Archive for the ‘All-inclusive Marketing’ Category

A Re-branding Project Plan

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Picture it, January 2002. A solo designer, just recovering from being laid-off, decides to give this freelancing thing a try. She sits at her rented desk and works up a logo using her name, and a business card. A fellow tenant helps her by building a website – it’s so cute with her dog on it.

Fast forward to summer, 2007 – she has a good reputation, four employees, many clients and a lot of experience under her belt. But, prospects and new colleagues still get the impression she’s a freelancer renting a desk. Her salesperson has trouble explaining that Faith Seekings is someone’s name and the firm is not a religious cult. She’s embarrassed by her brand and it’s time to change – new name and all.

Skip ahead again to December 2008 when the business has doubled, due partly to buying another, and the brand needed to mature again in look and messaging, to reflect the growth. No new name this time, but there’s an entirely different dog on the website.

I tell you this story because I not only re-brand clients regularly, but I’ve done it myself. Once you’ve decided to rebrand (see past post The Right Time to Re-brand), what would the steps involved be?

First, choose the right firm to do it.

If you are rebranding, at this stage you need more than a designer, you need a brand strategist and copywriter as well. A brand is more than a pretty logo, it’s how you tell your ideal clients who you are and why you’re different. That takes strategy and words, especially if there’s a renaming involved as well.

This doesn’t mean you have to go to a large firm, just one that offers this depth of service and experience. Ask for recommendations from colleagues, meet with at least three, make sure you look at their work and see diversity, yet evidence they can work with your kind of company (size, industry, etc). Don’t discount the importance of liking them and feeling good about communication style.

Our re-brand project plan

All design firms will have their own processes and approach, but would likely include the same basic principles as ours.

Step One: Look backward, look forward.

This would likely be covered initially in the discovery meeting, then in more detail – after we decide to work together. Look back at where you started and why you made the brand/design decisions you did. Review where you are now and what has changed in the interim – with your company, the competition, the marketplace, technology, etc. Then, look at where you want to be in three to five years. I give that time-frame because it’s not unusual to do at least a brand tweak every few years as things continually change. It also reduces the pressure of thinking you’re making decisions that have to work forever.

Step Two: Research, research, research.

Depending what you sign up for with us we may do a complete competitive analysis of your industry. At the least we use one of the best ways to gage how your company is seen: by asking existing ideal clients what they think about your firm, why they keep coming back and refer you. So they’re encouraged to be candid, I recommend having an outside (branding) team do it and explain that all results will be reported back anonymously. Once you’ve got your client’s permission, they set up calls and go. This may show things you need to change, but most often reveals strengths that the company didn’t realize they had, and what competitive advantage is most meaningful to your ideal client. See our May newsletter for more on this.

Step Three: Essential Message Session

This half day session uses the essential message, a method for uncovering your best competitive advantage, articulating it and generating a brand brief. It includes the closer look at your past and future goals from step one. There are interactive exercises to dig deeper into what core challenge your company really solves for your clients and all the ways you do it better than the competition. The research previously done plays a role by throwing new ideas into the discussion. It’s ideal for us not to have preconceived notions, so sometimes we swap step two and three.

From this session, both sides should have a rough positioning statement and a really good idea how the brand character is shaping up, with consensus. If a second session is needed, we book it. We should have enough of a creative brief to begin work on the tagline and brief for the logo.

Step Four: You won’t hear from us for a while

We then take everything we learned and results of the session away to work on. We may do further research or call with further questions. What we’ll come back with is a refined positioning statement and tag line options. The positioning statement is an internal statement meant to guide us in the rest of the branding, but can also turn into content for the website, your LinkedIn profile, or even your verbal introduction.

We also send a long list of tagline options with instructions like eliminating the ones that are definitely a no, highlighting the ones you like best and how to ask for feedback.

We consider both documents iterative. However, clear guidelines on rounds of revisions should be outlined at the outset. We gladly discuss and incorporate your feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and why for the next round.

