September/October 2011
Both old and new marketing tools can help scrap companies find and keep customers by providing products and services that meet their needs.
By Ellen Ryan
If you were looking for Adam Weitsman at ISRI’s 2009 convention in Las Vegas, he was at the pool. More specifically, the owner of Upstate Shredding (Owego, N.Y.) was in a cabana in the Mandalay Bay’s 11-acre tropical lagoon, serving food and drinks to his customers and listening to their concerns. He could have had the same meeting in an air-conditioned conference room, he says, but he prefers the cabana. “It’s more comfortable, and it breaks the ice better. It allows us to get at the negatives. People open up more and say things they might be too polite to say in a stiffer environment.”
That’s exactly what happened in this case. Shippers complained that the line to unload at his shredder could be three hours long, leading frustrated drivers to sometimes give up and leave. Sellers were weighing time lost against cash gained. “We realized it was a big issue,” Weitsman says, “when all we heard was, ‘the line, the line, the line.’” This informal, poolside focus group led Upstate Shredding to extend its hours and buy four additional cranes—at $500,000 each—just for unloading at the shredder. “It was a huge investment,” Weitsman says, “but it can take [just] one day or one mistake to lose a customer.” How many, he wondered, had his company lost already? The $2 million move shortened the lines and more, he says. “Sales are up, production is better, the volume of customers is up, and unloading time is so much less.” And all that, in turn, is bringing more customers.
Chatting poolside in Vegas is not what people typically think of as marketing. But if you define the term broadly as the strategies you use to identify prospects, turn them into customers, satisfy their needs, and keep them coming back, then Weitsman’s approach made perfect sense: He attracted prospects and clients to a laid-back environment conducive to their telling unpleasant truths, he listened, and he acted to keep the customers he had and appeal to new ones. In the process, he grew and strengthened his business. That’s what marketing is all about.
Traditional Approaches
For many scrap companies, marketing is synonymous with advertising. For years, the tried-and-true strategy was to place an ad in the Yellow Pages and wait for customers to find you through that. Some companies didn’t even go that far, relying instead on word of mouth. That might still work to some extent, but “marketing more will grow your business,” says Judy Ferraro of Judy Ferraro & Associates (Lemont, Ill.), a sales development and training consultant. Even if you have outside salespeople to drum up business, 360-degree marketing “gives salespeople the right tools and backs them up,” she says. “It’s more than business cards; it’s the website, brochures, events, and social media is a must—every company should have a Facebook and LinkedIn presence. [It’s] developing a consistent image and following through on it.”
Those are all worthwhile marketing channels if a company knows what it wants from them. But you can waste thousands of dollars on marketing tactics that have no plan behind them. “A marketing plan is like your business plan in general,” explains Bill Corbett, president and CEO of Corbett Public Relations (Floral Park, N.Y.). To create one, assess what marketing you’re doing now, decide on goals, set out a strategy to achieve them, and decide what vehicles you’ll use to get there.
So what are scrap companies doing now? Many advertise using mass media: billboards, newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. They use these avenues to convey what their facility does, where it is, when it’s open, and what it accepts to a broad audience—any member of which might have scrap to sell. Scrap companies advertise on the backs of buses in Chicago and on outdoor signs in Dallas and British Columbia; Upstate Shredding is considering on-screen ads in movie theaters.
The Yellow Pages are another mass medium, and they’re still a go-to resource for potential customers not tied to computers or smartphones. That’s one reason Joel Litman, president and co-owner of Texas Recycling/Surplus (Dallas), still advertises there—though he estimates he spends 70 percent less on his Yellow Pages ad than he did 10 to 15 years ago. Marc Rose, president of Schupan Industrial Recycling Services (Kalamazoo, Mich.), still has a Yellow Pages ad, too, “but I’m not sure we get much from it,” he admits. The upside, they say, is that as the number of phone book users falls, so has the price to advertise, so both men find it’s still worthwhile to use a Yellow Pages ad to reach customers who reach for the phone book.
