Who are your people?

October 7, 2020

We have been talking about some of the core elements of creating a marketing plan. My goal is to get you thinking and planning for 2021 and beyond. Previously, we focused on making sure your prospects can pick you out of the crowd. The next step in putting together your marketing plan is deciding who you’d like to serve along the way.

If you’ve been in business for more than a week, you know there are clients we can delight and clients who suck the life out of your company. The better you know yourself, the better you will be at identifying and chasing after those sweet spot clients that you love to work for, your team is excited to bust a hump to please, and in return, the client appreciates all of your efforts.

The bad clients aren’t bad; they’re just a bad fit for you. Your goal is to recognize what makes someone a good or bad fit early in the sales process so you can either double down to earn their business or stop chasing them.

Ideally, you’re going to stop chasing or even talking to the prospects that don’t meet your profile of the ideal client. We all do better work for clients who are a better fit. The good news is – you’ve experienced that more than once in your organization’s history. We’re going to use that experience to replicate those great clients.

If I said to you – if you could clone any three customers and work for those clones as well – which customers would you choose? Who are your people? After you identify those customers, look for common traits that make them the right fit for you.

If you are a B2B company, think about tangible factors like the size of their organization, the industry, your point of contact’s years of experience, their decision-making process (individual or by committee), if they have internal resources or if they’re going to be relying on you to provide 100% of the support, and other factors that matter to your work.

On the B2C side, think about tangible elements like the customer’s role in their family, all the demographics like age, gender, and income. Where do they live? What kind of dwelling? Is there a similarity in the type of work they do or the hours they work? For each of you, this will be a little different based on what you sell.

In either case, don’t forget about the intangibles like communication and work style, how they react to issues or problems, and if they’ll be a good referral source. Are they comfortable with technology? Are they animal lovers? No factor is too obscure as you look for common threads. Think of yourself as a reporter and you are about to write a biographical piece on your best customers.

While these lists of traits are useful, they become invaluable when you use them to create customer personas. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data about your existing customers. You can gather that data through observation, as I’ve been outlining. You can also add market research data to the mix if your budget allows for it. Put all this information to work and you’ll be able to be very clear on who your best prospects are, based on the clients you and your team love to serve.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Busines Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

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How do I pick you out of the crowd?

September 30, 2020

A few summers ago, my daughter and I spent some time in South Africa on a safari. When we first got there, all of the zebras pretty much looked the same, other than their relative size. But as we looked more closely (and our guides patiently pointed it out), we began to recognize that every zebra’s stripes are unique, like fingerprints.

I commented that it would have been a lot easier to pick out a specific zebra if they each had a single stripe of a unique color. They would have been easy to identify, even from a distance.

To your consumers, when they look at you and your competitors in the early stages of their buying process, you’re like that zebra herd, with all of the animals looking pretty much the same. One of the most crucial elements of your marketing plan is being very specific about how you are different from everyone else. We need to paint one of your stripes a unique color.

Today, we are going to focus on how to make sure your prospects can pick you out of the crowd.

This is not a stay on the surface activity. If all of your competitors can claim the same point of difference (i.e., it’s our people, we partner with our clients, we truly care, etc.), then it actually is not a point of difference.

To identify what genuinely makes you unique, you have to drill deeper than those surface statements that, in fairness, are true about most good businesses including our competitors. You have to ask some tougher questions if you want to get to a truth that only you can own. If all of your competitors can say “we do that too” then it is not unique enough.

The way to get started is to ask yourself these questions:

Is there something unique about our business model and how we deliver our product/services? (Do you embed an employee into your client’s office or do you get compensated based on their sales success?)

Do we have knowledge or expertise that most people do not have? (Are your employees all nurses, so they have incredible medical knowledge or have all of your travel agents been to Africa?)

Do you take a common element in your industry and do it to an extreme? (Do you give away free soda and sunscreen at your theme park or do you donate a pair of socks to the homeless for every pair of socks you sell?)

