TedRubin

Build Relationships, Not Billboards!

The marketing paradigm is shifting with much greater “power to the people” facilitated by social media.  If you want to continue to reach your market, it’s not about advertising any more, but about building relationships.

Consider the following differences:

Advertising Building Relationships
1.     Telling

2.     Starts with “me” (the brand, the product, the service)

3.     Focuses on “what can you give me?”

4.     Goal:  instant impact

5.     Where’s the money?

 1.     Listening, hearing, empathizing, asking,

2.     Starts with “you” (the customer’s needs, wants, interests and expectations)

3.     Focuses on “how can I serve you?”

4.     Goal: ongoing engagement

5.     Who are the people?

1. Telling vs. Listening

It may sound counterintuitive, but if you truly want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to listen.  Listen to what your consumers and potential consumers are saying before you even put one word out there:  What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need?   Then when you do “speak” (type), empathize with them and ask them questions.

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Brand Advocates are People Too… Nurture that Relationship!

It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks.  When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power increases exponentially, and it simply makes good business sense to leverage those opportunities.

The risk here is that we can become so focused on our Brand Advocates’ social reach that we see them only as a means to an end (sales) and stop seeing them as people.  We might get greedy and start looking right past them to market directly to their networks, ignoring our Advocates themselves.  While that marketing method can still be somewhat teffective, it costs more, it is more difficult to implement and maintain, and it is dangerous to our brand.  We cannot de-value our Advocates and expect our brands to thrive!

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Be the Change Your Customers Want You to Be!

In today’s fast-paced, ever changing environment, most brands rank poorly when it comes to customer service. We might argue that it’s to be expected, since change is now more constant than ever… but the hard truth is that if we don’t excel in customer service, our brands will become just another nameless part of the noise out there.

Customers are no longer willing to wait around for us to get our act together, and even if they were willing, we can no longer afford extended timelines for change. Let’s put it into perspective – what if I told you not to expect to even be doing the same thing in 2 years that you are doing today?

Suddenly you can see that it is to our advantage to operate within the customers super-turbo-fast timeline now.  But how to do that and still provide excellent customer service??  Those two goals are not as diametrically opposed as they might first seem.

Customer service is not just making sure returns are processed correctly, or customer frustrations are smoothed over.  In this new social media era, customer service now carries the expectation of continually proving to your customers that you VALUE them in all stages of the sales cycle… from product conception to developing and honing brand personality and promises, to sale, to after-sale satisfaction, to the resulting repeat sales.  All to start over again in the change cycle with a re-evaluation of the product and possible reconcepting.

The key is to involve your customers in meaningful ways through all aspects of the sales cycle. Online communities are one of the best ways to do this.  Those communities set up an environment of trust among the brand, marketers, and community members, and provide the technical features required to allow the conversations to stay in the foreground and the technology in the background.

Ask your customers what they want from your brand, your products and services.  Ask your customers how you’re doing, and what they want to see changed.  Ask your customers to rate their satisfaction AND to tell you stories about their experience with your brand, products and services.

Then go do something about it.  Make the changes.  Step into the future as soon as your customers tell you what it looks like!

Seek out and embrace change – look to the future through your customers’ eyes and you just might get there before everyone else!

Ted Rubin

Ted Rubin Ted has a deep online background beginning in 1997 with Seth Godin, as CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics, & recently as Chief Social Marketing Officer, Open Sky. Originally posted at SheSpeaks

Send Your Ego to the Back Seat and Bring Your Consumers to the Front.

Thanks to the continual evolution of social media, we have a growing set of useful tools for gathering feedback about our brand reputation.   Online branded communities, for example, are becoming increasingly valuable meeting spaces where community members and brand marketers can easily engage in meaningful conversation around specific products and services, and even the brands themselves.

This increase in brand–consumer conversation is beginning to change consumer expectations. They see that we marketers are part of their communities, and assume that we are listening, hearing, and planning product and service changes accordingly.

