Case Histories are the Best – but You Need Help.
Ask your sales team what kinds of marketing tools work the best in supporting their efforts and, chances are, a lot of them will talk about case histories. Being able to show a prospect how your company solved a problem for a customer with similar challenges to them is a great credibility builder and makes product specs into real solutions. BUT if you’ve ever tried to implement more than an occasional case history, you know how hard it can be.
Your sales engineer’s customer contact may be wildly enthusiastic about letting you describe their case, but will the company’s C suite agree? How about their PR department? If they aren’t agreeable, can the case still be described anonymously and be impressive? And if everyone is on board with the case history, how much will they let you divulge about the problems that led to the solution your company provided? In fact, in case histories, it’s often the “challenge” section that’s the most interesting. This is where you describe the mistakes, limitations, technology issues, etc. that the case history company encountered. Once you delineate the challenges, the fact that your company solved the problem becomes a win in itself. But getting your salespeople who mostly want to talk about how great their products are to understand this can take time, lots of questions and more than one interview.
Bottom line, case histories are complicated, require sensitive contact with both the SMEs and the customers, and may take a long time to complete. It’s not unusual for a case history to be in the marketing pipeline for 6 months or even a year! For a busy in-house marketing team, it’s hard to dedicate that level of detailed follow-up to a program of case histories. That’s when an outside marketing team becomes a worthwhile addition to your efforts. But the outside group has to understand your company technology and brand well enough to be able to speak and write as you.
At Strategies, we’ve implemented complete case history programs for clients, often adding dozens or even over 100 powerful case histories to the client’s marketing arsenal. Here is one example.
AI in Marketing Content
A couple weeks ago, a writer we know showed us some copy she’d created for an award entry featuring a customer of her client whom she did not know well. We read it and, though we didn’t want to insult the writer, we broke down and admitted that we thought the entry was “kind of boring.” It had all the facts, but the copy had no premise, no thesis, and nothing that would grab judges’ attention and make them pay attention to her entry more than others. It was adequate. She actually laughed and admitted that she’d been uninspired and had resorted to using ChatGPT to create the copy. Putting our heads together, we poured over everything the person being entered for the award had said about her position and we came up with a theme. Here was a person who worked behind the scenes, but the company couldn’t do the job without her. She was indispensable. We wove that idea through the award entry. While the writer doesn’t yet know the results of the award, she does know that this thesis thrilled the customer and her client. She also knows that copy generated by ChatGPT is easy to spot and, as marketing copy, isn’t effective.
Recent statistics show that 70% of marketers are using or have used generative AI to create headlines and copy. And yet few, if any, have corporate guidelines on how and when such content should be used. This is scary.
We recently asked ChatGPT to generate a bio for an author we know well. The bio came back sounding totally authoritative – and it was about 20% wrong! So research done by AI is very subject to errors that have been made by others online. Even more important, copy created by generative AI is not truly marketing copy. It’s, at best, editorial. But true marketing copy is generated with a subtle knowledge of the brand promise and message, the position of the company/brand in the market, the actions you want the reader to take, and much more. By the time you’ve entered all these subtleties into the AI engine in hopes of getting a decent result, it would be cheaper and faster to write it yourself. Or ask a professional.
Will AI develop to the point that it sounds original and creative? Possibly. But it’s not there yet. User beware!
Consistency Creates Brands
While we could spend a few pages discussing what a brand is and isn’t (check out this blog for that discussion), we can likely all agree that a brand involves the feelings and thoughts of a customer. If, when a customer sees your brand name or product/service, they have a positive response that tells them this brand is good, trustworthy, ahead of the pack, reliable, high quality, valuable, etc., then their chances of buying from that company immediately or in the future are higher. But what creates those customer feelings and thoughts? One of the main factors is consistency.
Consistency of Value: Choose a value your company wants to be known for – one you can deliver. Will it be quality? Innovation? Service? Don’t try to be all things to all people. Pick one.
