Garritano Group

What You Know, We Need to Know.

2017-07-05T11:45:11Z

When developing strategy for our clients we make a point of requesting bit of intel they can provide. Previous marketing efforts, results, financials, research – everything they have help us provide a foundation for strategic development.

Often, at first blush, the information we receive seems contradictory or illogical.

For instance, we might hear, “Our customer is a 35-45 year old, time-stressed female, with children living in affluent suburbs.” But when we analyze their customer base we discover those customers make up only 5% of total sales and respond less frequently than other segments.

Should we build our strategy around ‘who we are’ OR ‘who we think we are?’ OR ‘who we want to be?” The best demographic profile that emerges through customer analysis will certainly be easier to acquire and yield a better return on marketing investments.

Seems like a no brainer right? Not so fast. We need to dig a little deeper.

First, it’s important for us to understand if our client understands this path of least resistance to customer acquisition. If not, our recommendation would be to pursue this low hanging fruit.

Second, we need to understand the client’s market and brand dynamics.

Is there a logical reason to migrate away from our core demographic? Maybe: less competition, higher per transaction value, better credit, more share available, etc. There are a multitude of factors that could tip the scale in favor of focusing on a ‘harder-to-win’ customer segment.
If we are indeed shifting our marketing focus, are there commensurate efforts to ensure the product or service becomes more appealing to our desired segment? New branding guidelines, expanded product offering, altered pricing strategy?

Part of what makes us a powerfully effective marketing resource for our clients is the ability to avoid making assumptions. It’s data that enables us to make fact-based decisions on client strategy. Not just historical data but information related our client’s strategic direction.

We are privileged to have earned this level of trust and transparency with many of our best clients. And those clients benefit by receiving the kind of insightful, accurate and effective marketing counsel that just can’t be found anywhere else!

We’re From Marketing. We Come in Peace.

2017-06-29T13:18:53Z

We’re on an important, business critical mission:

We must acquire and keep customers, profitably.

To do this, we need information: What is a customer’s average lifetime value?; What is our cost of goods sold or cost of sales?; What is the margin on our various products and services?

To get these answers, we must interact with teams outside of marketing: finance, IT, sales, etc. We must not only interact with them, but we must get accurate information from them. If it is not accurate – we’ll know (eventually). In fact, if given access, we can pull the information ourselves – we promise not to break anything. Nor will we tell anyone how easy it was. We’ll make it sound super complicated.

If you are a fellow marketer and have struggled getting good information, you are not alone. We’ve been doing this a long, long time and have seen some crazy things:

The Negative ROI Mystery
We fielded a multi-cell direct mail test. When we tried to analyze the performance of the program we were instructed to send the number of responses for each cell to I.T. The report came back:

-299% ROI Cell1; -100% ROI Cell 2; -250% ROI CELL 3.

Dismal.

But THEN we noticed, cell three had a higher response rate and lower cost than cell two. How could it have achieved an even worse ROI? So we asked, “What factors were considered in calculating ROI?” “Can we see how you calculate the cost of goods sold?”

The answer from I.T.: “No. Why do you need to see that? You can’t change it.”

That’s like saying. “It’s clearly broke. Why fix it?”

What possible reason could there be for now allowing us to see how the results were calculated? What if we promised no one would get fired? No budgets would be cut and everyone would get a raise? Where do we go from here? Should we keep throwing marketing out there to see what random numbers come back from the ‘analysis team?’

“We Can’t Get That Data Out of the System.”
Perhaps YOU can’t get that data out of the system. But we can certainly get that data out of the system. We once had to build a 32 bit machine, load it with Windows 95, find an obscure ODBC driver and extract sales data from an ancient POS machine. We can certainly pull raw data from your enterprise level accounting and sales automation systems. In fact, we can automate the process. Don’t worry – we signed the NDA. Plus, we’re insured. And, we understand just how complicated it is… but don’t worry – we’ve been there before.

“We close 100% of our leads.”
This is just simply not possible. Unless you’ve never done any marketing. It could be that your only sales to date have been to customers who were so desperate for your product that they spent weeks searching the last pages of web searches to find you, call you and beg you to sell them your product. Even then you probably wouldn’t close 100% of leads. What we really need to know is: If, via marketing channels, we reach out to qualified prospects, they respond, we further qualify them and get them in front of sales… what is a reasonable close rate? A reasonable answer is 10%. An answer to make everyone giddy with excitement: 50%. Certainly not 100%. This is a critical component of our forecasting. Actively marketing for the first time, exploring a new market or increasing existing marketing efforts will likely lower historic close rates. And this is ok.