I believe the positioning statement should never be ‘written in stone’ as the world changes and companies grow, it should do so with you. Ideally after a couple rounds we have a tagline direction nailed down if not the exact words, because then we can start the fun part.

Step Five: The fun part – my favourite book is the Pantone colour book.

I’m a designer at heart, this is the best part for me. With the brand character defined and a tagline selected, the design studio begins generating logo ideas. We present the first round in black and white because personal colour preferences and dislikes are strong, and can adversely effect the impression of a great design. We hate to see a good concept rejected because someone hates orange. We present two to three concepts (or more) including the tagline, with our recommendation and rationale. The same suggestions for getting feedback apply.

The client provides feedback with change requests, mix n’ matches, but definitely narrows down options. Next round or so we show colour options for the favourite logo (or two if it helps with decisions). Again, there may be alteration requests. Seeing it in context also helps finalize the wording of the tagline, if not yet final.

Step Six: A brand is born.

With a strong brand base of positioning statement, tagline and logo finalized, we deliver a package of logos in all formats, colours and file types you’d need. Perhaps a brand guidelines document, and anything you may need to trademark it. We can also then begin design and writing all the support elements the brand needs to be taken public, i.e. stationery, business card, website, brochures, marketing materials, etc. There’s more that needs updating with the new brand than you think (what about company cheques?), so it can be an ongoing process.

Please remember that a brand is much more than a logo. It’s every way your company interacts with the outside world – your website and marketing tools, how your team talks about the company, to how your receptionist answers the phone. This is where your strong, well-defined positioning and tagline really come in to play.

Common Marketing Challenges of B2B Marketers – Part I

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

B2B covers a broad range of products and services, so to pick some common marketing challenges is no easy task. The challenges can vary hugely depending on whether you are selling a product or a service, but one common characteristic for all types of B2B organizations is that they don’t invest enough in marketing.

Not big budgets, budgets set for impact

Some may argue that B2B companies often have a limited number of organizations that they can sell (or market) to, so they don’t require big budgets. Versus companies that are selling to the masses, it is true B2B marketers don’t require big budgets. However, the argument here is not for creating big budgets, but for allocating budgets that are big enough to allow your organization to “out shout” the competition. To stay in the prospects mind so that, when the time comes to purchase, your firm is high on the list of potential vendors. Ideally, to be looked at as being different and better than the competition, so in any pitch or bid situation, you come from a position of strength.

In categories that have only a handful of customers that may buy from them, the marketing plan and recommended spend is going to look a lot different than for companies that have hundreds or even thousands of prospects.

What is the right amount for a marketing budget?

So how does one decide what the appropriate spending levels are? A common approach is to look at the competition and figure out what they do and how much they spend, and to make sure you invest similar amounts and do more impactful things.Another approach is to put together a detailed marketing plan. If you do not have the right resources internally, outsourcing a plan can be a great way to bring rigor to the process, and to look at the possibilities from a fresh perspective. A good marketing consultant should be able to take your experience and industry knowledge, combine that with information about your market, your prospects and techniques that have worked in similar industries, and provide you with a disciplined plan that will deliver against your objectives. B2B marketers often lack the discipline to do a plan and execute it faithfully, let alone measure the results. No wonder spending levels are low!

The wrong way to go about setting the budget is to either base it on what was spent the year before, (unless that budget was set based on the methods described above) or what you think you can afford. Unlike rent or other expenses that are necessary evils, marketing should be looked at as a “spend to get” approach. If you are strategic, your marketing spending should pay back, sometimes many times the original spend.

Be aware

Incidentally, the organizations with the fewest prospects can often have marketing budgets that are much bigger than you would think. Marketing budgets that allow for sales to take decision makers on high-end trips, play regular golf games or go out to events on a regular basis.  Don’t get caught thinking the playing field is level without getting a full perspective on the decision making process from the customer’s viewpoint.

Social Media – How to Separate Personal From Business.

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Last week I participated in a panel discussion on social media for SugarCRM. One of the questions that came up was ‘how do you keep business and personal separate?’ The three panelists gave various answers, the main theme being whether used for business or personal, as a salesperson or an employee,  remember that it’s there forever so be careful, professional and aware.

