CHAPTER 6
Becoming Intimately Familiar with Your Customers
Getting Your Hands in the Soil
Companies are struggling. As we’ve discussed, old sales and marketing methodologies rely on manipulations to generate sales, but that model clearly doesn’t work anymore. Unfortunately, neither do a lot of the things that you may have read (or been taught) when you were coming up the ranks. For instance, anyone who has spent any time at all in marketing has heard about the Four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion. These concepts were made leading edge by marketing professor Philip Kotler in his 1967 book, Principles of Marketing, and they ruled the roost for more than forty-five years. But the game has changed, and, unfortunately, the Four Ps are now dead.
In the early 1990s, Robert Lauterborn, a widely recognized and influential professor at the University of North Carolina, proposed a reclassification of the Four Ps (from a more customer-oriented perspective), suggesting that they might be better described as the Four Cs—customer, cost, convenience, and communication.1 Kotler eventually agreed and accepted this position.2 I greatly respect both of these influential leaders in the field of advertising and marketing, but I strongly believe there’s an easier and far more effective path for marketers and business leaders. What really matters these days is your character, community, and content—the Three Cs.
It’s a bit like alphabet soup—and it may be hard to digest. But, in short, the ongoing problem we routinely run into is that marketing is still viewed as a purely tactical endeavor focused on the “new customer addiction.” These tactics are important, of course, but while many organizations are busy trying to make the perfect six-second Vine video—or get the right post on Twitter, a better picture on Instagram, or more likes on Facebook—their competitors are focused on more important endeavors, thereby increasing profits by 50 percent or more. Which would you rather spend your time on?
To thrive in business these days you need to shift your focus from approaching marketing as a tactical operation to approaching marketing as a more methodical, more strategic endeavor. Your marketing team shouldn’t be spending months on creatives, wondering if the logo is placed just right or the font is perfect and properly justified. Yet that’s exactly what’s consuming most of their time. And it’s exactly why we have so much terrible marketing and so much misunderstanding about social media and other methods of communicating with our customers and prospects.
For years, Fortune 500 companies have gotten wrapped up in branding, and now they’re getting equally wrapped up in how to do effective social media. If you are anything smaller than a Fortune 500 company, then you should be wrapped up in results. Your team should be focused on the Big (Strategic) Picture—getting the Three Cs right, thereby increasing customer value and increasing revenues. You might not realize it, but your marketing department may be the most important department in your entire organization. They’re the ones focused on bringing customers in, and hopefully by now you recognize that they’re also the ones in the driver’s seat when it comes to keeping them. This chapter and, in fact, all the chapters in Part Two, are about strategic marketing and how to ensure your organization is focused with laser precision on the fastest, most effective marketing and business growth opportunities available to you. Nothing will change your business faster and better than more powerful marketing.
When a Kevlar bulletproof vest is made, dozens of layers of tightly woven fabric are interlaced together. Layer upon layer upon layer. This chapter, and the five that follow, contain actionable concepts that serve as your layers of Kevlar fabric. Your job is to interlace the layers—with each other, as well as within your organization. Successfully doing so will create marketing results that are nearly bulletproof. You’ll be able to implement processes and procedures to help retain customers, increase transactions, and build greater Evergreen loyalty.
Now that you understand the Three Cs in theory, let’s discuss specific ways to put these ideas into practice—starting with how to establish a better understanding of your customer.
WHY CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE IS BROKEN—AND HOW TO FIX IT
In Chapter 1, I explained that the biggest faux pas many organizations make when it comes to understanding customer lifetime value (CLV) is that they view their customer base as a single amorphous entity and use an “average” of the data they’ve collected to make their most pressing and important business decisions. Furthermore, they communicate with their customers as this single entity, as if “one message fits all.” Unfortunately, this type of thinking is wrong, and it’s both costing a lot of money and causing a lot of undue stress. It’s also what’s at the core of very bad marketing—and there’s a lot of it out there these days.
Even though I touched on this subject briefly in Chapter 1, let’s take a more in-depth look at this traditional model—what it is, exactly, and why it doesn’t work very well anymore—and then take a peek at a few things we can work on to fix it.
