The Marketing Maven

Part II - Hold on to Your Customers in Challenging Times: Survey Customers to Identify Problem Areas

In today's economy retaining and growing your existing customer base is more important than ever.  One key to retaining customers is to measure customer satisfaction. 

Although most marketers would agree that conducting a customer satisfaction survey is beneficial to the company, many do not do it.

Some of the typical reasons companies do not conduct a satisfaction survey are:

• Lack of in-house research expertise
• No money for research
• No time to put it together
• We already talk to our customers all the time through sales and customer support
• I already know what our performance is on many key quality areas like delivery, product quality, order processing
• What we don’t know won’t hurt us – or afraid of what it might uncover

Let me offer some suggestions on how to overcome these objections:

Hold on to Your Customers in Challenging Times: Survey Customers to Identify Problem Areas

In today’s economy retaining and growing your existing customer base is more important than ever.  One key to retaining customers is to measure customer satisfaction.  I recommend that every company assess customer satisfaction on a yearly basis at a minimum.

Some of the key baseline measurements that you should make are:

• Overall customer satisfaction
• Overall value of products/services sold
• Availability/Lead times
• Customer service
• Delivery
• Problem resolution
• Quality
• Sales personnel
• Technical support

The Three Elements of an Integrated Marketing Campaign

An integrated marketing campaign takes advantage of multiple online and offline media, resources, and customer touch points to achieve specific marketing objectives. Whether your objectives are lead generation, branding and awareness, lead nurturing, or customer cross-selling and up-selling, an integrated campaign will create a whole that’s greater and more effective than the sum of its parts, and help you achieve your objectives faster and more efficiently.

Link Popularity Explained

Link popularity is a search engine optimization technique designed to improve the rank of your Web pages on search engine results. It measures the quantity and quality of other Web sites that link to yours and is an important strategy for marketers to increase the visibility of their Web pages on search engines.

How to Win Friends and Influence Marketers

No matter how well integrated Sales and Marketing are in an organization you’ll probably still find the typical complaints from both sides.  Sales will say that Marketing isn’t close enough to the business and doesn’t really understand what sales does/needs/wants.  “Marketing never seems to be working on anything I need,” or “I don’t know what they do in that ivory tower but I wish they’d do this.” 

On the other side of the fence, Marketing is saying, “Sales doesn’t pay attention to any of the programs/tools/information that we put out there for them.  They don’t listen and ask the same questions over and over.  They don’t follow up on leads.  They don’t understand that there is a bigger picture and everything marketing does isn’t for the short-term sale.” 

Both sides hit on some truths; neither side is wrong.

2008 Industrial Marketing Insights

Join me on Thursday, April 10 at 2 pm EST for a webinar where I will share research on how your customers are interacting online. 

You'll learn the media prefrences of this audience, their reliance on the internet and how online activity can drive off line action.  You will also find out about the adoption of new social media within the engineering, technical and industrial community.

This is an important webinar for anyone marketing to the industrial sector.  The research will help steer your marketing mix.  You will either walk away confident in what you are doing and better armed to justify it internally, or you will have food for thought on better aligning your mix to the habits of the technical audience.

How to Make Marketing Work in a Challenging Economy

In a challenging economy, you must find new ways to make marketing work more effectively, get more out of marketing investments, and measure and account for marketing decisions. In short, you must make changes. Doing the same things in an uncertain environment and expecting the same results is a strategy headed for disappointment.

How can your company be one of those success stories that market and grow their business during challenging times? The following strategies will help you allocate marketing investments to better performing programs that will carry your company through uncertain times, and beyond.

Ten Tips for Using Media Mentions

Companies work hard to get press. The public relations professional is always busy: pitching story ideas to the media, cultivating relationships with editors, setting up interviews, writing articles, distributing press releases. In short, helping their company brand stand out, be unique, get noticed.

Do You Need an Online Marketing Agency?

Whether or not you currently work with a traditional marketing agency, you may want to consider retaining an agency with expertise in online marketing. With your customers and prospects using the Internet regularly for their work, your marketing mix should be shifting more to online programs. An online marketing agency can help ensure your investments are aligned with your objectives, and that you get positive results from online programs.

Marketer's Survival Guide for Tough Economic Times

If you are like most companies in the industrial space, you are concerned about the economy.  Your company is experiencing rising costs and your management is paying close attention to orders and wondering what 2008 will bring. 

From my past experiences working in manufacturing, when things get tight management starts to cut expenses.  Unfortunately marketing is often on the target list. 

So what's a marketer to do in the industrial space who might not be working in an environment where marketing's importance to the business is not entirely understood or appreciated?

Read our latest white paper:  Pragmatic Business Strategy - Nine Ways to Make Marketing Work in Challenging Times.  Don't wait till the CFO comes knocking looking to freeze or cut your budget.  Evaluate your current plan now and be prepared to demonstrate how you have the right marketing mix to take your company forward in uncertain times.