By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman at Sonnhalter
Your potential audience doesn’t want quantity, they want quality. So if you’re trying to generate more content quicker just for the sake of having it, don’t waste your time. You need to accelerate demand, not noise.
The best way to connect with your audience is to determine what kind of content they want. In other words, what motivates buyer behavior and how do they get information? If you know these, you can build the correct content architecture.
What motivates buyer’s behavior? You need to have a deeper understanding of how a buyer thinks and then what do we need to say to get him over to our side.
How do they get their information? What type of content do they prefer and where do they go to get it?
Building a content architecture – Once you have an answer to the above questions, then you can map out a plan to get to them with the right info at the right time.
Content Marketing’s main purpose is to drive specific business outcomes. So the buyers aren’t looking for more info, just the right info. He points to a 2014 ANNUITAS survey where less than 3% of those responsible for content marketing activities were happy with their outcomes. Here’s another scary fact from Sirius Decisions — that 70-80% of all content is never used!
These are not good numbers to take to the C-Suite to get more funding. If you can’t achieve positive and measurable results that can be tied to sales revenues, you really don’t have a content strategy at all.
Years ago, an Ohio-based specialty metal business made the decisionnotto charge for freight costs, even though their products were extremely heavy. The rationale? None of their competitors were charging, so they couldn’t either.
In reality, this company was No. 1 in the industry, so all those competitors were actually just followingtheir lead. When the company realized what was going on, it had the opportunity to change the policy for its entire industry.
And so it did—collecting more than $1 million in additional revenues.
Smart companies know pricing strategy isn’t just about the price on the invoice.To have an immediate impact on your bottom line without formally raising prices, here are three areas to tackle first.
1. Freight Costs
If you’ve been operating for decades, your freight policies have probably been in place just as long. Maybe you don’t charge for freight at all, or fees are the same across all territories—or you charge the same as you did 50 years ago even though shipping rates have risen dramatically.
To start, ask yourself:
When was the last time our freight terms were updated?
What is our justification for our freight policy?
What are our competitors doing in this space?
This line of questioning can help internal stakeholders determine if there’s opportunity for improvement without much effort, as the aforementioned specialty metal business discovered.
2. Rush Orders
When you place an order on Amazon.com and you want 2-day shipping, you understand you’ll have to pay premium pricing—in this case,$99 for a year of Amazon Prime.
Your customers realize this, too. Yet many manufacturers and distributors don’t charge extra for rush orders.
If your lead time is two weeks, but your buyer needs his order in three days, are you charging extra? In order to get that order to the buyer within his limited time constraint, you’ll have to disrupt your operation, move around other orders and pay higher shipping costs. You might even put other orders at risk. You should be paid for those efforts, but many manufacturers don’t actively seek compensation.
Remember, if a buyer needs an order faster than usual, they’ll gladly pay to get it sooner.
3. Volume Discounts
It’s natural to want to offer discounts to your biggest customers, but if you don’t have a discounting strategy in place, the practice can steadily erode your bottom line.
Discounts shape your customers’ perception of your pricing: With every discount your give, the lowered price becomes the new standard. The next time that customer calls with an order, she will expect that same price, even if the order is only half the size.
The key here is to communicate early and often regarding volume discounts. When buyers understand why they are receiving discounts for aspecificorder, they will begin to understand the rationale behind your invoicing and, therefore, not expect discounts with every order.
Additionally, the threat over-discounting poses on profit often goes undetected since most companies don’t truly know how much profit is lost when sales reps offer discounts. Your company does not need to ban discounts all together, but a discount ceiling should be put in place to keep your profits from decreasing too drastically.
Start Small (and Risk-Free) with Freight, Expedites and Discounts
Raising prices throughout each of your product lines can be a highly complex process that demands a lot of analysis. Freight, expedites and discounts are areas you can impact quickly without upsetting current customers.
Start by identifying improvements that can deliver the most profit with the least amount of risk and effort. The extra revenue you uncover can be used to support larger-scale strategic pricing efforts in the future, such as increasing product prices, which will require more time, effort and commitment.
Bad pricing practices are more common than you’d think. Find out why bad pricing happens to good companies in our free guide.
Today we have a guest blog post from Jeff Naymik, Marketing Director at Nook Industries. This post originally appeared on Nook’s blog Making Motion Work and is reposted with permission. Read the original blog here.
We live in a world of instant communication and yet, we are sometimes not good communicators. Poor communication is usually the root problem for creating silos in many technology-driven companies. Development secrets are usually held tightly and limited to only those in the organization who “need to know.”