Calculating Your Company’s CLV
Despite all the drawbacks and negative aspects of traditional CLV calculations, knowing the CLV number across your entire base of customers is still one of the most important insights you can ever have about your business. Therefore, you really should learn how to do this calculation the “old school” way. Figuring out your organization’s CLV is simple. In the most basic sense, you take all the profit from your client base, determine how long these customers have done business with you (on average), subtract all the advertising, marketing, and other costs associated with servicing that customer, and—voilà—you have your CLV number.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of calculators are available online that will allow you to punch in numbers to learn your average CLV. Some of these tools are basic and some far more complex, and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. You might already have an incredible team of marketers and data analysts who can quickly tell you your CLV with a degree of certainty. If not, I would suggest you simply Google “CLV” and use one of those tools. But keep in mind, this method is fraught with pitfalls.
Defining What “Lifetime” Really Means
One of the biggest and most glaring issues should be obvious to you. It’s the question of lifetime. In regard to customer lifetime value, who determines what the “lifetime” of a customer really is? It isn’t really a lifetime (in other words, the span between a customer’s birth and death), is it? If it’s not, then is it sixty days, three months, two years, or a decade? The problem is we don’t really know. Furthermore, do we really have to wait a lifetime to determine an accurate number for our CLV? If so, good luck.
Each business needs to determine what its specific “lifetime” is—for a number of reasons. Namely, having a defined lifetime will let you know when a customer is no longer actually a customer. (Is a customer who bought something from you three years ago still a customer, for instance?) I’ll discuss this topic at length in Chapter 10, since it makes people in many organizations scratch their heads. But, in brief, do you think that customer should be marketed to and communicated with in the same way you communicate with a customer who just purchased from you last week? Of course not! But guess what most organizations are doing? Hmmm… Are you guilty?
Instead of focusing on a single number for CLV, consider first the importance of understanding the makeup of your customer base; then determine lifetime value based on that information and a number of other criteria. Read on!
Taking Issue with the Word Average
Just like the word lifetime can create stumbling blocks if we’re not careful, we also have to be truthful about the fact that—and I don’t care what business you are in—there is no such thing as an “average customer.” You have different groups of customers, which we’ll discuss soon, all of whom deserve your unique attention. For example, you might have a segment of grandmothers and a segment of teenagers, each requiring very different marketing and messaging. Or you might have a group of customers that spans from, say, executives to assembly-line workers. Can you see why having one single database (and one single CLV number) can create such a huge problem and ineffective marketing? Every day organizations calculate fancy variations of their CLV numbers, but it’s no wonder that so many of them don’t know how to use this data effectively to increase their profitability.
In Chapter 3, when I introduced the principle of character, I only talked about how this concept pertains to your organization. But that’s only half of its potential application. Later in this chapter I’m going to focus on how you can articulate the character of your customer base. This is an absolutely critical factor that determines whether (or not) you are able to effectively engage and communicate with current and prospective clients. The important thing to understand about your customer base is that you don’t just have a single (“average”) customer profile.
Understanding Who Your Customers Are—and What They Are Doing
Traditional marketing typically focuses on two distinct types of profiles and datasets for customers. One is based on the demographics and characteristics of an organization’s customers; the other is based on activity and how the customer consumes (or uses or derives value from) the company’s content. As an example of the former, the demographic profile, a manager might claim: “Our average customer is female, 37 years old, married, has two kids, and makes $75K per year.” As an example of the latter, when I work with online entities to boost retention, I typically help them look at behavioral and activity-based data. We focus on how customers are behaving. What are they doing after the purchase? How often are they logging onto a website, for example, or posting a comment? How often are they submitting support requests? Did they sign up and then not come back for three weeks? How many files do they download? How many pages do they visit? These are the types of questions we would look at in a Web environment. Similar questions, of course, can be created for almost any organization.