Is your business taking a delivery element and re-inventing it? (Are your bank branches open until 8 pm or does your team stay onsite for a day to make sure everyone is trained on your equipment?)

Is your product or service genuinely different than what your competitors’ sell? (Is your seed a new hybrid that you just created or are you using artificial intelligence in a way that no one has imagined before?)

Don’t let features and benefits fool you. They are rarely what makes your business, product, or service unique.

This is not an easy exercise, which is why most companies can’t articulate what really makes them different. If you are willing to go to the effort to uncover your distinct position or create one if there isn’t one in place – your marketing is about to get much simpler.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

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2021 Planning Deconstructed

September 23, 2020

Big, small, for-profit, or not for profit – every organization needs a marketing plan, and that marketing plan requires a refresh every year. Now is the time to get your ducks in a row for 2021. The channels, audience expectations, and possibilities are changing faster than we can keep pace. A three-year-old marketing plan is absolutely obsolete.

Many businesses don’t even venture down the marketing plan route because they assume it has to be complicated and complex. The truth is, for most companies, even if they had such a plan, they wouldn’t execute against it because it had too many bells and whistles. I’d much rather see you oversimplify your plan and actually use it.

I want to look at the big picture vision of your marketing plan. If I asked you how confident you were that you could hop in your car and get to the destination, what’s the first thing you would say? It depends on the destination! If it’s Minneapolis, no problem. If it is Hong Kong, we have an issue. In that context, it seems absurd that I would ask you to get to an undisclosed destination, and yet that’s how many businesses run.

Without a doubt, the most crucial element of your 2021 marketing plan is the defined destinations. I use the plural because every plan should have more than one. Ask yourself these questions to define where you’re headed.

What metric will best define success when it comes to new customers for my business? Don’t assume it’s about more. It might be about bigger. Or a different composition. Or a whole new segment.

What metric will best define success when it comes to current customers of my business? Is it that they stay longer (retention)? It could also be that you have a bigger share of their wallet/spend. It might not have anything to do with sales. It could be that they become a more vocal, insistent referral source or an active source of five-star reviews and ratings.

What metric will define success when you look at your department or company’s workforce? It could be tied to improvements and enhancements in their skills or knowledge. For many businesses, the retention of key employees might be vital to a healthy 2021.

Finally, you need to define success in terms of your actual products and services. You might be planning on launching something new in 2021. Or you may want to have more of your customers using a specific service or bundle of products. Success may be tied to how many products or services your average customer buys.

Once you have defined success in these four core areas, you can begin to identify the potential barriers to achieving those goals. Is it a lack of awareness? Price issues? A competitive advantage that you don’t currently have?

If you can’t identify the potential barriers, you have some work to do before you can decide which marketing tactics will help you. It makes no sense to execute marketing if you don’t understand both where you are trying to go and what’s in the way of you getting there.

The more specific your answers, the better. Don’t just say the marketplace is crowded. List the key competitors and their position or influence on the market. Don’t just say your customers are hard to reach. Define what is in between you and that decision-maker.

If you put in the time and effort in these four core areas, I promise that you will have a great start on a marketing plan that you can dive right into executing.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

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New Report Finds That Brand Leaders Are Seeking More Media Cohesion

September 17, 2020

New CMO Council research provides insight on creating more effective integration between public relations and marketing

Today, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, produced in partnership with Cision, published a new report – Bridging the Gap for Comms & Marketing: Building Cohesion in the Age of Customer Disruption. The new report details the best practices and technologies for overcoming the challenges that brand leaders face when aligning marketing and comms teams. The insights are based on a survey of over 150 brand leaders and nearly a dozen in-depth interviews with executives from companies including IBM, Nokia, Schneider Electric, Lamps Plus, Certified First, Center for Creative Leadership, R&R Partners and InnerWorkings. Download the full report.

Bridging the Gap for Comms & Marketing highlights the importance of consistent messaging across paid, owned and earned media.