However, a more advanced way to help keep them separate is to go in with a plan and share it with all company participants. Give them the tools and training they need to be successful in this new arena.

Don’t Just Dive-in – Social Media is a Marketing Tool

I’m often heard to say that using a social media platform is just like any other marketing tool. Before jumping in you should figure out who your target is, where to find them (Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?) and what they’re looking for from a company like you. You would use this information to strategize on the best way to communicate with them and use your marketing tools effectively.

Are you using social media to raise awareness, educate about your service or industry or stay in touch with existing customers? What are they doing there? What’s their pain?

Social Media and Your Brand

Also like any other marketing tool, you’d need to hold it up to your brand and consider it in relation to everything else you use, like your website, brochures, etc. Chances are you’ve developed a look, a voice, a style, and specific marketing objectives. Though social media is often more of a personal approach, corporate brand should apply here too.

Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Your plans for social media should include:

  1. Where you should focus efforts (Twitter?)
  2. What you should do there (ie: discussions on LinkedIn)
  3. What you should talk about, your angle
  4. How it fits in with other efforts
  5. What are the objectives and guidelines for our participants (ie: no personal political comments)

With this basic plan in place it will be much easier to keep business separate from personal.

Educate Your Team

Just as you provide brochures and help prepare presentations, give your people the guidance they need to represent your company using social media. Remember that if you’re asking your professionals to be active like blogging, they may not be aware of brand guidelines at all and need briefing. It doesn’t hurt to do a little awareness education with other employees as well so they know what you’re doing and a little guidance as to what you’d prefer they did or didn’t do with their personal accounts. You can’t control their personal accounts but it doesn’t hurt to say ‘because our message is ____, we’d prefer if you didn’t mention ____.’

Top 10 Elements Often Lacking in Marketing Materials.

Monday, June 28th, 2010

How many of them are lacking in yours?

Next to your actual sales force and your own undeniable powers of persuasiveness, web sites, corporate brochures and identity kits should be among your hardest working marketing tools.
In order to make sure you’re maximizing the power of these tools, we have put together a checklist of attributes which no self-respecting corporate identity package should be without.

1. Synergy With Your Company’s Overall Image.

This synergy is the key to building awareness of your company as a brand. Everything should look like everything else, because that’s what makes you look professional.

2. A Strong Essential Message.

This is the promise you make to your potential customers or clients, and it’s one of the most important pillars upon which your communications is built.

3. An appealing Look & Positive Feel…

that’s both ‘in character’ and inviting to read. People read things that look appealing and interesting. Anything else, they tend to ignore.


4. Obvious Corporate Identification.

It’s all the rage in the design world to play down logos. But that’s how most readers end up missing them.

5. Bad English Ain’t Good.

Bad grammar is running rampant in communications these days. Bad grammar can make you look like a not-so-bright, and therefore not-so-trustworthy company.

6. First Person Focus.

Never talk about your company in the third person. If you do, people will think you’re weird. Talking about your company in the first person naturally personalizes the communication and makes it more inviting for the prospect to read.

7. Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity…

in the use of supporting language and graphics. Remember, you know more about your business than anyone you are talking to. Showing respect for what they don’t know will always be rewarded.

8. A Positive Selling Attitude Throughout.

This is all about keeping the tone and manner of your communications positive, upbeat and on point, and one of the most important keys to stimulating response.

9. Testimonial & Case Study Support.

Your satisfied customers are, bar none, your best salespersons. Anything that quantifies results is going to be more meaningful to your readers than abstract notions or platitudes. You’ll be surprised how powerful these underused selling techniques can be.

10. Concrete Reasons Why The Prospect Should Be Doing Business With You.

Too many companies fill their communications with reasons why they are so great, but they seldom turn it around and give their prospects a real sense of what’s in it for them.

Why B2Bs Should Care About Optimization (SEO)

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Should I care about Search Engine Optimization for my B2B company? The answer is yes.

