Embrace the change

I've been around since the early days of Facebook. I've watched it go from a network of fellow college students into a network of well, everything and everybody. It's undergone lots of changes and every time they change anything I read a lot of "I hate this new facebook" or "I want the old facebook back." But a few months later, people get used to it and even begin to like it. Currently, this rings true for Facebook Timeline.

Now all pages have been switched over to Timeline, it may be time for you to explore some benefits your business page will have in this new format. I'll highlight my 3 favorite aspects:

1) The Cover Photo

Talk about real estate for branding. Instead of one tiny photo in the corner, you now have an 851x315 pixel area to showcase your company. As a visual person, I absolutely love this feature. It's like a free billboard dedicated just to you. Visit the pages of other businesses to see what they're doing. A few of my favorites include Folgers Coffee and Old Spice. Remember though, Facebook says you're not supposed to place calls to action or promotions in this space.

2) Profile Picture

No need to just have a logo anymore. This is another great place to get creative. Have the profile picture mesh with the cover photo, or have it contrast with the cover as a way to add visual interest. Think about your audience and your brand because this is the image that will show up on the newsfeed.

3) Pin a Post

Tired of your message getting buried in the Facebook listing? Well fret no more, you can now "pin" a post to the top of your timeline where it will stay. This is a great place to showcase promotions, contests or other calls to action. You can keep it there for up to 7 days at a time and you are now sure that everyone who visits your page will see that message.

These are just 3 of the many benefits of Timeline, so explore, research and most of all embrace the change. It's good for business.

Until next time,

Gail

Disney Service In Your Branch

Now that Spring Break is behind us, my attention is squarely on Summer Vacations!  Not just the one coming up in 58 days … not that I’m counting … but of vacations of the past as well.

Which leads me to a story I often tell in my branch experience seminars.

A few years ago I took my family on the obligatory trip to Disney.  It was late June and we were “fortunate” enough to catch the park on a record-setting 115-degree day.  It was so hot that, during an air-conditioned lunch, my son actually cried, “Please don’t make me go back out to Disney!”

 

But we had to endure.  We had to head back out to the park … because we were on a mission,  a mission for my daughter, who, at the time, was obsessed with Sleeping Beauty.  The mouse and rides and castle and cartoons were all extra.  There was one goal - only one experience that drove us.  The trip would not be a success until she met Sleeping Beauty in person!  In Sophia's mind, the expectation was this…

But, taken at face value, the details of the trip were more like this.  We drove 14 hours to get to Orlando … the last several hours in stifling heat and no A/C (the van’s air died just past the Florida border).  After dropping several hundred dollars on tickets, we went straight to the princesses and waited nearly an hour only to learn that Sleeping Beauty apparently didn’t wake up until after noon.  With a day that was so hot, our shoes seemed to melt on the asphalt, the park apparently opted to mark-up water to a premium price.  My wallet was draining as quickly as my patience.

There is a point to all of this that reflects on your bank or credit union.

You don’t measure quality service on your best day.  

You measure it at 4:50 on a Friday afternoon.

As service providers, we are ALWAYS on stage.  When I interviewed for Disney’s internal ad agency in 2000, I got to see “back stage.”  At every entrance to the park is a full-length mirror with the words: Smile, You’re on Stage.  And every single cast-member from the janitorial crew, to the gardeners, to Sleeping Beauty herself embraces the concept.

When we finally met Sleeping Beauty, she was magnificent.  She had no idea of the National Lampoon-like journey we endured to place Sophia into her lap.  But she made it all worthwhile and took as much time with us as we wanted.  She was in character and on-point … she made us feel special – like the only guests in the park.  This is what we remember from that day at Disney.

In your branches, we don’t know what obstacles stood between our customer’s home and our branch.  We don’t know what hardships may have lead to their needing cash or a loan.  But we are all on stage!  We are all in that flowing pink Sleeping Beauty dress … in character … making our customers feel special – like they’re the only guests in our lobby.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Want to learn more?  Enroll in the MarketMatch eCollege!  Smart learning online sessions delivered five consecutive Tuesdays with CFMP credits, tactical advice and a game plan for success!

