To assist me in articulating to my clients how online marketing aligns with a typical sales process, I produced a diagram which shows the different stages in the marketing and sales process and how online marketing is used to drive leads, prospects and sales opportunites down the sales funnel.

1. Awareness

Using a combination of your company website, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, content marketing, your personal or company blog, social media marketing and smart phone and tablet apps, you create awareness and build credibility and encourage people to follow, connect, join your groups and subscribe to your blog and newsletter and interact with you.

2. Nurturing subscribers

People who have subscribed to your newsletter have given you permission to communicate with them on a regular basis. This is where you continue to build credibility and stay top of mind. Producing good content is crucial in order to retain subscribers and to encourage them to continue consuming your content and sharing your content with their respective communities.

3. Offline sales activity

This is where you make the transition from an online to an offline engagement and where the online channel can still play a part in building credibility. This is where you meet face-to-face with prospective clients, build relationships and present proposals.

4. Closing business

The is the last phase of the sales process and the start of an ongoing relationship with your new client. This is still an important element of your online marketing process because new and existing clients will (hopefully) provide favourable references online and can potentially allow you to publish case studies and testimonials on your website.

Without further ado, let’s get down to business. Today’s topic: 3 Reasons Why you need Webinars for your Content Marketing. So, what are webinars? Simply put, these are online workshops, also known as web-based seminars. Many companies have realized the power of webinars and are thus using it as an alternative means of seminars and conferencing.

Webinars have many advantages ranging from cost-effectiveness to flexibility, and anything in between. A solid example of how webinars are cost-effective lies in the reduction of transport costs together with accommodation. Traditionally, during a company’s annual general meeting, its employees would have to travel and even be availed with accommodation. However, with webinars, a conference can take place thousands of miles away and respective attendants won’t have to leave the comfort of their offices. Thus, many companies have had the pleasure of transmitting the message, without incurring extra costs.

According to a study released by the Content Marketing Institute, 59% of B2B marketers are using webinars. A further 61% believe that webinars are an essential tool in Internet marketing. That said; let’s get down to the nitty gritties. Here are 3 reasons why webinars should be a part of your content marketing strategy:

1.  Relationship Building

When it comes down to building a relationship with your audience, nothing beats webinars. Unlike how-to-articles and blog posts, webinars allows you to get right in front of your audience and interact with them in real-time. In your webinar, you can have Q&A time where you directly address concerns that your audience may have. In essence, this gives you a better chance of explaining what your business is all about and why they should purchase your products other than your competitors’.

2.  Long Term Value

Webinars shouldn’t be a one-time deal. You should record them for future use. As a fact, you can definitely host your webinars in your resource pages. This will not only add authenticity to your content, but many potential customers will easily relate to what you have to say. Always remember the very famous saying, “seeing is believing”. Continuous linking and promotion of past webinars will get you a steady return on investment long after the webinar is over.

 3.   Affordability

Some marketers, without even second thoughts, dismiss webinars as a marketing tool. They do this by comparing its effectiveness to live events. In our opinion, comparing the effectiveness of webinars to live events is simply – fallacy. You need to compare them as each has its effectiveness. Please note, we have nothing against holding live events, In fact, we love the glamour and effectiveness that they offer. Nonetheless, webinars are an easy and cost-effective way of getting the word out. For big companies, they can always use the two marketing strategies hand-in-hand. However, for smaller businesses that are looking for ways to increase traffic without spending so much, then webinars are a sure deal!

The Think Tank is proud to be the sponsor of the PR channel on the B2B Marketing Knowledge Bank, the UK’s premium resource for B2B marketing advice and best practice.

As part of our sponsorship we will be issuing a range of articles, white papers and web casts over the coming months, focussing on Public, Press and Media Relations.

