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The holidays are upon us and with that it is time to ramp up the marketing of retail businesses. For this post I used the assistance of HARO (help a reporter out) and got a good return of ideas. I will explain more about HARO and different ideas on how to use the free service a little later.

1. The first suggestion comes from Leah Dossey who is the owner, art director/ designer for Blue Leaf Creative. She suggests:

2. Next we have Karl Schmieder who is one of the founders of MessagingLab in New York. Karl suggests:

3. Erin Read Ruddick, the client services director at Creating Results, LLC – Strategic Marketing, suggested that I find a video clip from the show WKRP in Cincinnati “Turkeys Away.”
Here is the video, you might have to click here to view it.

also suggested by Erin:

We’ve done multiple fall promotions for clients, including creating a giant corn maze for a real estate developer that drove thousands of leads, but nothing specifically Thanksgiving.

4. Next Benjamin Christie suggested I take a look at his blog www.gourmetads.com.

“Taking advantage of targeted advertising next to online recipes for holiday favorites is a great way to get your brand at the top of every shopper’s grocery list this year. When a consumer goes online to look up recipes on how to roast their Thanksgiving turkey, will they be thinking Butterball, Norbest or Honeysuckle White? That all depends on whose ad is cleverly placed right beside the roast turkey recipe.

More and more consumers are turning to the Internet for their recipe needs; especially their holiday recipe needs and smart advertisers are taking advantage of this trend with their Thanksgiving advertising in order to create brand awareness during the critical holiday sales rush. Ideally, companies should get their products placed four weeks before the big holiday as many shoppers have already begun to stock their pantries in preparation for the big event.”

5. Lastly I figured I would throw out a suggestion of my own called the Turkey Hunt

I would aim for success by getting as much local publicity as possible, including local business sponsors. Then right on or around Thanksgiving Day I would dress 3-4 people up in big turkey costumes and have them run around in a big field. I would charge people a couple bucks for a bucket of water balloons (all proceeds go to a local charity). Next give them all water balloon launchers and let them rip. The first person to hit each turkey with a water balloon wins that turkey’s prize package from the local sponsors.

So we create a fun way to promote sponsoring businesses, free prizes and also donations to charities. Maybe even instead of charging for the water balloons we offer a swap of a balloon or two for a nonperishable food bank item.

Do you have any Thanksgiving marketing ideas for local businesses or charities? Have you ran a successful marketing campaign on Thanksgiving? Tell us your stories.

It baffles me how old and antiquated marketing courses at our local colleges are. In fact, this problem isn’t just for marketing majors but represents a major lag in a world of rapidly expanding technology.

Not one of our three local major colleges have a marketing program that focuses on online or Internet marketing.

Google has a market cap that is larger than the entire auto and airline industry combined. Yet most of our higher education treats Internet marketing as though it doesn’t exist. I can recall a conversation I had with a senior marketing major that went like this:

Josh: That’s great you are doing marketing, do they teach you any online marketing?

Marketing Major: Umm, yeah I think they do some online classes.

Josh: No, I mean do they offer any classes that talk about online marketing?

Marketing Major: I am pretty sure they let people take some marketing classes online.

Josh: Yeah, but in your marketing classes do they teach anything about online marketing?

Marketing Major: Um … (Long pause and blank stare)

Josh: hmmm….

The Internet has reduced all barriers to making money anywhere you live, Google sells 17 character ads and makes billions every month, more people than ever are online and broadband Internet connection is reaching 50% of the country, yet nobody is teaching Internet marketing!

I think something is seriously wrong here.

Could the bigger problem be that nobody teaching these classes even knows what PPC or PPM is? It’s true there is a world that exists outside of the confines of the Internet, but when will the two meet in higher education?

I hear that Stanford offers a class on Facebook. Funny how it’s possible to make inroads in the college just a few miles away from the Internet epicenter in Silicon Valley.

The truth is that the Internet and technology move quicker than school curriculum, and the only way to learn Internet marketing is to jump in and start.

More and more marketing will be geared to the Internet and especially mobile technology. As more Americans are packing more powerful communication devices, marketing will evidently follow. Soon we will all be carrying our very own billboard everywhere we go.

Our local Gander Mountain outdoor sporting goods store hung up this huge sign declaring that they will not be under sold. That is a big and bold statement in my book. I also believe a statement like that is a big attention getter as well. Over the last few months as consumer spending has dropped businesses have taken more creative approaches to gaining new customers, and for good reason.

What Gander Mountain did is said loud and clear we are your cheapest solution in town. They also stated you should come in and see if you can find anything that doesn’t fit that statement. And they did this with a huge sign on the front of their building. They are located right off of the Interstate and a busy overpass. This sign is easily visible to everyone who travels by there.

I am sure the sign will drive a huge number of visitors initially and possible steal some other customers from other sporting good stores in town, but will it last over the long run? I am not sure. Humans are funny creatures in the way we get used to things and rarely like to break away from the familiar.