MarketMatch is a full-service marketing firm, dedicated to the credit union and community banking community.  We utilize knowledge-based strategies to help you FOCUS on the efforts that will generate the greatest  MOMENTUM for your organization and demonstrate RESULTS with our written ROI Guarantee.

Learn more about us here. (click)

Chat with me LIVE! (click)

Or email me directly (click)

937-426-9848

4 Steps to Effective Email – and 1 Afterthought

According to The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, most of the world’s email traffic comes from the corporate world. In 2012, the number of businesses emails sent and received per day total 89 billion. This amounts to lots of emails flooding our inboxes every day! So how can we be as efficient as possible in our daily emails?

1. Always include a relevant subject in your subject line. This helps greatly in searching for emails you need to reference at a later date.
2. Keep your email short and address only one subject in your email – the same subject referenced in your subject line.
3. Reread your email before you hit send. Is it clear and easy to understand? Unclear emails only create more emails for the recipient to try and get a clear understanding of what you’re trying to say.
4. Check for grammar and spelling errors. Errors can make you look unprofessional.
5. If your company offers an instant messaging option, be sure to utilize this where appropriate. This can greatly decrease the amount of emails cluttering everyone’s inbox – including yours.

Until next time,

Melissa

• Learn More Here
• Chat with me LIVE!
• Or contact me directly

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. ~ E.B. White

MarketMatch is a full-service marketing consulting firm, dedicated to the credit union and community banking community.  We utilize knowledge-based strategies to help you FOCUS on the efforts that will generate MOMENTUM and yield the greatest RESULTS for your bottom line.

Purposeful Acquisition

Several years ago, I wrote a post entitled "You want to get into trouble? Concentrate on new audiences." At the time, I was confused and frustrated with the relentless focus on developing new audiences. The field's obsession with the new to the detriment of the loyal seemed illogical. My good friend Laura Willumsen, senior consultant at TRGArts, summed it up quite nicely by saying "we should find a way to love the one we're with, before we start courting others." Pretty safe advice that came at the perfect time for me.

Three years later, I have come to realize that healthy arts organizations have equally robust campaigns focused on new acquisition and retention, and increasingly we are focusing on improving the overall lifetime value of our customers.

For those with retention problems, I would still advise spending a majority of your resources reducing attrition before launching costly acquisition campaigns. There is nothing worse than spending a significant amount of resources enticing new patrons in the front door while your current customer base runs out the back door. And from a financial perspective, that is one of the easiest ways to sink the ship.

That said, if attrition and renewal rates are within the range of industry standards, more than likely it is time to concentrate on acquisition. Here are a couple of thoughts...

Programming. If you are looking to acquire new audiences, either you can dig a little deeper in your current well, or you can dig a new well altogether. If untapped audiences remain within your core programming, then continuing to dig deeper in your current well probably makes the most sense. If however, you find that your current programming has tapped out its audience base, digging a new well with expanded programming might be the key to acquiring new audiences. Digging a new well requires developing mission driven programming focused on an unmet need within your community. New programming initiatives are usually costly, and often times are prematurely abandoned when they don't hit a desired net revenue goal in a short period of time. Arts organizations need to view new programming initiatives as an investment in future audiences which will pay out over years instead of months. While digging new wells, it is important to maintain and cultivate your current well. Don't abandon the old for the new--let the returns from the old provide the investment capital for the new. Often times marketers are afraid of new programming because they don't want to risk offending current subscription audiences, but if you maintain a base level of traditional programming while offering an opportunity or two to test drive new programming, you will mitigate your risk of subscriber attrition. And for those who have highly subscribed houses, new programming might be the only opportunity that you have to get new audiences into your theaters which would otherwise be mostly sold out on subscription. During my final week at Arena Stage, I had to chuckle when a reporter asked me if we increased our number of musicals in the upcoming season because they were "cash cows." If only he knew that most musicals we produced actually lost money. Aside from artistic reasons, from a marketing perspective, we increased the number of musicals to attract more first time audiences, which we will then try to convert into lifetime patrons.

