Are you as envious as I of those people who know exactly what they want to do “when they grow up” and don’t let anything stand in their way of reaching their goal? I count those people as very fortunate and envy their tenacity and sacrifice. The rest of us find our way through trial and error, perseverance and a network of supporters. Or perhaps Lady Luck is on their side. The good news is that the end result is equally rewarding.

Finding your niche  (whether personally or in developing a business strategy) takes a lot of soul searching and requires taking risks. Once on course you need to have a steadfast commitment to your objectives. There have been so many companies who have failed to transform their business because they set unrealistic goals, weren’t willing to make the investment or didn’t get all of their employees on board marching toward a common goal. It’s not an easy road but when you reach the pinnacle, the rewards far outweigh the journey.

In today’s economy I daresay every individual and company needs to re-invent themselves. Gone are the days where you could avoid adopting technology as a cornerstone in advancing your market share. No longer can you rely on what worked 10 years ago to advance your business or career. Only the strong survive in such a competitive environment and that means developing a well thought out strategy, leveraging the new rules of marketing and executing flawlessly.

I have recently taken such a journey and am testament that you can transform yourself and end up in a much better place both personally and professionally. Being a part of Marsden & Associates afforded me the opportunity to work with companies both big and small and in a myriad of industries. We helped businesses evolve their digital presence and created measurable inbound marketing campaigns.  We developed marketing strategies and plans that will set up businesses to thrive. We implemented campaigns that grew revenue, improved sales effectiveness and enhanced brand images. Through this collective experience I was able to hone in on what was the best fit for me, and along the way I “lucked into” a consulting engagement for a company that has incredible assets, a talented leadership team, passionate employees and a focused strategy that will drive exponential growth.

That lucky opportunity allowed me to find my niche… at Foxwoods Resort Casino, where I am excited to begin my new role as their Chief Marketing Officer. The journey took a lot of hard work but the honor to lead marketing for such a diversified and fascinating business is my reward. Marsden & Associates is to thank for this introduction as they are sought out by businesses looking for marketing expertise that deliver real world results. If you’re looking to re-invigorate your marketing efforts, adopt the ‘new rules of marketing’ and more specifically, set up your business to thrive, then you need Marsden & Associates.

And, if you want to see if Lady Luck is on your side, please come visit me at Foxwoods Resort Casino.  www.foxwoods.com.

P.S. …. by Anne Marsden

It has been great having Becky as part of Marsden & Associates.  She brought new ideas and a fresh perspective that has benefited both our clients and our team.  We wish her the very best in this next part of her personal journey and look forward to seeing the ‘real marketing results’ that we know Becky will bring to Foxwoods.  And you can bet you’ll be seeing me around the Casino from time to time.  

I’ll post the results in a follow-up.  And if you’re interested on the the cute little widget that created this poll, it’s from Quipol, it’s free and you can get it here.

No matter what it is, how important or pressing, how successful it’ll be, how committed we are to it; it will never be as seductive as what’s about to come and is just on the periphery.

Why do we click over to our inbox in the middle of another project? It not only offers the comforting rationale that we need to stay connected… to boss, to co-workers, to clients…it offers an excusable reason to escape.  And we so want to escape…Green Grass and High Tides Forever….

We (the responsible ones) know that we can’t (won’t) abandon our deadlines or responsibilities of the immediate, but the siren of “What’s Next” is damn hard to resist.  And what price does our immediate work pay for that momentary break?  World class athletes swear that only by continuing through the break points – when your mind tries to steal you away, to get you to back off –  will you develop the strength and resolve and focus required to win.

The reason “What’s Next” is so alluring?  We haven’t yet experienced the “What’s Hard” about it.  As soon as we do, we’ll hear the siren again. But if you have pushed through, and refused to succumb, you will be stronger for the next time you hear the song.

by Anne Marsden

Ah, taglines – what a wonderful subject of debate.  Are they useful?  Do they really help build brand recognition?  Can they actually create connection between your brand and your market? Are they just for brands that can spend a gazillion dollar on advertising?

