Tom Feltenstein

You could open a marketing book, pick any page, pick a tactic, and give it a try. However, that’s not making marketing a way of life and it won’t get you to use promotional tactics in the most effective manner.

There are a number of steps you should go through, even if you think you already know what you’re doing to ensure success each and every time. In doing so, you may be surprised by what you will learn about your business, the people you’ve hired to work for you, and your role and perception in the community.

1. Determine your objectives. Is your goal to stimulate trial purchases by new customers or to stimulate more frequent purchases by current customers? Are you aiming to increase your average transaction, enhance your image, boost employee productivity or morale, stimulate community awareness, or a combination of these? These are all important goals, but you need to determine which one you want to achieve first, second, and so on… and which are most easily and effectively executed.

2. Be specific. If your objective is to get new customers to try you out, what is a reasonable goal–-an increase in new customers of 5 percent, 10 percent, or 15 percent? Would it be reasonable to shoot for an increase in customer frequency from three purchases a month to four? If your objective is to increase your average sale, what is reasonable increase based on your current pricing? If your objective is employee morale, how much can you reduce unwanted employee turnover by running this promotion?

3. Be realistic in your goals. Success is rarely achieved in one fell swoop. Remember, this is a way of life. Each incremental improvement builds on the last. If you get too ambitious, you and your staff will quickly become frustrated and disappointed, and you will be less enthusiastic next time. Set your goals high enough to make a difference and low enough to have the best chance of success.

4. Creating your plan. Once you’ve established your objectives and selected some tactics, you must decide how to make those tactics successful. What can you afford, and how can you maximize your results?

Consider such aspects as timing; frequency; capitalizing on local events; season population variation; competitive challenges that call for extra effort and provide a reward; variable costs of materials, labor, and real estate; and other factors that are unique to your situation.

Create a carefully thought-out plan for each promotion, and make sure that each promotion is slotted into its proper place in your long-term objectives.

5. Zero in on your target. What type of customer does your business attract–-upscale, blue-collar, families, singles, ethnic groups? Ideally, the group or groups that are predominant in your neighborhood (within a 10 minute drive from your front door) should be most attracted to your concept. Once you’ve zeroed in on your target audience, review your tactical options and pick those that would most appeal to that audience and would be the most appropriate.

6. Calculate your payout. Almost every promotional tactic that is intended to increase sales should have a measurable result and produce a profit. You should know how many new customers you need in order to cover the costs of your promotion. How many of those new customers must you convert to regular customers to consider the promotion a success? If you do your homework ahead of time, you’ll be able to tell how realistic your objectives are and what, if any, adjustments are necessary for next time.

Improving employee morale or improving the image of your business is more difficult, but not impossible to measure. Ask yourself or your bookkeeper or accountant, “What does it cost us to hire and train a new employee?” or “How much traffic will an improved image generate?” In most cases, you can find a way to track the results of a promotion.

Remember, if you can measure it, you can manage it. Or, as Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else!”

7. Check the calendar. Be aware of special holidays or events that could help or hurt your promotion. In addition, give yourself time… you shouldn’t be mailing announcements today for a promotion that starts tomorrow. You don’t need New Year’s noisemakers delivered in January. Leave extra time to make sure that each element of your promotion is in place in time. Leave time for creating, producing, and implementing each element. Make a promotion calendar or schedule showing each phase, and pad the time a little to allow for the inevitable changes and delays that will occur.

8. Refine you products and services. Be sure that the service or product you offer is right for your target customers–-that you’re offering the right varieties, with the most customer appeal, the right pricing, and the right presentation. Keep track of what is most popular, what’s producing the most sales, and what’s producing the most sales, and what’s producing the larges profit margin.

Compare what you know with what you competitors are offering. Survey your customers by questionnaire or on-on-one conversations. Take the temperature of your marketing, and be a good listener by leaving your ego and your preconceived ideas out of it.

9. Polish the brass. Go a step beyond your regular maintenance procedures. Make sure that your selling, operating, and customer areas are attractive; that your physical space is clean and tidy; that any background music appeals to your audience; that unpleasant sounds or odors are neutralized; that fading paint, broken door handles, and any other flaws are corrected. It all sells, even sparkling bathrooms. You may not see the grimy windows or the litter because you pass them every day and they’ve become invisible, but your customers will.

10. Check the logistics. You can execute your tactics with minimum difficulty by making sure that you have the technical know-how, the space, and the resources to handle the promotion without disrupting customer service or staff efficiency. Plenty of otherwise successful promotions have been ruined by insufficient or poorly trained staff, poor product quality, or equipment failure.

