Permission Marketing
The stats are clear: as a marketer, you should put more of your company’s talent and treasure into inbound marketing as opposed to outbound marketing.
In fact, one must work constantly on obtaining permission from your current customers or potential customers to market to them, and the message must be of pure intentions.
In order to do that you must provide creative information that is relevant and timely to your customer base. You must work hard to do this because customers are no longer going to tolerate “yell and sell” tactics; they are too smart and see through the dog and pony show.
A lot of blogs and books go on and on with this type of rhetoric. Reviewed from afar, in broad strokes, the pundits are right. Of course they are right! I mean what customer wants his or her mailboxes overloaded with sale offerings they are not seeking or commercials on their favorite shows about products or services that are not relevant to them. This is obvious. So what marketers should focus on is obtaining customers permission to market to them by gaining their trust with free helpful information that will aid the customer in the buying process. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah….the rhetoric goes on and on. The pundits build permission marketing up to the be the holy grail all marketers must seek. All this said, I believe they are right, absolutely right, but what most books and blogs on the subject are not clear on is how to conduct permission marketing.
Unlike the holy grail, I do not believe permission marketing needs to be a difficult. I believe customers are seeking help in the buying process from pretty much the same old traditional outbound marketing information they always have. The change today is that they expect to get the information how and when they want it, whatever form they want (electronic, physical, in person) and on their schedule.
So the secret to permission marketing is to make your traditional outbound information accessible online and for mobile, by allowing downloads of your flyers and print ads and signups for notifications of this traditional outbound information. On our Flaman Group of Companies’ sites we are amazed at how many downloads we receive of our traditional outbound pieces we put up on our website. I have even thought to discontinue traditional print advertising entirely and just have our print ads available for download because I know that each downloads represents an interested customer, as opposed to the maybe 2% penetration print ads give us. And yes, I know the cost per lead from inbound marketing is 61% less than outbound.
So should you blog and provide helpful product advice for free? Absolutely you should. But if you are not a blogger or prolific writer (it is still a struggle for me to blog and write even the minimum the pundits pontificate that I should) and you are looking for an easy place to start permission marketing, just focus on making your traditional outbound effort available online. Your customers want the information, and may not feel like going to a tradeshow or your store to get it. Maybe after they download a brochure or print ad they may even read your blog.
Steve Whittington is President of Roadmap Agency Inc. He has also served for over a decade as a member of the Executive Team of Flaman Group of Companies an award-winning organization and has over 25 years of executive experience. Steve’s current board work includes serving as; President of Glenora Child Care Society; and Co-Chair of the Marketing Program Advisory Committee for NAIT’s JR Shaw School of Business. Previous notable board work included, Chair of the board for Flaman Fitness Canada, a national retailer, a Director for a meal prep internet Startup Mealife and Chair of Lethbridge Housing authority, the third-largest Social housing NGO in Alberta.
Academically, Steve was an instructor of Project Management at Lethbridge College for seven years. Steve holds a Bachelor of Commerce Honours degree; he is a Certified Sales Professional (CSP), Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Marketing Specialist (CMS) and (CCXP) Certified Customer Experience Professional.
Steve’s first book Thriving in the Customer Age – 8 Key Metrics to Transform your Business Results teaches about the customer journey and provides a guiding framework spanning all stages of the customer experience. The book explains how every metric impacts an organization and how leaders can best utilize each metric to provide a stellar customer experience. Everyone knows the customer is the most important part of a business. This book provides the tools to improve an organization’s customer experience and drastically transform business results.
Recently Steve’s Blog has been profiled as one of the Top 75 Customer Experience blogs