By considering each customer’s personal experience, what they’re trying to achieve, and how you can help, you may find areas where you can:

• Offer advice or insight to help prospective customers solve a problem and position yourself as a trusted expert
• Eliminate frustration to improve their experience
• Remove obstacles to accelerate the customer’s journey and drive revenue

Large enterprises often have a customer journey map that aligns digital marketing content and tactics to each step in the journey.  But if you haven’t created one yet, now’s a great time to start.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and identify each of the steps they go through on the way to purchasing your products or services, what they’re doing, and what they’re thinking and feeling at each point in the process. How can you make the experience better, faster, or easier?

Not sure where to start? Check out this great post from IDEO U on how to use customer journey maps to uncover innovation opportunities.

While leading employee communications for a large company, I worked on many of its learning and development projects. We described everything we expected of employees to tell them specifically how to meet those expectations. Next, we showed them examples of the expected behavior in action. Lastly, we gave them exercises to practice was expected of them before performing the work in the real world.

This approach works well with training of any sort, and it can also be applied to brand training and standards. After putting effort and investment into developing a strong brand, how do you ensure everyone uses it correctly?

• Tell – To ensure that employees, partners, and vendors correctly represent your brand, create a brand style guide. At a minimum, include visual examples of how to use your logo, color palette, preferred fonts, and photography. See a simple example here.
• Show – Within your style guide and in any training you provide, go beyond simply describing the correct usage to show real “do’s and don’ts.” Show examples of your brand in all its forms — not just your logo on a page, but also your brand voice in writing, and your photography, color palette and iconography in video or animation. 
• Do – Give employees or partners the opportunity to apply your brand standards as you work through examples together. By transforming “before” versions of off-brand work to “after” examples that make your brand shine, they’ll build the skills they need to use correct branding going forward.

For help creating your brand training or communications, call us today.

Money is funneled to smaller sites through a complex system of agencies and third-party networks, which can resemble a stock exchange. This system, known as programmatic advertising, allows brands to collect many millions of impressions — an industry term that generally indicates that an ad has been displayed and can be viewed.

While programmatic advertising makes it cheaper and easier to target buyers as they browse various websites that interest them, it also makes it easy for publishers to promote low-quality sites – like those featuring fake news – and get paid to deliver low-quality impressions. Pay close attention to how your marketing dollars are being spent.

Technology has emerged to protect brands from showing up on sites that traffic in, say, pornography or spam, but those measures have been found wanting when it comes to disinformation.

Read more: Advertising’s Moral Struggle: Is Online Reach Worth the Hurt? [NYT]

Read more: Digital Advertising Grew Double Digits Again to Hit $17.6 Billion in Q3 [AdWeek]

With the launch of a new, better version of one of our flagship products, the interface had changed, as had many of the menus, shortcuts, and features.

While most of the changes were enhancements or significant upgrades to existing capabilities, I feared that we would face a decrease in customer satisfaction if we executed the launch without a great introduction and self-help tools to ensure a smooth transition.

Our sales, marketing, and development teams had worked together to develop launch presentations, announcements, brochures, white papers, feature/benefit lists, training guides, and a variety of other communication pieces to support the launch.

As I edited sales training materials, I asked our developers to answer a few final questions for me and share the information with our support team to incorporate into FAQs on our website.

The lead developer responded, “But FAQs are just that; they’re Frequently Asked Questions. We may have gotten that question once or twice from the beta group, but I wouldn’t qualify it as frequently.”

I voiced my concern that the beta group included some of our most active users, many of whom had requested the enhancements now being incorporated into the product. These individuals received small-group instruction from our team during the beta, and in some cases they were accustomed to one-on-one email access to the folks building the product.

One of these experts asking a question would likely represent a large segment of our potentially less expert-level customer base.  Expecting our support team to answer such questions multiple times would take away from their ability to quickly respond to more complex issues.

I thought I had made a pretty compelling case.  And still, he resisted.

We continued debating the purpose of FAQs for a few minutes, until I finally responded, “I understand that you think FAQs should be reserved for Frequently Asked Questions. For this launch, I’m asking you to expand your definition to include Fully Anticipated Questions. I fully anticipate that some customer – or maybe a lot of customers – will ask our sales and support reps this. If we know we’ll have to explain it to at least one more person, can we please just add it to the website in advance so people can find it instead of waiting for a response?  I’ll write it. All I’m asking you to do is say ‘yes, send it to me and I’ll make sure it’s correct and get it to support to add to the site.'”

“Yes,” he responded. “Send it to me and I’ll review it and send to them.”

