Can you add value to the services you offer your customers by aiding their buying decisions through the use of a case study?
A case study, most commonly described as a cross between an article and a testimonial, analyzes an organization similar to the reader’s organization and describes how it benefited through the implementation of the preferred product or solution. Historically, in most industries, consumer surveys reveal that the endorsements in a case study are more credible than direct advertising. Furthermore, case studies are a good investment since they have high readership and are more likely to be kept as future reference sources.
Checklist:
* Use a case study to detail your product or service in action. Does the case study communicate your understanding of your customer’s problems and concerns? Does it establish you as an authority in the solution of the customer’s challenges, as well as in the implementation of the solution?
* Utilize customers similar to the buyer as your case study examples. Does your case study reduce buyer objections? Does it assure them you have the best-choice solution? Do the details of your product or service sufficiently create identification with your buyer?
* Describe your product or service in the buyer’s own real-world setting. Does your case study increase your buyer’s purchase readiness by sharing the following details of another client’s success: the client’s business objectives, the technical and business problems and challenges originally faced, the details of the chosen solution, and the benefits realized after implementation of the solution?
Do Your Social Media Conversations Motivate Your Global Audience To Respond?
Today’s rapidly evolving global environment has produced the need to solve many complex challenges. Therefore, leaders, whether they act as individuals or on behalf of their organizations, must learn to lean across the borders in order to embrace certain solutions and to join international problem-solving communities and associations.
For the individuals who participate in these global networks, whether on behalf of their organizations or as part of their own personal enrichment programs, the interactions lead to networking opportunities, access to new resources, and exposure to creative ideas and solution shortcuts. For the leaders who provide vision and who understand how to motivate individuals, the result is that the individuals in their community are able to effortlessly self-organize around the group’s purpose and to help facilitate many beneficial outcomes.
Today’s successful leaders know how to achieve results through the influence of relationships. With the right mindset from leadership, the organization and all its stakeholders benefit from the helpful content and the focused attention that is provided to the community. In turn, the organization is able to cultivate core connections among its members, foster an environment of collaboration and encourage meaningful Business Media Intimacy.
Read more of Maria's thoughts regarding market leadership. Download Pinochet on Leadership - Uncensored. Your 18-page book preview. Visit Kore Access Web Page.
Historically, the role of advertising has been to communicate the offer of a service or product in order to inform audiences about the details of place and price. In turn, the viewers, listeners and readers who need the product or service are motivated to act on the offer. By eliciting this consumer behavior, advertising has accomplished its goal of driving selective demand for a particular brand, product or service.
Today, with the rise of competition from national and international brands causing market saturation, and with the proliferation of communication channels that compete for the attention of each audience, advertising has become more than a message about the details of the offer. The role of advertising has expanded from (just) a means to get attention to an attempt to shape and manage perceptions.
What forces have influenced this transition? What has made many advertising messages separate and distinctly independent marketing messages, messages that are not at all holistic components of the brand?
The increasing number of informational messages we are exposed to on a daily basis has been a main driver of the change. Agencies that track exposure to advertising messages report numbers that vary from hundreds of messages a day to thousands a day, depending both on what types of advertising is counted – billboards, television, print and/or Web ads – and on who is tracked – the average adult American or the American professional. Regardless of the specific numbers, the fact remains that every consumer comes into daily contact with a plethora of competing advertising messages.
The fact that this overabundance of market information causes advertising messages to compete constantly for audience attention is a key factor that leads advertisers to change the ways they approach consumers. Another leading causal factor for change, according to advertising professionals, is the declining attention span of audiences. The length of a person’s attention span depends on what a person is focused on and on what their level of interest is in a certain topic. Therefore, the normal period of focused attention fluctuates somewhere between seconds and minutes. In fact, studies, polls and data-gathering agencies report a downward trend for all types of attention spans – whether the activity is listening to a lecture, viewing a slide presentation, reading or Web browsing.
With these declining attention spans, and in an effort to maintain the effectiveness of the advertising, many advertisers have chosen to create messages that appeal to simple human emotions such as fear and greed. They argue that, by sheer time constraint, advertising cannot develop a strong cognitive/rational argument and must, instead, present a “slice of life”; therefore, the message cannot be anything but an unbalanced representation. However, some feel that this reliance on primal emotions has made advertising, in general, unethical. They say such messages have no transparency, lack depth and clarity and are thus completely disassociated from the brand, product and service values.
Have you given in to time and emotion in your messaging? How can you once again match your message to your brand?
Key Point – When emotional appeal is used in advertising, it is much too easy for audiences with different value orientations to perceive messages as more or less skewed or unethical. When that happens, your advertising message may become subject to a higher level of controversy and may even be considered a misrepresentation of stakeholder interest.