Well, the answer to each of these is the same – it depends.

Of course we all have our favorite taglines, and most of them are iconic B2C examples.

According to a 2010 Forbes article and as rated by a group of 10 CMO’s and advertising experts, here are the 10 best -loved taglines of our time. (I’ve included the year each one was introduced but intentionally left off the company names – if you don’t recognize a brand behind a tagline, shoot me a note and I’ll tell you):

1. The Ultimate Driving Machine (1971)
2. Just Do It (1988)
3. Don’t Leave Home Without It (1975)
4. We Try Harder – (1963)
5. Got (fill in the blank)? (1993)
6. There Are Some Things Money Can’t Buy.  For Everything Else, There’s (fill in the blank) (1997)
7. Think Different (1997)
8. The Few, The Proud, The (fill in the blank) (1976)
9. You Deserve A Break Today (1971)
10. A Diamond is Forever (1944)

So what makes a great tagline?  And beyond that – when can a tagline make a difference to your brand when you don’t have tons of money to spend on advertising?

Here are the 3 essential components of taglines that will work for your brand — even without the big ad budget:

1. Reinforce WHAT you do. If you have a company name that says what business you’re in – you’re lucky.  Most company names don’t have anything to do with the actual products or services provided.  So your tagline is your first opportunity to communicate to the world what business you’re in.   Here’s an example: Kinetix is in the business of Recruitment Process Outsourcing.  Their name doesn’t tell you that, but their tagline does: We Can Hire Great People Faster Than You. 
2. Define something about your brand that sets you apart. Not only should your tagline help communicate the what, it should also tell the WHY – why should a prospect consider you for that type of product or service?  The why should highlight your key strength and competitive differentiation. In the case of Kinetix – it highlights two of their core strengths – speed and quality  – and then pits them against their greatest perceived competitor – the prospect’s internal HR organization.
3. Create an emotional reaction. If your tagline is going to stick – if it is going to help cement your brand in a prospect’s mind – then it needs to connect emotionally. Again, looking at Kinetix, they create an emotional connection that also communicates their brand style and voice – young, confident, and a tad sassy. When you read We Can Hire Great People Faster Than You, don’t you just feel like you’re being challenged? A challenge is personal – and therefore bound to cause an emotional reaction – to either argue or go find out what makes them think they’re better than you. In any case, it’s personal.  And when it’s personal, it’s going to stick with you far longer than some generalized “aren’t we great” statement.  

Using a challenge as your tagline is one of many ways to create an emotional response. Make it funny. Make it warm and caring.  Make it provocative. Make it sound like your brand, what ever that is. Think about your brand – its persona and its voice. Does it have a specific voice?  If not, then start there and build your tagline to reflect and support how you want to be perceived in your marketplace. And do it in a way that involves, engages, or otherwise emotionally connects your brand to your target audience.

Go ahead – you can do it – can’t you? Of course you can!

But before you go off and launch a new campaign around your great, new, compelling tagline – be sure to check that you haven’t violated these two rules:

1. Don’t Talk Down. You want an emotional reaction, but you don’t want to alienate your prospects.  Being flippant, condescending or rude will get you noticed, but unless you’re a shock-jock, it won’t help your brand.
2. Don’t Self-Anoint.  You may think you’re the greatest in your industry.  Your customers may have told you you’re the best, but unless a credible 3rd party has bestowed a title on you, be careful. Take a look at the #1 tagline in the list above:  The Ultimate Driving Machine.  BMW didn’t declare that they were the best car in the world, they defined what class of car they build, they carved out the niche at which they excel, and made it visceral.

Taglines can make a real difference, providing memorable shorthand for a brand, but they aren’t easy.  As Pascal once wrote, “I would have written you a short letter, but I didn’t have the time”.  Seems like it would be a breeze to come up with a 3-5-word phrase for a brand; it’s actually really hard. But get it right and you’ll reap the benefits for years to come.

Stay thirsty my friends….

