Life is Like a BAG of Cookies!!!

Forrest Gump's Mama might have had it right. Life is like a bag of cookies. Okay, well she actually said it was like a box of chocolates but given she ain't here and it's MY BLOG, life is now like a bag of cookies. Let me explain.

Over the course of the past few entries we have explored putting the relationship in relationship marketing. Marc Schwartz did a wonderful job on his guest BLOG entry this past week. Many good things to think about and hopefully stimulated some ideas as to how you can go about leveraging the power of relationship marketing for your business.

When I owned my office equipment company, we found a unique and fantastic way to deliver our message and to build relationships with our clients and prospects. You guessed it....COOKIES!!! Hot, fresh baked, personally delivered cookies! Even the most difficult gate keeper or hardened office manager could not resist the very personal, the very unusual and unexpected gift of a bag of cookies. They simply turned to goo when we showed up holding that bag.

Though I know since then many companies in Austin have copied us, I know that our approach was unique and still is! How? We put personal heart into it. We showed a level of detail and design with each delivery. We never used the same color bag more than twice. We always had season appropriate tissue paper and ribbon and most of all, we did the cookie delivery at the most unexpected and unscripted times. We didn't wait for someone's birthday or the next holiday, we did it because it was Monday at 2PM or Thursday at 10AM. We did it when we felt like it but not too often to kill the allure. It was the unpredictability of our delivery which added to the excitement and anticipation.

I found myself getting into doors of companies that had previously been locked for me. A CFO who had received a personally delivered bag of warm home baked (well office baked) cookies and a personal hand written note was all the more open to take my call the next day when I called to inquire about an appointment. It was nothing short of amazing! Prospects loved us, clients loved us and most importantly the entire staff of the organizations loved us. I wasn't the copier guy, I was the cookie guy!

Life is like a bag of cookies, you simply have no idea whose hand your double chocolate macadamia nut special might land it. And like a bad line from a B rated movie, it always gets asked, "So who brought the cookies?"

"Well, Steve Harper did."

BITE

"Hmmm...good cookie (cookie monster voice). Who's Steve Harper?"

"You know the guy who has been calling on us for three years. He sells XYZ," the employee offers.

"Hmmm," as the CFO grabs another one or two cookies, "we should really set something up with him next time he calls."

BINGO!!!!

Relationship marketing comes in a variety of flavors. Cookies, newsletters, brochures, BLOGS, you name it, you got it. Whatever it takes to get your name in front of the right people who make the right decisions (of support those who do) boils down to relationship marketing. It may sound cheesy but I turned an investment of $ 55/mo in cookie dough into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business. Would I have gotten it doing the traditional BS way of going about getting business? Maybe eventually....maybe not. LIKELY NOT!

Whether you use cookies, newsletters, or whatever you use, be creative, be personal and always, always be sincere. Relationship marketing takes work but it’s the companies and individuals that put the effort into it that stand head and shoulders above the rest.

Putting the RELATIONSHIP in Relationship Marketing Part 2

I am proud to have Marc Schwartz participate this week as our Guest Blogger. Marc, as many of you know, was the editor of my book and has been a client and good friend for the past several years. He is a master at RELATIONSHIP MARKETING and I felt it would be great to have share his thoughts on this important topic.

Marc is the owner of Think Write Communications and he can be reached at marc@think-write.net

A couple of years ago, I read Al Ries’s book, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Skimming it again the other day, one sentence in particular jumped out at me: “To be effective, advertising doesn’t need creativity. It needs credibility.”

The premise of the book is that advertising, through both overuse and misuse, has steadily declined in effectiveness over the years. It’s become background noise, electronic wallpaper, 4-color clutter. Bombarded by hundreds (perhaps thousands) of advertising messages each day, we instinctively, intuitively tune most of them out.

As a result, the advertising industry has redoubled its efforts to catch and hold our attention — even for 30 seconds! Ads are bigger, bolder, louder, more outlandish — and more creative — than ever before.

And that’s part of the problem. In the rush to make ads memorable, we’ve sacrificed real sales effectiveness, which depends on credibility and clarity. How many times do you remember a commercial — but not the product it’s supposed to be selling? How often do you doubt the truth of the claims you hear? If you’re like me, it’s more often than not.

Ries says the better alternative is PR, which inherently carries more weight and believability. Think about it this way — if you were offered the choice of a full-page ad in Newsweek or a full-page article written about your company, which would you choose? I’ve asked that question to a lot of people, and I have yet to find someone who takes the ad.

As consumers, we crave credibility. It’s trite but true — we want to do business with people we like and trust. As business owners, therefore, it’s incumbent on us to find ways to create that trust and likeability. And the Yellow Pages isn’t the answer.

Generating PR isn’t always easy for small and mid-sized businesses. There’s only so much air time or column inches to go around, and reporters are paid to find stories, not give handouts to companies desperate for exposure on the cheap. Those bland, stilted, company-centric press releases you’ve been churning out? Junk ‘em. If you want something that catches the eye of the press, create stories designed to appeal to their audience. Focus on timely issues, concerns, events, opportunities or trends. Find a credible way to deliver value to their readers, viewers or listeners, and if the press doesn’t beat a path to your door, they’ll at least return your calls.

Most companies tend to favor advertising to PR not because they doubt the latter’s effectiveness, but because the former is so much more controllable. Given the right resources, we can not only choose the form, message and media, but also when and where our target market will see it. Want a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times? No problem. How about a Super Bowl ad? All you need is a few million dollars in your corporate checking account.

That’s the theory, anyway. The reality is somewhat different. Without mega-bucks to throw at advertising, our control slips away. We settle for what we can afford rather than what we really want, and we rationalize away the difference. Sure, a weekly full-page newspaper ad would be optimal, but a quarter-page ad once a month is almost as good, right? Right?

And just like that, we’re left dependent on a marketing mechanism that is neither particularly credible nor controllable.

OK, wise guy, you’re probably thinking, what do we do now? What’s needed is a hybrid strategy. Don’t abandon your advertising — but pick your spots carefully. Don’t give up on generating positive PR — but don’t depend on it occurring on your schedule, either.

There are a few tools that offer some the best of both worlds. Newsletters can be particularly effective in building credibility and brand image within a defined target market. You control the look, content and frequency (like advertising), but because there’s no overt sales pitch, it is also inherently more credible (like PR).

Some other good bang-for-your-buck tools to consider: special reports, articles or columns, dynamic web content, and books. Each can help establish you as a subject matter expert, reinforce relationships with current clients, and forge connections with prospects — or even the media.

Four key principles to keep in mind: credibility, consistency, frequency and value. More specifically: make every marketing piece credible; be consistent in tone, look and theme; use these tools regularly, on a set schedule; and deliver value with every communication.

Simple rules — and effective, if you apply them conscientiously.