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  • Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

    Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

    Every business out there has probably been approached about a sponsorship, or included sponsorship in their marketing mix in one form or another, especially those with a consumer sales focus. But how do you make the selection of which one’s might be the most effective long-term?

    Careful selection of the events, products, and people you sponsor will allow you to activate that sponsorship to benefit fully from your association. In order to make a beneficial selection, you have to know your brand inside and out, and have a good handle on some of the more “outlying” characteristics that consumers have pinned to it – not just the ones you’re broadcasting about it. Some of those alternative characteristics can make for very solid sponsorships if you pick them carefully and engage fully with all the opportunities they offer.

    Many businesses don’t engage fully with the opportunities they do select, and get less-than-optimal returns as a result. This is one situation where you really do get out what you put in. Don’t stop at the logo on the sign, that’s just the beginning. Here’s ten ways to maximize the return on a sponsorship opportunity, planned or impromptu:

    For Event Sponsorships:

    10) Make sure to provide adequate materials to the event hosts so that all participants receive something from you at the event. Don’t short the count on the collateral, the promotional items or the literature, because that one person who gets left out will carry that impression longer and to more people than all the rest combined.

    9) Be sure your brand is represented adequately, accurately and repeatedly. You’ve purchased a certain level of exposure, and most event organizers will bend over backward to help you get it, but if you don’t speak up and remind them, you may not get everything you were promised. Check everything to be sure the brand is represented in the best possible light, and that it’s reproduced at an adequate size, color fidelity and resolution to do you some good – after all, you paid for it.

    8) Even if you don’t have something already created, make sure you take advantage of every portion of the sponsorship package. Most sponsorships are multi-faceted, and usually multi-media. If you don’t have elements in use already for each medium, be it flash video, print collateral, sales sheets, logo files in every possible format, bios, soundbites, banner ads, animated gifs, promotional blurbs and items, signage, banners, and other typical elements to take advantage of the whole package of opportunities, create whatever it is you’re missing. You might be the only one of the sponsors who does, in which case, guess who’s going to be the most memorable?

    7) Make sure the audience matches your efforts. Most brands have a broad range of demographic, psycho-graphic and geographic audiences it serves. Be sure the sponsorship you pick reaches at least a viable, sizable niche slice of your total target market. If not, it doesn’t make sense to participate.

    6) Make your selection based on LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE, and not just acquisition cost. It may cost you $25 to reach, influence and close a new customer to buy your product once. But if the event sponsorship is a valid one, you not only close one sale, but in most cases (if you’re doing your retention efforts correctly), you’ve gained a long-term customer who will enact or refer multiple sales over the next few years. Once you factor that in, the numbers on ROI work much better.

    5) Do your part of participate in the success of the event. Your name and your brand is now attached to this event. Do you part to promote it, get some mileage of your own out of your participation, fill the stands and pack the seats – it‘s to your benefit, it drives that many more people to view your participation, and bring you more customers.

    4) If the package doesn’t fit, ask for what you want. Most event organizers want the sponsorship to benefit you, so that you’ll repeat or extend your participation and become an evangelist for their event. They want to make you happy, and will negotiate in good faith if you have an alternative proposal to present. If you don’t ask, they won’t likely offer what you want. The tough part is accepting and using the valuations attached to each element. Most often it pays to just make the best overall deal you can, and work it to the fullest.

    3) Pick events that make interaction logical. A mountain bike company sponsoring a swimming event doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that same company sponsoring an off-road bike race makes perfect sense. That’s not to say that you can’t sponsor an event outside your industry, you just have to be selective so that the audience can easily make the connection between your brand and the activity they‘re engaged in at the moment.

    2) Make the sponsorship an integral part of your strategy, even if it isn’t. Plan your sponsorships to work with your product’s sales curve, either to boost the top or fill in the troughs, seasonally or geographically. If you’re expanding your service or delivery area, work events on the fringes of your current area to make the expansion more organic. If you sell primarily in the summer, work the earlier and earlier events, or later into the fall to extend your season and broaden your exposure.

    l) Don’t select more sponsorships or pick more events than you can fully support. The up-front cost is just the tip of the iceberg, and once you add manpower hours, staff training, brand monitoring time, collateral and participation costs, and follow-up and activation costs, it’s easy to get overextended, and not give a full effort to anything, a recipe for failure. Make an honest commitment to the right mix of events and participate fully for the greatest benefit.

