How important is it to be ‘closer’ to customers or prospects?

Recently I came across an amazing service called Flowtown. According to the company blurb "When all you have are email addresses, Flowtown can show you all the different social networks your customers are on including: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and more!" Services like these are taking the virtual world to next level. These are helping marketers and sales managers in connecting better with their prospects and customers.

The online world has seen a major change with virtual meetings, emails, voice chats, messengers and social media. The need for face-to-face meetings is considerably reducing. I have myself been part of teams operating from one part of the world and serving customer base worldwide.

However, on the other end, last year when the Harvard Business Review conducted a global study that included over 2000 businesses, over 95% of the respondents judged in-person meetings to be critical to building long-term business relationships.

So what are we seeing here? On one hand, there are success stories of people have not seen a human being for months and have still managed to acquire and retain customers while on the other hand, there are entrepreneurs, business owners still believe in need of face to face meetings.

So what does it depend on? Does it depend on your audience- Tech-savvy or no-tech-savvy? Does it depend on whether you are selling product or service? Does price or cost play a role?

I am keen to know your thoughts.

What is your email campaign objective?

Email marketing, being a more personalized and targeted marketing, helps you reach out to your niche audience in a better and more focused way. The cost-per- lead in email marketing is much lesser compared to the direct offline marketing.

But creating a successful email campaign is not as easy as it sounds. The key in successful email campaign is the content. I think one of the main reasons why email campaigns fail is because the objective of the campaign does not come out clearly. Obviously there are other factors like appeal of the campaign, lack of click-to-call actions, non-clarity of message etc but in this particular blog post, I am focusing on the ‘email campaign objective’.

Here is a quick list of various objectives which can be considered while designing an email campaign:

1. Building Awareness:

If you are launching a new product or service, you first need to create awareness about it and establish the identity. The focus of marketing needs to be in effectively reaching out the prospective users and providing relevant and accurate information about your product or service. Tell the market who you are and what you have to offer.

2. Creating Interest

Various researches on consumer buying behavior suggest that the buyers first need to recognize the need before they actively start looking out for products or services. Convincing the customer that the need exists is the key and the campaigns need to be designed considering the fact that the objective of the campaign is to first convince on the need before selling the product.

3. Providing Information or Educating the User:

Once the awareness is created and interest is generated, you need to help the customers in making informed decisions. You, being the expert in the field, need to provide the customers accurate information which will help them in making the right decision. In case of innovative products, you might need to educate them on the innovation and why the product exists. Whereas; in case your product which competes with other products in market, you may need to provide clear comparisons with competition products helping them in forming mental differentiation.

4. Motivating for Purchase

Right promotion can drive customers to make purchase. For this, in case of new products, one can offer free trial or sample. In case of established products, one can encourage sooner purchase by providing strong reason such as promotional offers or discounts.

5. Reinforcing the Brand:

Getting a new customer is five times harder than retaining an existing customer. Therefore, it is no surprise that successful marketers take special efforts in nurture existing customers. Keeping in touch with existing customers helps in building a strong relationship and the buyer moves from just a user to a loyal customer. Here, you can choose to keep in touch with your customers updated by letting them know about new products, new offers or even by offering discounts on future purchases.

Once the objective is clear, it is easy to design and appealing email campaign. And the best part is that you are not ‘surprised’ on the results because you know what to ‘expect’!

Stop Driving the Car by Looking at the Rear Mirror

"Why is my marketing failing? I am doing exactly the same things which that big company had done when they launched their product." – a question which arises when companies introspect on their failed marketing strategies. The answer is simple - "because you drove your car by looking at the rear mirror".

Whatever has worked in past need not work now – the times have changed, people have changed, their perceptions have changed and most importantly, the media has changed. Now the media is more cluttered. It's a lot harder to get people's attention and the right mind share in this cluttered media. And before capturing the market share, it's important to capture the true mindshare.

It is the time when one needs to think beyond traditional advertising and marketing media such as TV, hoardings and paper ads because these are unlikely to give you the mind share – market share comes much later. Earlier when these were the new media, people used to pay attention to advertising. Now people have acquired the art of 'not looking' at advertisements. Grabbing people's attention is more challenging now.

