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…there was this video from Talk Talk, circa 1984.

Your most influential target audience is your staff.

_{This is a painting called ‘Confusion’, and it’s definitely how the inside of my head looks when I myself am not sure what’s going on.}

 

A couple of years ago I was working with a smallish-but-getting-bigger-fast B2B company, and our marketing efforts seemed to be fairly successful: We were getting buzz in the marketplace, having little trouble getting meetings because potential clients had always “heard good things” about us, winning new business over larger, more established competitors – by most indices, our marketing efforts were delivering results.

But revenue growth just wasn’t following the same trajectory.  Sure, it was growing – but not as steeply as our brand awareness and equity seemed to be.  And we weren’t sure why.

Then I sat in on an all-staff meeting, and I began to understand.

When the company was smaller, senior leadership (all of whom were highly entrepreneurial) was very involved with every client engagement.  They were handling much of the day-to-day interaction, which meant they could build relationships, listen for opportunities, ask for referrals, sell additional services – all the revenue drivers that make an investment in marketing worthwhile in the long-term.

As the company had grown, however, a lot of the account management had been handed off to newer, more junior employees.  When I sat in on the staff meeting, I could see that while the newbies were hard-working and anxious to do a good job, most of them weren’t nearly as enthusiastic about the organization as the senior leadership, and in many cases didn’t even really have a good grasp of everything the company sold, how it could help clients, and why it was so great.

In other words, they weren’t familiar with the brand story, the positioning, or the value proposition.

Stop thinking about training your people. Start thinking about marketing to them.

Now, some people would say that this was a job for Sales Training.  I tend to disagree – mostly because ‘Sales Training’ is something that seems to be reserved for ‘Sales People‘, and I’m of the opinion that every single person in the organization, from admin assistants to account managers to the accounts payable people, can (and should) be sales influencers.  They can spot opportunities, influence decision-makers, increase brand awareness, build relationships – all of the things that drive long-term revenue growth.

Try to give them ‘sales training’, and they’ll tune out or privately decide that it’s ‘not their job’, since they aren’t in sales.  Market to them, on the other hand, and they can become passionate evangelists who are invested in telling (and living) the brand story.

What does internal marketing look like?

Well, it looks a lot like your external marketing – just using different channels.  

Some ways to start marketing to employees:

• Include a session with the Marketing Director as part of your onboarding efforts for new hires – I know you probably make fun of your marketing people for being so bloody enthusiastic all the time, but they can be infectious
• Make sure all employees have reviewed your marketing materials and know exactly what you sell, why it’s different and better, and why it’s so successful in the marketplace
• Deliver the same great experiences to employees that you deliver to your customers.  Do you send flowers or gift baskets to new clients?  Great – send them to new employees or on employee anniversaries, too.  
• You know that e-newsletter you send to clients to tell them about all the neat stuff you’re doing?  Make sure you’re sending the same info to your employees – before you send it out externally.  It’s amazing how well people respond to feeling like they’re ‘in the know’ ahead of everyone else
• Have all staff – especially juniors and newbies – spend time with members of the senior leadership team, the same way you bring in the C-suites to help sell a new client.  Employees will feel respected and valuable, which encourages engagement, and they’ll absorb some of the entrepreneurial enthusiasm that your senior people are projecting
• You wouldn’t hand a potential client a giant binder of single-spaced text and tell them to read it and call you if they want to buy something – don’t do it to employees (via an Employee Handbook), either.  Review information with them, point out the interesting bits, and encourage them to ask questions
• It takes 4-7+ touchpoints for a potential customer to really understand what you do and make a purchase, and it takes a long-term relationship to drive repeat business.  It’s the same with employees:  Don’t assume that a week’s worth of ‘onboarding’ is all it takes for them to become experts in your business or passionate brand storytellers.  

I know this has a lot of overlap with what HR would call ‘training’.  But when you think of it as informing, persuading and wooing your employees the same way you do your customers, you’ll get the increased emotional investment that does a better job of driving long-term sales growth.

Strategies for helping reluctant clients find better ways to express themselves.

