Another Way to Think About Influencing Buyers

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

Do you know why your customers are buying from you?

·         Is it your legal “expertise?”

·         Your track record? 

·         The opinions of your referrals? 

·         The price you offer?

·         Your ability to provide them seamless service for all their needs?

·         You understand their business and can speak to them about appropriate ways to help them?

There are many factors that can affect the purchasing decision and understanding the KEY influences impacting buying can put you in a position to better tailor your approach – and have a better opportunity to resonate with clients/targets..

As you think about these influencers, whether psychological, demographic, personal or social, also think about how impacting a customer’s attitudes and behaviors can assist with your marketing and business development efforts. It’s no secret that emotions are powerful factors that move people into action and cause them to make a purchase. To influence your buyers, you must understand and appeal to them emotionally.

·     Impacting Attitudes – How do you get customers to prefer your product/services, believe in your cause, trust/respect you, drop an objective they have about your product/services or recommend/endorse you? Impacting attitudes is about how you communicate and what you communicate (key messages).

·     Impacting Behavior – How do you get customers to respond, attend an event, call you/accept a call, respond to a promotion/targeting campaign, actively consider your product/service or accept a meeting? Impacting behaviors is the result of understanding your target. If you can change a customer’s behavior, you are more apt to convert them to your product/service.

Taking a step back, the only way that understanding influencers matters is if you are properly identifying your targets. Without identifying your targets, you will not be able to accurately position yourself in the market and use influencers to drive marketing efforts. Targeting allows you to understand what venue you need to focus your marketing in that can generate leads that produce customers. The use of targeting, customer influencers and a multi channel strategy is a successful formula for success in marketing.

Think Outside the Box: Help Drive the Next Big Idea

As marketers, we know there are many things that we need to work on to assist our companies with meeting their objectives: traditional marketing, interactive, public relations and business development activities. Marketing injects the customer insight and creative thinking that gives business its edge.  We combine these with analytical data to drive strategy, innovation and profitable/sustainable growth.  With this, it is our job to help our firms keep on-top of the next big idea that resonates with our clients/targets. This can be both from a pure marketing standpoint or helping our leaders with the next area for growth (development of new or enhanced products/services).

Photo from Jannoon028

Tips for brainstorming:  In a series of interviews with highly successful creative people, Peter Sims, author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, writes that most innovators don’t begin with brilliant ideas – they discover them through experimentation. Here are lessons learned from some of those top doers:

• Get Out of the Office – One of the best ways to identify creative insights and develop ideas is to get out into the world, like an anthropologist might. Steve Blank, a retired Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is also a professor at Stanford, routinely challenges students to defy their assumptions by immersing themselves in the world. “No facts exist inside the building,” he says. “Only opinions.”
• Unleash Your Imagination – Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t set out to revolutionize the way we search for information. Their goal, as collaborators on the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project, was to prioritize online library searches. But their small discoveries led to the famous “PageRank” algorithm. Amazon.com also embraces the experimental discovery approach. “Many efforts turn out to be dead ends,” says founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. “But every once in a while, you go down an alley and it opens up into this huge, broad avenue.”
• Change Your Course – Acclaimed architect Frank Gehry designed conventional buildings like tract housing and shopping malls for much of his career. Inspired by how artists manipulate materials, he performed a series of experiments on his own house in Santa Monica in the late ‘70s. Soon after, he closed his firm and started a new, using his own style and voice. He was 50 years old. This wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t broken free from the realm of what he was used to.
• Take An Experimental Approach – Chris Rock, the Google founders and Jeff Bezos are examples of what University of Chicago economist David Galenson has dubbed “experimental innovators” – those who use iterative, trial-and-error approaches to gradually reach breakthroughs. They don’t try to hit narrow targets on unknown horizons, analyze new ideas too much too soon, or put their hopes into one big bet. They’ve all reached extraordinary success by making a series of “small bets.”

Now with all of this, we have to keep in mind what our business objectives are, where we want to grow our business and always keep on top of demo/psychographics of our customers.  Thinking outside the box, while we may not get to execute there all the time, is how we can help our companies stay competitive and innovative.

Here's to helping our companies anticipate the next idea that resonates with their clients/targets!

kathryn_anastasio@yahoo.com

First Impressions: More than just Human Interactions

We have all heard this warning: "You never get a second chance to make a good first impression."  In business, a positive first impression is crucial for forging sustainable, long-term partnerships with buyers to keep it thriving. Businesses spend a great deal of time and resources on keeping their existing clients. Consistently, making a strong first impression is essential for gaining new customers and clients.

Photo from renjith krishnan

There are many aspects to marketing, but one of the most important is in being able to quickly capture the attention of potential customers and clients. The field of marketing relies on good first impressions. 

It is one thing to grab the attention of a potential client or customer and another completely to grab their attention for all the wrong reasons. The art of attention seeking, without being overly persistent or irritating, is an important art to learn- really capturing the interest of the consumer.

It is almost important that, after grabbing the attention of your audience, you don’t lose sight of what the product or service that you’re offering really is. This has been a common problem for marketers, and has given rise to the common customer complaint that while they were entertained by an advertisement or a gimmick they were left without a real understanding of what the advertisement was trying to sell.

