Customize Your Message for Each Channel

This week, I want to share a story with you about message customization.

I once worked with a client on an advocacy effort to improve local public safety. Because they'd been told to try more online messaging, they were using Twitter to try and reach all of their messaging goals. Not unexpectedly, it wasn't quite working.

Lots of ways to get the message out. Photo: Kevin Poh.

I encouraged them to think of the overall campaign, and all groups they wanted to reach - local government officials were the primary targets, but they also wanted to move petition-signers, public safety workers, crime victims, and local media.

We discussed the best channel for outreach to each group, based on the makeup of the group and the action we needed them to take. We found that most of the local officials we needed weren't active on Twitter, but we knew they were reading the local paper, and that journalists from the local paper were on Twitter, so we tweeted at targeted members of the media instead, in conjunction with some more traditional media outreach.

We also used Twitter to listen to local discussions of crime and public safety, and inserted ourselves into that dialogue.

When it was time to reach out directly to the officials, who had seen our news stories thanks to our media outreach, we found it was actually more effective to use a combination of more traditional channels to get the officials to act. They were more receptive to our emails and phone calls because they had seen the news stories we'd been able to get.

Facebook, we found, was a great place to reach our petition-signers and also to collect victim stories. These victim stories and petition activities then became online content, that we used in our continued email outreach.

Your takeaway?

Consider your overall goals and align the channels you use to those goals. Not every channel can address every goal. Don't discount traditional channels because they're not new. It can take a combination of messages to get the results you want.

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Using Social Media Strategically

Right now, I'm doing some work with a client that's really starting to use social media more often, and more freely to promote its work and events.

Path from Flickr user Runran.

Recently, I delivered a bunch of numbers to them, using Piktochart, a handy tool I found for creating simple infographics.

The good news was, as a result of promoting our work on Twitter and Facebook, all traffic measures went up. More people watched videos, shared our content, commented on our posts, used our hashtags, and became fans of our pages than ever had before.

So, what do we do with all of this great attention?

It's important to make sure that when we generate a lot of traffic and attention to our content, that we have a goal in mind, and that we're leading people down a path towards that goal.

If we have a great new video, we need to make sure that we think about what we want people to do after they watch it. Watch another video? Subscribe to our email list? Share with a friend? Complete another action?

We (and you) really need to think about the path to conversion.

If you find, for example, that in your businesses, most of your sales come from email, then when you do an attention campaign like we did last week, you should be including an email sign-up call-to-action with the content you're promoting. With your videos, on your Facebook page, in your blog posts and on your site.

If you're not thinking about the path to conversion, you'll be setting the wrong expectations for your team.  It may be that people who like your posts on Facebook just aren't ready to buy your product - they need a little more encouragement. So the conversion goal for your Facebook fans won't be a sale  - it'll be an email sign-up.

Once you've established your conversion goal for each of your channels, then you'll be able to better determine what content goes where and customize it appropriately.

How are you using Facebook? What about Twitter? How do you inform, engage, and convert on each of your channels? Send me a note or let me know in the comments.

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Why All Marketing is Local

OK, all marketing isn't really local, but local marketing should be a strong component of your marketing strategy, whether your customers are consumers or other businesses. Why?

Local businesses. Flickr user RachelVorhees.

1) Being local gives you a natural connection to your customers. You're from the same place. You live and work in the same place, and this gives you a serious, valid reason to support one another.

2) You'll be able to make face-to-face connections. This is especially important if your customers are other businesses. You can call on new and prospective clients in person, sharing local stories, and building long-term connections. Your customers won't need to wait for you to fly into town to see you - you'll be able to stop by anytime. If you sell to consumers, you'll also be able to invite them to your store or call on them much more easily.

3) You'll have a much better understanding of the market than your non-local competition. Since you'll be selling to people who live and work in the same community as you do, you'll have an intrinsic understanding of the needs, environment, and conditions of that community. Knowing your local market inside and out will put you one rung above your non-local competition.


How do you access that local network? Simple is best - use your local papers (web and print properties), local events, local chambers of commerce and business groups, and local groups on LinkedIn to connect. Facebook also allows you to advertise by location, so you can find local customers there as well. Don't forget other networks that focus on local business reviews - like Yelp, ServiceMagic, and MerchantCircle.

What are you doing to strengthen your connection to your local community? Please share in the comments.

Are you local to the DC area? Drop me a line or let's connect on Twitter or LinkedIn.

How to Find Better Customers

The last couple of years have been hard on retailers. Customers expect sale after sale, more and more discounts, incredible service, and tons of freebies. And loyalty? Forget it. There's always another deal around the corner.

Photo: Flickr user Zizzybaloobah.

So how do you find better customers?

Reward the behaviors you want, and discourage the ones you don't.

First, examine your best customers.

How profitable are they? What are they buying? Are they on your email list? Do they follow you on Twitter? Are they your fans on Facebook? What's converting them to buy, and buy again?

In the process of this examination, you might find that your best customers are frequent responders to your Facebook promotions. That's great, but how can you use this knowledge?

Second, reward the behaviors you want.

If Facebook is your most profitable channel, then make your promotions even more profitable by crafting deals with the greatest possible margins.

Encourage customers on all channels to join you on Facebook as well. If your Facebook promotions are generating the most profitable customers, the more fans you have, the better.

Third, discourage the behaviors you don't want.

Which customers are the most expensive to serve? How can you redirect them to more profitable channels? If you find, for example, that customers who call your call center are the least profitable, consider adding more ways in which to serve them, perhaps encouraging them to use instant messaging, online resources (your FAQ are comprehensive, right?) or Twitter to ask questions.