When a company focuses on behavioral analytics, its marketing staff looks at customers’ consumption, usage, and participation levels, and then sorts the customers into different groups. This process can reveal incredibly valuable information, but the most powerful customer profile is one that defines characteristics and demographics while maintaining a watchful eye on behavior. Only when both types of data are combined together into one cohesive unit is a company able to recognize who its customers are and how they’re behaving, thereby dramatically increasing the company’s chances of communicating with its customers in a way that resonates.
Most organizations have a database of customers. Furthermore, most companies engage in traditional marketing (which involves, among other things, sending e-mails and engaging in social media). But most also make the mistake of blasting every person the same message. Everyone gets the same e-mail. Everyone gets the same promotion. Everyone gets the same update. Surely, there’s got to be a better way to communicate. There is! And it starts with knowing, precisely, who your customers are.
CREATING YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER ARCHETYPES
In Chapter 3 you defined your corporate character. Now it’s time to take the essence of that idea and shift your focus to your customer, with two important distinctions. First, when you create your corporate character, you create one character; when you create your ideal customer archetypes, you create several, with each being based on a distinct segment or group of customers. Second, your ideal customer archetypes are drawn from both demographic and psychographic traits of actual customers. This process is tremendously valuable, since it helps to define both the type of people you are trying to attract as a company and the people you’re communicating with.
What, Exactly, Is an “Archetype”?
In the early twentieth century, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung introduced the term archetypes in his work to describe the human psyche. He believed that all people could be categorized according to their individual archetype. Jung originally wrote about four distinct archetypes in his book Die Struktur der Seele (The Structure of the Psyche).
Almost a hundred years later, Dr. Carol S. Pearson expanded upon Jung’s concepts and classified twelve different archetypes, making Jung’s theories accessible to everyone. She includes the Innocent, the Orphan, the Warrior, the Caregiver, the Seeker, the Destroyer, the Lover, the Creator, the Ruler, the Magician, the Sage, and the Jester.3 Pearson describes each archetype based on a number of different personality traits. For example, the Jester is the type of person who believes you only live once. The Jester’s core desire is to live in the moment. This archetype’s greatest fear is being bored (or worse, being boring to others). The Jester’s biggest pitfall is wasting a lot of time, but hey, you only live once! Whereas, the Caregiver is more interested in the good of others. This archetype’s core desire is to connect with and help others in life through selfless actions. The biggest fear of the Caregiver is being selfish and ungrateful. The Caregiver’s greatest pitfall is being taken advantage of. The Caregiver is motivated by compassion and generosity.
Companies, too, can be categorized by archetype. In a book on that very topic, The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes, authors Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson classify well-known companies according to the twelve personality archetypes. For example, Ben & Jerry’s, the ice-cream company, is the Jester—a company that likes to have a good time. Whereas companies like Lego, Crayola, or GoldieBlox are Creators—companies interested in creating things of value. Thinking about your company as an archetype can be helpful while creating your character and defining why you do what you do, and how you conduct yourself.
And How Does This Concept Apply to Your Customers?
Even if this is the first time you’ve heard of Carl Jung and his archetypes, or Pearson’s work, you surely already know, based on life experience, that everyone is different. Everyone interprets messages differently. Everyone reacts to things in his or her own unique way. And yet, so many companies are guilty of treating their customers as a single entity, speaking to everyone in the same manner. This is a huge mistake that can crush your business, and it’s one of the primary reasons that many companies are terrible at marketing. Organizations must understand that marketing itself (as a discipline) and whom they are marketing to (the market) are two inextricably linked but distinct areas of focus. Instead of using a single CLV to communicate to nameless and faceless customers en masse, it is much more effective to have a library of your own company’s customer archetypes and to communicate with each group of customers (and prospects) in an individual and authentic way.
Imagine for a moment the following scenario: A football game is being held in a giant stadium. Fans on one side of the stadium are dressed in one team’s colors; it’s a sea of red. On the opposite side are the opposing team’s fans; it’s a sea of yellow. As the game gets into full swing we clearly know which fans are rooting for which team. We know because of the color of the clothes they’re wearing, the face painting, or who they’re cheering for when one of the teams scores. Now empty the stadium and fill it with your customers and prospects. You might have two, four, or six groups. Every section of the stadium should be a different group, each wearing a different color. I’d like you, as referee, to call forward a captain from each group of customers for the coin toss. You should be able to, with relative precision, tell me what each person looks like as an individual. This is the archetype that represents that specific group of clients.
