How to Get Your Marketing to Do What It s Supposed to Do -- Get and Keep Profitable Customers

Transcription

1 How to Get Your Marketing to Do What It s Supposed to Do -- Get and Keep Profitable Customers I m doing all this marketing stuff - and it isn t working! If this sounds like you, then you re going to want to keep reading because I m about to show you something that will save you time, money, frustration and even get your customers and employees engaged and excited about your company. If you aren t getting your desired outcome, then you aren t following the process. If you think that marketing is just about advertising and promotions, you re missing out on more than 80% of the process. Marketing is so much more than promotion. Philip Kotler, who many marketing people consider to be the authority on marketing, has laid out a simple marketing process that has become the standard for marketers worldwide. The marketing process starts with market research, then goes into segmenting, targeting and positioning, followed by the creation of a marketing mix (what you may have heard called the

2 Four P s and what I like to call the Offer ) and finally a feedback component that ultimately loops back to research. When you look at it that way, you can immediately see where your marketing strategy and tactics have gone off track. Are You Selling the Right Thing to the Right Customer? Your business will fail when you don t sell the right thing to the right customer. In other words, when you ignore the first two elements of the marketing process; Research and Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning. You re probably thinking that collecting this information would be time consuming and expensive. Not at all! I ve pulled together a process that gives you a super-three-fer of research information: 1. The specific attributes that matter most to your customer, so that you can focus your resources in exactly those areas that will attract your ideal customer and get them to choose you. 2. Competitive and benchmarking information on how you perform against other alternatives, so that you can enhance those features and benefits that matter to your customers, but that your competitors are ignoring. 3. Employee and customer engagement. Openly sharing what you ve learned with both customers and employees increases engagement and profitability. I call this The Signature StrengthR Process because it identifies the one thing your business

3 does exceptionally well and that your customers truly value. Here is what a completed The Signature StrengthR Matrix looks like for one of my clients: You can see that they have a clear strength in the Sweet Spot, but the real opportunity is with the two attributes below. Now they know that they can move resources into those two areas in the Improvement Zone. They can reduce the amount of resources they spend on the attribute in the Overkill quadrant and shift those over to where they will yield greater customer satisfaction.

4 How to Run Your Own Signature StrengthR Survey Running a Signature StrengthR Survey is a lot easier than you might think. I would recommend outsourcing the actual data collection to a market research professional or a freelance marketing consultant with experience in doing in-depth-interviews. This will assure that your feedback will be free of bias. This is not a blind branding survey. It s an open survey where your customers know that you are the company collecting the information. Another huge benefit to this survey is that you don t need to collect hundreds of responses, thirty completed interviews will often do the trick. But if you have a large population of customers, you may need to do more. How to set up your Signature StrengthR Survey : 1. Group your customers into three groups; happy customers, unhappy customers and undecided customers. This will allow you to group your customer responses by satisfaction and see why happy customers are happy and what s missing for the other two groups. 2. Create your call list. Your goal is to have ten completed conversations in each area, so you ll want to select at least 30 people per category on your call list. Be sure to choose respondents who are most likely to give you good, honest, and constructive feedback. If you re working with larger companies, you ll definitely want to choose multiple people from multiple departments 3. Send them a letter introducing the project. You ll want to craft a letter to your call list. Have the letter either come from you or the contact that has the best relationship with the person on the contact list. I like to send the letter in a large envelope, but if your customers are more likely to see it in , then it s fine to do that. 4. Brainstorm a list of attributes. You ll want to identify no more than 7 attributes that might be important to your customer when they are buying what you are selling. These attributes have to be specific. For example, 24-hour live customer service instead of customer service. 5. Create an online discussion guide. Use an online survey software to create an online discussion guide. I use QuestionPro because they offer a lot of wonderful features for a low price point. I ve created a sample survey that you can use as a template. 6. Schedule and run the phone interviews with your customers. I recommend scheduling phone interviews because this gives the interviewer control of the responses, allows them to probe and ask further questions that will give you more clarity. Be sure to transcribe everything your customers say in the interviews word for word. This will provide valuable voice of the customer information that you can use in your marketing messaging.

5 7. Process the feedback. When you have completed all of your interviews, it s time to look at the feedback. As you read through the responses, focus on the tone of the responses and focus on potential areas of opportunity and improvement. Do not look at these results as a grade or report card, consider them as a snapshot of your customers opinions at a single point in time. How to Use Your Signature StrengthR Results to Improve Your Marketing Results Running your own Signature StrengthR Survey is guaranteed to uncover exactly why your marketing hasn t been delivering on the results you ve planned for. Your next step is to put a plan in place to integrate what you ve learned into a new marketing strategy. It s a great idea to first review the results of your research with the customers that you talked to. This will show them that you respect the time they ve spent providing the feedback and that you are serious about making adjustments to give them what they want. Sharing your overall results with your customers will uncover new opportunities. They will see your results and give you additional comments and feedback that may not have been relevant in the interview, but now emerge as critical success factors. After you ve collected feedback from the customers on the results, share this information with your team. Show them what you learned in the survey interviews and then what additional insights you picked up from the customer reviews of the results. This process is the best way to prioritize your marketing, focus it on the customer and get both customers and employees engaged and excited about where your organization is headed.