Here’s a really great article I ran across on what it means to be "remarkable" to our clients. Hearing someone say "remarkable" often reminds me of the old Little Rascals episode where Spanky is babysitting the babies and one little baby keeps saying "remarkable" over and over again. Wouldn’t be great if we could get our clients to say that about us over and over again!

In today’s market we all need to remember what that means to our clients and how very important it is. Bryan Eisenberg lays out a great outline for what it means and how we can get back to being "remarkable". I hope you enjoy!

Why It’s Important to Be Remarkable in Marketing

"You want great marketing but nobody can be creative enough to compensate for the problem you have. The product you have been offering for the past 10 years just isn’t that remarkable, in fact, very few people truly even care if it exists." When I told this to the new CEO of a company I advised on a call this past week, I knew he wouldn’t like hearing it. I also knew that he was intellectually honest enough to agree. Would you be?

We were reviewing new marketing collateral his company had just developed. My question: "Who cares?" I wasn’t being callous. I was truly asking how this addressed a deeply felt need of his potential and actual clients. His marketing staff’s copy came off like the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons, "Wa wa wa wa wa wa."

There were at least three historical issues wrapped in this company’s marketing woes:

1. The old management’s communication style preference
    
2. Who they spoke to in their target market, dicated by that communication style 
    
3. The product and story they told about it were not remarkable

Your Story Gets Told the Way You See It

The founders of a company tend to set the company off on a trajectory that they envision and set. They see a need in the marketplace or come up with a product idea and set a story in place on how the market is going to receive it. Too often, they tell the story from their inside-the-bottle point of view and they never really get the proper results they desire. It’s often hard to take your customer’s point of view and tell them the story the way they need to experience it.

Great marketers and sales people have the ability to craft great stories. However, this company was extremely people oriented, founded to help companies better understand their customers. The founders’ communication style was highly "humanistic;" they were all about understanding and caring for people. I consider many of them good friends today and they are among the nicest people I know. So, they took their humanistic type product, told their story in a humanistic style, and the only people who cared or ever responded to their pitch for the most part were other people who preferred a humanistic approach.

There is nothing wrong with that per se. However, the majority of the budget for their product category was in the hands of decision makers with "competitive" and "methodical" personality preferences. While they kept developing their product to be more humanistic, their competitor took their equally less than remarkable "humanistic" product but told the story in a "competitive" point of view. Guess which one has the larger market share?

You Can’t Be Remarkable by Imitation

It’s often not enough to recognize you are speaking to the wrong persona or segment and just change your communication style. It typically won’t come off as authentic and your marketplace will see that you are just trying to copy your competitor. You still need something remarkable to share.

The new CEO of this company came in and had the development team work on an improved solution. The new solution is excellent and has the potential to be remarkable, depending entirely on how they decide to craft their narrative now. This one change can move this company from being a boring competitor in its current market to a natural leader in a new and emerging marketplace. However, it must make the change internally and externally to tell a new story and share it in the right voice. No amount of great marketing will resurrect a lousy story and unremarkable product, but in today’s world of "word of mouth," where social media is a top priority for marketers and the board room, you need your customers to share how remarkable your solution is. Will they want and be able to share your story?

Planning for Word of Mouth

My good friend Kevin Ertell did a fabulous job in his blog this week describing how planning for word of mouth may be the missing link forgotten about by marketers in the customer engagement cycle. He recommends that marketers plan for "satisfaction" and "referral" steps. As his post says, "Satisfaction is simply the foundation, and the minimum requirement, for a continuing relationship with customers."

Aiming for "satisfaction" isn’t enough. It’s more effective to have marketers think in terms of "delight." By adding "referral" as a step, it might misalign marketers into thinking they can trigger the referral if they just enable it, where we both know that when a customer is delighted (or angry) they share it today.

If you truly want to persuade people you must first delight them. We can learn a lot about this from Apple’s marketing. Seth Godin offers 10 tips on how to be remarkable as well.

How to Trigger Word of Mouth

When delivering a keynote presentation last week about social media to small and medium sized businesses, I told them nothing different than what I tell larger clients. Hopefully, they can now turn their agility into an advantage. Remember, it’s important to be remarkable! Think of it like Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz"; the power to capture social media attention didn’t rely on the wizard (social media gurus) or the ruby slippers (the social media tools), but rather that they had the power inside them the whole time – they just needed to be "remarkable!"

