Quotes for the week!“THE THING YOU RESIST IS THE THING YOU NEED TO HEAR THE MOST!” DR. ROBERT ANTHONY
“THOSE WHO DARE TO FAIL GREATLY CAN EVER ACHIEVE GREATLY” ROBERT KENNEDY
“MANY PERSONS HAVE A WRONG IDEA OF WHAT CONSTITUTES TRUE HAPPINESS. IT IS NOT ATTAINED THROUGH SELF-GRATIFICATION, BUT THROUGH FIDELITY TO A WORTHY PURPOSE. “ HELEN KELLER |
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The bigger questions hold the key to the “J.B. Dollar Stopped working” question. The type of business that Bob owned was a siding/windows company. It does make sense that if you are the only business of your kind in our magazine that you are getting an exclusive. This is an advantage for some businesses and if you have that going on right now GREAT! If you are the only one of your kind of business in Cuyahoga County then that would be an advantage too! The fact is that there are reasons why there is more than one kind of business in J.B. and in Cuyahoga County. With the layoffs and downsizing more and more people are trying to find ways to generate income for their households.
This means more small business owners popping up and starting a business that may be the same type of business as yours!
This means less business and fewer profits for the industry, it also makes it harder to close leads because there are more people out their taking your dollars. With new people in the market they have not figured out what the real costs are doing in business. They may just be trying to pay the rent and are willing to work for less! This makes business hard. Well, no one ever told me running a business is easy. This is just a fact of business….a good idea, a good business, starts making money, people start realizing that they might want to open their own business doing what you do better, worse, etc… and they start to cut into your market. It is the same thing with J.B. Dollar. A company advertises with us and starts to get good response, other business start to think if I advertise their with my company in J.B. I can get some business too and make money, and so on until we have several of the same types of business in our magazine. Since J.B. is a business too, our goal is to increase the number of advertisers and increase revenues. The sales staff’s goal is to increase their income so they can better the life of themselves and their families. Also there are Unfair Trade Laws that prevent us to exclude businesses, just like the Yellow Pages or Newspapers. So here we are, we are all in business, and we would all like an exclusive (it would be GREAT to be the only direct mail magazine in Cuyahoga County) but THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN! Where do we go from here? We could all close our businesses and get a job, we can go on complaining about how things are tough out there and it is the J.B. Dollar Stretchers fault because we have too many competitors, or we have to take responsibility to come up with a creative idea to fight the newer, less sophisticated business that is going to start advertising against you. They are not just competing with you in J.B. they will be competing with you in Val Pak, Town Money Saver, Gold Clipper, word of mouth Plain Dealer etc… THEY ARE IN YOUR MARKET THEY ARE COMPETING WITH YOU EVERYWHERE! EXPECT LESS RESULTS IN YOUR BUSINESS OVERALL UNLESS YOU CHANGE SOMETHING YOU’RE DOING. The solution is not to hop around with your advertising and do the same old things. It might mean you send out something in addition to, another area, different offers, add more value to your service, and change how you talk to customers. It might even mean to advertise in more publications than J.B. Dollar. If you have one bucket of water and it is full now, but some other businesses are taking water out of it, the solution is not to take the remainder amount of water out and pour into another bucket. You won’t move ahead. You have to add more water to the existing bucket and get an extra bucket and more fresh water to get ahead. And you have to do this consistently and regularly for a long period of time. Most things don’t change overnight. Don’t Give UP on a position you have already established. “Never, Never, Never Quit!” |
The universals of business and competition! |
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“life is difficult” |
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“certainly the game is rigged, but don’t let that stop you. If you don’t bet you can’t win!”
“Insanity is doing the same thing over & over again and expecting different results!”
