There are ways that you can absolutely guarantee that your strategic marketing and related communications will be ignored by your key prospects.

During a recent brand review I came across a prospective client who had been contacted by our client who had quite a strong point of view about our client’s communications. Here’s an abbreviation of what the prospect had to say which illustrates what NOT to do when marketing to prospective clients.

“This company has no clue how to communicate with people who are thinking about their products and services. After just one email contact I was deluged with multiple phone calls, e-mailings, and invitations to trial product offerings! I had to write an email and call the company directly to get them to STOP their solicitations!”

This is obviously an extreme example but it shows what is going on in the market. Since it’s been down there is a heavy fervor for “building a sales growth program.” Let me say there is nothing wrong with the objective, in fact, it’s absolutely necessary, but how you go about it is crucial.

Whether you are making sales calls for your company or managing a marketing program, consider these tips for prospecting for new customers:

Be a good listener. Knowing what your prospective customer thinks is far more valuable than he knowing what you think. Listen to his or her concerns and don’t expect that you will be invited to solve all of them during your first visit. Do not offer advice unless you are asked for it! This is a tough concept for many marketers to get a grasp of, I realize, but it will pay off if you can exert some patience. Establishing that you are both interested in their challenges and that you are willing to work collaboratively will build more trust more quickly than spouting off some quick solutions.

Be an informed provider. Save your prospect time by learning about his or her company before your meeting. This will demonstrate your genuine interest in their business and set you apart from the majority of marketers who don’t take the time to come up to speed on the company’s history, challenges and related matters.

Be accessible. This sounds like a no brainer but I can tell you that I often follow-up with individuals who request my attention on their new product or service who do not follow-through with information I request. I have learned over the years that if a company will not follow-through on simple requests they do not make good candidates for an editorial feature.

Be a giver. A quick rule of thumb is give three times before asking for anything from your prospect. You can bring them pertinent information they can use in their every day business. You can offer prospect leads they could follow-up with who might make good customers for their business. And you can investigate what they are working on and offer resources you are aware of that might help them. After you have done these things and built some trust you might have earned their appreciation and they might be inclined to return the favor.

Be professional. This tip seems obvious but it is often ignored in the marketplace. If someone hints they don’t have time to talk right then immediately offer to contact them at a more convenient time. Examples of putting the prospect in charge sends the right signals of how you would behave if they because a customer.

Prospective customers have many choices today. They don’t have to do anything they don’t want to, and that includes buying from you! So don’t give them a reason to not do business with you – give them a reason to do business today!

At least not at first. Two words marketers hate to hear are: Opt out. This occurs of course when someone decides that what he or she is reading no longer offers enough value to continue. Although inevitable that some will opt out, there are three things you can do to greatly decrease the number who do.

#1 Match Your Content to Your Audience: The more you can determine what your readers are most interested in reading about and write to that narrow knowledge vertical the better. This blog, for instance is about strategic market planning and strategic marketing case studies, tips and relevant information that help marketers make informed strategic decisions. The more you know about your readers the better you’ll be able to write to their needs.

#2 Optimize, Optimize, Optimize: Probably one of the most important things you can do is conduct a communications review of your online and downloadable information. At a minimum, once a year, go through everything and ask yourself “Does this information match up to what our company is currently offering? Does it bear the corporate branding our newest materials are using? These and other questions will guide you in your Spring Cleaning of what to keep or discard. Under all cases resist the temptation of including everything you can say about your brand. Frankly, the more you say can actually end up hindering your marketing effectiveness. Busy people don’t appreciate busy websites that are difficult to navigate and find what they are looking for. The expression of including everything, including the kitchen sink, is not going to help your cause.

#3 Be Responsive: As a bloggist and strategist I receive dozens of email solicitations and am always amazed how few follow-up with my reply email. Or worse, when I have found a company offering a service I was interested in and send the company an email requesting someone contact me, no one responds! In one recent case I even called the company after my email was left unanswered and customer service took my contact information. A month later I am still waiting for a response that I am certain will never happen. Amazing isn’t it? It’s a lot like a company that exhibits at a trade show and then doesn’t follow-up with those that stopped by their booth preferring to wait for prospects to contact them.

