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May 15 2012
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13 Questions That Will Lead You To Your Perfect Marketing Strategy

Plenty of startups try to determine the perfect business model to take to market only to find that the market doesn’t need, want or understand what they are presenting.

The fact is most books or courses on business models take this into consideration by suggesting trial and error scenarios and market hypothesizes prior to launch.

Any business model, or plan for that matter, is little more than a guess and I believe that your best chance for getting that guess right is to build your business model based on a marketing strategy.

This assumes the role a fully developed marketing strategy actually should play in determining the direction of an organization. The fact is most people, if they consider marketing strategy at all, stop at a core message, identity elements and perhaps a sales proposition and call it a strategy.

A marketing strategy is how you plan to use the resources available to you to build an ongoing case that your business, products and services are the obvious choice for a narrowly defined ideal customer.

If you accept this expanded view of marketing strategy then I would suggest you answer the following questions in an attempt to measure where your strategy stands today and where it could go if your understood and integrated it fully as your business model

  1. What about this job, work, or organization are you passionate about?
  2. How does this business serve a higher purpose for you and your customers?
  3. What value do you really bring that benefits your market in ways that your competitors wouldn’t dream of proposing
  4. What’s the dominant personality trait that you need your customers to associate with your business?
  5. What does an ideal client look like?
  6. What is the simple 10-word core message that explains and excites?
  7. How will your market become aware of your business?
  8. How will your market come to trust that you have the answers?
  9. What are the revenue sources that you can tap to grow this business?
  10. Can you describe the perfect customer experience throughout your organization?
  11. What resource gaps and constraints do you need to overcome to achieve your strategy?
  12. What partnerships do you need to create in order to achieve your strategy?
  13. What would the result of using this strategy model to run your business look like?
Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Vision Tagged With:
Apr 30 2012
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The Incredibly Logical Way to Manage Customer Relationships

In a perfect world, every customer relationship would be steeped in a complete understanding of the customer’s current wants, needs and desires. The trick of course is that getting anything that looks like that at all requires three things – incredible planning, thoughtful technology and consistent execution.

The entire category of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology inherently offers the promise of this kind of relationship management while often providing little more than a historical account of a series of contacts, emails, phone calls and purchases.

This is not to say that the technology itself is lacking. Most technology solutions are only as good as the planning that goes into the front end installation and consistency involved in the back end operation and execution.

In many ways the CRM system is simply a tool that expresses the logical manner in which a company views its prospects and customers. In order to get a great deal more from the technology, you must get a great deal more strategic about how a lead moves through the various stages of becoming a customer and how a customer advances to the ultimate state or referral relationship.

The Marketing Hourglass

Special Note: If this idea resonates with you go grab an entire workbook, video and lesson on how to apply it to your business free of charge. Get it here.

 

Developing the stages

I believe that most every business can benefit by viewing their customer relationships through the lens of something I call The Marketing Hourglass.® The Marketing Hourglass is a series of stages that make up the customer life cycle starting from the point at which a prospect comes to know your business through the place where they become a loyal referral champion.

The hourglass is far more effective in terms of customer relationship management than the marketing funnel approach because there is so much emphasis on the customer experience before and after the sale.

The seven stages of the hourglass are: Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat and Refer. In an effective customer relationship view each of these stages would have intentional tools, processes, actions, products, services and campaigns all designed to move someone in one stage on to the next.

So, your ads (Know) would not try to sell, they would be designed to offer an opportunity to get to know more (Like) and potentially move the prospect to take an action based on trust, such as exchange an email address or sign-up for a demo.

Most CRM makers and consultants will argue that this is precisely how CRM tools are meant to function, but experience tells me that few businesses are using them in this manner because the focus is on the tool and how to operate it rather on the business and customer objectives.

The Marketing Hourglass approach simplifies how to think about the overall relationship before you start to employ the tool to track and measure it.

Visualizing your stages

Once you’ve designed how you plan to move prospects and customers through your business you can attach the Marketing Hourglass labels to every contact in your CRM system as a way to keep tabs on the work you have left to do in your relationship building system.

Once you define and label the logical path you’re using to deepen your customer relationships you can start to use your CRM tool to visualize where every lead and customer is in your hourglass and this gives you the ability to easily view where you’re system is breaking down, where there are jams, and where it needs your attention.

One way to further think about this intentional staged approach is to view every person in one stage as a lead for the next stage. For example, a customer in the (Buy) stage should be looked at as a new lead for the (Repeat) stage. This allows you to build better processes, such as results reviews and additional educational touchpoints, aimed at moving them to that next stage.

Once a customer moves to the (Repeat) stage they are now a hot prospect for your (Refer) campaign, but only then.

As you can see all of this staged activity takes planning to get set-up and a great deal of execution to produce results, but the Marketing Hourglass breaks the entire relationship management practice into logical parts and allows you to think in terms of a logical global path. At this point your chosen CRM tool can become the most powerful tool in drawer.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: ,
Aug 11 2011
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Begin With the Customer Experience in Mind

When most businesses create a new product or service offering they initially develop the attributes of the product or service. Makes sense, you don’t have anything to sell unless you create something people want to buy.

