Customer Loyalty Programs: Knowing Your Customer is Key

As we have outlined on this blog in the past, customer loyalty programs are not only within reach of small businesses, they are a natural fit. Long before the introduction of points cards or buyers clubs, proprietors at small mom-and-pop stores learned that there was no better way to ensure continued business than to reward regular customers with an offer or a little something extra from time to time.

The thing that made this kind of loyalty marketing possible was the face-to-face buying experience. Seeing and speaking with customers on a regular basis made it easy to learn their preferences, gauge their interest in other products and know when the time was right for an offer or an upsell.

As we run modern-day customer loyalty programs, finding a replacement for this direct feedback is one of the biggest challenges we face. A telling example of this comes from a recent blog post that outlined three tips for loyalty marketing. The post made some great suggestions which could be summed up as: don't over communicate, don't under communicate, and don't miscommunicate. However, the whole foundation of the post ' the thing that gives rise to the advice ' is the fact that we have lost that direct opportunity to know our customers and what their preferences are.

There is no easy answer to this challenge, but for small businesses, there are a few steps we can take to know our customers better in the modern marketplace. The first of these is to make more of an effort to measure and analyze the results of our loyalty program communications. Whether we do this via QR codes to track direct mail responses, or by reviewing our email marketing data, marketing metrics offer a pathway to better understanding our customers.

One of the other tools at our disposal is a digital survey. These are quite easy to set up and can be run in conjunction with a QR code campaign to gather much-needed insights.

Whatever method we use, it certainly pays to know our customers, just as it always has.

What Next:

Get helpful tips for starting your own loyalty program in our free guide, How to Set Up a Customer Loyalty Program: Tips for Small Business Owners, or watch a recorded webinar: How To Get Started With Your Own Customer Loyalty Program.

What about you? How do you reward your regular customers? Do you have any kind of formal or informal loyalty program in place? Please share your experiences below.

Olympic Gold Medal Winning Marketing Strategies (Part 3): Unique Selling Proposition Gymnastics

All marketers can learn from the dedication, preparation and planning of Olympic athletes. This series of posts will put that into perspective when preparing your own marketing plan.

Here are the posts in this 5-part series:

• Part 1 ' Competitive Analysis: remove obstacles like a judo champion
• Part 2- Targeting Markets: zeroing in on your customer like an olympic archer
• Part 3 ' Unique Selling Propositions: what artistic gymnastics teach you about execution
• Part 4 ' Goals, Metrics and Timelines: the triathlon of marketing measurement
• Part 5- Tactics: sink or swim by using the right Olympic strokes

Today, we talk about crafting a Unique Selling Proposition that will dazzle your customers like an Olympic gymnast.

People are nuts about Olympic gymnastics. An entire episode of Seinfeld even centered around Jerry dating a former Romanian Olympic gymnast and the amazing things she used to do on a balance beam. The routines these champions put together are one-of-a-kind routines pulling together the best of their bag of tricks.

Unique Selling Propositions: Making it Look As Easy As The Olympic Balance Beam

When defining what makes your product and organization a winner precision and creativity make the difference between a statement that matters and one that falls flat on the mat. The unique selling proposition ('USP') started as a mechanism for understanding successful advertising in the 1940's. Today it helps marketers to differentiate their products and company from the competition. It guides the internal efforts of the marketer and can even help to perfect marketing copy as it gives you a clear understanding of what unique benefits your product gives to the customer.

The USP is something the marketer uses to make what they do look effortless. Much like the gymnasts who 'need incredible strength, control and balance, combined with speed' the marketer with a clear USP that knows how to integrate it into daring and ambitious campaigns will translate into a message that dazzles your customer. From the official Olympics 2012 website, 'Judged against such exacting criteria, the smallest extra step, wobble, misalignment or mistake in a routine can make all the difference. Gymnasts must not lose concentration for a moment.' Marketers who stick to emphasizing the benefits discovered through their USP, who stay the course and keep a focused message will win top scores from their target market.

Steps to Crafting a Unique Selling Proposition That Works

Step 1: List Benefits ' To get started in crafting your own USP, start out by listing the three biggest benefits to your customer in buying your product. Focus on benefits, not features. A benefit tells the customer 'what's in it for me' i.e. the problem your product solves for the customer, while a feature is how your product delivers that.

Step 2: List Differentiators ' list the three biggest things that set you apart from your competition. These are the things that make your business unique. Look for benefits you confer that others are either not doing well enough or not at all.