Anything worth building takes years, not minutes, so having a professional list of those that you have contacted or have contacted you is a necessity. Customers will learn to trust you and your company if you keep timely and up-to-date responsive call sheets and they will reward you with their repeating business. Something all companies need in any business environment.

No one has a crystal ball into what 2012 will continue to bring for business, which is why we all look back for context and ahead to try and project best strategies going forward. It’s tough not to see a few big trends – marketing has taken on social media, or online media as some prefer to call it – it’s become the basis for most pre-sales decision-making.

Regardless of your industry or who your key niches, the objective of your strategic market planning is to deliver the most impact in the least amount of space. Micro-messages out-pull longer text explanations. Within seconds your key prospects determine if they are in or out of here! Here are five strategies to ensure you get the biggest slice of your market.

#1 Decrease the number of messages: be painfully obvious what you are offering (price reduction one-time only sale, new product introduction, free download, or providing a page turn to the next logical reading place). Wherever and whenever possible be a minimalist by eliminating what is not needed. This leaves only what is needed and makes for fast and energetic reading.

#2 Emphasize visually what’s important: This is a lot like point one applied in a visual context. Are your communications obvious and impactful? Do they make it easy to understand the five all-important answers to Who, What, Where, When, and Why? Emphasize what’s important and eliminate the rest. Resist the urge to oversell your brand.

#3 Build Trust: Most companies are not mega brands that can rely on big brand campaigns of the past such McDonald’s, Apple, IBM, etc. so your marketing and communications need to offer direct assurances that your brand is one that can be trusted. One powerful way to accomplish this is to provide consistency throughout your online and downloadable communications. A logical and consistent creative footprint demonstrates you have pre-determined what your customers need to know about you and that you have thought-through their needs.

#4 Build Good Will: Although knowledge is power having a trusting set of relationships is worth more. People are more likely to return to a company who has demonstrated a sincere desire to get to know their needs and they are more likely to spread the word to their friends. A great way to get your word out is to offer thought leadership articles to appropriate industry publications – print and online – to build credibility and a stead readership of your written word.

#5 Ask for the Order: A fairly common mistake marketers make is to assume their prospects will ask how to signup for their products and services. The reality is it’s important to provide a clear path from inquiry to sale so when professional credentials and product performance issues have been satisfied, a prospect can easily become a customer. This should not be an inordinately complicated process as most customers prefer simplicity when purchasing a product or service.

Most marketers realize that prospects don’t want to read lengthy online text. Rather, they want to find the answers to their basic questions quickly and be provided with a clear path to signup when they’re ready.

If you’re in the marketing business or do your own marketing you know how difficult self-promotion can be. Due to current market conditions many find themselves working on their marketing campaigns and branding programs. Fueled by pressure to publish creative and technical publications and messaging marketers find themselves doing the work they would have outsourced just a few years ago. If you find yourself in this situation, here are three things you need to know about self-promotion:

1.  Win in the niches: Do you know what specific niches your brand can effectively compete in and win? If not, it’s back to the drawing board before you write word one. You’ll need three lists. The first will list what truly differentiates your brand from all others. The second will list your customers’ needs that your brand fulfills. The third will list the specific markets that your customers can be found.

With these lists in hand your next step is to analyze if you’re trying to sell in more niches than your company is truly capable of supporting. In most cases it’s desirable to sell more products in fewer markets than fewer products in many markets. In niches your company and its brand can be positioned as a leader will generally provide a greater return on your marketing investment.

2.  Know your competition: Before you begin writing your self-promotion, it’s critical that you study your competition to ensure you have a strong and persuasive story to tell to your customers in comparison to your competition. If you find a niche market that has many competitors that are all pretty much offering the same set of products and services as yours perhaps this is a niche you may want to avoid. If withdrawing from the niche is not feasible then the more you know about your competition the better so you can bring something new and fresh to the table.