To kick off this sponsorship we have issued the following ‘How To’ guides, case studies and white papers (click on the titles to view):

HOW TO: Survive a press interview

HOW TO: Manage your brand online

CASE STUDY: Permasense turn to The Think Tank to launch new company in risk-averse sector

Whitepaper: PR in a changing media landscape

We hope that you find these interesting and if you would like to discuss any of them in detail please contact Samantha Dawe, Director of PR, The Think Tank at samanthad@thinktank.org.uk or by calling 020 7831 2225.

Tips For Finding B2B Clients
Finding clients in a B2B or Business to Business endeavor can be a difficult affair, especially for new enterprises. There are prominent differences in the ways that the marketing procedures operate in a B2B company and the ways that they operate in a B2C company. [...]

Blogs have a far greater reach when it comes to search engine results. A blend of SEO techniques and relevant content can do wonders for a brand.

Consider the following ways in which brands can get themselves to be talked about by bloggers.

1.      Blogging Contests

A brand can announce a blogging contest and get bloggers to generate content in the online space for itself. The blogging contest can be given a well-defined theme, like the USP of the brand, etc. When a good prize is attached to the contest, bloggers would automatically be willing to participate and write about the brand in their blog.

For eg, recently, Dove held a Real Beauty blogging contest where in the bloggers were asked to write about what real beauty meant to them. It had huge cash prize attached to it. It created a lot of hype around the brand. These contests can be announced through various blogging directories or social networks for bloggers.

2.     Blogger Meets

A brand can announce a blogger meet where in the city based bloggers can come together and experience the brand first hand. This can include seeing the product, using it and learning about it. The bloggers can then go back and blog about their experience. This creates a valuable user generated content for the brand.

3.     Company’s Blogs

A brand can have its own blog that can not only talk about the brand itself but about other things related to it. For example, a cosmetics brand can write about various beauty problems, prevention and precaution, etc. Along with it, it can write about the brand products, their usage and how it can help solve those beauty problems.

4.     Celebrity Blogs

These days a lot of celebrities maintain their blogs. If a brand can get a celebrity to publish a post about its products and the brand experience, it will immediately generate a lot of publicity for the brand. It will be like having a celebrity endorsing the brand in the online space. Celebrity blogs are closely monitored and thus have high readership.

5.      Micro Blogging

Micro blogging platforms like Twitter can also help in creating a viral or an instant publicity for the brand. There can be contests especially for those using Twitter. With the use of hash tags and the brand’s Twitter handle, consumers can post a lot of content about the brand that can be read by their followers. This is a great way of engaging consumers as tweeting requires very less time. However, the shelf life of a tweet is very short.

- Imperatives to build even higher revenues with lower marketing budgets.

- Fewer staff to execute the same or higher volume of programs and campaigns.

- Requirements to execute marketing solutions across all channels, in particular mobile and the ill-defined “social media marketing” channel.

Much attention is currently focused on content marketing, which is a broad term commonly used to imply building thought leadership and demand-generating content rather than product- or solutions-centric content.

Recent research shows that B2B marketers plan to be spending a significant portion of 2013 focusing on how to better use content to create deeper prospect engagement and offer a more meaningful customer experience. This represents both a challenge for marketers to do more with less, but most critically, an opportunity to more closely align marketing with sales by delivering sales-enablement solutions that reuse and repurpose this content beyond the marketing experience through every customer encounter.

With increasing competition, companies must find ways to differentiate themselves and communicate their unique value. Here are three ways marketers can be seen as innovators who can do more with less:

1. Create flexible, reusable marketing content:

Don’t jump in and start producing product content just because you think you need to fill your channels. B2B marketers should get more from investments by creating product content ONCE, which can be used across multiple platforms without needing to be re-formatted, re-created or re-developed.
That Flash piece you want to develop for your website may seem like a great idea — until you want to utilize it on an iPad and realize the device has no Flash compatibility. Be sure to look into the reusability of content prior to development. A project’s cost can quickly balloon when it comes time to deploy your content to a platform other than the one you developed it for — from your website to mobile devices, social media, trade shows, etc.