Introduction by Anne Marsden:  I’m thrilled to announce another great addition to Marsden & Associates: Suzanne Moore. Suzanne is our newest Principal and brings an impressive wealth of marketing accomplishments with a heavy dose of Sports Marketing and Sales Transformation. Check out her background here, enjoy her first blog (posted below) and give us a call if you would like to talk to Suzanne and learn more.   

by Suzanne Moore

First impressions come once.  They will either open doors or close them.  So how do you transform your sales organization into a team that keeps doors open by bringing credibility and intelligence to their engagements? A team that thinks like business people and applies business acumen.

Start by throwing away the PowerPoint and brochures.  Do yourself a favor, skip the presentation and listen, talk, communicate.  A presentation is like a lecture.  A typical presentation rarely devotes much focus on the customer and their current situation.  Most of the focus, I dare say 90% of it, will be describing your company, your solutions and your products.

It’s too easy to start talking about your products and not get the information that will allow you to solve your customer’s business problem.  Some customers may not make the leap to understanding how your products apply to their situation and whether they should buy them.

When you take your car into the shop, the mechanic doesn’t hand you a brochure.  Nor does he go through a presentation lauding his credentials, products and solutions.  He talks to you.  Asks probing questions about any problems you’ve noticed.  Listens to your answers.  Takes your car back for diagnostic testing and then presents a solution.

Transformation starts when relevant solutions are presented that solve real problems.

So, here are 3 things to do, if you want to begin your sales transformation and be invited back to the customer’s table:

1.  Leave the brochures at home. Listen and talk to your customers.  Arm your sales reps with target questions; ones that will help them start the dialogue.  Ones that focus on known challenges in their business process and directly relate to cash flow.
2. Marketing should provide reps with data including industry information, regulatory challenges and key business processes that have the greatest effect on corporate operations and profitability.
3. Reps have duties too and should always go to a prospect’s website, read their annual report, look at the 10K and check press releases.

Trust me, if you go to a meeting prepared to initiate conversation, you’ll make a great first impression and pave the way to your sales transformation.

So, what’s your first impression of me?

How often do you reflect on what your personal brand is and assess whether or not you are living your life and conducting yourself at work in a way that exemplifies those attributes?  In a very crude survey at a dinner party last week I found that no one regularly took the time to step back and contemplate both the characteristics associated with them or how they were manifesting themselves in their day-to-day life.  New Years Day and life changing events aside, our personal brand is usually on autopilot.

Too often businesses with an established brand don’t take the time to reflect on how their brand is perceived or considered.  So much emphasis is placed on increasing awareness without the benefit of understanding what their target audience and customer base thinks and what it will take to get them to buy.  With the proliferation of marketing mediums, it is even more important to ensure the brand personality and attributes are resonating across all audiences.

Let’s face it.  It’s easier to get marketing dollars to put toward an ad or marketing campaign than it is to conduct research and develop processes and governance.  Many employees believe that they already understand their brand attributes so spending coveted marketing dollars to “tell them what they already know” is like throwing away money.  Processes and governance just mean more bureaucracy and delays to market.

But then the day comes when new competition is entering the market, share is eroding and revenue and profitability are on the decline.  Ad campaigns are not delivering the desired results.  Loyal customer advocates are now tempted with competing offers. The brand is no longer connecting with the market the way it used to, so now you’re behind the curve scrambling to repair.

It’s a matter of simple due diligence and established processes that will yield a greater return on the awareness investment. Luckily, due diligence doesn’t mean millions of dollars and months of research thanks to technology and social media.  Conduct a brand study and customer survey to get a pulse on where you stand.  Establish processes like tone and writing styles, training and review processes to ensure the attributes and personality are conveyed across the board.

Don’t let your company’s brand operate in autopilot.  The market is too volatile and buyers more empowered.  Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, step back and reflect on your business performance and whether or not your brand identity is resonating with those attributes that will drive improved perception, consideration, and more importantly, sales.

by Anne Marsden

I am so tired of hearing that phrase: Content is King. Content is simply a means to advance the conversation – to interest potential buyers into finding out more about your product, and to shape how they feel about your brand amongst all the others competing for your attention.

