If someone merely stops buying your product it may not be a total lose. If you sell diapers, perhaps they stopped buying because their kids are potty trained, right? A total loss—an all out failure—is when someone stops buying your product in favor of another product that fulfills the same need, writes negative reviews about your product or company and tells others where they can get the same product for less or with better customer service. A customer’s child may grow up, but you need to make sure their total experience inspires them to recommend your company and products, or at the very least, they don’t have negative comments to share or actively work to recommend your competitors.

Example: Lost Customer—An All Out Failure
The other day I purchased a Cat Climber thing (see image) that attaches to a door so a cat can climb on it and scratch it (instead of the couch). My cat loves to climb, so… I thought I’d ditch the nasty old scratching post for this cool thing. I didn’t buy it from Pioneer Pets directly. I purchased it through Wag.com.
The order went through, no problem. The correct item arrived on time. All was great—thanks, Wag.com. But then I tried assembling it. Wag.com and Pet Pioneer sites indicate “easy assembly and disassembly”. NOT! Aside from the fact that it is very heavy and awkward to actually assemble, the instructions did not actually indicate in writing or imagery exactly how to utilize the 2 washers on the bolts to make the platforms connect to one another .

I eventually got the thing together and tried to hang it on the door, but the door seemed to be too tall. The bottom piece includes a spring-loaded metal attachment that came assembled, but clearly had screws and additional holes for screws that seemed as if it could be adjusted for different size doors. When it wasn’t able to fit my door, I returned to the instructions to see how to adjust the spring, but there wasn’t any information. But, aha! help was written there: “For video instructions, please visit www.esmartcat.com. Unfortunately, no video existed on that site which is Pioneer Pets website. So I emailed them asking where I could find the video instructions.

To Pioneer Pets credit, they replied to my email within 1 day. That was good. But their response was: “The video is actually on YouTube. Search for “cat climber assembly” and
you will find a two-part video. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

My cat will pass away some day and I may not get another one, so I likely wasn’t going to be a constant purchaser of Pioneer Pet products forever. But, until I received this email, their lose future of a customer didn’t have to be a total failure. Unfortunately, since she couldn’t even be helpful enough to provide the actual video link to me in the response, they were fast approaching all out customer failure.

I replied to the email asking if she would just supply me with the link instead of me searching for it (it was basically the principle of the thing, rather than my effort to search) and asking why they didn’t just have the link on their website. I’m sure you can guess what might be coming. The second customer service response to me was: “I have been asking them to add the video to the website since I started here in January. I know it is frustrating. I did not know how to attach a link but I will try here.”

Nope, I didn’t get a link. I got to binary files attached to the email. So, not only will I never purchase another Pioneer Pets product, I will write to Wag.com (who I am happy with thus far) and recommend they not carry Pioneer Pets products anymore. In addition, I’ve written this blog post to share with all of you and I will actively let other cat owners I know of my experience with the product and company. And that is my all out lost customer failure story for the day.

As I’ve said before, I love daily deal sites as a consumer. Who doesn’t want a massage for $45 instead of $100? But my experience, particularly when it is a service industry business that I purchase a deal from (such as a massage or haircut) is an ear-full of complaints from the business like, “Sorry that we’re running late, but we’re overwhelmed with all the deal buyers.” And often, I get the feeling they’re trying to rush through my service because they’re behind and annoyed that they aren’t getting full price for the service and most deal buyers skimp on the tip, too.

It’s too bad that daily deal sites haven’t gotten around to being more helpful to small businesses who want to run a deal. Instead, they hard sell them on the idea that deals will bring in new customers and won’t cost you anything, but the reality is that many businesses loose money on deals and don’t get any repeat business.

Not getting the repeat business is largely the fault of the small business because they do treat deal customers in a less favorable way than regular customers and they aren’t capturing them on email lists and up selling them. But small business owners are not professional marketing people. They don’t know all the things they should be doing to attract these new customers as repeat customers. Or how to offer a deal that brings the customer in but is more likely to get the customer to buy more than just what the deal gives once they’re in the store.

But, there are so many deal offers now, that most consumers just aren’t going to be loyal repeat customers to these places who offered a deal to get them in the door. The new age of deal consumers just encourages them to wait for another deal at another store. And daily deal sites would rather those consumers stay loyal to the deal site by purchasing another deal when the next spa offers something rather than going back to the first deal-offering spa where the deal site revenue stream ended.

But, the downside for the deal site is that 82% of businesses don’t want to run any more deals. Eventually, the deal sites will run low on customers themselves so they won’t have many deals to offer. I wonder how long until that’s really a problem? Hmmmmm…

(Click image to view full-size at Hubspot. Infographic from BuySellAds.)

