The economy has slowed and for many companies shrinking revenue means much smaller marketing budgets.  Shrinking marketing budgets can shrink results as well so what is the savvy marketer to do when looking for more results with drastically smaller budgets?  They recycle.

Five ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle:

1. Don’t throw out advertising too early - Redefine “worn out”.  Extend the schedules on which you would normally rotate your creative.  This turbulent economic climate leaves your customers and prospects seeking familiarity and stability.  When you find the effectiveness of your current creative waning, evolve what you have by introducing a new element rather than going completely back to the drawing board. For example, a sticker can take care of a change of address on a brochure. And when you do new things, plan with longer life and “refreshability” in mind.
2. Do something with that old bridesmaid’s dress you’re keeping - Reuse favorite advertising campaigns and direct mail pieces that worked well in the past.  Sure, a few things will have changed over the three years or so since you last ran an ad but editing is always less expensive than creating a new piece.  A few updated touches will create something new from something that might be old to you but thanks to audience turnover and poor long-term viewer retention, plenty of people will be enjoying for the first time.   For those that remember it, showing an old campaign can be a way to demonstrate that you are stable and give them a feeling of security.  Many large traditional brands have begun getting back to their roots and re-airing old campaigns for that reason alone.
3. Look in the trash pile - If you hired an ad agency for a project, chances are that they provided you with multiple concepts for earlier projects. Perhaps you can make use of one of the alternatives. There may be a charge to finish the piece, but it’s usually less expensive than starting over.
4. Car pool - See if anyone in your organization has unused seats.  Many organizations are siloed, especially around the area of technology.  Your IT department may have implemented a tool for Operations that might have marketing capabilities which are going unused.  A good example of a tool like this is Microsoft’s SharePoint. While your organization might be using it for internal collaboration, it is also an excellent tool to make external websites, secure micro-sites, promotional pages, and even to manage an electronic prospect dialogue strategy.
5. Switch to electric power - Marketers are still struggling to find ROI from broad use of the newest social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter but one thing is clear already.  The cost of reaching an audience using these tools is extremely low.  While they are not yet (and may never be) ready to carry the weight of a large portion of your marketing strategy this is a perfect time to replace some of the poorest performing media channels you pay for and add some inexpensive social media to your mix.

All of these ideas will be much more effective when used by a company with a well developed brand identity, and if yours doesn’t, there is no better time to focus on building your brand and taking bold brand actions.

Bill Cutshall

Kirsten Cutshall

On July 16, 2009, the AMA hosted speaker Shawna Coronado, who shared the story of her dramatic recovery from chronic illness and discussed the value of promoting health, green living, and community through our business practices and marketing.

As the author of Gardening Nude, Shawna Coronado’s approach to marketing is, as you might expect, down to earth and distinctly organic. Her recipe for personal and professional success is all about building and nurturing connections—between yourself and Nature, among your organization’s employees, and between your organization and the local community.

Coronado overcame chronic illness through greening her environment and nurturing personal connections in her life. In the process she also cultivated a highly successful landscaping business, and these days her enterprise has gone global thanks to social media.

She advised us to focus on bringing people together through community action and promoting a greener, healthier lifestyle within and outside of our organizations. Advertising a good message, practicing what you preach, and helping others, she asserted, is the kind of non-traditional marketing that builds your business while making a real difference.

Shawna’s 3 Key Ingredients to Energize Your Business and Your Life

1. Health. In the workplace, a wellness program can be a catalyst for profound change, not only teaching skills for improving health but also by demonstrating to employees that they are valued as individuals. When the organization sets the example of sharing information and empowering people to make positive changes, those people turn around and share the skills and knowledge they learned with others in their community.

2. Conservation. Greening your business makes financial sense, obviously. Send emails instead of snail mail and save on office supplies and postage. Xeriscape office property and lower your water bill. Other benefits are less tangible. Coronado noted that people exposed to an enhanced natural environment—even the sight of a single tree outside a window—are less prone to violence. Making positive changes, such as implementing a greening initiative, brings people together with a common sense of purpose, pride, and ownership.

3. Community. Coronado suggested that responding to the universal human need for community is a key component of business success. When people shop, for instance, they’re not just looking for a product.

• They crave a solution to a problem.
• They crave the meaning of life.
• They crave emotional gratification.
• They crave less isolation.

In short, customers are looking for personal satisfaction. All things being equal, you can stand out from the competition by recognizing and fulfilling that need (not just pushing a product at people). Use your company’s resources to educate and inspire others. Coronado, for instance, has shared her passion for gardening by partnering with a caterer to teach people how to prepare healthy and affordable meals.

The more people you touch in your community in a positive way, the more people you’ll be exposed to; hence, you’ll have more people to sell to. Doing good things for the community at large draws in people from outside your traditional customer base. You’ll also be contributing to the health of the local economy.

Coronado began her presentation by asking, “What if your business could make a difference?” So now I am asking you, Austin AMA members: How can your business make a difference in the community? What talents, passions, and resources can you share with others to get the word out while enriching our local community?

