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5 ways to get your customers to sell your product for you

Case study: The Case Study – Part 1

So, you’re in businesses. You have customers. Better still, you have loyal customers who view you as a trusted and valued partner and who sing your praises. This is very rewarding for you and it makes you feel happy when you think about it. When you and your staff review the status of your customer accounts, you smile and nod at each other with deep satisfaction and say, “Boy, that customer is just so great. They love us and we love them. Isn’t that just perfect?”

And then you move on to the next customer on your list, never realizing that you might as well have just thrown a bunch of cash out the window because of the cheap marketing opportunity you missed.

To make sure you don’t repeat this mistake, we offer you five ways to get that perfect customer to sell your products for you. Two words: case study.

1. Ask

Yes, we know we’re stating the obvious here, but we find it never hurts to do so. The fact is that if you have great relationships with your customers – your product solved their problem or enabled them to grow or corner a market – then simply ask them if you can share their success story with other potential customers. Chances are they’ll say yes. People like to help each other and contribute to one another’s success.

Important: when you do ask, be very specific about how you plan to promote and distribute the information. If you want to post the case study to your website, your social media marketing outlets, and send it out in your customer newsletter, then ask permission for each specific activity. You don’t want to inadvertently damage your great relationship when the case study starts popping up across the digital universe but your customer didn’t realize it would get that level of exposure.

2. Seize the opportunity

Once they say yes, jump on the opportunity right away, while the success of the project is still fresh in everyone’s collective memory and everyone’s still feeling good about it. Set up an appointment for a phone call or visit, where possible, to get started.

Be sure to have a series of questions in mind (or better yet, on paper) that will facilitate you getting the information you need to tell their story.

3. Make it easy peesy

Make it so easy for your customer to work with you on this that they barely notice the effort. Remember, you’re the one asking for their help, so make it super easy for them to give it to you.

Find out how your contact prefers to communicate with you on this case study. Many customers find the “interview” method – whereby the person writing the case study (see step 4) conducts a phone or in-person interview designed to get the story – the easiest because all they have to do is talk. However, we’ve noticed that with the line blurring between work and home, more and more customers are asking us to email them the questions so they can work on them at their convenience.

Either way, be sure to stay on top of the project or it could easily fizzle out.

4. Go with a professional

This is where the real value of a case study comes in – by having a professional writer, especially one who specializes in storytelling – write up the customer’s success story.

If you have people on staff who can do this, wonderful. If you don’t, you really do need to hire a professional writer who can approach the project and the customer more objectively than you and your staff. Because a professional writer doesn’t already know the facts or the people involved, she’s more likely to approach the story with a fresh set of eyes and tell it in simple, plain language that a majority of readers will understand.

You may even want to hire the writer just after step 1 so she can handle the whole shebang for you.

5. Check the fine print

Before you post or otherwise distribute the case study, run it by your legal team and the customer whose story you’re telling one last time to be sure it doesn’t violate any non-disclosure or other contractual obligations you may have. Even if you and your customer do have strong contractual disclosure language, most professional writers should still be able to write a case study that’s compelling without sharing too many details.

However, you may do business in an industry where your customers are not comfortable with or just not able to share their success story publicly. In cases like these, you should still ask for short testimonials with the information the customer is willing to share. A testimonial saying “Widget Co. helped us secure our position in the Fortune 100 through their dynamic management consulting services,” demonstrates brand loyalty and trust without sharing details and is invaluable on a website or in a promotional piece.

Now that you’ve covered all five steps, be sure to:

  • Distribute the customer success story as far and wide as the customer has agreed to. Consider sending out a press release about the success of the project and attach the case story as backup material.
  • Start lining up additional customers to agree to participate in case studies. There’s no such thing as having too many!

Reinvention in six words? More like 30…

I finally made some time this past week to (very slightly) catch up on some reading (being under the weather and somewhat captive to the couch helped, too) and stumbled upon two articles from different magazines that inspired me enough to rise and return to life.