Creating content that is easily modifiable is crucial as well. The expensive, impressive video you labor over developing loses its usefulness as soon as one sentence of the information in the video becomes outdated, leaving you to either abandon what you’ve created or pay to create another video entirely. It’s impossible to see such changes coming, but why not prepare for the future by making content that you can simply modify and update as your products change?

People want interactive product content that’s relevant to their real-world experiences and consistent anywhere they go, so having the same content everywhere a prospect encounters your brand is ideal for a memorable customer experience. B2B product marketers should create product content once and use it repeatedly across multiple venues — trade shows, sales meetings, analyst briefings, training sessions, etc. — without needing to re-develop or re-create the content for different types of hardware or operating systems.

2. Create a Mobile App:

With the advances in mobile technology, everyone is staying more connected to the brands they love, and more companies are pushing mobile marketing to capitalize on this increased mobile connectivity. This creates a positive challenge for brands to create even better product experiences that are available 24/7 on mobile devices. As previously discussed, it is best to create content that works not just solely on one device (like the iPad or a particular Android device), but rather, develop mobile content that is device agnostic as users are increasingly adapting to the BYOD (bring your own device) trend.

Creating a mobile product app can help you keep your messages consistent because it allows you to put product content into the hands of all employees with a simple app download. With app updates, every single user can have access to real-time product information updates, which puts the most up-to-date information into the market faster. Due to the fact that apps can be dispersed globally through a simple download, mobile devices provide a great platform to get marketing messaging out to every corner of the globe. It will help you accelerate the sales process and increase global reach — even if you have less money to spend.

3. Create Marketing Materials that are Relevant to Sales:

A recent survey by the CMO Council uncovered that sales departments think presentations created by marketing are less than useful: salespeople are spending approximately 40 percent of their time preparing customer-facing deliverables, and they are leveraging less than 50 percent of the materials created by marketing. Why? They feel they’re too “cookie cutter” or generic — not relevant for specific prospects, not compelling enough or fail to clearly depict how their products differ from competitors’.

Therefore, marketing departments should focus on creating content that is relevant to any audience in your buying cycle. In doing so, your content will not only be repurposed at all marketing touchpoints but also in almost any sales venue. Sales needs the flexibility to show each person its products on a personal level. Avoid the pitfall of “one-size-fits-all” marketing. Create interactive, non-sequential sales and marketing materials that can be uniquely tailored for each customer to tell a compelling story.

By Gavin Finn, President & CEO, Kaon Interactive

Featured in the Agency Post on May 2nd, 2013

Marketing and Sales Alignment Remains Elusive

The issue of marketing and sales alignment isn’t new. Most marketing and sales people have been in organizations where marketing has been known to accuse sales of not following up on leads and refusing to track leads through the sales cycle and sales has been known to accuse marketing of not providing viable qualified leads. This misalignment is often attributed to a variety of factors, such as different goals, different timelines, and different psychologies. Market dynamics such as commoditization, the Internet, mobility and virtualization and changing business models only compound the problem. Companies attempting to resolve the issue often approach the problem by trying to tighten the alignment of marketing activities within the sales cycle, improving coordination around lead generation, and increasing sales force participation in the marketing process. Sadly these attempts often fail. Regardless of various approaches taken by companies to address this issue, the lack of alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales persists. Both organizations need to change for the organization to succeed.

 From Transactional to Customer Centricity

To achieve greater alignment, both organizations need to decide together which market segments offer the best opportunities and deserve the highest priority. Today’s buyers are more sophisticated and today’s buying processes are more complex. The transactional approach of marketing generating qualified leads that sales then brings to a close is an outdated view. The transactional approach is what permits marketing and sales to operate as independent silos. This results in Sales immersing itself in the latest training, engaging in calling on customers and focusing on post-sale efforts and Marketing focusing on implementing various campaigns and 2 coordinating a variety of tactics.