If you missed the presentation, I highly recommend you watch the video. Shawna Coronado is a fantastic presenter, and by the end of her talk the room was buzzing with energy, inspiration, and many questions about gardening!

Hungry for more green wisdom? Check out Coronado’s blogs, http://www.gardeningnude.com and http://thecasualgardener.blogspot.com.

Amy Gelfand (Gelfand Design) is a Web developer and writer. She is also an avid cyclist, SCUBA diver, and Web standards advocate. Amy specializes in designing accessible Web sites and spoiling her clients rotten. Contact her at info@gelfanddesign.com.

From Paula Berg, Manager of Emerging Media for Southwest Airlines.  Paula will speak at the Austin AMA’s Keynote Luncheon, part of the Power Lunch Series, on Thursday, May 21.  This month’s luncheon will be held in association with the Online Marketing Summit, a national educational event for marketing professionals.

April marked our third full year in the blogosphere, and I think the following photo sums up our experience.

Whether on a plane, in a plane, or in a plane costume, we’ve been completely consumed with social media.  I often joke that we haven’t slept in three years - which would be funny if it weren’t true - but I think we’ve finally turned a corner.

First, we’ve grown.  What began with two passionate Employees pursuing social media in addition to their day jobs has become an “Emerging Media Team,” with six of the most talented, creative, and passionate people I know.  We can now take vacations without taking our blackberries (gasp!).  Not that we would, but theoretically, we could!

Second, after all of the blood, sweat and tears, the sleepless nights, the blunders and the triumphs, I think our social media efforts may have finally “come of age.”

If one blog year is equal to 10 human years, that would make us about 30.  And, if you look at our evolution, that seems about right.

Our first year, we were learning to crawl, figuring out how it all worked, and finding our voice.  Our second year, we found our stride, we discovered our rhythm, and we gained some confidence.   By year three, we were fearless, we took risks, and pushed the envelope.

And, now, as we enter our fourth year in the blogosphere, we’ve matured a bit, we know who we are and what we need to do.  Today, we’re focused on doing it all better.

While we’ve learned from our past mistakes, we know there will be more to come.  We named our team Emerging Media rather than social media, because we want to continue to grow and evolve.  And, if we want to stay ahead of the curve, we’ll have to continue to forge through unchartered territory.  But that’s what makes it exciting.

We’re ready to mount that corporate blogging horse, and as we say in the airline industry.getting there is half the fun!

At next week’s meeting, I’ll share where we’ve been, where we’re going, our biggest successes, our biggest failures, and every lesson we’ve learned along the way.  I hope you will join me.

In the meantime, feel free to share your successes or failures, lessons you’ve learned along the way, your fears moving forward, or anything you’d like to discuss when we meet next week.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Paula’s presentation at the April Keynote Luncheon will be held in association with the Online Marketing Summit on Thursday, May 21, 2009.  This national educational event for marketing professionals offers the opportunity to learn and share with hundreds of peers and experts in Social Media, Search, Email, Analytics, Behavioral Targeting, and Website Strategy.  You can register for the full event or for the luncheon only.  Join us!

Paula Berg is the Manager of Emerging Media for Southwest Airlines, the nation’s leading low-fare air carrier and the largest domestic airline in terms of Customers carried. Over the last three years, Paula has managed and developed the Company’s corporate blog, “Nuts About Southwest.” In 2007 and 2008, “Nuts” was named Best Blog by PR News and has been recognized in major publications ranging from Wired Magazine to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to managing the Company blog, Paula leads Southwest’s online communication and social media efforts.

When John Ellett, owner of local advertising agency nFusion, speaks in front of college groups, it’s an Anheuser-Busch account that gets the most attention. Using interactive marketing, nFusion created a Bacardi Silver brand campaign, The Pick-Up Hall of Shame. The interactive campaign launched in January 2007 and is still running and pulling in viewers.

Yes, you have to be 21 to enter the website featuring all the flavors of Bacardi Silver. So, many of those college students have only heard of, not sampled the brand. After skimming through the over 1500 entries made by site visitors, the real list of Pick-Up Lines is surprisingly small. My favorite line was:

I wish I was a tear, that way I’d be born in your eye, live on your cheek, and die on your lips.

Many of the pick-up lines referenced advertising slogans:

When I studied advertising at Syracuse University, I chose a Bacardi ad for a critical analysis assignment. Through that exercise, I learned my first rule of advertising: Men like to look at women in ads. Women like to look at women in ads.

Bacardi often sells the social aspect of its product. So it was natural to continue the “fun feature” of the branding in nFusion’s campaign. The “Worse Pick-Up Line” feature is very viral. Of the viewers that “stick”, 82 percent of them will share the campaign with their community, add or rate the lines. That is an outstanding metric which shows the conversion of lookers to doers. The viewers spread the campaign through social bookmarking, adding it to their MySpace pages, or by forwarding it to their friends.

