davidpoulos.com

Category: Communications

  • New Trends Not Always The Most Valuable

    New Trends Not Always The Most Valuable

    As a marketing consultant, I tend to observe things critically, find parallels and patterns in everything, to try and make sense of what I see and experience, so I can apply those learnings to client problems. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes, not so much.

    This morning, my young son Alex, was playing in the livingroom. At 4, he sort of wanders around the room, and when his eye catches something bright and shiny or something he remembers from yesterday’s play session that was fun, he makes a bee-line for the new toy, dropping whatever he’s got in his hand already. Even though the “old” toy was perfectly captivating just 10 seconds ago, suddenly it’s yesterday’s news and he drops it like its hot in favor of the “new” one.

    It dawned on me that some of my clients had exhibited this same behavior regarding their marketing and outreach activities. They were rolling along, sending out e-mail, sending out letters, engaging members or customers with their website, growing steadily, when someone pipes up in a meeting “Hey, why aren’t we on Twitter?” or “Why don’t we have a Facebook page?”

    Before you know it, the whole marketing and IT department is discussing profiles, and launching pages and starting accounts and firewalls and policies and a whole host of related and relevant topics, and before long, these items are in place and being used, to what end no one knows. With all this discussion going on, and activity stemming from that discussion, often there is little or no thought given to integrating this new activity into the existing marketing plan, to setting goals and metrics for those new programs to measure their effectiveness at meeting those goals. Without those elements in place, and really solid and well-researched answer to the questions “Why are we doing this, and how is it going to help us achieve our goals, and how will we know it’s working?”, going forward blindly is a recipe for at least needless unproductive activity, at worst brand damage and reputational damage for the company or organization.

    Non-profit organizations often have a history of behaving that way, although small to mid-size commercial businesses have been known to do this as well. They look a lot like my son, tossing aside what’s in place, even though it may be working, for the shiny, new, trendy, activity, regardless of it’s efficacy or effectiveness.

    The moral of the story is that while some of the new media channels and applications may look exciting and may be experiencing a groundswell of growth and popularity, it doesn’t mean that they are the correct or appropriate types of outreach activity through which to achieve your particular goals. You can spot this type of behavior easily. Simply ask them, “What do you use your Facebook page for?” or “What do you get out of your Twitter account?” It’s not even a matter of cost/benefit analysis, it’s more about aligning the mission of the organization with the tools and public outreach mechanisms you use to achieve the set goals. Twitter can be a nice, real-time market monitor for short term buzz and brand recognition, even customer service monitoring or PR effectiveness, but that’s more about listening than posting. Facebook can be a good way to build community around a product or service, but it has to be used carefully and with some constraints in place to maintain control of the voice and the brand. It may not be appropriate for it to be used to help drive sales or leads.

    If you are contemplating using new media tools, treat them and think about them much as you would any other service purchase – assess the needs, THEN go find the best tool for the job. Don’t go looking to add tools when you don’t know what the job is. Even Handy Manny knows to use only the right tool for the right job!

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  • Key Marketing Element – Define “Value”

    Key Marketing Element – Define “Value”

    Whether we’re creating a marketing plan, implementing a creative campaign or setting up for a key sales call, there is always a big question lurking in the background of all of our efforts – “What is the value of our product/service to the customer?”

    Most marketers can create a list of features that show off their product, might even do enough to differentiate it from competitors, but features don’t really drive response or sales. A list of benefits, what good things your product or service will result in for the customer is better, and will drive response and sales. But showing value, real intrinsic and perceived value, is where the true art of observation, listening, distillation and research converge to drive real results. This is where experience will pay off.

    Take for example a simple cleaning service: the features they might offer include trained personnel, bonded service agents, natural or organic or hypoallergenic cleaning products, long-term contacts and one-time specials for realtors and landlords. But those features will make the reader work to derive the benefits from them, if you’re lucky. More likely they will go on to the next competitor.

    Benefits derived from these might include peace of mind for landlords and homeowners, high quality cleaning jobs above and beyond the normal, fixed and reasonable pricing, flexible scheduling for repeat customers etc. Good benefits, if you know you have a need and understand how such services work and the challenges that they can bring. Again, a lot of work for the reader to figure out whether this service is for them.

