very much money bidding on Keywords and advertising online.
To get started finding out the costs involved, go to yahoo sponsored search listing and watch the little movie tutorial. It gives you a good sales pitch for the reason to buy bid and buy keywords. Take the time to figure your ad budget first. Be very cautious. You can spend a lot on money really quickly and you might not get what you were expecting. If you bid on keywords from Google that would very likely give you a link back to you from Google, and cause your site to crawled by their robot. That’d be a good thing. Every day I get questions from business owners about doing business online or about websites. Most small business owners don’t have enough knowledge about what works what doesn’t and why. They don’t have much time either. They are busy running their businesses. But you can’t tell your Webmaster what to do to fix your site if you don’t know yourself. You need to be able to speak their language. Or trust them to do it right. Or email me. If I can’t help I’ll point you in the right direction.

More later
Clay

Stupid vs Ignorant

The difference between ignorance and stupidity.

The first thing I learned about the Internet was when I was done with something and I wanted to quit I was supposed to click on start. It seemed stupid to me at the time.

I used to feel so inadequate and helpless when talking to someone about “website stuff”. I felt stupid. I felt humiliated that I couldn’t do what people in the industry called “very simple” things.
But come to find out I wasn’t stupid; I was ignorant. Big difference. Webmasters, savvy Internet techs, and nerdy types all have this language that was foreign to me.

This is what I mean:
You need a robot text file that looks like this…
You can dominate the search engines by simply getting an important site to link to yours…
You need to have a Keyword-Rich Domain Name
You must have a well-designed Search Engine Friendly Web Page
Well-Formed HTML is crucial…
We are going to employ a Flat Directory Structure
Do you want a Site Map?
Spiders don’t like Frames, JavaScript, & Flash; but people do.
I think these Trigger words work the best.…

I simply started reading and learning and then putting into use on my own site what I have learned. That has taken my site from being non-existant on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Msn (the four top search engines) My site www.kentuckyopry.com went from being non-existant to being on the top of the first page under several of my keywords and:
I paid no money for keyword advertising. I learned how to do it with a little coaching, lots of reading and a little implementation.
So my advice is: just learn a little, put it into use right away. Learn a little more; use it right away.
Knowledge unapplied is as useless as “tits on a boar” my Daddy always said.

If you want to rank highly in the search engines, you simply need to focus on building a great site, finding the right search words, and getting the right people to link to you. Or, in search engine language: you need to build a search engine-friendly site, find the right keywords, and get the right inbound links.
But now, I want to tell you, that sounds really simple, but it is a lot harder to do than it is to say.

In my understanding of things it’s kinda like saying this:
To be a big star in the music business you have to know the right people, be in the right place at the right time, be a sellable commodity for the record label, have a hit song and get then all the radio stations in the United States to play your CD. Pretty tall order I’d say. There are millions and millions of singers and very few stars making big money.
Just like there are millions and millions of websites and very few like the top ten websites listed below.
According to Ranking.com, these are the best of the best with msn.com having over 198,394,202 links to it.

1 msn.com
2 yahoo.com
3 google.com
4 passport.com
5 passport.net
6 microsoft.com
7 yieldmanager.com
8 aol.com
9 starware.com
10 ebay.com
11 whenu.com

More later,
Clay