    Making smart selections when choosing a sponsorship is a combination of art and science, and the basis is really knowing your market, knowing your brand intimately, and using some common sense with an audience perspective. Sponsorship can be a strong part of your marketing mix, if you make the right choices and work them to the fullest.

    If you found these tips helpful and would like to read more, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Let Customer’s Imagination Flow for Effective Research

    Let Customer’s Imagination Flow for Effective Research

    If you want to boost sales, increase membership, enhance volunteer participation, increase market share or find new profit niches, the best methods start with knowing your target audience. One of the most effective ways to do that is to listen to them. How you listen, and how you organize and collate the results of that listening is the determining factor in the usefulness of the data, and the accuracy and actionability of your analysis. Clearly, much depends on the goal, but the type of research you select will drive the type of information you receive, and dictate how reliable it is.

    For sales-, membership-, and interest-based organizations, a method termed “Right-Brain” research could hold the key to cost effective, actionable information you can use quickly and effectively to increase your knowledge of prospective customers.

    The human brain consists of two “hemispheres” left and right. Based on Nobel award-winning research by Roger Sperry in the late 1960s, it was determined that each has different functions and characteristics associated with it. Sperry’s research showed that the Left side of the brain is responsible for the more linear functions and thoughts – math, computation, organization, languages (not speech directly), rational analysis, value prioritization and decision-making. The Right side is responsible for the more interpretive and sensory aspects, like art, music, philosophy, creativity, visualization, and imagination. Left is rational, Right is more intuitive and emotional, while neither is exclusively that way. In fact, the aspect of “handedness” is reversed; with the right side controlling motor and other functions on the left side of our bodies and vice versa. Recent studies have proven this to less than completely accurate, but it seems to work in practical applications.

    Often in decision-making, especially regarding purchasing behavior, the Left side is informed by the Right. The Left rationalizes the emotional inputs from the Right to drive a purchasing decision. To drive sales, it is fundamental to appeal to that tricky Right side. When divining the needs of the customer or prospect pool you’d like to reach, it is important to gather and record output directly from the Right side. One way to accomplish that is through verbal communication. A long-form, personal, one-on-one discussion with customers, but on a large, organized scale, will elicit results you can put to use in crafting a strategy to approach the entire pool of prospects. In short, the resulting data from such small group research is projectable.

    Right-brain research has been used to test new products in the prototype stage, test new concepts for advertising, movies, even gauge the effectiveness of customer service or test brand attributes for entire companies. It can be very effective, but it requires a high level of organization, some time and patience in listening and interpreting the results, and some resources to create the components and arrange for the interviews.

    The components of this method are fairly straightforward:

    • A set of goals for the research should be established and communicated to all involved – what do you hope to find out or accomplish when you are done?
    • Describe the target audience for this goal. Discover what attributes they have in common, what characteristics can be used to select them from the general population, and how they differ from the rest of the audience.
    • A profile of the ideal participant is developed. That profile is used to select a representative sample of respondents to participate in the interviews. This profile can include age, gender, marital status, purchasing behavior, geographic proximity, socio-economic status, professional standing or experience, education, membership in organizations and many other properties.
    • A Discussion Guide or Study Guide is created. This is the blueprint for the interviews, the guide for the interviewer to weave into their questions and discussions with the participants. It starts with the goals from the first step, to be sure that the questions drive responses that allow the researcher to answer the goals. It sounds simple, but if the goals are not realistic or the scope of the study is too broad, it will show up at this stage. This study guide is the key to effective implementation of this type of research. The questions have to be formulated in such a way as to elicit a response that is accurate, honest, direct, and emotionally unguarded. Often questions are asked multiple times in different ways to check for consistency of the answers.
    • Create the list of possible participants. In some cases, especially for consumer research of this type, the facility can offer some assistance in this area, as they often have pools of potential respondents and a good database of names and demographic data from which to select a pool of candidates. Selections are made based on how closely they fit the selected set of attributes from the profile.
    • Candidates are recruited by phone, either by your staff or by the facility, and the offer is made. Most participants are compensated for their time, either with cash or an incentive gift of some sort that will appeal to the intended audience. Professionals like doctors and attorneys are usually compensated at a higher level as their time already has a given “value” in monetary terms, an hourly rate.
    • Respondents are scheduled for their interviews, which are usually 60-90 minutes in length. More than 10 interview sets per day per interviewer are not recommended as fatigue for the interviewers tends to taint the results. More than one interview can be conducted at one time, depending upon the availability of interviewers and the size of the facility. Over book initially on each day to account for no-shows when you confirm the schedule the day before the interviews by phone.
    • The interviews are conducted by skilled interviewers, professionals who are personable, knowledgeable, aware of the goals to be achieved, perceptive and skilled in interpreting human emotions and the associated verbal and physical cues that telegraph them. They are terrific listeners, and skillful at guiding the conversation to keep it on track and on time. The facilities can often recommend or have interviewers on staff.
    • Each interview is recorded to capture both audio and video, and tapes are labeled and packaged with the release form for each subject for later reference.

