A Blog Above The Rest

Updates To Our Blog

Brandt & Sons Marketing Group is excited to introduce two industry specific blogs in addition to our President's new personal blog. To be enlightened with our thoughts follow the links below:

Read Our President's Blog

Read Our Restaurant & Bar Marketing Blog

Read Our OHM Business Consulting Blog

Twitter Click Through Rates (CTR)

For almost three weeks I have been measuring the click-through rates on two different Twitter accounts.  The first is @justanbrandt which is my personal Twitter feed.  Here I post several times a day which includes mostly insight into different marketing approaches and news. The second is @wausaunightlife which is a community project we’re working on to help promote the nightlife and locally owned/operated restaurants and bars in our community and features an average of 1 or 2 tweets a day.  These posts are quick overviews of upcoming events and refer visitors to the full listings on WausauNightlife.com.

These two accounts are unique in content and audience, but amazingly their click through rates (CTR) are near identical: 

• @justanbrandt has an average CTR of 6.8% with a high of 23%.
• @wausaunightlife has an average CTR of 6.6% with a high of 24.5%

I find the results interesting and believe they warrant a longer term analysis with additional accounts, which I will be doing over the next few months.  But the fact that @wausaunightlife which is directed solely at the residents of a single community and @justanbrandt which is directed towards businesses nationwide can produce an almost identical CTR may suggest a trend is beginning to form  on Twitter. 

For reference the average CTR for banner ads in 2008 was reported to be 0.25%.

How HootSuite Can Help Healthcare Providers Maximize Twitter

Twitter is a medium that is considered an interruption, too time consuming or a hassle by many marketing directors in the healthcare industry but HootSuite is a Shorty Award winning application that can help any healthcare provider maximize Twitter for their facility and here’s why:

Tweet Scheduling -Instead of having to login to your Twitter account multiple times a day HootSuite will allow you to schedule your tweets in advance.  This means you can handle all of your tweets for the following day, week or month in one sitting while monitoring your account, when you have time, for replies and direct messages. 

Editors - HootSuite provides your marketing director/consultant with a dashboard to monitor all activity related to your Twitter account.  They can then add “editors” who can contribute to the Twitter feed without having to login to Twitter directly.   These “editors” can be the doctors, surgeons or other marketing contacts all of which are contributing to one twitter feed eliminating the stress of having one individual write every tweet. 

Auto Initials - When you have multiple people contributing to your Twitter account knowing who tweeted what can be important.  HootSuite offers the ability to have every tweet followed with the initials of the contributing editor so the marketing director/consultant knows exactly who is writing what and how often they are contributing.

Multiple Twitter Profiles - If your managing a healthcare organization that has distinctly different marketing & PR it may be a good idea to have a Twitter profile for each identity.  HootSuite allows you to manage all of your Twitter profiles from one user friendly dashboard saving you time and the headaches of multiple logins.  You can even assign “editors” to multiple profiles. 

RSS/ATOM Feeds - If your doctors or facilities already have a Blog you can automatically have new post to the blog show up on your Twitter profile.  Simply add the RSS/Atom feed address and HootSuite will generate a tweet every time the blog is updated.  

Measurable Click Through - One of the biggest advantages of HootSuite is the integration of their link shortening service http://ow.ly.  By using the built in web link shortener you’re able to track daily, weekly, monthly and annual click through of the links you’ve posted on Twitter.  By evaluating your click through rate and retweets you can begin to measure the effectiveness of Twitter for your facility. 

In closing we’ve seen and used many different applications that offer similar services to HootSuite but their user interface, click through monitoring and list of available tools is by far the best setup we’ve ever seen or used. 

Restaurant TV Commercials Should "Avoid obvious mistakes, don't follow obvious successes"

Recently Seth Godin posted a blog where he wrote "Avoid obvious mistakes, don't follow obvious successes".  The intriguing part of this statement is "don't follow obvious successes".  

When it comes to TV commercials many local restaurants will have their ad's produced by the station for free when they purchase air time.   There are many problems that can and will arise with doing this but the most obvious is the fact that the TV station is not a creative marketing agency, in fact they are a mass media broadcasting affiliate.  

Below are two TV commercials, one is for a national restaurant chain while the other is for a small restaurant.

Disclaimer: To ensure non-bias views and writings we selected two commercials that we have no affiliations with.

 The producers of the Luigi's restaurant TV commercial were probably not copying Qdoba directly but other TV commercials which use a similar feel, but the point remains the same: Luigi's commercial is not as powerful or effective.  Here are just 4 reasons why and budget is not one of them:

• Qdoba offers more excitement from the people onscreen, even though they're acting you are drawn in by them and you want to be there. 
• Qdoba mentions 4 different menu items and 4 different condiments  allowing you to understand what they offer.  Luigi's focuses on three words Promise, Freshest and Best. When the Luigi's commercial is over you don't remember them or what they offer.
• Qdoba opens with mentioning their name twice in the first 5 seconds where Luigi's squeezes their name in only once within the first second, making you wonder who the commercial was even for. 
• Qdoba offers 8 different clear and colorful shots of the food being mentioned, Luigi's offers half as many with one out of focus shot highlighting three different items followed by 3 different close up shots and to be honest they do not look appealing.  Watching the commercials which food would you rather eat?

Even small and local restaurants need to take the time to ensure all of their marketing is powerful and effective. Just because you can get your TV commercial produced for free does not mean it will help your restaurant or be the best approach for the air time you purchased!

2 Dog Marketing

By Justan Brandt

For three years we’ve owned a yellow lab who has been a great family companion and on occasion she would get noticed when in public.  People would come up and ask to pet her and talk about the memories they had about their labs, but these occasions were rare and were almost always by individuals that owned a lab themselves. 

A week ago we added to our family by rescuing a 10 month old chocolate lab and since then we cannot go for a walk without being stopped at least twice.  We’ve had cars pull over, people stop us on the street, and groups of people point and smile.  The attention these two dogs bring, when together, is amazing.  And the attention has not been limited to previous or current lab owners anymore, it seems everyone wants to see these two dogs.

We could’ve added another yellow lab to our family and I don’t believe the attention would be the same.  The mix of two unique but similar dogs together is a draw.  It grabs peoples attention, makes them curious, evokes positive emotions and makes them feel confident in coming over to take a closer look.  Does your marketing do that?  Take a lesson from our family friends, CoCo and Chloe (our dogs), and adjust your marketing campaigns to stand out and draw attention like they do.