• Your service providers are mistakenly thinking that their clients understands the wide range of services provided by your firm. In most cases, this simply isn’t true. When clients think of the services your firm provides, they think of the services THEY receive and nothing else. Clients have their own problems, they don’t sit around all day thinking about you. You need to remind them of everything you know how to do and uncover their problems before they engage someone else to solve them.
• As service providers, you get wrapped up in solving the problems your clients have presented to you, then moving on. Unfortunately for service providers, your clients won’t face every problem at the same time. So cross selling isn’t a same-time sale. It’s not like the fast food worker asking you if you want fries with your meal. It’s more like the waiter at a fancy restaurant checking on you after dessert to see if you’d like an after dinner drink. You need to keep in touch with your clients long after your services have been rendered in order to sell them something else.
• The originating service provider can’t explain the other services offered by your firm, or doesn’t understand how to recognize the cross selling opportunity. Just like clients think about your firm as doing for everyone what you do for THEM, service providers think about clients needing what they know how to provide. Without a good understanding of what your own firm can do, you can’t see these opportunities.

The solution to these problems is content marketing. By sharing information about other services your firm provides, your clients will be exposed to these services. Your clients will recognize themselves in your case studies, blog posts, and newsletter articles. If you read your own firm’s case studies, blog posts, and newsletter articles, you will learn more about how to describe these services in plain English. That way, when your clients ask you about what they have read, you will be able to answer the question, or at least direct them to the author of the article.

The trick with all of this is to be deliberate and consistent. Without a communications plan tied to your organization’s goals, you’re just talking to make noise. Think about how your firm wants to grow and build your content marketing plan to match these goals. This will tell you what to write about and where to publish the information. Then, force yourself to be consistent. People need to hear messages more than once before they sink in. But with time, a well-planned content marketing strategy can help your firm cross sell without turning your service providers into “salespeople.”

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Well duh! Most agency blogs aren’t all that great. Both Gass and Brogan point out that most blogs have no strategy behind them and that nobody likes to read self-serving posts. We agree. We also think that agencies generally have horrible websites too. I think it’s because as creative people our own websites are a great place to turn the creative faucet all the way to high. This sometimes leads to beautiful, oddly-functioning, hard to navigate websites. Also, agencies often flock to the latest, newest, shiniest tool and get bored quickly with “old” (as in 6 months old) stuff.

We continue to advise our clients to blog and to (gasp!) publish e-newsletters. They work. But you have to be willing to share what you know. Remember, you can talk all day about what you know and a good prospect will recognize that it’s better to pay for your expertise than to try to figure out how to do something for themselves. If they’re a DIY kind of business, they’re not a great client anyway. At least not yet.

Don’t give up on blogs. They’re great for SEO. They’re great for forcing yourself to read and write on a regular basis. They demonstrate expertise. And they do work!

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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One of the main points I tried to stress throughout my presentation is that community relations, public relations, and social media are completely intertwined. The use of social media has greatly affected the traditional media world. Social media has opened many doors and closed others. It has fragmented our distribution system for messages. It makes it easier to reach everybody, and nobody. It has also changed our expectations for communication.

But traditional media has not gone away. Sure, it has adapted. Newspapers may be smaller, but people still read them. So, unlike the social media guru in the next room who was completely discounting traditional media, at Clear Verve we stress a planned, integrated approach. You can’t be everywhere all at once, but if you make a plan, taking into account your goals and the audience each outlet reaches, you can develop a process that will help you strategically reach out to the right people at the right time.

Don’t just do what’s cool or what you know. Do your research and to what’s RIGHT for you.

We’re asked all the time to share our ideas when we meet with prospective clients and we hate doing it. It’s not because we want to charge for these ideas – although it is important to remember that we get paid to generate ideas – that’s how we make our living. And it’s not because we expect our clients to hire us blindly, we know they need to understand what we’re capable of. It’s because when we provide ideas without proper context, it’s really easy to provide bad ideas.

When you go to see your doctor, you don’t stand in front of him or her, fully clothed and ask, “Doc, what should I do to feel better?” Your doctor wouldn’t know what to say. He or she would probably be forced to come back with some general recommendations about taking vitamins, exercising, and eating right. He or she would never be able to treat your ongoing stomach pain without knowing about it.

That’s what happens to us. We can’t make accurate recommendations without learning about your organization. A five (or fifty) minute review of your website won’t cut it. We want to meet your employees, learn about what you’ve done in the past, examine your competition, talk about your goals, and figure out what will realistically fit into your budget.