Just because Facebook and Twitter are there, doesn’t mean you have to do them. If you’re looking for personal exposure for your expertise to advance your career, try keeping updated profiles in places like LinkedIn. Also consider online locations that allow you to pull in information from other activities you do–for example, LinkedIn allows you to add your blog postings and SlideShare presentations, as well as other online content, to your profile. Take advantage of these integrated platforms. What’s great about LinkedIn, and other types of online integrated profile locations like this, is that you set it up and don’t have to worry about it. It continues to pull in the feeds from the other locations on it’s own. Also, your profile won’t change continually, so just be sure to review it periodically to correct items or add.

Social media sites can offer terrific opportunities for increasing your business or generating awareness about your products/services or personal skills, but some are time suckers! I love Twitter and Facebook, but they do require a time commitment. There are ways of pulling in content automatically to keep them updated and looking robust, but be sure you aren’t adding auto-content updates just to add something new.

If you really won’t have the time to participate in these kinds of online discussions and content posting locations, don’t do it. It’s better to choose 1 thing to do that you actually have the time, interest and resources to do well, than to setup accounts and pages that will end up being empty or just have stale old info.

If you offer a service or product that people can write reviews on, consider choosing a location or two, such as Yelp, and implementing a standard process to request people to write reviews. For example, if you offer a service that you invoice your clients for after completion, consider including a request for them to write a review on Yelp when you send the invoice. It’s always better to include a link that people can quickly click through on than something in the snail mail, but however you do it, just do it!

Just some quick food for thought for the day!

In my research and working with clients I’ve seen a number of ways that these can work to actually make you money and get you repeat customers without being overloaded with new business that you’re not making a profit on.

1. Daily deals are fantastic for selling products as opposed to services. Why? 1) because products almost always have a higher profit margin to begin with. 2) You can use daily deals to promote specific products that might not be selling as well as expected. 3) You can offer a deal for a dollar amount and if you choose the right dollar amount for what you sell, most of the customers will end up spending more when they come to use the deal. And 4) People are more likely to be a repeat customer if they get hooked on a great product that they’ll need to replace or replenish their supply (like candles or bath products)–if it’s a service like a massage, most people just wait for the next massage daily deal.
2. Restaurants, coffee houses and bars make a lot with daily deals. These types of businesses use deal sites in 2 ways: 1) to sell a sampler package and 2) to sell a dollar amount off. Both of these can be very successful. Selling a sampler package is great for bringing in new people. This is particularly good for bars who also offer appetizers or cheese plates, etc. With this idea your selling the environment to get them to be repeaters. With a dollar amount deal it is really great for restaurants because the staff will still get tipped, sales tax is still paid by the person who bought the deal and almost every customer will end up spending more than the deal was for.
3. The marketing activity has to continue even after the deal is sold! This is critical for a daily deal campaign to be successful, especially if it is a service industry business. You should automatically assume that the customers buying the deals will not come back again. So you need to do everything you can to help them enjoy the experience–DO NOT treat it like a discount customer that is a hassle because they aren’t paying the full amount. With these customers you need to go the extra mile so they feel like paying full price would be worth it. You want to make sure they have a positive experience from booking an appointments, walking in the front door, the service or products offered, the payment/signout process, etc.
4. Build a relationship and engage with daily deal buyers. Even if someone isn’t paying full price for something, they can be great customers. Ask them to write a positive review. Encourage customers to become repeat customers by asking them if you can write a blog post or case study on them (depending on what is applicable for your business) or request a quote for promotional purposes. Be sure to ask for an email address to send them monthly newsletters or let them know about future deals. Most daily deal sites won’t give you the customer’s email address so you need to be sure you are asking them for it.

Be smart about how you use a daily deal site and you can make it successful rather than just cheap marketing. Remember, this type of advertising isn’t cheap if you loose out on your profits and don’t get new repeat customers from it!

The problem with this tactical approach, however, is that conflict is inherently negative and if you aren’t careful the conflict can backfire on you, turning your customers off. So how do you create positive conflict to attract audience attention while making your company/product the hero who successfully overcomes the conflict?

Consider these ideas for creating positive conflict:

1. Pit Your Audience Against Itself with Humor: My favorite recent campaign is from Cottonelle Toilet Paper. Their “Over or Under” controversy campaign challenged their audience (their customers and all toilet paper users) to choose up sides on which direction the roll should be set on the holder. It was funny because many people really do have a strong preference even though it is such a mundane detail. The company’s new campaign for “Respect the Roll” is equally as clever by using toilet paper consumers who believe the toilet paper roll is such worthy item that they are chastising other toilet paper users who don’t adorn their roll in a decorative cover.
   How another product category could use this concept: A toothpaste producer could go along this line by doing a campaign about leaving the toothpaste cap off the tube, pitting couples or roommates against one another and a superhero solving the issue by replacing their tube of toothpaste with a new flip cap instead of a twist cap tube.
2. Honestly Address Your Flaws: Domino’s Pizza did this brilliantly with their Pizza Turnaround campaign. They honestly addressed the issues that people thought their pizza tasted terrible and used that to launch a new recipe for their pizza that received favorable reviews. They came right out and said they were sorry their pizza was bad and they’re listening.
3. Rally for a Cause: Many companies and organizations have done this very successfully. In 2009, the National Heart Lung & Blood Institute’s Red Dress PR campaign helped generate awareness of the number 1 killer of women, heart disease, by persuading celebrities, politicians and business women in America to wear red dresses. It became a social phenomenon that built a national movement highlighting female heart health.
   Tide laundry detergent took on nature as their foe with their Loads of Hope campaign to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. by sending trucks with laundry facilities into neighborhoods who needed help cleaning up their lives, Tide helped people tell the natural disaster that it wouldn’t keep people down. The company has kept the campaign alive by helping people of other natural disasters.

Consider your products/services and what your company stands for. Somewhere in there you’ll find a positive conflict waiting to get out.

In the meantime, here is a marketing thought for the day.

If you have to lie in your marketing communications to get people interested in your product/service, you’re working for the wrong company.

Too many consumers think that marketing is just about tricking people into wanting things they don’t need. I don’t practice this and I don’t advocate it. I believe audiences for all products, services, programs, political or social campaigns are much to smart for this, and besides, it’s just flat out wrong.

People will always need goods and services and they’ll always have personal social interests that they want to spend time focusing on. And there are tons of people on this planet! There is no need to lie to anyone or trick anyone into something they don’t want or need. Be honest with your audience and give them valuable information to help them fulfill their wants and needs. If they choose another product/service, perhaps you need to consider your competitiveness in the market space. If people just aren’t aware of your offering as an option, than you need to figure out how to participate in the market conversation more effectively.

Companies are often concerned about doing or saying the wrong thing that will turn off a potential customer, especially start-up companies. They fear committing to words, venturing into campaigns, taking media and social opportunities by the horns and spending precious funding the wrong way. Building a company and developing new products isn’t easy and it’s understandable to want to mitigate risks. But consider this, some of the greatest companies who have developed market busting products succeeded because they weren’t afraid to jump into the deep end and take some risks.

For all the successes, however, there are hundreds that failed. I wonder if companies like Google or Facebook would be the dominating companies in their markets if they had been started by entrepreneurs who already had long careers in technology or had been launched as the next in a line of products by a long-established company. Maybe their success is due to the fact that their founders were not only brilliant visionaries, but they were also young, un-business-jaded and didn’t know any better than to take crazy communication risks to draw in their audience.

Today, a marketing plan isn’t only about advertising, messaging, lead generation, etc. Today, marketing plans need to include a plan for accepting what your audience may say about you and having the guts to respond and acknowledge your fans and those who don’t like you. If you haven’t read Personality Not Included by Rohit Bhargava (2008), get to it. Bhargava covers the benefits of showing personality, humanity and having a soul for your business. The concept of a good company culture is nice, but if you keep it all internal and present a boring, automated, humorless, fearful face to customers and prospects than your likely to confuse or loose your audience.

Succeeding in communicating to your audiences, in fact, succeeding in business, will include making mistakes. It isn’t the making of the mistakes that are the problem, it’s how you deal with them. Whether your mistake is a product that flops or an ad campaign that turns out to offend, don’t be afraid to try them. And you don’t need to run blind. Do your homework. Research your market spaces, profile your target audiences, test messaging and gather new product feedback, and then use that information to make the best choices you can that have the highest potential for getting great returns. Get outside your comfort zone. Be daring. Base your marketing plans on solid information and then commit to great ideas and stand behind them whether their great or flops. Admitting you made a mistake when you do only highlights the human quality of your company.

Think in terms of a superhero. Even if they have the coolest super power, they won’t get their own bat signal from the commissioner if they can’t get to disasters in a timely manner or they have a cape that doesn’t allow them to effectively lift a bus of school children to safety from a bridge that’s about to collapse. What separates great marketing/marcomm pros from the wannabes, even at the strategic level, is having incredible organizational project management skills and strong attention to detail.

If you aren’t naturally gifted in project management and detail tracking, it’s not the end of your career, but you’ll need to work harder to compete. Look into software tools that might help you track details. You might also consider taking a class or finding a mentor to teach you what to think about when planning details, coordinating resources, keeping on budget and timelines, etc. Being diligent with followup and creating digital alerts to remind you when tasks need to be done can also help.

There’s no one system that is perfect for everyone, but if you work toward developing a process that works for you–and more importantly, that you can use for managing all types of marketing activities–you’ll notice that more co-workers are noticing you’re work!

