How do you add value in your marketing? Have you thought about it? To be effective in Content or Educational Marketing you must add value as defined by the customer.  I want you to steer away from your first thought, which is more than likely your product or service, but instead think about your marketing material. For your Content marketing material to be effective, I believe it must have 4 components:

Value Added: Your marketing needs to add additional knowledge or be a reinforcer of your product or service to your customer. A blog or commenting on LinkedIn are several online examples. It can be done in traditional advertising and marketing. Using a 2-step advertising strategy and offer something of value versus trying to coerce them into buying a product. Especially consider your marketing message in each step of your marketing process. I believe that if you are effectively using the Pillars of Lean Marketing House properly that you need to increase the value of your offering as you walk someone through the process. You must also segment your list during the process so that the perceived value is also recognized.    

Quality:  If you look at marketing in today's world, I believe authenticity is sometimes more important than a professional full color ad in your trade magazine. People want to become connected, just review some of the YouTube videos of BelndTec and the Will it Blend series. Variability is the lager culprit of quality. It goes without saying, your marketing should be professionally looking, but I believe the biggest problems with quality is variability.  It confuses the message to your customer. When you dilute your marketing message not only by confusing advertising but sometimes being in the wrong place, even with the wrong customer, can send mixed messages to your target market.

Time: Delivering your message when a customer needs it, is imperative. Before or after the proper time reduces the value tremendously. Few customers will put it in a file and save it for when they need it. We are simple on information overload – ALL THE TIME. The timeliness of your message is important to understand. You seldom can do this without understanding your customers buying cycle and the needs they have during that cycle.

Cost: This is a little of a 2-way street here. One you must consider your own cost and the ROI on doing the particular piece. You have to determine if a Super bowl Ad is worth it. However, when I consider the marketing piece I am going to employ, I like to think of it in a different way. Is the content something that the customer would pay for? If this does not raise the bar on your marketing, you are doing a lot of things correct. If you had a free whitepaper to download, why not sell it on Amazon for $2.00. Is is worth it? Is not relinquishing my e-mail address and giving you permission to market to me worth $2.00.  Look at your marketing material and put a value to it! Better yet, ask your customer if there is a value to it? Would it be great if your customer was willing to pay for your marketing?

Related Information:

Value Stream Mapping

The Pillar Worksheet

Lean Marketing House Overview – Video

Related E-books

Technorati Tags: lean,marketing,content,value stream

When those old guys say stuff, you should listen!

I am working and creating some examples for the Lean Marketing House, and I wanted to create several A3 reports on several pieces of the foundations. As I was struggling to get started, I remembered what my first Lean teacher told me: Start with 5S so that you don't spend your time on anything wasteful and then do Standard Work. Most people know what 5S is but Standard work may confuse a few. Standard work is a simple written description of the safest, highest quality, and the most efficient way known to perform a particular process or task.

There is no secret to standard work. Watch several people do the same task and see the difference. Is there much variance built into it? Why would I care about this in marketing? Just using the procedure for creating an ad or a direct mail piece. If there is a lot of variance in the production do you think the schedule will be met? More importantly, will the best use of creative time be used or are you the type that works better under pressure!!! The key to standard work is keeping it clear and simple, so staff can quickly and accurately complete their work.

When I started doing the standard work for a procedure there really was not one in place. I know it sound kind of corny, but really go to try to create an A3 report without a standard, it was next to impossible. I thought an A# was supposed to make it easier. But the old guy was right, you have to know what you are doing before you improve on it. The photo of a Standard Work Template is provided by Systems2win.

As Taiichi Ohno said - "Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen."

Related Post;
Lean Marketing House Foundation

5S - I did a set of stupid Videos on 5S in marketing a while back.

How much planning is enough - Use Lean and Standardize

Value Stream Mapping

Technorati Tags: lean,5s,standard work,lean kaizen

Marketing Idea of the Week!

I was reading Success Coaching U Blog and Joe wrote an article about Ready, Aim, Fire. Good headline, you already can guess what the headline is about, Target Marketing. I remembered a piece of advice I received from another Duct Tape Marketing Coach on targeting your direct mail, which I call the Machine Gun approach. For obvious reasons, I won’t disclose the source, but the following statistics were shared:

I don't have a success story, I have a sobering story. Here it is:
   Number of pieces mailed: 10,000
   Response rate: 1%
   Number of inquiries: 96
   Number that you manage to reach by phone to qualify: 70
   Cost of qualifying by phone, per inquiry: $30
   Number who turn out to be qualified leads (20%): 14
   Total cost of qualifying ($30 X 70): $2,100
   Campaign cost of $10,000 + phone qualifying cost = $12,200

Total cost of $12,200 divided by 14 qualified leads = $871.42. In other words, you must spend $871.42 to get to each lead who needs your product or service, can afford it, has authority to buy, and is ready to buy now. Not so good for a small business....

