Be Different or be dead

March 26, 2022

Three easy ways you can market how you treat your employees

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From a business and a human standpoint, you must treat employees well. First, well taken care of employees work better. Second, it takes more than a good product or service to convert today’s consumer into a customer. People look deeper into a brand and business before making a purchase.

Specifically, how a company treats its employees influences a person’s purchase decisions. For example, say a consumer wants to purchase clothing from a boutique. The clothes may be amazing, but if the boutique has a reputation for shady workplace practices and mistreating employees, it will likely dissuade them from making a purchase.

Because consumers focus more on employee treatment and company culture before supporting a business, company leaders should prioritize marketing how they treat their employees.

This article will dive into tips for successfully marketing how you treat your employees, and how treating your workers well gives your business a competitive advantage. But, first, let’s talk about why it’s important to treat employees well.

Why it’s important to treat employees well

It’s important to treat employees well because when they feel supported and valued, they’re more likely to do their best work for your company.

Also, it positively affects your customer service when you treat your employees as more than just warm bodies. They’ll do more than list the functions and features of your products or services. Instead, your employees will become advocates for your customers and do everything they can to ensure your customers get the most out of your brand and their purchases.

On the other hand, when employees are overworked, underpaid, and undervalued, they are unlikely to treat customers well and they’re probably going to leave the company sooner than later.

Companies that fail to treat their employees well are losing them in droves.

How customers view companies that treat their employees well

Customers view companies that are good to their employees as trustworthy.

Trust is the foundation of every relationship, including customer relationships. When customers see how much your employees trust your business, they feel more comfortable moving forward with your company.

All in all, when you create trust-filled relationships with potential customers, they’re more likely to become actual customers and loyal ones at that. And you can use marketing how you treat your employees as a vehicle for creating that trust.

Three easy ways you can market how you treat your employees:

#1. Create content around your company culture

One of the main things to focus on when marketing how you treat your employees is content. You must create content around your company culture, employees, and the behind-the-scenes of your operation.

For example, let’s say you’re making remote work a permanent part of your workforce. In that case, you must be mindful of people who are skeptical of remote work because of the lack of support for these employees. If you’ve built a comprehensive employee recognition program for remote workers, create content about it and market it.

You can also create content that focuses on the following to highlight how well you treat your employees:

● Compensation and benefits packages
● Your company’s mission and values
● A day in the life of each employee
● What each team in your company does
● How each employee contributes to excellent customer service
● Employee accomplishments and milestones
● Personal employee stories
● Company culture

#2. Share how you support your employees on social media

Company leaders worldwide can attest to the power of social media in their businesses. You can boost brand recognition and awareness, in particular, on social media by connecting with potential and current customers.

Social media is also beneficial when sharing content on how you treat your employees. For instance, one of your employees can do a social media takeover and share a day in their life at work. You can tell your brand’s story in a series of posts. Or you can create content that talks openly and honestly about things most companies don’t talk about, like wages and benefits.

Whatever content you share on social media about how you take care of your employees, be sure it’s emotionally intelligent, genuine, and that your company culture is embedded in it.

#3. Appeal to the “anti-work” crowd

Anti-workers are focused on ending work as we know it. They aren’t against making money. They’re against the mistreatment, inadequate support, and toxic work habits that find their ways into many workplaces.

If you treat your employees so well that even the “anti-work” movement says, “If you have to work somewhere, work here,” customers, potential employees, and the like will come running. 

Focus on how the “anti-work” crowd perceives you. What are people who hate work saying about your company, its culture, and how you treat employees? Create a workplace environment that makes a person who despises working for someone else want to work for you.

Ultimately, if you can get the “anti-workers” to say nothing but good things about your company culture and employee treatment, it will go a long way with your customers.

Conclusion

Attracting customers by marketing how you treat your employees can’t be achieved overnight. Consumers are more knowledgeable and empowered than ever before. So, you must connect with them in ways that don’t involve selling your products and services.

Start by showing them who you are by highlighting how well you take care of your employees.