I’m always looking for great tips to pass on to our fans! Here’s a really great post I ran across on Mashable about social media campaigns about 3 very important things everyone needs to know about creating a social media strategy. B.L. Ochman makes some really good points that we all forget about establishing effective social media campaigns. These are important notes that not only we need to understand, but points we need to be sure our clients know as well. Social media is not an easy, cheap, quick fix. It takes team work, solid strategies and objectives, and it doesn’t happen over night. And just because you can create a facebook page for free doesn’t mean you’ll have social media success. It takes upfront thinking and man hours to really make it work. Hope you enjoy!  

3 Things You Need to Know About Social Media Strategy

Companies large and small are rushing to understand and get involved in social media. But most of the agencies and consultants who are being paid to establish social media campaigns for corporations are afraid to tell their clients three things they don’t want to hear.

1. Everyone Must Work Together

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In most big companies, IT, digital, marketing and sales not only don’t work together, they compete with each other. Until they start collaborating as a team, you will not succeed in social media.

For example, I recently handled social media advertising for a major retail chain’s holiday microsite. The promotion was conceived by the digital department and involved augmented reality. But the IT department refused to allow a link from the homepage to the microsite because the microsite’s design was done by an external agency.

Further, the marketing department refused to allow a dedicated e-mail to go out to the company’s mailing list, and when placed in the company’s normal promotional e-mail, the link to the microsite was lost in a sea of weekly specials.

These hurdles made it very hard to drive traffic to the microsite.

But more than that, this lack of internal collaboration and contact makes any kind of social media involvement virtually impossible.

A company that hasn’t learned to listen to its own employees, and encourage them to collaborate internally, is not likely to succeed in integrating social media tools into its marketing mix, no matter what agency or consultant they hire.

2. Top Management Must Be On Board

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If the direction doesn’t come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo.

Despite the best intentions of agencies and consultants, social media integration is bound to meet huge resistance until top management says it’s OK to spend time and money to integrate it into the company’s marketing and culture.

Example: The marketing team of an international manufacturer of electronics wanted to know how the company could begin to use social media and we discussed the many possibilities.

Listening and responding to what customers are saying about the brand in social media can supply good intelligence and give the company a chance to interact with customers.

“Our management doesn’t want to listen to customers,” the PR director said. “They want to talk to them.”

However, that doesn’t work anymore. The status quo is dead. Any company that isn’t willing to listen to customers and be nimble and quick enough to respond, and, when necessary, change, will soon be unable to compete with smart, tech-savvy companies that can turn on a dime.

Willingness to change is the new bottom line for every business today. But top management has to buy in before change can begin.

3. Don’t Expect Overnight Success

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Sure there are videos that go viral, contests that attract a lot of buzz, and Facebook pages that get a lot of fans. But what comes after those efforts?

After the tools change (and they surely will) how will social media fit into the company’s overall strategy and help it reach long-term goals?

Example: Smart companies look at the long-term. The Fiskateers, now in its sixth year, is the brainchild of digital agency Brains on Fire, for their client Fiskars.

With the scissors brand losing market share to foreign knock-offs, the company enlisted several actual crafters to blog, attend events, and represent the brand to customers as part of a new community strategy.

“If you empower your customers to become your evangelists, you’d better be prepared to continue it,” says Brains on Fire’s Geno Church. “It’s permanent when you engage in this type of marketing.”

Once you have created the community, listen to it. Fiskars made several changes to its products based on what it discovered through its Fiskateers community. Doing so helped build customer trust and loyalty.

Where Should Your Company Start?

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Realizing that employing social media in the marketing mix is a long-term commitment to change, the best way to start is to pick manageable, measurable goals.

Pick a small number of social media goals for the coming year. Some possibilities:

- Turn the company newsletter into an internal blog and give all employees the ability to contribute
- Establish a social media policy for employee participation in social media on company time and beyond
- Let employees vote on the best ideas suggested by other employees
- Resolve to respond to customer service issues within three hours, via social media

Don’t try to do all of these things at once. Pick the ones that are most likely to be possible for your company to start and sustain.