When all the pieces of your marketing come together, amazing results seem to appear like magic... but it's not magic, it's SYNERGY.

Watch the video I made for you or read the (lightly edited) transcript below. As always, please scroll to the bottom and leave your comments, questions, ideas, and reactions!

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Video transcript below...

The comments you left on the last blog post were wonderful, thank you!  We love  seeing  the light bulbs going off and the ideas starting to percolate.

In the last two blog posts we talked about having a marketing plan and discovering the strategies that drive your marketing plan and how important those two elements are to your retail success.

Now let’s flesh it out a little bit and complete the formula…

First of all, really successful retail marketers discover their strategies, then they pick tactics that naturally support those strategies, they drop those tactics into a comprehensive marketing plan, and finally they execute the tactics correctly, flawlessly.

That’s right, even the best tactics have to be executed correctly to get you the results you’re looking for!

One of the things I see happening all the time as people are transitioning from being a “little bit of this, little bit of that” marketer to true strategic marketers is that they’ve got the right tactics… but they don’t execute them correctly.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

I was speaking to a group of sewing machine dealers not too long ago and when I started talking about giving gift certificates a gentleman in the room raised his hand. He said, “You know, Bob, I’ve been giving away those $5 gift certificates like you recommend and nothing’s happening. Nobody’s redeeming them.”

Well, about six or eight other hands immediately shot up in the air. And what those folks said was that his denomination was too small. $5 wasn’t the right amount. They had ALL been giving away $20 gift certificates, not $5, and having tremendous success with it.

So… right tactic, not executed correctly, not getting the desired results.

Execute the tactics correctly and the results change.

Here’s another gift certificate example. Our favorite local ice cream store was giving out gift certificates for a free small ice cream cone. It wasn’t working the way it was supposed to and her Dad (and business partner!) was giving her a hard time.

It was immediately apparent to me what the problem was – by giving a small ice cream cone she wasn’t giving her new customers the choice to buy anything bigger, more expensive. They all just got their small ice cream cone and left.

We switched it to a gift certificate for $1 (which is less than the price of a small cone) and all of a sudden her average sale on those gift certificates went way up – people could use their certificate for a $3 flurry or a $5 banana split. They could use their gift certificate for the more expensive items on the menu. The customers were happier and she was acquiring new customers at a profit. Everything was good.

Again, right tactic with the incorrect execution didn’t produce the desired results. But with a little tweak – actually giving away less – it was enormously successful.

Now those are two simple gift certificate examples, but here’s one that was a little bit more complex.

Our friend Trudy Salinas has the Retail Mastery System and she takes action on what she learns. So she started working on cause marketing but her efforts still weren’t working…

She called me on the phone and we walked though everything she was doing. Now because this is what I do for a living and because I’m able to spot those pesky execution problems, I saw what was wrong and had her make a few minor tweaks and one major shift. Her cause marketing events went from barely making a dent in her sales to creating an enormous impact on her business.

She had the right tactic, she just wasn’t executing correctly.

Once we made those tweaks, kept the right tactic and executed it correctly, now she’s having massive success.

It’s doing the right things, at the right time, in the right way… This is strategic retail marketing; this is how you get to big-time retail marketing success.

It’s SYNERGY, folks!

I could give you some fancy scientific definition for synergy, but here it is in a nutshell…

Synergy is when 1+1=3.

The total sum of the parts is greater than the individual components combined.

And that’s how synergy works with your marketing, too. The combination of all the right tactics end up delivering MORE than the sum of their parts.

It’s not “a little of this and little of that” and you hope it works… it’s 1+1=3.

There’s synergy that happens when all of your tactics enhance each other and you execute them correctly. The road is smooth and the road is straight – it gets you where you’re going fast and easy.

Now there’s another, bigger, synergy at work, too. And that’s the synergy not just between your different tactics, but the synergy between your strategies, your tactics, and your plan.

When you pick the right tactics based on your strategies (not because a random ad salesman showed up in your store) and you drop those tactics into a comprehensive marketing plan, you get synergy between those three components.

