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Jennifer Foster Marketing

2016 marketing

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From the inside out: How do you truly create a market-driven company?

One of the most common goals I hear from would-be clients, is their desire to be more “market-driven.” As with most topics you can spend a lot of time and money to completely over-engineer this into a task so big and daunting that it becomes impossible to implement.

I’m sure there are complicated models you can use to prove to yourself, or your investors, that you’re successfully adopting some highly-tested principles. There are consultants who will charge you way more than I would — gotta pay for all that overthinking I guess.

I think a much more efficient approach is to find a few tricks that help good companies be great companies.

When you create good processes, your clients and customers will have good experiences, and in the end, your business will grow.

So let’s talk about a few of those things that can get you going in the right direction!

  1. Customer Service Team: Make your customer-facing employees into your best information gatherers. Whether you’re a small business with a single appointment setter or a large healthcare company with teams of dedicated customer representatives, these people interface with your customers every day. Your CSRs know what makes customers happy, and they for sure hear about what you do that drives them crazy. CSRs also know what they wish a product or service could do. Create a way for them to feed that information into the decision makers. In a small business that may just be getting the info back to you, in a larger, more complicated organization, it may require a process to synthesize and prioritize the feedback. Either way, this is FREE market research if you can harness it.
  2. Product Development: We love our products. We think they are great. We know their weaknesses. Or do we? Your product development pipeline likely includes a host of enhancements that you either can’t afford or don’t have time for. That’s the nature of product development. However, before you launch your next product enhancement, your development leaders should also be asking your marketing teams about competitive information. What are your competitors doing that you aren’t? That doesn’t mean you chase everything they do, but it may warrant some critical understanding of your longer term priorities.
  3. Finances. Everyone’s Market-driven- When you create good processes, your clients and customers will have good experiences, and in the end your business will grow.favorite topic: the money. Being a market-driven company, your finance leaders should understand the value, cost, COGS and markup on your products. One of my recent clients is currently running over budget on their print costs. Makes sense that their money guys and gals are all up in their potato chips about over-spending, right? The reality is they are over budget because the company has far exceeded their membership numbers. They’re sending more enrollment kits than they ever planned to, but that’s because they’re killing it on their enrollments. So while the budget is soaring, so is the income, and therefore the ROI should be strong. Your finance folks need to understand more than the budget’s bottom line.
  4. Sales. Your sales team is not automatically market savvy. It’s no secret that combining your sales and marketing is a recipe for disaster in my book. Generally, if you do it, you will end up with a “sales” and “sales support” team, not a marketing team. With that agreement under our virtual belts, hopefully, you’ll follow me when I say that that your sales team needs to intimately know your top competitor products. That’s a great first step. But how well versed are they on the consequence of doing nothing? Do your sales leads understand the industry well enough to know what the cost of saving the money your product costs? If not, they’re not fully market-driven — they should understand the market they’re operating in.
  5. Your marketing peeps. What do you mean all marketing people are not market-driven? No. They are not. Not even most marketing professionals are market-driven — because they don’t measure things. They likely have no idea if their activities are successful at influencing your target market or not. Marketing leaders must work cross-functionally to help their colleagues know better and perform better. Do they get to boss people around? Yes. I mean no. I’m kidding. Sorta. Marketing-driven doesn’t mean that marketing drives everything. It means that as market research and best practices become available it is shared, discussed and assessed.

Tell me some of your successes (or struggles) with being market-driven?

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Using Your Time Wisely: Finding Influencers While You Work on Funding

Dallas just wrapped up its second Dallas Startup Week.  It’s such a great way for the start up community to come together to celebrate (and commiserate, ammiright?) the pros and cons of startup life.
So let’s talk about the elephant in the proverbial start-up room.
Funding.
Or rather waiting on funding.
So many start ups in the world are “waiting on funding.” It can be hard to be productive during this wait-and-see time. Sure, it’s easy to stay busy, but staying productive is different.

One of the best things you can do while you wait on investments is to build connections with potential influencers. Networking takes time, but the good news is that for the most part it is free. Taking the time you have now to build relationships will pay off down the road when time becomes your most limited asset.