Scrap companies also use billboards—where they can, at least. Rose says billboards keep his company’s name and phone number in front of “the guy cleaning out his garage”—especially for his facility in Elkhart, Ind., which has 10 small competitors. Billboards used to work in Texas, Litman says, but they’re no longer an option for his company. Restrictions the Dallas city council imposed about a decade ago mean “they’re disappearing in the city.”
The value of broadcast media might depend on the geographic market. Gershow Recycling (Medford, N.Y.) has one yard in Brooklyn, N.Y., and six more on Long Island. In such a dense media market, the company advertises on cable television to reach everyone from homeowners to contractors to manufacturers. The ads cite the nearest location and give a toll-free phone number and a promise of the best price. Though many said they consider broadcast advertising too expensive—it might take dozens of repetitions for a 30-second commercial to have an impact—Gershow can measure its ads’ efficacy. “The 800 number is used primarily in TV ads,” says spokesman John Zaher, “so the number of calls [we get] shows how TV advertising is working.”
Direct mail is more targeted than mass media advertising. Each time Gershow opens a new location, it mails a promotional piece to contractors and business owners within 10 miles of the new facility. Targeting like this helps, but moderate your expectations: With a general sales piece, a 1-percent response is considered successful, Ferarro says.
Other marketing techniques scrap companies favor fall under the “branding” umbrella. They build brand awareness by getting the company name and logo out into the community, sometimes in connection with a charitable endeavor. Texas Recycling/Surplus sponsors a hole at a charity golf tournament, for example; Ben Weitsman sponsors a Little League baseball team and gives away logo-branded clothing. “We print T-shirts and hats to be walking billboards,” with the facility location and phone number, says Stephen Donnelly of Dynamic Innovation Group, a marketing, Web, and PR firm with offices in Colorado, New York, and California which does marketing for Upstate Shredding. “In bulk, you can get shirts for $6 apiece.”
A notable scrap brand-building campaign was one Steel Pacific Recycling (Victoria, British Columbia) conducted in 2006. Right after a difficult merger and a corporate culture shift and name change, the company faced a problem: After the nearest landfill closed, Vancouver Island’s other landfills did not want to accept the company’s shredder residue. Steel Pacific mailed a large full-color, eight-page brochure to re-introduce itself to every household, government entity, and employer on the island, home to about 735,000 residents. (See “Looking Toward the Horizon,” Scrap, November/December 2008.) The appealing tabloid, full of recycling facts and photos of employees’ children, won over the population, from individuals who wrote letters thanking the company to the province’s top elected official. Requests poured in for extra copies of the brochure. “This helped reposition [Steel Pacific] from scrap metal dealers to green recyclers,” says Caroll Taiji, creative director of Taiji Brand Group (Duncan, British Columbia), which directed the rebranding campaign.
The mailing cost CN$80,000—a “startling” amount, says Andrew Ketch, Steel Pacific’s executive director. But consider the payoff: “Our margin went up substantially, we got higher-margin work, the Scrap-It program came along, our free-ton ratio went up, [as did] both our tonnage and our reputation.”
Scrap-It is British Columbia’s Cash for Clunkers program, which has taken more than 25,000 old vehicles off the roads since 1996. The provincial government gave Steel Pacific a no-bid contract to recycle the end-of-life vehicles the program collects on Vancouver Island. Participants can get $300 or a variety of transit-oriented incentives from the program for each qualifying vehicle they recycle. Other free material the company receives is a result of its policy to only pay for metal in quantities greater than 1,000 pounds. Steel Pacific’s 10-percent to 15-percent free-ton ratio became the island’s highest.
“The added margin per ton and higher free ton alone more than paid for” the cost of the brand mailing, Ketch says, “plus [there’s] the intangible [benefit] of having a great reputation.” The company mailed a second, similar brochure in 2010 that featured stills from a video on its website of a vehicle going through the shredding and separation process, which led to a 400-percent jump in website traffic. “Putting videos or coupons into print can drive people back to your site,” Taiji notes.
