The Four Best Marketing Strategy Tips You'll Read this Year

There are plenty of tips when it comes to marketing strategy but by far, these are the four best you will see this year.

Focus on your brand reputation 

Even the best marketing strategies will fail if a company has a poor online brand reputation. Solidifying your brand reputation requires an extensive campaign that encompasses several components of digital marketing. A recent Forbes article explains how social media has changed how companies manage their brand reputation:

"Power has shifted away from businesses and toward consumers when it comes to voicing a company’s marketing message. While companies used to be able to carefully craft their message and then promote it using traditional advertising methods (billboards, radio and TV spots, etc.), social media means has largely transferred that power to consumers."

Create and post quality content 

Online marketing isn't just about SEO tricks and trying to trick Google anymore. The only way your company can improve its search rank long-term is to create quality content. There are several ways to do this, ranging from writing blogs to filming videos. Once you have already made the content, post it on social media to increase your brand visibility.

Learn from the best

Consider the companies that you admire in terms of their marketing strategy. You'll probably notice that they focus on the two psractice mentioned above. Study their strategies and campaigns and try to learn from them. You may be able to incorporate some elements into your own campaign. 

Professional consultation

At the end of the day, marketing is one of the most important components of your business. It's the final link between your product or service and your target market. It's not something that can just be pieced together to get the job done. If you can't give 110% to your marketing strategy, you should consider speaking with professional consultants who understand the industry inside and out. 

To talk more about this, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks. 

Centralize Your Arsenal With Sales Enablement

It can prove difficult to find balance between sales, marketing and revenue. Without question, if you consistently connect the dots you will launch your company farther. Utilizing our sales enablement services your force will soar!

Rapid absorption

Providing up-to-date information to your team is critical. Palomar Marketing has more than 20 years of experience in distilling product information, competitive analyses, and customer insights into practical content your team can easily digest.  

Unify your team

Sales enablement is ever-evolving but one thing is certain: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Bringing a clear and concise message across the board unifies your employees and promotes quality communications.

Customer loyalty

When the company sales focus is clear and effective support is readily available, your message is conveyed exactly as you dream and your brand breathes dependability. In turn, your revenue receives a boost. We can help a startup company realize a vision or reinforce the presence of a Fortune 500. Regardless, successful sales enablement is proven to yield the results you desire.

Palomar Marketing provides a solid, customized and consistent service of sales enablement by centralizing and analyzing information for your team's consumption. Find the rhythm and flow of your customers' needs and provide the arsenal of information your sales team requires to generate leads and close the sale. Streamline and strengthen your company by contacting us today.

How to Write a Customer Success Story

It’s early spring down by the lake. A group of youngsters is gathered on the bank wearing their swimsuits, but the water looks pretty darn cold. They’re all looking to each other to see who’s going to be the first one in. Eventually one of the kids — let’s call him Brave Billy — give in to the peer pressure and plunges in. As soon as the others see Billy having a great time in the water, they pile right in behind him. That’s just human nature.

Now imagine that same group of youngsters all grown up and making buying decisions for their companies. They’re surrounded by throngs of vendors, each claiming their product is just what the doctor ordered. Which should they pick? What if they make the wrong choice? They look around — figuratively — at their peers on the lakeside and ask, “Where’s Billy?”

That’s where case studies come in. I think every marketer should have “Case Studies” or “Customer Success Stories” at their disposal to use in their content marketing programs. 

Why? Because prospective customers want to know that what you’re offering really works. That your offering is going to be good for them. Nearly everyone wants to see proof points in the form of validation from others like them. 

Telling a compelling story about someone just like them achieving great results by using your solution may not make the sale, but it can keep the momentum moving forward.

Be Concise

I’ve seen case studies that are pages and pages long. I don’t recommend going that route for a customer success story. I like to get the whole thing to fit into one or two pages when laid out in a PDF. More than that and you’ll probably find your readers dropping off before they get through it. If you can be concise and tell a convincing story, you will have a great case study to use in your content marketing programs.

Anatomy of a Case Study

A typical case study has three sections: The Challenge, The Solution, The Results. That’s all you need.

1 — The Challenge

Describe the challenge  (‘challenge’ sounds nicer than ‘problem’) the customer was facing that led them to pursue your solution. It’s usually best to express the problem — er, challenge — in business terms rather than technical terms. Make it clear that by successfully answering the challenge, the company will reap real, tangible benefits. 

2 — The Solution

Describe the solution that the customer found. It’s often helpful to describe some of the alternative solutions the customer explored and abandoned, and explaining why those didn’t work out. It helps the readers by taking them through the pathways they may also be considering. They may still follow those avenues to see for themselves, but will appreciate having the heads-up on potential problems from you.

Make sure to include details about the final solution, and how it addressed the challenge. The idea is to make it easy for the reader to draw parallels to their own challenge, and envision how the solution would work for them.

3 — The Results

 Explain the benefits the customer saw once they implemented the solution, and relate them directly to the challenges described in part 1. This is where you paint a picture of a happy customer, satisfied that they’ve solved their problem and are reaping real benefits in business terms from their solution.

Give it a try

And that’s all there is to it. Don’t feel you need to include every detail of every step taken along the way. Like any story, it’s best to highlight the most compelling parts, and eliminate those that don’t advance the plot. 

The next time you create a user story, I urge you to give this format a try. Let me know how it works for you.

