I’ve been invited to present at a meeting of a business referral networking group tomorrow. Topic: How to create a business referral marketing program.

Most of the group’s members work for small businesses or have their own businesses. A few work for banks or insurance companies, but must build their own customer base through marketing. What some members of the group may not realize is that they already have a business referral marketing program. As a member of a networking group, they are investing time, energy and some money into marketing their services. But are they getting the most they can out of their group membership? Should their program include other strategies and tactics? That’s what I will focus on.

Building a referral marketing program is much like building any other marketing program, with some slight twists. Here are the components:

• Objectives:  Don’t say your objective is to gain referrals. Be more specific and measurable; for example: my objective this year is to get 5 new referral clients for my web site design business and 5 new referral clients for my search engine optimization services — and provide 10 highly qualified referrals to colleagues in my network.
• Audience: In this case, your end customers are not your audience. Your networking partners are. Where can you meet them? Why would they be interested in helping you out? How do you gain their trust? Analyze everything about your audience and build an audience profile.
• Message: What are you selling? You are not selling a product or service; you are selling yourself. You need to promote yourself as a brand: what will people think of when they hear your name? How can you position yourself to be unique from others in your line of business? How can you connect your name to your service in your audience’s mind?
• Media: Your audience drives media choices. The networking event is a media choice. Picking up the phone and calling your contacts is a media choice. Sending a hand written note on your personal stationery is a media choice.
• Process: Give yourself tasks and timelines to improve the effectiveness of your marketing program. For example, if you meet someone who could be a part of your network, send them a next-day email or letter or call them up. Keep a simple spreadsheet of contacts and communication tasks.
• Measurement: The reason you set specific goals and keep track of all activity is so you can measure what’s working and what’s not, including any networking referral group you happen to belong to. Don’t waste time on what doesn’t work; try new things that might. It’s the only way to improve results.

Everyone has heard the expression “Content is King.” Good content helps improve search engine optimization, educate prospects, generate qualified leads, position your company as experts and more. So what type of content actually is kingly, or king-like, or just king?

At the top of my list are white papers based on surveys. One of my clients, GlobalSpec, a specialty search engine for the industrial sector, regular conducts surveys of its registered user base — engineers, technical buyers and others who use its search engine. They ask questions about searching and buying patterns, how they locate information that’s important to their jobs, how the economy is affecting their work and so on. Then, they compile and analyze the results and publish a white paper that they push out to industrial suppliers they want to advertise on their Web site.

The target customers of these industrial suppliers are the respondents to the surveys. The information in the white paper is valuable to suppliers because it demonstrates how they can best reach out to these target customers and win their business. That’s the kind of educational content that drives sales.

Here’s an example of a recent white paper based on the survey: “2009 Economic Outlook Survey: How Industrial Companies can Succeed in the Current Economy.”

To execute this marketing tactic, you need to:

• Identify the audience you are going to survey and the audience you are writing the white paper for
• Create and conduct an effective survey
• Analyze the results
• Write a persuasive yet educational white paper
• Promote the white paper to your intended audience

It may seem like a lot, but it’s worth it.

Dear Dave:

My colleague at work says you’re only supposed to put one space at the end of a sentence before starting another sentence, but I learned you should put two spaces and that’s how I write documents. He’s always changing them. Who’s right?

Signed,

Two Spaces are Better

Dear Two Spaces are Better:

You call this marketing? What are you people doing in your company? Build your brand why don’t you. Generate leads. Help out the sales team.

Okay, the way documents and passages of text appear online and in print is important, and is part of marketing’s domain, but I’ve got some news for you, Two Spaces is Better: one space is better. Let me explain. 

Many of us of a certain age learned our keyboarding skills on good old fashioned typewriters, which allotted the same amount of horizontal space to each letter, whether that letter was an ‘m’ or an ‘i’. Fonts that give each letter the same amount of space are called monospaced fonts.

Courier, which I’m using here, is an example of a monospaced font.  Using an extra space after a sentence, as I do in this passage, helps readers visually identify sentence breaks.  I know, the one space versus two spaces is a small detail, but studies have shown it to be important.  Overall, I’m sure you’d agree this monospaced font is not very appealing.

Most fonts used today on computers are proportional fonts. With proportional fonts, different letters take up different amounts of space. An ‘m’ takes up more space than an ‘i’. You don’t need an extra space after a sentence when using proportional fonts because the software attempts to “fit” the type to specific line lengths, expanding and contracting available space to make the type fit. Word spacing is where most of this space adjustment takes place.  