Online and Beyond
Steel Pacific’s 2010 mailer is one example of how old media—paper—coexists with new media—online video and a website—in a marketing strategy. Other scrap companies also use technology to enhance traditional ways of connecting with customers and prospects. For instance, scrap company owners and PR consultants recommend attending local, regional, and national industry meetings—not just once, but on a regular basis. “It’s like a health club: You can’t just join; you have to go and exercise,” Ferraro says. And send someone with the right personality to the meetings, she adds. “Someone who’s not happy to be there will just gravitate to people they know, not reach out to strangers.” Once home, take all those business cards you collected and feed the information into your company database for direct marketing, Corbett advises. Connect to these new contacts on LinkedIn, too—but more on that later.
E-mail direct marketing has taken the place of paper direct mail for many firms. Gershow Recycling e-mails price changes and its twice-yearly newsletter, Zaher says. The newsletter “gives a positive image of [the company’s participation in] community events, car donations to the fire department, etc.” At Schupan, e-mail smooths the way for Rose’s eight outside salespeople. After plenty of Internet research on what companies might be good prospects, “we bombard people with e-mails,” he says. “Then they may open the door. We get most of our business this way.”
If e-mail is the online equivalent of direct mail, you’ll find online equivalents of other traditional marketing communication channels as well, such as billboards and phone directories. “Buy Yellow Pages or Yahoo! banner ads online,” recommends Ferraro, who does the marketing for Chicago’s Acme Refining Scrap Iron & Metal Co. When advertising on a search engine like Yahoo! or Google, it’s important, she adds, to buy advertising space tied to the right search terms, or keywords. Go to the search engine site and “type in ‘ad words for Google’ to learn what works for you.” Donnelly is another fan of online advertising. “Dollar for dollar, the Internet is the best place you can spend your marketing money,” he says. “Whether it’s on their phone, their laptop, their desktop computer, [or] on Facebook, people are looking at the Internet.” Further, online advertising provides more—and more detailed—tracking than any other form of marketing, he says.
The complement to online outreach is a company website, which should be the hub of any company’s online activity. To upgrade yours—or to build one—“go to a professional, not your kid or a cousin who has a business in his garage,” Corbett says. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can waste a lot of time and money. Think of [your site] as another salesperson for your organization—one that works 24/7. You get what you pay for.” Look at other recyclers’ websites to see what works and what doesn’t. Does a site project the right image? Can you find the information you need? Are there appropriate calls to action, such as “Get a price,” “Contact us,” or “Chat now”?
And once you get customers or prospective customers to the website, give them something to do, Ferraro says. Acme’s website has a “Visit Chicago” feature that gives sports schedules as well as restaurant, theater, and concert information. There’s even a crane game that times you as you load a scrap trailer with a crane. This fall, Upstate Shredding customers will be able to log on to a password-protected part of the website to watch their scrap get dumped and sorted; later the company plans to put infrared cameras in its shredders and put that video on the website, too.
Websites can collect multitudes of data about site user behavior: where visitors click on the site, when they click, what site they came from, where they go next, how long they stay—even what operating systems they use. Effective marketers use this data to make their sites better and plan further marketing initiatives. “All this helps us target the customer,” Donnelly says. “What’s the appeal of that page? We can look at warm and cold areas of each page of the site, whether it lists our address or hours or prices. Then we can improve the cold areas.” However people use your website to get in touch with you, make use of that information, advises Rick Ramos, CEO of DualEagle.com, a marketing agency in Miami Beach, Fla.: “With a contact management program such as Salesforce, if someone calls or fills out a form or takes part in a chat, it tracks their ISP, name, phone, and so on, so you can treat them like a customer.”
Before you can treat visitors like customers, though, those visitors have to find your site. “Nine out of 10 people go online when they’re looking for anything at all,” Corbett notes. “If someone searches ‘copper scrap company, [your town],’ does your company come up first?” If not, it’s time to learn one of the newest marketing buzzwords: search engine optimization, or SEO. Here’s how Ramos explains it: “Your site has code in it that Google uses to find it. You can make that code fit the way Google works to rank your website higher than your competitors. Rank No. 1 gets 80 percent of the traffic, No. 2 gets 15 percent of the traffic, and No. 3 gets 3 to 4 percent of the traffic.” SEO gives you the best return on investment of all marketing you can do, he says.
