Sunday, June 30, 2013

Tilt



Just Marketing has been silent for a few months. I was working on a book.
The book is now written, and will be published by the Harvard Business School Press on November 5th. Here's the Amazon page.
For Just Marketing readers, here's a preview of what the book is about:




Why Marketers Need a Revenue Growth Theory

For the past several years, marketers have faced growing pressures to prove the value of their activities and programs. In a 2011 survey of CMO's by IBM, nearly two-thirds of respondents said that return on investment will be the primary measure of the marketing function's effectiveness by 2015.

Despite all the recent focus on measuring and quantifying the performance of marketing, it is clear that marketers still have work to do to build credibility in the C-suite. A study conducted earlier this year by ITSMA, VisionEdge Marketing, and Forrester revealed that only 9% of CEO's and 6% of CFO's use marketing data, metrics, and analyses to make business decisions. In a study last year by The Fournaise Marketing Group, 80% of CEO's said they do not really trust marketers. According to Fournaise, most CEO's believe that marketers are disconnected from the financial realities of their companies.

This lack of credibility exists primarily because marketers don't typically demonstrate the connection between marketing programs and important business outcomes. Most marketers focus instead on measuring marketing activities, spending, and the immediate results of marketing programs (response rates, etc.).

The principal mission of marketing is to drive revenue growth. As Sergio Zyman, the former CMO of The Coca Cola Company, wrote more than a decade ago, "The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of your product, more often, for more money." (The End of Marketing As We Know It, 1999)

Every marketing activity or program is (or should be) designed to generate revenue either directly or indirectly. It's up to marketers to explain the links between marketing activities and revenue growth and make those links visible and understandable to the CEO and other senior company leaders.

To effectively demonstrate the connection between marketing activities and revenues, marketers need a revenue growth theory. I know from experience that many business and marketing leaders have a deep-seated aversion to anything that's "theoretical," but in this case, a theory is essential.

At the most basic level, a marketing strategy is a theory or a hypothesis about revenue growth. It's a big if-then statement that essentially says, "If we do A, B, and C, then our revenues will grow."

More specifically, a marketing strategy is a collection of if-then hypotheses that collectively describe a company's theory for growing revenues. The individual if-then statements are combined to create chains of cause-and-effect relationships that connect individual marketing activities to revenue generation. A simplified version of one of these cause-and-effect chains might look something like this:
  • If we publish an effective blog that offers readers access to compelling content resources, then more potential buyers will identify themselves and consume our content.
  • If more potential buyers identify themselves and consume our content, then we will generate more sales leads.
  • If we generate more sales leads, then we will also generate more qualified sales opportunities.
  • If we increase the number of qualified sales opportunities, then we will close more sales.
  • If we close more sales, then we will produce higher revenues.
With a clear understanding of how individual marketing activities fit into an overall revenue growth theory and the right metrics in place, it becomes relatively easy to demonstrate how individual marketing tactics contribute to revenue growth.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Download the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Report

Content marketing is going mainstream in 2013. B2B marketers are increasingly using content marketing tactics to engage B2B buyers with compelling content to educate, inform, entertain and guide them along their buying journey. But what’s behind the buzz and growing popularity of content marketing? Download the new B2B Content Marketing Report to find out.


Download the
B2B Content Marketing Report (2013)

* required 
*





Top-5 Content Marketing Trends in 2013

  1. Content marketing is going mainstream and is becoming more sophisticated to help marketers generate more leads and enable thought leadership.
  2. The popularity of white papers as a content marketing format is declining relative to interactive, easily digestible formats such as video.
  3. More than 82 percent of B2B marketers are increasing their content production over the next 12 months.
  4. YouTube is gaining popularity as a social media platform to reach and engage B2B audiences – Facebook is losing ground.
  5. Marketing automation is on the rise. 61 percent of marketers use marketing automation platforms, up from 43 percent last year.
For more details and charts, please download the full report above.

What's Your Promise?


“We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.”  -Abraham Lincoln 

A brand promise is the expectation you’ve given your members and communities.  It is your legacy and your differentiator over your competitors.  It is the basis of peoples’ decisions to buy with you. 

Your brand promise should stand the test of time no matter what products you offer, what communities you serve, and the goals you have for your financial institution.  Hence it needs to be simple, yet aspirational, and most importantly, something you can deliver on no matter what.

After all, it’s not the making of the promise that is important, is the keeping of that promise. 

