Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Companies big and small need to keep track of their customers. What products or services are they buying? What is their history with your company? When has someone from your company made contact with them? What kinds of offers have you sent them? All of these things should be tracked, and indeed there are many software companies devoted to tracking all kinds of information to help business owners track their customers. Why then do so many companies seem to have a right hand that doesn’t know what the left hand is doing? The answer is lack of planning.

This morning I read an excellent articles on Forbes.com by Kasia Moreno titled “Why Do Companies Undervalue Customer Loyalty?” She pointed to an experience with a major magazine where they sent her both a renewal offer as an existing customer and an offer as if she had never subscribed. Not only is it poor business for them to not even know who their customers are, but they rubbed it in by offering a better deal to the new customer than the existing one! This seems so backwards by all accounts. When it comes to communicating with customers we should know who our existing customers are and who are future customers.

Communicating with Customers, Old and New

Anyone who has been in business for very long will tell you that it is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than go out and find a new one. Keeping customers happy will keep them coming back, which is especially true to service or subscription based business models. You should be offering the best deals to your loyal customers. While you may have introductory offers for new customers, don’t underestimate the value of a longtime, loyal customer.

I am well aware of the problems that arise from not having a software package that can do everything you really want with your customer database. For small to medium sized businesses you must fit into the template of whatever software program you use. For larger businesses there is no reason they cannot develop a system for all their different divisions to use to track customers at all levels. You should not be wasting money sending new offers to existing customers.

While these things are easy to say in a blog post, I know that they can be difficult to actually implement. What processes or tools are out there to help keep track of customers and get rid of these kinds of situations?

It seems as though in business we spend a lot of time looking for the next big thing. One that is too often overlooked is the value of good customer service. Customer service will make or break a business in the long term. To be successful at it, you need to consider 3 things: company culture, employee training, and measurability.

Company Culture

This seems like the easiest part of it, but really it is the hardest to implement and the most important to do well. When everyone at a company is on the same page, the service and response your customers receive will be the same whether they interact with a customer service rep over the phone, a sales rep in the field, or a truck driver delivering product.

You do you build culture? It’s easier said than done, you need to make sure that every level of the customer understands what kind of experience your customers should have.

“You have to be no less than a customer concierge, doing everything you can to make every one of your customers feel acknowledged, appreciated, and heard. You have to make them feel special, just like when your great-grandmother walked into Butcher Bob’s shop or bought her new hat, and you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were.”

– Gary Vaynerchuk, “The Thank You Economy”

Employee Training

Even the most seasoned employee needs to have updated training periodically to remind them of best practices, new information and reinforced policies. We can all use time to review situations and take the time to come up with the best responses to those situations so that when the time arises we are not on-the-spot making it up.

I recently heard half of a phone conversation one of the customer service reps in my office was having with a particularly difficult customer. As the call progressed emotions got high and it became more and more difficult for  the rep to successfully conclude this call with the customer being happy. While I think the rep handled the call professionally as as good as could be expected, there were things to learn in it.

Several people in the office reviewed the call afterwards and we used the time to reinforce things like avoiding trigger words that make customers defensive or emotional. Constant review and training, both formal and informal, will keep you on top of everything.

Measurability

Coming up with metrics that make sense for your situation and business is important to know if your efforts are making any difference. Are you retaining more customers? Is talk about you on social media more positive? Are your existing customers spending more money with you? Whatever the metric is, find a way to measure it regularly over time and keep at it. If you don’t measure you don’t know.

Lately there seems to be a rash of articles online talking about Millennials, or those born between about 1982 and 1996. I have read article after article that outlines how Millennials lack work ethic, need petty praise and feel entitled. These articles seems to portray Millennials as a very homogeneous group that feel like everything is owed to them. I think that it is bad practice to paint an entire generation based on a few individuals and some assumptions that have not been shown to be true. This isn’t really a new way of thinking, every generation has assumptions about them, which are almost always proven wrong in the end.