The main goal of this exercise is to paint a vivid picture of each segment of your customer base. However, if you find that you are having trouble describing each archetype, then your discovery process should start with selecting one group and asking a few simple questions, such as:
• If you could combine all the customers in this group and create a single person, who would it be?
• Is this person male or female?
• What does the person look like?
• Where does the person live?
• What is this person’s income level?
• How old is the person?
• What is this person’s most burning desire?
• What are the person’s goals and/or aspirations in life?
• What motivates this person?
• What is this person’s biggest fear/pain/frustration?
• What goes through this person’s head when waking in the morning?
• What does a “day in the life” of this person look like?
• What are the unique commonalities of the members of this particular customer group?
• What are their emotional hot-button issues?
• How do they communicate with each other?
• What makes this group of customers different from the other groups?
By no means is this an exhaustive list of questions. And feel free to tailor the list to suit your company’s needs. The point of this exercise is simply to get you thinking about different groups of customers and fine-tuning the unique characteristics that make members of each group similar to one another. This process will inherently be easier for some companies than for others—particularly when organizations are fairly narrow in their appeal. But don’t be lulled into oversimplifying your archetypes. Occasionally, a business will have a single customer archetype, and that’s fine, but most businesses will have several.
It is worth noting that various incarnations of this idea are out there. In Keith Eades’s 2003 book, The New Selling Solution: The Revolutionary Sales Process That Is Changing the Way People Sell, he refers to a similar process as creating your “straw man.” Others have called it building your “customer avatar.” Personally, I like to use the word archetype because most organizations have more than one ideal customer. Whatever you choose to call it, the concept is powerful when used strategically.
What Are the Benefits of This Approach?
Businesses love to talk about the “voice of the customer,” but often these very same companies don’t have a true understanding of the people they’re actually talking to. How can we understand the customer’s “voice” and what resonates with this person if we’re not actually sure who the customer is? How can anyone possibly imagine this strategy will work, let alone foster loyalty to a brand? When organizations try to talk to everyone, they end up talking to no one.
When you take the time to learn about your ideal customer archetypes and build models to describe them, your organization becomes prepared to truly focus its marketing efforts. You know, intimately, who your customers are and how they behave. And it becomes crystal clear that each group of customers requires different marketing, different messaging, and different follow-up. You find yourself in the position of ensuring that all of your marketing efforts are speaking only to one type of person, which enables you to communicate without breaking rapport. Each customer, in turn, feels as though everything you do, or say, was created almost exclusively for him or her. It’s as if you are generating thoughts already happening subconsciously in your customer’s mind. This is when the magic happens.
To quote that tired old TV ad slogan: “But wait! There’s more!” The benefits of creating models of your various archetypes go far, far beyond marketing. Archetypes can be used across your entire organization as a training tool. For example, they can give your customer service team members a better understanding of the type of person raising a complaint, and a clearer sense for how to communicate with that customer. They can also help your sales team members communicate more effectively with leads and more quickly identify new opportunities. In short, to get the most value out of this strategic approach, everyone in your organization should be fully versed in the archetypes of your ideal customers.
I’m sure you are starting to understand the potential ramifications of this concept. It’s powerful stuff. But let’s get back to marketing. Every time your organization communicates with either current or prospective customers, you need to ask yourself, “Will this message/marketing/copy/design resonate with this specific customer archetype?” Your ideal customer archetype should be the basis of every customer communication—before, during, and after the sale. If you follow this strategy systematically, you will generate the most effective marketing you’ve ever created; your organization will experience a major breakthrough. Guaranteed!