So what are the options? No point in advertising where everybody else is advertising. Identify a media which is unconventional. Something which will give you focused mindshare of your target audience. In past, there have been successful examples of using such clutter free media such as space on peanut bags used by street vendors in New York City or back side of fortune cookie!

Another strategy is leveraging on the early adopters of your product. Make sure that they create the buzz about your product and talk about it. Buyers are more likely to believe in them rather than your advertising.

Have you tried any new marketing idea in your business? Anything which you can share?

Are you confusing advertising with marketing?

"I have decided to do a banner ad and email advertising for my product. Does this not mean that I am doing marketing?"

Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes because advertising certainly is one important part of marketing but marketing is not restricted to only advertising.

Marketing involves much more than just ad planning. It involves additional things such as:

• Strategizing
• Planning
• Deciding advertising media
• Understanding the target user and target market
• Product pricing and positioning
• Forming a perception about your brand in the minds of people
• Planning distribution
• Forming customer community and customer support– very important because customers play a very important role in your business success

In short, whatever it takes to form a relation and communucation between the consumer of your products and services and your business.

We can say that marketing is a process of reaching out to the target user whereas advertising is description or presentation of product or service.

It is therefore important that businesses, especially small and medium size organizations, make balanced use of marketing and advertising for successfully taking their products and services to the market. By concentrating only on advertising, there are chances that you are missing on a large chunk of effective marketing which could potentially hurt the business.

Successful advertisements – Do they touch the reason or emotion?

"Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission." - Fred Allen

Thoughts, Emotions and Beliefs almost 'drive' every individual's life. It won’t be exaggeration to say that emotions control many of the decisions. It’s not surprising to see many advertisements appeal to emotional desires more than logic, economy or utility. Emotional appeals work better at selling brands because brands are built in the minds and hearts of the users.

Fear, safety, security, hope, anxiety, love, distress, surprise, guilt, shame, interest, excitement, happiness, joy, anger, disgust, contempt or loathing, pleasure, self-esteem, sadness, amusement, peacefulness, grief, sorrow, trust, anticipation, depression, envy, frustration, sympathy, loneliness, embarrassment, horror, recognition, status, respect are various forms of emotions. There is an increasing trend of touching on these emotions to make ads connect with consumers. The basis for this trend is that if consumers connect with the ad emotionally, they are more likely to "hear" you out.

However, successful advertisers understand what the consumers like and what makes them go for their brand emotionally as well as rationally. If an ad evokes strong emotional response but does not provide sufficient information about the product, then it is unlikely to succeed. People need credible information to change their mind and opinion and if the ad does not provide that, it can’t change consumer behavior or increase the market share. This is underselling. Getting audience attention is the most difficult task and once you get that it is important to cash on it and if the deal cannot be closed after that, it is of no use. What’s the use of just building the goodwill and not able to increase sales?

In a nutshell, successful ads need to strike the right balance between generating emotional connection and providing sufficient information about the product. Effective ads need to communicate both the aspects flawlessly.

Concept Selling – More Than Just Selling

Wikipedia defines innovator as “…a person or an organization who is one of the first to do something and often opens up a new area for others and achieves an innovation”. It’s a dream of every product development company to come up with a product which is first of its kind in the world. Being someone who has managed product developers for several years, I can say that engineers thrive on developing such innovative products.

So where are the challenges? The challenges are often faced by the sales teams. For the sales person, the challenge is in convincing the customers about buying something which they have not heard of. Customers, most of the times, believe that they don’t need it because they have lived without it for years.

For an innovative product, when it comes to selling, it is about selling the concept. Concept selling involves educating the customers. Here the product benefits and Unique Selling Points (USP’s) need to be used to ‘create the need’. It is about selling the benefits rather than selling the features. It’s different than established products. For established products, it’s about convincing the user in buying a product by telling how it is better than others.

