Chapter 19
Customer-Driven Marketing
In This Chapter
• Embracing Marketing 2.0 and the voice of the customer revolution
• Developing strong relationships with your customers
• Marketing best practices in a socially wired world
• Finding the right tools to get the word out about your products and services
For most of the twentieth century, the discipline of marketing was essentially a one-way push conduit that generated appeals to targeted groups of prospective buyers and then called on people to take action, usually by making a purchase that didn’t involve a salesperson. Typically, there was no meaningful pre-sale communication between an individual buyer and the selling organization. Companies created products, services, and offerings, and then simply pushed various one-way media appeals—print advertisements, broadcast advertisements, direct mail appeals—that were designed to persuade people to buy.
In recent years, however, the game has changed. Advances in communications technology have allowed some marketers to augment these traditional appeals in a powerful way or even replace them altogether. How? By creating and supporting an ever-expanding ocean of conversations with prospective and existing customers.
These two-way discussions—whose speed, scope, and market influence are well beyond what could have been conceived in, say, the 1950s—represent nothing less than a marketing revolution. Some people have come up with a catchy name for this revolution, Marketing 2.0, but it is really a natural extension of what marketing guru Ernan Roman years ago dubbed the “voice-of-the-customer” movement. Roman, whose central teaching principle is “listen to your customer,” is the founder of Ernan Roman Direct Marketing (www.erdm.com) as well as the author of many influential books and articles, most recently Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing.
Whatever we choose to call the powerful two-way dynamic that has now emerged as the dominant expectation between sellers and consumers, we are ourselves part of it … as consumers. Our familiarity may come from our own experiences with sellers like Zappos and Amazon, who have an uncanny way of predicting what we will be interested in next, or from our typed responses to a chic local restaurant that posts Facebook photos of its mouth-watering menu selections. We simply expect more from businesses than consumers of yesteryear did: more choices, more specialization, and more interaction from our favored sellers. Someone trying to sell us shoes, books, Chicken Marsala, or anything else had better be prepared to engage with us.
Forget about technology for a moment. The phenomenon known as Marketing 2.0 is really all about becoming a favored, first-tier, top-of-mind provider for consumers within our target market rather than a member of the second-tier, “everyone else” group of sellers. The sellers in that second group are not yet in dialogue with us. They have not yet engaged us.
The same principle applies to the person we hope to turn into a repeat customer. Joining that person’s elite group of favored providers means creating opportunities for two-way conversations, listening carefully to what we hear, and adjusting course frequently. It means fusing marketing, public relations, and customer service into a single coordinated effort. This is something large companies often have a hard time with; fortunately, it is something that smaller companies are perfectly positioned to pull off.
In this chapter, we show you how to join the winning side of the ever-expanding marketing revolution and how to harness the force of that revolution to become one of the winners in your target market.
The Voice-of-the-Customer Movement
Having a voice-of-the-customer program simply means having a process in place for understanding who your customer is, what your customer’s most important challenges are, and what your customer expects from a relationship with you. Today, companies of all sizes have adopted voice-of-the-customer principles into their marketing and customer service initiatives, and many of those companies—such as Apple and Zappos—have emerged as market leaders.
BEST PRACTICE
Some consumer data may be captured via surveys or focus groups, but the most meaningful insights arise from extended in-depth interviews with individual consumers. For more information and resources on setting up voice-of-the-customer programs, visit Ernan Roman’s website: www.erdm.com.
An effective voice-of-the-customer program uses in-depth, voice-to-voice interviews to discover what kind of personalized communication is most relevant to customers, including what channel(s) they prefer and the volume and the frequency of communication that meets their needs.
Harnessing the Voice of the Customer
Businesses use voice-of-the-customer information for a variety of purposes, including …
• Learning why people buy from us (and why they don’t).
• Fine-tuning the value proposition.
• Ensuring the products and services developed are the ones that meet the customers’ needs and address their problems and concerns.
• Determining how to improve current products and services.
• Keeping in touch with the customer by providing the right communications at the right time via the right channels.
• Creating new products and services, or adapting existing products and services, to fit the customer’s requirements.