In marketing, like in medicine, there is no magic bullet. Growing a service-based business (or any business for that matter) is hard work. Help us out. Let us learn about you. Tell us what you’re thinking about and what you want for your business’ future. Then, we might have some good ideas and we can work with you to make them happen.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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I loved this article and wanted to share it with you because I think that the same philosophy can be applied to marketing ideas. In order to stand out and be truly different from your competition, you have to get off the beaten path. You have to look beyond the easy solution to find what is really different and what will really work. I recently gave presentations at both Marquette Law School and MATC to college students who are thinking of starting their own businesses. In these presentations, I pointed out that one of the most common mistakes business owners make is marketing by imitation. If you find yourself making marketing decsions by saying, “What would so and so do?” you’re guilty of this problem.

Of course, getting off the beaten path can be scary. It means taking risks. It also means really delving into your business to see what is going on and thinking hard about where you want to go in the future. When I get scared about this, I remind myself of some of the best advice I was given back when I first started my career. I was a Manager Trainee at Kohl’s Department Stores, doing one of my first walk-throughs with my District Manager. If you’ve never had to do this, basically it involves walking your boss’ boss’ boss around your part of the store, telling him or her how everything in your area is doing and answering questions about how you plan to improve. As a totally inexperienced Trainee, I was doing a TERRIBLE job. Luckily, my District Manager was a mentor, not a killer. When I was done, he took me aside, told me how to do it next time, and then said, “And be sure to get off the aisles. If you don’t walk on the carpet, you’ll never see what’s really going on.”

Whether the innovation in your business is on the edges or buried deep in the middle of your company, don’t be afraid of it. If you want to stand out from the competition, you have to get off the beaten path.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Imitation works sometimes, but often it does not. The problem with copying what someone else does is that your business has to somehow make the idea your own by tweaking it or allowing it to morph into something even better. Here are three examples of imitation campaigns we’ve seen recently that we hope will get you thinking about what NOT to do when brainstorming ideas.

End-of-Year Donation Letters

The end of the year is a big time for nonprofits. Most businesses and individuals wait until the end of the year to decide how much money they can afford to give to their favorite causes. Of course, nonprofits take advantage of this mindset and work diligently to contact past and potential donors hoping to get their share of the pie. We don’t blame them. The problem is, everyone is doing it at the same time! Here’s a picture of the pile we received last December.

What do you see? Nothing special? Of course not! They all look the same. If you could read them, you’d find out all the letters sound the same too. However, we did receive one solicitation that stuck out. It was a holiday card. By combining holiday wishes and a thank you for a past gift with the solicitation, it actually made us want to whip out our wallets and donate again. If you’re with a nonprofit, challenge yourself next December, or whenever your fiscal year ends, to come up with something besides a piece of white paper in a #10 envelope. You don’t want to get lost in the shuffle.

Promotions and New Job Announcements

There are a number of publications that run personnel listings and there are several financial advisors who pay attention to these blurbs. If you are one of them, listen up.  Yes, I’ve received a promotion or landed a new job, but that doesn’t mean I have lots of new money to invest. And if I did, would I respond to your vanilla approach?

Ok, ok, we can’t blame you for trying. There is a slight chance you might find someone in the market for a new to person manage their money. The problem is that you are trying to find that person using the same method as your competition. The mailed congratulatory notes and the unsolicited phone calls rarely work the way you might hope; it’s barely enough marketing to get attention or move the promoted person to action. People are usually skeptical by nature and rarely reply to random requests to work together. So quit wasting your time Googling phone numbers and mailing missives. Try some other smarter strategies to land yourself new clients.

And to the financial planner who mailed me a crumpled letter with the coffee stain: nice work getting my attention. You’re still not getting my money.

Personal Injury

One of our family members was recently in an automobile accident – no injury occurred –  thank goodness. Within a week of the State of Wisconsin motor vehicle accident report being filed, we received a slew of mailings from personal injury law firms.  Several used almost the exact same messaging of “one call is all you need” (paraphrased of course).  All focused on the firms’ capabilities, using nearly the exact same language, and included a form letter with the materials.  Only Hupy and Abraham’s mailings stood out from the rest. It included a helpful guide related to automobile accidents, as well as impressive testimonials and resources.  Only a few took advantage of the outside of the envelope to share some catchy thing about their firm.

We assume the direct mail approach must work, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many law firms using this tactic. But to truly stand out from the pile of other firms, it is important to do something different.  If we were to choose to set up a meeting with a law firm based on just the mailings we received, I bet you can guess who we’d meet with.

Post by Chistina Steder, Jackie Costa and Susan Schoultz of Clear Verve Marketing.  Follow us on Twitter:@clearverve @JackieMCosta @clearverve2

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Font choice can make a HUGE difference in how your company is perceived. Using too many fonts looks messy. (Remember, just because your computer came with 57,000 fonts doesn’t mean you have to use them all.) Use the same font as everyone else, and you look boring. Choose an unprofessional, overused font like Papyrus or Comic sans and risk being laughed at by the entire design world.