As a longtime David Bowie fan (he’s in my top five list), I couldn’t wait to read “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust: How David Bowie Changed the World” in the February 2, 2012, issue of Rolling Stone magazine. This article, by Mikal Gilmore, chronicles Bowie’s rise from unknown pop singer to androgynous glam-rock god and beyond. It’s an interesting, if somewhat meandering, look at how Bowie created various personas to distance himself from the mental illnesses that ran in his family, or so the author claims.

David Bowie is clearly an accomplished musician and songwriter as well as a complex person who has been dubbed a “chameleon” many, many times. As I was reading the piece, however, I couldn’t help seeing Bowie as an inspiring master of reinvention. Of new chapters. Of soaking up everything he learned from people he met to create a new and improved David. A very changed David, in many cases.

And who of us hasn’t either done that, or dreamed of doing that? Perhaps not on as big a scale as David Bowie, but big enough for our stories to be changed in some way.

Still musing about the Bowie article, I picked up another magazine from the ever-growing pile; this time, the February, 2012, issue of O: The Oprah Magazine (hey, I like this magazine!). After flipping through the pages and catching up with my favorite columnists, I came across a feature titled “You…in six words.” This feature spread was a collection of six-word personal stories, inspired by the “Six-Word Memior ®” contest held in 2006 by SMITH Magazine, which has kept collecting the memoirs on its website for over five years.

Some of my favorites from the O spread:

Surfing life’s ripples, wishing for waves. – Karen Barbier, 49

Might as well eat that cookie. – Paula Deen, TV chef, 63 (wonder if she regrets that one since her public admission that she has type II diabetes…?)

Old too soon. Smart too late. – Ibis Kramer, 75

Loving heart for sale. Like new. – Ariel Faulkner, 25

As I laid there with visions of Ziggy Stardust, Alladin Sane, and the Thin White Duke swirling around in my head and thinking about what six words I would use to tell my story, I thought that many of us, like David Bowie, probably needed more than six words to tell our stories as they changed and shifted. I mean, if I wrote a 6-word memoir back when I was 18, would it still hold up today? Likely not, but it would still be valid. Surely, people like David and I had a right to at least 12 or even 18 words, given how many things we’ve done and changes we’ve made? (Hey! Another connection – one of my favorite Bowie songs, “Changes,” from 1971’s Hunky Dory album – the anthem to reinvention)

And so, I think there should be a new rule: anyone who has written a number of life chapters and gone through a lot of ch ch ch changes can write more than one six-word memoir to tell their story. I myself would want to use about five sets of six words (for a total of 30 if you’re keeping score) to describe each chapter. The latest? “Got off the ladder. Creativity abounds!”

Oh right; almost forgot the post’s punchline. If you’re in business, your company is probably reinventing itself on a regular basis (and if you’re not, you risk falling by the wayside, but that’s a topic for another article). Be sure that your marketing plans include updating your image and your customers on the new and improved you – hire Lockstock to help!

Renovations aren’t just on HGTV

This week we started working on a fun and exciting new project – helping to redesign the website of a heavy lift trucking company. Redesign our website today!As we got started doing our usual thing – brainstorming web marketing strategy, helping the client to develop a brand and a brand image, etc. – we were reminded just how profoundly a site redesign can change how you do business and impact your bottom line.

Redesign, refresh, rework, rebuild, redo, renovate – any of these terms will work to describe the act of taking the time to really look at your website and determining what, if anything, it’s doing for you and what it’s not doing for you that you know it could.

Take the example of FaviEntertainment.com, a website that sells consumer electronics manufactured by its parent company, Favi Entertainment. Favi Entertainment had grown into a top electronics manufacturer but saw only $5,700 in revenue from its site in 2010.

Jeremy Yakel, Favi Entertainment’s owner knew why: the site was too busy and not at all well-organized. Overall, the site’s user experience was not conducive to selling the company’s products. Yakel decided that only a complete redesign and an accompanying shift in web strategy would turn the situation around.

The result? After investing only about $3,900 for the site redesign and taking several essential steps to make it easy for customers to find the site and purchase products on it, FaviEntertainment.com brought in more than $183,000 in the first three quarters of 2011.