Direct Marketing. During the last year, I have heard of several companies eliminating acquisition efforts entirely due to budget cuts, thinking that investing exclusively in retention campaigns would result in higher returns over time because the ROI was better than comparable acquisition campaigns. Unless you are in desperate shape, please do not kill your acquisition efforts entirely. And here's why--if you currently have a healthy 80% renewal rate for your members/subscribers, it means every year you will lose 20% of your base. Statistics show that even if you have a flawless renewal campaign, you will still lose 10% due to changes in lifestyle or death. To replace those lost, you must invest in acquisition or budget for a reduced base each year that you don't. If you cut acquisition entirely, with an 80% renewal rate, you will lose half of your entire base in three years. And getting them back is going to be incredibly expensive! When looking at acquisition costs, often times it will take two to three years for a new member/subscriber to produce a net positive result, but over a lifetime, these new acquisitions will be responsible for years of renewal revenue.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul. When the economy took a nosedive in 2008, marketers responded by looking for places to cut by thoroughly monitoring the cost of sale for individual campaigns. Normally, I would encourage such behavior. But I believe it has resulted in a zero sum game of gains and losses among the various theaters in the Washington, DC area. Studies show that even as venues have dramatically increased their capacities, theater audiences in our nation's capital have not grown. And as we all looked for opportunities to reduce our marketing expenses, we refocused our acquisition campaigns to aggressively target the list segments that performed the best, which frequently were qualified leads of theatergoers from other companies. The most cost effective means of acquiring "new" audiences was soliciting patrons from other theaters. Acquiring "new" audiences didn't actually mean developing new theatergoers as much as it meant marketing to previous theatergoers who had never visited your theater before. This wasn't dirty pool. It is standard operating procedure in any highly competitive marketplace. But as I left Arena Stage, being incredibly proud that we had almost doubled our subscriber base in three years, I found myself being more interested in the number of none theatergoers we were able to convert into theater patrons. And the truth is I don't know because we never tracked it. As a community, the greatest challenge we have is developing truly "new" audiences in Washington, DC. If we are using each other as a primary source for our "new" audiences, then we aren't creating a healthier community as our individual successes come at the expense of others. Therefore I encourage marketers to look at acquisition in terms of developing completely new audiences for the community as well as acquiring new audiences for your organization. The latter will improve your individual health, while the former the health of the artistic ecosystem.

Sometimes Customers Are Pretty Stupid

This is a guest post by Justin Fox. Justin Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.

The only sustainable way to build a business these days, we are told, is to be straight with your customers. Today's sophisticated consumers, armed with the tools of the Internet

Marketing in the Age of Consensus Buying

The conventional wisdom among marketers and sales professionals is that the fastest and surest path to a closed sale is to identify and create engagement with the economic buyer - the individual who can actually make the decision to purchase your product or service.

Both marketers and salespeople know that most B2B buying decisions now involve more than one person, especially when a significant purchase is on the table. They also understand that it's important to communicate with "influencers" as well as the ultimate decision maker. That being said, the economic buyer remains the primary focus of most marketing and sales activities. One example of this focus is that many companies still use the traditional BANT criteria (Budget-Authority-Need-Timeline) for defining a qualified sales lead, and the "authority" component of BANT is the authority to make the purchase decision.

As it turns out, though, taking a direct approach to the economic buyer may not be the most effective strategy. Research by the Sales Executive Council of the Corporate Executive Board shows that when decision makers (economic buyers) are evaluating purchases, the single most important criteria is widespread support for the proposed supplier/solution across the organization. In other words, what the decision maker really wants to know is that a proposed purchase has the strong backing of his/her team.

Consensus buying is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Wise economic buyers have always sought input from their colleagues, especially when they are one or two steps removed from the use of the product or service under consideration. Consensus buying has now become the norm because leaders recognize that stakeholder buy-in is needed for the successful implementation of any new solution.

