From the marketing trenches...

More with less

It's that time of year when in-the-trenches marketers are asked to create a budget for 2006. And if your company is like most (and like mine) we are being asked to do more with as much or perhaps even less. Here are a few ideas we're doing this year that may spark a thought for you as you work on your own budget:

• Focus on PR. Stop advertising and let your customers do your talking for you. Prospects would much rather hear one of your customers talk about how you've helped them succeed. It means a hundred times more than anything you say yourself.
• Testimonials/Case Studies. In addition to PR, or even in place of it if you can't afford to pay a PR agency, is getting your customer to tell your story with their words through a case study or customer testimonial. This doesn't have to be anything fancy. Post quotes on your website or create a pdf and post it on your website or even just email it out to your prospects.
• Create a customer feedback group. This group will prove invaluable (and inexpensive) and will trump any expensive marketing research you do. This group can either meet in person, over the web, or even over the telephone 2-3 times per year.
• Create PDF's of all your collateral. Many prospects would rather have information emailed to them and it cuts your printing costs considerably.
• Communicate to your prospects via a newsletter. A quarterly newsletter is a very cost effective way to stay on the top of your prospect's mind. Create content about your industry in general, not just about your company. Interview authors or consultants in the industry...they're always looking for free publicity and it makes your newsletter content more relevant to your readers. Plus, it's a lot cheaper than direct mail.

Back to my budget...more ideas later.

Innovation is a team sport. (And your customers are on your team.)

Everyone knows you can't innovate in a vacuum. Not so common wisdom is that you can't innovate without customers' input. Jennifer Rice put it this way:

- Brands that aren't in touch with their customers miss out on small but critical innovation opportunities.
- Brands that seek customer insight only along predetermined lines of thinking (like taste tests) can easily miss out on the real opportunities (like plastic sheets).

My recent experience agrees with Jennifer's take. My company recently invited 10 customers in for a look at our future product roadmap. Let's just say it looks markedly different now than it did 2 weeks ago. Glad we asked.

Forget Branding, Just Fix the Carts.

I was shopping in my local grocery store (Albertsons) yesterday. My cart was so squeaky and loud that everyone in the store stared at me, as if I could do something about it. Every new isle, every new rounded corner brought upon the gawking of annoyed fellow-shoppers. I swear some were even looking down their nose at me, as if I had just driven a Yugo through their neighborhood streets littered with Mercedes-Benz and Land Rovers.

A quick trip to the Albertsons web site reveals two of their corporate goals:

"...make life easier for our customers" and to offer an "enhanced shopping experience".

I wondered what part of my shopping experience was being enhanced by my screeching cart. (I found an abandoned cart on one of the isles and hoped to make a quick switch. Unfortunately, two of the wheels had large chunks missing from them which would make for both a bumpy and noisy ride.) Really, how hard would it be to pull these broken and noisy carts aside and give them a quick makeover? I'm talking a little WD40, not the complete works.

The ah-ha here is that brand promises, corporate websites and annual reports don't mean squat if you can't deliver on some of the simplest parts of your business.

Companies are spending record dollars hiring branding consultants and launching corporate programs to promote the brand, internally and externally. It makes you wonder...are the "little" things  where the customer meets the brand in action (e.g. shopping carts) being overlooked by all of this corporate mumbo jumbo?

As an investor, I'd be impressed by the company's "customer focus"...after all, it's on the corporate web site's home page. But as a customer....nah, not so much.

So, what shape are your company's carts in?

See Jill Sell.

The power of simplicity! Kudos to the guys at Joyent.com. They are using simple imagery (like the image above) to accompany a simple narrative so you can simply understand what they do. Of course this fits into their product strategy,

"Joyent delivers simple, powerful, web-based software for small teams."

But I think this also speaks to a bigger marketing issue. Why do we as marketers often think simple=unsophisticated or simple means the product will be perceived as less valuable? We as in-the-trenches marketers fight this battle every day. We tend to oversell all of the features and benefits, thinking if we make it seem complicated enough the prospect will come to their senses and realize we know something they don't and they better jump on the bandwagon before they're left behind.

The simple fact, though, is people buy what they understand. Nobody wants to feel inadequate or looked upon as really stupid for asking that question. When we as humans more or less "get it", we're much more apt to ask questions about the finer details. Thus, as marketers we have created the beginnings of a conversation with our prospects. And what better goal to have as marketers?

 

In the trenches? Read this.

If you're an in-the-trenches marketer like me, consider picking up a copy of the unofficial battle plan...Mao In The Boardroom, by Garbiel Stricker.  This gem is chock full of rules for would-be revolutionaries and case studies that bring them to life. My copy is dog-eared on rules such as: Their  Rules: Whoever shouts the loudest gets heard. Our Rules: Whoever reaches the most people most intelligently gets heard. And on chapters with titles like, "Speed Kills. He who hesitates is dead."

Although it is great fun to read (and the pictures are hilarious), the book is very practical. For example, we employed this tactic from Chapter 6 of the book to win out over two competitors more than twice our size:

When we fight the competition on their terrain, we must play by their rules--rules that make victory unlikely for us. We must use the strategy that lures the competition to our territory--a place unfamiliar to them, where we can use all of our guerrilla tools to surprise and wound them.

By creating our own playing field, we forced our much larger and wealthier competitors to talk our language when approaching prospects. And the language was skewed to our strengths, their weaknesses.

I hope you find it to be as useful and fun as I have.

A big risk if you do it. A bigger one if you don't.

We recently invited 10 key, multi-million dollar accounts to a no-holds barred customer advisory/user group meeting. What's the big deal? Some LOVED us and consistently sang our praises while others would likely be calling our competitors come contract renewal time. Yet we encouraged open and honest feedback on what we were doing right as well as how we were screwing up. We also exposed our R&D concepts and asked their opinions.

At times it was downright ugly. We learned some of our ideas looked great on our white boards but simply didn't cut it with those we were hoping to sell it to in the first place. And the unhappy ones were, of course, the vocal ones. It couldn't have gone better.

Those who LOVED us coming into the session continued to do so, remarking on our openness, candor, and transparency. They felt now,even more than ever, that we were a business partner they could see themselves with for the long haul. We even converted some of the others from the dark side. As it turns out, the happy customers came to our rescue, often in side-bar conversations between just the clients themselves.

Bringing together clients with various feelings about our company was a risk. The unhappy could have influenced the others. Our supporters could have wavered under the peer pressure. And we could have looked like fools opening ourselves to criticism in front of them all. Yet, we saved large amounts of money and other resources killing projects deemed to be turkeys. And we'll generate more future revenue by bolstering the burgeoning product lines we now know will sell.

So, yeah, it was a risk. But future profits will show it was a risk we had to take.

They don't care how cool you are.

I received (another) 3-dimensional direct mail piece today. It was a life-sized mail box. That might make sense coming from a direct mail agency touting their service. But, believe or not, this came from a search engine optimization firm. This is a problem I see far too often...the concept looked really "cool" on the story board and it was unique--therefore a sure-fire way to break through the clutter. The problem, of course, is the concept had nothing to do with the offering from the company. Was it cool and different? Yeah. But did I care? No.

The take-away: potential buyers care how you can help them solve a problem. They don't care if your marketing is cool.