Step 3: List 'Pain Points' and 'Performance Gaps' ' pain points are the customers' unfulfilled needs. Performance gaps are the areas where the current market does not fulfill those needs. These are opportunities for your business to swoop in, stick the landing, and go home a champion.

Step 4: Focus on the Unique Points ' you should have list of beneficial attributes about your product and company. Hone in on the ones that fill the performance gaps, the places where no one else is hitting the customers' need. Try to get this down to 3 to 5 options at most. Then open up a new Power Point deck and create a slide for each statement ' try to find a visual that expresses the idea as well as adding sparse words to the slide (and please follow my rules for not sucking at Power Point).

Step 5: Talk it Out With Customers ' try to schedule 5 to 10 interviews with customers to talk about the USP you are developing. The idea is not to bore them with the mechanisms behind USPs, rather you want to see their reaction to each of the USPs you are developing. Engage them in a real conversation and use their feedback to further hone your USP.

Step 6: Integrate Your New USP ' at this point you should be able to articulate your USP. Use it to drive the rest of your marketing strategy and to make sure that you stay within the core message of what you are doing whenever you try new things. Also, as the business evolves, always review the USP to make sure it is still relevant to what you are doing and what your customers want.

Focus on What You Can Do for Your Customer

Remember, unique selling propositions are all about focusing on what you can do for your customer. When crafting yours and thinking about how to integrate it into marketing copy and campaigns always try to think about what the customer needs to know to make the best decision. Marketing that does this is engaging, simple and effective. Make the buying decision process simple for your customer with a clear articulation of how this product will make their lives better. Do this and you will stick that landing to the sale like an Olympic gymnast.

Why Content Quality Matters: The 7 Hallmarks of Compelling Content

As social media redefines what passes for communication and information today, companies are beginning to question whether they should continue to invest in developing high-quality content. Their thinking goes, 'If we're just tweeting or posting to Facebook and LinkedIn, we don't need anything longer or more substantive.'

Our years of experience working with several leading consulting firms that embody the gold standard in content marketing tell us otherwise. These firms long ago recognized that superior content is the best way to enhance their brands, connect with prospective buyers and grow their revenues. They also know that while social media channels are valuable for staying connected with prospects and clients, they still need something of substance and quality behind the status updates and one-minute self-produced YouTube videos. We've not heard of any senior executives making a multimillion-dollar bet on a consulting firm because he was intrigued by a clever tweet.

What these consulting firms understand ' and other B2B companies should, too ' is that high-quality content is more important than ever. Here's why:

1. Attention is harder to grab

More distribution channels for marketing messages mean more publishing and more competition for buyers' attention. Bullet points aren't the answer. Simply good content is the most effective way to stand out from the rapidly growing publishing crowd. Leading consulting firms have long known that to capture distracted executives' fleeting attention, they must provide deep, valuable and concise insights relevant to the challenges those prospects are facing.

2. You can't fool Google

Search engines are getting smarter and more proficient at sniffing out bad content, especially with Google's Penguin algorithm. Why? By incorporating time spent on pages, bounce rates, sharing of pages with friends and other measures of how real people use websites, the new algorithm makes the quality of a site's content much more important to search rankings.

3. Content lives longer and can have a lasting impact on a firm's brand

Because of email and social media channels, it's impossible for a company to fully control the dissemination of its content, good or bad. The risk associated with publishing poor content (i.e. not adding value) ' and having that content live in perpetuity online ' is greater than ever.

4. High-quality content combats pressure on prices and margins

Customers today are more focused on price than they were before the recession, particularly for commodity-type offerings. High-quality content that demonstrates a compelling reason why customers should buy a particular product or service shifts the conversation from price to the overall value delivered by the product or service ' and thus elevates the company and its offers above less-expensive (but also less-valuable) competitors.

5. You need something to say, and something else to say tomorrow

In our experience, one of the best ways to ensure the idea pipeline stays full is by investing in major pieces of high-quality content that can be 'sliced and diced' for use in different channels over a longer time horizon. For instance, leading consulting firms produce major research studies, the findings of which they release in phases via LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook posts over several weeks or months to extend the content's value while keeping their communication fresh.

6. Expectations increase for marketing ROI

As many companies' marketing budgets have tightened in recent years, leadership is demanding a greater return from their marketing investments. Marketers must get the biggest 'bang for the buck' from every collateral piece or campaign they create. By focusing on quality and not simply getting something in prospective buyers' hands, companies can increase the chances their messages will resonate with target buyers.

