Oh, the wonder of beautifully crafted taglines. Those few strategically selected words that sum up everything your business stands for and what you want your target audience to know about you. They’ve made companies fortunes by telling people what makes them stand out in the sea of sameness. Consider FedEx’s brilliant “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” Nine simple words that tell FedEx buyers precisely what they’re going to get, while simultaneously informing all of its employees what their mission is. What if FedEx’s slogan was “We ship things!”? Would Nike be as successful if it allowed an executive committee to red-pencil “Just do it” into “When you need great shoes?” How would BMW’s vision change if “The Ultimate Driving Machine” became “Our cars are fun to drive!” My point is that these companies didn’t settle for weak platitudes or vague, generalized statements that could have applied to their competitors. Nope, they decided that they weren’t going to settle. Instead standing out and differentiating themselves was business-critical. Can the same be said for your company and its marketing? Do you have a themeline or slogan that makes you stand out? Is it unique and memorable? Or is it mediocre because somewhere down the line, people settled?
Imagine you owned a small piece of your buyers’ brains. And every time they thought about making a purchase where your product or service could be considered as an option, the brand or company name came to mind. For example if they were thirsty, they thought, “This Buds for you, “ or if they wanted a burger they thought, “Have it your way!” or if they when were tired and looking for a lodging for the night they remembered “We’ll leave the light on for ya!” That’s what the marketing slogans from Budweiser, Burger King and Motel 6 do, they help people remember a product and increase their propensity to buy. And that’s what a good marketing slogan can do for you. Unlike your company tagline or marketing message, your marketing slogan may change regularly or you may have more than one. For example American Express has: “Membership has its privileges.” And “ Don’t leave home without it.”
The taglines that work the hardest are not puns or rhymes, but ones that present many layers of meaning, where one layer can speak to the product while another speaks to value or even a brand a brand belief. It can manifest itself in any number of ways…online or offline. In ads and as a social media hashtag. On promotional products and product packaging. Most everywhere.
So what does a good tagline do? At its best, a good tagline conveys a singular value, loud and clear, on what a brand stands for. Remember, powerful words are powerful things. It also connects across all generations, geographies and markets, and becomes relevant for the consumer in his or her own personal way. And the right tagline doesn’t work for competitors because it’s only unique to your brand/company. Unfortunately, far, far, far too many taglines are generic and meaningless. In this time of technology disruption and increasing competition, clear positioning is valuable. Problems occur when the company and its messaging doesn’t have a focus, or the tagline could apply just as easily to other companies. In the marketplace, taglines are used to quickly communicate company differentiation. That said, taglines aren’t developed for customers alone. They’re also important for internal audiences as they can align an organization around a common cause and vision.
With that in mind, there are plenty of taglines out there that don’t work because they fail to connect. They’re easily overlooked, dismissed as “every day,” they lack originality or even mistaken for another brand. This usually happens when one of these mistakes happens:
Alternatively, good taglines have a number of hard-working qualities to them. They’re:
The process of developing a fresh, original and imaginative tagline is no easy task. From competitive research and brainstorming to paring down the list of options to more brainstorming, the process can take more time than you think …not to mention the back-and-forth given the stakeholders who are involved. And even then, the tagline may not be “all that.” That said, here’s how powerful a tagline can be – after 50+ years! Avis Rent-A-Car built its business with “We Try Harder” (which they finally put out to pasture just a few years ago). How the phrase came to be sounds like something out of Mad Men. The tagline was created in 1962 and actually came about in the response that Bill Bernbach, the co-founder of DDB, received from company management when asking why anyone ever rents a car from them. “We try harder” was the answer. Within a year, Avis turned a profit for the first time in over a decade and the rest is history.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a trade show and after walking up and down the aisles, it occurred to me just how much of the same-old, same-old I was seeing. Nothing really new (unless you consider irrelevant modifications like changing the color from blue to orange and different shaped bottles as new). There was nothing that I can say showed me that companies were spending any amount of time and energy in looking at the marketplace with an eye toward identifying the opportunities that trends in customer purchasing or behavior would present.
With that as that backdrop, on my flight home I started thinking about the ways that the marketing department within an organization can start the process of getting out in front of their competitors in order to seize on untapped business opportunities and identify trends before their competitors do. It’s really not as difficult as a lot of people think, but it does require that one to think more about the future by asking questions around the idea of “so what does that mean?” As an example of this, watch the video clip that stars Kevin Spacey for E*Trade.
In short, imagine if you could get a 12-18 month head-start on everyone else in your industry. Wouldn’t even 6 months be nice? Wouldn’t that make a huge difference in how your business runs? Maybe you could get the jump on your competitors every single time you make a move. Heck, this would even apply not only to products and services but also to channels, processes and even personnel hires.
Before we get into the ways that one might start spotting new trends, it’s important to understand a few things. So here goes:
OK, with that as the backdrop to trend watching, let’s walk through the process of how and where to find possible trends:
Now that you’ve identified some trends, where do you go from there? First, think about the consequences if a trend continues to spread. How will the trend change what people buy? What will happen if the trend grows in strength? Here’s where you have to ask yourself a lot of questions about “what does that mean?” In short, imagine the future (and your future) if the trend plays out. After you have in your head what the trend might look like, identify what need is currently being unmet that, if created, will help customers take advantage of the future scenario. And then lastly, define what the product or service opportunity is— that being the space between what is currently available and what people who would be effected by the future trends will want.