    But what is the real value – a good impression on viewers or potential renters or buyers of the house or it’s residents, reduced risk of disease and infestation because the house is clean, reduced risk of allergic reaction due to reduced dust and allergens, and the bottom line – you don’t have to put in the work to clean the house! People hire a cleaning service because they don’t have time or expertise or inclination to clean it themselves. Luxury, convenience, time saving, thoroughness and a quality result are the key value triggers for marketing those types of services, so make sure you highlight them in your outreach efforts.

    Those values can be derived from some quick customer and ex-customer research, maybe a card after the service is SOLD, not after services are rendered, that’s a service-level evaluation, not a buying reason. Maybe a quick online survey or e-mail survey to your current and past customer list would reach the audience effectively. But you have to ask the right questions to extract this actionable information, and some analysis is needed to apply the newly derived data to your creative and strategic executions – that’s where the experience comes in – a highly experienced marketer can do that distillation of data and analysis and derive a strategy based on that knowledge and execute it for real results.

    Do your homework, do the analysis, and show the VALUE in your offering, not just features and benefits – value finds a home in buyers minds every time.

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  • You Gotta Have A Plan!

    You Gotta Have A Plan!

    After thirty years of helping commercial companies and non-profit organizations enhance their effectiveness through high-impact marketing efforts, we’ve seen some patterns develop. It appears that there is a correlation between how effective these companies’ marketing efforts are, and wait for it, the specificity and thoroughness of their marketing plan. It’s not budget, it’s not necessarily vision, it’s not brilliance in creative execution – it’s how well they draw up a plan and stick to it.

    Imagine a fighter pilot, maneuvering a $150 million aircraft (small one), randomly, changing course whenever clear skies present themselves, dropping ordnance on whatever targets strike his fancy. He might hit the assigned target, at the right time, in league with others also scheduled to attack that target. But the odds drop precipitously with each misguided maneuver and missed “opportunity” bomb dropped on his way there. That’s how some companies run their marketing operation, wandering from media outlet to outreach platform to new endeavor, without ever consulting the plan, if one even exists. This kind of rudderless marketing is nearly always doomed to failure, and results from a lack of vision, lack of discipline, lack of planning.

    The best way to avoid this is to actually go through the often painful but always beneficial exercise of creating a specific, measurable, organized, well-researched and grounded marketing plan, and disseminating it to EVERYONE, so that all stakeholders are in sync and can be involved in carrying it out in an informed way. Make a plan, stick to it, carry it out aggressively, and measure your results routinely, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much more successful your efforts will be.

    There are loads of publications, books, blogs etc out there to help you with this task if you are a young start-up with no experience at planning. Each one is different, each is unique, but each share several key elements, including measurable specific goals, time milestones, assigned responsibilities, and available resources. Fully complete plans include media choices for outreach advertising and PR activities, brand characteristics, audience profile, media schedules for placements, creative cues for progressive campaigns, drop dates for mail, e-mail, and designated resources and personnel for all tasks including social media activity.

    Big job, but one that not only saves time and money over the year by reducing missteps and waste, and one that removes the guesswork and allows everyone to move forward confidently and aggressively toward achieving the goal. How simple is that? Apparently not very, based on a resent study showing that nearly 40% of businesses with over 20 employees have no written marketing plan!

    If you need help, get it. If you can’t find it within, hire it! If you can’t stick to it, post it and have someone else hold you accountable. Ultimately, it’s plan now, or pay later – your choice.

    If you agree with these assertions (or disagree) drop me a line and let me know what you think. If you found it valuable, subscribe to this blog above, and be sure to pick up your copy of  “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • Tell The Corporate Story – Not “Just The Facts, Ma’am”

    Tell The Corporate Story – Not “Just The Facts, Ma’am”

    We’ve been reviewing lots of corporate materials over the last several weeks, as it’s stock Proxy season. Each Spring, public corporations hold their shareholder meetings, and issue proxy voting statements for the shareholders to provide feedback to the Board, elect new board members and settle other issues like compensation, accounting firm choice, and other matters. They are also required to bring shareholders up to date on the financial health of the company. Many of them choose this opportunity to further inform shareholders of their efforts and fill them in on future endeavors planned by the company, by mailing out Annual Reports with lots of artfully crafted text and full-page glossy images – all that’s required by the SEC is a set of edited, audited financials and some bare-bones intent reporting.

