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Plan Your Promotions 01

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So you want to run a promotion, huh?  Maybe an appearance, or an ad. Maybe you want to put on a mini-tradeshow, or hire a band to play outside your store.

Before you just hand off a credit card or write a check to make things happen, there are a number of things you should do before you let anyone else know that you want something to go down.

Objective:

What is your objective?  What is it that you want to have happen once the promotion or event actually happens?  Maybe you want to increase your email list by 547 names. Or maybe you want to attract 1,322 new people into your store.  I know – you’re trying to increase same-store purchasing volume by 5.3% this March as opposed to last March.

What’s with the weird numbers?  No, I’m not trying to be funny – or a jerk.  You need to be very specific about your objective.  You need to quantify it so that you can measure the results.  You should move away from thinking about adding “a lot” of new customers, or “a few more” sales this month.  “Several thousand dollars more” has no real way to be measured – how many exactly is “several?”

Cost:

What will it cost you to run this promotion or ad?  I didn’t say “price” – that’s the dollars you’ll shell out to get things rolling.  I said cost. Will you need to move employees from one task to another? Receiving attention always gets people to ask questions.  Is your customer service staff ready to field questions specific to the promotion? Will you need to keep people working longer, so they can pack more boxes, so that you can send out three shipments per day?  Will you need to be away from home longer, and miss your kids’ little league game and dance recital? All of these are costs, and you need to know that they exist, and you’re gonna have to pay them.

Plan:

What, exactly, is your plan for this promotion?  You do have one, right?  What is the promotion is going to entail, who is responsible for what?  What steps need to be carried out, and by whom? What needs to be where, and when?  What are the dates & times for each milestone? What does the cleanup procedure look like?  Do you even need a cleanup procedure?  All of this, and more, should be covered by your plan.

Statistics:

During the time that your promotional event is going on, what are you measuring?  How are you measuring? Who or what is doing the measuring? Where and how are you recording the results?  Who’s responsible for making sure all the data is being recorded? Can they fix it when – and not if – things screw up?

Results:

Data is all the information you’ve collected.  Statistics is how data set #2 – all the info you’ve just generated – compares to data set #1 – all the info you already had.  Now it’s up to you – and maybe someone else – to look at the data, look at the stats generated, and decide the results. Well, I suppose the results are what they are.  What I mean is, you’re going to be deciding if the results are good, bad, or indifferent. Maybe you measured something that isn’t worth measuring. Maybe you forgot to measure something that’s very important.  Whether your results are “good” or “bad” is subjective. How did the results measure up to the goals you wanted to hit?

Rinse & Repeat:

So, once you run your ad or event, you’ll need to decide – first of all – if you’re going to repeat this promotion.  If so, when? If not, what will you do instead, and when? If you keep this event, what will you do differently? Who will you have covering all the important action points during the event?  Who will be responsible for what during the next go-’round?

 

I know this sounds like an awful lot of questions.  It’s not that bad, really. Just taking 10 minutes to sit down and write out a simple plan will cover most of them, and put you a lot farther ahead than most folks.  I’m going to let you in on a secret – most people who run a promotion for their business, or a specific product or service, do it by the seat of their pants.

Today’s action item, which will put you ahead of at least 75% of the competition, is to build a one-page plan for your next promotional event or advertisement.  To get ahead of 99% of the competition, you have to actually use that plan!

Why You Need Lots Of Landing Pages

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Whenever you’re promoting something, and you want the person to go online to a web page, you need a custom landing page.  Whether it’s an actual advertisement, or a link from someone else’s site, or even a media release you put out, each one of those should have it’s own, distinct landing page.

A landing page is where you send folks who respond to a notice you’ve put out into the world.  You want to engage these folks in a specific manner, and get them to perform a definite action, like join an email list or purchase a product.

So yes, you may technically have a three page website, but behind the scenes you may have over a dozen different landing pages, depending on where your incoming links are, the specific markets you’re targeting, the reasons they may have in responding to your call to action, and the conversations already going on in their heads.

