In reality, it’s not that simple. People who are hungry could go to the grocery store, or they could order take-out. People looking for a new book could go to your bookstore, or they could go to a library. Companies looking to improve processes could buy software, or hire a specialist.

Your company, product, customer, and price point all contribute to your value proposition. Your value prop details the exact usefulness that your product provides. It is also your differentiator.

Value proposition definition

Value proposition is a promise of value stated by a company that summarizes how the benefit of the company’s product or service will be delivered, experienced, and acquired. (Corporate Finance Institute)

A value proposition is what you do, and how you do it.

Why is a value proposition important?

A value proposition is crucial for your company’s success. Here’s why.

A value proposition centers your company

Value propositions define exactly what your company should be doing. Oftentimes growing companies can be tempted to pivot or adjust their vision. A value proposition serves as an investment to keep the company focused on the task at hand.

A value proposition explains your company to your customers

At the end of the day, a customer doesn’t care about your marketing spend. They don’t care about how many social media posts you publish, or how many blog posts are on your site. They care about what your product does, and if it serves their needs and meets their expectations. The value proposition is the bridge to your customer having brand awareness.

A unique value proposition sets you apart from your competitors

Your product, value and price point are different from those of your competition. But does your audience know that? Your value proposition allows you to outline what makes your offering unique, and how it disrupts the market.

How to create a value proposition statement

Value proposition statements are best done when developing your business plan. Yet, many CMOs may want to go through value proposition exercises later on, as they refine and improve marketing programs. You can adjust your value prop as your company grows and changes. Use these steps for new and revised value proposition statements.

Identify the features of your product

Start simple: list the products that you offer and their useful features. If you are a software as a service (SaaS) company you may have many features that allow users to do many different tasks. If you are a restaurant, your products may offer breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can include outstanding customer service or special events as your offerings.

Features can be large or small, many or few, original or unoriginal. By listing each feature, you get an idea of exactly what you are offering to your customers.

Identify the benefit of each feature

Features and benefits are often lumped together, but they are distinct. Each feature should provide a benefit. For example, Uber’s app for requesting a carshare is a feature. The driver picking you up and taking you where you need to go is a benefit.

Map each of your features to their customer benefit. By doing this exercise, you’ll start to see which features provide the biggest benefits.

Define your target customer

You’ve likely completed many exercises aimed at understanding your target customers. By clarifying their identity, you’ll better understand their journey to your product.

Dive deep into your customers wants & needs

Sure, your customer might want to buy a new software solution because they need a new software solution. But—what do they really need? Say, you sell financial management software. If your target customer is a finance manager, they might need your solution. Yet, what they really need is to free up some time during their end-of-month close. This will give them the time they need to still have 1-on-1s with team members. They might be searching for a financial solution, but what they are really looking for is time.

Clarify your price point

It takes time and research, but you must understand if your product has a price below, at, or above market rate. This allows you to understand if your product is a value product, a typical product, or a premium product. Your unique value proposition allows customers to understand if they are getting their money’s worth.

Put it all together

Steve Blank (Lean Startup) suggests the following simple phrasing for your value proposition. “We help X do Y by doing Z.”

Mapped to the above framework, this may look more like:

“We help our [TARGET CUSTOMERS] do [CUSTOMER NEEDS] by doing [OUR FEATURES AND BENEFITS].”

If you offer a low-cost or premium product, include your pricing in your value proposition statement well.

Examples of effective value propositions

These seven digital technology companies each offer a unique product, but also face stiff competition. Each of these value props outlines their target customer, their needs, and how they meet them—setting them apart from their competitors.

Calm

Calm is a mobile app based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Calm helps people who have trouble relaxing sleep, rest, and meditate by providing an app that offers these experiences.

Curology

Curology is a custom skin care solution based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Curology helps people in need of skin care by providing custom skin care products. They also include their competitive pricing and delivery mechanism.

Duolingo

Duolingo is a language-learning app based in Pittsburg.

Value proposition example

Duolingo teaches second-language enthusiasts how to speak a new language by providing an app that gamifies language education.

Impossible Foods

Impossible is a meat-alternative company based in Redwood City, CA.

Value proposition example

Impossible Foods provides an option for health-and-environmentally-conscious consumers to eat sustainably, by offering a meat product alternative.

Slack

Slack is collaboration software based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Slack provides busy professionals a way to avoid using email, by offering a more comprehensive and easy-to-use collaboration and communication tool.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer support SaaS based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Zendesk provides customer service professionals a way to manage their operations with a comprehensive software solution.

Conclusion

Setting your value proposition is an exercise that helps everyone. It aligns your internal focuses and it better communicates your company to customers.

The post What is a value proposition? Definition + examples appeared first on Insightly.

It’s not complicated: You choose a beer that you know that you like. Why? Because you know the brand, i.e. you have brand awareness.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is familiarity with a brand by its name, how it distinguishes itself from its competition, and any unique values it may hold. The average person in 2021 is estimated to see 6,000-10,000 ads per day, according to Sam Carr of PPC Protect. Without even clocking it, customers consume advertising at every turn, but there are only a limited number of brands of which they have full brand awareness.

According to research from Penn State University, customers can be aware of a brand in one of three ways: aided, spontaneous, or top-of-mind.

• Aided brand awareness: a customer can pick your brand out of a list
• Spontaneous awareness: they can list your brand as one of several in your category
• Top-of-mind awareness: a customer thinks of your brand first, unprompted

Brand recognition vs brand awareness vs brand reputation

Brand recognition, like aided awareness, means a customer recognizes your name and logo. Brand awareness strategy goes further and aims at achieving customers’ understanding of your product, market fit, and brand voice. However, awareness stops short of brand reputation, which includes personal feelings about the brand.

Why is brand awareness important?

Brand awareness is a critical step in the customer journey. A prospect cannot become a customer until they are somewhat aware of your brand. They cannot become a great customer until they have full brand awareness. By building awareness, your company establishes trust, a competitive advantage, and long-term value.

Brand awareness builds trust

Your customers trust those that they know: their closest friends, family, and colleagues. Think of each interaction with your audience like building a friendship. Then, when a customer is at a purchase point for your product, they’ll think of you as a trusted confidant.

Customers are loyal to well-known brands

Brand awareness marketing compounds. Once you build this strong relationship with your customer, your brand becomes less penetrable to competition. As your customer becomes more aware of your brand, they are less likely to want to forge an unknown relationship with a competitor.

Brand awareness is a long-term strategy

A few years ago, I bought a blue Honda Civic—a style that I hadn’t ever noticed on the road. As soon as I signed the car title, it was like a thousand blue Hondas appeared overnight. I saw one anytime I left the house.

This is the frequency (Baader-Meinhof) illusion. Once someone sees something for the first time, they are aware of it every time they see it. In branding, this means it only takes one touch for your customer to become brand-aware. Once they’re hooked, they’ll see your brand everywhere.

What is a brand voice?

Developing a brand voice is crucial for brand awareness marketing. Wendy’s has achieved a level of notoriety for being a unique example of a brand voice throughout social media and company branding.

“The company’s Twitter persona is a natural extension of the Wendy’s brand Dave Thomas founded in 1969. […] Wendy’s playful approach allows it to make its points in a likeable way, like trolling McDonald’s on National Frozen Food Day with tweets poking fun at the use of frozen beef.” – ‘Behind Wendy’s Epic Social Strategy,’ Fast Company (2)

When honing your brand voice, think about how you would personify the brand. Are you a rugged executive or a sweet grandmother? What about a cutting-edge expert or an empathetic teacher? Once your customers know who they’re talking to, they’ll develop meaningful associations and a greater familiarity with your brand.

