Straight to the Point

Volume 4, Issue 2

This Issue's Contents:

The Yin & the Yang of Customer Referrals
Many of our high-tech, business-to-business clients rely on customer referrals as a significant part of net-new business generation. Customer case studies are valuable sales and marketing tools for these companies, so we’ve made this the theme of this newsletter.

Success Story (Customer Case Studies: Even Better than Word-of-Mouth)
Many of our clients make customer case studies and success stories a cornerstone of their sales and marketing collateral. Aside from demonstrating real-world success with named customers, good success stories speak to prospects in their own language, conveying experiences and frustrations they can relate to, and explaining the relief from those frustrations in realistic and concrete terms.

Lesson Learned (The Importance of Landing Pages )
Pay-per-click, e-mail and online advertising campaigns are popular methods to bring new visitors to a website. Typically, a great deal of time is spent thinking about how to get prospects to the website, but less thought is put into what to show visitors once they arrive.

---

Marketing Communications Smarts from Kaszas Communications

Spring 2008

The Yin & the Yang of Customer Referrals

– by Maria Ford

Many of our high-tech, business-to-business clients rely on customer referrals as a significant part of net-new business generation. Customer case studies are valuable sales and marketing tools for these companies, so we’ve made this the theme of this newsletter.

This theme got me thinking about something else that many of our clients have in common: the need to somehow coach and craft the messages that their customers use when giving a reference. This is a relatively simple thing for us to accomplish during the process of interviewing customers and writing case studies or testimonials. It is much more difficult for an organization to control in verbal reference calls or the casual references that occur between peer organizations and colleagues.

Customers Refer You Using Their Own Language

Customer referrals are wonderful things, but they are double-edged swords. Customers tend to refer to you using their own language, which is very much grounded in the specific products and services that they have engaged you for. You may be happy to get a new prospect via customer referral but at the same time be frustrated to discover that the new prospect has an incomplete, out of date, or skewed understanding of your capabilities and offerings.

This is one of the most powerful examples of the critical role that an effective – and an effectively delivered – messaging and positioning strategy can play. It’s imperative that an organization maintain a strong and consistent set of key messages that accurately positions its offerings, value, and differentiation in the customer’s terms. It’s just as important that those messages are delivered to the existing customer base frequently and consistently.

Too often, companies spend more time focusing on communicating with prospects than with their own sales teams – which include internal staff as well as existing customers who hold the power of referral. But, because your customers will refer you using their own language – you must make the effort to provide them with the appropriate language to talk about you.

What You Can Do  About It – Right Now

So, the next time you have a customer success story or testimonial created, think also about how you can deliver that story and its messages to your existing customer base. Next time you update your website, product, or service offerings, be sure that you get the word out to your staff and existing customers. It’s also worth providing your customers with regular, on-message updates via email or print newsletters, RSS feeds, seminars, webinars, and so on. In addition to keeping them up-to-date on your core messages and current offerings, it’s also likely to help in reselling and upselling to them.

Back to top

---

Success Story

Customer Case Studies: Even Better Than Word-of-Mouth

Many of our clients make customer case studies and success stories a cornerstone of their sales and marketing collateral. Aside from demonstrating real-world success with named customers, good success stories speak to prospects in their own language, conveying experiences and frustrations they can relate to, and explaining the relief from those frustrations in realistic and concrete terms.

The companies that turn to us to interview their customers and write these stories tell us that we are able to get information and quotations from their customers that they would be unable to extract on their own.

A Journalistic Approach

As a third party, we are able to apply an objective and journalistic approach to interviewing your customers. Put another way – we can ask your customers the questions that you can’t (or won’t), and they typically give us answers that they won’t give you.

More often than not, this is because too much is assumed between you and your customers, while nothing can be assumed between your customer and Kaszas. We’re often able to tease out information that the client’s customer might not otherwise divulge and ask questions that may not have occurred to our clients to ask.

As experienced interviewers who know how to construct interviews in a way that elicits high-yield answers and quotable gems that make the difference between a rote success story and a truly compelling read.

A Fruitful Conversation

Our wide range of experience in multiple industries as well as the knowledge we gather through interviewing customers in an even wider range of businesses provides us with a broad experience base that ensures we can have an intelligent and fruitful conversation with our clients’ customers.

We have written both business-to-business and business-to-consumer customer stories that cover topics from complex technological products to common professional services. No matter what the industry, product or project, our customer interview process ensures that our stories clearly illustrate the business problems solved.

Margot Menna, Head of Marketing at PIKA Technologies, says this of PIKA’s experiences with our customer case study services:

“Kaszas has the unique ability to speak with our highly technical customers and identify the problems that they had and why they were seeking a solution.It is important that we are able to identify why PIKA was the best choice for the customer, and how we solved their problem.I often learn about the customers by reading what Kaszas has written!”

