It turns out Matt and I took similar paths into marketing. We both graduated in 2008 (he in Wisconsin, I in Minnesota) and both had the kind of majors that make people ask, “what are you going to do with that?” (he studied English an

d I studied humanities.) Both of us stumbled into internships with tough-minded entrepreneurs (I with experienced newspaper publisher Marti Buscaglia and Matt with Milwaukee beer maven Russ Klisch). And as the recession raged on we both earned our stripes. I was pulling together calendar events and tabulating survey results while getting into better and better magazines, Matt was working in production and filling up kegs in while doing more and more marketing work for Lakefront Brewery.

Now he’s the sales and marketing support for Lakefront Brewery, meaning he does much of the day-to-day marketing work. Lakefront is a 46,000 barrel a year company with a reputation for creative but consistent beers (especially their gluten-free New Grist) and an entertaining brewery tour. In addition to a large following locally, Lakefront exports to South Korea, Ukraine, and military bases in Japan,. The company also hopes to get its beer into China. Here’s what I learned from the company’s current marketing efforts.

Lean Operation

Like a lot of breweries, Lakefront has a bootstrap ethos. They have a brand manager and a director of business, but except for Instagram and international outreach, Matt does the creative work himself.

“I write all the copy for our sell sheets and for what goes on the web site,” Matt says.

Furthermore, Matt runs social media and does in-house graphics—all without a team under him. Lakefront works on some campaigns with Milwaukee based Traction Factory but for a company of its size that’s a pretty lean marketing department.

Because the craft beer market is so saturated right now, I see some danger in this approach. I think craft brewers tend to underinvest in campaigns, which leaves them vulnerable to competition from marketing-savvy rivals—in Lakefront’s case that would be New Glarus, Revolution, and Central Waters. Quality should be enough to get ahead, but people have short attention spans and need to hear about your product in the first place before they’ll know to try it.

Local VS National

“We’re definitely not like the super trendy brewery,” Matt says. “We’re pretty consistent.”

Lakefront is definitely a local favorite in Milwaukee. The media knows them, local beer drinkers love the product, and people from out of town stop by for the tours. The trouble is stretching that reputation beyond the cozy confines of the city to the US at large. Matt says he wishes he had “more time” to build rapport with regional or national journalists in the beer space. Google News shows that of the many stories written about Lakefront in the past year nearly all are extremely local to Milwaukee.

Wish List

Some marketers are pretty narrowly focused but most have a “wish list” of good ideas they’d enact if only they had more time or money. Owners obviously shouldn’t torpedo their budgets by handing a blank check to a new marketing director (especially if he or she came from a larger company or is fresh out of business school), but when someone has “come of age” in a company and been there for years it’s easy to forget that they probably have your best interests in mind—and have been gathering ready-to-implement ideas for years. I’d advise owners to ask their marketing director this simple question:

“Could you give me a one sheet proposal for what you’d do if I increased your budget for the year by 50%?”

The answers might surprise you. You probably won’t take all the ideas, but it’s likely you could incorporate one or two of the new initiatives and get a great ROI.

Matt, for example, said with more time he’d monitor media and social media to see what people are currently saying. It’s a lot easier to evaluate someone on what they produce (graphics created, descriptions written) rather than on what they hear (customer feedback), but ultimately listening and understanding the customer is far more powerful for a brand’s growth.

Matt suggested creating videos of day-to-day behind the scenes work like beer being packaged, which is a good idea for a medium like Facebook. As I mentioned before, he also talked about having time to engage national and regional reporters. I often hear people say “we just want a story”, but stories take time to develop and you have to build a network before you need it or the pitching comes across as forced and inauthentic.

Based on what I’ve seen from Lakefront I think they’re a polished company with a good sense of humor, and with some additional marketing could definitely increase their market share outside of Milwaukee.

The post Beyond Milwaukee: Matt Krajnak at Lakefront Brewery appeared first on Be Our Guest PR.

Getting into national trade magazines like Nation’s Restaurant News and QSR Magazine means plumbing depths of the restaurant industry you didn’t know existed. Public relations people at the restaurant companies can either be your best friends or your worst nightmares.