How does your brand voice build strong brand awareness?

Consistency

Your brand voice should feel similar in each instance where a customer interacts with you. By achieving this consistency, you will meet the expectations customers have of you. This will build your brand’s trust and reliability.

Clarity

Muddled messaging means that your customers will have to put in more effort to get to know your brand. By being clear in each instance, you build quick trust with your audience.

Reflection of audience

Use a voice that your customers can relate to and trust. In the example of Wendy’s, they adjusted their brand voice to match that of their young target market. When customers can see themselves in your brand, they fill in the gaps to become brand-aware.

Earning brand awareness in the digital age

Brands have weaponized online reputation engines to build awareness. Online recognition is the ‘digitization’ of word-of-mouth marketing and can take many forms. It might be a recommendation via LinkedIn, or an Instagram influencer sharing a product. Online endorsements are a critical way to your build awareness strategy in relevant audience groups.

For better or worse, online reputation can be easy to game. Companies spend millions of advertising dollars to appear popular and established among the right groups. Especially in emerging spaces, companies woo customers with flashy advertising and competitive prices. With the simplicity of online purchasing, switching brands may be easy and cost-effective.

However, brand awareness is an advantage when competitors outspend your advertising or undercut pricing. Even with cost savings, customers will not be able to estimate the cost of having so many unknowns when switching to a new brand. This gives the edge to the company with a stronger brand awareness strategy.

If your company doesn’t have a six- or seven-figure ad budget, brand awareness allows you to compete. Smaller companies have the opportunity to gain audience awareness by using digital marketing strategies that capitalize on the organic methods that customers use to learn about products before they purchase.

Using digital marketing to build your brand awareness strategy

Upwards of 87% of product research takes place online, according to Dan Alaimo of RetailDive.(6) To compete, balance your digital marketing presence across channels to control your brand’s messaging.

Content

Content is storytelling about your brand. Content refers to blogs, templates, product information, videos, customer stories, and more. With content, you create a narrative that reflects your company, product, and values. Companies with strong brand awareness share their voice with their audience through content.

SEO, or ranking in top positions on Google Search

When conducting online research, your audience trusts Google (or other search engine) to show them the most valuable content. Increase your chances to be at the top of search results by optimizing your website with SEO (search engine optimization) best practices for digital marketing. High rank has a double benefit:

1. Customers searching for relevant information see your brand.
2. You build trust by showing that Google considers your content highly relevant and valuable.

Social media

Is your audience on Twitter? LinkedIn? TikTok? Regardless of the platform, these apps exist to enhance connections between people. A presence on relevant social media shows interest in connecting with your audience. Social networks also provide opportunities for friends and colleagues to recommend your brand. By capitalizing on these forms of digital marketing, you can build brand awareness among the most trusted circles.

Influencer marketing

Build brand awareness by getting the recommendations of thought leaders in your industry. By utilizing networks that tastemakers have built, you reach new audiences and customers. Often, this is pay-to-play, but in many industries, thought leaders give earnest recommendations.

Email marketing

Email is popular and used daily across the world. This makes it, still, the marketing program with the highest reach. Email analytics also provide unprecedented insight into customer behavior. Because of this, email can be used as a learning and listening tool to better understand your brand awareness.

Paid ads & media placements

Awareness is not built on organic authority alone. Google, Facebook, and paid media ensure that brands’ ads will be seen by their audience. With advertising, your brand can have greater reach and potential for brand awareness. Find the best opportunities for your industry and budget your ad spend competitively. By aligning your content, SEO and paid strategies, you reinforce your message and build consistency across brand assets and channels.

Brand awareness is a journey

Improving brand awareness is an implicit or explicit goal of many marketing teams. We now know that brand awareness isn’t necessarily an objective, but a process. Brand awareness is expansive and includes customer interactions at all stages of the funnel. Yet, as you and your marketing team grow your understanding of what brand awareness is (and what it’s not), you can work to improve your mix of strategies and tools to reach your brand awareness and, ultimately, business goals.

Sources:

1. 10 Branding Statistics You Need to Know in 2021 [infographic], Oberlo, 2020.
2. Behind Wendy’s Epic Social Strategy, Fast Company, 2019.
3. Brand and Advertising Awareness: A Replication and Extension of a Known Empirical Generalisation, Penn State University, 2004.
4. How Many Ads Do We See A Day In 2021?, PPC Protect, 2020.
5. What the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon Is and Why You May See It Again… and Again, Healthline, 2019.
6. 87% of shoppers now begin product searches online, Retail Dive, 2018.

The post What is brand awareness? appeared first on Insightly.

The coronavirus pandemic has seemingly served as a catalyst for digital transformation by forcing many day-to-day business operations to incorporate remote work accessibility to the workforce. With the pandemic came a recession; one the World Bank predicts to be the worst since World War II.

A retrospective

While there is no historical precedent for today’s exact state of affairs—a global health crisis shutting down the economy—these periods of recession and cultural change can serve as an opportunity for companies to adapt to customer needs in real time, define what the brand stands for, and work on customer centricity.

How Hewlett-Packard got its start

Entering the Great Depression of 1934, Hewlett-Packard (HP), presently a household name, was started by two Stanford graduates. Based in Palo Alto, California, HP, won their first major contract with Walt Disney, another California-based company. They produced audio oscillators for the movie Fantasia. By 1942, the company was still small, but World War II changed everything.

Bill Hewlett was called back into the Army during World War II and HP had become well-known enough to start producing audio oscillators used in proximity fuses and microwave-signal generators used in radar and counter-radar measures.

Employees wages were reduced to war-time wages, but HP created incentive plans allowing for profit sharing, which later became a model for “people centered” practices. It was practices such as these that allowed HP to keep their strong workforce despite reduced wages.

HP focused on innovation and achievement. They rewarded employees for new ideas and allowed them to take ownership, which helped to earn trust and loyalty. Over time, HP’s focus on fostering innovation contributed to the company’s success and prominence in the technology industry.

During the recession in the 1970s, HP again reduced wages across the board by 10%. After six months, everyone’s wages were returned to pre-recession numbers as the company weathered the storm together.(2)

Lesson learned

Employees can often serve as the eyes and ears of the company for what the customer needs. By encouraging employee innovation and collaboration, not only can internal teams, including engineers and customer service teams, work together to create solutions, but can evolve a product to better serve the needs of customers over time.

Customer needs

Netflix is a company that hit its stride during the 2008 recession. It started as a by-mail DVD rental company in 1997. By 2007 it began its streaming services and was expected to fail when the economy crashed one year later.(3)

However, with more people at home due to unemployment and the low subscription cost of $8/month (at the start), Netflix thrived and is continuing to do so.

Through strategic partnerships with Roku, Xbox (Microsoft), LG, and other streaming services, Netflix was able to adapt to the digital landscape and use streaming technology to provide convenient access to a wide range of entertainment content. As customer demand grew, Netflix began to produce original content, while traditional production studios were cutting budgets. Once again, Netflix disrupted the entertainment industry by focusing on evolving customer needs and preferences, using data to continuously improve both content and user experience.(4)

Strategic commonalities

What HP and Netflix seem to have in common for weathering the economic storm is customer centricity. HP was able to meet the needs of the time and Netflix, coming of age during the rise of more sophisticated digital technology, was able to use algorithms and user data to enhance the customer experience.

Although HP may have lacked such digitally savvy tools, through investing in its workforce, it was able to build a company around what its brand stands for as a pioneer in the Silicon Valley tech industry.

According to Gartner research, 2020 was predicted to be a year of great digital transformation for businesses. New technology, such as artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, are set to arrive. It won’t be enough to simply add these tools to current strategies.

