The Relationship |
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The world turns around relationships among people and the
governments, businesses and religions and other groups they
create. Central to every relationship is the issue of consent.
People consent to belong to groups and, unless forced, can leave
most groups and join others at will. Therefore, it is incumbent
upon you to create an atmosphere or environment where groups of
people can gather or visit individually to buy things, learn
things or use your destination as a platform to express their
ideas and opinions. In some cases, people can use web sites to
do all of these things. The more value you provide, the greater
the chance people will return and, hopefully, recommend your
site to others. The more respect you show your visitors, the
greater the possibility they will become advocates for your
business, your products and/or your services. The more you
personalize your site, the more intimate your relationship can
become with your audience—down to (dare we say it?) a one-to-one
level.
Now take these principles and apply them to your messaging:
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Does your online advertising and marketing accurately reflect
your business? |
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Does it do anything to explain your site’s purpose?
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Does it help people find the connection between the place they
see your message and the context in which your information makes
sense to them? |
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Have you been wasting people’s time with messaging that is
unfocused and confusing? |
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Do people who respond to your messaging get frustrated when they
can’t find the point of the message? |
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Have you received emails from angry customers who tell you about
problems with messages they have received from you? |
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If so, what have you done (or not done) about these messages?
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Do you drop everyone off at your home page and leave them to
fend for themselves to find information that you have buried on
some obscure section of your site? |
All of these things are relevant to understanding the way you
spend your online marketing dollars. Your audience wants to have
a meaningful interaction with you. Are you prepared to provide
that interaction, or should you do more due diligence before
embarking on another campaign?
Some might think that we are discouraging some potential clients
here and, to some degree, that is our job as counselors. There
are few things worse than putting your worst foot forward, or
drawing attention to yourself that backfires and creates a
firestorm or criticism around your company, your products or
your marketing efforts. You might be surprised to learn that we
might not be able to work with some clients due to their
inability to address some of the deficiencies we discover in our
process of analyzing their reasoning, capabilities and rationale
for doing advertising and marketing online. Sure, there are 100
other firms that would gladly take the work, and we would be
happy to refer them to other sources, but we cannot allow
ourselves to do substandard work or play “Yes Man” to clients
just to take their money and run. After all, our reputation is
on the line as well as theirs. It’s not all about making money.
It’s also about having a clear conscience, doing great work for
excellent clients, having potential clients approach us without
having to solicit them first and having people sending us their
resume, hoping we will hire them to work with us instead of
poaching people from other firms. As you can tell, relationships
are as important to us as they are to you. Without them, we have
no business being in this business.
As you may have determined from the dozens of questions posed
earlier, we want to know as much as possible about your
relationship with your customers and visitors. Then, we want to
find out what it is you are seeking to accomplish by engaging
our services. After we determine those things, we can begin to
make recommendations to you that will enable you to strengthen
your relationship with existing customers and visitors, attract
and convert new customers and visitors, and create a climate of
trust and understanding that places your message in a context
that gives recipients a comfort level, encourages response and
promotes interaction.
This is the work we seek to do on your behalf.
Our services