The problem here is that sometimes we marketers are so committed to our own brand experience that we may be resistant to change and have trouble actually hearing when our consumers are trying to ask us to change components of our brand.  In order to work around our own (natural and understandable) resistance to change, we need to take a step back from our fierce attachment to what we believe makes our brand successful.

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Customer Service “is” the New Marketing

Remember the old small business customer service mentality?  Where pleasing the customer came FIRST, and the need to delight them was “a given” not an option?   Great news – it’s back (or at least on its way back)!

The democratizing nature of social media has returned power to the customer, making Brand Advocates one of our strongest marketing assets.  If we want to share their power (not take it!), we need to adopt customer service as the new way of marketing – or “unmarketing,” a term mentioned by Brian Solis in the introduction to his book Engage, and Scott Stratten details extensively in his blog and book UnMarketing.

Considering this power shift, the #1 question we should be asking our Brand Advocates is “How may I serve you?” Ask early and ask often.

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Don’t Forget to Ask Women for Direction(s)!

In this new social media marketing world — where it’s less about demographics and more about relationships — one demographic still clearly matters:  WOMEN.

Women control 85% of household spending, and (according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch)

in 2011, women’s earning power will recover from the recession far quicker than men’s earning power will.

These numbers are good news for marketers, but they need to come with a strong CAUTION statement:  just because women are a strong purchasing demographic does not mean we can pay any less attention to the relationship work required to make and keep our brands highly relevant to women.

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How do *You* define ‘Best Customer’?

Seth Godin has it exactly right when he asks in a recent blog post, “…what if you define ‘best customer’ as the person who brings you new customers through frequent referrals, and who sticks with you through thick and thin?”

In other words, what if we define “best customer” as “strongest Brand Advocate”?  How would that change the way we think about and treat our Brand Advocates?

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The Antidote to Negative Commentary

As much as we might not want to admit it, something negative about our brand will be said sometime by someone in a social network.  It might be due to a change, or something out of the brand’s control or only one little misstep in many months, but chances are, that unfortunate experience will be shared.   Such is the nature of information-sharing through social networks.

But it’s that same nature of social media that also gives us a powerful antidote to negative commentary – ENGAGEMENT.

We might be tempted to cover any negative feedback with a huge push of positive messaging, stating and re-stating how wonderful our products and services really are. This attempt at damage-control, however, does little if anything to protect our brand reputation.  Whether or not our products and services are usually terrific doesn’t matter to the person who had a different experience with our brand, nor to those closest in their social network.  What matters to them is the one unsatisfying experience they had.

This is where engagement becomes vital.  We can stay disengaged and pretend nothing negative was said, but ignoring those comments won’t keep them from spreading quickly through various social networks.  If we choose instead to engage with the consumer(s) making those comments, we have a huge opportunity to help positively change the perception of our brand.

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Don’t Simply Ride the Social Media Wave… Guide it with Strategic Intent!

Social media is hot, hot, hot, and it can be tempting to just dive in and ride the social media wave without any specific plan.  That’s a great way to guarantee misjudging the swell and getting tossed around underneath the wave.  That’s what social media marketing without strategic intent will get you– possibly a few lucky “rides” for your brand messaging, but also a predominance of mis-steps and wasted time and effort.

Now that more businesses are getting on the social media marketing bandwagon, it’s no longer enough to just include a generic “use social media for marketing” line item in your brand growth strategy.  You need strategic intent. Gary Hamel defines strategic intent as “An ambitious and compelling dream which provides emotional and intellectual energy for the company and defines the journey to the future.”

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Women’s Online Communities Powerhouses of Trust

It’s becoming more and more clear that women’s online communities are the true powerhouses of trust.

Social networks have their place, but it’s the online communities that women trust the most for brand and product referrals.

New research not only backs up that claim, but hits it out of the park.

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