3.  Write with distinction: There are zillions of brands and messages in the market today so you’ll want to make your self-promotion unique and memorable. Strategic themes that are simple are easier to recall than complex themes. Being creative helps memory recall as well. Make your communications easy to understand by avoiding complex sentence structure. The keys are to be direct, simple and creative.

The challenge for today’s brand owners is to persuade potential customers to give you their time and attention, and to become engaged with your branding. That takes knowing how to create an intriguing and inviting brand story that your customers will want to learn from and become interactively linked to.

So ask yourself, what am I doing with my brand that makes it the one that my best prospects will want to pay attention to and begin participating? Customers will appreciate your well thought through approach to solving their problems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdWwqAI6x9A

I want to be fair but at the same time I want to focus on reality. The title “Keep me. Protect me. Share me.” along with the other tagline above were the words Kodak chose for its 2005 ad. What a shame they didn’t see past this excellent campaign into their next gigantic breakthrough. As this story shows, having one idea is enough if you know what to do with it.

As one of the most venerable and cherished brands ever, Kodak, after all was the company that invented the first functioning consumer film camera in 1888. Their dry, transparent and flexible photographic film began the production of “rolled photography film.” In 1986, Kodak invented the world’s first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5×7-inch digital photo-quality print. Commonly known today as the digital camera.

Many would argue either of these were world-class breakthroughs on the order of the personal computer or the automobile. What strikes me as truly incredible is the television ad that Kodak commissioned in 2005 that had the embedded ideas of storing photographs in a ‘gallery’ and if someone had just thought one step further, could have captured the digital online storage market segment. And yet, even with more than a 100-year head start in its tail winds, Kodak was unable to steer a course into its future. Take a look at their ad and decide for yourself. How smart and close were they, and yet how far away from executing their next big idea?

We’ve all benefited from Kodak’s remarkable inventions and use them every day. Those of us in the strategy business should take note and learn from both the successes and failures of this awesome company.

Complaints about not generating enough sales conversions abound. Perhaps you have heard or seen the daily requests from companies that are looking for an “Experienced business development director” who can bring in the bacon! I receive these types of requests from companies as well. It’s quite understandable really, given the current business climate, and it drives to the heart of what’s really needed. These companies are looking for radical and often quick answers to their decreasing sales problem. Perhaps you find yourself in the same position and are asking what can I do about it?

Quick bold steps you can take immediately

1. Cross-media marketing. Most companies are engaged in a multiple set of marketing and branding that might include social media, direct marketing, direct selling, conferences, and public relations. Few though are driving an integrated program across many media channels working in concert with one another with one brand platform. If you want to engage your customers and prospects you need to create a holistic approach that allows for both push and pull marketing up and down your sales and marketing channels.

2. Interaction through conversation. The primary strategy is to create engaging conversations with your customers and prospects alike and often the best way to accomplish this is by asking them for their opinions, allowing them a place to express themselves on your website or on your forums, or any number of other means to get the conversation started and keep it going on a two-way street.

3. Guard against too many messages. There is a saturation point for your customers and prospects given how many messages and items they will respond to. Sending out multiple messages each week to the same list, over and over again, is a dangerous tactic if you learn that your customers really only want to think about your brand on a twice-monthly basis. This goes against the hard-pressing sales marketing team that pushes on and on regardless! Trouble is, this outdated thought-train can get you opted out faster than much else since many people are trying to streamline their workflow.

4. Be responsive. Quicker is always better than slower. If you can reply to a message in a few minutes, rather than hours, you may just beat out your nearest competitor who does not consider that a priority.

These simple principles can make a positive impact on your branding. By listening and testing new ways to communicate you can find the right balance of push and pull marketing that every marketer needs to sustain its branding program.

