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By Mitch Glasser, August 31, 2010 11:58 AM

Social media offers unprecedented capabilities to communicate and connect with prospects and customers.  However, it will only benefit your company if you first decide where it is your current activities need assistance to meet your communications goals.

Clearly, this last statement is true for all communications tools: print advertising, direct mail, e-mail newsletters, TV and radio advertising, event sponsorships, trade show attendance, speaking engagements, etc.  The situation that makes answering this question for social media so acute today is the massive hard-sell going on among the ever growing list of social media vendors.

People buy using the same model they have always used.  What was important to buyers 30 or 50 years ago is still important.  What has changed is the variety of information and communication sources that exists and the ease with which they can be accessed.

For my money, social media can make major contributions to answering a number of buyer questions.  Specifically, which vendors:

• Have the offerings and capabilities that meet my specific needs?
• Are credible?
  • Have a track record?
  • Have customers?
  • Are experts about the industry issues and problems they purport to solve?
  • Can be trusted to deliver on their promises and stand behind their products?
  • Have a vision for and commitment to future product improvements?
  • Have customers who are happy to be their customers?

Social media affords you the potential of getting your answers to these questions in front of your prospects.  I say ‘potential’ because what has to be true is that your prospective buyers have to first be engaged in using social media for this to happen.  If you’re talking in places where they’re not listening, you’re wasting your money.

So the first step in your social media activities is to first uncover if and how your customers are using social media to stay informed about the industry in which you operate and the solutions and capabilities you offer.  How do you do that?  Well, as simple as it sounds, you could ask them.  This will provide you with the information you need to direct your social media efforts and bear fruit from your investment of time and money.  Once found, then you need to decide what combination of awareness, credibility, trust, etc. needs form the majority of your social media content.

If surveying your customers and prospects about their use of social media is not the first step proposed by a prospective social media supplier, start looking for a new one.

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By Mitch Glasser, August 13, 2010 12:05 PM

In Part I, I put down some ideas about how to tell whether your marketing organization has a real strategy or just a collection of words labeled strategy.

Let’s go another step.  For the sake of argument, we will assume you have an honest to goodness marketing strategy (and it is the correct one for your company—no small assumption). Now here is a test to consider:

If an outside marketing consultant studied your organization, documenting all your plans, tactics and activities, what would he or she conclude is your marketing strategy?  Would it agree with what you’ve stated it to be?

It should, but more than likely it would not. In my experience there is a chronic lack of rigor applying a company’s marketing strategy to its tactical planning.  They are usually done by different groups and are seen as independent functions.  What results from this approach is that the tactical planning winds up creating the strategy, rather than the other way around.

You see, it is the sum of your tactics that defines the strategy under which you actually operate (regardless of what is stated in your PowerPoint slides).  The stated and actual strategies will be one and the same if your tactics were properly developed from your strategy.  If your tactics were developed independently—that is, without deliberate adherence to your stated strategy—they are bound to collectively point to a different strategy than the one intended.

It could be even worse.  If the consultant can’t recognize a consistent purpose and focus running through your plans, for all practical purposes you don’t have a strategy.  That is, you are not focused enough to accomplish anything in particular.

The upshot of either of these scenarios is that you won’t achieve the expected outcome from your marketing activities, and you’ll realize something needs to change.  It would be time consuming and often difficult to uncover whether it’s your strategy or tactics leading you astray.

Even in the best if economic times it is no easy task to develop a true, effective marketing strategy.  In today’s environment, getting the strategy and tactics right the first time is imperative to survival and growth because there is little wiggle room for a ‘do-over’.

Think about allowing someone from outside your company to look at your tactical plans and see what they come up with as your ‘implied’ strategy.  Yes, it would be a gutsy thing to do because it might challenge some of your market assumptions.  But if problems do exist, how soon would you like to know about them?  Sooner, when you can actually do something about them, or when the market eventually tells you something is amiss?

Your marketing achievements could rest on your answer.