I remember one time in Los Angeles driving through an intersection and seeing the gas station on the corner with more cars than it can hold. Meanwhile the one directly across the street had none. The crux of it was the empty gas station had much cheaper gas prices. What gives? I have a feeling it was partly due to preference, but more so, convenience. One gas station had an easy in and out for traffic, while the other wasn’t as easy to get to. But what if there were bigger variables at play such as time of day, going to work / coming from work, new and clean vs. not, or any other unseen reason.

Essentially what Gander Mountain is doing is making a statement, hopefully strong enough to make people break away from their life habits. They are challenging and encouraging people to visit their store with a bold declaration that they will find what they were and weren’t looking for cheaper in their store. In the end, I am sure Gander Mountain will make more money from the sign than anything, but only time will tell in the long run.

What are your thoughts?

One of the most popular posts on this blog is one where I describe contacting Warren Buffett using a postcard. I got the idea originally from Tim Ferriss’s book The Four Hour Work Week. Tim describes attempting to have a class contact a famous person only to have none of them succeed. I thought it would be neat to try myself to see what kind of result I got. Here’s how:

The target:

I chose Warren Buffett mostly due to his stature in the financial world along with his ability to rely on sound principles and no B.S. responses. At the time, according to Forbes he was still the second richest person in the world. That changed about a week after I got my response back from him.

I knew that Warren Buffett had been a long time resident of Omaha, NE, for much longer than I have been alive. He also bought and lived in the same house for the last couple decades, so his address isn’t the world’s biggest secret. With the help of Whitepages.com and Google Maps (plus Streetveiw), I was pretty confident that he would receive my letter and quite possibly respond to it. He actually lives on the same street as his office building just further down where there is residential houses.That is why I used to Google Streetview to make sure I was in fact sending it to a house.

What did I learn?

First and foremost, just about anyone given the right circumstances will be willing to reply to a simple request, including the richest person in the world. I also learned that he was an actual human with thoughts and feelings replying to a direct question with a direct response. Sometimes I, and I am sure I am not alone in this, tend to think of some famous people as unreachable or on a pedestal. This isn’t the case. They are who they are and sometimes it only takes the right combination of variables to get a response from them. Not to mention the time invested in myself in pondering the most suiting question to ask that pertained to my life at the time. The funny thing was I knew the answer all along it just sounded different hearing it from someone else.

If you put a little thought into how you might contact someone you consider famous, it will surprise you how simple it could be. I can’t imagine how many people have showed up at Warren Buffett’s office or phoned in the hopes of getting a word from him, or how about all of the different authors and financial analysts who would love a little golden investment nugget. All it took was a postcard.

If you really would like to contact someone famous, I would take an hour out of one of your day and figure a way to do it. In the end, you will only learn more about yourself and someone else in your quest. If you ever do contact someone, you can always share your experience here.

(Image from nymag.com)

I’ll tell you. About two years ago, these signs started popping up all over Fargo as a new and convenient way of marketing. I have to say that the very first bright, neon signs I saw like this did catch my attention and cause me to stop and read them. The problem was that after a little while, others thought they would make some money with this new and successful advertisement and set out to replicate the success of the originator. I am not sure exactly how much it costs to put one of these signs in front of your business. I believe about $150 / week. As you can see, it would only take about two weeks to recover the cost of the materials used to make and alter the sign’s message, then pure profit.

The major problem now is that the novelty of these signs wore off and now they are just like all the other billboards in town begging to interrupt our lives in the hopes of selling us something. The bang for the buck advertisements these signs once had is now gone. They only attract the people who were already looking for whatever is being sold. What are people to do now when they want to get their message out about a new deal or gizmo? Doing something different works for a while, but that requires lots and lots of change to stay ahead. How does this relate to online advertising?

Remember when the fold down ad corners popped up online and everyone went crazy to stick ads in there because people were intrigued? Well, that novelty has worn off and pretty quick I might add. Or how about Google Adsense? It is no wonder Google always has to invent new ways and places to stick ads in order to keep up ad generated revenue. Ads in video, ads on the sidebar, ads in email, ads on their own version of Wikipedia now named Knol, ads on cellphones and the list will go on.

What if, and I mean a big what-if, you took all of the money you planned to spend on advertising and interrupting people’s lives and used that money to better your service or product. You would probably end up with a product that people will start talking about because it has become truly useful or over the top in a way that will separate itself from anything similar to it. It would be like spending the time to run a free clinic to get people interested in a sport or new hobby. The end result could be more sales of your product for helping others get involved, or perhaps more recognition as an authority on the subject increasing your demand.

A funny thing happens when your demand goes up, so does your salary. This will never happen overnight, but it will eventually happen as you increase the value you contribute to others. In other words, you separate yourself from the pack and distinguish yourself or product, allowing for people to talk about it openly. When was the last time someone was ecstatic about the McDonald’s dollar menu and told you about it?

edit* If you don’t have these signs in your town yet, you could make a lot of money by being the first to start.