    Once the interviews are conducted, the tapes are reviewed, and transcripts are made, to remove any “image bias” generated by the subject’s appearance. Those tapes and those transcripts are used to analyze and codify the results, to distill them into some sort of organized format that can be used to make recommendations for action.

    How do you make the jump from transcripts to action?

    Analyzing the results of such research is a skill unto itself, as the interviews generate a huge amount of data, buried deep in the responses. It takes time and patience,(and a very left-brain-oriented person) to organize, sift, and distill all those conversations, picking out commonalities and similarities among them, and highlighting stark differences and inconsistencies that can signal false results, or emotionally guarded responses. Once that glut of data is distilled and interpreted, those interpretations are put together in an organized fashion, ranked, rated and codified, much as you would survey data or focus group data. Those ratings and rankings are put into a report, along with recommendations for action.

    Uses for the final analysis vary widely. Some distill the video recordings, editing them down to some representative responses for each major question, some pro and some con, and present them in video form along with the written analysis. Sometimes, just the transcript is enough to get a sense of the trend of the responses, and can show glaring problems or highlight positive areas simply and quickly. Sometimes the two are combined in a multi-media presentation for added impact.

    This type of research can highlight any number of aspects of the prospect pool, depending on how the research guide is structured. The more aspects of the prospective audience that are included in the study, the less depth you get in any one area. For a accurate study that is statistically projectable, and has a high degree of confidence, 30-40 interviews will usually suffice. Depending on how small the area of interest or niche you want to study, the toughest part might be finding enough respondents to interview.

    How does The Right Brain Approach complement other research methods?

    The Right Brain Approach measures emotions, not people.  Quantitative data is valuable, but the information it provides can be even more valuable when used in conjunction with Right Brain Research.  For example, if you conduct Right Brain Research before a quantitative survey, you will know what the key issues are and will be able to ask the right questions and ask them in the right way based on the actual language that consumers use.  Once Right Brain Research results are known, future surveys can target the factors that affect buying decisions with more accuracy.

    How can we use what we learn from Right Brain Research in conjunction with the results of our quantitative research?

    What you gain in understanding from Right Brain Research will illuminate the information garnered in quantitative assessments.  Now you have a chance to know the rest of the story!  Actually, the Paul Harvey analogy is an excellent one.  He tells you all the facts with no interpretive framework.  Your mind goes off in all different directions trying to make sense of what he is saying.  Then he hits you with a surprising ending or twist and all the facts make sense in a startling way.  This is what Right Brain Research can do for your company/brand/packaging.*

    No matter how you approach it, speaking directly with a population closely representative of your target audience is extremely empowering in it ability to accurately inform your creative, sales, membership recruitment or product development activities. You can’t know too much about customers, and this method allows you to gain insights that can’t be accessed any other way quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.

  • Reach Your Audience The Way THEY Want You To, and Success Will Follow . . .

    Reach Your Audience The Way THEY Want You To, and Success Will Follow . . .

    It has been said that on occasion at least, the medium is the message, and that’s a good thing to keep in mind when setting up your next marketing program. However, the choice of media is not really up to you anymore – and no, despite all the rumors, it’s not up to your ad agency, either – it’s really up to your customers. Sometimes, it’s via newspaper or magazine, sometimes it’s television or radio, often it involves a digital component, e-mail or a website, blog or social media platform. Regardless of which one, you have to let the customer decide which they prefer to interact with your brand, which one has credibility for them, which one will carry the message most effectively, or which combination will move the emotional needle and spur a buying decision or action of some sort. That’s really the goal, isn’t it?

    I want to thank John Garcia, a writer for The Business Journal chain of media (print and online both) for coining the term “Tradigital” to describe the proper mixture of traditional and digital media used to reach a given audience. In a world full of cutesy contractions of celebrities’ names, this stands out as a brilliant single word explanation of the best approach to finding the audience in the right way.

