Wesley Day Advertising

ON ADVERTISING
October 2007 issue

MULTIPLY YOUR CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORIES.
Your sales manager just presented you with a wonderful customer success. How can you get the most bang from it?
Answer: make it a series of four stories.
1. Vision of a solution
Report how your customer gained an understanding of his problem and then built a vision of a solution, often in concert with your sales team.
2. Solution as initially implemented
The initial deployment may be rough, incomplete, and only partially address end-user needs; however, it can be especially useful to share within your sales and marketing organization. Often, these early implementations will be the same or similar to what other customers want to achieve as well.
3. Solution as consumed
The capabilities actually used by a customer may be only a fraction of your solution, but it represents the real success story.
4. Solution as evolved
Have you ever visited customers and discovered they have found uses for your product that you never envisioned? Solutions after they have evolved are often the most valuable of all success stories. They represent new market opportunities, increased deployment, and deeper market development.
To start taking full advantage of your customers’ successes, contact Wesley Day Advertising today.
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COPYWRITING SECRET #5 OF 8:
SETTING THE HOOK.
In a previous newsletter we discussed writing the hook headline or opener for effective advertising. It is: unique, useful, urgent, and ultra-specific. That’s a great start. But the best hooks also support your big promise.
Find and circle the big promise in your copy. Now look at your hook.
Is your hook just "interesting"?
Or is it both interesting and a good set up for your promise – the benefit your product offers to deliver?
If your hook is just interesting for the sake of getting attention, go back and read our article on how to write an effective hook.
Watch for more copywriting tips in upcoming newsletters.
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DEMYSTIFYING CRM.
Today, CRM is thought of as a combination of business processes, technology solutions, and advanced analytics that allows companies to understand customers from a multifaceted perspective to build deeper and more profitable customer relationships.
At heart, customer relationship management is an old-fashioned idea. Personalized interactions date back to time immemorial.
When commerce was localized, with only one customer touch point, the corner shopkeeper knew all of his customers by name. He knew their buying preferences. He knew their hobbies, lifestyles, occupations, familial relationships, and life-stage situations. He kept these and countless other bits of information about each customer in his memory and used it to sell them additional products.
The same applies today as we use CRM to:
1. Identify individual customers.
2. Gain relevant knowledge about them.
3. Use that knowledge to cross-sell products.
Maybe there's some truth in the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In our complex world, it takes technology solutions and specialized expertise in advanced analytics to approach the level of CRM that was so easily attained in a different era on a far smaller and more localized scale.
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TO COUPON OR NOT TO COUPON.
Coupons are a quick way to inject sales growth, but it's also a risky strategy. It’s hard on the bottom line. Customers also become reliant on them and will follow coupons elsewhere.
Coupons make the most sense when a company is introducing a product, opening a new location, or even moving.
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SEO ON A BUDGET.
Here are three tips that won’t break your budget but will boost your ranking.
Review your Web site design.
Search engines typically don’t like frames, Flash, image maps, and JavaScript navigation. They do like standards-compliant sites (www.webstandards.org).
Take full advantage of page titles and meta tags. Every page should have unique, appropriate tags for title, description (<500 characters), and keywords (<200 characters). Every image should have an “alt” attribute. And don’t forget to take advantage of headers such as ‹h1›, ‹h2›, and ‹h3›.
Think beyond your Web site.
In addition to loading your site with search engine-friendly content, get your content published on other Web sites with links back to your site.
Find sites that cover your industry, and accept articles from outside writers. Post your articles, white papers, case studies, and Blogs with your byline and a link to your Web site.
Some companies have even found success with a MySpace.com page for their business.
Analyze Web data.
Don’t get overwhelmed by all the data. Start by looking at the keywords people use to get to your site. When you find a pattern, work to include them on your Web site.
Then go to Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) – it’s free and full of valuable information.
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BRANDING MYTH #5 OF 7:
CHANGE FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE.
Random change is not the same as planned evolution. Nor is boring, stagnant messaging the same as brand consistency.
Defining the experience that customers want is the best marker for what and when to change.
Other points to consider are:
   • Does this effort contribute to our brand image and equity?
   • Does this dilute our brand position?
   • Will this enhance our consumers' “experience” of our brand?
Watch for more myths in upcoming issues. Read previous tips at wesleyday.com.
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