Marketing

Marketing face-to-face can be difficult for many (most?) people. I know I feel a sense of envy when a door-to-door salesman appears completely at ease talking to me about their product on my front porch!

Welcome to Full Contact Marketing.

Full Contact Marketing is any face-to-face meeting with any (potential) customer. It can be door-to-door sales or working a trade show booth or taking orders over a counter. Often, Full Contact Marketing is considered just customer service.

But it is so much more!

Your poeple on the front lines represent your business brand more than any advertisement or PR campaign ever could. People relate to people. And if that relationship goes bad…

Front line people = Your brand

Are you inspecting your people before they go out to represent you? Do you offer coaching to help them polish their pitch, service and appearance? How can you inject confidense into your Full Contact Marketing program?

I’ve moved this site over to the new domain (www.incluesive.com) that builds a stronger brand. It’s tougher on the SEO but the customer - you - come first!

I’ve moved several WordPress blogs over in the past. And I’ve always run into the same problems:

• Not all posts make it over
• Design isn’t an exact match

I’m still trying to figure out why the template changes. But I did find a fix for transfering data over cleanly: Technosailor’s WordPress-to-WordPress Import. It’s built for pre-2.1 versions of WP and supposedly is included in the 2.5 version. What I noticed is the exported code from the default setup has some errors. Technosailor seems to have cleaned them up so all posts move over nicely.

Special thanks to Aaron Brazell and Matt Mullenweg for making my life that much easier. Moving dozens of posts over by hand is time-consuming!

The battle for a business that runs well and a business that thrives is the ability to match the outside perception with the inside reality. Treat your staff as well as you do your customers (or better!) to create an atmosphere where anything is possible.

Your outside perception is what you what you want people to beleive. It is what your advertising tells them.

How close is your actual running operation (inside reality) compared to that? Customers sense resentment, fear, doubt and all the other problems that slow, stall or stop business. The more you make the inside reality match your outside perception, the more your employees will “buy in”.

But first you have to buy in. All in. All the way. 100%.

Big wigs lead the charge. If you aren’t comfortable with what marketing is preaching, make it right — now! So that you can (and will) buy in.

The only thing in the way of your people’s success is you.

Your product is not what you sell. It isn’t the thing-in-the-box. It isn’t the quality of the thing-in-the-box either. Or how the thing-in-the-box is better than your competitors things-in-the-boxes. Your product isn’t even the experience of using the thing-in-the-box!

Your product is the experience the customer has after they are done using the thing-in-the-box: satisfaction, wealth, belonging… Your product is as intangible as the idea it came from! Your product is a feeling.

What feeling are you selling today?

Is it in your advertising? How is it reflected in your brand?

Marketing has been considered many thing: the 3 P’s, advertising, PR, etc.

I submit Marketing is the art of attracting the people that want what you have and keeping them.

This means Marketing is a necessary internal function. Because you want to keep your best employees, right? This also means that Marketing is the caretaker of the Brand, managing both the outside perception (through all the usual channels and any new innovative ones) and the inside reality.

This also means that Marketing should have no problem justifying their existence or budget!