    If you read this creatively crafted text carefully, you’ll have a hard time discerning where the company fits in the competitive scheme in their industry (they’re all industry leaders) and how their products are perceived, sometimes even what they do or are used for! Some are so nebulous, so vague, so “artful” and flowery, they become nearly useless.

    Holy missed opportunity, Batman! What a tremendous chance to reach out and tell your corporate story in a way that really provides not only usable information that might prove relevant to increasing future investment, but to do double duty in a number of other forums where a corporate story might be useful. Love the images, too, but do they reflect the daily reality at that firm? Not likely. Do they tell the story? Better than the text, but is it the right story? Maybe not.

    I think they can do better. Printed Annual Reports may be going the way of the dinosaur, with online websites allowing technology to improve communication’s timeliness, and relevance. The use of multiple imagery, video, and the tantalizing prospect of nearly endless real estate in which to put more flowery copy, not to mention the reduced cost of reproduction and distribution, make online Annual Reports very tempting. Not sure of the SEC’s feelings on this, but we now have online proxy voting, so the annual reporting requirements can’t be far behind.

    For now, let’s hope corporate marketing departments take transparency to heart, and while they don’t have to back track all the way to the days of Dragnet scripts, a little direct, honest language may go a long way toward convincing shareholders to maintain and even increase their investment. It might also allow employees and other constituencies to become company evangelists – surely the current copy can’t be repeated verbally by company representatives – at least, not with a straight face . . .

    If you liked reading this and found it valuable to you in your business life, or just entertaining, you can receive more like it in your inbox weekly – FREE – just by subscribing to this blog above. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Leaving Gold On The Table

    Leaving Gold On The Table

    For those companies out there who include industry tradeshows in their marketing mix, either on purpose as part of a strategy, or “because all our competitors are there”, you are probably leaving a pile of gold behind when you pack up your boxes to go home.

    Recent studies by independent national organizations show that very few companies do any pre-show marketing to prospects or clients, and that the number of leads actually followed up after the show is in the single digits!

    This type of behavior makes no sense to me, and is creating a case of diminishing returns for the tradeshow industry as a whole and for those who participate in them. If you were to spend millions of dollars on a Superbowl ad for your company, and then disconnected your phones for the month after the ad ran, you’d consider such behavior ludicrous, wasteful to the nth degree. Yet, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you fail to broadcast your presence at an event, when you pay dearly to participate; spend thousands on a complex display and related collateral material; spend endless time in meetings reviewing a hundred different types of tchochkeys and giveaways; take a week’s worth of time from your key sales people, technical people and administrative staff; when you don’t get full benefit from T&E, including travel, meals, hotels, cabs and entertainment; and then don’t follow up some of the most qualified sales leads and partnership opportunities you’ll ever encounter. Absurd, you say? Commonplace, at best, if we’re to believe the data. And that’s just for one major show – scale that up to include 6-10 shows a year, and you’re watching a pot of gold in lost opportunity fly out the window!

    So how to you capitalize on all that opportunity? Five quick fixes that will cut waste, provide more value and prevent lost opportunity:

    5) Train and select your on-site staff with care. Even for a major show, you don’t have to send the whole team. While a big group of people all dressed alike trolling the floor and inhabiting the exhibit does have some value, especially in reinforcing your brand, it’s a costly and inefficient way to do that, and the job can be better handled by fewer better selected candidates. A mixed bag of junior and senior sales staff, one technical person to act as advisor and closer on the BIG sales, and a couple of engaging administrative folks to help clean up the loose ends, steer traffic to the sales group and provide coverage. That’s it. Train them all to be effective in as many different roles as are appropriate, so there is good overlap, but make sure everyone knows how important this show is to the prosperity of the company, and that all leads, no matter how small or remote, could be important, and are to be treated as such.

