Peeling Back the Layers of the Onion

Before you decide to transition all your lead gen marketing from offline to digital channels, this article from CNET today points out the importance of understanding your targets and how/where they would like to communicate and interact with you.

The article states that younger doctors who have been raised on technology are more apt to embrace it in how they build their practices, treat their patients and communicate and engage with both patients and colleagues. Conversely, older doctors, not having been raised in a digital world, are reticent to embrace IT as robustly. Thus digital marketing platforms and vehicles may not be as effective with more senior targets.

This points to the importance of segmentation and micro-segmentation, with the need to delve further into what would seem like a homogeneous group (ie doctors) to decipher their specific needs, traits and habits.

Surveys and focus group research (not as formal as it sounds -- calling a dozen or so of your customers and asking some basic questions about how they like to engage w/your company, what they like/dislike, where they go for their info, etc) -- are absolutely critical for you to understand how to best communicate and market to your intended targets. It's a wise place to start when developing new messaging and outreach vehicles and as an ongoing exercise helps to supplement the valuable data and results you'll get from your campaigns once they've been deployed.

Secrets for a LinkedIn Group

As you build your outbound marketing strategy through the use of various online social networking tools, here's a tip for creating a LinkedIn Group.

Many companies I feel miss the boat when they establish a LinkedIn presence for their company. Often a company will create a profile under their company name. That's fine, but think about how that affects the credibility and impact of the content and information that you impart. Right off the bat, I'd suggest that most LinkedIn members would be at least slightly biased against much of what you have to say as part of an ongoing effort to sell products and services.

Now while it's true that selling solutions and services is your company's mission, you also (ideally) provide valuable thought leadership, data, problem solving, innovation, new ideas, thinking, etc that provides unbiased value to your intended audience. And they would welcome that type of expertise being available to them.

Consider instead creating a group that instead speaks to your industry and can be easily viewed as a rich community that promotes and exchanges thoughts, ideas and discussion about industry topics, business issues and creative ways to solve those issues. Many posts will speak to (and ideally support) many of the tenets of your company's core value and solutions, but many posts will not. And you may have to be prepared for discussions that don't necessarily promote your company's point of view.

But think about the credibility that a group like that would have with your targets. A free-flowing exchange of ideas that at their core have the best interests of helping people to do their jobs better. That is the essence of a real outbound marketing orientation, where prospects and customers flock to read about and discuss the latest ideas and content that make them better at what they do.

A great example of this is one LinkedIn group I belong to called Pro Marketers - For Marketing Professionals.

It was established by the marketing company HubSpot as an online community that discusses how to reach your best customers online through techniques like inbound marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. Which just happens to be what HubSpot does.

I find it to be a valuable forum, with very little hard selling going on. And it's caught on as a credible community to discuss and debate inbound marketing.

What Channels Are Your Customers On?

I've been reviewing some direct marketing vehicles from a couple of companies recently... in both cases these companies have been using print pieces to reach out to their targets. The pieces are nicely designed and reasonably effective.

I've always maintained that any and all marketing channels (including print DM, it's not necessarily a dinosaur) can and should be used to interact with your prospects and customers. I've done highly-qualified, high impact dimensional and print pieces that have delivered response rates in excess of 70%! A multi-channel campaign ensures that you are using all available communication highways to your target.

But what channels do they prefer to be messaged to and communicate back to you? Have you asked them? Think of the channels now available to marketers - digital, print/dimensional, mobile, telemarketing, personal, broadcast. Remember you want to engage a prospect or customer on their terms, not what's best for you. It's entirely possible that a percentage of your target audience may not have as readily adopted online communication so perhaps email campaigns are not as effective. Or print pieces rarely if ever make it to their desk as they go through numerous gatekeepers. Or they are impossible to reach via the telephone. Or they don't attend trade shows.

What's important to recognize is the answer to the question -- what are the most effective channels in which to communicate w/my prospects and customers? -- is sitting on your desk. Pick up your telephone and call your loyal customers and simply ask them. You probably (hopefully) have a number of customers who love your product and service and want to see your company continue to succeed and grow. They would love to be a part of that success. And they would most certainly share their likes and preferences about how they like to be communicated with, the types of marketing vehicles and channels that they prefer. How often do they wish to be contacted? What type of offers appeal to them? Do they take the time to read white papers? Are they Internet savvy and do all their research online? Do they ever see print pieces? What types of media (on and offline) do they read? Why did they buy from you originally? What types of marketing don't they like?

You can take just a handful of customers and reach out to them via the telephone, or online survey or print survey. Design 8-10-12 primary questions that will provide you with the answers that will help you to better understand how to engage with your customers, how to give them what they want.

From the types of offers you build, to the channels you use to communicate to the design of your products, your customers and prospects are an untapped goldmine of information and data that should be shaping your entire marketing strategy. Remember, these are the people who chose your company over all others. Whatever you did with them worked (or didn't work). Go ahead. Pick up the phone.