All Contain-A-Pet dog fence dealers undergo extensive training and are required to be certified dog trainers in order to train your dog. They can’t own a Contain-A-Pet dealership any other way. We use humane, tried-and-true and effective dog behavior techniques developed over 20 years by master dog behaviorists. We ensure your dog understands that you want him to stay on your property BEFORE we ever put on his dog collar receiver. It’s the training that works first, then the state of the art equipment.

 

Looking Back

The holiday season and year end planning are upon us. As of this writing, consumers are increasingly jolly with their shopping, based on personal income reports.

Third-quarter real GDP was revised upward again to an annualized increase of 2.6 %, manufacturing inventories are up, an indication that business is increasing production to meet future consumer demand. Manufacturers are bullish about customer growth, are you? What’s in your new customer plan?

Looking Forward

Many businesses take stock this time of year and review the past 12 month’s results and make business plans for the next year or two. What were your challenges? What were your successes? What will you do differently to make up the gap between your goals and actual results?

Grow or …

If you’re like most business owners, you’re looking to grow your business this year not just survive. You’re either growing or your dying. There is no status quo. Your competitors are scheming every day on how to steal your customers and keep them. And there’s only three ways to grow a business:

1. Create more new customers
2. Increase your current customer’s average sale
3. Get your current customers to buy more frequently

Number one is the most sort after strategy, and the most expensive to your business, so let’s start there for now and see if we can make it more profitable this year.

So what’s a customer worth?

Any strategy about new business development generally revolves around Return on Investment (ROI) right? But most business owners make the mistake of taking a myopic, one dimensional and shortsighted view of ROI. You’ve got to examine, measure and calculate the front-end profits as well as the back-end, and you’re got to know a few other metrics other than ROI… like CLV, CPA, and average sale.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a critically important concept that too few small to medium sized businesses evaluate. It’s the amount of revenue you’ll generate from a customer over the lifetime that customer favors your business with purchases during their relationship with you.

For example say you’re a service company that sells, installs and services equipment for residential homes and you know your average customer spends $100 a month on your service. Over 12 months you generate $1200 from the average customer. For simplicity, let’s assume these figures include all other expenses and costs and they represent the net profit to you.  OK here’s where most business owners stop. In fact you’d be surprised at how many just look at the first $100 or two. But think about it, you earn more than that.

You do a good job right? And that customer stays with you longer than a month, or a year. In fact let’s say you know that on average your customers stay with you for 3.5 years before moving, dying, migrating to a competitor etc. So that means that his CLV Customer Lifetime Value is $4,200. ($100 average sale x 12 months x 3.5 years)  Hmm, that’s a lot more than that $100 sale you first made, eh?

What should you spend to get a new customer?

Ok, so the next step is to figure how much you’d spend to acquire that $4,200 customer. Big companies spend a lot of time with this. Many chief marketing officers, and their CFO bean-counting counterparts, believe 10 percent of CLV is a good estimate. So in the above example you could invest $420 in marketing dollars to bring in a new customer. It’s considered the allowable cost per acquisition (CPA).

So here comes the Dutch Uncle talk. If you’re not reaching your customer growth goals, chances are you’re not spending enough to effectively market your company to keep it growing. There, I said it.  Remember, some of your customer growth is just to back fill your natural customer attrition. You pick up 20 new customers a month, but maybe you’re losing 10-15 without knowing it. Maybe you’re losing 20 or more!

If your  sales are suffering, you can’t be gaining that many new customers can you? You’ve made all the cuts in spending by now in this economic slowdown, so your profits may be flat or not declining that fast, but growth?

If you’re gaining customers but sales are still flat, then you need to also concentrate on #2 and #3. Remember, the three ways to grow any business above? I’ll cover those strategies in another post. Right now we’re creating new customers.

How many customers do you want?

So when you’re looking at your budgets these next few weeks, remember who butters your business’ bread. Marketing is an investment in sales growth. Don’t treat it like discretionary items. Tougher times require tighter targets. If business is off, do you fire all your salespeople or hire more? Your marketing dollars are your sales people.

So how many customers do you want in 2011?  Fifty, one hundred? More? You know what the CLV Customer Lifetime Value is, and you know what an acceptable CPA cost per acquisition for each new customer is. Your budget is now strategic and mathematical, not emotional and undisciplined.