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The other day I had a brief conversation with a former J.B. Dollar Magazine customer. The interesting fact is that he was NOT my customer and he did not know that I worked for J.B. Dollar Magazine. What was interesting was to get his honest opinion about what he thought about advertising and specifically about J.B. During the conversation he said that he did well with J.B. in the beginning and then later he noticed that more and more of his competitors started to show up in our book and that the leads got less and harder to close. I know that you might have had the same feelings about OUR magazine, but in the exchange we both worked out that there is a bigger more universal principle involved and that it has something to do with J.B., but in reality is a condition of a “Free Market System”.
Has J.B. Dollar Changed? Have You Changed the Offers in Your Ad Lately?
Other than our growth to 3.3 million homes and the improvements that we have made that have been discussed in other newsletters the basic concept and audience of J.B. Dollar has remained the same. We mail out a magazine that has ads and money in it. A lot of people read it, see your ad and then decide whether or not they are going to use your products or services. And the fact that I have never had all of the businesses “do bad” in any single magazine this suggests that J.B. and the readers have not changed. |
J.B. Dollar Stopped Working! |
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Who is setting the temperature in Ohio?
Recently, I pondered the question "which comes first the chicken or the egg" and I promise not to dig too deep in that age old question I will entertain the question which comes first the Marketing or the Customer? I do believe to a certain extent that you cannot sell air conditioners in January, but in a business that decides to stay open during it's slow time there is someone out there buying then you need to make sure they come to you rather than to someone else. I have talked to a lot of people who say that the Cleveland market is a little "depressed", and that means that some of the people are not spending much even though the economy is doing well through out the rest of the country.
So, what can we do as small business owners to make a change in our local economy?
Back to the question which comes first the Marketing or the customers. I am not saying that the J.B. Dollar Stretcher has all the answers for you….but what are your choices to make more business happen. Well, the first one seems too popular, wait it out and hope that business starts to pick up, and I suppose that if we wait long enough it will happen. The Second choice is to make something happen. This is what it means to be the Thermostat, the thermostat sets the temperature. And most successful businessmen already know that when in business you make more money when you are proactive rather reactive. So what are your choices in being proactive in marketing for your business? Some of the choices are telemarketing, cold calling, networking, or traditional advertising. It has seemed and studies support the fact that advertising in the traditional way has become less and less effective. Even direct mail doesn’t have the appeal that it use to. More and more money is going to direct mail because it has become the best way to get your message in the hands of potential clients. There has been a lot of different types of direct mail than J.B. Dollar that hit the streets over 20- years ago. Anytime you have a good thing for a while you will have a lot of competition in your industry. We have been no different, but I have been surprised at the effective strategies other companies have put together to give you the impression that they are a better value than J.B. Dollar Magazine. There is a company out there telling businesses that all you need to increase your business is the local zip code in their area. But in 20 years most companies have determine that the best market for them is a 3-5 mile radius in their area. A free lookup that I have mentioned before (www.melissadata.com) will show that a 5 mile radius is over a 200,000 population which translates to about 100,000 addresses. When you start comparing the price to cover what most businesses need to survive as a business, to our prices, J.B. ends up being one of the least expensive ways to market in the area. Now I have been around long enough to know that the competition is always giving away good deals to get people to try them for the 1st time. And to be honest I would take advantage of those specials sometimes. The cool thing about marketing is that it is progressive. It will build upon itself and it is the one thing that can give you more if you use more. If you exercise on a regular basis (btw, I just found out that it only constitutes 8% of the population) to get more fit you can do more than one exercise. It is not only doing one thing over and over that is the best for you, you plateau out and you have to DO MORE to get more results. And that is true for marketing and advertising. |
Be the Thermostat& Not the Thermometer! |
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Excerpts from Dave Volpe’s JB Holler... |
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Dreamfinders Leadership Training and Development |
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Find Your Dream to Find Your Future! |
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News Articles |