Centering customer’s needs will be a large part of adapting marketing and technology. And, unless digital business transformation models focus on customer experience and use empathy to build these new strategies, the sole use of new technology will not cut the mustard.

Customer centricity

Focusing on what the customer needs means that, as Gartner notes, “organizations are under pressure to drive digital business transformation while maintaining a focus on customer experience under the new and existing business models.”(5)

Chances are, current environments have forced companies to go fully remote with their employees. Not only has this enforced an upgrade in digital environments for company communications, but employee experiences similar to what Hewlett Packard employees might have faced during World War II.

With this sudden shift in infrastructure, comes a change in business thinking. “What does it mean to keep the customer happy despite current limitations? How to deal with problems quickly? How to understand the context of a customer’s needs?” (5)

This is where continuous collection of customer data becomes critical. Businesses can analyze customer data and make strategic decisions, big and small, by looking at what types of products and services customers purchase at any given point in time, how often, and where.

In a time of crisis and post-crisis recovery, customer empathy can set businesses apart from competitors, help build long-lasting customer relationships, and sometimes even establish/strengthen a brand. Similarly to how HP ran their operation, employees working at home may also have some insight into customer empathy during the coronavirus pandemic.

Gartner suggests the following for building customer empathy:

• Channel convenience for the customer
• Timely response to feedback
• Deep knowledge of the customer’s problem
• Proactivity in customer engagement
• Being helpful and friendly
• Fairness
• Honesty

2020 and beyond

In the 2019 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive survey, 82% of CEOs said that they have a management initiative or transformation program underway to make their companies more digital.(5)

Going forward, businesses need to ensure they are delivering value to customers and improving their lives in some way, which can work hand in hand with keeping employees engaged and aligning with the brand mission.

Technology alone will not help businesses to withstand and evolve through social, economic, and other disruptions, unless they pay adequate attention to their customers’ needs and digital journey with the evolution of their products/services. Looking back through history and how certain brands evolved by meeting the needs of a changing world, businesses have an opportunity to use this uncertain time to make a positive impact and grow.

Read more like this:

• Navigating uncertain times with the new ‘business as usual’
• Reevaluating & rebounding
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics
• 5 rules for customer engagement in challenging times

Sources:

1. 2020 Planning Guide Overview: Building Skills for Digital Transformation, Gartner 2019
2. Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Valley Historical Association
3. Netflix Thrives Despite the Recession, Forbes 2009
4. Netflix: American Company, Encyclopedia Britannica
5. Digital Business Requires Organizations to Focus on Customer Centricity, Gartner 2019

The post From recession to growth: a historical perspective appeared first on Insightly.

Is local SEO really that important? Should local businesses engage in it? The answer to both questions is a resounding “yes.” A few important statistics back this up.

Local SEO is important for local businesses as more consumers use smartphones and geo-specific searches to find local stores. Estimates indicate that by 2021 searches from mobile devices will drive $1.4 trillion in local business sales.(1)

Last year, 76% of consumers who searched for a local store on their smartphone visited one within 24 hours. Of those who visited a store within 24 hours, 28% made a purchase.(2) With today’s rapid increase in smartphone usage, that percentage is sure to continue rising in the coming years.

That said, what is local SEO? How does it benefit your business? How can you approach it?

What exactly is local SEO?

Local SEO is simply a local approach to standard SEO. It involves using various tactics to appease Google’s ever-changing algorithm. That algorithm determines which pages appear in which order when someone conducts a search that includes your town or city’s name, zip code, or any other geographical identifier.

How it works

If someone searches Google for “bicycle repair shop,” they will receive results from various locations. But that’s only true if their smartphone’s “location services’’ function is turned off. If that’s the case and they search for “bicycle repair shop Madison Wisconsin,” it’s exponentially more likely that your bike shop in Madison will appear closer to the top of the search results.

On the other hand, if the smartphone’s Location Services feature is turned on—and this is the case for most smartphones—the phone will recognize the user’s location and automatically return results for that area.

NOTE: In this article, we exclusively refer to Google instead of mentioning other search engines. That’s because over the past year Google accounted for 72% of web searches. After Google, 13 competitors account for the remaining 28%.(3)

The greatest SEO challenge

The greatest challenge you will face once you start to engage in SEO is keeping up with Google’s algorithm. It is constantly changing. Plus, Google keeps most of its formula a secret. Even seasoned SEO experts find it difficult to stay abreast of Google’s latest algorithm changes.

It can even seem as though Google is playing a cruel game with us. But keep in mind that Google’s objective is to present the best content to its users, and they constantly shift gears to accomplish that.

Local SEO benefits

SEO provides loads of benefits to those who master it and stay up-to-date on the latest SEO trends. At the top of that list of benefits, of course, is greater brand exposure and visibility. This increases traffic to your site and results in more sales and revenue growth. In fact, all SEO tactics are undertaken with that goal in mind.

There are many additional benefits of local SEO to consider—too many to list here. But, to give you a better understanding of the importance of local SEO, let’s look at a few of the most important ones.

Forming local business alliances

You can join forces with other businesses in your area and add links to their site on your own site. They will do the same for you in return, boosting your web traffic.

Increased consumer trust

Let’s face it, very few of us scroll to the seventh page of Google results to find the page we want. We trust that the top results are the best and tend to navigate to those sites.

Reduced money spent on advertising

Local SEO, in a way, is slowly replacing local television and print advertising as the most effective way to entice consumers to visit your store.

More reviews from satisfied customers

If you set up a Google My Business account, customers can leave publicly-visible reviews of your business. More positive reviews equal a higher Google search ranking. Moreover, people place lots of stock and trust in reviews from other patrons. Learn more about Google My Business below.

Gaining a competitive edge in your locality

Odds are that most of your competitors are not engaging in local SEO tactics. Gain an immediate edge over your competition by making your business more visible online for both in-store or online shoppers.

Effective local SEO tactics

Local businesses leverage various tactics to increase business visibility and search result rankings. Here are a few of the easiest and most common SEO tactics you can start implementing today:

Set up a Google My Business account

Setting up a Google My Business account is free and does a lot more than open the door for reviews. It provides metrics around how customers interact with your business online and places your business’s name on Google Maps.

Use popular keywords in your website content

Keyword research is a key element of effective local SEO efforts. It’s easy to find the most relevant keywords for your business, as well as their search volume and the difficulty of ranking for them.

Sites like Moz offer free keyword research tools that allow you to gather this keyword data so you can start incorporating those keywords into your website content.

Incorporate those keywords into your site’s metadata

Metadata (or meta tags) refers to the information embedded in your site’s code. If you hire an SEO expert to optimize your website for local SEO, they will know all about this. If you manage your site yourself, you can learn how to make some basic improvements by checking out this beginner’s guide to meta tag usage.

Link to highly-ranked websites

An easy way to learn how high a website ranks is to find its domain authority (DA). DA is measured on a scale from one to 100. A link to any site with a DA of 60 or above will help increase your own site’s ranking.

Moz, mentioned above, also provides a free domain overview tool. That tool allows you to enter another site’s web address, and then displays that site’s DA.

When you hyperlink to another site in your site’s content, be sure to check its DA before doing so. Linking to a site with a low DA can do more harm than good.

Be strategic with external links and run periodic SEO status checks to identify and remove or fix broken links.

Measure your efforts against your competition

The free tools mentioned above allow you to enter your competitors’ web addresses and see how their SEO efforts stack up to your own. You can gain valuable insight that will help you improve your approach and the tactics you use.

