Would You Prefer More Haystack or Needles?

I know what you’re thinking, ”Jack’s going to give us all a pitch on the great new DirectFlow targeting that is yielding more acoustic pianos and less digitals." Well, I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. We are proud of eliminating (sorry for another agricultural cliche’ but I had to do it) more chaff so making hay would be easier. The truth of the matter is that there is no “cut and dried” right answer. (There I go with a cliche again.) Maybe a better way to state that is: there is no wrong answer to the question in the header. See, not so predictable am I?

There are advantages to more haystack, both economical and cultural, if your definition of “haystack” is different than one that a totally “dyed in the wool” luxury retailer or service provider may need. (Where are all these cliches coming from?) You may need a larger than normal amount of interest in the entry level leads if that is what your inventory or services dictate. Retailers who cater to the “used” market may be luxury market businesses who fill a necessary niche in the marketplace. HVAC companies service all homes, homes with one unit and those who have huge, several thousand square feet homes that need multiple units with more SEER2 (seasonal energy efficiency ratio) power. Needing both parts of the market to be your potential clients is normal to most businesses. Yet, the messaging and marketing approach to different consumer buying segments may not work as well with a “one size fits all” approach. This is where an agency needs to understand and weigh the needs of its clients, and cover all messaging needs appropriately per target. How does this tie into the question asked in the title? Read on…

There are technically different segments of sales opportunities within reach of every business, thus the different vehicle models made by all car manufacturers. The line up of vehicles Mercedes Benz makes totals about 70 if you include all classes. Chevrolet doesn’t have a quotable number because it changes frequently but once more, there are many models. The overall, encompassing marquis value of Mercedes vs. Chevrolet in public perception points the consumer towards different price ranges, and that affects the reputation of the company overall; but different models inside their umbrellas can be marketed using different lifestyle benefits or price point statements.  Now that I’ve acknowledged that there are different products and services to be promoted inside each company type, allow me to state this: it is important to identify then present the highest number of true opportunities per segment inside the individual haystacks as possible. Thus the title.

OK class, take notes; geo, psychographics, consistent messaging, aesthetics, and the proper offer all need to be pragmatically married to reduce the size of the haystack. I won’t go into all the ingredients of the recipe but over the years, via combined testing and experience, we have figured out how to eliminate an impressive amount of fluff that will never translate into a sales opportunity. No marketing entity will ever be able to eliminate all the fluff, because human nature isn’t always predictable. Yet since time is money, the fewer folks we can safely disqualify from needing to be chased, the better. Therefore whether we are targeting families, new homeowners, or interest types, we have refined the quality of the leads we generate. What is the collateral damage? Volume, thus the reason I reference the “needle in the haystack”, can be a barrier needing to be sifted through. Reducing the size of the haystack can be a relief and create an environment in which to be more productive to luxury marketing businesses, be they retailers or service providers.

 So, do lower end leads have value to a business? Possibly; it could even be a company's mission to fulfill the needs of people who are primarily “cost conscious" more so than value conscious. 

We have worked a lot with the piano industry, an industry which has models of all sizes and flavors. All price points are represented and some pianos are traditional, some high tech, and some hybrids. The place a company fills in the marketplace can sometimes be diverse but there is usually a “pervasive area” in which they end up specializing. Such is the case with a company I recently visited for personal reasons. I stumbled upon a business example accidentally. Here’s a short story that is an example of the attitude and training of a company matching their reputation and mission:

I was waiting for a heavy duty double guitar stand to be brought up from the massive warehouse at Sweetwater Music in Ft. Wayne Indiana. I had already spent some time playing guitars and dreaming about the perfect 12 string in the acoustic guitar room and picked up some other small items I needed for a couple non-profit shows I was doing that weekend. For those of you unfamiliar with Sweetwater, their physical location is, as advertised, “The World’s Largest Music Store.” The physical operation is huge, well laid out, diverse and impressive, with tons of employees well versed in POP (point of purchase), but the heart and soul of this company is the online sales. It is the largest online retailer in the US. Although it has some premium quality products, It is not a luxury marketing company.   

