Marketing Tips

Archive for March, 2010

Customer Service Is The New New Marketing

The topic of empowering your customers so that they become an extension of your marketing isn’t new. Transforming people into a surrogate sales force is the dream of any service organization. The difference today is that the landscape has shifted to the point where good customer service is no longer the minimum ante to play the game.

Over the next year customer service will fuse with marketing to become a holistic inbound outbound campaign of listening to and engaging with customers that will rewrite the rules of the game. And most importantly the lessons learned in the field will be fed into the marketing department to create and run more intelligent experienced and real world initiatives across all forms of marketing PR sales and advertising.

Over the last year Social Media has intrigued and even inspired companies to engage in the communities where their brands and products as well those of competitors are actively discussed by the very people they want to reach aka the new influencers.

Participation is no longer an option as Social Media isn’t a spectator sport. Whether you believe it or not these conversations are taking place with or without you so ignoring them only eliminates you from the conversation and also removes your company from the radar screens of your customers.

Marketingsavvy corporate executives are working with PR Advertising and Marcom teams to explore options and strategies on how to participate in relevant online conversations. This represents a shift in outbound marketing as it creates a direct channel between companies and customers and ultimately people. It starts to look a lot less like marketing and a lot more like customer service.

Last year I introduced customer service into the Social Media equation. As for every company PR is truly is the responsibility of the entire organization. But it’s much bigger than boxing it in a PR paradigm. I truly believe customer service is the new marketing and communities are at the very least opportunities to engage customer service.

Social Media is rooted in conversations between people and peers regardless of the technology that facilitates them and everyday they take place across blogs networks forums micromedia and online groups. And each day with every new community and social tool that is introduced brands products and services are actively discussed supported and disassembled. Some companies are listening while many aren’t even paying attention.

Services such as Satisfaction ThisNext and even DIY communities such as Ning Yahoo and Google Groups and Facebook are playing host to conversations between customers regarding products and services and while they don’t invite marketing they do seek helpful information advice and direction.

Participation is Marketing

Social Media represents an entirely new way to reach customers and connect with them directly. It adds an outbound channel that complements inbound customer service and traditional PR direct marketing and advertising placing companies and their customers on a level playing field to discuss things as peers. Most importantly it transcends the process of simply answering questions to creating a community of enthusiasts and evangelists.

For the most part the only way companies know that customers have questions comments or concerns is if they contact customer service make the news form a public group or if buying patterns stock value and sales trends suddenly shift.

You can bet that for every inbound customer inquiry that there is a significant percentage of existing and potential customers actively discussing the same topic out in the open simply looking for guidance feedback acknowledgment and/or information. And usually these discussions transpire without company participation leaving people to resolve issues and questions on their own.

Why leave the door open for your competition to jump into the conversation and steer customers in their direction?

Companies must engage or they place themselves on the long road to inevitable obsolescence.

It’s like the old adage out of sight out of mind. Or quite simply engage or die.

Nowadays participation is marketing.

Conversations are a form of marketing.

However marketing needs to be clarified as I am not referring to the traditional marketing that typically “speaks” at people through “messages.” In Social Media this is about dialog two way discussions that bring people together in order to discover and share information. Joining the conversation isn’t as simple as jumping in however.

Companies first need to listen in order to accurately analyze how where and when to participate.

Social Media forces companies to look outward to proactively find the conversations that are important to business and relationships. And it’s not just the responsibility of PR it requires the participation by multiple disciplines across the organization in order to genuinely provide meaningful support and information. Again we’re not talking about messaging or sales propositions. If you stop to think about it we’re talking about fusing marketing PR community relations and customer service in an entirely new sociallyaware role.

Defining the Strategy and the Role

This is about formalizing outbound communications and community participation creating a dedicated team to ensure that customers and influencers are not overlooked but engaged.

We’re already seeing companies that are either dividing outbound responsibilities among existing teams or dedicating roles to full time listening participating responding and commenting across all forms of Social Media. But this isn’t limited to a select few businesses. This is a role that will become standard in companies around the globe from SMBs to enterprise organizations and will likely scale from one person to teams.

This is more than prioritizing enhanced customer service over bloggers. We shouldn’t aim our fire hoses at only the fires that have public attention. We need to focus on customers that take the time to contribute to and participate in social networks that are simply seeking information even if it is delivered in the form of a rant. Furthermore we can not simply rely on inbound service. We have to analyze inbound activity in order to seek out related conversations among those that decide to take the conversation outside of the traditional service process.

In addition to PR and marcom these new roles are combining a variety of marketing disciplines including communications customer support and product management and go by several titles:

• Community Advocate
• Community Manager although I also hear push back on this title as communities can’t really be managed.
• Community Ambassador
• Social Media or Community Specialist
• Community Relations
• Community Builders

Many of us have been involved in online community relations since Web 1.0 through topicdriven discussion groups user forums and other online communities such as DejaNews Yahoo and Google.