How do you go about coming up with the one big thing that you want to promise and can deliver on no matter what?  Here’s how:
  1. Listen to the buzz.  Figure out what your members and customers really think about you.  This is NOT your perception about what people are thinking and saying about you.  We often make a big mistake in assuming more people know about our credit union or bank than actually do.  Moreover, we assume we know how they view us.  But there is no better way than to ask.  Ask your staff members, board members, current members and people in the community what they think about your financial institution.  Also do searches on sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and other social media sites to gauge the honest feedback and reviews people are posting about your credit union or bank.
  2. What do you stand for?  Working together as a team to determine your short and long term goals and making sure that those goals align with the foundation of your business is key in being able to live up to your promise to customers and members.  Is it to make banking fun, easy, or efficient?  Or perhaps having the lowest fees?  Price alone is hard to stand on, and determining the "why" of your organization takes some time, but the promise you end up making should be pointing directly toward this target.
  3. Do a SWOT analysis.  What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as an organization?  Having a candid discussion with your team about all of these areas will be beneficial as you enumerate and discover differentiators for your financial institution. 
  4. What is your brand’s personality?  What attributes does your credit union or bank exemplify through the course of doing business with customers and members?  These attributes will help you determine the kind of promise you will make and how you will deliver on that promise over time.  “A brand personality is an expression of a brand, described and experienced as human personality traits e.g. friendly, intelligent, innovative, etc.  It is an expression of the relationship between the consumer and the brand.”  (Source: www.esomar.org).

It’s all about values.  

Core values and brand values are two ways of saying the same thing, but having these foundational values in place that guide every decision you make as an organization is very important because it gives your employees and members and the community something real to believe in other than products or services.

Some great examples of core values can be found at the following companies: Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton,Whole Foods Market, and Zappos.com.  What makes these examples great, however, aren’t the words written on those pages or in their respective break rooms.  It is the lengths to which these companies go in their everyday businesses in order to fulfill these values that makes them so special. 

Having a brand promise can seem like such a little thing when you have to worry about how your financial institution is going to keep growing in this heavily competitive and regulated industry.  But it is one of the most important things your business can do for sustainability in the future.  It comes with many benefits:
  • Employee loyalty.  Enumerating the things listed above gives your employees a “why” for coming to work for your company.  When they buy into the vision and mission, they are investing themselves in you just as you have invested in them. 
  • Greater brand awareness.  Having these many facets of your brand defined gives you more bandwidth to do some really special stuff with your marketing and branding efforts.  Put together a brand communication plan for both inside your financial institution and outside.  Communicating the different elements of your brand at every opportunity with employees and customers will yield greater brand awareness for everyone. 
  • Knowing exactly who is best suited for your institution.  If you are always targeting different groups for different campaigns, or find yourself asking “who is our best target market,” focusing on the elements of your brand – including your brand promise – will help you determine the customers and members for whom you are able to serve perfectly. 
  • Organizational alignment.  This is the “utopia” we all strive for in business; ensuring that everyone in your organization - from the tellers to the back office staff to the board members – is on the same page with the same end game in mind.  Having a well-structured brand is the foundation for alignment across your organization. 

While it is important to be focusing on the metrics that measure the growth and progress of your credit union or bank, not focusing on your brand as well can become an enormous liability on your balance sheet.  At the end of the day, what is your promise?


Amanda


Let MarketMatch help you harness the power of your brand to impact your bottom line.  Our proprietary branding process will target opportunities to obtain new customer relationships, grow existing customer relationships, and build brand awareness. Contact me for details.


Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Integration of the NON Sales Culture

What You Say
Sales: Educate and advise customers and members on institution product and services to cultivate a win-win relationship … benefiting the consumer and growing the bank or credit union.

What They Hear
Sales: Push products and services on customers that they probably don't need because my boss said to.  I may get a couple extra bucks for my efforts, but ultimately it’s all about growing the institution.

Odds are that if you polled your staff, very few want to be in “sales.”  The term has grown to have a bleak connotation.  Seriously, go to Google Images right now and search “salesperson” … go ahead, I’ll wait …

Do you really want to be most of the bottom-feeders that show up in that search?  Well, neither does your staff.

Yet, so many places focus on and preach about a "Sales Culture."  You hire consultants and trainers and go to seminars and webinars … all in search of the secret weapon that will make your people "sell."

