The 3 R's: Relationships, Referrals, and Reviews

I recently gave a presentation at Vista Consulting Team’s 2021 Annual Conference in Dallas. Vista is (obviously!) a consulting team that works with law firms across the country and Canada to improve their internal operations to maximize productivity and brand value, ultimately increasing performance and client satisfaction. To that end, I was invited to speak about strategic marketing tactics that lead to those outcomes. The presentation centered around relationships, referrals, and reviews, and how all three of these work together to build an established brand and build its new business pipeline. I’m happy to share with you some highlights of the presentation.

Relationships:

Relationship marketing can be defined as the ongoing process of identifying, establishing, maintaining, and enhancing successful relationships with clients/customers/stakeholders so that the objectives of all parties involved are met. This is done by mutual giving and fulfillment of promises.

Referrals:

CIMply put, a referral is an act of sending someone to another person or place for advice, assistance, or other help. Key point: Referrals come from relationships…they don’t come from automated responses, AI, or bots. They come from truly being engaged P2P (people to people). By establishing and building genuine relationships with clients, referral sources, and others in and out of your industry’s sphere, you can send and receive referrals to and from trusted sources.

Reviews:

A review is a narrative report card that addresses the quality of a company’s services and products so that newcomers can make an informed choice as to whether it's a good match for their needs. There are so many review platforms to monitor and manage (Google, Yelp, Avvo, Facebook, etc.), and your customers or clients will largely decide where to post a review about you. Just because you may wish that your company didn’t have Yelp reviews, won’t make it so. The point is, with statistics like those below, reviews are real, they make an impact on your business and its potential clients and they need to be managed (responding to both the good and bad).

Our best advice is to be proactive in your review management process. Designate someone within your company to monitor and reply to all posted reviews. We also suggest making it easy for your customers to give you a review, asking for reviews from satisfied customers, and repurposing great reviews on your website and social media. At CIM, we manage many clients’ review efforts (responding and soliciting) with services like BirdEye and Podium.

Embrace the 3 R’s and experience them working for you. If you’d like to discuss your approach or have the CIM team work with you to orchestrate your efforts, please let me know.

Nevada Business Awards

CIM was recently honored at Nevada Business Magazine’s Nevada Business Awards luncheon as a finalist in the “Others First: Philanthropy and Giving” category for DJs for PJs, the nonprofit organization it founded in 2001. DJs for PJs have collected more than 100,000 new pairs of PJs for children in need in Southern Nevada.

Create alliances: Everyone wins when you’ve got a network of quality referral partners.

~Unknown

PPC Tips and Tricks for Your Business

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a form of advertising that allows you to target consumers and generate potential leads. While there are quite a few platforms that perform PPC, we will focus on the Google Ads platform today. There are four distinct ad channels on Google’s platform: Search, Display, Video and Shopping. We will be focusing on search marketing PPC in this email.

The PPC marketing model charges you every time your ad is clicked. It is an extremely powerful tool to drive traffic to your website while consumers are searching for keywords or browsing sites related to your business or service.

Here are a few tips for your PPC campaign

Monitor keyword pricing for the first-page position on Google so that you are bidding competitively.

Constantly review the search terms report to filter out negative keywords that you do not want your ad to rank for — you don’t want to pay for irrelevant clicks.

Refresh your ads with new content — headlines, descriptions, ad extensions, etc.

Utilize the audience targeting strategy to increase your ads' relevance.

CIM Marketing Partners is proud to be certified in Google Ads. We won’t sugarcoat it, PPC is a big lift and ongoing management is required. It isn’t a “set it and forget it” system. If you have thought about PPC, we would be happy to discuss any opportunities to run PPC campaigns for your business. We enjoy strategizing alongside businesses in order to develop the most effective PPC campaigns possible to get you the greatest return on your marketing investment.

Quote of the week:

Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.

Bill Bernbach

Snoozeletters are a Dime a Dozen

Don’t join the club of having a snoozeletter where your intent is a newsletter. Whether investing in a printed and mailed piece (which is still my favorite in our highly digital world) or sending an e-newsletter just to check it off the to-do list, here are the best practices we recommend and implement. We encourage you to do the same.

PURPOSE
Why send a newsletter (printed or e-version)? To effectively connect with your clients, prospects, and referral sources and stay top of mind.

 

CONTENT
We’ve all heard that content is king, but what kind of content should you include? The answer is a balance of content. A newsletter should be informative and educational, providing real value to the reader. It shouldn’t be a sales brochure. We find that the most effective newsletters include industry trends, news you can use, team member spotlights, and success stories.

