Using the Internet to create a good service reputation

Everyone realises that Internet Marketing is now vitally important to business, but how should it be used when your business depends on reputation for referrals and enquiries? Nick Henley of online marketing specialist Blended Content, explains what you need to think about.

Businesses offering specialist or personal services know that a large proportion of their work comes from referrals. One satisfied customer tends to lead to another as word-of-mouth recommendations are made between mums at the school gate, friends over a beer or colleagues at work. Networking plays a big part too, with a need to attend or create local small scale, but personal, events.

These service businesses depend on creating a great experience for the customer. The professionals providing the service, who are also often the proprietors, know that personal contact, a friendly and professional demeanour and going the extra mile count for a lot.

So how can Internet Marketing help these businesses?

From a user perspective, poorly planned Internet marketing can be associated with an email box full of spam mail, frustrating searches, and a huge number of faceless businesses to consider from search results. It can put you off.

But managed well it can also be associated with finding what you are looking for quickly and easily, being able to understand the service area in general, and being able to identify one or two businesses worth consideration and which ‘feel’ right for you.

This type of Internet experience seems much more relevant to a business that depends on reputation and word-of-mouth recommendation. So how do you create this feeling online?

Reflect the customer’s decision making process in your marketing plan

The best way to ensure that Internet marketing works for service businesses is to ensure that it helps prospective customers make a decision and take action in an appropriate and timely way.

Online marketing depends more than ever on being relevant, as personal as possible, and creating attractive offers in exchange for people’s time and attention.

When making a decision to do something, people typically go through a number of key stages of thought and action. Keeping these states in mind when organising your marketing, including your Internet marketing, means you will meet the customer’s needs better; that way your marketing message gets listened to and is more relevant.

Typical stages of customer thought and action

A typical customer might go through these stages of thought and behaviour, so be careful to provide the right information and the right level of personalisation as interest changes.

• Pre-contemplation – prospective customers haven’t thought about using this service and certainly haven’t looked for information about it, but they may have overheard something or seen something in the past.
   
• Contemplation – some change of situation in their life triggers a higher level of interest or they become aware of a particular service and what it does for people. They are now thinking of doing something in the near future (weeks or months); visiting a health specialist or addressing a personal issue.
   
• Preparation – they are preparing to take action in the immediate future (hours or days) and just need to decide exactly who they would like to approach about a service.
   
• Action – people move forward to engage with a particular service provider. The thinking and indirect enquiry is over and they take action.
   

What is relevant when?

There are so many ways in which the Internet can be used for marketing and advertising, so how do you choose what to do?

Well everyone has a limited budget, so identifying what is most important is critical. But many Internet marketing options don’t need to cost a fortune if you’re prepared to spend a little time creating and managing them. Here are some pointers of what should work best for service businesses. The important thing is to integrate them altogether.

Write a targeted article and place it online

Identifying customer segments that are most likely to need one or more of your services allows you to focus your message and to place it in the most relevant places. For the customer it means they will associate you with that specialist service area.

For example, if women expecting babies are most likely to want relaxing foot massages due to carrying excess weight, then you can talk to them about the massage services your business offers. But how?

Write an article about foot massage for expectant mothers and offer it not only to local newspapers and local pre-natal groups, but also offer it to online baby groups, online health portals and place the article with PR services; including links to your site of course.

Create and publicise a community event

If massage and skin care is your thing, then arrange to offer massages at the PTA organised school fete, providing free foot massage to any expectant mother attending the event. You could even include this offer in your article to help publicise the fete and your presence.

That will get people talking at the event, but then use the pictures you take at the event to create an online news story and again send a PR release and pictures, with links to your website, to the press and to online news channels.

Be found when people start searching

The most important thing at the contemplation stage when customers are gathering information is for your business to be found high up among the results relevant to their search.

But it is important to remember that they are not necessarily looking for your business at an early stage. Instead they are finding out about the possible types of solution.

At this stage they will be looking for advice and expertise, as well as testimonials from other people, about how they can find a solution. This is where the Internet has a clear advantage over other sources of information and where user generated content is so useful. Almost instantaneously people can search for a solution and can learn about the types of services available and their benefits.

This is where specialists and professionals can really help prospective customers. By providing wide ranging advice to help people understand an aspect of their lives, you not only help them progress towards a decision, but also introduce yourself as an expert; a trusted source of information.

