Nov 11, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
The stupidity of the functional silos that deliberately separates an organisations capability to deliver value and service to their customers, and the way the customer experiences those services never ceases to amaze me.
A friend of mine has a mortgage on his home, and a cash flow problem.
The stupidity is being demonstrated again, as the bank concerned is sending him very nasty computer generated letters telling him of the dire consequences of not getting his payments back in order. His equity is around 99%, for 25 years the payments have been made on time and he has much of his other financial products through the bank.
Why would a responsible, customer responsive, innovative and customer oriented bank, which we know they are because they spend millions every year telling us this is so, set out to so terminally piss off a long standing, loyal customer?
He has options, few of which are beneficial for the bank, and he also has family and friends who are less than impressed, and now would not touch this bank with a bargepole, and they all communicate widely.
I pick on the bank because it is top of mind, but they are not alone. Corporations everywhere cling to the functional management system while consumers take delivery of their products and services cross functionally.
Failure to acknowledge and manage this intersection in an age of Social media and the ubiquity of information is marketing suicide. I guess the upside is that it leaves plenty of room for innovation for those not stuck in the C20, which has led to the rise and rise of Paypal, Uber, Airbnb, e-wallet, and thousands of others who manage the way they deliver to customers in the way customers experience the need to have a product or service delivered. Tom Fishburne put the Maths Vs Mad dilemma wonderfully simply in a cartoon this morning, pointing out the stupidity of just allowing the technology to take the place of common sense, marketing wisdom and customer intimacy.
Nov 10, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Sales, Social Media
courtesy www.copyblogger.com
Much of Email marketing has become a bit like the electronic version of the letterbox stuffing junk mail. Marketers are aggressively and creatively finding ways to collect email addresses, then directing traffic to the addresses in the expectation that a few will be opened, and a few of them will then lead to a transaction.
However, this misses the essential point that email marketing has in its favour. An email can be personalised and directed, just like a snail mail letter from the “old days”, it is just that most do not do the hard work necessary that puts in place the “necessaries” to get them opened.
To improve your open rate success, there are six things you need to do:
- Add value. An email that is just seeking to extract value from the receiver will not get much time given, usually it will be deleted assuming it gets through the spam filters. On the other hand, an email that explicitly sets out to add value to the recipient will have a way better chance of being opened and acted up on in a meaningful way.
- Be optimised for however the receiver wants to see you. Mobile is growing exponentially, so ensuring you are mobile optimised is a must do.
- Be personalised. When was the last time you opened an email directed at “Dear Mr Andrew Bloggs” or even worse, “Dear customer”? Been a while right? The email has to be directed to the person as if it came from their best mate, not some automating system. We may all know it is automated, but knowing and having it demonstrated by a stupid salutation are two different things.
- Be contextual. A personalised email is good, but if it is of no interest to the receiver, it will be discarded. Recognising the interests of the reviver in the subject line is immensely important. However, being able to do that assumes you know a lot about them, their interests, habits and lives. Without wanting to be at all spooky, it is possible to collect information on individuals and reflect that in the subject lines of the email.
- Be focussed in the subject line. You get a split second of a receivers attention when they first see the email. Typically people look at the subject line, if it is of interest, they usually look at who it is from, and if it is still of interest, may open it, or perhaps put it aside for a better time. Miss out on either of these two things, “interest”, and “who”, in that split second, and you have probably lost them.
- Measure and improve. The analytic options available that enable continuous improvement in open rates are myriad, often free, and your competition is using them, so there really is no excuse.
Of course, once the email is opened, the marketing game begins. When you need help with that, get in touch to access the StrategyAudit experience.
Nov 7, 2014 | Governance, Leadership
Reflecting on the behaviours of the best people I have seen in leadership positions over my 35 years of playing in this area to a friend a while ago, it seemed to come down to a small number of discrete behavioural characteristics. I know there are libraries full of books on leadership, but this is the list that evolved during that conversation. Luckily, my friend was jotting a few notes for a workshop he was running the following week, and subsequently sent me the jottings.
Those characteristics were:
- They always take responsibility for their own actions, and those of the people who relay on them for direction. No finger pointing, excuses, and wasted energy playing “the game” ,
- The flip side, of the first is that they give credit where it is due, never taking the credit for themselves, even in situations where most would say that their leadership and decisions were the deciding factor .
- They do not let the status quo, sacred cows and the fear of change stop them. In fact these things offer opportunities to improve, and benefit by being first, different, and recognisable.
- People are not pushed into the background by technology. People run the technology, design it, implement, and use it, but so often the technology comes to be the king. Great leaders would never allow themselves to be distracted by a phone call when talking to someone who was relying on them, respect given is returned in spades.
