Using IT To Focus On Your Customer

Early on in a B2B organization’s growth, you probably had one or two key customers. Your business was geared solely and completely to focusing on those customers. You focused like a laser beam on their needs, their wants, and their requirements.

However, as we develop more customers and grow our business, we can begin to develop a tendency to focus  inwardly rather than that laser like outward focus on our customers. You can recognize this tendency when people’s job descriptions become so specific on tasks, that there is no mention  of how those tasks affect, improve, or alter the satisfaction of your customer base.

I freely admit, many of these ideas I mention below blur the line between marketing and IT (which is why both those functions should be joined at the hip) but as many growing businesses don’t have full time marketing staff, lets look at some ways that IT can help fill in the gap.

1) Actively monitor what people are saying about you, and about your competitors. Setting up tools such as Google alerts, or Twitter search will alert you to conversations that are happening. These conversations could give you insights on improvements to your offerings that competitors don’t have, or even highlight a prospect who is dissatisfied with a competitive product. Funneling this information through the appropriate parts of your business could be as simple as an e-mail.

2) Actively monitor how people are using, or hoping to use, products such as yours. To do this, ensure that you have set up analytic software on your Web Site, and secondly, using tools such as Google’s Ad-Words key word tool, look at the search queries that people use when looking for tools or solutions in your space.

As an example, in my organizations product space, I was able to identify that the term E-Mail was often used in conjunction with the keywords I was looking at. I can translate little piece of data that into;

Show me products in this space that can send E-Mail for me.

This shows me that having our solutions E-Mail enabled (they are) is something that we should call more attention to in our marketing and Web Site content.

3) For your existing customers, If they order from you every month, is re-ordering a round of faxes and telephone calls? or can IT create a system that allows these orders to be created easily and electronically?

4) Actively record and report on all issues that come in to you via telephone or e-mail. Data that is too often ignored! but if 10 calls a week are about the same concern or issue; what are you waiting for?

The SMB Takeawy

Nothing magical about the above ideas, they boil down to one thing; listening, and responding to what your customer needs.

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Real SMB IT: Web Site Improvements; The Next Step

This post is the next in an intermittent series looking at your web site from a marketing perspective -  When you are not a marketing person!

I introduced this series with this post titled; IT -  In Marketing?,  this is the next post on helping smaller businesses to improve their Web sites at little to no expense.

This series has been looking at real world improvements that don’t require major work or extensive help from experts. Stuff that can be typically done by a smaller business either by themselves, or in some cases just basic tech staff assistance.

In the last post I identified and fixed an issue with how our Web Site is found on the Internet.

For this next stage, I wanted to start working on two more (very) common errors for smaller businesses;

1) You created your Web Site, but then have not updated it in years

2) Your Web Site does not have a Site Map (Full definition of what a Site Map is, and does from Wikipedia)  to improve how people can navigate around your Web Site, and secondly, to assist the Search Engines to index all of the content on your Web Site. NOTE: Two Site Maps are actually required, one human readable and one machine readable, for search engine indexing spiders. I will go into the machine readable type in a later post

Search Engine Spiders!

To get this started, I asked our Web Site Developer to create the human readable Web Code for the Site Map, and the Web Code for a spot where I could add new content in the form of press release type News articles.

I will be looking at improving the core content on each page of the Web Site, but I wanted to get these ‘News’ pieces ready to go first as we have been pretty bad at demonstrating what we have already done successfully for our customers.

Once that framework was created, I wrote our first News content, formatted it and placed it in the container that the Web Developer had created for me.

Keyword Alert: Container or Template!

Don’t forget, my goal is NOT to have to go to developer staff each and every time I need to get each new piece of content added to the site, so I asked that they create a template that basically says; Insert new content here!

I still had to format the content the way that I wished, but did not have to write any ‘code’ to get it working.

So now we have a new site map and some new content on the Web Site. The machine readable Site Map is also there, but it is a little different and worth its own post. It will be a little while before the next search engine visit to index the new stuff, but I will keep watching!

There will be more to come, so stay tuned by getting updates with the RSS icon on the Home Page!

Photo credit scoobymoo via flickr

I’m On Your Web Site, Are You Listening?

Glenn Schmelzle has some excellent recommendations on evaluating your Web Site in this post titled; How tech companies should evaluate their websites

Although the title references tech it applies to all of us in the small to medium business space. So go read some of the land mines that too many of us make in the creation and management of our Web Sites!

For the  pupose of this post, I want to expand on one point that that Mr. Schmelzle makes;

..must take an objective view of ourselves

1.    Where am I?
2.    What can I do here?
3.    Why should I do it?

Quality Of Experience

Those three questions by Mr. Schmelzle are the start of more questions that you must be answering, and answering quickly.