Synergy between your strategies, tactics, and plan….

Synergy between all your different tactics…

Execute correctly…

BOOM! You’re a rockin’ retail marketer.

This is huge stuff and when you get all of this working together you are going to see massive changes in your results. It can literally transform your business.

So here it is… Your road map to becoming a Strategic Retail Marketer.

Discover Your Strategy > Choose Tactics that Support the Strategy > Drop the Tactics into a Marketing Plan > Execute the Tactics Correctly

It really is that simple!

But it’s not necessarily easy.  And you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed or anxious because my guess is that you aren’t doing it this way right now…

Let me share one of our strategies here at WhizBang Training. One of our strategies is to create the maximum positive impact for independent retail store owners.  

Maximum positive impact for the retailers in our Tip of the Week community, for the store owners in our circle of influence, for YOU.

It’s what we come to work and think about and talk about every day. How can we help you become more successful?

Even though I wish I could, I clearly can’t go visit every single one of your stores and spend a couple of days with each of you figuring all this marketing stuff out.

But that doesn’t change your need. It doesn’t change your need to understand your strategies, your need to pick the right tactics, your need to pull together a killer plan, your need to know the correct way to execute the tactics.

Your need still exists.

And that’s why, after a 3-year hiatus, I decided to bring back the Marketing Mentor Program.

It really is the best way for me to create the maximum positive impact for you in your marketing. It’s going to be absolutely fantastic!

The Marketing Mentor Program is a 6-week, on-line coaching program. Because it’s all on-line you don’t have to travel, plus you and your spouse, you and your partner, you and your manager can all take the class together.

Over the course of those 6 weeks you’re going to get crystal clear on the right strategies for YOUR store, you’ll choose the right tactics that support your strategies, and all along the way you’ll be working on your complete, comprehensive written plan that will drive your marketing and increase your sales for the next year!

And there are going to be follow-ups throughout the year to support you and make sure you’re on track and executing your tactics correctly.

Doesn’t the thought of breaking free of the stress that comes from not knowing what to do excite you? Doesn’t the thought of being confident in your marketing results thrill you?

If it does, then the Marketing Mentor Program is for you.

I know you’ve probably got a million questions about the program… so keep your eye on your inbox. Tomorrow morning you’re going to get an email with all the details, everything you need to know about the Marketing Mentor Program and information on how to register.

I am really looking forward to working with YOU!

In my last blog post I talked about the importance of having a marketing plan, which according to the survey results, most of you don’t.

But not just any old plan will do, you have to have the right plan, a strategic plan. In fact, if you want to shift away from being a “little of this, little bit of that” marketer, the first step is to understand your overall business strategies.

I walk you through it in this video - or read the lightly edited transcript below the video. And don't forget to leave me your comments, ideas, thoughts, and reactions!

Video transcript...

Thanks in particular to Tom and Gail for pointing out that the Corn Palace is in Mitchell, SD not Kearney, Nebraska!  I guess that really points to the need for a good map, huh? I should have known better because I’ve actually been to both the Corn Palace in Mitchell and to Kearney, Nebraska (bought a butter dish at a garage sale there!)

Strategy vs. Tactics

In my last blog post I talked about the importance of having a marketing plan, which according to the survey results, most of you don’t.

But not just any old plan will do, you have to have the right plan, a strategic plan. In fact, if you want to shift away from being a “little of this, little bit of that” marketer, the first step is to understand your overall business strategies.

Your strategy is an idea, a big idea. It’s the WHY. A great strategy is something that you can build your whole business around. It helps define and drive your business. It’s an idea your customers can rally around.

A tactic is an action, something that you do.  A tactic is HOW you are going to achieve your strategy.

The tactics are what you do, the strategy is why you are doing it.

Now this is often a tough concept for people to wrap their head around, so let me give you some real life examples to see how strategies and tactics work together…

Domino’s Pizza

In the early 1960's Tom Monaghan had one small pizza joint in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It was sandwiched in between two major universities, the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University.

The dorm rooms, and student apartments, and frat houses in those two giant universities were filled with students (in the ‘60's, remember) who were all getting a terrible case of the munchies. Now these people didn’t want the best pizza, or the tastiest pizza, they wanted the fastest pizza. They had the munchies and they wanted their pizza NOW.

So Tom Monaghan came up with the strategy of having the fastest pizza delivery. Being the FASTEST was his big idea and he built his entire business around that strategy.

In order to be the fastest delivery he had to make the pizzas faster. Now I don’t know exactly how he did it, maybe he used pre-cooked crusts, installed more ovens, or gave his cooks better training.

After the pizzas were made, he needed to deliver them faster. Maybe he hired more delivery drivers. Maybe he hired better drivers who actually knew the area, or drivers who knew how to use a map.

All those actions are the TACTICS that supported his strategy of having the fastest pizza delivery. Strategy: fast. Tactic: More ovens. Tactic: Better delivery drivers. All those tactics grew out of his strategy which was being fast.

His marketing tactics also grew out of his overall business strategy. The most memorable marketing tactic was his guarantee and his slogan. It’s so memorable that you probably know it even though it hasn’t been in use for decades…

“Your Pizza Delivered in 30 Minutes or Less, or It’s FREE.”

That tactic, the guarantee and slogan, was the cornerstone of all the rest of his marketing efforts and it sprang naturally from his main business strategy.

That strategy helped make Tom Monaghan a billionaire. Last year Domino’s delivered something like 400 million pizzas. That’s the power of a hot strategy!

Mackinaw Kite Co.

Let me give you an example from my past, from the Mackinaw Kite Co., the retail store I founded in the early '80's and owned for 19 years.

Our strategy was FUN.

The business tactics that followed from our fun strategy included having a really fun product mix, hiring very outgoing, energetic staff members, and creating interesting interactive displays in bright fun colors.

Our marketing tactics also flowed from that strategy of fun. We had kites festivals, yo-yo and juggling clubs, Kite Day programs in schools all over Michigan, and crazy in-store demos of all the toys and games.

All those marketing tactics reinforced our strategy of fun.

Can you start to see how your strategy informs your choice of tactics? Dominos didn’t spend their money on better ingredients or fancy restaurant décor – they invested in more drivers, spent money on their great guarantee and on ads plastering that awesome slogan everywhere.

At the Mackinaw Kite Co. if given a choice between spending money on newspaper ads or having a kite festival, it was a no-brainer. The kite festival supported our strategy of fun. And when we did do newspaper ads we made sure they weren’t some boring 2x3 boxed display ad, they reinforced that idea that we were fun!

When you get clear on your strategies, all of a sudden the tactics start to flow naturally, effortlessly.

But you don’t have to limit yourself to just one strategy. Most retail businesses have between 1-5 strategies.  I like 2-3 really big ideas that you are building your business around – any more than that and you start to lose focus.

For example at the MKC one of our other strategies was to develop hobbyists. So we didn’t just sell a yo-yo; we were in the business of creating yo-yo players, and yo-yo collectors, and yo-yo evangelists!  We didn’t just sell a kite; we were in the business of creating kite flyers and people who would collect kites.

Once we got clear about the fact that these were skills that people could continue to enjoy and develop for years and years, then we had a strategy we knew we could hang our hat on and we had tactics that effortlessly flowed from our strategy.

Dicovering Your Own Strategies

Don’t stress out about this!

When I do a strategy vs. tactic session, say at the Retail Success Summit or some other live seminar, I can almost see the panic in people’s eyes. They see the power in this concept and the tendency is to want to grab that big idea right away, to instantly understand the strategy and get going on it immediately…

But it rarely works that way.

You see you can’t force a strategy on your business. A strategy is something that needs to be DISCOVERED. It needs to be un-covered. 

You see, deep inside I knew I was selling fun and not kites. Kites are just a piece of cloth held up in the air by a string. I knew I wasn’t selling yo-yos that I was really creating yo-yo players.

I knew all along that I was in the FUN business, but it took me awhile to articulate it. For a long time I'd have told you that I was in the kite business. It took some time to realize that these were our strategies and that these were big ideas that we could build our business around.

So take your time and think about it. Let it percolate for a bit.

• What is your big idea?
• What is that you can hang your hat on?
• What big idea will really resonate with your customers?
• What do the customers need and want?

Understand that your strategies are there, waiting to be discovered, un-covered. If you give them the time and the energy and the thought, they will reveal themselves to you. And then you can use them to create the tactics, to create the marketing plan, and to build your business.

Do you see how this changes everything?

The right strategy leads you down the highway – smooth and fast and straight. The wrong strategy is like driving the back roads hoping you’ll get from Michigan to LA via Florida. You can do it, but it’s not the easiest, fastest, best way to get there.

If your marketing isn’t working, if you feel like you’re beating you head against the wall, it doesn’t mean you’re a loser…  it’s probably just because you have the wrong strategy!

The right strategy will lead you in right direction and help make you a retail winner.

What do you think? Please, take a few minutes to leave your comments, thoughts, ideas, and reactions. I read every single one of your comments and what you have to say will help me with my next blog post.

I’m going to be blogging about how to wrap this all up and make the shift to a successful strategic retail marketer.

 We found the results fascinating… but not surprising. Watch the video for my take on the results and what it means for YOU as an independent retailer. Scroll down to read the results and leave your comments.

Many thanks to the 638 independent retailers who answered our quick survey questions! Survey says…

Do you have a written marketing plan for 2011?
   Marketing plan? What’s that??                                                                                             6.8%
   I have lots of great marketing ideas, but they’re not exactly what you’d call a plan…     47.2%
   My plan is all in my head, not written down.                                                                         23.9%
   Yep… now, where is that yellow sticky note I wrote it on?                                                 10.7%
   Absolutely! It’s complete and it includes every marketing initiative in my business.       11.4%

If you DON’T have a complete, written marketing plan, why not?
   I don’t do much marketing.                                                                                                    4.5%    
   I had no idea I was supposed to have a marketing plan!                                                   3.3%    
   Just lazy, I guess.                                                                                                                   10.0%    
   What a waste of time! I’d rather just wing it.                                                                         1.6%    
   I don’t have a clue where to start or how to create a marketing plan for my store.         42.2%    
   Too busy. I’ve got to sleep sometime…                                                                              38.3%    

If you DO have a complete marketing plan, how valuable is it to you?
Rate on a scale of 1-10.

I never look at the thing.      
   1       2.5%
   2       0.5%
   3       4.1%
   4       6.1%
   5       8.6%
   6     13.7%
   7     13.2%
   8     23.9%
   9       8.6%
   10   18.8%
I'd run into a burning building to save it.    

After the results were compiled we weren’t all that surprised to find the vast majority of retailers - well over half of you - have no marketing plan at all.

Some of you have a plan, but say it’s all in your head, not written down. You know what one of my favorite retail sayings is?  “If it ain’t written it ain’t real!” A plan in your head is really just a bunch of ideas…

A few of you have a complete written marketing plan – good for you! And, again, we were not surprised to find that almost everybody with a complete marketing plan finds it very valuable. More than 15 retailers would run into a burning building to save their marketing plan – that’s how valuable it is to them!

Like I said, these results are not surprising to me – I talk to retailers all the time who are floundering around with no plan. And yet the folks with a plan overwhelmingly find it super valuable. Let me tell you why I think they find those marketing plans so valuable.

It’s because without a complete, written marketing plan you end up doing a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, which ends up equaling a whole lot of nothing.

Let me see if this sounds familiar to you…

• The Yellow Pages salesperson shows up in your store and tells you that your competitor is buying a bigger ad… so you decide to try something new in the yellow pages.

• Then the local radio station ad rep promises you exposure to 20 ka-jillion local listeners… so you decide to try a little of that.

• A couple of weeks later an attractive Welcome Wagon salesperson flirts with you a little bit, shows you their compelling offers… and so you do a little bit of this.

• Your friend suggests Groupon because they love getting those deals in their email… so you decide try it out. After all, it’s the latest new thing.