Topics that emerged from the study include:

• The future of the marketing-comms relationship
• The primary challenges when aligning marketing and comms
• Which technologies and solutions help drive cohesion

The misunderstanding of roles and media channels

Brand leaders surveyed for the report also addressed how COVID-19 increased the importance to deliver cohesive messaging. “With the majority of the world now spending significantly more time at home, consumption, sharing, and engaging with digital media has only increased,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council.

“In many cases, digital media now singularly impacts buying decisions and how consumers feel about brands, only amplifying the importance of consistent messaging across media channels. Yet over half of respondents agreed that when it comes to amplifying and aligning media strategies, there isn’t strong alignment between their teams.”

Other key survey findings include:

• Nearly 2/3 brand leaders felt they’re effective at integrating and amplifying earned media to drive customer experience and engagement strategies
• 81% of brand leaders said the change in global business climate due to the pandemic has led to a definite rise in earned media efforts and importance

One out of five marketing leaders were dissatisfied with their earned media performance

“In order for organizations to achieve true integration between marketing and comms, they must first attain collaboration within the one constant both teams can agree upon: data. Both teams need to treat data as the source of truth and have someone with the skills to interpret that data as it relates to specific KPIs in order to understand progress and ROI,” said Maggie Lower, Cision’s Chief Marketing Officer. “Cision’s own partnership with The CMO Council validates the opportunities that can arise when PR and marketing work together.”

For more information and to download the full report here.

CMO Council, in partnership with Cision, will host a webinar – Shifting the Content Game – on September 23rd to discuss the report findings in further detail. Learn more and register here.

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You didn’t get there on your own

September 16, 2020

One of the contributors to every organization’s success is the business partners that come alongside us to serve our clients better. Most businesses are reasonably good at showing their appreciation for customers. But the vendors who often save the day don’t always get showered with the thanks they deserve.

One of the truths of being in business is that sooner or later our clients get in a jam and we have the opportunity to save the day for them. But we rarely do that without an assist. I think in those moments, we probably gush with praise. As we should. But in the calm of “normal” workdays, our business partners are often the unsung heroes.

Harvard Business School and Wharton published research that shows that expressing your gratitude can result in a huge spike in a vendor or partner’s investment and willingness to help your business when you are in a jam. And if there is a given, it’s that we’re going to be presented with the opportunity to help a client navigate their way out of a mess.

I’ve seen some really wonderful ways that businesses express their gratitude to those save the day partners. But the common thread that connects all of them is that they’re intentional and calendared. If we don’t assign it that level of importance, it will get lost in the chaos of our day.

The suggestions below are not new ideas. And you’ve probably done some of all of them once or twice. What I am suggesting is that you magnify that occasional burst of gratitude by systemizing them. Which one of these, or a variation of one, would work for your organization?

Send your thanks up the chain: When someone at one of your partner companies goes above and beyond, don’t just thank them, send a note (not an email) or letter, celebrating what their teammate did. Let them know that the extra effort is what you value most about your work with their company and how it has earned your confidence and loyalty.

What if you identified one partner a month to celebrate with a letter to their boss? Get it on your calendar, so it actually happens.

Create connections: There isn’t a business you work with that isn’t looking for new customers. If they’ve been a rock star for you, odds are they can deliver that same level of service to other businesses in your network.

Do you send out a monthly newsletter? Or hold a holiday party for clients and prospects? Why not spotlight a vendor who is worthy of some extra praise?

Invite them in: One of the most impressive ways to thank a good business partner is to be a better customer. Why not ask your best vendors to help you refine the way you work with them? I’m guessing they have some pretty interesting ideas that will help you bring even more value to your customers, make your processes smoother, and elevate your product or services.

This could be a monthly or quarterly initiative. Ask your team who has demonstrated a depth of expertise that you could tap into and invite them in. This collaborative brainstorming will make your company better and deepen the relationship you have with that partner.

We should thank our vendors because it’s the right thing to do. But if you need more incentive, just remember that there’s another jam around the corner, and our business partners can be our best referral sources.