    As always, the key to making the best balance of Tradigital media selection, good, solid customer research is the best place to start the planning process. Dip into your customer base, review your prior media mix, see what’s working and what’s not, and for whom, then vet it with some in-depth, interrogatory interviews with actual customers, asking them specific, actionable, emotionally-driven questions regarding how they feel about interacting with your brand both traditionally and digitally, see if you can divine their decision-making process and where they like to start versus where they enter your actual sales process.

    Data in hand, now it’s time to make some decisions. Do you need to reinvent the wheel, recreate the existing sales funnel to match your customer’s preferences more closely, or are just a few reorganizational tweaks all that is needed?  Only your data can tell you for sure. Certainly, the more closely your sales process aligns with their decision-making process, the more comfortable your customers will be interacting with you, and the more often they will return to buy again – you win!

    Getting the mix right can be tricky, but with two types of data to work from, transactional and anecdotal, you should be able to connect the dots mixed in with some experiencial knowledge and common sense and get pretty close.

    If you don’t feel comfortable doing this type of baseline research with your own customers yourself, hire a professional to work with you and get you going in the right direction – they do this all the time and are objective and understanding at once, able to empathize with customers while keeping their emotional distance so that it doesn’t influence their analysis. That what professionals are for.

    Did you get it right? Time will tell, as will your sales dashboard. Unfortunately, the job is never done, as the customer parameters and demographics shift and change over time, so even if you got it right for now, you’ll need to keep a close eye on it and be prepared to shift over time as customers evolve and change.

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    Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Innovation: Bravery + Curiosity + Support = Advancement

    Innovation: Bravery + Curiosity + Support = Advancement

    As we effect change at various client organizations, mostly through redirecting the current marketing efforts, we often encounter some underlying resistance from some of the down-line managers. Most of this has very little to do with our efforts specifically, and has much to do with aversion or resistance to change in general. We are change agents by nature, indeed that’s the reason we are engaged is to effect change. If change wasn’t needed, we wouldn’t be there . . .

    The question often arises, “How do we mitigate this resistance and achieve full consensus throughout the company to drive the program forward successfully?”

    The answer often lies in two areas:

    1) We realize that you can’t please all the people all the time (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln), and there will always be dissenters and those who don’t completely buy in to the new programs or processes. The way we’ve found success in handling those is to isolate, educate, reformulate, and redirect those individuals. This keeps them from spreading negative messaging throughout the firm, poisoning the well.

    2) We understand that much of the atmosphere of innovation we are trying to create comes from the roots of corporate culture, and so that’s where you start to effect the necessary changes.

    That all sounds good on paper, but what does it really mean to client companies?

    Like many such changes in corporate behavior, it all starts at the top. We work closely with CEOs so that they understand the impact of their downstream messages, and help them position the new elements in the proper light, so they can lead by example, both in action and words. Once the messaging of innovation is firmly established, it should be supported by new programs run by Human Resources, so that innovation carries an incentive and is rewarded. This clearly establishes the goals and guidelines for those individuals responsible for activating those new elements.

    Once that infrastructure is in place, mid- and lower-level managers can be directed both by specific goal and by example, to help create the atmosphere that supports innovation, building competitive teams, setting an agenda that drives innovation and rewards initiative, and stresses accountability.

    This trickle down effect needs to be championed all the way through the rank and file and out to customers, suppliers, vendors and support groups, so that it rings true no matter what angle the company is viewed from.

    More on this issue in a later entry, but for now, effect change, champion the positive effects, and guide the culture and the results will follow!

    If you like this article, and would like to read more like this, subscribe to this blog above and more will delivered to your inbox for free! Also, be sure and pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Build Customer Brand Loyalty by Letting Them Depend On You

    Build Customer Brand Loyalty by Letting Them Depend On You

    Consumer’s purchasing behaviors have changed over the last 20 years, yet many companies are still marketing like it was 1954, pushing down advertising messages, focusing on media buys and eye-ball numbers, knowing little about how customers decide to purchase their products, how often, and most importantly, why.

    Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor and researcher at Stanford University, posits that consumers have essentially three categories of input when making a purchasing decision: Preferences, prior personal experience, brand impression (P), point of purchase messaging, advertising from outside sources, packaging, shelf positioning, coupons, price point, (M), and the input of peers and others they know or have seen, like online reviews by customers, friends and family, co-workers, etc, (O). There is a balance between these three that needs to be satisfied, and he contends that it’s a zero-sum game, since the more you rely on one factor to make purchasing decisions, the less you rely on the other two.