We gathered additional questions during sales training and added them to our FAQs, and we incorporated the additional messaging into some of our other communications for the launch. The product enhancements were a great success, and we measured a lower spike in support contacts than we had during previous releases. Of course, this wasn’t driven by just changing our FAQs, but by the great work done by our development team and the execution of a comprehensive product marketing, communication, and training plan.

It’s important to anticipate and answer your customers’ questions in a variety of ways. FAQs can be an effective tool for communicating information – just like a video, presentation, or email message.  Think creatively about how you can use all of the tools available to you, and above all, don’t wait until your customers are frustrated and asking for help before you give them the details they’re looking for. Anticipate what they want to know – and ask them when possible – and then, publish the information in a variety of formats that are easy for them to consume.

[Updated: Thankfully, Starbucks returned to their Gingerbread Latte roots. Maybe they read our blog.  Or, perhaps the sight of people spitting out their drinks got to them.  Either way, I’m glad to have my drink back, and the marketing lesson still applies.  Read on…]

I’ve written and talked a lot about Starbucks in my time, mostly because they’re a good company to study when it comes to marketing.  And, while they’ve had some missteps over the last few years, they generally seem to be on the upswing.

Until this week, that is.

Let me start by saying that I am a creature of habit.  This is a good thing for vendors that want to sell to me, because when I find something I like, I am loyal to a fault.  Starbucks is one company that benefits from my loyalty, because I buy their products more frequently than almost any other company’s.

I am the Starbucks customer who has been waiting all year for the company to offer its holiday Gingerbread Lattes.  I drink Frappuccinos when it’s hot, but come winter, I’m a grande, non-fat, easy-whip, gingerbread latte gal.

This winter, however, Starbucks pulled a bait and switch on me.  After being told in their stores that the holiday drinks would, as usual, arrive in early November, I dutifully showed up and ordered my gingerbread latte. Instead, I received a Ginger Snap latte.  Which, in case you’re wondering, is NOT the same thing.  Tastes similar, but is not quite the same.  And it has actual chunks of ginger in the bottom of the cup.

This is bad for a number of reasons.  First, loyal customers like me who ordered a gingerbread latte received a different drink.  Not knowing I was getting a different drink than I get – EVERY YEAR –  I was actually grossed out to find something chewy in the bottom of my cup. No one mentioned the change to me, so it actually took me 2 visits to Starbucks to notice that they’ve changed their drink offering, and this is part of the new product, rather than just a drink gone wrong or the result of something falling into my coffee while it was being made.

My reason for mentioning it here is: if you have very happy customers who are loyal to one of your products, don’t quietly change it on them. You want to add something new? Great. By all means, expand your product line. But, when someone buys and loves something they’ve always bought from you, don’t hand them something different that gives them the urge to spit it out.

You can develop a relationship with a prospective customer, identify their needs, and demonstrate the value of your product or service, but if you don’t ask them to buy it, you’ve wasted your time.

The same is true in marketing.

As a writer and editor, I frequently see marketing materials and web copy that provide a wealth of information about a company and its products, services, people, philosophy, and everything else you might possibly want to know.

Yet, the most common mistake companies make is never asking prospective clients to do something once they review the information. Companies hire web designers, graphic designers, printers, and a host of other people to create communications with no purpose. Why bother?

If you’re going to invest in producing a communication of any type — from a marketing brochure to a website, newsletter, direct mail, or email — you must have a clear objective. If you ask someone to read information, define exactly what you want them to do when they finish reading it; this is your “close.” In marketing, it’s known as a “Call to Action.”

Just as sales people close by asking prospective customers to buy, marketers, writers, and any business people responsible for communications should call on prospective customers to act. Not sure how? Here are some examples:

• “Call today to take advantage of this special offer.”
• “Click here for more information about how our software can save you time and money.”
• “Share your views about this article in our comments section.”
• “Visit our website to order your copy today.”
• “Call today to schedule a viewing of this property.”

It’s easy, and it will immediately make your communications more effective. Whatever you do, close every prospect!

Having spent my career in a fast-paced, technology-centric field, most newspapers are simply too slow for me. By the time I’ve had my morning coffee and read the front page, I can find more current, detailed information and analysis at any online source worth reading.

So, while I still look forward to sitting down in the living room on crisp November mornings with the Sunday paper laid out in front of me – fire crackling and the football game on TV – it’s primarily for the experience and not the news.

Much like choosing to listen to music on vinyl instead of my phone, there’s a time and place for it, but it’s rare and mostly for sentimental reasons.

When it comes to the search for real news or entertainment, more and more people are forgoing print in favor of online media. And where people go, advertisers follow.

Edit: This is an archived post I originally published after a report by private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, which showed that Internet advertising is passing up newspaper as the largest advertising medium. We’ve come a long way since then, but you can still check out a summary of the report by Information Week’s Thomas Claburn here.