Smart Marketing

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And thanks for reading me...

What's with this obsession to contact cold prospects?

Too many businesses these days focus on generating fresh leads from cold lists. You know what I mean: mail brochures out to the local Chamber of Commerce's mailing list or make random digit dials using telemarketers. 

These efforts are OK, but they SHOULD NOT be considered the bread and butter of any company's marketing campaign. That honor can only be bestowed on a "keep-in-touch" marketing effort directed to customers and those already familiar with your company.

If you don't already communicate, at least every 90 days, with your customers, drop everything and do that. These communications can take the form of:

• Emails
• Letters  OR
• Phone calls

but the objective of this effort is to stay in front of  those who already love you. Why is this preferred? Because doing this generates word-of-mouth and referrals; the lifeblood of any successful marketing effort.

I harp on this constantly (probably too much) but it is so often overlooked by my clients. If the question "How often do you communicate with your customers?" is met with the answer "Not enough", then you have a valuable clue as to how to improve your marketing effort.

A few words about word-of-mouth marketing

There's a marketing movement afoot to actively promote word-of-mouth as a viable marketing tool. Fair enough. Some products and services can benefit from an approach like this. But some marketers are now crossing the line, and again, threatening to spoil it for the legitimate marketers.

For example, Sony recently hired graffitti artists in San Francisco to paint comics on outdoor surfaces in order to promote their PSP game devices. The goal of the campaign was to generate buzz for the product although the ads never mentioned the company or product by name. 

But once real artists got wind of who was behind the graphics, they tagged the graphics with the word "Fony" and bitterly complained that the giant corporation should leave the city's sidewalks alone. The end result was that Sony was seen as a poser and alienated itself from the indie art community.

In my opinion, marketers have an obligation to disclose their intentions. Anything less than that is a thinly veiled attempt to deceive the public. Do you agree or disagree?

Want to measure customer loyalty? Try this marketing question

In Fred Reichheld's classic article The One Number You Need, he makes a great argument for asking only one market research question of your customers. Any guesses on what it is?

Here's the question:
"How likely is it that you would recommend (company X) to a friend or collegue?"

Across most industries, and in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies, this single question gets at the heart of a company's marketing operation. Here are the reasons why:

• It helps a company establish how satisfied its customers are.
• It helps quantify how likely these customers are to generate word-of-mouth.
• It helps establish how likely these customers will be to generate referrals.

If your company plans on surveying its customers, don't just ask How strongly do you agree that (company x) deserves your loyalty? or How likely is it that you will continue to purchase (company x's) products? These questions are good, but not great.

Instead ask How likely is it that you would recommend (company x) to a friend or colleague?