One important component of voice-of-the-customer marketing programs extends well beyond the initial interview. Not only must you gather feedback from the customer, but you must also be willing to consider changing your organization’s practices, and perhaps even its structure, based on that feedback. This may not always be easy, but it is usually in the customer’s, and your company’s, best interest.
Let’s assume you sell hand-painted furnishings. Thanks to extended in-person interviews conducted with some of your best customers and prospects, you have recently received feedback from a number of customers that, while they love the look and construction of the furniture they purchase, the colors fade rather quickly and the wood stains easily when glasses are placed directly on the table. You also learn that your customers would prefer to have some kind of personal input about the designs of the furniture they buy from you. Based on this feedback, you will not only want to change the materials and processes that you use to paint your furniture, you will also want to find some way to incorporate your customers’ custom needs into the design process.
Tracking What Customers Are Saying Online
Interviews with customers are not the only way to uncover the voice of the customer. There are lots of free online tracking tools that can help you learn what is being said about your business, your products, and your services. Use any of the following to learn what prospects, customers, and others are saying about you:
• Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) enables you to track where your business name, your own name, or a product name appears online.
• Collecta (www.collecta.com) and Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) enable you to search for relevant terms related to your company, product, or service to see where they are being talked about online.
• Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) enables you to enter a search term, such as a product or company name, and see all conversations associated with that term.
Addressing Customer Comments
In our connected world, heeding the voice of the customer means responding quickly and effectively to suggestions, to compliments, and, yes, to the occasional complaint. Addressing a complaint is a marketing opportunity—make sure you make the most of it.
Let’s say you receive a complaint via e-mail. Send an e-mail in reply immediately, even if it’s only to report that you’re aware of the problem and are looking into it.
An essential best practice here would be to follow these steps to address customer comments that come your way either because of a message to your organization or because of something you overhear online:
1. As soon as you receive feedback from a customer from any source, acknowledge the issue and provide a date when you will respond after you have looked into the matter. If possible, use the same communication medium the customer used to reach out to you. (Of course, if the customer asks you to connect via a different medium, such as a personal phone number, you should respect that request.)
2. Provide the customer, by or before the date you promised, with your analysis of the situation based on your research and what you are doing to address the situation.
3. Make good on your promise. Once you have handled the situation, follow up with the customer and thank him for his feedback.
Make Customer Relationships a Strategic Advantage
Building your marketing initiatives, and indeed your entire organization, around the voice of the customer, requires that you look constantly for opportunities to interact with your customers. These interactions are not only short-term marketing opportunities, they can also help you generate good ideas about new marketing initiatives.
Best practices that will help you turn your relationships with customers into a strategic advantage include the following:
Have a customer council. This is very likely the best marketing consulting advice your company will ever receive … and it’s absolutely free (see Chapter 17)!
Conduct regular customer satisfaction and other surveys via telephone, mail, or e-mail. These surveys, which you can conduct through sites like www.surveymonkey.com, are great because they give you something to measure. That’s certainly important, but keep in mind that surveys are no replacement for a one-on-one conversation with your customer.
Hold as many informal, unscheduled discussions with customers as you can. This kind of unstructured interaction with customers is essential. If you have a storefront operation, you will want to chat with customers as they come into the store.
Express gratitude. With each purchase a customer makes, send a thank-you message along with the order that shows how much you appreciate the decision to make a purchase from your company.
These seemingly common sense best practices actually reflect an uncommon, or at least rarely implemented, piece of business wisdom: the better your relationships with your customers, the sounder your business’s strategic position will be.
Building and Rewarding Customer Loyalty
There is no shortage of ways to reward customers for their loyalty to your business, but some of them do a better job of heeding the voice of the customer than others. Before you try to establish any rewards program, ask your customers what they think of it.
Panera Bread, for example, offers a card that earns points toward free food and drinks. CVS has a card that provides coupons and discounts for purchases at CVS. Both of these popular programs were tested in various ways, and both resonated positively with existing customers. By providing these incentives to customers, both businesses are now encouraging their customers to spend more money and more time in their business to earn discounts.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
When talking to your customers, ask them if they would be interested in an awards program and, if they are, what that awards program should look like. Are your customers interested in discounts, points toward free products, cash back, or some other incentive that you haven’t even considered? What kind of value will motivate them to buy more of your products and services?
