Marketing Matters: Brand Management Guide for …...the web – bottom line: the failure to control the message and manage your brand will cost you clients (not to mention the risk

© 2011 KAULKIN MEDIA

Marketing Matters:Brand Management Guidefor the ARM Industry

A Report by Kaulkin Media

Brand

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More than ever, ARM firms need ways to protect their good name online. Negative search results can wreak havoc with a company’s reputation and carry a high cost - loss of potential leads. We’ve pre-pared this Guide for ARM firms who want to get started with some basic brand management tactics, and also learn about core strategies that can preserve the reputation of their businesses.

1 © 2011 KAULKIN MEDIA

Marketing Matters: Brand Management for ARM

Your Next Competitive Advantage: Web Marketing

SEO: An Essential Brand Management Tool

Should ARM Firms Blog?

4 Best Practices to Begin Tomorrow

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What’s the next big competitive advantage in ARM?

Better web marketing.

I look at a lot of business sites every day. What surprises me is that I rarely say “this is a very well-designed website with a clear set of goals for the end user.” Why?

It isn’t clear why good online marketing practice has failed to spread among B2B companies as it has in B2C markets. What is clear, however, is that ARM companies who supplement their sales efforts with great web marketing will find themselves with a solid competitive advantage during the sales process.

So, is your company struggling with its web presence or have you integrated the web into your sales process? It’s okay if you fall within the first group. Turning your website into a competitive advantage only requires a small shift in thinking, as well as the application of practices and behaviors that you probably have already learned as a consumer.

The internet is serious business.

First, let’s identify the purpose of your site. It is no longer just a line item on a business card – it’s a viable way for a prospect to know that you’re serious about meeting their needs. In the last decade, there has been a standardization of mar-keting and design practices for generating business online. The usage of these practices is industry-agnostic – they are the new way to build sites in order to sell products or services and establish instant credibility with a prospect. Optimization of online marketing has led to an explosive growth in consumer retail sales, with predictions that by 2014 as much as 8% of all retail sales will be online.[i]

We can see these trends bleeding into business-to-business sales as well. No longer is the online sales process an extension of your brochures. It’s now the most ROI-efficient way to seed the concept of your product/service as the solution to specific problems, provide strong case studies and facilitate a discussion with a prospect. Consider that mobile-focused B2B marketing budgets are slated to increase by a staggering 124% in 2011.[ii] Such an increase is due to a shift in the behaviors and expectations of B2B buyers who have experienced consumer mar-keting through various sub-channels, such as social media or email newsletters.


Web Marketing: Your Next Competitive Advantage

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ARM marketing has not accounted for this shift in prospect behaviors and expecta-tions. The firms that successfully do so will find themselves well ahead of the pack in terms of an effective sales process with a low cost per lead. Web marketing is not just about making pretty websites – it’s a way to streamline sales and lower your costs.

Where to begin? Think like a user.

1. Prospects have problems – are you giving them solutions?



J. Decision Maker

-40%

Whatever the market, the goal is to break down the barriers preventing your targets from seeing the value of your service offering.

They want solutions to their prob-lems. If you don’t provide them, they will go somewhere else. Think care-fully about how your prospects phrase their needs and how your message answers their problems.

Be honest – is your site’s design amateurish? Does it fill you with a sense of credibility and trust?

Good design instills trust in your end user. If the image you put out in the marketplace does not seem credible, they won’t take you seriously as a solution to their problems.

2. Does your site look credible?

LOL

3. Have you provided a clear call to action?

Note that these are just the first steps in considering a redesign. Many other factors come into play, such as the keywords you use to describe your services or even colors and branding. Later on, we’ll explore how search engine optimization plays a huge role in the market perception of your company to potential clients.

So what. My business doesn’t depend on the web for leads.

“This doesn’t apply to me – I’m doing just fine without web leads.”

Sure, you’re not losing money by avoiding web marketing. But you could be making more, at a higher ROI than traditional sales and marketing methods. Why spend time qualifying leads with calls and meetings when they could do that work themselves with a few clicks of a mouse?

