May 29, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
http://tomfishburne.com/?s=word+of+mouth&x=0&y=0
This morning a friend was telling me about a product he had used recently, and how it changed his life. Well, made a small piece of it better at least.
Next time I am looking for a product in that category, I will try it. Very little to lose even if I do not share the enthusiasm, and I value my friends opinion.
Word of mouth marketing.
Free marketing for the product supplier, right?
Consider how much effort went into making the product right, managing and optimising the value chain, in creating the programs that engaged and made an advocate of my friend, and gave him the stories to pass on to me.
Word of mouth is very effective, the most effective form of marketing we humans have ever seen, and on the surface it is free, but beneath the surface, there is frantic paddling going on.
Word of mouth marketing works but is not free, it is earned.
Apr 29, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Sales, Small business
Successful selling
Regularly I find myself on the receiving end of a pitch of some sort, as do all in business. We all buy and sell on a daily basis, and whilst there are easily recognisable and specialised functions that buy and sell on behalf of our organisations, we nevertheless are “pitchers”, and “pitchees” every day.
It seems that one of the impacts of digital communication has been to help us forget, or perhaps brush over some of the foundation sales skills honed over the millennia of human activity, so here they are again:
- Listen rather than speak. Asking questions, listening to the responses, and then asking the follow up questions has always been, and will always be the best sales strategy.
- Benefits not features. When you are speaking, talk about the benefits of your offering to the “pitchee” rather than reciting the features. Customers are really only interested in what value a product is to them, not what the range of features may be, so focus on value to them by demonstrating how your product makes their life easier, more efficient, and more productive.
- Deliver useful insights, knowledge, and intelligence. Being of value to a customer is more than just flogging product, it is also about articulating the context in which the product will be used to add value. Clearly however, there is a line here with confidentiality, any potential customer who hears what their competitors may be doing from you will never trust you again to keep their confidence, but the best sales people are always able to deliver solutions to problems they have collaborated to articulate.
Easy to say, often hard to do.
Apr 24, 2014 | Branding, Category, Customers, Marketing, retail
Businesses spend many millions trying to understand the way consumers consider the choices confronting them in a supermarket. With up to 30,000 items on shelf, and some categories having hundreds of choices, it is a key consideration.
A mix of psychology, data science, habitual behaviour, discretionary spending dollars available, and individual preferences all play a role.
A complicated mix.
However, there is a way to at least clarify part of the mix.
Consumers use decision trees, usually without thinking about them when they are in a supermarket making their purchases.
Some purchases are automatic, a habitual choice, others are made after a considered set of choices on a range of factors important to the individual are made, and there are, obviously, many shades of this continuum that apply to a highly personal process.
Imagine a consumer approaching the dairy case looking for fruited yoghurt. Some may just buy their usual brand, flavour and size irrespective of everything else. Others will make a series of choices that will vary for every person, and may look something like the decision tree below.
It will differ for each individual, some will choose the brand first, others the flavour, or the size and price, and a whole range of variations on these factors, but based on the total sales, supermarkets will range products, and give them shelf positions and space based on sales, gross margins, delivered margins, and various promotional strategies. They also use a decision tree.
Retailers and suppliers spend huge amounts of effort, and resources. on this category management exercise, trying to read the consumers mind, and anticipate their reactions to various combinations that are available to them.
It is a data intensive exercise, well suited to the “big data” techniques that are evolving around us. Combining checkout data with store loyalty cards is now becoming commonplace, what is emerging currently is the integration of mobile and social media data into the mix.
As you walk into the store to buy something, there has already been lots of effort gone into reading your mind, and there will be lots of effort and money expended in store in an effort to manage your purchase decisions.
Apr 22, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
These days with the ubiquity of mobile and social, almost everyone is a media channel.
Recognising this simple fact changes the formula for media success. In the old days, the formula used so successfully by mass marketers was:
Money X mass media = Sales.
This used to work, no longer, now that media has fragmented into thousands of pieces, and individuals have a personal menu of media consumption based on their interests, time, and competing priorities in their lives. The formula marketers now have to use is something like:
Time X tailored and personalised media = a chance for a sale.
Much more uncertain.
In this context, spending some time considering the productivity of the investment being made in social media, and you are making them, even if it is just the employee who spends some of your time checking their facebook timeline, would be useful.