We did so as experts and didn’t try to BS the people who were seeking advice and answers. This is an important note because in order for any of this to work you actually have to know not only about your products services reputation strengths weaknesses and benefits but also how you compete in the market and where you stand against the competition.

The social media landscape is vast and growing and may require several internal people to listen and participate every day across blog posts blog comments forums groups social networks micromedia etc.

Please note that contrary to the Social Media love fest that’s taking place across the blogosphere not anyone can jump in and solve problems. Companies need to create an internal game plan that officially assigns specific people who will go in and help customers.

Shhhhh. Im Listening

Listening to active communities will dictate your participation. But let me point out something very important here. It’s not just about reactive community relations. Companies can and should learn from listening to and talking with customers to create specific content that addresses the wants and needs of customers and distribute it within their communities. This allows you to translate the lessons learned from one on one conversations for the greater good of the masses.

Outbound customer and community relations is among the most important campaigns any company can integrate in its immediate and future initiatives. It not only helps PR and customer service it builds relationships creates enthusiasts and ultimately instills customer loyalty.

Additional resources:
The Four Tenets of Community Management by Jeremiah Owyang
Join the International Online Community Management Association
Public Relations is Customer Service by Kami Huyse
Customer Service is the New Marketing by Valeria Maltoni

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Brian is Principal of FutureWorks. He is cofounder of the Social Media Club an original member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup a contributor to the Social Media Collective and ConversationalMedia.org

Solis in concert with Geoff Livingston released Now is Gone a new book that helps businesses engage in Social Media. He has also released a series of ebooks on new PR and blogger relations.

You may also find articles by Brian at the TalentZoo.com website under Very Public Relations.

Curing Follow-up Woes With Newsletters

You read a marketing book or hire a coach and they tell you “The key to real growth is follow up.” With an inward grown you add FOLLOW UP to your todo list where it consistently slides to the bottomor right off the page!

Is this you?

Everyone knows the key to any company’s growth and success is to follow up with current and potential clients. What you need is a painless way to follow up that doesn’t require calling each one individually and doesn’t annoy the recipient. Picking up the phone to call busy people is the way of the past. Now through a company newsletter you can keep in touch read: follow up in a way that connects with clients in their own time.

Here is a simple system:

1. Create a press release announcing your company’s newsletter that includes a link to a page where readers can sign up.

2. Gather articles and information about your company that would be of interest to your target market.

3. Mention your newsletter on the company blog don’t forget the link to the sign up page.

4. Send out your newsletter. You can make it as simple as a quick email with a few updates and a small article of interest or as detailed as you like with graphics interviews news testimonials etc.

Newsletters have proven to be a number one lead generator. Why? Well a newsletter allows the reader to get to know the company or provider thus building a sense of loyalty over time. Newsletters also get talked about forwarded on and can be offered to anyone you meet and any visitor to your website. So consider newsletters as a source of curing your follow up woes while also generating new leads for your company.

About the writer:  Need help with that newsletter? Adria Laycraft is a freelance copywriter in Calgary Alberta Canada. For more information about Adria’s services and experience visit The Write Initiative

Content Marketing Is Whats Next

An ad is a great way to encapsulate information into a tiny bite. Think of it as a tiny cracker with a piece of cheese. It leaves us wanting more. I think the main meal is content marketing: creating useful information for prospective buyers.

Content marketing is about providing something useful. A how to video on hanging up a picture sponsored by Black Decker is content marketing. A blog post about five things we often forget when staying at a hotel sponsored by Priceline.com is content marketing.

Infomercials aren’t always content marketing. They often swing a little too far into the fakesmilesandbobbinghead department of gee whiz testimonials. Instead we’re talking about useful information presented in a way that makes the receiver of that information feel they’ve been given a value.

There are lots of ways to do it for free or cheap. Blogs video sites podcasts and social networks are great places to share information and build interest about a product. These can be a great way to measure sentiment drive awareness and encourage conversation. Tie this to a marketing funnel and you’ve got the opportunity to convert people who respond to the information into more qualified leads.

Take a break have a laugh!

In building your content marketing think about these traits:

• It’s brief.
• It’s easy to share.
• It’s about the buyer not our product.
• It’s useful.
• It isn’t the sale offer. It’s the lead into a marketing funnel.

With this in mind you have an opportunity to deliver value to your organization for little expense and with a greater potential positive impression on your marketplace.

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Chris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses organizations and individuals. Chris speaks blogs writes articles and makes media of all kinds at chrisbrogan.com a blog in the top 20 of the Advertising Age Power150 and in the top 200 on Technorati.
You may also find articles by Chris at the TalentZoo.com website under Guest Colum.