In recent years many clients have come to us with search engine optimization (SEO) as an item in RFP for websites. Once they see what it takes to really make a go of it, to compete for first page, they’re turned off. They think it is not important or relevant to their business after-all, or at least not enough to pay so much. ‘We’re B2b, we provide a professional service, not sell products. People find us through word-of-mouth, not Google.’ I used to feel that way myself, but now I’m a convert.

Social media has created reasons to care about SEO from both ends of the spectrum.

First, because we all know how much user generated content, blogs, review sites are out there, more and more people are using search to find information or do research. When you search you are most likely to land on a blog or such like. If you generate content, people will find it.

Second and from the other end, social media has made it easy for companies to create opportunities for their brilliant content to be found in search, by writing blogs, participating in other blogs or discussions, having key people involved and hopefully active on sites like LinkedIn and Twitter – which all leads back to your company site.

Two sides to Social Media

There’s the literal driving people to your site, but those link-backs to your site also tell Google you’re important and socially active.

There are a number of things Google evaluates to rank your site; like in-bound links, conversion forms, alt text for images, blogs, meta descriptions, etc. They change the algorithms all the time but recently made a higher than usual significant change placing importance on social relevancy. Do you have an active Twitter account associated with your domain? Etcetera.
So what this means is, it’s not hard to build a website with good search-ability right from the start, like conversion forms, alt text for images, meta descriptions, etc. but then why not use social media to generate the content to be found? Google is a hungry beast, give it something to gorge on.

By the way, I learned a lot of this stuff from brilliant Smojoe, who we hire to help Rapport clients learn to make that content more findable and use social media for search with really different and interesting campaigns.

How to Ask for Feedback

Monday, June 14th, 2010

At lunch today, my favourite writer told me a story about a client of ours whom she worked with while I was on vacation. She’s writing his brochure. After initial direction was approved, then a couple of back-and-forths between them, he took the draft to his advisory board for feedback. He got so many and such varied responses his head was spinning and couldn’t sleep that night.

We encourage clients to run their creative by an advisory board or, even better, ideal clients at exactly the stage our client did. However, if you simply say “what do you think,” the question is too open-ended. Here are some tips on how to get the most useful input.

This applies to anything from logos, to web design to any kind of content.

Give Them Some Background

Tell them who the audience is, how it will be used and what you were trying to achieve. For example, it’s going to a specific audience like financial controllers in large corporations (very different than the head of HR at a smaller company). It will be handed out at a tradeshow and you’re hoping to get meetings out of it. Also, tell them what specific result you are after, if applicable, like getting them to call directly versus sign-up through your website.

It helps to give a bit of background on your discussions with the creative team involved as well, like what led to the format or approach taken This may eliminate a lot of questions that can have you second-guessing yourself. Like ‘why didn’t you just do a tri-fold brochure’? You could pre-empt it by saying ‘we discussed doing a tri-fold brochure but realized it would be inserted into large folders and we also wanted to email it so…’

Consider sharing some of the market research that was done to help put it in context, like ‘client interviews indicated what’s most important to them is ______’

Create a List of Specific Questions

What about the piece is important to you – that a certain message get across? That people take a specific action at the end? That it builds a feeling of trust and stability or makes people feel warm and fuzzy? Use this as a guideline to come up with specific questions. Like, ‘did it make you feel warm and fuzzy?’ Same goes for concerns you have – ‘or did it seem too corporate’.

Also think about what you are sure of and don’t intend to change when framing questions. If you definitely like the design but are not sure about the colour, ask them specifically ‘what do you think of the colour?’ Tell them what message you are trying to convey and ask them if they get that from the design or copy. If not what did they get from it?

Broad Questions Are Okay

‘If you had one impression from this piece what was it?’

However, you may want to have follow-up questions ready. If you want it to convey that your services are delivered quickly because of the technology you’ve developed, and they got that, you could ask something like ‘but does it make our service sound cheap because it’s so fast?’

Make the Most of Your Community

Asking for feedback from people who represent your ideal clients or peers you trust for business advice is a great idea. Just prepare for it and know you may get some conflicting input. Don’t be reluctant to ask – most people feel privileged that you value their opinion.