    Your job as a marketer is to make marketing, (M), the most influential it can be, since it’s the only factor you have direct control over. But this can back-fire if the other factors are too far out of balance one way or another. If all your marketing messaging, packaging, color selection, product size, convenience, media placements, shelf placements are all perfectly aligned, but the product itself is too far down-scale for the audience, or the quality is low, or the need for the product disappears or is usurped by an innovation, you still lose the race with the consumer. Too many negative reviews, bad word-of-mouth buzz, poor peer referral, and even if the marketing is perfect, the product will tank.

    This effect is tied to several factors inherent in the product itself. The higher the complexity, the broader the range of choices, the more important peer review becomes. The risk of making an ill-advised purchase rise with the level of price and complexity of the product. A carton of milk isn’t too complex, and the price point is relatively low risk, as purchases go. Under those circumstances, even though there is a seemingly ever-widening range of choices of types of milk, (P) plays the largest part of the purchase decision. It would take a tremendous amount of marketing dollars to shift that and make people’s perceptions and purchasing habits change. On the other hand, items like cars, computers, and personal consumption, (like restaurants), rely increasingly on peer reviews to drive purchasing behavior.

    As marketers, it’s our job to make our efforts so direct, so appealing, so transparent and dependable, to make our brand so reliable and stable, that our brand burnishes consumer’s choices of ANYTHING carrying that brand. That makes (M) the biggest factor, and develops a level of trust with the consumer that really moves the needle in the long term. This serves several purposes, including strangling competitors and locking them out, expanding the brand’s circle of influence, broadening the potential audience for the brand, and keeps the brand evolving and contemporary with the target consumer as their behavior grows and shifts throughout their lives, keeping the brand relevant.

    Review sites and their reviewers change constantly. If you want to win the battle for consumer mindshare, continually strive for quality, keep your brand consistent with that quality, and go the extra mile for customers – that way no matter what the platform or source of the review, they will be overwhelmingly positive and you’ll get the purchasing nod.

    Did you find this interesting? If you’d like more information like this, subscribe tot his blog and they will land in your inbox weekly, FREE. Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Can You Spare 111 Minutes for Better Direct Marketing Results?

    Can You Spare 111 Minutes for Better Direct Marketing Results?

    When we get near the Holidays, we often get requests to do special mailings, Holidays card mailings, special e-mail templates and the like, usually these projects consist of smaller batches and less-organized data, and often for the printed material, not particularly machinable materials. If there is one area that could save mailers money, and make the process run more smoothly and quickly, it’s data hygiene.

    A clean list is a thing of beauty. Each piece of data has it’s place, it’s all in the right format, it’s been put through NCOA, it’s been postal standardized, CASS Certified, in zip order, and will personalize and mail completely and reliably. A responsive list is a clean list – there’s nothing worse than getting mail at your address with someone else’s name on it, or with your name spelled incorrectly, or genderized incorrectly. I had a male friend named Tracy, and if I had a nickel for every piece of mail he got addressed to Mrs. or Ms. Tracy Smith, I could have retired long ago. He learned early on that if mailers didn’t know him well enough from his purchase history or habits to properly genderize his name, they didn’t know him well enough for him to spend his money with them. Good lesson there, mailers.

    For the smaller projects, data organization and software platform choice can also save you money. Make sure that your fields in your database are labeled clearly and intuitively. First Name, yes! Name 1, no! If you’re using Excel, for smaller projects, under 1000 records, this will still be quite adequate if the spreadsheet is set up correctly. Even a table in Word, for really small projects, say under 200 records, can work if the table is set up correctly, so that the fields can be edited in aggregate, sizes and type fonts adjusted to fit the label template being used, etc.

    For anything over 1000 records, a real database, Access, or Act!, or a straight ASCII file, can work well. Please include a record layout with these, so I can see how your fields array, and make sure you’ve included all the right fields to make it mail properly.

    For e-mail drops, especially holiday lists, its worth taking an hour and reviewing each address, one by one, to see if

    1) It conforms to the standard of an e-mail address: xxx@xxxxx.xxx

    2) You can weed out the ones that are sent to a general mailbox, info@xxxxx.com. When you run them through the mailer program and it personalizes each greeting, “Dear info” won’t really work.

    3) You can confirm that these recipients are still at that domain and if the domain is legitimate or live

    All three of those steps, for a modest-sized e-mail list, should take you roughly an hour and a half or less – our list took 111 minutes to standardize and vet, including a random sample being looked up on their website to check the domains and to ask around the office to see if that contact was still at that address. In that time, we spotted and removed roughly 20% of the list, saving us the cost of not only sending that mailing, but others subsequent to it, and cut way down on time spent sorting and handling the bouncebacks, and boosted our response percentage accordingly on future mailings using that list. Its a win-win if there ever was one.

