Adding Value with a Marketing Plan
by Keith Evans, Saint Joseph, Mo.

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"Marketing is just as important to your success as is your breeding program," Keith Evans told more than 215 Angus enthusiasts who attended the 2002 National Angus Conference.
Marketing–it is as essential to the success of every registered Angus business as is its breeding program. Yet marketing is given short shrift by far too many registered beef cattle producers who believe that high quality cattle will market themselves.

If nobody knows you have cattle for sale then nobody will come to buy. The better the marketing program, all things being equal, the more customers your business will attract.

In the next hour we will cover three essentials of marketing–the basic principles of marketing, the building blocks of a print advertisement and what it should accomplish, and defining a proper market area.

Understanding the basic principles of marketing is the first and most essential step to successful marketing. These principles apply equally to all sizes of businesses. The Angus breeder with a marketing budget of $2,000 should use the same basic principles as does a major corporation with an advertising budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.

These principles are:
1) Positioning – As a marketer you can’t be all things to all people. It is essential to develop a position in the market that allows you to fill a specific niche. This requires knowing who your potential customers are, or should be, where they live and work, and what kind of cattle they need and buy. Positioning allows you to produce what your customers want and need, and to market specifically to those in your predetermined audience.

2) Understanding when buying decisions are made – Business buying decisions are made months, sometimes years in advance of an actual purchase. The advertising you do today, this month or this year, likely may not sell many bulls tomorrow, next month, or maybe not even next year. Business-to-business advertising is a long-term investment

3) Top-of-mind awareness – This must be the goal of every successful marketing program. Top-of-mind awareness means that when a potential customer thinks of registered Angus seedstock, they think of one breeder first and favorably. The advertiser who achieves top-of-mind awareness with an individual gets first chance at that person’s business.

4) Programming – To market effectively requires that breeders develop a program and stick with it year after year. You don’t breed cows once, you breed them every year according to a well-determined plan. Just because your breeding program was successful last year doesn’t mean that you can rest on your laurels this year: it is on going, never ending as long as you are in the registered Angus business. Advertising and marketing are no different, they must be part of a well defined program.
Now let’s look at these four principles in more detail.

Positioning
The owner of one of the most successful restaurants in Houston,Texas, often tells how he was going nowhere a few years ago trying to run a restaurant that sold everything. A business consultant he contacted for help asked him to describe his business and its objectives in 10 words or less. He couldn’t do it. “You are not focused enough to run a successful business,” he said.

Edd Hendee decided that day to reposition his business. Instead of trying to attract everyone who was hungry, he decided to operate the best steak house in his city. He signed up with Certified Angus Beef (CAB) LLC and built his future on high quality beef and customer service. His business, over the next few years, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

What Edd Hendee’s advisor referred to as being focused, advertising people call “positioning.”
Angus breeders too need to position their businesses. Start by putting it on paper. Write a positioning statement that in 10 words or so describes the kind of customer you intend to serve, and the kind of cattle you will produce—“To breed performance tested bulls for commercial cattle producers.” Then, develop a slogan that sums up that position—“Performance Angus Bulls for A Tough Commercial Environment”or whatever you want to stick in the mind of potential customers.

One successful advertising agency executive taught his employees that if a business stands for everything, it stands for nothing. Positioning, he said, is sacrifice– deciding what is important and what can be left behind.
Once you’ve developed a market position you can aim your advertising and promotion effort directly at your target audience. You’ll have less waste and higher efficiency. What’s more, since you know more about your customers and what they want and need, you can be a more effective breeder. The knowledge allows you to focus your breeding program and fill the needs of potential customers.

When buying decisions are made
How many people, do you suppose, need a bull the day they read or hear your advertisement? Not many. Buying decisions for business-related items like herd bulls, trucks, farm equipment and the like, are seldom impulse purchases. These decisions are arrived at months or even years ahead of the purchase. Advertisers who don’t understand this can make costly advertising mistakes.

Bull customers start planning purchases when the first calves are born, or at weaning. Think of your own situation. Many of you also start planning your breeding program for the following year almost from the time your cows are bred. The chance of an advertiser changing your mind at the last minute is remote.

Still, many livestock advertisers believe their advertising should work like grocery store advertising. If they run an ad today, they expect results tomorrow. But grocery and department stores stock thousands of items that are purchased regularly. When retail stores advertise specials in the daily newspaper their main goal is to get customers into the store with the hope that they will buy additional goods, or at least find that the store is a good place to shop regularly.

All you have to sell is Angus cattle, and only a relative few at that. You can’t offer bulls at below cost to create traffic through your place. Your advertising needs to build awareness of your business by making favorable, lasting impressions on potential customers. But even the most memorable advertising impressions fade with time. That’s why repetition (ad frequency) is so important. Before the potential customer forgets, another impression is needed to re-enforce and build upon the last one. From first impression to the actual purchase of a bull, the buying cycle is measured in months or years, not days or weeks. Advertisers must take this into account.

