Tag Archive for Marketing Strategy

26 May 2010
Marketing Strategy

Brand Butlers

A recent briefing from Trendwatching.com listed “Brand Butlers” as a trend to watch. This may be the time to consider ‘service as the new sales’ to provide more service and care to jaded, time-poor, pragmatic consumers. Brand Butlers can be defined as providing instant access to supporting services and tools to pragmatic, convenience-loving consumers. This is encouragement to focus on assisting consumers to make the most of their daily lives, versus the old model of selling them a lifestyle, if not identity.

Here’s why consumers are embracing these BRAND BUTLER-style services:

  • For consumers, time, convenience, control and independence are the new currencies: this need requires B2C brands to turn many of their interactions with their customers into broader services. In short: a shift from ‘broadcasting’ to assisting.
  • Relationships with brands are now more down to earth and less reverential. From individualism to eco-concerns to decreased spending power in developed economies: for consumers, the practical and pragmatic rule.
  • Yet, in uncertain times, there’s also a consumer longing for institutions that truly ‘care‘, which is more about showing empathy and providing customers with a status fix than being purely practical. This too requires brands to master more service-oriented personae.

BRAND BUTLER services equal interaction, meaning they can provide brands with valuable feedback, metrics and other learning opportunities about what interests, drives and triggers customers.

BRAND BUTLER service categories:

  1. Transparency & ‘In the know’
  2. Saving money
  3. Finding
  4. Connectivity
  5. Health, nutrition & exercise
  6. Skills & advice
  7. Eco
  8. Tools & amenities

Examples:

  • Since 2006, personal care brand Charmin has been offering New Yorkers access to clean and comfortable restrooms in Times Square. The brand opens the free facilities during the festive period each year.
  • To launch Stove Top Quick Cups, Kraft Foods offered warmth and hot food samples at cold Chicago bus stops. In November 2008, Kraft began heating ten bus shelters to give consumers relief from the cold.
  • 3M’s Airport Privacy Havens aim to create peaceful zones in major American airports, giving business travelers privacy during important phone calls, and hiding their computer screens from the eyes of passers-by.

BRAND BUTLERS is about turning marketing into a service, and thus it is one of the most important branding trends currently out there. A start would be to establish the themes your brand is about, and dream up an integrated ‘suite’ of BRAND BUTLER services. Use the eight categories above (Transparency and ‘In the know’, Saving money, Finding, Connectivity, Health, Nutrition & Exercise, Skills & Advice, Eco, and Tools & Amenities).

When plotting your BRAND BUTLER, your ideas may revolve around existing customers. However, there’s a huge win in services that are open to non-customers, too.

We hope you see these posts in the same light, we want to share knowledge, tips for saving money, ways to find the resources you need, ways to connect you with the people and services, new skills and tools.

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19 May 2010
List

Smarter Selling

The Aberdeen Group published a report of survey results titled: “Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling”. They found that within Best-in-Class companies, an average 52% of sales representatives are currently achieving quota, as compared to a 26% average among Laggard organizations.

Best-in-Class companies see a 9% year-over-year reduction in time sales reps spend searching for relevant company/contact information, as compared to a 5% increase in time among Laggard performers.

Best-in-Class companies boast an average 5% year-over-year reduction in the sales cycle time, as compared to a 7% increase in sales cycle time among Laggards.

These numbers tell the story of the economy and the what a difference implementing good sales lead management and generation can do.

How can we help you find great, relevant leads?

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17 May 2010
Business • List

Business to Business Sales Leads

Marketo provided the inspiration for these tips. They propose a process for growing business to business sales leads.

1. Nurture. Lead nurturing is the process of using many channels including the mail, phone, web, email, and other channels to build relationships with qualified prospects who are not ready for sales efforts. Many leads are still in research mode, so communication and offers should provide best practices, statistics, research, etc. to help the customer frame their research.

Lead nurturing:

  • Builds relationships with prospects
  • Creates understanding of needs
  • Facilitates lead scoring

2. Frame the research. Lead nurturing is not sending a newsletter to your entire database, or calling prospects every few weeks to see if they are ready to buy yet. B2B purchases are, by their nature, complex. Buyers need help to see possibilities and issues they wouldn’t think about on their own. If you can help frame the discussion, you will be seen as a trusted advisor and thought leader. This will help buyers believe that your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them. Lead nurturing is your opportunity to demonstrate the value you can provide and to position yourself as a resource.

