Census Bureau shows us all how to market with education

Randy Aimone, my Duct Tape Marketing coach, talks quite a bit about effective advertising. After all, businesses can easily break the bank getting the word out about their services, and it's nice to be able to get an idea of how much return an advertising investment will yield. In particular, Professor Aimone (yes, he is indeed a college professor) warns how interruption advertising just doesn't have the bang for the buck that it used to carry.

Interruption advertising is something you see all the time, whether or not you know it by that name:

• Television commercials (which use technology to actually louder even if they're not legally louder than the program)
  
• Newspaper stories that are continued after two pages of furniture store sales (honestly, do furniture stores just hang a "going out of business" sign outside on opening day?)
• Radio spots that make you cringe (auto dealerships, anyone?)

Today I heard about a brilliant piece of marketing that is sure to be effective because it's not an interruption - and surprisingly, it comes from an organization that isn't exactly known for innovation: the US Government.

The Census Bureau partnered with Telemundo, a large Spanish-language television network, to reach out to this underserved demographic. A character in one of the network's most popular soap operas will be getting a job as a census worker, and spend several episodes explaining how and why people should participate. Both partners have something to gain: the Census Bureau hopes to alleviate fears that illegal aliens will be reported if they are counted (it's not part of their mandate, so they won't be), which will probably help Telemundo's ratings, since census data are used by Nielsen to place those oh-so-powerful boxes in homes (and the more Spanish-speaking homes have Nielsen boxes, the more Telemundo can charge for interruption advertising on its programs).

The idea is innovative, unobtrusive, and will probably be very effective for both partners. Kudos to the person who pitched the idea, and double-kudos to the people that didn't reject it out-of-hand because "that's not the way we do things."

The High Cost of Low Price

Author Kirk White once told me that Jack Canfield, of Chicken Soup for the Soul
fame, has an interesting way of setting prices for speaking engagements: ask for the highest number you can without laughing. Canfield has mastered the idea that competing on price is nearly impossible if you're not WalMart, something that I've always understood intellectually but I've struggled with emotionally.

You want me to charge HOW much?
My Duct Tape Marketing Coach is quick to tell me why I should never overspend on advertising, but when he saw my list of services he was quick to tell me that my hourly writing rate was much too low. There are a lot of costs that have to be factored in to the rates you charge.

• Overhead expenses, like the ink cartridges, the internet access, top-notch business cards, and the like.
• The time spent on activities like marketing, meeting with clients, and other critical functions.
• Anything that contributes to top-notch customer service, like overnight deliveries, a solid guarantee, and staying up all night to finish a project that the client really needs done quickly.

It's pretty easy for a business owner, particularly one who used to do the same kind of work for somebody else, to underestimate how much to charge by failing to consider what his services really cost to provide.

The economics and psychology of price
On top of the business considerations, pricing services and products too low can impact my business in other ways. For one, if I pick a price-point that is too far below what others in my industry are charging, potential clients may think I don't have the experience to do the job right, and look for more competent help elsewhere. Drop it even lower and I find myself with rates just a bit higher than writers in the Phillipines are charging. I can't compete with someone who can live on four dollars an hour, at least not on price. My target clients don't go to Elance to find writers, because they know that you get what you pay for.

Overcoming my own objections
I know all of this, but the knee-jerk reaction to setting an appropriate price is, "Good gods, nobody will ever hire me!" Luckily, I had a near-disaster of my own that helped me overcome that objection.

In my Practical Marketing Program we've learned that providing educational content is absolutely necessary these days - people want to know what you know before they'll give you a try. So, I took a long, hard look at my Professional Wordsmith blog, which has been functioning as my website. It has served me well, but I needed something with more pizzazz, and elected to build a Wordpress site because it's powerful, customizable, and easy to learn.

I picked a company from the list of recommended hosting providers with Wordpress built in and arranged for my domain name to be transferred. As soon as I got access I realized my mistake: with no way to compare them, I had gone with the cheapest company, and it showed. Wordpress may be easy, but trying to navigate GoDaddy's interface is anything but! I immediately asked to cancel the transaction and reverse the domain transfer, but ICANN, the organization overseeing such things, has rules preventing transfers more often than every sixty days.

As I puzzled this all out, my site and my email service tanked, and I was in a near-panic when I discovered I had a solution right under my nose: I knew that Kathode Ray Media, a Hudson Valley marketing firm, is excellent at web design, but I didn't realize they also provided hosting services. Arielle Doerle took a look at my situation and quickly hashed out a solution: keep my domain registered through GoDaddy, but transfer the hosting to Kathode Ray. I didn't know there was a difference, and there wasn't a person at the other end of a phone to lay it out the way Arielle did. She got my hosting resolved so that my email was up and running again within the hour, and within a week I'll have a site with all the flexibility of Wordpress but without the headaches of a distant stranger hosting my site.

So what did I learn? Without going on a serious tangent, a few things:

1. Shop local, you ninny!
2. Don't assume the companies you already work with don't provide a service you need. Ask, you ninny!
3. Be suspicious of low prices! I just can't get the level of support I need from a discounter like GoDaddy. Knowing that my domain is safe, my email is reliable, and my site is customizable by me is valuable to me. Being able to pick up the phone and get a problem I don't even understand fixed in under an hour is invaluable to me. You just can't put a price on value.