Top-of-mind awareness
Let’s assume your teenage daughter has an important social function next week, and she needs a new outfit. Tomorrow is the day she wants to buy those clothes.

What will she do first thing in the morning—grab the newspaper or flip on the television to look for clothing store ads? Not likely. She will jump into the car and drive directly to the Unique Boutique or some similar place that she is convinced will have the fashions she wants.

Tomorrow morning there is little if anything another clothing store can do attract your daughter’s business when, credit card in hand, she is ready to shop. This first opportunity to get a customer’s business usually goes to the merchant who has established top-of-mind awareness in individual buyers. Top-of-mind awareness should be the goal of your marketing program.

Consider the products you buy, large or small, and you will discover that most of your purchases are the result of top-of-mind awareness. Suppose you are repairing the barn and the handle breaks on your only hammer, what do you do? Rush into the house to look at hardware store ads? No, you will get into your vehicle and drive directly to a store and buy a hammer. Most of you know where you would go first if tomorrow you needed to buy a pickup or a tractor. Where you go to buy is most often determined long before the need to buy occurs. That’s top-of-mind awareness.

When the urge to buy Angus bulls strikes a cattle producer in your trade territory they won’t reach for a magazine or the Internet to find the names of nearby breeders. Their minds will already be made up. Will they call you, or your competitor? At that point it’s out of your control. That’s why understanding the buying cycle and the concept of top-of-mind awareness is essential to your success.

Programming
Suppose your physician tells you that for the sake of your health you must lose weight and get in shape. Taking that advice to heart, you skip lunch and have a rice cake and lettuce for dinner. That evening you do pushups and sit ups then put on jogging shoes and run until you nearly drop. You can barely drag yourself home and onto the sofa. Now, are you in shape?

The answer is obvious. You are dog tired, sore and hungry. The prospect of going through this experience anytime soon has no appeal, but you certainly aren’t in shape. To get fit and lose weight you must develop an exercise and eating program that matches your ability, your needs and your goals. Then you must follow it day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. Stop the program, and its positive effects are soon reversed.

Marketing works the same way. I have known people who get excited about marketing and start out with a bang. They make a big one-time outlay of funds for advertising and promotion, then assume that the job is done. When little if anything happens they feel discouraged and cheated, just as the person who overdoes his diet and exercise the first day. Virtually nothing is accomplished.

Your marketing program, just as your exercise program, must be sustainable. Sustainable not for a few weeks or even a few months, but indefinitely. You must review and revise the program at the end of every marketing year. But the program must continue on as long as you are in business.

Evaluate Print Advertising
There are many ways to communicate with potential customers and achieve top-of-mind awareness. But one that is most often used and misused in the registered livestock business is print advertising. You can save money and strengthen your marketing program if you know what goes into making a high quality print advertisement.

Although it isn’t always apparent to the untrained eye, the best print ads are usually made up of five basic components. And when combined properly, these five components should accomplish five basic tasks. Understanding the five components or building blocks of a print advertisement, and the five tasks that an ad should accomplish will help you create better advertising and evaluate the advertising others create for you.

The five basic building blocks of an advertisement are: 1) dominant, attention-getting illustration 2) a headline that includes a benefit 3) persuasive body copy 4) consistent signature and logo 5) overall distinctive appearance.

Each ad should accomplish the following five basic tasks: 1) Grab the reader’s attention. 2) Arouse the reader’s interest. 3) Create desire to learn more. 4) Build conviction. 5) Make the reader want to act.

The illustration is the most important element in most ads, certainly in most cattle ads. The ad illustration should usually show the product, demonstrate how it is used, or illustrate the results a buyer will receive from purchasing the product. But before it does anything, the ad illustration must grab readers’ attention and compel them to stop and learn more, if only to satisfy their curiosity. When it comes to stopping people, we’re talking a matter of seconds, maybe two or less, for readers to decide whether to stop and learn more, or turn the page. That’s a powerful order for a photograph.

Your herd bull may be so unique, and so overpowering compared to his competition, that a standard, side view, posed photo will do the trick. But for most, that won’t work. It’s true that a potential customer will want to see a picture of your bull before he invests in the bull’s semen or progeny. However, a brochure mailed to an interested potential customer, a visit to your place or a smaller, secondary photo can accomplish that task.

The illustration is responsible for grabbing the attention of the reader.
The headline, like the illustration, should draw attention to what you are selling and create interest. It should expand on the illustration’s promise by telling what the picture is about. Moreover, it should state the most important benefit a customer will receive–more pounds, more dollars, more peace of mind, whatever. A slogan or a trite expression should never, never be used as a headline. Some advertising experts work for days to write the “perfect” headline. Never shortchange the headlines in your ads.