3. Define what makes a lead “ready”. Work with your sales team to build criteria that determine the steps prospects should take before they are ready for a sales call. Criteria could include:

  • Demographic information – Geographic location, company size, etc.
  • “Push” actions – What have you done to interact with the lead, what have you told them?
  • “Pull” actions – What has the lead done to pull information to them? What pages have they visited? Have they downloaded special information?

4. Score the lead. The prospect is in control of the buying process. Monitor their efforts to pull information and interaction to know when they’re ready to move to the next stage. Interest level should be defined not just by their words but their actions. Actions speak louder than words. Track all the actions and update scores accordingly.

5. Provide detailed information to sales when leads are determined to be “ready”. Don’t just toss the lead over and leave it up to the sales rep to create a continuous experience for the customer.

  • Let sales know what marketing activities the prospect has responded to, and indicate which product the prospect is most likely to purchase based on responses to date.
  • Create tools such as templates, qualifying questions, and call scripts to guide sales reps during their initial contact with the lead. Be sure to refer to the marketing activities they have responded to.

6. Track follow up. Work with sales to create the scoring criteria to build goodwill with them. After that, regularly analyze the leads that were determined to be sales-ready to further refine your lead scoring criteria.

  • Adjust lead score thresholds based on business conditions.
  • Make sure sales follows up with leads and reassign leads that don’t get contacted.
  • When leads aren’t closed by sales as expected, recycle them back into marketing for further nurturing.

7. Track every marketing activity. Tracking every marketing activity is critical to understanding which marketing programs work. What programs directly contributed to sales? What programs generated the highest quality leads? Which programs had the greatest influence on the sales pipeline? You need to know the impact of all the programs.

8. Understand prospects needs. As you build a relationship with your prospects, you should also be learning more about their needs. Every campaign the prospect responds to tells you about their interests. Every page they visit on your website tells you about their interests. Every link they click, and every piece of information they fill out on a form, tells you more about them. Be clever with your forms – don’t ask prospects to enter information you already know, and use the opportunity to find out something new!

9. Track all traffic and tie to new leads. Simple code on your Web pages help you track prospects, whether anonymous or known. This helps tell you which companies are interested in your products. As anonymous prospects complete forms on your website or landing pages, any previous web visits can be automatically attributed to the new lead. This is important to determine the sales readiness of new leads, since you know the entire history of the relationship with that prospect – including which campaign helped them find you in the first place.

10. Data quality standards, including de-duplication. Demographic analysis has long been a part of the sales process, and the Web makes it easier to collect this information. Certain information such as company size can help you determine the lead score. With many demand generation and lead nurturing activities running concurrently, automatic deduplication is imperative. Forms which auto-complete if the visitor is recognized not only help your prospects but can also facilitate the collection of additional information for profiling and scoring.

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03 May 2010
Business • Marketing Strategy

The Plan for Those Who Don’t Plan

BNET recently offered these ideas about business planning. The premise started with the observation that during the last twelve months, the business and economic landscape has continued to change and no one can predict what’s next. So why waste time with five-year plans?

One of the most prevalent rules for entrepreneurs is to create a long term plan! But in 2010, small businesses are learning that it’s more important to be agile and flexible. Plans are unhelpful when they restrict your thinking or don’t allow for deviation or reinvention.

That kind of thinking can give you the edge in the market. Liberating your company from traditional business planning may mean you can be both more enterprising and more robust for survival in difficult times. Here are four tips for navigating your way through the unpredictable business landscape without a big strategic plan:

  1. Think fluid. Don’t get stuck to a rigid strategic plan. Instead, see where the water flows and trust your instincts — not your spreadsheet — in pursuing new options. Make sure your business is agile enough to react to market trends or new innovations in technology. If you spot a new opportunity, you don’t have to check it’s on the plan first — just go for it.
  2. Prototype. Test your ideas in the real world. Better to launch beta versions of your website, so you can evaluate and tweak as you go, rather than trying to perfect the model before you launch. Otherwise you might never get the site off the ground.
  3. Reinvent. Learn to love change and be prepared to rethink what you do and how you do it. Maybe your business feels a bit stale, a bit stuck. You might need to shake up your organization so your clients start thinking differently about you. Re-energize your organization by taking your team on an ‘away day’ to brainstorm new ideas; think laterally about how you can re-engineer your offering to grow the business.
  4. Think goals, not plans. Set objectives for the year: deadlines to meet, products to launch. It’s important to know what you want to achieve — if not necessarily how you’ll get there. This allows you to think big without initially worrying about the details. A goal may be “I need to get a new client every month.” Perhaps you don’t have a strict linear plan for how you’ll actually achieve that — you just start off the instinctive way: word of mouth, social networking, client meet-and-greets, and so on.  You can’t chart this activity on a graph, but mentally focusing on the goals will help you reach your desired outcome.