    Spend a little time now to clean and vet your list, and it will save time and money later, likely for the balance of the year.

    If you found these tips valuable and would like more information to make your marketing program more effective, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • 5 Ways To Waste Your Firm’s Marketing Budget On Research

    5 Ways To Waste Your Firm’s Marketing Budget On Research

    Alexandra’s hit it on the head with this one. Precisely what we’ve been telling our clients for years.

    Top 5 Ways to Waste Your Professional Services Firm’s Money on Research

    By Alexandra Marigodova

    More and more firms are discovering the extraordinary power of strategic marketing research. In fact, Hinge’s own research shows the firms that conduct systematic research on their current and potential clients grow from 3 to 10 times faster and are up to 2X more profitable.

     

    Faster growth and more profits – that’s the power of research. But in order to work, it needs to be done right!  This blog post lists some of the most common, budget-murdering mistakes that are easy to avoid.

    1. Use Research Designed for Consumer Products

    The truth is, marketing research started in the consumer sector in the 1920s. Client research built on consumer product research is truly the “mullet” of professional services research. It’s out of style, it doesn’t quite fit, and it makes us cringe here at Hinge.

    Think about it. Trying to figure out how to sell accounting services using methods designed to market baby formula just isn’t the best strategy. Purchasing a product at the supermarket involves less risk and different decision makers. This is one sure way to waste your firm’s hard-earned money.

    Instead: Use research designed for professional services. One thing for sure, professional services buyers don’t purchase on impulse. To design the right research, you first need to “pilot test.” Ask open-ended questions, then turn them into categories. First explore, and only then narrow down.

    1. Ask Little Questions

    By nature, people are greedy. Many try to pack very granular, nitpicky questions to get the most bang for the buck. Our mind tells us to add, when we should be subtracting. Asking little questions is one of the easiest ways to introduce bias and get meaningless results.

    Instead: Focusing on the big questions will yield the most results. Think of it as removing layers rather than adding more to get to the real truth – what’s most important for your firm. Think more along the lines of how your clients would describe the real value that your firm delivers, rather than how they feel about a specific service.

    1. Use Quantitative OR Qualitative Questions

    More often than not, we come across research studies that ask “what” without asking “why.” This is especially common for times when quantitative data tells us what we want to hear. Imagine you got this finding: “80% of our clients are very loyal to the firm.” And… full stop. We don’t need to know more, right? Wrong. You just missed an opportunity to find out what makes you so unique that the clients want to stay with you.

    Instead: Use BOTH quantitative and qualitative questions. “What” should always be followed by “why.” Understand the reasons behind the numbers and listen to what your respondents are trying to tell you.

    1. Poison the Pot with Judgment Words and Phrases

    What’s wrong with the question below?

    “On a scale of 0 to 10, how important are the awesome services that firm X provides to you?”

    I spoiled the question on purpose, so it’s an extreme example. As you can tell, it explicitly tells the respondent that the services are, in fact, awesome. We can’t both ask for an opinion and give our own. Freedom of expression to all of our respondents!

    In all seriousness, surveys often use descriptive adjectives and add unnecessary leading information. Dictate the results of your research and lose money.

    Instead: Use neutral language and phrases to let the respondent make the call. The questions themselves can impact the objectivity with which people respond to them. Be mindful of word choices and put extreme care into the wording of your questions.

    1. Talk to the Wrong People

    Another way to pour money down the drain is to ask a whole bunch of wrong people. Even with the right set of questions, the wrong set of people will not give you meaningful results.

    There are really two predominant ways to mess up your sample – trying to ask each and every person or only talking to clients you have the best relationships with.

    Instead: Use smaller, highly targeted sample groups. Ask yourself, “What does the client I want to do business with look like?” and “Who are my most desired prospects?” Interview them.  Ask your internals, too. It’s important to see how well your employees know their clients.

    The growing investment into research in professional services also exponentially increases the amount of blunders. But don’t worry! Now you know how to avoid the common mistakes. No need to risk your money. It’s time to get actionable results from research to grow your firm and become more profitable. For a more comprehensive overview of best practices, download our free Professional Services Guide to Research.