This does not mean you can’t include service/product updates and a call to action. A newsletter affords you the opportunity to establish yourself as the expert in what you do.

Keep the content brief and bite size. Brief articles or bulleted lists are great, digestible for a fast read. Be sure to link to content on your site for longer articles.

STYLE
A newsletter that looks like a copied and pasted document is not visually appealing and is more likely to be ignored. Establish a uniform look with a header and footer and content flow so your audience gains familiarity with how you frequently present them with good information. Photos, colorful infographics, and graphic elements will help draw in the reader. For e-newsletters, linking to video content is highly recommended.

FREQUENCY
More important than the frequency of your newsletter (weekly, monthly, quarterly) is that you stick to the schedule as closely as possible. Don’t let your recipient groups wonder why they haven’t heard from you, especially after you’ve built an expectation amongst your audiences. The flipside of this is emailing or mailing too frequently. You can get a pass for one or two “fluff” newsletter issues, but if your audience does not get any benefit from your content, the unsubscribe and trash bin will be your newsletter’s fate going forward.

OWN IT
We have found that when no ONE person is responsible for the newsletter, it is much more likely to fizzle over time. Designate a single person to be responsible for pulling together the content and ensuring it is formatted for distribution. That doesn’t mean that one person is responsible for creating all the content; he/she can reach out to others for articles or updates, or can purchase some of the needed content.

Newsletters are an effective way to connect with your audiences, provide them with useful information and keep your brand top of mind. Above are some top line considerations, but there’s so much more, including segmenting your recipient list and possibly creating multiple versions of your newsletters (tailored to each audience). We’ll cover more of those facets of successful newsletters in future emails.

Quote of the week:

Good words are worth much, and cost little.

George Herbert

 

Don't Let Analysis Paralysis Take Over Your Marketing

Do we need some Public Relations (PR) activity? Someone asked me why she couldn’t find us on Facebook. I feel like we’re being left behind in social media. Should we do that sponsorship? Maybe we should do something. I think we need a plan. It’s time to move the dial on our business plan…wait, we haven’t updated “the plan” since 2016. Even though the new year is underway, it’s not too late to strategize and implement a proactive marketing plan.

We hear it routinely when meeting with prospective clients. Everyone seems to know they could benefit from marketing and PR efforts, but often they’re not sure what to do, how to do it, how much they need to invest to make it worthwhile, who should be involved and what, exactly, the plan should be.

What we’ve done for years is proven to work, year after year, for clients who stay the course and invest in marketing in the good times and bad. Here are some START NOW steps to take:

Once you have a solid plan and it’s put in motion, it’s amazing how much easier it is to then tackle new potential marketing activities as they come along. You’ll be doing marketing and enjoying the measurable results. You’ll be building the value of your company and its brand. You’ll be much more active in determining the future of your company instead of just letting things happen to your company. And…you will have shed that analysis paralysis that has frozen you for who knows how long.

Quote of the week:

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.

Bruce Lee

 

Marketing Insights from a Pandemic

There’s so much that could be written about lessons learned this year, many of them as unexpected as COVID-19 itself. I was talking with the CIM team last week about that topic, and the conversation turned to specific marketing lessons learned. Take a minute to reflect on these:

Having strategic, business, and marketing plans is vital, but plans cannot be set in stone. While they serve to keep you focused and on track, it’s critical to be able to flex as the business and competitive landscape shifts. We didn’t just have a shift, the ground fell out from underneath us! In many cases, we learned to reinvent ourselves, our products/services, and our core ways of working. We didn’t just slightly correct course, we pivoted and did 180s and back again!

Having strategic, business and marketing plans is vital.
The human connection is vital.

The human connection is vital. We learned new ways to connect with family, friends, and clients. From simply letting clients know “we’re still open to serve” to announcing operational or service changes, it became more important than ever to communicate, frequently, with our target audiences.

Downturns have their upsides. It has been a strategic time to invest in marketing. Similar to during the Great Recession a little more than a decade ago, media rates dropped significantly and some companies have been able to afford certain advertising opportunities for the first time. Historically, studies have proven that firms that invest in marketing during a downturn (especially while competitors cut back) come out ahead – in brand awareness and business growth – in the years following the downturn.

Downturns have their upsides.
QR codes are making a comeback!

