Memo to Santa

Marc Sokol

To: S. Claus, CCO (Chief Christmas Officer)

From: North Pole Marketing Department

Dear Santa,

A few reminders as you get into the final stages of this year’s holiday push:

1.     New banner.  This year’s theme, “Santa knows his customers!” appears on a banner flying behind your sleigh.  If asked what’s different, just respond that we have newly appended files about children around the world.  This information was contained within the last set of WikiLeaks.  Ho, ho, ho!

2.     Enhanced segmentation.  For years you been singing that you know who is ‘naughty or nice”.  Our elf analytics team has identified more detailed segmentation for you to use.

Just so you know, we applied modified RFM analysis, prioritizing frequency of good behavior, followed by recency of good behavior, and lastly by the monetary impact of nice and naughty behavior. 

Segment	Description
Goody two-shoes (GTS)	Compulsively well behaved, these are your best customers in the way they carry your brand message throughout the year.  Consider a mix of toys for personal use and opportunities that enable them to keep doing good for others.
Seasonally behaved	Like promotionally sensitive customers, these children respond well to various marketing initiatives.  As a result some stores have begun to promote their Christmas displays as early as September.
Sibling selectives	For the most part, these are high potential customers who might be seasonally well behaved or even GTS, with one exception – they can’t remain nice to their siblings.  Most grow out if it by their mid 20s depending on the balance of positive vs. negative sibling experience.   For this group we suggest interactive family games with the hope that fun times will set the stage for more harmonious relations.  Think Wii.
Attention seekers	Often confused with naughty children, these customers are in fact seeking more attention throughout the year and act out to achieve that effect.  Consider toys that will be as appealing to parents as to children so they choose to spend more time together.
Just plain nasty	These are the naughty children who typically receive coal in their stockings.  It’s a small percentage, but a challenging one.  Be careful of mousetraps, thumbtacks, plastic cookies and other traps they may set for you by the fireplace.

3.     Social media. Don’t take it personally, but your number of followers pale compared to those of Lady Gaga or Oprah.  You’ve got to get out there and tweet or at least post on Facebook more often if you want kids to know you exist after January 1.   We signed you up with Foursquare, and expect you could claim a global badge on Christmas Eve if you remember to check in often enough.  Santa, you could be the mayor!

4.     Online reputation.  Sorry to say Santa, but there still exist many consumers who don’t believe in you or your message.  Just after Christmas we launch an early push into next year. The theme for 2011 will be  “Keep a little Christmas spirit all year round”.  With even a small lift in response, we could change the world!

From the elves in your marketing department, we wish you safe travel this holiday season.

Marc Sokol is an organizational psychologist with an eye for how people and teams can be more effective, even in a dysfunctional company. He is part of M Squared Group, a data-driven marketing consultancy.  

Are you the trusted expert?

Jackie Kaufenberg 

As marketers, much of our job is to position our brand (whether ourselves or a product/service) as the trusted expert in our respective industries.  Earning trust and achieving expert status are not quick or easy tasks, but can be a solid foundation for success.  Even if your company or product is fairly new or small, there are many ways to position your brand as the expert in your field, especially through the content you provide. 

Are you on track to position your brand as the expert in [your product/service/niche]?  Ask yourself these questions:

·      Do I have the human resources to help position my brand as the expert? Are my employees passionate about the brand?

·      As a company, do we do what we say we are going to do and have a brand promise that speaks for itself? Is our customer service top-notch?

·      Do I provide educational resources on my website that customers cannot find anywhere else?

·      Do I practice the 80/20 rule in social media (80% about things beyond my brand, 20% brand specific) and provide engaging content?

·      Are our employees reaching out to share their expertise by speaking at seminars, writing white papers or guides, or contributing to magazines or blogs?

·      Is our company helping people in the industry or community, either thru cause-related marketing or by simply providing educational content without expecting sales from every effort?

·      Am I aligning myself with other “trusted experts” - people, companies, and associations that can help me achieve expert status?

Are there any areas where you are excelling or could improve? What are some other ways to help position yourself/your brand as the source for your product or service? 

Jackie Kaufenberg is the Marketing Manager for Altimate Medical Inc. in Morton, Minnesota. They manufacture standing frames for people who use wheelchairs and also have a blog for people with disabilities, and medical professionals. You can reach her via Twitter @jkaufenberg.

