Before you go spending a lot of money driving people to your website, or through the doors of your bricks and mortar business, you had better be sure that they will have an outstanding experience once they arrive.

This is not one of those situations where you can fake it until you make it. If your customer service is not locked down, the rest of your marketing is doomed to fail.

There’s an old saying (sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln) …

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

A great customer experience is your very sharp axe, and that’s why I want you to think of customer service as a marketing tool.

Customers will overlook a lot of problems if they receive great customer service, but no matter how great your product, poor customer service will doom your business.

Five steps to using customer service as a marketing tool

Step 1: Customer Experience Audit

Before you can get to where you’re going, you have to know where you are. So start your journey to an improved customer experience by evaluating how your business is doing right now.

If you are mostly internet based, you can just set up a gmail account and submit a lead. If you’re customers come in through phone calls or in person, you will probably need to recruit a friend to mystery shop. If you receive customer leads through multiple channels, be sure to mystery shop all of them. This will help you identify breakdowns in each of the channels and give you a better picture of where you stand.

Step 2: Make a plan

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”
– Pablo Picasso

Next, you will want to evaluate the results of your mystery shops and identify the weaknesses and the strengths of your current system. Then put together a plan to build on your strengths and improve on your weaknesses.

Did you find that some employees are better at handling some tasks and others are better at other tasks? Did anyone stand out as a rockstar?

Take every piece of data that you were able to collect, analyse it, and determine if it is useful.

Finally, assemble your thoughts into a document, a memo, a manifesto, a powerpoint, or any other format that will help you communicate your vision.

As you fill out your plan, don’t forget to add specific details, not just broad concepts. For example, the concept, “we will reply to every customer inquiry,” is much less useful than this statement: “We will reply to every customer inquiry with thoroughly researched and complete answers to all customer questions, and we will do so in fifteen minutes or less.”

Step 3: Invest in training

“You are your greatest asset. Put your time, effort and money into training, grooming, and encouraging your greatest asset.”
– Tom Hopkins

That word invest doesn’t have to mean a cash outlay. If you, or one of the rockstars on your team, have the ability to train the other members of the team, by all means tackle your training in-house. You and your rockstar employees will have a much better handle on the unique demands of your customers than any trainer from the outside.

But if this is your plan, You will still need to invest the time and attention, as well as the training materials, necessary to have a successful training campaign.

If you need a lot of help, and you don’t think your customer experience issues can be effectively handled in-house, it is time to call in an expert, or at least seek out some professional advice. Obviously, professional trainers or consultants won’t be cheap, but you have to ask yourself, “how much money am I wasting marketing to customers who contact my business and are turned away by sub-standard customer experience?”

Step 4: Insist on consistency

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Will Durant

Have you ever eaten at Chick-fil-a? Did you notice how the person taking your order replied when you said, “Thank you”? I’ll bet they replied, “My pleasure”. They always reply, “My pleasure”. Every. Single. Time. That consistency comes from training and a focus on customer experience.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that your team should behave like a bunch of automatons when dealing with your customers, but I am saying that there should be a set of expectations they are expected to meet with every customer. Every. Single. Time.

Every internet lead should flow through the same series of steps. A phone lead would follow a slightly different process. And a walk-in would have a different process again. But every customer interaction should be held to a very high standard, and should yield some expected results – customer name, contact info, product/service they are interested in, follow-up expectations, etc.

Step 5: Track your progress

“What gets measured gets improved.”
– Peter Drucker

After implementing your plan, it may take some time to really see visible progress, in terms of sales and positive reviews. It will be helpful to set up some milestones to ensure that your business is on the right track. Perhaps break your training into a series of modules and track your employees’ progress through the modules. Also, plan out a series of mystery shops at regular intervals and keep score – not necessarily to single out individuals, but to keep track of overall progress. Customer Experience is a team effort and you will succeed or fail as a team.

The payoff

As your team improves, you will start to see improvement in terms of lead to sale conversions and post sale reviews. This will be followed by improved customer retention and customer referrals. That is the ultimate payoff for your Customer Experience campaign … a steady stream of repeat customers that are more than happy to refer you to their friends.

Have you started using customer service as a marketing tool? If so, what strategies did you use to get there? If not, what’s holding you back.