A Warning—Don’t Let Predetermined Notions Hide Big Oceans
I once had a client who, after being in business for fifteen years, wasn’t really sure who his ideal customers were. Well, to be fair, he had a general idea of what was unique about his customers. But he didn’t have as deep an understanding of his customer profiles as he needed in order to maximize his company’s potential. And he most certainly wasn’t able to articulate his ideal customer archetypes. Sound familiar?
My client knew his customers were predominantly males age 40 and older. A good start, but the rest was mostly a guessing game. What made these men over forty tick? What was their driving motivation? What kept them up at night? What did they think about on the drive to work? We needed to find out.
We put forth a little effort to connect with and learn about his various customers, and to build archetypes for each of them. Within just a couple of sessions of working together, my client recognized he actually had three very distinct types of men who purchased his content, as follows:
• The first group consisted of men who were self-employed. They were nearly all married, most of them had kids, and they wanted to grow their companies. They were looking for marketing help to take their practices to the next level. Their biggest concern was that business growth had become somewhat stagnant.
• The second group were men in their sixties, also self-employed, who were wildly successful and now quickly edging toward retirement. They were mostly concerned with setting up their business to be sold in a couple of years or passed down to a family member. In a nutshell, they stayed awake at night thinking about what would happen to their businesses.
• The third group of men worked for larger manufacturing organizations. All were top-performing sales stars. These guys were mostly single, but some were married. That wasn’t terribly important. What was important about this group was they all desired to start their own companies, and they needed the assistance and value from my client to help them do that.
Most companies would have considered the entire customer base as one type of customer. In this case, they would have said “our ideal buyer is a male age 40 and older.” As such, most companies would send out one set of e-mails, engagements, sales processes, and promotions. However, this one-size-fits-all approach clearly would have overlooked crucial nuances—precisely the things that pinpoint areas of value just waiting to be mined.
The insights my client and I gathered allowed him to make some simple and subtle shifts in how he marketed his content to each group. Doing so, he said, was literally like “flicking a switch.” His marketing results went from okay to amazing, and moving forward, this kind of smart, strategic marketing guided the organization to make better decisions about everything it did, across every department.
By segmenting his customers, my client was able to create three types of offers and promotions, three types of communications with customers—each with its own unique style and tone. He said results and response rates went through the roof on everything they did. Sales increased (both in terms of frequency and transaction size), and customers became far more loyal.
Are you guilty of treating all of your customers as one single entity? Just a little bit of extra work could drastically change your relationships with your customer base. Don’t you think it’s worth it?
COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR ARCHETYPES
For a long time, we, as marketers, have understood the importance of knowing our ideal client. However, up until now, very little effort has been focused on understanding our customers with the intent of building genuine, long-term relationships with them. In other words, thinking about archetypes from a customer retention standpoint. This is a quality reserved for Evergreen organizations—and with a little bit of effort that success can be yours. The only way to succeed is to not only have a better understanding of who those customers are, but to know how to communicate with them as well. Let’s begin.
Step One: Get Inside Your Archetype’s Head
If you really want to create effective marketing, you need to understand, on a visceral level, what it’s like to be each individual archetype. To do this, you need to step inside this customer’s head. This is how you learn about the customer’s hot-button issues and what really makes that specific type of customer tick. Here are a few questions to get you started:
• What does a typical day in the life of your archetype look like?
• What fears or frustrations does your archetype deal with daily?
• What thoughts go through your archetype’s mind?
• What keeps your archetype up at night?
• What does your archetype really want out of life?
• What motivates your archetype to keep going?
• What gets your archetype really excited?
• What challenges does your archetype face daily that might be holding this person back?
An aside: When I ask the first question, most people come to the sudden (shocking!) realization that their ideal customer doesn’t spend all day thinking about their company. No, the customer is thinking about picking up the kids from school or getting an oil change, or wondering what’s for dinner or if there’s a line at the barber, or thinking about that toothache—hoping it doesn’t require a root canal! But I digress.
Use these questions to build a profile that describes what a “day in the life” of each archetype looks like. They should provide a good starting point, but then flesh out the story by asking some additional questions: How does your content impact the life of your customer? How does it solve this customer’s problem or meet a specific need or desire?
