Are you listening to what your customers want?

With this week's good news about the turn around in the economy there has been a shift for businesses to re-focus on how they can stand out from their competitors as consumers slowly and gradually return to thier previous free-spending habits.

Hand in hand with this is considering your customer and understanding exactly what it is that they want. Whilst I think this is an important part of dealing with customers as the economy strengthens, I also think that it has been a pivotal part of remaining in business during the economic down turn.

Rieva Lesonsky, from All Business notes that the answers your customers give you about why they keep coming back to your business may surprise you, or at least give you some ideas on how to maintain their loyalty and attract new customers as well.

Lesonsky argues that 'the main point here is that you need to determine if you are providing everything that your customers want.' Additionally, if your customers aren't happy with the way you are 'looking after them' then they can easily go elsewhere.

So providing customers with what they want and looking after them helps you to stand out from your competitiors, but how do we make this happens?

Once again this comes back to you and your staff. Lesonsky notes that successful entrepreneurs have good leadership skills, which reuslts in motivated employees and happy staff leads to satisfied customers.

So continue to be successful with the economy becoming more competitive again, 'Honour your customers, your workers and your principles.' Pay close attention to these and you will be bringing your customers what they want.

We are about to experience another change in Digital Marketing Trends

Gary Stein from ClickZ has written an article about advertising changing forever. He said that he had often wondered if we would have another one of those moments where advertising splits again...well that monement may be upon us.

From what he has discussed, he won't have to wonder anymore. The next major change in advertising has arrived with the magazine, 'Entertainment Weekly' featuring a small video player embedded in the pages. This digital ad can be best understood as an enhanced version of the circulars slotted into a Sunday newspaper. So this isn't completely mind blowing, however it is a significant step in the evolution of advertising.

As Stein points out in his article, the interactive marketing experience still relieas upon a person having the right device at the right time to do the right thing. However, this step forward in advertising evolution means that the emergence of these screens and chips forces publishers and advertisers to start thinking about how small bits of purpose-built interactive experiences can be delivered without someone manually driving them.

We can now begin creating interactive experiences all over the place!

You can use this idea to engage with your market, providing them with background and getting them excited about what you have to offer.

Any brand that has a long and deep purchase cycle can certainly benefit, along with any physical place, such as a venue or holiday destination.

This new device certainly holds the same benefits as online video and are two mediums that I think will continue to grow in the upcoming months.

Are you doing any market research in your business?

I just read an interesting article by Augustine Fou from ClickZ about conducting market research and the problems of traditional market research being based on approximations.

He suggests that great companies don't use traditional methods, but rather do continous market and customer research by listening to what their customers tell them. I'm sure we have all heard babout the importance of listening to our customers before, but I wonder how often we actually do. However, if this is what makes great company research, it is great news for big and small businesses alike because they all have access to this powerful resource!

So how do we go about listening to what our customers tell us? Are customer surveys enough? I don't think so...I think that many hold back in surveys, maybe because they don't want to offend or can't really be bothered and just want to get the survey over and done with. I'm sure there are many of other reasons why and despite the fact that I don't think that they are necessarily enough I do think they are essential and can provide some great insight.

What Fou also talks about is using the power of social networks and digital tools where hundreds upon hundres of users can provide feedback constantly - "It's just a matter of knowing where to look and correctly interpreting what you see." The advantage of using these metrics is that they reveal actual behaviour and preferences and not just made up answers.

Another major benefit is that you can run experiments and use real-time metrics to see immediately if you were on track or not.

So the next question is what metrics to use and how to sort through all the information online...The other is what business objectives they can shed light on. To narrow your options down you should therefore decide on your objectives first.

Some metrics he suggests you might like to start using:

• Lifehacker: reveals how many peple viewed a blog post and how many commented
• Twitter trending topics and Google Hot Trends: reveal what people are actually tweeting about or searching for any moment in time
• You can also use sites such as Amazon.com and the like to compare the number of reviews for one product compared with the number of another, as well as what consumers preceive as equivalent or related products by showing with related products people also looked at

I hope this helps you with your market research!

An interesting and clever way to use social media marketing!

Beth Harte, Community Manager at MarketingProfs had someone post a blog about her that essentially ‘bashed her,’ calling her clueless and lacking common sense (http://bit.ly/pIJUr ).
In a poised manner she didn’t respond to the blogger trying to defend herself, but rather shared it with her online community. This obviously shows that she had enough confidence in them, which can only be seen as an attribute to the work she had already put in with her community. I know for one that I don’t personally think I would have a strong enough relationship with our online community to quite get the response Beth got.

Her community defended her and even made edits to the post! She went on to say that ‘if you have taken the time to build up relationships, trust, authenticity, etc. your customer/community/ etc. will come to your defense.’

How confident are you in your relationship with your online community? Would they also defend you?

This highlights the usefulness and benefit of using SMM as a relationship tool and Beth Harte has demonstrated here that if you use it effectively it can build those strong relationships. This is an important aspect particularly for those who operate in the Business to Business sector.