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By Mitch Glasser, August 9, 2010 7:15 AM

Marketing strategies are like budgets, every marketing group has one.  But is what’s claimed to be the marketing ‘strategy’ really a strategy?

A true marketing strategy describes the intended outcome of a marketing organization’s cumulative activities.  It describes what it’s trying to accomplish given its resources and the state of the market it tries to serve.  The strategy is fed by an understanding of company’s targeted customers, competitors, its own strengths, ‘unique-nesses’ and position in the market, and the business and economic environment in which it has to operate.  It addresses the firm’s advantage in the market and often the position it is trying to achieve.  Importantly, a real strategy also limits what the company offers.  Does your marketing strategy read like this?

Once created, the most important purpose of a marketing strategy is to serve as a framework for aligning all the planned tactics and activities with the department’s intended accomplishments.

Operationally, the strategy is a key tool for tactical planning in that it is the filter through which all proposed marketing tactics must pass to be approved.  If the tactic supports the strategy, then it can move ahead (albeit possibly dropped for other reasons).  If it addresses customer targets, products, promotions, pricing, distribution, communication, etc. out of line with the strategy’s intent and direction, it is eliminated.  Not using the strategy in this way effectively means you have no strategy.

What does a strategy NOT do?

A strategy does not state or imply what will be done—specific activities, operational plans, etc.  These are all part of tactics, and are determined based upon what is needed to realize the strategy—those activities which will move you from where you are to where the strategy says you desire to be.  They are the execution tools for implementing the strategy, and not part of the strategy itself.

More often than not, what’s purported to be a marketing strategy is merely a set of tactics assembled in strategic-sounding phrases.  The lack of a marketing strategy, a real, well developed (and utilized) marketing strategy underlies much of the ineffectiveness of today’s marketing activities.  Why?  Because without the focus brought by a real strategy, all planning and execution activities will not be pulling in the same direction.  There will be no synergy across tactics that enables them to build on each other.

If your marketing strategy contains the tactical ‘whats’ of your activities and not the higher level market issues mentioned above, you don’t really have a strategy.

You have a problem.

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By Mitch Glasser, April 13, 2010 12:20 PM

[Note: This story was told to me by John Coe, President of The Sales and Marketing Institute (http://www.b2bmarketing.com/) about a client he had when he ran a full-service direct marketing agency in Chicago.  He currently provides consulting and training in B2B lead generation and sales productivity improvement to firms throughout the US.]

An interior architectural design firm hired John’s DM agency to help market their company’s office design services to commercial real estate developers and brokers in the Chicago area.  John first collected the brochures of competitive firms to see how they were going about attracting new clients.  All the brochures looked the same, talking about the education and experience of their architects, showing images of their most impressive projects (marble foyers, etc.) and generally bragging about just what wonderful companies they were.

John decided to take a different approach (smart guy that he is).  He asked the question, “Why is one architectural firm chosen for a project over all others?” That is, what are the compelling differentiators among design firms?

Instead of holding a brainstorming session with his client to conjecture and pontificate on what those attributes were, John reasoned that the most credible source of this information would be the customers themselves (you know, the people who actually choose the design firm and sign the deal).

So he held face-to-face meetings with a sample of this group and discussed their use of interior design firms, their experiences, what worked well, what didn’t, etc. using standard market research interviewing techniques.

So what did John find to be the most important characteristic?  Skills?  Experience?  Previous projects?

No, no and no.  It was much more fundamental, much more ‘down and dirty’ than that.

Real estate developers and brokers viewed architectural skills to be a commodity—all firms with any depth of experience provided essentially the same high quality work.  No meaningful differentiation here.

What these firms did seek out, quoting from the interviewees themselves, was “a company that would not screw up the deals” they were putting together for prospective buyers.  Not a very sophisticated or technical need, but it was a compelling business consideration in their selection processes.