Having worked on both the agency and corporate side of the desk, I can attest that most companies are more comfortable sticking to last year’s budget allocations than changing them. There are a variety reasons for this. One reason is the budget in the previous year was approved so it’s logical to think that this course will help them in the next year. The problem with continuing a budget year-after-year is it makes it difficult to establish and track specific results, and it usually does not bring growth gains that nearly all budgets state as a primary goal.

Consider two companies, each with a different set of brands and strategic initiatives. Company 1 spends most of its budget on direct to market campaigns aimed at a specific customer demographic and adjusts its budget in micro-increments after business results area analyzed, upping or downing mini-campaigns based on results. Sounds pretty smart, right?

Now consider Company 2 who invests in specific business divisions that perform at their highest projections and rewards them for their performance, and makes major changes in their budget allocation as success is achieved based on the division’s earning potentials.

Over a number of years, which one of these companies would you suppose would end up the winner? If you guessed Company 2, you would be right. It’s because as time goes along the more major investment in the strongest brands that is based on performance will outperform weaker brands that have been propped up with incremental budget support.

Over the years I have found companies much more comfortable taking ‘small steps’ because they felt they were taking on less risk. After all, if they guessed wrong they’ve only hurt themselves in a small way. Therein is the major strategy misstep that companies fall prey to in the budgeting process. They train their executive management and therefore their staffs to not look for big opportunities, but rather ‘safe’ ones. So year after year a company can underspend itself out of business particularly if they apply this same strategy to their product development. It’s sad to say, but many companies are in a downward spiral this year because they can’t break out from what they did last year.

I am a second-generation brand strategist who has been observing and producing branding programs for three decades. My dad was a partner in an ad agency in Chicago for 25 years before I got out of college. I remember many Saturday mornings going with him to his Michigan Avenue offices and watching him look over ad tear sheets and make strategy and copy adjustments that would be implemented on Monday. So you see, it’s in my blood, so to speak, and I have a lot of experience to base my outside reviews on. Here is one simple thought on simplicity.

The web has made everything very easy to review. And control. Google it. Go to Amazon. Look for it on eBay. In seconds you can put your computer pointer on it with a few clicks.

Is this a good thing? Probably, but it has its consequences.

It’s easier to switch brands today than ever before. There are so many FREE OFFERS everywhere that when someone asks for payment or opt-in people turn away and look for someone who doesn’t require that sort of upfront commitment.

Is this a good thing? Once again, that depends on how well you have adjusted to this new market reality. If you are having trouble with your sales you can find someone to help you with your self-confidence to build it back up, but all of this has created such ubiquity that it’s really easy for your brand to get lost in the shuffle.

So what can you do? When in doubt, move away from what everyone else is doing and do something new. Be different. Be unique. Be sure. And most important, be simple.

Consumers will pay.

Buyers will pay.

But be sure to provide whatever it is you are offering in real-time, today, without the wait. Frankly, no one is going to wait for your lengthy and complicated explanation to make sense. They will simply click on until they find what they think they are looking for. Simplicity is required for the new reality.

Branding is an ongoing process that cannot be produced in an afternoon of decisions regarding your logo, corporate colors and website design. Rather, we all know that a successful brand is built from a multitude of coherent decisions that grow out of one powerful corporate and brand strategy. If owning and managing a leading brand is a goal of yours here are 10 simple rules on how to become, well, a brand leader:

1. Share all of your best ideas with everyone. Don’t hold back! People respond generously to the most generous people so you will be rewarded by your open-sharing policy.

2. Be prepared for heavy competition but lightly change strategy to adjust to a new reality and do it with so much grace everyone will think you planned it that way.

3. Be a better listener than a talker! In fact, be more interested in learning about your customer’s needs than explaining your services. Remember, people are interested in telling their story, not necessarily listening to yours, at least not until they’ve told theirs first.

4. Realize that you need to be a team of one. Be confident and proactive.

5. Use research but trust your instincts, as they will usually be right if you have been in your industry for some time.

6. As a very close friend told me recently, “Be better each day so you can help others do better.” This is a baseline way to conduct your life and it will never let you down professionally or personally, for that matter.