Following is a framework you might like to think about. The reality is that it is little different from a normal Marketing Audit, is it just that we are focussing on social and the content that fuels engagement.
Social media competitive analysis.
- What are we doing?
- What are direct competitors doing?
- What are the successful Social media attention grabbers doing?
- What kind of content are our competitors producing and distributing?
- How, where and when are they distributing?
- How are competitive strategies performing? A. In keeping their customers engaged, and, B. In attracting other customers, including ours
- Where do we have opportunities?
- Where are we under-performing?
- What can we do to restructure our activities within existing capabilities?
- What capabilities do we need/should be developed?
Content plan
- Determine the behavioural and “tone” of the intended audience
- Indentify what type of content should be developed
- Source and develop the content
- Create a content calendar
- Develop a set of performance metrics
- Build in the expectation of continuous A/B testing, tweaking testing, tweaking….
- Build a list of users, and track their use of and engagement with your content, being prepared to personalise
- Leverage the list, but ensure that the communication is always personal, and appropriate to the current situation of the prospect.
Repeat all above, again.
Content marketing has become all the rage, there are so called gurus out there selling new brands of snake-oil, and many are extraordinarily good at parting you with your money. However, the simple and fundamental truth of marketing remains: you must add value to your customers lives. Failure to do that results in just having a big bag of fancy hot air, not much use to anyone, no matter how fancy the plan.
Oh, and one last thing about plans that I bang on relentlessly to my clients: You get only 1 point out of 10 for the plan, the other 9 are reserved for implementation.
For a “How to” of an audit of the technical detail on your site, this post of Neil Patels is a terrific start.
I would value your feedback on how you undertake a content audit, so let me know.
Apr 14, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, retail, Sales
Walking into chain retailers these days you are inevitably confronted by displays of product, usually at a discount.
Most people seem to think that it is the retailer doing the promotion as a means to attract added sales, which is true, but the reality is that the promotion is funded by the suppliers, and it is a competition for the retail space that is generally won by those suppliers with the deepest pockets, and best information.
Retailers are in two businesses, selling stuff to consumers, and renting retail space to suppliers. Chain retailers business model relies on a formula that accommodates volume, revenue, and total margin over the space allocated. This can get very complicated, as the number of variables is enormous.
For a supplier to a chain retailer, the challenge is to balance the complex and competing demands of enterprise profitability and investment in the future against the need to meet retailer margin demands necessary to retain access to the consumer via the distribution controlled by the retailer.
Of real significance is the difference between sales that would have been made irrespective of promotional activity the “base sales rate” and sales made in a period as a result of promotional activity, “incremental sales”.
The need to fund retailer margin via promotional allowances is universal, but the sales that occur as a result of the activity may not be there when there is no activity, and are therefore” rented” sales. The effectiveness of the activity has many measures, but to the supplier two measures only are of any real use.
- The real cost of the promotional activity including all discounts on deal volumes and associated co-operative advertising.
- The number of consumers who convert over time from being a rented consumer to one who becomes a part of the base sales volume.
If you are not making these calculations, and adjusting the mix of your expenditure programs accordingly, and are prepared to make some very tough choices on the basis of the information gathered, chances are you are going broke being successful, a very common complaint in the Australian FMCG market.
Apr 1, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
What do I do now?
The great paradox in selling is that to sell successfully, we often raise the expectations of those to whom we are selling, but to have satisfied customers, we need to under promise and over-deliver.
Complicating that dilemma of the potential mis-match of promise and delivery is that people hear what they want to hear, filtering out stuff that is inconsistent, unexpected, off their personal radar, or is just uncomfortable, while interpreting and exaggerating the stuff they want to hear. This particularly applies to sales outside the expertise of a customer.
Flicking through the TV channels last night, a bit slower than usual, I saw (another) ad for some sort of home training device that promises to deliver me the body of an Adonis in 10 minutes a day with little effort. A classic case of over promising if ever I saw one, but I guess someone is sucked in every minute, or they would not be aired.
Wonder if the poorer suckers ever get their money back? Guess not, but they do get to keep the flab.
The only antidote is to build a brand that customers trust. To do that you need to deliver on the value proposition consistently, over a considerable period, and act with honestly, humility and transparency. Big call for the “fat-be-gone” industry.
