Google strives to endear itself to the individuals searching for information. By algorithmically deriving who is most likely to be worthy of an individual searcher’s attention, they have an unwavering loyalty to the searcher. As for the individual websites, Google offers up paid services to facilitate their websites to be found. What keeps them in strong position is their ability to provide a search engine results page that is deemed to be of highest quality. They have all the answers. But, they are still an intermediary. A powerful one for sure. But nothing more than that.

I have launched a number of products throughout my career, where it was advantageous to extend the market reach by seeking out intermediaries. We are talking about: value-added resellers, distributors, agents, reps. Whatever name they go by, they serve as sales intermediaries who have a certain customer base that they have built up, to which they provide a range of products and services.

Now in all my instances, I carefully sought out and wooed these qualified intermediaries. They serviced the desired target market, and the product offering was complementary to their existing offering. Given a proper fit, the goals of the product launch and the number of real customer engagements were expected to gain momentum at a more rapid pace. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen.

No matter how much interest an intermediary shows in your product offering, their first loyalty is to the end-user and customer who actually consumes the product. If they aggressively promote a new product offering and it is not well received by the end customer, they are concerned about their reputation and relationship being tarnished. And this is a risk that they do not want to take.

So what happens? At best, they will make a soft introduction. And if the customer takes an interest, they will move ahead slowly. At worst, they will make no introduction at all, and wait for a customer to inquire about it. This doesn’t exactly lead to breakthrough sale momentum.

But, given the intermediary’s established relationship in providing comparable or complementary solutions to your target market, the potential is always there. To realize it though, we cannot depend on the intermediary to get the desired sales traction. It is still very necessary to target and woo the end customer with all of our targeted marketing activities, while leveraging all of this activity, to increase the propensity of the intermediary to take action. When there is a take-up by the end customer, there follows the take-up by the intermediary. And only then do we see benefits of a leveraged sales channel.

Well, this is no different in the digital domain with Google. The indexing of your website goes way down to the bottom of the page. You don’t get any attention from Google, until you get real attention from the end customer or from someone who has an opinion that the end customer will give some attention to. And then, all of a sudden, Google cares more.

What it all means is that you are best served by not over-emphasizing your marketing towards Google. They are just an intermediary and will naturally behave like all other intermediaries. They don’t care, until a real customer cares. So, it is far more essential to devise ways in which you can get directly in front of your prospective customers, and those who have influential opinions. Once they start googling more about your company, Google’s interest is enabled. The days of artificial link-building and keyword stuffing are over. Google is now much more focused on understanding the end customer, and so should you be. It all starts with the customer. Off-line or on-line, an intermediary or still an intermediary.

 

All markets are getting more and more crowded with an increasing abundance of product and service offerings. And, although there has been an increase in the number of channels through which customers can be reached, they are also becoming pretty crowded. The only way to prevent our business from fading into the noise is to maintain control of our marketing and sales processes. Two examples of where a business needed to regain control of their key marketing and sales processes are Leica, and Pangea Organics.

In the case of Leica, they are a German manufacturer of precision cameras, where their dealer network in the US was declining. So the company decided to open a flagship retail store in 2012 in Washington DC. But not your average everyday retail store. It included a studio to properly demonstrate the products, a gallery to show the photographic results, and the ability to hold photography courses. Leica is in direct control and their marketing message is now resonating as it should.

In the case Pangea Organics, a skin-care company, they felt they had improved their customer reach, by finally achieving the big time distribution in Macy’s and Whole Foods. But these were powerful partners who controlled their channel to the point where Pangea was hampered in how it promoted within the store, and the costing structure that it had to work under. So they made a drastic change. They exited this distribution channel and moved to multilevel marketing model, which effectively is a network of independent sales agents. Although they are independent, their commitment and motivation is much better suited to the product offering, and their results are now better.

There is no question that those who own the customer relationship, control the fate and direction of the business. But owning that relationship means that you must maintain a level of connectedness that suits your specific product offering. And if you put too much in between your business and your customer, there will undoubtedly be less opportunity for communication. Less opportunity to show the value you provide. And less opportunity to gather that all important market intelligence from real and prospective customers.

