The marketing strategy for Starbucks is not one commonly seen in many businesses today. Did you ever realize that it’s a rarity for you to find a Starbucks ad in a newspaper, television commercial, ad space, or billboard; as compared to other popular coffee establishments often seen through these venues, like McDonalds or Tim Hortons?

Let’s explore the marketing techniques Starbucks has implemented over the years in order to create this global coffee phenomenon:

Starbucks is a “Third Place.” From the very beginning, their marketing strategy has focused on creating Starbucks as the “third place” to go to between home and work. Creating this relaxing and unique “experience” for people has been imperative for the company as they recognize this one of the most categorical concepts attached to the company.

Starbucks Sells the “Perfect Cup of Coffee.” According to their history, Starbucks has demonstrated a huge emphasis on product quality. Their coffee, even if priced slightly more expensive than expected, is known for attracting customers with its rich, delicious taste and aroma. From the time you step foot into the store; to your very last sip, it is a must that customers fully feel the uniqueness of enjoying their Starbucks coffee experience. Without a doubt, Starbucks Coffee Company knows the answer to the question, “Why is customer service important.”

The Marketing and Sales of Starbucks. Instead of marketing through big and flashy billboards and advertisements, Starbucks has gone with the more traditional route. If you pay attention to popular television shows, or movies, characters are often seen sipping on a Starbucks coffee. It’s a subtle, yet tactful way to grab their targeted audience’s attention.

Image advertising, such as these, is the company’s primary medium.

Starbucks has carried out their marketing strategy by moving distribution into department stores, grocery stores, movie theatres, businesses, airports, and college campuses.

Many brands and businesses can learn a great deal from the way Starbucks conducts their business. They excel in knowing their customer wants, needs, and most effective way to reach them.

With all of the company’s positive achievements, its evident the root of their success is effective communication with their customers.

Starbucks places communicating with their customers and potential customers at the top of their list for priorities. Can you say the same about your company?

By Christina Gurtowsky, Sales Coordinator and guest blogger
Market Insights, LLC

The number of ways to sort your customers really depends on the needs of your business. Here are just a few of the ways you can segment your most profitable customers:

1) What do your best customers have in common? Are they in a common industry? Do they seem to have the same role at their company? Do they face a similar problems or challenges? Similar buying patterns? How does your service help them? Do they belong to similar clubs or charities? Do they have the same interests, attitudes and habits?

2) How did you attract your top customers? Website? Advertising? Conference? Networking? Cold calls? On-line Newtorking? Referals?

You may be surprised at the results! Once you’ve divided customers into sub-segments, consider the implications for your marketing strategy: Make sure your initiatives are aligned with the profile of your best customers!

My Best,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC

About 80% of my marketing budget is dedicated to membership dues. I have chosen groups that I feel may help my business as well as groups I feel I can make a good contribution to their efforts. I never join a group just to join. If I decide to apply it is only if I can carve the time to dedicate to it properly. My business groups include SWCRC (Southern Wayne County Chamber), TBA (Trenton Business Association), DADBA (Downriver and Detroit Business Assoc.), USIMO (United States Independent Marketing Org.), Rotary and Downriver Network Group (Healthcare Professionals). I have also belonged to professional networking groups, but that is a total different marketing strategy. Here is what I would suggest when considering membership marketing:

1. Set a plan for each membership. If you don’t participate, it doesn’t work!
2. Check all of these networks before purchasing ANYTHING. If they are not in your membership ask them to join one of the groups so you can purchase from them. Purchase only from members and talk about how it helped you.

My plan for example for the SWCRC is go to board meetings, participate in the green committee, help with their email marketing, give ideas to staff for marketing , attend the ABO’s and try to refer members. For TBA my plan includes attending the meetings, promoting my business by showing what types of marketing I am doing for the TBA and using TBA members for any purchases. My DADBA strategy is also pretty simple, show up to meetings, participate on the bulletin board (at least once a month), use their e-blast program for great results, attend their IBR’s when I can and pass referrals to members. My USIMO activities include posting on the bulletin board and promoting members. The DHN basically is a once a month meeting for lunch, I attend when I can or send someone else if I can’t. It’s a great group to find out all the latest in the health industry. I joined Rotary to give back to my community. We have weekly lunch meetings and I have no goals for this group except to help. What I have found though is once you start helping, many business acquaintances also attend every week, so we can catch up. It also saves me drive time as many projects can all be delivered to the same meeting, I find it very fulfilling to be part of such a great group.

