Marketing Series Article Dig Deep to Expand Your Market
The internet begins to come of age! by Dick Barnes, Principal, The Freeland Group The company manufactured student desks, designed for use in elementary schools. For a decade the sales force had worked with school administrators within each salesperson’s assigned driving territory. Sales had grown very little over that time, increasing by a significant amount only when additional sales people were hired and driving territories were therefore expanded. Presently they were covering about 20% of the U.S. market. “How,” the CEO asked, “can we sell more efficiently? The salesmen can only make so many telephone calls to set appointments, can only drive so far, and can only make so many stops a day. If only we could reach more school principals more efficiently.” I spent a few hours on the internet and had his answer. Almost every state education department in the country published a monthly or quarterly magazine for school principals. In most of these publications ad space was very reasonably priced, and the small, but very targeted, market they served consisted of loyal readers. The CEO and I immediately designed a half page ad and placed it into a dozen of the magazines. Six months later he called to tell me it had been like adding another salesperson…only at a fraction of the price. Just the other day I received a telephone call from a reader with a company in Ottawa. Where, he asked, would one begin looking to build a database of customer prospects for a new distribution firm? I appreciated the call and the subject he brought up. A few years ago my first answer would have been the public library. Today the internet has become the best source for identifying and contacting sources of such data. It is fast becoming a marketing professional’s best friend. Of course, to get to the real information you still have to wade through about ten million home web sites, numerous other millions of home based business sites, and countless research papers and academic works. So the first thing you will need is an efficient “search engine,” which is a program that will search millions of web sites for words or phrases matching those you choose as search parameters. Unfortunately, most web sites are registered only with a few of these search engines, and there are dozens of popular search engines. So why aren’t there programs that make use of a number of search engines all at the same time? There are...and one of my favorites is called “Copernic 98” and can be downloaded for free from that company’s web site (http://www.copernic.com). It will list up to one hundred sites, after deleting most duplications, along with a short description of each. Using this “search engine operating and management software” will allow you to identify associations for different types of businesses, find magazines and trade journals which are read by your target audiences, and even find databases of prospective customers. It will also enable you to do so in a fraction of the time it once took. Some trade publications will have entire issues reproduced on the internet (note the magazine in your hand appears each month at http://www.mhwmag.com) and will enable you to study whom among your competitors are already advertising there. From “letters to the editor” sections you can get a pretty good idea of the type of person who is faithfully reading the publication. There is a lot of intelligence gathering you can do in this way. There are thousands of local, state, and national associations that put out newsletters on a regular basis. For example let’s suppose we are manufacturers of a new type of fertilizer that we want to market to professionals in turf management. To start the search for our prospect base we sign onto the internet then turn on Copernic 98. We put in the following key words to be searched: turf, maintenance, management, and athletic. Like most search engines, Copernic is pretty self explanatory and comes with a “help” command in case you have problems. Also, like most search engines, the program will give you thousands of worthless “hits” if you do not use multiple key words. Using the four chosen key words, Copernic gives us 27 “hits” that we can connect to with a simple click of the mouse. One of the first is the web site for “Grounds” magazine (http://www.grounds-mag.com); a professional journal. That’s good, but even better, and why the internet is becoming so valuable, we next find the web site of the University of Michigan’s Turf and Grass Information Center (http://www.lib.msu.edu/tgif) which has links to over two hundred journals and newsletters from around the world. In almost any subject area, you will now find someone who is actively keeping an index of active web sites. University home pages are very often the location of such indexes. This will save you hours of searching. In this case we have managed to obtain a list of almost every publication we could possibly want to advertise in or to obtain mailing lists from…and we’ve done so in less than five minutes. This is, literally, an incredible find. We’ve hit the mother load of marketing information. Similar searches find us a national magazine for professional hydroponic farmers? (http://www.teleport.com) A magazine for community bankers? (http://www.acbankers.org) Another magazine for credit union managers? (http://www.nafcunet.org) Human resource professionals? (http://www.shrm.org) Wallcovering contractors? (http://www.paintstore.com) Vineyard management? (http://www.wines.com) Nail care professionals? (http://nailpro.com) You name an organization…it puts out a magazine, newsletter, or journal and it probably has a web presence or will pretty darn soon. You can bet almost every profession or business has such an organization representing it…and there is always a mailing list of members. Now let’s take a sample look at prospecting within the material handling industry. We’ll turn on Copernic 98 once again and use the key words: warehouse, management, newsletter, and association. Sifting through the assorted “hits” we come upon the web site of the Warehouse Education and Research Council (http://www.werc.org) with links to their newsletter, to a complete list of their membership, and an index of journals in the trade. Bingo! We’ve made a good start. We also find the web site for Valley Distributors (http://www.valleydist.com), a private firm, but with links to the International Warehouse Logistics Association (http://www.iwla.com) with it’s own links to publications and to membership. Bingo again! The web site for the Automotive Aftermarket Distributors (http://www.aftmkt.com/associations) comes up with a complete set of links to publications and similar associations. Is this marketing gold mine ever going to end? Not hardly...that site links us to the Industrial Truck Association (http://www.indtrk.org) which serves professionals in the lift truck industry with a complete membership list, industry statistics, and other features. From that site we manage to link to the home page for the American Warehouse Association and Canadian Association of Warehousing and Distribution Services (http://www.iwla.com). The number of links grow quickly as we move along the net and our biggest problem becomes one not of where to find market information, but of what to do with the hordes of information we are finding. So how do you start? First off you can simply read through the journals and newsletters and get a feel for that group of prospects. Additionally, as we have seen, the search for the journals themselves may bring other industry groups to your attention that could also be prospects. Study the newsletters of each group to determine whether they need your product, and again, see where the links in those publications send you. This is an important way to gain understanding of your target customers. Read the articles and try to grasp what is happening in their world. What are their problems and concerns? How can you present your product as a solution to some of their concerns? Are your competitors advertising there already? Study those ads and come up with an approach that will stand out. If the newsletter or journal is not published on the internet…call them. Most are more than happy to send you a complimentary copy at no charge, particularly if they think you might be interested in placing advertising. Next; most of these associations will have mailing lists of their members, usually available for a price but sometimes free for the downloading. Don’t be afraid to ask…remind them that you may be buying advertising which you will need to reinforce with direct mailings. Third; and most obvious now that you have all those prospects, is to actually sort through them, organize them, and design your plan of attack. You will find there is no end to the number of companies that might need your products, or to the ways you can find and contact those prospective buyers. There is, however, only so much advertising, mailing, and prospecting you and your sales force can do. Don’t crush yourself and your staff with information overload, but sift wisely, think strategically, and then go to work. And here is a final tip. I once e-mailed a start-up journal that I could sense from the web site was desperately seeking advertising. I ended up making a deal for my client that consisted of a year’s worth of full page ads for fifty dollars an ad. The quoted price was over ten times that amount, but nobody had ever checked to see if they were ready to make a deal. They needed to have advertising in order to sell future advertising and jumped at my offer. It was a true win-win situation. Now that’s using the internet! It’s not just a toy for computer hobbyists anymore. The internet can be a real marketing tool. (next article in series) |