There were two ways ‘screwing up’ typically happened:

1. The design firm got far too ‘artsy’ and created a concept that went way over the buyer’s budget, causing them to look for another developer (who used a different design firm), or
2. In a side conversation, the design firm would tell the prospective buyer, “this building won’t work as well for you as another one I know of that’s nearby”.  And that building was NOT in the portfolio of the presenting developer or broker

The people John spoke with were both adamant and uniformly consistent about this costly issue.  It was not what design firms did that was most attractively differentiating, it was what they didn’t do.

How did John use what he learned from his research?  He mailed a three-paragraph letter, personalized to each of the 600+ targeted recipients that began with this sentence:

“If you want to work with an interior design firm that won’t screw up your deals, then you should call [his client].”

He went on to elaborate about how his client is keenly aware of the threat of these deal-killing actions and that they were savvy and experienced enough to never create such situations.

Before he executed his campaign, John was told by people who had marketed to developers and brokers that they were a ‘hard core’ crowd (described as ‘land sharks’ by those in the know) who didn’t go for being marketed to and would never open any ‘advertising’ that fell on their desks.  That was not John’s experience.

Instead of an anticipated low, single-digit response rate from the mailing, John’s client received responses from 22% of the recipients!  That is nothing short of miraculous (and awe inspiring).  In the subsequent 3 years, this kind of insight helped John’s client to go from 2-5 employees to a professional staff of 25 architects.  When you know what’s really important to your current and future customers, it’s amazing what you can do. Growth anyone?

The insight that drove this kind of result (what NOT to do) could only have been uncovered by deliberately engaging with customers and prospects about what’s important to them—that is, ‘listening to the market’.

Regardless of how smart you may be about your customers, often there are key insights that are not picked up in typical customer meetings or sales encounters because they are not the subject or purpose of those conversations.  This is, however, the kind of core issue that is often uncovered in market research.

Do you know YOUR market’s FUNDAMENTALS?  You should, because there is a lot riding on it.

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By Mitch Glasser, March 21, 2010 2:46 PM

On March 16^th Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that she will freeze funds for expanding the virtual fence (a network of cameras, ground sensors and radars) that was supposed to monitor the southern U.S. border with Mexico by 2011.  Having cost the government $672 million so far, a string of technical glitches and delays has put the project in jeopardy.

So how do I equate a $672 million cost with the acronym ROI?  I do so because in this example it means Risk of Ignoring.

You see neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the engineers at prime contractor Boeing bothered to ask the people who would actually be using the surveillance system what they wanted or how they wanted the system to work.  They ignored the very people who would best know the environmental and operational demands the system would have to meet in order to be up to the job.  Had they asked, they would have known that the standard, off-the-shelf surveillance equipment they selected would not be able to handle the heat, high winds, dust and vast distances of the southern Arizona border.  They set out to meet a need they simply did not understand.

So not knowing their market cost you and I the better part of a BILLION dollars (so far).  And I’ll bet that by and large the designers were very smart people and felt they had made sound assumptions about system’s requirements.  They may have been smart, but not smart enough.  They were obviously way too self-assured to think that they needed to speak with the ultimate users of the system.  They didn’t want to hear that their preconceived ideas might be wrong—“I know what I want to do so don’t challenge me with the facts”.

Unfortunately, the avoidance of real customer input is not atypical for many companies.  They create a set of ‘educated’ assumptions about their targeted customers, maybe bounce some ideas off a few colleagues in allied fields (but who look nothing like the target and would never be buyers) and then go design the product.  When they finally bring it to market it becomes painfully clear that they missed a key product feature, or erred in the way it’s delivered, or even that they chose the wrong user types to target.  They not only wasted money, they lost time and credibility by not meeting the revenue time line on which their business case depended.

Don’t be one of those companies.  Know your market first.

Here is the link to the 60 Minutes report on the virtual fence project: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6078904n&tag=related;photovideo

If you don’t want to watch it in its entirety, the relevant portion falls between 4:45 and 8:00 minutes into the program.  You can skip ahead, but when you do so, you have to first sit through a 60-second commercial.  After that you can move around at will.