For example, you can see which keywords they rank for and what their rank is for that keyword. Then you can focus on outranking them for those keywords. Constant measurement is the best way to continually improve and differentiate your business from those of your competitors.

The final word on local SEO

With an understanding of local SEO, its importance, and key tactics, you’re ready to launch your own local SEO initiative.

As mentioned above, most local businesses still haven’t jumped on the SEO bandwagon. By starting now, you can get a head start and maintain that lead well into the future.

Completing basic local SEO tactics and picking some low-hanging fruit is both easy and produces significant results. And, you don’t need to hire a contractor to carry out these basic SEO tactics.

There are a number of step-by-step tutorials and videos on local SEO best practices you can use to start implementing SEO as part of your digital marketing efforts. The only thing this will cost you is your time. That time will be an investment in the future survival and success of your business.

Read more like this:

• Step-by-step guide to launching digital marketing
• How to implement a digital marketing plan
• From personalized to humanized marketing
• Why use marketing automation?

Sources:

1. Mobile Will Influence $1.4 Trillion In Offline Sales By 2021, Forrester Research, 2017
2. How Mobile Search Connects Consumers to Stores, Think with Google, 2016 (updated in September 2019)
3. Search Engine Market Share, Netmarketshare.com, 2020

The post How to implement local SEO appeared first on Insightly.

The concept of a unified approach, including a unified platform for managing different parts of a business, is not new. In the 1970s, SAP developed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform for manufacturers to help them align and unify different parts of the business, including finance and accounting, inventory management, supply chain, distribution, procurement and production.

At that time, it was all about products. Today, with the internet and e-commerce, the customer is more important than the product, and the emphasis has shifted to customer interactions. Customers today want a personalized, frictionless buying experience, and they also want to know what you stand for and if your values align with theirs.

To achieve that, businesses are looking for technology that would enable them to consistently collect and centralize customer data, so they can create consistently great brand experiences throughout the entire customer journey—from the first touch throughout the sale and post-sale interactions. In a way, they are looking for unified systems that would accomplish what ERPs did in the 1970s. As the founder and CEO of a platform that combines customer relationship management, marketing and sales, I’ve seen this firsthand.

But technology by itself is not going to solve this. A unified approach starts with organizational culture and management. In most cases, this means tearing down artificial walls among sales, marketing and customer service teams and building a data-driven culture across the entire company.

Building a unified approach might seem like an overwhelming task, but there are a few steps you can take to make sure you’re on the right track.

1. Slash the silos

Inconsistent terminology and siloed data can lead to costly misconceptions about buyer behavior. Make sure everyone on your team uses consistent terminology across processes and systems with a shared definition of success. Without a shared goal, more time is spent cleaning and organizing data than addressing the real needs of the customer and designing new ways to improve the customer experience. Have a single source of truth on customer data so that every team has access to key insights on customers’ needs, preferences and history of interactions.

2. Be a leader

Like most business initiatives, buy-in for a unified approach starts at the top, which means sales, marketing, delivery and customer service stakeholders must align and agree on the strategy. Your team leaders should conduct regular planning and check-ins to ensure everyone remains on the same page and that teams are on track and transparent with one another.

Any big gaps, issues and growth opportunities should be reviewed and addressed with a unified approach. Consider how changes in one part of your business impact the entire business and, ultimately, customers. How do changes in marketing operations affect your sales performance? What can marketing learn about your customers from your service team data?

3. Take it to the team

Once executives are on board and aligned on goals, metrics and the plan, the next step is to rally the teams around the same mission. Evaluate the company culture and personalities to foster a healthy environment for collaboration so your teams are working together most effectively. This is an ongoing effort.

4. Choose your technology wisely

Data, knowledge and technology are your most powerful assets for integration. Think about what your teams need and how that information can work across departments, including marketing, sales, customer onboarding and support. Ensure the tech you choose will help your team be efficient, collaborative and transparent, as this can have a direct impact on your customer relationships and even retention.

With a unified approach and technology that supports and strengthens it, you can foster a data-driven culture and create a powerful collaboration that unifies your business around one main goal: customer success. It’s the foundation of your business success.

Preparing for challenges along the way

As you begin to implement a unified approach, you might find that your technology is lagging behind. Or maybe not everyone on your team is as enthusiastic about the changes as you are, and it’s harder to align teams than you had originally thought. I found the following couple of strategies helpful in overcoming these challenges.

Clear communication

Whether you’re explaining the need for a unified business approach and new technology to support it, the ways in which changes will impact each team member or addressing your employees’ reservations—being clear and transparent from the start helps to avoid confusion, get buy-in and save time.

Big-picture thinking

In a fast-moving startup world, it’s easy to get bogged down in daily operations and lose sight of long-term vision. Use weekly all-hands meetings, company-wide emails or another way to remind employees how a unified business approach would contribute to the company’s growth and their individual success.

When thinking about building a unified approach, remember that at the heart of any organizational change are people. Sitting at the epicenter of a high-growth technology company in the heart of Silicon Valley and everything that entails, I find that, by far, the most challenging thing about being an entrepreneur is the human side of the business—the hiring, culture building and motivating your team to strive for more. As you think of how you’re going to unify your business, including which systems and technology you are going to use, don’t lose sight of the human factor in your decision-making.

The post 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020 appeared first on Insightly.

Evolving customer expectations are transforming the way marketers, salespeople, and other customer-facing teams interact with customers and prospects. Today’s customers expect personalization from the brands they do business with. In fact, 63% of customers expect brands to use their purchase history to provide them with personalized experiences.(1)

Here are seven best practices for adapting to shifting customer expectations in the digital era.

1. Focus on the customer experience

Today, customer expectations and purchasing preferences are largely driven by the experience customers receive from your employees. If they receive a poor experience, they are unlikely to return for repeat business.

Plus, it’s quite possible that they will share that negative experience with their friends, family, peers, on social media, and/or on business review sites. A customer who has a negative experience interacting with your brand can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time.

Consider these statistics on the customer experience:

• 67% of customers list a poor customer experience as their primary reason for leaving a vendor.(2)
• 91% of customers who have a bad customer experience don’t complain, they just leave and don’t purchase from you again.(3)

Looking at these numbers, it’s hard to ignore the importance of the customer experience. A great experience leads to satisfied, loyal customers, which increases repeat business and revenue, boosts your brand reputation, and reduces customer churn.

Understanding and catering to customers’ needs is perhaps the most important thing businesses can do to adapt to shifting customer expectations.

2. Use social listening & monitoring tools

In today’s business landscape, most processes and tasks are completed digitally. Social media is one the most-used information channels. Social listening and monitoring tools, such as Hootsuite and Buffer, alert you instantly when someone comments on your brand’s page, posts a review, or mentions your brand in a comment or post.

These tools are particularly helpful considering that users expect a quick response and high level of engagement on social media.

3. Conduct your research & analyze results

Competitor research is helpful because you can uncover their sales and marketing tactics, how they are leveraging social media, if their content is engaging, and much more. Competitor research can also help you to identify unused tactics and gaps in content and product offerings. You can then focus on filling those gaps and differentiating your business.

Review your competitors’ SEO rankings, keywords they are ranking for, and which industry keywords customers are searching for most. This provides insight into what customer interests are and what things are most important to them. You can use that insight to adapt your business strategy in those areas.

4. Give your customers a voice

Making customers feel their voices are being heard is a valuable tactic that will help you adapt to shifting customer expectations and build lasting customer relationships. Here are a few ways to provide your customers with an opportunity to share actionable feedback.