3. Once you set your membership plans, what I have found is that these groups have many of the same members who also work their membership marketing. Often I take my 20 some year membership with the Chamber for granted and get lazy. How often have you gone to an event and are drawn to friends and other fellow networkers from other groups because it “feels safe”? I now make it a point to attend these events by myself and have some great conversations. I ask about their business, learn something new and also try to think of a referral for them.

Membership marketing is my favorite form of marketing, it often results in many more referrals than a whole afternoon telemarketing…. and by the way, there’s usually food and I always end up having fun. If you don’t enjoy marketing your business, why would customers want to buy from you?

• Choose a theme/What is different from other like events?

• Choose the date/Make sure it does not conflict with other efforts

• Choose a charity/What clear message can be portrayed as the other benefit for attending the event?

• Set a Budget/What is the revenue goal? Charity goal?

• What will raise the funding? Ticket sales, booths, sponsors, ect.

• What will be the sponsor benefits?

• What will be the attendee benefits?

• Plan Your Marketing/Based on budget, what ads will be placed, web site, press coverage, signage ect.

• For each element of the event select a committee chair

• Set timeline 6 months prior to event and have a deadline for each item to be completed. (Most groups with larger events do meet year round)

Good luck with your event!
My Best Regards,

Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC

These guys will have your head spinning with all the creative marketing you can do with social sites, directory listings and sites that store video and photos.

If you are in the Southeastern Michigan area you have to sign up for this program. It is the first “Before Business Hours” for the Southern Wayne County Regional Chamber, but you need to RSVP by May 11 (734) 284-6000. Member of the Chamber are only $5, non-Members can come for only $15 and it includes breakfast. Carve out two hours to learn some new techniques that will have you twittering and posting with new goals and aspirations! Hope to see you there!

My Best,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC

Do make sure your email is….
• Permission based! Don’t blindly send an email to people you’ve met years ago. Ask for e-mails at Point of Sale or Check Out. Ask for e-mails along with a contest clearly stating you will not sell, spam or share their email.
• Easy to read. You can insert photos and if they can’t see them because of firewalls, they can now view them on-line with these programs.
• Professional. Many of these programs have professional templates you can make your own or easily insert a graphically designed flyer. (most take a jpeg or picture format)
• Reporting! You can clean out emails that don’t exist, see who opened your email, see you went to your web site or blog or article. This is the best feature of email programs and shows your success rate for people who are opening your mail. By the way a 30% open rate is pretty good for most campaigns.
• Video Friendly. If you send a video link, make sure it is easily downloadable (Like You Tube, Talk Fusion or on your web site) people will not click or take time to download a large video file!
• Keeping Up On The Latest Techniques. The rules are always changing, even my emails are not always perfect, make sure to correct as you go.

My Best,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC

How about offering your services as a fund-raising opportunity? You can piggy-back on their marketing (i.e. donor lists, media contacts, etc.) to fill seats at events. Depending on the arrangements, you may receive a set fee or a percentage of the proceeds with the rest going to the nonprofit.

The big money at any event is always in the back of the room. The opportunity to offer additional services, obtain contact information and develop relationships is the real benefit to your business. The ongoing income stream from services or goods can be impressive. Increased awareness and publicity is the added bonus for the nonprofit (which incidentally you will also receive.) There may be tax advantages as well.

So, the community wins through the service you provide. The organization wins through funds and publicity. You win through increased cash flow, publicity and business relationships. People who rely on the charity of others for food, clothing and shelter – the basic necessities we take for granted – win through your generosity.

Then publicize it yourself on your web site.Market Insights has contributed quite a bit last year, why not get a little goodwill from it? It also helps when you get do get hit up by other charities, you can say you do give to certain groups. I am a Rotarian because I so whole heartly believe that this is a way of life all small business must adopt.

Oh, there is one other bonus – the warm feeling you get from knowing that you made a difference in peoples’ lives beyond just making a dollar. It feels so good to make money and also give it back!

My Best in Charity,

Kathy Kane
Market Insights

Online advertising is exploding; a good campaign can be very expensive. Using Article Marketing is a very efficient way to drive traffic to your website at little or no cost at all. Writing articles based on topics that your products or services fall under must contain valuable information to your readers. Do not hard sell them; they should be informative giving the reader confidence that you are an expert in your field.

Why Is Article Marketing Powerful?

Articles should be 300 to 400 words long, and just mention the “keyword” or main topic a very few times. Your articles should focus on sub-topics that go hand in hand with your main keyword. This will give search engines like Google some great food for their spiders. Articles stuffed with keyword and meaningless dribble will not help your search engine rankings, in fact they may hurt you more than not posting at all.