In his classic book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey Moore claims that the way a company succeeds is by targeting a very specific group of customers and focusing all the company’s resources on becoming the dominant leader in that specific marketplace. Moore worked with technology companies through a process of building a “day in the life of …” their ideal customer. After a company had a pretty good idea of what that day looked like, he had company managers complete a second exercise where they created the day in the life of their ideal customer after he or she had used their product.
Think about your own content. If I asked you, right now, if you could describe what your customer’s life was like before doing business with you and what it looked like afterward, could you describe the impact in detail?
Step Two: Understand Your Archetype’s Voice
In Chapter 3, I asked you to imagine a fictional conversation between your ideal customer and your corporate character. Now that you’re an expert on archetypes, I’d like you to imagine their conversation again. If they met for the first time today, what would they say to one another? How would they say it? Except there is a slight wrinkle in this new assignment. Now you know that you don’t have just one ideal customer; you have multiple archetypes. And each of these individuals, of course, responds differently and communicates in a different manner. You need to try to capture each voice. To do this, ask yourself these questions:
• What specific words or phrases do each of your archetypes use?
• How would archetypes in specific groups talk to one another?
• Do they use sophisticated language? Or is their conversation more casual?
• Do your archetypes use shared lingo (recall the discussion on tribal lingo in Chapter 4), shorthand expressions, or acronyms?
Imagine if every time you communicated with your customers you acted as if you were having a face-to-face discussion with them. You’re not talking to them, but rather you’re conversing with them. This is how you should approach all of your messaging. Communicate on their level. Don’t try to speak above your customers. Think about your own interactions. When people try to overpower you, overimpress you, or speak above you, you feel something is amiss. However, when people communicate with you in a genuine manner, rather than talk at you, the exchange engenders trust. You have the opportunity to create this type of feeling every time you communicate with your customers. Don’t squander it!
As you are drafting your imaginary conversation, consider the overall tone of the specific archetype. For example, is your archetype casual or formal? We’ve been told during the past few years that we need to be more casual and real with our customers. But this advice is misguided, if it doesn’t make sense to that specific archetype. You wouldn’t want to be too casual if your customers were all retired brain surgeons. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to be too computer techie if your audience was primarily senior citizens with very little computer experience. This is why it’s important to recognize your various archetypes. Think of it like a cocktail party. What kind of cocktail party discussion would you have with this archetype outside of business hours? It may be casual, but not overly casual, or it may be a little more formal, depending on who is attending.
Step Three: Match Your Communication Plan with Each Group
When customers are connected to a company, and companies are connected to their customers, they understand each other’s wants and aspirations and are able to relate on a deeper and more meaningful level. When a customer feels understood (particularly in a way that is as intimate as what we’re talking about), then e-mails, messages, and everything else tend to resonate on a much deeper level. E-mails get opened. Messages have impact. Customers feel good about their relationship with your company, and they want to do business with you over and over and over again. Not only that. They want to identify themselves—and their own unique personalities—with your company’s character.
So how do you get to this sweet spot? You need to understand your customers in a way that makes them much more real. You need to have a vision of your customer that’s bigger and more clearly defined than how they actually see themselves.
Most organizations are obsessed with talking at people and not to them. By now, you are keenly aware that, to be successful in this day and age, you need to communicate with your customers personally. Instead of yelling from the mountaintop, you need to interact with your customers as though you are actually in a relationship with them. People don’t want to do business with someone who talks at them; they want to do business with someone they like and can have a conversation with.
Remember Jamie Oliver’s brand guidelines in Chapter 3? “Jamie is … approachable and fun—unpretentious, accessible, and playful,” and so forth. While the guidelines don’t identify who the ideal customers are, or which archetypes are identified, they do specify how the Jamie Oliver brand communicates with most people. Does how you currently communicate with your customers match the profile of the person you are trying to reach and, more important, the person you are trying to retain or build a relationship with? If not, then defining your customer archetypes in great detail can be a wonderful initiative for your company. These findings can have a dramatic impact on every facet of your organization—from the front lines to the executive suite.
