Marketing Firepower With Jeff Dostal

posted by David Wolf on Jun 5, 2009 | Comments (8) | Permalink | Trackback URL

Questions covered in this episode:

1. What do most businesses feel is their best form of advertising and why are they way off?
a. I’d visit about how businesses rely on word of mouth because they see it as free. I’ll explain that word of mouth is slow, incomplete and more likely to be negative than positive.

2. Should a business strive to achieve name awareness?
a. I’ll visit about how many businesses want to “get their name out” and then explain in more detail what we call the Buying Funnel and how consumers must be taken from unawareness, to awareness, to a comprehension, to a conviction of your business before they will ever enter into the action stage which is the only stage you will ever see as the business owner. So you can see, if your goal is “awareness” you are long way away from a sale.

3. What is the biggest source of untapped revenue for most businesses?
a. We’ll talk about how businesses do such a poor job of communicating with existing customers. So many businesses collect a database of contact information and don’t do anything with it. Others assume that once the consumer has become a customer, they can move on to find other customers. It’s like relationships. We court someone and if we stop paying attention to them, they may seek out someone else who will. Customers are no different.

4. Where is the biggest waste of advertising dollars by most small businesses?
a. Easily, it’s the yellow pages. So many business owners feel they must be in the yellow pages to be legitimate. They can be in there; they just don’t have to invest thousands of dollars every year. Businesses in today’s economy need to spend time educating and not advertising the consumer to turn them into a customer. You have to proactive with that education. You can’t put your money in a book and hope it get’s opened to your ad. Of the six ways consumers use the yellow pages, the top four (92% of the users) are going to the book to find a specific name they already have in mind, not opening it for a random search.

5. Does a company need a website?
a. Yes. Yes. Yes. It does not have to be something that costs thousands of dollars but because of the way consumers do business, especially with someone new, they’ll most likely check out the company website. In addition, directing consumers to the website is a much more efficient way to promote a business. They just need to be sure the content is kept current!

6. What form of advertising is the most effective?
a. This question is hard to answer because each market a company is in will be different but there are six key characteristics that should be considered when deciding which media to select and I’ll cover that list of six.

7. Why is advertising often a test of a business and not of the advertising?
a. We offer a video titled the Marketing Bridge. It discusses all the areas of a company that impact the marketing and advertising is just one of the steps on that bridge. If any of the other steps are out of whack, it will negatively affect any advertising done.

8. When developing advertising messages, who is the most important person to talk to?
a. We can talk about how the customer is usually not included in the discussion about what is great about a business and that they need to be.

9. How much should I budget for my advertising?
a. Often the question asked by businesses is how little can I spend and get by when they should be asking how much firepower I can bring to the marketplace to dominate. Customers are the life blood of the business. They can’t short change that process, especially in today’s economy. We can talk about several studies that reinforce the need to maintain and even increase a presence in difficult economic times because of the short and long term benefits.

10. What’s the key element in customer service?
a. The customer. We can talk about how businesses spend a great deal of time and money on operations, product, employees and procedures but you can’t have great customer service if you have no customers to serve.

FILED IN: Advertising, Branding, Communication, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Podcast, Sales