Posted by on Wed, Aug 04, 2010 @ 08:44 AM
It’s always been a challenge for marketers to find ways to stay top of mind with their customers and prospects. It’s even harder when your company offers services where the customer’s need is intermittent or unpredictable. This is the challenge our business faces every day. The question is; how can we be visible when the customer has a need?
Obviously you can’t mail or call all of your customers or prospects each week to find out if they need anything. Well, you probably could but you would get a lot of hate mail. You need to be confident that when the need arises your customers can find you.
One way to do this is with a high-impact mailer. Your prospects are getting dozens if not hundreds of envelopes and letters every day and most of them suffer a swift death in the recycling bin. But what if you sent them a small package that pops open? One of my favorite pieces here at Structural Graphics is our
Book-Cube™. It never fails to surprise the recipient, even when they know it’s coming.
The Book-Cube is just one of the many high-impact designs we have created through the years. When people approach our booth at trade shows and tell us they received some cool piece that popped-open, or made a sound, or flipped over itself, or broke the rules of traditional mail in some unnatural way, we are delighted. This is the best way we stay top of mind with our prospects and customers.
Of course, there are other things your company should be doing. Sending out a weekly email newsletter is a great way to stay engaged with your database. With the dramatic increase in spam over the years this is much more difficult, but as long as you provide useful content in an consistent manner your email should get read.
The popularity of social networks and online groups has also created an avenue for marketers to communicate with their customers in a consistent and efficient way. This too has its limitations, but is still something you need to be looking at.
The reality for most marketers is that it’s impossible to insure all of your prospects and customers will keep you top of mind when the have a need for your services. But it’s important to communicate with them when they don’t need you, so you’re sure to be around when they do.
If you want your own surprise in the mail
shoot me an email and I will personally send you one!
Posted by on Mon, Jun 28, 2010 @ 12:49 PM
As we spiral into, or rather burst into an age where so much is controlled online, a new buzz word has come into mainstream. “Online Reputation” never really had a meaning before Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but now companies need to pay as much attention to this area of their business as they do their offline public relations efforts.
An interesting example of how online reputations can spin out of control is with Twitter. It’s free to sign up so you’ll find many imposters pretending to be another person or company. Often these fakes can get lots of followers and fool many people. Take for example this fake AT&T account, or this Steve Jobs account. Both fake accounts with thousands of followers and free to post whatever they want in the name of a real person and company.
User forums can be a great way for your customers to interact with your brand and each other. They can provide you great feedback and criticisms to help steer your business, but they can also get a bit ugly. When someone is behind the vale of anonymity that a user 
forum provides, they are free to say whatever they want without direct consequences. You might not tell an intimidating executive in person that his product stinks, but you probably wouldn’t have a problem with that if you were online and out of reach! It’s important to monitor your user forums to find inappropriate or inaccurate postings and remove them. However, you shouldn’t necessarily sensor or restrict users from expressing their true feelings about your business, even if they aren’t flattering. Instead have an executive in your business respond to the posts with the company’s position.
As an example of dictatorship-like control of a user forum, I once posted on the Apple forums that I was thinking about getting rid of my iPhone and replacing it with a Blackberry. I listed all the reasons and then sought people’s feedback. I never got any feedback from my post because within a minute or two of submitting my post it was deleted. I understand why it was deleted, probably automatically, because I used the word “Blackberry”, but in reality, this should have been valuable feedback for Apple and a chance to keep a customer.
What online reputation really boils down to is what appears when someone searches for your company name. If it’s a bunch of anti-you sites than that is definitely going to be bad. You can’t directly control what appears in the search results, but you can help effect it. Try the following:
- Be sure your employees have LinkedIn accounts and that they link to your company website.
- If you don’t have one, create a blog and add relevant and interesting content about your company and especially your industry.
- Setup active Facebook and Twitter accounts and be sure to maintain them.
- Create YouTube videos about your product or service and add relevant keywords and links to your company website in the description.
Keep in mind that search engines are increasingly adding live, up-to-date information to their search results pages, so you will start to see your Tweets and YouTube content show up under your company name. This is all good and essentially allows you to control what people are seeing when they search for you.
The online community is a wild untamed landscape, but that doesn’t mean you can’t maintain a polished image. Practice good social networking habits and keep quality up-to-date information on your websites and blogs, and you’ll have as much control over your online reputation as is possible. Resist the temptation to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have an outside firm do this for you, as there are many that would be willing to. Remember, they don’t have anymore control over the web than you do. You’re a willing (or unwilling) participant in this jungle so speak up!
Posted by on Thu, Jun 03, 2010 @ 09:58 AM
If you’re into Twitter you may be interested to know that we have a little bit of a contest going on, which is to say, we’re bribing people! We got the folks in accounting to authorize three Amazon.com gift certificates worth $100 each, and we’re giving them away to three lucky people on twitter. All you have to do is follow us on twitter before June 14th and you’re automatically entered into the contest!
I wanted to give away something super-sexy like an iPad but since the good people in accounting had no idea what that was they said no. But hey, a hundred dollars to spend at the largest online retailer isn’t too shabby, especially since all you have to do is click “follow” and you’re in! The three winners will be announced using Twitter on June 14th so be sure to check your account for direct messages! Oh, and we’re not one of those companies that has ten trillion followers but only follows a few people. We follow everyone who follows us.
Follow us now
Posted by on Thu, May 27, 2010 @ 10:10 AM
There is no doubt that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer unbelievable business opportunities. However, when businesses rely too much on the emerging medium, still in its infancy, there can be problems.
This week Twitter announced that it will no longer allow third-party applications to advertise in their live tweet streams. But guess what was announced last week? In-stream Twitter advertising platform, Ad.ly, just secured an additional five million dollars of angel funding. There is no word yet on how Ad.ly will deal with this, but it seems pretty bleak for the young startup. There entire business model will be obsolete when Facebook enacts this new restriction next month.
The folks who probably are affected most by sudden regulatory changes from the major social networks are developers. The rules for developers are constantly changing, especially on a major platform like Facebook. For example, Zynga, developers of Farmville and Mafia Wars, two of the most popular third-party apps on Facebook, face this same danger. What if Mark Zuckerberg, 26 year old CEO of Facebook, wakes up tomorrow with an itch in his throat and decides he doesn’t like cute little farm animals and doesn’t want them on his site?
Last year the enormously popular website Tr.im ceased operations. Tr.im was a service that allowed Twitter users to shorten long URLs to preserve space in their 140 character tweets. After offering the company for sale and failing to find a buyer, they had to shut down. A company representative said there was just no way to monetize their site traffic. Isn’t that something they should have thought of sooner? Anyway, all of the millions of people that used their shortened URLs now found them completely useless. Dead links everywhere!
Of course I am not advising that you drop your social networking efforts or cancel your Facebook account. We have seen lots of success driving new people to our brand through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But with companies increasing their online spending every year, you have to wonder if some of them are putting all of their eggs in one basket. Smart marketers are finding ways to utilize digital and traditional mediums through highly effective integrated campaigns. These campaigns take advantage of the best of both worlds, which makes a lot of sense given how volatile online networks seem to be.