Identifying Your Ideal Customer
To market effectively, you must have some idea of who your current ideal customer is so you can target more customers that fit that profile. In-depth discussions with your own prospects and customers will go a long way toward giving you the insights you need to figure out not only who your best customer is, but why that customer buys from you in the first place.
Identifying your best customer means being clear about the external identifiers. Is this someone who purchases a certain amount from your business each year? Or someone who refers you to others? Is this a business of a certain size and revenue? Let’s look at an example. Let’s assume that you sell meals to go. Your ideal customer may be a dual-income family with limited time to cook healthy meals and who have the disposable income to purchase ready-made meals from your business. (In-depth discussions with multiple customers may help you get even more clarity on what kinds of families you should be targeting.)
Identifying your best customer means understanding the motivations that drive both initial and repeat purchases. Talk to a customer who fits the external criteria you’ve identified thus far; ask questions that spotlight buying motivators. What inspired this person’s first purchase from you? How was the decision to purchase finalized? What factors made it possible for this person to decide to do business with you a second time? An important note: the willingness to do business with your company more than once is almost certainly a trait of your best customer. Unless your business model explicitly precludes repeat purchases—and hardly any do—you should make sure this is the kind of customer you’re interviewing. Find out what kinds of experiences support the decision to do business with your company more than once.
Developing Your Brand
Developing a brand for your business sets you apart from the competition. For example, United Parcel Service (UPS) uses the slogan, “What can brown do for you?” You hear that phrase, you immediately think of UPS. In fact, the acronym UPS is part of their brand, as are the brown uniforms the drivers wear and the brown trucks they drive. Of course, you should get voice-of-the-customer feedback about your brand and the messages it conveys to present and future customers.
Given the increasing competition in a global marketplace, you need a brand to distinguish your business from your competitors. But brands are not established overnight. You need to work on building your brand—it takes time, consistency, and careful planning.
Defining Your Brand
Defining and building the right brand is an art, not a science, but it is an art you can perfect with the help of your customers. By identifying what is most important to your very best customers through voice-of-the-customer interviews, you can evaluate (or perhaps re-evaluate) a strategically vital question: whether your brand is bringing you closer to, or taking you further away from, those kinds of customers.
Follow these best practices in developing a brand for your business:
• Keeps things visually and textually simple. Think of McDonald’s golden arches, Coca-Cola’s “dynamic ribbon” logo, and Capital One’s “What’s in your wallet?”
• Use your value proposition and mission statement to help in developing your brand.
• Test, test, test your ideas for branding in extended voice-of-the-customer interviews.
• Highlight the features and benefits of your products and services that voice-of-the-customer feedback identifies as the most important.
Using Your Brand
Once you have established a brand for your business, use it! Include it on your letterhead, in all of your marketing pieces, in presentations, in surveys you send, in press releases, on packaging for your product, on your website—everywhere. You want customers to see the brand and start to associate your business with the brand. Your goal is to ensure consistency in the use of your brand. If you have resellers, provide them with parameters for using the brand.
Inbound Outbound Marketing
For your business to reach its full potential, you will probably need to do both inbound marketing and outbound marketing
DEFINITION
Inbound marketing is when potential customers find you rather than you going out to find them. An example of inbound marketing is when people search on Google and find relevant information on your website through a natural search rather than a paid ad. Outbound marketing is the process of actively pushing out information about your products and services to potential customers. An example of outbound marketing is an e-mail blast to a list of potential customers.
In the not-too-distant past, businesses marketed mainly by sending messages through outbound channels—mailing catalogs to customers, sending e-mails about products and services, setting up booths at trade shows, and taking out advertisements in newspapers and magazines. While this type of marketing is still important, inbound marketing is now playing an increasingly essential role for marketers.
Effective inbound marketing channels include social media outlets such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging. By participating in these social media outlets, you effectively accumulate a fan base, or a followership, that essentially becomes a captive audience that is interested in your discussions and therefore in interacting with you and your business. The following sections take a look at some of the media that, as of this writing, are helping small businesses support effective inbound marketing initiatives and create quality, long-term engagement with customers.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process and strategy of setting up your business website so that it ranks higher than other similar websites on natural searches on search engines.