Small Business Success: How to Manage the Social Media Overload

Rob McChane

Small business owners have felt the effects of the economic downturn as much as anyone and those who have survived the lean times have a universal skill…they’ve learned to do more with less.  That’s why I’m constantly surprised to hear about the time commitment for social media as a pain point for small business marketers.  In an effort to help ease the stress, here are a few pointers on how to make the ever-changing social media landscape a little more manageable. 

Stake your claim 

You don’t have to have an airtight strategy (or any strategy for that matter) to proactively protect your brand, so set up a company account for all of the major social media channels even if you’re not planning to use them now.  As the old saying goes “possession is 9/10ths of the law” and it’s extremely difficult to get a username back once someone else has claimed it.   The easiest way to check availability is to use a name check service like namechk.com.  It’s free and it only takes a few seconds to see what usernames are available on most of the major social media platforms.  This gives you the ability to select the channels that will best target your customers now with the flexibility to adjust in the future.

 Follow Your Customer 

Ask yourself, “where would my customer be looking for me online”?  All too often I hear social media strategies that consist of a statement like “we have to be on Twitter” without any explanation as to why.   These are exactly the types of statements that lead to the feeling of being overloaded.  Instead, determine where your customers are spending their time.  Are you a retail business where customers are looking for your newest products and offers or are you a B to B company that needs to nurture sales relationships with purchasing gatekeepers?  Let the strategic goals of your business dictate where you focus your efforts rather than chasing the next big thing.  If, retail is your business, consider Twitter, Facebook or other options that allow your customers to “stay in the know” and share news with their network.  If B to B is your focus, LinkedIn has variety of industry discussion groups where you can contribute or you can create a group for your industry niche.    

Work Efficiently 

Once you’ve identified a couple of channels where you’re going to focus your energy, look for tools to help you make efficient use of your time.  Tools like nutshellmail.com are free and will send you an email with all of your updates for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace at intervals you request.  This makes tracking posts and interacting with customers easier by having a single digest of all your updates in one place rather than having to constantly check multiple locations.

Like any other marketing initiative, a strategic approach to social media takes patience and research.  However, a small amount of planning will definitely help the small business marketer manage social media overload while connecting with new customers.  

Rob McChane is the AVP of Marketing Communications for the MN AMA and the Founder and Managing Partner of Digital Sherpa, an online marketing consultancy for small business.  Rob can be reached via email at rob@thedigitalsherpa.com, on twitter at @rmcchane or on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/robmcchane.

Invert the Pyramid and Supercharge Your Profits

Mark Price

All customers are not created equal.  Rather than investing your marketing budget equally across your customer base, consider focusing funds on customers with the highest current value, the strongest relationships and the greatest ability to return value to the company.

Different customers have different needs, and different willingness to spend their money on your business.  In addition, customers differ on the amount or type of relationship they want to have with your company, either due to their psychographics, or their relationship with other companies in your space.  Net of everything, most customer bases end up being distributed like this:

Across our clients, consistently, the top 10% of customers represent between 50-60% of revenue, and the next 30% represent 30-35% of revenue.  The bottom 60% of customers are extremely low value, and usually contribute less than 15% of total revenue (this trend of value concentrated in top customers is even more so when you analyze profitability).  Now, the “right” way to do this analysis is based on Customer Lifetime Value, but as you can see in this post, that approach has its challenges.

When researched, most customers do not spend all their money with a single company, even when those customers are in the top 10% of the base.  In some of our research, we have found that even those best customers spend only 50-60% of their category spending with our client. So even the best customers have upside – additional category spending they could do with your company, but do not.

If you ask marketers whether they target those best customers (and the mid-value, high potential customers) or not, and they will tell you “yes.”  Sometimes they do.  Some marketers limit their direct mail to high value customers; some do not.  Way too many marketers mail too deeply into their customer file, choosing to waste marketing dollars to squeak out a little bit more revenue, even if that revenue costs more than the profit it yields.

While some marketers do tighten their targeting to focus on higher value customers, they consistently fail to change their spending per customer in their database marketing efforts to reflect the differences in current and future value.  The best marketers vary their spending per customer in three different ways: 

1.     Frequency of communications – Rather than contact each customer one time, contact higher customers two or three times to break through the clutter and successfully reach your customer.

