Archive for Referral Marketing
The Power of Repeat and Referral Customers
Posted by: | CommentsI recently did a blog post, Turning your Marketing Cycle into a Kanban that created a basic Value Stream Map in a beginning Marketing Kanban discussion. I defined the Exit point of the Kanban as the purchase of the service or product. I purposely left out the Repeat and Referral Customers to simplify the explanation. Many people may not end their marketing strategies and tactics at this point but most do stop their budgeting at this point. Let me tell you why RE part of marketing deserves the money.
RE-peat customers: You spend less money finding them and marketing to them. You also know they already likely to buy your product and services and the chances are they will spend more money with you the next time.
RE-ferral Prospects: A typical referral customer is already somewhat qualified and usually enters your Value Stream further down the path than at the beginning. They also have a tendency to spend more money with you at the beginning since they have been referred.
RE-Ignite Customers/Prospects: These are former customers or maybe even qualified prospects that have been dormant for some time that you bring back to life. They may have decided it was not the time or found another solution but they still may be a viable candidate.
A bonus RE is Re-Purpose: When you create a marketing piece, a certain call to action, a new marketing tactic, etc. that works well. Re-use (not meant to be a play on words) it till you wear it out. Remember, the old saying that when a particular advertisement starts to seem old to you is when your prospects are just starting to see it. In your marketing you now have many different ways to reach a customer. So use the good material in as many different ways as possible: Blogs, Articles, PR, Videos, etc.
I have argued for a long time that people spend way too much money at the top or the beginning of their Marketing Funnel or Cycle. I created this short video to demonstrate the power of Repeat and Referral Customers.
Related Blog Posts:
Turning your Marketing Cycle into a Kanban
Bootstrapping the Kanban
Value Stream Marketing eBook Released
Marketing Kanban 102, Work in Process
Are you in your Prospects Circle of Trust?
Posted by: | CommentsIn the movies, Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers the soon to be Father in Law, Jack, so brilliantly played by Robert DeNiro had a Circle of Trust that Ben Stiller, Greg, so desperately tries to become accepted into. Greg just keeps stumbling as he tries to penetrate that invisible barrier. As you sit back and look at the different things that happen; the cat’s tail, the truth serum and the babysitting adventure you may be able to create an analogy of your own trust building attempts with prospects. Have you ever tried being a little more than you are? Have you ever attempted to disguise the truth? Probably not, but have you ever told a prospect what you really thought of them?
We many times talk about partnering; being close or a term I like to use is to be intimate with our customers. In essence, we are really after gaining their acceptance, exactly what Greg Focker so valiantly tries. Have you ever felt like your prospects are checking you out in their own control center and sometimes even unfairly? No matter what size of sale though, you do have to crack that circle of trust. Fortunately, seldom do you have to gain the trust of such a skeptic like Jack.
I find it interesting that many of us struggle in this area; I certainly do on just defining what trust might mean to our customers. That word “Trust” how do you define that? Do you believe trust emerges from meeting obligations or just being open with a prospect? That’s probably part of it. But these alone will not build trust. To leverage the power of choice in interpersonal relationships, trust must be built into the fabric of the relationship through continual reinforcement. It must be focused, manage, nurtured, and rewarded. Before someone decides to grant trust in a working relationship, a calculation goes on in the mind. The person granting your permission into their Circle of Trust can be simplified around these four dimensions:
- Confidence: Does the person have the skills necessary to accomplish the past?
- Reliability: Does the person deliver what is expected, when it is expected and in the form it is expected?
- Open/Honest communications: Is the person forthright in his or her dealings?
- Caring: Is this person willing to defend the interests of the other, even when that interest may affect his or her own interests?
According to the book,The Strongest Link: Forging a Profitable and Enduring Corporate Alliance, if the person scores are low on any one dimension, trust is difficult to achieve. The higher the person scores in each dimension, the stronger the trust. If someone is confident, reliable, honest, and willing to risk their career for you, what’s not to like about them? Ask anyone about these dimensions of trust, and they usually place confidence, reliability, and honesty on the list. However, caring is a different issue. We asked people in a business relationship how they show caring for their counterparts, he had some interesting answers. Typical responses you should listen to the prospects views, think about issues from their perspective, and include that person in all decision-making. But that answer does not go deep enough. Carrying in a business relationship means taking risk even risks that threaten one’s own standing in the firm. That is where true trust lies.