The Marketing Hourglass

Marketing Hourglass

But, the very next thing they do, once they think they have a winner of their hands, is go to work on the promotion of the new offering – the sales letter, landing page, brochure.

Again, another important marketing consideration, but I would like to suggest what is ultimately a much stronger path to take.

Begin with the end in mind.

In other words, the very first thing you should do when thinking about bringing a product or service to market is to think about what you want the customer to be thinking and feeling about your product or service180 days or so after they made the purchase and work backwards toward the point where they become interested in making a purchase.

The processes, touches and follow-ups you build by taking this “customer experience” approach can help ensure that you have a winner, promote a winner, and perhaps more importantly thrill your customer.

In the rush to create and promote our goods it’s this final, crucial point that often goes without thought or is made up after repeat sales and referrals lag.

Think of it this way – the sale is not complete until the customer is so happy they confidently make referrals.

So, a backwards process example for a training course you’re promoting might look something like this:

  • 180 days after purchase – customer receives free course updates and offer to meet with a select group of other course participants in an invitation only peer-to-peer group accountability program.
  • 90 days after purchase – customer receives email offering them 30% off of any other product or service of their choice as a current customer courtesy
  • 60 days after purchase – customer receives coupon offering free evaluation of their progress with the training course and the opportunity to engage a consultant to help them if they are stuck working on their own
  • 30 days after purchase – customer receives coupon for free 60 minute coaching session to help keep them on track
  • 14 days after purchase – customer receives coupon for 30 days of unlimited email support to keep them on track with their purchase
  • 7 days after purchase – customer receives mailing with additional bonus materials as a way of saying thank you for their purchase
  • Immediately on purchase – on successful shopping cart transaction customer is directed to Web page that hosts a welcome video that sets the expectation for when and how they will receive their purchase. Automated email provides instructions and orients the customer to the contents of their new purchase and how to receive support if they have questions.
  • Trial – After viewing video series prospect is offered the opportunity to download 2 free chapters from the course and receive free 30 minute coaching session to discuss their specific challenges.
  • Information gathering – After seminar prospect is offered opportunity to sign up to receive video series of client case studies and ebook featuring content covered in seminar
  • Awareness – Attends informational online seminar that dives into the problems most business face when trying to do X that your course addresses

Obviously, the components of this approach will vary greatly depending upon the offering and prospective customer, but it’s the thinking here that’s so important.

The process of beginning with the end in mind actually forces improvement on the product or service, creates opportunities to upsell and cross sell and focuses on the long term positive experience for the customer – which creates lead generation by way of referral and word of mouth.

Astute Duct Tape Marketing readers might recognize this as The Marketing Hourglass  – a process that suggests the development of logical processes that move prospects to customer and customers to loyal fans by way of 7 phases – know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat and refer.

One final word of advice. Don’t make this a stiff, automated, spammy drip system. Put personality, fun, surprise and value in each and every contact.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Vision Tagged With: ,
Jun 20 2011
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7 Resistance Crushing Questions Every Business Must Answer

marketing hourglass

The Marketing Hourglass

You’ve created buzz and awareness about your business, you’ve gained permission to educate and you’ve even started to build trust through your content and SEO work – prospects are coming to know, like and trust you – you’ve achieved the equivalent of marketing nirvana, right?

Well, not exactly. In fact, you’re also making your case in logical terms, you’ve offered up a perfectly competitive product or solution, one that everyone should buy, only to meet with one of the most powerful forces in nature – resistance.

I’m no science wiz, but I’ve always loved the idea of resistance in physics as a metaphor for the kind of resistance many business owners encounter when trying to spark a sale. Resistance is the ability of a substance to prevent or resist the flow of electrical current.

Many times we can present a solution and price that seems like the obvious and logical choice, but can’t seem to make the sale. What we sometimes fail to factor, however, is that while a product may have a logical price of, say, $10, the buyer’s emotional price – “I don’t trust myself to implement this solution, I don’t know enough to believe this is the answer, the cost of potential disruption is too high” – has effectively raised the perceived cost beyond recognition – and that’s the resistance you must address.

You must bake resistance crushing tactics, products, services and processes into your overall mix and marketing approach.

Below are seven questions that every business owner must answer, as part of what I call The Marketing HourglassTM, in order to lower or overcome resistance for their products and services and create competitively sustainable momentum.