Here’s some free advice … It doesn't exist!

So, while none of your staff want to be greasy haired, panel jacket wearin’, slime balls – they do want to HELP people.

Most financial institutions focus far too much on the wrong things.  Think about the last 12 months.  What percentage of your staff training was on operational issues and transactional business?  Is that where you grow your business?  No, it’s grown by the relationship opportunities.  The face-to-face, meaningful, “they came here to do something important” stuff.  This is NOT the time to "sell," but the time to build rapport and trust.

There are 5 simple steps to the NON Sales Culture:
   1. Get the customer talking
   2. Listen for cues on financial need
   3. Translate those needs into products and services
   4. Describe how your products and services can fulfill the need
   5. Ask if they want to open the helpful account while they are here

Facilitate Meaningful Conversation
The most important step is to get the customer to talk and to learn to REALLY listen.  To get them talking, you simply need to ask the right questions, then shut up and know what to listen for.  Here’s are a few starter ideas using checking as an example:

The Basics:
  • Where do you have your checking account today?
  • What do you like about it?
  • What would you change?
  • How do you use your account?
  • What other important accounts do you have at other institutions?

The REAL Helpful Stuff:
  • Learn about their family.
  • Learn about their job.
  • What d they do for fun?
  • What life milestones are happening in their life?
This is a helpful front line tool that you can implement today
to help your staff ask the right questions EVERY time.

You don't need Zig Ziglar to fly in and train your team on this stuff.  By discussing the power of Meaningful Conversation to your entire staff: tellers, new accounts, lending, investments, call center, collections – you’ll have an integrated relationship building machine that will help your customers and grow the business!

We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too. Contact us to see how.

Nearing 240,000 visits worldwide, we hope that you enjoy this blog.  If you find it helpful, please share it with your colleagues. Also, check out our YouTube Channel for short video blogs about financial marketing.  

MarketMatch is also a nationally and internationally requested speaker. Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your next conference.

937-426-9848
Follow me on Twitter @egagliano

Sunday, June 23, 2013

When Listening to Customers is a Bad Idea

Over the past three decades, dozens of books, magazine articles, and blog posts have been written about the importance of listening to customers. Becoming more customer focused is now a critical strategic objective for many companies, and listening to the "voice of the customer" is seen as an essential ingredient in the recipe for success.

Marketers often have the primary responsibility for gathering, analyzing, and extracting insights from customer input. So, it's important for them to understand that listening to customers in the right way can valuable, while listening in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons is a bad idea.

Companies often seek customer input in order to develop products or services that customers will buy. However, many companies still struggle to develop new solutions that resonate with potential buyers. Of course, a new product or service sometimes fails because a company hasn't listened enough to its customers. But just as often, the failure occurs because the company listens to customers in the wrong way and for the wrong purposes.

In the typical scenario, companies ask their customers what they want and encourage them to describe specific product or service features that would be desirable. The problem is that most customers aren't well suited to perform this task.

Most customers have a limited frame of reference. Like all human beings, most of what they know is based on their past experiences. This means that customers can do a fairly good job of describing what they want when they're asked about familiar products or services. However, when customers are asked to imagine or describe new products or services, they usually encounter what psychologists call "functional fixedness." This is the normal human tendency to fixate on the way a product or service is normally used or on the features and attributes a product or service normally possesses.

Functional fixedness can make it almost impossible for people to imagine new features or functions. In short, most customers have great difficulty describing products or services they've never experienced. As a result, customers often describe features or functions that offer only modest improvements over what already exists. As Henry Ford is credited with saying, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

The key to listening to customers the right way is to shift the focus from specific features or functionality to desired outcomes. Customers may not be particularly good at describing specific solutions, but with a little prodding, they can usually do a great job of describing what they want to accomplish and what problems they face.

Focusing customer input on desired outcomes enables you to understand what customers really value, and this will help you design solutions that customers will be anxious to buy. The outcomes-based approach places the responsibility for designing the solutions squarely on your shoulders. That's where the responsibility should be since you, and not your customers, are best suited to perform this task. So by all means, don't stop listening to your customers. Just be sure you are listening in the right way and with the right objectives.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

What Do You Brand For?



In recent years, “brand” has become somewhat of a buzzword in business.  While a lot of people think it is an intangible and amorphous word with little meaning, your company’s brand is the single most important contributor to your bottom line as an organization.  Successful brands are invaluable.  Conversely, undefined brands are a black hole on your organization’s balance sheet.

