One of the curses of marketing is that so much of it is bounded by what was done yesterday. Never mind that today’s circumstances are different than were yesterday’s. The people are different, the problems are different, the needs of the audiences and markets are different. We wonder then why what worked yesterday, or what was done according to that article we just read, should have worked as well today, but simply didn’t. What went wrong?
Except for the one thing that’s at the core of everything in marketing – understanding the target audience and its needs – the answer is different for each marketing activity. Let’s look at some of them.
Marketing itself.
All that money and time and manpower spent, and nothing happened. All of it by the book, too, and all of it using plans and devices and gimmicks that worked for other people – and no impact on the market. Possible reasons why…
· The plan started with what you have to offer, and not with an analysis of the market. It’s the Melancholy Baby Syndrome -- the piano player who’ll play anything you want to hear so long as it’s Melancholy Baby. Marketing works when you base the plan on four points…
o Know your market. Who are they and what do they want and need? This is the most important facet of marketing – and the one that’s most often ignored.
o Know
your service. Not just the fact that you’re a lawyer or an accountant, but what
you have to offer in terms of the needs of the prospective clients. Don’t be like the storekeeper who says, “I
bought a load of this purple cloth, and that’s what I’m going to sell you,
whether you need it or not.”
o Know your tools. The tools of marketing – the devices we use to market – are finite. In the past two or three decades, only two new ones have been added for professionals – telemarketing and the Internet. The other tools, such as advertising and publicity and direct marketing, existed before, and are now simply adapted by the modern firm. And everybody has the same tools in the arsenal. You’ve got to know what each one does, and how each contributes to the whole, and which ones are best to use for your particular outreach for your service to your prospective clients. It’s not the same for everybody, and each must be added to the mix thoughtfully, not just automatically because that’s the way it’s always been done. When everybody has the same message, and the same tools, you compete successfully by choosing the right tools, and then using them more artfully than your competitors do.
o Manage your tools. There is no such thing as spontaneous marketing. Somebody has to make it happen. Somebody has to do it. Unfortunately, in professional services marketing, the professional marketer can only do part of it. Ultimately, the professional who performs the service is going to have to participate in the sale. Marketing professional services is different from marketing a product. Nobody hires a lawyer or accountant from an ad or a press release or a brochure. The sale must be made by the people who are going to perform the service.
· Professionals tend to forget what business they’re in. Peter Drucker, the noted consultant and business philosopher, pointed out that the purpose of any business – and the professions are certainly businesses – is to get a customer. Few professional firms seem to know what most successful corporations know -- their purpose is to get a client. The professional practice is how we serve that client. The professional firms that understand this thrive.
· There is rarely such a thing as the big splash. The Edge Group’s Gerry Riskin makes the point that the difference between the leading firm and the one behind is a small increment. Find or make that incremental difference, and hammer that.
· Know that since 1977 and the Bates decision that first enabled professional firm marketing, the world has changed, and keeps changing. The clients are different, the practice is different. The effects upon the professions of competition, since 1977, has created a whole new climate of practice. The firms that understand this are the ones who have survived and thrived. This is not your father’s profession anymore. It’s yours.
· While the events of September 11 made an impact of magnitude, the fact is that its major sustaining effect on the professions was to slightly accelerate the trends that started long before the events of that tragic date. As the great philosopher Satchel Paige put it, “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” The future of the professions is ahead, not behind.
Advertising.
Less than a decade ago, the managing partner of one of the leading Big Eight accounting firms, said that his firm would advertise “…only over my dead body.” That same firm, only a few years later, and even before its merger with another Big Eight Firm was spending millions on advertising. Some of it was marketing groping – “Let’s throw it to the ceiling and see what sticks.” The problem is, how do you advertise competitively when you can’t say, “We do better audits?” Or “We write better briefs?” But as the firms got the hang of it, some of the advertising campaigns were great. What made the difference?
· The successful firms began to understand the difference between focusing on a single service to a single market, and what we call institutional advertising. Institutional advertising says, “Law firms are good for you and ours is a great law firm.” Single service advertising recognizes that the nature of professional services is that most prospective clients generally can’t tell the difference between one firm and another. But when a firm says, “Our rate of successful real estate closings for major institutional lenders has propelled us to leadership in the field,” and advertises it to institutional lenders, then the target gets hit with meaning and impact.
· They did market research. They know their audience, and what their audience needed. Then they recast their services to address the needs of that audience.
· They didn’t rely on just advertising, which became one tool of many in their arsenal.