— Jori Hamilton is an experienced writer residing in the Pacific Northwest U.S. She covers a wide range of topics but takes a particular interest in covering topics related to wellness and mental health. To learn more about Jori, you can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Posted 3.26.22 at 03:34 am by Roy Osing
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March 21, 2022

Why brands that don’t say how you’re different are useless

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Why brands that don’t say how you’re different are useless.

I recently did a podcast with Shannon Peel of BrandAPeel on the subject of branding, and it reminded me that there are shortfalls (with solutions) in the way branding is currently done that need to be covered once again.

I’ve written on the problems that I see with organizational mission statements and generally with relying on general aspirational statements of intent to define what people/organizations do and the value they create for others.

What Google says

If you Google ‘examples of brand statements’, this is the type of information you get.

“I help individuals reassess their life choices to discover their true paths to success.”

“I develop sustainable business models and marketing strategies to fuel small business growth.”

“I help manufacturing organizations improve their processes to reduce waste and grow profits.”

“Let’s build job free income.”

“Helping you build a big brand with your small business.”

“Chipotle provides premium, real ingredients for customers looking for delicious food that’s ethically sourced and freshly prepared. Chipotle’s dedication to cultivating a better world by cutting out GMOs and providing responsibly raised food sets them apart in the food industry.”

“Starbucks offers the best coffee and espresso drinks for consumers who want premium ingredients and perfection every time. Starbucks not only values every interaction, making each one unique, but the brand commits itself to the highest quality coffee in the world.”

“Disney provides unique entertainment for consumers seeking magical experiences and memories. Disney leads the competition by providing every aspect of related products and services to the world and appealing to people of all ages.”

What’s missing?

These statements address what the brand owner intends to deliver: entertainment, coffee, food ingredients, brands for small business, job free income, improved processes, business models, marketing strategies and ‘true paths to success’.

As a consumer, however, what these statements DON’T tell me is how each brand is different from their competition, and why I should buy their brand and not their competitor’s. My eyes glaze over when I read these claims because for most of them I could substitute their competitor’s name in each statement and they would be valid.

In other words these (and most other) brand statements focus on what the brand owner intends to produce with no comparison with the other choices available to the targeted consumer.

Disney’s reference to ‘leads the competition’ and Chipotle’s to ‘sets them apart in the food industry’ are modest competitive references but they are so vague they don’t offer any concrete and meaningful comparisons to their competitors.
In fact the use of terms like ‘premium real ingredients’, ‘best coffee’, and ‘highest quality’ I find to be high level aspirations that offer little clarity and an abundance of ‘fog’.

How do you create an effective brand?

There are two basic principles I’ve used to develop brand statements that resonate with customers and position the organization as compelling and unique among alternatives.

#1. Create a tight strategic fit for your brand

Your brand must be tightly bound to the Strategic Game Plan—SGP—of your organization, it cannot be allowed to ‘float free’ to be on its own.
You need to be able to ‘see’ the organization’s strategic intent when you assess their brand statement.

If you can’t interpret the strategy being pursued by the brand, it means the brand is too cloudy and vague; it lacks strategic relevance.

Successful brands have a direct ‘line of sight’ to the strategy of the organization.

My SGP process makes it easy to establish the strategic imperatives the brand must serve.

By answering three questions it’s done.

HOW BIG do you want to be? —
defines your growth objective for the ensuing 24 months.

WHO do you want to SERVE? — identifies the customer groups you intend to target to generate the revenue from the HOW BIG question.

HOW will you COMPETE and WIN? — defines your competitive value proposition.

Questions #2 and #3 are particularly useful in establishing strategic context for a brand. They not only define the target for the brand message—WHO to SERVE—they also describe how the competitive encounter will be played—HOW to WIN

My next point examines the importance of question #3–HOW to WIN—more closely.

#2. Declare the differences that define you

The second principle to follow to create an awesomely effective brand is define in the brand statement the difference between you and your competitors.

It’s interesting to me that most brand pundits ignore that people choose one organization or individual over another based on the differences between them, not by the absolute singular claims they make.

Declaring “I develop sustainable business models and marketing strategies to fuel small business growth.” may accurately describe what you do for small businesses, but it says nothing about how you are special or unique among your competitors and hence why I should pick you to help my small business and not any one of them.

