Points and perks expire. What lasts is the company’s “personality,” as well as a two-way relationship with the customer that reinforces the brand

But how does a company ensure that its loyalty program achieves effective share of heart? Here are five principles to consider:

Roots of Loyalty

The first principal may be counterintuitive to those who work so hard trying to create committed customers: Loyalty is natural. Think about it. Identify with someone or something, then reinforce the credibility of our beliefs and one way we do that is by forming loyalties to them. So we give them repeat business and brag about them to our friends.

Appealing to the Heart

The second principle: behavior often comes from the heart.

We care about performers because we empathize with them. They lay themselves out for us—whether it’s an actor demonstrating raw emotion, a musician performing passionately, or an athlete leaving it all on the field. The common thread is vulnerability, the willingness to expose themselves and take a risk. And that creates a heartfelt response which makes us want to attend the movie, buy the CD, or sit in sub-zero temperatures watching the game (at full price, mind you).

Take Your Time

Love takes time. It’s as true in business as it is in romance.

A Two-Way Street

The fourth principle may be the most significant because of the damage that can be caused by ignoring it. Put simply, relationships are reciprocal.

True relationships develop along the lines of give-and-take. Relationships develop only so far as trust develops. And trust develops only by mutual disclosure and the circumspect protection of valuable information. The more data you collect on your customers, the greater the danger that the give-and-take balance will get out of whack.

It’s More than Numbers

Fifth, just because you can’t precisely measure something (or measure it easily) doesn’t mean it’s not working. We don’t know how poetry moves the heart but our lives would be much less fulfilling without it.

Behavior tends to get measured because it can be measured. But measurement can create its own reality and cause the loyalty marketing focus to become too narrowly defined.

Be polite, be respectful, and be patient with your loyalty marketing efforts and you’ll find that they not only increase short-term transactions but drive long-term affection as well. That affection will pay off for years to come, long after the points and perks expire.

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The essence of marketing is to understand you customers’ needs and develop a plan that surrounds those needs to create your offers. Let’s face it anyone that has a business has a need and desire to grow their business. The most effective way to grow and expand your business is by focusing on organic growth.

You can increase organic growth in four different ways. They are:

• Acquire more customers
• Persuade each customer to buy more products
• Persuade each customer to buy more expensive products or up selling each customer
• Persuade each customer to buy more profitable products

All four of these increase your revenue and profit. Let me encourage you to focus on the first which is to acquire more customers. Why? By acquiring more customers you increase your customer base and your revenues then come from a larger base.

How can you use marketing to acquire more customers?

• Create a strategic plan and spend time researching and planning.
• Guide your product development to reach out to customers you aren’t currently attracting.
• Price your products and services competitively.
• Develop your message and materials based on solution marketing.

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Macromarketing addresses big/important issues at the nexus of marketing and society. The principal scholarly outlet for macromarketing research is the Journal of Macromarketing. In a more interconnected world of markets, marketers, and their stakeholders, macromarketing is an important mechanism to study both opportunities and shortcomings of marketing, and both its intended positive effects and unintended deleterious effects. Macromarketing therefore includes an optimistic perspective; it seeks functional mechanisms to enhance marketing processes and systems, to the benefit of the largest number of stakeholders, the world over. The following text borrows heavily from Shultz (2007; in press).

Macromarketing today

Today, macromarketing continues to morph, to draw new and diverse followers, and thus it defies neat boundaries, descriptors, and limitations. With its growth and maturation have come new directions in the forms of sub-disciplines, as described by the section editors on the webpage for the Journal of Macromarketing.

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Also

Marketing is the act of communicating with your customers. You have to tell them that your product or service exists, so that they can buy it. You have to present it. Then you have to continue presenting it, continue explaining it and continue selling it. That’s marketing. When you stop marketing, you stop selling. It’s that simple. The more money you can continue to spend on marketing the more successful your business will be.

Macro Marketing is the art of using every possible applicable, appropriate tactic available to simultaneously communicate to the target audience the benefits of buying your product or service.