An SEO methodology comprises:
• Defining keywords that are relevant to the products and services your business provides
• Incorporating those keywords within text appearing throughout the website
• Increasing back links to help your website rank higher in the search engine’s results
DEFINITION
Natural searches occur when a person searches a specific term (such as “creating a business plan”) on a search engine and the results that appear are due to the relevancy to the term being searched rather than a paid ad. Back links are hyperlinks that exist on websites other than your own that link back to your site or product pages.
We know one consultant who implemented a successful SEO methodology when she established her website. Thanks to the SEO methodology, the site became very popular quite quickly. After 18 months, the site was getting more than 3,500 hits monthly from organic search alone, which currently accounts for 50 percent of traffic to the site.
Pay-Per-Click Keywords
In addition to seeing organic search results when you search a term on Google, you can also see sponsored links.
DEFINITION
Sponsored links are advertising, also called pay-per-click keywords. Businesses pay search engines to advertise based on the keyword searched. The business has control over frequency, time of day, geographic location, and amount to be spent in a period of time for those ads.
With sponsored links, businesses pay for visitors to click through to their website based on a specific keyword or search term. The more popular the search term, the more costly it is for the business when an individual searching clicks through to the website.
As a best practice, choose your pay-per-click keywords carefully. We recommend you concentrate more on developing your SEO to rank higher in organic search rather than spending a lot on sponsored links.
Expanding Your Reach
Think of social media as long-term relationship building—not just with customers, but with anyone, anywhere in the world, who could possibly have an impact, either positive or negative, on your business. You should not expect immediate revenue to come from your social media efforts; rather, social media should be a part of your overall public relations plan.
Whether you like it or not, the quality of your marketing efforts is now all about the quality of discussions managed largely via social media channels.
Using Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedln
Facebook (www.facebook.com), Twitter (www.twitter.com), and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) are the three most popular social media channels for businesses of all sizes. Regardless of whether you are a sole proprietor or have hundreds of employees, social media tools such as these enable you to reach out and connect easily with individuals across the street or around the globe. Through social media, prospects, customers, vendors, members of the media, and others can develop a personal relationship with your company.
Let’s look at an example. In 2008, no one outside of a core group of companies had ever heard of Arment Dietrich (www.armentdietrich.com), a digital communication firm in Chicago. Today their CEO, Gini Dietrich, is listed among the top 10 communication experts—all because of Twitter. Spin Sucks, the company’s blog, was launched in 2006 with no real purpose other than understanding blogging so they could recommend it as a tool to their clients. But in 2008, needing to try something new to drive business, they began to use Spin Sucks as a marketing tool, with Dietrich as the main author.
Dietrich began using Twitter to extend the blog’s reach. She followed other PR and marketing professionals. She engaged in conversation with marketing and advertising professionals. She began to build an 80/20 content strategy that allowed her to showcase her thinking by tweeting what others had written 80 percent of the time and to drive traffic back to Spin Sucks 20 percent of the time. Dietrich used Twitter to help build traffic, awareness, and credibility. Spin Sucks now rivals (or exceeds) the traffic of its largest competitors and is in the top five engaged communities in the PR and marketing industries. By October of 2010, Spin Sucks had more than 22,000 visitors per month, with its primary traffic source coming from Twitter.
Other Social Media Resources
There are a variety of other social networking resources available. Don’t try to get involved in everything that exists out there—you simply don’t have the time and will not find value in it.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Two of the other popular social media resources include Ning (www.ning.com) and Squidoo (www.squidoo.com). Ning is an online platform that enables individuals to create their own social network. Think of it as a community page for people who share a common interest. Unlike Linkedln, which is based on profiles of individuals, Squidoo is based on an individual’s expertise in various subjects. Squidoo enables users to create lenses online around a particular subject of expertise. Lenses, by the way, are just another word, in Squidoo-speak, for a web page.
Social media channels provide a variety of benefits to help companies increase awareness around their brand and, eventually, lead to an increase in the number of customers buying their products and services. Your interaction in all of these arenas provides word-of-mouth marketing for your business and its products and services.
