Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Secret to Being Liked

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By Mac Logue

As a parent of interested kids, I get a lot of questions that defy quick, superficial answers. It’s not unlike answering questions from clients whose money depends on the answer. Recently, one of my kids asked me, “what’s the secret to being liked?”

With Abigail, the typical pabulum about “being yourself” simply won’t do. So I told her about the inverse relationship between being interested in other people and your own popularity. When you meet someone for the first time, ask five questions about the other person before you say anything about yourself. It’s a strange dynamic, but the more you get someone talking about themselves (not hard to do) the more they begin to like you.

On the flip side, how many times have been to a party and couldn’t escape that person who would not shut up about themselves? It’s enough to make you stuff baby corn in your ears to drown out the boring.

Sounds like most corporate marketing doesn’t it? The principle is the same. Since the discovery of marketing, companies have spent literally billions of dollars talking to themselves. And no one is listening. If you find in your own marketing that you talk almost exclusively about yourself and how awesome your products or services are — you’re being that guy at the party.

Try this instead: talk about your customers. Talk about what matters to them. Talk about how they can make more money or simplify their lives or look younger. Talk about what they stand to gain from buying from you — and only then talk about how your product or service does what you promise.

It’s a simple formula that works in personal relationships as well as business. To be liked (or bought from) care more about the other person. Ask questions about them; talk about what interests them. And they’ll remember you and like you and, assuming your product is a viable alternative to other choices, most likely buy from you.

We have two sayings around here that, if you are a client, you have no doubt heard me say. First, everyone’s favorite subject is me. Find the me in your sales cycle that matters most and talk about what matters to that person.

Next, we love to say (because it’s true) that people never remember what you say, but they never forget how you make them feel. As you approach your marketing, it’s a good philosophy to keep in mind.

The role of blogging in your in-bound marketing strategy

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By Mac Logue

Blogs. While they are seemingly everywhere these days, it’s impossible to know exactly how many active blogs there are in the world, but it’s safe to say that the number is in the hundreds of millions. With all of that noise on the Internet, why should your business be adding more to the conversation? The answer to that question is easy to understand. Creating an effective blog, on the other hand is not so simple. Continue reading →

The Right Font

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By Geoff Johnson

Being a designer, I am all about fonts. I could spend hours on myfonts.com typing in my name, trying to find the coolest rendering of “Geoff Johnson”. Using cool fonts is one of the big things that drew me to being a graphic designer in the first place. But what about fonts for the web? What really used to bug me about designing for web is that I was so limited by the choices available.

It used to be that as a designer you were limited to a select few standard fonts, Helvetica, Arial, Times New Roman, Courier (you can see the rest of the list here: Web Safe Fonts) If you wanted to vary from that list you would have to export your characters as an image, like a jpeg or png file. Aesthetically this wasn’t a problem; it became an issue however, when it came to Search Engine Optimization. Images aren’t visible to the bots the way text is, and the lack of text tends to reduce your rankings.

Image-based text is also a problem if you use a Content Management System and want to be able update text on the fly. You can’t simply type in your text. Instead you have to convert your text to an image in a program like Photoshop and upload it to your site. Clearly a waste a time and a pain in the anatomy.

But the good news is, we’re no longer limited to a handful of web-friendly typefaces. New products like Typekit, and Fontdeck have emerged in the recent years, making a designer’s life easier but more importantly allowing for better looking, more branded sites.

These services offer designers the ability to use any display typefaces, without having to save them as images. And now content on the sites we design both looks good and is searchable by Google’s bots. This helps our clients tremendously, both from a brand perspective and with SEO, because our sites are both aesthetically beautiful and completely functional — attributes every business needs.

 

One of our favorite ads ever

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There is so much to love about this spot. The casting. The music. The concept. Black and white. The surprise. With no voiceover, no text (until the very end) — it communicates with undeniable strength the benefits of “buying” this brand.

This is a low-res video, but that doesn’t diminish the spots power. It’s quite possible I’ve posted this before, but it’s worth seeing again.

The Power of Giving

How to leverage your social media following into more leads

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By Brittany Moore

Every company has heard the buzzwords: SEO and social media. In fact, last year the Harvard Business Review surveyed 2,100 companies and found that 79 percent use or plan to use social media. You know that you should be doing something but you’re not sure exactly what. You’ve been told that you need a social media “presence” because your customers are “out there.” Well, that’s all very true but most companies stop short of what will add to their bottom line.

First of all, you can’t just create a Facebook page or start tweeting 23 times a day and expect to make an impact on your brand or company. You have to have followers and you have to know what they like if you ever want them to “like” you. A saying at our office is: “When a person talks to themselves, people call it crazy… but when a company talks to itself, people call it marketing.”

Whatever your message, don’t make it about you and your company; don’t go on endlessly about how awesomely awesome you are. Make your communications about your customer. Focus on what they want and tie your marketing strategy steadily to it.