Although referred as concept ‘selling’, this is one step beyond selling. Here, one needs to come up as an expert in the field and true advisor to the user. Although the end goal is to “sell” the product, it needs to go through: educating on the concept --> convincing on the benefits --> explaining the features --> describing the ROI --> and finally selling.

Why Should Small and Medium Sized Businesses Care About Online Marketing?

Online marketing has become the most talked about but least implemented phenomenon. Most of the small and medium size businesses talk about it but then lot of apprehensions start creeping in: "Do I really need the online brand?", "I don’t have time for this, I am busy selling", "I don’t think I am yet ready for my marketing plan / strategy", "Which mediums are effective for my business", "social media, SEO, website optimization, newsletter - I don’t know how it can be used in marketing".

Rather than concentrating on the apprehensions, let’s start looking beyond that and identify the value which online marketing can bring in such as: cost effectiveness, can be done from any corner of the world, ability to address the audience worldwide, very effective, huge spread and so on.

Once we are convinced about the value, then it gets into the “how” part. Obviously it is not rocket science. The key is to identify the right sequence of right medium to start with. Identify your audience and then decide on the medium. For example: When your business demands reaching a wide audience, then social media is the way to go. Whereas while addressing a very niche audience, probably a good email campaign with right collateral material will do the trick.

It’s already year 2010, no matter which business you are in, if you have envisioned spreading it and going global, then you NEED to have an online presence. If your business is targeting the young generation, then you need online presence now! Sooner you start the better lead you have. So for me, the right time to go online is "NOW".

What are your views? Have you implemented online marketing in your business? Any success stories to share?

High price of your products: Do you justify it or cash on it?

Do you represent the rare businesses where low price or low cost is NOT the point on which you can get the lead? In fact, you have relatively high price – compared to your competitor? For known brands, probably high price is easily justified because the consumer gets the brand name to flaunt.

What if your business has not yet established the brand but still, the price is high. What’s your stand in this case? Do you go about justifying the price or you believe in cashing on it.

Let me explain what I mean. When you ‘justify’ the price, you are in a defensive mode. You take an apologetic stance and try and explain (often unsuccessfully) why you have a high price. You get into feature on feature comparison with your competition and start describing how you are better and therefore the why the high price is justified. You are living in a red ocean in this case. Trying to get head on with competition (and not competition as well).

So what does it mean by ‘cashing on high price’? It means explaining the value which your product or service brings in rather than concentrating on price. It means describing benefits rather than describing features. It means assuring quality. It indirectly also shows the confidence you have in your product. It indirectly also means you choose your customers rather than they choosing you.

What’s your stand point for your business? Do you agree /disagree?

Social Media Marketing – Conversation or Conversion?

There is a lot of buzz around social media marketing and Twitter, blogs seem to be the most commonly heard names in that. Companies are either hiring agencies for this or doing it themselves. The goal seems to be to have presence on these mediums and somehow believe that this is all what needs to be done. Once done, everyone starts expecting something out of this – sales managers start expecting “leads”, developers start expecting feedback about their products, business owner starts expecting to know the pulse of users and so on. Is social media only for ‘expecting’ something – or it also means giving? In fact the core concept of social interaction is helping each other in a social network.

To me social media is more about conversation than conversion. It’s a great medium to have communication and connection with your customers and users.

How about using social media for solving some issue if you know the solution, sharing some good news about your company, sharing some achievement, sharing your experiences of using a product/ service, publicly appreciating others’ work, narrating your stories so that others don’t end up reinventing the wheel, sharing tips – about your product or otherwise. The key is to have give and take. It’s about involving people than to just having them on your friends list.

Have you tried using social media in your business or personally? What are your experiences/ success stories?

What’s in name?

When we think of a name for our business or product, what all points do we consider? Here are few which I would consider…

• Is the name easy to pronounce?
• Does it have some meaning?
• Does it have strong resemblance with any other popular brand – obviosuly not to choose unless you want to get in some legal trouble
• Is it scalable – yep, it’s a technical term but let me explain. What I mean is - does the name restrict you from entering into a new market, geography, application and so on?
• How will my logo look like with this name :-)

What is your list?