Re-examine your shopping cart - is it too difficult to buy online? If you have a two-screen process, can you get it down to one screen? Can you highlight the safety and security of your shopping cart process?

At the same time, make sure your customers still have several options for both sales and service- your stores, call center, web site, and email. You don't want to turn people off unless you're absolutely sure you don't want their business.

What are you doing to reward your best customers? Please share in the comments.

Profiting from Off-Label Uses for Your Product

Are there off-label uses for your products?

You know, like the use of hormone injections for weight loss or coffee to relieve headaches?

Now is a great time to think about other ways your own customers might be using your product.

Tito has some great alternative uses for your extra tuna.
Photo: J. Ibraheem

Do your socks make great potholders?

Are people reheating their leftover pizza with your waffle irons?

Are they using your spreadsheet software to plan their weddings?

Or using your kitty litter to prevent odors in the fridge?

There are huge opportunities to sell, keep, save, and serve your customers if you can figure out other purposes for your products:

Sell – people might not need your product for its primary use, but they badly need a solution for one of its alternative uses. Are you letting them know about other uses in your promotions?

Keep and Save – your current customers might no longer have the problem your product was originally meant to solve. No worries- they can still use it. Just make sure to let them know how.

Serve – Customers who love your product for its original use will be delighted to find out it’s so versatile. Make sure to let them know how useful it is!

Not sure how your product is being used by your customers?

Ask them! On your blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, in your stores, in your e-blasts, on your web site. Your customers are your best source of information. Ask them all kinds of questions, and ask frequently!

Not sure if your product can protect your hands, reheat pizza, prevent fridge odors, or help with wedding plans? Send me a note and I’ll be happy to help.

How are people using your product off-label? Please share.

What Were Your Marketing New Year's Resolutions?

House with snow. Photo: L. Ibraheem

Back when the temps were low and the snow was blowing, we were all making New Year's resolutions. Four months later, how's it going?

Have you:

Lost Weight? It's a great time to get rid of vendors you don't need, products you shouldn't offer, and relationships that aren't working.

Made the Most of What You Have? Your marketing channels should  be synched up so that they work together and support one another. Invest in efficiency and you make the most of what you've already got.

Tried New Things? It's always a good exercise to explore a new marketing channel or enhance one where your presence is minimal. Does Twitter now make sense for you when it didn't before? Is it time to beef up your Facebook presence? Or are all your customers hanging out on LinkedIn?

One thing I've been working on this year is SEO marketing. I've been learning how to edit web copy and keywords to be more search engine friendly. It's tricky, but very interesting, to see how people actually use search engines to find the information they want. It's also helping to drive more traffic to the web sites I work on and informing how we write e-blast, web, blog, press release, and facebook copy.


How have you enhanced your operations this year? I'd love to hear from you. If you need help getting it all done, just let me know.

A Tale of Two Credit Cards - Why Customer Service is Marketing, Too

These guys were totally frightened by my credit card rates.
Photo: Leah Ibraheem

I have two credit cards - one I use several times a year for making travel arrangements, and a second one that's a backup.

Earlier tonight, I called my main credit card company to ask them to lower my rate. I'd read a number of scripts for this conversation and planned to tell them all about how I had received better offers from other companies, that my rate was too high, that I have excellent credit, and they should help me out.

The first person I talked to said that I already had the best rate and that she would not be making any changes. I said, "I guess you'll just need to cancel my card, then."

I'd read in all the scripts that you should do that.

She said, "OK."

Wow.

So I was transferred to a supervisor and she couldn't lower my rate either. After several minutes of negotiations, she offered me two months of interest payments back, which was nice. I was not happy that they wouldn't lower my rate, but this was better than nothing. Feeling empowered, I called my other credit card company, which happens to be Discover.

The woman at Discover was the nicest woman ever. She even told me where she was located (Portland, Oregon) and thanked me for my eleven-year, six-month relationship with Discover. She asked me how she could help, and was interested and enthusiastic.

Well, let me tell you this -

Not only had Discover recently evaluated my situation and taken the initiative to lower my existing rate by five points (which I didn't know since this happened after my last statement), they readily agreed to offer me a 6-month promotional rate that was another eight (eight!) points lower than the new rate they'd already extended to me. That's 13 points!

After that, my customer service rep let me know about some additional discounts I could get for travel and a special cash-back bonus on home improvement items that begins this month. She never rushed me and she kept thinking of more and more ways she could help me.

Her goal: to make sure that my Discover card was my primary card, which it hasn't been - I hardly ever use it.

But that's about to change. Why? Because Discover's marketing, sales, and customer service are integrated to effectively save, keep, sell, and serve me, all at the same time. How does that work?

• They were actually working proactively to save me by assessing my account and lowering my rate before I even called.
• They were ready to keep me with an additional offer to make their card even more of a value.
• They had several product suggestions ready to sell me - products that would save me further on things I'm already buying, deals which are useful to me specifically.
• They emphasized how much they wanted to serve me by identifying the length of our relationship, thanking me for it, and offering numerous ways to help.

What can we learn from this?

Maybe it's time to take another look at your customer service operation - does it work to save, keep, sell, and serve your customers? How can your marketing department help your customer service reps with the right things to say, great offers, and the power to use tools like special promotions, savings clubs, and new products to keep your customers happy?

I'd love to hear about what you're doing to save, keep, sell, and serve. Please tell me in the comments, or send me a note.

So, which credit card just moved from my desk drawer to my wallet? Three guesses, and the first two don't count.