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Photo courtesy Todd Quackenbush / Unsplash

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When marketing your business, no matter how great all the rest of your content is, without great merchandising, your business isn’t going anywhere.

Merchandising Content: If you don’t get this right, the rest doesn’t matter.

There are many kinds of content, ranging from the mundane to the epic. If you think of your marketing content as a pyramid, today we are going to talk about the base of that pyramid. The one element that supports all the rest. Today we are going to talk about merchandising.

“But I am in a service business. I don’t have products to merchandise.” Guess what, even if you are selling a service, you are still selling a product. Furthermore, if you are selling a product, you are also selling a service – customer service.

Products and services are not so different as many would have you believe. And either way, you have to get your merchandising right. It’s your foundation, and usually, it’s the last content that a prospect sees before making a buying decision.

So what is merchandising?

The planning and promotion of sales by presenting a product to the right market at the proper time, by carrying out organized, skillful advertising, using attractive displays, etc. – Dictionary.com

I like that definition, but it’s a little broad. For this discussion, we are going to discuss merchandising content:

The images and descriptions that outline the many features and benefits of your product or service. – Me

Alright, let’s break that definition down a little:

Images

Here, we are talking about product images. Simple and clean, but professional in appearance. Easy to understand. This is not the time to get artistic.

If you are in a service business, we may talk about photos of your facility, or of your vehicles. If you are selling yourself (as a consultant, for example), then your “merchandising” photo may be a nice clean headshot.

If you are selling a product, especially a physical product, you will want multiple photos that show your product from every angle. If it opens, open it and take a photo. If you use it in conjunction with another item, show how they attach and how they interact.

The idea is to use your merchandising photos to answer your prospects’ questions before they even realize they have them.

Descriptions

You see that little “s” at the end of the word description? That “s” is not only there because you may have more than one product or service. Chances are, you will need more than one description for each of your products or services.

You may need a 100 character description, and a 100 word description, and a 500 word description. If your product or service is complicated enough, you may even need an entire micro-site. The point is, you need to have total clarity about your product or service. Can you sum it up in a few words? Can you go deep and give a thorough explanation that even a layperson can understand? That is your challenge.

Features and Benefits

Even though this phrase came last in my definition above, it is what you need to think about first. Considering the features and benefits of your product or service will guide you as you make your images and write your descriptions.

How can you illustrate this feature of your product with a photo? How can you describe that benefit of your service in only a few words? If you don’t clearly understand your features and benefits, you are flying blind. You are guessing about what will be important to your prospect.

Features and Benefits – Redux

That last sentence contained a critical phrase – “what will be important to your prospect”. As you are considering your features and benefits, you must remember to always view them as a prospect would. Avoid the mindset of the creator, retailer, or service provider.

Here is a quick example… Say you have developed a SAAS app (Software As A Service application) for project management. As the developer, the first thing that pops into your head is that we developed it using Ruby on Rails (a programing language). Do you think that your prospect will care that we developed it this way? Only if they are a developer as well. Now, what they may care about is what using this specific programming language means to them – greater security, ease of use, lower processor overhead, enhanced interoperability, etc. I have no idea if anything I just typed is accurate (HTML is the limit of my coding ability), but you can see how those features and benefits would seem far more important to the prospect than the name of the programming language.

Remember, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and create your merchandising content from that perspective.

But why is merchandising content so critical?

Merchandising content is critical, foundational, because it is the content that is closest to your product or service. It is the deciding factor. After prospects work their way down your marketing funnel, your merchandising content is the last thing they will see before making their decision.

Depending on the business you are in, your merchandising content may be the content that gets syndicated to third-party vendors. Your images and descriptions could be published on eBay, Etsy, Amazon, or many other marketplaces. If you are selling an online course or digital product, your merchandising content could be published on JVZoo, or ClickBank, or distributed by joint venture partners. If you are in a service business, your merchandising content is the most concise and pertinent content you will produce, so that makes it the content most likely to be shared by your fans and friends.

All the other content you produce will serve the main purpose of driving prospects to your merchandising content. So if your merchandising is not rock solid, you have wasted a lot of effort. Your key take-away is that quality merchandising content makes the rest of your marketing more effective; it’s an amplifier. Poor merchandising makes everything else you do ineffective and irrelevant.