11 Cheerlead. Hold a team meeting of all your employees and explain the objectives, the rationale, the implementation and the fun of your upcoming promotion. Let employees know what is expected of them, what is in it for them personally, and how much you case about their job satisfaction and feedback. They are your customers too, and you should work just as hard to earn their loyalty. It’s the right thing to do, and it pays!

12. Plan your analysis. Successful promotional activity is a learning process. You take lessons away from each effort, and you build on them. Setting specific objectives allows you to measure the success of your promotion. For example, before your promotion even begins, you might prepare brief customer and employee questionnaires that you can use afterward to solicit reactions. Review every aspect of your promotion, and gather the information you need to make your next promotion even more effective.

Great promotions do not occur by luck or happenstance. They are well planned, well executed, measured and improved upon for the future. By taking these steps, you’ll dramatically increase the odds that the time, effort, and money you put into your promotions will payoff for you and your bottom line.

Your marketing messages are conveyed one-to-one, first to your employees, then from your employees to your customers, and finally from your customers to their families, friends, neighbors and co-workers. Face-time marketing is intimate and personal, the opposite of slick mass media advertising.

You start face-time marketing by hiring, training, motivating, and then leading your employees to go beyond the idea of service and embrace your own belief in hospitality. Service can be mechanical. It’s putting the right size tire on your car, installing carpet right-side up, or writing your airline ticket to the correct destination. It’s essential, but it’s not the same as hospitality.

Service is something you can teach and train. Hospitality, however, comes from the heart. It’s the personal gift of caring. It’s me taking care of you because you’re you, not because you’re one of 75 people coming through my door this afternoon. You don’t serve 75 people. You serve one person at a time, 75 times.

Whatever your business, you are in the business of creating customers. You do that by making them feel important, by showing them you care.

But before a single person crosses your threshold or phones or emails you to make a purchase, you first customers are your employees. Too many businesses ignore this essential element of success, even the big ones that should know better.

How do you hire, train, motivate, and retain people who care about other people? It’s a way of life, like the rest of marketing. If a smile is the way you greet your customers, it’s the way you should greet your employees. If excitement is the goal of promotion aimed at generating new customers, excitement is what you should offer your employees. Everything you do for your customers to gain their loyalty, you should do for your staff.

Businesses complain that when it comes to exceptional employees, we have a recruiting problem in America, but they’re dead wrong about that. What we have is a retention problem because our hiring processes and decisions are ineffective, and then we don’t take care of the people we employ.

Red Auerbach, the legendary coach of the Boston Celtics basketball team, once said, “If you hire the wrong people all the fancy management tactics in the world won’t help you out.” You should develop a profile of the person you want to be a member of your staff. If you do that, the rest is relatively easy. Low-cost employees are not cheap if they quit in three months. And the person you have to fire is the most expensive of all.

Hire people who are sunshine, and keep them as long as possible. Some people radiate warmth. You see it in their smile, hear it in their voice, and sense it in the way they move. They’re gifted in the art of relating.

You can’t train people to be sunshine. You may find someone who seems awesome in every other respect, but doesn’t smile. You may think to yourself, “I can teach her to smile.” You’re wrong. You must determine up front exactly what the qualities of the people you want are. You want people who are experienced, people who already have a job and are good at it. This is marketing at its most basic. AND… you want people who truly like people… who are naturally hospitable and who make you and your customers glad that they are there to serve you.

Not to sound like Forrest Gump, but your business is just like a box of chocolates.

What you’re selling, in most cases, is a commodity — like chocolate or sugar (even if what you provide is a service). But a box of chocolates is presented as much more than simply the basic ingredients. They come in a specially-designed box, often covered in shiny paper, wrapped with a bow, and lined inside with tissue. And the intricately shaped candies are neatly arranged in their own cubbyholes in fluted wax paper cups, all in a shiny plastic tray. Opening it is an experience; it feels special, and there are delightful surprises once you’ve gone through the ritual. You should think of your business the same way.

The elements that go into making your business a memorable or special experience — one that leaves your customers wanting more — include you, your staff, your physical location, your delivery vehicles, your promotional pieces, how you answer your phone, how you greet people who come into your business, how you treat people who are unhappy with you, and the overall mood you create.

Look at your business as a total package — from the curb or parking lot, to your interior space, to your restrooms… it all matters! Think of it as a design and traffic flow, right down to the look of your promotional pieces, and the way your people dress and interact with each other and your customers. By working to make your business be “the whole package,” you’ll start to pay attention to details that are so easy to overlook, but that make an important difference in terms of how your customers see you and what they say about you.