The blogger consequently corrected partial areas of her post, which Beth says is ‘enough for me’ and further poised the question ‘would it be enough for you? This also raises another important point about what we expect from using these mediums and really what we can expect...you may like to think about this a little more when your communicating in any way online.

One comment to Beth’s post about her ‘bashing’ was about the environment being one that allows for the brand, company or individual to hear constructive criticism and this is something that all bloggers – and everyone sharing their thoughts online – need to be prepared for because this essentially is part and parcel of using these mediums. So whilst we can expect this type of behaviour from time to time at least this gives us a positive and helpful way to respond and deal with such situations. The other important point is to make sure that you start working on those relationships now so that these people will be there to support you when you need it the most!

An expert's opinion on video campaigns

Since we have mentioned using video campaigns a bit as of late, I thought it was important to look to an expert for their opinion on the matter.

First of all 'video is the fastest-growing medium in history, having gone from zero to mass market globally in three short years' (Shane Atchinson, ClickZ, August 17, 2009). This article by Atchinson also provided great insight from an expert in the field.

Michael Rucker, product marketing manager at YouTube/Google suggests 6 best practices when it comes to using video to ensure that your company does it well and handles it correctly.

1. Create ats that work as content - tell a story
2. It's all about dialogue - take into consideration all comments, ratings, the cycle of video responses, remixes, mashups and the like
3. Ideas come from everywhere - sourcing from your audience is a legitimate and effective tool, so stay open to it
4. Find the talent and use it - partner where appropriate and secure exposure for your video is available
5. Tools exist. Use them - explore ways to best palce and promote your video, for example featured videos gain far more traffic in a shorter time. Rucker also suggests buying supporting media can help your content reach and grow its audience.
6. Metrics matter - YouTube offers sophisticated ways to measure video enagaement. This allows you to easily track the ups amd downs of viewings at each moment in your video - now that is pretty impressive and can give you a great indication of what people really are looking for! There are also a number of other metrics that can be very useful.

Whilst we have been looking at putting videos on YouTube for sometime, looking into these 6 points a little further has certainly given us the drive to embrace the power of YouTube for video and well as the power of using video campaigns.

Are you measuring your social media the same as other marketing activity?

The usefulness of social media for business has come into question time after time and we ourselves have had a number of customers ask us the same thing. Whilst we have looked at the pros and cons, the features and benefits of mediums for different types of activities and different businesses, we haven't looked at measuring them the same as other marketing activites.

We posted a blog post a little while ago on measuring social media, but what we didn't look at in a lot of detail was whether or not it can or actually is being measured the same as your other marketing activity.

Jamie Beckland, Emerging Media Specialist has made a great point, stating that 'we've found that many people still don't have the same metrics across different channels - which makes apples to apples comparisons impossible. If your direct mail and digital efforts aren't judged on the same criteria, then how do you know which is performing better.' This point really puts it all into perspective that without measuring them the same, it really is hard to determine which is working better. You should also consider the purpose for each marketing activity to work out what is the most appropriate measure to make a comparison on.

Jamie's company is putting together a webinar on evaluating your cross-channel marketing mix so this may be something that you would like to keep an eye on https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/510171673

Some thoughts on qualifying business leads

Bob Leonard, managing director of acSellerant has written an interesting and thought provoking article about Business Lead Qualification.

The major out take from this article is well summarized by, “everything you do to generate leads and close deals is hard work. Don’t waste it. Get to ‘No’.” I think this is an interesting yet powerful concept and whilst it has been around for some time, it is certainly refreshing to hear especially amongst all the doom and gloom over the past few months. In any business, we need both time and money and I agree with Bob that it is a waste of your time

This certainly makes sense. There really is not point making highly unqualified and highly unlikely leads a priority. So Bob’s point about getting to the ‘No’ makes a lot of sense by finding out early if they are likely to become a buyer or not and whether they are likely to become a buyer soon or perhaps in the future.

Another really interesting element of his article is his distinction between different mind sets or mental attitudes - “There’s a substantial difference in your mental attitude when you’re going for a ‘Yes’ versus when you’re going for a ‘No’.”

When you go for a ‘Yes’:
You’re trying to get an appointment.
You’re trying to get approval for your proposal.
You’re trying to close the deal or close for the next step.
Your posture is one of a supplicant.

When you go for a ‘No’:
You cross prospects off your list faster.
You never do proposals that have no chance of leading to a sale.
You’re looking for reasons not to waste time with loser deals.
Your posture is one of confidence that what you sell is of value.

These points demonstrate that we have a clear decision to make about how we want to spend our time with leads. However I do question about how we can best set criteria to evaluate them without putting any off side.

Something that we have been focusing on a lot is the ‘pain’ of the client and Bob also makes a good point about this. ‘It’s so much better to deal only with qualified prospects; prospects who have pain and are actively seeking help.’ To me this means that you should make these your priority before you look at nurturing the other leads in your sales funnel.

You’ll save a lot of time and effort by not pursuing leads that will never close!

If you would like to read more on this, you can read his full article at http://bit.ly/6G5k8