Getting back to our new client, the trucking company, we have big plans for them with this project: a professional website that gets across the company’s brand, its specialized services, and the high ratings it consistently gets from customers and partners. How? Professional and pleasing design, customer stories (or case studies), vivid photographs of the fleet in action, and compelling web marketing copy.

If you’re ready to go from four figures in online sales to six, contact us today!

 


We’ve got a relly big shoe for you tonight. Please welcome…scientists!

Video series asks today’s leading scientists to tell their stories

If you’re like me, fascinated by science and its continued evolution and exploration but usually unable to make it through esoteric science journals without falling asleep, then you may want to check out “Cambridge Nights: Conversations About a Life in Science,” a series of interviews with academic scientists intended to give them the space to share their views and thoughts. Or, in other words, to tell their stories.

Cesar Hidalgo interviews Marshall Van Alstyne

Cesar Hidalgo interviews Marshall Van Alstyne

The series, brainchild of César Hidalgo, ABC Career Development Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and an assistant professor at MIT, wrapped up its first season at the end of November with eight videos of interviews with scientists who find themselves conducting research or teaching at leading universities in the Boston/Cambridge area of Massachusetts. The videos range from 20 to 45 minutes, with the last 10 or so dedicated to the subject’s personal life, career choices, and development.

Watching and listening to the interviews with some of today’s thought leaders, in which they describe their current work and theory as well as how they got to this point in their lives, makes the scientist’s specialty – and the scientist himself (so far all the interviews are with men) – more accessible and interactive than reading a research paper. Don’t get me wrong, research papers and journals are extremely important for the scientific world and community, but for us interested laypeople, the storytelling in the “Cambridge Nights” videos allows us to get a good basic understanding of the subject matter and the person behind it, perhaps spurring us on to deeper interest and reading.

For example, listen to Luis Bettencourt’s interview and you’ll hear him explain why people who live in New York City walk much faster than people who live in Topeka, Kansas, and why, contrary to what you’d think, large cities are less energy-intensive than more spread-out areas. Bettencourt, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a former researcher at the Las Alamos National Laboratory, then goes on to talk about how he eventually made his way to the U.S. and why he thinks that right now is not only an exciting but downright historical time for science in the U.S. and why so many scientists are coming here to work on issues together.

Or maybe Marshall Van Alstyne speaking about information exchange and “information markets” within companies and broader organizations is more up your alley. Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University and a researcher at the MIT Center for Digital Business, explains that sharing information is a big productivity and profit booster within a company, but also presents challenges like how to motivate top performers to share information with average or low performers. Van Alstyne also discusses “information markets” across organizations or within a field of specialty. He cites the example of the Google.org Flu Trends page and how sharing data and data analysis can help people see trends and make decisions using that information.

A highlight for me was listening to Lant Pritchett discuss why he thinks the education world is too obsessed with “schooling” rather than educating and how and why governments control the curriculum of public schools. Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, also explains how his time as a missionary in Argentina influenced his career choices and why he’s a professor of “the practice” of international development and not solely a researcher of international development.

All in all, the talk show, even without a witty opening monologue, house band, and stupid pet tricks, is another great example of how using stories to explain complex ideas to plain old people can hook us into listening/watching/reading/consuming.

Tell your story and they will buy

Storytelling, marketing, telling stories to sell more, branding

Good stories open doors

Storytelling is huge for business

What if you could increase your sales $80 million over last year’s numbers simply by adding more personal information about you, your company, and your products? “Hogwash!” you say? Not according to the January issue of Entrepreneur® magazine.

In her article titled “What’s Your Story?” author Jennifer Wang explains that consistently articulating a personal or company history through products, services, and branding generates customer loyalty and can make a company stand out in relation to its competitors.

However, a quick scan of corporate websites reveals that a large number are still not effectively using their web presence to tell their story. Many companies don’t use their “About Us” page to make an emotional connection to their customers, partners, and investors, instead listing products or services or simply describing the “cold, hard facts” of the company’s history. The problem with this approach is that cold, hard facts mean little to consumers who want to identify with a company’s brand and feel good about their purchases.