  • To Provide a Positive Customer Experience, You Have To Know What They Want

    To Provide a Positive Customer Experience, You Have To Know What They Want

    In some ways the modern brand ambassador marketer’s job has changed focus in recent years. Recently, its not so much about informing or enticing the buyer, it’s about delivering on a promise and providing an “experience” to go with the transaction. In our experience, we’ve found it difficult to create and provide an enticing customer experience if you don’t have a rock-solid grip on what the customer really wants and will respond to from your brand and your product.

    This getting-to-know-you activity can take a number of forms, but the bottom line is that not only is your customer base a dynamic entity, ever changing, growing in need and sophistication, shifting in it’s preferences and requirements, but is composed of an ever-transient population, because most data, especially transactional data, is static, it’s a snapshot of the group at that particular moment. In order to avoid this, smart companies with the long-term view have devised and implemented a system for driving ongoing customer feedback, interaction and input that lets the company keep a finger on the pulse of it’s customers. Once that pulse has been taken, an environment, an experience can be crafted and replicated for each customer that resonates in a positive, energetic fashion.

    In the retail world, customer experience is often focused on the physical environment – rack height, sight lines, lighting, merchandise selection and placement, shelf space allocation, aisle configuration to drive traffic down high-profit aisles, signage digital and otherwise, music, even scent, are all priority considerations. The digital realm of retailing doesn’t offer those aspects, at least not yet, but they have their own “experience” concerns. Eye-tracking, navigation and dwell-times, abandonment of the cart, payment processing glitches, as well as things like color selection, use of white space, imagery, user-interaction studies and the like take the place of lighting and shelf space concerns. But the experience in both cases goes beyond the physical environment in which the shopping occurs.

    Customer experience has to do with the initial engagement (how you already feel about the company and the purchase before you even get there), to the initial contact (are you greeted sincerely at the door, are you made to feel welcome, do they even HAVE what you want), and continues to the shopping and selection phase (do they stock what you want, in your size or color, is it really the item you thought it was, and did the onsite staff assist you in making the selection or a decision between two similar items), through the payment, the upsell, and the return and aftercare phases.

    If somehow all of that goes well, the experience can still be less than perfect – did you FEEL that it was a good experience, did you feel guilty for making the purchase or did you get good justification for the quality/price/value equation of the purchase, among other elements.

    For marketers, especially online marketers, that means you have to have a stranglehold on what your customers value, what parts of that transactional chain they value most highly, how they prefer to be approached and what their ultimate goal is in making the purchase – a tall order for a couple of images and a screen or two of product description. But good research can answer those questions and save the day.

    Know the customer, show your interest through offering an accurate engagement and a welcoming, familiar presence, and carry through on the promise, and the customer experience will be a positive one.

    For more thoughts on how important research and customer engagement are to successful marketing, a FREE white paper on customer engagement is available at www.Granite-part.com just for the asking.

  • Is facebook Your New Customer Service Department?

    Is facebook Your New Customer Service Department?

    I was speaking with some colleagues at a networking function the other day, and the presenter asserted that some companies have scaled back their customer service phone centers, and some have virtually done away with theirs altogether. The natural extension of this is the assertion that eventually all customer service would be performed through, and customer interaction take place on, social media platforms. Initially, I was astounded at the audacity of such a possible future, but upon further reflection, this might not be such a bad thing . . .

         

    There are some advantages to this strategy, including:

    1) All interactions can be collected, cataloged into a database, and searched for trends later to guide not only marketing, but new product development.

    2) Both parties to the interaction would have a record, held on an independent server, so that the practice of CS takes a more friendly footing, rather that degenerating into a “He said, She said” proposition for long-term issues.

    3) Since CS is often outsourced, and off-shored, having all customer communication be transacted in writing eliminates problems with misunderstandings due to accents and local dialectic usage – spell check and autocorrect should take care of 80% of that problem, anyway.

    4) Having to write down your problem forces the customer to think through the problem from beginning and end, and to actually ask for the action they would like the company to take. So many customer call and say things like “I bought this and it’s not what I wanted” or something else equally vague, and expect the company to not only know what the problem is, but to try and solve it in satisfactory fashion without actually being asked to do so.

    5) Having to write down your issues brings down the tempo of the conversation, makes the customer think about how that problem might sound to others, and gives the customer some time to calm down and remove some of the emotion from the issue before assaulting the CS rep on the phone.

    Those are mostly advantages to the company, but the consumer gains a few benefits too.

