THINKing

Building Brands One Touch At A Time

Thanks to Jason Falls, I saw this post today about brand touch points, which provided an excellent case study of how to bring your brand to life. So much of what we do as marketers involves communication with digital media that we forget how powerful the human touch can be in building a brand.

In the old days, that is the 50s and 60s when you could reach all of America with a fairly simple media buy, you could build a brand primarily with advertising. Today, public relations leads – or at least should lead – the brand building charge. Your PR people should audit every contact you have with your publics to make sure those contacts resonate with your brand. Remember, as we discussed recently, that your employees are your primary communication vehicle.

I once worked on a project for an airline in which we looked at every point of contact. Some of these points of contact were out of the brand’s control, although customers didn’t think that they were. For instance, signage and parking at the airport were little things that angered customers that the airline could not control. In fact, out of something like 30 points of contacts customers mentioned, about half were out of the airline’s control. But these were essential to the brand. So, we had to come up with ways to strengthen the ones we could control and mitigate the ones we couldn’t.

This airline had a high percentage of repeat customers. So we offered them an email program that provided them with directional information and parking tips for the various airports this airline flew into. Where we couldn’t control, at least we could inform.

Have you done an audit of your brand’s touch points? Any surprises about what customers thought were points of contact within your control? How have you changed your touch points to better serve customers and build your brand?

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Get Write To It

Today’s retrospective look through THINKing’s archives is all about writing. Let’s get going:

Write Tight -  My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on.

Tell Me A Story – Since the dawn of time mankind has been a sucker for a story. We may be wearing synthetics now instead of skins, but that one truth has not changed. Whether you are communicating with employees, customers or the media, a story has the most power.

Writer’s Block? -  The toughest thing about writing a news release is getting started. But writing doesn’t have to be hard. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you beat writer’s block.

Get Active -  My lovely bride and mystery novelist par excellence, Terry Hoover, is the queen of the vivid verb. Read the first chapter of her book, Double Dead, to see what I mean.

Top 10 Story Starters For Blocked Bloggers -  Are you blogged out? Got writer’s block big time. So big even my previous post on writer’s block didn’t help? Never fear, your doctor of creativity is here. I have some big time block busters.

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Links – 2/24/2009

Internet Media Sways Shoppers – E-mail and social media marketing boosts customer loyalty and has a positive influence on purchasing decisions even when consumers are trying to reduce their spending, according to two newly released studies.

The Marriage Of Search and PR – Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system.

10 Tips for Blogging Your Way To Small Business Success – Sure blogging and social media are great if you enjoy spending your days ‘cyberloafing’, but they certainly can’t help me to promote my business. Or, can they?

Is Your Organization On FaceBook? It Should Be. – With over 50 million people on Facebook, organizations and brands are also starting to see its benefits as a marketing tool.

New Marketing Tools Coming From Yahoo! – Yahoo is expected to unveil new tools on Tuesday that are intended to help marketers better target their online ads, according to a report Monday evening in The Wall Street Journal.

BONUS LINK: The Powerful Potential Of Permission-Based Email

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HR & Marketing: You Need To Talk

With corporations looking for ways to cut costs, I have an idea that will pay off in both the short- and the long-run. My idea involves how to make sure you have great employees. Don’t fire them randomly. First, get rid of the employees who don’t live out your brand values.

Let me tell you why most companies won’t do this. HR and marketing never talk. There is no agreed upon set of brand values for employees in most Fortune 1000 organizations. But there should be, and both marketing and HR need to have input into that brand value discussion.

As marketing focuses on its best customers, HR should focus on hiring and retaining the kinds of employees that are the best match for your organization. Once your organization has these like-minded employees, you can provide positive emotion and a sense of mission, carry on a dialogue with them, and then your company will tap into a reservoir of human experience and innovation that will propel your company to new heights.

Does your organization have brand values for employees?

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Pencil In Some Marketing

Let’s pretend it’s an October evening and your major reception for donors has just begun. Turnout is substandard and most of the attendees are women. Can you say, “World Series?” Sure, I knew that you could!

Every organization should create an annual PR and marketing calendar so that it can avoid the World Series’ of the world, as well as take advantage of dates of significance. Now is a good time to fill out your 2009 calendar. Here’s a template to help get you started.

Start inside the organization and work your way out. Don’t try to do this alone. Everyone in your organization has a little different perspective and can help come up with some dates that you wouldn’t know. Are there company anniversaries, holidays or closings to consider? Do you already have special sales events scheduled? How about trade show appearances? Any new products, services or new locations planned?

Now, let’s head outside the organization. What’s happening in the lives of your suppliers and customers? How about in your industry? Any trade association meetings or conferences? Are major white papers, reports or industry research planned?

Often your best opportunity for press coverage comes from special industry reports and stories that the media has on its editorial calendar. So, start collecting editorial calendars from business and trade media that cover your business. Also, see if your local media have editorial calendars. All of the American City Business Journals have their editorial calendars online. Go to Bizjournals and drill down to your metro area from there. You’ll find it under “About Us” and “Editorial Services.”