    4) Set up a lead management system, and use it. That’s not the same thing as renting the capture machine from the show management’s vendor. This is a system within the company for qualifying, funneling and following up on leads gathered at the show. Your existing prospect database is a good start, but it’s probably not built to handle a big influx of leads in a short time, and likely doesn’t have a good qualifying system within it. It should be designed to work quickly, have all the follow-up materials created in advance and be able to customize them to a certain extent for each lead. Nothing is more impressive than having a quick, well-crafted, specific follow-up note waiting for you when you get back to your room for the evening from a vendor you spoke with that afternoon!

    3) Craft an effective pre-show marketing strategy. If you really want to stand out of the crowd, marketing your presence at the show a couple of weeks beforehand is one of the best ways to do it. You can prompt booth visits, make appointments with big clients or promising prospects who are planning to attend, build attendance in your hospitality suite event, pre-qualify leads, and much more with this simple step. Get access to the registration list from the prior year if it’s available and use it repeatedly and effectively. You’ll be amazed at the resulting traffic.

    2) Set goals for the show that make sense, and hold EVERYONE accountable for meeting them. Especially if this is one of many shows you participate in each year, goal-setting will give you some idea of how worthwhile your tradeshow investment is likely to be. It gives you an ROI variable to push back against when making decisions for next year. Make them just barely reachable, and make them finite and quantifiable – “we will contact and follow-up with 25 new prospects not in our current database at this show.” Now, it’s everybody’s responsibility to be familiar with what’s in that prospect database, know who the big fish are, and engage everyone in a productive, helpful way to make that number attainable. It forces a teamwork approach, and keeps down the finger-pointing later if you don’t hit the number.

    1) See the show as a triple opportunity and treat it as such! How many times do you get to be in a room with a huge universe of prospects and customers, prepared, armed and in a selling environment, all in one week, with your best troops in attendance? Not very often, I’ll wager. So make that opportunity count. Follow-up religiously, engage every reasonable visitor, invest in some staff training, make the display work for you, make sure it carries the brand well and is easy to read and understand, make sure your staff understands the goals and the importance of the results to the success of all concerned. Make sure that lead management system is working for you, not just making you more work.

    You’ve invested a significant chunk of budget to participate in these marketing opportunities – its up to you to make the investment pay back. Enjoy.

  • Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    I’ve long been an advocate of soliciting the help of marketing experts when developing, launching and branding new products, services or businesses. We’ve seen in our practice that the earlier you get the marketing folks involved in the process, the more likely you are to be successful. This is backed by study after study, both anecdotal and empirical, over the last 20 years. How many articles and references have you seen, including obituaries, that say something like “. . . successful business man was a marketing and promotions genius and applied his skills to creating and growing the company . . .” ?

    Clearly, the knowledge of the practice and theory of marketing is a valuable, nee critical skill to have in your bag of management tricks. And indeed, it seems the more input from the marketing folks you get, the faster and bigger the success is! Ramp up times are shorter, development and product lifecycles reduce, launches are more dramatic, and alternate applications and uses surface faster and are more often taken advantage of, when the marketers get heavily involved in the upper echelon decision making.

    So why has it taken so long, and required so much effort for marketers to seek and achieve a true place at the C-level of management structures in the U.S.? The newly-invented Chief Marketing Officer title was a hard fought battle, typically one that is won on an individual basis, and in only a small percentage of companies, often larger and older firms, where upper management is often tinged with risk spreading behaviors rather than overt leadership. Often this battle is won by only the most vocal, dynamic, personable, innovative and connected of marketers. One might say these are inherent traits in every good marketer, but you’d be surprised at some we’ve worked with who are impossibly poor at blowing their own horn while excelling at promoting the business they serve.

    I’m convinced, after working directly with over 100 marketers in the last thirty years, that those who market themselves as well as they do their firms are those destined to go the farthest. In some cases, it’s a matter of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, but that only really works on an internal basis on the way up the ladder in a contained environment. But in this case, they have to not only talk the talk, they have to walk the walk, too. You have to back up the swagger with bottom-line success time after time to truly gain legend status. Just plain visibility alone won’t do it.

    Business executives rise to prominence in their own small world through long-term, solid achievement, aided by public recognition of those achievements and a desire to be associated with those achievements. Which makes it even more amazing that marketers have had such a hard time gaining celebrity status in the business world, as marketers have an endless series of “wins” to point to on a given day.

