Marketing New Year Resolutions

We’ve all said it, we’ve all done it …. New Year’s resolutions. But, the real question is, who is still looking at those resolutions we made months ago? Not many. A new calendar year symbolizes a new beginning. Many of you are probably thinking about personal resolutions, but how about establishing New Year’s resolutions for your business?
Small business owners are consistently pulled into many different directions. We spend so much of our time trying to make that next sale, keeping customers happy and product on the shelf, that many tasks fall by the wayside. What if you set just five or six manageable goals and looked at them on a weekly or even monthly basis? Consistency and keeping them top-of-mind is key. Write them down, don’t let them weigh you down.
We challenge you to think about these five marketing ideas in thinking about how to focus your 2019 business resolutions.

1. What do your online and real-world footprints look like?
2. Do you know who your customers are?
3. What is your brand saying to your customers?
4. Have you actually listened to your customers?
5. Are you putting too many of your marketing eggs in one basket?

You might be asking yourself how to turn these into resolutions.

1. Pick one real-world or digital channel each month, whether it’s Facebook, Google Search, Yelp, etc on the digital side or your collateral, trade show booth, business signage etc on the real-world side and dive deep and learn how your customers are reacting to your messaging across all the channels? Are you being consistent in your messaging? Are you leading with your competitive advantages?
2. Make this the year, you will know who your customers are. Even if you cannot afford a fancy customer relation software, a simple excel spreadsheet will work to start.
3. Details matter. Take one piece of marketing collateral – a sign, a brochure, one page on your website – and take a critical look, or better yet, ask someone in your professional network to take a look. Tell them what your goal of that piece is and ask them does it achieve it. Each month, pick a different piece of material.
4. Words are powerful. Customers want to be heard. Picking up the phone, talking to a customer face-to-face in a store means you are connecting. In the days of heavy automation, that personal contact is lost. Set a goal. How many customers are you going to connect to this month? Make sure it’s realistic.
5. Many companies try one marketing tactic; sometimes it goes well, but many times, it fails. There are many reasons for the failure, however the biggest is that just one print ad or one Facebook ad or one direct mail piece isn’t going to move the needle. Customers consume their information in a variety of different ways and you need a suite of integrated activities to help you move the marketing needle. What product or segment are you going to focus on?

Go ahead, write down those resolutions today and throughout this month, refine them until you have 2 or 3 achievable ones and 2 or 3 stretch ones and then make a plan. 2019 is the year of technology mixed with getting back to basics. Your customers are your success. If you have a solid actionable and results-oriented marketing plan, making that next sale will be easier and keeping your customer happy will take less time. Let us help you make your 2019 resolutions a reality!

Why Branding Is Important for Growing Professional Services Firms

A number of traditional marketing tactics do not easily translate to professional services firms, such as independent wealth managers, legal professionals, and others in highly regulated sectors. However, the fundamentals of brand- and trust-building apply across industries and should remain core aspects of your marketing mix.
What Good is Branding?
Because of the highly specialized nature of professional services, it’s fair to say many prospective clients are uncertain about how to evaluate your services. For that reason alone, your brand becomes an important way to establish credibility and trust. And, it’s important to note, regardless of how much – or how little – marketing you have done, you probably already have a brand, whether you know it or not.
Everyone has a brand.
The question is whether the market has defined you or if you are in control of your brand. Ideally, you want to control your message. To do so effectively requires planning, strategy, implementation and ongoing monitoring. In a market where people often lack the expertise to really know which provider is the best, and have more choices than they know what to do with, your brand makes it easier for them to narrow down and weigh their options. And, because potential clients typically conduct initial research online before deciding to hire you (or a competitor) it’s important to ensure first and foremost that they find something about you and your firm, and secondly, that what they do find reconfirms their initial impressions about your brand. This is equally true for your referral pipeline.
I would argue that branding is and should remain a key strategy for professional services firms, regardless of specialty, not only to stake your ground in an already crowded marketplace, but also to establish yourself in anticipation of more and new competitors or alternative solutions.
The stronger your brand and the more articulately and consistently it is communicated, the more likely it is that you will attract like-minded prospects, partners and referral sources. A solid brand also increases the likelihood that your clients will remain loyal and that they will become strong word of mouth advocates for you and your firm.
But Business isn’t Built on Brand Alone.
As important as it is to develop and promote your brand, branding alone does little if it is not paired with effective business development initiatives.
In short, marketing is about creating the demand, while business development is about closing business opportunities: both are necessary to grow your business. And in industries in which it takes a significant amount of time to build the level of trust and comfort necessary to sign a new client, the goal should be to develop a multi-faceted marketing campaign, including branding, as a powerful tool supporting your in-person efforts.
Below, some Brand Development activities I recommend for Professional Services providers.
Brand Development Activities for Professional Services Providers
Content Marketing
o Position and white papers, e-books and worksheets, calculators
o Blogging, content curation, social media presence and relationship building
Public Relations
o Establishing yourself as a SME (Subject Matter Expert)
o Public speaking and writing opportunities
Business Development activities that build on brand and fill the pipeline often include:
In-person Networking and Event Marketing
o Active membership in professional organizations
o Attending and maximizing personal interactions in public events
o Hosting or co-hosting live events
There are obvious overlaps between traditional marketing tactics and those best suited for professional services firms. Striking the right balance, and finding the time to understand and manage all of the elements of a professional services marketing strategy is difficult. It’s especially challenging for many professional services firms to market themselves effectively while also growing the firm, since closing any new business relies so heavily on the personal relationship between the professional and the prospect.
Helping our clients strike the right balance by taking on the marketing management role (freeing up their time) and helping to select the best tactics to most effectively market their business so they can not only grow, but continue to provide their clients with the appropriate level of service, has been very rewarding for me personally. If you have questions about Business Development activities, Public Relations, or Branding for your professional services firm, please get in touch.  I’d welcome the chance to discuss your firm’s marketing challenges and goals.