    • It’s hard to be given the run-around being transferred to different departments as the company tries to figure out how to deal with you, or tries to avoid it at all
    • No more waiting on hold endlessly to ask a simple question not listed as a choice on the phone tree.
    • Now you have some time to gather your documents, account numbers, invoices and the like and organize your thoughts into something coherent someone can actually act upon.
    • Now there’s a public record of your complaint, available to all your friends! They can steer clear of the company if the problem is severe enough or not handles promptly and effectively – it’s like everyone’s a walking copy of Consumer Reports!
    • Digital interaction is here, the technology is so advanced that “chatting” has taken on an entirely new connotation, all encompassing a digital conversation online with a rep on the other end in real time.

    Now, that’s not to say there’s no downside to all this digital back and forth. Companies gain some great insights from their interpersonal contacts with customer, or at least they should if they are listening. Nothing telegraphs a problem better than watching the phone banks light up and hearing the noise level rise in the Call Center ten minutes after the release of a new version of a piece of software or the launch of a new product, or a new issue of a newsletter or magazine hits the mail stream. That cumulative noise tells you in a collective, aggregate fashion that something is amiss, and it had better be dealt with quickly and effectively to stem the tied of customer defection and mitigate damage to the brand.

    The big loss is the interpersonal connection customers feel with the brands they know and love. Sometimes you just want to talk to a “human being,” not be dealt with in turn by a machine or work through a series of choices on a phone tree. All the kitten pictures and blather about meals on social media will never replace that human connection, and the reassurance that there is “someone” responsible for taking care of your problem. Digital pixels aren’t accountable, and it leads to a distancing and disconnection between customers  and the company, which is what your marketing efforts are designed to avoid.

    What do you think? Will social media replace customer service in the near future? Comment below, or contact me through LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter, or through my automated customer service website . . .

  • Battle For The Bucks: Big Data VS. Good Data

    Battle For The Bucks: Big Data VS. Good Data

    With marketers, retailers and web pundits delving into the topic of Big Data, studying their Google Analytics report like it’s the Zapruder film and studying up on their compiler language, how does all that information translate into creating products that people love and that fly off the shelves?

    I contend that there are two elements of this, one is Big Data, which shows you a tranactionally-based road map of what’s popular, what people like, what they prefer given an unlimited number of choices, and can show you how people’s purchase decision gets made; and Good Data, which is gained through other means than digital, but has a digital internet component, and can show you WHY people prefer one thing over another, WHY they gravitate to certain elements or items, WHAT MAKES things popular, WHAT their needs might be in their daily lives BEFORE its been created and marketed.

    The two are different and both are extremely useful in putting together a cogent innovation program that can generate the new things we all crave and to marketing them effectively and making them popular and successful. One is only “better” than the other under specific constraints and circumstances. I tend to use both depending upon the project, Good data being the best and most useful to drive new product or service innovation, and Big Data the most useful for gathering and testing theorems and intelligence on applications and market positioning for the product once it’s been developed.

    True innovation is a brand new, never been seen before element, and therefore Big Data will not be able to provide you with any comparative data because there’s nothing to compare it to. I doubt the folks at Apple tried to sift through transactional data to see if anyone wanted an MP3 player the size of a lighter with a thumb wheel selector, but if you had asked individuals (primary insight research, Good Data), how they listened to music, where they listened to music most often, and how they WANTED to be able to listen to music (while running, exercising, swimming, in the car,), and why they couldn’t do those things with the current gear, those answers might have lead you to create the iPod.

    The wealth of Big Data spawned by tracked internet traffic, and the dearth of Good Data based on ineffective feedback loops, automated CS phone trees and do-it-yourself web-based customer service devices have isolated the bigger more established brands, those with a solid customer base, and a culture often lacking in specific innovation paths beyond incremental improvements f the current product line. That isolation will likely have a dampening effect on those firm’s ability to innovate over the next several years and beyond, if internal structural changes to the organization are not made and a comprehensive, skin-thin customer facing transparency established so that consumer input can be distilled into actionable intelligence quickly and efficiently.

    Those firms without an effective “Data Loop” to constantly feed the development teams a source of Good Data will slowly stagnate and become copy-cat innovators, while those closest to their own customers will clear a path to new product development that is facile, smooth and relevant on an ongoing basis, fostering innovation in search of customer happiness. Expensive? Not really, when considered against the cost of lost customer base, eroding market share, lack of attention to pirated technology due to inattention to customer need, defense of intellectual property infringement and a host of other ills facing a stagnant brand.

    If you think like I do, and want to help your company become a place that fosters innovation, comment below, or contact me via e-mail at dpoulos@granite-part.com or on LinkedIn.