An amazingly effective brand shouts out how you are different from everyone else.

Your unique qualities need to be woven into the brand statement, otherwise the recipient of it is left to their own devices to figure out why they should choose you out of the herd.

The ‘HOW will you COMPETE and WIN?’ question addresses this challenge unbelievably well because it involves the creation of ‘The ONLY Statement’ for your organization.

I invented The ONLY Statement precisely for the purpose of declaring how an organization—or an individual —was different from their closest competitors.

“We are the ONLY ones that…” declares what separates your organization from the crowd around you and hence why customers should choose you.
And, furthermore, it is the key to directing how your brand statement should be written in order to have a tight strategic fit.

So if your organization had an ONLY that read:

“ABC Ambulance is the ONLY First Aid Advocate that provides safety solutions anywhere, anytime.”, the brand statement possibilities are straightforward.

In the First Aid Advocate example, their brand statement could read:

”ABC Ambulance provides safety solutions anywhere they’re needed, whenever they’re needed, and we’re the only organization that does.”

Or, the brand statement could incorporate ONLY directly:

”ABC Ambulance is the ONLY First Aid Advocate that provides safety solutions anywhere, anytime.”

My last word

Brand statements are not just about YOU!

In a world where people have so much choice of who to do business with, who to hire for a particular job, which charity to give their donations to and which causes to support, your ‘ask’ of them must paint you as the ONLY choice.

If not, your declaration—brand— gets lost.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 3.21.22 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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March 19, 2022

Proven easy ways to integrate TikTok into your video marketing strategy

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Looking for the secret sauce guaranteed to boost your company’s video marketing strategy?

TikTok may be exactly what you’re looking for. This worldwide phenomenon originally soared in popularity with younger audience members and is now amassing even more users in older demographics thanks to the hours of entertainment it promises.

What does this mean for you as a business owner? Frankly, it means you need to be on it and figure out how to show up and show off. While having a presence on TikTok can be beneficial to nearly any business in any market, it’s an especially strategic move for those targeting females ages 16 to 39 as this demographic makes up the majority of app users.

Here are some ways you can integrate TikTok into your video marketing strategy right away.

What You Can Expect

Before you start investing time, energy, and money into your TikTok marketing, you may be wondering what you can expect to get in return. Is this even worth the effort?

Well, how would you like to see the following:
● Better connection between your business and online communities.
● Increased Brand Awareness.
● More engagement with your products and services.
● Improved conversions for advertisements.

If those sound like something you’d be interested in seeing for your business, let’s move along and find out how you can achieve them thanks to the help of TikTok.

Getting started with TikTok

If you’re entirely new to the app, you’ll need to first set up a TikTok business account so you’ll have access to analytics, insights, editing tools, and other metrics that will help you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts. Next, take a look around the app and familiarize yourself with its features while starting to build your presence.

Take notice of trending topics, hashtags, and content with high views. What do you notice about them? Why are people engaging with it? By taking note of these observations, you’ll be better prepared when it comes time to make your own content.

Finally, start engaging with other brands and the TikTok community. This is the kind of app that works best when you’re actively communicating with others instead of just sitting back and watching.
‘Like’ videos, subscribe to users, even post comments. These small acts of engagement are all part of your TikTok strategy so spend some time building your presence.

Get your toes wet

Now that you’ve taken the time to observe other users, it’s time to get your toes wet and create some of your first content. Don’t worry, this is the fun part! Play around with the filters TikTok offers and don’t take yourself too seriously! TikTok is universally entertaining because it showcases authenticity so just be real and get to creating.

Keys to success

As with any form of marketing, especially in the social media world, the first key to success is to be consistent. Set a schedule for posting content and try your best to keep it. Even if you’re just putting out a short clip, it’s better than being inactive.
Let your audience peek behind the curtain and see the “real” you with behind-the-scenes content and interviews. Post something silly like a TikTok challenge. Or, create a how-to video for one of your products.

Key point: post often.