Brands have real, actual value behind them, which is known as “brand value” or “brand equity.”  Investopedia defines brand value as “the value premium that a company realizes from a product with a recognizable name as compared to its generic equivalent.  Companies can create brand equity for their products by making them memorable, easily recognizable and superior in quality and reliability.  Mass marketing campaigns can also help to create brand equity.”   

Let’s use Coca Cola as an example.  It is the most recognizable brand in the world with its brand valued at $77.8 billion, according to the 2012 Best GlobalBrands Report by Interbrand.  This $77.8 billion is the cost of the actual brand…not inventory or real estate or its executives.  It is the value of Coca Cola’s brand recognition throughout the world.  Coke’s consumers pay more for the Coca Cola brand product over competitors and generic labels, and that difference of what consumers will spend is Coca Cola’s brand equity. 

Coca Cola promises fun, freedom, and refreshment to consumers.  Not the lowest price for cola, or the most convenient to find.  Their aim is to sell an experience. 

The reason behind branding is because you are standing for something. 

It’s difficult to near impossible to put a figure on the brand of our credit union or community bank and our financial products and services.  But the important lesson we can learn from Coca Cola is that you have to stand for something, build your brand around it over time, commit to continuous marketing and communication of your brand's elements, and then you won’t have to rely on price as your differentiator.

How can your financial institution increase its brand value with current members/customers and the community?  Develop a brand strategy, which includes a brand promise, positioning statement, and a defined identity and be that brand every day.  Over time, you will earn recognition and loyalty, which should be the true foundation of your financial institution’s marketing efforts.

My next post will focus specifically on how to define your brand promise, so be sure to check back next week. 

Amanda


Let MarketMatch help you harness the power of your brand to impact your bottom line.  Our proprietary branding process will target opportunities to obtain new customer relationships, grow existing customer relationships, and build brand awareness. Contact me for details.


Sunday, June 16, 2013

Passing the Baton Without Missing a Step- Sales Enablement, Part 3


 

This is the third of three posts that are discussing the role that marketing plays in helping the sales team sell - what is usually called sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed what sales enablement is and why it is an important issue for most B2B companies. The second post discussed one of marketing's primary sales enablement responsibilities - providing the content resources that will help sales reps advance sales opportunities.

In this post, I'll explain why effective sales enablement also requires marketers to provide information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without a loss of momentum. In essence, marketing and sales need to work together like the runners in a relay race. Here's what I mean.

As I wrote in my last post, business buyers don't distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. We now know that most buyers are performing research on their own before they are willing to meet with a salesperson. So by the time a potential buyer meets with your sales rep, the buyer will probably have visited your website and accessed several of the content resources you offer.

These self-educated buyers have little patience for "starting over" with a salesperson. They expect their sales rep to come into the initial meeting with a basic working knowledge of their business and industry. Just as important, today's buyers also expect their sales rep to know what has already transpired in the relationship. They want the sales rep to step in and provide new insights that build on what has already occurred and help advance the decision-making process.

To make the transition from marketing to sales without losing forward momentum, marketers must do more than simply provide contact information when they pass a lead to sales. An effective lead hand-off should include significantly more information, such as the buyer persona assigned to the lead, a description of the content plan for the relevant buyer persona, and a list of the content resources developed for that buyer persona.

An effective lead hand-off will also be accompanied by an activity history detailing the prior contacts between the lead and the selling company. The activity history should include the following kinds of information:
  • Outbound marketing offers sent to the lead
  • Outbound marketing offers the lead has responded to
  • Website pages viewed by the lead
  • Content resources accessed by the lead
  • Summaries of any person-to-person communications between the lead and representatives of the selling company
  • The prospect's lead score
Delivering this information isn't as overwhelming as it might first appear. Marketing should have developed a content plan and content resources for each buyer persona for each stage of the buying process. So, this information should already be available. Your marketing automation software should be able to capture most of the lead's activity history and transfer that information to your CRM system when the lead is passed from marketing to sales.

