The more you understand what’s important to your customers and prospects, the more relevant your product or service will be. It’s that simple. Problem is, simple isn’t easy.
Typically, when a company starts up, the customer is the center of attention. Virtually everything you do centers around your customers – and your prospective customers. As you grow, however, things tend to change. Not because your customers are any less important to you, but because your company creates internal demands: new products, new employees, and new competitors to worry about, among many other things. When this happens, there is a natural tendency to see your business through the narrow lens of your product – from inside your company outward – instead of from the perspective that made you so successful to begin with: seeing things through the eyes of your customers and prospects. High-tech companies tend to make this mistake all the time. It's why I've always said that high-tech marketing is a oxymoron.
So what, exactly, should you look for in an agency to help you with this? Find one that begins at the beginning, by looking at how people are actually using your website. What kind of site do you really need? Strictly informational? Strictly transactional? Or something in between? If you made it more relevant to them, would they visit more often? Based on what you learn you can craft a living, breathing website: a site with your customers foremost in mind because it’s been created from their perspective . It becomes the centerpiece – the lynchpin -- of your marketing efforts. But it doesn’t end there.
You want an agency partner to serve as a customer advocate. This is how we do it at my shop, but this isn't a commercial so much as an advisory. We’re obsessed with our clients’ customers and not only make sure that their brand revolves around them, but that everything is aligned with their customers' needs. We’re obsessed with making sure our clients see things through their customers’ eyes.
You want your agency people to know not only how to pull the levers of traditional marketing communications but also to be intimately familiar with the best practices associated with the newest technologies and trends. Look for people who know what it takes to build successful companies by virtue of having done it. People who don’t think of themselves as offering “creative services” so much as creative thinking that charts the shortest distance between your customers and new revenue. Stay tuned. I'll have plenty more to say about this in future posts.
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