A Customer-Centric Approach Offers Hope

Customer Centricity requires a company to look at the world through the eyes of the customer, what they want from you, what they expect from you, what they can count on from you. One way to become more customer-centric is to move from looking at the world from a selling perspective to taking a customer relationship lifecycle perspective. Taking a customer relationship lifecycle approach provides an avenue for alignment by focusing both organizations on the same set of outcomes – creating, keeping and growing the value of customers. The customer relationship lifecycle begins the moment a customer appears on the radar screen, moves into the lead-sales funnel, emerges as a customer and engages in a variety of experiences that result in them becoming an advocate. The customer relationship lifecycle provides insight into which customers provide the greatest values to your company. As result, the company can create a set of common metrics for both organizations which will help ensure alignment. Customer relationship management metrics include buying related metrics such as recency frequency and quantity; cost related metrics such as gross amount of money spent on acquiring and retaining the customer through marketing dollars, resources spent generating each sale, and post sales service and support; and customer value related metrics such as the duration or longevity of that customer’s relationship with your business, the referral rate, and share of wallet. Establishing a common set of customer-centric metrics facilitates alignment and collaboration and provides both organization with customer-oriented vocabulary and set of priorities.

Does Alignment Matter?
While no one can offer any guarantees, aligning Marketing and Sales makes good business sense and ultimately impacts the bottom line. A study conducted by Aberdeen on sales effectiveness with more than 200 executives from the executive, sales, marketing and IT management functions study found that companies that had strong collaboration between these two functions achieve a higher sales effectiveness. For many companies, this additional boom in sales more than justifies making the effort.

I hate webinars. They take forever to plan, no one wants to watch them, the people that do watch them aren’t paying attention to them, and they just suck in general. Webinars are the death of me. Maybe I have a bias against webinars because the first webinar I ever tried to put on was a complete an utter FAIL.

My company was supposed to host the webinar and our business partner was supposed to present. I already hate GoToMeeting, but this was my first time using GoToWebinar. OMG. I was trying to run the thing on two screens and set up a screen capture on a Mac (nightmare), which wasn’t happening.

So now the webinar is about to start. I nervously read the script I wrote to introduce our business partner to the ONE webinar attendee (fail). Then, to avoid noise coming in my office through the phone, I ask my colleague how to mute the phone. Of course my colleague puts the phone on hold and doesn’t take any responsibility for what ensues next, because I’m the new kid in town. Here’s the epic fail part of this story: The hold music starts blasting over the webinar. Radiohead, to be exact. Our business partner sends us a frantic email, which I miss because my colleague and I walked into another room to view the webinar. “Hmm I don’t hear any sound coming from the webinar“, I say curiously. Apparently, our business partner muted us to stop the Radiohead hold music, and the sound cut out the for the rest of their presentation. So the one webinar attendee is watching a shit-show before his very eyes with no sound coming out.

And that’s how I completely wasted our business partner’s time and lost all credibility with webinars. And that’s why I hate webinars and GoToWebinar. Anyway, webinars blow. It’s the one part of B2B marketing that I really could do without. Oh and all the bullshitting that comes along with B2B marketing. That could be done with too. I wouldn’t  mind. What do I know? I’m just a kid. All I know is that if another business partner approaches me for a webinar without sending me a shitload of leads, I’m cutting their bitch asses out.

This piece has been written by Samantha Dawe, The Think Tank’s PR Director.

Working with the press can be a great way to get stories about your products and your organisation across. But before you leap in for a chat take a few minutes to think through what you are going to say.

Using the press effectively to get your point across is a skill. In most cases, you only get one go at this in an interview, so you need to get it right first time when you are speaking to journalists directly.Whether you’re speaking at a planned face-to-face interview, a quick chat catch up at an industry event or a short briefing over the telephone, you will be in the spotlight. Here’s a short memory-refresher on the dos and don’ts of dealing with a press interview.

