Monthly Archives: July 2016

July 13, 2016 · 10:41 am

Hi. What Do You Need?

I bet each of us has someone in our life from whom we never hear unless and until they need something. You know the type. When you’re in touch with them everything is great and you’re BFF’s. The problem is that the only times you’re in touch come when they are having a problem. When you reach out just to say hi, it’s crickets.

Many of us conduct our customer activities in exactly that mindset. They never hear from us unless we need something (generally we need them to buy something). A recent  Salesforce survey of nearly 4,000 marketers highlighted the fact that many marketers are increasingly focused on customer satisfaction and customer engagement as their top measures for success, and the way to spur those measures is through an ongoing presence that is customer focused. In addition, high-performing marketers are creating journeys for customers, with 65% saying they’ve adopted a customer journey strategy and 88% saying it’s critical to their marketing success.

This is what the CEO of Salesforce had to say about the results:

The rise of the connected customer is forcing marketing to evolve from delivering outbound campaigns to managing personalized experiences that engage the customer from day one and guide them through a seamless journey with the brand. The results of our research show that high-performing marketers that change their mindsets, tactics and technology to embrace a customer journey strategy will reap the benefits.

In other words, we can’t just show up when we need something. Think about something as simple as the Amazon Dash button. If you’re not familiar, Amazon describes it a Wi-Fi connected device that reorders your favorite product with the press of a button. If you run out of Red Bull, push the button and Red Bull shows up. It’s always there, ready when you need it. Is that walking the customer through a journey? I think it is, in a very simplistic manner.

When the phone rings and it’s this particular guy, I know I’m going to be asked for something. How do customers feel when your email arrives? Any differently?

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July 12, 2016 · 10:02 am

Selling To The Sold

I read a piece this morning about how political campaigns are doing a bad job of using the data available to them. The main thrust of the article is this:

It doesn’t make the most sense to continue advertising to a voter after they’ve already made a decision about which candidate they’ll choose on Election Day. While inefficient government spending seems as inevitable as death and taxes, it is still shocking how much budget is wasted marketing to voters who have already demonstrated an affinity one way or another.

You might be sitting there smugly saying to yourself that it’s typical of how politics is out of touch with the real world. After all, many campaigns are marketing organizations that come together for a relatively brief period of time with a basic short-term goal: convince 50.1% of voters to buy your product by a date certain. Our businesses, on the other hand, are in it for the long term and need to garner on-going and repeat business so we’re forced to be better at marketing. But are we?

I’d suggest that we’re really not. Many of us spend a good chunk of our money trying to convince another brand’s partisans to switch to our brand while spending inefficiently against the “undecideds” that are more open to choosing us. That thinking is why a lot of money targets the young. In theory, they are less locked-in to any brand. But why stop there?

We need to spend less time selling what’s already been sold and focus on growing our consumer base. Yes, reinforcing and thanking your current user base is important but it should take far fewer resources than finding and convincing those who are both open to a brand message and ready to buy. You probably aren’t going to turn off your “base” and you’re never going to convince the other brand’s base no matter what you do. You with me?

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July 11, 2016 · 10:34 am

The Supermarket Doesn’t Take Shares

I almost called this post “Counting What Counts” but I thought it best to keep it even simpler to understand. I got into another discussion with someone not long ago about how they were measuring success. They have a fairly active social community – Facebook and Instagram primarily – and they were quite happy with how things have been going. The problem is that they’re focused on things other than those that create tangible value. That, to me, means cash because one of my other mantras is Cash Is King. You can generate all the shares and likes you want but the supermarket – or your investors/employees/vendors – doesn’t take shares or likes.

It’s great to foster engagement but the aim of that engagement should be to convert it into sales. Sometimes that conversion comes indirectly, I know, but if you’re tracking things with an eye toward cash, you’ll have a sense of where the conversion began and not just where it ends up (first click vs. last click for you data nerds out there).  Please don’t take that to mean that we should ignore folks who aren’t in a buying sort of mood right now. Consistent, user-focused engagement is the best way to assure that we will be on their radar when buying time comes around. Just don’t take the fact that you’ve got that engagement to mean that you’re making great progress until you can demonstrate that it’s resulting in something that will buy you a quart of milk.

Make sense?

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