If you want to get more press coverage, you should know that we journalists do remember who was easy to work with and who wasn’t. I met Kate Morganelli when she was working at Dickey’s Barbecue Pit and was completely impressed. She was friendly, responsive, and worked behind the scenes to set up interviews with principals so I could get my stories filed. Not only did I end up including Dickey’s in more stories than I would have otherwise, I could tell Kate was going places. When she left for the Fossil Group and then started her own agency I had the feeling it was going to be successful.

And how. What she started with her husband as a “side hobby” turned into a full-fledged agency with hundreds of clients ranging from small shops to national businesses. The Morganelli Agency covers industries from chiropractic to dentist to milk producers to childcare. Kate and I talked the other day about marketing and she had some strong insights that I want to share with you.

Take Your Own Medicine

Can you really trust a fat fitness coach or a barber with bad hair? Kate says that even though word of mouth has become her agency’s primary source of businesses, they also practice the same techniques they use with their own clients.

“Everything we offer to our clients is something we believe in ourselves,” Kate says.

Only 3% of B2B companies use marketing automation, which drives a 451% increase in qualified leads. You can count the Morganelli Agency among that 3%. Their customized program, TMA360, helps with lead scoring, behavior tracking, automated email and more. They use it internally and also allow their clients to use it.

They also use targeted print campaigns. Kate says that print really isn’t dead, and for some segments of the market it’s still a powerful lead driver. Attached here is a campaign for a school client that had social, online, in-center, and print components. The print portion went to homes with the right age and income for the client. It directed people back to the landing page specific to the campaign with a unique offer.

Total traffic and average length of time on the specific landing page was the largest the client had ever seen and even beat out the client’s own homepage for the duration of the campaign. Interest in school tours went up during the campaign.

Kate believes not only in a multi-touch approach, but making it very clear to clients what the results are so they understand why it makes sense to retain her agency.

“There are tons of us out there,” Kate says. “What we’re doing is going to make [our clients] successful, and [we] make sure they understand it.”

Outsource The Lean Way

Having full-time employees provides for stability, but outsourcing can be a more cost effective way of getting the best people. I personally prefer the flexibility of scaling up and down project by project. I was a contractor for PureDriven, a digital marketing firm that works with Play It Again Sports, Plato’s Closet, Music Go Round, and other franchisees. It’s a booming company and nearly all the work is done by subcontractors.

The Morganelli Agency is similar in that it only has 3 employees but has a large number of contractors. I think Kate’s hiring strategy is interesting and I’m not sure if she’s even conscious of what she’s doing. She says it’s “all about personality” and wants people who are determined, goal-driven, entrepreneurial and do “everything 150%”. Essentially she’s hiring mini-Kates! She says that after someone has worked with her for a while they may want to launch their own agency. Sound familiar? It’s obviously a good strategy and it fits the natural bent we have towards hiring in our own image.

In my agency I hire mini-Roberts—people who take ownership of projects, get the work done, resolve roadblocks on their own, and report back to me with the results. It’s how my first boss (who herself probably liked to hire mini-Wendys) thought so naturally it’s how I ended up thinking.

This really does show how important an executive’s personality is in shaping a company, because you end up hiring, firing, and promoting on your values.

Cut Through Fluff and Watch The Red Flags

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Even though the competition for market share is fiercer the large a company gets and it’s harder to organize a large group than a small one, I’ve noticed less defeatism and more efficient meetings at $10 million plus companies compared to their smaller peers.

Kate caught something I haven’t been on the conference circuit long enough to notice, and I’m glad she told me because now I know what to watch for. (I am going to the Digital Marketing Innovation Summit in New York City this March 21 and 22 if anyone wants to grab coffee!)

“These bigger conferences can be a little fluffy,” she said. “I honestly believe in local first.”

The way she explained it there’s a bit of a conference complex, where you have the charismatic speaker who hits the road and repeats the same spiel over and over. It makes sense you’d see this with national speakers because in the coaching and consulting worlds there are a LOT of hammy, pre-packaged platitudes that don’t really bring you much value. In contrast, Kate finds local events (she lives in the Dallas area) are filled with business owners and entrepreneurs who actually have to produce results if they want to stay in business. It’s a “feet on the ground” perspective that is easier to work with if you’re in the business of making tangible changes.