Surveys, Complaints, and the Value of Regularly Scheduled Listening

Who doesn’t get excited about survey responses, right? Right?!

In case it’s not coming through on screen, that was written in a sarcastic tone. Creating and managing customer surveys online (or paper, or phone surveys) is rarely earthshaking. Survey response rates are often low, and responses tend to roll in rather slowly. But the insight from even a very small number of respondents can be invaluable to planning and executing your marketing and sales strategy.

Customer Surveys Are Worthwhile

Low response rates do not necessarily indicate failure. The voice of the customer always has value. An ongoing collection of input (and responding to that input) positions your company to be successful in several key areas.

Our advice? Keep asking questions. And even more important: Listen.

Of course there are things you can do to improve your customer surveys and response rates. See below for tips to improve your surveys and feedback forms. But remember, how you handle the process and what you do with the responses is every bit as important as the collection process. To put it simply, you need to make listening to the customer a habit.

Customer Stories = Marketing Gold

If you don’t already monitor your “listening” channels, make a list and check it twice (or more) in the coming year. A robust website should have several touchpoints or data collection tools. Consider how you use those on your website:

• RFP/RFQ Buttons
• Contact Forms
• Social Sharing icons
• Sign up for newsletters/promotional communications
• Thank you for shopping with us auto-responders
• Sale cancelled/abandoned cart follow-up emails with surveys

Employees, Vendors and Partners Have Stories Too

Speaking of the voice of the customer, one thing we hear repeatedly from our small business customers is how valuable it is to have regularly scheduled marketing meetings with a team of people – both internal staff (a cross-functional team is great) and in-sourced marketing experts. In monthly marketing meetings with our clients, we consider all customer reviews, complaints, survey results, anecdotes, and other input, and discuss it briefly in the opening few minutes of a monthly marketing meeting. That input informs not only marketing strategies but often, also the company’s overall business direction.

Hidden Value, Surprising Benefits of Using Surveys in Your Business

We say surveys are a marketing “gold mine” because surveys –

• Provide a mechanism to listen to customers
• Personalize your brand
• Strengthen your relationship with your customers. (Even if they don’t complete your survey, making one available creates a line of communication.)

Listen, and Share

While constantly running promotions and discounting your products is not recommended, listening all the time absolutely is. We’ll go so far as to call it a best practice. But, listening isn’t enough. Listening and using customer feedback to improve operations isn’t even enough. You have to share, too.

By the way, this is one of the reasons why we like Yext Ultimate Reviews so much – the powerful tool makes getting client reviews and adding them to your website easy and attractive – and because of its design, businesses that use it see increased natural search traffic to their sites. More on that in a future post.

Letting your customers and prospects know what you’ve learned from them is part of the process. People like to know that they’ve been heard; they’re interested in hearing what others think about the same thing; and they LOVE IT when a company makes changes based on their imput. So sharing on your website, newsletter, social channels, and in face to face marketing events (like trade shows or at point-of-purchase displays) is critically important to getting the best ROI on your survey program.

