Five Bits of Marketing Inspiration #2

1. Create and Cultivate Partnerships

If there’s one thing that I’m convinced of in marketing, especially local marketing, few things are better for business than strong partnerships. It’s amazing what an organization or even an entire city can do when they band together, market together and co-develop business that benefits everyone involved, especially the customer at the center of it all.

It’s a simple thing, but this was brought home for me in a simple coupon that I received when I checked out at a local retailer.  Office Max was printing out coupons for Payless shoes when you checked out in the store.  What a great idea.  Cross-couponing with a non-competing partner.  Smart, smart, smart! 

Who can you partner with to help better serve your mutual customer and grow your business together?

2. Making Every Day a Special Day for Your Customers

This can be as simple as having a ‘daily special’ for a restaurant, but when I encountered this sign at our local flower shop, I was really pleased to see how they were trying to change things up a bit and provide you with a reason to do business with them every day of the week.

We make a pretty big deal of doing great things with social media content each day.  What else can you do in your business to make each day unique for your customers?

3. Think Like a Marketer

We’ve been thinking a lot about professions that seem to have a lot of ‘sameness’ lately. For example, realtors come to mind.  Personally, I have a really hard time figuring out how realtors really differentiate themselves.  However, something that I caught in a recent issue of Success magazine caught my eye and fits the bill, if only part of the bill…

Lauron Sonnier, author of Think Like a Marketer has a few solid and very insightful ideas for standing apart from the sea of sameness.  Just because these are simple, doesn’t mean that they are easy!

1. Do different things. “It’s easy to stand out when you do something no one else is doing,” Sonnier says. “To beat your competition, you can’t just be a little better than they are. You have to do something different than they do.”

2. Do things differently. “This is where you demonstrate your understanding that the ‘how’ can be more important than the ‘what,’ ” she says. Add a special touch of class, elegance, humor or spice that makes even the common seem special.

3. Stir emotions; spread happiness. “When you stir positive emotions, be they joy or inspiration or peace of mind, you send a message that there’s more where that came from,” Sonnier says. And they’ll keep coming back for more.

4. Be consistent. The three aforementioned methods of standing out will work only if they are consistent. “Whatever it is, however seemingly insignificant, if it always happens or never happens, you have created something sticky. You have developed an identity that people can count on and will talk about.”

4. Keep Referrals from Being a Dirty Deed

Craig Pearce had an excellent article on the dirty side of referrals when cash and kickbacks are involved.  I agree with him.  I’m OK with a bit of incentive, but when it becomes a quid-pro-cash scheme, I back away.  Keeping referrals clean is the best way to promote honest business and altruistic (inasmuch as it can be) commerce.

Seeking money from referrals is bad PR and marketing juju – two dirty deeds

On the other hand, I have some tales to tell in regard to what I think is a negative, divisive and often fundamentally unethical and dishonest approach to business referrals. That’s right, I think it sucks.

Quite a few years ago when I was working for an agency, a friend (…) of someone in the agency referred a potential client to the PR agency.

Lo and behold, we won the client. Lo and behold, the ‘friend’ then asked for a considerable cut of the business due to their referral, the logic to this approach being you wouldn’t have got the business without me.

Now I railed against this at the time, spluttering in dismay and, yes, disgust, but it seemed there wasn’t much to be done. At the time this approach really was marketing industry pretty standard practice, so I’m led to believe, and kicking up a stink at the risk of losing the client wasn’t a preferred option.

5. Connected Marketers with an Ecosystem are XXX Times More Successful

Honestly, I don’t have a real number to put into the XXX, but everything I see around me points to the need for staying connected to your community for success.  I’d even go so far as to say that if you work in one city and live in another, and you’re try to establish a ‘personal brand’ in an area, you really need to focus your participating where the business lies.

This translates into an industry as well.  Associations, clubs, user groups, forums (online and off) all run on participation. (that means you)

Think about stretching yourself to get more involved in everything around you. 

• Your immediate community
• Industry associations
• Boards and committees in your area
• Causes & charities that could use your help where you’ll meet like-minded professionals

In order to be the most successful you…you need to have a great ecosystem around you to help you grow and flourish.  No one can do it alone.