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If you are like the majority of small business owners your marketing budget is limited. The most effective way to market your company is to create a well rounded program that combines sales activities with your marketing tactics. Your sales activities will not only decrease your out-of-pocket marketing expense but it also adds the value of interacting with your prospective customers and clients. This is priceless.Small businesses typically have a limited marketing budget if any at all. Does that mean you can’t run with the big dogs? Absolutely not. It just means you have to think a little more creatively.  How about launching your marketing campaign by doing one of the following:

• Call your vendors or associates and ask them to participate with you in co-op advertising.
• Take some time to send your existing customers’ referrals and buying incentives.
• Have you thought about introducing yourself to the media? Free publicity has the potential to boost your business. Position yourself as an expert in your field.
• Invite people into your store by piggybacking onto an event. What about a concert coming to town, willing to sell those tickets for them? If not, how about a walkathon that is taking place in your area, why not be public outreach and distribute their material?

When you do spend money on marketing, don’t forget to create a way to track those marketing efforts. You can do this by coding your ads, using multiple toll-free telephone numbers, and asking prospects where they heard about you. This enables you to notice when a marketing tactic stops working. You can then quickly replace it with a better choice or method.

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Understanding customers and examining their role in the marketing process is very important.  We will see that for most organizations understanding customers is necessary not only because of their effect on marketing decisions but because customers’ activities influence the entire organization.

Yet, understanding customers is a never-ending challenge.  One reason is that not all customers are the same and, consequently, benefits sought by one customer may differ from those sought by another.  Because of this marketers must continually conduct marketing research to evaluate customers and to determine what they want.  And uncovering what customers want is made significantly easier if a company establishes methods designed to manage their customers.

In this tutorial we explore the techniques marketers use to manage their customers.  We begin by defining what a customer is and why they are important to an organization.  We then look at what tools and strategies must be in place to skillfully manage customers including the crucial requirement that marketers build relationships with their customers.  Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how servicing customers is often just as critical as selling products to them.

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What Are Patents, Trademarks, Servicemarks, and Copyrights?

Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there may be some similarities among these kinds of intellectual property protection, they are different and serve different purposes.

What Is a Patent?

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. U.S. patent grants are effective only within the United States, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions. Under certain circumstances, patent term extensions or adjustments may be available.

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

There are three types of patents:

1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;

2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and

3) Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms “trademark” and “mark” are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the USPTO. The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described on a separate page entitled “Basic Facts about Trademarks” (http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/).

What Is a Copyright?

Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

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Here are words and acronyms you may see in the search marketing literature or hear in conversation.

Affiliate Marketing – A marketing revenue sharing arrangement by which an affiliate site refers potential buyers to a merchant’s site in return for payment.

Baseline Metrics – Typically, web site data from a specific point in time, often just before the inception of an Internet marketing campaign, which can be compared to similar types of data from a later date to assess the effectiveness of the marketing campaign.

CPA – Cost Per Acquisition. The total cost of an ad campaign divided by the number of conversions.

CPC – Cost Per Click. The price that a search engine charges an advertiser for every click sent to the advertiser’s web site.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand. The cost per one thousand impressions, typically charged by context-based networks for online search ads

CTR – Click-Through Rate. The number of clicks that a search ad gets, divided by the total number of impressions for that ad.

Conversion Rate – The percentage of prospects take a desired action, such as downloading a white paper, or buying a product

DKI – Dynamic Keyword Insertion. A search advertising technique that involves placing the exact keywords that a searcher uses in the title of the ad served

Geo-Targeting – A service offered by some search engines whereby a search ad is shown only to searchers from a specific geographic location, such as a city or state or selection of states.

Impression – One display of a search ad. If an ad has 1,000 impressions in a week, it has been served or shown to one thousand searchers during that period.

Keyword – A single word used by searchers to find information about a topic, such as “football.”

Keyword Phrase – Two or more keywords relating to a specific topic, such as “college football,” or “USC football.”

Keyword Stemming – The process of expanding a keyword list by going back to the root of the word and adding prefixes and suffixes, or the plural form.

KPI – Key Performance Indicators are key metrics used to quantify the success of a marketing campaign.

