As tough economic conditions have caused general advertising revenue across the board to diminish, newspapers across the nation are closing their doors entirely. Some are willing to take a chance of converting over to the Internet in hopes of keeping the local news in front of their loyal subscribers. Others who are currently using the Web to generate ad revenue have already experienced low volume ad sales.

The thing is, a local newspaper that once filled neighborhoods with the community news in print is NOT going to reach that same audience with the Internet. Why? Not everybody has the Internet that reads the newspaper. And Not everyone who does will read the online version. In fact, 23.7% of the World still does not have Web access. What’s more, 32% still uses dial-up from their remote or rural location. This makes it difficult to view all of what the media has to offer.

Newspaper owners have NO idea what they are about to face when it comes to Internet advertising. With all due respect to the industry I love, calculating profits and measuring metrics is venturing into unknown territory for most publications. With little or no way to know if online news or ads even reach their target audience, it’s shotgun marketing at its best! The only way to know is to measure it.

Online Advertising Analytics

More Web staff will be needed to help process log files for measuring and analyzing the effectiveness of their web site in terms of customer experience, return on investment, and site effectiveness. They must learn how to collect massive amounts of site visitor and usage data to provide a better customer experience and determine ROI. Employees will have to adjust with greater intelligence regarding how their online publication operates. Everyone will need to know how to execute precision marketing, effective sales, and real-time customer service. This will be extremely important in the current economy when they can’t afford to waste time, resources, or money.

Understanding Data Collection

Various niche publications that choose to place their entire operations online must enforce a niche concept that rests on the importance of customers to its company. They must determine the needs of their customers. Develop their competitive advantages. Select specific markets to serve. Determine how to satisfy those needs and analyze how well they’ve served their customers. Online sales and conversions are not enough. They need to find out who the customers are, what the customers want, where and when they want it. This type of research can also expose problems in the current news service, and find areas for expansion of current services to fill customer demand. This should also encompass identifying trends that may affect sales and profit levels.

Advertiser Experience

Every media kit from every publication is negotiable. One of the best kept secrets in newspaper advertising is how to get better rates than what the publication tell you is available. All will quote you their rate card numbers. And they will offer you a discount if you agree to do multiple runs of the ad. But, what about online ads? Will they be upfront and inform you about the banner impressions you couldn’t track? Or will you ever hear from a visitor who has been bombarded with pop-up display ads? How will they combine news and ads for a pleasurable reading experience without compromising standard business relationships? Clicking Web ads while reading the latest news column weighs heavily on whether the visitor will return to read more.

For once, newspapers hold an edge. While larger publications hire professionals to do their research, smaller ones are close to their customers. They can learn much more quickly the likes and dislikes of their customers and can react quickly to change in customer buying habits. While there is NO safe prediction on where our economy is heading, a decision to go entirely online is seldom a purely rational one. One that can influence your reader’s behavior. As you explore various techniques for presenting your publication online, do not ignore psychological and emotional appeals. It might save your paper!

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It is extremely important to keep accurate records in any form of email marketing. It is only through these records that you can determine which ads pull the best, which advertising lead is the most enticing, and how well your product or service is selling.

Good records are the follow-up of good testing!

Keep copies of all ads and conversion material in a spreadsheet or a reliable file. You may also include in that file, or a separate folder, a record of all of the addresses you have used. The separate records per addresses or publication will help you to compare which ads are bringing in the profits.

You may have your own way of filing these ad campaigns. You’ll need a separate document for each ad you place. At the top of the document, place the name of the publication the ad appeared in, the issue number or date, the date the issue was placed on sale, the address, the size and cost of the ad, which ad you used, and the price of the product or service. This will be needed to calculate your profits later.

The main body of the document has two main categories – inquiries and sales.

First, the number of days should be listed in a column at the left. These don’t necessarily coincide with the days of the month, rather, start with the first days responses came in.

The subheads under “inquiries” should be:

- Date Received
- Number Received
- Running Total

The subheads under “sales” should be:

- Number of orders received
- Running total
- Cash sales
- Running total for cash sales

These records will help you figure out the responses to ads, orders from sales copy, and how much money you’re making.

To calculate the cost per inquiry, divide the cost of the ad into the number of inquiries received.

To find the cost per order, add the total of sending the sales copy to the cost of the ad and divide that by the number of orders received.

