Advertising 101

It takes more than just a sales team to communicate with customers

By -- Industrial Distribution, 5/1/2000

What is it worth to find new customers who represent repeat business? Ask one of your salespeople and you'll hear, "priceless."

Industrial distributors spend considerable time designing annual business plans-some simple, some complex-aimed at gaining new business. Why do those plans seldom include advertising? A marketing strategy worth its salt must address each element that makes up the total marketing picture, and advertising must be included. Advertising is a form of communication, much like your sales staff-and it may be even more persuasive. Reaching out and uncovering prospects using industrial advertising in a scientific way has been used since the Industrial Revolution.

B-to-B advertising

In this country, business has used advertising to accomplish many objectives. Industrial advertising, as opposed to retail advertising, was born when big companies used it to set up personal sales calls. The belief was that if the purchasing agent had seen the company name and had a positive impression of the firm, then the sales call would be more productive. Getting its name and primary message out was the advertiser's main goal. Communicating a message and having a salesperson follow up with a visit made a scientific one-two punch. The sales call became much more productive, as did the ability to get the appointment with an important decision maker.

The same theory works today, though creativity must come into play. Just ask Christine Szafraniec, marketing manager for Chicago-based general line house Cragin Industrial Supply. As manufacturing headed south out of Chicagoland in search of warmer climates, non-union labor and profitability several years ago, it took the bulk of industrial sales with it. That left Cragin Industrial in a quandary.

Fortunately, thinking "outside the box" is what Szafraniec does best. In need of new customers, she used radio advertising to reach a hard-to-impress audience of industrial buyers who listen to talk and sports shows. Consumers reached by the same radio spot were greeted by retail-friendly Cragin staff upon arrival at the store and then sold whatever they needed.

Szafraniec is now negotiating with TV-WGN, which sponsors the Chicago Cubs baseball games, and planning more aggressive radio ads. Cragin will use all of its earned two percent co-op advertising funds for the project-funds provided by manufacturer partners-and will continue to ask its manufacturers to dig deeper to support the firm's efforts. As Szafraniec explains: "Our manufacturers balked at first with how we spend co-op funds. But now that we've proven that direct mail and radio work, they come knocking on my door wanting to get involved."

In addition to radio, Cragin Industrial uses direct mail to stay in front of customers with services, products and news. In a nutshell, this distributor broke away from the companies going out of business in its region and blazed new trails in advertising for an industrial distributor.

Marketing paves the way

Marketing theory paves the way for advertising principles. That's from chapter one of any "Marketing 101" class. What that means to distributors is that marketing should be completed before undertaking advertising. The reason is, the information derived from basic marketing will dictate an advertising campaign.

For instance, you may discover through research that you have some problems that went undetected in the past. Uncovering valuable data from your customers may suggest that your service level is low at the city counter, where you thought it was high. Advertising can strengthen that weakness while you address your internal infrastructure and implement a solution.

Another form of research that can be an integral part of the actual advertising campaign is a tailored customer mailing list, including prospects. There are two parts to setting guidelines for such a list: geography and SIC classifications. The key is to target the right customers in specific regions. The goal is to reach out into new geographic market areas-then you can begin to set geographic boundaries.

Fluid power distributor Orton Industries made use of this principle. Hal Kemp, vice president of the Atlanta-based firm, partnered with Parker Hannifin to influence both industrial and consumer customers through scientific advertising. When Orton opened a new location in Columbus, Ga., in December, 1998, a well thought-out campaign paved the way to announce the new location to the industrial buyer. Its textbook direct mail marketing campaign kept it simple, including: a mailing list of segmented SIC code prospects; creative direct mail; and a swat team sales effort.

Parker Hannifin helped pay for the effort, supplying ad slicks to help Orton's marketing guru Kevin Burrows, and providing a stipend to be used in any advertising form. The location Orton opened was a Parker Store, a concept in which the distributor sells Parker products out of a hardware store-like location.

When asked how well advertising works, Kemp says: "It certainly adds to our exposure and sales effort, thus creating ingredients for success."

In advertising, we always look to the quickest route to reach the desired objective, and there's nothing wrong with that-provided the objective is well spelled out. If your objective is to advertise a showroom open house for the upcoming Friday evening, advertise in a newspaper for three days, on radio for one, and send out a public relations release 10 days ahead of the event.

But most industrial distributors need a professional image, first and foremost. A campaign should be ongoing and consistent. The graphic look should keep a foundation of similarity. Distributors can try product-specific ads or slicks from manufacturers so they can measure which items seem to bring more people in. But above all, every customer-or potential customer-deemed worthy of a 33-cent stamp should be evaluated.

Positioning, which is the perception your customers have of your firm, can be manipulated through advertising, as well. Your marketing efforts may direct (or redirect) you to work on repositioning the image of your company. Remember that both positioning and repositioning can be done through the science of advertising.

Why not retail?

What's wrong with selling through the home center? This issue, which comes up all the time in the do-it-yourself market, has really opened up a Pandora's box as Home Depot, Lowe's, Builder's Square, and others have sensed the weakness in the partnerships involved in the distribution channel and have taken advantage of it. So, sell the home centers; sell them their fill-in orders; sell them special items. Make sure they know the products that you carry because their weakness is your strength-depth of inventory.

Whether you are IBM or ABC Industrial Supply, the theory still applies that sales increase incrementally with the advertising expense. Spend more on advertising and sales increase. What do some industrial sales managers do to scientifically promote their firm? Hopefully something more than, "let's send out a salesperson" or "we'll open our doors every morning at 7 a.m. and they'll come in."

Again, advertising is the art of communication, and communication can take many forms. There are, of course, tangible forms of communication-like the written sales letter, newspaper advertisement, magazine, billboard, etc. And then there are the intangible-the spoken word, like radio and television. As an industrial distributor, you can put these forms of communication to work as a constructive tool to build your business.

Bruce Webster is president of ACI, Inc., an advertising and communications firm based in Tavares, Fla. He can be reached at (352) 742-7434.