adam qureshi

Marketing has become everything you do. Everyone in your organization is a marketer.

In classical management thinking, marketing, advertising and branding were often separate from the product and company. This is a particular type of thinking best associated with what is called Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), but has become popular for all types of products and services.

For many FMCG goods there is essentially no difference between competing products. So, marketers are employed to invent a difference. They do this through association and repetition; essentially psychological and emotional manipulation and trickery.

Sometimes it’s about story telling. You tell a funny or interesting story to the consumer and they repay you by buying your product. In many ways, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Exciting, funny stories and fantasy make life interesting. We pay a little extra not to be bored.

The problem is that this sort of marketing has become commonplace. Marketers think that this is marketing and branding in general, rather than the product-specific type of marketing it really is. So many marketers dream of having big ad budgets. They think that their heroic marketing is convincing those who have absolutely no interest in your product that they now absolutely MUST have it.

The Web reflects an empowered, engaged consumer who sees past many of the traditional marketing tricks. “At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company,” Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill write in a July 2011 article for McKinsey Quarterly.

Kristin Zhivago is one of the smartest marketers I know. In her new book, Roadmap To Revenue, she states: “Stop trying to “sell” and “market”. Instead, start to figure out how to make the purchase easier for the customers who would benefit from your product or services.”

This is an essential point. A few days ago I searched for “digital watches”. Did I want to buy a car, jeans, glasses, house, gloves, pension plan? What were the chances of a big banner ad trying to sell me home insurance? Here’s what I wanted to buy. You’ve guessed it, yes, I knew you would, because you’re very clever and perceptive. What I wanted to buy and what I did buy was a digital watch.

There’s a growing number of consumers out there who know what they want to buy, or at least have a very good idea. Many of these customers judge your brand first and foremost based on your service, not your product or fancy advertising. Part of this service is the self service simplicity of your website. How easy is it to use? Does it give real answers to specific questions?

At Zappos they state that, “Customer service isn’t just a department. We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple… We’ve aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.”

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Talk about hitting two birds with one stone: Besides Facebook, Twitter is another social-media site threatened by Google+.

Users of Google’s new social network have found it is essentially a “Twitterbook” hybrid. As with Twitter, users can follow large numbers of people. As with Facebook, users control who they share information with. You can broadcast to everyone on the network or share photos of a night out with friends only.

Facebook, at least, is taking Google+ seriously enough to conduct reconnaissance on the service. Facebook product manager Sam Lessin has been posting test messages, presumably to understand how the service works. “Why are you following me?” he asks his nearly 2,200 followers on the site. Facebook director of product Blake Ross goes a step further. A recent posting of his encouraged users to contact Facebook’s vice president for user feedback—via Google+.

source:WSJ.com - Overheard: Socially Active http://on.wsj.com/phvJUf

The first step in top task management is carrying out a task situation analysis in order to understand the whole range of customer tasks that exist. I call this list of customer tasks the ‘Longlist.’

The following longlist sources are specifically for a public website, but the basic approach to building a longlist works just as well for an intranet. (However, you can’t really look at ‘competitor’ intranets, and using public web search statistics is not relevant from an intranet perspective.)

Start with organization strategy. Analyze corporate philosophy, vision and strategy statements. What does the organization want to achieve over the next 5 years and how much of that does it want to achieve on the Web? It is very important that you link your website strategy to the organization’s overall strategy. This seems obvious but you wouldn’t believe how many websites are disconnected from core organizational aims and objectives.

Talk to key stakeholders: Find out what key people within the organization think the website’s purpose is. What do they think the customer’s top tasks are? What do they think the top tasks should be? Tip: Sometimes we deliberately include stakeholder tasks in the final list that we know won’t get a big vote. But then we can say, look, this task didn’t get many votes.

Examine the existing website: A good way to gather tasks is to copy level 1 and 2 of the website classification into the longlist. Another good source is the site index.

Collect top search terms: Get the top 50-100 search terms over a 12 month period for your search engine. With the English National Health Service (NHS) Choices we used Google Adwords to find out the top health related terms that people were searching for on Google. 

Competitor websites: Examine four to six competitor websites, taking tasks from the homepage and second levels of these websites.

Relevant media (including social media): Are there magazines, blogs, specialist industry websites, associations, Twitter feeds, etc. that might have relevant tasks?

Customer feedback and research: What are the most common customer inquiries and complaints? Talk to support, help and sales staff to get this sort of data. Are there surveys or other research that show what tasks customers come to the website to complete?

For a large project, I recommend doing 10-20 customer interviews. These interviews don’t usually uncover new tasks outside those already discovered as a result of analyzing the sources above. However, interviews are great for getting a feel for how the customer thinks. Make these interviews very short (about 15 minutes), using the following format:
Brief introduction

It’s important that you are as comprehensive and thorough as possible in gathering your tasks. Remember, top task management is an evidence-based approach. You don’t want someone saying later that you missed an important task.

Depending on the size of the website the initial list of tasks may range from 300 to 1,000. For example, for the NHS Choices website, we had almost 1,000 initial tasks. Next issue I will describe how to go about cleaning up the tasks and bringing them to a much shorter list.

Source:www.gerrymcgovern.com