The ratio of conversion is the number of orders compared to the number of inquiries. For example, if you get twenty orders from one hundred inquiries, the conversion is twenty percent.

How To Calculate Profit

This is total the amount of cash sales. That is your gross profit. Subtract the cost of the product or service, mailing, conversion of the ad. That is your net profit, the one that counts. Just stick with it and you can watch your profits grow larger with each ad – each conversion – each sale.

How To Segment Your List

Building a email list for your business should be a top priority. It is the most important marketing tool where you can build a mailing list and segment them according to your geographic, demographics, psychographics and product benefits for your target market.

No email list is ever going to pull as effectively as your own email list created from thousands of prospects that your business will have the opportunity to market to, as well as the hundreds of customers who have tasted or selected or used one or more of your products or services.

Just names and addresses aren’t enough. You need to segment your prospective client email list like the big mailing houses do.

The way you do this is ask your clients and prospects their preferences. Why they purchased? Their reading habits? Their spending habits? You could ask them where they heard about you? TV? News? Interent? Radio? Paper? Other?

As soon as they become a customer, you record their purchase whether it was this particular product or that product, this service or that service. Track every purchase, every phone call you make to them, and everything else you’ve ever talked to them about on your computer.

You need to know how long they’ve been a customer. Whether they’re current on their payments. Whether they respond to an advertisement. What other subsequent purchases they’ve
made? What caused them to make those purchases? Was it a letter you sent, a follow-up? The list goes on, and on.

You want to be able to improve and offer them more things based on the pieces of information you know about them. You can segment your customer file as:

- Calculate the value of your customers. This is the value of every lost name that you don’t capture.

- Capture names through registrations, drawings, coupons, free subscriptions, consultations, charge card verifications, and photocopy their checks.

- Design surveys, registrations, etc. to solicit personal information from your customers regarding those variable, important pieces of information for your business.

Of course, testing your campaigns will allow you to clarify and organize many of the foundational procedures and processes of any business. These concepts and processes, though basic and often lost in routine are ones that, if mastered, could potentially bring you immense wealth very quickly.

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There are a variety of reasons and excuses behind poor sales lead management because the $10 to $2000 companies spend to generate each business to business inquiry largely go to waste. I call them Barriers To Sales success. Here are six of the most common which plague businesses today.

1. SENIOR MANAGEMENT DOES NOT CARE

Paid to lead the organization in the big picture issues of market strategy, quality and customer satisfaction, senior managers are tempted to dismiss operational fundamentals and assume all is well. They are not aware of the tactical need for complete lead follow up, rapid inquiry fulfillment, accurate qualification practices or actual measurement of communications and sales performance.

2. SALES PEOPLE REMAIN UNINFORMED

Unless they understand the potential value of qualified leads, salespeople (an independent minded breed) think they do not need help. Sales managers who fail to insist on follow up imply that leads are at best an option for slow days. Marketing departments that fail to qualify leads in advance will most likely contribute to the problem, giving leads a poor reputation.

3. POOR COORDINATION HOBBLES MARKETING AND SALES

Marketing and marketing communications people frequently have little idea of the quotas salespeople must meet, the timing of their sales contests, their need for seasonal boosts in lead volume, the products needing extra lead support and the geographical balance need to apportion leads sensibly among sales territories. Meanwhile, the sales force does not understand why lead follow up reports are essential if marketing is to fine tune its advertising, mail and other promotion tools.

4. THE COMPANY MISMANAGES ITS PROSPECT LIST

Inquiries become orphans in a netherworld between marketing and sales. As a result, the company sends wrong information to inquirers, sends it late and does not tailor it to inquirers’ specific interests. Marketing collects limited and uninformative data and updates them frequently. Marketing rarely compares separate databases – one for orders and one for inquiries, for example – and even more rarely merges them into a marketing information system.

5. MANAGEMENT DOES NOT HOLD SALESPEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE

Sales management does not insist on follow up and new prospect status reporting, even though it fusses and gripes over detailed expenses and call reporting.

6. MANAGEMENT DOES NOT HOLD MARKETING PEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE

Chief marketing officers do not hold subordinates accountable for lead handling performance. They do not insist on program return on investment reports, for example, evidence that inquiry generation ties in with company sales goals or analyses of inquiry source productivity.

All six barriers are the product of poor communications, inattention, lack of knowledge, human frailties and the sublime dysfunctionalities that lurk within all organizations. None is the result of weak strategies, poorly designed products, sloppy manufacturing, competitive pressures, government regulations or inadequate capital the classic management issues that pre-occupy most companies in the world today.