Social media provides additional ways to get objective, anonymous and/or professional feedback. You can ask for feedback via the major channels like Twitter and LinkedIn, but there are also great places, both free, like Get Satisfaction or User Voice and professional/paid like EntreBahn (full version coming soon)

PS. It’s a great way to get a little social media exposure too.

Then What?

The best thing to do is gather the feedback and go over it with your creative team, who should be completely open to that. We’d discuss each bit, hold it against the creative brief and objectives, decide what’s important and what’s not, and make some executive decisions.

Marketing To Women. Contrary To Popular Male Belief, There Really Is A Difference

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

One of our clients has decided that they would like to do a campaign that targets women. As a man who professes to be in touch with the feminine psyche, (with female partners in and aside from business), my assumption was that I would not find all that much of a difference between marketing to men and women.

But the question of what the differences actually could be was intriguing so I decided do a little digging on the good old world wide web.

Now you have to be careful when you research anything on the web, because it is the great equalizer when it comes to information, and it’s really hard to separate the political agendas from the honest information, especially with issues like this. But like anything in life, if you dig around enough, you will start to see patterns of opinion.

Rather than bore you with the longer version of the results I found, I have distilled this research down to what I call “The 10 Commandments of Marketing To Women.”

What you will hopefully find as you read through it is that there is a high level of interconnectivity between all of these characteristics, which is not something you can always observe in men.

Here they are, in my opinion, the 10 most important things to keep in mind when marketing to women.

  1. Women Are Focused On Connections: They look for similarities as opposed to points of difference. They focus on creating cooperation, good relationships and ways to help each other.
  2. Women Trust Common Experience, as opposed to men who tend to put more faith in authority. The reason for this is that men think vertically as in hierarchies whereas women tend to think laterally as in common ground or level playing fields, where everyone can benefit.
  3. Women Prefer Win/Win Situations, as opposed to men who think win/lose. That is not to say they are less competitive than men, just competitive in a different way.
  4. Women Plan Ahead To Avoid Negative Outcomes. As a result women tend to be better long term thinkers and planners.
  5. Women Put More Time And Research Into Their Decisions. This means that if you are marketing to them, you are obliged to do a very thorough job of communicating information to them, as they will take it all into account.
  6. Women Are More Loyal To Those With Whom They Do Business. This has to do with the fact that women are simply much more confident in their decisions, whereas with men, not so much.
  7. Women Refer More Often Than Men. This is an adjunct to 6. It’s a lot easier for women to be good and frequent referrers, because they are more confident in the decisions they make in the first place and because it is more in their communal nature to recommend products and services they are happy with to others.
  8. Women Are Much More No-Nonsense Than Men. If a woman has an objection to something, she will tell you about it and expect you to address it immediately. She is a big believer in testimonials, as opposed to marketing hyperbole because she has highly developed B/S meter.
  9. Women Prefer Stories Not Facts. To women, stories are more memorable than features and benefits. She will relate stronger to stories involving people’s experiences with your product or service. This makes an emotional connection that can motivate them to take action. This means that things like testimonials and product reviews are something they will take a good deal of interest in.
  10. Women Believe That Quantity Is Not Quality. Women tend to look at just about everything in their lives from a qualitative perspective. Quality of life. Quality of service. Quality of products. Quality of experience.

An Wisened Man’s Perspective

Now being a man writing this post naturally puts me at a disadvantage. Because on the one hand, you could look at the aforementioned things to keep in mind when marketing to women and think, well OK, that’s the man’s point of view.

But then I would have to politely correct you because the sources I used to derive this list all come from blogs and web sites that are run by women. Just wanted to clarify that point.

Now if you’re a woman out there reading this, very little here is going to come as a surprise. But if you’re a man, most of this is quite a revelation…at least it was to me. It might be worth reading a couple of times, and seeing if there aren’t some things we men could do to be more like women. Maybe then the world would be less of a ‘dog eat dog’ place than it is now.