Millennials Aren’t Than Different From Previous Generations

Take Generation X, my parent’s generation. A recent article on CNN.com showed that researchers found that the myths about GenX were actually dead wrong. It was characterized as a generation of slackers who were disengaged and isolationist, depressed and neglectful parents. These myths were based on what made them different from previous generations and how that might negatively influence them. Why is it that no one ever seems to look at the positive ways that new experiences might impact a generation.

The same way that popular ideas about Generation X proved to be wrong, I would put money on Millennials turning out to be a positive influence on society. Look at the good things that Millennials have going for them. We are the first truly digitally fluent generation. We grew up as the Internet got huge and have been using computers from a young age. This generation has already given the world things like Facebook, YouTube, Runescape, Mozilla, WordPress, Threadless Tees, and Digg. What do all these have in common? They are all based online. Businesses that want to be on the cutting end of online communication, technology and innovation could learn a lot from hiring Millennials.

Do you really need a big idea in digital advertising?

Not long ago I read an article on a particular online marketing blog (that shall remain nameless) and the writer of this article says that advertising agencies were obsolete in todays market because there was no need any longer for a ‘Big Idea.’ I disagree.

Not long ago I was able to hear a brilliant presentation on Search Engine Optimization given at my local chapter of the American Advertising Federation. There, in a room full of local marketers and media reps, Marshall Simmonds (@mdsimmonds) gave a great overview of the various things he has learned and taught clients in his experience in this field, which is about as long as anyone’s experience in this field can get.

He touched on a few good points with titles, keywords, alt-text descriptions and such. The single most important thing that I think he said, was that the actual text of the article was one of the last things that you should worry about in thinking about the search engines. Why would this be the case? Haven’t we been taught for years that search engines look for keywords and rank you page based on that? Yes, but that isn’t necessarily the most important thing about your content. Your content is made for people, not bots.

People are who read content. They are your audience. It doesn’t matter if you are a news outlet, or a business publishing content about your industry. If your content is written for bots, real people won’t find it as engaging, entertaining and informative and are less likely to share it. In this social age of the Internet it is important to make your content sharable. I tell all my clients and I work with my copywriting team to make sure that we have keywords and phrases where we can, but it must be readable and be written first for the audience, second for the bots. If you don’t, then only bots will be likely to buy your products or services, and last I checked, Google bots don’t make a lot of purchases.

This post originally appeared on the Star Moose Blog.

Earlier this year I was at a conference that was supposed to be all about online and emerging advertising. The conference had some really good moments, but overall I was astounded at the number of people who really aren’t taking advantage of the best parts of social media, online video and other new channels. So many of the older attendees and presenters at this conference kept saying things like, “online video is just like TV,” or “mobile is just like direct mail.” What they don’t get is … they aren’t just like anything, that’s why they’re NEW media.

Honestly, I think the Web has been around long enough that we can stop calling it new media, it’s just media now. There are some great industry veterans out there that have been working in advertising longer than I’ve been alive, but like anything, it is hard to change your ways and get into a new mindset. Both agency and client-side marketing people need to recognize that there are many differences between traditional media and some of these “online things” that kind of resemble them.

Take YouTube for just one example. Anyone who just takes their TV commercials and puts them on a YouTube channel and says they are doing online video is kidding themselves. To do it right, you should be producing content just for the Web. Things that aren’t constrained by that pesky 30 second time period or over-analyzed in some agency creative meeting. Online video should complement and enhance your television campaign, as well as offer stuff that wouldn’t work in a TV ad. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have your commercials on your YouTube channel, but it certainly shouldn’t be the only thing on there.

Bottom line, think about each medium and its capabilities and plan individually. Just tacking on digital stuff to your traditional marketing is not a good plan. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t mind so much as my agency gets a lot of work from companies who don’t have a good handle on online video, social media and digital in general.

This post originally appeared on the Star Moose Blog.

There is a new car dealer in my area who claims to offer everyone a deal with “no gimmicks.” This same guy also has his black lab ‘Buddy’ in every commercial, usually sleeping the in the back of a truck or on top of a car. I actually have a textbook from college where that is used as the definition of a gimmick. The problem I see in his ads are not in the use of a gimmick, but of the negative connotation he puts on gimmicks when in reality gimmicks work.