To lead off on this concept, Mr. Schmelzle has referenced a study that stated that if they are not engaged, the majority of people will be off of your web site in less than a minute.

That statistic is being generous! other studies and reports have stated that you may get 3 to 5 clicks by prospective customers before they bail out on your Web Site and find someone else.

The statistics are irrelevant – Whether it is less than a minute, or 5 page clicks, the problem is that you are simply waiting to disgorge your information, you are hoping to shoot your mouth off without asking what your prospect is actually asking about. Which is the second key in this concept;

Waiting to talk is vastly different than listening.

As much talk as you may have on your Web Site, If you are not listening, there is no communication.

What is listening?

To put it bluntly. When someone finds your Web Site, they are asking a question on how to solve a particular issue or problem. It is up to you to ensure that you quickly and efficiently identify those questions that are being asked, and provide concise and clear reasons why you are the one to answer that question and solve that problem.

You may recognize that concept as your value proposition, which is exactly what it is. But too often in our excess and unclear mass of words, we never actually answer those questions!

So; answer those questions!

I am asking questions about a problem, I am asking questions about a pain point, I am asking questions about some knowledge that I need.

It is up to you to offer me alternatives, It is up to you to offer me offer me solutions, It is up to you to offer me that knowledge I need.

It is no accident that the Home Depot’s (NASDAQ HD) You can do it, We can help. tag line is so memorable. It boils down everything written here into 7 memorable words.

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Book Review: Six Pixels Of Separation

Mitch Joel is the President of Twist Image, a fantastic writer  and a recognized expert in digital marketing and the application and management of what we loosely call social media.

In his book; Six Pixels of Separation the author presents an excellent argument on how the world of marketing, communications, PR – in fact business itself! – has changed in our digital world.

As an introduction to the text, let me quote the publisher;

This is the first book to integrate digital marketing, social media, personal branding, and entrepreneurship in a clear, entertaining, and instructive manner that everyone can understand and apply.

Owners and Managers in the small to medium enterprise, let me say it clearly;

Read This Book!

Some Historical Background will tell you why.

Almost a decade ago, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger published a seminal text titled; the Cluetrain Manifesto

In that treatise they argued that consumers now demand that business has to open up the kimono, that they must become more transparent, and that business must revert to the public marketplace or commons. And that to move towards this new public marketplace would require moving out from the opaque Orwellian box that business had been living in.

In Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel extends the boundaries of that theme by demonstrating that in our 21st century digital age, monitoring and embracing this Marketplace or Commons is no longer optional – it is mandatory.

It is mandatory because within that commons, people are already talking about you. They are praising, criticizing, disseminating, lambasting and generally sharing information about your business anyway! Those digital communications are happening right now – the question is;

Do you even know what is being said about you?

If you don’t believe it; consider that a decade or so ago it took very persistent reporters and motivated NGO’s (Non Governmental Organizations) to drop the branding bombshell on Nike’s sweatshop labour practices.

Then compare that with the recent famous (or infamous) United Breaks Guitars video’s or the Domino’s pizza spoilage video. No cloak and dagger travel across the world required. From thought to on-line in no time at all.

Mr. Joel clearly demonstrates that for consumers in our open marketplace, they require trust. They require that there is authentic two way communication between business and consumer. The author clearly demonstrates ways to begin building that.

I do point out one caveat though

Much of the text describes case studies of individuals successfully utilizing these digital tools to drive branding, often to very lofty heights, but that is the caveat; the majority of the examples are individuals, not businesses. I am sure that this is partially because transformational case studies by businesses are probably still a little thin.

But this is a learning curve that we have to go through; namely what are the risks of personal branding within your business, vs. the branding of your business?

This is a question that needs to be thought about because as most small business owners and managers know, the brand recognition and equity you have has to belong to the company – not to you.

Does that brand equity rub off on the business? – or stay with the name?

I don’t have that answer.

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Real SMB IT: Learning Web Site Optimization

As I introduced in this post titled; IT -  In Marketing? , this is the next in a series looking at your web site from a marketing perspective -  When you are not a marketing person!

This series will look at real world improvements that don’t require major work or extensive help from experts. Stuff that can be typically done by an SME either by themselves, or in some cases just basic tech staff assistance.

The second in this series was my amusing incident with Google Local  here.

For the next step, I wanted to see how our current Web Site stacked up from a marketing perspective.  To do that I used Hubspots’ Web Site Grader  to take a look at the current state of our site. (If you are interested in improving your site, go subscribe to their blog)

We did not do very well in their grading! – to put it bluntly – we scored in a fairly low percentile.

As I can’t do it all at once, the first thing I identified was that we were losing inbound links referencing our web site as we have DNS (Domain Name System) records pointing to our web site as www.domain.com and plain domain.com, with no www in front of it. This is pretty normal, as it ensures that if someone does not type in the WWW part first, they will still find your Web Site.