    Some of the difficulty is that marketers tend to be collaborative, work in teams, even if the team leader works in a supervisory capacity – there’s just too much for one person to really do without spreading the load, and thus the credit. CEO’s get credit for the good decisions, and spread the blame for the bad ones among their top management team. Marketers tend to take it on the chin for the failures, while others take credit for the successes. That shadow tends to keep them in the background, slaving away as good corporate brand stewards, until there’s a regime change.

    The challenge before us as marketers is to loudly and often show the value we contribute to corporate success. We needn’t be shy about putting our names and faces behind the successes we create, because in reality, there is no success in business without something being bought or sold, and we’re the closest to the end of the sales chain and have the best understanding of what customers want and need. That makes our expertise not only critical but invaluable. Don’t be afraid to step up and take credit for the successes, spread the credit as far as you need to, to your team and beyond, but accept the success for what it’s worth without demurring or deferring. On the other side of the coin, never shirk responsibility for the inevitable misses, take them head on, learn from them and apply that education to the next situation. You’ll be applauded and respected for the integrity, so you win anyway.

    Stay the course, be visible, be effective, have an impact, and don’t be afraid of public exposure – you’ve earned every last bit of it. Be the corporate leaders we know you are, but do it in a visible way. Everyone’s a winner in the end when you do.

  • Exhibitions and Trade Shows – A Thing of the Past?

    Exhibitions and Trade Shows – A Thing of the Past?

    Guest blog

    Posted by garethcase ⋅ August 30, 2011 ⋅ 5 Comments

    It’s a subject that comes up every year. There is always an Account Manager who wants to do an exhibition because it’s closely aligned to their vertical market, but is there still real value in these events?

    The internet’s exponential growth over the last decade has meant that we have access to pretty much any information we want, no matter where we are or what device we are viewing it on. Research in general, for that latest gadget, your next holiday or even which e-marketing platform you are going to deploy is at our finger tips 24 hours a day.

    Before these technological advances, research was the reason I used to attend trade shows, but over the last 10 years, I have noticed a dramatic decline in both the size of events and the number of attendees.

    There are many reasons company’s choose to exhibit at trade shows. For example, it’s a good forum to launch your brand into a new market or geography. It’s also good to have brand presence at an event well subscribed to by your customers. The other main driver is lead generation. How many of you can honestly hold your hands up and say you have had a really good ROI from events and exhibitions overall? I hope I hear about some great successes but in my experience the ROI does not stack up. Yes there have been shows where we have converted some great opportunities, bit If I compare it £ to £ against over marketing activities it probably comes out bottom of the list. When working out the ROI, don’t forget to include the investment of time from your employees, a trade show with 4 of your sales team not only means you’re paying them to be there, but also missing out on them selling elsewhere during that time.

    If you are going to do trade shows and exhibitions then my advice is to pick niche events aligned to specific vertical markets you want to attack, rather that generic shows that cover your solution/product set. The key is to develop a proposition that really helps your target market overcome a ‘common challenge’. This way you will quickly gain engagement and been seen as a value add rather than a box shifter.

    Surely it’s better to be the only company at an event that offers your products and solutions than being one of 150 all offering something similar?

    My Response:

    Gareth – I, too, have sat on both sides of this fence, organizing some of the largest industrial events in the country (US) and attending and exhibiting in hundreds of shows for a variety of clients. I, too, have seen reductions in attendance and square feet sold, likely a factor of a combination of better information sources (the internet and elsewhere) and the current economy. However, if applied to the marketing plan in a focused strategic way, there is still a huge value in live trade events. NOTHING can replace the face-to-face interaction, the energy, the insight gathered at a live event. True, hard data research can be gained electronically, but the “Who” portion of the show is just as important as the “What” that you get electronically – seeing your competitors approach, viewing new entrants into the market for possible partnership, gauging the health and direction of an industry at large, are invaluable to the well-rounded executive.

    True, lead generation is one of the principal reasons to exhibit, and many shows don’t support this activity aggressively enough, though they should. But on the corporate side, 8 out of 10 viable leads are NEVER followed up with – after spending all that time, money and energy to exhibit, craft a display, man the exhibit with top, expensive sales staff, the leads lie fallow, reducing the ROI by a huge percentage. Shame on the sales manager who lets this practice continue . . .