Maybe all the hoopla around content marketing is because the cost of distributing content has plummeted. You no longer have to take out full-page ads or spend a fortune on direct mail. The internet has made distribution practically free. But there’s the rub. With the low cost to distribute, the amount of “junk” has skyrocketed. So getting our content through the noise and actually engaging our audience is not about how deep our pockets but how strong our inbound marketing and brilliant our content. OK, so compelling, informing, and/or entertaining content that engages is essential. Relevant content strengthens your SEO, increases your on-line authority, drives lead generation and can even improve your AdWords Quality Score. But it still ain’t King.

And neither is “Conversion”. We talk and talk about how to get prospects to “convert”, to give us their precious email addresses and the right to follow-up with more content in the future. Well, I can get anyone to give me their info if I give away free iPads.  And they can instantly unsubscribe the next time they get something from me. (Most people have an email account they use just for this purpose and where they expect all the junk to go to anyway.) Of course conversions of true potential prospects are the heart of a strong lead generation program: you can’t get to Home until you’ve gotten to Second Base.

But in the end, the Customer is King. Who they are, what they need, how we help them, and how they feel about the relationship on an on-going basis, is King. According to a report by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, acquiring a new customer can cost 6 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer. Existing customers are our best prospects for cross-selling additional features and other products. They are a built-in marketing research team to help with product development.

So what I’m advocating is that as marketers, we need to spend at least as much time worrying about our Customer Experience Index* (CxPi) and our Net Promoter Score (or your preferred Customer Loyalty metric) as we do our monthly conversion rates. A little more attention in this area can provide greater revenue lift, at a lower cost, than just about any of our content creation efforts.

Oh yeah, and happy customers are a constant source of good content (case studies, testimonials, videos, etc.) too.

*CxPi is Forrester’s Consumer Experience Index. It measures the revenue benefits from 3 sources, and across 13 industries:

1. Incremental purchases from existing customers in the same year.
2. Revenue saved by lower churn.
3. New sales driven by word of mouth.

A free summary of the report and its methodology is available here.

If you’ve had the pleasure of going behind the scenes in the kitchen of a ‘haute cuisine’ restaurant, perhaps you were struck like I was by the clarity of role everyone had and the incredible team work it took to deliver a beautiful and delicious four course meal.  The head chef, like a maestro, directs the various specialists and ensures the outcome.  The fry chef focuses on his station and the pastry chef creates her masterpieces.  The sommelier selects the proper pairings.  They work in harmony all toward the same goal of delighting their hungry patrons.

Imagine if all marketing organizations were able to achieve the same coordinated and collaborative approach to increase lead generation, brand awareness and customer loyalty.  It all comes down to having a well-communicated marketing strategy and clarity of task across all functions.

Marketing organizations come is so many different forms that I daresay there isn’t a right or wrong way to organize it.  To centralize or decentralized is hotly debated especially in global pursuits.  Balancing sales support and true field marketing (lead generation) can be a challenge.  Ensuring compliance with country regulations about whom and where data can be accessed needs to be carefully addressed.  Assessing what aspects can and should be outsourced requires thoughtful consideration.

The fastest path to failure in a marketing organization is lack of clarity in roles and a breakdown in full knowledge and respect for what each person is accountable for.  This is especially important where decentralized marketing organizations are empowered to create their own lead generation campaigns.  Ensuring branding and messaging is consistent, leveraging existing collateral and thought leadership materials, maximizing database efficiencies and aggregating measurement tools will yield more positive outcomes and better ROI.

Imagine a scenario where each product silo is responsible for their own marketing campaigns.  One product team develops a target list, pushes out materials and invitations to encourage prospects to learn more.  They own the web content and set up separate social media campaigns.  Their goal is to sell THEIR product.  In a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company, this model works well but in the B2B world, they lose the full effect of what they could otherwise accomplish in promoting their brand and entire portfolio of solutions.

