Featured | Your Next CMO

What is Your Brand’s Personality?

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Jeff Swan Posted in Branding, Featured

When your best customer interacts with your brand, how do they feel about you afterwards?

This is a question only a select few savvy marketers can answer confidently. Instead most are focused on how to get more traffic, subscribers, leads, transactions. While these are important, the companies that offer a cohesive brand experience benefit from intangibles that are overlooked by data driven companies. First off I want to be clear that being driven by data and results is nothing but the best way to make marketing decisions. However, some companies are able to go above and beyond the numbers to offer something truly unique; and they benefit by earning long-term loyal customers.

An Example of Superior Customer Service

Take for instance Zappos.com. In a market that’s saturated with online and offline shoe stores, Zappos has consistently set and raised the bar for a unique customer experience that, in my opinion, supersedes any I have had in a bricks and mortar shoe store. Each and every staff member is empowered to provide the best possible service to their customers through social media, live chat, and more and are encouraged to create a “Wow!” moment every time.

In my personal experience, I had just finished reading the book Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Knowing that Zappos does not offer service to Canada, I thought I would put their infamous customer service to the test and see if I could somehow get a pair of shoes delivered to my home in Vancouver, BC. Although I was not 100$ successful (disclaimer: they really don’t offer shipping to Canada), I had a uniquely pleasant experience with my customer service representative who went out of her way to find me a convenient place near my home to ship the shoes and store them until I could pick them up. While I had to spend half a day driving to Blaine, WA to grab my shoes, the savings in gas and the mini-adventure made it all worth while!

At the end of the day, I came away from the experience happy and notably impressed with the level of care the Zappos staff member took to make sure I was able to happily purchase from their store. My impression from Zappos was that theirs’ is a personality of kindness, helpfulness, and that they would go above and beyond the call of duty to make for a happy customer experience. To be analogous, they’re like what everyone’s best friend should be!

How Create Your Own Brand Experience

Taking this lesson into your own company, consider the concept that a brand is more than just a collection of graphic design and carefully written key messages. The true measure of a brand is how it resonates with its best customers during and after an interaction with its staff or properties. When designing these customer experiences for clients, it always helps me to develop a narrative in my head not unlike the voiceover on a movie trailer.

By creating a narrative you imagine the customer going through the experience and you pick up details of how they’re dressed, who they’re with, and what might be important to them. This helps a marketer uncover the additional actions and services that truly make a memorable experience. It’s like when you order wings from a restaurant and the server brings you a finger bowl and a hot towel to clean your hands afterward. Or the gas station attendant who cleans your windows while filling up your gas tank. It’s these little things that take away any anxiety or extra work involved with making a purchase and inspire the right customers to want to continue going back.

Key Takeaway

Creating an impact with your best customer takes careful thought, hard work, and maybe even a little bit of extra money. However, providing a uniquely pleasant customer experience that leaves nothing to be desired sets you apart from the countless marketers today who allow cost savings and strict ROI calculations to limit the customer experience to the bare minimum required to make a sale. Life is about experiences, and the brands that not only embrace this but also champion it, consistently succeed beyond expectations.

Just Do It: A Lesson in Simplicity & Focus

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Jeff Swan Posted in Featured, Lead Gen/Customer Acquisition

My fourth year of university was an exciting one for me. I had a schedule packed full of marketing classes so my creative juices were flowing day and night. Every project was exciting, utilizing my full skill set, and I learned a tremendous amount of marketing theory during the day while applying it at night in selling home electronics at Future Shop Canada. With Future Shop’s elaborate incentive program, Circle of Excellence, I thought I knew everything there was to know about managing a sales team and motivating them to succeed. Then I took Sales Force Management with Brock Cordes. He taught me that “Just Do It” is not just a famous Nike tagline.

Theory vs. Reality
To be fair, students have an ideological approach to business. They see the world in black and white and expect specific, well-thought-out actions to achieve consistent results each time. Professor Cordes though, knew differently. Only after being in the business community for the past 8 years have I realized how much grey area there is in marketing and sales. I now know how challenging it can be to truly earn a long-term customer, but have also learned countless interesting strategies and tactics to do so in a consistent and efficient fashion. The one lesson that rings through though is that a simple approach usually wins out over the more complicated.

The Lesson
One project, which focused on a case study for an established mid-western US business services company, taught me a valuable lesson in efficiency that I consider every day in managing sales and marketing staff and contractors. Tasked with motivating an underperforming sales team, my team and I looked to Future Shop as an example of a company that is great at motivating their staff.

With Circle of Excellence and a creative commission incentive program, my colleagues and I knew that selling specific products, warranty programs, and accessories garnered significantly higher commissions in comparison to other alternatives. Therefore the highest earners in our company focused 100% of their attention in selling only the highest incentivised products and services. Combined with aggressive daily and monthly sales targets and extremely involved sales managers, the company grew and grew. With these factors in mind, my team and I set out to create an elaborate incentive program designed to motivate this under-performing sales team; and we got crucified!

On presentation day, we were excited. In our minds, our program was going to wow the pants off of everyone in the room, especially Professor Cordes! With passion and excitement we shared the details of our plan and demonstrated how it would solve all of the manager’s problems and get the team going. It was only until Q&A period that we realized how much we missed the boat. The problem was not incentives, employee relations, or even sales skills. It was in poor leadership.