Customer surveys

Send your customers a quick survey to learn about their expectations. Ask them what they need that they don’t currently have, what they expect from you over the next few years, and so on. The insights will be super valuable and provide ideas for new tactics and changes you can implement to better adapt to expectations.

Closed customer forums

Create a customer forum on your website. It can be a closed forum that is only accessible to customers with a login and password. Allow them to share ideas with one another, propose product and business process enhancements that will help your customers to be more successful using your product or service, and voice their complaints. As Bill Gates says, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

The personal touch

Customers like to interact with people, not faceless brands and logos. You can add that personal touch—which customers increasingly expect—by having your customer success reps call individual customers at set time intervals. Ask them if they have everything they need, let them voice any frustrations, and offer tips on making the most out of your product or service. You can set a cadence that’s ideal (or realistic) for your team, but try to reach out at least once per quarter.

Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions streamline this outreach process. For example, you can set recurring tasks with automated reminders that alert the assigned employee when it’s time to reach out to Customer X.

5. Make & announce changes based on customer feedback

If you survey your customers, collect their feedback from outreach calls, and ask for their input in product development, you must take action based on that feedback. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time and theirs.

Be sure to respond to questions and product enhancement suggestions on your closed forum. Identify the common concerns and frustrations that customers express in your customer expectations survey. Track all feedback and challenges provided through your success team’s outreach calls. Collate all that information and find the most common themes.

Then, form a plan and start to implement some changes that will address customers’ needs and challenges. And be sure to spread the word about these changes. Share your changes via social media. Send customers and prospects a newsletter mentioning changes you’re making or have already made based on their needs.

Share it anywhere you can think of that’s appropriate. When customers see you are actually implementing enhancements and updates based on what they told you they need, they will feel valued, appreciate the fact that you’re truly invested in their success, and most importantly, feel that their expectations are being met.

6. Increase your first contact resolution (FCR) rate

First contact resolution means that an incoming customer support call is fully resolved on the first attempt. It means not having to escalate the issue or troubleshoot and call the customer back. Research shows that a mere 1% improvement in FCR rate saves businesses $276,000 annually, on average.(4)

Today’s customers expect a rapid resolution to technical support issues. If you can resolve their issue on the first attempt, you are certainly surpassing their expectations and generating loyal customers. According to that same research, 98% of customers will continue doing business with your brand if you resolve their issue on the first attempt.(5)

7. Initiate customer retention campaigns

Retaining existing customers is key to business growth and overall business health. It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one.(6) Luckily, retaining customers is easier than ever if you use a unified CRM solution that includes marketing automation capabilities, such as automated campaign management.

However, most companies spend way too much of their marketing budget on lead generation campaigns and not enough on customer retention campaigns. That’s a mistake. It’s great to win a new customer because they represent a new revenue source. But, it’s costlier to win a customer than it is to retain the ones you already have. So, run customer retention campaigns to provide helpful, educational resources and regular company updates.

This will increase the quality of your customer experience and raise customer satisfaction levels, which in turn will lead to customer loyalty.

Risks of ignoring shifting customer expectations

Companies that take a business-as-usual approach and don’t pay attention to emerging trends will fade into the annals of history. There are various risks associated with not trying to adapt to evolving customer expectations, including:

• Negative impact on brand reputation
• Reduced customer satisfaction rates
• Increased customer churn and decreased customer retention rates
• Difficulty in finding and hiring top talent as a result of a poor brand reputation
• Fewer sales, reduced revenue generation, and slower business growth

Final word on customer expectations

Customer expectations are changing at a fast pace, especially with new customers entering the market with even higher expectations than those that came before them. Use the seven best practices above to get out in front of this trend and adapt more quickly so you can remain competitive in your industry.

If you’re looking for tools to help you improve your customer relationships throughout the entire customer lifecycle, take a look at Insightly’s unified platform for sales, marketing, and projects. With the right technology at your fingertips, you’ll be able to adapt to evolving customer expectations faster and stay ahead of your competitors.

Request a demo

Sources:

1. Rising Expectations in Customer Experiences, Google/Greenberg, 2017
2. Customer Experience for Executives, ThinkJar, 2018
3. Ibid.
4. Top 5 Reasons to Improve First Contact Resolution, SQM Group, 2018
5. Ibid.
6. Rethinking Customer Loyalty, Forrester, 2017

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In this post we explain the differences between personalized and humanized marketing and dig into the benefits of humanizing your brand. We wrap things up with a list of best practices for digital marketers.

Marketing personalization

Personalized marketing is the practice of using customer data to include personal elements in marketing communications. If you use a customer relationship management (CRM) system that includes CRM, sales, and marketing capabilities on one, unified platform, you can store loads of customer data as well as carry out marketing campaigns and measure their performance. All customer data—typically behavioral and demographic—is captured through customer and prospect interactions with your company.

Marketers use that data to personalize marketing communications. Using a recipient’s first name in an email greeting is an example of personalization. If your CRM system is tracking the product pages your prospects and customers visit the most, you can send personalized messages to them about those products.

Because personalization is data-driven, it’s not as personal as it sounds. Essentially, prospects and customers are treated as pieces of data, not live human beings. However, that data collected for personalization facilitates humanization, making it an essential building block for humanized marketing.

Marketing humanization

Humanization adds the human element across all stages of the customer journey and product lifecycle. It involves getting to know your customers on an individual level. It requires you to interact one-on-one with customers and prospects, know them by name, and understand their unique challenges, goals, pain points, etc.

As marketers, we must shift our thinking away from achieving our goals to supporting our customers in achieving their goals. A customer-centric approach to marketing is essential to humanizing your marketing efforts. You must show customers and prospects that you’re investing in their success and forming closer interpersonal relationships with them.

But how do you benefit from forming those relationships? Below we unpack the key benefits marketers gain from humanization.

Key benefits of humanizing your brand

When customers and prospects feel your employees and your company are taking a vested interest in their success and in learning about them individually, many benefits reveal themselves. And these benefits are all interconnected.

Better customer experience

Today’s consumers care more about their experience interacting with your brand than ever before. And these interactions include identifying common values. Customers today want to know what your brand stands for. This is particularly true with millennials. A better customer experience leads to happier customers, a better brand reputation, and increased revenue.

To put things into perspective, research indicates that companies that adopt a customer-centric mindset and deliver a stellar customer experience are 60% more profitable than companies that do not. (1)

Customer loyalty

A better customer experience generates loyal customers. Loyal customers recommend your brand to colleagues, friends, and family, which amounts to free advertising. In fact, 73% of consumers claim the customer experience is the biggest deciding factor in their purchase decisions and brand loyalties—ahead of product quality and price. (2)

Customer satisfaction and retention

Satisfied customers stick around longer and purchase more. This increases customer retention and recurring revenue. Consider that customers who report a positive customer experience spend 140% more on your products or services than those that report a negative experience. (3)

How to humanize your brand

There are many tactics you can use to make your brand more human. The best practices below are at the core of humanizing your brand and will help you to get started.

Get to know your customers

To humanize your brand, you must forge strong, interpersonal relationships with customers. You can accomplish this by collecting and using personal data.

But collecting personal data today is more difficult than in the past. Emerging data security protocols, like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), require businesses to receive explicit consent from consumers before collecting and saving their data. This relieves the anxiety and discomfort many consumers experienced in the early days of personalization when data collection was less regulated.

How you use data also matters. Marketers should always err on the side of caution when using customer data, out of respect for the customer. This means not sharing your data with other businesses, customers, or any other entity.

With a deep understanding of a customer or prospect, any interaction with them comes across as more human. One of the most effective ways marketers can use customer insights is via social media. More on this below.