- They are not imitators, they look for different paths, and follow them with passion. It may lead to a few more missteps, but it also opens the opportunity of seeing the emerging opportunities first. Being the same for the sake of some concern about being seen as different is of no importance to them.
- They know they are not always right, so are willing to be pulled up, corrected, and accept good council. You would never hear one say “I told you so”.
- They are collegiate, happily working with others, contributing their time and expertise in the way that best benefits the objectives being sought.
Finding ways to build these into your natural response mechanisms can only help you become a better leader, and coaching those with whom you work to be better themselves is in itself, the essence of leadership.
Nov 5, 2014 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Courtesy http://tomfishburne.com/ Thanks Tom, love your work!
For many small business people, Social media is a mix of mystery, distraction, and something that at some level they feel they should know about. However, they have seen too many stupid cat videos, observed the stream of consciousness that can be twitter, seen their children leave an indelible image on facebook they would rather not have seen, lack any native sense of what it is about, and lack the time to find out, so they avoid it.
It is pretty common, but misses the essential point. Social media is where your customers are, where they gather their product and supplier intelligence, and pass on their experiences. Choosing to exclude your business from these experiences is akin to going to play golf, but believing you can still be competitive if you leave your clubs at home.
There are a number of pretty simple ways to start. Social media is by its nature both incremental when you choose it to be, whilst at the same time if you allow it, overwhelming. There are just a few simple things to remember:
- Nobody can know it all, even the experts. Anybody who tells you different is either a liar, delusional, or just after your money. In the end, like all business decisions, there is risk and reward, your job in business is to be on the positive side of the ledger, and to do that you must make decisions and take action.
- Anybody can become engaged, in a small way, become comfortable, gain some understanding, and take another step, or indeed, backtrack and take another route.
- Social Media is a combination of two words, “Social” and “Media”. Individually they mean different things, together they take on another persona. If you remember the “social” part, and behave on SM as you would face to face, there is very little that can go wrong, unless, just like it is in person, you act stupidly, without regard to consequences.
- You need a “map”. Navigating Social Media is no different to finding your way through any unfamiliar territory. You need to know where you are, where you want to end up, and then if you have a map, you can make choices along the way depending on the circumstances in which you find yourself.
- Know who you want to talk to, and find the e-places they congregate. The better you can define your target “receiver” the better you can focus your communication on their needs and wishes. Demographics are just a start, on top you need behavioural and contextual information, how they react in different circumstances. If you can describe your intended audience as a person walking through the door, you will have done well, as to get to that point, you will have to have made choices about who is in, and who is out.
- Social Media platforms are not alike, almost not at all. Whilst there are similarities, and overlap, it is both relatively simple and sensible to choose 2 or at most three platforms on which to engage, depending on who you want to talk to, what you want to talks about, what you want to say, and importantly, what you want them to do with the information you give.
- Leveraging social media commercially rather than using it as a simple place to “e-meet” requires that you assemble and find ways to leverage the “list” those who by signing up in some way give their permission for you to market to them. This is a concept first articulated by Seth Godin 20 years ago, and is probably more relevant now than it was then.
- Develop curiosity. The best way to get to get to understand and feel comfortable with social media is to play around with it, make a few mistakes, gain some confidence, and most importantly, be curious, and experimental. After a while, it becomes easier, and the easier it becomes, the more you will use it and in turn get better at using it.
To get started, shop around until you find someone in whom you have confidence, can demonstrate they know what they are talking about, and read widely to inform yourself, then just get on with it.
Nov 4, 2014 | Change, Marketing, Small business
In the 35 years I have been practising marketing, absolutely everything has changed.
Well, almost everything.
What has not changed are the foundations.
The recognition that delivering value to a customer is the “raison d’être” of marketing, and that seeing everything you do from the customers perspective is absolutely essential if you are to understand what “Value” really means in any given context.
It is a fact of life now that marketing is controlled by software.
Marketing was pretty late to the software game, but in the last 5 or 6 years, it has exploded. Now we can not only automate a whole lot of tasks previously taking up valuable time, and gain vast leverage from the automation, but we can measure the performance of activities, bringing a whole new world of accountability and reach to the practice of marketing.
What we cannot automate, and really only measure after the fact is the influence of creativity on the process, the ability to see what others cannot, to interpret a given set of numbers and circumstances through new eyes, to connect the unconnected dots.
This explosion of automation and tools has created a new “middleman” in marketing, he/she is called “Software”.
Like all middlemen, “Software” needs to be proactively managed. There are many choices of middleman that can be made, often more than one may be appropriate, but those chosen need to be managed, and these tasks require a whole new set of capabilities many businesses do not have, and smaller ones often think they cannot afford.
They also need a new way of working, a collaborative, and cross functional culture that encourages hypothesis generation and experimentation. It must be “failure tolerant”, simply because failure is not really failure, it is an opportunity to learn about your market, competitors and customers.