Here’s the choice you have: As a company, you can sit around and talk about strategies year after year. You can even hire consultancy firms to tell you what’s hot…last year. You can scratch your heads at all that new stuff that you’re seeing but end up sticking to known quantity. Or, you could wrap your mind around the potential that a new product or service has to offer. You create your own crystal ball!
Maybe the people who are good in spotting trends and anticipating what people want are able to imagine what others can’t. These trend spotters collect relevant data from what they read and hear and can read between the lines. Hopefully you’re one of those people.
Just remember, the sooner you spot an opportunity, the more time you have to leverage the tar out of it. And the faster you can move on an opportunity, the more likely it is that you will score a win. Keep your eyes open.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
Most every time I listen to a radio spot in my car, see a TV spot on cable or fan through the pages of a magazine (trade or consumer), I find myself wincing. Ad after ad tells the same sad story: money spent leading to no results. In fact, I’d venture to say that better than 85% – 90% of the ads lay the same leaden egg. Oh, the humanity!
If you’re questioning whether your advertising is doing what you paid it to do, odds are it’s not. And although there are master classes you might take in advertising creativity, marketing strategy and media planning, it’s very likely the problem falls within four main areas. Checking off each point, you can estimate your ad’s effectiveness even before you place it. I mean it.
Here then are the four fundamental concepts that can make a meaningful difference in how successful your next advertising effort is.
1) Have a something compelling to say. And by that, I mean not just compelling to you and your staff, but to a completely disinterested audience. If you’ve followed my posts for any length of time, you know that I frequently observe that people don’t like advertising, and completely ignore the boring or hard-to-figure-out kind. So whatever you have to say must go the distance to alter their indifference. Don’t just tell your audience you’re “a leader in the industry” or that you’ve been around for three generations. They’ve heard that so many times before from you and your competitors that it means nothing to them. Instead tell them something they don’t know, something that might even surprise them. You can tell when someone’s ad is truly compelling when you think, “Gee, I didn’t know that!” We sometimes call that a “sticky” message, one that has staying power after the reader has turned the page or flipped the channel.
2) Sell, don’t just tell. One of the most egregious mistakes advertisers make is simply laying out all the features of their product or service and expect the audience to figure out why that’s important to them. Often that’s done in the form of five or seven bullet points, such as:
or in Business-to-Business ads (snatched from the pages of a recent trade pub):
Yikes! There’s no emotion in that. There’s no selling. There’s no story or connection. Instead of praying that maybe one or two bullets might hit home with some member of the audience – or worse, trying to be all things to all people – why not focus on one point at a time and spell out why that point really matters. People don’t buy bullets. They don’t buy features. But they do buy benefits and ideas that add value to their lives. Always be thinking, from their point of view, “what’s in it for me?”
3) Be your own brand and not a clone of others. All too often, within any given industry, I see ads in which the logos and contact information are interchangeable, one company’s with another’s. None stand out, all look alike, and thus all the players are perceived as a commodity. Here’s a question for you: If your logo was blocked out of your ad or commercial, would the audience still know it’s yours? Take, for instance, Jack-In-The-Box. Their commercials are radically different from McDonalds’. BMW’s ads are unmistakably theirs and not Mercedes’. It’s a matter of message but also a matter of style, personality and consistency. The more striking and distinctive your ads are, the stronger competitive impact they’ll make, while your competitions’ ads could be just anybody’s. Dare to be Different!
4) Tell the same story across all your platforms. With all the buzz about Social Media, it strikes me as odd that most business Facebook pages and outbound Tweets have little in common with their owners’ main marketing messages. In part that’s because the marketing messages themselves aren’t that well-defined. But it’s also because the marketers don’t appreciate the importance of speaking with the same voice at any touchpoint. Good marketing is a collective enterprise and an erosive processes. For instance, if your main story is about how your company has been around for over 100 years, use your Facebook pages to talk about the early days of your firm, the companies you’ve served, etc. Make sure your phone hold-message tells the same story. Make sure you hold special events or promotions that support the theme. If you don’t keep hammering away at the same selling proposition at every touchpoint, then each effort conflicts with every other.
While hardly a full compendium of marketing knowledge, if you make the effort to assure your advertising and marketing is consistent with these four points, you’ll be far out in front of 85% of your competition. And that’s the goal, to create ads your customers will react to and that your competition will hate.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
“What do you mean they’re no longer a client? Are you kidding me? When did that happen? Why did they leave? I can’t believe it!” Have you heard (or said) these words in the past few months or so?
Well, as we all know, clients come and clients go but the sad part about it is that more times than not it’s because we’ve lost track of them or taken them for granted.
Which brings me to the question that begs to be asked: “Why do customers leave?” Curiously, most business owners and managers have the exact wrong idea about why customers leave. Most people believe that customers leave because:
(Drum roll please)…Wrong!
According to an in-depth study by the research firm CRMGuru, the reasons customers give for taking their “business down the road” are:
As you can see, when it comes to keeping your existing customers, customer service is three times more important than price–and five times more important than functionality. Which obviously means that if you want to keep the customers you’ve got, you should think about reversing priorities and pay more attention to customer service and quality – and, consequently, less attention to functionality and price. I fully realize that this runs contrary to 90% of what most people think is important, probably because price and functionality can play a large role in new customer acquisition.
Yet, many marketing plans are so focused on customer acquisition that they largely ignore customer retention. Even a tiny change in customer retention can have a large effect on long-term profitability and growth. This shouldn’t be underestimated. The easiest way to grow your customers is not to lose them. In fact, I recently read that 96 percent of dissatisfied customers don’t complain. They just take their business to one of your competitors, and the unfortunate thing is that you’ll never know why. And what’s worse, while they may not tell you what’s wrong, they will certainly tell plenty of others!
Want to get an edge over your competitors? With a little attention, your business can be one of those which can negate customer churn and improve profitability. Here’s a list of the five strategies (only limited by space) you can use to improve customer retention.
Keep them on your radar screen
So many companies do an excellent job of making the initial sale, then start chasing other prospects and in the process forget about their current customer…ignore may be the case as well…or they just get complacent. Gaining a new customer only begins when someone makes that initial purchase decision because there’s this thing called “buyer’s remorse.” To make sure that future referrals and repeat business materialize from this customer, it’s important to make sure that your customers’ fears are put to rest, and that you demonstrate by your actions that you really care and that they’ve made the right decision to deal with you. This can be accomplished by putting a plan in place to communicate with them, and sell to them again and again, constantly proving that your company was the right choice.
Build engaging relationships
With CRM programs all the rage, coupled with Big Data and predictive analytics providing marketers with in depth customer insights, the key to engagement is through personalization. In fact, as consumers ourselves, we expect and demand that companies personalize messaging and offers so they’re relevant to our wants and needs. You can do this by providing clients with offers that are personalized to them. Send them offers and information/content that they’ll like at the right time based on when they might need the product. Do some A/B testing in order to see what catches the attention of your customers. And, even recommend products to them. Offers, timing and product recommendations all show that you know and care about your clients.
Share useful content/information
Customers buy from people. They buy based on trust. Building trust with new customers is the key to getting them to buy in the first place. And maintaining and strengthening that trust is the key to keeping your customer over the long term, improving customer retention. In today’s marketplace, it’s not enough to have a wonderful product or service, you also have to help educate your customers on how they can use your product or service better. Content must abide by three criteria: it must be expected, valuable and relevant.
Give Back
Going back to your own personal experience for a minute, what is your impression of a company that, out-of-blue, gives you something you could use….for no cost. Not as an incentive or ulterior motive to purchase or do something else, but rather “just because.” It probably left you feeling good about the company, maybe even made you happy. Using the element of surprise to your advantage is a good thing because people naturally remember when something surprised them in a good way. You see, winning customers over starts with winning their thanks on individual terms. And while technology allows you to offer up this surprise to whatever scale you want, the fact is people remember acts of kindness when it feels personal.
Provide Exemplary Customer Service
When it comes to retaining customers, nothing’s more important than hands-on customer service. So let’s address a few different ways that customer service plays itself out. Critical to this is making sure that interactions that you have with the customer are quality interactions. Think about it: when you’re the customer, you expect the company that you’re dealing with to be courteous, willing and helpful, right? Also, make sure you’re dealing in the communications mode that your customer prefers. Although the majority of people prefer email, some like receiving calls or connections through social media channels. On that note, being proactive, or anticipating what the customer might need or addressing problems before they happen is always better than the alternative. This could be as simple as calling and asking if everything is OK before the client calls you to say something is not. Or letting them know that the product they recently bought is being redesigned and will look different or is going to be sold in bulk versus single-product purchases. And lastly, there’s nothing like hearing from the customers themselves. Some sort of a feedback system, such as a survey or speaking directly with your loyal customers, shows them that you really care about their recent experience with your company and will help identify any issues to address.
Regardless of what you’re selling, your long-term profitability is largely dependent upon your ability to keep current customers, compared to acquiring new ones. While you must always try things to attract new customers to your business, don’t take for granted those who are already in your camp and are supporting your business. Don’t forget, every now and then, to “dance with dem dat brung ya.”
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
I think we can pretty much all agree that most everyone, be it on the job or in our personal lives, is stretched thin on time. And this crunch for time has shortened our attention spans and concentration levels to the point that we’re lucky if we even remember some bits and pieces of phone conversations, face-to-face discussions, emails, etc., let alone those marketing messages that other companies put out in the marketplace in hopes we’ll act on them. Who has time for them?
With that scenario playing itself out in most everyone’s lives, marketers have a hard nut to crack when it comes to creating marketing messaging that sticks in order to counterbalance people’s shrinking attention span. Every marketer faces this reality daily. As most of us have heard, the average attention span does not exceed eight seconds (ten years ago it was 12 seconds). Comparatively, the attention span of the average goldfish is nine seconds. Capturing attention within eight seconds is a formidable challenge. As marketers, we have enough trouble with summarizing a message into a small packaging label, a web banner, a half page magazine ad, an outdoor board, or other media channels where the time or space allows for only something along the lines of a “quick bite.” Remember when the 60-second TV commercial was the norm? Then it went to 30 seconds and now we’re seeing more and more 15’s. And Vine built a platform around 6-second video posts and YouTube incorporated a “skip ad” option on their commercial videos after five seconds. Any more than that, and viewers lose interest and get really ticked off .
Oh, and let’s not forget about how the shrinking attention span has also led to people fidgeting between multiple screens (their TVs, computers, smartphones and tablets) at a rate of up to 21 times per hour, according to a recent study. Guess the average minutes a day that a person spends on their smartphone? 147 minutes. Now compare that to just under 120 minutes per day watching TV. Boy, we are distracted!
Growing evidence blames Internet, TV and computer games for creating shorter attention spans. Bombarded daily with mind-boggling amounts of things to read, watch and respond to, most of us have real difficulty paying attention on one subject for longer than a couple of seconds. How to fight against this rapidly decreasing attention span of an average consumer? How do you market to a group of people who don’t have enough time to listen to everything you have to say? It’s hard, and it’s getting harder to get and keep anyone’s attention.
Well, some marketers are trying to get people’s attention by going where more people seem to be…on social media, the “Land Of A Million Tweets, Comments And Posts” that repopulates itself every few days, or hours…or even minutes. And then there’s special offers, sales, email blasts and just about anything else that has a slight chance of possibly working. In doing so, I’d argue that for many companies, they’re not breaking through the clutter but instead adding to it.
It’s more important than ever to hold the attention of customers and prospects quickly and interactively in ways that weren’t possible or necessary in years past. So here are 5 messaging tips that will go a long way to having your audience stay tuned rather than drift away:
Now, at a time when attention spans are shorter and less focused than ever, you need to be more focused on making sure your marketing messaging doesn’t fall on deaf ears. There is too much noise because too many people want to be noticed without having to say anything worth hearing. The genuine voice sounds different and therefore it can be more easily discerned. The problem is, because of so much noise, people are hardly listening any more – expecting to hear nothing of worth anyway. Make every effort to be the voice that gets heard.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
As a marketing firm that’s always looking to engage in new business relationships with interesting companies, we continue to have more than our share of new business meetings. These companies run the gamut from small to “you’ve heard of this company before” and while they’re sometimes far removed from one another in terms of sales and recognition, a surprising number of times there’s not that much of a difference in their approach to their marketing initiatives which, as my business partner puts it, “borders on marketing malpractice.”
How am I defining “marketing malpractice?” Well, while it might take form in a few different ways, it’s primarily about a breach of duty that does harm when another course of action, as performed by a reasonable person, should have been taken. In short, it’s about negligence. While malpractice is commonly associated with the medical, financial and legal world, it could also be readily applied to the marketing world as well.
With that in mind, let’s look at 5 ways that companies and marketing leaders could become guilty of marketing malpractice:
Not having a full grasp of the marketplace
Too many companies assume that there is absolutely no need to substantiate their beliefs about the marketplace, about what their prospects want, about why their customers are buying, about what people think of their brand, about most anything having to do with those whom they want to purchase their products or services. Generally the thinking is that no one can know the marketplace as well as the company and the market will accept whatever you offer. Are you pretty darn confident on how your specific industry is changing and what is needed to get out in front of the competition? Understanding the marketplace as a whole will create the opportunities that bring with it the sales, visibility, prominence, trust, etc., that you might be looking for. And you get there by doing some research…the right way.
A lack of focus
The “We have to be here, there and everywhere” thinking is a sure way to squander the limited budget that you have. And who said that you need to be all over social media platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest? Heck, you’ve got your product literature online, and your Web site has a blog and videos. Not to mention all the offline activities ranging from tradeshow activities to advertising to PR, etc. Why did you believe you need to be in ALL of these media locations in the first place, and, just as importantly, who is making sure that all of these activities work together?
Inconsistency or mixing of marketing messaging
When different aspects of your marketing messages don’t reinforce each other, the inconsistencies alienate prospects and current customers. Inconsistent marketing distorts clear expectations, makes potential customers unsure of the characteristics of your products and creates unhappy customers who don’t get what they expect. These inconsistencies affect businesses by reducing both initial sales to consumers as well as repeat sales from dissatisfied customers. Throwing stuff up against the wall to see what sticks is a clear path to wasting resources and confusing people/organizations that you want as customers.
Being just like the other guy
How many times have you read or seen something from one company that looked just like what one of their competitors has or is currently saying? For an example, go online and look at professional services firms and tell me why one is different from the other. The fact is that there is no relevancy to what you’re saying if you just keep repeating what others have said already. Your company/products/services only has value if you’re different and if you can find a way that you can take who you are, what you make, and what you offer and create a relationship with prospects and current customers that is instantly captivating. Striving for differentiation rather than being a “me-too” allows for the organization to seize on new sales-producing and revenue-generating opportunities. Otherwise, you’re just a lazy copycat…two words that don’t leave the minds of the customers and competitors anytime soon.
Confusing strategy with tactics
Maybe, just maybe, the most common marketing malpractice occurrence is not having one over-arching marketing strategy – and ensuring its implementation through all your tactics. Executing marketing tactics without having a well-developed integrated strategy is a recipe for disaster. It’s easy to start with the “how” but if you haven’t identified the “what,” you may find yourself spending a lot of time executing tactics that don’t take you where you want to go and in so doing, you’ll be wasting time, resources and losing out on sales-producing opportunities. What is needed is one single integrated strategy that looks across all delivery platforms whether online or offline, print, broadcast, or mobile. Your customers don’t have an online self and offline self and neither should you. Think holistically about all your marketing initiatives.
At the end of the day, both the short-term and quite possibly the long-term prospects of the company could be affected as a result of marketing malpractice. Whether done because one doesn’t know better or because of expediency, it happens and the organization will have to live with the results. So, while you won’t be brought into court (unless you did something very egregious), one question that a marketer has to ask oneself and answer honestly, is: “Have I breached my duty as the marketing leader for the organization so much so that it has caused harm to both short and long term sales, visibility, prominence, market share, and trust for the company?” Hopefully, the answer today and in the future will remain a resounding NO.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
Last week, just after sitting down for lunch with a new business prospect, and right after exchanging business cards, the gentleman looked at my business partner’s card and then mine, and said, “Hey, both of your titles say ’Agent of Change’…tell me more about that.” And we did. We told him about having trademarked “Agent of Change,” how every one of our employees has the same title, how it’s the essence of our business approach, and most importantly by far, how it’s our mission and mindset as marketers. For us it was easy to define what those three words meant because we live and breathe it each day. You might say it’s part of our DNA. But for many marketers, those who want to believe that they are an Agent of Change within their organization, it might not be as easily defined. In fact, if I were to ask you right now, how might you define an Agent of Change, you’d probably want a minute to think of a good definition. (At the end of this post, I’ll give you our view on how our firm defines an “Agent of Change”.)
If you’re looking for a dictionary definition, an Agent of Change is someone who “alters human capability or organizational systems or activities to achieve a higher degree of output or self-actualization.” Beginning with the end in mind, the goal of an Agent of Change is obviously to make changes that stick and is the foundation for future change which achieves results that weren’t previously possible. While this dictionary definition is ok, I think it misses the essence of what it means to be an Agent of Change. It has as much to do with identity and character as it is any definition.
So with that in mind, here are some ways that it feels to be an Agent of Change
Lives in the world of “tomorrow.” Regardless of what is going on today, an Agent of Change has a vision of what could or should be and uses that as the driving force to take action. To a certain extent, an Agent of Change is dissatisfied with what they see around them, in favor of a much better vision of the future. A great place to be!
Fueled by passion, and inspires the same. Change is hard work and it takes a lot of energy. Don’t underestimate this. Without passion, it’s very difficult to gather up enough energy to take on dreaded status quo that seems to otherwise carry the day. “Status quo is Latin for the mess we’re in” said former President Ronald Reagan.
Understands people. You can’t create the change that is needed if you have no real understanding of what people need or seek. It’s not about what you can do or say but rather about what the customer wants to hear. It’s also not about what you think the customer wants. Instead, you need to know what the customer wants and that sometimes requires digging deep to get to the heart of what motivates people. Knowing has saved me from my mistaken “I think” a good number of times.
Has a strong ability to motivate themselves to move forward. There are going to be lots of days where people don’t understand and can’t recognize or grasp what’s being offered up as a solution. The Agent of Change needs to find it within themselves to get up every day and come to work and risk being misunderstood and unappreciated.
However, I think the definition also needs to be based on what an Agent of Change does, in addition to the personal traits required. You see, people are willing to change when the pain of the status quo exceeds the pain of change. Or, when the future looks like it does today or worse. A successful Agent of Change recognizes the opportunity for change, identifies the best approach, and becomes the catalyst that makes the change possible, whether by design, planning, or inspiration. While they can’t do it alone, they’re the force that gets the ball rolling.
Also, an Agent of Change isn’t so much a job title or job description as it is a mentality. It’s just what they do or how they do it. Like breathing. They don’t do it only when permitted or told to do so, but rather all the time. There are very few companies that has someone with the title of Agent of Change because they don’t expect things to change much over time. If you work in an organization where committees are king, you know what I’m talking about. Sloooowww and steady is the mantra while competitors seize on all sorts of opportunities and grab market share …and new customers. The only “change” this type of company knows is the coin kind in a pocket.
OK, I told you earlier that I would share with you how we see our firm as an Agent of Change and what we told our new business prospect at lunch…so here goes:
Being an Agent of Change means upsetting the normal course of things, turning up the heat, altering the future as it now stands. It’s serving as a catalyst for growth. Being an Agent of Change is about looking beyond the immediate marketing tasks to consider the entire business environment and how an audience engages with brands in the new marketplace. From that perspective, problems and solutions start to look very different. Being an Agent of Change is about embracing the new marketplace in order to seize untapped sales/revenue-producing business opportunities, delivering real value and long-term sustainable brand credit. Whether it’s a message delivered through an email inbox or on a national TV campaign, or creating new touchpoints where customers can connect on their own terms, everything we do is designed to communicate a total value proposition and spark a noticeable Change in the relationship between the customer and your products. We do this with a shared sense of urgency in increasing sales, growing traffic count, expanding the customer base, increasing stakeholders, strengthening brand identity and enriching bottom-line revenue.
You can be that Agent of Change within your organization or find yourself an Agent of Change to help because the world is changing…with or without your permission.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
Come on now, doesn’t it feel good when you receive an email or letter from a client saying how much they enjoy buying your products or working with your company? Or when your boss tells you a customer just shared a positive experience of your company’s service, thanks to you? It comes across as some version of Sally Field’s famous Oscar speech… “You like me. You really like me!”
Which brings me to the most powerful persuader in the marketplace, apart from a customer’s own experience, and that’s the opinion of someone they know. In fact, in today’s world, the majority of prospective customers, both B2B and B2C, spend time researching online or through social media before they buy. They depend more than ever on word-of-mouth references from people who have used those brands or products – even when those references are from people they don’t even know. (Think Angie’s List, Buzzillions, or Yelp.) According to a the marketing group, ODM, about 90% of consumers trust the word of people they know and 70% of consumers trust the word of people they don’t know! That’s why so much effort goes into viral marketing or “word of mouth.” That’s why social media has suddenly emerged from nowhere in the past couple of years to what it is today.
And that’s also why genuine testimonials are so effective. A testimonial is third-party endorsement at its best. There is much more credibility in the words of other unbiased people than in your own words of self-promotion. Heck, you’ve probably asked for and have probably written a recommendation (testimonial) for someone on LinkedIn, right?
So how are you using testimonials, or are you using testimonials at all, to keep current customers as well as acquire new ones? While I wrote an associated blog post about this a while ago having to do with how to acquire and utilize testimonials, I’m finding that a large number of organizations have decided that presenting testimonials from clients isn’t something they’re interested in or want their current or prospective customers to see. On that last point, help me understand why you wouldn’t want to strengthen the bond between you and current customers by reminding them why they chose you and not “the other guy,”as well as having prospective customers see you as viable recommended option for their needs. Testimonials help overcome buyer skepticism. Which leads to trust. Which leads to sales. Just look at what Mark Zuckerberg says: “A trusted referral is the holy grail of marketing.”
With that in mind, there are times when testimonials are incredibly powerful, and times when they might actually hurt you. For example, testimonials are powerful when:
They’re specific
Specific testimonials say things like: “When I needed to find a printer at 11 pm, your concierge service found one not too far away from the hotel. It saved my presentation the next morning.” Or, “Bob in your tech support team answered my questions in plain English and pinpointed my problem in just a couple of minutes.” Specific testimonials work for two reasons: First, they sound more credible. Second, they speak to a specific benefit or address a situation or question that may help persuade prospective customers.
They overcome objections.
Some companies shy away from these type of testimonials, yet they are arguably the most powerful tool you have. Testimonials from former skeptics stand out because they come across as credible. And by addressing and voicing what many perspective customers may be feeling, these testimonials are powerful persuaders. These type of testimonials sound like: “For years, I’ve heard of products that seemed to be similar to yours that just didn’t live up to their billing. Somewhat reluctantly, I used your free trial and saw how quickly and easily I was able to forecast future sales by industry type.” Or, “I thought it would be a confusing and tough to learn your new online ordering system, but it was quite the opposite. It’s a smart system that knew my tendencies and as a result, the ordering was done faster now than it was before.” Use testimonials that bring up objections, where customers admit being skeptical. These are the most powerful testimonials out there.
They substantiate your claims.
If you say your super-duper vacuum cleaner can pick up things as large as marbles, and you get people saying that it does, than these type of testimonials are as good as gold. Like you and I, people want to hear that your marketing claims aren’t based in hype. Nothing kills a so-so product quicker than good marketing….and the ability for people to tell anyone on social media.
A good testimonial is comparative. Did your customers try another product that didn’t work before they found yours? You want your visitors to know what your product can do that other products can’t. Testimonials that set your product apart from your competition (even mentioning the name of the competitor) provides that comparison factor that people remember.
But as powerful as testimonials can be, there’s also the time when they’ll not work well…so beware.
They’ll not work well when:
They’re fake.
Once a lie is discovered (and one way or another, it will be…call it business karma), you’re discredited and anything you say from then on just falls on deaf ears.
They’re obviously edited.
People usually provide feedback in a certain way, sometimes wordy or even slightly inarticulate. The more edited, the more businessy, and more “perfect” the testimonial, the more likely the audience may distrust the speaker. Therefore when you find a customer that uses a fresh and genuine language, take full advantage. Also, please don’t exclude a comment or add information you want to hear. As readers, all of us can sense when words have selectively been added or deleted. Anything that sounds vague or cliché can smack of insincerity. Out with the bragging and in with the sincere personal thoughts.
They’re vague.
Vague testimonials that tell the reader almost nothing and lack detail are pretty much not worth posting. You know the one I’m speaking of: “I was really satisfied with your customer service,” or “Your food taste great,” or “Your golf course is the best I’ve played.” Like you, when I read these type of kudos, I’ve learned nothing about why the speaker chose this particular company versus someone else. It’s a good waste of ink.
They’re anonymous (e.g., “Satisfied Member”; P.M. – Scranton, PA).
I don’t know about you, but I just can’t identify closely with these testimonials. It’s not just a matter of trust – though certainly that is a factor – it’s a matter of emotional connection. And while we’re at it, don’t use a customer testimonial without permission.
As I noted earlier, most people would rather act on a referral than make a purchase based on a sales pitch alone because we want to know that the product actually works before we put down money to buy. Just remember, the only thing better than saying the right thing at the right time is when your customers do it for you—and better.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
Making this kind of offer won’t necessarily produce an immediately measurable return. But its impact will ultimately return value many times over.
If you’re tracking financial return on investment (ROI) as the sole benchmark to determine if your marketing programs are working, then you need to know that there are other ways in this new world to go about doing so because otherwise you’re missing a big part of the picture.
You see, as much as we like to talk about ROI being a critical metric for marketing success, there are not many organizations that really calculate this metric — I mean really calculate it. The reason being that linking ROI to business efforts is just plain difficult, especially as a cumulative total, due to the blurring of cross-channel integration, competitive activity and economic and marketplace factors. The truth is, most CMOs have a general sense for what’s working and what’s not with respect to overall marketing spend and therefore overall ROI is calculated with experience and intuition (not on a spreadsheet).
The thing is, marketing isn’t black and white, and there are a number of marketing objectives don’t link directly to revenue / return. What if the objective is branding or awareness? You might expect an indirect impact on sales. You would also measure the success of the campaign very differently; maybe you just want to see if more people visited the website, or visited the store.
Enter Return on Objectives. Analyzing ROO means that you accept and understand that not all goals are measurable with hard data. Sometimes, marketing efforts simply help a business move in the right direction to meet its long-term objectives. For example, it could take the form of a business that develops a social media plan and creates a library of content on its website blog page, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and so on over the course of a year, all of which will undoubtedly move the company closer to its long-term brand building objectives.
There has been and always will be two schools of thought on the value of hard vs. soft metrics. Solely relying on traditional ROI isn’t enough and there will always be marketers who don’t like the fact that soft metrics play an important role in marketing today, but without considering them, a big piece of the story is missing. For example, the value of word-of-mouth marketing and an emotional connection to brands can’t necessarily be quantified. But that doesn’t make it any less important. A CEO, CMO, or CFO who ignores the less tangible importance of engagement and consumer perceptions of brands will limit the potential growth of those brands. In today’s world, that’s a big mistake. The best marketing leaders and teams can marry the two — hard and soft metrics — in order to make the best strategic decisions for the company.
Think of it like this: If short-term financial ROI is the single factor with which marketing activity is measured against, many large successful brands would never advertise. For most business types, only a smaller proportion of marketing communication generates a short-term purchase response, and this is particularly true for well-established mature brands.
Investment in marketing communication for some brands should therefore be seen for often what it really is: reinforcing/strengthening favorable brand perceptions and insuring the brand’s strength and status for the future. It isn’t always a math calculation where the dollars spent have to exceed dollars coming in. So much of building brand value is tied to emotional involvement in a brand, and that’s even harder to quantify than social media conversations and sharing. However, I don’t think anyone would argue that emotional involvement doesn’t add to equity (at least I hope they wouldn’t). Otherwise, a brand like Nike would be just another athletic shoe company. Disregarding those emotions because they can’t be precisely quantified would be a tragic mistake.
As well, what current ROI metrics don’t account for are what I’ll call “lurkers,” the people that are watching and waiting to take action. If we as marketers bail too soon based on the short-term analysis of results, then we miss the boat. How many of us have at one time or another been a “lurker?” All of us, right?
That said, without a doubt most marketers want to prove that the dollars they have invested have achieved measurable success and cost effectiveness. For me, ROO can be defined as the “Total cost of campaign divided by the number of objectives met.” To do it right, the key to measuring ROO is that specific objectives need to be created from the outset of a project along with a specific end date. In other words, the marketer must plan for measurement at the same time that the campaign is being developed.
So, instead of evaluating success based on revenues, marketers should take a look at measuring returns based on whether their objectives, from brand awareness to customer relationship-building, are met. Completion of these objectives, rather than dollars earned, will determine the success of a given campaign. As a result, ROO results will come in all shapes and sizes, but will not necessarily be defined in immediate dollars and cents…just like the offer in the photo above probably achieved for Plaza Cleaners.
My point is that ROI numbers don’t tell the entire story and relying on hard metrics alone isn’t enough. The hard and soft data is available to you for you to use it. You can bet your competitors are…or will be doing so soon.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing and hopefully all of you sinners out there have repented. Given the response, I thought it might be good to talk about the flipside, the Seven Cardinal Virtues of Marketing. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “Vices and virtues: Can’t have one without the other!” Anyway, as individuals responsible for the marketing activities of the organization, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we do have a responsibility to “behave” in a way that allows for the marketing function to perform its responsibilities in a manner that helps the company survive and thrive.
Patience
In today’s world of “needed it yesterday,” too many marketers see patience as something that can’t be accepted by the company because it’s “just not how we roll.” Well, as a marketers we need to continue to be reminded that patience is a valuable skill and critically important to the growth of the company. For example, staying the course of what the brand’s strategy is when you know it is the right course, rather than over-reacting to others’ activities. As well, patience guides how long to stick with your marketing message. It may feel like it is old and stale to you but that’s because you’re exposed to it daily while prospects and customers aren’t nearly as familiar with it. That doesn’t mean you should keep repeating the same thing over and over again, especially if a better approach is required. Be patient with yourself and resist the temptation to compare your progress to that of others. Hey, it takes some time to set up a lead generation and follow-up machine that will crank out good results month-after-month, right?
Diligence
Sometimes the best course is to apply a little dose of patience and sometimes one needs to persist and push through the challenge at hand. Be diligent in doing something every day to move your marketing and sales programs forward. You can always do a bit more to optimize the website, create more content, tighten your message or figure out how to better add value to the selling process. Keep learning the new skills necessary to succeed in a changing marketing world. Since the web is such a powerful awareness and lead generation tool, anything you can learn about how it works is helpful. With social media becoming an increasingly more visible component in your marketing efforts, be determined to write that blog post, send some tweets, utilize LinkedIn, etc., even when you don’t feel like it. You never know when your efforts will pay off. In short, it’s keeping the brand’s finger on the pulse of the market, and working to respond properly to it.
Fortitude
News Flash! The marketplace is as fluid as water so the watchwords for the day are “Stay Alert and Stay Brave.” “The Fast and the Furious” isn’t just a name of a movie series, it’s also how the Net moves. It can also describe competitive activities and certainly how your customers think and take action. Keep in close touch with those factors that will either lead you to success or be the things that will keep you up at night. Do your best to stay up to date by doing the necessary customer and competitive research by seeing what is being written and said about you online from Epinions to Yelp and many more review sites. Remember, “not knowing” is just that and more than one company has been blindsided by bad sales results because they imagined they knew what was going on in the marketplace and what customers and prospects thought of them. Sure they did.
Honesty/Justice
Customers know when companies are not being upfront or honest with them by what they see, read or hear in the marketing or advertising. They know when you’re trying to hide behind the small legal type or legal mumbo-jumbo. And guess what? As people who really dislike honesty, they bail…and they let others know about it as well. Conversely, think like your customers: If you had a problem with an order and wanted it resolved, you’d want to be treated fairly—and so would they. Make sure that your marketing material and activities reflect a company who respects and values their customers…because we know that they’re not easy to come by.
Faith/Courage
Believe in yourself and what your company is marketing. Know that marketing does work, regardless of the naysayers throughout the organization from C-Suite to the folks in finance and sales. My business partner is quick to point out that marketing is a self- fulfilling prophecy: If you believe in it, you’ll commit to it, invest in it and give it time to work… and it will. Or, if you don’t really believe in it, you’ll hold back, and guess what? It won’t work, and you’ll be right as well. If we’re honest with ourselves, there are times when we’ve wondered if what we’re doing is really achieving the goals we’ve set forth. Realize that success usually comes only after setbacks. View failure as an unavoidable component of success.
Prudence
Planning and acting can be difficult for a lot of marketers who often fear looking indecisive or making a mistake when the firm’s future—or their job—is at stake. Making decisions that are politically expedient, that travel the path of least resistance or avoid confrontation are dangerous and often unproductive without thinking through the ramifications of the decision. And when that happen, like clockwork, a marketing problem raises its ugly head. To help with that, first listen to what others have to say because the right answer might possibly come from them….really. Second, judge with the information in hand. And then, once you judge the right thing to do, the next thing to do is act. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Chastity/Charity
It’s a virtue combination that in our everyday life we think is important….but is rarely acted upon in business. Yes, as marketers we’re responsible for communicating a meaningful and unique value proposition that the brand alone can own and then making sure that the audience embraces it both emotionally as well as rationally. But shouldn’t we also make sure that the brand contributes something meaningful to the market – or even better, the society? A brand should stand for something more than just the product or service that comes from a company. A reputation for being a good corporate citizen only comes through actions that don’t have an obvious ROI attached to it, such as sponsorship or participation in causes or activities that benefit the community because it’s a right thing to do. Think about how as a marketer this chastity/charity mindset could feed the soul of the organization.
As marketers, we realize that the marketplace brings with it many trappings and temptations that could lead us astray from doing the job that both we and the company expect. Recalibrating our thinking and actions to embrace the virtuous side of ourselves in a way that also benefits the organization will lead us to a better place. Let’s go and do good. Your company and customers deserve it.
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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.