Don't misunderstand me. This type of lead hand-off does require additional work, but it will also provide significant benefits to the sales team and the company.
  • It reduces the amount of time that sales reps must spend on lead research.
  • It eliminates the need for sales reps to guess about what content resources to use.
  • It reduces the need for sales reps to create or customize content.
  • It improves the ability of sales reps to continue prospect relationships without losing momentum.
  • It helps improve sales pipeline velocity.
The changing dynamics of B2B demand generation require a coordinated effort by marketing and sales. That's why sales enablement remains one of marketing's most important responsibilities.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 2 of the sales enablement series here.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Goldilocks and the Three Brands



Make sure your brand is just right.
If you look up the word “brand” in the dictionary, here is what comes up:

brand  (brænd) 

— n
1.
a particular product or a characteristic that serves to identify a particular product
2.
a trade name or trademark

But a brand is a whole lot more than a mark or a characteristic.  There are many imperceptibles that go into a brand, and it is a lot more complicated than just an icon or logo as a successful brand has many elements.

Look up “brand” in business or marketing books, however, and it is overcomplicated, impersonal, and ambiguous:
"Unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combinationof these, employedin creating an imagethat identifies a productand differentiates it from its competitors. Over time, this image becomes associatedwith a level of credibility, quality, and satisfactionin the consumer'smind. Thus brands help harried consumers in crowded and complexmarketplace, by standing for certain benefitsand value. Legal namefor a brand is trademarkand, when it identifies or representsa firm, it is called a brand name."
(Source: www.businessdictionary.com)

Getting Your Brand Just Right

A brand is personal.  People choose to buy and/or interact with brands they can relate to and that evoke a set of emotions.  The easiest way to define a brand is to think of your organization as a person.  Everyone has a certain consistent appearance, a tone, a set of personality attributes and quirks, likes and dislikes, ideal friends and partners, etc.  This definition is easy to understand and is just right for any business.

While a brand takes a long time to build and define, there is a science behind it.  The great and successful brands of today are personifying their brands, and many have actually hired someone to embody those attributes in order to amplify their brand awareness with consumers.

Some brands that, in my opinion, do a fantastic job of personifying their attributes are Progressive Insurance, M&Ms, and Geico to name a few.  And, while they are actual people, Oprah, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump and even Jennifer Lopez are successful brands.

What words describe your brand?
If you’ve had trouble knowing where to start in defining your credit union or community bank’s brand, take a step back and start describing it as you would another person.  Then you’ll be on the road to getting your brand juuuuuust right. 

Amanda

***Stay tuned for next week’s blog for tips about how to define the different elements of your brand!  


Let MarketMatch help you harness the power of your brand to impact your bottom line.  Our proprietary branding process will target opportunities to obtain new customer relationships, grow existing customer relationships, and build brand awareness.  Contact me for details.

Monday, June 10, 2013

You'll Never Get Everyone to Love You!

This blog is going to go against your every human instinct. Though it will logically make sense, many of you will disagree. That's good, I'd love some good ol' fashioned argument here -- change my mind!

We all have an innate need for the approval of others. We want people to like us. Many of us take it personally if even one person doesn't find us groovy.



"It's not personal, Sonny ... It's strictly business."
Michael Corleone

But as marketers, it isn't personal ... it's strictly business. Yet, we focus so much of our attention and energies on trying to make sure that every single person in our communities love us. Seriously, how many times have you discussed changing a policy because 3 or 4 people complained?


“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by 
saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing.” 
~Aristotle


Aristotle ... if nothing else, THAT cat knew branding!

From a branding perspective, we are trying too hard to be all things to all people and trying so hard to avoid criticism that we become branding's brown paper bags.

So, here's the beautiful truth ... as a public service to help you sleep better at night.

In most larger markets, if you have only 30% market share, you will be the largest institution in town.  With only 15% market share, you'll typically be #2.

Whew! Think about the weight that just lifted! If 1 in every 3 people like you enough to do business with you ... You win! If 1 in 10 like you, you're doing GREAT!

To have an impactful brand, stop trying to appease everyone and be something meaningful to a focused group of people.

So now that we know that not everyone will ever love us, who do we focus on?

Check out these blogs on segmentation:

Identify who your desired target is, learn what they want from you, determine if you can provide it, then make darn sure that you are THAT thing down to your very soul. With every interaction, every new hire, every policy and every message.


We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too. Contact us to see how.

Nearing 240,000 visits worldwide, we hope that you enjoy this blog.  If you find it helpful, please share it with your colleagues. Also, check out our YouTube Channel for short video blogs about financial marketing.  

MarketMatch is also a nationally and internationally requested speaker. Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your next conference.

937-426-9848
Follow me on Twitter @egagliano