Marketing keeps going when they get Here — Kelford Labs Daily

You got the project, you got the client. Marketing’s job is over, right?

Sadly, for those who don’t like marketing, the answer is... no, not at all.

Every decision is a marketing decision, including the ones we make when clients arrive “Here,” as in, they are now working directly with us.

At this “Distance,” marketing is about overdelivering on our promises. The unfortunate thing about people is that they only talk about good things if they’re surprisingly good. We need to be better than our clients expect for them to talk about our great work and refer us to others.

Which means we need to do two things with our marketing while we’re working with clients:

1) Emphasize the areas where we know we’re overdelivering on our promises

2) Demonstrate curiosity about their experience throughout the project

How do we do that?

Well, first, we make sure we’re staying active in our communication.

Just because the project has started that doesn’t mean we cool down our communication and let things play out. We need to stay actively involved in updating and reminding our clients of the progress that’s being made, especially in the areas they might not expect or may have had bad experiences in the past.

As a marketing consultant, for me that means being hypercommunicative and demonstrating our ability to not miss deadlines, because our marketing peers tend to miss deadlines and tend to slack off on communication. That’s just the nature of the industry, so we need to overdeliver here to defy expectations.

Secondly, we need to ask our clients questions about their experience with us.

Yes, curiosity and showing that we’re curious are marketing techniques. It demonstrates to our clients that we care about their experience, not just their work or their money. It shows we want to get better as a result of working with them. Which shows them that they have a hand in our progress, which makes them more likely to want to work with us and refer us in the future.

For me, that means asking for feedback and taking it seriously, and demonstrating that the feedback made us better. So the next time our clients think about referring us, they also think, “And I know they’re good, because I can see them getting even better, all the time.”

But once we’ve worked with a client and the project is over or the relationship is progressing past our current work, we want to make sure those clients stay Connected to us.

How?

We’ll dive into that tomorrow!

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

Kelford Inc. shows communicators the way to always knowing what to say.