Request and implement customer feedback

Your customers want to know you are paying attention to their needs and listening to them when they run into challenges. They can provide insight into your performance and product or service quality that you can’t obtain anywhere else.

There are a few easy ways to leave customers feeling acknowledged and valued. One is to send them customer satisfaction surveys. This will help you identify areas in need of improvement.

Another tactic is to create an online forum that is closed to the public and only available to customers. This gives them a venue to ask questions and suggest product enhancements.

You can also develop a customer advisory board, which is a small group of customers that represents the voice of your entire customer base. You coordinate the board’s meetings. But you should let customers do most of the speaking so you can gain maximum insight into what they love, what they need that they currently don’t have, etc.

Once you collect customer feedback, it’s imperative that you use it to implement changes. And it’s crucially important to share those changes with your customers via a newsletter, social media, or any other channel you feel is most appropriate. Your CRM solution can help you maximize the ROI of collecting customer feedback.

Turn employees into brand advocates

Satisfied employees are more inspired and motivated and, as a result, deliver a better customer experience. One key tactic for maintaining satisfied employees is to develop employee engagement initiatives, such as employee volunteer programs and matching charitable donation programs. Data from a recent survey shows us that businesses with engaged employees outperform the competition by as much as 147%. (4)

Also, companies that spearhead initiatives to improve the customer experience see employee engagement levels rise by an average of 20%. (5)

Now we start to see the interconnectedness of it all. Satisfied customers boost morale among employees, and engaged employees help increase revenue and drive business growth.

Once employees are satisfied—and you should survey them regularly to ask if they are—they often start to promote your brand on social media and to colleagues and friends. In short, they turn into brand advocates. Internal brand advocates improve your brand reputation, reduce employee turnover, and grow your brand recognition.

Use social media to engage your audience

Social media is a great venue in which to engage your audience and humanize your brand. However, it must be done properly and with a strategy in mind. Using the profiles of your employees to engage your audience adds the human element to your social media marketing efforts.

Consumers want to interact with people, not logos. While it’s important to maintain a company profile on social channels, it doesn’t help humanize your brand.

When your employees follow customers’ and prospects’ public profiles and interact with their posts, they put a human face on brand interactions. Over time this will humanize your brand and facilitate stronger customer relationships.

If you heavily engage customers and prospects with employee social profiles, you will slowly create more brand advocates. Customer brand advocates help put your content and brand in front of a much wider audience. This is because when you tap into their follower base, any post of yours they share is seen by new potential customers.

The final word on humanization

Now that you have learned how powerful humanizing your brand through marketing can be, it’s time to put some of these best practices into action.

Interested in more digital marketing tips and best practices? Check out Insightly’s blog series on digital marketing:

1. How to perform a digital marketing audit & sequence opportunities
2. Preparing for a successful launch
3. How to convert a solid plan into a successful digital marketing program

Sources:

1. Wealth Management Digitalization Changes Client Advisory More than Ever Before, Deloitte, 2017

2. Experience is Everything: Here’s How to Get it Right, PWC, 2018

3. The True Value of Customer Experiences, Deloitte, 2018

4. Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, Gallup Inc., 2016

5. Customer Experience: New Capabilities, New Audiences, New Opportunities, McKinsey & Company, 2017

The post From personalized to humanized marketing appeared first on Insightly.

As a result, chief marketing officers (CMOs) are forced to have an entirely new set of skills in their toolkit—namely, the ability to wear many hats at once.

It’s about acting as a chief financial officer (CFO) to be strategic about when and where to invest marketing dollars for optimum ROI, acting as a product developer to ensure the solution matches the customers’ evolving technical needs, and integrating sales expertise to ensure marketing is driving leads through the funnel.

So let’s break down this evolution…

CMOs of companies of all sizes are now, more than ever, directly responsible not only for revenue but also for their contribution to profitability.

At the beginning of any planning period, every dollar requested by the CMO for marketing’s budget needs to be justified to the CFO/CEO, and every dollar spent needs to be accounted for. But once the budget is approved, the CMO and marketing’s performance will ultimately be assessed on a hard ROI metric by the end of the stated time period, usually 3, 6, or 12 months.

Until recently, that assessment was based on a series of volume metrics, such as number of event attendees or number of website visitors, and a choice of cost metrics, such as cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA). But with increasing adoption of deep analytics and data visualization technologies, the most progressive businesses assess marketing’s performance on the revenue-based metric of customer lifetime value (LTV) divided by the customer acquisition costs (CAC), or LTV:CAC.

To calculate the total cost of acquiring a customer (CAC), all expenses need to be considered, including digital marketing, content marketing and SEO, content creation, event management, media relations, influencer marketing, creative services, website development and maintenance, personnel, and other vendor costs.

Anything in excess of 2-3X for the LTV:CAC calculation is fairly healthy; and, if that rate is sustainable, the CMO can breathe easily. The hard part now for CMOs is truly understanding where to invest precious marketing dollars for the best ROI.

The good news is, as with every profession and school of thought, there are guiding principles with which to navigate…

1. Know your customer

The best CMOs first ask the simple, but fundamental questions: Who are our customers? How do they buy? Why do they want to buy from us? The answers to those questions will help define the foundations of the most effective CMOs—a deep understanding of the ideal customer journey, by type of customer.

With such knowledge, the CMO and the marketing team can make more informed decisions on whom to target, with what content, in what form, how often, and in what sequence.

A customer journey can range from the very simple and linear to the highly sophisticated and multilayered. When versioned by customer segment and type, the entire exercise can get complicated.

2. Choose the right tech

There are literally thousands of technology providers servicing every aspect of the marketing function. They include paid search and advertising, media relations, and content management systems; marketing automation platforms; customer journey analytics… the list goes on.

Choosing the right combination of technologies is critical to the CMO’s success and the task of delivering ROI results to the rest of the C-suite. Having a deep understanding of many of these technologies, and the often only slight differences in their functionality, is a must. One wrong decision can be costly: Many technology vendors require minimum-term or multiyear contracts, and unwanted costs will very quickly eat into positive ROI.

3. Assemble a team of athletes

Marketing as a functional area is the decathlon of business; no other area in a company has such diversity in skillsets, running the gamut from the highly analytical (left brain) to the ultra-creative (right brain). CMOs must have a deep working knowledge of an ever expanding range of disciplines or be schooled enough to intelligently and effectively direct and help those responsible on the marketing team.

The key is to hire the right people for every role. People are a CMO’s most valuable asset. Hiring the wrong person can, again, cripple the effectiveness of the marketing organization, and it can be a very costly mistake. Hire only when you are 100% sure that the person has the level of expertise that is required for a role.

The level of expertise required can vary depending on the go-to-market (GTM) strategy. For example, if PR is a critical part of the overall strategy, hiring a highly skilled and seasoned media relations expert is key. If a business is highly reliant on its website as a source of demand, then having a deep technical and creative team is preferred.

Whatever the goal, be sure to align your people resource with the marketing strategy, and hire only the best talent you can attract.

4. Craft your GTM playbook

Defining how to go to market involves making critical decisions about target market segments, ideal customer profiles and personas, partnerships, branding, campaigns, advertising (online and out-of-home), messaging, and timing and sequencing of activities.

Those decisions are not just the purview of the CMO. All those responsible for the commercial success of the business—CEO, sales and support leaders, product development and engineering leaders, and the heads of business development and partnering—have a role to play in determining the GTM plan for the business.

It is imperative that everyone be aligned around common GTM goals and objectives for a business to reach its revenue goals and beat the competition. Those need to be documented and revisited periodically during a formal operations review process to make sure the business is on track, and to change course if needed.