"Dear %_FirstName..." or How Not to Address a Customer Email

In recent years, we’ve heard so much talk about how marketing is no longer about pushing our messages onto people. Now it’s all about building a relationship with them using dialog on social media and in our blogs. We’re told it's a new world where customers seek us out, so we have to provide valuable content, establish credentials as an authority in our chosen domain, and connect like we’ve never connected before. It’s a world where interaction and conversation reigns supreme over the old ways of bombarding potential customers with one-way messages that scream, “BUY MY PRODUCT,” from the rooftops.

And it works. Sort of. It works provided we all play our part in a mutually agreed upon illusion. Customers and prospective customers pretend that they have a relationship with a brand or corporate entity. And the brands act like their prospective customers are their pals. 

The problem is that everyone involved knows that it’s a bit of a ruse. A contrived relationship at best. So the shared illusion can come crashing down on itself with the slightest provocation.

Take today for example. 

What Did You Just Call Me?

I’ve been a member of a professional association for many years now. I’ve attended their conferences, read their content, and watched their videos enough to start believing these people are my friends. See, social marketing works! But they managed to disabuse me of that notion with the stroke of a key. I just received a message in which my friends addressed me as Dear %_FirstName. 

*Sniff*

They got everything else right. The casual, friendly tone of the copy. The respectful close to the message. But none of that works when the message starts out saying, in effect, “To whom it may concern.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I know we’re not really friends. I know I’m just one of tens of thousands of entries in their CRM who received the exact same message today. So it’s not that I’m shocked or hurt to discover that we aren’t really buddies. Not at all. My point is how such a simple mistake (and yes, I’ve made the exact same mistake myself) can undo many years of relationship building by stripping away the illusion of relationship — even if just for a moment. After all, a real friend would never say, "Hey....ummmm, what's your name again?" would they?

Lessons Learned? 

Not so much a lesson, as a reminder not to let all the effort you’ve put into building a connection with customer through social media and content marketing slip away because of a simple mistake. Make sure to check, double-check, triple-check those mailings before clicking that SEND button. It’s worth the extra time.

Tell me what you think. Have you received a “Dear <firstname>” email from a company you deal with? How did it make you feel?

photo credit: Esellee via photopin cc

5 Things You Must Do To Squash Your Competitors

It sure would be nice to have the whole market to yourself, wouldn’t it? With nobody else to turn to, everyone would beat a path to your door. But real life isn’t like that. Any market worth being in will certainly draw competitors, so you may as well suit up for battle. 

Doing battle with competitors can be a tricky thing. Particularly when you’re doing business in a new market. Things move fast, customers are learning the market, and competing products can change on a dime. Here are 5 key steps that you can take to make sure you beat your competition.

1. Know your enemy and know yourself

The foundation of any good competitive strategy can be traced all the way back to the writings of Sun Tzu in The Art of War. If you haven’t read it lately, I highly recommend picking it up before starting your competitive strategy session. One of the underlying themes of the book is knowing how the battle will go even before it begins. The more you know about your competitor’s product, and your own, the better you’ll be able to handle any objections from prospective customers.

Bring the competition’s product into your labs. Learn how it works. Play with is. Analyze it. And — this is very important — get other people’s opinions too. Have friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and anybody else you can wrangle use the product. Watch them. Listen to them. Learn what works and what doesn’t. The more time you spend doing this, the better prepared you will be when it counts.

2. Never underestimate your competition

I know. Your product is great, and their’s is junk, right? But is it really? While it may make you feel better to say that to yourself, and even to a potential customer, you do yourself a disservice by not recognizing the virtues of competing products.

3. Know the shortcomings of your own offerings

With so much at stake, and so many obstacles in your way, it’s critical to maintain a positive attitude. But that can lead you to overlook real shortcomings in your own product.

Staying positive is great when you’re making cold calls, and delivering your elevator pitch. But when it comes to developing a competitive strategy, you’ve got to let a little reality seep in. Sometimes startup founders view their product the way parents view their children — infallible. Just ask any grade school teacher what happens when Mom and Dad refuse to accept that little Johnny is a trouble maker in class. Denial leads to detention. The same is true of the founder/inventor who refuses to acknowledge that there may be something less than perfect in his own product. Even when customers tell him so. 

Try to be objective when listing the weaknesses of your own products. Take those founder-blinders off, and really look at what’s there. What have customers told you. What feedback have you gotten when you pitch? Could they have a point? Put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer and try to bash you own product. It’s ok. We’re alone here. Nobody else is listening. Now is not the  time for that “think positive” self-improvement stuff.  To make your product better, you must a ruthless critic. When you do,  you will find ways to improve your product and start turning rejections into purchases.

4. SWOT The Competition

After you’ve done an exhaustive review of your competitor’s product, and an objective criticism of your own, it’s time to evaluate your findings. There are lots of ways to approach this, but the most common approach is a Strength/Weakness/Opportunity/Threat (SWOT) Analysis. A good analysis takes into account your product, of course, but also your company’s capabilities. This goes beyond product to include service, support, capacity, and any other asset and capability that might affect a customer’s buying decision.

You can use the SWOT analysis to do a couple of important things. First, it will help you position your product in the market, and build strong messaging that customers can’t resist. Second, it will let you know where to place your effort in improving the next version of your product.

5. Believe in yourself

Now I know I said you needed to be ruthless when criticizing your own product. But once the analysis is done, it’s time to set aside any criticism and get back to that positive thinking you had going on before. Sure your product isn’t perfect. Sure the competition has some good things going for them. However, now that you’ve dissected everything, and exposed the tender underbelly of both offerings, you can set about pitching your product with confidence, knowing that it’s got a lot to offer. Believe in yourself, and in your product, and customers will believe in you too.

photo credit: teliko82 via photopin cc