For me, the value I provide is in listening to my clients, and taking the time to make sure my words say what they mean. I guarantee work that's free of the grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors which are common in the work of even the most fluent writers of English as a second language. I revise when I miss the mark, and I listen to the feedback I get as carefully as I do during the initial interview for the project.

That's value to someone looking for writing. After seeing how valuable choosing the best was for me and my website, I am now ready to price my services fairly for the value I provide.

Marketing Improves with a Tighter Focus

Probably the most challenging - and most important - step towards successfully marketing a business is figuring out the answer out how to respond to those four little words:

Who am I marketing to?

Yes, I know that this question has five words, not four . . . but if you think marketing is a small word, then either you're a native speaker of German (or another language with words as long as javelins), or you meant it metaphorically and have no clue just how big marketing is to your
business.

The four little words I mean are the ones that shore up marketing with the personal responsibility to take action and not just assume that you can do business with anyone that has money.

• Who indeed? It's a narrow, clearly-defined target market that ensures we don't piddle away our time and resources on people that just don't want or need what we're offering. I know that my who is business owners, small business owners even, but I need to fine-tune it more if I want to market meaningfully.
• am is the action word. This means you've got to remember that marketing is a verb and doesn't happen by itself. Of course, running a display ad with my logo and a phone number is about as verb-like as my rock garden is avalanche-like . . . it may be active, but just barely. (I think this is a perfectly legitimate reason to slip my new logo into this post.)
• I is the whole personal responsibility thing. Not only do I have to work on my marketing before it can do me any good, I've got to hold myself accountable for doing so. I don't know if that's tougher for a one-man show or a multinational oligopoly, but if you don't know who is doing what about the marketing, and when they expect to have it done, then it's just never going to happen.
• to brings it right back to the customer, like it should. My training in my rather unsuccessful journey to the world of multilevel marketing taught me that I should be talking to anyone that has a pulse, because the only people that don't use this service are just too stupid to breathe. My marketing coach Randy would definitely have told me that refining my aiming mechanism is worth the effort, because I would have spent less time in unproductive conversations (and no doubt would still be speaking to a few of my former friends and coworkers).

So I'm finding this bit of the marketing journey to be more than a bit challenging, and I'm looking to jump ahead into the fun parts. I won't get away with that, so instead I'm giving some further thought as to the demographics and psychographics of my market - what they look like, and what they want.

Narrowing a market is counterintuitive but logical. If I spend my time learning how to reach a small number of businesses that really need to hire a blogger, I'm going to get a better return because I'm talking to people that already value one of my services. And narrowing isn't irreversible - I can always relax my definition of the client just a bit if I tightened the statistical screws too much, or just add another target market entirely.

Want to know what your clients value? Ask them!

My client interviews have given me some interesting insights into the psychographics of my ideal market, and how closely they fit my business model.

Of course, if I keep writing like that I'm just going to make big problems out of little ones - but I'm getting ahead of myself. The questions that I asked each of my best clients were designed to help me know my ideal market, and the answers I got fell into three general categories:

1. Strengths that my clients value;
2. Value I didn't realize I provide; and
3. Shortcomings that aren't really as bad as I had feared.

For me, the most valuable information fell into the third category. There's no doubt in my mind that my clients were candid with me about where I fall short, and areas that give me the greatest anxiety didn't come up. It doesn't mean that I don't really fall short in those areas, but now I know that they are weaknesses that don't hurt my brand.

I also found out that, even though I'm good at finding the right voice to reach my client's target audience, that occasionally I assume that the target audience is a bit more knowledgeable about the subject than it really is. Using "psychographics" in the opening line of a post targeting novice marketers and small business owners may not draw in the readers I'm looking for.

The creative insights inspired by these interviews have been surprising and exciting. Armed with the knowledge that my descriptive language is powerful and evocative, I've been coming up with ways to tie visuals into how I describe my writing. If a picture is worth a thousand words, doesn't that mean that words are currency? How much is your business worth? Is The Professional Wordsmith worth a thousand pictures? I'm not sure where this will take me, but I'm due to brainstorm about it with a bunch of creative business owners and my Duct Tape Marketing Coach in a couple of days, and I'm really looking forward to it!

My Story: Big Ideas, Little Plans

I've read plenty of business books over the years, I've helped clients write business plans, and I've done enough blogging for businesses that I have picked up some essential marketing tidbits.  However, when I found myself forging ahead with my writing career and leaving the security of employment behind, I knew that I was going to have to get serious about marketing in order to make The Professional Wordsmith a successful venture.

This blog is about my journey from a simple business writer to a business owner with a comprehensive marketing plan - at least, that's what I hope.  Just over two weeks ago I started taking a marketing class with Randy Aimone of Aim One Marketing.  I agreed to honestly document what I learn and how I apply it to my business.

State of the Business

To establish some kind of a baseline, let me document the types of marketing efforts I had been using up until I started working with Randy:

• Professional blog
• Facebook page
• Other social networking, including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, and LinkedIn
• Referral marketing

I pretty much started my writing business on a shoestring, which is why I haven't invested tons of money in advertising.