A website can use various approaches to improve its search ranking—how high the site appears within the search results. The site designer might need to remove inadvertent barriers to crawlers, the automated programs that search engines use to constantly browse and index the World Wide Web. If the crawlers can’t find a site or access its content, the site won’t show up in that search engine. Links to the site from other popular, credible websites can raise its prominence, as can adding more content to the site that users find valuable. (Those two tactics make the site more useful and accessible regardless of their impact on site ranking.)
Many companies interested in SEO focus on keywords: making sure the site—and links to the site—use the terms that people most commonly use when searching. One SEO expert gives this example: If your company sells running shoes, do you describe them on your website as running shoes or as fast-moving footwear? What do people type into a search engine to find your product, running shoes, athletic shoes, or track shoes? And how do other sites label links to your site: “click here” or “buy running shoes”? An improved search ranking could come from small changes to keywords, like using scrap metal company instead of scrap metal companies, Ferraro says. Though you’ll find some free tools for keyword research and targeting at the search engine sites, such as at Google Adwords, she recommends that companies “pay a professional to do the work of matching search terms to your needs.”
Search engine optimization is not the same as search engine marketing. SEO’s goal is to improve a site’s rank in the “organic” search results. A company can hire experts to analyze its website, do keyword research, and take actions to improve its SEO, but it cannot just buy a better ranking in the organic search results—advertising on the search engine site will not affect the company’s organic ranking. Search engine marketing, in contrast, looks more broadly at how to make a company more prominent on search engine sites. This might include buying ads on specific keyword search results pages. Some experts use the SEM term narrowly to describe just such advertising; others use it more broadly to describe any action that improves the company’s visibility on search engines, both paid advertising and the various SEO techniques.
Getting Social
The newest marketing frontier—and the newest way to influence a website’s search ranking—is social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more. “Say Company A has a website and a social media presence connected to it with lots of traffic and hits,” Ramos says, “and Company B has an equally good website but no social media presence. Google assumes Company A is more of an authority and will give it a higher ranking in searches.” Acme, Gershow Recycling, Upstate Shredding, Steel Pacific, and E-Scrap Destruction of Ilandia, N.Y., (which Corbett works with) are among the many scrap companies that use social media to further market themselves and connect with customers. They measure the results in dollars, not just rankings. At Upstate, “Steve Donnelly is in charge of marketing, networking, posting, tweeting, and doing Facebook,” Weitsman says. Such activities have undoubtedly contributed to the company’s growth: “Our sales went up tremendously in the three years we’ve been doing SEO and SEM, from some $200 million a year in sales, with debt, to just under $600 million in debt-free sales in 2011,” he says. Here are a few of the most popular social media sites and ideas on how to use them for marketing:
Facebook. Upstate Shredding started a Facebook page in August 2010; within 10 months it had 3,500 friends. To Donnelly, creating a presence on this free social networking site is a no-brainer: “You can join scrap groups. You can alert all your contacts at once about your new shredder, new location, or employee of the month. And you can post links to news coverage; that way our contacts can hear the good stuff from sources other than us.” The company’s page even contains Weitsman family photos. Friends of the page see those posts in their Facebook news feed, as will anyone who searches for the page on the Facebook site.
Upstate has one Facebook page set up as an individual account and a second created using a newer option, Facebook for Business. The latter differs from an individual Facebook account in a few ways: Other Facebook users become “fans” of the page, not friends, which gives them more privacy. The page administrator sets the level of interactivity the page allows—deciding whether fans can post on the page’s wall or just comment on the company’s posts, for example. A Facebook page is no substitute for good business practices—“You still have to pay high and pay quick,” Weitsman says—“but it helps to form a bond” with employees, customers, and others in the community.