“[Name] will get you what you need.”
[Name] has been with the company for 20+ years. He/she processes all of the vendor invoices and once re-negotiated our printing rates and saved the company thousands. He/She also organizes employee birthday celebrations and is generally our most beloved co-worker. In fact, we meet and immediately fall in love with [Name]. He/She is truly a wonderful person. The problem is [Name] does not have the authority or access to accounting, sales and I.T. to serve as a liaison capable of extracting the complex and mission critical data we need. If anything, her repeated requests only serve to diminish the importance and validity of this important marketing endeavor. Marketing needs an executive sponsor for any meaningful, revenue generating program. But we still want [Name] on the team because He/She’s awesome.

We come in peace.
Especially those of us on the agency side – we are held to a very high level of accountability. At Garritano Group, our entire value proposition is built upon getting measurable marketing results. This information is very, very important to us and even more important to your company. We won’t cost someone their job, we won’t place blame, we won’t shift dollars away from ‘special projects’ – this is a TOTALLY apolitical request. We simply want to do the right thing over here … in marketing.

Offer Strategy: The Numbers Never Lie

2017-05-19T11:05:32Z

When a major furniture retailer rebranded and redesigned their stores, they wanted to generate tons of traffic for their grand re-opening. They increased their radio and television advertising and store traffic increased modestly. Garritano Group recommended scaling back radio and television and using that money to send targeted e-mails and direct mail packages to previous customers and customers within 10 mile radius to the stores. Our courageous client agreed to let us offer $50 to spend on ANYTHING in the store! We knew the sales team could convert a sufficient portion of that traffic into $500 sales to make the program pay for itself.

To us, $50 seemed arbitrary. Would $10 work? Or $25 or even $100? We built an experimental test design to randomly assign people to different cells according to offer value and list source. As expected, $25 pulled significantly better than $10. Significantly means – enough incremental transactions of a necessary value occurred to justify the additional expense. $50 pulled better than $25 BUT it did not generate enough incremental revenue to justify the incremental expense. $75 and $100 offers pulled only modestly better than $50.

So, $25 wins, right? Not so fast. The goal of the program was to get as many people into the store as possible to experience the new store layout and new product offerings. This was a brand-building endeavor. So, even though the $50 offer did not satisfy the gains needed according to a straight revenue model – it did pull more customers into the store, at a cost substantially lower than adding marketing dollars to an already saturated media budget. $50 offer wins.

Key learnings:

Return on investment, while central to every Garritano Group strategy, must be taken in context of brand equity, budget utilization, relationship building and many other factors. Sometimes it is important to invest in future relationships. Especially when those dollars would otherwise be wasted on unmeasurable media or applied to an already saturated media schedule.
Bigger is not always better. $75 and $100 did not pull in proportionally higher numbers. Sometimes offers can seem ‘too good to be true’ and disregarded by the audience.
Regardless of your budget you should always test. We have very rarely discovered truth in anecdotal marketing ‘wisdom’.

Click here to download full PDF of An offer to good to (not) refuse

Aeration Industries Select Garritano Group

2015-01-29T20:52:50Z

We are proud to announce that Aeration Industries, a leading, international provider of innovative, cost effective and environmentally sensitive aeration and wastewater treatment solutions headquartered in Chaska, Minnesota has engaged Garritano Group to provide strategic marketing services across a variety of industries, utilizing a variety of channels.

“Aeration Industries is an emerging leader among Minnesota’s numerous water treatment focused companies.” said Agency President Joe Garritano. “Their unique technologies have so many applications across a variety of industries – it’s an exciting challenge for us to help them capitalize on their advantage.”

The Garritano Group will help Aeration Industries leverage their thought leadership position online and help them demonstrate how their technology can be applied across industries as diverse as wastewater treatment, food production, aquaculture and petroleum extraction.

“We’re doing a good deal of research to be able to understand and subsequently communicate to water engineers with specific needs related aeration,” Garritano said. “Different industries use different terminology and it’s important to be able to use language that is relevant to each sector.”

Garritano Group is a full-service marketing agency serving clients in a wide variety of consumer and business-to-business industries in both traditional and digital media. For more information on how Garritano Group can help your organization ‘grow, smarter,’ contact Joe Garritano at (612) 333-3775.