Keep in mind your marketing first impressions:

• Brand – Do your key messages convey how your product/service will help your buyers (not just support your firm)?
• E-mail Marketing – Many firms deal with lackluster open rates of e-mail communications.  Are you subject lines engaging to your target?  The right message at the right time does little to benefit the brand if it is never opened.
• Website – Is your website easily navigated from a customer’s/buyers point of view? Is it easy for people to contact you if they have questions? Do you have a mobile viewable website for easy of today's technology savvy buyers?  Should you invest in a mobile application to ease the buying process?  What web/technology channels are important to your targets?
• Social Media - Do you need to utilize social media?  If so, are you posting consistenty?  Are your messages important to your targets?  Do your messages engage your targets or get them interested in a product/service?  As marketers, we need to determine what our strategy is for using social media and ensure that our first impressions are not hurting our overall brand and positioning.
• Collateral – Firms spent time and money writing, designing, and printing various pieces of collateral to communicate your firms products/services.  Does your collateral grab your viewers’ attention and encourages them to read the information you've worked so hard to put together? Or keep your business card in their files, bookmark your website, consider your proposal, or whatever the goal for the marketing piece may be? Are your "sales" material focused on benefits and ways your product/services help your potential buyers?
• Phone messages/Receptionist Greetings – Part of making first impressions include voice messages of the firm and how the receptionist answers the phone.  Are these consistent and professional?
• Store Layout/Displays – Is the design of your store or your display logically attuned to your buyers (not just appeasing to your design preferences)?  For displays, does it grab the attention of your buyer?
• Product Packaging/Signage –  This is critical for B2C.  Enough said. For B2B, are you bundling services to make the buying process easier for your buyers?

First impressions are important for your employees and your marketing efforts.  Here’s to making positive first impressions with your marketing efforts. 

kathryn_anastasio@yahoo.com

WHAT'S THE BUZZ? Overused Words Impact Differentiation

As marketers, it is important that we differentiate our companies in the eyes of potential buyers. A way we differentiate is through the words we use to communicate the benefits of the products/services our companies sell.  Choosing words that buyers connect to is essential for top of mind awareness and recall during the buying process.   The words are not only used in print, but also by employees when communicating the companies products/services.

Photo from Idea Go

I recently ran across an article the highlighted words that are overused in the workplace and through it would be good to share some insights as a reminder of the key for differentiation.

“When business or industry terms become overused, people stop paying attention to them,” said Max Messmer, chairman of Accountemps.  “The best communicators use clear and straightforward language that directly illustrates their points.”

The market and workplace is overwrought with clichés, buzzwords and industry jargon, often leading to a “disconnect” between coworkers and buyers. A survey, funded by Accontemps, was conducted by an independent research firm - telephone interviews with 150 senior executives from the nation’s 1,000 largest companies. Executives were asked, “What is the most annoying or overused phrase or buzzword?” Their responses included:

• Leverage: As in, “We intend to leverage our investment in IT infrastructure across multiple business units to drive profits.”
• Reach out: As in, “We consistently reach out to customers impacted by the change....”
• Viral: As in, “Our video has gone viral.”
• Game changer: As in, “Transitioning from products to solutions was a game changer for our company.”
• Disconnect: As in, “There is a disconnect between what the consumer wants and what the product provides.”
• Value-add: As in, “We have to evaluate the value-add of this activity before we spend more on it.”
• Circle back: As in, “I’m heading out of the office now, but I will circle back with you later.”
• Socialize: As in, “We need to socialize this concept with our key stakeholders.”
• Interface: As in, “My job requires me to interface with all levels of the organization.”
• Cutting edge: As in, “Our cutting-edge technology gives us a competitive advantage.”
• Results:  As in, "Our product is top rated and provides you results that drive change."
• Innovative:  As in, "Our innovative approach to solving problems leads to faster implementation."

Other words that surfaced included:  Solution, synergy, paradigm, customer centric, accountability management, core competency, alignment and incremental. 

Everyone is guilty of using buzzwords from time to time.  The problem is that these generic terms force buyers to interpret what you mean when you say them.  Choose your words carefully!

Learn more

• To learn more about overused words with LinkedIn profiles, read an article on the FOX Business page. 
• For Press Releases, read an article by Adam Sherk.
• For general office communication, read an article on CBS Money Watch.com.

Here's to differentiation!

Kathryn_anastasio@yahoo.com

What was it You Wanted to Sell Me?

As I was rummaging through a file today, I came across one of my favorite marketing philosophies that I learned early in my career.  In a famous ad for McGraw-Hill Magazines (in 1950), a grumpy looking business man sits, hands folded in his lap, squinting at the reader with a defiant expression.  His message is memorable to marketers, as it is a cornerstone for success.  The ad states:

I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know your company.
I don’t know your company’s product.
I don’t know what your company stands for.
I don’t know your company’s customers.
I don’t know your company’s record.
I don’t know your company’s reputation.
Now — what was it you wanted to sell me?

Moral: Sales start before your salesman calls - with business publication advertising. 

Translated today - if people do not know your company/product, the "build it and they will come" marketing approach will not generate revenue....so, how are you using a multi-channel strategy to gain visibility/positioning with your clients/targets?

The Business Marketing Association created a great video that demonstrates how this ad is relevant in today's modern, tech savvy world.  It reinforces the importance of the basics of positioning. Take a few minutes to view - times may change, but the fundamentals of marketing remain.

Here's to branding and messaging!

Enjoy!

kathryn_anastasio@yahoo.com