Marketing Chameleon
The hardest and most rewarding part of my life as the CEO and CCO of ASMM Digital is the education that comes along with a new client. At ASMM, we pride ourselves on being a "different kind of marketing agency." What does that mean? It means that we become our clients online. We are not only posting for them but responding to their posts as though we were them. Because we can say that in one sentence, you might believe that's easy. It's not.
We take this part of our jobs very seriously. We know that to pull it off well, we must do several things well:
Understand The Owner's Motives
The difficulty here is that owner's don't always understand their motives. They may say that they started the business to feed their kids. They may say that they enjoy making widgets. Or, they may just shrug their shoulders and not have a clue. Our job, from the first meeting is to pull out the snippets, put those snippets aside, and then rearrange them to form a complete motive. Understanding why a person started their business, why they keep pushing forward even though success seems to be escaping them and why they truly love their business even on the hardest days, gives us a starting point to their marketing plan.
Recreate Their Voice
We had a really great call from one of our non-profit clients, Warrior Music Foundation recently. He wanted to share a story with us.
He started by telling us that he had received a text from a one of his donors. It was clear from the text that she was carrying on a conversation she believed they had had. But he thought maybe he was losing his mind because he had not spoken with her in weeks. Suddenly, he realized what happened and switched over to Facebook Pages. Sure enough there in his inbox was a full conversation that had been going on for days.
"If I had not known better, I would have sworn I had typed those messages," he said, "but I know it was your team. "
He was in absolute awe of how much we were able to simulate his voice and his message with his donor.
That is always our goal. It is what we work for with every client but it does not come without work. We have to truly know our clients in order to be able to do recreate their voice that well. We have to have built a relationship with that client. ASMM Digital is built on relationships.
That's why we are picky about the types of clients we take on. A "set it and forget it" client is very difficult for us. They want us to run their posts and answer their posts without their input. They want to give us their account and walk away for a year or even two. The danger there is that our voice can easily become theirs and it becomes clear to their customers that it is just marketing. In a world where being more human is the most important part of a campaign, "just marketing" is almost dead.
Understand Their Business Backwards and Forwards
This is the part that inspired me to write this article today. Today I am working on a new account. BL Technical Services out of Baltimore. This takes a lot of work but it also allows us to create posts that will represent his company and it allows us to respond to comments or messages in a coherent way. This is the part of our job that takes the longest because we have to always have our learning caps on.
A new question may stump us, but finding the answer now will make our jobs easier down the road. This is the part that makes us stand out. There is no way to say it but to say it. This is the part where we shine. As we move forward with a client we become fluent in their business's language. We can answer questions that would normally interrupt their days and our staff is trained to treat every question as a sales call so that we can forward these hot leads onto our client.
I am a chameleon. Today I will be a computer systems engineer before slowly morphing into a sales coach and finally into the king of networking. This is the part that keeps my life interesting. It is the hardest but most rewarding part of my life as a business owner.