Setting Up Social Media Campaigns
Four best practices can support an effective social media campaign through websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. They are as follows:
Engage person to person. Avoid over-relying on corporate accounts. By engaging with people at the individual level and communicating responsibly as a representative of your company, you allow others to learn about you as an individual and about your organization. Remember, people purchase from other people. By showing your personal side, customers begin to develop trust in you, and that trust will lead to interest in your company and its products and services.
Promote yourself and your business as a thought leader. By publishing original articles and other timely, relevant content of interest to your readers, you become known as a thought leader in your industry. People will begin to come to you as the source for information on the latest technologies and industry best practices.
Share interesting information. By sharing information relative to what your company does, such as tips for managing projects from a project management consulting company or tips for hiring and retaining the best employees from a recruiting firm, you provide your customers with useful information that helps them do their job better. This information may or may not connect directly to your products or services. Through these efforts you’ll find that customers come to you because they have come to know you.
Interact with current and potential customers on a regular basis. Once a month won’t cut it. Interact with others daily via social media. This kind of interaction doesn’t have to involve a huge time investment. It could be as simple as a general conversation about a business book you are reading or a link to an interesting blog post. For example, a company that provides project management training may use social media to share information about increases in the number of individuals getting certified as project managers or the number and variety of organizations looking to hire project managers.
Direct Mail and Print Advertising
Direct mail and print advertising are used less frequently than in the past due to the high cost of such marketing and the prevalence of electronic marketing (such as direct e-mail, e-newsletters, pay-per-click campaigns, and SEO). It is still an important marketing tool, however, and one that many small businesses continue to use successfully.
BUSINESS BUSTER
Undifferentiated, untargeted marketing messages such as repetitive e-mail blasts or postcards may serve to disengage customers from your business. Today, we receive so much irrelevant e-mail and “junk mail” from a variety of advertisers that eventually we just ignore the messages.
The most important best practice to bear in mind here has to do with targeting. Any direct mail marketing you do must be targeted to those who want to hear your message—those individuals who opt in by asking to receive information from your business. The quality of the opt-in information you receive from people who join your list is directly proportional to the perceived value of the information, resources, and assistance you are offering them.
Advertising in newspapers, magazines, and industry journals can be an expensive and risky endeavor. However, with the right target audience and the right location in print media, the impact can be powerful—just choose your timing and location wisely.
Public Relations
In the past, the only way to get press for your business was to provide a press release to a reporter (and hope that the reporter found it interesting enough to print and share with others) or hire a public relations firm to help you get access to reporters and news agencies. This is no longer the case. Today, there are many resources on the web for posting and sharing your company news without having to rely solely on a news agency or a public relations firm.
To be sure you reach the widest audience and draw attention to your business, post only newsworthy information in your press release. This might include information about forming a new partnership, securing a well-known customer, releasing an innovative product or new service, hiring staff in key positions, expanding the business, or introducing a customer case study on your website. A customer case study introduced in a press release tells other potential customers that you have had success with another customer in a powerful, memorable, and credible way. It can be used to drive visitors to your website to learn more about your business.
Public relations, however, is more than just press releases. It includes social media networking (think Facebook and Twitter), sharing ideas and knowledge on LinkedIn groups, blogging, speaking engagements, company videos, and the like. As a business owner, you need to regularly engage with others in order to ensure that when they are ready to buy you are foremost in their mind.
Can You Do PR Yourself?
Yes, you most certainly can! There are a variety of online resources you can use to post your news and engage both traditional and user-driven media; some are available at no charge, and some charge a minimal fee. Some of our favorite resources for press releases include www.prweb.com, www.prlog.org, and www.free-press-release.com.
Using an Outside PR Firm
Choosing a PR firm can be a real challenge for small businesses. The cost of using a PR firm can be prohibitive and requires extensive monitoring. It’s important to keep in mind that you know your business better than the PR firm does; do not rely on them to know all about your business and who your customers are. And don’t expect them to be experts about your products and services. Instead, rely on the PR firm to help you develop creative ideas to promote your business and build your brand. The value you get from a PR firm is all based on how much you put into the relationship with the firm.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Once you have selected a PR firm, the work doesn’t end. You must track the results. How successful are they in winning your company more visibility? What do they do that makes your company stand out from your competitors? Schedule regular meetings with your point of contact at the PR firm to discuss progress on current projects. Ask for regular status reports on what has been done to promote your company. Be sure to update the PR firm regularly with any new products or services you release to your clients.