DO
Prepare, prepare, prepare
Wherever possible build in time to do some preparation before you meet the journalist. Read the publication they are writing for. Ideally find out what the journalist wants to cover in advance so you can be ready with the right sort of information for them. If you don’t know this in advance, ask them when you meet or speak to check. This will also give you time to collect your thoughts. Have you had some media training? It’s worth it if you are in any type of marketing role.

Know your facts and figures
Remember you can talk to a journalist about any information that has already been announced, and bringing in other examples as context can often help illustrate a point. Again, have facts and figures to hand (be prepared wherever possible) so you can refer to them.

Be succinct
Try to speak in short sentences and repeat key points that convey your view. This helps to minimise the risk of being quoted inaccurately. Resist the temptation to go on and on about your favourite theme unless this is the only subject to be covered in the interview.

Raise points that you feel may be of interest
The journalist may have done some preparation but you are also able to raise points on a subject too. Make sure they that are relevant to the journalist’s train of thought; showing them you are trying to give them as much information as you can is usually perceived as helpful as long as you don’t go overboard.

Be interesting
Bring in how you see the industry or your sector developing, if appropriate. This sort of insight also shows that you and your company are continuing to keep track and responding to change. Don’t speculate though unless you are happy to see your speculations in print.

DON’T
Don’t talk about areas you don’t know about
Don’t make forecasts about products, markets or sales, unless the information has been agreed beforehand and you can produce the data to back it up. If you don’t know much about a subject, say so. And wherever possible get someone in your company to speak to the journalist who is an expert.

Don’t gossip
And don’t be derogatory about the competition; it’s unprofessional. Just give factual information to the journalist, and let them make their own comparisons. Talking too much about the competition actually helps to sell it, so you may want to avoid that.

Don’t be evasive
If you don’t know something (see point 1 above) or you feel you need to get more information in front of you, say you will find out for the journalist and get back to them; check the deadline they are working on. This can also be used to ‘buy some time’ while you formulate an appropriate response to a tricky question. But if you promise further information, make sure it is followed up, even if it is to say that you need more time.

Use colourful phrases with care
Avoid the use of particularly colourful phrases unless you are absolutely sure you want them used. Otherwise, they may appear out of context or as headlines. A sub-editor may well select the juiciest quote from a journalist’s copy just for this purpose: “Widget Ltd’s Marketing Director Paul Smith says that they are murdering the competition”. Enough said.

Don’t go “Off-the record” unless you are really, really confident
This can be a dangerous trap – you are giving information ‘off-the-record’ for a journalist’s guidance, they should not publish it under any circumstances.

You have to tell the journalist the information is ‘off-the-record’ before you give them the information. The phrase should not be used retrospectively.

You should then say when the information you are discussing is ‘back on the record’ that means they can write up what you are saying.

A general rule of thumb is not using ‘off-the-record’ at all. In exceptional circumstances with a journalist that can really be trusted and you know – for example a trade press journalist you are in regular touch with and you know writes in a fair and informed way, and above all will respect this convention, you might be OK. But why chance it?

A Director I knew went ‘off the record’ with a journalist to say that he expected the privately-owned company he worked for would be floated in the next six months. It was a great story and appeared in print. You can imagine the fall out that happened when it was published.

This piece was written as part of The Think Tank’s sponsorship of the PR Section of B2B Marketing’s Knowledge Bank, and forms part of a series of guides, blog posts, case studies and a white papers.

Thomas A. Edison – “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

My new favorite quote.

1. “Business decision makers LOVE online video because it gives them the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time.” - Robert Weiss, President of MultiVision Digital

2. The right people to start video blogging are those with a passion to tell a story. - Steve Garfield (Author Of Get Seen)

3. “By publishing content that shows buyers you understand their problems and can show them how to solve them, you build credibility.” - Ardath Albee, Author of Emarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

4. “People share, read and generally engage more with any type of content when it’s surfaced through friends and people they know and trust.” - Malorie Lucich, Facebook Spokesperson

5. “Humans are incredibly visual and powerful, moving images help us find meaning… [and] video helps capture and contextualize the world around us.” - Dan Patterson, What Makes an Online Video Worth Sharing?

