Messaging and Terminology

Messaging and Terminology

The way we talk about things can be important to convey what they mean to us. Calling someone who works in your organization a team member rather than an employee may seem trivial, but it can send a different message. When we work with a company, it is important for us to understand why they use certain terminology. Additionally, they might never have outlined for the organization which words to use and why. In some cases, it can make a huge difference. When beginning the marketing process, it’s important to talk through what words we use for which things. Defining the words and terms that are important to your brand can even be part of your branding process with an agency. If you want your “team” to use the word “customers” instead of “patients” then you have to weave those terms into the fabric of your business. Another example would be a personnel company who refers to its staffers as “associates” instead of “temps.” It has a different ring to it and can help direct the parts of your company to treat those people differently.

It is also important to share those terms and meanings with your marketing partners. Using those words internally is one thing, but making sure that the use of those words is consistent externally is also important. The words you use paint a picture of your company to the world. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Stark Raving Fans

Stark Raving Fans

“Stark Raving Fans” is a term that I came across in Seth Godin’s work. Stark Raving Fans means you go beyond just customer service to seeing every interaction with a customer as a chance to turn them into a marketing channel. If you are so good that your customers love doing business with you, they will tell others. If you make Stark Raving Fans of your business, they will help you grow. How do you create them? By doing business the right way. Under promise and over deliver. Deliver on time. And if something does go wrong, make it right (even if it costs you financially). When we stop seeing customers as a transaction and start seeing them as people and investments in our future, we create Stark Raving Fans.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Do You Deliver Well?

Do You Deliver Well?

If you spend $10,000 on advertising and your customer service or product is horrible, what will the result be? You’ll have wasted that $10k and then some. Why? First impressions matter more to a person than just about anything else. If you fail to deliver on your products and your customer service is horrible, people will tell other people. In the social media age, that is even more true. Even the best brands have naysayers online because it costs so little to leave a bad review. It costs almost nothing socially and it is free to run your name through the mud or sing your praises online. You also lose out on the potential of repeat business which is the lifeblood of most businesses.

You need to ensure your product is ready for the stage before you put a spotlight on it. Customer service is an investment worth making. Have you stress tested your product, your delivery method, and your customer service? What would happen to your business if 10 more customers than usual called tomorrow? What about 50 more? What if 3 more had a bad experience? Considering these things and planning for them is crucial to success in marketing.

One of my favorite books on customer service is: Customers for Life by Carl Sewell. I was on a trip to Texas with my wife when our Subaru started acting funny. We stopped in the local Subaru dealer on a Friday afternoon and desperately asked for help so that we could return home that night. This local dealer was a Sewell dealer and they went above and beyond from every level, so I left them a good review online. While looking them up, I found the owner’s book and it did not disappoint.

Investing in customer service is investing in your customers. It will help grow repeat business which is more affordable than investing in new customers. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Price/Position/Product/Place

Price/Position/Product/Place

Now that we have covered who you are, we can start to get a better understanding of where you sit in the marketplace. The classic reason for doing this is building out what is often referred to as the “Four P’s.” They are: product, price, place, and promotion. They are important to evaluate as you start investing in marketing. There are entire books written on this topic alone, but we are going to take a quick look at each of these:

    1. Product- What is it that you are selling? Is it good? How good is it? What makes it special? 
    2. Price- How much is your product? Is it expensive for the market? Is it cheap for the market? Do you use coupons or would that hurt your brand? (Also, you are probably not charging enough.)
    3. Place- How are customers getting access to this product? I imagine this answer was much simpler when the concept of the Four P’s was created. 
    4. Promotion – How are you going to communicate it? Are competitors communicating in certain ways? Are there any no-no’s for your industry? What have you already tried and was it successful?

 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Who Are You? Mission/Vision Purpose

Who are you? Mission/Vision Purpose

One of my favorite jokes from the TV show Scrubs involves a character described as “Johnny the tackling Alzheimer’s patient.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kx7tgkJbjo) Johnny yells, “Who am I?!?” as he tackles the protagonist, JD. Many businesses act the same way. They have done enough to start making sales, or tackling, but they are not sure who they are, which makes it difficult to grow beyond their base. When you do not understand who you are, you will waste time chasing ideas that do not fit with you rather than investing in the things that will make your company great. 

When you consider who you are as businesses, you need to get beyond the desire to make money and get into why you do what you do. Some businesses only want to make money, but they need to develop a self identity beyond that goal to build relationships with customers. 

At Adelsberger Marketing, we like to request the mission or vision statements from our clients. The clients who have one shows they are thinking about both the big picture and how to become the best organization that they can. 

