Ntrinsic Blog

Maximizing The Power Of Your Marketing

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:26:35 EDT

We spend a great deal of time helping our customers define the Ideal Client or Customer Profiles (ICP) for their business. Some time ago, it was enough to understand the demographics and psychographics of your target prospects. In other words, we once schooled our customers that they needed to know the size, location, industry, buying habits and experience of their Ideal Prospects so that they could form the most effective messaging and target that messaging at their ICP. By being more specific in their definition of their ICP, we could help our customers see a higher return on their marketing investment – what we commonly call ROMI.

Surprisingly, this was really difficult for many of our clients. They wanted to fall back into the habit of just marketing to as many people as possible – what we commonly refer to as Shotgun Marketing. Just keep shooting and hopefully you will hit something. Unfortunately, this type of shooting takes lots of shotgun shells or different marketing campaigns, which costs lots of money. Also, we don’t always know which shot “brought down” the prospect so it makes it difficult to track the performance of individual campaigns. Without being able to track campaigns we cannot pick the winners and stop doing the ineffective ones.

As we progressed over the years in the sophistication level of the guidance that we provided to our clients, we added another dimension to the amount of information gathering required to build an ICP. In addition to the demographic data, we asked our clients to determine which of their customers had the greatest lifetime value so that we could increase the ROMI or at least decrease the cost of customer acquisition over the lifetime of the customer. In other words, the longer we can keep a customer and the more of our products that they will consume – the better the customer they apparently were.

The next progression in the level of our guidance to our clients was in the area of qualitative value. Of any company’s customers, some are bad customers, some are okay customers and some you want to take home to meet mother. By studying these customers, their buying habits and their load or encumbrance on the organization from a support and cost perspective, we could further increase our profits by not only defining and messaging to our ICP, but by defining the types of customers that we actually want to have.

And now, our clients have found that we have become absolutely unreasonable in our demands for them to further define their ICP. Adding to demographics, profitability and desirability of prospects, we now ask our clients to define their personality. See – absolutely unreasonable. Now we want to drill down into their customer’s psyches, their wants, likes, dislikes, fears, and even quirks. What do they need, what are they looking for and why is this particular product the one that best fulfills that need? Imagine, for a minute, how effective you could be at gift giving if you somehow magically knew the one thing that the person was dying to have. Or imagine how effective a negotiator you could be if you knew the exact words that would make your opponent grant you everything you requested and still feel like they had won the negotiation.

Spending the extra time to develop in-depth persona descriptions of your best customers provides so much insight and power to your marketing efforts. A complete description of each of these customer types can increase the performance of every marketing effort because you can tailor your message to a specific personality of one of your target prospect groups. Now you can know what they want, how they want it. And most importantly, you can present the perfect product to them in a way that they cannot refuse to buy it – now that is powerful marketing.

It's Planning for Doing Time

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:28:32 EDT

Well it is that time of year when many companies begin to take an introspective look back on the year. It is the unique company and team that is on-target to hit the goals that they established at this time last year. Most realize that they haven’t achieved their yearly goals and are looking at ways to do a better job next year. Finally, there are a few out there still confusing vibration with forward momentum and justifying their lack of goals attainment by detailing all the “other’ thinks that they got done.

To be painfully simple, there are two things that are vital to achieving your company goals. The first is actually creating them and writing them down. The second is actually implementing them.

It is surprising today how many companies are out there without an internal (strategic) and an external (marketing) plan. The widespread belief is that plans are hard to put together and take months of work. This is just not true. A truly implementable plan can be put together in a few long days of focused work with the team. Of course, an experienced facilitator can make this process more efficient, effective and productive but that is a discussion for another day.

With regard to implementation, there are a few tricks that help organizations actually achieve what they detailed in their plan. The first is to have those executives responsible actually build the plan and be vested in the construction process. Seems logical right? Many companies don’t do it this way. Locking the team down, creating a consensual vision and sharing in the benefits and accountabilities of execution are all key factors in building an implementable plan. Once you have a plan that the team is aligned with (no not everyone agrees with every goal but all of the executive team must be aligned with the company’s vision and direction,) then the individuals that are responsible for goals and tasks must meet regularly with the team members that they are accountable to so that there is visibility in achievement and in roadblocks. When combined with the buy-in that is built with a team-constructed plan, this visibility is the secret sauce to achieving your company’s goals and the successful implementation of this years plan.