A timeline or a spreadsheet can’t capture those opportunities that arise from serendipity and random meetings. If you remove the traditional business planning mindset, you’ll be liberated to grow your business in line with how the world really changes — not with what it says on a spreadsheet.

How can we help you test a new idea or be fluid in your marketing?

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30 Apr 2010
Advertising • Marketing Strategy • Tough Times Marketing

The “Down Sell”

BNET posted an article by Jeremy Quittner suggesting a new strategy. We are very familiar with “up-selling”, the practice of giving a product premium characteristics and a premium price too. There are success stories of luxury brands that began as basics all over the place. Think of what Starbucks has done to the 50-cent cup of coffee.

In this economy, down-selling might be a worthy strategy. Consumers may be spending again, but they’re doing so cautiously and with a newfound resolve to stick to a budget. If they’re giving up the bells and whistles in favor of more basic and affordable products, why not follow suit and take the “premium” out of your premium products?

It’s a much trickier proposition — that’s why. If you go too cheap, you risk, among other dangers, killing your profit margins and diluting your brand.

Ways to try this strategy:

Give Customers Something New
You could simplify an existing product by stripping it down to its essentials, or invent a completely new, cheaper product. Go to your customers for clues about what they’re looking for and what they’re willing to buy. Just make sure you don’t give them exactly what they say they want — your customers probably only know what’s already out there. It’s your job to figure out what’s new.

Pitch the Value
Marketing non-premium products in a down economy requires a different kind of sales pitch. Convey that they are still getting a valuable product, but it’s priced for this economy, and the value may not last. That way, customers get the message that you are looking out for their needs and you are still providing the high quality that they associate with your brand.

Know Your Brand
Down-selling customers won’t work for every company, particularly if your image depends on an air of high-end exclusivity to differentiate it from your competitors. Don’t cannibalize your core (business, products, brands or customer base) to stimulate sales in the short term without thinking long term and strategically.

When you are ready to introduce your new ideas, direct mail is a great way to test messages, approaches and innovations.

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29 Apr 2010
Business • Marketing Strategy

Cameron and Jobs: Passionate Leadership

To celebrate the release of Avatar on DVD we thought we would share some similarities offered by BNET of two innovative leaders by looking at traits which produce incredible innovation. In fact, following any of these styles could get you fired — unless you have the inspiration genius that can deliver results like Cameron and Jobs.

Bonding Through Innovation

Cameron. “Breaking new ground is Cameron’s raison d’être — nothing interests this man unless it’s hard to do,” wrote Rebecca Keegan on HBR.org. “But innovation has also become a way of bonding his teams… For Cameron, a sense of exploration isn’t just personally enriching, it’s a crucial tool for motivating and uniting his teams.”

Jobs. When Jobs created the original Macintosh team in the early 1980s, he moved the group to a remote building on the Apple campus, raised a pirate flag above the roof, and moved in a popcorn machine to give his people a sense of esprit de corps. Today, management experts prefer you unite your groups rather than pitting them against each other, but they also love the idea of inspiring your team with sense of purpose they can rally around.

More Perfection, Please

Cameron. On Avatar, Keegan reports, “Hours were spent on the smallest details, like getting alien sap to drip precisely right…. It’s hard to argue with Cameron’s nitpicky style, however, when audiences thrill to immerse themselves in the richly detailed worlds he creates.”

Jobs: Just weeks before launch of the original iPhone, Apple decided to replace the plastic touch screen with optical-quality glass. The change not only delayed the introduction, but caused its screen vendor, Balda, to reconfigure parts of its assembly line “causing a material impact on financials,” according to AppleInsider. For Jobs, however, the aesthetic of the product would have been ruined by an inferior screen.

Inspiration Through Fear

Again, not a great trait you’d teach to MBAs, but both Cameron and Jobs are stern taskmasters who demand the most of their employees, and occasionally cross the line to get it.

Cameron. “Many Cameron alumni will share a story from their first film with him, a day they were sure they were going to be fired, almost hoped for it. But Cameron rarely fires people. ‘Firing is too merciful,’ he says. Instead he tests their endurance for long hours, hard tasks, and harsh criticism. Survivors tend to surprise themselves by turning in the best work of their careers, and signing on for Cameron’s next project.”