When selecting a PR firm to work with your company, keep in mind these important considerations:
• Choose a firm that understands and will work with you on your existing social media campaigns.
• Choose a firm that will help you get articles and white papers into publications for your industry.
• Ask for references from customers in industries similar to yours.
• Make sure you meet the people who you would work with on your campaigns.
Your Website Is Key
Quite frequently these days, you don’t hear directly from a potential customer. Rather, they perform a search on a search engine and, when they come across your website, they gather information there. If they don’t find what they need, they are gone. In most cases, they don’t call you looking for that information if they can’t find it on your website. In other words, you rarely get a second chance to capture that potential customer.
Given this, your website must meet the following criteria:
• Maintain and promote your brand image
• Attract and keep people on your site
• Help them find what they need quickly
• Be search-engine-friendly
Your website is likely your main lead generator for customers. If customers submit inquiries via a contact form, you must be very responsive. If your site is an e-commerce site, you must ensure that purchasing a product is integrated seamlessly into the site to enable the user to quickly make the purchase as well as to continue shopping if they so desire.
Making the Website Customer-Friendly
Ideally, your website should be designed in such a way that your prospective customer is so intrigued by the (constantly updated) content that he or she keeps returning to the site. Eventually, the visitor engages by making a comment, sending you an inquiry, or making a purchase.
Does every small business have to follow this model for creating a content-driven website? No. But more and more of them are doing so, and this is certainly the direction in which the Internet is taking not only our economy, but also the global economy!
Your website doesn’t have to be perfect right out of the gate, but it does need to be effective, user-friendly, appealing, and search-engine-friendly.
Good websites include additional content above and beyond information on your products and services. For instance, your consulting firm’s website may include case studies, templates, newsworthy articles, and white papers that potential customers can peruse on the site or download for their reference. This provides you credibility and helps develop your reputation as a thought leader.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Ensure that you update content on your website regularly. In addition, include a site map (a list of all the pages on your site) and update it each time you add new information; doing so makes it easier for search engines to index your site. Fresh content keeps your customers coming back and encourages search engines to “crawl” your site more frequently.
If you are running an e-commerce site, you might choose to add a review section for customers so they can post reviews and get other customer’s thoughts on the products. The feedback you get from these reviews gives you yet another opportunity to elicit voice-of-the-customer feedback and to demonstrate your company’s ability to address and resolve complaints quickly and professionally.
You may also consider having additional information, such as videos on how to use the product or customer testimonials. For example, Amazon.com very effectively uses customer reviews to promote products.
Tracking Your Website’s Progress
There are a variety of tools you can use to track use of your website. One of the most popular is Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), which is available at no cost. Google Analytics enables you to track …
• Visitors to your website and the source of the referral.
• The behavior of the visitor, including what pages they visited and which path they took to get there.
• The length of stay on your site and their geo-location (country, state, city).
• What computer platform (e.g., Microsoft), browser type (e.g., Internet Explorer), and browser versions (e.g., Internet Explorer Version 8.0) they are using. This enables you to ensure that your site looks best for the visitors to it. If you find there is an increase in visitors using Mozilla Firefox to view your site, and you have never tested your site on that browser, you’ll want to make sure it looks good to them.
BEST PRACTICE
Consider hiring a consultant who specializes in search engine optimization and search engine marketing. You want to be sure you are capturing the information necessary to track the progress of your website. Without this information, you really have no idea how effective your website is for your customers. Once analytical software is set up for your website, you should be able to manage it yourself or turn it over to an employee to manage. One potential resource to find consultants is SEO Consultants Directory (www.seoconsultants.com), which enables you to search for search engine optimization specialists.
By tracking who visits your website, you can determine what marketing campaigns are effective (for example, do people click through to your website when they receive an e-mail from your business?) and which pages on your site attract the most visitors. This enables you to continue to enhance your website based on the user’s desires.