5. Integrate with other departments

In addition to generating revenue and positive ROI on investment dollars, CMOs also act as a service provider for many internal business functions:

• Sales for campaign development, product training and enablement, and event management
• Customer Success for customer marketing
• Support for online help center creation
• Human Resources for recruiting and talent branding

Marketing is the hub for the customer journey, and it is imperative that the CMO integrate and have transparency into other vital functions to ensure a successful end-to-end relationship.

Today, CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite, so those who want to survive and thrive must attack the position in a new, evolved way to ensure a successful customer journey, business growth, and career longevity.

Interested in learning more about Insightly Marketing? Schedule a call with one of our reps and get a free assessment of your marketing tech needs.

Request a demo

This article was originally published on MarketingProfs.

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Survey overview

In August 2019, more than 440 Insightly CRM customers — the majority of whom own or work at US-based companies with up to 500 employees — participated in an online survey on trends and challenges in marketing. Survey respondents included C-suite executives, mid-level managers, and CRM administrators from different industries, such as manufacturing, retail, consulting, education, healthcare, advertising and media, technology, and IT.

Key findings

How important is marketing to business growth?

More than half of the respondents find marketing “very important” to their business growth and nearly one in five report they couldn’t run their business without it.

So how does this recognition of the role of marketing translate into decision-making and operational management? Keep reading.

The scope of marketing activities

Even though the majority of survey respondents work in small teams (fewer than five people) with less than 10% of annual revenue allocated to marketing, the scope of marketing activities remains quite broad, covering digital marketing, advertising, PR, and events.

As expected, website management and email marketing are the most common marketing functions, followed by social media.

Investments: people, budget, & technology

People

In the survey, 48% of those who consider marketing “very important” and those who say they “couldn’t run business without it” (combined) report having only one or two dedicated marketers on their teams. Note that this number doesn’t include outside agencies — 37% of all survey respondents say they use contractors and external agencies.

Budget

More than half of all survey respondents report setting aside less than 10% of their annual business revenue for marketing, which is typical.

Interestingly, 44% of those who say marketing is “very important” or critical to their business growth, also report allocating less than 10% of their annual business revenue to marketing.

While most businesses in our survey are conservative with their marketing budgets, almost half of all respondents say they are spending more on marketing in 2019 compared with 2018, with the majority reporting up to 25% increase in year-over-year spend.

Technology

Considering the heavy focus on digital marketing and small team sizes, we were surprised to see a rather limited use of marketing technologies among survey respondents. Almost 17% of all respondents say they don’t use any technology at all and 56% use Excel to manage marketing.

Sales & marketing alignment

Keeping in mind that in today’s economy people expect consistent and customized experiences throughout all their vendor interactions, we asked our customers how well their marketing and sales efforts are aligned. Of all survey respondents, 46% say they are fully integrated and 11% say they are not integrated at all.

Of those who report not fully integrating their sales and marketing efforts, 42% say that it’s because it’s not a priority for them and 24% say they don’t have time to align.

Important to point out that 47% of respondents who state that marketing is “very important” to their business growth report full integration between their marketing and sales efforts.

This makes sense. According to Gartner, “The ‘single’ or ‘360-degree’ view of the customer requires combining all the operational master data pertaining to the customer — and often also to the product and service — from all data silos where it currently resides. Only by doing so can data and analytics leaders enable improved customer engagement across all customer-facing channels, including marketing, sales, customer service and digital commerce.”*

Measuring performance

As more companies focus on tracking their return on investment on every marketing dollar spent, we wanted to know how our customers measure marketing performance.

Surprisingly, more than one third of all respondents say they don’t measure marketing performance on a consistent basis.

Of those who say marketing is “very important” or crucial to their business growth, 46% report measuring marketing’s contribution to business revenue (deals closed, revenue per lead, etc.).

Survey takeaways

While our brief survey confirmed that the majority of businesses recognize the importance of marketing to their business growth, it also revealed inconsistencies in the ways businesses manage and invest in marketing and marketing technologies.

We also learned that one of the most common reasons why businesses don’t fully align their sales and marketing efforts is because they don’t consider it a priority.

There is an opportunity for companies to better invest in marketing technologies that would allow them to do more with less and focus on aligning their sales and marketing efforts. With a strong combination of a strategic sales and marketing alignment and scalable, integrated marketing technologies, businesses can not only create consistent brand experiences for their customers at every touchpoint, but also accurately measure the performance of all marketing activities and their impact on business growth.

Explore more content on the Insightly blog.

*Gartner, MDM Is Critical to Maximizing CRM and Customer Experience, Bill O’Kane, Michael Moran, December 2018

The post The state of marketing: a snapshot appeared first on Insightly.

A serial entrepreneur who leads with culture first, Paul Daly launched Congruent Story five years ago as an internal communications media unit for his auto repair and reconditioning company (Image Auto). With Congruent Story, or Congruent, Paul wanted to keep his team—which spread across 500 miles—aligned under a unified vision as they reached out to and serviced car dealerships. His customers, auto dealers, were so impressed with the branding and content that they asked Congruent to produce marketing strategy and materials for them. Soon, Congruent Story became a business in its own right, serving companies in the auto industry. Today, Congruent works with local and national companies across industries to help them build brands, create compelling content, and foster lifelong customer relationships.

Recently, Insightly CMO Tony Kavanagh checked in with Paul on Insightly Gamechangers Podcast. They spoke about the auto industry, brand-first marketing, how Congruent Story uses Insightly CRM, and more. Listen to their fascinating conversation on the podcast or continue reading to learn more. Please note that the interview below has been edited for readability, length, and clarity.

Listen to the full podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud.

What is the state of the auto industry? What are auto industry trends?

Tony Kavanagh: So there’s a lot of disruption in the auto industry. Elon Musk recently talked about Ford going bankrupt when we hit the next recession. The auto industry touches everybody in their everyday lives and has such a huge influence over us. I’d love to get your perspective on where it’s going.

Paul Daly: Look, at the base of automotive, or aviation, or public transportation, mobility is the real currency. Getting from point A to point B, and that’s nothing new. Mobility has been a type of currency and a staple for centuries. The auto industry has been quintessential America for the last hundred years. The automobile has been our ticket to mobility. It’s become a part of our culture, our lives, and what we rely on.

In this technological age, not only the mobility scene has begun to change because we’re in a car, but also because of the availability of that car now with Uber and Lyft and autonomous vehicles. It’s just a lot of fun and there’s a lot of hype around these new technologies.

Elon Musk has become such a voice in the industry because he’s disrupting the sales model—how we manufacture and get to the customers. I think when most people think of the automotive industry, they think of a car dealer because that’s where we purchase cars, historically.

[Auto industry] has been a staple of our economy for years. Prior to the 2008 recession, the saying was, “Whatever’s good for General Motors is good for America.” That changed in 2008 when GM went under. Then, we realized that one company and our economy weren’t so closely tied together, because we found another way.

But the auto dealer model is how we have traded vehicles, and that’s been legislated. It goes back to World War I. When Henry Ford was making cars in America, the government and the people saw that the more Ford succeeded, the more Americans had these vehicles and [the business] would develop faster.

So, it was conducive to distribute these vehicles faster, which meant, building a franchise model so that they could sell through franchise dealers. Then, the legislation came in place to protect those dealers, so that they could build a business around selling a certain product. Here we are, a hundred years later, and we have deep legislation to protect auto dealers from direct to consumer sales model, which Elon Musk is disrupting. There’s a lot of fighting over that.

