How to Create a More Profitable Customer Experience

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Mac Logue

By Jessica Phillips

Many of the conversations I have with my clients revolve around how to create a memorable, and ultimately a more profitable, customer experience. They know it’s important for B2C companies, but they don’t fully understand the benefits of providing a superior customer experience for B2B companies or how to go about creating this kind of experience.

Some clients think it takes a radically different approach to provide customers with a memorable experience, compared to B2C companies. I’ve found that it really isn’t all that different between the two segments and the same principles and research methods apply to both. After all, we’re still marketing to people, no matter which segment you fit in.

The very essence of your brand is made up of what people think about you (how you meet their needs and wants, the emotions they feel when interacting with you and the stereotypes associated with your brand). When we work with companies on refining and improving their customers’ experience, we follow a proven curriculum set in place by Disney Institute (http://disneyinstitute.com). We’ve added a few ideas to the process based on trial and error over the years, but here are a few things we’ve found to be very helpful.

Categorize your company into “core groups” (the core areas of operation…ie. Service, product development, employee training and recruitment, etc) and build teams that can focus on improving that core area. This team should be cross cultural, intentionally having members contributing and thinking outside of day-to-day roles For example, your product development team may be made up of your product analyst but also front line service employees, maintenance supervisor, director of HR, etc. Encourage an environment of ideas and thinking from everyone!
Establish an “integration team”. One group needs to be completely responsible for taking the ideas generated by all groups and weaving them together. They’ll analyze and prioritize the ideas from an operational perspective.
Answer this foundational question and work from here: What do you sell, how do you deliver it, to whom do you deliver it.
Identify your standards of service. What principles are core to everything you do, are your criteria for making decisions and how you measure service delivery.
Meet together in your core group once or twice a month to develop ideas. Most people that come to FitzMartin for help with this part just need learning how to create ideas – starting from a white sheet of paper and ending with a solid idea. Once they understand how to do this, they do incredible things with this process!

The first step is to study your customer and prospect groups through the lens of their needs, wants, frustrations, stereotypes of you/your industry, and emotions when they interact with your brand/industry. Start there. Start with the customer and the ideas will fall into place.

Also, do secondary research. See what others inside and outside of your industry are doing. Many of my clients are fixated on finding out what the competitors in their industry are doing and only using that as fuel for ideas. I would encourage you to look outside of your industry…study and secret shop companies you admire and who have had great success. And then find ways to shape what you learn to your business. Conduct surveys via social media, create a poll on LinkedIn, study keywords that are being searched in your industry, listen to conversations on industry forums. These are just a few ways to fuel your thinking!

Take the foundational thinking, customer information and your secondary research and ask “for each of these nuggets of information, how can I use it to exceed the customer’s expectation and build a favorable perception?”
Present your ideas to the integration team every few months and let them challenge, feed and implement a few key ideas at a time.
Continue this cycle, allowing members to roll off their team and new members to join. Maybe you even offer incentives for the best ideas generated…whatever you do, keep the energy and culture of ideas alive!

Why your Web site, inbound and outbound marketing strategies depend on one word: relevance

Posted on February 24, 2013 by Mac Logue

“Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible.”

Google Official Blog, February 24, 2011

Two years ago, Google made some significant changes to their algorithm (named Panda) for one simple reason. They wanted to increase the ranking of “high-quality sites” and lower the rankings of “low quality sites.” To quote the official Google Webmaster blog:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Since the rollout of Panda in February of 2011, there have been 24 updates to the algorithm, each designed to refine the results and further reward sites that create content that is relevant, original and valuable to searchers.

What Google has clearly said is that to be ranked high, you must be relevant to your audience. Be an expert, create content that adds value to your audience and Google will reward you. Try to game the system and Google will beat you down into oblivion.

So when creating content for your Web site, designing your pay-per-click or in-bound marketing strategies, it’s critical that you really understand what your audience finds important. What words and phrases are they searching? Build your content around the ideas your customers care about. Help your customers solve their problems or improve their own business. Be relevant.

