Hard and Soft Marketing

Marketing must be organized into Hard and Soft activities. Very simply, hard activities are ones you pay money for, but require little or no time. Soft activities are those that require a time commitment, but usually cost little or no money.

I’m going to name some marketing activities, and you figure out whether they are hard or soft.

a. asking someone to try CF

b. mailing a direct mail piece

c. airing a commercial on local cable

d. PPC (pay per click campaign)

e. press releases

g. hanging up posters in local hobby shops

Hard and soft distinctions are easy to understand, aren’t they? In the above list asking for someone to try CF, press releases, and posters are soft activities. Direct mail, PPC and the commercial are examples of hard marketing activities.

The best marketing plans are those that have a mixture of Hard and Soft ideas. Why? Because hard activities are usually expensive, and CF doesn’t have a huge marketing budget. Hard activities bring new players, but usually require some sort of financial commitment.

HAVING A NICE ARRAY OF SOFT MARKETING ACTIVITIES HELPS LOWER YOUR PLAYER ACQUISITION COST.

Consider the following case:

One of the guys I’ve done some marketing work for is a local pizza guy named Julius. Julius runs a cool little pizza parlor, eat in or carry out, in a kind of family environment. We met at a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

Julius is pretty good with Hard marketing. These activities produce new customers for him pretty consistently. If you looked at his last quarter, his numbers were something like this.

His commercial on local cable (which he stars in) brought in, at his best estimation, thirty new customers. The commercial costs him $300 to run a quarter because he’s not gungho running it a million times. That means the commercial brings him customers at a rate of $10/ea.

His adds in Valpak are easier to track because the utilize a coupon, and there were sixty coupons returned. So it was easy to calculate, he’s paying $300 for his valpak also, and that means valpak brings him new customers at $5/each.

So in that quarter we know that ninety new customers were acquired at a total cost of $600. This figure is determined by combining the results of the cable commercial with those of the valpak ad. This means that his cost of acquiring a new customer is just under seven dollars. We arrive at this number by dividing the $600 by the ninety new customers.

In the pizza industry this figure is on the high side. The average pizza transaction is $20, so he’s spending 30% of his gross on advertising. In the pizza industry, Julius tells me the number they look for is 10%. (By the way, I disagree with this - if you do a good job with the customer they’ll buy 80 pizzas from you in a lifetime - that’s $1600 big ones, so why not spend $100 to acquire a new customer? I would. But I digress.)

So my suggestion to Julius was this: Start inviting grade school classes to visit the shop, which he now does. It’s a big hit, he shows them how pizzas are made and let’s them pig out on free cheese pizza. He sends them home w/ coupons for mom and dad. He also attends the chamber meetings, and we pretty much all buy pizza from him. I also suggested he contact our local paper and offer to write a column, free of charge, that teaches readers all about Italian cooking. These are, of course, all soft activities.

Next quarter Julius was in much better shape. He did all the same hard marketing stuff, and those produced customers in exactly the same way. But when you look at his total number of new customers it’s 150ish now instead of 90. This represents a huge improvement from the previous quarter. It also drops his cost for acquiring a new customer from $7, to $4 - and I’m told in the pizza business that means big moolah.

NOW HERE’S WHATS REALLY GOOD ABOUT COMBINING HARD AND SOFT ACTIVITIES:

The better you do with Soft activities the better your Hard activities work. There is a huge movement in the industry right now away from advertising and towards promotions and PR. It’s based on the idea that anything you say about yourself is only moderately believable, but if someone else says it about you - it’s 10X more likely to be taken seriously.

I imagine conversations in homes all over Northville going like this:

Dad says, “Hey babe, there’s an ad with a coupon here for Julius’ Pizza (actually it’s called Mamas.) That might be a good place for us to go on family night sometime.”

Mom says, “You know Timmay went on a field trip there last week, and we got some coupons from that as well. Timmay really had a good time, and he’s been asking to go back. Let’s make it a point to go.”

In this scenario the Hard activity might not have been enough to get the job done, but the Soft activity pushed them over the top.

In the beginning, when you’re marketing a low budget you are going to do more soft, and less hard. As time goes on and donations for marketing rise we’ll be able do more hard activities, but always remember that the combination of both is a huge key to success in marketing any product.