Many miss this very important part; make sure you include a resource box or bio at the end of each article. This is how you plug yourself, your product and provide a link to your website. It’s always a good idea to invite the reader to visit your website or blog for more information on your article topic.

So you aren’t the best writer in town? You can still use this promotional strategy to increase your website traffic. Finding ghostwriters that write good quality articles can be challenging, but you can use services like Enlance and Rent Coder and usually pay around $5 per article. You may what to tweak the article just a bit to make is sound like you are the one talking to the reader – make it personal!

You Have An Article – Now What?

You have completed the hardest part of this marketing technique, writing or buying a good informative article. Now you need to submit it to various article directories. GoArticles.com, EzineArticles and Search Warp are some of the top directories that accept articles for free. You will find may pay to post directories, but I’ve never used them with so many legitimate free resources available.

Some guru’s will tell you should submit to 100 or 200 directories for each article, but I have found that submitting to 5 to 10 directories per article is more effective. This will reduce any penalties for duplicate content – which would make all your efforts worthless.

To streamline the process of submitting articles I use an article submitting program called Article Submitter. This program is very cost effect and includes a hugh database of directories cutting down the time it takes to find the directories in your niche and then submitting to them. Can’t stress enough not to summit the same article to more than 10 directories, rewrite them or submit different topics.

You should also create a “Google Alert” with the title of each article you submit, this will notify you when one of your articles has been indexed. You can also see who used your article, and then you can contact the website or blog owner and build a relationship so you can regularly provide him/her with articles. This type of relationship is even better for rankings than submitting articles, because you do not submit these articles to any other directories or websites – the content is fresh and unique and Google loves that – no duplication what so ever.

Tim Somers is owner of Bizarre Promotions, Inc. a promotional products distributor with over 750,000 promo items to help your business grow.

This is what I LOVE about Constant Contact

1. Reports! You get to find out who bounced, who opted out, who click thru to the sites and email links, who opened my mail.

2. Easy! If you have any publication knowledge it is pretty easy to manipulate the fields and get communication out within minutes to thousands of recipents. Use their templates or pop in a jpeg file and send it within minutes.

3. Cheap With Results! Only $15/mo for up to 500 emails. So send one email blast, get one new client or old client to buy something and this program is paid for. Plus you can have sales staff follow up with folks who clicked thru to your web site or looked at other information you may have posted.

4. Use it for everything! Not only business, but associations, sports groups, organizations. All my extra curricular activities have their own CC list so we can effectively communicate.

5. $30 credit! Let me send you a link, if you are thinking of joining….you get a $30 credit along with a 60 day FREE trial. kane@marketinsights.us …can’t beat this!

Now that being said there are a few drawbacks…but they still definitely outweigh the results…

1. Templates cannot be altered to custom, what you see is what you can use. I understand they may be working on custom designed templates eventually, but some items within templates right now cannot be manipulated.

2. You can import a picture file, but cannot use links within the file… but you can add links below, which still work well.

3. Spam filters…well…this is a toughie because even though all my emails say 100% spam proof, I use opt outs on every email and permission based lists only….they still have issues with images not coming up in some formats without another click and some issues with no display at all for high firewall protected businesses. Sometimes it is an entire group like Yahoo or AOL won’t go thru on some occassions. But you can always send it again.

I am sure they are working on these pesky problems of the email communication industry and I appreciate what their software has done for my clients and my own business. I have researched many other like providers and they are the BEST, so I am sure they will keep on top of their game.

My Best,

Kathy Kane
Market Insights

SuddenValues.com not only gives you another venue to advertise and link your web site, they keep in touch with your customers and other businesses customers with a totally opt in/opt out program that is sent every week.

What I like about this program is if you still don’t have a web site, at least they will give you a web page presence.

If you don’t have time to keep in touch with customers, they do this for you too! Every week coupons, events and promotions are sent to their database (currently in the Southern Wayne/Downriver Michigan area is 4000). I have clients that say they see the coupons coming in and their customers are also signing up to get the weekly email.

SuddenValues.com also can send a completely autonomous email on your business behalf to your clients list which is great for restaurants and entertainment events and for companies who don’t have time to do marketing, this process is turn key.

Customers looking for deals don’t have to wait for Friday, they can go to the Sudden Values site anytime and download coupons or look up event information.

Sudden Values is out in the community promoting its site and ultimately your business as well. Tina Walther, the Southern Gal with Rapport who has the Southern Wayne Territory is also another reason that this program works. Not only is she quick in response, but she helps build your on-line presence. For the cost of one time full page newspaper ad, this turn key source of marketing is a great value and builds your current e-list and ability to touch customers every week!

My Best Regards,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights