Sez You!

The persuasive value of personal experiences can’t be overestimated, particularly since the advent of the internet.  Prior to that, people still complained, but it was usually done in fairly short-lived ways, like letters to the editor or a call to the local radio station.  Even word-of-mouth was pretty much limited to people you knew.

That was then, and this is now.  Not only can people post their experience in a wide variety of online locations today, but their submissions are readily searchable and can linger out there for years.  You can look up a product, service, or company, and within seconds be reading a twelve year old complaint from someone in Greenland. 

So what can you do about it?  You can’t stop people from searching online.   Short of perfecting your offering so that no one ever complains (not a bad goal, but hard to deliver against), your best defense is to significantly outweigh the occasional bad review with testimonials.  When people see a dozen testimonials for each bad review, you won’t have a problem. 

tes·ti·mo·ni·al/ˌtestəˈmōnēəl/

Noun:

A formal statement testifying to someone's character and qualifications. A public tribute to someone and to their achievements.

Few marketers take active steps to protect their online reputation.  Here are three steps to get started: 

1) Monitor what people are saying about you.  Search your company/product/service name online on a regular (preferably daily) basis.

2) Work at providing a good customer experience.  When people complain, take immediate steps to eliminate the cause of the complaint—then tell the complainer what you’ve done.

3) Make it easy for people to post testimonials. A bad experience provides its own incentive to “vent.”  Customers have to be encouraged to take the trouble to post testimonials.  Ask every customer if they’d write one.  Tell them how and where to do it!  Provide links to online review sites (particularly ones where complaints about you reside).  It is a good investment to reward people with a discount or gift card for posting comments (you can always suspend or discontinue the reward once your “inventory” of testimonials reaches the desired size).

One other thought:  Feature testimonials prominently on your website. Solicit them directly or copy them from online review sites.  Ideally, rotate them through a space on your homepage.  People are much more likely to believe good things about you when they’re said by someone who isn’t drawing a paycheck from your company!

Uncommon Content

It is very easy to become so consumed by how you’re going to communicate your marketing message that you pay insufficient attention to the message itself.  [Just for perspective, consider that professional speakers usually spend over an hour of writing for every minute of their speech.]  Here is a checklist that may help you fine-tune the content of your marketing message:

1) Know what action you are trying to provoke.  How do you want your audience to react?  Does your content request and enable this reaction? [ie, if you ask them to call you, have you provided a phone number?]

2) Envision your audience.  Is your message sufficiently customized to them?  Are you using the kind of structure, words, and images they will understand and empathize with?  Are they capable of doing what you are asking of them? 

Even more important, are you communicating what you want to say, or what they need to hear?  [Hint: it should be the latter.]

3) Have you kept your ego out of the message?  Does it contain unnecessary company history, product facts, company mission statements, or other content that make you feel good, but mean nothing to your audience. 

4) Is your message consistent with your brand?  Are you using consistent selling points, language and imagery across all your messaging?

5) Are you talking generalities or specifics?  People respond more favorably to specifics.  Saying Krazy Glue was strong wouldn’t have impressed them nearly as much as the commercial where a dab on a hard hat allows someone to dangle by their head from a girder. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXZv2KZKCCo]

6) Have you passed your content through “beta readers”?  You may think your content is the most cogent, understandable, brilliantly creative thing ever created.  But no matter how little you want to hear criticism, you should run your content past other people before you publish it—preferably people who are as similar to your target audience as possible!  Your content will almost invariably improve as a result—and they might just catch the kind of mistake that could have you calling your lawyer down the road.

What does a lost account cost?

Too many complaints, slow or non-payment, excessive service demands, and other factors can push any company to "fire" a customer. And this is usually a good thing. But you want to make it a conscious decision.

Because losing a client unintentionally has severe repercussions. Let's see what needs to be calculated to estimate the cost of a lost account:

Lost Lifetime Value: The profit on what the customer would have bought if they stayed with you. Don't forget to add future lost up-sell and cross-sell revenue, which probably represents a 30-40% increase over the customer's current revenue contribution.

Lost Acquisition Cost: This is what you spent to acquire the customer in the first place.   It is your marketing and sales "prospecting" expenses for a specific period divided by the number of customers added during that period.

Replacement Cost: Now take the acquisition cost and add it in again. Because you need to replace the lost customer.

Referrals: Next think about referrals you'll lose. A good sales force will obtain at least 2-3 referrals a year from each account. Add the cost of acquiring these (superior quality) prospects from another source. Then increase this number significantly, because each of these referrals, if they had become customers, would have produced second and third generation referrals.

Negative Advertising: Remember, a lost account isn't going to be saying good things about you. They're going to spread the news of any bad experiences they've had with your company. This will make it harder to convert prospects into customers, increasing your sales and marketing expense (particularly if the complaints "go viral" via social media).

I'm not quoting specific costs as they will differ significantly from one business to the next. But trust me, they are substantial. For that reason they need to be understood from the boardroom down to the sales force; and from accounting to the service department.

One of the better services you can do your company is to quantify these figures, and communicate them to every employee of your company.

The two most important (and underused) words in marketing are “So what?”

The idea is to ask “so what” until you can’t take your questioning another step.  For example:

Our tires have a special tread pattern.  (So what?)

So they channel water away from underneath the tire.  (So what?)

So the tire makes better contact with the road.  (So what?)

So the car will steer better when it’s raining.  (So what?)

So you’re less likely to have an accident.  (So what?)

So you’re less likely to be hurt, or killed, or have to repair your car.

Aha!  We’ve finally arrived at the real benefit of our special tread pattern.  The thing that we should be communicating to prospects.  Yet, how many times have you seen advertising that stopped short of that “Aha!” benefit and advertised one of the earlier, less effective benefits instead?

And “So what?” doesn’t just apply to product benefits.  Think about a mission statement that says:

“We will provide excellent customer service.”  (So what?)

So customers’ problems will be solved more quickly.  (So what?)

So they will be happier with us.  (So what?)

So they will buy more of our products.  (So what?)

So we will make more money.  (So what?)

So we can continue to be successful as a company.  (So what?)

So you can continue to receive a paycheck.

And there’s your “Aha!”  If you want your mission statement to resonate with employees, this is the point you should be making. 

“So what?” isn’t hard to apply, but it is amazing how seldom people make use of it.  Make sure you are one of them!

Your CMO can help you apply this technique to your marketing. 

(So what?) 

So your job will be more secure and you will get promoted!

Don't waste your time...

...reading this month's marketing thought if you can complete the following statement in ten words or less :

"What makes my product or service better than anyone else's is _______________________."

OK, I assume you weren't able to do it, or you'd have quit reading.

You're not alone-most companies haven't identified a unique competitive advantage. And even if they have, it often suffers from one of two additional problems:

1) The advantage they've identified isn't meaningful to their audience ("Who cares if your car can parallel park itself?"), or

2) They can't deliver on their supposed advantage ("No, your customer service isn't world-class. In fact, it's dismal...")

This isn't just an academic exercise. The ability to articulate, execute, and publicize a competitive advantage has a huge effect on your marketing spend. The more desirable and unique your offering is, the less you have to spend to generate awareness.

Don't get me wrong, you'll still have to advertise. But when everyone's advertising collateral is saying the same thing, the only way to stand out is to say it more often, to say it in bigger advertisements, to provide more giveaways, and so on. If you've got a believable, relevant, unique (or even relatively unique) feature or benefit, you don't need to outshout the competition. And that means lower marketing costs.

And remember, parity products sell on price. Products with a competitive advantage can command premium pricing. So whether you're interested in cutting (marketing) costs or pumping up revenue, creating a competitive advantage is key.

Strategy first. Warehouse second.

You know I’m a big proponent of (centralized) data warehousing and what it can do for a business. But the key is the “what it can do” part of that sentence. Too often, companies want to start with centralizing the data, when they should be starting with how they’re going to use it.

Consumers (rarely) react to a single contact. Their relationship to your company will normally depend on the sum of all their experiences with it. You need to understand that sum, and what goes into it. The way to do that is to:
1) identify and map out all the ways a customer can interact with your company throughout the customer lifecycle,
2) create a strategy to link and optimize these touch points, and
3) then create the infrastructure to implement your strategy

These interactions will involve tools like your website, email, snail mail, telephone, social media, and face-to-face. They will take place during proactive and reactive interactions with people in your sales, marketing, accounting, operations, distribution, legal, and other departments.

Prospects and customers are not all the same. Which of them are “influentials?” Which are “advocates?” Who is profitable? Who is costing you money? How do you want to interact with each of these groups during every potential contact with you?

Sound complicated? It is. But would you rather have your prospect and customer relationships developing randomly (as they do for most companies), or under your direction?

The more you understand, guide, and control the contacts that create a customer’s relationship with your company, the more successful you are going to be. That idea is simple, it’s the execution that’s hard. But the more you embrace that execution, the greater the competitive advantage you will generate.

Your CMO can help you map your interactions and better control their outcomes to create more profitable relationships with prospects and customers. Give me a call and we’ll talk about it!