The BIG goal

When it comes to TikTok, the Holy Grail is being featured on someone’s ‘For You’ page. This content is curated for users with AI and is based on their past views and interactions.
Getting your content on this feed will boost your interactions as more and more users like and comment on your video. Once your post gets in the flow, your content can live in perpetuity and your new followers will be as organic as they come.

Top ways to use TikTok for business

Now that you understand more about TikTok, let’s look at the top three ways your business can use it to your advantage. It’s not all about posting content, believe it or not!

#1. Post TikTok videos — Now, we said it’s not ALL about posting content but that doesn’t mean doing so isn’t the best way to utilize TikTok. Finding ways to creatively engage your audience through videos is crucial to your TikTok success.
Your posts need to be fun, authentic, engaging, and consistent. Think about what your followers want to see and find a way to give it to them.

#2. Team up with influencers — Before you give us a huge eye roll, hear us out. Influencers have gotten a bad rep in the media but they can actually be hugely beneficial to your business.
How? Imagine the biggest influencers on TikTok posting raving reviews about your product or service. What do you think their followers are going to do? Finding the right influencers to partner with can be a game-changer for a business!

#3. Run TikTok ads — This wouldn’t be a marketing blog if we didn’t talk about paid advertising, right? TikTok advertising is one of the best places to spend your marketing dollars and it currently gives you five different ways to do so:

▪️In-Feed Ads: These ads are posted on the user’s ‘For You’ page and from there can be shared, liked, and commented on. With an engaging Call to Action, your ad can give a huge boost to your revenue.
▪️Top-View Ads: As TikTok says, these ads are ‘top of feed, top of mind.’ While they’re also featured on the FYP, these ads present your brand first on someone’s news feed.
▪️Brand Takeovers: These short ads appear when a user first opens their app before they even get to their news feed.
▪️Branded Hashtags: This option can be a part of your influencer strategy and is a fast and easy way to increase engagement.
▪️Branded Effects: The most creative option, your company can create a branded filter or effect that users can create their own content with.

Time is TikTok-ing
Forgive the pun but the truth remains: it’s time to get your business on TikTok and start boosting your video marketing strategy by utilizing this insanely popular app.

Remember, the key is having fun with your content so followers will engage with it and share, share, share! What will you create first?

— Torrey Tayenaka is the co-founder and CEO at Sparkhouse, a corporate video production agency. He is often asked to contribute expertise in publications like Entrepreneur, Single Grain and Forbes.
Sparkhouse is known for transforming video marketing and advertising into real conversations.Rather than hitting the consumer over the head with blatant ads, Sparkhouse creates interesting, entertaining and useful videos that enrich the lives of his clients’ customers.
In addition to Sparkhouse, Torrey has also founded the companies Eva Smart Shower, Litehouse & Forge54.

• Posted 3.19.22 at 06:17 am by Roy Osing
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March 14, 2022

How your customer service can be made mistake proof

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How your customer service can be made mistake proof.

Successful organizations figure out how to make their customer service OOPS! resistant.

They’re mindlessly focused on how they handle mistakes. It’s all very well to talk about doing it right the first time and providing seamless transactions, but it’s a pipe dream.

The reality is that mistakes will always happen in organizations regardless of the good intentions to ensure they don’t happen. Mistakes cannot be mitigated. The chances of them occurring can be reduced but they can’t be completely eradicated.

Mistakes are a way of life in modern organizations. Humans are not perfect not are they predictable. Technology has its glitches. And systems break down.

So in a marketplace replete with mistake-making, how does an organization gain a competitive advantage over the other mistake-makers?

Do they try and make fewer of them in which case their competitive claim might be ‘Buy from us because we make fewer mistakes than our competitors’?

Or do they go back to the first principles of Quality Management and claim that they are the only ones who deliver what customers expect error-free every time?

No. The only way to gain an advantage in a mistake-riddled world is to pursue two tactics simultaneously:
1. OOPS!-proof the organization as best you can to prevent mistakes from occurring, and
2. Build a recovery strategy to action when #1 doesn’t work and an OOPS! occurs.