Also, fill in the holidays and special events for the year. And don’t forget smaller holidays or those with significance to your faith and to other religions. You might find one that sparks a thought for a story idea or a special promotion. Be sure you add major elections and sporting events, as well as major local events.

Think seasonally as you assemble your calendar. Back-to-school, tax season, vacations, heating and cooling seasons: all of these can be harnessed for their marketing and PR value.

Once you have all the dates plugged in, you can start scheduling your own PR and marketing specific programs and tactics for a successful 2009.

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Dusty Archives – February 2009 Edition

From time to time we sort through the archives of THINKing to resurrect gems that you may have missed. Here are a few that we recommend.

It’s The Relationship, Stupid – I don’t care how you slice it, when it comes down to fundamentals, business is all about relationships. Ignore this truth at your own peril.

What Customers Want – Here’s the truth: Your customers don’t know what they want. And to assume otherwise is folly. When you begin relying totally on customers to be your product development department, you are asking for serious trouble.

Patience? No, Let’s Kill Something – There’s the old joke about the two buzzards sitting in a tree overlooking a highway. One responds to the other, “Be patient? I’m hungry. Let’s kill something.” Just like that buzzard, it is not in the nature of most marketers to be patient for business to grow.

Great Employees = Happy Customers – Companies spend millions of dollars each year identifying their brand, and then communicating their brand promise through various media. Employees are the primary “media” in the majority of brand contacts. Raise your hand if you think a majority of your employees understand your brand promise well enough to live it and articulate it clearly.

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Take Market Share Now

Bold marketers know this: an economic downturn is the perfect time to gain market share. Spending marketing money during tough times seems counterintuitive, but time and again it has paid off for some of the best known brands. During the 1970s Revlon and Phillip Morris turned up the advertising heat to gain market share. Further, MediaPost reports that,

A McGraw-Hill Research analysis three years after the 1981-82 recession found that companies maintaining or increasing ad spending during that period enjoyed 256% higher sales than companies that had decreased their budgets.

There is no better time than a recession to brand yourself as an industry leader and survivor. Consumers avoid lesser known brands during tough times. They want the comfort of knowing they have purchased something from a brand that will weather the storm.

Weak competitors throw in the towel, giving smart, strong competitors an opportunity that should not be passed up. Also, media companies are struggling so the canny marketer can negotiate deals on advertising. Thus, fewer marketing dollars are needed to make the same impact. It becomes easier to reach your audience with less competitive clutter. Your aggressive marketing message now tells consumers that you are stable and strong, perfectly positioning you for a surge in better times.

However, it appears most of the big boys have forgotten those lessons learned in past recessions.  General Mills should be the poster child of every marketer, increasing its consumer marketing spending by 19 percent recently. So, get out there and take the market share that rightfully belongs to you.

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Links – 2/17/2009

Here are a few links that might be of interest to you:

• Email tops online ad budget changes in 09
• iMindMap
• The new toolbar from My Creative Team
• What’s your news IQ?
• PR MatchPoint
• Blatant Self-Promotion: My Creative Team eNewsletter Sign-Up
• Google SearchWiki Strains Online Reputation Management
  

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Retool Your Content Marketing

Content marketers looking for a way to keep their communities informed now have a free tool for that purpose. Conduit now offers a build-your-own toolbar in which you can feature – and update – your best content. This is a great way to make sure your best content is a click away from your community members.

I’ve already built one for My Creative Team. If you download it, please let me know how you like it.

It’s simple: a step-by-step wizard walks you through the process. Says Conduit,

Whatever your users do on your website they can do with your community toolbar — from shopping to social networking to making reservations… you name it. Whole applications can even be put on the toolbar! Imagine your users always signed–in and engaged.

Advanced XML can be used for personalization and other database–driven content. Our easy API will assist with advanced features.

Keep your subscribers’ attention with exclusive new features like Community Alerts and u–Page. Choose from thousands of fun gadgets and tools, including e–mail notifier, local weather, pop–up blocker, message box, and more.

Let me know if you build one, and we’ll let the THINKing community know about it.

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Small Business Needs To Go Digital

Small business needs to get on the stick when it comes to online presence and marketing spending. Only 44 percent of small businesses have a website, according to MarketingCharts, which puts them out of sync with their consumers,

Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online, according to research from Webvisible and Nielsen.

This disconnect between small business and consumers – which Webvisible calls “the great divide” – could not come at a worse time. You may survive a good economy if you are less than visible on the web. In a downturn, perform last rites for the digital invisible. Says MarketingCharts,

An overwhelming majority of searchers (92%) say they are happy with the results they get when using search engines, despite the fact that 39% report frequently not being able to locate a particular known business. Webvisible said this means that while searchers don’t always find the specific business (no online advertising/no website, etc.), they may choose to contact a similar business with a stronger online presence.

How strong is your online presence?

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