The more that the value of your product or service offering needs to be communicated to your prospective customer, the more important it is that you stay in control of the process. No one is in a better position to communicate the value of the offering than the business that is actually creating it. But the reality of penetrating any marketplace means that it is necessary for you to find channels to the prospective customer that you are after. And this is where the whole intermediation process starts to set in. So it is a bit of a Catch-22. You need to go through some intermediation to get in the channel. But as soon as you add a layer of intermediation, your level of control and influence is reduced.

Whether you are going through the internet, or whether you are going through dealers or agents, as soon as there is an intermediary, it is vital to understand the nature of the relationship between you and the intermediary and how it will impact your control of the customer relationship. Too many layers weakens the connection. Too many sources of conflict weakens the connection. Too much power imbalance weakens the connection. Too much cultural differences weakens the connection. The more dimensions along which you and the intermediary differ, the more dilution to your entire marketing and sales process.

When it comes to an intermediary, you must ask yourself the question: Are you part of their business model? Or, are they part of your business model? But even though you may be able to answer yes to both questions, you need to ensure that you are able to retain the degree of connection to the customer that you need. Without it, you will lose the ability to control the direction of your business, and that is a losing proposition.

Quite often when companies are under pressure to bring on new customers, there is a burst of energy driven into random acts of marketing. When I come across these situations, it always reminds of the The Three Stooges episode where they are hired as sales reps to sell a product called Brighto. The only thing that they know is that it “makes all bodies new”. When 2 of the stooges debate what the product is for, the smart one bops them, and advises them that it is for sale. So they run through the downtown streets, approaching random strangers, promoting and selling this miracle product. With no knowledge of what the product is for, how to use it properly, or who may benefit, they create those crazy comical situations that result, which do more harm than good.

Clearly this is not the kind of result that you expect from your marketing initiatives. And, although the Three Stooges’ situation is completely farcical, it happens all the time. Marketing may be an afterthought while things are going ok, and the company is busy enough catering to existing customers. But there comes a day suddenly when new customers are needed. And borne out of some notion that the company does indeed have a broad set of capabilities, the marketing net gets cast quite widely. Figuratively, it is much the same as that paper posting on the light pole at the street corner.

There are places where prospective customers expect to learn about new products and services, and there are places where they do not. Certainly there is a level of serendipity that can and does occur in bringing businesses together with new prospective customers. But, both the overall context and messaging play a vital role in actually being able to obtain attention and proceed further. If you do not understand the behavioral characteristics of your customer segment, you cannot market to them. You may not even be able to sell to them. So your starting point and progression needs to be mapped so that you get better at this, and the process yields improving results as you go along.

Those who are anxious to cast a wide marketing net will want to cite the favored phrase: “Half my marketing is working, I just don’t know which half.” I agree that there is certainly more than one touch point for your customer. But it still has to be a touch point that fits into a circle where the prospective customer is willing to give attention to your solution. Multiple communication channels will always be necessary. But, it is not the same thing as finding a situation where the prospective customer is captive, and then imposing marketing messages upon them.

What it comes down to is that in order for your marketing to be effective, it cannot be random. It must be targeted to a behavioral set that fits your customer persona. It is not a one-step process to figure out what really makes your customer tick. The effort must occur on an ongoing basis. You can start with assumptions and engage in marketing activities where both the goals are set, and the results are measured. And by seeking to understand, you will come across the marketing tactics that work for your offering.

In the movie “The Truman Show”, Jim Carrey plays a character where he unknowingly lives his life in an artificially created reality. When the character becomes suspicious that his interactions with the world are not genuine, he begins a quest to discover the reality, and starts to behave in unpredictable ways. It is a great satire that brings attention to the fact that behavior changes when we start to treat something as a device-under-test.

When marketers hear the words “marketing automation”, there is an inherent lure to a utopian state where we can setup our computers to automatically coax and nurture visitors to the point where our sales efforts are completely concentrated in the right place. We certainly want to be convinced that it is possible. Unfortunately, humans do not have a history of reacting all that well to these marketing mechanization effects. I don’t see anyone raving about their great experience on receiving robo-calls; or their great experience in navigating the telephone keypad (“Touch “1” for…); or their delight in receiving what appears to be a robo-tweet; or about their great experience in talking to call center reps with ID#s and no direct call-back numbers.