In The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson argue that the emergence of consensus buying has far-reaching implications for sales effectiveness. They contend that sales reps have traditionally viewed stakeholders in the prospect organization as sources of information. In the traditional selling model, sales reps gather information from stakeholders and use that "inside" information to fine tune their presentation to the economic buyer. Dixon and Adamson argue that a new sales model is emerging in which information and insights flow from sales reps to prospect stakeholders. These insights are designed to build broad stakeholder support for the proposed solution and provide stakeholders the information they need to evangelize the proposed solution with the economic buyer.

The emergence of consensus buying has implications for marketing as well as sales. Most importantly, it means that marketing must create content that speaks to the concerns and needs of all the stakeholders who will influence the purchase decision. Marketing is just as responsible as sales for creating engagement with all significant buying influences.

The second implication of consensus buying is that marketers can't afford to target lead generation campaigns too narrowly. We now know that targeted, more relevant lead generation programs are more effective that the "spray and pray" campaigns of the past. Targeting is important, but you shouldn't exclude influencers from lead generation programs, even if you have a good idea of who the economic buyer is. Other stakeholders can provide a valuable initial contact with the prospect organization, and their support is essential for a successful sale.

6 Examples to Get You Noticed

The goal of any creative initiative is to get noticed.  Of course, you also want a clean message with an easy to understand call to action … But unless you differentiate and stand out, your message will never be heard.

A catchy headline, crisp copy and bold design are a good start …  but think beyond that.

Here are some examples that may fire up your creative neurons.

Why Use Normal Paper?

We had 2 different jobs that pushed us creatively to think outside of traditional paper.

In the first example, our client offers the first personalized debit card in the market, where the member can put their own photo image on their card.  So, we “demonstrated” what the card “could” look like by turning part of the postcard into an actual mirror.

Another client was targeting physicians for a Commercial opportunity.  So we delivered the message to them in an x-ray envelope and printed the “message” on actual x-ray paper.  The best part?  We include an "appointment card" like you would receive from your family doctor or dentist.  The card lists the date and time that our team will follow-up.  

Again, the goal is to get your message noticed, so you can have your message understood.  In both of these cases, a world-class printer can make you look like a rock star!

Get Them Involved.

You don’t need to have a lottery to use scratch-offs.  Here are 2 examples of mailers that use scratch-offs to get the reader engaged with the piece.

We have a client who positions themselves as the mortgage authority and expert in “specialty” mortgages … RD, VA, etc.  This card asks the questions that the target is likely to be thinking with the answers under the scratch-off keys. 

In another example, we used a scratch-off to reveal what customers can do when they “Need extra cash,” with the answer, “Use the equity in your home!”

Much like the stickers in a Publisher’s Clearing House promotion, we simply use a tool where the reader expects to “win” something and get them more engaged with the mailer.

Why Use an Envelope?

The “Shoe Mailer” may be one that we are most commonly known for.  We ask Commercial prospects to “Take the next step with us,” and mail the message in an actual shoe.  The postage and address are applied to the sole of the shoe and it ALWAYS gets noticed.  During follow-up calls, it’s common to be recognized as, “the shoe people.”

Our local post office loves us!  The vessel that you mail in may be more important than the actual message.  Think creatively through the entire project.

Show NOTHING on TV.

Creating a television message, on a local production budget, that gets noticed isn’t easy.  It’s a common rule in presenting that if you want the room's attention, say nothing until people look up.  We used a similar strategy in this 30-second ad – where the first 5 seconds are black.

If you read this blog regularly, you know we believe that great creative starts with a sound strategy and focused segmentation and is supported by detailed front-line processes and success measurement.  But, there comes a time when you simply have to don the Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops and get your creative groove on.  When that time comes – I hope these ideas help take you further.

Want more creative ideas?  Click here for a sample of our creative library.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Want to learn more?  Enroll in the MarketMatch eCollege!  Smart learning online sessions delivered five consecutive Tuesdays with CFMP credits, tactical advice and a game plan for success!

MarketMatch is a full-service marketing firm, dedicated to the credit union and community banking community.  We utilize knowledge-based strategies to help you FOCUS on the efforts that will generate the greatest  MOMENTUM for your organization and demonstrate RESULTS with our written ROI Guarantee.

Learn more here. (click here)

Chat with me LIVE! (click here)

Or email me directly (click here)

937-426-9848