By not utilizing the web to ignite their sales and marketing efforts, many busi-nesses operate with a sales cycle that produces leads at a high cost. ARM firms generally tend to follow this pattern as well. Best practices for marketing are often fine-tuned in B2C markets and then implemented by B2B companies. ARM firms have an opportunity to innovate and dramatically lower their cost per lead.

Business as usual may be a safe approach for now, but if you’re aiming to get ahead of the competition, a serious commitment to improving your web presence could result in a prime advantage in a competitive landscape that lags behind other industries online.



How are you displaying information? Is there a method to the layout? A shotgun approach won’t work – you need to provide specific paths to a call to action.

By making things easy for your prospects, you drive them along a path to self-qualification, saving you time and money.

J. Decision Maker

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For any industry that routinely encounters negative press and online consumer backlash, search engine optimization (SEO) is an important concept to understand and use properly. Many debt collection agencies can probably attest to the reputa-tional risks posed by derogatory statements posted online about their businesses by performing a Google search of their company name and scanning the number of inflammatory results. So what exactly is SEO and what specifically is its value as a brand management tool for collection agencies, debt buyers, collection law firms, and other ARM service providers?

Simply put, SEO is a collection of best practices, strategy and tactics for increasing the prominence of your company’s name, website, and overall brand in online search results. When deployed as a business tool, it can be a powerful compliment to other traditional marketing efforts. Research shows that the first page of Google search results receive an overwhelming 90% of all click-throughs[iii], demonstrat-ing that it is critical for businesses to rank in the top ten results for their respec-tive terms. For ARM firms, proactive SEO strategies provide the additional benefit of helping to control the online message about your company.

There is a science to proper SEO. However, rather than dive into the technical complexities of Google’s search algorithm, let’s instead examine how ARM firms can use SEO to control their marketing messages, make their businesses more visible to potential clients, and leverage social media sites as powerful inbound-link allies.

Controlling your message.

You know the drill—a debtor receives a call from one of your employees and immediately posts a negative comment on a consumer board about your company. After a few months, you’re faced with a massive stream of negative search results when you Google your company’s name.

While it’s easy to brush off consumer gripes about your company as just the cost of doing business as a debt collector, imagine how these search results look to a potential client who is trying to verify your firm’s credibility via the web. Instead of positive press releases or articles, demos, and valuable information about your products and services, they’ll see negative consumer posts from forums and social media sites. Unless you take steps to actively control the message about your company, you may have already lost the battle — and potential revenue — on the client front.


SEO: An Essential Brand Management Tool for ARM

How are you displaying information? Is there a method to the layout? A shotgun approach won’t work – you need to provide specific paths to a call to action.

By making things easy for your prospects, you drive them along a path to self-qualification, saving you time and money.

J. Decision Maker

?

Social media is not just a trend.

If you take away only one lesson from this blog, let it be this: social media is no passing fad. Sure, the whole process can seem absurd at times—after all, do we really need to know the sandwich habits of our favorite celebrity, or that our friends are sitting in traffic during their daily commute? Many consumer and B2B businesses have found ways to make social media a useful sales tool through customer engagement and special promotions. Unfortunately for the ARM indus-try, social media platforms also enable consumers to band together to broadcast their criticisms of a given company or the entire collection industry.

So how does social media figure into SEO and impact your company’s brand image? It really boils down to the domain authority (explained below) of sites like Twitter and the sheer number of inbound links to those domains. Consider the following sequence of events:



1. Joe Consumer posts a negative

blog about DebtCorp.

2. He posts a link to the blog on

Twitter, where it’s seen by others.

1

2

CONSUMER

ANGRYDEBT

DEBTCORP!

3. Other people see the link and reTweet it 200+ times, connecting Joe’s negative blog post with the keyword #debtcorp.

3

RT @ AngryDebt#DEBTCORP is evil!