Guest blogger, Rosalinda Sanquiche, is the Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media. Rosalinda’s childhood years hiking through Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest informed her belief that we must engage in sustainable behaviors to preserve the magnificent world we inhabit. She earned a masters in Environmental and Resource Policy as a George Washington Fellow at George Washington University in D.C. She is a speaker and author on environmental issues and is thrilled to work with Ethical Markets Media to promote socially and environmentally responsible behavior from an economic perspective.
Larry Page is a whiz at algorithms, ones you likely use every day -- yes, really.
When you do a web search for anything, Google has an algorithmic method of determining what you see first on the search page, and PageRank is key.
Google PageRank is a proprietary mathematical formula that implies value of a website. It can be correlated to traffic but is more importantly correlated to the quality of connections to other reputable, high-value, quality sites. A website that gets "less" traffic but offers higher-quality content and lots of active, useful links might have a high PageRank whereas a site that gets lots of traffic but has poor content might get a lower PageRank.
As per Google, "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results." With a website like www.ethicalmarkets.com, if anyone searches the term "ethical markets," we come up first because we have one of the few urls with those key words, because we're currently an active site with lots of pages and because we have a high Google PageRank.
In the forthcoming book, Dare to Care, the author describes Ethical Markets Media as a "typical global Internet company, ranked a 6 on Google with more than 30,000 links." The editor rightly questioned, "what does that mean?"
To those who manage traffic to a site, IT people, web managers, exec directors like me, this is important and meaningful. When reading the book, we'll think, "impressive." For everyone else, they'll probably gloss over it. It'd be nice to put the numbers on a scale, like a 6 out of 10, but that implies an arithmetic or an exponential relationship. I doubt it's even a bell curve or other standard deviation. See Wikipedia for the gritty details. The math is beyond me. We say we're a 6, but that's rounding for simplification. We're probably more like a 6.193743378+/-.025 (only Google really knows).
I've never seen a 10 (the possible max). I've never even seen an 8, though I've heard they're out there. A six is strong for our type of website (one of the 500 million variables - not porn, not sales, not .edu, and so on).
If I were re-writing the line, I'd say something like this: "a typical global Internet company with a strong PageRank 6 on Google and more than 30,000 links." The author probably doesn't need to include anything about PageRank since the term has little meaning to most people and tends to be used as a marketing tool, but as a point of pride I think it's worth mentioning. Thanks, Larry!
Do You Craft Meaningful Communications for Your Stakeholders?
Companies, once the vital backbone of our communities, provided opportunity, stability and security and were regarded as good citizens that would act in the interest of the communities they served. However, no one can deny that customers no longer automatically confer to companies the trust they used to command. Much has been written about the breakdown in this trust, once such a very valuable goodwill asset. Regardless of the arguments of theorists, one way or the other, about how to fix the problem, the final analysis is the same. At the very least, customers must consider communications from your company credible in order for those communications to stir them to action. Therefore, restoring confidence in corporations requires a new approach.
Is your company communication style outdated?
Long gone, in fact, are the ‘old school’ days of company communications. You can no longer market to customers solely on the basis of their status as consumers of your product and service. You can no longer generate public press exclusively for company shareholders. And you can no longer focus policy and performance communications toward employees only. Especially long gone are the days where effective messaging included communications that were extensions of the old corporate paradigm. That paradigm used selected messages, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), conceived by the public relations department for the sole purpose of creating a positive “halo” around the company. The problem was that such messages did not always represent the fundamental core values at the organization, nor did they always represent true changes in company policy or purpose.
How do you need to communicate instead?
Remember that the availability of today’s technology can open all the “back doors” at your company. Such access can allow stakeholders to document and to share all kinds of information about your company over vast media channels. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before the core values of any organization are made transparent to the marketplace.
Mindful Marketing takes care of such concerns! As a first step, Mindful Marketing has you take stock of the core values that are the true cultural DNA of your organization. You will then use those values to craft your communications so that they document your core, i.e., the values that really count to you and to your company, the values that will connect your company to your clients and your customers in a very substantial and valuable way.
A Mindful Marketing Model of communications will sustain your brand over time. It will also build the trust level that is so necessary to ease transactions between your stakeholders and the communities in which your brand has impact and relevance.
Key Point – Once they are identified and established, a company’s core values facilitate the crafting of consistent communications across sectors, industries, markets and audiences that are authentic and credible stakeholders in that company. Company communications about your core values help bridge any of the gaps between the various roles (i.e. employee, customer, investor) that stakeholders may have in relation to your organization.
Why are Mindful Communications the Marketing Key to 21st Century Success?
“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.” John D. Rockefeller
Where do opportunities for market leadership abound in the 21st century? In the past, companies have created market leadership by relying on the 4 Ps of the marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion), but most heavily on the uniqueness of product, the competitiveness of price and the convenience of place. Historically, the 4th P, promotion, has been subordinate to the other three.