Gratitude can be your business’ superpower when it’s heartfelt and shared liberally. Give it a go.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

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Give your message some space

September 9, 2020

This past fall, I was able to spend some time in New York City and was able to catch several Broadway shows. Some were musicals, and some were dramas. Some were based on real-life events, and others were pure fiction. Some featured award-winning, famous actors and others did not. Some were set in modern-day, and others harkened back to an earlier time.

To say they were all very different would be an understatement. But all of them had one thing in common. Each one was roomy. What I mean by that is each show gave the audience plenty of room to absorb the message.

The sets were simple and more representative than actual. For example, in Come From Away, twelve chairs were a plane, a path, and a church. To Kill A Mockingbird, two tables and four chairs were a courtroom. The dialogue was deliberate, and the silences were purposeful and effective. It occurred to me that we could learn from these masterful playwrights and directors.

One of the common mistakes we make as marketers is trying to pack five pounds of message into a one-pound bag. We end up drowning our core messages with noise in a desire to include everything. My recent experiences as an audience member reminded me that when we do that, we actually weaken our messages because they don’t have room to breathe, grow, or take hold.

The truth is that our audience is only going to remember one or two key points of any marketing message. Given the barrage of marketing messages out there, we can help our audience get the main point by not complicating the delivery so they can grasp and retain the message easier and faster.

There are some ways we can minimize the noise and give our core message the room it needs.

Visuals: One of the common missteps I see in ads, websites, tradeshow booths, and collateral material is the reliance on the photo montage. Rather than letting one visual stand alone and deliver the message, we feel compelled to use multiple images. That means the audience’s attention is immediately divided. Each photo or visual is smaller and has less impact.

White space: Another way we demonstrate our lack of conviction in our product or service is by using up every inch of space in a layout. We’re so worried that we’re not going to catch or keep someone’s attention that we need to add a starburst, five different font families, a headline, subhead, body text, bullet points, and some bold and underlined words as well.

Instead, we create a blur for our audience and force them to decipher what is most important … if they’re willing to invest the time.

Words: How do you leave room when it comes to words? There are a few ways. First – use fewer of them. Don’t tell them what you want them to know, and then tell them what you told them, and then sum it up by telling them again. Just say it. Say it boldly and clearly. And then, shut up.

Let your audience have time and space with your message so they can connect to it and assign it meaning that is relevant to them. Or, in some cases, decide that you aren’t relevant to them at all, and move on. Either outcome is better than having no impact.

It takes incredible confidence in your product or service to execute on this idea of giving your marketing message some space. If you lack that assurance, more words or pictures probably isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you probably need to take a step back and ask what would need to change so you could get comfortable giving your message a little bit of white space.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

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Viral is an elusive state

September 2, 2020

Pre-COVID, my daughter and I flew to Vegas to see a Lady Gaga concert. We were fortunate and had terrific seats. Right before the show started, security walked Bradley Cooper to the seats directly in front of us. As you probably know, he and Lady Gaga co-starred in A Star is Born and everyone was abuzz about their chemistry in the film.

Oddly, most people didn’t notice him there. As the concert started, we surmised that she might call him up on stage to sing with her so when she sat down at her piano and began to talk about a friend of hers, I was ready. From our unique vantage point, I caught the moment on video and uploaded it to my Facebook news feed before we left the venue.

Over 10,000 views, 50+ shares, and hundreds of reactions and comments later on Facebook, it certainly caught the attention of my audience. I was just sharing a cool experience that my daughter and I had with my Facebook friends, but it quickly went way beyond that. Because of our unique placement in the audience, over the course of the next couple of days, we showed up on The Today Show, Entertainment Tonight, and a bunch of other news outlets, and the video was exposed to more and more people.

On a very micro scale, it went viral. Not intentionally, but it certainly got more attention than most. For many marketers, creating a video for the business or client and having it catch fire is the holy grail. We all want to launch the next ice bucket challenge, but it’s rarely manufactured. It usually is lightning in a bottle sort of magic. Let’s use my Lady Gaga video to dissect this a little bit.