If the service company above wanted 100 new customers in 2011, and he generates $4200 on each (CLV), and his CPA is 10% then his annual marketing budget to acquire those 100 customers is $ 42,000 or $3500 per month. (100 New Customers wanted x $4,200 CLV x .10 CPA = $42,000 Marketing Budget)

So enjoy the festivities, have some holiday cheer and set your sights on a prosperous 2011. Analysts believe that a recent increase in consumer spending along with the extension of the tax cuts approved by Congress may further gin up additional growth in the months ahead. Anything can happen, but for now there’s reason to celebrate…and plan ahead.

Four easy steps to capture the new Facebook user profile.

Facebook is going to unveil their new design for Facebook user profiles tommorrow. Tonight in a sneak preview interview on 60 Minutes, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, explained his motivations for the changes. The idea is to share useful information to allow friends to make more connections with you. To better understand where you came from, and what you value most. The revised user profiles,were created to put your work, education and interests up front in words and pictures posted by you.

Of course, if tommorrow is just to far away, you can get the new shiny Facebook profile by visiting http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/, click the “Get the New Profile” button, and install the new design into your profile.

To capture the new Facebook profile, follow these simple steps:

1.Go to http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/.

2.Click on the green button at the top right of the next page.

3.Finished. The new profile design is now live on your page.

The recent announcement by Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, of “modern messaging” got me thinking about email. Email is struggling now, some say its broken. It takes a lot of our time to clear out unimportant messages, and time wasting ones as well. While it’s much faster than its snail mail grandfather, it doesn’t always keep up with today’s faster paced society. What, wait 15 minutes for a reply? Zuckerberg got the inspiration to create the new integrated feature that allows users to communicate with each other regardless of what they’re using… email, chat, text messaging or Facebook.com from asking questions. His conversations with high school students and how they communicate with each other was quite revealing. They don’t use email he learned. They find it “too formal” and too slow. They prefer faster, simpler methods of staying in touch such as chat, text messaging and Facebook. But a problem occurs is when you jump from one platform to the other; you lose the context of the last conversation. You have to start all over with a new one on the new platform.

 Modern messaging solves this by housing all your conversation history with that person in a “social inbox”. Sounds great, but it got me to thinking about email, and how long its been around. Actually, it hasn’t been around that long at all. Even Google hasn’t been with us that long (1997) even though I can hardly remember how I ever got along without it. So here goes: Email in one form or another has been with us since the early 1960′s. Time sharing computers of the day could be programmed to exchange text messages and even real-time chat among users at different terminals. IM in the 60′s, who knew? Those systems where “store and forward” systems like current day email systems. Electronic mail predates the creation of the Internet. Actually, it was a critical device in bringing it to life by allowing it’s developers (not Al Gore) to collaborate one block of programming at a time.

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson added a program to those early messaging systems that allowed files to be copied over the (closed) network. He chose the commercial @ symbol to extend the addressing to the network “user @ host” is still the standard for email addressing today. Emails sent in the early 1970s look pretty much like ones sent on the net today. Although they weren’t sent on open networks available to everyone. In the 1980′s a more efficient SMTP protocol was created allowing senders to CC copy an email with more than one a addressee. This made email even more useful for communicating with multiple users. The first sanctioned commercial use occurred in 1988 when MCI Mail was connected to the NSFNET for “experimental use”. Then in 1989, the CompuServe mail system also connected to the NSFNET. The beginning of large scale adoption of internet email on a global standard happened when Online Services connected their proprietary American Online (AOL) email systems to the internet in 1993. “You’ve got Mail” So unless you’re a high schooler and commercial email started 4-6 years before you were born, it hasn’t really been with us that long. Of course back then you had to wait for the “dial up” system to literally make a phone call over hard wires to connect with the internet servers. OMG… NFW…ILMFAO!

High Schoolers have a way to make you feel real old, real quick. As a matter of habit, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, asks them what they are currently using to stay in touch with each other.

Apparently they don’t like email. “It’s too formal” Errr formal? Oh, and it’s too slow too. Necessity being the mother of invention, this led Zuckerberg, 15 engineers and over 15 months of programming to clandestinely create Facebook’s new “modern messaging system” code-named “Project Titan”

“This is not an email killer. This is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it,” Zuckerberg said at the announcement in San Francisco. Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with over 500 million users worldwide.