Make a list of the top 10 questions your prospects and clients ask you. As you write, address those questions. Answer them honestly, not with a self-serving answer, but with advice/expertise that is useful to your reader.

Post once a week to your blog and then post links to to your social media networks too. So many companies don’t do this and it’s a significant mistake because social media sites are excellent to help drive traffic to your site. And each person that comes to your site is a potential lead. Converting that traffic into leads, though, takes work. This is the next step where many digital marketing plans fail.

When you’re sending your Facebook fans to your blog, make sure you have Calls To Action (CTAs) around your blog posts. These CTAs should make an offer to your web visitors (aka prospects and clients), and it should be an offer of value.

Once a prospect clicks on the CTA, they’ll be taken to a landing page where they must give their name and email to receive the offer. Voila! A lead is born. The key is in the offer itself. I doesn’t matter  if it’s a whitepaper, ebook, video, demo or a webinar. Make it educational and beneficial to your prospects so that they will feel that the exchange of their name and email is fair. Also, make sure you add tracking codes to your site so that you can see where you get the most traffic referrals, then integrate your CRM with your inbound website leads so you can track lead-to-customer conversions. Before you know it, you can say this web visitor came to our blog from LinkedIn, clicked on a CTA, downloaded a whitepaper and became a lead in our CRM, now they’re one of our top clients. It may seem like a mouthful but you know what they say…money talks!

Responsive Web Design: flexibility built into your code

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By Geoff Johnson

There is no doubt that the iPhone and iPad have revolutionized the way we interact with design. With these devices, people can now grow and shrink images, surf the web, and play video games with just the swipe of their forefinger. With all of this neat technology, it also places a higher expectation on websites and web design. It is true that every year more and more people are accessing your site through devices with screens no larger than 3”. So now a site that looks gorgeous on a 13” macbook, sadly falls apart when it is pulled up on an iPhone.

So what is the solution? As a business owner do you have to have two budgets for a mobile version AND a regular version of your site?

I think you will be relieved to hear that the answer is no. Recently, I’ve been reading a book by Ethan Marcotte about a new way of designing websites called Responsive Web Design. The theory is that you design your site around a flexible percentage based grid, instead of finite pixel based grid. This allows for your site to scale, and reorganize itself based on the size of your browser. This is huge, because now as a designer, I can start planning for how your site is viewed on the smallest possible device like an iPhone without having to worry about it breaking down. The best part is that a responsive website is only one site. You don’t have to have a budget to create an iPad, iPhone and regular version of a site. It is all taken care of in one version of code.

This is a topic of growing interest and many existing sites are using this technology. A beautiful example is the Boston Globe’s website: The Boston Globe

Go ahead and resize your browser, notice how it reacts to the change in your window. This technology is exciting and well worth considering when going in to the design process of your website.

Failures as a potential harbinger of useful insight

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By Mac Logue

So I’m reading a book called The End of Competitive Advantage for a client project. It’s a new and interesting read about the changes in business that have rendered our old strategic models obsolete. One line earl in the book prompted a thought. Talking about corporate strategy, the author said:

Clinging to older advantages is seen as potentially dangerous. Exits are seen as intelligent and failures as potential harbingers of useful insights.”

I find that view of failure interesting because, as my father used to say, if you aren’t failing occasionally you aren’t trying hard enough.

Most businesses aren’t looking for huge failures, of course. But in the digital age, failure is an everyday thing. What I mean is that with our enhanced ability to track everything we do, campaigns, programs, offers, calls-to-action — we test them all. Some score, some fail spectacularly, but we’re constantly “analyzing the analytics” and making adjustments on the fly so that failures don’t last — they point us in the direction of what works.

Now testing has long been a part of marketing. Direct marketers, especially, have historically tested every aspect of a campaign, refining everything from headlines to colors based on “what pulled best.” But that kind of testing was really only practical for people managing huge campaigns.

In the new digital world, we can test adwords, test offers, test colors, buttons, and position on a page to see which items people will click on. It’s not expensive and the results over time are compelling growth in the number of leads we generate and the number of customers we convert.

It’s a constant movement: execute, test, measure. Depending on the results you produce, you either invest more in what works or execute those elements of your campaign that fail in the literal sense and put them to the sword.

Think about that as you contemplate the analytics of your inbound marketing program. Are you failing enough but not too much? What are you learning in the process?

 

How to Create a More Profitable Customer Experience

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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.

  1. 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!
  2. 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.
  3. Answer this foundational question and work from here: What do you sell, how do you deliver it, to whom do you deliver it.
  4. 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.
  5. 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!

  1. 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?”
  2. Present your ideas to the integration team every few months and let them challenge, feed and implement a few key ideas at a time.
  3. 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

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“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.”