7. High-quality content will increase your odds of getting new business

This is the No. 1 reason why high-quality content is more important than ever. Consider the IT services industry: According to a buyer survey by ITSMA, a service provider's strong insights on a buyer's problem and its best solution to that problem increase the odds the provider will win the work, even as a sole source. Great content also is an excellent way for smaller, less well-known companies to get on prospective buyers' radars. This is especially true in the professional services industry, where executive buyers are intrigued by the strength of a firm's ideas, not by the size of its marketing budget.

If high-quality content is so important, how can companies go about ensuring they produce it?

In working with leading consulting firms, we have found a simple set of criteria is useful for ensuring content quality. We have used these 'seven hallmarks of compelling content' to evaluate the strength of consulting firms' white papers, articles and other marketing materials. But any company can use them to improve the quality of their own content ' particularly documents that promote a specific product or service.

• Novelty: Is the content unique or does it break new ground?
• Focus: Does it have a single, overriding message that can be stated in a few sentences?
• Relevance: Does it meet a critical market or buyer need?
• Validity: Is the product or service being advanced supported with strong evidence of how it works and how it benefits the buyer?
• Practicality: Does the content demonstrate that the product or service can be used or applied by the buyer?
• Rigor: Does the content have tight, consistent logic throughout?
• Clarity: Does it use language and concepts the target audience understands?

By evaluating its content along these seven dimensions ' for instance, using a simple 1-to-10 rating scale ' a company can roughly gauge whether its content meets the high-quality standard or needs further development. For instance:

• Content that is weak in focus should be stripped of extraneous material that obscures the main message.
• A piece that lacks rigor or clarity may benefit from the help of a professional editor who can tighten the logic structure and enhance the writing.
• A document that is not especially relevant may need to be recast to more sharply address a particular buyer need (or, in more drastic cases, simply eliminated).

Content should score an '8' or higher on all seven dimensions to be truly 'market ready.'

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Want to Succeed Wildly? Adjust Your Attitude

Have you ever wondered what makes someone a world-renowned musician or a critically acclaimed novelist? Malcolm Gladwell would say it all comes down to practice ' over 10,000 hours of practice, to be exact. But a study by Gary McPherson, discussed in David Brooks' book The Social Animal, highlights that there is also an important attitude needed for success.

In 1997, Gary McPherson decided to study musicians ' namely what exactly contributed to a musician's success. Was it practice? Genetics? Environment? He studied 157 randomly selected kids as they picked and learned a musical instrument. Some went on to be professional musicians, and others quit playing after they left school. He was looking for patterns. Were there traits or characteristics that all of the successful musicians had?

Amazingly, the commonality was not one of the obvious ones. It was not IQ, aural sensitivity, math skills, natural rhythm, or even their parents that dictated success. There was only one question that provided a clue to indicate which students would be successful and which wouldn't. Before they even selected their instrument, McPherson asked the budding musicians one question:

'How long do you think you will play the instrument you choose?'

The answer to this question predicted whether or not a student would be successful. If they thought they would play an instrument their whole life, they did better; if they thought they would only play temporarily, they did not play as well. Their success had nothing to do with skills ' it was all about their attitude.

Logically, this makes sense. If you think you are going to do something for life, you work harder at and you are therefore better. However, we often do not apply this knowledge to our choices and work. For example, how often do you hear someone say, 'I couldn't be a doctor, I am terrible at science,' or 'I can't do that project, I'm not good at organization.'

We do not need any inherent skills to be able to be good at what we do, we only need an attitude that we are going to stick with it. Our minds and skills set will grow with us as we stick to our goals. How can we use McPherson's study in our own lives and businesses?

1. Set your mind up for success. When facing a business project or when applying to a job opening, throw away unhelpful mindsets like 'I wouldn't be good at it,' or 'I could never.'
2. Forget how and focus on when. When picturing your work or projects, start by adjusting your perception of how long you will stick with it instead of focusing on whether or not you have the right skills.
3. Dependent on others? Don't forget to tell time. When working with team members on a business project, you can gauge how successful they will be by asking them about their timeline. This is especially good if you are interviewing employees. If you want to know how someone will be at a potential job, ask them how long they expect to do it ' this will be a better predictor of their performance than anything else.

Knowing how our attitude affects our performance is an essential aspect of furthering our understanding of ourselves, and the probability of our success.

Vanessa Van Petten specializes in social and emotional intelligence research and development. The focus of her company is to research youth behavior and help adults keep up with young adults.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

photo by: The Infamous Gdub

Stop Circling: How Moving from 360 Degrees to High Definition Social Listening is the Customer Service Future

The Web 2.0 world has prompted a relentless move from command and control organizational structures to more fluid, collaborative and connected organizations that can better serve today's customer demands. The migration from a 360-degree view of the customer towards a high-definition perspective that makes organizations more customer-centric, is a trend well underway, and it will only accelerate as more companies discover that customer-centric software is enabling a better way to do business.

