Home & Garden Shows for Marketing Pest Control?

Google
by Thomas B.
I was approached about setting up a booth for a Home and Garden Show in San Antonio, Texas. Pest control should do well in a marketing effort targeting homeowners, right? The promotional material sent to me included the following quote:

“Dollar for dollar, consumer shows continue to offer the
most significant return on investment and are the most
effective use of the marketing dollar.”

– The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 2007

Intrigued, I searched this article out online. …It was no where to be found.

Reviewing the Quote

Beyond the fact that I could not find this quote anywhere online, I see some flaws here. The quote is 5 years old. A ton has changed in 5 years. Internet marketing is still in it’s infancy. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that internet marketing can be beat on ROI. But that’s only speaking from my experience as a pest control guy. As it were, the fully report cannot be located online, therefore I cannot even determine if internet marketing was considered in the study. The quote alone a reveals nothing as to the business or businesses that they used to determine that Home Shows were the best ROI for marketing dollars. Sorry, but this quote does nothing for me. I need real data please.

Marketing Dollar for Marketing Dollar best ROI

market 1 (Photo credit: tim caynes)

Where would you put your money for the best marketing ROI? Well… that really depends on who YOU are. If you expect to get the exact same results as everyone else in a specific marketing avenue regardless of your business, of you location, or of your target audience then you don’t understand marketing. “Consumer Shows” probably work extremely well for the wedding industry. It’s a very niche audience, the attendees are looking to buy your service. But for the vast audience of “Homeowners”, not all of them will need new flooring, new windows, or new appliances. And many of them will not show up at a Home Show with the sole intention of finding a pest control company. Therefore, it becomes a harder sale. An exterminator’s ROI is not going to be the same. And the San Antonio Home and Garden show isn’t cheap, well not by my standards. How many pest control services would one have to perform to recoup the money and time investment?

Weighing Marketing ROI

Don’t buy into the “Branding” concept. Don’t just assume that you have to brand your business and that the ROI can not be determined for every marketing endeavor. The best way to determine ROI is with hard numbers. Find a measuring stick and use it. And work it backwards. How many widgets do I have to sell to break even on a given marketing campaign? Does that number seem feasible with the size and demographics of the audience? When it comes to numbers, my accountant has taught me to error on the side of caution. Be realistic. Look at the worst case scenario. Once you determine how you will measure the success and considered the value at the worst case scenario, then you can proceed and report on the success or failure.

but hey… i am just a pest control guy.

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Attribution’s Value to the Customer Intelligence Function

Today’s email brings to mind a number of great questions… Read the following for a peek into the future of digital marketing attribution.