While we can’t trace actual sales that result from the Pick-Up Line feature, the Anheuser-Busch executives approve of it enough to let it to run for two years. In interactive marketing, that’s like dog years. I like how nFusion runs the flavor buttons at the bottom of the screen with a new flavor tag for the latest version of Bacardi Silver. The new flavor tag refreshes the content.

Bacardi Silver’s interactive marketing accomplishes the goals of stickiness and engagement with its target demographic. It also has a timeless quality — the pick-up line, “You must be wearing spacepants, because you’re out of the world,” could have come out of the David Bowie disco days of the 70s. There’s no other explanation for such a bad pick-up line. Why do you think this campaign works?

About the Author

Brenda Hessney

Brenda Hessney is a successful Austin marketing specialist with a knack for quickly analyzing, planning, and implementing effective, cost efficient sales campaigns.

The 1.01-minute clip swept through the media last week. As a Public Service Announcement, the anti-smoking message was effective in gaining attention and multiple views on multiple media platforms.

But at what price? How far should you go to get across your message?

There he is circling in distress, a 4-year-old boy, who loses sight of his mom in a busy train station. At 37 seconds, the tiny boy wells up. At 47 seconds, he is in full wail, sobbing his heart out, his cheeks and nose reddening.

Quit smoking commercial- Separation

The ad originated with the Australian non-profit Quit Victoria, a joint initiative of four health organizations. It began its Australian TV run in November. With the release of the ad by the New York City Department of Health April 1, 2009, NBC news called the PSA “heartbreaking and meant to make smokers gasp”. They tied it to the state’s sin tax on tobacco:  a New Yorker now pays $10 to buy one pack of cigarettes.

Did the Australian film crew make the boy cry? Did they tell him it was acting? Does it matter if it’s less than thirty seconds and obviously, since a camera is filming, the boy was not truly abandoned?

The voiceover is heart-stopping to any parent: “If this is how a child feels after losing you for a minute, just imagine if they lost you for life.

Ad agency owner and CNBC personality Donny Deutsch applauded the ad, saying “Bravo.” In a follow-up question from NBC’s Matt Lauer, Deutsch replies, “The kid cries 20 seconds, saves 20,000 lives, I’m all in.”

Indeed, anti-smoking hotlines reported as much as a quadrupling in calls.

Isn’t that what we’re paid to do as advertising and marketing professionals? We’re paid to get results.

End of story: The New York City Department of Health pulled the ad from TV.

Do you think the Department of Health made the right decision?

About the Author

Brenda Hessney

Brenda Hessney is a successful Austin marketing specialist with a knack for quickly analyzing, planning, and implementing effective, cost efficient sales campaigns. She also wrote and produced all the PSAs and ads for Boulder Radio Inc.’s KBOL and KBVL No children or animals were harmed in the making of those spots. Of course, it was all talk radio.

Recent studies have again shown that inbound marketing is a cheaper lead generation tool than outbound marketing.

While inbound marketing (which includes: blogging, social media, search engine optimization [SEO], and search engine pay-per-click advertising [SEM]), may reach smaller audiences than outbound marketing (direct mail, telemarketing, trade show, and trade and consumer advertising), the cost per lead and cost per sale are typically significantly lower for inbound. While it may be impossible to generate all of your sales leads requirements through these inbound efforts you should certainly maximize and allocate your dollars and efforts to attain the lowest cost per lead and/or cost per sale.

I am often asked by clients and prospective clients, “How much should I spend on Search Engine Marketing aka pay-per-click?” The answer is as much as your budget per lead allows until you can convert the leads to sales and validate the lead source via a cost per sale. Typically, I am accused of double talk after the response. The simple fact is that most companies know how much it costs to produce a product or provide a service, but many do not know what their customer or sales acquisition costs are.

Without knowing your costs of acquisition you have to focus on your cost per lead until you can track leads to sales. You’ll need to know your typical “time to close,” “closing ratio,” “percentage of closure rate per sales process step,” and more. All should be tied back to your lead acquisition source to make an educated judgment on how to spend your resources by source.

As the internet has evolved and the economy has gotten worse, prospective buyers research more than ever before making their list of products and vendors of consideration for purchase. The most prevalent research medium is the internet and articles, white papers and media coverage are all reference points for prospect research. A solid internet strategy is more than SEM and SEO, it’s also getting the references, back links, chatter on blogs, reviews, etc. Public and Media relations are critical to a successful internet presence. While many trade publications are “controlled circulation and access”, which is not indexed, or at least the articles are not readily available via an internet search, many trade, consumer, and news sites, blogs and archives are widely indexed.

Like any investor with your lead generation and marketing you need to “spread the risk, invest in the highest probability returns to the lowest, and monitor them constantly.”

If your PR firm is focused on paper - you better augment them with online efforts or replace them with a firm that can integrate the online and offline editorial opportunities. 

Share your thoughts or questions by leaving me a comment.

About the Author

Michael Romanies has more than twenty-three years’ experience in P&L management, marketing, sales, business development, product management, and operations. Michael has held executive positions in technology and publishing companies and has extensive experience in business-to-business (B to B), business-to-consumer (B to C), and business-to-government (B to G) product development, marketing, and sales.