As many of our classmates pointed out, there were indicators in the case study that described a sales manager that was disenfranchised, bored, and not properly leading her team. She was not holding her sales representatives accountable for sales activity and was not sharing her valuable experience with the team to achieve their targets. When we asked the Professor what we should have done instead, he said “Just Do It”. To translate, he meant that there does not always need to be a fancy or elaborate way to solve a problem. Sometimes, just going out and doing your job with confidence and determination can achieve more results than anything else.

How I Use This Lesson
Taking this lesson with me, I consider my approaches to marketing and sales projects every day. I ask myself, “If I took away ‘X’ from this marketing strategy, would it negatively affect my campaign’s performance?” I quickly identify expendable programs in which my clients may be investing heavily and identify ways to be more efficient with their marketing budgets. The lesson, while simple, acts as a battle cry for my marketing practices and serves to keep me mindful of my clients’ marketing budgets while getting consistently strong results.

Thank you Professor Cordes for the lesson. I am “just do(ing) it”!

Does Your CMO Drive Business Growth Through Culture?

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Jeff Swan Posted in Business, Featured

I believe marketing executives need to be more than just focused on driving business, but instead should be driving a culture that matches both the market demand and the core identity of the organization. It moves beyond planning, implementing, and tracking campaigns and moves into affecting each and every business function.

The transformative approach outlined by Korn/Ferry in this whitepaper considers that every employee adds some value to the customer relationship. In nurturing the employee and developing systems that help them satisfy customers to the best of their ability organizations will be equipped to succeed for a long and sustained period of time.

Organizations led by this new generation of CMO build a lasting legacy that hold true importance to their customers in a way that was not possible in earlier generations. The relationship they create is stronger than price, incentives, or a well-designed brand in influencing buying behaviour. Therefore the new CMO views this relationship as more valuable than merely increasing transactions, but instead focuses on building long-term, profitable customer relationships.

So how does a CMO operate in a business environment that is constantly evolving, offering more and more innovative ways to reach an audience and reducing the barriers to entry for competing business like every before?

By focusing on culture. Build a culture that genuinely speaks to your best customers and they will want your brand and its products and services.

Content Relevancy: A Behavioural Approach to Email Marketing

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Jeff Swan Posted in Featured, Lead Gen/Customer Acquisition

How does an effective marketer achieve top customer engagement through email marketing?

It goes far beyond a catchy subject line. By tying content closely with users’ online behaviours you can assure the highest level of relevancy for your company’s marketing content. Here’s a quick example of how it can work for a services-based company:

Subscriber receives newsletter, clicks on an article on Search Engine Optimization
Subscriber reads article and clicks on the “Tweet This” app to share it with her followers
Marketing Automation program is alerted by an action from a Subscriber and schedules a follow-up invitation to a Webinar on “How to Leverage Social Media to Increase Search Rankings”

In this context your marketing program automatically invites the most fitting subscribers to your Webinar thereby increasing your prospective CTRs and registrations. Using this example it is easy to see how adding behavioural targeting to your email marketing program can increase user engagement and therefore improve your marketing team’s ability to produce Sales Qualified Leads considerably over time.

How can you use behavioural targeting to improve your marketing program’s effectiveness?

What Is Marketing?

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Jeff Swan Posted in Business, Featured Leave a comment

When people ask me this question, I always like to explain it in the most simple sentence as follows:

“Marketing is the practice of bringing a product or service to a market that needs it.”

Of course you might be thinking that “needs” is a pretty hard term. The fact is, that if you fulfill a “want” you will get some sales. If you fulfill a “need” you will have a long-term viable business. This is why my driving motivation when helping a client succeed in his or her respective industry is focused on the customer NEED.

From there the approach is easy. You can do it yourself. Just think long and hard as to what your target customer base cannot live without. For example, a restaurant cannot do without sanitary supplies (not one I’d like to eat at anyway)! What is THAT important in relation to your business? Does your business have the resources or capability to provide it better than the competition? If the answer to this question is “yes”, then follow these simple three steps and marketing will seem easier than you’ve ever seen before:

Step 1: Research

Going further than just what your customer needs, find out how they like to use/consume it, where and how they like to buy it, and what type of service expectations do they expect after the purchase/use is completed? Use surveys, observe buyer behaviours, study website analytics. The options are endless, but the end goal is the same – find out in the most efficient way possible what is important to your customer base in creating a solid offering.

Step 2: Innovate

With your research in hand, identify the areas of your business that can be improved within your current constraints. Do you find that clients drop off of phone calls at your call centre after 8 minutes on hold? They need a shorter wait time. Again, the options are limitless. For a problem like the above, you can use chat technology to add more service options with shorter wait time, hire more staff to answer phones, or offer an online ticketing service. The goal is to improve on the delivery of your products and/or services to solve the need.

Step 3: Communicate

The bottom line is that you can have the best product or service in the world but if no one is around to see it then you’ll go flat broke! Let people know about your new innovation and communicate its benefits in a way that makes sense to your customers. Here’s a couple popular options available to marketers today:

Social Media
Email
Viral Video (animated ones are really cool!)
Advertising (yes, this is still cool too – cuz it works!!!)

If you follow these simple steps, you will get results. As I said earlier it doesn’t have to be complicated but it does have to be focused. Forget the “wants” and focus on the “needs”. The company that solves it better will win in the end. Isn’t that right Apple?