Another component is the availability of information. In the sense that, the way I buy a car now has changed. I don’t walk into dealerships and see what they have, and pick something that they have. I go online, do my car shopping, and I know every dealer that has every car that I like. If I like a 2017 Camry, I can now see where all the 2017 Camrys are in my market and their price. That’s historically called an efficient market—where the buyer and the seller have the same information. We are there now, and that’s a huge disruption.

How are car dealerships adjusting to new consumer behavior and trends?

Tony: You talk about Fordism, which is the foundation of what we know as production lines today. Of course, they’ve been improved over the years; robotics and so on have influenced how cars get made, so radical changes are always happening there from a technology perspective. But also, the dealership model, as you say. Anything that’s in a protected environment is bound to be disrupted at some stage.

How do you see the dealership model working in the future? Because, it is changing, right? The experience that we expect as consumers is also changing with the whole move to a subscription-based model for purchasing of goods and services.

Paul: I have to start off by saying I owe quite a bit to the dealership model. A number of Congruent Story’s clients are dealerships. I will also say that that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to what the consumer thinks about it. It’s the consumer who’s going to decide.

My message to dealers that are hanging their hat on franchise law I say, “You know that laws are decided by legislators, and legislators are voted in by people. If people want something enough, they’re gonna get it.”

So, I agree with you—eventually, these types of things are disrupted and I don’t know how and when that’s going to happen. It’s already being shaken up quite a bit. But I also, to your other point, believe that the consumer experience has now risen to the top of the pile when it comes to what you need to deliver as an auto dealer.

You need to deliver a transparent experience. We have a bad reputation in the auto dealership world of being dishonest, always trying to get a little bit more out of the customer. There’s just not a lot of trust built there.

Now, I see a lot of progressive dealers, and the savvy ones, and the ones who are disproportionately going to win, they’re the ones that are empathetically addressing that issue head on. They’re not trying to hide from it. They’re not trying to say, “Well, that’s not us, that’s the dealer down the street.” They’re saying, “Hey, we understand you feel this way. Frankly, this industry has earned it.”

I believe that the dealers who are paying attention can and should deliver the very best customer experience and are capable of it because they’re in the communities. Many of these are family businesses who have been staples of the community and have given usually more money, and time, and volunteer work than the next 10 businesses in any community.

I still believe that the local dealership model, the franchise dealership model, has a lot of life in it if they pay attention. There are enough that are paying attention, but they’re just going to disproportionately crush the other guys. Their acquisitions are going to increase. It’s just going to be a more consolidated market. So, I guess that’s my 30 thousand foot on the industry for the next 10 years.

Considering the changes in the auto industry and consumer expectations, what is Congruent Story focused on?

Paul: We’re a brand-first creative agency. There’s a big problem with communication—from one person to another, or an organization to a group of people. It’s a problem that will never be fully solved. I don’t think it will ever be solved by AI.

We can have algorithms and marketing AI bots. We can solve a lot of problems. But I really believe that some of the things that they solve are just tactics. They’re important tactics, but I think below all of that, the empathetic communication from one human to another by one purpose, communicating someone else’s purpose—that’s what I think about most.

At Congruent we’re going to continue to think brand first, because it’s going to be the critical aspect of differentiator between the companies that win and the companies that don’t: sharpening that brand message and then executing to that. So I think there’s a lot of white space there and I don’t think that space is ever going away.

What does it mean to be a brand-first company? How do you become one?

Tony: It’s so interesting. Here at Insightly, we are so maniacally focused on trying to deliver a tailored or a very personal message and experience to customers that we put a lot of time and effort in figuring out our customers’ needs and how to satisfy them and deliver a tailored message—that’s what they expect and that’s what they should get.

To your point, AI and technology take away the drudgery, the blocking and tackling, and the basics we’re addressing. But you can’t replace an individual’s or human being’s ability to resonate with another. I think the more we can do that on a more personalized basis, the better.

Paul: What you’re saying about empathy, the ability to connect and being focused on that—I’m sure in your business, just like in mine, it’s the same principle. Having a clear message actually helps you recruit and align a great team. Because, like the communication aspect of it, it goes both ways. It’s hard enough to communicate with customers, try aligning a team behind it. If your messaging isn’t sharp and your vision isn’t sharp, it makes that task twice as hard.

Tony: We tend to take a lot of pride in hiring the right people. You’re a culture-first guy. We are the same way, it is all about the people and the culture. It speaks volumes. When we write our brand guidelines, we talk about the culture and who are we.

The brand is everything we do. It’s who we are, it’s how we behave, it’s what we say in the market. It’s how we treat our customers, it’s everything.

It’s sort of cool to think that really the future success of any business is to be able to treat every customer like they’re your only customer, even if you have thousands of them.

Paul: That can only ever happen if you have a brand understanding within your own walls. You can never do that unless you do the hard work of what you’re doing.

People will say, “Hey, your brand is not your logo, your brand is not fonts, your brand is not a sign. It is not a mission statement. Your brand is a feeling. It’s how people feel when they hear your name, when they interact with one of your people, when they log onto the app and they see the Insightly logo. It makes people feel a certain way.”

One of my favorite brand definitions is from Shep Gordon: [A brand] is a set of expectations, and memories, and relationships that, when you add them all together, basically, account to a customer’s decision whether to do business with you or someone else.

So, I love that Insightly is working on that. You know, it’s funny, it shows in my experience with Insightly and my interactions, I know that there’s a focus there. I could just tell that when I’m doing business with a company that has a level of unified beliefs. So, it’s cool to hear some of the backstory.

How does Congruent team use and benefit from Insightly?

Paul: I have a team, it’s several people who use Insightly at the same time. I’m more of a beneficiary of the rest of my team using it because I don’t personally interface with it that much anymore. But the part that means the most to me, which I use often, is the pipeline feature and the way we can track our sales pipeline. I make business decisions based on that all the time.

For example, my business director and I go through leads and how far along they are. We’re able to set up a flow that works for us and close probabilities that work for us. We’ve gotten it dialed in really well now. So it’s part of my weekly review with my business director.

But when it comes to hiring more people, or potentially considering new space or equipment purchases, that pipeline has become a tool that I use to inform those decisions on a weekly basis. So, to that note, that’s what means the most to me and is the most effective component in my decision-making process at this point in our business.

Tony: It’s great to have all data around your customers and your potential customers in one place. There’s millions of data points that you can look at and start to build a picture that’s much more higher definition than anything you’ve ever done before. So, having all of that data in one place is very important.

[At Insightly] we truly believe that it’s all about customer information and to be able to service the customer exactly the way they expect at every touchpoint in the buyer cycle. So the more information you can surface to people, who are servicing the customer over time, the better. So the more informed your salespeople are, your service people are, or your delivery people are about the customer and their preferences, the better that delivery quality will be or the better that sales experience will be.

Being able to surface that in a way that’s easily consumable is tantamount for us as we move forward as a company. But also, for our customers for their success in the future. So, it’s really cool stuff that we’re working on here in the background. You’ll see a lot of new stuff coming out over the next coming quarters and years.

Paul: Wow, that sounds really interesting. I don’t know what you’re cooking, but it sounds like it’s gonna be really interesting.

Tony: Paul, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for taking the time today. But also, thank you for being a great customer of ours. We’re delighted to help you on your way.

Paul: It’s been a pleasure being an Insightly customer and to talk to you today.

Want to learn about other Insightly customers who are changing the game in their industries and making a difference in people’s lives? Check out Insightly Gamechangers Podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Prefer to read the stories on the blog? Here are the links:

• Authentically yours, Candice Simons
• What is the future of work? A conversation with Hot Spots Movement
• Connecting people to care with Insightly CRM + Office 365

For more customer stories and use cases, please browse Insightly Customer Stories.

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