Blogging for Professional Services: Make a Plan and Make it Easy

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Life Before Blogging

Before blogging, lawyers, accountants and consultants left the marketing work to the marketers. Yes, the management team would work with the marketing team to determine what the firm should stand for and be best at, but beyond that, there was little to do but wait for the marketing campaign to start.

Life After Blogging

Based on the need for “top 5” placement for search, suddenly, every website needs a blog to protect its rankings. And who would be better equipped to do a blog than a professional services firm? Professional services firms are full of subject matter experts that can gain interest and help clients and prospects by blogging about the things that their clients care about.

Except those same experts are often getting paid $500- $1,000 an hour (or more) to do client work. And if the marketing budget includes internal time…things can get really expensive, quickly. Or if the professionals in the firm don’t think blogging helps build business, the challenges can be even greater.

To significantly increase your chances of getting great blog content from your internal experts make it as easy as possible by using the following techniques.

Top 5 Techniques to Get Your Best Bloggers Blogging

  1. Get buy-in. There is no use even starting a blog unless your subject matter experts agree that a blog can and will help build business. A blog is one of the most easily accessible lines of communication a company has, providing exposure to people that actually care about what your experts have to say. People that could easily become future clients.
  2. Solicit help from subject matter experts that are good at writing and communication. Willingness and talent are two different things. If your experts are keen, but not very good at articulating their views, the time spent getting a decent blog post can increase exponentially. If your most expensive talent can create a blog post in 15 minutes, versus someone less adept taking several hours, go for the quick hit.
  3. Create a master plan for the year. How many blog posts should there be? How many contributors? Is there anything happening in your industry that will be big news during the course of the year? What other topics will gain interest, provide value, and help build awareness of your firm’s expertise?
  4. Make the “technical” side of blogging easy. Assign an internal proof reader (or hire an external). Provide coaching on how to do blog entries, or, if your experts are not at all technical, have someone technically oriented post the blog (or outsource). Get your support team to find appropriate pictures. If all else fails, have your expert verbalize their opinions and have someone else write them down. Don’t forget to enhance the blog for search. That too can be outsourced.
  5. Be clear about your objectives and celebrate your successes when those objectives are met. Are you trying to be one of the top 5 firms on a Google search for corporate lawyers in your market? Are you trying to gain clients through your website? Do you want your experts to be quoted in the press to build credibility? Whatever your objectives are, it is critical to keep people engaged and committed to making your corporate blog into a key source of information. That will only happen if there are goals, and you are achieving them.

What It Takes To Be Creative

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

What does it take to be creative? To be faced with a blank page time and time again knowing that your clients business could rise or fall based on how you fill it.

In a way, it really depends on who you are. I have learned, from many years of experience, that great ideas can come from just about anywhere or anyone. And even the most ‘non-creative’ individuals on the planet will come up with at least one great idea in their lives. Because ideas are the expression of inspiration itself.

Sometimes they just fly in out of the blue, hitting you when you least expect it. At other times it can be the result of a brainstorming with other people, which, depending on the people, can be real labour or a ton of fun.

A few of the key qualities that most creative people have in common are a  natural and abiding curiosity about what motivates people and a strong interest in the popular culture: ie new products, new services and new cultural phenomena.

But the most important quality that any creative person can possess is salesmanship.

Inspiration VS Realization

While it’s true that anybody can get a great idea, not everyone is capable of actually filling that blank page and bringing their ideas to life in a way that will actually stimulate the audience to buy or, at the very least, find out more about the product or service being offered.

This process often requires a couple of people: a writer who can express the idea and make it easily understood in words and a designer or art director who can enhance that idea and make it into something that the audience will really want to eTeamwork means  fitting togethermbrace. The chemistry between the writer and the designer needs to be on the same wavelength, otherwise the creative process will end up being stilted and often times ineffectual.

In addition to being compatible with each other, the art director and the writer must also have a good feel for each other’s craft. Because while good art directors are not often good writers, they know good writing when they read it and the same holds true for writers and design.

