The BlackSheep Marketing Blog

9 Ways to Outwit and Outsell Your Competition in 2009

1. Focus On Your Profit Margins
Are you selling products that have a high profit -- that is products and services that are returning a high profit in dollars and cents -- not in percentages? There can be a big difference between profit in percentages and profit in dollars and cents. Remember, you can’t take percentages to the bank.

2. Focus On Your People
Is your staff on your bandwagon? Explain to them that you are building a championship team that’s going to survive these tough times. Are they on board? If not, you shouldn’t be employing them. You can’t afford to have one dissenter on your staff because you simply can’t afford to lose
one customer.

3. Communicate Your Differentiation, Your Story And Your Value
Do you have a differentiation or value story to tell people? If you do, they will remember you and talk about you. If you don’t … they’ll forget about you. Give your customers the “materials” they need to remember you, to talk about you and to be your “marketing ambassadors.”

4. It’s All About Connections
Be the mayor. Your business is up for election every single day of the year. What’s your platform? What do you stand for? Put your time and energy into developing relationships within your community and collecting votes. Nurture your connections. The only cost of doing this is your time.

5. Be A Personality
Get in front of people and be the face of your company. Speaking in front of 100 people is worth more (financially and in good will) than you can imagine. People would rather do business with someone they know and like.

6. Love Your Customers
Your customers are the sole reason your business exists. A lot of companies have forgotten that. So, make your customers feel important. Ask them for feedback. Once a year, invite your key customers to a special event to thank them for their business. It’s easier and far less expensive to market to your true “fans” than to find new customers.

7. Wow! Be Fascinating
Everything you do and everything the customer sees about you -- your showroom, products and services, greetings, landscaping, washroom and lobby area -- must be remarkable. If they’re mediocre, then in your customers’ eyes, you’re just another average company that’s easy to forget about.

8. Make The Internet Work For You
If you’re not found on the Internet, people won’t know about you. Invest in “search” and PPC programs. Explore the advantages of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Learn about mobile messaging programs. Make it a point to maintain visibility on the Internet and engage in two-way conversations with your customers.

9. Develop A Written Sales-Building Plan
•    Ideas are a dime a dozen and don’t mean anything if they remain stored in your head. Write down what you want to achieve (your vision), your deadline for achieving it and what it’s going to take to get you there.

•    From this, develop a six-month sales-building plan. Get feedback from your staff so they “buy into” the program. And finally, get someone to hold you accountable for getting the plan done.

•    Having a written plan and having someone to make sure you implement the plan will make you unstoppable.

If you follow these guidelines, 2009 will be just fine.

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Banana Republic and LinkedIn joined together

Banana Republic and LinkedIn joined together this month and created a sweepstakes that offers anyone who updates their LinkedIn profile the chance to win 1 of 25 $1,000 Banana Republic Wardrobes. Any update to your profile spurs a pop up of the promotion that also includes a 25% off coupon to print out and take to the retail stores. Side banner ads on your profile page mirror the offer.

It’s a match that helps LinkedIn keep members using the application, which only enhances the power of its brand, the network. For Banana Republic, it’s an unprecedented way to reach 30 million professionals using LinkedIn.

It's a great direct marketing idea and the information both brands are achieving in terms of audience demographics could be historical. But for now, the question is, how many of these types of promotional ads will users be willing to accept. 

Texting Surpasses Cell Phone Calling

Does This Surprise You?

This shouldn’t surprise you if you have teens in your household, but to make it official, the number of text messages received or sent via cell phones has now surpassed the number of calls made. More people are using their cell phones for text messaging.

A Nielson Survey reports that during the second quarter of 2008, a typical U.S. mobile subscriber placed or received 204 phone calls each month. In comparison, the average mobile customer sent or received 357 text messages per month — a 450% increase in the number of text messages circulated monthly during the same period in 2006.

If this is your target market, we suggest that if you are currently collecting email addresses, you may also want to be collecting cell phone numbers and starting a “Text VIP Club” for your business. 

This and other stories in this month's BlackSheep Marketing LeaderSheep Newsletter. Click here to signup.

