Posted on

Why just ‘knowing’ your customer is not enough

Every customer support forum and blog has at least one post talking about the importance of ‘knowing’ the target customer. This is one of those well established cliche-stereotypes that David Foster Wallace points out in Infinite Jest – we talk about them so much because they happen to be true. The only question is, how true?

Is ‘knowing’ your customer really enough?

Cadbury’s knows that its customers are young parents buying chocolates for their kids or teens buying chocolates for each other or middle aged people buying chocolates as gifts. Netflix knows that its customers are strapped-for-time movie buffs who love the convenience and ease that Netflix gives them. But do Cadbury’s and Netflix really know who their customers actually are, what they are doing when they want to buy a chocolate or a movie, when the decision is made to buy a chocolate or order a movie, and so on.

The ‘ideal customer profile’ is not going to reveal the details, and these are the details that matter.

Getting your hands dirty

A month back, Economic Times ran a fascinating story on Airline bosses and the lessons they picked up from talking to passengers while travelling. They figured out how important cheese sandwiches were, faced ground-level problems, got themselves a crash course in regional culture and basically got their hands dirty. The CEOs of India’s flying corporates, though competitors and sometimes bitter enemies, all agree on the point that they learn more from actually being in the shoes of their customers than by anything else.

This is something FMCG companies like ITC and Unilever know very well. Both these companies send their fresh recruits out into the field, into the place where the product has to be sold – the rural heart of India. Even the top management heads out to the street sometimes, in search of that small and elusive insight that could take the sales charts off into the stratosphere.

Do it like Dockers

In Malcolm Gladwell’s retelling of the story, this is exactly what ad agency FCB did with the Dockers campaign of the 1980s. The campaign called ‘Dockers World’, catapulted the khaki brand into probably the most ubiquitous male fashion statement of that period. The insight that FCB used was the male baby boomers’ urge to conform to standards, and not look like a made up Ken doll. The Dockers khakis were exactly that, they came in just three colours then, and all of them were made up of the stringently similar amount of cotton. And so the men who wore Dockers ‘fitted in’, which was exactly what they wanted to do. The iconic campaign is still remembered as one of America’s greatest, and FCB still consider it one of their crowning achievements.

Look for that insight

This story again illustrates why just knowing your customer isn’t enough. And in a product marketing setting, it only makes more sense. The customer profile you have drawn up can help, of course, but it will never come close to looking at the world from your customer’s eyes, figuring out his motivations, his reasons for doing something and what he wants from the product you want to sell to him. These questions may have the most surprising answers and from these answers, will come the insight that will endear your product to the consumer.

Posted on

How to get your product’s content marketing juggernaut in place

Congratulations, you have just started up. It has taken so long to get here – you’ve worked hard, saved up, staved away every comfort, and your product is out, garnering rave reviews. Now you turn to the other important stuff you need to do – get your product in front of your market. It’s time for the marketing and selling push in a startup.

And this is when you know you have to set up a content marketing effort. You know it costs less, brings in way more, and can contribute to branding in an unimaginable way.

But how and where do you start?

I’ll try to answer that.

When I started out, content marketing was just about catching fire as a viable marketing channel. The field was nascent (and in many ways, still is) and everything we have learned about it, we have learned by doing. I’ve tried to make a small guide out of what we’ve learned.

The two towers of content marketing 

There are two separate efforts involved in content marketing. I call them the two towers. One of them is of course creating the content that will educate the market and convince people to buy your product. This is your first challenge. The other is getting it in front of them, what we call ‘distribution’. Even if you have written and designed amazing content, it’ll only be valuable if your audience reads it. Your second challenge lies in grabbing the eyeballs that will translate into greenbacks.

Wading in, then.

The first tower – content

1. Blog
2. Whitepapers
3. Case Studies
4. E-Books
5. In-product help texts
6. Infographics
7. Videos
8. Presentations

The list I have compiled above is just a snapshot of the things you can do. Platforms and formats abound for people who want to get more creative and tell stories in a new way. But to get started, the list above will do very well. For any B2B product, educating the customer about what your product can do and what your product can do better than others is the aim, and all the content generated should be tailored around specific takeaways for the audience.