LinkedIn. This career-oriented networking site is helpful for finding prospects, Corbett says, because it allows you to search for a person or company and see where your networks overlap. “If you want to reach someone, and you see that you’re one person removed from him or her, see who’s in between—maybe [it’s] a guy you went to college with or a woman you met at a conference. Ask that person for an introduction to the person you want to meet.” Also ask customers for recommendations for the site; they’ll make your company shine online. Like Facebook, LinkedIn has business groups (including ISRI) you can join to further expand your network.
Twitter. Information you tweet goes to those who sign up to follow you, but it’s also publicly available and searchable. Tweets can be no more than 140 characters, but you’d be surprised at how much you can say in that amount of space. You can announce an event, link to a new price list, or post a photo of material you’d like to buy or sell. A PR firm can tweet for you or train you how to use Twitter to market your company or track what people are tweeting about you or your industry. This summer’s tweets from Upstate’s Weitsman included “Worked over 10 frustrating years trying to put a scrap yard in Scranton Pa. Finally made it happen.” and “Extra proud of my Jamestown scrap staff today!! They broke their all-time volume record.”
YouTube. This site turns videos into social media by allowing viewers to like or dislike them, share them, or comment on them. Whether here or on a company website, videos attract eyeballs. Look up “Acme Refining” on YouTube and see a six-minute video with interview clips for one example. Steel Pacific’s car-destruction video has been a huge draw to its website.
As the world becomes more connected, so do its media. What you do in social media can lead people to your website, and vice versa. Donnelly has integrated the Upstate Shredding website with its Facebook page and Twitter feed so that information he posts to either Facebook or Twitter appears on the other—and in a revolving feed on the website, which keeps it fresh. “You can’t have your website looking tired and dead. We post something new all the time. It takes only as much time as getting a drink from a fountain,” Weitsman says. Gershow is upgrading its website to include more news links and the ability to share content.
What will all this cost? There’s no charge to create a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or You-Tube, and free resources online can help a company get started with any of those platforms. Search engine optimization or search engine marketing services could cost $500 a month for a small firm, Ramos says; Ferraro estimates $500 to $5,000 a month in the industry overall. Online marketing can be the responsibility of someone on staff, or a company can outsource some or all of it. Training can shave costs. “Someone can consult on an hourly basis,” Corbett says. “Or take seminars or workshops. It can be cost-effective.”
Marketing Intangibles
With all this emphasis on posting and tweeting, it’s easy to lose track of marketing’s purpose: to find and keep customers. It’s useful to step back and consider the company’s overall image—both what it projects in its marketing communications and the physical impression visitors get from the facility. Steel Pacific’s website has photos of people who look friendly. And after a major cleanup of its yards, its environmentally themed mailers “demonstrated that people too intimidated to drive onto [another] scrapyard might drive onto a Steel Pacific site,” Taiji says. It worked: Neighbors have brought a lot more material for recycling, much of it for free. Tours for school groups “create little customers” excited to see cars crushed and get refrigerator magnets, Ketch says. (For more on the value of educating the community, see “An Open-Door Policy” on page 65.) The pride of yard workers and the education of young visitors’ parents continue to burnish the company’s image.
Likewise, Upstate Shredding considers its housekeeping part of its customer-service-oriented marketing strategy. Weitsman makes sure all of the company’s yards are paved, with no potholes. Street sweepers go around multiple times a day to prevent glass, nails, and stray pieces of scrap from causing flat tires, and to keep down the dust. There’s coffee for customers in the office; and each facility has someone who will help unload scrap from cars and trucks. “We want to [provide] this sort of service for customers because these are the people who put food on our tables,” Donnelly says. “We want to treat them with respect and keep them coming back.”
The common element here? Marketing, no matter how it’s done, is always about people. “You can e-mail, tweet, or text, but I want to know who my customer is, and they want to know who I am so I’m not a stranger,” says Texas Recycling/Surplus’ Litman. That’s why he tries to get out of the office and see customers and prospects in person. “It’s old-school, and it takes time and energy, but it builds our business. Shake hands, see the facility, get to know them. It gives us an edge. Don’t rely on e-mail all the time.”
Ellen Ryan is a Rockville, Md.-based writer.
Both old and new marketing tools can help scrap companies find and keep customers by providing products and services that meet their needs.