May 26th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Silence.  The tell-tale sign of a telemarketer.  They called you after all, so the social contract is for them to identify themselves after you say hello.   This is not the way these contractors for the San Francisco Chronicle work.

Like other telemarketers, they let you know in no uncertain terms that you’re just a number to them.  They have a bank of operators and an auto-dialer that makes as many calls as they need to keep all their operators busy.  And if all their operators are busy and no one can answer your hello, so be it; they’ll get you on the next round.  Just consider each call to be a gentle reminder to put your phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry.

There’s exactly one case where I’ve gotten a telemarketing call that I’ve appreciated.  The Acura dealership (or part of their ownership group) calls me every few months to remind me about getting an oil change and let me know what specials they have on that type of service.  What’s the difference between this and the San Francisco Chronicle?

My dealer lets me know what they’d be calling about and asked for my permission.  The value proposition was obvious: they call me around the time I need an oil change with a lower price than I would have gotten if I had to remember myself.

Permission marketing isn’t a new concept.  People have been asking whether they can follow-up on a phone conversation or a correspondence for as long as business has existed.

But this month also marks the tenth anniversary of Seth Godin’s book about Permission Marketing and he summarizes his book as follows, “Don’t be selfish. You’re not in charge. Make promises and keep them. It’s like dating. It’s an asset, it’s expensive and it’s worth it.”

I’m often (pleasantly) surprised at how big of a thank you I get when I follow-up with someone where we didn’t get the opportunity to work together after we first met.  I spend most of my time solving problems for other people so I take copious notes and try to remember something about that person and what I can solve for them.  Simply thinking about others at that level of detail and how you can help them grow their business, or make their lives easier, is often enough to get their permission to contact them again.

What some companies fail to remember is that unless you’re a monopoly or oligopoly provider, you can’t brute force your way to a customer.  That’s not completely true: you can use brute force, but you’ll need to throw money at the problem.

It’s an era where the traditional ad spend and marketing muscle are being augmented and sometimes replaced by more personal connections.  Major brands like Hyundai are basing campaigns today around the social networking referrals they get from Twitter, and even very small businesses like food trucks are creating their own online communities.

Other businesses also want to apply the concepts of permission marketing to building long-term business relationships through drip marketing, which we’ll cover in our next post.

May 20th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Blogs are websites that keep and organize a running journal of articles.  You’ll find many opinions about what style of writing your blog should have, how it should be a participating member of the blogosphere, and lists of do’s and don’ts.  “The rules” make blogging sound more complex than it really is for businesses.

Blogs give businesses three distinct advantages.  First, your business will have a larger search engine presence.  It’s easier to find your business on Google with a blog than without one.  This will bring you more traffic that you can convert.

Second, your business will have a fast and convenient way of publishing ad-hoc information and syndicating it across the web.

If you know how to use Microsoft Word or equivalent, blogging will be second nature.  Then, when you have new announcements or product releases, you can write a blog post that’s about the length of a longish email and post it using your blog.

Your blog will then ping dozens of sites that will take your new content and notify hundreds of other sites, making it available to their readers.

Unlike websites, blogs are born connected to other websites. They have software built-in that talks to other sites and gives worldwide (or hyperlocal) exposure to your content.  With the right setup, your blog will even tell search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN when you’ve published new content.  That way, you’re more likely to be included and it’ll happen more quickly.

Third, blogging is the great equalizer.  A blog gives your business the opportunity to compete on equal footing with larger companies.  Instead of competing based on ad budget, you can build a reputation for expertise by describing parts of the business that only a true expert or insider would know.

As your content gets more popular and receives links from other sites, you’ll organically appear higher and more frequently on search engines.

In this age of skepticism demanding transparency, there are no more faceless corporations.  If you don’t put a face on your company, someone else will.  And what that face becomes won’t be up to you.

So no matter how large or small your company, your blog posts will help prospects and customers get to know you as a company and connect on a more interpersonal level than they would necessarily with the traditional “faceless” corporation.

Your blog doesn’t have to get a lot of comments to be successful, I’ve spoken with many businesses worry about negative comments.  When I ask whether they’d rather receive a negative comment on their blog so that they can respond, or a negative comment on a third-party site where that might not be an option, the answer was overwhelmingly one-sided.  You can turn it into a positive and there are even cases where other customers chime in about how the complaint itself isn’t merited.  Or exercise editorial control for egregious trolling.

Our next blog post talks about how blogs can be used with your current website and methods for building traffic to your web presence using traditional and social media.

May 13th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Integrated marketing is the planning an execution of all your company’s marketing activities, online and offline, in a way that is consistent across all of your customer contacts and creates more value than when those activities are performed separately.

It’s very much based on the concept of gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  In order for that to happen, your marketing messages must be consistently reinforced at every point where you interact with customers.

But integrated marketing goes beyond integrated marketing communications, which focuses on consistency of messaging across different mediums.

Instead, integrated marketing as a whole uses a number of different mediums to convert people into leads and provide data to support turning those leads into customers.

The campaigns center around a strong web presence — usually a website or a blog, sometimes a microsite — but may also include email, print, direct mail, television, radio and social media to support and publicize that web presence.

Integrated marketing also combines the data you get back about your customers from those mediums to give you a more complete picture of your market and the segments you’re targeting.  This information is used to identify how well the campaign is performing in those segments and can sometimes be detailed enough to help close individual deals.

With integrated marketing campaigns, your best data comes typically from web analytics and email response measurement: the reason is that the information is easily, reliably and automatically measured without using special phone numbers, printed promotional codes or coupons.

But it’s not always easy to get the right metrics and interpret them correctly.  In our next blog post, I’ll tell you a real-life story about how one company picked the wrong metric and encouraged its employees to make that division unprofitable.  Then I’ll share how other companies measure their integrated marketing success and use that information to grow their businesses.

December 7th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• How Internet Marketing Is More Effective Than Traditional Advertising
• Tracking How an Actual Visitor Became a Lead
• Building a Stronger Reputation By Combining Internet and Traditional Marketing

Done correctly, Internet marketing is one of the most cost-effective mechanisms that businesses can use to generate leads.

The reason for Internet marketing is simple and ironic: permanence.   When a business launches a mail campaign, your pieces get delivered and you hope that you found enough people who are interested to make that mailing worth your while.

But most, if not all, of the mailings get thrown away.  People may not have even looked at them — and those that did may or may not remember your business. That’s why the author of The Fundamentals of Business to Business Sales and Marketing, John Coe, recommends mailing three times in a two to four week period in order to maximize effectiveness.  But after the mailers are sent, you have nothing of lasting consequence in your hands.  An online presence grows as you invest in it.
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October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• Determining the lifetime value of a customer
• Choosing the right customers to focus on
• Developing higher value customer relationships (CARLA)
• Building an effective referral system

Earning the business of a new customer is six to seven times more expensive than retaining an existing one according to Bain & Company director emeritus and author of The Loyalty Effect, Frederick Richheld.  So it makes sense to focus marketing efforts, not only on new customer acquisition, but also on increasing the lifetime value of your existing customers.
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October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• Why some websites won’t return your investment
• What a good-looking website can and can’t do
• The 5 C’s for building productive websites

One of the most common issues I hear from clients is that they built a website but aren’t getting any return on their investment.  The complaint is the same from clients who spent a small fortune at an ad agency to ones who tried to cut a few corners: no ROI.

The problem is so pervasive that many businesses not doing e-commerce think of websites purely as cost centers or online brochures and not as a steady source of leads and revenue.  Companies using this type of conventional wisdom are leaving money on the table.
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