Marketing Above the Noise summary

The cornerstone of a great marketing campaign is strategy; if you don’t know where it’s going, how can you hope to market your company?

And if you want to build a stable foundation, you must define and prioritize your goals and establish how to present and address yourself to the customer.

While some marketing strategies haven’t changed for years, others are constantly evolving. One major change is that marketers need to engage with and respond to customers quickly and effectively.

Sometimes merely welcoming customer feedback isn’t enough to ensure that your customer’s voice really gets taken into account in your organization. Sometimes you also need to make room for customer complaints.

No one loves hearing complaints. But a customer who complains often cares enough about your organization to stay engaged, even during rough patches. The great thing about people who complain is that they tend to have faith in you and your company and, by complaining, give you a chance to change things and make it up to them. Silent, disgruntled customers don’t help at all; they simply disappear and there’s nothing you can do about it.

If you’ve ever turned your hand to marketing, you’ll know that branding isn’t just about a nice-looking logo or a catchy slogan. Everyone and everything has a reputation – things almost entirely created by branding.

In the previous blink we saw that attracting new customers and keeping current ones is a matter of communicating in such a way that you can be heard above the noise. But how exactly do you do that?

You must create and curate content that interests your target customer.

Those in the industry know that marketing can be tricky when sales are thrown into the mix. In fact, it’s not unusual for marketing and sales teams to rub each other the wrong way, even though they have similar goals. Sales reps think marketing people don’t understand what it’s like to be out there every day bearing the brunt of disgruntled customers’ complaints; and marketing people are frustrated that salespeople fail to see how much they help them.

But there are organizations that have managed to move beyond this mindset and have changed the way marketing and sales deal with each other.

Today, and across all industries, big data is one of the buzzwords most often bandied about. Companies are collecting and analyzing data using billions of transactions to learn as much as they can about customers and the market. But leveraging such information to understand your customers requires that you know how to use and filter it.

Amazon knows how to do this well. For example, the author’s refrigerator filter needs to be replaced every six months. So when she ordered it on Amazon, she chose the automatic shipment option, and now receives a new filter every six months without having to manually place the order.

Sometimes the person responsible for sealing the deal is a shop employee who was friendly and held the door open for a customer. Remember: employees can be your most effective marketers – or a marketing nightmare!

Unhappy employees lead to unhappy customers, but happy, obliging employees can make a markedly positive impression on customers.