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Showing posts from April, 2017

Make Customer Loyalty a Bigger Part of Your Marketing Efforts

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In the early days of your business, the goal of your marketing program was essentially a singular one: you tried to get your product or service in front of as many eyes as you possibly could. Once you've established yourself, however, it's time to switch gears a little. According to most studies , it's between five and twenty-five times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to keep one of your existing ones. This means that if you're not already making customer loyalty a significant part of your marketing efforts, it's about time to get going on it. What a Difference Customer Loyalty Makes According to a study conducted in 2014 , seventy-three percent of consumers said that loyalty programs should be the way that brands show loyalty to their existing customers. Regardless of which way you choose to look at it, even instituting a modest customer loyalty program can have significant benefits across your entire organization. It can help make your ma

Don't Fear Your Marketing Competitors. Learn From Them

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Regardless of the products you're trying to market, the audience you're trying to cater to, or the industry you happen to be operating in, all businesses face competition. This is just a fact of life. But it's important to realize that a competitor isn't just another company that is trying to go after the same pool of customers that you are. Competitors are invaluable learning opportunities that are just waiting to be taken advantage of, provided you approach things from the right angle. Learn About Your Audience One of the most important lessons that you can learn by taking a closer look at your marketing competitors has nothing to do with your competition itself and everything to do with the shared audience you're both going after. For the sake of argument, let's say that your number one competitor offers products or services that are very similar to yours. How is your competition marketing those products and services to that audience? What types o

Leadership Sometimes Means Showing You're Human

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Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, has seen her share of tough times. She took on the CEO mantle as one of the first female company leaders in the auto industry, only to get slapped with a faulty auto ignition switch recall. Barra had already done her time in the trenches while going through the GM bankruptcy in 2009. However, when Barra faced down her first big CEO challenge with an ignition switch that was being attributed with killing consumers, she did something no one expected - she apologized. The Road That Leads to Trust Barra's apology rang the auto industry like a deep bell of the apocalypse. Everyone heard it, everyone saw it on TV, and everyone was in shock. Her apology wasn't the end of the matter, of course. She had to go through multiple congressional hearings, fire managers and engineers she had known and trusted for years, and put the reins on employees to turn the company around. But her leadership was and continues to be rooted in a basic, inhe

How to Take the Lessons Learned in Online Marketing and Apply Them to the World of Print

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Print marketing isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Over the last few years, people are coming to the realization that digital and print isn't an "either/or" scenario. Many use one to supplement and compliment the other to great effect. Despite this, people still tend to think of them as two different mediums, thinking you have different rules that you use online than those that you follow in print. Because online marketing has become so prominent, it has taught us some very valuable lessons. One of which is that those lessons aren't reserved only for the digital market. You can apply those lessons to your print collateral and come out all the better for it. Marketing Is About Intimacy Perhaps the biggest lesson that various digital and online marketing channels have taught us is that at the end of the day, you're not trying to "sell" to someone at all. You're trying to connect with them. The best marketing reaches out to customers and

It's Okay to go Niche: How One Unusual Brand is Turning Trash into Specialty Surf Bags

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Sometimes, we stumble across an answer to a problem that we did not know existed. Alec and Aric Avedissian are solving two problems at once with their business Rareform. Rareform's customers get durable, one-of-a-kind surfbags while the company helps reroute some of the thousands of pounds of billboard material that is discarded in the U.S. every day. The average billboard goes up for four to eight weeks, then is discarded. While there are no firm figures on how many billboards exist in the United States, the number is high. The Los Angeles area alone is host to over 6,000 boards. Since billboard material does not decompose, that is a lot of waste. Inspiration in the Strangest Place Avedissian stumbled on the idea of surfbags from billboard vinyl after spending time volunteering with a fishing cooperative in El Salvador. While there, he saw people using discarded billboards to make roofing. The sight was a revelation. He'd previously never considered the material an

Never Be Afraid to Take on the Big Boys

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Something strange is happening on the yogurt shelves: the most popular yogurt is not from a big maker like Dannon or Yoplait. It's a product from a small, 12-year-old upstart from New York. In March, Bloomberg wrote that Chobani had overtaken Yoplait to become the most popular yogurt in the U.S. The story of how this independent took on the big brands and won has lessons for all of us. Distinguish Yourself From Your Competitors Big yogurt brands had become complacent and did not anticipate how new products would catch customers' interests. Instead of sticking with the same types of yogurt already popular in the U.S., Chobani made their name with Greek yogurt, a thicker and richer product. By the time the larger yogurt companies introduced their own versions of the product, it was too late. Consumers had become loyal to the brands that made Greek yogurt popular. If you craft your marketing materials and your products to fill a need that your competitors are not, tha

Packaging as a Marketing Tool: Because Innovation Waits for No One

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Marketing is all about relationships. You're not just selling to someone; you're informing them. You're providing them a service that extends beyond the literal product or service that you're selling and into the realm of education. People want to make informed decisions, and a properly executed marketing campaign plays a role in that. To that end, it's important to talk about an essential element of marketing that far too many people tend to overlook: product packaging. Sure, packaging has a physical function in that you can't get a product onto store shelves (or directly into the hands of consumers) in one piece without it. However, it also has the potential to be an incredibly powerful "last second" marketing tool if you approach it from the right angle. Why Packaging Matters Few things are more important than a first impression. According to a study conducted by Business Insider , customers usually only take about seven seconds on average t