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You’re the Boss Blog: Where Should I Invest Invest My Marketing Dollars?

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Generating revenue along with the buzz.

Courtesy of Broadway Kitchens Baths. Jeff Chinman: Am I just bothering my little bubble of friends?

Jeff Chinman, 53, is the president of Broadway Kitchens Baths, which remodels kitchens and bathrooms for residential customers in Manhattan, Northern New Jersey and Stamford, Conn. It also sells materials and remodeling services wholesale to builders and management companies. The company generates a few million dollars in revenue each year, but in 2012, its growth was flat.

Mr. Chinman, who says he is an avid reader of this blog, had been hearing so much about blogging and social media that he started feeling like he should do something new to market his services. But what? Confused about where to start, he left this comment on one of my recent posts:

I am working on my either 3rd or 4th revamp of my web site, I have a Facebook page and I am trying to figure out the Fb, twitter, blog integration thing, but then I ask myself, does it really work. Am I just sending and bothering my little bubble of friends and acquaintances or do I really get business from it? There seems to be a gap in what works, and who really knows what there doing. My big question is for 2013, do I spend money pushing social media/ Internet advertising (google adwords) or stick with radio and print?

Mr. Chinman and his wife, Linda, bought Broadway Kitchens Baths 18 years ago. They were drawn to the Manhattan location, conveniently positioned on a busy corner in the Village. The business grew, and in 2000 they opened a showroom in Englewood, N.J., near their home. In 2008, they opened their third store in Stamford.

They built the business, Mr. Chinman said, on customer service. “Hey, this is New York, people demand excellent service in this city,” he said. “We don’t just sell faucets. We’ve done the homework for you, so you don’t have to go out and research everything ad nauseum.” Mr. Chinman said his biggest marketing challenge was to drive traffic to his showrooms and to his Web site. “I want to move up in position in organic search on Google,” he said.

His ideal client is someone who may not have a lot of time but does have some money to spend. Currently, 80 percent of his sales leads come from the visibility 0f his location and from referrals. When asked what is working, Mr. Chinman said he advertises in the newspaper, on local radio and in the Frankin Report, and he uses lawn signs when remodeling in suburban areas. Referrals from manufacturers account for about 5 percent of his business.

So, as Mr. Chinman asked, where should he put his marketing dollars: social media? Google AdWords? Or print and radio?

Personally, I do not think it’s an either-or situation. Social media should be part of any overall marketing program.

When I looked at this company’s social media footprint, a few things stood out. First, the Web site could use a face-lift. One option is to upgrade the site to one based on WordPress, which would offer the flexibility to add a blog and social media connections. A new site should be mobile-ready, as well, because more and more smartphone users go to the the Internet only from their cellphones.

Blogging can be a great way for a service business to build a social media footprint, but it is important to understand at the start that it is time consuming. You don’t want to start out strong and then stop. Mr. Chinman might also consider developing an e-book or special report to give away on the site to start building an e-mail marketing list.

Once the site is upgraded, local online advertising is a great option for this company. Since the goal is to drive traffic to the showrooms, a pay-per-click campaign using Facebook ads or Google AdWords should be effective.

Right now, the company has three separate Facebook pages for the same location, none with more than 51 followers. He might consider developing a Facebook page for each location and highlighting a project of the week. Engagement is everything, and good pictures go a long way on Facebook.

Mr. Chinman should also train his sales team to track where his sales leads come from. That will allow him to test multiple marketing campaigns online and offline to see which ones create the most interest.

While I had his attention, I asked Mr. Chinman if granite counter tops were still popular. He said yes and added that quartz tops were selling well, too. I think he has plenty of material for a blog.

What would you recommend for Broadway Kitchens Baths?

Melinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development company. You can follow her on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/where-should-i-invest-invest-my-marketing-dollars/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Ad Companies Face a Widening Talent Gap

A talent gap is growing between the skills that many new advertising jobs require and the number of people who have those skills. The dilemma, one familiar to many industries across the country, is particularly acute for jobs that require hard-core quantitative, mathematical and technical skills.

The talent pool, advertising technology company executives say, is not a deep one. And those who have the skills are in high demand, often fetching annual salaries that can reach $100,000.

“There is pain for hiring in digital at all levels,” said John Ebbert, managing editor of AdExchanger.com, a Web site dedicated to advertising technology.

“The marketers, the publishers, the ad tech companies, the agencies, data management companies — they’re all going for the same type of employee.”

The job board on AdExchanger, which is updated every 45 days, has postings for positions with titles like “Yield Optimization Manager” and “Director of Platform Marketing.” The number of jobs on the board has nearly doubled in the past year, Mr. Ebbert said, to 80 jobs every 45 days from 40.

The digital talent gap is driven in part by the enormous amount of user data that ad tech companies are collecting for agencies and marketers — data that is instrumental in directing ads to consumers and analyzing trends. New hires are needed for a variety of tasks, including writing code, creating digital advertisements, Web site development and statistical analysis.

“The demand has far outstripped the supply,” said Joe Zawadzki, the chief executive of MediaMath, an ad tech company in New York. “The number of things that you need to know is high and the number of people that have grown up knowing it is low.”

Mr. Zawadzki said that as of last week his company had 13 positions open and had gone to job boards, recruiters and even hosted technology-focused meet-ups to find people. In September, the company hired its first senior vice president for human capital to help with recruitment.

On average, Mr. Zawadzki said, it takes two to three months to find the right person — someone with a combination of pure quantitative skills, applied marketing skills and an understanding of how the advertising technology business works. With a limited talent pool, many ad tech firms are after the same people.

“Half my job is maintaining a mental Rolodex of people that are at various places,” Mr. Zawadzki said.

Edwin Lee, 40, is typical of the candidates that many ad tech companies are competing for. Mr. Lee, an economics major at Stanford who has a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Southern California, was hired as an account director at MediaMath in September. He came to the company after leaving a Silicon Valley start-up and began his new job after entertaining a variety of options, including other small start-ups and Google.

“For me it was like, ‘The world’s my oyster here — what do I want to do?’ ” said Mr. Lee, who describes his new job as “helping companies and clients make sense of something they don’t really understand and they hear a lot about.”

The difficulty in finding qualified candidates is affecting advertising agencies as well, said Jerry Neumann, a venture capitalist from Neu Venture Capital who invests in ad tech companies like 33 Across and YieldBot.

Agencies have not traditionally hired for skills like “number crunching, data visualization, quantitative analysis,” Mr. Neumann said. “They’ve never needed those in the past.” Instead, media buyers and even those on the creative side of agencies need to prepare for a new digital reality.

“The kind of media buying that’s happening now is much more quantitative” Mr. Neumann said. “The agencies are staffed for qualitative.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=123f4a2190c0ed5f8e51ccd05735a768

You’re the Boss Blog: Where Should I Invest Invest My Marketing Dollars?

On Social Media

Ad Companies Face a Widening Talent Gap

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