I still believe in the blog as the key channel for any startup. A few months after my CEO Girish Mathrubootham had started up Freshdesk, he wrote a post on the Freshdesk Blog about how a Hacker News comment had been his inspiration to quit his job and start a company. The post went viral, people across the world read it, shared it, and were inspired by it. It brought us recognition on a scale we hadn’t even imagined. And this was when we didn’t even have a marketing plan in place. It is just not about the customers the blog brings as well; a good blog is a good branding statement. The first thing that most people look at when they reach your site is the blog. It just has to be amazing.

All of the rest come under the banner of educational informational content. Make it a point to tailor content to different stages of the sales cycle and deliver it when the customer has the most need for it. For example, when a customer is trialling your product, make sure he gets in-product help texts to help him navigate the newness of it. You can send him white-papers comparing your product with your competitors and tell him all the reasons he needs to choose you. You can send him videos showing him little tips and tricks in the product that makes his work easier. You get the point.

Now on to the trickier part of the equation.

The second tower – distribution

1. SEO
2. Social
3. The Community

Anyone getting into the Content Marketing equation should understand this first – one thing you do will feed into the other.

Now that you have created the stuff you think your audience will like, you need to get it to them.

Basic SEO is imperative. This is the most targeted form of inbound marketing there is. If you do not deliver content to the people who are actually looking for it, you might as well pack up and leave. And make no mistake about it, this is grunt work. You have to get down, get your hands dirty, pick through tags, metatags, best practices, measure impact, rinse, repeat. Use a tool like Scribe. Think keywords, SEO pages, landing pages and more.

This should get you started.

Now to the social web. Your social presence is your admit card to the masses. You now have access to people all over the world who are looking for and consuming information just like what you are creating and some of them are ready to open their wallets for the product you have made if it is going to give them any value. But again, it is not something to be totally enthralled by. The worst thing you can do is consciously try to ‘go’ viral. Get on the social platforms that make sense for your business, and build a consistent and interesting presence. Share stuff that your followers are interested in, and not just what you create. Build a social community. This will give you credibility as well as an audience that wants to listen to what to have to say.

For a product, it is sometimes better to build communities by themselves. One way to do this is like how Dropbox does it, forging a community by giving users incentives to evangelize the product in exchange for more space. This is a great way to growth-hack, if your product is something as inherently social as Dropbox. But for other ‘normal’ products, several support tools let you build your own community, including Freshdesk. When you let customers talk to each other, put forth new ideas for your product, vote on new features, share tips and tricks and so on, what you have is an engaged community that co-owns your product, has a stake in it becoming better and even more amazing, and will go out of their way to help you make it so. This community will be the greatest pack of evangelists you’ll ever have, and your content will be shared and trumpeted by them, thereby reaching audiences far beyond what you’ll be able to reach yourself.

I was talking to my boss Vikram last night, and standing on the balcony of our 7th floor office, he told me about how “There is no shortcut to slogging. You just have to. Only then will anything worth learning be learnt.”

An so it is with Content Marketing. To get better at it, you need to put in your hours, grind it out, make mistakes, learn.

So that is what I urge you to do. Start.

Posted on

How and why you should kickstart your Retention Marketing.

I first read the term ‘Retention Marketing’ in an article in a marketing journal at University and dismissed it immediately as one of the new terms we marketers come up with. It was for an assignment and I did not pay it a second more attention than was needed to write a passable term paper.

I heard it next at a meeting in office, about two years later. And was promptly dumbstruck by how important it now seemed.

Munch on this –

1. Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
2. Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
3. It costs 6 times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer. And of course, the one stat that was drilled into my head so many times during my brief stint in retail.
4. 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers.

If you are among those who rely on instinct and not so much on data, the fact that it will cost much more to find a new customer than to retain an existing one is just common sense.

I experienced this firsthand when after the exhilarating first few months of pulling in new customers, we suddenly had to contend with churn. I realized that even when customers are using your product enthusiastically and find no fault with it, they will still immediately switch when they see something even remotely better as an offering. Of course, my more experienced colleagues knew this; it is the major advantage of the SaaS model.