As I waited for my double guitar stand to be brought to me from the warehouse, I overheard a manager training, of all things,  a new employee in the piano department. “Yes, we do have premium pianos here too; we carry the Yamaha brand, and in this local market we do OK with them,” he explained. ”But our bread and butter is selling and shipping digitals under the $5,000 price point. We’ll ship an occasional digital over $5k but for the most part, your job with call-ins from across the country will be to make the buyer feel like they are just as safe to save money and buy from us as they are with the local dealer. We can handle warranty repairs and schedule service just as well as they can… so, why not take advantage of our buying power and save? Then steer them right back to the price and help them select the best unit for them.”  

So there you have it. Reducing the size of the haystack is not desirable for this retailer because they have something for just about any musical instrument desire or need. Their model is built on branding themselves as the place to get anything musical, so reducing the size of the stack is counter productive for them because they offer “universal appeal.” Their business model is based upon being able to serve any musical need; they are a “one-stop-shop” option. Let’s juxtapose this with a local piano dealer who specializes in not only new but also well-vetted, used instruments of various manufactured types, and have a territory they operate inside primarily where the vast majority of their sales come from. The Sweetwater haystack is national; the local dealer enjoys sales revenue mostly from a 30 to 50 mile radius, with a few exceptions from time to time. Sweetwater’s success though is proof positive that there is more online business then you can imagine; if not, why would they spend over $100 million annually in national online digital advertising? Instead of making sure they spend money fishing in the right fishing hole, they have bait all over the lake catching every species, age and size of fish. BIG haystack, lots of bait set to catch anything there is to catch in any purchasing proclivity school.

Niche marketing is what the luxury space is all about, and the typical community and regional oriented retailer or service provider has budget constraints to operate inside, so the primary haystacks are all they can logically commit to. Anything that reduces the size of the stack is desirable. Refining the targeting and eliminating as much fluff in the stack as possible saves money and time, and as we know, time also equals money. Reducing the haystack to make the needles and easier to find faster is critical to local luxury marketing Main Street USA businesses. This is who we serve, the US businesses who know exactly who their prime prospects are and need someone to help them create more relationship possibilities with that specific segment. This means that finding the right audience online is the only budget-able option a small (not meant as an insult, but definitely “small” compared to Sweetwater) business can afford to invest in.

Having been blessed with a long and adventurous sales career, I can’t resist sharing a thirty five year old sales story which just coincidentally pitted me against Sweetwater in a “head to head” sales competition. Since I am originally from the heartland in Northern Indiana, I found myself making a living selling jingles in part of Sweetwater’s radio advertising area. They have always had studios and recorded jingles for businesses in the tri-state area of Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. If you go online it will tell you that Sweetwater has never been involved in selling and producing jingles, but that is either accidentally incorrect or revisionist historically. 

How do I know? I had a jingle house named “Heartland Music” because my sister, brother-in-law, and I wanted a way to make a living and pay for a studio for our songwriting demos. I sold to local businesses, and we made some memorable and often ridiculous jingles for local businesses so they could break through the clutter of all the same sounding commercials from the radio stations and jingle houses, such as Sweetwater. How does this tie into haystacks vs. needles? My prospecting haystack was about three counties in size and theirs was 3 states. Their needles were anyone who used the radio; the more frequently, the better the prospect. They were a formula-oriented operation that wanted their onsite music studio to stay busy when they didn’t have enough custom recording projects booked.

My needles were people who wanted to stand out and wanted something unique to break through the barrier, something that branded them as a different option from their competition and sold more of a feeling and a single benefit than a list of reasons why they were the biggest or the best, or both. We were way more creative, even eclectic, so we found our niche with smaller businesses (local moms and pops) with smaller dollars who couldn’t buy the frequency that the regional and national chains could, but still spent media dollars as a part of their business model.

A strange domino effect took place after we had sold our little :15/:30 second packages to the locals. Our stuff was more off the wall: Joey’s Wallpaper-“We Gotcha Covered” was country, the material for the local boat marina sounded like Buffet and Marley had hosted a party, and the local shoe store (who wanted to promote a new high end line) was metro-jazz in a rural market. We had fun, the listeners had fun, and the merchants and service providers got noticed for a change.