The other problem with two spaces is that it can contribute to ‘rivers’ of white space that run vertically through a long passage of text and distract the reader.  Justifying both the right and left margins also can lead to this visual problem, because the software sometimes has to add spaces to make sure those pretty margins on both the right and left side are nice and straight.  I’m justifying the left and right margins of this passage, and using two spaces after a period, so you can see how the problem might arise.   Your eyes might be attracted more to the spaces than the words, wreaking havoc on your comprehension of textual meaning.   Try this: pick any space in the first line and see how easy it is to create a visual path down through the lines to the end of the passage.  The other crime I’m committing is italicizing a long passage of text: italics are harder to read than straight-up text.   But you didn’t ask about margin justification and italics, you asked about one or two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence.  One space, period.

Or I should say: period, one space.

For David Klein Marketing, I’m Dave

When Harvard Business Publishing offers a ‘Tips’ article on business writing and refers mostly to email writing, you realize two things:

1. How essential email is in business communications
2. How poorly most business emails are written

Here’s a link to the Harvard Business Publishing article, “Four Tips for Better Business Writing“, by David Silverman.

You likely use emal to communicate with customers, prospects, colleagues, managers and executives . . . and with wives, husbands, friends and others. You may be so used to dashing off a quick and casual email to a colleague or spouse that you end up being quick and casual when using email for important business communications. That’s where you get in trouble:

• An email to a customer that isn’t proofread and ends up riddled with typos. There’s a dent in the brand armor.
• An email to your manager that rambles on without purpose or direction. That’s one way to waste time.

Silverman brings up a great point when he states that every email should have a call-to-action. What do you want the recipient of your email to do? If you answer that question, your email has a purpose. An email with a purpose and call to action will eliminate a lot of those numbing FYI emails. It will eliminate emails to customers or prospects that aren’t relevant to their interests and needs.

One thing that bothered me about Silverman’s article was his ranting against an email that says “What are your thoughts?” followed by a long string of forwarded messages. What made me squirm is that I’ve sent that type of email in the past. I either didn’t know how to succinctly summarize the main point or define purpose of the email – or didn’t take time to do it. I’m cured of that problem now.

Here’s a couple of additional tips on using email for business communications:

• Don’t respond hastily to emails, especially ones that contain information you may not agree with. The quick, emotional response is often not the best. Take time to think about what you really want to say and compose a careful reply.
• Don’t send any email to customers and prospects unless you can identify why your email will be engaging and relevant to them.
• Use the subject line to let recipients know exactly what your email is about. If someone sends you an email and you hit ‘reply’, you can add a few words to the existing subject line that will help define your purpose and improve clarity.
• Get a book on grammar and usage and write like an educated professional, not a teenager in IM mode. And leave the little emoticons off

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have a notoriously short lifespan. But some allegedly good news was just reported by John Quelch in Harvard Business Publishing:

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are holding on to their jobs longer. Spencer Stuart’s annual survey of CMO tenure at the 100 most advertised brands in the USA reveals average time on the job has risen to 28.4 months from 26.8 months in 2007 and 23.2 months in 2006.

I guess that’s good news. I mean, if the doctor says you have 28.4 months to live instead of 23.2, wouldn’t you be grateful for those extra few months? Still, a little over two years on the job is not that long, especially given the challenging work of understanding a company’s brands, customers,  markets, pricing and more.

Quelch attributes the extended lifespan to CMOs aligning better with their CEO. I agree, but here’s another idea: constant turnover hurts. It’s hard for a CMO to come into a company and operate at full speed when the company’s marketing strategy must be reviewed and revised. And then have another one come in a couple of years later.

During those times I’m serving as a company’s CMO, I try to kick off a few short-term projects that can produce measurable results while simultaneously addressing long term marketing strategy and aligning it with business objectives. The quick hit projects produce early wins and keeps the wolves away from the door.

A colleague of mine said she’s recommending that all her clients create videos to help market their companies. When I asked her why video I expected to hear about how it’s important to diversify your marketing mix and communication channels. You should reinforce written web copy and drive home your point with a punchy video. You can humanize your marketing by associating a face or two with your company. 

What she said: “People are too lazy to read. No one wants to read anymore-they want the quick fix.”

Can any declaration be more disheartening to a writer?