Timeliness matters: If I had shared my version of what happened at the concert a few days after it happened, no one would have cared. My video was share-worthy because no one but the people at the show knew it had happened and there was no official Lady Gaga issued video of the event yet. My video was live 15 minutes after the concert ended.

If you want your video to take off and it’s tied to a moment or event – there’s no time to finesse the edit or run it by legal. You either can go live immediately, or you risk sacrificing your edge.

It’s tied to a more significant reason or cultural hot button: A Star is Born was a huge movie, the Oscar nominations had come out four days before, and both Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga were nominated. On top of all that, they’d never performed the song (Shallow) live before. All of those factors contributed to the interest level.

The Ice Bucket Challenge was tied to a charity and a crazy stunt which also added an element of participation, which the Lady Gaga video did not.

It captures something unexpected: No one who bought a ticket to that concert thought Bradley Cooper might show up. It was a fluke event, and that was part of the appeal. Think of the videos of the kid on gas after being at the dentist or the cat frightened by a cucumber. One of the reasons we share them is because they surprise and delight us. That’s pretty tough to manufacture.

Video is a very effective marketing channel, but the odds of us creating something that goes viral are pretty slim. If you happen to be in the right place at the right time – take full advantage and leverage it for all you can. But we need to stop trying to create something that is, almost by design, a freak event.

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Change like we can’t imagine (yet)

August 26, 2020

Voice technology is changing everything. I know that’s a ridiculously bold statement. But let’s go back in time.

It was about 1989 and I was walking through an airport. I spotted a man on one of those bag phones and thought, “why in the world would anyone ever want to carry a phone with them all the time?” If someone had stopped me that day and said, “mobile technology is going to change everything,” I wouldn’t have believed them and I certainly couldn’t have imagined the critical role that our cell phones play in our lives today.

In fairness, voice is changing everything, at least initially, thanks to our cell phones. We’re at the caveman stage of understanding how to harness voice technology and how it will dramatically alter the way we live, work, play and communicate.

This sounds like hyperbole but we’ve been watching our world build up to this since cell phones came on the scene. As they became commonplace, another element that is critical for voice was also gaining some steam – artificial intelligence (AI).

Remember back in the 90s, when you first experienced an automated phone tree, where you were asked simple questions and based on your answers, routed through a series of pre-recorded messages? I don’t know about you, but for me, that was rarely a positive experience. I typically ended up shouting at the phone in an attempt to be understood and hitting zero as often as I needed to, to get to a human being. The natural language processing technology just wasn’t that good yet and while the intention was sound, the experience was not.

Fast forward to this past week. Using my cell phone, I was able to contact United and get a real-time update on where my lost luggage was in 37 seconds. Thanks to AI and voice technology, it was seamless, easy, and efficient. Think about the conversations you have with Siri, Alexa, or Google. And even with that huge leap forward, we’re still at the inventing fire stage of this shift.

As marketers, we are always looking at whatever is new and wondering, is it a fad? Is this just another channel? Is this something that is going to be widely adopted by my audience or industry? We’re already working with limited resources – do I need to invest in this too?

Voice, I believe, is a seismic shift, like the internet and mobile phones were. And in a way – they’re all simply the next wave of the same shift. But voice will touch everything. It is already changing SEO and search. This year, it is estimated that over 50% of all searches will be conducted by voice. The whole idea of wanting to be on the first page of a Google search result will go by the wayside because voice searches don’t offer up ten options. It offers up one. Suddenly it’s the featured snippet or nothing.

There will be a day when people going to your website can navigate through it without ever clicking on a link. How we think about our owned media, like our websites, is going to be flipped on its head.

If you aren’t learning more about voice, as a marketer you need to make that commitment. Here are two conferences worth considering:

MAICON: The first annual Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference took place in July 2019 and although the 2020 conference has been canceled due to COVID, the dates for the 2021 conference are locked into place – July 13-15, 2021. We heard a lot about the merging of AI and voice at the first conference and the conversation is bound to grow in 2021.

