Follow-up: An Essential Touch Point to Building Your Business

I recently was featured as a guest blogger on Legal Sonar.  Wanted to share with you!  Enjoy.

One of my favorite words in marketing is “touch point.”  Why?  Touch points are reasons for clients/prospects to learn more about how you can help them meet their objectives, as well as a way to provide value-add information with follow-up.

It is common for professional service marketing and business development efforts to fall flat based on the lack of powerful follow-up (use of touch points).  Lawyers build business based on relationships.  The efforts of your marketing team can drive brand recognition, but the trust and rapport that is built during the “business development” process is what sells.  Having your clients keep you top of mind is essential for success and an easy way to do that is consistent follow-up to keep your name in front of them.  Look at these general statistics (from a study from McGraw Hill):

• 48% of sales people never follow-up with a prospect
• 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop
• 12% of sales people only make 3 contacts and stop
• Only 10% of sales people make more than 3 contacts
• 2% of sales are made on the first contact
• 3% of sales are made on the second contact
• 5% of sales are made on the third contact
• 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact
• 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact

Now, with that said, follow-up is not just something you do after a meeting.  Follow-up, as defined by Dictionary.com is an action or thing that serves to increase the effectiveness of a previous one, as a second or subsequent letter, phone call, or visit. Follow-up is often as important as the initial contact in gaining new clients. Here are a few ways that you can effectively follow-up and add value:

o   After a meeting, send a thank you e-mail with next steps (demonstrates your interest in helping meet their needs). 

o   For positive press (client/prospect), send a congratulation note on the news.

o   Inform clients/prospects about a book, article, industry reports or website that might help to them based on conversations they have had with them.

o   Reach out to see if a client/prospect would like to grab a coffee/lunch to chat about a new trend your firm is seeing in the industry (this is a great opportunity to bring along another lawyer to chat about the trend and introduce them to another area of the firm.

o   Ask clients/prospects if they would like to be added to pertinent e-mail/newsletter lists.

o   At firm events, for your clients or prospects that attended, send them an article that expands their knowledge of the topic of the event.  The key here is to send a piece that’s adds value (not a product slip – an article, checklist, etc.)

o   At firm events, get with your marketing team to see who RSVP but did not show.  Contact key individuals to see if they would like to set a meeting to discuss the topic in more detail.  Send the slide presentation to those that did not attend and see if they would like to set a meeting to discuss key points of the presentation.

o   For those you met during networking portion before or after an event, send a “nice to meet you” or “great seeing you again” e-mail; send pertinent article/information on areas of interest they mentioned to you (to keep the doors open); ask for a lunch/coffee meeting to continue discussions and build relationships.

o    Inform them of an upcoming event/webinar that may be of interest to them.

o    If your firm has news that can be of interest to your clients/prospect, share it with them (press in reputable publications, new hires of the firm they might be interested in meeting (especially if industry focused or have a niche specialty), new location that is in alignment with their footprint, etc.).

o   Reach out to them to refer a prospect to their business.

We know that the sales process can take a considerable amount of time to complete.  It’s important to stay in front of clients/prospects consistently so that when they’re ready to buy you’ll be there.  Another reason to stay top of mind with your prospects and clients is that they may not be ready to purchase today, but they may know someone else who is.

Here’s to taking time to execute touch points and build your business. 

True Value: Measuring Marketing (Part II)

(Part II of a two-part post)

Photo from jannoon028

As started in my last post, measuring marketing performance has always been a challenge to marketers due to the vast number of mediums to execute against, as well as determining what metrics are meaningful.  Marketers have come a long way; today, marketers have the ability to capture data elements from almost every stage of the buying process from awareness to satisfaction. As a result, we face a flood of data, making the identification of meaningful data overwhelming.

As marketers do better jobs at measuring their efforts, they are using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) more religiously. KPIs are quantifiable measurements, agreed to in advance, that reflect the critical success of a firm, group, practice, product, etc.   KPIs for marketing vary according to specific areas of responsibility, but are essential for valuing effectiveness of initiatives.

What you Can Measure

The question I get a lot is "what can you actually measure?"  You can measure almost all of your efforts - the key is your objective for using a medium and setting KPIs to measure effectiveness of marketing mediums in achieving your objectives.  Below are a few examples of areas that can be measured - just the tip of the iceberg.  I stress, it is important to set objecitves for your efforts, otherwise you will not know what initiatives to execute and what to measure.