OOPS!-proofing

OOPS!-proofing your organization means creating the infrastructure and environment that reduces (not eliminates) the chances of mistakes occurring.

Here’s a checklist:

▪️Examine your rule and policy architecture. Do the rules and policies you have enable easy customer transactions or do they get in the way because customers refuse to follow them (because they think they’re dumb).
▪️Check your culture and values. What comes first: quarterly earnings or amazing experiences? Does your organization put the customer on a pedestal and subordinate everyone in it to creating memorable experiences for them?
Do you have a value that specifically says ‘We exist to provide memories for our customers every time they touch us’?
▪️Ask customers to help design systems, processes and procedures that affect them. An OOPS! is less likely to happen if a customer is doing business with you in a way they helped architect.
▪️Spend more money on training your frontline people. If they know more, they will fail less.
▪️Remove the grunge that gets in the way of employees doing their job. Fighting unnecessary internal resistance gets in the way of focusing on taking care of the customer which causes sh** to happen.

OOPS! reaction

Even if you’ve OOPS!-proofed your organization as best you can to minimize the chances of mistakes happening, they will happen. That’s just the way it is.

So with that reality in mind, the OOPS!-proofer prepares themselves to recover when the mistake is in their face.

Their business plan has a specific strategy to be the best mistake fixer in the market, and there’s good rationale for taking this position.

Brilliant recovery is a customer loyalty builder; customers are more impressed with how the mistake is fixed than being upset about the mistake being made in the first place.

What does brilliant recovery look like? The ‘formula’ for OOPS! recovery is quite simple:

Recovery = Fix the mistake fast and surprise the OOPS! victim with something they don’t expect.

Studies have shown that customer positivity—and loyalty—towards an organization that has screwed them over actually increases after a successful recovery compared to how they felt toward the organization before the OOPS! happened (which is a function of the cumulative experiences they’ve had with the organization to date).

Furthermore, they show that recovery must be achieved within 24 hours of the OOPS! event to have a positive impact. If you haven’t recovered in 24 hours, the opportunity is lost and perhaps the customer with it.

The proper OOPS! recovery is a business loyalty builder and yet few organizations plan for it.

How does one build an OOPS! recovery plan?

Here are a few plan-building steps to consider:

#1.Work on your culture — Most cultures encourage mistake avoidance; mistakes result in added cost because of the rework involved in making things right.

The OOPS!-recovery artist knows that the special sauce is not trying to eliminate mistakes, it’s about having a strategy in place to do the right things for the customer when the blooper happens.

The serious ones have a value statement that goes something like this:
“We will do our best to prevent making a customer OOPS! but when we do, recovery will be our #1 priority.”

#2. Measure your recovery effectiveness — After recovery, ask the customer how you did. You can use all the internal metrics at your disposal, but in the final analysis it’s about how the customer felt about your actions.

Perception is reality, so take action from their feelings regardless if your own tracking says you did an ok job.

#3. Empower people — Speed requires a flat organization structure devoid of the need to escalate action for approval.

OOPS! recovery success is inversely related to bureaucracy: the more bureaucracy involved in making decisions, the longer it takes to take action and the recovery window closes. And you’ve lost the opportunity the screwup presented.

So if you’re serious, you have to empower people to do things to recover without the need to ask anyone for approval (the recovery plan will of course have guidelines to follow but that’s all they are - guidelines).

This is where leaders must step up and declare that they trust that people will do the right thing for both the customer and the organization, and that in recovery mode the organization structure is virtually flat and that an all-out assault on the OOPS! is to be supported by everyone who touches it.

#4. Provide superlative support to the frontline — Frontline people are lynchpins in the OOPS! chain, from when things go bad until recovery is complete.

If frontline people are not supported by authority to command the rest of the organization into action with the tools they need, your recovery plan goes south. Make sure your plan has the investments with the necessary leadership trust to give you a fighting chance to win every OOPS! event.

To make your organization OOPS! resistant, do the best you can to avoid making a blunder (which people expect you to do) but make sure you add the special ingredient—‘recovery sauce’—to recover memorably when you do.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 3.14.22 at 06:10 am by Roy Osing
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