There are some great resources for fonts. One of our favorites is fonts.com. You can search based on different type characteristics and purchase fonts easily. Fonts are not that expensive, and using something distinctive in your logo can really set you apart. Just be careful to choose something universal for email or electronic documents that will be shared, unless you enjoy turning everything into PDFs.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Beyond saving me time and money, and generally making my consumer life easier, I love this concept for so many reasons. Here’s the Club’s ad if you haven’t seen it.

I saw this for the first time on my husband’s Facebook page. I thought it was a joke. After we were done laughing, we became members. Our first shipment arrives in May. It was supposed to be here in April, but we received a friendly, apologetic email explaining that the Santa Monica fulfillment center has been crazy busy since the ad launched March 5 and that the Korean- and Chinese-made blades were on back order.

We’ve rarely been this motivated by an ad. But this one is so good; it slices straight through all the noise. In fact, Dollar Shave Club doesn’t even play on same playground as Gillette and Schick. This is an internet-only ad. A Business Week article reports that it cost $4,500 to make (fairly typical amount for a minute and a half-long video) and was viewed 2 million times its first four days on YouTube. Now, less than a month old, it has 4 million hits and close to 35,000 likes. Fewer than 210 people dislike it, perhaps because of the rough language. I suspect the big brands pay millions more for ad production and placement and would love to have that many views and purchases. According to Business Week, the club signed up 5,000 people the first day.

What’s also noteworthy is that co-founder and CEO Mike Dubin, who has a digital marketing background, understands comic timing and uses it to make this ad work.  Dubin, the cute guy in the ad, studied comedy and improv in New York while working as an NBC page. It’s fun when brands use humor to connect with potential customers. Let’s face it, this spot wouldn’t be viral without the funny.

Bottom line, this brand does what many products promise to do, which is make life easier. Just like Netflix sends me DVDs, Dollar Shave sends me fresh blades – for just a few dollars a month. Not that shopping is a hardship, but who needs to fret about shaving?

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Jackie Costa, the director of content marketing at Clear Verve, works with clients to create and distribute smarter, better marketing communications materials. Listen for her on Twitter as @JackieMCosta.

It’s a flyer for a marketing campaign the U.S. Postal Service launched in conjunction with the TV show The Biggest Loser. The campaign encourages people to write to their favorite contestant on the show for a chance to win a ticket to the finale. Obviously, these letters have to be mailed, so it encourages use of the Post Offices’ services. It also ties in with Heart Health awareness month (February) and promotes the purchase of heart health awareness stamps. There is a related website that explains the promotion and the sweepstakes as well as provides visitors with information about things they can do to improve their heart’s health.

Generally, we love marketing campaigns like this. It’s fun, it ties in nicely with the sponsor’s business, and it’s doing good in the community by promoting heart health. However, in this case, even after reviewing the website and trying to understand what the USPS is trying to accomplish, we are left with one big question. Why?

The post office is a government entity with essentially no competition for the service it is promoting in this campaign (daily mail). Sure, the Post Office is under pressure from the likes of FedEx and UPS, but this campaign isn’t asking participants to send care packages, they’re asking people to write letters. And, although we know the USPS is facing some extrordinary financial challenges, I’m pretty sure they can’t sell enough extra stamps to bail themselves out of their troubles, no matter how popular The Biggest Loser is.

It’s sad. From a marketing standpoint, this campaign is great. From a business (and a taxpayer) standpoint though, I’m still left with my one big question. WHY?

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Most of us know the bum-but-a-dum-dum-but-but-a-bum-but-a-dum-dum theme from the movie. Here it is, in case you don’t remember:

During the concert, I realized that many of the James Bond themes became big hits. I was surprised by how many songs I remembered from my childhood. But the biggest surprise for me was the consistency of the music used in the movies. Hearing music from all the movies played one song after another; I heard many of the same musical themes. Of course, there were variations, but the familiar bum-but-a-dum-dum, the screaming trumpets, and the drum sounds always came back in one form or another.

Of course, this doesn’t exactly please music critics, and I was sad to read a horrible review of the concert in yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I played the clarinet for eight years, but I know I’m hardly a music expert. However, I think there’s a big difference between something like Bach’s Symphony Number 4 and The Theme from Dr. No. Let’s face it; this is James Bond music after all. That’s the Bond brand – driving music, amazing gadgets that would make MacGyver drool, exotic locations, and leading ladies half Bond’s age with ridiculously chauvinistic names. It’s all part of the fun.

Music can be as much a part of a brand as anything else. Many people think of a logo when they think of a brand, but branding is so much more. It’s about every encounter your company or product has with its audience. Can you imagine Harry Potter movies without the sweeping John Williams soundtrack? Or walking into a Starbucks with no music? If you think Starbucks doesn’t spend a ton of time picking out those tracks, you’re kidding yourself. When you think about your company or product, think about how your customers use every sense when they engage with you. Take advantage of every opportunity to provide a consistent experience. You might not please everyone, but your customers will thank you and appreciate that they get the experience they have come to expect.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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