Eventually we became Sweetwater's worst sales nightmare in my three counties; so much so that they offered to buy us and our growing book of business. What would be the fun in that? They only went there because we broke the monopoly that they had in the region and they were afraid we would grow and garner more “jingle real estate.” It never happened; we all moved to Nashville, but the experience was a real lesson in finding our own needles in the haystack and being different enough in our approach than the other options. I heard those jingles run for more than a decade whenever I went back home to visit family and friends. Passionate servicing, listening to who they really were, and painting that picture in song was the difference. Listening always is. If you are to market effectively, you must listen well. An uncustomizable product offering and a low price will only get you so far. Getting prospects to open up is fundamentally critical and still the firm foundation of a growing company in today’s world.

In our shrunken online world today, the competition of the local luxury marketing retailer or service provider is MASSIVE. Why? Because even if you are in "Podunk, USA", the internet feeds consumers more information and purchasing options than ever before in history. Even if you are the only brick and mortar in town, you have competition. Every other recreational option is your competition. The consumer decision isn’t merely between your X-Y-Z vs. the competition's either. It may be your X-Y-Z vs. a boat, a horse or an RV. The prospect could have a lifestyle decision in progress. The haystack is HUGE! Not to worry though, one of the benefits of technology that we can take advantage of is the “interest activities” and actions that people take online. We can find them based upon what they express is important to them, and invite you into the fray and be an option on how and where they decide their dollars would be most well spent.

A great targeting strategy married to the right aesthetics and messaging can find the needles better and reduce the size of the haystack. Local businesses have advantages they can and should evangelize about, things unique to them that the consumers need to know about, such as: the list of happy local customers, the institutions that have trusted and done business with them, the charities supported, the local folks employed, your commitment to client satisfaction (because you might run into them at the grocery store) and how you live in, and are a contributing part of the community. There are plenty of things the local luxury marketing provider has over the box stores and online sources. The problem? If you’re not marketing digitally well, including your social footprint, and talking to the needles buried in the right haystacks, they are talking more to them than they are to you.

Solid targeting and filters can reduce the size of the haystack, and why is that important? Because it takes less dollars to find a prime prospect if you're searching the right section of the stack. Also because “time is money” in the sales realm and if you can get to the needles faster you can sell more, faster. There are times in smaller markets when you simply need whatever and everything that is out there, but for the most part it's best to have less stack and more needles because time is money and the cost per lead should be subservient to the quality. Vanity analytics are fun but what we need is something we can take to the bank right? Not busy-work.   

Summary: There are some things marketing people have little or no control over: when a prospect is really ready to pull the trigger, rich folks who act cheap. and “looky-loos” who were shopping casually because they really need to consider getting a life instead of sitting on their butt all day long and taking up our time.

The things we can control? 

The targeting, budget, and follow up protocol. We can figure out the best ways to make more friends online, that will accept our invitation to allow us to help them make the best decision for themselves. The targeting is getting better as our audience intel refines and matures. The budgets will be determined by how many impressions the market decides it takes before the convert. These first two things are elements we can manage but not control. Tech platforms will give you filters to use, and use a combination of. The balance is to harvest as many leads as possible while keeping an eye on the necessary amount of high end and mid-range opportunities. The market will tell us how many times we must fund the impressions and that will give us budget parameters. The follow up protocol?!?!? Now that is a discussion for another day; but suffice it to say, items one and two being an equal playing field for all competitors, we must self-examine the sales activities that do and do not work then gravitate toward the recipe that works best and refine it. The haystack is there, the needles are there, and we must learn the most efficient way to convert the interest into more sales than the options we compete against but we can! Why? Because music has a life enrichment quality and magic that can’t be replaced. We must simply evangelize and influence as many folks as possible for our mutual well-being.

"One of the internet's strengths is its ability to help consumers find the needle in a digital haystack of data." -Jared Sandberg