Here’s the problem. There are a thousand different options, a thousand great offers, a thousand nice salespeople, a thousand possible ways to market your business - I’ve not even scratched the surface here.

And some of them work! Some of those thousand possibilities would be good for your business.

But until you make a plan and understand WHY you’re doing what you’re doing, you’re just grasping at straws…  doing a little bit of this, and a little bit of that and HOPING that some of it works.

Let me tell you right now, HOPE is not a good marketing strategy!

So here’s a story. Think of your marketing as a road trip. A road trip from, say, Grand Haven, Michigan where I am right now to Los Angeles, California.

One kind of road trip is to get in your car, pull out of the driveway and HOPE you get to Los Angeles eventually. You don’t really know where you’re going; you just drive around for a while going here a little bit, there a little bit and maybe end up in Florida until someone points you west again.  You’ll probably run out of money, time, and interest before you ever get to LA.

You see, just hoping to get to LA, trying to get there without a plan, isn’t very effective or efficient.

Now a different kind of road trip would be if you knew you had to get from Grand Haven to Los Angeles in 5 days and you had $2000 to get there.

The first thing you’d do would be to buy a map and plan out the shortest route between Grand Haven and LA. Then you’d figure out how much you’d have to spend on gas and that would be the first expense that would come out of the $2000. You’d plan out how many nights you’d need a hotel room and how many meals you’d have to buy. Finally, if you had any money or time left over, you could think about doing some fun stuff like pulling off the highway in Kearney Nebraska to see the Corn Palace, or heading south to spend a day at the Grand Canyon.

You see how that changes things? The person with the plan gets the most things done, the best things done, the right things done (they make it to LA!), and because of that they experience the least stress and have the most fun.

That’s what a plan can do for you!

When you think of your marketing like this doesn’t it excite you?  I hope so – I get excited for you!

BUT here’s the catch…  You can’t just have any marketing plan; you have to have the right plan. It has to be a plan that’s driven by STRATEGY.

And that’s what I’m going to talk about in my next blog post – how to make the switch from a “little bit of this, little bit of that” marketer to a strategic retail marketer. That change is a huge shift for the future of your business.

Right now what I’d like you to do is to post your comments below. Tell me what you think about what you learned in this blog post. Ask any questions you may have. I’ll take it all into consideration as I make that next blog post about what it means to be a strategic retail marketer.

I regularly blog for the 'Aftermarketer Club', a club for people who are in the automotive business.  They sent me a request for a blog post about “What’s your best business-building resource?”  

I started to think about it and I realized that it was my car.  My car... why?  Watch this short 3 minute video and find out! Or if you prefer, read the transcript here.

Another video on getting the most out of everything you do!

Click here for a lightly edited transcript of this video

_{TO WIN...  place your bid as a comment below the video.}

The highest bidder on 10-10-10 (my birthday!) will win my "travel buddy" Retail Mastery System PLUS, the amount of the winning bid will be donated to the charity of the winner's choice. 

Happy bidding!

What Are You Doing To Leverage YOUR Retail Successes?

Here is a lightly edited transcript of the video:

Hey, it’s Bob here, and in this blog entry I am going to continue my train of thought about how important it is to make sure that you write down what you’re doing so you can build upon your successes.  This is another strategy to build upon your successes; and it’s about leverage. 

I went online and I looked up some definitions, and here’s a definition that I found that best suited our conversation today.  “Leverage is the application of limited resources through a tactic intended to create magnified consequences.”

Let me read that again for you:  “The application of limited resources” – you don’t have very much stuff to work with – “through a tactic intended to create magnified consequences.”  In other words, how do you do more with less?

Several years ago I read an article in the Harvard Business Review about resource poverty.  And almost every independent retailer I know, almost every small business owner I know, including all of us here at WhizBang! Training, suffers from resource poverty.  And resource poverty is not just money; it’s creativity, it’s time, it’s energy, it’s all of those things.  We’re not big organizations.  We’re trying to do a lot with a very limited amount of stuff.  We don’t have unlimited resources.  We’re resource-poor.