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Six Ways to Wow Your Business

Discounting your product is the penalty you pay for being unremarkable, thus being unremarkable could be hurting your company’s bottom line. Here are 6 ways to wow your business, ensuring your customers will talk about and remember you:

1. Take the plain old vanilla and turn it into a Ben & Jerry's flavor.
2. Take what's straight and even and see what it looks like slanted and twisted. Take what's centered and look at it off-center.
3. Break conventional wisdom and think about "what if."
4. Do the opposite, or do better than what the competition is doing
5. Break the rules and dream about how to make your company better and more fun for your customers. Then just do it.
6. Be remarkable. Give your customers a snippet, a special story about your business or your product - something that they can remark about to their friends.

This and other stories in our recent Thought LeaderSheep newsletter. Sign up today

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Where’s Your Remarkable WOW?

Finding what makes your business remarkable and a way to WOW your customers can be a challenging task. In many cases, the answer is hiding right in front of you. For others, discovering the answer comes in re-defining your company’s culture.

We are four months away from the critical holiday shopping season. Four months away to step your business up a notch and move ahead of your competitors by providing a higher than expected level of service. Do you know where your remarkable WOW is? Call us. We can help you find it … faster than ever.

This and other stories in our recent Thought LeaderSheep newsletter. Sign up today

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Critical Need Responsiveness

Critical need. It's one of those things we learned from our high tech clients. It seems like everything in high tech marketing is a critical need.

By convincing clients to create communications plans, we've been able to alleviate many fire drills. However, on occasion, there are those times when an unforeseen opportunity arises that demands a quick response.

Case in point: A media rep approached us with a last minute, one space left, reduced cost opportunity that made it a no brainer to commit. Unfortunately, the pub needed new art (5x7 postcard) by noon the next day. Did I mention it's 5:30pm the day before?

Our project system and an accessible client made the process efficient, effective and on time. Approved creative arrived with 21 minutes to spare. Another tasty example of the Total Client Experience.

Viral Vanity

Here's a tasty little viral video widget (or Vidget) that will get you laughing.

From a viral marketing standpoint,
this example brings two things we love together:
Vanity and Video.

"Yes, I'm running for president . . . appreciate your vote.
Now, here is an industrial love song."

Click here to see vidget

Another Reason to Join LinkedIn

Back on 7/30/08, we wrote about LinkedIn and its recent surge as a great business tool. After getting LinkedIn fever, I spent about an hour a day for a week or so, building my profile, importing my address book, sending out 177 invitations to connect with colleagues, clients, vendors, family, and friends.

And here's two more reasons to jump on the bandwagon: First, it drove 8.9% of our website traffic in July. We're able to track referring sources to our website and LinkedIn referrals grew 378% from June to July. It's a major eyeball channel for awareness of our company overall and did bring in two inquiries so far.

Secondly, it turned into a effective networking tool to begin our recruitment search for a new account executive. With LinkedIn, plus a database of unsolicited resumes we've collected, we were able to eliminate any need to pay for a recruitment ad or headhunter.

Join the Flock

BlackSheep Marketing has a position available for a client-ready AE type (2-4yrs experience)

Manager of Agency Services
Bring a polished, client-ready demeanor to this exciting opportunity. Successful candidate will work existing and new client projects through the Agency. Experience the thrill of working on a wide array of marketing & advertising programs.

You must have client and project management experience in a busy deadline-driven environment (ad agency experience a plus). You’ll get your hands in everything from media planning to reporting the success of client programs, assist and support new business development, get in on the creative action, a chance to make a direct impact on our growth, and much more.

Send resume to: Info@BlackSheepMarketing.com
Hurry, much like everything here, this will go fast.

Transition to Transit Advertising

With sky-high gas prices, more and more commuters are climbing aboard public transportation across the country as a cost-saving alternative to driving.

A national opinion poll by a market research firm called GfK surveyed 2,000 adults who own cars and found that 8 percent of motorists said they would begin to use public transportation once gas hit $2.50 a gallon, which it has already well surpassed. That figure increased to 16 percent at $3 a gallon, 26 percent at $3.50, 40 percent at $4 and 59 percent once the price of a gallon of gas exceeds $5.

What kind of numbers are we talking about? For example, Friday, June 20, was the third-busiest day in the 32-year history of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area Transit Authority with more than 850,000 people riding the rails. Our recommendation is to consider transit advertising as part of your media mix

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