Search engine optimisation of your business website and marketing materials linking to your site (PR stories, articles etc) means that you will appear more relevant to the key words and phrases people typically search for.

It also opens up the possibility of using social media. Having a business-related but not direct business conversation with people likely to be interested in your services at some time in the future is definitely useful. It reflects the sort of conversation people have at the school gate or at work where advice is sought and anecdotes exchanged.

Think what subjects you can talk about with authority and relevance and create a tweet in Twitter, a Facebook page or a blog. If you can’t write, get someone who can to help write and do this regularly so that you gain trust within an online community.

Create a website experience to enhance your reputation

Although online marketing seeks to place content about you and your business widely throughout the Internet, it is still important to have an effective website. All articles, reviews, press releases, interviews or advertising should include a link to your website. So it had better be well designed to meet the needs of your business and to channel enquiries to you.

If referral and word-of-mouth recommendation is important then you can be sure that 9 out of 10 people receiving the recommendation will want to find out more about your services before calling. Just like a well-designed brochure, your website needs to be attractive, to inform and to encourage direct contact or enquiries.

But for a specialist personal service business it also has to make people feel something – your site needs a personality. Besides being informative and providing physical links back to you and your business the site needs to make people feel you are approachable and to ease them closer to making a call or enquiring via email.

Provide material for your fans to distribute

Once you have found a number of customers and provided a special service experience then you can help them to tell others about you.

Creating a website with clear descriptive links to sections detailing your specific services will allow you to send information by email in the form of links back to your site. Do the thinking and hard work for your satisfied customer, but writing the email you’d like them to send to a contact or friend who might need the same service.

Enhancing the personal referral not replacing it

Importantly, creating the right range of information, stories and links online, both in important social media spaces and on your own site will support the referral process. If you have these links and materials ready for them, then the conversation in which the introduction is made can be followed up by a simple email with details of your article, your event or your services.

The role of your website is not to replace referral mechanisms, but instead to turbo-charge them and to make referrals more likely and more successful for your business.

Nick Henley is a veteran online marketing specialist working with service businesses. He runs an integrated brand communications consultancy called Blended Content, which as the name suggests plans, designs and creates content for brand marketing. Visit www.blendedcontent.co.uk or email nick@blendedcontent.co.uk for more details.

Asking the right questions

I have just heard David Lloyd speaking on the radio about the sacking of his brother as coach of the woeful British Tennis Team, explaining that it wasn’t (all) his brother’s fault but the fact that the LTA has the wrong system.

It made me think about the importance of asking the right question when trying to find a strategy for success.

His argument went something like, Andy Murray is the only decent British men’s tennis player at the moment and that the LTA system didn’t produce him, so there’s something wrong with the system.

True that this is a very poor indictment of the system but it suggests that the question that will lead to a solution is ‘what is the right system’?

But this logic perhaps misses the point, because it presupposes one important thing; namely that other top men’s tennis players are produced as a result of a nationally funded system.

Before John Lloyd’s question is asked perhaps a better question would be to ask whether top men’s tennis players around the world are produced by a national system?

I suspect not.

Having lived in Spain (currently number one 1 think) and LatAm, I have a sense that tennis is a rich kids sport and that private sports clubs provide the tennis stars of the future.

So the right question is, out of the top 500 men’s tennis players in the world how many were produced as a result of a national system? If true, can we suppose that the others therefore came from a private tennis club and had family support? Politically tricky to use government funding in this way, but if we want success ….

Disgust in marketing research

I’ve been thinking about how disgust, defined as having a strong aversion or being repelled by something, is a pretty uncontrollable response that could be useful in consumer research.

Having looked up the definition and seen that the antonyms of disgust are just the sorts of things we seek to create from marketing comms I am encouraged; admiration, appeal, desire, esteem, fondness, like, liking, loving, respect, reverence.

The reason I stated thinking about it is that so much marketing research uses groups to discuss what they think about a particular product category, how they choose and use brands and what they do and don’t understand about a category. This has always seemed less than ideal to me as conscious responses are socially mediated; the group affecting the response and the facilitator and analysts laying their interpretation forward as ‘the truth’.