So what we have to do is we have to leverage everything we do; and this is particularly true in marketing.  And let me give you a couple of examples of people leveraging their marketing efforts and getting a lot more from what they’re doing.

One of the tactics you can use is to duplicate successes to the point of diminishing returns.  I have this conversation a lot.  I ask in a program, “How many of you do customer appreciation events?”  And people raise their hands.  And I say, “Are they successful?”  And they say, “Yeah, they’re slammed.”  “How often do you do them?”  “Oh, once a year.”

Well, if you have an event that’s a success once a year, it’s standing room only, maybe you should do it twice a year.  And if it’s successful twice a year, you should start doing it four times a year.  Again, do it to the point of diminishing returns; clearly, you can’t have customer appreciation events every day or every week – or maybe you can.

I just talked to a guy who owned a skateboard park; and he said once a month they have a customer appreciation event.  And the kids, his customers, absolutely love it.  It’s their special day.  Kids skate free; they have huge volumes.  And it started out as once every six months and became more and more often.  Taking what you’re doing if it’s successful, do it more often.  You can also do the same thing with classes and clubs.  If you have a class that’s successful, if you have a club that’s successful, apply it to another product, to another service.

We used to do yo-yo clubs at the Mackinaw Kite Company.  And if our yo-yo day was filled to the rafters with kids, we knew it was time to add a day.  All of these things, if they fill up, it indicates there’s a need for more.  Duplicate it.  Expand on it.  Leverage your knowledge, leverage your success, and get more from it.

Another example of this would be the product of the month.  If you’re a gourmet cookware store or a gourmet food store and you have huge success with a hot sauce of the month, you may want to consider adding a pasta sauce of the month.  You see, you spent the time figuring out how to get the system going, why not just replicate it; don’t invent another wheel when you can take one wheel that you’ve already done and put it on and use it again.

Let’s talk about amplifying an existing idea. This is another way to leverage something that you already have in place.

I’m going to give you an example from my friends at the CigarBox in Pennsylvania.  I was doing a sales training for their team so their sales people would be better during the holidays (by the way, if you need a sales trainer at the holidays, call me; it will be worth it) and part of what they sold was lottery tickets.

They had these sheets of tickets and I said, “Do you sell very many of those sheets?”  They said, “Oh, yeah, we sell a lot of them.”  So we started talking about it.  “How much do the sheets cost?”  “They cost $20.00.”  “Well, why don’t we have a $100 sheet?  Why don’t we have a $500 sheet?”  And so we kept going like this; we kept leveraging the idea.  When it was done, they decided to have a $5000 wreath made out of lottery tickets.  So that’s leveraging it, right?

We took the idea and just exploded it from $100 to $5000.  Now, it turns out that they couldn’t make a wreath out of 5000 lottery tickets, so they made a giant gingerbread house.  They leveraged it one more time – rather than just trying to sell a $5000 gingerbread house, they decided to give 10% -- essentially, all of their profits from this sale of this house to the charity of the purchaser’s choice.

And since they made it a cause-marketing event, all of a sudden then they could do publicity.  Do you see how we just took this simple idea, $20 lottery ticket bundle, essentially a stocking stuffer, and all of a sudden made it press worthy.  That’s leverage.

So they sent out press releases.  Guess what?  Here’s the article, half page.  The television stations came and covered it.  They created a giant buzz.  Of course, that drove people into the store and somebody bought it.  Here’s a picture of the store owners and the guy who bought it.  The guy who bought it is the guy who looks like Elvis Presley.

This is huge stuff, folks; you have to keep thinking that way.

Now here’s what happened; they had so much momentum from this first one that they created a second lottery gingerbread house made out of lottery tickets.  This time they didn’t make it a cause-marketing event, but this time what they did was they sold chances.  So for $20 you could get 20 chances; and they made a significant profit selling chances to their second gingerbread house.

Do you see how what they did was they kept thinking, “How can I make this better?  How can I make this bigger?  How can I tweak it for maximum publicity?”  And they took a very simple idea and turned it into something very significant during the last holiday season.  So that’s amplifying an existing idea.