6. “Audiences everywhere are tough. They do not have time to be bored or brow beaten by orthodox, old fashioned advertising.” - Craig Davis

7. “As you’ve noticed, people don’t want to be sold to. What people do want is news and information about the things they care about.” - Larry Weber, Author of Marketing to the Social Web

8. “There is no black magic to successfully attracting customers via the web.” - Rand Fishkin, CEO, Seomoz

9. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” -Peter F. Drucker

10. “By publishing content that shows buyers you understand their problems and can show them how to solve them, you build credibility.” - Ardath Albee

11. “You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (PR). You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free.” - David Meerman Scott, marketing speaker

12. “The Internet has turned what used to be a controlled, one-way message into a real-time dialogue with millions.” – Danielle Sacks, Fast Company reporter

13. “Focus on the core problem your business solves and put out lots of content and enthusiasm, and ideas about how to solve that problem.” - Laura Fitton

14. “We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.” - Pierre Omidyar, founder, eBay

15. That, and I think those who invest in producing more creative, high quality, and unique video content will be able to far exceed the success of their peers who only invest lightly. - Rand Fishkin, CEO, Seomoz

According to a study that Forbes.com quoted in the January 2013 published article: 5 Surprising Marketing Trends for 2013; “73% of (marketing) executives do not believe that marketing significantly ties to creating revenue”. Ouch – no wonder why the marketing function in many professional services organizations has had a hard time qualifying and quantifying their existence in the last few years.

So then how do we marketers change that perception? How do we educate our partners, professionals, executives and others that what we bring to the table is true value? How do we prove that our involvement directly relates to growth? Simple – we do our job to drive growth vs. focusing on the new trendy buzz word or the swirling tornado of “stuff”.

Core areas that I personally feel need to be demystified as it relates to “Traditional Marketing Rules” (these three areas have always “ruled” marketing – they just have changing names:

Data / BIG Data

Today we hear a lot about BIG DATA.  A novel concept, BIG DATA, but what really does that buzz phrase mean?  Without “googling” it, can you answer it?  My interpretation is that Big Data is the aggregation of all data touch points that an organization has both internally and externally to better clean, analyze target and segment clients / customers to grow revenue.

I hate to break the bad news to everyone, but this is far from a new concept!  The retail catalog industry had this figured out years ago, followed by some leading automobile manufacturers.  When email marketing and internet retail started to really take off, marketers had to figure out very quickly how to better target and segment data.  This meant making sure all systems both internally managed (buyers / purchase data) and externally managed (mailing list/rentals, business lines, etc) talked to one another so that we could be more efficient in our marketing but also ensure that our customers did not get hit with repeated offers and messages.  The end goal has always been the same, generate repeat buyers and drive loyalty while also gaining new buyers.

One area to be looking at here that poses significant risk to all organizations is that of data integrity and security.  You have to remember that it is one thing to combine your data in a data warehouse or whatever your team calls it but it does nothing for you if:

• The data is not clean and updated regularly
• The data is not protected from hacking, stealing or abuse (this includes internally and externally)

Revenue Growth / ROI

Yet another concept area that is far from new but is getting much more attention. The unfortunate reality is that when business is booming and the economy is strong, the focus of marketing is on “advertising” and creating a “brand” and we often times forget that we still need to build the foundation to drive new business and generate loyalty to sustain current business.  That said, when times start to get a little tough and budgets are squeezed, the marketing function is now asked to show ROI (and we silly professionals realize that uh oh – we better figure this out).  You see, ROI is something that should always be a part of anything that we do.  As the marketing landscape changes and new technologies are emerging, we need to be in front of them and utilizing them to not only “advertise” and build our “brand” but we have to be much more strategic in our “spend”.  This means, less focus on the traditional methods (print ads and snazzy images) but more focus on how to utilize the right channels to get the brand recognized.

