Until a little while ago, social media was an experiment. Will it work? Will it make a difference?
In 1995, so was that Worldwide Interweb thing. Not so much anymore.
Same goes for social media. We’re currently making the transition from if to why and how.
According to a recent study by Business.com, webinars and podcasts are the number one and number two social media resources that North American business professionals turn to to get what they need (advice, tips, etc.) to do their job. And a lot of people now, people with decision making positions, are included in that group.
We’re always trying to get in front of the decision maker, many of whom are C-level executives. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been told that C-level executives don’t search online, don’t spend time in social media, and don’t do their own product, service, or company research on the web. Perhaps they’ll make a cursory glance at your website to see if you exist, but beyond that, some underling is doing the research for them. If they’re doing research at all. Right?
When it comes to business-to-business purchases, few buyers are willing to take chances on new providers, according to a recent survey of 3,600 B2B buyers conducted by Enquiro.
Among the fastest-growing private U.S. companies that are using social media, the results are in—social media works. Not only are these companies listed on the Inc. 500 using social media as a key part of their marketing strategy, but it’s working for them.
The overwhelming response from those using social media, when asked whether it has been successful for their business is “Yes.” In the research conducted by the Center for Marketing Research, UMass Dartmouth, Twitter users reported an 82% success rate while every other tool studied enjoyed at least an 87% success level.
Professional services leaders face all types of challenges on their way to growing revenue. Marketing, business development, strategy development, you name it. There’s no cookie-cutter growth strategy. One size certainly does not fit all.
But on the road to strategy development and revenue growth, there are areas that all B2B professional services firms should focus on. In Wellesley Hills Group’s recently published Five Drivers of Revenue Growth for Professional Services white paper, we’ve outlined the five major areas that affect a firm’s ability to grow.
Because there’s no everyone-should-do-this strategy, executives must first look at the core of their firm’s activities to know what’s working and what’s not for them, and develop a strategy that will work given their own desires and circumstances.
There’s no shortage of advice about which strategies work or don’t work for services marketing. Yet they seem to conflict with each other regularly. So what’s the scoop? Which ones work?
It’s less a question of which ones work than it is which ones will work for you given the dynamics of what you sell. Answering that question requires many considerations, but there’s one that many firms overlook: whether the service they offer is demand driven or demand driving.
Batten down the hatches. Stick to your knitting. Trim the fat; trim some more. With no end in sight for the recession, you must embrace new ways of leading if you want to compete in a downturn…
STOP! You and your team have heard the mind-numbing drumbeat of endless how-tos “in a downturn” for the past 24 months. And it has wrought the following:
Cultural fear
Postponed innovation
Reduced client service
Quality breakdowns
Tepid marketing activity
Endless excuses about the economy from the rainmakers (and everyone else)
Defeatism
Now that the end of the Great Recession is here, services firms must renew hustle, passion, intensity, and competitiveness. It’s time to roll out words we haven’t used for a while: innovation, opportunity, and progress.
As always, it’s up to leaders to make sure they happen. This four-step process will help them stop leading in a downturn, and start leading in an upturn.
Cookie, Oh cookie,
How you taunt me,
With your fiendish taste,
Your devilish charms - Anonymous
I can eat a whole pan of fresh cookies if I have enough milk to smooth their passage, and if the wife isn’t home to witness the carnage. I’m not proud. Not ashamed either. Just another helpless victim of the all-mighty mixture of chocolate chunks, butter, vanilla extract, egg, flour, sugar, and baking powder.
Apparently, a couple of billion dollar corporations have tapped into the power of the cookie as well, and they’re using it to create competitive differentiation in their markets. The New York Times has published a nice piece about how DoubleTree Hotels and Midwest Airlines have baked cookies into the fiber of their business strategies, and how the strategies are paying off.
I can imagine a competitive differentiation strategy brainstorm at a professional services firm; the “let’s align around the cookie!” plan might not end up with the most votes. Yet it’s working for DoubleTree and Midwest. Here’s why it does, and how you can cook something up that might work for you.
“They told me I had to become a thought leader or I’d never achieve great success as a professional.” This is what a leader at a professional services firm told me recently that a marketing consultant told him.
He didn’t say this to me matter-of-factly either. He said it with a mix of fear, skepticism, sadness, and hope.
Fear. Because he can’t write and doesn’t have much “new” to say, and neither do the rest of the folks on his leadership team.
Skepticism. Because he didn’t think it was true that thought leadership was now a requirement, but he was starting to hear it so much he thought maybe the tide had turned and it now was.
Sadness. Because he liked his job selling, delivering, and managing and didn’t want to become, as he put it, a “professor type”.
Hope. Because he was hoping I’d say what he wanted me to say: that it was not true.
Giving Away Products and Services to Create Loyalty
A reporter for a major business publication asked me whether businesses that lower prices and give away free services for buyers that are struggling to “give them a break” is a good strategy for keeping them loyal when the economy turns and their financial fortunes improve. Here’s what I told him…
Cookie, Oh cookie,
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