I will call this method the Machine Gun Marketing. Another method of Machine Gun Marketing is the Marketing Idea of the Week.  You have an Ad Rep call on you and they have this special 3 for 2 deal. Plus they have this even that they will be attending and handing out another 1,000 pieces of whatever they are selling. Oh yeah, you will also be exclusive to your area of expertise and we will even create the ad. What a deal! But….you will have to do something by Thursday, this being Tuesday. Sounds like a great idea?

If it is not part of your overall marketing strategy, if it not targeted, and I mean really targeted, and you have extra cash in your marketing budget that you were just clueless on how to spend it and you have no collateral material supporting it and you cannot create the ad yourself(a two-step ad, by the way), and you already know how you are going to measure it and….. I have asked Ad reps, that I do not respond to this type of marketing, many have stopped calling. I wonder why…has their machine gun jammed or just ran out of bullets? 

 

Technorati Tags: Target Marketing,Ideal Client,Direct Mail,Advertising

Value Stream It’s just not about the Value

Applying Value in your Marketing process is not the only thing that is important. In today’s marketing managing the stream is becoming equally more important. I alluded to this concept when I discussed E-mail providers in a previous post. I concentrated on the value and the touch points within your Marketing Hourglass. Just as important though is the Stream or Flow of the process. Without managing this, you will end up creating a great deal of wasted effort in your marketing process.

Of course when I start discussing flow, I am going to start discussing Theory of Constraints. In your marketing process, you will have numerous constraints but Goldratt claims that at any given time, there is only one constraint. That constraint is much like the neck of an hourglass and will limit the entire system. Actually, if it is well managed you could throttle your process accordingly (We only wish we could that). Simply doubling the efforts in a constraint could be the easy solution and may just move the constraint to another area. However, we operate in a more complicated world than that. Something else usually cases something else to happen.

What is that something else? It is the marketplace. What we see in our constraints may not be problems but indicators. If we treat the perceived problem without really determining the root cause we just may go in a merry-go-round. It would be like just adding sales people. You could double your sales capacity and that may or may not increase sales. In fact, what typically happens is additional responsibilities are given to salespeople and you off-load other stages of your Marketing Hourglass to them without increasing sales. You did not find your root cause. The good or bad part is that your indicator will return because the constraint really never went away.

David Armano just wrote a blog post on Dynamic Signals for Business and how rapidly dynamic signals are transmitted and received. He discusses how Google has organized the Web by figuring out who has authority, but now the real-time Web behaves differently. It is about trending topics, and SEARCH JUST CAN’T REACT QUICK ENOUGH. He goes on and discusses how he receives trending information, and what they mean to him.

So marketing today has to address value and the content they are distributing. However, as importantly, they have to address the time or the stream of their marketing system. The acceleration or throughput is extremely important. Creating systems within our process that are efficient and propels customers through the Marketing Hourglass or Sales Cycle is imperative. Our days of leaving non-responsive customers on our mailing list, online or offline are ending. Creating advertising to the masses and expecting a reasonable return have already ended for small and maybe even medium size businesses. These statements are not meant to say that we only market to someone for 90 or 120 days and that’s it. It is more inline that we have to create interactive platforms that allow our customers to interact at their leisure, their timing and at their discretion. A good description of pull marketing, but how do you manage a stream?

You must understand your Marketing Stream well enough to have a throttle. You must know here your constraint is, maybe even on a seasonal basis. You must address indicators that are built into your process and not built into month-end reports. I look at my Google analytics daily. If I see web traffic dropping from referral sites, I realize that I am spending too much time pushing my message versus participating with others.

What are the real-time indicators within your business? Do you have a monitoring system that lets you know? Do you adjust your marketing message accordingly? Are you improving your stream with better information to qualify yourself to the customer? If you are proving a higher value of information to the customer, does that propel them through your marketing hourglass?

If you believe that your referral process is a sub-standard or your constraint, it may be a way to create an immediate impact in your process. Applying a couple of these principles to the bottom of the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass in the refer stage. If you worked in this area alone and increased testimonials and referrals, what would it do for you? Could you reduce the time spent in your hourglass? Do you give every customer the opportunity to refer and to provide testimonials?  Try a few of ideas and see if you can get a handle on your throttle.  

P.S. I have a Lean your Marketing thru Referral Power Group starting soon!

Technorati Tags: Value Stream,Referral Flood,Duct Tape Marketing,Marketing Hourglass

Get Rid of Your Marketing Vision Statement and Address the NEED!