In the digital sphere it very easy for someone to choose your competitor over you. A simple Google search of your product can yield all sorts of web pages devoted to any number of brands, including yours. There can be company controlled pages, open forums, fan pages, social media chatter, and a brand only has control over a small piece of it. Brand loyalty would seem to be a distant memory. This is where you really need to know the influencers, both inside your industry, your target audience, and your brand itself.

Trust and Reputation

There are those bloggers, commenters, sites and sources that are just trusted in an industry. In advertising I have trust that stories on adage.com are going to be factually correct and I trust many commenters on their site because they are industry professionals and I see their constructive comments all the time as I read articles. Forums also fit into this category sometimes, as they often have very knowledgable commenters that love to share their experience and links.

Hang-Out Spots and Habits

Your customers do more than just think about your brand all the time. They have hobbies, interests and favorite hang-outs online. If you can get your brand message in front of them through these channels (both paid and editorial) you will be able to start conversation about your brand and/or product. Just like we all used to do with magazines in years past, research your target audience’s online habits and go there.

Influencers Drive Brand Loyalty in Others

Lastly, there are those influencers within your brand that bring more people to it. There are people who are huge fans of your products and will tell everyone they know about it whenever they get the chance. Give them that chance, cultivate that loyalty and reward them with something worthwhile.

You can look at your customers by where they are on what I call the Bertasso Curve (pictured below). This was the brainchild of Andrew Bertasso while we were working on a campaigns class in college. Basically, the more involved with your brand a customer is the more loyal they will be, but there is a steep increase at the far end where at a certain point customers become extremely loyal. If you can find those extremely loyal people and engage with them regularly, they will spread every new brand message that you produce and will become an integral part of your distribution network.

This post originally appeared on the Star Moose Blog.

This post stems from conversations I’ve had with Mark Richardson (@mitchrichie) many times and also from a great breakfast conversation with Tim Kilroy (@timkilroy) of PM Digital and others at the OMMA Global conference in San Francisco this year. I’ve posted about partnering before, but I want to look at the different stages in the life cycle of a client.

Every so often I stop and take a look at the clients that I am working with and what we are doing for them. We have clients at various stages in the client-agency life cycle. New clients we are just getting to know, clients who have been with us only a short while, but we are getting to know their business and what works with both their customers and their management and older clients that we’ve been working with for years and are trying to come up with new ideas, new ways to do things to keep them on top in their arena. I’d like to talk about partnering with these groups individually.

First, the new clients. When we take on a new client it involves getting to know their business and what they care about. That has meant everything from learning advanced computer networking protocols to snowboarding lingo. At this stage you need to immerse yourself and your staff in this new business and put the time into becoming a part of their business just as they are becoming a part of your business.

The clients who have been with us a short while are starting to see some benefits for our relationship. They are seeing creative ideas being produced into actual ads/videos/online materials. We still talk to them every day it seems and we always have questions for them about how they do something, or how do we explain something in terms their customers will understand. We’re getting to know them, but are not completely involved yet.

The last group is in the perfect place. We are still in constant contact, but that may be more like a few times a week rather than multiple times a day. We understand their business, we are gathering analytics for them and receiving honest feedback from different departments on their end. We are developing new ideas and getting ideas from all kinds of sources. You never know where the next best thing for a company will come from, but you should be able to work it into the best advertising possible no matter if you came up with it or the CFO suggested it in an email. I am not so egotistical that I believe the best ideas only come from the ad agency.

Those groups define where our work lies. We always want to have as many as possible in the last group, but there seems to be a couple new people lately that have been welcome additions to the Star Moose community. I like to think I have the best staff and we produce the best work, but I’ll admit that I’m biased. Either way, the more client-agency relationships can be like partnerships, the better the advertising and the results that will come from it.

This post originally appeared on the Star Moose Blog.