HFTB Marketing Blog

image by Joe Shlabotnik

Your price, whether you sell a product or service, is most likely based on the costs you pay to produce the product or deliver the service… plus your margin obviously. You have to make a margin, right?

But what goes into your margin? There may be more than you think. In fact, there is often a hidden component that instead of boosting your bottom line, may eventually cost you your entire sale.

Rohit Bhargava has an interesting post on his Influential Marketing blog about a related concept – making your price less expensive to your customers without reducing your monetary price. His point is that there are things we can do to make our services or products less expensive for customers (without reducing the actual monetary price they pay) through what I would term, business process improvements.

The idea makes a lot of sense. After all, we’ve all dealt with unresponsive sales people, poorly designed websites and less than helpful customer service departments. What do all these things have in common? They waste our time. They also make the product or service relatively more expensive.

It’s important to take a long look at the product or service you provide and ask yourself, “What can we do to make our customer interactions and relationships less expensive… for our customers?” I’m not talking about your price. Look more closely at the markup that isn’t seen in what you charge. The markup that includes waiting time, unanswered calls and delayed shipments, to name a few.

The worst part of this unseen markup is that no one gets the benefit. It simply evaporates without lending value to your customer or dollars to your bottom line.

But don’t be fooled. Customers will feel the markup. They may not think of it in terms of an added margin on your services. But they will notice unneeded conference calls, late deliverables and unfulfilled promises. The result, a wandering eye for other service providers that might not be quite as inefficient in managing their time as are you.

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Marketing customer relationships, Marketing, marketing communications, optimize websites, traditional marketing

There’s been quite a bit of talk about the DiGiorno Flatbread Pizza product launch/social media campaign lately. DiGiorno, a Kraft brand, decided to deliver their new product to various Tweetups in major cities around the country.

The reaction from the online community has been interesting.

Some are hailing Kraft’s foray into social media as a harbinger of mainstream corporate acceptance of the value of some of the new marketing tools and tactics.

This reaction is a little odd to me.  After all, let’s think about what Kraft has really done.  They’ve found a way to dip a toe into the world of social media without actually taking part.

Trading pizza for influence doesn’t strike me as sound social media marketing strategy.  But perhaps this is only the first step in a larger Twitter presence.  Let’s hope… nowhere to go but up.

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New Marketing, Social Media New Marketing, new media strategy, Online marketing, Social Media, social media marketing

One of the true eternal questions of social media marketing – How do I convince my boss it’s worth the effort (read-in, “measurable financially”)?

Image by ArtemFinland

The folks at Hubspot and Chris Brogan got together this week to present some ideas on just that subject.  And while the answers to the above question where about as grainy as the webinar audio feed, Brogan did a great job of at least framing the subject.  He discusses the landscape of tools that are currently out there and some possibilities for business use of each.

Metrics for actual Return on Investment of social media marketing are conspicuous in their absence.  Which leads to the tried and true marketers axiom that the same can be said about definitive ROI for most marketing tactics.

Uhh,.. not sure where that leaves us exactly, but let’s press forward anyhow.

So what did I take from the presentation?

First, as noted above, Brogan references many great tools marketers can use for social media campaigns.  In my opinion, this alone is worth the price of admission… which is,  free… by the way.

But regardless, I’d recommend the webinar for this purpose alone.

Secondly, social media marketing is happening.  Instead of wringing your hands about metrics, the arguments to simply start participating are strong.  “Start participating” here is important because, to paraphrase Brogan, the conversations about your company are already taking place.  You can either choose to be an active part of those conversations – or not.

What is often missed by companies reticent to dive into social media marketing is that there is a wealth of consumer information about their products or services at their fingertips on a daily basis… and it’s relatively inexpensive (not free by any means, but all in all, inexpensive).

Many companies, including former and current clients of mine, spend large sums gathering this data by other means.  But when confronted with the idea of starting a blog, putting out an enewsletter or becoming a part of a social community, typically balk at the ideas because they are unsure of the payback.  Well, how about a decreased focus group budget to start with?

Take a look at the webinar and Brogan’s slide presentation here.  Brogan is well worth your time simply for his ideas on social media strategy and utilizing the tools that are out there to execute it.

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Social Media, Web Design blogging, new media strategy, Social Media, social media marketing

Attended a great webinar put on by Hubspot this week.  Brent Leary, co-founder of CRM Essentials, presented on How to Use Social Media to Attract More Customers.

You can find the video and slides for download here. Check it out!

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New Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Web Design Add new tag, blogging, content, customer relationships, digital marketing, New Marketing, Online marketing, Social Media, social media marketing