“These days, corporate-weary customers…want to know the story of what they’re buying, who is selling it and what causes it may support. In a business landscape where success hinges on establishing a personal connection with customers and investors, the “About Us” page has become prime real estate,” Wang writes.

But companies shouldn’t stop there. Telling a product’s story can be just as important as telling the company’s story. Just ask Stauer, the Minnesota-based jewelry and watch retailer that saw the $80 million increase in sales from 2010 to 2011. Check out Stauer’s website for product descriptions that relay the history of the product’s design.

Owner Mike Bisceglia reminds us that although companies may know and love their own products, customers still need to be “romanced” into purchasing. How? By telling the story of the product’s design, history, or origin or of its eco-friendly and sustainable materials.

Having been “romanced” into buying the Pet Rock, we can relate to that.

Need your story told? Contact us today!

Motivation from unexpected places

One of my great pleasures each week is to sit down with the Sunday New York Times and a big cup o’ Joe. I’m talking the real, printed, covered-in-newsprint-ink-when-you’re-done New York Times; not on a digital reader or computer screen (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

I love the NYT and I’ve been reading it for years. I can easily while away hours when I have the time to read it from cover to cover. I’ll admit to loving – still – the Magazine, the Style section (can’t believe she wore that hat with that dress!), and the Business section where the different schools of thought in business, economics, and politics duke it out. But my guiltiest reading pleasure in the Sunday Times…?

The Obituaries.

That’s right; I love reading about other people’s lives, even if it is on the sad occasion of their deaths. Reading the obits – especially those in the Times because they cover the lives and deaths of remarkable people from around the world – is a great way to learn about the people who’ve recently passed as well as the era in which they lived, and, most inspiring, the impact many of these people have had on our lives even if we didn’t know it before reading their obituaries.

For example, this past Sunday’s times included an obituary for Betty Haas Pfister, who died on November 17 at the age of 90. Ms. Haas, a pilot since 1942, undoubtedly made a difference in my life, entering a field and a war (she was a member of the 1,074-strong WASPs in WWII) where few women were allowed. In later years, Ms. Haas worked as an aircraft mechanic and then bought and flew her own plane in competitions and races, twice winning the All Women’s International Air Race. I, like all women in the U.S. today, have people like Ms. Haas to thank for paving the way to greater equality for women. And how exciting to read about her life and feel that connection on some lazy Sunday?!

For what is an obituary – at least a well-written obituary – after all, but a story? The story of someone’s life and often a celebration of  that life. Which leads me to my next point: what would any of us want our obituary to say, and what do we do to be sure that it says that? How do we want someone to feel after they’ve read our obituaries?

Thinking about this can be a strong motivator. It’s enough to prompt me to think about what my life story is so far and what additional accomplishments I want celebrated in my obituary. And with our life stories still being written each and every day, the content of our obituaries – the stories of our lives –  is completely in our control.

 

 

The sisters are doing it for themselves

Hello! Maggie Evans, Lockstock founder and chief storyteller, here with an exciting announcement. I bugged my sister enough that she’s finally agreed to become part of Lockstock Communications! Yay!

So let me introduce to you the one and only Phyllis Moroney.

Phyllis comes to us with a background in journalism and copywriting. Being a power social media consumer for many years (I think Groupon has a framed picture of her up on their wall), she’s the perfect choice to lead our social media marketing department. So, if you need someone to create and manage Facebook and Linkedin pages, start a Twitter account, and write and manage your blog, tweet for you, etc., we’re now ready for your business!

Contact us today to get started!

Check out our new website!

Hey, Lockstock fans! Check out our new company website and let us know what you think.

It’s been an interesting journey finally getting to the point when we’re ready to go live with our site. You know the old saying, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes?” Well, that’s been our situation. But we finally finished making the shoes, and we’re ready to walk all over the web with them.

So, when you have a “spare” moment (“as if,” right? But hey, it’s us and we know you’ll do it for us), send your feedback to info@lockstockcommunications.com or post comments on Facebook.

–Maggie and Phyllis