I recently spoke to Larry Weber, who is the co-author, with Lisa Leslie Henderson, of The Digital Marketer, 10 New Skills You Must Learn to Stay Relevant and Customer-Centric. Weber is the Chairman and CEO of Racepoint Global, an advanced marketing services agency. He is a globally known expert in public relations and marketing services and frequent public speaker. Larry is also the author of four additional books on marketing, technology, and leadership: Sticks & Stones: How Digital Business Reputations Are Created Over Time…And Lost in a Click, business bestseller Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business, and Everywhere: Comprehensive Digital Business Strategy for the Social Media Era.
In the following interview, Weber talks about the marketing tools all business leaders should focus on, why startups should use social media, what you can learn about consumers through analytics, how entrepreneurs should go about advertising their services online and more.
Dan Schawbel: What marketing tools should business leaders spend the most time on and which should they avoid altogether?
Larry Weber: Today’s marketing toolkit is larger than ever, so some prioritization in learning and adoption is necessary. The most essential tools are those that help companies understand what matters to their customers and what positively and negatively impacts their customer experience, which is today’s primary’s source of competitive advantage.
These tools include customer journey analysis, sophisticated social listening software, customer communities, and behavioral analytics that capture how customers respond. With this knowledge companies can better understand the needs their customers are trying to address, the motivations surrounding those needs, and their customers’ preferences for communication, which allow marketers to design highly relevant and often predictive marketing experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. Think Amazon, Nike, Warby Parker, and IBM.
As for tools to avoid, today’s marketing toolkit is inherently neutral; however, the way the tools are applied determines if they are ultimately helpful or harmful to our brands. Using these tools in an interruptive manner, where we push our way into customer experiences rather than being invited, will yield negative results, eroding any value we hoped to create by adopting these tools in the first place.
Schawbel: A lot of research shows that small businesses are shunning social media tools. Do you think they are worthwhile for startups? Explain.
Weber: Social tools are definitely worthwhile for startups. However, for social to be effective, companies must be able to wrap their products and services in well-designed experiences that people can get excited about and share with their friends. For example, Burberry could target display ads across the Web, to raise awareness of its cosmetics line. Or, it could introduce people to their new cosmetics line via Burberry Kisses, a social experience that uses facial recognition technology to allow people to send a digital kiss to anyone, anywhere in the world. The sender of the kiss can enclose a message and choose a lipstick shade for their lip print from Burberry’s latest beauty collection. Taking advantage of location data, the sender is able to watch his or her message travel to its destination, crossing a three-dimensional landscape that includes local landmarks and actual street view images. Experience it yourself at kisses.burberry.com.
To be effective, startups must also be selective about their social engagement, choosing to be involved only in those social environments that make the most sense for their customers and their business needs. For example, while over 1 billion people are active on Facebook, a high-tech startup is likely to get more mileage out of being part of Spiceworks, a social community where over 2.5 million information technology folks gather to talk all things tech, or IBM’s Midsize Insider, a lightly branded customer community for CIOs where conversation about the tech needs and concerns of the group flows.
Schawbel: What can you learn about your consumer using new tools and analytics that can help you better sell to them?
Weber: Today there is no shortage of data about our customers. The challenge is to be able to access, integrate, and analyze it to find relevant insights that can positively impact our customer experience. There are plenty of companies out there offering solutions to help marketers accomplish this.
Take web analytics software, for example. iPerceptions makes it possible for companies to get at the WHY behind the customer behaviors captured by their core analytics systems. By capturing Voice of the Customer Data across multiple channels through live feedback and customer surveys, and linking this data with real-time customer path analysis, marketers can better understand where they need to take action to improve their customer experience.
Similarly, new tools and analytics are helping marketers improve their lead scoring capabilities to increase the quality of leads delivered to sales. According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales ready leads at 33 percent lower costs. Most marketing automation analytics allow marketers to score prospects based on their activity. New predictive scoring applications like Fliptop, incorporate thousands of additional data points and closed win/loss history to CRM and marketing systems to create a more complete picture of prospects and more accurate scoring.
Schawbel: How does an entrepreneur know whether to do an advertising campaign with Facebook, Google or traditional media? How do they decide where to invest their money early on in the startup process?
Weber: The American designer Brian Collins once said, “Advertising becomes the penalty paid by companies that cannot design well.” A well-designed customer experience takes the place of most advertising. How much money did Google or Amazon spend on advertising in their startup phases?
We recommend an influencer strategy: identify the key people and organizations that can inform a desired customer base and get to know them well. As an entrepreneur reaches out, personally, influencers develop an appreciation for the startup’s unique story and begin to see how their base of followers can benefit from getting to know the company as well. This shared storytelling can help entrepreneurs build brand awareness, create and activate content, and build partners for crisis management, product development, competitive analysis, and event and product promotion. Influencers can be journalists, experts, analysts, regulators, bloggers, celebrities, and customers; their influence can be earned organically or purchased in the form of sponsorships or paid blogging.
Schawbel: What are some modern innovations that can help them outperform the competition?
Weber: Today’s marketing automation systems have the ability to scale personal relationships through customized and predictive interactions. These systems can often assess where individuals are in the customer journey and distribute content based on that individual’s behavior, being mindful of redundancies and changes in cadence, interest, and priorities. Marketers can also use this technology to run comparative champion-challenger analyses of content in real time, allowing for optimization on the fly, and to track leads and sales back to the marketing initiatives that generated them. With this information, marketers can identify their most powerful interactions and channels and use that insight to optimize their marketing investments and customer experience.
Private online customer communities are helping companies put customers at the center of their marketing, customer service, and innovation efforts. Research shows that people go to public social spaces, such as Facebook, to hear from brands, but to share their thoughts; customers often prefer a private setting away from the influence and ears of their friends. To successfully collaborate with their customers, many brands are forming private online communities to supplement their public social media presence. Godiva Chocolates, for example, created its best-selling chocolate line, Godiva Gems, based upon conversations it had with customers in its invitation-only online community, Chocolate Talk.
Dan Schawbel is a speaker and best-selling author. Subscribe to his newsletter.
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