Consistency of Communication: Make sure every member of your company knows what the brand represents – that one thing. Sure, you’re good at other stuff, but that one thing will never fail! Train everyone from the CEO to the shipping clerk so they know this message and deliver it consistently. Every communication that touches a customer needs to reinforce the brand value.
Deliver Every Time: No matter what else happens, make sure that one value doesn’t slip. Are you the company known for quality? Make sure your quality is high for everything – products, people, service. If you fall down once, apologize and explain how you plan to get back to the top.
Don’t Get Bored: It’s so easy to decide you’ve done enough of that message, let’s try something new, more creative. NO, no, no. A brand isn’t a slogan or a logo or an ad. It’s what the customer thinks or feels when they see your name. It’s hard to gain real estate in a buyer’s mind. Once established, you don’t want to try to rip out that value from the customer. Just keep delivering over and over. If you want to grow it, do it over years by addition, but don’t let it go.
There’s lots more to say, but let’s keep it simple. This message is so easy to forget.
In-house or Delegate? The Ongoing Social Media Question.
People often ask us if they can delegate their social media to an agency or consultant or if they should do it all in-house. The answer is: it depends. Whoever does social media has to be willing to immerse themselves in your company, messaging, products and position and they have to value and appreciate social media as a powerful channel of communications, not write it off as a frivolous afterthought. They need to know how to encourage interaction and take replies and comments seriously. IOW, they need to know what they're doing.
Social media is relentless. It never lets you sleep. It can't be shrugged off just because you got another assignment. If you have an in-house person or team with these skills and time, in-house may be the answer. But be sure to give the social media practitioner and/or team the responsibility and access to get the job done -- plus the title and salary. Be certain the person/team is known to your inside experts and that they are encouraged to support and participate in the social program. All of this is hard to do, but many companies make it work.
On the other hand, if you know an agency/consultant willing to accept that kind of responsibility and dedication, that may be most cost-effective and results-producing in the long run. You have better assurance and control of costs, the automatic respect accorded an “outside expert”, and a ton of oversight. An agency expert in social media can also bring new ideas to the table rapidly and their continued association with your company depends on them doing a good job from day one. In addition, an agency with experience in your field will likely have a greater grasp of your product, technology, and market messages more rapidly than an in-house person.
Weigh your options and explore your particular situation. The value of social media to companies and brands increases every day. It’s an important decision.
For Optimum PR, Lose These Ideas
Even with the importance of social media today, media relations or earned media is still one of the most sure-fire pathways to perceived expertise and market leadership. When a company’s subject matter expert (SME) contributes an article or blog content or is interviewed by a reporter for a staff-written story in a key media outlet in the industry, it provides instant credibility for the company. Readers assume that if you’re writing for an important publication that your content has some authority. It’s not a paid-for appearance. Your company becomes the perceived expert.
Generally, the opportunity to be featured in the media in this way comes from a PR pro, whether in-house or from an outside agency. This is true because these media professionals know what media and outlets are most desirable for your company to best reach your target customers, what other stories are being written, and how to approach the editors with material and story angles that will appeal to them. Sometimes, however, a reporter or editor may approach an SME directly. Maybe the editor saw a presentation by this expert, saw a video or read other content written by the SME. (When this happens, the SME should contact their PR department post haste, if they have one.) Either way, it’s important that the next steps meet the editor’s expectations and needs. The fact is the relationship between the media and company SMEs is a two-way street. Companies need to reach editors and reporters who serve as the gatekeepers for influential publications, and editors need industry experts to keep them up to date on all the newest trends, technologies and solutions. But only if the material the company provides fits the reporter’s needs and specifications. Here are some key “don’ts,” with a few accompanying “do’s” –
Never assume the editor wants to “write a story about us.” Unless the publication is a financial outlet and your public company has just had record earnings or losses, chances are good, no publication wants to write a profile about you. If their readers don’t care, they don’t care. It’s the job of the “pitch” to help them care.