So, set aside some time, follow the tips outlined in this article, and create some great merchandising content.

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Photo courtesy Joschko Hammermann / Unsplash

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So what went wrong? How could this have been avoided? Simple, you started with the thing – a railroad – rather than the idea behind the thing -transportation. Everyone wants transportation, but maybe they don’t want a train. Could be that your train is too expensive. Maybe they would rather drive. How about a hovercraft?

So, if you started out with nothing, just an idea, just marketing, and you built your business from there, you would know that the railroad wouldn’t work before you bought your first parcel of land. Perhaps your prospects would prefer buses. Maybe you could go ahead and build those perfect train cars, you just need to sell them to other railroads that are already successful. But you won’t know anything until you figure out your core marketing message and determine if it resonates with your target prospects.

Marketing is everything… and nothing. What is your core marketing message?

In the developed world we have reached a point of near market saturation. Almost everyone has almost everything that they need. Food and water, check. Shelter, check. A serviceable vehicle, check. A smart phone, check.

In order to differentiate your product or service, you have to appeal to their desires, their wants. So, how do we differentiate? How do we appeal to those desires?

We start with nothing. We start with marketing. Huh? Marketing is an idea. It’s a set of strategies and best practices and tactics. You don’t make it. You can’t hold it in your hands. But if you want to be successful, you had better have a core marketing message influencing every decision you make and each path you go down.

Planning

Before you start designing your next product or planing your next service, start thinking about how you will market it. How can you make it different than what is already out there? How can you make it better, or smaller, or cheaper, or more expensive? How will your service disrupt an existing market? What is it about your product that will make the big boys shake in their Italian loafers?

Next you need to do some testing. A little market research. Put up a simple web page and drive some traffic to it using Google Adwords. If your product or service is local, target local prospects only. If location doesn’t matter, open it up wide. Will people give you their email address for more information about this proposed product? How much would they pay for that service? You are looking for proof of concept, and it has never been easier to get. Use this research to determine what your prospects care about, and what they don’t. Refine your message down to the essential elements.

Once you have your core marketing message figured out, everything else gets a lot easier. You will know how to position your product – luxury, efficiency, simplicity, performance. You will know how your website should feel and what your ads should look like. You will be able to give that 30 second elevator pitch and have it sound like you know what you’re talking about.

Production

As you move into the production phase of the process, concentrate on those differentiating factors. If a feature doesn’t serve them, it can be eliminated. It’s just a distraction from your core marketing message.

As you build your service, keep things as lean as possible while still living up to your message. It is the one area where you can’t cut corners. Other features and benefits can be added later, but if you miss the mark with your differentiating factors your business will be adrift.

Execution

As you move through the production phase of your business and into the execution phase, you must keep your eye on the ball. All aspects of your business should fulfill your core marketing message.

If you are all about luxury, then your customer service must go above and beyond what is normally expected. If efficiency is your thing, then your e-commerce platform better be flawless and user friendly. If your products are based around clean minimalist design, then everything from your website, to your Facebook page, to your storefront will have to live up to those expectations.

You can not afford to have a disconnect between your core marketing message and your product or service.

Marketing your core message

So, your differentiating factors were built right into your planning process. You stuck like glue to your core message through the production process. And now your execution is on point – customer service, e-commerce platform, store design are all a perfect match for that core marketing message. Now what?

Now you get out your bull horn. You start broadcasting that message through every channel available to you. But don’t go about it all willy-nilly. You still have to stick to the principles that have gotten you this far. If your message is about quality, don’t run an ad about rock bottom prices. And if your are trying to differentiate yourself through your down home atmosphere, don’t put a bunch of stark, edgy images on Instagram.

Build yourself a solid base of good quality content on the platform or platforms of your choice. The content should echo the main concepts of your core marketing message. Write articles about how your luxury service is far above the bargain priced alternatives. Record YouTube videos that show how much more efficient your prospect will be once they start using your product. publish a podcast introducing customers to the homespun wit and wisdom they can expect when they visit your boutique.