· They
understood positioning, one of the most important (and misunderstood) concepts in
marketing. Positioning is not as simple as it looks, but it’s not mystical,
either. It means working very hard to understand the prospective target audience’s
needs, demonstrating that you understand those needs, and focusing you message on showing
that you understand and can meet those needs. The difficult fact is that no professional
firms can successfully be all things to all businesses. Positioning is the technique of
focusing and honing your message to a pin point precision. In successful positioning,
lasers work; baseball bats don’t.
· The
didn’t get hung up on fads, like branding. By focusing, their prospects and target
audiences learned who they were and what they could do. Law firms and accounting firms ain’t
Wheaties, and don’t get talked into thinking otherwise. And don’t confuse name
recognition and reputation as branding. Three different things, and not to know the
difference can cost a lot of time and money with little to show for it.
· They,
and the agencies that worked for them, knew how to write ads that work – that
achieved the ads objectives. They knew that a good ad campaign starts with a theme that
focuses on the perspective client’s problems or opportunities. They understood
positioning. They know how to write headlines that are not only catchy, but relevant, and
stem from the position. They write copy that’s not only easy to read, but that
fulfills the promise of the headline.
· They
used professionals. Advertising – in fact, most of marketing – is like tight
rope walking. It looks simple when professionals do it well. Amateurs need a net, because
they most frequently don’t always know how to do it. Somebody once said that if you’re
a lawyer or an accountant you’re smart enough to write your own ads. True. You’re
also smart enough to learn nuclear physics. But being that smart doesn’t make you a
nuclear physicist.
There’s a lot more. For example…
Publicity
Publicity, the communications part of public relations (which is an entirely different thing), is one of the earliest devices used by professional firms. We were doing it for accounting firms and law firms well before Bates. And like everything else in the professions, it too has changed. Not better, but changed. It used to be all press releases and buttering up editors. Still is, but to a sharply diminished degree. Richard Levick, who runs what may well be the best public relations firm serving the legal profession, says that his firm rarely uses press releases. (Click here to see his article)
Publicity, in fact, is no longer simply a matter of getting your name in the paper, as it was in the days of the infamous Walter Winchell and the gossip columnists. If your publicist doesn’t know the difference, you can find yourself seriously messed up.
· Publicity
has to be about something. It has to report news. Not just something you want to
see in print (or in any other medium), but something that persuades the gatekeeper of the
medium – the editor, producer, or publisher – that the news is genuine and
valuable to the readers. Publicity, then, doesn’t begin with the press release, it
begins with the news.
· News
can’t misrepresent – the acoustics of the marketplace are too good, and
falseness or shallowness will soon be found out. Publicity can clarify and present
reality, if sufficient skill is used. Skill without integrity, by the way, rebounds badly. It’s the acoustics again.
· Image
is a myth. It implies that if you don’t like reality, you can manipulate symbols to
change the perception of reality. It’s not so. As the old saying goes, “What
you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say you are.” If you don’t like the way you’re
perceived, change the reality, and the perception will follow quickly.
· Even
journalism has changed, which means that the long standing practices of public relations
may include a lot of obsolete things. The
fabled four W’s that were supposed to be in every lead paragraph (who, what, when and
where) went out even before dress down Fridays came in. Just read the front page of a
newspaper like The New York Times or The Washington Post, and see for
yourself. And remember, every publicity presentation competes against every staff
journalist’s story for the same space or air time (or Internet time, now), so the
presentation had better be good professional journalism, not merely good professional
public relations. The motto, remember, is the publicist proposes, but the editor disposes. (This, by the way, is why publicity is not free
advertising.)
· Publicity
doesn’t work when you confuse a press release with an ad. A press release is a news
story, and should be written in a style that would fit comfortably on the front page of The
New York Times, no matter what paper the release is going to. Remember, you’re
competing against the medium’s staff --
not other publicists – for limited space or air time.
· News
can’t be manufactured, but news making activities can. Newsworthy stories can’t
be manufactured out of whole cloth, but the newsworthiness in a story can be focused and
highlighted and presented clearly.
· In
the past few decades, print media has been joined by broadcast media, and now internet
media. The journalistic styles are different, as are the techniques of dealing with
journalists. Long gone are the days of the roll of nickels and the phone book and the
Rolodex. Now are the days of media as a target audience, and new ways to deliver news.
What was once as unacceptable as smoking in a public place is today, is now as acceptable
as going to the opera in a turtleneck shirt. Ah, me.
· Publicity
and public relations go wrong when the publicist loses sight of its role in a total
marketing program, and the need to focus on the client , and not the firm. In publicity,
as in all marketing, think you, not we. Think in terms of the medium’s
needs, not yours.
Okay, this is a start. In future weeks we’ll expand this to include newsletters; responses to RFPs; direct mail; brochures; presentations; internal communications; strategic planning; selling; and networking.