Archive for June, 2012
Using employee expertise to market
Les Paul knew how to sell guitars.
Certain retail businesses are more likely than others to attract knowledgeable salespeople. The cashier at Target ringing up your car floor mats, laundry detergent, flip flops and deodorant is not likely to be particularly enthused about or expert on any of the items.
On the other hand, the guy selling you a new Harley-Davidson Super Glide Custom is almost certainly a biker. You wouldn’t want to buy one from someone who wasn’t. He’s selling bikes because he loves them and loves riding and wants to share that passion with you.
Employees who are passionate about what they sell – whether it’s tropical fish, quilting supplies or snowmobiles — can help your marketing. Guitar Center, the national music store chain, hires musicians in each of its 220+ stores and it’s not unusual for customers to turn to the clerks for advice about everything from guitar strings to the relative merits of Zildjian vs Paragon cymbals.
Questions turn into discussions turn into swapped advice and news about whose band is playing where this weekend and who’s looking to add a keyboard player to their lineup. As a result, the stores become more than just a place to buy a new pedal or mic stand; they become resources and hangouts for musicians.
Guitar Center has taken the next logical step by posting the photos, bios and expertise of employees at each store online and inviting people to email them questions. By positioning their employees as experts and not merely salespeople, the company accomplishes the following:
- It establishes itself as an authoritative resource.
- It humanizes itself in the eyes of consumers who can see online that Jeff is a guy who really knows recording equipment.
- It lets music-loving customers see what they have in common with the salespeople and, by extension, the brand.
- It creates goodwill by offering free advice to people who aren’t in a store.
Well played, Guitar Center.
You are surrounded by content
The problem with undertaking a content marketing campaign is that you need content and plenty of it. It’s natural for you, particularly if you’re new to this sort of marketing, to worry about where it’s going to come from.
It could be right under your nose, unrecognized and underused.
Traditionally, it’s been difficult for Halloween haunted houses to distinguish themselves. Haunted Warehouse, Haunted Factory, Haunted Laboratory — they all have costumed ghouls, chainsaws and things that go bump in the night. Their marketing largely is limited to websites and garish ads in the local alternative weeklies. But Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Ontario, got a brilliant idea on how to use something it had plenty of – scared people.
The haunted house rigged a camera to take photos of people at their most frightened and posts them on Flickr and its website. The photos are hilarious, popular enough to trigger remix memes and sell Nightmares better than any ad could. And it took a minimum of effort to create and push it out to the world.
In some cases, content produced for internal use can also be sent out to consumers. Maytag created 3D instructional animation to teach salespeople the differences between regular washing machines and High Efficiency washers. But modern consumers like to do their own research and not rely on salespeople so, after tweaking the videos to make them more consumer-friendly, Maytag posted them on Lowes.com.
Sometimes what a company has to offer is expertise and a venue. Commercial plumbers and pipefitters are the most loyal customers of RIDGID Tools. They like to talk to each other about tools, jobs, customers, problems etc. So RIDGID established a forum where they could talk, comment and ask questions. RIDGID moderates the forum and sometimes weighs in with answers or explanations, but it’s largely self-policing and self-perpetuating.
Forum users provide the content and RIDGID benefits from having a website where its customers go to get answers and swap stories.
While content marketing sometimes does mean starting from scratch, there is often an easier way. Just look at what you are already doing.