Is there such a thing as a best in class marketing organization?  Absolutely, but it has less to do with what the org chart looks like and more about how the team works in harmony to deliver on the business objectives.  Having governance over the brand, clarity of role and common objectives tied to the business results is what makes a best-in-class marketing organization.

We thought the paddleboat was securely tied to the dock and were enjoying an evening cocktail on the porch when a group of intelligent and worldly adults noticed the boat was adrift.  Quickly surmising the situation, four discussed the strategy by which to rescue the run away boat.  Two offered to swim out to save it.  They put on life jackets and set off after the boat. Two more didn’t wait to participate in the strategy and took off down the closest route – a treacherous cliff – and one of them ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist.  While both the swimmers and ‘acrobats’ accomplished the same goal, the ones who adhered to the well-thought out strategy avoided weeks of rehabilitation.

There are always multiple ways to accomplish the same objective but inevitably the most well thought out strategy wins out.  Why is it that we sometimes take the short cut to achieve speed to market?

Today marketers are under so much pressure to deliver in seemingly unrealistic timeframes to stay ahead of the competition that they often rush into “random acts of marketing”.  In order to fully maximize results, marketers must stop to develop a ‘roadmap’ for each campaign and plan for the ongoing nurturing of leads.  They must leverage every medium at their disposal to captivate their audiences who have unique ways in which they consume information.   Lucky for us, we have more resources at our disposal to achieve these objectives.

Gone are the days when marketers would report their results based on the number of people to attended their trade show booth, or opened a direct e-mail or clicked through on the website.  We are now held accountable for defending the ROI of our marketing budget and those metrics are a radical departure from the past.

In order to deliver a true ROI on marketing campaigns, marketers can’t take the fastest route.  They must step back and assess their audience and messages and proliferate their campaigns across a myriad of vehicles.  Taking the time to develop that roadmap, setting specific goals and executing consistently will yield the best results.

While launching a social media/inbound marketing campaign may seem easy – just start tweeting, or post a blog, or create a Facebook page – it’s not going to be effective unless you’ve thought through the next steps.  If someone reads your blog and wants to learn more, you need to have your website and resources aligned.  If they react to a tweet, you need to be prepared to respond.  You need to have thought through the lifecycle of interactions that eventually nurture each lead into a sale.  To learn more, I encourage you to read “The 10 Step Program to Jump-Start your Inbound Marketing Machine” by Anne Marsden.

Don’t take the short cut that just allows you to ‘check the box’.  Do the work and create a multi-faceted plan to maximize coverage, nurture potential clients and deliver real world marketing results.

Many of our clients have come to us with questions about inbound marketing. They’re either new to inbound marketing or need help improving the effectiveness of specific parts of their program.  To lend a hand, I decided to write a reference guide on the topic.  It’s an easy to read, interactive PDF full of useful facts, figures, links and specific instructions to start up – or tune up – your inbound marketing program.

A word of encouragement and a word of caution:  If you follow these steps you WILL get results.  But they aren’t magically easy, nor produce overnight results.  (I’m not one of those marketers that guarantees instant weight loss with no need to exercise or eat less.)

Inbound marketing isn’t an event, it’s a discipline.  And as many companies know, it is one of the most cost effective ways to find, attract, and engage prospects. In this interactive E-Guide you’ll learn the statistics that show that inbound marketing isn’t just for B2C. You’ll learn why it’s becoming the cornerstone of the most effective B2B marketing organizations. And you’ll learn the steps required to get your program in shape.

These 10 steps, when practiced with dedication, will change the marketing – and sales – lives of the companies that implement it.  Nothing that is life changing is easy. But these steps are do-able and when consistently applied, the results are guaranteed.  More inbound traffic.  More leads.  More engagement with your target market.  More sales.  Yes, more sales.

So if you want to learn how to jump-start or re-invigorate your inbound marketing program, click here to download your free copy.