Once you have established your core principles on your platform of choice, use creative marketing and advertising techniques to drive prospects back there. A clean, minimalist print ad can be used to drive customer back to you clean and efficient website. A wine tasting event can be used to draw people in to your luxury housewares storefront. And a silly infographic can go viral and lead people right back to your world class collection of cat videos.

Just keep pounding away at that core marketing message and your targeted prospects will start to take notice.

Wrapping up

I realize that this article was a little more esoteric and less tactical than my previous posts. Hopefully you found it interesting and informative. Let me know what concepts in the article you would like me to expand upon. I’m here to help.

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Photo courtesy Samuel Zeller / Unsplash

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A marketing funnel is much more chaotic than that, it’s actually more like that picture ^up there^. People enter the Underground station and face a plethora of choices on how to get to their destination. Will they take the escalators? The staircase on the right, or maybe the one on the left. Perhaps they will stop to grab a bite to eat, or pull some cash out of the ATM.

Your marketing funnel is the device used to get people to proceed down your staircase. To keep them from getting distracted. To help them find their path, and to help them find your product or service along the way.

You see that guy in the gray suit, standing on the platform right above the automated ticket machines? That is your prospect. He has started down your staircase, but now he’s a little lost. How do you get him to go right – right down the funnel to being a customer and a raving fan?

That is what this article is will cover. So grab a cup a coffee and dig in. This is kind of a long one…

What is a marketing funnel, and how do I get one?

The term “marketing funnel” is thrown around a lot, and it has different meanings to different people. There can be marketing funnels for your entire business, marketing funnels for each of your product lines, or marketing funnels for each of your individual products or services. I’m sure there are even more types of funnels, but you get the idea.

In this article, I will describe a general marketing funnel for a typical small business. And I will relate it to online content marketing. As you are here, reading about content marketing, I’ll assume this approach is the most applicable to your current situation.

Let’s think of our funnel as having four sections. The fat part up at the top is what we will call Discovery. Below Discovery, in a slightly narrower part of the funnel we have Know. As your customer passes through Know they move into the third section of the funnel, let’s call this area Like. If you can get your customer to move past the Like section of your marketing funnel, they will enter the Trust phase. Once you have successfully migrated your customer through these four phases, they will be at a point where they are happy to buy whatever you are selling (within reason).

Next, we will tackle each of the sections of our funnel individually, learning what keeps our customer moving down the funnel and what might cause them to leak out.

Discovery

The fat end of your marketing funnel is what I like to call Discovery. This is where all those people out on the internet find you, whether through a Google search or on a social media platform or even through virtual word-of-mouth.

So what leads to discovery? Great content. SEO focused content. Funny and interesting content. Creative content. This content gets indexed by Google, shared by your fans and friends, and leads to browsers on your website. So the trick is to figure out who your business should target and what types of keywords they are typing into the search engines.

This is not the time to worry about analyzing these keywords, or grading them, or making value judgments. Why? Even if these important “first impression” keywords are too competitive to rank in Google, they still need coverage on your website. You will need to create the content anyway. And guess what, if you are creating high quality original content, you will rank for important keywords that you would never have thought of, no matter how much research you do. The robots (algorithms) over at Google are pretty smart, they know good quality content when they see it. And millions of people come up with brand new search queries every single day.

As you fill out the content on your platform, you will get to a point where you need to come up with fresh ideas. This is where keyword research and analysis comes into play. But we are a ways off from that point. You are just getting started. Start writing about the things your customers are searching for and you will be well on your way to Discovery.

Know

So what do you do once traffic arrives at your site? How do you move your potential customers down the funnel from the Discovery phase to the Knowing phase?

To make this a reality, you need one small commitment from your visitor. You need an email address. An action that costs them nothing can be of immeasurable value to you.

Before I go on, I need to make something clear. Just because giving you an email address doesn’t cost your prospect any money doesn’t mean that you should abuse it. It is a lot of work getting someone onto your email list. The last thing you want to do is burn them by being aggressive or spammy.

Stepping off my soapbox now … Once you have a prospect on your list, you can ensure consistency of communication. You can let them know when you post a new video or write a new white paper. You can ask them about their biggest problem and help them solve it. In short, this consistency will help them get to know you.