New Options for Marketing
Today you hear quite a bit about content marketing. Search engines are interested in the quality of content on your website. When you put out high-quality, relevant content, you rank higher in the search engines, which drives more customers to your site. Content marketing includes providing your website visitors with information they can use—case studies, research, white papers—in return for their contact information.
By offering content that people want to view, you entice them to provide you with personal contact information in exchange for viewing that content. There is nothing wrong with asking the visitor to input their personal information—such as name, company name, e-mail address, mailing address—in order to access that content. This helps you build your lead database and gain a better understanding of who is interested in your business and what in particular they are interested in. For example, you may choose to provide visitors with an executive summary of a white paper; if they are interested in downloading the entire white paper, you ask for their contact information. Remember, the greater the perceived value of the information you are offering, the more detailed information about the consumer you can expect to receive.
A particularly important best practice to follow here is to ask only for information that is obviously relevant to the offer you are extending to the consumer. If people do not see the possibility of receiving real value, they will not share their personal information with your business!
Blogging Purposefully
Bogging is an example of content marketing. Research by Hubspot (www.hubspot.com) published in 2010 has shown that websites that have an active blog attached to them draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic than a site with no blog. Additionally, small businesses that blog generate 55 percent more traffic to their websites than those that do not. What does this tell you? You want to be blogging!
Blogs should be used to push out relevant information to your readers such as case studies, articles, your thoughts on current topics, and other topics of relevance to your business and industry. When you write about the current state of your industry, as a by-product you are at the forefront of innovation. This makes you a thought leader. When people want to learn more or are looking for new ideas, they will be drawn to your blog and your business, providing you a high level of credibility in the industry, and thereby bringing in more revenue over time.
Using Videos and Podcasts
Using videos and podcasts (audio clips) on your website or blog enables you to provide another outlet for distribution of content to your customers. Gina, one of the authors of the book, has effectively used podcasts on her blog (www.ginaabudi.com) as a tool to interview business leaders about their perceptions of current affairs in their particular industry. These audio clips have drawn visitors to her site interested in learning more.
One of the most popular video outlets is YouTube. YouTube enables users to share original videos with a large online community. Many businesses use YouTube to share videos about products, customer testimonials, presentations, and company events.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
To see how you might incorporate YouTube into your business, consider this example. Let’s say your business sells birdfeeders. You might post a video on ways to keep squirrels off the birdfeeders, or you might post a video of a squirrel creatively finding a way to get on to a birdfeeder to get at the bird seed. If your company sells lumber for building projects, you might have how-to videos for customers, such as how to build a bookcase or create unique picture frames from leftover pieces of wood. For example, Williams-Sonoma (www.williams-sonoma.com), a gourmet food and kitchen supply store, uses video clips on their site to demonstrate the use of some of their products.
Conferences and Public Events
Conferences and trade shows enable you to showcase your products and services to customers who are part of your target audience. For example, the Project Management Institute holds an annual North American Global Congress where individuals who are project managers, project team members, or executives in project management attend sessions to enhance their skills and learn more from others in the industry. Many vendors showcase their products and services at these events, thereby enabling them to reach out to people who are potential customers. There are many such events for nearly every industry.
When researching events in which you might participate, keep in mind these best practices:
• Look at the type of audience who attends and the expected number of attendees. Are they in your geographic area and part of your target demographic?
• Look at the longevity of the conference or tradeshow.
• Determine other vendors who are showcasing at the event.
• Determine if the cost of attending and showcasing your products and services is within your budget.
If you are unsure about the benefit of having a booth at an event, you may want to attend the event as a participant first to see the types of people who attend and the types of companies who have booths at the event.
The Least You Need to Know
• Have a process for capturing voice-of-the-customer insights (such as meeting regularly with a customer council) and a flexible plan that enables you to use the information you uncover.
• Identify your best customer’s traits and preferences; find out what experiences are likely to lead to a repeat purchase from that customer.
• Consider a variety of social media channels to get the word out about your business; create and support good conversations with customers and prospects.
• Develop a brand image for your business and use that brand consistently.
• A website is essential to your business’s success, even if you are not doing e-commerce.
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