^{Yes, this is a dung beetle pushing a large ball of dung.  At least I didn’t use an image of Sisyphus.}

Yesterday I wrote about how to approach the problem of a client with a brand identity you don’t like, and making sure you’re not mistaking ‘personal opinion’ for ‘professional advice’.

But what happens when you’ve asked yourself the right questions, remembered you’re not the target, and still come to the conclusion that the client’s brand identity is getting in the way of overall marketing success?  

Negative know-it-alls never prosper

You know who I’m talking about:  The people who waltz in and proceed to tell the client, with a boatload of condescension, that everything they’ve done up to this point is a giant heap of awful and they need to rebuild everything from the bottom up if they are to have a hope in hell of getting any more business from anyone, ever.

These blowhards do manage to get the odd client, but it’s amazing how they never seem to keep them for very long. Because anyone who tells you they have the magic marketing answer to everything never does – sooner or later clients realize this for themselves, and go elsewhere.  

When you first meet a client, you don’t know how much money they’ve already spent on their brand identity; you don’t know how emotionally invested they are in it; you don’t know how the organization feels about it; and you definitely don’t know if what they’re doing is working for them or not.  Walking up to someone at a bar and saying, “You know, you’re really kind of ugly, but if you fix your hair, makeup and wardrobe, maybe we could go out sometime…” is the start of a totally dysfunctional relationship.

Ask questions, build trust

Client relationships are like any other relationships:  Before they’re going to take your advice, they’re going to have to trust you.  So before you make pronouncements about their brand and their organization, start by asking questions.  These are the questions I ask when I think a client may need a brand identity overhaul:

1.  Tell me the story behind your brand.

As I said yesterday, a logo or brand identity that looks unappealing to you may in fact have a great story behind it.  You may even find that that story has value for their sales team, or quite a bit of equity in the marketplace.  (‘Kleenex’, for example, is actually a terrible name, and the logo isn’t much better.  But it doesn’t matter, since ‘Kleenex‘ has been around so long, and is so ubiquitous, that it’s become the generic name for any paper-based facial tissue.)

How this can help your case: If they struggle to tell you the story behind their brand, you can suggest that building a brand identity with a proper story behind it will make their sales and marketing efforts a lot easier.

2.  Tell me the history of your brand identity.  Have you worked with designers or marketing people before?

This is important to know, because if they say they just spent $50,000 on a new brand identity – especially if they worked with one of the blowhards mentioned above – they’re going to be highly sensitive to criticism or suggestions for change.  On the other hand, you may discover that the current logo was designed by the CEO’s 18-year-old nephew.  

How this can help your case: If you discover that they’re new to ‘marketing’, educating them about how a properly-articulated brand identity can help them position and sell themselves can be all you need to propel them in the right direction.

3.  Tell me about how you think marketing can help your business.

Good marketing starts with understanding the client’s business, so by the time you’re talking about branding you should already know what they do and why they think they’re unique in the marketplace.  Now it’s time to drill down to identify gaps or opportunities that marketing can help to fill.  Ideally this will become a discussion between you and the client – with you recommending opportunities, not just taking orders from the client – but it’s good to start with what the client is thinking about how you can help them.

How this can help your case:  If the client identifies a specific challenge (“Our salespeople aren’t getting enough meetings” or “People aren’t spending enough time on our website”), they open the door to a conversation about how the brand identity might be part of the problem.

4.  Who is your target audience/market?

Over the years, I’ve worked with several property management-related companies, many of whom have had dreadful brand identities.  At first I tried hard to get them to change, until I realized that 95% of their business happened as a result of long-standing relationships within a fairly tight-knit community of guys (yes, it’s usually men) who have known each other forever, have owned commercial/industrial properties together, and tended to make business deals based on handshakes and beer.  They didn’t need expensive brand identities with charming brand stories – they just needed some basics to make them look professional.

However, when some of these businesses grew, and were looking to penetrate larger consumer markets, then it was time to push a better brand identity.  

How this can help your case: Knowing your client’s target market will allow you to demonstrate who else is excelling in their space – and show them how important it is that their brand identity is good enough to compete.