7. Pursue your dreams and big ideas. Don’t let them sit on a shelf year after year. Try them out and see if you can make something of them. You’ll never know if you don’t try.

8. Try and be the industry imaginer. Steve Jobs was always out in front of his competition and customers and offered something new and different. This capacity of coming out with something new serves Apple well today.

9. Be a detail person. Follow through on every single drop of opportunity that comes your way and finish every item you start, regardless of how large or small.

10. Don’t sit by the phone waiting for it to ring with an idea or opportunity. Instead, pick up the phone and make something happen!

When was the last time you had to respond to a specific criticism over an issue associated with your company or with a perceived product defect and you were at a loss for words realizing that your response needed to be carefully phrased? Difficult questions like these and many, many others often catch people at a loss because they are unrehearsed. The good news is there are ways to prepare for these unexpected questions, even tough ones, so you don’t embarrass your company or yourself in the public eye. Here are five ways I would recommend to anyone who deals with the media or buyers who need to prep for sensitive topics.

1. Prepare some twists you can use in response to a negative question. In sports the best defense is offense. The quickest way to get on the offensive side is to research your company and pick out the 10 worst questions you might be asked if someone decided to play the protagonist. For example, let’s say your sales have been sliding for 18 months and market buyers are aware of this decline and you’re asked, “What’s going on with your declining sales?” Rather than trying to respond directly to the fact that was just laid out you could answer with “That’s right, our sales have been in decline in the specific market you cite along with our top 3 competitors, I might add. All of us have had our challenges in this down economy however we’re encouraged by our ‘Widget’ has been selling briskly in specific markets and is well ahead of our forecasts of last year.”
2. Make equally aggressive responses to aggressive questions. At a recent sales meeting several key salesmen were strongly questioning the wisdom of a specific set of directives they had received from their director. Rather than trying to softly respond to their objections the director bluntly asked, “Do you want the benefit of my inside industry and customer knowledge or go it alone and live and die by your solo efforts?” Since the director was an acknowledged market leader the sales people quickly recanted their objections and became far easier in their communications. This was made possible because the director knew what would and wouldn’t work in the market and was prepared to stand up for her beliefs.
3. Be an interesting storyteller. People love stories and interesting examples because they can see themselves in them and quickly gain a sense of direction from them. When presenting to a board of directors recently I gave an example of when I first started in the business in my first line job. This brought the board of directors back to their first job, something that we could all talk about and be interested in. When the discussion turned back to what it was I was proposing it was a much easier communication because empathy for the continuous improvement program I was proposing had been established.
4. Be the expert in the room. But don’t be a ‘know-it-all.” This is a common mistake made by professionals. They seem to have an in-bred need to always remind everyone in the room of how much they know. Frankly, this is a total bore. I recently interviewed a director who was on the one hand a total expert in his area filled with information but on the other hand, I couldn’t wait for the interview to conclude because there was so much self-aggrandizement in the room we needed to open a window to let some fresh air in! Know the facts, be prepared to share them, but always do so in the context of the question you’ve been asked. Short and quick answers are always preferred to long-winded complicated explanations.
5. Be yourself. One of the worst mistakes someone can make in media and sales is to pretend to be someone they’re not. Rarely does this have a happy ending because the truth is easier to keep straight than untruth. Look for ways to demonstrate your competence and explain things in a simple and straightforward way. Report negative facts just as easily as positive ones to set yourself up as a trustful resource and lay out what you are going to do next to right the situation. Honesty is always the best policy.

Human nature leads you to hold your breadth and hope that no one notices, but this hardly ever works. The world is too small now to hide from specific or critical events. It’s always better to stay in front of an issue and be prepared to set the directional course for that issue. Really strong executives bring out the worst news in their interviews quickly offer the remedy that will solve to the problem they just cited. That’s leadership in action.