    There are indeed numerous branding tactics associated with a tradeshow outside your individual exhibit, but some of the guerrilla tactics mentioned here in other poster’s comments would do more than “irritate the organizers” – they can get them thrown out of the venue, ostracized within the industry, their brand destroyed or reduced to a cartoonish bottom-feeding lout. If you work closely with the organizer, such tactics can be negotiated and usually an accommodation made so that these activities are viable and above-board, and a win for everyone.

    The branding aspect cannot be overstated – you’re given an opportunity to put your best foot forward in the most prominent arena your company has – a room full of customers and potential customers! Can’t ask for more than that in ANY business. When all this is factored in to the ROI equation, a well-selected show that gives you a forum to launch a new product, do primary customer research, show off a rebranding, put on a good face for the industry, and eyeball all your competitors in one room is an unbeatable opportunity. The rumors of the tradeshow’s death are greatly exaggerated and superbly premature . . .

  • Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    As business people and entrepreneurs, most of us don’t like failure in general, and largely feel that failure is bad. True entrepreneurs, however, often tout great failure in the past as the driving force behind their current success. They’ve looked at their past objectively, dispassionately, and impersonally, and taken strong lessons from the failures and used the knowledge to fuel success. A very healthy approach, but one that is often difficult to adopt in other circumstances. If you’re not the boss, continual and ongoing failure in your work will not likely lead to a long career, unless you work at a Wall St. bank!

    Failure is a terrific teacher. It shows you when you should have zigged when you zagged. And often, the ultimate failure of a business enterprise is not caused by any single event or decision – its usually a cascade of seemingly small, inconsequential decisions and actions that take you down a path leading ultimately to collapse. If you could review any one of those decisions separately and out of context, you’d be hard pressed to find logical fault with it, taking into account it’s isolation and the information available at the time. But couple it with incomplete or inaccurate information that fills in or corrects later, and couple that with other seemingly innocuous decisions, and when you step back you can see a pattern developing. You can almost watch the slide in the wrong direction, but at the time you can’t see it and are powerless to stop it.

    Someone smarter than I once said, “it’s not what knocks you down, it’s how you handle getting back up that shows your true character.” I firmly believe that to be true, being an optimist, and believe that this kind of thinking is what powers the entrepreneurial spirit that makes this great country what it is. No matter what obstacles people put in your way, no matter how many times they knock you down, if you just get up, brush off, restore your dignity, regroup and come out swinging with a new action plan, you’ll eventually be alright and prosper. To do that repeatedly and not be insane, you have to examine the failures and learn from them to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the failure.

    We closed down an ancillary business unit this year, as it produced insufficient revenue to be self supporting after 2 years of investments in time and money. The research told us we were right to launch it, the market should have been there, our advisers and others told us it was a great idea, but in the end, not so much. Now it’s time to do the autopsy, find out what went wrong, and file it away so we don’t repeat it in the future. Without this final, often painful, step, the failure has little positive value. Simply chalking it up to experience and loss without the analysis only yields negatives. Eventually enough negatives can weigh your efforts irretrievably downward to the point of being unable to recover.

    What’s the recovery plan? Once the analysis is done, the lessons learned, the mistakes and missteps identified, we move forward in a positive fashion, richer in the knowledge that we can apply that learning not only to our own endeavors, but apply it on behalf of our clients as well. That’s progress.

    In short, don’t hide from failures or hide the results when they are less than optimal. Own them, learn from them, use them to your advantage. Those who say they only succeed are lying or selling something.

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  • Innovation – Courage or Survival Technique?

    Innovation – Courage or Survival Technique?

    Modern corporations that want to grow and prosper must innovate to survive and differentiate themselves from the competition. Simple statement, not so simple to do.

    Does your firm innovate? Are you a leader, first or second in market share in your vertical or industry? If so, you are likely an innovator in your arena. If not, you are likely a follower, and destined as such to toil away to maintain the status quo, fighting to find and keep customers, build sales, create and use buzz and maintain your brand.

    Innovation comes in a variety of forms, some in internal structure, some in product, some in technique or offering. And it doesn’t have to be something complicated. Sometimes the simplest thing is innovative. Just because it hasn’t been done that way, doesn’t mean it can’t be, its just that it seems so obvious, you think someone else must have thought of it before. Not always true!