There are several ways to grow your network. A few that I like are:

  • Attend a local 1 Million Cups presentation — 1MillionCups is a nation-wide program that offers the ability for young companies to practice their pitches and gain valuable feedback from the audience members. Sitting in the audience, you can meet everyone from angel investors to fellow entrepreneurs — influencers! If you think you’re ready you should present! You never know who may be sitting in the audience. When you’re there you can likely find out other programs and stages for similar presentations. Practice makes perfect!
  • Social Media — It’s just almost trite to say if you’re not on social media you need to be. You need to be. But you can’t just be there — you need to have meaningful content. Show your influencers that you are a thought leader and that you’re on the cutting edge of whatever industry. You should talk WITH people on social media not just to them. Search for people talking about what you want to talk about. Tools like buzzsumo.com are amazing ways to find curated content quickly. Other tools I like, include FlipBoard and, once you have a little cash, look into Meltwater or a similar monitoring tool.
  • Publish Content — Right along the lines of social media is blogging. If you’re not blogging, you’re missing a huge opportunity to find and reach out to your influencers. I like to use my blog to “power” my social media. If you don’t want to blog on your website, then blog via LinkedIn or another social media tool. The important thing is to write, just write. You can tell people about what you’re learning and what you’re doing. Best of all good content is easily shareable and you’ll create brand evangelists in the process.
  • Attend conferences as a Speaker — One of the best PR tools I have is getting my clients onto stages either as a guest speaker or as part of a panel at events. It’s a great way to get your message out to a room that likely contains at least a handful of your influencers. We were lucky enough to get a client on stage two different times during Dallas Start Up week. One of which then resulted in a pic being on the front page of the business section. FREE ADVERTISING! YEAH!  While Dallas Startup Week was a free event, as a speaker you normally can get a complimentary pass to the rest of the event. (You may save yourself a couple of hundred dollars in admission/sponsorship fees!!) Additionally, speakers usually enjoy “back stage” access to other speakers and event organizers. Great potential networking with influencers!

Building anything from scratch is a daunting challenge. Anyone who has started a company knows this. Startups are often challenging much bigger, well-financed competition. Disrupting them means you have to focus on marketing activities that give you a solid return.

 

 

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Be An Expert: Using your experience in your content marketing

Happy 2016! Everybody have their trees down and the glitter swept up? I’ll admit I saw a stray piece of glitter today in my kitchen, stuck quite insistently to the back splash behind the cooktop of all places. As we jump, crawl or trudge our way into the new year I thought we’d revisit content marketing.

Content Marketing is Promotion Masquerading as Education

At it’s core, content marketing is education. It’s the provision of meaningful and educational content to your customers, potential customers and maybe even investors or other interested parties.  Using content marketing sounds new, but really, it’s not new. Anyone worth their salt has been using content marketing for ages. We just simply used to call it strategic marketing, meaning it was thoughtfully planned against and probably consistent with other similar messages (also called branding). Content marketing is getting more popular, because quite frankly, most of us are too smart to be marketed to in any other way. You can’t inundate my TV because –haha– I’m watching on DVR or via NETFLIX. You can’t spam me because, well, it’s illegal (and even if you do make it thru to my inbox  — neener neener neener — I don’t have to read you.)

Being An Expert: How to use your experience in your 2016 content marketing
Being An Expert: How to use your experience in your 2016 content marketing

So now marketing must simply be smart.

Telling the Stories that Make You an Expert

  1. Tell the Stories of Your Product: Most products have developed over time. Even the newest of gadgets probably started out a little different in the initial prototypes. Tell your customers about that. Now admittedly you probably don’t need to go into detail about how the first one caught on fire in your mom’s basement and that the cat for some reason can’t meow anymore, but tell us why you changed it. Presumably, you heard from potential customers about features they wanted added or removed. Doing this shows that you listen. It helps customers understand how to use your product and what need it solves and can be a key part of your content marketing strategy.
  2. Tell the Stories of Your Customer: This is my all-time favorite. I love to build customer profiles for my clients. Last summer I outlined several ways to use customer stories in your marketing efforts. If you missed it, click here to read it.  I think you probably need three or four Customer Profiles in your collateral plan. Better to do three or four really good ones than eight to ten that aren’t rich enough in content to cover off the customer in enough detail. (Note: Cutting a profile too narrow can actually be isolating to readers instead of inviting.)
  3. Tell the Stories of Your Industry: This one can be tricky because by telling the story of the industry you’re potentially promoting your competitors. So while, it has to be done carefully, raising all boats is a strategy that can be very helpful, especially in an emerging space. Take for example an organic produce market, by touting the benefits of fresh fruits and veggies as compared to those trucked and flown in from other countries; you could successfully encourage your customers to shop more locally. But, you may not convince them to drive out of their way to visit your store. But chances are that the message will resonate, and that viral marketing will prevail. As more and more people discover the need for local, organic shops, you’ll benefit as well.
  4. Tell the story of your future: It is a new year! Time to be excited about what’s coming, especially while everyone is planning resolutions. You likely have a few resolutions for your products. Make them part of your 2016 content marketing efforts. People will find it interesting, and they may want to check back in to see how well you fared over the course of the year. This helps you grow your followers, and keep them engaged.

Showing yourself to be an expert is a great way to amp up your content marketing. Whether you were the first to market or most recent in a long line, you likely have experience that your potential customers will find engaging. Tell your story — if you give it a try, Tweet me @jrfoster75231 to share! I promise to give you a retweet.

Best Wishes for a Phenomenal 2016!