What they’ve done here is created a way to communicate no matter what format you’re currently on…email, chat, SMS. They’re all bundled in here. Down the road VoIP is under consideration. According to Zuckerberg, 350 million use it’s system for private correspondences, daily representing 4 billion messages.

All the messaging is housed in a single social inbox along with conversation history you’ve had with people you know. This will work with Facebook.com as well as their mobile apps as well. Launching shortly will be an updated iPhone application as well. Unread messages are ranked like the News Feed by how important Facebook interprets the sender is in your life. You can adjust those settings of course.

The “social inbox” houses conversations with people you message with the most often. Then there’s the “other” folder for companies and people the Facebook system isn’t familiar. Administrators of pages you’ve “liked” can send message to the “other” folder. The last bucket is spam unless you reclassify items. The system will learn and improve the filtering as you use and reclassify items.

The idea is to keep messaging going even while you’re on the go…and you don’t need an app, this can work with SMS too. You don’t need the @facebook.com email address, but anyone can get one. You can use any email address.

Facebook will be slowly rolling this out over the next few months starting with the press already invited to demo it.

There has never been a better way to promote TOMA, build customer relationships and foster the almighty referral than with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The key is providing meaningful dialog with your customers on a timely basis. Don’t just treat it like a newspaper ad, have a conversation.

First, remember to be consistent. Today’s social media butterflies get disinterested in a hurry if the last update you posted/tweeted was four or five months ago. A steady stream of brief tidbits outweighs a huge dusty newsletter that no one is going to read anyway.

While it may sometimes seem difficult to regularly create new content suitable for your customers, there are some easy to follow formulas for generating useful information to pass along.

1) Special Offers
Why should anyone register with your Facebook or Twitter page anyway? What’s in it for them? Many users follow businesses to receive special offers like exclusive discounts, special privileges and VIP invitations to special events etc. If they show an interest in your business shouldn’t they be rewarded in some way? Rewarding loyalty is always a good idea to help them remain followers of your business.

2) New Products & Services
If you launch a new product, bring in new inventory items, make changes to existing products and services you should let your followers know. They’re genuinely interested in your business after all. Remember John may know you sell X because he bought X from you, but he can’t tell a friend about your new Y product if he didn’t know you also offered that.

One of my clients installs windows, doors and siding. In a recent conversation he was surprised that a long time customer didn’t know he also installed roofing. How would Bob know? Bob bought windows from my client…and that was 6 years ago! Keep your customers up to date on all you do, and offer, to make sure you’re not leaving referral money on the table.

3) Helpful Advice
You have expert knowledge and years of experience with things your customers (and their circle of influence) may know very little about. When you come across a helpful tip, or interesting article in one of your trades, pass it along. You have a great deal of valuable information at your finger tips you probably take for granted. If you provide your “audience” with this information and expert knowledge on a regular basis, you will get the attention of others, build your reputation, AND your following. Providing something for nothing is always immediately appealing.
Providing helpful information not only gets you noticed and liked but also goes a long way in building trust and respect. Establishing yourself as an authority within your market, can generate a lot of faith among other users in your business.

4) Get ‘em Involved
Remember, you want to create a dialog. Social Media is a conversation. It’s not just about providing information, but also receiving useful feedback from customers. It’s like a giant focus group in real-time, sometimes referred to as “crowd sourcing”. Users like to get involved and feel like they’re contributing to the conversation. Encourage them by asking questions, learn about their opinions and gather relevant and useful facts about your target market using Twitter and Facebook…in real time!

Learning about your customers, what they really want, and actually need can make a significant impact on your future product offerings, price points, packages that would sell etc. because you’re communicating with your target audience.

5) Show your Community Spirit
If there’s an interesting event, fund-raiser or family entertainment activity going on in town, post the who, what, when and where of it. Customers are people just like you, and they have families and outside interests just like you. Don’t go overboard with this, you’re not the town crier, but occasionally mixing in some fun can’t hurt.

If you’re looking to generate more referral business and hold on to more of your current customer base, social media can play a huge role. While relatively new, Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming increasingly powerful business tools, and are also having a big influence on today’s search engines.

People today get their news, information and entertainment from a variety of sources from print, broadcast, cable and the internet. By 2001 internet usage as a percentage US population was 50%. By 2008 that number was 3 in 4 Americans.

Clearly the internet is critically important, a growing influence and every business owner wants to be popular on it. If you can be found easily when customers are looking for your product/service you’ll produce more clicks, phone calls, increased sales, and your business grows.

Since social media is the fastest growing slice of the interactive marketing pie, and Facebook is dominating that space, the recent Facebook-Bing joint venture announcement should make you pull up your chair a bit closer. Facebook and Microsoft’s announcement that they will integrate Facebook data with the Bing search engine will fundamentally shift how results can be found in a search engine. It will change in the future how customers and others find you on the web. SEO practitioners are taking notice and already jumping in, how about you?

Search Engine 101

Since the modern search engines began functioning, they haven’t changed much. Search engines like Google crawl and index all the websites they can and create a huge index of pages and their content, similar to paper book index pages.

They Jump from one page to the other by scanning each for hyperlinks, and then leapfrog to the next one. The engine then gives each page a number so it can refer back to the page when someone is looking for content it may contain. There are billions of pages on the web with similar content, so the search engines try match up the phrases the user types into the search box with the pages that they think are most relevant to the query.

Search engines count the hyperlink backlinks from other pages to your businesses webpage. Kinda like a vote of relevancy. The more you have, the better you rank with the search engines. Other web sites that get lots of traffic because of the subject matter are weighted more heavily and given more “authority” because they’re more popular or more relevant to the topic. Pages that are the most relevant and important for a particular topic are shown at the top of the results pages. This is where you want your business to be right?

So why is Facebook and Bing’s joint venture so fundamental to future search?

You can’t swing a computer mouse around the web these days without hitting the ubiquitous Facebook “Like” button now on so many websites. You and everyone you know (and everyone they know) click it to announce they recommend a news article, maybe a new restaurant, repair shop or a professional’s services.

Facebook and Bing will be using a gazillion “like” vote data points to enhance your searches with stuff that your friends on Facebook have chosen to “Like”. This makes these products, businesses, and services more relevant… and important to you. This may be the initial phase in recalculating how the search engines rank web pages in the search results from today’s hyperlink head counting, towards more personalized open graph results that are popular with your friends and people you know. It may also highlight people in the search results that have expertise on narrowly defined topics. Maybe local people you know? Hmmm?

When someone is looking for your product or service, they’ll pay more attention to what their friends recommend, and will be more likely to click on those links than the generic search engine results we’ve been getting for over a decade or so.

Think about it. When you’re looking for something yourself, say a restaurant. You’re looking for a type of food close by right? It can’t hurt if it has good reviews and it’s easy to find. Better yet, how about if those good reviews are from your friends, coworkers and others on your friends list that ate there last week and were satisfied? Facebook is word of mouth referrals on steroids. You need to learn how to harness it fast.

Finding a business online certainly looks and feels a lot like searching out a good place for lunch. You’re looking for a company that has what you need, has a good reputation, fair prices etc. If it’s important enough to you, you probably would feel better if people you know have done business with them and felt good about their results wouldn’t you?

If dozens of folks hit your like button they’re saying “Hey…he’s a good guy, buy from him.” Not only that, now your chances of being found on Bing just increased! Who knows where all this social media enhanced search optimization will lead to. But if I were you, I’d get my oars in the water early on this one.

Here’s some suggestions:

1. Have a Business Page on Facebook - You can’t receive recommendations if you aren’t on Facebook, so you’ll need a business profile page there.

2. Incorporate Like Button - Add the Facebook Like Button to your web page and blog if you have one. You can do it yourself, or hire a company familiar with the technology. That way you make it easy for your current customers and others to refer you to others. Friends telling friends who talk to their friends…

3. Do unto others - If you find content on the web that would be relevant to your customers or potential customers, start hitting that Like button and recommend tips, hints and interesting news items to help others in your social grid.

4. Blow your own horn - Announce new inventory, exclusive Facebook-only specials, or special events you’re holding. Updates are like micro newsletter articles, except people actually read them!