How Digital Marketers in Sydney Can Be More Polite
Rudeness doesn’t get anyone, anywhere. Yet, rudeness, seems to be what too many Digital Marketers in Sydney, and elsewhere, specialize in.
As an ex student of psychology, a Strategic Marketing Consultant and the ex-Managing Director of Ogilvy One Malaysia, I have only one thing to say about rudeness – “it presents you as a credit risk – a person, not to invest in – so don’t indulge in it.” I use the word “indulge” because that’s what rudeness is – it’s an indulgence – you do it, for fun, not for any other reason.
In Marketing, in Sydney, or elsewhere, People buy people who are ‘Polite’
If you’re not polite, even if you’re an excellent Strategic Marketing Consultant, people won’t buy you – no matter how good you are.
Politeness may even be the 5th P in Marketing. Once purported to be Purpose, Marketing’s 4 P’s have traditionally been Product, Place, Promotion and P……
But competition has made every product and solution a company can offer today – duplicable. Everything can be copied – except service whose hallmark is the politeness with which it is delivered.
Brands that are polite are usually brands that are quiet. Introverted. Nothing wrong with this at all. Customers like such brands because of the way they get things done – without any fuss or ado.
How can a Digital Brand in Sydney be more polite?
There are 5 ways I’ve uncovered so far:
- Use data less invasively, more thoughtfully – there is nothing worse than having your data misused. Every time we give our email or phone number to someone, we are giving our data out to them. We wouldn’t want people to call us for a reason that isn’t relevant – so we should not contact them for a reason that isn’t, either.
Some SME Businesses in Australia are stripping data from their competitor’s websites (it’s possible). Don’t do these things. Besides being illegal, they make your brand look immature and insincere.
If you are going to contact anyone, make sure you have their permission to Seth Godin, a famous marketer wrote a book called Permission Marketing. Half of marketing is gaining people’s permission to contact them. The other half is conveying why your brand is more relevant than your competitors’.
- Use every engagement to collect data and improve your customer service with it – in a short qualitative research I did with consumers in Sydney – regular men and women, aged 30 – 55, the most annoying aspect of –email marketing was the ‘Do Not Reply’ button at the top.
Hey, you’ve just contacted someone but you don’t want them to contact you back? C’mon, let’s play a game that’s fair.
From what I’ve found, as a Strategic Marketing Consultant in Sydney, is “if you allow people to respond to you, the free text comments offer a rich repository of data that you can mine for insights that can greatly help you understand Service Level Expectations of your customers and improve them.”
Our customers are always changing – and as a Strategic Marketer, this is one thing you never forget to remember!
- Make a member of staff accessible by phone – the goal of all service in marketing or business, is to remove irritants. When a customer’s irritants are reduced to zero, service levels are scored high. When a high level of irritants are present, service levels are deemed low.
It’s a simple equation – and to understand the quality of your relationship with your customer, simply run a survey where one of the questions asks the recipient to “detail 5 irritants you’ve had in the last 6 months with service areas of your brand”. If you change the five areas – your customer’s perception and regard (loyalty) for your brand will go up instantly.
- Take politeness and make it a key KPI – we respond to KPI’s still. They give us a target – something to aim for. A lot of us can’t focus as well as others can. And that’s why we need a goal a target or KPI. Making Politeness a KPI is hardly ever done. But we did it at Euro RSCG Havas Singapore when we handled the agency’s biggest account, NTUC Fairprice Supermarkets. This worked and we had a very successful 360 relationship that kept the business together for 11 years and saw 16 quarters of successive growth occur of 21% per annum.
- Make Politeness part of your company’s culture – culture, they say, eats strategy for breakfast. Integrate anything into culture and you quickly turn it from fantasy to reality. Culture are the values you espouse and enact on a daily basis in your brand. When we make Politeness part of our culture, we literally bullet proof it against competitive attack
Being Polite as a Strategic Marketing Consultant in Sydney starts with me
Being Strategic in Marketing, means you are usually very good and very effective at what you do. However, good and effective are not enough. One must be Polite as well. It completes the axis and makes it one your success and your client’s revolve around.
To find out more about my Strategic Marketing Consulting Services, please contact me on 0450 545 725 or email me on Patrick@dsouzaconsulting.com.au