In general, I don’t think people are unwilling to read. But I do think people are unwilling to read awful writing: crippled sentences, falsely inflated claims, irrelevant detail, words that should have stayed in the thesaurus.

If you want someone to read your writing, you must first know who that someone is. Understand the audience you are writing for, analyze their information needs, and use a professional writer to craft appropriate copy your audience will not only read, but be compelled to act upon.

My colleague says the videos don’t have to be costly projects-YouTube has lowered the bar for acceptable production quality, giving the home-made look legitimacy even in the business-to-business environment. With writing, there is no lowering of standards. If anything, you must write better than ever if you want to be heard over those video clips.

Like many businesses, in my business my partners can be my competitors. Take one of the bigger marketing and advertising agencies, for example. It doesn’t have to be that big. If it’s got ten full time employees, that’s ten times what I have. They have a media buyer, web expert, creative director, copywriter, designer—I have those resources as well, less the overhead, as part of my virtual network of professionals.

I like working with agencies. They have talented people and good ideas. Sometimes an agency calls on me to help them with a specific B2B client, usual a technology company that to translate all that cool tech stuff into compelling business benefits and value propositions.

And sometimes I turn to an agency for help. Too bad my most recent experience was disappointing. I’ll call it working with the Hungry Ad Agency.

I have a new client that was looking for a fresh marketing approach to reach a specific target audience. Previously, they had worked with an agency to develop and then maintain its Web site. Truth be told, there hasn’t been a lot of maintenance over the past two years; the content hasn’t changed much.

However, I need to work with this agency-because they still hold the keys to my client’s web site kingdom-to develop a landing page for capturing qualified leads.

Well don’t you know this agency, while willing to take on a tactical deliverable, prefers to look at the bigger picture in terms of overall marketing strategy. I agree, that’s wonderful idea, and I’ll be getting to that as soon as I get this campaign off the ground, which is my first deliverable.

The agency wants to include a proposal to optimize my client’s web site for search engines, to help raise its web pages for specific keyword searches. That’s fine; search engine optimization (SEO) is important. And it takes a lot of work: there’s keyword research to perform, page optimization techniques, external linking strategy, and submission to search engines.

But why would we perform SEO on a Web site whose content is two years old? Or when the overall marketing strategy still needs to be defined? The other thing I didn’t like is that the proposal was for a one-time project. But SEO is anything but a one time project. It is an ongoing, iterative, never-ending initiative to optimize a Web site, analyze SEO performance, make appropriate adjustments, analyze SEO performance, and so on.

I think the Hungry Ad Agency is looking to add in some extra work that a client doesn’t need yet.

 I’m passing on the SEO proposal from the agency. They’re right in one aspect: SEO is important and needs to be performed, but start with your marketing strategy, then develop a web content strategy for keeping web pages fresh and relevant, and finally begin SEO.

 I do like working with agencies. But in this case, I have to register a complaint.

You work hard and invest valuable resources to earn new customers. You should also invest to keep them loyal over the long term. Repeat customers tend to be highly profitable because it costs much less to keep a customer than to get a new one. Repeat customers are your best source for new referrals. Repeat customers like you . . . so like them back. Here are five tips on how.

1. Segment Your Customer Base

If you have different types of customers, segmenting your customer base serves as the foundation for targeted marketing, selling and relationship activities.  Your goal should be to segment customers into groups that share common characteristics, so that you can communicate with them in relevant, targeted ways that keep their interest. You don’t tell the same story to your college buddy as you do to your new love interest.

Segment customers by the type of products or services they purchase from you. Industry or market sector is another segmentation that makes sense. Another useful, yet less apparent way to segment customers is by how long they have been your customer, so you can tailor different style communications to each.

Customer segmentation an also be used to create a profile of your customers. You will to discover which types of customers buy which products, and can plan marketing programs to best reach that type of customer.

2. Stay in Touch

An easy and inexpensive way to stay in touch with customers - and make them feel important and remembered - is through email. Your email communications can be in a variety of ways: a regular e-newsletter, a simple thank you email when a customer orders a product, or a follow-up email after they have asked for support.

If you have segmented your customer base, you can send each segment emails that contain information relevant to that segment. It could be a white paper, or links to articles, or product announcements.

Email isn’t the only way to stay in contact with customers. A personal touch such as a phone call from the customer’s account rep simply to ask how things are going will establish and maintain goodwill and personal attention - and may uncover customer needs that could lead to sales. Or consider writing a “thank you for being our customer letter” from your company president. You can combine that type of letter with an important company announcement.