As this story illustrates, social media doesn’t just give a consumer an isolated platform to discuss your firm; it can directly impact the impression you create in the minds of executive decision makers who seek out and vet your company on the web – bottom line: the failure to control the message and manage your brand will cost you clients (not to mention the risk of derailing consumer relationships and timely payments to you).

The good news is that if you take the time to craft a social media strategy for your company, you will reap the dual benefits of leveraging the domain power of sites like Twitter and Facebook while driving down negative results with your positive, controlled messaging.



4. Googlebot hears about the post

from Twitter. Since 200+ people

reposted the link, they have e�ec-

tively endorsed Joe’s blog as a

credible piece of information

about DebtCorp. Googlebot raises

Joe’s post to the front page of

search results for DebtCorp.

Google

201 LINKS FOUNDFOR DEBTCORP

4

5. J. Decision Maker searches Google for DebtCorp and �nds Joe’s post because it’s been given high rank by Googlebot.

He decides not to hire DebtCorp due to the negative results like Joe’s post.J. Decision Maker

DEBTCORP!

5

Ugh. Blogging. The idea of giving just about anyone a platform to write whatever they please sounds quite terrible. This is, after all, why some detest “microblog-ging” formats such as Twitter or Tumblr – they allow the most untalented, boring writers to spew forth the minutiae of their lives on a regular basis, not to mention providing a platform for unsubstantiated comments about anything and everything—including your company.

Surely, blogging is best left to basement-dwelling trolls, illuminated only by the glow of their monitors, clicking away in silence aside from the methodical crunch of potato chips and sips of Mountain Dew, right?

For the ARM industry in particular, it can also be a strong effective tool for estab-lishing your standards of quality and a communication channel to tell your cus-tomers that you are dedicated to those standards by actively discussing the issues that matter to them.

What does blogging do for my company?

In short, it can do a lot. Blogging gives your company a regular controlled message that can be cited by your marketing materials and salespeople as a sign of cred-ibility and expertise. The twist is that your blogs should not be sales-focused or pitchy – rather, they should present you as a resource or font of knowledge about your particular product or service in a given market segment or the ARM industry as a whole.



Of course not. A quality corporate blog can work wonders for your company’s reputa-tion and marketing efforts. It also presents some nice side effects that positively impact your SEO (search engine optimiza-tion).

For most B2B firms, a blog serves as a way to proactively reach out to prospects and develop a reputation as a solid company.

Blogs also help you to set expectations for your customers and prospects. If you’re producing quality content, you’re proving your expertise and demonstrating that you have an edge over your competitors. As a marketing channel, your blog can also deliver a sense of who you are as a firm. In a landscape of rather monotonous marketing copy, an interesting blog with real personality can make a big difference in terms of getting eyeballs on your products and services. You’ll stand out as a firm in ways that are important to potential clients as they evaluate your business.

Finally, and possibly most important for ARM firms, is the concept of controlling the message about your company. ARM firms too often enter the battle against negative consumer perception after the damage has been done. Your blog is a chance to actively engage with an issue and diffuse it before it becomes a larger problem and forces you to put out more PR fires. You can also leverage your blog to promote your company’s sense of corporate responsibility. Are you donating to good causes? Providing consumers with the right educational tools about their accounts? If so then you should be writing about it.

How does blogging help ARM firms with SEO?

If you create a fresh cycle of content and get it linked by authoritative sites, you can effectively push down negative search results about your company. Your static website (meaning, one without a consistent stream of fresh content) isn’t doing you much good in this fight, is it? A blog gives you a system to churn out positive, controlled messaging.



Getting it linked in the right place, such as online industry news publications, blogs, and other highly-visited sites will get it the “link juice” your blog article needs in order for Google’s webcrawlers to place it at the top of search on your company name.

Of course, this process requires proper keyword targeting and best practices, but the effects are well worth the effort.

Google

JUICE

What should ARM companies blog about?