The most classic example of brilliant consumer marketing for a business product was done by Intel in the 1990s. The Intel microprocessor was simply an ingredient in computer products sold under other brand names. Most people couldn’t have told you what a microprocessor was, but the clever commercials and ad campaigns had people entering electronics mega stores demanding computers with Intel Inside!

This strategy worked for Intel, but how can it work for your company. Here are 3 bits of food for thought when trying to decide if a consumer marketing campaign can help meet your company’s business goals for your B2B product or service.

3 Bits of Food For Thought on B2B via B2C

1. End users: Does your company sell a product or service to other businesses that ultimately have a consumer end user? For example, if your company sells spa oils used for massages or products or services companies give to employees as benefits it can make a lot of sense to market directly to the individuals who choose where to make a massage appointment or which company to work for based on their benefits packages.
2. Everyone’s a Consumer: Every person who orders and signs off on purchasing business products is a consumer themselves. Do the people who purchase from you at the businesses you sell to live typical individual consumer lives? Maybe hitting them at work and at home with your messages will help them to remember you.
3. Bottom Up Approach: Enterprise software is a great example of this. Many companies have an IT executive or chief business officer of some kind  who chooses which software will be used by the company, even very technical software or hardware that will be used by the most technically knowledgeable employees. The individuals who will use the software are usually the people who know best what they actually need. Marketing to these individuals can encourage them to request your products from those with the purchase authority.

When thinking of using business to consumer marketing tactics to increase demand of your business to business products, consider the people who actually use your product or service after a business buys it as influencers. Get them to talk about you and demand that the company they work for, or purchase a service from, buys from you.

Startups and small businesses who are trying to do much of their marketing internally are the most susceptible to brand messes. Usually it’s a matter of these companies trying to save money as they get up and running or grow, but by not giving brand look, feel and voice consistency enough importance they tend to end up with a hot mess! Their messaging across copy, collateral and elevator pitches tends to be inconsistent and look like it’s representing multiple companies. In some case, their materials might not even look or sound like they’re talking about the same product!

If you’re messaging is inconsistent, than your employees won’t be giving consistent visions of who you are or what your product does. This effort to save money is more likely to cost you more than what you would save by creating materials in-house as needed by whomever needs it.

Let There Be a Guide

I recommend that early-stage startups and small businesses take the needed time to craft a comprehensive messaging and branding document. If you need to save money by creating marketing pieces in house and you can’t afford to hire a full-time person to create those pieces for everyone in the company, than this document can act as a guide in helping multiple employees or contractors you hire for specific pieces to stay consistent.

To include in the messaging and branding guide, I find these 12 items to be the most helpful:

1. Mission: The company’s present moment, broad spectrum goals for success and how they’ll achieve it.
2. Vision: The company’s future, broad spectrum purpose in the market space.
3. Value Proposition: A statement on why a consumer should buy your specific product/service as opposed to a similar/competitor offering.
4. 5 to 8 Key Company Messages: Statements that communicate, to target audiences, who you are, what you are selling and what differentiates you from competitors. These along with product/service messages will be the guiding ideas behind items like website copy, advertisements, case studies, sales presentations, etc.
5. 3 to 6 Key Product Messages: Statements that convey how the product works, what need or want it fulfills, how it fulfills it, features, etc. These should be in addition to the company messages but should be more specific to the actual product itself.
6. Benefits: A list of the benefits buyers would get from your product. If you are a B2B company than these should include benefits to your customer and the end user of the product.
7. What It Is, What It’s For and How it Works Descriptions: These should be short paragraphs that cover exactly what the titles imply.
8. Target Audience Description: The reason you’re putting this together is because you can’t hire an agency or a marketing content professional to create all of your collateral, so include a short, basic description of each audience you are trying to speak to within your different collateral pieces to help the people who will create the pieces understand exactly who the pieces should be aimed at.
9. Corporate Positioning: A summary of how you want to be positioned in the market space based on knowledge of the industry, competitive information, company objectives, etc. This ties directly to company strengths and reinforces objectives and strategies.
10. Brand Personality: Create a list of descriptions about your brand as if it were a person. What traits would it have? How do you want people to view your company/product?
11. Brand Voice: A short description of how your brand would speak if it was a person. How do you want people reading about your product to think of your brand? Example: If your audience is mostly lawyers who want to feel that your company is serious and solid in your market stance, perhaps you want everything written in very formal English, without slang or creative sentence styles.
12. Brand Design Theme: Create some basic design templates for documents, presentations and any other types of collateral you’re considering. Choose a color scheme and font style that everyone should use when they create collateral. Be specific about heading styles and bullet points, etc.

There are many more things you could do, but as a general guide for multiple people who are not professional designers, writers or marketers, this should help you keep some consistency across your public-facing materials.