Most organizations try to develop a meaningful marketing vision statement designed to guide their action for today, tomorrow and in the future. The vision statement serves as a platform for all their marketing goals.  Armed with a vision, you establish your marketing goals, which are time-sensitive and detailed orientated. We send the goals through the SMART procedure to make sure that they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-specific. 

Duct Tape Marketing addresses the marketing vision in the book and further defines it in the Marketing Plan Pro software by using these three components:

· Goals: list the significant personal, business, strategic, and tactical goals of your marketing plan

· Marketing purpose: describe the greater purpose that the execution of your marketing plan and the growth of your business will fulfill.

· Marketing visual: write a paragraph describing a picture of this business as you would like a customer to experience it in a perfect world.

Back in April, I wrote a blog discussing the Marketing Vision, and as I implemented the Lean Marketing House, my thoughts about a vision statement started to evolve differently. I studied the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass and used it as the Pillars in the Lean Marketing House. I segmented each Pillar based on the different customer channels that were required. However, I kept pondering because it still seemed to be missing a very important ingredient and even formulated the vision that each channel needed. The funny thing was that the answer was there all the time. It was obvious, very obvious.

The problem was that our vision statements are internally focused. Marketing is about the customer, it’s not about us. Your vision statement needs to be a definition of the NEED that you serve for the client. John Jantsch author of Duct Tape Marketing has always defined marketing as “Getting someone with a Need to know, like and trust you. That was further developed and expanded in the Marketing Hourglass to include the other steps of Try, Buy, Repeat and Refer. However, somewhere along the line the NEED disappeared.

The NEED is the vision and for each customer segment or Pillar if you are using the Lean Marketing House. Defying that need clearly takes quite a bit of effort, but I would certainly start by using  the Fishbone Diagram or the 5 Y’s to determine the actual need. It may even get a little more difficult in that and the use of Goldratt’s Logical Thinking Process could be used. However, the NEED must be defined and your ability to solve that NEED must become crystal clear in your Marketing NEED statement.

What NEED do you solve for the client? Put that at the head of the Fishbone and address the different causes. If your customer understands this message, and he should if you do it right(it is his NEED), your marketing may become extremely simplified. Even for the future, you will be thinking about how your customer’s NEED will be changing, and what they will NEED.

So would you rather go to market with a clear VISION or a clear NEED statement?  

Gathering Information For Your Plan

Affiliate Post By Palo Alto Software, Inc.

A common problem people encounter when writing their business plan is finding information about their business industry and competitive companies. Fortunately, in recent years the Internet has made information gathering simple and easy, but sometimes the best information is found much closer to home, with real people, in real time.

Always take a look at other businesses similar to your own, as a very good first step. If you're looking at starting a new business, you may well be starting one similar to one you already know. If you're doing a plan for an existing business, you are even more likely to know the business well. Even so, you can still learn a lot by looking at other similar businesses.

• Look at existing, similar businesses

  If you are planning a retail shoe store, for example, spend some time looking at existing retail shoe store businesses. Park across the street and count the customers that go into the store. Note how long they stay inside, and how many come out with boxes that look like purchased shoes. You can probably even count how many pairs of shoes each customer buys. Browse the store and look at prices. Look at several stores, including the discount shoe stores and department store shoe departments.

• Find a similar business in another place

  Find a similar business far enough away that you won't compete. For the shoe store example, you would identify shoe stores in similar towns in other states. Call the owner, explain your purpose truthfully, and ask about the business.

• Scan local newspapers for people selling a similar business.

  Contact the broker and ask for as much information as possible. If you are thinking of creating a shoe store and you find one for sale, you should consider yourself a prospective buyer. Maybe buying the existing store is the best thing. Even if you don't buy, the information you gain will be very valuable. Why is the owner selling? Is there something wrong with the business? You can probably get detailed financial information.

• Always shop the competition.

  If you're in the restaurant business, patronize your competition once a month, rotating through different restaurants. If you own a shoe store, shop your competition once a month, and visit different stores.

It takes a little hard work but by using the Internet and doing some research at local businesses, you should be able to gather all the information necessary for your business plan.

Technorati Tags: Marketing Plan Pro. Marketing,Finding information,Duct Tape Marketing

Have you taken the path of your customer?

One of my steps in working with a client is that I like to put together their Marketing calendar to understand what they have on the table, events, conferences, advertisement, flyers, etc. They usually have some type of marketing in place, and we are looking at improving the system not dismantling it. After the marketing calendar has been constructed, I start moving, sometimes  just the post-it-notes from a chronological order to a marketing flow stream based on the customers' viewpoint.  We could even call it an assessment, but in initially I am just on a fact finding mission, in Lean terms = Current State Map. The next step in the process is diagramming this current state map and in Duct Tape Marketing terms, their Marketing Hourglass.