When you continually seeking feedback, ideas and other input from customers you’ll gain insight that will help you make good business decisions. You’ll also gain a reputation as a company that’s receptive, and easy to work with.

Not a bad way to start a New Year.

Regularly-scheduled meetings are a hallmark of the JointSourcing client relationship. We are committed to listening to our clients, and to their customers, in order to recognize and respond quickly and wisely to changing market demands and opportunities. Need a partner to help you listen and respond to your customers in order to grow your business? We’d love to help you start a conversation with your customers – and meet your sales growth goals.

A Unique Selling Proposition May Be the Big Idea You Need

Creating a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is a risky move – but with a well-developed strategy and a coordinated public relations and marketing effort, it can pay off.

Creating a USP

Jim Bolin was born and raised in Casey, IL. As he grew up, Bolin watched a familiar small-town story unfold: Casey lost population, visitors, business, and industry. As the town’s revenue went downhill, so did Casey. Bolin responded with a plan to put the town on the map, and back in business.

Bolin knew Casey needed a marketing plan, a plan that focused on why people should visit (and shop, and eat, and otherwise spend money) in the town. After all, there are a lot of quaint towns with friendly people and small businesses with great customer service in the Midwest. What Casey needed was something to truly differentiate it. So if marketing Casey as a great small town wouldn’t work, what would? Something a little bigger. What Casey needed was a Unique Selling Proposition, or USP.

Casey was about to become the small town where big things happen.

In Business, It Pays to Think Big

Bolin was determined to give people a reason to visit Casey. What he came up with were several reasons – big reasons. They include the World’s Largest Wind Chime, World’s Largest Golf Tee, World’s Largest Rocking Chair, World’s Largest Knitting Needles, and the World’s Largest Mailbox.

The unique attractions drive traffic – a lot of traffic – to Casey. In fact, so many people visit Casey to see the (big) sights that it’s created a (small) problem: the occasional traffic jam.

At this point, it’s safe to say that Bolin, and everyone in Casey, has learned that success can drive traffic – and more success.

Certification Supports USP

The USP that Bolin “made up” for Casey may sound quirky, but it’s legit – all of the town’s World’s Largest attractions have been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. Casey’s largess goes a little further, however.

Once the town began to garner attention for its World’s Largest items, Bolin (with the support of the majority of residents) added several other oversized attractions. While they don’t carry the official “World’s Largest” designation, they’re still part of Casey’s allure, and they align with the USP.

What If You Don’t Have a USP?

To be clear, we don’t necessarily recommend that clients “invent” a USP – but we won’t create a marketing plan without one.

The efforts led by Jim Bolin in Casey provide an excellent example of how you can put your business, services, or attractions on the map.

Bolin clearly had a vision. Big Things in a Small Town is what Bolin dubbed his local workshop, which is now a tourist attraction in its own right. But vision isn’t enough.

Bolin put Casey on the map with a solid strategy and coordinated marketing effort.

Here’s how Casey’s “invented” USP drives traffic to the town and its businesses:

• Excellent use of Social Media – check out the town’s Facebook Page to see what we mean.
• Face-to-Face Marketing – all of the town’s retail businesses participate in some way to promote Casey’s unique features.
• Operational Support – a trolley runs on the weekends, carrying tourists from one big attraction to another, and the local post office hand-cancels postcards deposited in the World’s Largest Mailbox with – what else? – a stamp that reads “World’s Largest Mailbox.”
• Coordinated Marketing/Public Relations efforts have resulted in press coverage from regional news outlets and niche publications like Roadside America and Road Trippers to a recent feature on CBS Sunday Morning

As we’ve stated before, a purely invented USP won’t work for everyone. But when you have a USP, a solid marketing strategy, and coordinated, well-managed promotional tactics, then you’re on your way to growth. Big time.

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Effective marketing starts with a thorough understanding of your business and how you stack up against the competition. (In other words, discovering and testing your USP.) You also need a methodical assessment of your opportunities, and a little bit of vision. This is why we start each client relationship by completing a Blueprint, a comprehensive assessment of your business. It is invaluable in determining the strategies needed to grow your business, and once it’s complete, the blueprint becomes an actionable plan for that growth. We use the Blueprint to weigh each marketing program and expenditure before launching any initiative. For our Joint Sourcing clients, the Blueprint also forms the basis of our shared risk and reward. In fact, we’ll go so far as to say that Joint Sourcing is our USP. Contact us to learn more about the Sales Renewal JointSourcing™ process.