A good mission statement states what the end goal of the organization is. A good mission statement contains four key elements:

  1. Concise – A good mission statement is not a paragraph long. It’s one – maybe two – sentences. The more concise you can make it, the more effective it will be. Concentrate on your core purpose, not a strategy or a set of tactics. Strategy is a level of planning that affects things like where you place your ads. Tactics are more granular such as using certain dimensions on video exports to maximize value for each social channel. In World War II, the Allies’ mission was to defeat the Axis powers. The strategy was to invade Europe from North and South and the tactics involved things like storming the beaches of Normandy. Mission statements must stay above the frame of strategy and tactics. 
  2.  Memorable- Memorability is important because it allows the mission to sink into the language of the team and affect their judgement. A good, memorable mission statement, consistently preached by leadership can help infect a team with that mission. 
  3. Timeless- Occasionally you will come across a mission statement that mentions specific methods for completing your mission. This is a common error. Look at the World War II example again: strategies and tactics change over time. (The obvious exception of this would be a mission statement that was for an organization that was time sensitive or limited in scope like an election campaign.) Methods, strategies, and tactics change. If your organization survives for any period of time, you do not want to rebuild your mission statement every few years.
  4. Focusing- Organizations are presented with a variety of opportunities. It can be difficult to sort these choices out. A solid mission statement can help an organization evaluate and find all the good ideas that come to it. When considering new opportunities or plans, look back to the mission statement and ask: “Does this opportunity fit with the mission statement? Does it prevent us from doing the things that are already helping us accomplish this mission?”

These are a few mission statements that I have helped write. I feel like they satisfy the above qualities:

-Our Jackson Home: To tell the stories of the people and the city that we all love. 

-STAR Center: To help any person, with any disability, to realize their potential. 

-Adelsberger Marketing:  To make creative work that grows our clients’ businesses, in a culture that values our team and community. 

Vision statements are slightly different. Vision statements look ahead to what the world would look like if the organization is able to complete its mission. These are generally less important to an organization than a mission statement. It doesn’t hurt to have both, but if you only have time for one, go with the mission statement. We recently helped write this visit statement for Madison County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates):

-We provide a volunteer voice for all abused and neglected children in the West Tennessee Juvenile Court System.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Introduction

Marketing begins with the old saying, “know thyself.” 

In Chapter 1, we talked about “what is marketing?” In this chapter, we will turn the focus to where the process should begin – with you. If you do business with a good marketing agency, almost all of them will start with some sort of discovery process. Some may call it a brainstorm or Strategy Workshop (like our Friends at Sodium Halogen). Regardless of name, the agency uses this activity to learn about your business so they know how to best communicate with your market. If they’re really good, they’ll focus on  value for the customer, not just what you want to talk about.
In our experience, the best clients are usually the ones who have spent time thinking about the “know thyself” components before they come to the table with us. If they haven’t, we think it through with them. Knowing thyself allows you to communicate clearly. Whether that communication is internally to staff and stakeholders or externally to potential and current customers, without a clear picture of yourself, it is difficult to communicate effectively.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Awareness and Direct Response Marketing

Awareness and Direct Response Marketing

Two final categories we need to consider when we think about marketing is awareness and direct response marketing. While these two ideas can work together in many contexts, I usually see them in contrast with each other. A simple way to define these are: awareness as ‘’aren’t we cool and will make your life better” and direct response as “buy this thing here, now preferably.” There is certainly some crossover between the ideas as we look at below, but the two approaches are very different. We use these levels of awareness not as a hard and fast rule but helpful categories in what we are trying to communicate. 

When we think about our customers, we need to realize there are levels of awareness each of them has. Awareness breaks down like this (inspired by: Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz)

1. Customers who don’t know your product or don’t know that they need your product. (Awareness)

2. Customers who don’t know your product but know that a need for your type of product exists. (Awareness)

3. Customers who are aware of your product and know that they have a need for your project. (Awareness/Direct Response)

4. Customers who are ready to buy your product but have not yet. (Direct Response)

When we have a customer who hits level 3 and 4, we need to use direct response advertising to help drive sales. Direct response is like the coupons you get in the mail from restaurants or walking through a mall and seeing a “50% off” sign in the window. It even includes offering the product on sale for a limited amount of time. These ads create a response directly from the customer. These ads are very trackable, especially online with UTM parameters (UTM Parameters are the way Google Analytics can read web addresses to show where website traffic came from. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module which is the company that Google bought to acquire this technology). With UTM parameters, you can see a customer’s journey very clearly.

When you are talking to customers in level 1 and sometimes level 2 of awareness, you need to be focused on awareness marketing. Awareness marketing is sometimes grouped together with brand marketing. The goal of awareness marketing is to ensure that as people learn about your product/service, they understand what it’s for, who it’s for, and what it stands for. That will help them go from steps 1 or 2 to step 4.

When working with marketing to groups of people, taking the opportunity to work on both ends of the spectrum will allow your business to win over the long run and help build a funnel of customers. However, certain companies will only play in either end of that pool. The closer your product gets to commodity status, the closer it will get to always needing to do direct response in mass marketing efforts. The more premium the branding, the more likely they are to stay in the awareness branding. For example, Apple almost always runs awareness campaigns through tv and online media. Oil changes and fast food are almost always direct response marketing through mailers and tv.

You will not likely see a generic mailer with coupons from Apple in your mailbox. You will likely see them online or on tv with an ad that paints a picture of a cool or better life with their product. While you will see some restaurants paint a cool life picture, it almost always ends with “$6.99 at participating restaurants.” 