Research is essential to understanding a category, drivers of choice and brand positions but if we are using dodgy research methods then we are fooling ourselves that we really understand. We’ll find out the consequences of this some months or years in future when advertising propositions fail to create the consumer response we seek even though they perform well in research groups.

So how might disgust be used in research? Is it the link between functionality and emotional appeal – a kind of functional emotion and importantly one that can’t be controlled by consumers?

Alas no. It seems the disgust we exhibit is inherited but not genetically rather socially through mothers teaching their offspring expressions of disgust to avoid them eating nasty things. Worse than that (for my idea) it seems this teaching extends to expressions of disgust for certain types of reprehensible behaviour and even classes of people. Oh dear.

So if disgust is in fact an expression of learned social behaviour, then perhaps it’s role in research can’t be as an uncontaminated source of consumer insight about deeper wants and needs? But instead it might be a way of tracking how successfully marketing and communications have managed to create social norms against which consumers can judge the need for a product or decide how to behave in a certain situation? Brands could map themselves against category disgust in some way?

For brandsthis would mean instead of promoting, for example, the positive benefits of giving Ferero Rocher chocolates as an indulgent and special gift to a party/dinner host(actually that’s probably not a good example) but bear with me, and instead focus on the unforgiveable social faux pas of not giving Ferero Rocher or indeed any gift to your host, so the disgust mechanism could be invoked?

Maybe this use of disust is only applicable at the category level? Although a brand could certainly use it as a differentiator making that brand selection the most adequate respone to avoidance of a disgust?

I still like the strength of emotion disgust involves. It’s better than a lot of weak and vague positive comments from a consumer group.

God how it disgusts me when we sit in a qual research debrief and hear a subjective evaluation of a some skimpy and vaguely positive comments, having to come to a consensus of meaning for social/business harmony!

Smart Nivea Shaving Strategy

Funny how many thoughts and musings occur when you’re preparing for the day. Perhaps it’s because it’s a private moment (usually) and your brain is a little less focussed than it needs to be later in the day, so open to thoughts.

What I noticed the other day was that I had bought and really appreciated a new pack of Nivea Shaving Gel. Why was this significant? Because I, like many other men, am a creature of habit and I rarely consciously think about personal care products. True I might be getting a little older and be changing my interests and tastes, but I was surprised in myself; surprised for a specific reason.

Gillette shaving products have dominated the market for years, especially in the UK, and despite the attempts of competitors including Unilever and P&G (pre-buying Gillette) to muscle in on the very lucrative market, Gillette through strong branding and sheer weight of impact had managed to capture men’s minds’ if not hearts.

Usually there have only been 3 choices in store; Gillette (with various choices), the very much perceived as second-class Wilkinson Sword and then store brands. Who in their right mind would seek to enter the men’s shaving market when other mighty players had failed and own label meets the functional need? That said there is a huge price gap between the two.

Enter Nivea. I must stress that I did not buy the Nivea showergel with these thoughts in mind, but instead they are occuring to me afterwards. In other words, I had an emotional response in front of the shelf, helped by a hefty 50% off discount to motivate the risk of change.

What I realised had happened was that I had bought the product because I liked the pack. What’s more, I liked having it in my bathroom and I felt good about using the product. For me as someone who perceives himself as pretty functionally motivated in the personal care department, this was a shock.

But times change and these days everything is about design and aesthetics. Perhaps my appreciation of well-designed cars, sunglasses, food, furniture and transport systems had changed me into someone more appreciative of design overall? Now I was a prospect for a well designed and aesthically beautiful pack of shaving gel!

When I think about it Nivea have been smart in two ways.

Firstly they have looked at the macro trends not just the category trends and realised that an opportunity for a new positioning had emerged; one that Gillette and store brands were not meeting. Secondly they chose a marketing strategy based on packaging, trial and therefore product experience, instead of copying Gillette’s turbo charged, celeb-endorsed macho-media assault on the senses.

Perhaps that is where Unilever, who have the same sort of personal care muscle and resources had failed? As I say, I was never previously aware of Gillette’s advertising except in a professional sense and frankly felt it had become a little embarrasing and the bane of jokes of late. But the way to my heart was via the pack.

Well done Nivea.

**By the way, does anyone know how the Nivea shave UK share of market is trending – I have since repurchased but once again managed to buy 3 packs for the price of 2?