As marketers, we owe it to our leadership teams, and our buyers of product and service, to ensure that what we are promoting to the market place has a direct correlation to growth – without it, our value is nil. Zip. Nada, nothing!  Marketing is about growing a business – advertising and developing a cool look or tagline is just one small part of the puzzle, a very small part but a part nonetheless.

Channel Integration / Content Marketing

Oh, one of my favorites!  If you have read any of my previous posts, then you know that this one is near and dear to my heart.  We marketers, after all, are content specialists.  Everything that we do should revolve around the message and the audience to which we send.  This, at the end of the day is what Content Marketing is really. The concept is not new – the name has changed, but the end result and the utilization of the message to the audience is the same.  See my previous post on pagination – for those of you that are old enough to remember.

Dynamic content population was a big thing in the 90’s with internet retailers.  You see, catalog marketers had it going on – they understood content marketing.  We developed digital strategies for catalog retailers to send emails and based on the buyers historical buying preferences (DATA), we inserted custom fed graphics and messages to help encourage repeat sales and growth.  Yeah, we were doing that way back then.  What has changed today is that there is more of a focus on “words and length” vs. the message.  I think we have a ways to go here in some areas, but at least we are getting focused, finally.

Remember, this area also poses some risk to your organization.  If you are not strategic in to whom and how you distribute the content, you could have an adverse effect on your brand.  Additionally, the creation and compilation of the content is another key area – if you do not bring in the right teams, identify your champions and help do the work “for them”, there may be a lot of wheel spinning and in turn, lack of buy in.

Remember the original stat quoted above that “73% of (marketing) executives do not believe that marketing significantly ties to creating revenue”.  Saying you do it is not good enough anymore.  Doing it right will ensure growth and prove our value to our organizations.  Anything less and we should, well, maybe be looking into just an “advertising” career..

1. Be nice to your customers

This is first and the foremost way of avoiding negative word against yourself. Be nice to your customers, take care of their needs and serve them the best you can. Nothing flatters customers more than the service provider/seller treating them with dignity and respect. Make sure your front desk staff or salesmen are well groomed and well equipped to give your customers an experience they would find hard to forget. In certain Indian restaurants, you will find the owner himself serving the customers along with the crew, especially during rush hours. This only shows that the owner is concerned about the guests and not just leaving it to the waiters to handle them. Even if the food is not appealing to the taste buds of the guest, they would think twice before saying anything negative about the restaurant.

2. Don’t fake it

A lot of companies themselves write positive testimonials and good comments about their brand on review websites, blogs, feedback columns on the company’s website, etc. One can usually make out what is genuine and what is not if there is an only positive review to be found. Another way of doing it is paid advertorials which may not be as appealing either. Try to avoid that, instead wait for genuine feedback from clients which are believable and the exact expression of their experience with your brand.

3. Accept criticism positively

When you hear a negative word about your brand doing rounds, analyze what is triggering the bad word. The criticism should be taken positively and the changes be implemented based on the criticism. This will only make you realize what your weak areas are and where the competitors are scoring over you.

4. Show that customer’s feedback matters

When you hear negative review of your brand, try to ascertain what will make the pain areas go away. Take the feedback seriously, acknowledge the negative word and work on improving the brand. When the customers know that you have taken serious efforts to work on their feedback, they will only respect you more. For eg, when Cadbury got in trouble because of the worms and everyone started talking about how unsafe it was to give the chocolates to the kids or anyone else, they launched a campaign which clearly stated about the packaging and safety measures that Cadbury had implemented post the crisis.

5. Improve your SEO

The negative reviews, blogs and comments can help you find out what are the key words associated with your brand in terms of negative publicity. These can help you do a better keyword research for online ads, response strategy and website content.

