Starting and sustaining relationships

November 18th, 2008 Nic

For B2B marketers communications are all about starting and sustaining relationships – moving the prospects to the next stage of the buying process and motivating customers to interact with you. Digital is an incredibly powerful medium to initiate, develop and sustain successful working relationships. There are a number of strategies that can be employed to increase opportunities in the pipeline, whilst decreasing transactional costs and creating customer loyalty. And the beauty of it is, it works whether your customers are in Sydney or Sydenham.

How do you effectively build relationships online? Here are few starting points:

1. Hold their hand: A dedicated landing page is the single most effective way to turn a click into a prospect. A relevant landing page can easily double conversions versus sending clicks to the homepage, and testing your pages can increase conversions. Together, these tactics alone can result in more leads for every dollar you spend.
 
2. Start a conversation directly with them: Digital provides the means to create and deliver incredibly targeted messaging, create specific customer-centric microsites, online demos or applications. Provide discussion boards and forums, inviting conversation between you and your customers. Talk with prospects in language they understand and show your dedication by creating messages that are directly related to their business issues and the solutions you can offer.
 
3. Usability, design & interaction: The user-experience is vital to fostering your relationship online. The site created for your customer should have them at the heart of it. If your site is designed poorly or is confusing, clients will favour an online presence that is easier to use and navigate. Frustration and irritation are not the emotions you want to evoke in your prospects. If your clients can’t find what they are looking for or the site is slow and clunky, they will go elsewhere.

So, whichever side of the world you’re on, if you want to find out more, get in touch.

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Time to tell it how it is

October 30th, 2008 Fran

There is incontrovertible proof from both the IPA and the Marketing Society that continuing to market in a downturn not only protects your business but puts you in an immeasurably stronger position when things improve. But despite that, marketers are in fear. We all know that it’s marketing budgets that are the easy ones to cut, agencies that get stood down and marketing staff who tend to get laid off.

Now here’s an interesting thing. Since the arrival of the credit crunch my inbox and even my desk are filled with invitations to events to help us ‘perform through adversity’ or ‘win in a downturn’. Everywhere you turn companies are emphasising how their particular product or service will help you save money or get more from your budget. Special discounts abound.

It’s as if people have finally realized that if they want to sell something they’ve got to come up with an absolutely compelling reason why I should attend this, buy that, or go there. Maybe, as Ben said last week, we are finally getting the idea that the purpose of what we do is to shift some product.

And I quite like the fact that it feels like businesses are fighting back instead of sitting with their heads in their hands.

A Blitz mentality? Perhaps. But at least it forces us all to think hard about exactly what it is we are selling and how to express it in a way which hits our target audiences right between the eyes.

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Let’s shift some product

October 17th, 2008 Ben

Too many people who work in marketing forget that we’re here to shift product. In times like these it’s especially important to think how marketing can support sales. 12% of the US workforce are in sales; so in honor of them here are a few of the people that put sales on the map.

Joe Girard – Sold 13,001 Chevys in his career. That’s six cars every day for 15 years.
Alfred Fuller - Fuller Cleaning Brush Co legitimized door-to-door selling. They reckon he and his colleagues knocked on 75% of the doors of all US households in the 1960s
Li Ka-shing – who allegedly swam across the Pearl River from China to Hong Kong with nothing but a plastic flower in his teeth. Today’s he’s worth $26bn

The close relationships that people in business brands have with customers and prospects means we all influence the sales process. Just because it’s online doesn’t make it different. Once in a while we should put ourselves in the car showroom or stand on the doormat. Let’s shift some product.

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Would you rather work in a bank?

September 18th, 2008 Fran

Building Bank Brands in Difficult Markets. An ironic title for the conference I attended on Tuesday. Or maybe the organisers were more prescient than most. Either way, Lehman Brothers jokes were in short supply.

What became obvious over the course of the day was that building a bank brand had little to do with branding or advertising and everything to do with the customer experience. Banks are service brands. As a result, the single most importance influencer in building a differentiated brand with customers was the bank’s staff. How well the bank manages to gain staff buy-in to its aims is what really differentiates the good from the bad. That and how far the organisation actually allows them to provide a positive experience to customers. Which takes us back to something brand managers do know; that if the gap between the brand promise (We’re the Listening Bank) and the brand experience (AVR hell and overseas call centres) is too wide, you’ll lose your customers in between the two.

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