    Like most things, especially marketing, it all starts with research. Figure out what others are doing, and improve upon it. Find out what the audience wants, and give it to them. Find out what causes your customer’s pain, and alleviate it.

    Sometimes the research can be done within your own company. Talk to customer service, talk to reception, watch how customers react to things, listen to their grievances, hear their stories, see how they behave wit respect to your product, or organization. They can tell you things about your company you might not know . . .

    Innovation can create challenges. That’s the point. You need an internal champion to shepherd the change created by the innovative approach throughout the company, to nurture it, to answer questions, to guide it’s development, to protect it from the nay-sayers. It can start at the top with a visionary leader, it needs buy-in from the top, and must have universal buy-in up and down the chain to succeed quickly and completely. Once that universal acceptance and understanding is firmly rooted, you’ll notice that champions appear, and the organization as a whole starts to embrace and live the story of the new offering – transparency becomes apparent.

    Once you’ve gone through this learning curve so you know the steps to innovation, you can apply them over and over again, creating an environment of innovation, keeping your company ahead of the competition, permanently!

    Innovate, differentiate, dominate! Sounds like a plan to me . . .

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  • Guest blogger Adam Schectman of Eye Catching Creative on Branding

    Guest blogger Adam Schectman of Eye Catching Creative on Branding

    Branding is one of our mainstay services – it touches and influences every engagement we have to one degree or another. We focus on it so you don’t have to. I caught this article by fellow SMEI veteran Adam Schechtman, and though rather than restate it, I’d simply repost it and give him the credit he so richly deserves! Way to go Adam, nice take on one of our favorite subjects.

    Guest Blogger: Adam Schechtman, VP of Business Development  and Marketing, Eye Catching Creative

    To brand or not to brand? That is the question so many small and mid-sized businesses tend to overlook in the early phases of their development. The problem is there’s a tendency to keep shuffling this linchpin of marketing success to the dark corners of the priority list. Then one day, we read an article or hear someone talking about a competitor and cringe in uneasiness because they did something we didn’t…built a solid brand.

    Like marketing in general, branding is easy to lose focus on, especially when we have experienced some degree of success. If you agree that today’s markets have changed and the way businesses DO business has changed, then it’s time to recalibrate some of your own marketing efforts. That means its back to basics! Like the “butterfly effect,” small improvements in your branding strategy can have a tremendous impact on growth over time.

    We know from marketing 101 that your brand is your identity. Beyond the visual or physical makeup… name, logo, advertising, a brand is quite simply the psychological impact you have on customers. Branding is so important because people buy emotionally and then logic steps in to support their buying decision. Your brand is essentially a part of the ongoing relationship you have with customers. It is a compilation of messages that differentiate (or don’t differentiate) your business, product or service from everyone else who plays in the same space as you do. Take a second look at the competition of today. If someone stands out, why do they stand out? Who doesn’t stand out? Which category does your company fall into and who might be able to help you to improve on that position?

    From your email address to your website, to how the phone is answered to the relevance of your marketing materials, your brand must be professional, consistent and CURRENT. What the company stands for and what you’re offering should be different and clear. When is the last time you really dissected how you are perceived in the market and what your market position truly is? One easy way is to run a survey using existing customers or even some customers that you lost. Resources like SurveyMonkey.com are fantastic, free, e-survey questionnaire tools that are easy to use and easy on the budget. So let me ask you… what perception do your customers have of your business? What does your presence in the market “feel” like to customers and professional peers (aka competitors) and more importantly… are you being felt?

    Adam Schechtman is an entrepreneur and co-owner of Eye Catching Creative, providing virtual, on-call design, advertising and marketing solutions to budget-conscious small and mid-sized businesses. With more than 15 years in marketing, business development and sales, he is also the former owner of Achieve Senior Home Care and former co-owner/franchiser of Advance Realty Solutions. Adam holds an MBA in marketing from Johns Hopkins University. Visit www.eyecatchingcreative.com for more information.

    Get the feel right the first time – we can help you with your branding research to give you the insights to get it right the first time! If you liked this, be sure to subscribe to this blog above.