3. Provide Valuable Resources

Your most valuable resource to customers is probably your Web site. Make it a destination for customers to be able to search for and find product information, articles, white papers and other information that will help them do their job better. Keep your site updated with fresh content. Yes, it takes work.

4. Solicit Customer Feedback

Letting customers know that you are listening will help earn their loyalty. Create a customer advisory panel that provides input and helps shape product direction for your company. This will help ensure future products are designed around customer needs.

Use surveys and polls to broadly solicit customer feedback. Surveys and polls give customers the opportunity to express their views, and let you collect valuable data you can use to make business and marketing decisions. A number of free or low cost survey and poll services are on the Internet. Here’s a few to check out:

• www.surveymonkey.com
• www.zoomerang.com
• www.polldaddy.com
• www.questionpro.com

 5. Let Customers Be the First to Know

Make customers “insiders” - part of your team. If you are adding new products or services to your offerings or have other important announcements, make sure customers are the first to know. Send sneak preview e-mails. Schedule a “Customer Only” Webinar for a special announcement or new product launch. Set a specific date and time and send customers invitations through email. You can also record and archive the Webinar for customers who can’t attend to access the information at a later date - yet another touch to show you are in tune to their needs.

In July 2008, when I first wrote about Starbucks closing 600 stores, I said to expect more store closings and a long, slow decline for a once highly respected brand (see original article). Well, here I am reading the New York Times and discovering another 300 stores are closing, which will affect 6,000 employees, with another 700 employees getting laid off elsewhere.

Of course a big part of their problem is what’s ailing everyone: the economy. But more than that, Starbucks had damaged its reputation as an authentic coffee house by featuring a bloated menu of over-the-top high-calorie, sugary drinks, along with some smelly food offerings that destroyed ambiance. Their raison d’etre had been lost.

Has Starbucks hit the bottom? No, it’s only going to get worse. In March, Starbucks will introduce breakfast combination meals to “challenge misconceptions about affordability,” according to Schultz. In other words, “Would you like an egg muffin with that vente caramel latte?” Yuk.

Perhaps a name change is in order, to “McStarbucks.” Although I think the market segment Starbucks is going after is already well serviced. And so the decline continues.

I just laid off a client. It’s the first time this has happened during my ten years of operating a marketing business. It’s sad and ironic, that during a time when so many people are losing their jobs, so many companies staggering on the ropes, that I would be laying off a paying client.

But it had to be done. Here’s why:

I always tell companies to focus on their target market, identify core customers, create clear and compelling messages to match customer needs, and then market smartly and aggressively.

Focusing like this isn’t easy. It means you can’t be everything to everybody, the position some companies want to take lest they lose a potential customer. And I’ll admit that occasionally those companies do get the new customer from another industry, a different size company, a bigger one-shot deal. Someone always believes it means the transformation of the company, and sometimes it does. Most often it doesn’t. Usually - either instinctively or based on data - a company knows what it does best for what kind of customer. And when you veer away, it’s easy to get lost.

That’s the reason I parted ways with my customer. I knew I could not best serve them; they were taking away my ability to focus on clients who were marketing driven. And to think our relationship had started with great promise a few years ago - a company with a small, growing, attractive services portfolio, with an established customer base in a high potential market. And enthusiastic about using marketing to grow.

Following some early marketing wins, business strategy ping-ponged, new markets were longed for, the services offering shape-shifted, executives came and went. That lead to new marketing plans, again and again, but not enough budget to support the new business objectives. The business strategy never stabilized, which meant marketing never found its balance. Which meant the same questions came screaming back at us: Who is our customer? What is their need? Why are they willing to spend scarce resources with us? How are we indispensable to them?

It got ugly. A lot of wheel spinning in the snow on both ends. That’s not what I do best. If nothing else, I drive marketing momentum.

In the meantime, my name had gotten passed around, and other companies were contacting me for marketing services. I started up with two new clients. Several existing clients are ramping up marketing efforts. I take these events as empirical, rather than anecdotal evidence, that marketing during a recession pays off.

I also take my decision to break ties with my former client as support for my constant pulpit-pounding about focusing on what you do best and for whom. Finding your sweet spot.

Losing a client this way is like ending a bad relationship. You’re not right for each other and you feel a little guilty, but you have to go ahead and do it anyway. It’s the only way to move on, move forward, be successful.