  • What are your free or trial offerings? – Although you may have created the perfect solution there are times when people need a little taste before committing to the entire purchase. It’s essential that you find ways for people sample your products or expertise. You can do this by creating starter offerings that are free or low cost, packaging information products that make your solutions accessible, or presenting educational workshops that teach while putting your approach on display in a non-sales environment.
  • What is your guarantee? – This one frightens some people, because they fear the repercussions of every customer demanding a refund. Of course, if that’s even remotely possible then you’ve got bigger problems than marketing. The fact is most businesses offer or honor an implied guarantee – if a customer feels they didn’t get what was promised we often resolve this by offering a refund. So, why not lower the implied risk of doing business with you by finding a way to offer a compelling guarantee up front. Tell the world you’re so confident in the results you can bring that you’ll assume all of the risk in the transaction.
  • What is your “make it easy to switch” offering? – Even if you offer the perfect answer the customer must still factor the change in routine, disruption or down time, and chance that something will not go as planned into the decision to switch to or adopt what you’re offering. It’s essential that you consider ways to shoulder some of this burden by creating support processes and assurances that all but eliminate this potential snag. This may include doing prep work unrelated to your product or even offering to switch the client back if they don’t realized the promised benefits.
  • What are your core offering enhancements? The question of buying or not buying often comes down to total value and total value is built by surrounding your core offerings with additional products, services and value enhancing features that may or may not be directly related to your product or service. For example, if you sell a product, then offering training or providing a maintenance plan as part of deal may tip the scales in your favor. If you’ve developed an expertise in some area of business that could benefit your client base, say blogging or SEO, you may find that you can add value by teaching these skills, no matter what you sell.
  • What is your good, better, best appeal? Offering a variety of prepackaged price points makes it easier for some prospects to make a decision about your products and services. There is a strong psychological pull in this approach and some firms find that, although most of their sales come from one package, the existence of the other options helps to overcome resistance because people feel they get to make a choice. This can also create some distinct competitive differentiation as well.
  • What is your members only offering? The offer of exclusivity or community is very appealing to most, no matter the industry. The airlines, rental car companies, credit card companies and even the local coffee shop, have based a large part of their existence on the loyalty club and membership program model. I believe any businesses can explore ways to promote their best customers into some form of exclusive membership offering. This can include things like special discounts, networking opportunities, advance product features and premium content.
  • What are your strategic partner pairings? I’m a very strong advocate of assembling a team of best of class providers that can help your clients with any facet of their business or personal needs. When you become the “go to” person for your clients, you dramatically increase the value you provide in the relationship. I believe you can take this a step farther than many people do and proactively promote access to your network as a benefit of doing business with your organization. Of course, this mindset requires you to build strong and tangible relationships with your strategic partners, but if you do, and you take this proactive pairing approach you can dramatically enhance your own offerings while simultaneously creating referral relationships that will open the doors to additional opportunities.
Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy Tagged With:
Dec 7 2010
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7 Little Words That Sum Up the Entire Marketing Machine

Marketing is essentially getting someone that has a need to know, like and trust you. Of course then you must turn that know, like, and trust into try, buy, repeat and refer.

That my friends is the entire practice of marketing summed up in seven little words that make up what I call The Marketing Hourglass.TM

The idea behind the hourglass is that you look at each of the seven stages and intentionally plan products, services, processes and touches that logically move prospects along to the point where they become customers and then receive such a remarkable customer experience they become repeat customers and referral advocates. I talk a great deal about building your hourglass in my book The Referral Engine.

If you do nothing but spend the time to fill in the blanks in each of the stages in the infographic below you will be miles ahead in your thinking about a simple, yet powerful approach to your marketing. Feel free to print, share and use the graphic to help build your marketing hourglass

Click on the image to enlarge and get a bird’s eye view of your entire marketing machine.

Image Credit:CreditLoan.com

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Plans, Marketing Strategy Tagged With:
Nov 17 2010
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Marketing Is Your Most Important System

Image: Deliver Magazine

A lot of people ask me what Duct Tape Marketing is. Usually Duct Tape Marketing represents one of the various parts they’ve come into contact with.

There’s this blog, a podcast, a newsletter, books, self-study courses, and a network of independent Duct Tape Marketing consultants around the globe.

Even with all of those tangible representatives of Duct Tape Marketing, more than anything it’s an audacious idea that marketing for the small business can be simple, effective and affordable when practiced in a systematic fashion.

It’s my experience that any business, regardless of industry, can benefit from this view and that marketing can be stripped down to the effective implementation of these 7 steps and a big part of my business purpose revolves around bringing this message to the small business world

  1. Develop strategy before tactics – Base all decisions on an ideal customer and core message of difference
  2. Embrace The Marketing Hourglass – Look at every potential prospect and customer touchpoint and design a remarkable experience
  3. Adopt the publishing model. – Commit to producing content that builds trust and educates
  4. Create a total web presence. – Develop a plan that takes advantage of the SEO and social media aspects of being found
  5. Orchestrate the lead generation trio. – Use technology to create multiple ways to generate leads via advertising, public relations, and referrals
  6. Drive a lead conversion system. – Develop a sales system that everyone in the organization can use from initial contact to results review
  7. Live by the marketing calendar. – Make marketing a habit by establishing monthly, weekly and daily action steps

I outlined each step in detail for this week’s AMEX OPENForum post – Read the entire article here – 7 Steps to Creating a Sure-Fire Marketing System

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Referral Marketing Tagged With: , , ,