And this is why as product marketers, we have to keep our brand in the minds of our customers. The recall has to established, the emotional attachment has to be drilled into minds and hearts. Most importantly, no hint of a reason, however far fetched should be given to the users to think about switching.

Here’s a list of five things you can do –

Push your content
Keep reminding your customer about the product he’s using. Send him newsletters, put him on a blog mailing list. Keep popping up in his attention span in a way that is not obtrusive but makes him feel he’s using something made by committed people. Do not let the customer forget you. That’s where the trouble begins.

Reach-out
Call your customers every once in a while; institute a process for the same. Write a case study or a blog post from what they tell you and put it up. This will feed into your content, and give your customer something to show others as well. This is precious – never underestimate the value of making your customer feel good.

Listen to product suggestions
When your customers have sensible suggestions for your product and if the suggestions are feasible, implement them. And once you have, tell him & the world what you did. This has a two pronged effect. Because any suggestion an active customer makes is bound to make sense, it’ll be good for the product. Two is that the customer will also be reassured that there are people listening. This customer will never leave you.

Focus on high risk customers
Look for customers who are suddenly using your product less or aren’t using it at all or have suddenly downgraded from a higher plan. These are the ones who are on the ‘endangered species‘ list; they may soon decide to go extinct. Engage with them, call them up, do something special for them, give them some freebies, anything. Come up with something that makes them start using your product again.

Actively up-sell
This is something a lot of amazing companies can fail at. It is quite a common misconception that ‘good‘ companies don’t up-sell. Some important person once said that if you don’t up sell to your customers, you are cheating them of something. I agree. They could be using your product so much better if you do up-sell, and customers, would never think of leaving. Give your product that advantage.

Keep your customers happy and in doing so, keep them with you.

Source for stats: 
1. http://marketing.about.com/od/relationshipmarketing/a/crmstrategy.htm
2. http://marketing.about.com/cs/customerservice/a/crmstrategy.htm

Posted on

How Sales and Support can also be ‘Marketed’!

The best marketer of our time was, inarguably, Steve Jobs. And everything Steve Jobs did was aimed at one thing – marketing his products. His presentations were performances, his product demos were carefully directed and choreographed; there was an air of showmanship about everything going on at Apple leading to a launch. Even their support stories became huge news. Walter Isaacson and others dissected this approach later, but at that time, all of us consumers were led to think only one thing – I need that Apple device!

That need wasn’t an accident; that craving was the result of an orchestrated marketing campaign, parts of which would never come under the understood umbrella of ‘marketing’. And that is where they won. 

The lesson in this is very simple – everything is marketing. Every single thing. Even something like customer service. In fact, here’s Forbes terming customer service the new marketing. I couldn’t agree more.

But it’s not just customer service that now falls under marketing’s all encompassing realm. Sales and support can also be ‘marketed’. In fact both sales and support, tied in with customer service, can become integral parts of the marketing machinery, using every customer touchpoint as a marketing channel.

The ‘support is marketing’ line

This is the first point of customer contact and definitely the most important. An indifferent support experience is not going to get a prospective customer to open his wallet. We need to make him pause, make him think, and make him buy. Every support query should be treated as an opportunity to clear roadblocks a customer has in using the product. Anticipating the next question and offering help before the customer even asks is part of this. This is just good support, you might argue, and that is exactly what I’m talking about – great support is great marketing.



The ‘sales as marketing’ story


It was the last week of the month and our sales team was rushing to complete targets. A colleague called up a hot lead and it turned out the lead, the CEO of a small business didn’t know about our occasional agents feature, which would cost him a lot less than actually buying usage for a whole agent. My colleague could have sold the customer the extra agent, but he didn’t. He explained the occasional agent concept, and when the customer purchased our product, he spent less and got more value. 

That customer would now think twice before leaving us, if ever. If that is not spectacular marketing, I don’t know what is.

The Bottom Line
As marketers we are looking for a customer to 1) spend more on our product and/or 2) tell someone else he should be using our product. 

When sales, support and customer service add up to give a customer a smooth and satisfying experience, he’ll have no qualms in spending more on our product or recommending us to others. Our job is done.


And that is why I think we need to take that lesson from Steve Jobs to heart. Everything is, in fact, marketing!