These are some broad thoughts on marketing. Before you start marketing, you should figure out what you are marketing, more on that in chapter 2. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Permission-Based Marketing and Interruption Based Marketing

Permission-Based Marketing and Interruption Based Marketing

As so brilliantly pointed out by Seth Godin in his book, Permission Marketing, we need to understand the difference between permission and interruption based marketing. 

Traditionally all marketing was interruption based. It is called an “interruption” because it breaks up the content you were intentionally looking for. You are watching tv and *boom* interruption with an ad. Driving down the road enjoying a scenic view and *boom* billboard (unless you are in South Dakota. THERE ARE BILLBOARDS EVERYWHERE IN SOUTH DAKOTA). The advertising is interrupting the experience you are having. Entire industries are based on interruption advertising. All tv, radio, and most newspapers and magazines are based on interruption advertising.

Of course, the internet is largely focused on this as well. Most digital advertising is interruption based. News websites use display advertising to generate revenue. YouTube plays preroll and midroll ads to keep your attention for its advertisers.

Certain sections in the online economy are suffering because there are also forces trying to prevent digital ads from showing on your computer. The Ad Blocking industry is huge and growing with people being willing to pay for ads to be removed from their web experience. One estimate says that up to 25.8 percent of internet users were using ad blockers in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach-usage-us/). Industries that are designed for interruption marketing are already struggling to survive in our modern world. For users to prevent a few ads hurts the news and content sources we enjoy to consume. Imagine running an ad supported business and having 25% of our audience get the content and not “pay” by blocking ads. We will increasingly see subscription only content models for things we are used to looking at for free. There will be a technological arms race to figure out how to make this viable. Before the dust is settled and some sort of equilibrium is reached, there will be many sources of great content lost to the history pages in wikipedia.

Permission marketing however is the opposite of interruption marketing. Permission marketing is called permission because the customer has given us permission to talk to them. This spans lots of media: print newsletters, emails, text messages, some forms of social media. But the key here is that with permission, we contact these customers. We can help create loyal customers for life if we work with permission marketing.

Permission marketing works with existing customers. Interruption marketing works to help bring in new customers. It takes both kinds. But if we can, we push clients to work on permission marketing first. If you are able to maximize the value of existing customers, you are setting yourself up for huge success in business.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com

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Providing Value

Providing Value 
Many of the best versions of marketing provide value. Value in this instance has a really broad definition. Value could be: something that is funny, something that makes you feel good, or something that educates. We like to suggest to many of our customers that providing education is always a good idea. When you provide education to your customers, in business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), you will gain a few things: 

    1. Evergreen Content: If you educate your customers, that content is evergreen. A restaurant talking about a weekend special is only valuable to the audience for a limited amount of time. A restaurant doing an explainer about what certain terms mean on their menu or how to select the best steaks provides value and is relevant for a long period of time. These pieces can also be reused over time without much reinvention. 
    2. Higher Value: If you are able to educate your customers on why things are valuable to them, you increase your own value. If an accounting business is able to talk about how certain business structures can end up saving owners money, they are at the same time increasing the value of their services in the customer’s mind. Sometimes people do not understand that full value proposition of a good or service. If you can educate someone about the full value, you might take them to a place where they are willing to pay more for that good or service than they would have previously paid. Saddleback Leather does a great job about educating customers on their quality which helps them charge high amounts for their products. 
    3. Positioning as an Expert- This might be the most valuable component of education. The more you are able to demonstrate your expertise to your audience, the more you will be viewed as an expert in the industry. People like hiring experts. Being the top in your field means extra money for you. Being seen as an expert on a subject in your geographical area, leads to free marketing opportunities and the increase of reputation leads to more business. 
    4. SEO Value- Educational content usually answers questions for customers. Answering questions is a key component of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing. When you create content that has informational aspects to it, you will likely end up adding keywords to those posts that will help your potential customers find you on Search Engines. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Builders and Drivers

Builders and Drivers

When we consider working with a client and when someone considers their marketing resources, using two categories, builders and drivers, is helpful. Builders are pieces of marketing that are “evergreen.” “Evergreen” is a marketing term that means, like an evergreen tree, it doesn’t go out of season. It also has a long shelf life and, much like your house, it is a fairly permanent fixture. Drivers are more temporary and like sunflowers, they are only good for a season (sunflowers are an annual plant, I am told.) This a concept we are borrowing from Paul Roetzer and PR 20/20. https://www.pr2020.com/

Builders: Builders are great places to start when thinking about marketing. Builders require some investment but allow your team to be successful for a long time. A Website is a builder; it’s evergreen . A hero video is a builder, if done properly. We want to have builders because it helps establish yours as a business worth working with. Builders will provide value for a long time – they are an investment. Examples of builders: 

Website,
hero video,
Email marketing system,
value providing ebook,
sales deck,
branding elements,
business cards,
brochure. 

Drivers are what help motivate people to go to your builders. Examples of drivers:
Facebook social media content,
digital ads,
tv ads,
blog post,
PR piece.  

Investing in drivers without having good builders in place is where lots of customers want to start, but it’s a short-sighted strategy. If you drive someone to a low-quality builder, you are likely going to put a customer off. Invest in builders first, then create drivers to continue to help build a business. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com. 

 

 

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