Jobs. “”It was probably the best work I ever did,” former Apple designer Corsdell Ratzlaff told Inside Steve’s Brain author Leander Kahaney. “It was exhilratating. It was exciting. Sometimes it was difficult, but he had the ability to pull the best out of people.”

If these men, both brilliant in their own fields, managed by the book, they may not have been nearly as successful. What they share is passion for the work, and their management styles both demand and instill passion in the people that work around them.

How can we help you be passionate and innovative with your marketing?

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26 Apr 2010
Business • Marketing Strategy

Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy

This is classic business strategy information. We thought you would appreciate an opportunity to think about competition and profitability in different ways.

The Harvard Business Review is selling an article by Michael E. Porter that updates a 1979 article.

The article suggests that to sustain long-term profitability you must respond strategically to competition. Naturally you keep tabs on your established rivals. But as you scan the competitive arena, are you also looking beyond your direct competitors? Four additional competitive forces can hurt your prospective profits.

  • Savvy customers can force down prices by playing you and your rivals against one another.
  • Powerful suppliers may constrain your profits if they charge higher prices.
  • Aspiring entrants, armed with new capacity and hungry for market share, can ratchet up the investment required for you to stay in the game.
  • Substitute offerings can lure customers away.

Commercial aviation is one of the least profitable industries because all of the about forces are strong. Established rivals compete intensely on price. Customers are fickle, searching for the best deal regardless of carrier. Suppliers—plane and engine manufacturers, along with unionized labor forces—bargain away the lion’s share of airlines’ profits. New players enter the industry in a constant stream. And substitutes are readily available—such as train or car travel.

By analyzing these competitive forces, you can gain a picture of what’s influencing profitability in your industry. You identify game-changing trends early, so you can swiftly exploit them. And you spot ways to work around constraints on profitability—or even reshape the forces in your favor.

By understanding how these competitive forces influence profitability in your industry, you can develop a strategy for enhancing your company’s long-term profits. Porter suggests the following:

Position Your Company Where the Forces Are Weakest

Example: In the heavy-truck industry, many buyers operate large fleets and are highly motivated to drive down truck prices. Trucks are built to regulated standards and offer similar features, so price competition is stiff; unions exercise considerable supplier power; and buyers can use substitutes such as cargo delivery by rail. To create and sustain long-term profitability within this industry, heavy-truck maker Paccar chose to focus on one customer group where competitive forces are weakest: individual drivers who own their trucks and contract directly with suppliers. These operators have limited clout as buyers and are less price sensitive because of their emotional ties to and economic dependence on their own trucks. For these customers, Paccar has developed such features as luxurious sleeper cabins, plush leather seats, and sleek exterior styling. Buyers can select from thousands of options to put their personal signature on these built-to-order trucks. Customers pay Paccar a 10% premium, and the company has been profitable for 68 straight years and earned a long-run return on equity above 20%.

Exploit Changes in the Forces

Example: With the advent of the Internet and digital distribution of music, unauthorized downloading created an illegal but potent substitute for record companies’ services. The record companies tried to develop technical platforms for digital distribution themselves, but major labels didn’t want to sell their music through a platform owned by a rival. Into this vacuum stepped Apple, with its iTunes music store supporting its iPod music player. The birth of this powerful new gatekeeper has whittled down the number of major labels from six in 1997 to four today.

Reshape the Forces in Your Favor

Use tactics designed specifically to reduce the share of profits leaking to other players. For example:

  • To neutralize supplier power, standardize specifications for parts so your company can switch more easily among vendors.
  • To counter customer power, expand your services so it’s harder for customers to leave you for a rival.
  • To temper price wars initiated by established rivals, invest more heavily in products that differ significantly from competitors’ offerings.
  • To scare off new entrants, elevate the fixed costs of competing; for instance, by escalating your R&D expenditures.
  • To limit the threat of substitutes, offer better value through wider product accessibility.

Soft-drink producers did this by introducing vending machines and convenience store channels, which dramatically improved the availability of soft drinks relative to other beverages.

Does this information inspire you to craft a new marketing message? Can we help you reach some customers with Direct Mail?

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23 Apr 2010
Marketing Strategy • Saving Money

Low Cost Publicity Tips & Ideas

You want to stretch every marketing dollar right now! If you decide to promote your own company here are ten ideas and tactics to get you started. We saved the traditional ideas for last.

