Services Archives – Think of Whiting

Marketing Challenges for Diversified Companies

Diversified companies face challenges in their marketing outreach that need to be addressed. Goals should be set to overcome those challenges. The greatest challenges have to do with diversity. Diversity can lead to lack of focus and poor marketing communication. If objectives are met, diversity can become a strength.

Challenges

The main challenge is how to better manage marketing for diverse businesses under one corporate umbrella. Those diverse businesses were probably stand-alone companies at one time. They all had separate marketing departments and separate brands. They were probably bought and assembled into one corporation with the aim of reducing costs and leveraging each others strengths.

Cost reductions usually come by integrating systems, de-duplicating personnel, and sometimes reducing interest on debt if the acquiring company has a better debt rating. Marketing is sometimes left alone because of a lack of overlap in that area. Put another way, there is a perceived lack of synergy in the marketing departments.

Opportunities for Betterment

Integration should be the goal. Not necessarily complete integration, because the individual brands still have value. Nevertheless, some overarching corporate image should go along with the individual brands so the market can start to see some connectedness.

Some grouping of the diversified companies is desirable. Those groups should ideally have overlap among buyers of the products. That’s because the marketing outreach should start to converge so that a buyer of one product, service, or solution can recognize kinship with the other brands.

An important goal of branding is developing brand loyalty. It makes perfect sense to leverage the brand loyalty of one brand to develop loyalty toward its kin. Customers like companies for lots of reasons, including quality, value, design, customer service, etc. By not leveraging these qualities between brands, the parent company is not getting full value out of its structure.

Similarly, if one brand is clearly better and more recognizable over another, serious consideration should be given to eliminating the weaker brand. The stronger brand can absorb it.

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Contact Think of Whiting to help organize your brands and to develop a marketing and brand integration strategy.

B2B Marketing Trend – Understanding Buyers Better

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is increasingly focused on understanding buyers. According to recent marketing research completed by ITSMA (Lexington, MA), this trend is now becoming the primary focus of B2B marketers. The trend is occurring at the expense of brand and positioning (B&P), which have been the primary marketing focus areas in B2B.

Before: Brand and Positioning

Brand and positioning have long been the best strategic focus areas available to B2B marketers. These focus areas have been the “tools” that have given marketers control. Marketers implement a strategy according to a plan that aligns brand and positioning with organizational goals.

There is a downside to brand and positioning and that is that these strategies usually require that the marketer cram a lot of information together, trusting that the customers, prospects, salespeople and influencers will sort through and discover the specific information pertinent to them. Some variables can be broken out into smaller bundles, such as by language and country. But by and large, a B&P focus ends up with broad categories of products, services and solutions.

Forcing buyers to sort through broad categories and wide product selections can be arduous for the buyer. In the worst cases, sellers essentially post a catalog online, and depend on the buyer to have a product number or the exact right description of a product or service. Many have minimal or no visual clues to help navigate.

Now: Focus on Buyers

The new trend is buyer-focused. Getting to know the customer has always made sense, but it has been hard to do well in practice. In businesses with lots of buyers, there may be great diversity in buyer behavior, motivations, knowledge levels, and specific needs. It’s now becoming possible to capture some of that information efficiently.

For large purchases and recurring purchases, it may be the salespeople, who have a relationship and knowledge of the buyers. So the salespeople hold key customer knowledge. Valuable knowledge-of-buyer may consist of institutional knowledge, product/service needs, motivations, etc. It’s important that this knowledge gets channeled back to the marketing department. Otherwise that knowledge may not be acted on organizationally.

For smaller purchases across a diversity of buyer personas, it helps a lot to give the buyer the power to self-select some of his or her segmentation variables. The marketer now has information that is useful for predicting buyer preferences in real time. This can easily be done online with data to support at the back end.

Market research and competitive intelligence still add value. By planning ahead, and using the right tools, marketers can truly focus on buyers and by doing so, improve results, whether they be measured in revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction, or some other metric.

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Let Think of Whiting help you achieve better focus on your buyers. Contact Think of Whiting today for strategic help with improving focus on your organization’s buyers.

Using Case Studies to Achieve Communications Objectives

The Case Study – An Effective Communication Tool

A case study is one of the most effective communications tools available. Case studies work because they tell a story that people can relate to and learn from. People like to see how a product or service is used by others. A case study is often a good way to show that.

A case study can be written to lead the reader (or listener) on a narrative, guiding the reader to specific objectives, such as to fill out a form, take a survey, attend a webinar, etc.

Communications Objectives – Education and Raising Comfort Level

Companies need to communicate with lots of different people: potential customers, customers, their own sales people, their development teams, their investors, influencers, and others. The communication objectives often have several things in common. Educating readers about some topic is a common objective. Case study narratives can be very good at achieving this objective with these diverse audiences.