However, this week the procedure took a strange turn. I completed the process but I happen to know one of the client’s customer very well. So, after constructing this hour glass with the new client, I was able to sit down with his customer and my friend and map the process from the customers' point of view. Voice of Customer seems to an over-used word in our Industry but this was one of my best experiences. We actually pulled the clients file from the customers file cabinet, reviewed the folders on his computer including e-mails and bookmarks. I then laid out all the marketing material that had accumulated, highlighted and even taking note of the bent corners in the catalog. This was all followed by an interview.

Of course, my sample size of 1 is not a good indicator. The key to this process was the awaking to the client and myself on what the customer valued and what his procedure was in making the decision. His process was simply different. We talk about going to Gemba and walking the walk from the customers' point of view, but do you? How much non-effective marketing could you save by doing this? How much effecting marketing could you implement?
 

Related Posts:

Is your Value Stream Mapping backwards?

Mirror Marketing E-Book

Another word for Marketing – How about Voice of the Customer?

Technorati Tags: Duct Tape Marketing,Marketing Calendar,Marketing Hourglass,Value stream Mapping

Need an internet presence, but don’t have the time

First let's answer the question: What do you have to do?

Get Found Online: To run a successful online business, people need to be able to find your website. You must improve your visibility.
Improve Your Traffic: You must use customized SEO and Social Media tasks that help you boost the number of visitors to your site.
Make More Money: Improving traffic, rankings and brand visibility will generate more sales from your website.

I found a nifty tool that I have been using the past month called Lotus Jump. When I first started using it, I thought it was really nothing more than a spreadsheet telling me to do the things I do to get my website found. However, after using it for a month, I found that it put me places that I have not been before. It did give me additional insight into place that I should be and links that I should be creating. All I have to do is allocate 30 minutes of my time or someone else time that can post content to create a web presence. It is simply not enough to have a website anymore you need a web presence. Read this case study about a simple Flower shop or watch a demo!

This fits into a very nice into a Standard Work Practice for developing an Online Presence. Or, it can be used as a brick in the foundation of Lean Marketing House.

Technorati Tags: SEO,Social-Media,Web-Traffic,Internet-Marketing

The Ultimate Marketing System – The Forgotten Pillar

Readers of my blog have read my explanations of the Lean Marketing House and how your Marketing Channels determines your number of pillars and the size of each. You can suffice with just one pillar if it is big enough and strong enough to hold up the roof but the other day I realized that I had forgotten to describe what I will now call the Forgotten Pillar. Continuous Learning in the Lean Marketing House means theUltimate Marketing System. This is a term coined by Duct Tape Marketing and actually includes their workbook and CD's explaining their system. Most marketing plans and systems fail if adequate training is not provided.

Lean Six Sigma Practitioners always realize that the training is what makes the processes work. Without, old habits stay the same and new habits are never developed. Nor are these new habits expanded to the greatest extent. It happens in marketing too. Marketing that works today is all about authenticity, customer touch points and the connection of those touch points. You have to be everywhere, but you also have to be you. Perfect marketing is less important because people really are seeking you. Even from an organization viewpoint, they are expecting a human and personal experience.

How do you go about creating this new wave of marketing in your organization? My advice is that you have to create a continuous learning cycle within your company. This is best done by starting out with a learning system, a structured program and a Marketing coach. This is self-serving to say the least, but it is what I truly believe.

I use the Duct Tape Marketing System as the learning system and the structured program to get someone started. I am not going to go through the entire program, you can do that here, but it will set you on the road to success and provide a foundation for you to build from. Without going through these necessary steps, you will never fully defined your marketing needs and just continue to respond to the marketing idea of the week. I cannot tell you how many phone calls I get weekly a call from an Ad Rep telling me about the next greatest deal. Please take note: It's not about the money, it's about the target!

Now, the coach is pretty important. I am not going to talk about that even Tiger Woods has a coach, you to keep you on track, hold you accountable and all that garbage. I am going to discuss about someone that has been there done that in the real world. I am also going to mention another cliché: Talk the talk and walk the walk. I can only talk for myself, but I will put myself up against any other coach in the sense that I walk my system. I believe in the Duct Tape Marketing philosophies. I practice them. If you think that is not true, just look at my Tag cloud on the left. Look at my Alexa score, Hubspot rating and Twitter feeds. They are better than the vast majority of corporations and certainly better than 99.5% of other coaches and consultants. Why is that? I simply follow the practices that John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing has taught me. Have I added a few tricks of my own? Certainly - Authenticity, Personalization, Differentiation and building your Core Message is what I have learned in my Continuous Learning cycle. What can you gain from that expereince? You will simply short-circuit your learning curve by having a coach on board!

Technorati Tags: Duct-Tape-Marketing,Lean,Lean-Marketing-House,Six-Sigma

Do you have Continuous Learning going on in your Marketing?