At PIKA, case studies are important marketing tools:

“We find it very valuable to have a cross section of case studies available that other potential customers can relate to, so that when they read it they think, ‘That is the same problem I have!’ With next to no effort on our part, Kaszas produces a case study with testimonial quotations that we can re-use in press releases and elsewhere on our website. We also intend to start using our case studies as a basis for audio podcasts.”

Never Say “Never”

Aside from a customer not giving permission to be interviewed, there are very few barriers to our ability to write exceptional success stories. A project does not necessarily have to be completed; a product does not necessarily have to be in full deployment for us to find a great story for you to tell.

Here is an example: Demonstrating return on investment is always one of our main goals in a customer success story. Often, however, customers have not calculated an actual ROI value for the solution in question or the product has not been publicly launched. So, we are skilled at asking a variety of questions to learn the concrete benefits realized by the customer. We often surprise our clients with the depth of information we’ve been able to obtain.

Effective Sales Tools

Prospects always want to know that the company they’re approaching has real customers and can solve the business problems they are experiencing. Our clients have found that customer success stories act as effective sales and marketing tools to demonstrate the value they can offer their target market.

To see an example of one of our customer case studies, read this PIKA Technologies customer success story.

Contact us for more information about how you can have Kaszas write your customer case studies!

Back to top

---

Lesson Learned

The Importance of Landing Pages

Pay-per-click, e-mail and online advertising campaigns are popular methods to bring new visitors to a website. Typically, a great deal of time is spent thinking about how to get prospects to the website, but less thought is put into what to show visitors once they arrive.

A lesson we’ve learned is that the content displayed to a visitor after they arrive to a website can be the deciding factor in whether a client receives a conversion (the prospect takes a desired action) or records a bounce (the prospect leaves the site immediately).  Visitors who are directed to customized, campaign-specific landing pages are most likely to convert and maximize the advertising investment.

Landing Page Design

A landing page is the first destination reached by a visitor coming to the website from a third-party link. The page may be part of the website architecture or a “standalone” page visible only to those visitors coming from a particular source.

While the format and look of landing pages can vary, good landing pages have two things in common:

1. Each is extremely targeted, focused and customized.
2. Each has a clear and compelling call to action.

Targeted & Customized

The best landing pages focus on one topic and provide only the most critical details of that the subject matter. A landing page can be thought of as making good on a promise: some kind of promise was made or implied in the promotion, ad, or link text that brought the visitor to the landing page. So, the landing page should provide what was promised.

If the offer is a white paper download, the page should be devoted to the white paper with extraneous offers avoided or placed in sidebars only. If the promise is information about a product, then the landing page should be devoted to that product and not a variety of other products.

If the visitor is arriving at the page via a paid-search term, it is good practice to feature that specific term (or variations of that term) in titles or headings on the landing page to let the visitor know that he or she is “in the right place.”

As mentioned earlier, landing pages also need not be part of the site’s navigation – they can be standalone pages visible only to visitors coming from a pay-per-click (PPC) ad, online advertisement or direct mailer. One of our clients, for example, created a standalone landing page visible only to recipients of a specific direct mail piece. Recipients of the mailer were given the URL of a landing page that contained industry-specific content, imagery and access to a whitepaper relevant to that audience.  In this case, the landing page was promoted as being “special” and available only to those “in the know.”                                             

A targeted landing page is not enough, however. In addition to providing the information the visitor is looking for, the page must guide one to take a logical action that benefits both you and the visitor.

Clear Call to Action

Using sidebars, in-text links throughout the content, and buttons or links at the bottom of the page, the landing page must encourage visitors to take a second step. This may be a visit to an online quote generator, an e-commerce shopping cart, a relevant download or a form to be completed.

The call to action should be logical and help the visitor complete whatever task he or she had in mind in coming to the website.

One of our business-to-business clients with a range of customer segments has had success with four unique landing pages. Each offers a distinct call to action while and funnels visitors to appropriate pages within the website based on their interest.

Each landing page features language, imagery and resources appropriate to the industry audience, and points the visitor to company solutions relevant to the industry in question.

This client’s statistics indicate that the landing pages have been very effective at leading visitors through the website in a logical fashion and encouraging resource downloads and requests for information – the site’s main conversion actions. In fact, pay-per-click ads pointing users to the landing pages have conversion rate 2.5 times higher than the company’s average PPC conversion rate.

If you are running online advertisements or promotions that simply direct visitors to your homepage, many of your visitors are likely losing interest quickly, or getting lost in the website and never reaching their goals – or yours. Contact us for more information about how Kaszas can help you create landing pages that get out your message and boost your conversion rates!

One of our favourite Marketing websites, Marketing Sherpa, has compiled examples of effective and ineffective landing pages at http://www.marketingsherpa.com/lp/study.html. The original study no longer seems to be available, but the examples describe how companies were able to lift conversion rates by up to 10% by following landing page best practices.

Back to top