Even if the readers are generally familiar with the topic of the case study, a case study can still be used to raise the reader’s comfort level with the product or service. This is an important objective, not necessarily for the earliest adopters, but for those coming later. Developing a comfort level can be a critical factor for many people, whether they be buyers, influencers, or for those selling to others. Increasing the reader’s comfort level can allay fears of failure that hold people back from making a purchase.

Communications Objectives – Introducing Terminology

A third objective for a case study can be to introduce the reader to terminology and concepts they may not be familiar with. Introducing terminology within the context of a case study is a good way to convey how that terminology applies in real-world situations.

Using Early Adopters as Case Study Subjects

Early adopters are people who buy a product or service when it is first introduced. Often, early adopters are loyal customers who trust the company, and the promised value of the new product or service. Whatever the case may be, early adopters can be the best subjects for a case study.

People relate to the stories of others. When a narrative reveals a person making a decision that shows intelligence and leadership, readers are more likely to follow suit. The challenges faced by the early adopter, and the rewards and successes to the adopter by making a good decision can be inspiring.

The reader may develop an affinity for the product or service by recognizing similar challenges faced by the adopter in the narrative. The affinity grows stronger when the case study shows how the subject of the narrative successfully overcomes those challenges. The experience of the early adopters can become a template for the approach of the reader toward the product, service or solution.

Two-way Learning from Case Studies

A surprising benefit of writing a case study is that there is often two-way learning happening. Writing a case study is a process of learning about the customer, and interviewing that customer about his or her challenges, failures, and successes. The study process helps the writer understand the customer better. Just from going through the process itself, valuable realizations and insights can occur.

That two-way learning should factor in when weighing the costs and benefits of the case study. That two-way learning can be hard to measure, but is unquestionably beneficial. You can start by asking yourself if you’ve learned anything from your completed case studies. Then ask your salespeople, marketers, customer-service representatives, and others if they gain value and insight from the case studies. If the internal benefits are great enough, the case study can be entirely justified from that back-flow of knowledge.

Case Study Help

Let Think of Whiting help you with your case studies. From planning, to interviewing, to writing and editing, image acquisitions, and formatting, Think of Whiting can help with every step of the process.

Writing about Business Services

Writing about Services – The Challenges

Writing about services often has challenges not faced when writing about products. Services don’t have “features”. Services aren’t “photogenic”. They are intangible, and because of that they can be harder to describe. Add the complex nature of some services, and you have a real challenge to communicate effectively.

Services are the sole source of revenue for many companies. Product-oriented companies are expanding into services because the revenue streams can be more consistent; products tend to be driven more by business cycles whereas services are less cyclic. For all of these companies, there’s a need to have service offerings communicated effectively to potential customers.

Writing about Technical Services

Technical services can be hardest of all to describe. There is jargon and there are acronyms. Technical services can be complex. People may or may not have heard of these technical services before, and even if they have, they may not have a clear idea of what the technical services are, how they may be of value to them, and if it’s even possible to integrate these new services with pre-existing services.

Create Content that Serves Reader Types

Like teaching to a group of students who are at different levels of proficiency, writing about a technical service should cover a range of proficiency levels from basic to advanced. Technical service subjects should be written about in a way that unwinds complexity. It’s important to keep in mind that many different non-technical people may be looking at the information, from customer executives, to interns, to the people who may be using the service someday. If a newcomer is reading, that reader should be able to learn about the subject step-by-step, and not be turned off by jargon. For those more proficient in the subject, navigating past more basic descriptions and should be made easy to do.

Something else to watch out for: technical subjects can make for dry reading. Lists of service areas have their place, but to engage the readers at various levels, some other writing strategy is needed.

Storytelling Case Studies

A “storytelling” style can be a very effective way to awaken the imagination of the reader. People naturally relate to stories, especially when the person in the story faces similar challenges to the reader. Stories can pick and choose details to emphasize. A good story will show how the company’s service offering found and implemented a solution to a customer need. Showing the problem-solving ability of the service company can give the reader some confidence that issues he or she faces can be dealt with effectively in a similar fashion.

Remember, the reader might be looking at the story from one of several perspectives. She might be a prospective customer. She may a current customer who could benefit from the new service. The reader may even be a salesperson who needs to be familiar with his own company’s solutions.

Story Structure

The story should be a true one, based on a real customer experience. The story might start with a typical customer need, perhaps expressed in the “voice” of a customer. Describe the need. Describe why the service company was well-suited to address the need. Describe the approach taken to solve the customer issue, and how the customer benefited. Once again, in the voice of the customer.

Summary – Consider reader proficiency, and a story-telling approach

To summarize, writing about services, especially technical services, should invite readers of different levels of proficiency to read and learn. A good approach is to include customer stories which can awaken the imagination of the reader.

Think of Whiting Can Help

Think of Whiting can provide the writing services you need to communicate your service offerings to your various audiences, both internally (within your company), and externally, to your business partners, investors, and clients.