Yesterday was the emfluence Marketing Platform User Conference (#emflconf) and, as usual, our pals at emfluence did a first-rate job. (Hosting the event at the swanky Boulevard Brewery Muehlebach Suite doesn’t hurt either.)
Besides filling the day with their own presentations full of great content and best practices for digital marketing , they also had a really cool guest speaker as well.
John Jantsch is the author of Duct Tape Marketing and the new book The Referral Engine, and although he lives right here in Kansas City, he speaks to small business leaders all over the world.
7 Stages of The Marketing Hourglass
His keynote was called “Maintaining the Marketing Hourglass,” and he blended themes from both books together. The Marketing Hourglass is a principle John’s been working with for years. The key to gaining and maintaining customers is “getting someone who has a need to know, like and trust you.” To that end, customers go should go through seven stages where processes and actions you have developed move them forward:
1) Know – ads, articles and referred leads
2) Like – website, reception and email newsletter
3) Trust – marketing kit, white papers and sales presentations
4) Try – webinars, evaluations and nurturing activities
5) Buy – fulfillment, new customer kit, delivery and financial arrangements
6) Repeat – post customer survey, cross sell presentations and quarterly events
7) Refer – results reviews, partner introductions, peer-2-peer webinars and community building
Flipping the Order
You’ll notice “refer” is the last step. John showed a slide of the entire hourglass inverted and made a great point: If businesses start thinking with the referral part of the process first, their entire marketing system can be based on generating referrals.
Notice how integrated social media and web tools are into this process. In The Referral Engine, John says “The highly converged business uses every advance in technology to open the opportunity for a deeper personal relationship.” This principle is “the primary filter for every marketing process, customer touch point, and tactic.”
Spot Trends, Opportunities for Online Marketing
The Referral Engine recommends online listening and acknowledges that “the sheer volume of what’s being said makes it a more complicated exercise.” (That’s why having your listening tool also be your research partner is a plus.) Some of the things John says companies should be listening for online include conversations about:
1) Your customer’s ongoing experience
2) Any brand/product/CEO mentions
3) Complaints about competing services
4) Inaccurate information about your organization
5) The thoughts and needs of journalists in your industry
Web and social media monitoring and research should be a constant presence in small business marketing. John’s advice will help companies integrate the latest pieces of valuable information from all over the web into their company’s strategy, and highlight just some of the creative ways companies can harness the power of useful web data to craft and constantly tweak a marketing plan that works.