Everything and anything that can demonstrate the following:

Some ideas to get you started:

That’s all great, but…

I know what you’re thinking. This is going to take a lot of effort, time, and resources. I don’t make money from blogging – I make money from sales. Blogging is not going to be a serious sales lead mechanism for any ARM firm. It is just another marketing channel for you to present expertise and control the message about your company. The real value is that blogging solves a lot of problems for ARM firms in one fell swoop: reputation management, SEO, and marketing.



Your �rm’s expertise in whatever services you provide.

�at your �rm is made up of real human beings and is not just an entity.

And that you genuinely want them to �nd something useful in your blog.

While the method of your posts may vary depending on the tone and message you want to present as a company, blog topics can range from instructional to analytical.

Just remember that you always have to strike a balance between being a helpful resource and nailing down the key points that reinforce your firm’s value to your prospects.

Buyer’s Guide to [ Product You Sell ]

How to Avoid a [ Problem You Solve ] Meltdown

Meet Your Support Team

If you’ve got the time and resources, using different media formats (such as video or podcasts) can help make your post stand out a bit.

They don’t need to be epic, large productions. A simple video of your marketing guy talking to the camera can be enough grab a prospect’s attention.

1. Capitalize on what you’re already doing.

Does your company occasionally issue press releases? An easy method to increase the number of positive search results for your company is to get more positive info out there. Write short and simple PR headlines to improve search results. And don’t restrict your releases to new service offerings or executive changes; topics like a group of new collection floor hires (benefit to local economy) or an innova-tive employee incentive program (investment in people) are viable topics for press releases to boost your company’s public image.

2. Leverage materials you already have.

Your company most likely has a history of major and minor successes on behalf of your clients. Why keep those accomplishments to yourself? Consider turning one of your triumphs into a mini-case study—nothing fancy, nothing proprietary.

Perhaps you discovered increased collections lift on one set of accounts by utiliz-ing a particular telephone soft skill. Strip out the client name, write up an example or two in a few paragraphs and post the story on your site, or have your sales team send a copy to client prospects as a way to kick start their business development conversations. And remember, you’re just telling a story—it doesn’t have to beShakespeare.

3. Chart a course.

As conference season begins to heat up in the ARM industry, make the best use ofyour travel budget by announcing your presence at a face-to-face event before you arrive. If your company plans to exhibit at a conference, a no-cost alternative to printed mail is a more personal, targeted email campaign (1 or 2 messages) alerting your prospects that you’d like to see them at the show. Linkedin has a built-in travel tool that alerts people in your network about your upcoming trips (and even allows you to see others who plan to attend the same events) - use it!

4. Be visible.

A lot of ARM companies have a catch-all Contact Us page on their websites that draws in questions from customers, complaints from consumers, and (if you’re lucky) a sales lead or two. Who sees these emails? How are these inquiries being assessed, tracked, and handled? At minimum, consider a separate online contactchannel for your salespeople.


Getting Started: 4 Best Practices to Begin Tomorrow

Kaulkin Media Creative Marketing Services

Kaulkin Media brings you 10+ years of ARM marketing and content development success. If anyone knows how to reach your targets, it's us. Why go to a generalist who won't know anything about our industry? ARM is a complicated beast — don't leave your company's marketing engine to chance.

Get in touch with us.

Jennifer MingesClient Marketing Specialist

[email protected]

Endnotes:

[i] Forrester Forecast: Online Retail Sales Will Grow To $250 Billion By 2014http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/08/forrester-forecast-online-retail-sales-will-grow-to-250-billion-by-2014/

[ii] Reflecting on 2010 – The Year the Customer Became Kinghttp://blogs.business.com/b2b-online-marketing/2010/reflecting-2010-year-customer-king/

[iii] Google SERP ranking statshttp://www.seotips247.com/google-serp-stats


Got Questions? Contact Kaulkin Media.

Marketing Matters: Brand Management Guide for …...the web – bottom line: the failure to control the message and manage your brand will cost you clients (not to mention the risk

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