From Looking Around Your Customer to Looking at Your Customer

A 360-degree view of the customer is a single view of all customer interactions. While it's one of the enduring tenets in the CRM market, that view of the customer is fundamentally flawed: having all the information at your fingertips about any given customer is of little value if you can't do anything with it. The information needs to be actionable in order to better serve the customer every time you interact with him or her. According to industry research, only 10% of companies are delivering outstanding customer experiences, meaning that even with all the sophisticated tools and technologies at our disposal today, most companies have difficulty creating processes that connect people across disparate systems and converting customer data into useful information. They're not able to use the 360-degree view of the customer to determine the right information in the right format for each customer interaction in the contact center'and yet still more information pours in, going unused or misunderstood. And as customers increasingly turn to social networking, it becomes easier to get a snapshot of who that person is. Much like a high-definition TV, taking a 1080p approach to customer service gives organizations newfound visibility to see what they never saw before. It's 360 times x 3. This enables a high-definition perspective for our ever-connected world.

Social networking has empowered people with powerful tools to collaborate with their immediate friends and beyond, to influence and be influenced by people they never would have otherwise known. New communities have arisen and traditional communities have increasingly adapted to leverage social media tools such as forums, blogs, social networking sites, podcasts, RSS feeds, wikis, and others to exchange ideas, build affinities and interact. Social media has become a powerful mechanism for customers to share their product and service experiences. It's impossible to ignore, and smart organizations have noticed that the escalating social voice'from product reviews to supportive customers and those who share great offers, or on the converse, negative sentiment'has an immediate impact on bottom lines. Literally within minutes, people's experiences (good or bad) can be broadcast, through their extended social networks and beyond, to millions of other consumers.

The trick is to unify these individual social interactions with core customer service solutions, understanding and analyzing a customer's needs in order to give that 1080, high-def view'and to respond to these needs in the same channel where the customer initially engaged us. It's only by understanding everything about your customer'not just who they are and what they buy, but how they like to hear from you, where they like to use your product, understanding where they'll take their praise rather than their grievances'that you can truly have a complete portrait of your customer base.

Social Listening and the Competitive Edge

Having a comprehensive understanding of your customers' preferences changes the landscape of customer relations. As Forrester analyst Paul Hagen says in his study, 'Empower Customers by Transforming Business Processes':

We have moved beyond the point where companies can compete on product innovation alone. Now, most companies establishing centralized customer experience teams are looking at how to organize around the customer rather than around the product. Increasingly, companies are making it an imperative to not only understand expectations that customers have of their brand, but also deliver on those brand expectations through all of the different channels. They realize that company metrics don't match customers' perceptions of the firm, and are trying to fix this disconnect. As customers' power and expectations rise, more companies will differentiate themselves based on this new reality.

But knowing that we need to do this and actually getting it done are two different things. You'd be hard-pressed to find a company that doesn't understand the importance of monitoring what its customers say about it in order to deliver better customer service.. But it's amazingly easy to take an old fashioned inside-out approach to implementing new pathways for customers to interact and engage with you, and it is so easy to get it wrong. Several companies have gone astray in this way'doing too much, too fast, or conversely, being overly analytical and slow to respond'only to find that their customers have deserted them, or at bare minimum called negative attention to their tactics. Think Groupon: in its haste to capitalize on location based e-coupons in advance of its public offering, there were countless examples of customer frustration as the company tried to localize its global product. The company forgot what Amazon learned several years before Groupon was even founded: customer trust must be earned over and over again, and that customers know when they are being used. While we now trust online purchases at Amazon; Groupon is still learning its lesson.

Erasing the Divide Between Marketing and Customer Service

With social media's ubiquity and pervasiveness, customers are empowered to communicate their every experience, and unfortunately, negative experiences are more frequently broadcast, so it's more critical than ever to keep your customers happy before they take to the Internet. Savvy companies understand that the world is communicating in ways it hadn't five years ago. Facebook, for instance, has 750 million registered members, or approximately 12 percent of the world's population. By breaking down the artificial and historic boundaries between marketing, sales and service, companies can create a service environment where in any conversation with the customer, they can make an offer, sell new or additional services, fix an outstanding issue, or proactively address a potential future issue'without the machinations required when these functions operate across organizational silos.

This article is an original contribution by Steve Kraus.