Compelling, persuasive body copy is essential if the illustration and headline do their job. Once your ad has the reader’s attention, it’s the job of well-written copy to create desire on the part of the reader to own the product or at least learn more about it. This is where you give the sales pitch, explaining the features and benefits of the cattle you have for sale.

Good copy also creates conviction by backing claims with proof. State the facts, spell out your guarantee and make people want to do business with you. Good copy tells the sales story in a nutshell, in a logical order. Each sentence should make the reader want to read the next sentence. In closing, the copy should ask the reader to take some action—telephone for more information, ask for a sale catalog, stop by for an open house next week, come to the sale, etc. Too many advertisers assume that the reader will automatically act in a certain way, but that’s seldom the case. Tell them how to do it, and make it easy.

Part of this final job is handled by the ad’s signature. Effective ad signatures feature the business logo and include the name of the contact person or persons, the telephone number, fax number, E-mail and Web site address, mailing address, and directions to the farm or ranch. The herd logo must be attractive and distinctive and identify your business at a glance. A professional should design it, and you should use it in every ad and every promotional piece you produce.

Finally, these four advertising building blocks, illustration, headline, body copy and signature, should be combined in such a way as to create an overall distinctive appearance for the advertisement. You can identify top advertisers simply by the distinctive appearance of their ads, even before you recognize the illustration, read the headline or identify the logo. Distinctive appearance in an ad is usually produced by someone who knows how to combine proportion, color, type faces and other graphic elements to produce a pleasing, eye-catching design. Once you have achieved the desired “look” then use it time after time to build recognition for your business.

Study advertising like you study genetics and cattle breeding. Insist that each ad you run contains the five basic building blocks and accomplishes the five basic tasks. You’ll be more confident about approving and paying for advertising, and your advertising will return you more money.

Defining your market area
The most effective marketing is done by people who have carefully defined their market area. In fact, knowing the size of your market area and the number of potential customers it includes is essential for efficient marketing. The marketing budget and program you should use depends upon whether you will market cattle worldwide, nationwide, statewide or only within a 50-mile radius of your farm or ranch.

Start the process by digging out your sales records for the last few years. Get a map and place a dot near the location of every buyer or every animal sold. If you are like most producers you will find a shotgun-type dot pattern. Over the years I have done this for both large and small private sales, and state consignment sales. Always, the heaviest concentration of dots is clustered around the breeder’s location. The dot pattern thins as the distance from the sale location increases.

Thin or blank spots in the pattern almost always show up. These identify areas with no potential buyers, areas where another breeder dominates the market or areas that are not being adequately reached with advertising and promotion—or some combination of the three. In more populated areas of the country the bulk of a breeder’s buyers will probably be within a 50-mile radius of home. In areas where the carrying capacity of the land is lower, the cluster of buyers will often be more widely distributed. Even sellers who attract buyers nationwide find that the majority of their buyers live relatively close to them.

Before you decide that the heavy concentration of dots on the map will be your defined market area, do some more research. First check out the number of commercial cattle in this area. Then figure four or five bulls to breed each 100 cows. This will give you an estimate of the number of bulls in service within your area. Figure a 25 percent annual bull turnover (or whatever is appropriate to your area of the country) to get the number of new bulls needed in the area each year.

Also take into account the competition you face. There are sure to be other breeders and consignment sales that you must compete with. To get a complete picture mark these competitors on your map, and list roughly how many bulls they sell. You can’t calculate exactly how all these factors affect your business. But with this information in front of you it will be easier to define your primary market area and design your marketing plan.

Regardless of how large or how small a market area you map out, your advertising and marketing goal is specific: establish awareness, hopefully top-of-mind awareness, of you and your business with a high percentage of the potential customers in that area. You want every producer within that area to know about your business and to at least consider you and your cattle when it’s time to buy bulls.

At this point the answer to the often-asked question, “Where should I advertise?” becomes more obvious. You should use media that will most efficiently reach all the potential customers within your defined market area. If the area is small, weekly or small daily newspapers may be an efficient buy. There may be a well-read local farm or livestock newspaper that reaches a high percentage of your intended audience. In some areas radio stations might cover the area well. On the other hand, direct mail of some kind could be both efficient and effective. Once you’ve checked the circulation and rates of all the media options, and the other methods of reaching and influencing buyers, you will likely use a balanced combination.

As the market area enlarges so do the media options. Breeders who want to attract volume bull buyers from a distance, or who target other registered producers can often make good use of national beef cattle magazines, the national breed association publication, or regional breed publications. In some instances various types of national publications would be efficient. None of these would be efficient for a 75–mile radius market area.
Many breeders, once they are satisfied that their defined market area is well covered, will reach out with advertising and promotion beyond the fringe of their sales map. This introduces them to new prospects, and can eventually broaden their sales base. But never do this by taking money from the budget that properly covers the designated market area.

Every successful business has a good handle on its competition, and its customers and potential customers. Defining your market area and understanding the potential customers within it can save you money, give your marketing program direction and clout, and improve your business.

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