6. Future strategy

A negative review of your brand can help you make a more profound marketing strategy and product innovation strategy for the future. You can learn from the mistake and come back much stronger and better. Usually, brands are advised to go for a small test marketing of the new products to avoid mass negative feedback, if any.

Visit any job board or any corporate website and pull out any job posting or job description, and you will see a disaster. You will see lists of duties that go on for pages, you will see requirements that no one person could ever fulfill in a lifetime, you will see preferences for this and demands for that and a chirpy little footer about how they value diversity but most certainly won’t call you. What you won’t see is any sense of priorities, opportunities to work on cool things or long-term possibilities for greatness. Are you still wondering why you have mediocre applicants?

There are two ways these ridiculous things come into being. The first is that they are automated. I once worked for a company where hiring managers were required (yes, required) to select from a set of standard job description templates before their role could be posted online. Can’t find one that matches your open role? Well just come as close as you can… They’re just a guideline.

The second way these come into being is Some Manager. Some Manager who has never seen a decent job description, and who has certainly received zero training about how to write one. If you are Some Manager, what can you do? HR is now strategic so don’t expect help there…

I know, why not go online, find something close and copy that? There’s the ticket! Now add in all the specific projects you want this person to tackle, list all the skills you and your team lack, demand a Nobel Prize in PhotoShop and make sure you ask for exceptional communication skills. Don’t worry, Bethany in HR will edit it and it’s just a guideline.

But here’s the problem: Bethany won’t edit that thing. It’s not in her job description. Bethany’s incompetent job description is all about keeping people out of the corporate East Gate by matching up their resume with your job description. Bethany doesn’t do guidelines, Bethany plays word search.

All of which assumes a resume even gets as far as Bethany. Chances are, the guard at the West Gate, ART, our automated recruiting technology, has turned your hideous list into a dataset that promptly rejected bunches of great applications because they didn’t match your stolen keywords. Algorithms don’t do guidelines either, it seems.

Welcome to the South Gate, the one your corporate city-state secures with incompetent job descriptions, guaranteed to impale even the most earnest applicant on the portcullis of your collective laziness and lack of imagination.  It’s time, Lords and Ladies of the Spin Cycle, to teach ourselves a new skill: writing decent, professional job descriptions.

Your friends in the Productivity Prevention Department are probably pretty screwed on this one, but we’re marketers and we know how to sell things to people who don’t want them; we know how to write compelling copy; heck, we know how to define a value proposition for a soul-destroying market segmentation role.

It’s all about perspective. Bethany and ART and the other strategic sorts view job descriptions like screens. They’re there to keep the bugs out. As hiring managers, we need to think of them as spider webs: sticky enough to engage candidates, strong enough to hold them and capable of keeping them interested (or at least struggling) until it’s time to poison them and suck their insides out for lunch. Okay, this metaphor needs work. But if you’re still with me, you’ll agree that our job descriptions will look a lot better if we start from the point of view of selling something instead of preventing something.

On a day when you should be doing a budget or something tedious, try drafting a job description that:

• Fits on one standard page
• Does not include any of the following phrases: attends meetings, prepares reports, other duties as assigned (anyone who is surprised to find these things in the workplace probably won’t get too far in the interview process)
• Has no more than six areas of responsibility (fewer is better)
• Has five key skill requirements, and nothing stupid like proficiency with Outlook
• Lists no education requirements (I’m fairly certain high school students won’t be applying anyway, and it’s Bethany’s problem if they do)
• Lists no specific platforms and applications (you can train for those)
• Does not demand industry experience (marketing is a transferable skill, people)
• Does not say anything like this: “… works collaboratively with sales, IT, finance and shipping in a fast paced environment..” (First, it isn’t true and you know it, second, it isn’t interesting and third it doesn’t sell the job)
• Resists the urge to demand anyone be “an enthusiastic self-starter who works well with others” (that’s a job description for a Golden Retriever)

Next week, we’ll look at the final gate, the one with the bug zapper.

BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmarkter

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