The Competitive Advantage

October 16, 2012

Go team go! Integrate your marketing & sales for maximum impact.

Two heads are better than one.  And three or four are even better than that.  The fact is, putting together teams to tackle your big issues or your big projects is simply smart business.  The team gets together, discusses options and tackles the assignments as a single unit.  Good stuff.

The same concept applies to your marketing & sales… and not just having your people working as a team, but to have elements of your marketing & sales initiative also working together as a unified group.  When you do this, the effects are additive, each one building on the other in the minds of your clients and prospects.  It’s called “integrated marketing.”

October 10, 2012

Are you out of touch with your clients? It’s not too late to reconnect.

I ran into a friend of mine on Saturday at the local coffee shop (the real social networking site!)… he works for an international manufacturer of equipment for the healthcare industry.

We were talking about the bureaucracy of working for such a large firm and how their marketing department is actually divided into two groups: strategic marketing and operational marketing.  He then made an interesting comment. He said that the marketers, while being really smart people, have no real idea what’s going on “in the field” because they rarely talk to their sales team and never talk to clients.

I was shocked!  How can you build an organization to serve customers if you don’t know what customers want… because you never talk to them?

October 2, 2012

Content Marketing Execution and Promotion

(Part 2 of a 2-part series)

In last week’s post, I defined ‘content marketing’ and wrote about the many benefits of including it in your marketing strategy.

This week, I want to get into the nitty-gritty, starting with a review of 10 different ways to provide quality content to your target audience.

September 26, 2012

If Content Marketing is not part of your Marketing Strategy… it should be!

(Part 1 of a 2-part series.)

Read through any marketing resource, website or blog post these days and you’ll see that ‘content marketing’ is THE hot marketing topic… and with good reason (we’ll get to that in a minute).

First, what is ‘content marketing?’

As simply as I can state it, content marketing is the development and sharing (a.k.a. giving away) of useful information that will help the reader to better understand a particular subject and/or help them to do his or her job better.  As an example, for a research firm, that could include providing content with titles like:

• 10 things to look for when sitting “behind the glass”
• Conducting ethnographic research in the digital age
• How to save time and money with online bulletin boards
• The top 5 coming trends in CPG research

Notice anything unusual?  None of the topics are salesy.  None of them are internally focused.  Content marketing is about providing genuinely helpful information.

Are you giving away some of your ‘secret sauce’ when you do this?  Maybe.  But, it’s the price of admission.  If you don’t – your competitors will.  And those that provide the best content often win.

September 12, 2012

15 Ways to Focus on the Client Experience

I had coffee the other day with an old friend, Clint Smith, Founder of EMMA (www.myemma.com), one of the Southeast’s fastest-growing technology firms and provider of one of the top email marketing platforms on the planet.  I’ve been a client of theirs for almost 10 years.

After catching up on our families and life in general, we started talking about what specific things were happening at our respective firms.  Clint’s comments were all around one topic – the customer experience.

The on-going focus for he and his team is all about adding to and tweaking little things on his email platform with the goal of making his software easier to understand and easier to use – thus providing a better overall use experience.  And superior performance keeps clients coming back.

Do you think about your firm and the services you provide in terms of your client’s experience?

September 4, 2012

After attending a conference this fall… don’t let the flame go out. Nurture those leads!

Our industry offers up some great conferences, particularly in the fall of the year – CASRO, QRCA, ESOMAR, MRA, TMRE and so on.  They are all great places to learn and (wait for it…) network.

That’s right… these conferences provide you with the chance to meet with prospective clients in a non-threatening environment.  Whether it’s during a conference session, at a cocktail reception or on the exhibit floor, conferences give you the opportunity to shake hands, swap business cards, do a little personal “selling” and lay the groundwork for future business conversations.

But then you head home from the conference… return to your back-to-normal business routine… and before you know it, that pocketful of business cards representing a number of warm leads now has a thin layer of frost on it.

August 28, 2012

Conduct an Old-fashioned SWOT Analysis to Find Your Competitive Advantage

The SWOT Analysis (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats) has been around for a long time as a way to take a critical look at your own company.  Strengths and weaknesses are internally focused… opportunities and threats are for looking outward.

What you do is think about your own firm in terms of each of the four categories: “What are our strengths?”, “What are our weaknesses?” and so on.  In those answers could be ideas for helping you to move your company forward.  Not a bad process.

But even though it’s “old school,” with a few tweaks, the SWOT Analysis can continue to play a valuable role in helping to look deep inside your firm to find your competitive advantage(s) and market position to help drive future success.

August 22, 2012

Don’t Kid Yourself… Social Media is NOT Free

Almost all businesses have embraced social media – at least at some level. Blogging, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the others all represent potential weapons in your marketing arsenal.  And we love them for two primary reasons:

• Reach!  900,000,000 FaceBook users, 550,000,000 Twitter users and so on… the numbers are staggering!
• Cost!  It’s $0.  That’s right… you can jump into social media in a pretty big way and not have to pay anything.

Well… that’s not entirely true.  While there may not be any out-of-pocket expenses, they do require and can take up a lot of your time.  And for very busy or smaller market research firms, time may be even more precious than money.