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Has PPC Gotten a Bad Rap in Inbound Marketing?

In a word, yes. Inbound marketing has many advantages over push marketing, most notably the tendency to build relationships over time with earned media, but the demise of paid search has been greatly overstated. In fact, PPC is alive and well, and businesses that ignore this channel are making a huge mistake. Here's the breakdown.

The folks at Wordstream put together a great infographic on the subject (see below). I love infographics, because the good ones boil down the essence of the argument and frame the discussion at a glance. In this case, research shows that PPC is still crushing organic search results for 'high commercial intent' keyword phrases such as, 'purchase inbound marketing services.' When consumers are ready to buy, clearly they don't care that the most relevant search engine results are paid ones. To be clear, organic wins over PPC in the overall number of clicks, but for buy-cycle searches, the opposite applies.

Click here to view the enlarged infographic.

Here are some more eye-opening results:

• Organic search results only occupy about 15% of the above-the-fold visibility on the average SERP'ads are crowding them out
• Paid ads have become far more appealing in terms of visibility, design and content'leaders in the space are optimizing them for maximum click-throughs
• Click-through rates on Google ads for high commercial intent keyword phrases are 600 times higher than those for equivalent Facebook ads
• SEO/organic still wins the day for 'informational' keywords and branded keywords, but leads generated from these keywords need additional lead nurturing
• PPC wins in the 'ready to buy' category'can your company afford to ignore these potential leads?
• Google Adwords has become a very sophisticated tool, requiring expertise and experience to perform well'should you hire/outsource to experts?

Time to Get Back in the Game?

If you have abandoned PPC because you weren't getting the results you desired, it's time to rethink your strategy. Inbound marketing is a powerful cocktail of demand generation, content marketing and lead nurturing. By itself, inbound marketing helps you build a sustainable, growing sales funnel over time, but there is always an untapped element'targeted buyers who are ready to buy from you right now. Will those people find you through organic searches, blog subscriptions and the occasional social media update at just the right time to influence their impending decision? Done right, PPC can cover that base for you while driving more targeted leads in your direction faster than conventional inbound tactics. That's why when we hear clients say that they want to divert their SEM budget into more effective channels, it makes us pause. In most cases, it's not the effectiveness of PPC that's at fault, it's the way it's being used.

I'd love to hear from you. Is PPC staging a major come-back? Did it ever leave?

Infographic reproduced from Wordstream ' thanks guys!

Photo: Search Engine People Blog

Spending Too Much Per Lead?

The 6 Best Slideshare Decks on Content Marketing

Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I just get sick of reading (and writing) articles but still have the desire to consume or share great content.

That's why I spend a lot of time on Pinterest, scanning people's pictures on Facebook and on Slideshare. And while some people think slides are a sign of the downfall of civilization, they can be an effective way to deliver a message, make a business case and walk others through a process.

So I sought the best slideshare presentations on Content Marketing and found a ton to chose from. And from that list of amazing presentations, I chose these 6 to demonstrate some of the best thinking on content ' from the business case, to the strategy, to how to get it done. I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think. Did I miss any great ones?

I love a good manifesto and a call to change. Rand Fishkin does a great job in this deck explaining why we all need to just get started in content marketing. Warning: some content is not suitable for young or especially innocent audiences.

The Content Marketing Manifesto from Rand Fishkin

In this presentation, Joe Pulizzi details why content marketing has become such a hot buzzword. He looks at the latest research, and shares case studies looking at five content strategies that separate the good from great content marketing professionals.

Good to Great Content Marketing: 5 Content Strategies Working for Marketers from Content Marketing Institute

In this deck, Charlene Li and Rebecca Lieb from the Altimeter Group talk about new research results on Content Marketing and discuss the need for organizations to rebalance their resources to become proficient content creators.

Marketing Cloud: Winning Content Strategies Marketing Webinar from Rebecca Lieb

In this deck, Steven Van Belleghem shows how advertising is evolving towards content marketing, and delivers a pragmatic way to start with content marketing in your company.

A six step content marketing model from steven van belleghem

In this deck, my friends from Eloqua and JESS3 show you how to get some business done with content marketing and address every stage of the buyer's journey in your marketing strategy.

From Content to Customer by Eloqua & JESS3 from Eloqua

Not to be outdone by their competition, the folks at Marketo use the visual storytelling power of slideshare to show the impact of marketing with visual content. They go through how to use infographics, video, visual note-taking, memes, and Instagrams into marketing campaigns.

Visual Content Marketing: Capture and Engage Your Audience from Marketo

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