• Website – ensure you develop KPIs for analyzing your success (hits, page vies, time on site, number of downloads, etc.).  These will help determine if your online efforts are yielding results that help you with your objectives.
• Social media – based on your objectives you can measure your blog subscribers, email subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, YouTube subscribers, SlideShare followers, social bookmarking followers/friends, etc.  If you keep track of your community stats you can analyze increases or decreases and where you need to spend more time.
•  Advertising – the hard one to measure, especially for B2B - as most advertising is to increase awareness.  To be most effective, ensure you have a call-to-action on advertising to provide easy connections for access to information.  For B2C, the call-to-action is critical (phone number, web address, promotion code, toll-free number, etc.).
• Direct Mail/Collateral – targeting is key for measurement in this area as it is voluminous - especially for B2C.  Ensure you know what you are measuring so you know if the piece is effective.  A few tracking ideas include, response rate (via use of personalized URLs, campaign page on website, use tracking codes on coupons or reply cards/forms/envelops, use specific toll-free numbers for a campaign, create a specific e-mail address for the campaign, etc.).  
• Events - remember that there are event metrics as well as post-event metrics. You can measure desired vs. actual attendees, evaluation of attendees, sales that the event helped generate, number of attendees followed-up with, business generated from event, etc.
• Public Relations - the key is how these are helping reach set objectives of the organization.  Examples of KPIs: Number of articles, subscribers, posts, visits, number of 500 word+ features, cover stories, executive quote inclusions, company and executive profiles, percentage positive/neutral articles, comments in Twitter, number of negative @messages, etc. 
• Client Satisfaction - companies should set their KPIs for understanding clients' impressions of our product/service.  KPIs can also uncover needs or areas for up-selling/cross-selling business.

Examples of specific KPIs:

• Account Expansion -   Measures the increase in business from existing clients
• Acquisition Cost - The cost of a single response to a promotion or total cost divided by total number of responses
• Customer Churn - The retention to attrition ratio in a given period
• Lead source – when a deal closes or sales are made, determine where the buyer originally made contact (via event, direct mail, newsletter, etc.). This can help identify channels that work more efficiently than other channels for business acquisition.
• Market Share - Product or service sales as a percentage of the sales across all competitors
• New Customers -  Percentage of new customers over existing client base
• Price Sensitivity - Price flexibility of each product per market segment. How much are people willing to pay for the product in given industry, geography or application based on survey results.
• Reach - The percentage of potential ad viewers who will be exposed to at least one ad in a given period
• Sales Per Customer - Number of sales made by a given customer in a given time frame

Marketing is more than an expense to an organization - it is investment that should lead to increased opportunities for revenue generation.  As marketers, it is our job to help demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategic initiatives and execution of tactics.  Here's to planning and analyzing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Other Resources:

• CMO Guide to ROI - this is a 55 min presentation that provides some good insights
• Developing KPIs to measure marketing effectiveness
• Examples of KPIs - General examples as well as by industry, function within company

kathryn_anastasio@yahoo.com

SEM/SEO: Five Tips for Better Results

Marketers know they need to help drive customers to their companies. Today SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is taking a prominent role in marketing plans.  Marketers are seeking to promote their companies’ website to increase visibility for search engine results/SEO (search engine optimization (SEO).  Marketers know that search engines reward pages with the right combination of ranking factors, so specific SEM initiatives are being focused on to compliment the marketing mix. 

graphic from digitalart

SEO is a good tool for marketers in targeting, as it forces them to go through the exercise of mapping out their content and the hierarchy of categories, topics and ideas. It also forces them to pinpoint the focus of content they create for their website  (and helps them avoid creating useless content written to a general audience).

There are many SEO tips.  Here are five that I find to be most useful in getting more immediate results of your efforts:

1. Use a unique and relevant page title and meta description on every page. The page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor. When search engines crawl a site, the page title is the first thing they see.  Generic titles like "home" or your company name are not strong. The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing (assists with click-through from search engine result pages (SERPs). These short paragraphs are a company’s opportunity to advertise content to searchers and let them know exactly what the given page has with regard to what they’re looking for).
2. Optimize individual pages with keywords - helps with ranking. Marketers know that differentiation is key.  They also know that users will search for key words to locate what they need.  It is important to weave your keywords into the text on your website.  According to Dedric Polite at the HubSpot blog, to witness the power of an ideally optimized page, look at the Google search.  For example, conduct a Google search on the term "George Washington." Your first result, he notes, will belong to Wikipedia for two key reasons: perfect on-page SEO structure, and the strong off-page SEO of inbound links from respected sources.
3. Include a site map page. Spiders can’t index pages that can’t be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site’s hierarchy. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links.
4. Make SEO-friendly URLs. Use keywords in your URLs, such as yourcompany.com/dress-shoes.html. Don’t overdo it, though. A file with more than 3 hyphens tends to look like spam and users may be hesitant to click on it.  The more descriptive, the better for spiders.
5. Ensure Fresh Content on Your Site.  If your site content doesn’t change often, consider adding a blog, as spiders like fresh text. Blog at least once a week with relevant, fresh content to feed the spiders.

As part of an SEM strategy, firms are not only utilizing SEO, but also paid searches (Google Ad words, digital ads with pay per click, etc.).  No matter what your digital strategy, at a minimum, ensure you know what results you are looking for with your SEM/SEO strategy.  This will help ensure your time and dollars are contributing to your revenue goals or visibility objectives.

kathryn_anastasio@yahoo.com