Don’t expect the publication to come up with the story idea. There are way too many good stories and too few editors to know and cover them all. Sometimes, a reporter may approach a company with a roundup topic on which they want multiple comments and input from a variety of experts. If you wait for these stories, however, you won’t get a lot of coverage. Instead, you want to come up with story angles of your own and “pitch” them to the press proactively.
Good story angles are not about products or services except in those rare instances where publications are actually covering a particular product type. Good stories are about problems that large numbers of the people who read that publication have and how to solve those problems using a particular method or technology.
Resist, resist, resist the desire to name the technology or add your brand when you’re contributing an article or guest blog. The only case (there are exceptions) where your company name should appear in most good stories is under the author’s name. The moment you name a technology or approach or add a product to a contributed article is the minute the story’s credibility drops in the reader’s eyes. More importantly, the editor will likely not accept the story. The exception, of course, is if the article is staff-written by the reporter. At Strategies, we’ve managed to take a company technology that is exclusive to our client – the only one on the market – and create a generic, problem-solving article about it.
Some publications are written entirely by staff, in which case, the job becomes suggesting topics of interest to the editors and then supplying information to them if they select one of your ideas.
To create good content for publications, the authors need to learn “generic voice.” How can you describe the market need/problem for the solution you have in mind and then give the steps of the solution in such a way as to suggest that the readers can take the steps or make the decisions themselves? It’s wise to give anything you write to a PR professional to check this approach – or allow the PR department to write from expert input.
For every one of these do’s and don’ts, PR professionals have dozens more. Rely on them when you can. Meanwhile, these tips will get you on the road to good media coverage.
Interaction and Ownership – Websites
The number of communication platforms and resources available to companies today for promotion and interaction is mind boggling. Social media alone has completely changed the communication landscape, but companies struggle to take advantage of all these resources – especially smaller firms with limited in-house communications capabilities. So, when deciding which platforms to use and how much emphasis to give them, how do you choose? Often companies select to do what they’ve always done, or the platform they like the best. But two factors need to be taken into consideration – interaction and ownership.
Does the communications platform allow the customer or prospect to interact, respond, express opinions and receive response? And, does the company own the platform? If the resource were to go away tomorrow, would all the information, interaction and goodwill accumulated on it go away also? All platforms include a mix of these two factors that communicators need to take into consideration. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at communications platforms from the viewpoint of these two factors. The first is the website.
Web Sites – Ownership
Companies generally love their websites and there was a time when the cardinal rule of communication was “get them to your web site.” That’s because companies own their websites. A visitor to your website is “yours,” at least for the duration of the visit, and if you can get them to come back, that’s even better. If you have customers who rely on your website as a resource, that’s best of all. The rule to drive customers to the website still exists in many executives’ minds, but unless its fully supported by the website vision, design and navigation, the goal is no longer realistic. Why? Because of lack of interaction.
Social media has done away with the website as the primary source of information for most companies. If a customer can ask a question in a user community or on a social platform, why should they go to a website with limited information and no response mechanism?
Some consumer retailers do a fantastic job of making their websites essential. They sell on them, offer benefits not available anywhere else, include live chat and immediate support and response, and promote them heavily. These are tactics often not used by business-to-business website owners – although the wise web designer takes a page from the consumer book.
Constantly updating content is a mandate of websites most people know, but it’s hard to do. The vehicle essentially created for this purpose is the blog. A continuously changing blog, especially if it’s promoted on social media, is a source of renewed content. Even better, if the blog is interesting and addresses questions and problems users have, it’s a great hook for traffic. But most companies have trouble sustaining a blog, and quite frankly, it’s a tactic almost always better left to outsourcing. Bring in a good content development company and give them access to your SMEs and you can keep a blog going. Sometimes, however, due to security or other issues, a blog may not be desirable. In that case, if you want to make your website your primary communications focus, make sure the number one source of all your best knowledge – brochures, white papers, application notes, videos, etc. – is the website. And drive people to the website to get those resources. If customers can get what they need in four or five places, they won’t make the trip to the website.