Why then has promotion now emerged as THE competitive advantage – if one’s intention is to gain market leadership?
Today, access to global markets has evened out the playing field for many companies. They can now show that they also provide the product and service characteristics that created world-class standards and led to sustained market leadership for companies in the past. Promotion, the placement of your product or service, is about positioning your brand in a way that will demand or attract the attention of your target audience. Such positioning influences perception, and you gain market leadership when the perception you create confirms that the core values of your company are well aligned with the values of your target audience. Communications using this type of Mindful Marketing hit all the right notes with your target audience and stakeholders. They are, after all, the authentic voice of your core values: the beliefs and truths that guide your company’s actions in the marketplace.
The opportunity to use promotion to develop your market leadership presents itself in today’s world with more frequency and with more potential power because of the following reasons:
1. The number of communication mediums has increased – from a limited number of print and radio outlets to hundreds of channels over a multitude of communication platforms.
2. The entire globe is available, and it has become a self-serve, 24/7 marketplace.
3. The real-time use of such things as cell phones, texting and streaming video has made the immediacy of information exchange commonplace.
Therefore, the availability and flow of information between you and members of your target audience generate an ever-increasing potential for success as shown by the following:
1. You can now communicate constantly with your audience.
2. Your constant communication offers an opportunity to interact with your audience.
3. Your constant communication and interaction helps to clarify and strengthen your brand.
4. Your constant communication and interaction, as well as your powerful brand, creates your leadership role in the global marketplace.
Key Point – Everything in today’s marketplace is moving and moving fast. Positioning via promotion, therefore, is a daily challenge. However, as long as you take care to remain updated, muster the courage to seize opportunity ahead of the competition and provide feedback by mindfully addressing – through your communications – the concerns of all your stakeholders, you are acting in a manner that will gain and promote your market leadership.
Do you want to find out what your customers or clients want from you and your business or from your product? Technology has made the process easy, the answers accessible and, in most cases, the service FREE!
While quantitative measures, such as those discussed above, are critical to your online success, they do not reveal qualitative measures. The do not explain, for example, why buyers are motivated to buy from you and not from your competitors.
In today’s electronic age, you can get such answers through the use of online surveys and polls. These informative tools are available for free on certain online social media platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, or by invitation via e-mail from services such as Survey Monkey. Upgrades for more involved surveys are also available from Survey Monkey, as are other paid-for services.
With such ease of use and such access, you have no reason to delay gathering the opinions of your audience. In fact, we ask you to please take a moment and click here to answer our question on leadership skills.
Are you minding your KPIs when making online social media marketing decisions?
Contrary to popular opinion, establishing KPIs (key performance indicators) to benchmark your online performance is possible and simple. In three easy steps you can 1) identify, 2) measure and 3) test the most crucial metrics for your online performance.
Step 1) Identify. Your first step is to identify the activities that you conduct online. These include, but are not limited to, tweeting, blogging and updating your Facebook entries. You should also identify the corresponding measure (such as click-through rates or number of retweets and shares) for each of these activities. Tie this metric as closely as you can to your end goals of more orders and/or more booked clients (i.e., the lead-to-sale conversion rate), in order to produce output that is as accurate as possible to use in your decision making.
Step 2) Measure. In this step, take the particular metric you have identified and selected, and develop a plan to measure what you want to improve. As evaluation metrics, the KPIs (e.g., the number of visitors who complete a purchase) are used over time to benchmark your success toward a business objective (in this case, an increase in online purchases).
Quantitative measures such as these can relate directly to the goal. For example, a metric can measure lead-to-sales conversion rates, the number of Web site visitors who click on the buy button and finalize their purchases with a payment. At other times, however, the quantitative metrics are by proxy, as is the case when a measurement infers the value of the desired outcome. Engagement metrics (number of pages viewed per visit and time spent per visit) are an example of this type of metric. The inference is that the more engaged each visitor is with your content (visiting more pages, spending more time on the site), the more likely it is that he or she will buy.
Step 3) Test. Once you have established benchmarks and are tracking KPIs that impact business objectives, it is time to test the design elements that are most likely to influence each of the KPIs. Consider each step of the buying process you offer and experiment with changes in each of its element: e.g., the length of online forms, the size and color of buy buttons, the image content, and the font style of the test. Examine and test also the surrounding marketing support activities such as e-mail campaigns, online advertisement and organic keywords. At times, even small changes can increase your sales numbers dramatically.
Key Point – When you identify and track KPIs that measure the success rate of activities that are closely tied to the success of your business objectives, you will make decisions that are well informed. You will also be able to manage and direct your progress in new and unique ways.
*To learn more about KPIs and online business benchmarking, send an e-mail message to Kore Access Marketing Communications Consultant Maria Pinochet. Make sure to indicate whether you just need more information or whether you would like a personal call.
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