When you start limiting the flow of information in your organization, divides begin among associates, departments and divisions. Many mature brands struggle with the problem of departmental silos, while some start-ups introduce products at lightning speed. How can this happen? The reason is communication is their lifeline to survival and success.
Look around your organization for signs of silos. You’ll find:
Special projects in every department no one has heard of.
Too few meetings to inform senior staff of progress.
Poor communication from the top illustrating how your efforts fit into the big plan.
Many companies recognize this problem but most don’t know how to address it. The senior staff needs to appoint a cross-functional team of people committed to change, “Change Agents” if you will.
With the backing of the senior staff, this team has the authority to break down barriers of communication throughout the organization. A process needs to be put in place and everyone needs to take ownership.
Change will come through the commitment of proven leaders in the organization as they drive the change process.
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman at Sonnhalter
Contractors and professional tradesman often don’t have time to read the latest trade publication or look at the magazines’ website on a regular basis and might miss your message.Chances are, unless you only make one product, their interest at any given time may be on another product.
When they do go looking for things, the first place most go to is the internet, and the chances are that they are looking for a solution just as much as they are looking for a specific product. That’s why search is so important in the big scheme of things, and what makes you go up in search – good meaningful content!
Heidi Cohen had an interesting article regarding advertising vs. content driven messages that had some good points for the B-to-B market.
B-to-B lags behind the consumer counterpart in doing research before they contact a manufacturer or distribution point. But even at 57%, you’d better have some skin in the game from a search perspective or you’re going to be left at the curb.
50% of U.S. consumers will do anything to avoid ads
75+% of U.S. consumers hate hearing or seeing ads multiple times
65% of U.S. consumers use a DVR to skip ads
Those are some scary numbers, and even though they are consumer driven, remember that those same consumers may be buying your products at their workplace. So what’s the alternative?
86% of U.S. consumers value brands that are useful over those that have interesting advertising.
Translation: give your customers the info they need when they need it. Here are some tips:
Leverage the social media platforms where your customers hang out.
Supply product info for potentials to seek out.
Tap into sources your customers trust, like trade associations.
Make sure the info you give prospects enhances the product value.
Skip the promotion and show them best practices when using your products.
Re-promote your content. Once is not enough.
So the question is, how much effort are you using to create great content?
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
One of the biggest challenges we all face is getting more out of our marketing budgets. Most of us, when thinking of developing content, think of it as a new task that we have to start with a clean sheet of paper.
Some overlook the fact that you may be sitting on a gold mine of existing content, but have you maximized your existing content (content curation)? Heidi Cohen’s post, Internal Content Curation: What Most Marketers Miss, shows how to give new life to content you’ve already published.
By changing headlines, graphics or focusing it on a specific industry or application, you can get more mileage out of it. Or utilize the content in a different format, i.e. SlideShare or an infographic. It’s a great way to get more content out there to incremental audiences without spending lots of money.
Heidi lists 10 steps to maximize your internal content curation. Here are a few that caught my eye:
Audit existing content – This is low hanging fruit. Look at the gems that get the most attention. Are there content sections missing or that are weak and need to be bolstered up?
Gather content from across the organization –Look outside the marketing department for relative content. Don’t overlook customer service, tech service and engineering as good resources. Collect questions they get from customers on a regular basis and make sure you address them.
Monitor content analytics – What kind of content attracts the most traffic? What keywords do best? Is one platform outperforming others?
What are you doing to maximize your ROI on content?
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
We’re in a service business, and I always say our assets walk up and down the stairs every day. The key to any good company is great people. This is especially true in smaller companies where every “body” needs to be the right person.
Don’t put jerks in management just because they’ve been around for a while; it doesn’t mean they are ready to manage others. No matter who you put there, they need to be able to think out of the box and come to the table with new and fresh ideas.
Hire for the future, not the past – Choose talent that has a broader perspective on life and can adapt to the world of today.
Measure results, not hours –unless you run a factory. Focus on the end game, not how they got there. There’s plenty of ways to get to a goal; be open to new ideas.
Mix old with new – If your company is big enough, include different generations on teams to get a better perspective on solving a problem. A good idea can come from anywhere and the Millennials have a lot to offer and are willing to learn.
Formal training program – No matter how big or small your company is, if you want them to move up the ladder, you need to get them exposed to different aspects of your business. Someone in sales may need to do a stint in customer service or production scheduling to have a greater appreciation of the bigger picture.
Empower your team – The best way for anyone to make good decisions is have all the facts. Don’t hoard info or rationale on why you want to do something.
When you start limiting the flow of information in your organization, divides begin among associates, departments and divisions. Many mature brands struggle with the problem of departmental silos, while some start-ups introduce products at lightning speed. How can this happen? The reason is communication is their lifeline to survival and success.