So, how do you get people onto your mailing list? Well, that is the topic for another post, or more likely a full book. But I will touch on a couple of main points. First, you need some technical stuff like an email service and a landing page. Second, you will need a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a digital product that your prospective customer will gladly accept in exchange for her email address.

So you put up a landing page that has two functions – it describes your lead magnet, and it has a simple form to collect the prospect’s email address. That’s it. There is nothing else on the page, nowhere else to go. Once the prospect fills out the form, her email address goes into your database, you send her the lead magnet, and you can start building a relationship.

Use the email address to help your prospects get to know you. Send them emails when you publish great posts on your website. Point them to great resources from other websites. Make them look forward to receiving your emails.

Like

Ok, so you have a group of prospects on your email list. How do you get these strangers on the internet to Like you? It’s no different from what you would do out in the real world.

Step 1 – Be nice. Send them valuable information. Don’t waste their time.

Step 2 – Introduce yourself. Let them know about you on a more personal level. People don’t “Like” businesses, they like the people who work at businesses. Let your prospects know you are, in fact, a real person.

Step 3 – Ask about them. Ask them to write you back and let you know how you can help. What are their struggles related to your service? What product or service do they really need? How have products like yours failed them in the past? Start a conversation and see where it leads.

So, how do you go about implementing these three steps into your business? With a tool called an autoresponder sequence. Don’t let the long complicated name throw you. An autoresponder sequence is simply a series of emails that you set up in advance and send out to your prospects in a pre-determined sequence. The technical aspects of this are easily handled through your email service. The hard work comes when you set out to write your emails.

You should try to have at least a few emails in your autoresponder series, and you should space them out over the course of a few weeks. The key is to put in the work writing these emails. Make them long enough so the prospect gets a sense of your personality, but not so long that they are time consuming to read. And stick to the themes outlined in the three steps above. You can mix and match within the emails or make each email specific to one of the steps. Do whatever feels the most comfortable to you. This will be obvious in your writing and will help your prospect connect with you.

Trust

After your prospect gets to know you, they can move down the funnel to the trust stage. This is a critical point in your process. It is pretty unlikely that the prospect will ever pull out their credit card if they don’t develop this trust.

So how do you help them develop this trust? It’s just an extension of all the strategies listed above. You will need to continue creating content that speaks to your target audience. Keep in touch consistently with high-quality emails, and never take advantage of the email address that they so generously provided.

This is also the perfect opportunity to introduce a type of content called social proof. Here are just a few great examples of social proof…

• Social Media Likes, Mentions, Shares, and Reviews – these are all great ways to let your prospects know that your small business is an up-standing citizen. The only problem is, your prospects may see none of this social proof if they are not following you on these social media channels. So be sure to ask them to follow you in at least some of your autoresponder emails.
• Customer Testimonials – It would be a great idea to have a page on your website dedicated to customer testimonials. It’s even possible to set up a WordPress plugin to collect the testimonials for you. Once you have your testimonials page setup and your form built, it is just a matter of emailing your customers and asking them to let you know what they think of your product or service. Then direct them back to your testimonials page, and assuming that you are doing your job in terms of customer service, they will write you a quality review.
• Case Studies – Describe how your current customers are making more money, saving time, helping the environment, etc. Case studies are your opportunity to have others toot your horn so you don’t have to. They are like good old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising, but better because they are highly relevant to your prospects. In reading them, your prospects will be able to envision themselves having the same type of success. They will understand that these other people or business trusted you, and were better off for having done so.

Wrapping it up

So there you have it. A 30,000 foot view of your small business marketing funnel. Of course, only a small percentage of your prospects will work their way all the way from Discovery, through Know and Like, to finally reach Trust; but those who do will be your best customers. They won’t have to be sold, they will be excited to buy. And they will enthusiastically tell their friends about your product or service.

And what about the ones who don’t make it all the way down the funnel? Don’t give up on them. Keep sending them quality content and trying to build that trust. They may just be slow movers.

In a future article we will talk about plugging any leaks that you may have in your funnel, but you need to remember that not every prospect is right for your product or service. A good marketing funnel is just as effective for sorting out bad prospects as it is for turning good prospects into buyers.

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Photo courtesy Anna Dziubinska / Unsplash

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