QR codes are making a comeback! Yes, several years back, QR codes hit the scene with a splash, then we saw them start to fade away. However, with most new mobile phones incorporating QR code reader technology within their cameras, coupled with our new “touchless” obsession, we’re seeing QR codes’ resurgence. Enter just about any restaurant, and you’ll see “Scan here to view our menu.”

We’re not done yet. No, we’re still learning and growing and managing to succeed despite all the challenges. I truly hope your efforts are paying off to stay safe and healthy, keep your family, friends, colleagues and clients as your focus, and adjust your business model to ensure continued success.

Quote of the week:

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Soren Kierkegaard

Ready For 2021 Reboot!

What a year it has been. Summer’s gone. Cooler temps are finally here. Thanksgiving is around the corner, and December will be filled with holiday activities. That makes now the perfect time to prepare for and lock in an effective 2021 strategic marketing plan and budget.

What’s in it for you? By planning now, you’ll…

  • Avoid entering the new year with no plan, leaving you to only react to opportunities that may appear.
  • Get the whole team on board with where you’re headed, why you’re headed that way and how everyone can contribute to getting there.
  • Save marketing dollars by working with your marketing/PR agency to identify and evaluate the best opportunities (those with the greatest ROI), as well as potentially lock in lower 2020 media rates into 2021.

Investing in planning now will allow you to more fully enjoy the remainder of this year and help ensure a more profitable, more focused, and less stressful 2021. After reading the next few sentences, switch screens on your computer to see your calendar. Block off several hours with others involved in your marketing decision-making process and plan for a review of your business and the competitive landscape.

Now is the time to take the time to work through important questions and begin to develop your strategy for 2021 marketing:

 

We suggest you work through this “reflection and review” as a starting point to nail down a true strategic approach for 2021. If you need help, ask for it! Working with a team like CIM Marketing Partners can put you on a more solid path to growth and prosperity, while at the same time freeing YOU up to focus on what YOU do best (like operationalizing your company’s products and services, and providing superior client service and experiences).

With your plan in place (and the ability to adjust it as needed in our current environment), you’ll experience marketing efforts working behind the scenes to improve profitability and ultimately build the value of your company.

Quote of the week:

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.

Alan Lakein

 

Managing Your Brand: Design 101

It’s all around us: Bad graphic design. Whether on a billboard, on a website, or in your mailbox, you know it when you see it. One of my team members even keeps a “Marketing Mishaps” folder filled with examples from over the years, just for fun. Thankfully, there are some rules of thumb to help you avoid design blunders and properly manage your brand. Here are a few:

Trust a talented designer. You’ve invested a lot in your brand, the visual part of it. Your logo, tagline, branding elements, colors, and brand standards/usage guidelines are the foundation pieces. With those in place, it’s up to a pro to know how to use them as a part of extending your brand, creating your brand presence effectively. A designer gets to understand your brand and knows how to artfully balance design and verbiage to propel your message.

Less is more. The recipient will remember your message when you communicate it CIMply and clearly. You don't have to display all brand elements in every instance just because you have them.

While you may have built a treehouse in the backyard, you wouldn’t try to build your new home yourself. True designers have innate talent and training to use tools to pull it all together.

Stand out. When looking head to head at competing products and services, you want to best the competition’s offerings. How you do this is by having well-conceived, graphically pleasing designs that reach this goal. A designer knows how to accomplish this for you.

Don’t forget the family. Your brand family, that is. Your brand footprint is ever-expanded by using your brand elements everywhere you have a presence. Your printed marketing materials should match your digital marketing efforts. Whether one visits your website, views your social media pages, or receives an email or actual mailpiece from your company, it should look and feel like it’s something about your company.

Brand consistency doesn’t happen by itself, but must be managed, and that ultimately helps lead to a higher trust in a brand: “I know this company, I recognize this company, I like doing business with this company.” Think about Apple, for example. When this company touches you with a message, do you almost instantly know it’s Apple?

Investing in good design pays for itself in spades through building your competitive advantage, elevating your company’s products and services above others, increasing actual sales and revenue and, ultimately, driving marketing results. Step one: Make sure it’s being effectively led and managed by someone or a team you trust.

Happy Labor Day!

Quote of the week:

…knowing how to use a design or art software doesn’t make you a designer.

Adri M.