Let’s say you sell dog collars.  There are tons of reasons people might look for a dog collar.  Maybe they want their small dog to be safe, maybe they want their large dog to have a stylish collar.  Maybe they’re looking for a harness for their support animal. One person wants a collar that’s leather-free, while another one only wants natural materials.  What you want is a specific page for each of these folks, one that addresses their concerns and ONLY their concerns.

As I’ve mentioned in previous ‘casts, there are two ways to address your prospects.  You either offer to remove a pain point, or to provide a pleasure point. Those are two very different things.  For each of the “dog collar” examples above, you could either remove a pain point, or provide a pleasure point. Let’s say you have 6 different solutions to a given problem or situation.  You can present each of those solutions in two different ways. Suddenly you need twelve different landing pages.

I have a nonprofit client, looking for donations.  That’s the very basic info. They’re a cat rescue operation (point #1), willing to take small donations (point #2), or large donations (point #3).  This fall, we’re going to try to find people willing to make a large donation to their nonprofit.

I have to appeal to these prospects by either providing a pleasure point, or removing a pain point.  What I need to do is create A & B versions of a landing page for each of the points mentioned. So at the very least, I need six different pages: one set that addresses people who have an interest in rescue cats (point #1), one that addresses people who want to make a small donation to help care for rescue cats (point #2), and one for people able to make a large donation – for my purposes, that’s any amount of $5,000 and above.  That’s point #3.

Let’s say I’m creating pay per click search engine ads to capture the eyeballs of people able to make a large donation, which is exactly what we’re planning for this fall.  First, there are two groups of people – those who love cats, and those who don’t necessarily. Second, we have the reasons they want to make a donation. Some people are in it for the recognition.  Some people are in it for the effect their money will have. Others are simply looking for a tax writeoff. Who makes large donations? Obviously, individuals. But also, corporations and foundations.

So I need to create an ad for each of those specific interests, and then I need to create a different landing page for each of those ads.  The focus of one landing page might be, “We’ll publish your name in our newsletter, on our website, and send your name and photo out in media releases.”  The focus of another landing page might be, “Your donation is tax deductible and will reduce your tax burden for the current fiscal year.” I could address the concerns of people who love cats in two different ways: “Your contribution will keep the cats under our care healthy until we can find a family to adopt them,” or “Your contribution will help remove unwanted cats from the streets.”

It sounds like a pain in the rear, I know.  But that’s what marketing is: you’re looking to have the right conversation with a specific person.  If creating the right links, and sending individuals to specific landing pages accomplishes your goal (like building your email list or making a sale), then it’s worth it.

Once you start building these landing pages, you need a good statistics program on your website to sort out how many visits you’re getting to each of these pages.  You should be able to tell where these visits are coming from because you should never send visitors to a specific page from more than one source. If you run the same ads on both Google and Bing, make a different copy of that landing page for each source.  You might name one “Large dog collar safety Google” and the other one “Large dog collar safety Bing.”

Also, you don’t want to list any of these landing pages on your navigation system for the site.  You don’t want people stumbling on them from a general search. If someone finds one of your specific landing pages from a link on a news page, and then forwards that link to a friend, that’s fine.  Essentially they’re both coming from the same place.

What it boils down to is: you need a LOT of different landing pages.

Today’s action items:

  1. Start writing the marketing copy for two different versions of a landing page.  One of these pages should supply a pleasure point for your customers, and one should remove a pain point.
  2. Build the two different landing pages, or have your webmaster build them.
  3. Create copy that offers the pleasure point, and that offers the pain relief.  Put this copy in ads, media releases or other marketing materials that you disseminate. The link in the “pleasure” release should point to the “pleasure” landing page, while the link in the “pain” release should point to the “pain” landing page.  And of course, action item
  4. Start recording and measuring the results.