2.     Type of communications – Instead of just sending low-cost emails and blanketing your customer base with communications that they may not want, create a multi-channel communication plan, where you reach your best customers through a blend of low-cost and higher-cost communications (such as email, direct mail, phone calls, etc.).

3.     Value of the material delivered – if you are creating a database marketing program, consider increasing the value of the communications that you send to your higher value customers.  For example, send a postcard to your lower value customers, a trifold piece to your medium value customers and a beautiful brochure to your highest value customers.  Take a lesson from the airline reward programs, where the costs of the intro pieces escalate according to the value of the customer.

 When you add all of this up, you end up with a marketing investment plan that looks like this:

  

Ultimately, the goal is spend most of your resources where they can do the most good, where they will yield the highest return.  Focus your spending (and your effort) on the smaller group of customers who buy the most from you.  Measure your marketing strategies carefully and you will reap the rewards.

Check out a video blog post on this subject at: http://www.cultivatingyourcustomers.com. 

Mark Price is Managing Partner of M Squared Group, a consulting firm focused on understanding and building customer relationships, and the author of the blog “Cultivating Your Customers,” where he writes about practical approaches to improve customer retention and overall customer value.

The future arrived half an hour ago. Where were you?

Marc Sokol

If you are reading this post on the MNAMA blog, odds are you also attended the recent MNAMA conference.  Perhaps you were fortunate enough to hear the keynote address by Cecily Sommers, ‘Think like a futurist”.  Dave Buchanan, wrote a nice summary of that session, which you can read if you scroll back a few posts.   

Let’s build on the ideas surrounding her session.   Why a futurist at a conference on conquering chaos in today’s marketing world?  Don’t you have enough to do without being distracted by someone going on about what’s going to happen someday somewhere?  And if you’ve seen some of this before, why give it another thought?  After all, it’s at least one week since the conference has come and gone.

As a psychologist (yep, I’m one of those), I can tell you that if you resonated to the conference theme of Conquering Chaos, then you need a conscious strategy beyond just showing up for the day.

We’ve already acknowledged that the marketing space (and wherever you locate yourself within it) is expanding, evolving and accelerating.  Great, just what you need: more chaos! 

All of which creates a stress reaction.  A little stress is a good thing as it activates your brain.  More stress continues to energize some people and begins to paralyze others.  Too much stress and we all get overwhelmed.

There are, however, well known tactics, which we can call the 3 A’s of stress management for marketers:

1.      Avoid the source of stress.  Hmm, you could hide under the covers, cross the street when you see future trends at your doorstep, or get into another field, but I’m guessing this tactic really isn’t you.

2.      Adapt to increased stress levels.  This is where you learn to adapt and adjust your body to more ambiguity, more multi-tasking, more rapid change imposed by changing events.  Exercises, healthy eating, sleep, biofeedback, mediation, keeping a sense of humor – they are all part of the prescription.  These work, but you may still feel like a victim to events coming at you faster than level 15 of that video game on your Smartphone.

3.      Alter the situation that is causing stress.  Take action! Kick back at the source of stress; change your course of actions so you impact the situations that create stress.  See the future, create your own future, and eliminate some of the stress of an externally imposed future. 

What does that look like?  Well it could look like a traditional brand strategy firm (or independent consultant) diving deeper into the social media space, learning how to moderate online communities, and from there discovering new ways to deploy brand strategy that go far beyond traditional advertising for CPG companies. And it could look like someone who does that in sync with their awareness of increased societal/business/government focus on a particular macro trend, such as getting yourself known as THE expert for design of branded, engaging online healthcare communities.  (If it sounds like I’m talking about you, it’s because I am!)

So how does a futurist fit into the stress management prescription?

In our culture, people often are optimistic that anything is possible in the future, but focus all of their energy on today and what is immediately required.   For many, aligning today’s actions with the future is more hope than strategy.  But that doesn’t have to be you.

What Cecily and other futurists offer is perspective; today’s events are just one point in a stream of events.  When you have a sense of the trends, you are better able to place a bet on the future and see how your choices today line up with where you plan to go.  The world will begin to seem less chaotic; misaligned, yes, but not nearly as random or chaotic.

One last thought:

Assume the future arrived half an hour ago, but is distributed in many different pieces and locations.  All you have to do is connect the dots!

So what are you waiting for?

Marc Sokol is an organizational psychologist with an eye for how people and teams can be more effective, even in a dysfunctional company. He is part of M Squared Group, a data-driven marketing consultancy.