A Relatively New Phenomenon

The art director/writer team concept in communications is actually a relatively new one and can be traced back to the beginning of the modern era of communications in the early 1960s when an art director named Helmut Krone and a writer named Bill Bernbach started working together in an equal partnership on the Volkswagen business.

Before that time, the writer was the boss and the designer was basically a tool for the writer to use. In fact they were actually called ‘wrists’. However as the development of modern communications progressed, design grew in importance, a balance between these two disciplines became both necessary and desirable.

Choosing The Right People For The Project

In our shop, there are a multitude of creative talents available for any given  project. Putting the right talent with the right project is an art in itself. Different writers have different styles: some are more comfoVariety of  Style allows for more fullfillment rtable writing speeches and presentations than advertising, brochures, web sites or TV scripts. Art directors are the same: some are extremely good at advertising, some are good at publications and others skilled in the e-market, but very few can do it all.

In order for us to maximize results for a client we make it our business to work  with a diverse range of talented and experienced creative people and from this pool, choose the creative talent that is best for the project. This in turn, can maximize the ROI because the people we choose have a greater understanding of what is required and get to the heart of the project faster and more effectively.

Is It Good To Specialize In One Area?

Again it depends on who you are. There are a number of areas such as pharmaceuticals and certain types of technology, where specialized skills can
really be a benefit. The downside of specialization is the number of conflicts of interest that you can potentially run into, which can limited your growth potential.

At Rapport, we choose to be more diverse in the kinds of businesses we work on. This may have a lot to do with the fact that we have a number of people in our sphere who are highly experienced in a wide range of communications areas and business sectors.

But more importantly it has to do with the fact that we are all true creative people and as such embrace the challenge of facing the blank page and filling it with strong, focused ideas that help our clients build their businesses.

Because as a very wise and successful advertising man named Chester Bowles once said, “It’s Only Creative, If It Sells.”

They used to say it takes seven points of contact to make a sale…

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

These days that number is much higher due to the massive amounts of sales messages we see in email and on the web. Even in the B2B space – there are lots of newsletters and Google ads, LinkedIn messages, blog posts, etc. Even if that number is now 50, the key is still the same: the more and more kinds of points of contact the better.

What are points of contact?

Any time or way in which someone comes into contact with your company. Including: business card, networking, call from your office, newsletter, website, they see you speak, an ad, blog posts, articles you write, Twitter messages, etc.

The reason I say the more kinds the merrier is because, for example: if they met you once and only continue to receive your company newsletter, it gets monotonous and they start ignoring it. Meanwhile, if they also see an ad, an update pops-up on LinkedIn, then notice you’re speaking as an expert, or spot your brochure on a colleagues desk, then get the newsletter again; suddenly you are top of mind for whatever you do. Plus, you provide more opportunities for them to sell you to decision makers and more ways to refer you (ex: send your newsletter to a peer). You provide more opportunities for them to see your brilliance and understand all of what you do.

I want to do something bold!

This is what a very action-oriented and adventurous client said to me. Doing a specific campaign, something one-time and flashy is great for bringing people into your funnel – the most fun projects for Rapport actually. However, if you succeed in bringing people in, then what? You need to have other points of contact ready to go to keep them engaged and coming back, or leading them to your pre-sale action step. For this particular client once she brings them in en masse, she needs to build trust with them to move to the next step in the buying cycle, so we have to make sure mechanisms for doing that are there to support the initial big effort.

Sounds like a lot of money and effort.

This is also why variety is good. The best thing to make it easier is include items that happen more automatically and can impact a large number of people at once, like a newsletter. The second thing is to decide what marketing things you’re going to do and then plan and budget for them over a quarter, if not a year. An action plan really makes things much less daunting.

Remember, if you don’t plan for and support one effort with other points of contact, you’re probably wasting time and money on the first one anyway.

Bring all that marketing together.

Be strategic and smart. Spend your time and money wisely by planning, making sure you’re talking to ideal clients in the right way, but also by ensuring all your points of contact are leading prospects on a consistent and compelling path towards your pre-sale action step. Rapport has developed a great tool for helping you do this: the Rapport Marketing Map.