Making the Marketing Dollars Count
Kathleen O’Toole was a hospital cardiology nurse and worked as a nursing home RN and a visiting nurse before she became interested in educating senior adults and their families about their health-care options. In 1997 she started a small part-time business helping the elderly in south Orange County with a holistic approach to their long-term care and acting as a liaison between their families and their physicians. O’Toole’s first marketing efforts, using direct mail and magazine ads, produced scant results. Then her husband, Lawrence, took the company through a promotional marketing strategy meeting that transformed their efforts and helped quadruple revenue. The company is now a full-time effort with two employees. Lawrence O’Toole, a corporate executive with a background in marketing planning and strategy, spoke to freelance writer Karen E. Klein about the marketing matrix he designed.
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Adult Care Planning Inc. was trying a lot of things in terms of marketing, including magazines and direct mail, and even was considering buying some radio spots. But once we sat down and analyzed the company’s promotional strategy, we realized they hadn’t been effective in getting the right message out to the right people.
A lot of small businesses take a shotgun approach to marketing, scattering their resources, when they should use a scope and a rifle to take a very targeted shot with their dollars. I helped define that target and fine-tune the company’s marketing plan. Many entrepreneurs have no marketing experience, and they can’t afford to hire professionals to help them once they’ve spent money on lawyers and accountants.
What I’ve noticed is that they tend to try and write a marketing and promotions plan and they get frozen because they are caught up in wordsmithing and flow instead of thinking about the real, underlying issues. So they make off-the-cuff decisions about promotional activities because they seem like a good deal. They don’t stop to think about whether a certain marketing tool is a good fit with what the company is trying to do.
At ACP, we started using a graphic matrix instead of a written plan. I felt a visual would help foster questions and dialogue.
First, we depicted the company’s current marketing situation. On the left-hand side of the matrix, we listed the company’s current customer segments. I challenged the employees to group the clients as specifically and narrowly as possible, but what cropped up right away is that we were choosing client demographics that were too broad, so that certain promotional vehicles were reaching parts of a client category instead of the whole.
We divided the space along the top of the matrix into several columns. In the first, we listed “revenue/profitability,” and then we went down to each customer group and figured out how much business it was bringing into the company and what the trend for the future was likely to bring. This exercise shows many companies are doing promotions slanted heavily to reach customers that bring in lower amounts of revenue, or they’re spreading their money evenly across the board when they should be concentrating more heavily on groups that bring in the most income and have the greatest potential to become more important to the company.
The next column across the top was labeled “message.” A lot of people fall short here. We put in key words defining what message we were communicating to each segment of our clientele. Many companies find there is no message, or at least no consistent message, being conveyed.
Over the next several columns, we listed the promotional and marketing vehicles that are available to any company, such as radio, television, print ads, direct mail, seminars and training, trade shows and exhibits, telemarketing, sales calls and public relations. We walked through each client group and filled in the boxes with the promotions that we were doing in each category.
Once that part was filled in, we had a visual that showed whether our promotional activities were consistent and whether they matched the importance of the target group. Some companies find that they may have a group that represents 50% of their business, but they do very little to support that business with promotions.
Next, we filled out a second matrix that reflected what we wanted our promotional strategy to look like. It worked as a powerful tool to keep us focused and consistent all year, so we didn’t make rash, short-term expenditures for things that didn’t support our plan.
What the exercise did for us at Adult Care Planning was open up a dialogue about how seniors and their families choose help. We figured out that our clients generally look for help when they are in a crisis mode, and they generally turn to professionals for advice on what to do: physicians, attorneys and financial planners. They aren’t necessarily receptive to magazine ads or direct mail unless the need is immediate.
This showed we had underestimated the power of “influencers” in bringing us clients, and we knew we had to go directly to the influencers to tell them about our company. We pulled out of the traditional ads completely, took the same amount of promotional dollars and redirected it toward reaching the right influencers. Now we do regular luncheons and seminars for local physicians, telling them how we can improve their patient outcomes by helping with communication and advocating for their patients’ medical plans.
It also helped us refine our marketing message. To be most effective, we want to cater our message differently to each group, and we want to choose the best vehicle to deliver that message to each group.
The other way we’ve used the matrix is when working with vendors, like graphic designers, so we can convey easily who our customers are and what message we want to get across to them.
I think the most effective way to use this strategy is in a group setting, putting it up on a whiteboard, and then revisiting it on an ongoing basis--at least twice a year--to see how well you are following the plan.
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AT A GLANCE
* Company: Adult Care Planning Inc.
* Owner: Kathleen O’Toole
* Nature of business: Senior care and coordination services
* Address: P. O. Box 80605, Rancho Santa Margarita 92688
* Year founded: 1997
* Web site: https://www .acp4seniors.com
* Annual revenue: $50,000
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If your business can provide a lesson to other entrepreneurs, contact Karen E. Klein at the Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016 or at kklein6349@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number.