Marketing is About Keeping People's Attention

Wed, 02 May 2007 05:23:21 EDT

Marketing isn’t about getting peoples attention – it is about keeping it. Until you do, it is difficult to get them to buy!

According to recent studies most of us are hit with thousands of marketing messages and advertisements a day. As a result we have grown very good at quickly filtering all of these interruptions out of our busy schedule.

If you are good at this filtering, so are your prospects!

And this is why I’d be willing to bet that your marketing isn’t working well - if even at all. I’d be willing to bet that your company, like many of our clients, is experiencing some of these symptoms.

•   Slowing sales growth
•   Weakening or Empty Pipeline
•   Longer Close Times

If you are like most companies the reason that you're marketing doesn't work is because the message is meaningless to your target audience, is not delivered at a time and place when they are receptive and gets filtered out by the brain’s noise and nuisance filters.

If you want your marketing efforts to work and in fact show a return on the money you are investing you must change your marketing. You must develop meaningful and consistent marketing messages based on effective marketing strategies that will resonate with your customers and prospects – no matter what vehicle you use to deliver them.

Developing these powerful messages requires a clear understanding of exactly who your customer is and the value that you bring to them. The goal is to be able to express this in a manner that compels them to want to learn more, even compels them to want to buy.

The Value of Knowing Who Your Customer Is

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:49:19 EDT

I was recently in a pre-project meeting with a prospective client. This prospect is a rather large media company in the 40 million range near Atlanta. The meeting was filled with multiple uninterested and preoccupied executives who I guess did not have much better to do than to watch the very interested director of marketing try to push one of her initiatives forward.

The most interesting person their was the CFO who had a new tablet pc that he was really enjoying. While he was playing with his new productivity enhancement device, he was listening to the meeting with one ear. Every now and then, to one of our questions, he would pop up like a rabbit and bestow wisdom on the group – then go back to learning how to write on a PC’s screen.

When we asked the question: well who really is your customer, he popped up again and spurted out: hey we are a communications company so everyone is our customer. I then replied, “hey you are like Coke!” Which made him look up to ask why. To which I responded, “well, Coke thinks everyone should be their customer." He agreed that they indeed were like Coke. I then said that Coke had a marketing budget of several hundred million dollars that they leverage to make everyone a customer of Coke.

When I asked him how big his budget for customer acquisition was (... as big as Coke’s), he replied: “Well, I guess not everyone is our customer.”

The moral of this story is if you only have a few bullets for your gun and you need to eat all winter, you had better be really good at picking fat deer. Marketing can be most effective when you have a very clear picture of who your Ideal Customer is and what you need to say to them to buy your products or services.

What Makes a Good Strategic Plan?

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:55:31 EDT

OK, first, what the heck is a strategic plan? A strategic plan documents your purpose for being, who you are, where you want to go and how you intend to get there over the long term. The plan maps out short and long-range goals of the company and what actions of management will have to take place to reach those goals. It states what is important to you and how you will leverage those values to be successful. It articulates the key philosophies, concepts, ideas and directions which, when put into effect, profoundly shape the nature of your business. For this reason, your strategic plan should be carefully thought through.

So what is in it? A Strategic Plan consists of a strategic vision & business mission, strategic & financial performance objectives and a comprehensive set of strategies for achieving the objectives.

On to what makes a good strategic plan ... The same thin that makes a good map. A good map actually gets you to where you want to go. A good strategic plan is a map that actually takes your company where you want it to go.

What else makes a good plan? Most importantly, one that is actually implementable. What does that mean? Here are a few characteristics of an implementable plan:

First, your entire management team are in agreement as to where the company is going and how it is going to get there.
Second, those people that are responsible for executing portions of the plan are invested in the plan -- they know that there are personal riches in store for achieving the plan and pains for not doing so.
Third, everyone responsible for the plan is accountable to someone else and there are ramifications if the tasks are not completed.
Fourth, timelines and resources are realistic -- no one will perform if they think that they are already set up for failure.

The short answer to "What makes a good strategic plan?" is:
A good strategic plan is one that you can actually execute and when you do, you will get to where you had planned to go.