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Articles filed in: Marketing
The Difference Between Average And Exceptional
The service at the restaurant is only as good as the investment the manager makes in staff training.
The quality of the website’s user experience is a reflection of how many hours the developer spends testing and tweaking.
The hours of research the journalist conducts before writing a single word shines through in the genius of the article.
We tend to focus the majority of our thinking on the moment of the performance, forgetting that it’s the work we do leading up to it that makes all the difference. The things we do when the customer isn’t looking is what creates moments of delight.
What differentiates the average from the exceptional is not performance, it’s preparation.
Image by Hernán Piñera.
Responsive Marketing
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
There are two approaches to selling memberships at the local gym. The first is to show the prospective member the facilities—highlighting the abundance of equipment and classes, and then to offer a ‘limited time only’ joining discount. The second is to spend time listening to the reasons why he wants to join in the first place and then to tailor the sales conversation to those needs.
Two Things Your Marketing Messages Must Do
1. Communicate to the customer that you have understood his unmet needs or unspoken desires.
2. Paint a picture of the customer as the hero of the story in the presence of your product (a lot of marketing messages have this backward).
Average marketing is filled with statements of fact. Great marketing is a response to the customer’s problems and desires. It’s the difference between, ‘this is better’ and ‘this is how we can help you to be better’.
Image by midwestnerd
Everything To Everyone
While I was consulting with a client last week we got talking about people who had built powerful personal brands and the reasons for their success. When we stopped at one in particular, her reaction was immediate.
“I don’t like him.” she said, as her nose wrinkled.
Of course, she has never met this person, but that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t formed a strong opinion about his values, ethics, and intentions.
It’s tempting to believe that success, influence or impact means winning over everyone. It doesn’t.
You can never know who everyone is and what everyone thinks, but you can know what your right people care about and want to align themselves with.
Don’t aim to be everything to everyone. Aim to be something to someone.
Image by Pabak Sarkar
The First Rule Of Increasing Brand Awareness
Sustainable growth is the goal of every business and conventional wisdom tells us that in order to grow we need to command more attention. Ironically, when we begin thinking about how to increase brand awareness we often shift our gaze internally.
We work on differentiating from our competitors. We articulate whatever we believe our edge to be. We get just a little louder, all the while forgetting that if we want people to notice us we need to get better at noticing them first.
The first rule of increasing brand awareness is to improve your customer awareness.
What three things could you do today that will help you do that?
Image by Ashley Ringrose.
The Simplest Way To Improve Your Sales Copy
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
I was at the local garden centre on Sunday. There amongst the shrubs, trellis fencing and climbing plants was a comfortable-looking, but otherwise, unremarkable garden chair with wooden arms. Unremarkable that is until you read the description on the flip side of the $300 price tag.
“Meet the Gin & Tonic Chair. The world’s most comfortable garden chair, perfect for relaxing outdoors with your favourite tipple after a long day.”
When we’re writing sales copy for our products and services we tend to describe first and empathise later.
Instead of leading with descriptions and listing the features of your product or service, imagine the customer using the product. Now retell that story. What is he doing? What does he want to do, but can’t? How is your product helping? How is he feeling as a result?
The best copywriters (and companies too) empathise first and create later.
Image by Ben Mizen.
Are Your Marketing Goals Aligned With Customer Objectives?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
As marketers, we often skip the important step of assessing our marketing goals against customer objectives. As a consequence, we fall in love with our message and forget to question what it is the customer needs to know or wants to hear. It’s not hard to check if this is true of your company—simply answer the following two questions.
1. What are the three most important things you want the customer to know about your company, product or service?
2. What are the three most important things the customer wants to know?
The customer, not the company is the hero of every standout brand story.
Image by Glenn Scott.
The Difference Between Saying You Care And Caring
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
I’m not sure when we became defensive about customer care became. I suspect it might have been when we began to put more distance between the customer and us. In the days when there was a cash register that rang with ‘real money’, when we sold eye-to-eye and transacted hand-to-hand, instead of digitally, we had no choice but to ‘see’ our customers. The transaction itself was as good as a handshake. Word and bond. No us and them, only us.
Now we build barriers. We expect the customer, not the company, to take responsibility. We create guarantees that protect us from having to fulfil them. We armour up against customers. We require proof of purchase that leaves no room for us to be exploited by the shady few and sadly, fewer opportunities to delight the honest majority.
So when we find a company that cares, no questions asked we should celebrate them. When I buy a Crumpler bag it comes with a lifetime warranty. If it fails, I can bring it back, and they will repair it. The only proof of purchase I need is the product that let me down. What a breath of fresh air.
Caring is simpler than you think. What story does your customer care tell about your company?
Image by Anna D.
A Reason To Come
“Hey! Are you after some lunch?” asked the young woman on the pavement waving flyers during the 1 pm rush. She gestured to a place on the side street as she tried to lure people down it with the promise of a discount.
Most diners who eat at a restaurant down a side street go there on purpose. They’ve heard about it from a friend or a guide book. Side streets are for the kind of place that doesn’t need flyers or cajoling to get people to visit. Side street businesses give people a good reason to be there.
Every business has a choice. We can build for the main street where we have the chance of being accidentally discovered, or we can build for the side street and give people a reason to come.
Are you hoping to be discovered or giving people a reason to come?
Image by Charles Van den Broek.
The Value Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
During Tulip Mania, the new merchant class who wanted their gardens to reflect their newfound success, is said to have traded acres of land for a single flower bulb. The scarcer the bulbs became, the more valuable they were perceived to be. As a commodity, the tulip’s inherent value was derived from the fact that there were more buyers than tulips.
It wasn’t a sustainable business model.
Today we live in an age of abundance, where it’s becoming more difficult to sustainably create value with a purely status driven, scarcity strategy. Luxury brands like Gucci, Prada and Ralph Lauren are experiencing tough times as they struggle to remain relevant and profitable.
As people’s values change, their value story changes too. What millennials value and invest in,
is different to what their parents were prepared to spend money on.
All business success depends on the business’s value creation story aligning with the customer’s value story. We not only succeed by being important and useful to our customers. We win by being worthy of their time, attention and financial outlay. Our brands become valuable not simply by creating value in the moment, but by valuing and adapting to the changing narrative of the people we serve.
It’s pointless shouting about how great your tulips are to a customer who wants to grow thyme.
Image by Hammerin Man
The 4 New Stages Of Customer Engagement
The commercial reality for any business is that sales keep the lights on. We’re still following rules that were proposed in the late 1800s by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in order to do that.
“The mission of an advertisement is to sell goods. To do this, it must attract attention, of course; but attracting attention is only an auxiliary detail. The announcement should contain matter which will interest and convince after the attention has been attracted.”
And so the marketing and sales funnel followed this four-step process for over a hundred years.
Attention —> Interest —> Desire —> Action
A lot has changed since 1800. Yes, we still need our customers to take action, but we now have the opportunity to help them do that in a much more sustainable way. The crucial difference comes in the middle of the funnel where trust and affinity are built.
Awareness —>Trust —> Affinity —> Action
The irony is that as marketers we still focus most of our energy at either end of the funnel, creating awareness and trying to close the sale. The kind of long-term customer relationships you want don’t happen because the text on the ‘buy now’ button says the right thing. They are fostered when the customer trusts your brand to be the kind she wants to be aligned with and come back to.
Image by Erik