It would be great if your salespeople could develop this kind of trust. However, stop for a second and ask; does your organization build this kind of trust, internally and externally?
Have you ever forgotten the obvious – Duct Tape Marketing
Posted by: | CommentsHave you ever forgotten the obvious? I do not believe that I have ever featured Duct Tape Marketing: (The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide
) Book on my blog. It has sold over 50,000 copies in hardback, paperback and Kindle editions and has been translated into Croat, Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish and never once appeared in the Business901 blog. Since this writing, John Jantsch has been at the forefront of Social Media and Referral Marketing. His new book on Referral Marketing is due out in the spring of 2010.
In the Duct Tape Marketing book, John Jantsch, the author has really focused on three areas that I feel are the most important: Simple, Effective and Affordable strategies for the Small Business Owner. John effectively followed these terms throughout the book. Take a look at the excerpt and see if you agree: Google Books.
Value Stream Marketing: It’s just not about the Value
Posted by: | CommentsApplying Value in your Marketing process is not the only thing that is important. In today’s marketing managing the stream is becoming equally more important. I alluded to this concept when I discussed E-mail providers in a previous post. I concentrated on the value and the touch points within your Marketing Hourglass. Just as important though is the Stream or Flow of the process. Without managing this, you will end up creating a great deal of wasted effort in your marketing process.
Of course when I start discussing flow, I am going to start discussing Theory of Constraints. In your marketing process, you will have numerous constraints but Goldratt claims that at any given time, there is only one constraint. That constraint is much like the neck of an hourglass and will limit the entire system. Actually, if it is well managed you could throttle your process accordingly (We only wish we could that). Simply doubling the efforts in a constraint could be the easy solution and may just move the constraint to another area. However, we operate in a more complicated world than that. Something else usually cases something else to happen.
What is that something else? It is the marketplace. What we see in our constraints may not be problems but indicators. If we treat the perceived problem without really determining the root cause we just may go in a merry-go-round. It would be like just adding sales people. You could double your sales capacity and that may or may not increase sales. In fact, what typically happens is additional responsibilities are given to salespeople and you off-load other stages of your Marketing Hourglass to them without increasing sales. You did not find your root cause. The good or bad part is that your indicator will return because the constraint really never went away.
David Armano just wrote a blog post on Dynamic Signals for Business and how rapidly dynamic signals are transmitted and received. He discusses how Google has organized the Web by figuring out who has authority, but now the real-time Web behaves differently. It is about trending topics, and SEARCH JUST CAN’T REACT QUICK ENOUGH. He goes on and discusses how he receives trending information, and what they mean to him.
So marketing today has to address value and the content they are distributing. However, as importantly, they have to address the time or the stream of their marketing system. The acceleration or throughput is extremely important. Creating systems within our process that are efficient and propels customers through the Marketing Hourglass or Sales Cycle is imperative. Our days of leaving non-responsive customers on our mailing list, online or offline are ending. Creating advertising to the masses and expecting a reasonable return have already ended for small and maybe even medium size businesses. These statements are not meant to say that we only market to someone for 90 or 120 days and that’s it. It is more inline that we have to create interactive platforms that allow our customers to interact at their leisure, their timing and at their discretion. A good description of pull marketing, but how do you manage a stream?
You must understand your Marketing Stream well enough to have a throttle. You must know where your constraint is, maybe even on a seasonal basis. You must address indicators that are built into your process and not built into month-end reports. I look at my Google analytics daily. If I see web traffic dropping from referral sites, I realize that I am spending too much time pushing my message versus participating with others.
What are the real-time indicators within your business? Do you have a monitoring system that lets you know? Do you adjust your marketing message accordingly? Are you improving your stream with better information to qualify yourself to the customer? If you are proving a higher value of information to the customer, does that propel them through your marketing hourglass?
If you believe that your referral process is a sub-standard or your constraint, it may be a way to create an immediate impact in your process. Applying a couple of these principles to the bottom of the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass in the refer stage. If you worked in this area alone and increased testimonials and referrals, what would it do for you? Could you reduce the time spent in your hourglass? Do you give every customer the opportunity to refer and to provide testimonials? Try a few of ideas and see if you can get a handle on your throttle.