Also be sure that your response mechanisms on your website are a constant focus of attention. If a customer asks a question or requests live chat and gets no answer or a limited bot, they’ll never try again.
Obviously, don’t select your website as your primary communications platform if it’s not up to the challenge. If the content is sketchy or out-of-date, or if the response is limited and the navigation is difficult, focus your communications efforts on a different resource – like your mailing list. But that’s another story.
Social Media – No, “Anybody” Can’t Do It
We’ve talked about this before. Companies get all tied up in the idea that social media is “social.” This can result in the underestimation of the power of social media and companies dismissing its execution to the lowest rung of their in-house staff, or to people already so busy that social media gets short shrift. If it is social it must mean anyone can do it, right? So wrong!
This approach is a huge disservice to your brand development. As we talked about in an earlier blog, there is no better tool for brand development than social media. It is a way to touch customers and prospects frequently, with smaller bites of wisdom and service that create a continuous flow of awareness and attention. Plus, your prospects get to interact immediately, which is a rare commodity in marketing. If you remember the old adage that it takes people ten touches to actually create awareness, then social media is a way to get those touches done fast and cost-effectively – but not if it is just a random barrage of recycled ad material or meaningless “social” posts. Social media, like all good marketing, takes planning, orchestration and consistency of message, and dead-on persistence. It is not something to be done as an afterthought in people’s spare time.
Despite misunderstandings of the “social” term, which makes companies believe that social media should only be done by in-house staff, in fact, social media can be done as an outside service. If it is, however, it needs to be from a provider who is willing to make the commitment to a deep understanding of your company’s brand promises and messaging strategy. If you can get that, an outside social media firm may be your best choice, because they provide a central control of consistent messaging and posting frequency. An outside service also oversees a balance of messages between company departments and markets and keeps the story user-oriented. If your social media program stays in-house, make sure that your best marketing minds are overseeing it, even if they aren’t doing all the posting.
Strategies has developed and maintained social media programs for clients big and small. Doing a good job needs a balance of high-level strategy and the most nitty-gritty detail.
Want to talk about how social media can work for you?
Brand Development & Social Media: the Marketing Imperative
We said in our last blog that few things in business are as misunderstood as branding, but one of those is probably social media. Even today, with countless social media triumphs in terms of development of corporate preference to point to, many company executives still cut the social media budget first and technical staff scoff at its significance. So let’s talk about it.
We said in the branding blog that a brand is owned by the customer and is made up of the thoughts, feelings and expectations each customer has with regard to a given company or entity. Positive thoughts, feelings and expectations lead to brand preference – and that glorious day when a customer says, “I always buy (insert your company here).”
How does that day arrive? How do positive thoughts, feelings and expectations get developed? Through interaction between the brand developer(you) and the brand owner (the customer). These interactions are built upon customer experience with your product – BUT, what happens before they buy? That’s where communication comes in. Every touch you have with a prospect either directly or indirectly develops expectations. This might be reviews, training, word of mouth, advertising, corporate generosity, thought leadership, and lots more.
But the things a prospective customer will remember best are those that touch them personally. This might be sharing a fundamental commitment, a funny story you both enjoy, a mutual love of baseball and most of all, a question answered or some direct help. This is, of course, where social media comes in. There is no medium more conducive to interaction than social media – even face-to-face because across the desk (if you can even get there)customers may not tell the truth. Social media lets people reach you, complain, yell, praise, question, confront and generally interact in unforgettable ways. Even clicking LIKE is more personal than hitting mute on a passing TV commercial.
The fact is, people remember what they interact with. They even tend to recall what other people interact with. For some people who are not yet customers or in remote places in the world, social media may be the only way they can interact with you. Social media is personal. Does that mean dog and cat pictures? No, it means chances for personal interaction and interaction is how thoughts, feelings and expectations (i.e., brands), are built.
(Okay, and maybe a couple dog pictures.)