  1. Network! Join groups and talk to people.
  2. Start a newsletter. This implies you have a mailing list. If you don’t have one, start building it now. In your newsletter always make sure you include news your readers can use – there has to be at least one part that will benefit your readers directly.
  3. Ask for testimonials. If your clients were happy with your services, ask them for a testimonial to use in your marketing. If they don’t time to write one, write it yourself and ask them to approve it.
  4. Blog about it. Don’t have a blog? Get one! If you’re worried about the cost, you can sign up for a free account. When writing your posts, take considerable time in writing your headline. Make sure to include keywords that relate to your post. Also comment on blogs. Compile a list of blogs that complement your service/company or relate to your industry and comment on their posts. Consider guest blogging too. Offering to guest blog on someone else’s blog can be a great way to introduce yourself or service to others. Research a list of relevant blogs and contact the blogger. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is and how willing bloggers will be to talk to you.
  5. Profile your company in Wikipedia. Check out how other companies profile themselves and use the same format. Be sure to include links to your site so people can find you.
  6. Leverage Social Media. Social networking sites can be a great way to market your company and/or offering. Make a list of groups on each that are relevant to you, join them, network with other members, and promote yourself and your service.
  7. Add E-Mail Signature Lines. You are probably constantly e-mailing vendors, clients, partners, etc. Did you know you can also market your new services in them? Add a signature line at the end of your e-mail with a link to your site that promotes your new service or blog post. It’s easy to do.
  8. Start a contest. Everybody loves to win something and a great way to market your company is to start a contest. Make one of your offerings for free as the prize. Use this opportunity to add to your mailing list.
  9. Write an interesting article. Writing articles is a great way to establish credibility. The key is to make sure your article ends up benefiting the person reading it. Send us an email and we will share lists of topic ideas. Your headline should draw people in make it short, funny, thought provoking and/or engaging. Sometimes writing it last works best. Your byline should give readers a brief background of yourself and your company. Be sure to include contact information.
  10. Submit a Press Release. Write a noteworthy press release in third person and submit it yourself at free online sites. You can also send the press release to the local media around your area. To gain a better chance of getting it picked up, include a cover letter that showcases how the information in your release benefits your local community. It may prove worthwhile to pay for one PR service if you have truly newsworthy information.
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06 Apr 2010
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Inexpensive Marketing Maneuvers

Forbes Magazine featured a story about some marketing ideas. Our favorite was to make your customer the star.

Using a classic cooperative strategy, you could create their marketing for them. If you provide services or products to other businesses, can you help them with creative marketing featuring your products. Do you sell framing materials to frame shops, create postcards featuring finished frames.

To feed egos of your customers, feature a few them enjoying your products and services. Make them look really good, help them say smart, witty things or touch on their vanity with great lighting, hair and makeup.

To draw your customers into your creative process, what about a creative writing, illustration or visual contest? The contest could be tied to something new like a product launch and the reward for submitting an entry could be a sample of the new product. Contests are also great opportunities for publicity and free media coverage. Since you really want to stay in touch with your current and past customers, sending them a postcard or letter explaining the contest accomplishes many goals at once.

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05 Apr 2010
Marketing Strategy

The Future of Marketing?

Is it really the economy, or is the recovery sluggish because people are not being reached when they want to consider marketing messages?

In a post that appeared on a Harvard Business Review blog, Dick Patton suggested that the four P’s of the traditional marketing mix (product, price, placement and promotion) be replaced. His article suggests a new acrostic: ROIDs

  • Responsibility marketing, including social responsibility, green marketing, and sustainability
  • Organizational leadership, requiring marketing to touch as much of the value chain as possible
  • Insights about customers, based on new analytic techniques that replace yesterday’s market research
  • Digital marketing, requiring companies to master an amorphous bundle of fast-changing media

What about the four D’s?

  • Dependability, as in marketing that is accountable, conscientious and responsible
  • Direction, marketing should be an integral part of determining where the company goes
  • Discernment, understanding of customers and the environment
  • Digital, companies must harness the power of ever-changing media, but be careful not to give it more influence than it deserves

Direct marketing needs to stay an integral part of this future; even as the environment, the rules, the models and what is really working and yielding results and returns on investment keep changing. Many businesses in many sectors have put more and more resources toward marketing using new technology, but the profits and revenue have not been created.

We need to talk to people when they want to receive information, not when they are in the middle of trying to just get through 50 emails or when they are gathering information for what they are ready to buy right now.

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