5.  How do you see your business growing in the next 12-24 months? 

As a business grows, so does their need for marketing materials.  Today, all they think they need are business cards and a website; 6 months from now they may need anything from billboards to tradeshow displays to RFP templates; 2 years from now they may need branding and materials for line extensions. 

How this can help your case: The more you know about your client’s future plans, the more you can help them identify the marketing and communications materials they’ll need down the line – and the easier it is to demonstrate how their current brand identity won’t accommodate that kind of growth in the long run.  

It’s an organic process

It’s a rare client who, after being asked a question or two, says, “Okay! I get it – let’s revamp the whole brand identity! How soon can we do it?” That’s okay – I’m a firm believer that the best brands are built over time, and as a result of a close relationship between the organization and their marketing team.  Asking the right questions will help you build that relationship.

Print ads can express great ideas.
They’re just hardly ever worth the money.

_{This is a pretty ad.  Unfortunately I have no idea what it’s trying to tell me.  I’m pretty sure dentists won’t know either, since mostly they practice in offices, not fields.}

A few months ago I got a call from one of my clients, who was excited.  “I got an email from a business magazine and they want to do a feature on us!  I told them you’d get back to them with all the details.”

Neither of us had ever heard of the magazine, but that didn’t matter. As long as they’re not asking my clients to pose naked or offer opinions on religion, I’m happy to take PR where I can get it.  And we’d had a lot of media exposure in mainstream channels in the previous 12 months, so I wasn’t surprised that we were getting the call.

So I called the ‘editorial assistant’ who’d contacted my client.  We discussed the feature (4 pages!  with photos! and case studies!), and the various angles we could pursue.  I investigated the magazine (something to do with ‘women in business’), which seemed legit, if a little obscure.  Over the course of 2 or 3 weeks, I provided detailed responses to questions, information about the business, and even provided the names of a couple of clients they could contact for ‘commentary’.

But then the sales pitch started:  They wanted a list of my client’s suppliers (with contact information), and I started getting emails from a sales manager type ‘recommending’ that we purchase a half-page ad to accompany our ‘feature’.  

Finally I got a bit annoyed, and called the editorial assistant.  “Look,” I said, “you pitched this to my client as a proper feature article. Now I’m getting the impression that this ‘feature’ is entirely dependent on us or our suppliers spending a lot of money.”

She denied it, of course…but after a couple more emails from the sales manager guy, we didn’t hear anything from them.

It’s all about the opportunity cost.

These days, most of my clients are small businesses who don’t have a single dollar to waste on marketing.  So spending $5000 for a half-page ad in some obscure business publication whose distribution is basically a mailing list they bought in 2006 just doesn’t make sense.

I always think about what else I could do for my client with that $5000:  I could host a networking event with good snacks, create several webinars, do a direct mail campaign, create a mobile version of their website – or my client could take 50 clients for fancy lunches, during any of which I know she could generate more business than she will through an ad in some magazine that no one ever reads.

Sure, print ads sometimes have their place.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that for some brands, print advertising works, especially as part of a larger campaign.  Big luxury brands can get a lot of mileage out of spreads in Vanity Fair or GQ, and from what I see on YouTube (where bedroom walls can often be seen in the background), kids are still cutting out ads from magazines to use as posters.  Heck, I even had this Hermes image as my computer wallpaper for a while.  Ads like these, which look like print ads but mostly live online, can generate a fair amount of brand awareness.

And I also know that even in this digital age, there’s something kind of cool about being able to pull out a printed publication and point to your very own advertisement.  For small business owners, especially, it can confer a sense of credibility, like “Wow, I have a real company, and here’s the proof.”

But ultimately, the goal of advertising – as a part of a larger marketing strategy – is to sell more stuff, and at the end of the day, a single print ad just isn’t going to do it for you.  So the next time someone calls you about advertising in a magazine you’ve never heard of, just say “no, thank you”.  I promise you’ll have made the right decision.

I don’t often talk about design on this blog, mostly because I fall into the “I don’t know much about design, but I know what I like” category.  There are plenty of people who know lots more about design than I do.

However, whenever I think about what my album cover would look like, if I ever had one (I don’t care what you say, you know you’ve thought about this too), this is what comes to mind:  Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ ‘Whipped Cream and Other Delights’.