Watch Now vs. Read More

For years, we’ve been encouraging and helping our clients to incorporate video content into their marketing mix – website, email marketing, social media platforms, and online advertising. Research continues to show an increase in the number of people who, given the option of watching a video or reading information, choose video. A few statistics:

In addition to well-written content, video is another touchpoint with significant benefits. Videos are natural attention grabbers. Their movement draws people in to watch and learn more. Search engines love video and typically return search results of video higher within the rankings, making your website (and its videos) more likely to be discovered.

What types of videos might you consider creating?

Talking heads or interviews:

These videos can be a person simply talking about your company, a service or practice area, or two people discussing a particular topic. The content should ultimately focus on the viewers, that is, offering to help them with something they need, or providing a solution or answers.

Explainers or “doodle”:

These animated or sketch videos literally draw a picture while telling a story, describing how something works or walking the viewer through a process. Keywords typically appear within the video, which is narrated throughout.

Testimonials

Testimonials:

These videos feature actual customers or clients talking about their experiences in working with your company.

Demonstrations:

These videos feature the use of a product or “how-to” to illustrate how something is done or used. These are along the lines of explainer videos, but used when providing a detailed walkthrough on using a product or navigating a process.

The most impactful videos are engaging, entertaining and informative. While a mix of video lengths is appropriate (longer for certain purposes), with the shorter attention span of many people today, short videos (under 90 seconds) have a higher chance of being viewed to the end. Even shorter videos (under 15 seconds) may be required for online advertising to very quickly make a point and encourage a click-thru to your website to learn more.

If your marketing efforts don’t include video, it’s a missed opportunity to connect with your target audiences, to let them hear and see what you do and how you help clients. If you would like to discuss how video can be effectively created and incorporated into your marketing efforts, please reach out.

Quote of the week:

Business decision makers LOVE online video because it gives them the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time.

Robert Weiss, Use YouTube Video Marketing to Generate Leads, Awareness and Customers

 

Getting Social With It

Are you feeling overwhelmed by social media? For businesses, over the past few years, it has become a necessity to establish and maintain a presence on various social media platforms. Especially now, in a time where an in-person conversation is not always possible, many have turned to social media as a way to communicate directly with their audience. Some companies have reluctantly been forced into social media, simply because this is where people are these days. Others have embraced these new communication channels as additional avenues to build awareness and attract clients. Here are a few “lessons learned” from our team, who is immersed in the social media landscape. They have become guiding principles to avoid becoming overwhelmed, allowing us to focus resources most effectively.

CHOOSE WISELY:

For the past few years, my social media team and I have attended Social Media Marketing World, one of the largest social media conferences in the country. From them, we learned that you fail at social media by trying to be active everywhere and not giving any of them your all. Instead, you should pick one or two and be REMARKABLE on those platforms. Choose the ones that make sense for your company. Where are your current and potential clients interacting? What are their demographics? Match your efforts to your audiences.

MAINTAIN ACTIVITY:

If you’re going to have a presence on a particular platform, do so with intent. Beyond building out your landing page to reflect (graphically and content) your brand, plan regular new content and posts, and stick with it. Avoid the bad impression that results from a client or prospect seeing that you haven’t had any activity in the recent past. Build out a content calendar for posts and react/reply to posts of others on your pages.

PROVIDE VALUE:

Visitors to your pages should experience content that resonates. There should be a good mix of posts: Consider product/service updates, testimonials, team member profiles, client stories, and special events. Each post should connect in some way with visitors, making them feel a part of your company. Your presence on social media platforms is an opportunity to further enhance and manage your overall brand and its reputation. Planning and managing your efforts will help you avoid feeling overwhelmed and overworked.

Quote of the week:

We don't have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.

Erik Qualman

 

Marketing in Difficult Times - Double Down

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve touched a time or two on marketing philosophies. One of those is that even the darkest of times, it’s helpful to find a bright spot...either find one, or create one. 

You and your team are surely already over-performing on many fronts, maintaining your accounts, and striving to perform for and keep existing clients, as well as fill your new business pipeline. As importantly, you’re making adjustments to your products and services and how you deliver them. At the same time, you’re working hard to reassure and thank your team for all of their efforts. 

As a partner in marketing for many clients, we are doing the same, and I’d like to share some of what we know to be true and effective in that realm.

As you march forward through the times we’re in, seek the bright spots for your business, your team members, and your long-term success. Let what you do today, in part, create your tomorrow. 

Quote of the week:

Businesses that maintained or increased their ad spend during the recession averaged higher sales growth both during the recession and in the following three years.

Professor Andrew J. Razeghi
(at the Kellogg School of Management, citing a McGraw-Hill Research study of over 600 businesses)