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While satisfied customers may be your best sales force, that doesn’t mean they’re the only sales force. There are lots of other people out there who can send business your way if you make the effort to network with them and make it worth their while.

The concept of networking and word-of-mouth marketing is a very hot topic in business today for one simple reason: So many people are starting small businesses that need to find other businesses they can work with for mutual benefit. That’s why you will find no shortage of business,

professional or service organizations through which you can meet other people. The key is to pick them wisely, choose only one for a few organizations that will be good for business networking and ignore the rest. Otherwise you’ll be spending all your time meeting and socializing and not working. Marketing without producing is another surefire formula for bankruptcy.

How do you decide whether or not to join an organization or go to its social functions? Let’s ask another question “Am I likely to meet people there who will buy from me or refer customers to me?” If the answer is no, don’t go unless you have some other reason for going.

The world is full of professional joiners who never met an organization they didn’t like. They go to all the meetings. They hold offices and serve on committees and boards, and since they do all that free work, the organizations love them. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that when you run a solo business you can’t delegate your work to others while you go out and play social butterfly. Your networking time needs to be marketing time. This means putting yourself in front of customers or people who will send customers your way. With that in mind here are six guidelines for networking with others mutual gain.

#1. Look for businesses that complement yours to network with. for example, put a tax accountant, financial planner, estate planning attorney, stockbroker and insurance agent together and you have five people who can refer customers to each other endlessly. Similarly, a wedding photographer would find it profitable to network with caterers, jewelers, bridal consultants, florists, churches, synagogues and reception halls. When a customer buys from you, what other products and services is he/she likely to want or need? Those are the type of businesses that would be excellent ones for you to network with.

#2. Competitors can also be an excellent networking opportunity. Just because you go head to head with other businesses doesn’t mean that you can’t work together sometimes for mutual gain. Have you ever noticed how one airline will book you on another carrier if it doesn’t have a flight to

the destination or at the time you want? Airlines have an agreement whereby they book business for each other in return for compensation. You may find it useful to work out such an agreement with some of your competitors. Or you may have an informal agreement whereby you refer one of your

competitors to customers for no pay. I frequently refer other speakers to potential clients if I can’t do a date or provide the kind of service at the price the client wants. Other speakers do the same for me as well.

#3. Before going to a networking function, prepare in advance. Bring plenty of business cards. If you want to be remembered, have your picture printed on your business cards and do something with your name tags that will attract attention. Also before going compose and memorize a brief

memorable statement and unique sales proposition when writing the description. For example – if I were going to a networking function my description would be “I like to work smarter through my books, CDs and seminars. My latest work is focused on teaching people how to become financially independent working in a one person business. I know first hand that it can be done and I want others to profit from what I have learned.”

#4. Once you get to the meeting make good use of your time. Arrive early and leave late. That way you’ll meet more people. Don’t stand around and wait for others to come to you. Act like a gracious host. Go up and introduce yourself to others. Find out what they sell and what type of people

they want to connect with. If that’s not you, do you know others who might be of some help to them? If so, pass their names along. Encourage others to tell you about their businesses and you will be remembered as a brilliant conversationalist. If you know someone who might be a potential customer for them, pass the information along.

After you learn about their work, be sure to deliver the short message about your business to everyone you meet. Exchange business cards and write anything you need to remember about them on the back of their cards. Don’t be abrupt, but try not to spend more then 10 minutes with any person. Remember you are there to market your business and to help others. The more people you meet the more chances of forming a few good profitable relationships.

#5. Be sure to ask for leads and referrals. That’s why you’re there. After describing your business to someone ask “who do you know – who?” and describe your typical customer. It might be that person or you remind him/her of some one who could be your next big customer. As you get leads, write them down and follow up fast as possible.

#6. Always remember the Great Law of Life: (What goes around comes around.) If you want to get referrals you need to give referrals. Reciprocity is the basis for all good relationships and it’s especially true in business. When someone sends a customer to you, acknowledge it with at least a thank you note. A small gift is even better and sending him/her a customer is better yet. Keep in touch with those you network with. If you see an article or item of interest to them clip it out, fax or email it to them.

Finally, When you refer a customer to a business make sure it’s a quality business. If The customer gets poor treatment, it’s going to reflect poorly on you.

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