Attribution’s Value to the Customer Intelligence Function By Bill Muller, Editor With the emergence of the Customer Intelligence (CI) function within many enterprise-sized marketing organizations has arisen the desire to look at customer behavior across the entire marketing ecosystem. Inherent in attribution modeling’s functionality is the ability to do just that – to not only scientifically assign credit to the channel, campaign and campaign traits that helped marketers achieve success by whichever key performance indicators they choose, but also to associate that media performance success with the demographic and behavioral traits of given audience segments. Let’s look at just three examples of CI value that can be drawn from the attribution process: Customer Value As transactional data that’s associated with customers is fed back into the marketing attribution process, it can be married with media performance data and customer demographic information (that’s collected through the transaction process, surveys, or via overlay by any number of third-party data providers). As a result, algorithmically attributed media performance can be identified for an organization’s highest value customers, or by those with the highest propensity to convert, or by those with the highest propensity to be repeat buyers – as defined by the demographic and behavior traits of a particular customer segment. Armed with this information, CI professionals can advise their online and offline media buying colleagues to adjust their tactics by customer segment to increase LTV, conversion rates and yield. Mapping the Funnel By analyzing the demographic characteristics of customers whose marketing performance data has been fed through the attribution process, CI professionals can also identify the tactics that produce the best results at each stage of the conversion funnel – by audience segment. Which channel, publisher and offer serves at the first touch (“introducer”) for the customer segment with the highest LTV? Which combination of tactics serves as the last touch for the segment with the highest propensity to be repeat buyers? For the highest value customer segments based on several different key performance indicators, what do the ideal conversion funnels look like? With answers to questions like these, the CI function can not only advise the rest of the marketing organization on which tactics produce the highest results by customer segment, but can also prescribe at which funnel stage and in which sequence those tactics should be executed. Assessing Lag Time There are numerous “lag time” metrics associated with every customer’s stack of touchpoints on the path to a conversion. The time between every milestone – first impression, first click, first website visit, last impression, last click, last website visit, conversion, etc.-can be calculated, and as with the examples above, can be associated to the demographic traits and media performance of the highest value audience segments. With the intelligence gleaned from this analysis, CI professionals can advise media professionals on which audience segments have the longest and shortest lag times between critical milestones in the conversion funnel, the lag times for the highest value segments, and which media tactics should be employed to produce faster conversions, higher value customers, and the greatest return across the entire marketing ecosystem. Just Scratching the Surface Though attribution is rapidly on the rise within the media buying function at many organizations, the Customer Intelligence function is rarely taking advantage of the cross channel touchpoint intelligence that only the attribution management process can provide. But as these professionals begin to experiment with attribution and incorporate it in the value-add they provide to their media buying colleagues, it will undoubtedly become their default methodology, never again choosing to look at audience characteristics in isolated, non-attributed silos. Articles From Industry Publications Can Online Marketer’s Lead the Charge for Analytics & Attribution? By Manu Mathew, Co-Founder & CEO, Visual IQ Published in Marketing Land Search Campaign Optimization Through Touchpoint Analysis By Manu Mathew, Co-Founder & CEO, Visual IQ Published in Search Engine Land Proceed With Caution: Attribution’s Insights Not Always A Straight Line By Anto Chittilappilly, Co-Founder, President & CTO, Visual IQ Published in Online Metrics Insider

In This Issue Attribution”s Value to the CI Function Can Online Marketer’s Lead the Charge? Search Campaign Optimization Attribution’s Insights Not Always A Straight Line White Paper Click here to download 10 Steps to Enterprise Marketing Measurement: A Marketing Executive Checklist Note to The Editor Have feedback to provide on the content of this issue? Want to suggest a topic for a future issue? Drop a note to the editor here.

Attribution in 2012 and beyond

To think that analyzing touch points, lag time, and buying behavior has become so systematic and trackable is amazing. Marketing philosophy a decade ago only mentioned these processes, never before has a company been able to document these. Marketing in the past simply just gave into overlap of marketing. You show a message on TV, they see and ad in magazine, they hear your name across the dinner table… 21 impressions… 7 touches before a buy… ALL OF IT GUESS WORK. In the past you really just needed an intuitive guess on what was working. The way of the future will allow even more accurate tracking and documenting of the elusive touche points it takes for a customer to buy.

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.XXX Domains are Open for Public Purchase

.XXX General Registration Opens Today. 

The TLD (top level domain) .XXX was created this year in hopes to give adult websites their own location online. While the idea of separating out adult material from the rest of web has it’s appeal, it seems that those buying domains don’t agree. Adult content websites argue that the annual price of $99.99 is unfair. Many in the adult industry don’t want the new TLD. Many businesses don’t want to be forced into buying yet another domain to prevent the abuse of their trademark. At $99.99/year, the price for little online reputation management is pretty steep. And the price of letting someone destroy your name?

Let’s Be Adults About This

Yes, that is really their tag line, hard to keep an adult face when you incite a chuckle with a tagline like that. But they apparently mean business. They only want those that use .XXX domains to offer adult entertainment. So as much as I’d enjoy the spoofs on “Live Naked Bugs”, I don’t think that would fall into the proper use for BUGS.XXX. And as funny as it might be, the domain itself isn’t likely to show up in a “safe search” and simply because of the .xxx TLD will be blocked from Net Nannies.

So despite their tag line, being adult about it seems far from the majority of real life business scenarios. Most companies buy to prevent the abuse that comes from less than adult like activity. Stealing a brand’s good name is anything but adult-like conduct.

And that is your Pest Report. Buy now or forever hold your piece. (<— not a typo)

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