The beauty of Google’s approach, of course, is that you should be doing this anyway because it’s the most effective way to sell. Whether you admit it or not, your customers don’t care as much about your products or services as you do. They do care about what you, your products or services can do for them.

And when you build your communications (in any form) in a way to convinces people that you are the best alternative to solving their problems, or making their lives better — they’ll buy from you.

Google will reward you for the same reasons. Another quote from the Google blog:

“Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals.”

FitzMartin is looking for an experienced designer…

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Mac Logue

You hear a lot of talk these days about creating jobs.…in every political speech of every color…jobs, jobs, jobs, blah, blah, blah. Well here’s something a little more concrete.

FitzMartin currently has an opening for a designer with 5+ years of experience; specifically, we’re looking for someone who can lead our interactive design efforts.

Naturally, we’re looking for someone with an excellent design skills. FitzMartin has a 20-year history of great design and we need someone who can add to it. We expect that this person can think conceptually and has the skills to take their concept through design all the way through production. We’re looking for a storyteller, someone who can help visually articulate our clients’ stories in a compelling form.

Given the state of the market today, we need someone with excellent interactive design skills. You won’t be programming (much) but you will be working with our developers to ensure that your finished product matches your vision. Like most agencies, we’re working more and more on web, mobile and app technologies. Of course, we still work with archaic forms like print, so you’ll need those skills too.

FitzMartin is a close-knit team. You’ll have a defined job here, but there will be plenty of opportunity to develop multiple skills. We like people who are curious, who enjoy learning new things and sharing what they know.

What attributes do we think you’ll need to succeed here? You’ll need to be someone who can both lead and work as part of a team. You’ll need to be both teacher and student. You’ll need to be able to think clearly and explain your ideas in a compelling way.

If we’re describing you, send us your portfolio and let’s talk. You can contact either Randal Snook or Mac Logue at 205.322.1010.

If you are curious, here is a link to our portfolio. To email your resume click here.

All marketing is content

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Mac Logue

There is some very good advice in this article. It’s a reminder that Google is smarter than anyone trying to trick their algorithms. Seriously, the only way to gain the favor of the search engines and earn a high ranking on organic searches is to provide good content. Be interesting to your audience. Talk about things they care about. Give them good, practical content that they find useful.

Don’t pretend to be relevant. Be relevant. But that’s the trick, because it requires actually being of value to your customers and that’s harder work than most of your competitors want to put in. Focus on the relationship — focus on your customers/prospects. Give them value and the search engines will find you.

SEO isn’t what you think it is

Greatness in copywriting

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Mac Logue

If you’ve been watching the Olympics, by now you’ve probably seen one of the Greatness ads from Nike. They are brilliant, as you would expect from W&K, but one ad in particular has me thinking about what “greatness” is in terms of copywriting.

The ad features Nathan, an overweight kid from Ohio in a single shot jog down a country road. The voice (performed brilliantly by Tom Hardy; Bane!) reads simply:

Greatness. It’s just something you made up. Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is a gift reserved for a chosen few. For prodigies. For superstars. And the rest of us can only stand by watching.

You can forget that.

Greatness is not some rare DNA strand. It’s not some precious thing. Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We’re all capable of it.

All of us.

While everything sounds better when spoken with an English accent, the language (and the economy of language) here are poetic.

But what makes this great advertising is the way it voices an idea that most people believe already. You may not have thought about it, or considered the idea in the way the ad presents it. But greatness is not standing on the medal platform, or seeing your name in next to the world record. Greatness is the daily grind, the will to do what must be done to reach a goal.

The art direction emphasizes both the brilliance of the language and the power of the idea. Shot in one take, it’s the essence of minimal — and a far cry from typical, especially for Nike.

Most of us can relate to Nathan. We can relate to the suffering, both physical and mental, he endures as he tries to change his circumstances. What he’s attempting is hard; soul-crusing hard. And it’s only done in the loneliness within ourselves.

The brilliance of this ad is its ability to show us what we already believe in a way that is both new and beautiful.

Side note: Nike is not one of the “official sponsors” of the Olympics. But with their creative, their media strategy and their athlete partnerships, they are certainly one of the most visible brands of these games.