Step Four: Be Only Where You Need to Be
Now it’s time to start considering how—or, more specifically, where—you’re going to communicate with your ideal archetypes. Here are a few sample questions to get you started:
• Do your ideal archetypes all use cell phones? Or do some of them still use fax machines?
• Are they plugged into social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn? If not, how do they communicate with their friends or colleagues?
• Do they read books? If so, what type?
• How about traditional media sources? Do they read the newspaper, and if so, which one?
• Do they watch television? If so, what’s their favorite thing to watch?
• What else is interesting or unique about them?
The purpose of these questions is to determine what marketing activities will align with your specific archetypes. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list. I’m simply giving you some questions to get you started, but I want you to ponder and dig as deep as you can. The more you know, the better position you’ll be in. This is your opportunity to focus not just on where your current customers are, but also on where your prospects might be, and where they’re likely to go. This is also your opportunity to articulate where you truly need to be, not where the social media experts tell you that you need to be.
So when the next hit start-up, “bamboozleboo.com,” makes a big splash and everyone on the planet is in a mad rush to jump on the bamboozleboo train, you’ll quickly recognize if it is a medium that your customers might use, if it’s a place where prospective customers might hang out. (Or not!) Consequently, you’ll instantly know if it makes sense for your company to focus its time, energy, and resources there. (Or not!)
I get e-mails all the time from companies that tell me they are doing everything on social media, but nothing’s working. I visit their websites and see all the familiar logos: Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. View us on Pinterest … Instagram, Vine, Flickr, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, RSS, and more! They’re burnt out because they are trying to maintain profiles on all these social networks, or they’re overpaying self-proclaimed social media experts to manage these important tasks for them (without a proper understanding of their corporate character, which is crucial), and they’re freaking out each time a new service gains critical mass and they’re told they need to be there, too, or they’ll miss out on a great opportunity—the game-changing, be-all and end-all opportunity for companies everywhere.
Stop it! Be only where you need to be.
The great Canadian former ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” This doesn’t mean you jump at every new opportunity or tech start-up. Quite the contrary. It means you should get to the point where you have such a grasp on your customer archetypes that you know exactly where they are now, where they are going, and where they’ll be next. That’s the type of insight “The Great One” applied to his hockey game, and it’s the same type of strategy you can apply to your marketing efforts. Focus.
CAPITALIZING ON THE NATURAL SYNERGY OF THOUGHTFUL MARKETING
By now I’m sure it is crystal clear why the principle of character is so important—and why our discussion of the Three Cs started there. When a company has gone to great lengths to define its character, and then takes the next step to carefully define its different groups of customers, a lightbulb goes on for the organization itself. Suddenly its marketing, its follow-up, and its relationship building become a heck of a lot easier. When experts talk about being “authentic,” this is really what they’re getting at.
We know that learning about our customer archetypes and the specific qualities that make up those customers allows us to market more effectively, but it does more than that. It allows us to create a sense of trust, faster. Loyalty isn’t generated by the “wow experience.” Loyalty is generated by the feeling your customer gets from doing business with your company.
But the magic doesn’t stop there. Loyal customers tend to become more active members of a company’s community. And when that happens, suddenly a tremendously powerful synergy starts to occur—a synergy that has direct and measurable results. A synergy that points toward Evergreen.
As with anything in life, you want to be able to gauge progress and, more important, your return on investment. By shifting from a “new customer focus” to a “relationship-building focus,” you will have time, energy, and money to spend on such things as community-building endeavors. To properly gauge your efforts, you need to be crystal clear on your strategies and objectives. From there, you should be able to devise the metrics to gauge your success. For example, if one of your objectives is for your community to help increase your referral business, then your marketing department must seek to measure how many new customers come to the community as a direct result of your community-driven initiatives.
Do you see the potential in this approach? It is a game changer, for sure. Are you willing to invest the time to learn more about your customers and, in so doing, gain their loyalty? If so, then you are primed and ready for Chapter 7. Read on.