While we’re on the subject of puncturing bubbles, Kate is also wary of those businesspeople who think they don’t need marketing to begin with. At discovery meetings she’s particularly leery of anyone who makes comments to the extent that they don’t really “need” to market, or who is dishonest about the state of their business. She’s turned away business from people with those attitudes, which frankly is their loss rather than hers.

I think the takeaway here is that if you don’t have your marketing nailed down, you should take a humble approach. Prima donna clients self-select for bad agencies because the good ones don’t want to work with you. Once you end up with a bad fit, it will further sour you on agencies, and the dysfunctional cycle continues.

You have the right to results, and good agencies will be transparent. But when you start off with the posture that everyone’s out to rip you off, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Make sure you’re getting your money’s worth but don’t start out with a chip on your shoulder!

The post Outside Insight: Take Your Own Advice and Cut Fluff appeared first on Be Our Guest PR.

Do you know the two most powerful words in the English language?

“Free beer”.

Buying someone a drink is a time-honored ritual and one that carries a lot of weight with customers. Servers know that free drinks can boost check averages (and may actually be pouring them behind your back, but that’s a subject for another day). Managers use them to pacify angry customers. From a marketing standpoint, the only reason to give out free drinks is to get more revenue in return.

To do this you have to be selective. Trying to get sales in a slow period will backfire if you end up attracting a big crowd of cheapskates who buy little beyond the minimum. Instead, get your free drinks into the right hands.

For Ironfire Bar and Grille, a burgers-and-beer type restaurant on Leech Lake, I suggested a drink token system. The owners also own Anderson’s Northland Lodge, which is 8 minutes from the restaurant by boat or 15 minutes by car. To attract their lodging customers to their restaurant, they put out a tray of wooden coins marked “Free Drink” and noted that they could be turned in one per customer for a domestic beer or soft drink.

The program has run nonstop since 2010. Northland Lodge customers have already proven their willingness to spend money (since they are guests at an upscale lodge) and the fact that there is a small travel commitment to get to the restaurant virtually ensures that they buy something beyond the free drink. Furthermore, it is good for market share. It’s not uncommon to hear guests say, “we should eat at Ironfire to get those free drinks”.

If you can find the right system, selective use of “free” will keep your customers happy while actually making you more money. It might be time to buy your customer a drink.

The post Buy Your Customers A Drink appeared first on Be Our Guest PR.

How valuable is a former customer? According to big and tall clothing store KingSize Direct, very valuable.

I am 5’7 and 165 pounds. My shirt size is M and my pants size hovers near 32. KingSize’s smallest shirt size is L and their smallest pants size is 38. But because I bought one pair of sweatpants, once, from KingSize (as part of a Halloween costume), I’ve been getting catalogs for almost a year.

I tried to tell them to stop. It didn’t matter. I’m on their list.

Think of the cost of that: to design, to photograph, to print, and to mail 76 page catalogs, once a month or more, probably until the end of time.

But the reasoning is simple—former customers are a valuable audience. You have certain demographics you target based on age, income level, hobbies, and gender. These demographics are indirect and speak to probability. Your real goal is finding people who are likely to spend money on your product. Targeting former customers is a huge shortcut. They already spent money on your product so you know they’re the right type of people. Now you just have to pull them in again.

One resort I’ve worked with sends annual Thanksgiving cards to all its former guests. Because people meet with family and discuss vacation plans over Thanksgiving they chose this time to insert themselves into the conversation. (It also doesn’t hurt that most other resorts wait until Christmas to send cards, so they have a first mover advantage). The owner signs the cards in batches while watching TV at night, so it’s a personal touch without much effort, and even one $2,500 booking more than makes up for it.

At our bakery, we put together lists of people who ordered for Thanksgiving and compared them to the list of those who ordered for Christmas. Those who didn’t order got a friendly phone call asking if they were interested and offering a free cinnamon roll. The amount of orders we got offset our employee’s phone time by 7 to 1.

Think of ways to reactive your former customers. KingSize’s strategy of relentlessly targeting past buyers is clearly making them money—even if a few of those catalogs end up going to short guys like me.

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