There is an important tenet that cannot be forgotten. Our prospective customers are human. And given the complexity of human nature, we must recognize that some things can be mechanized and some cannot. There is no doubt that marketing automation can increase the productivity of our marketing efforts if done correctly. And if done incorrectly, it can spurn away potential customers that could otherwise be a great fit for the products and services that we have to offer.

Before we can start automating anything, it is a key pre-requisite to develop both our messaging and an appropriate level of marketing content, which will be effective in showing up on search results. Not any old search results, but search results that are presenting answers to the type of problems which customers are seeking information about. This is the key starting point from which it is possible to start to apply analytic tools to understand the digital behavior of our visitors. It is all about characterizing behavior. What brought them to us? How long did they stay? What areas were most interesting? Did they make repeat visits? With an aggregated set of behavioral data, it provides strong feedback on what messaging is effective or ineffective; and where our marketing communication emphasis needs to be applied. If we get in our visitor’s way by asking for an email, with no justification, we are just encouraging them to bounce. And that just deprives us from the opportunity to learn more about them.

If we can get to this key milestone of understanding what prospective buyers are interested in, it is then possible to use marketing automation to up the ante, in terms of what marketing content can be provided to them. But marketing automation becomes somewhat of a misnomer for what is happening. It is really “permission marketing” that we are transitioning to. And it only works if the information is perceived as useful by the visitor. If it is, it then becomes permissible to up the ante again, with new offers.

We can only expect marketing automation to get us so far. There is a reason that it is not called sales automation. Regardless of what point system we develop to score the visitors, the best that our marketing automation system can achieve is arrive at a “marketing qualified lead”. To convert it to a real lead requires that human touch from our sales people. Don’t let your marketing automation efforts be “The Truman Show” where prospective customers are spurned to run, or duped with false promises. Find ways to better understand their behavior and invest in creating information that will help them. They will be more likely to stick around and take your call when they step forward in the buying process.

You want new customers to knock on your door. This is the most desired state.

Prospective new customers will want to contact you when they believe that there is a semblance of a solution for them. But what makes them believe that this is the case? The situation that you are painting must resemble their situation in order to allow them to self-identify. This is what causes things to click.

From the perspective of customers, there is always more than one way to deal with a specific situation. And so what is it that makes one solution preferred? When potential customers are cast into a marketplace where the vendors are all striving to differentiate their offering, it all becomes much less obvious which solutions merit more attention.

To get through this wall, the context of your messaging must allow potential customers to see themselves. An understanding of all those great capabilities and benefits will not do it alone. There is often that lingering doubt. Will it work for me? Is it worth it? Should I wait?

But if a prospective customer hears of the story of someone who was in a similar situation, it becomes the ultimate trump card. The whole mindset shifts to one where the situations are compared to decide whether one can serve as a proxy for the other. And if there is a match, it is quite likely that the propensity for engagement increases.

A skilled salesperson would be able to readily determine which solutions present themselves as a good fit for new customers. And they would be able to naturally migrate a customer through progressively changing needs. But therein lies the problem. With the plethora of solutions out there, new customers do not want to engage directly, until they themselves have determined that your solution could be a good fit.

In absentia of direct human contact and without another customer proxy, it becomes necessary for new customers to use the information that you provide, to self-diagnose their own situation. So the onus is on the solution provider to create self-diagnostic methods for prospective customers. This is what the incognito customer really is trying to do. They are trying to self-qualify themselves before they reach out to a supplier. By establishing an effective way to guide the self-diagnosis, the prospective customer will arrive at the level of self-awareness which enables self-identification for the solution that is being offered.

The process is simple enough. The challenge lies in how you present the stories, and how you enable potential customers to self-qualify. Deriving the key insights from actual customer experience is not always apparent, and does require a closer communication with those real users. Determining how best to break down the self-diagnosis or self-qualification steps also may not be immediately apparent. They can only be uncovered from a true understanding of how customers are dealing with their current situation.

So there you have it. The greatest propensity to action is when a potential customer initiates first contact. To get to this much desired state, you must enable a prospective customer to easily self-identify with the problem you are solving. They must see themselves within the messaging context that you create. And that is when the great epiphany occurs. Round peg meets round hole.