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It came up one more time the other day about someone starting to go into their “good season” and was wondering whether or not it was the “right time” to advertise for their business. Of course I took the side that the “right time” or a “good time” to advertise is All of the Time! Now before you shoot the messenger as my customers assistant did and accuse me of being a “good salesman” trying to get more money from them…let me explain why I said what I said and how I came upon this information. I am sure I have mentioned the number of years I have been involved in advertising (20) and going to school for marketing and business. I have discovered that there are principles in advertising and marketing that you can not deny. These are not things that ad sales people make up. It is after reading text books, marketing books, going to classes and researching it through articles and now the WEB I am simply passing the information from studies and experts in the industry. How large is my market? How many homes should I reach in the community? Almost any business owner would agree that 80% of their business comes from a 2-3 mile radius around their location. There is a FREE LOOKUP on the WEB which is www.MelissaData.com you can click on zip code and type in 2 or 3 miles and it will give you the population that live in the radius of your business. Take the population and divide by two and that will give you an approximate number of homes in that radius. I have been doing this for quite a while and on average each business should be minimally be 100,000 addresses. Again don’t shoot the messenger! I didn’t write the books that said that you should advertise 2-3 miles around your business. Also, in 20 years this is what most customers have told me that is where they want to advertise! A popular sales technique for direct mail salesmen is to tell you “you only need to hit the small area around your store with 5-10,000 addresses. I am not disputing that it is important to hit those homes, but that generally won’t get you a half of mile radius around your shop. You need a very high saturation level in order to be successful with that small of mailing. In other words you have to have an exceptionally high amount of people using your service to achieve enough cash flow to keep your business profitable. Take a small restaurant for example: the national average profit for restaurants is 3.1%. That is NET profit for a business after all is said and done that you could stick in your bank account without touching. I know a lot of businesses who don’t make a NET profit, but that is another newsletter… So to make $15,500 net profit, you would need a total of $500,000 in revenue. Let’s say that your average sale is $20.00 per ticket, you would need 2100 transactions a month, which is 70 transactions a day for 30 days straight. Let’s say you only advertise to 10,000 homes; you would need a 20% return on your mailing…(continued on back) ...and 100% retention rate. And that doesn’t happen. If you mail to 100,000 then you need a 2% return and 100% retention rate. And even that is going to be hard. I know that the numbers are bigger, but it will work with smaller numbers too. The percentages don’t change.
With the web available you can pretty much go to Google and type in “top ten reasons to advertise” or “should I advertise in a recession” and in seconds (for broadband) 1000’s of sites and articles will pop up that take the same positions that I have covered in this newsletter. I am just plagiarizing the information that studies and surveys have determined over the last 100 years of business and advertising of what works the best for your business. Now it doesn’t mean that you HAVE to take the advice and apply it! But it is my job as a marketing consultant to tell you what the experts say. I recommend an approach that has been proven to work over time. I have NEVER read, seen or heard any one expert or study that says “the way to be more profitable is to advertise only in your slow times!’ If you have some information from a book, articles etc…please give it to me the next time you see me.” Or “most businesses only need to reach 5000 to 10000 homes to cover their market”. You may hear that from a salesman that is competing against us, but don’t take it at face value. Look it up on the web, ask “where does that philosophy of advertising come from?” or “what book did that come out of?” or “what study did you pull that from…?” Look the bottom line is: just get the facts and have them verify them. I used to carry a 3 ring binder with articles and studies that back up everything I tell you! Now it is on my laptop. I have a ton of information on how to set an ad budget, national statistics etc…. If you ask me to produce information and facts to back up what I tell you I can do that in a few minutes. It is just the TRUTH and I know some disagree with the idea that you NEED to ADVERTISE all YEAR long, but it is the TRUTH. You will gain a real benefit in increased sales over a period of time. Today the information is so readily available with the internet you can easily “Trust but Verify”. I am trying to give you the right information, so you can make informed decisions that will help your company grow. Most of my customers are long term and realize that there is no benefit for me to give bad advice to my customers. |
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Don’t Shoot The Messenger! |
