Recently in Marketing Strategies Category

My Creative Team, with whom I work on a large number of projects, recently completed a content marketing piece for client Pet Sitters International, an 8,000 member professional organization.  I wrote an article for MCT's most recent newsletter, THINK that talks about "The Buzz Factory: Marketing Tools for the Serious Pet Sitter," a series of how-to pdf's for the groups' membership that covers event planning, media relations and social media marketing.

As individuals, companies, and product and service providers, we can benefit from introspection, especially at a milestone like the arrival of a new year.  In fact, there’s no better time than now to do just that.

While you’re looking back at the business year and analyzing successes, near-successes and setbacks, one thing to seriously consider is to augment that thinking with input from those who know you best, your customer or client base.

There are many types of surveys and other methods to engage your customers in a productive dialogue.  Customer satisfaction surveys can help you define or update a benchmark measurement and are valuable in assessing your products, operations and even associates.  For marketing, branding and message development, however, a quantitative satisfaction survey has limited value.  

What we want to do is get a fresh insight into who you are in your customers’ eyes.  What does your role in their business mean to them?  We need to determine whether the features and benefits of your offerings, which you spent hours and dollars developing, are really the features and benefits that keep that customer interested in conducting business with your company.

You want to get out of your head and into theirs to find out what makes them tick.  Your success, it seems, lies closest to the approach that you take with the survey and how you process and act upon what you learn.

The best surveys focus on the survey taker.  That sounds simple enough, but consider this hypothetical approach:

1. How’s company X doing in helping you with your taxes?
2. What’s the three best things about company X’s people when they come to do your taxes?
3. Is company X’s brand promise working for you?

Seems straightforward - and it is - but you’re not really asking them to open up about their motivation for engaging you, Mr. or Mrs. X.  And that survey approach is all about your company, not them.  Consider this approach:

1. As tax deadlines begin to approach, what concerns start cropping up in your mind as you’re running your business?
2. Rank these concerns in importance to you and your business.
3. Which aspects of company X’s services best put your mind at ease?  Why do you think that is the case?
4. In light of this, what do you think makes company X best qualified to serve your tax needs?

The steps you take to brand and market your professional services firm is not radically different from your steps up the corporate ladder. In either case, it's typically not an overnight accomplishment - and if it is, you've probably done something disingenuous or perhaps illegal to get there. Is that the 60 Minutes van outside? Selling services is selling people - primarily yourself and secondarily your firm as a group of diverse people with a similar, cohesive goal. So, where do you start building that brand and planting the seeds that grow the elusive word-of-mouth success? Start with your cube neighbors. Do they know what you're about and what you're doing? Can your employees, associates, partners, accountant, attorney, and current customers recite your elevator pitch? Are you staying in contact with them with news, developments, accomplishments? It's a captive audience and they can be your biggest advocate. Don't set off the BS alarm. Start with talking in plain English, everywhere. On your website, in written and oral communications, in your collateral material. Buzzwords are for you and your comrades. The people don’t get them and glaze over when you use them. Not a good thing. This is the first step to what James Gilmore and Joseph Pine term "exceptional authenticity" in their book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Gilmore and Pine remind service providers in particular that "people tend to perceive as authentic that which is done exceptionally well, executed individually and extraordinarily by someone demonstrating human care." Become that helpful, smart coworker. Be a thought leader in your area of expertise and give away your ideas at every turn. Become an expert and the media, other influencers, and eventually the right customers will stop by your cube and form a line. Use the web as a forum for raising your stature. Blog, write and distribute white papers and case studies about what you're doing. Speak at events. Call reporters back within five minutes when they do call you. Tell your story until your voice fails - or until you are promoted. Individual self-promotion and professional services self-promotion is essentially the same thing. The key is creating and refining efficiency in your message - meaning discovering and developing your spiel, then creating all the fun stuff - logos, taglines, websites, printed materials, ads and press releases.

Ted Mininni, president of Design Force, writes in the Marketing Profs blog about the tendency to put a new face on a product to try to achieve instant fresh appeal with consumers. Whether is repackaging, a new package design, or a new name to the same old stuff, this represents a quick-fix mentality that often leaves out the insight of the buyer. A better use of time and resources, writes Mininni, is to get clear, usable feedback from customers:

Getting consumer feedback is a vital aspect of conducting an internal audit. Spending time, capital, and human resources on this exercise, if done thoroughly, is never fruitless. Never a waste of money. It's the best bang for your marketing buck. In fact, the results may surprise some executives and lead them back to reinstituting those products, those policies, and those brand values that made them successful in the first place.

Check out the results of the three-minute online survey of marketers from My Creative Team.

From product and service attributes all the way down the line to product delivery and subsequent customer support, branding opportunities permeate B2B touchpoints. Harry Hoover, in his Think blog, unearths a great article from bnet on branding products and services in the B2B world. Here's a simple, yet tried-and-true tactic from the article: "In many industries, potential new customers will be influenced to buy by the caliber of people who already use the product or service: a blue-chip customer list demonstrates product quality and approval. Ask existing customers for their permission to use their name and some positive feedback on your Web site and promotional material."

Previously, I wrote about how RSS could replace e-mail in terms of catering more to the individual's preference for receiving opt-in information. Chris Garrett makes an excellent point on this need for more personalization in RSS, calling for a next-generation RSS that would allow the feed to recognize and acknowledge the person reading the information. This has been done in direct mail and, of course, e-mail marketing for some time, but it is something I think we'll see very soon.

Harry Hoover and the folks at My Creative Team have published an excellent, concise article on 11 ways to promote your website. The bottom line:  to receive you must give.  Share ideas, thoughts, words, articles, anything you've got that's germane to what you do and you'll receive legitimate attention.

The Brains on Fire Blog relays news of JC Penney's new tagline, "Every Day Matters." Apparently, this is another example of how bringing on a new agency often yields a new tagline. Oh, yes, there's the quote from agency representative about "resonating with consumers." Is it a new day at JC Penney? I don't think so. Spike Jones at Brains on Fire testifies: "A rallying cry is great. But a remarkable experience is even better. It transcends tag lines and advertising. (And when you have a great name, you might not even need a tagline because your name says it all.) "Creating a new tagline won’t change anything. Try starting with the culture. The experience. The people inside your company."

Master landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of New York's Central Park as well as the grounds of George W. Vanderbilt's Biltmore House and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, liked to talk to strangers while crisscrossing the country by train to check on work in progress. In June 1893, on a trip to Asheville, NC, from Chicago, Olmstead quizzed fellow passengers about their intentions to attend the recently opened World's Fair. Most everyone said they planned to attend the Fair, but gave a variety of excuses regarding why they hadn't gone just yet. People feared a looming economic crisis and the coming summer heat, he learned. Probing further, he uncovered a common fear of being "fleeced unmercifully" in the wild western streets of Chicago by hoteliers, restaurateurs, and even the Fair itself. Writing back to other Fair directors, Olmstead pled for urgency in making early improvements that would be fodder for the stories people took back home: "This is the advertising now most important to be developed; that of high-strung, contagious enthusiasm, growing from actual excellence: the question being not whether people shall be satisfied, but how much they shall be carried away with admiration, and infect others by their unexpected enjoyment of what they have found."