Tax Resolution Academy

We’re down to the final week of this 941 tax resolution marketing challenge. We’ve covered a lot of ground over the past three weeks, and you’ve laid the foundation for ongoing marketing campaigns that you may otherwise never have considered.

I’m sure that, by now, you’ve noticed that marketing isn’t always sexy or fun. Some marketing tasks, especially the ones that require manual labor or spending a lot of time on the phone, aren’t necessarily fun, depending upon your personality type. But, that’s the nature of being in business for yourself.

But today, I want to focus on something that might be a bit more fun. Or, at the very least, a marketing task that will give you warm fuzzies.

Most of us have causes, organizations, or events that we care about. I have several causes that I support regularly, including animal shelters, scholarship funds, and figure skating. These are very disparate causes, but each of them provides unique marketing opportunities if I were inclined to take advantage of them.

What cause or organization are you most passionate about?

Most people have an automatic answer to that question. What was the first thing that popped into your head?

That’s what we’re going to focus on today.

With your cause or organization in mind, start asking some questions and doing some online reasearch:

• Does this organization do fundraising mailers that I can sponsor/piggyback on?
• Are there online, print, or public display advertising/sponsorship opportunities they offer?
• Are there events, mixers, fundraisers, etc. that I can attend? Volunteer at? Exhibit? Sponsor?
• Is there some way I can get involved that will further the cause, but also allow me to “rub elbows” with my target market?

I would never recommend volunteering as treasurer of any organization (that’s always what they want us to do, but don’t, for liability reasons), but there are definitely ways that we can get involved and mix business with our interest in the cause.

I’ll give some quick examples from my own interests:

1. Due to recent humane society donations, I now find myself on the regular fundraising direct mail lists for a few different puppy/kitty shelters. These organizations send fairly elaborate fundraising mailers, and the big fundraising organizations are very good marketers (keep their marketing materials, btw, many lessons can be learned). Since these mailings are going out to other above-average donors, I might start to wonder how many of those

Today’s post is short, but the challenge task important.

You’ve spent time over the last two days gearing up for this.

Now, rubber meets road. Hammer hits nail. Probe hits Mars atmosphere.

Task: Take the information you gathered yesterday, and send email AND place a phone call to the appropriate contact at the organization, media outlet, or website (or two) that you identified as good candidates for your online advertising dollars.

In that conversation, you want to specifically inquire about two things: Remnant space and agency discounts.

“Remnant space” is an advertising term for unsold inventory. There’s actually an entire sub-industry built around buying and selling remnant ad space. Why? Because once airtime has gone unused…once a trade journal has gone to print…once a day goes by without a banner ad occupying a piece of screen real estate… It’s gone. Opportunity lost. Thus, huge discounts can be had on remnant space, including digital ad space.

“Agency discounts” are exactly that: Discounts that publishers give to ad agencies. This is incredibly common practice, and it exists to incentivize ad agencies for buying media. The ad agency pockets the discount for themselves as profit in a lot of traditional advertising situations. For companies that aren’t using an ad agency, like you and me, we are serving as our own ad agency. And that’s exactly what you tell the publisher or organization you’re dealing with: “We operate as our own in-house ad agency. What is your ad agency discount?” Boom, just saved yourself some dough.

A very typical agency discount is around 15%.

The whole point of today is for you to have one or two serious conversations with a publisher, organization, or web site to get discounted ad space in their publications, event sponsorships, or web site/email advertising. Never, ever pay “rate card” rates for advertising — hardly anybody actually does, and you shouldn’t either.… Continue reading

In yesterday’s challenge task, you conducted research into the available online media that report on and support your chosen B2B target market.

Today, I want you to delve a bit deeper into two or three of them.

That’s it, just two or three. Rumor has it that today is a national holiday, so this is something that you can spend ten minutes on at literally any point in the day.

From your Google searching yesterday, select two or three of the trade journals, industry associations, online discussion forums, or other websites that you found. Running with one of the two examples I laid out yesterday, here are three options that service the healthcare industry that I found:

• American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)
• Physicians Practice (media outlet)
• Association of Independent Doctors (started by two CPAs, btw)

As I mentioned yesterday, this is not an endorsement of this particular niche or these particular sites. I’m just using it as an example for purposes of illustrating the principle.

Looking at the websites for these two trade organizations and one media conglomerate sub-site, I want to look for a few things. These are the same questions you should ponder as you look through the websites that YOU found:

1. Is there obvious on-site advertising?
2. Is there a print magazine that they produce for members?
3. Is there an email list that people can subscribe to?
4. Is there a member directory listing?
5. Is there a vendor directory?
6. Can I download a media kit that includes advertising rates?
7. Are there local chapters?
8. Do they host events of any sort, either online or off?
9. Is there a designated contact person for media, advertising, or sponsorship inquiries?

Based on just clicking through all the links on a website, including the stuff nobody ever looks at in the footer of the homepage, I’m able to make some pretty quick determinations about the potential value of advertising or sponsoring something in relation to that website. For example, the Association of Independent Doctors doesn’t really provide any opportunities for creating backlinks or generating access to their membership, as far as I can tell, so I can eliminate that one pretty quickly.

PhysiciansPractice.com, on the other hand, provides a gateway to something bigger, called the “Modern Medicine Network”. Spending just 5 minutes on their website tells me they allow article submissions from other businesses (that’s you!), they have print publications to advertise in, a full advertising … Continue reading