Landing Page – The page that a web searcher is taken to after clicking on an ad. Advertisers create these pages in such a way as to maximize the chance that the searcher will take the desired action (convert) after seeing the page.

Long Tail – Keyword phrases will three of more words in them. These keyword phrases are searched on less frequently, but often by more serious searchers.

Meta Tags – Information imbedded in the code for a web page that is intended for search engine robots to help them index a site. Human visitors can only see the meta tags by examining a page’s source code.

Organic Results – Listings on search engine results pages that are not paid for; listings that are served because the search engine presumes their content is relevant to a given search.

PPC – Pay Per Click. In search advertising, a revenue model whereby an advertiser pays an agreed amount every time someone clicks on an ad.

Paid Listings – Listings that search engines sell to advertisers.

Personas – Refers to an online marketing technique developed by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, whereby marketers plan web site content and advertising around specific personas, or types of people, who may visit the site.

ROAS – Return on Advertising Spending, calculated by dividing the profit generated by an ad campaign by the cost of that campaign.

ROI – Return on Investment. Expressed as a percentage; if a search campaign costs $150,000 and the return is $200,000, the ROI would be $200,000 – $150,000/ $150,000 or 33%.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. The process of editing a site’s content to make it more visible to the search engines.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page. The page served by a search engine when a search is done on a keyword.

Search Engine – A database of web pages.

Tier I Search Engines – The most important search engines, as judged by the number of searches conduced, currently includes Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.

Tier II Search Engines – Smaller search engines, such as Ask.com and AOL, as well as more vertical search engines, as well as web meta-crawlers that display the results of many search engines.

Tier III Search Engines – Usually, networks that display contextual ads, usually on a Cost per Thousand (CPM) basis.

Unique Visitor – A critical web analytical measure that tracks each visitor to a site by the originating computer’s IP address, so that, for example, one person’s multiple visits to a site from the same computer over a given period of time will be counted as just one Unique Visitor.

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Before you learn more about marketing, you should get a basic impression of what marketing is. See What’s “Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Public Relations and Publicity, and Sales?”. Basically, you might look at marketing as the wide range of activities involved in making sure that you’re continuing to meet the needs of your customers and are getting appropriate value in return. Think about marketing as “inbound” and “outbound” marketing. (In the following, consider “product” to be either a tangible product or a service — nonprofits often refer to these as “programs”.)Inbound Marketing Includes Market Research to Find Out:

1. What specific groups of potential customers/clients (markets) might have which specific needs (nonprofits often already have a very clear community need in mind when starting out with a new program — however, the emerging practice of nonprofit business development, or earned income development, often starts by researching a broad group of clients to identify new opportunities for programs)
2. How those needs might be met for each group (or target market), which suggests how a product might be designed to meet the need (nonprofits might think in terms of outcomes, or changes, to accomplish among the groups of clients in order to meet the needs)
3. How each of the target markets might choose to access the product, etc. (its “packaging”)
4. How much the customers/clients might be willing pay and how (pricing analysis)
5. Who the competitors are (competitor analysis)
6. How to design and describe the product such that customers/clients will buy from the organization, rather than from its competitors (its unique value proposition)
7. How the product should be identified — its personality — to be most identifiable (its naming and branding)

Outbound Marketing Includes:

1. Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
2. Sales
3. Public and media relations (focused on the entire organization)
4. Customer service
5. Customer satisfaction

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Includes:

1. Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
2. Sales
3. Public and media relations (focused on the entire organization)
4. Customer service
5. Customer satisfaction

When you jump right into outbound marketing, you push products onto people who really don’t want the products at all. When your inbound marketing is effective, you would have effective outbound marketing and sales.

Research:

1. What specific groups of potential customers/clients (markets) might have which specific needs
2. How those needs might be met for each group (or target market), which suggests how a product might be designed to meet the need
3. How each of the target markets might choose to access the product, etc. (its “packaging”)
4. How much the customers/clients might be willing pay and how (pricing analysis)
5. Who the competitors are (competitor analysis)
6. How to design and describe the product such that customers/clients will buy from the organization, rather than from its competitors (its unique value proposition)
7. How the product should be identified — its personality — to be most identifiable (its naming and branding)

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