Voice Summit: This event has been in existence for four years and is the largest voice-first event with over 5,000 attendees last year. They are still on track for their event, October 5-15, 2020 but keep up to date here for any changes.

Now is the time to learn and explore this new opportunity.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

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Are you selling from a position of confidence?

August 23, 2020

Given everything we’re all carrying on our shoulders right now, how in the world do we muster up the confidence to sell?

Marketing and sales are all about confidence. When you believe in what you’re selling, know it is the right answer for the prospect, and can see the benefits the prospect could enjoy – it’s much easier to approach a new opportunity and offer your assistance.

That’s where I think we can regain our confidence. By recognizing that we have something valuable to offer and by seeing it as us offering assistance. Your marketing should be helpful and useful, which builds trust. Once the trust is seeded, sales is about continuing the trust-building while offering tailored solutions that are going to exceed expectations.

Barbara Corcoran, from ABC’s Shark Tank, recently shared a letter that she wrote to the show’s producer Mark Burnett. It’s clear from the letter than she had received a “thanks, but no thanks” response to her audition and I’m sure Mark expected her just to exit gracefully.

Instead, she sent him this letter, outlining very respectfully why this was not the right decision.

Check out her letter below.  Are you approaching your marketing and sales with that same level of intensity and passion?  Do you present yourself with confidence?

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You actually have to say thank you

August 19, 2020

I don’t know many business leaders who aren’t incredibly grateful for the team of people who help them carry out the organization’s vision. When asked, they will rave about the skills, professionalism, and passion of their team and tell story after story about how they routinely save the day. But those same business leaders are so busy that unfortunately, they often forget to slow down and say thank you. Sadly, in today’s ultra-competitive job market, that can be a very costly mistake.

When it comes to our employees, The International Business Research Journal cited studies that have shown that organizational gratitude reduces employee turnover, fosters employees’ commitment to the organization, and increases productivity.

Those are huge wins on their own, but beyond that is what an attitude of gratitude does for your company culture. We know cultural fit is a crucial component for job seekers. If a company’s culture attracts employees who value and exude gratitude, your customers are the beneficiary of that chain reaction. Happier, more loyal employees lead to happier, more loyal clients.

Best of all, you can bake gratitude into your work environment with a minimum of dollars. Here are some of the most effective ways to make sure that your organization’s internal brand includes more than a sprinkling of thanks.

Make it personal: Most of the time, we deal with employees in batches. By department, by tenure, or perhaps by skill set or location. Gratitude is a very personal thing. There’s nothing wrong with thanking groups of people. We should do that. But it’s very different when you single out a person and make your appreciation about them and just them. Work anniversaries, hitting significant milestones, or earning a new level of expertise are all excellent reasons to stop and thank your team member.

Make it 360 degrees: Many companies have peer recognition programs, and they usually start off strong and then most wane from neglect and focus. Teaching your team to appreciate each other and to practice gratitude internally is a smart tactic. Just make sure your program has a champion, so it doesn’t feel like yet another “idea of the month” that we managers often get accused of starting and allowing to die on the vine.

Involve your clients: There’s no better way to emphasize that you value, teach, and practice gratitude than asking your customers to share in that experience. This can shift from sincere to uncomfortable in a hurry. Don’t ask them to do anything that will make them feel silly, like ring the bell for five-star service. An easy way to invite them is to send a letter, sharing your core values, and asking them to send you examples of team members who have lived out those values. This has a double benefit. It gives you a chance to remind your customers what you stand for and gets them to help you recognize your superstars.

Know what matters: There’s a fantastic book by Matthew Kelly called The Dream Manager. It’s a business allegory that reminds us to invest in our employees, know what matters to them, and help them achieve their dreams. Some employees may appreciate you demonstrating your gratitude through a new educational opportunity or a cash bonus. Others might prefer an extra day off or a gift card so they can treat their family to dinner. Knowing how to say thank you in the most meaningful way will make the thank you last a lot longer.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

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