Without going into details (of which I am not an expert!) these inbound links are a type of currency for the search engines. The more people reference your Web Site, Well the more important you must be! The problem though is that the search engines think that www.domain.com and domain.com are actually different Web Sites.

To fix that and to get all links pointing to the same web site, I had to setup what is called a canonical redirect.

Having never set this type of thing up before, I was not sure if I needed to obtain a second Internet (IP) address to do that – So I posed the question on Linked In.  That question was answered by by Kyung Cho with;

can assign multiple virtual hosts to the same IP provided you specify a different host header for both. in the wizard, when it asks you to assign an IP or all-unassigned, make sure the host header field(3rd down IIRC) is unique for that website

Our Web Server is Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, so this is specific to IIS. With the Internet Information Server Management tool, I took our existing web site and created the host header for www.domain.com. I then created a second web site with the same Internet Address, and pointing to the same physical directory as the first web site, but set the host header to domain.com, and clicked the permanently redirect check box.

It worked perfectly, now if I type domain.com into my web browser, I can see that it automatically changes to the www.domain.com.

Next step is now complete!

There will be more to come, so stay tuned the RSS icon on the Home Page!

ROI And Social Media Bytes

Some excellent ‘Blogversations’ on a topic that has been talked about many times!

Olivier Blanchard at The Brandbuilder blog

Just because you don’t know how doesn’t mean it’s impossible

Mark Gould’s Enlightened tradition

but account is rarely taken of the price of doing nothing

IT, In Marketing?

OK, feel free to laugh!

In many, many posts on this blog I have argued that your senior IT staff should be conversant with all disciplines in your business; to the relevant level of detail.

Then in this post,  Ahh forget it – forget I wrote it!

Anyway, we have not done a good job at Web Marketing, I demonstrated to our management team using Google’s Adwords Keyword tool  that in a market we compete in, that one single key word generated over 22 thousand queries on Google last month, and we were no where to be found in those results.

Be Careful What You Wish For!

OK, the boss was nice enough to ask, but you guessed it, at least on the Web side, this IT guy is going to be helping out in marketing.

So don’t change your dial for the details of a typical SME improving their Web Presence! It’s going to be fun!

And hey, for the longest time I have been ‘lurking’ and learning from some of the best!

This series continues with; Real SMB IT;  Learning Web Site Optimization

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I Ain’t A Marketer

But I firmly believe in this day and age, your IT and your marketing have to be joined at the hip.

Marketer Frank Reed has this post titled; Internet Marketing Makes Selling Easier for the SMB

Let Me tell you a story!

I know a chap who owns his own business. Before his son joined the business, he was working at a large consumer electronics chain.

In a talk we were having about web technologies, I asked the son in front of his dad, what was easier; trying to sell a product, or have a customer come in and ask for a product?

I am sure you know what he answered.

Shall I ask you the same question?

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Customer Experience And IT

Check out this post by Mike Moran at his biznology blog.

Plain and simple it outlines a great customer experience.

But look deeper.

In this case it is not just friendly happy people

It is based on IT

Is your IT staff talking with marketing?

I think they should be.

I gotta warn ya though. If you have neglected the IT infrastructure to support that kind of initiative, well I think its’ time you made IT a real part of the conversation!

Don’t ya think?

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B2B vs. B2C, Fear And IT Strategy

Tom Hall has a thought provoking piece titled; The Difference Between B2B and B2C buyers.

Mr. Hall states that the majority of business to business buyers thoroughly research their vendors prior to engaging with them. This echo’s research by Marketing Research firm The Marketing Sherpa  which identified that about 80% of the time your customer found you through research, and not you finding your customers. (so if your marketing strategy does not help people research you, maybe you should revisit that!)

What is a little different about Mr. Halls article is this;

Research buying is driven by fear – the fear of the unknown

The author expands on that, this fear can be driven from the perceived personal risk associated with a business solution (maybe even your job) vs. the risk of a consumer purchase relationship.

We have had a few discussions on this blog about clear and explicit corporate goals  and this fear idea struck me as a clean, clear objective that can be addressed by your organization. 

An objective of Reduce Perceived Customer Risk is clear, specific and something that all parts of the organization can sink their teeth into.

From marketing (obtain 2 high quality case studies) right through to IT.

How Can IT help reduce perception of risk?

There are probably many ideas – chime in if you think of some!

But I can think of ensuring that every customer touch point is easy and seamless – leaving your customer to say Damn they’re good.. And then facilitating that customer satisfaction comment into true social communications.

The SMB Takeaway

We have talked many times about being drop dead easy to do business with.

When looking at how your customers are interacting with you – look at the areas that you can say don’t be afraid…

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Remove Fear

Photo Credit WTL photos via flickr