By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are copyblogger and Read Write Web and three great articles from Fast Company.
Forget the mission statement. What’s your mission question?
Questions (as opposed to statements) can provide a reality check to a business and are designed to keep a company focused on what matters most, writes Warren Berger.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from June 2011. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
Marketers are well familiar with the concept of segmenting their marketplace. Segmentation is the process of dividing a broad and undifferentiated set of consumers into ever-smaller segments until you have identified that group of potential customers that is the best match possible for your product or service. My wife is also afflicted with this contagion we call marketing and that gives rise to some strange conversations in our household. One such conversation a few years back resulted in our developing an easy-to-understand explanation of market segmentation we refer to as finding your gay Acadian dog lover. The key to segmenting the marketplace is to identify those traits — some demographic, some taste-based, many certainly geographic — that define the customers most likely to be interested in your product or service. Not only does the process tell you a lot about who you’re trying to sell to, it also gives you a lot of insight into how you might reach them.
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By Leo Valiquette
This is a story about a dining room set and organically grown frozen meat products, but it could just as easily be a story about a B2B technology product or service.
A couple of months ago, Francis wrote that customer service must be a deliberate strategy. How you approach customer service ought to be a strategic decision that is carefully and deliberately made. Retaining good customers, after all, is far less costly than acquiring new ones.
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By Bob Bailly
Artists, poets, writers, revolutionaries, magicians, explorers, musicians and creative innovators of all kinds are among us today. Their muses, oracles and inspiration are available to us all if we want to understand their secrets.
And one of those secrets is that they are all great storytellers.
Why are stories so powerful for humans? Why are the best orators also great storytellers? What can we learn from our desire to tell, listen and interpret stories that can be applied to what we do in our business lives?
To the best of our knowledge, humans are the only animals that have the ability to remember the past beyond their own lifetimes. This feature likely arose and continued as an essential aspect of human evolution for two reasons: the advent of language, and the need and requirement to seek a narrative for the events and interactions that shape our lives.
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By Leo Valiquette
It may have been a short month, by we still pulled together in February a rich lineup of content for marketers, entrepreneurs and investors alike. Hot topics included how not to do customer service, what’s to love and hate about technology marketing, the root causes of the so-called Series A crunch and the risks of “mentor whiplash.”
In case you missed any of it, here is a handy recap of our posts, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
Feb. 5: Is the ‘last mile’ of sales automation keeping your reps from closing more business?, by Jeff Campbell
Feb. 7: The trouble with mentors is…, by Francis Moran
Feb. 21: 6 little things that tell your customers you don’t care, by Linda Moran and Francis Moran
Feb. 25: Ego capital and the ‘Series A Crunch’, by Ronald Weissman
Feb. 13: Getting to the point in drafting a patent application, by David French
Feb. 20: The traditional corporate presentation is dead!, by Anil Dilawri
Feb. 27: You just never know where a story is going to stick, by Leo Valiquette
Feb. 6: Does your business suffer from multiple personalities?, by Leo Valiquette
Feb. 11: Do you have the key ingredients for an effective board?, by Denzil Doyle
Feb. 26: App development today demands a three-in-one approach, by Peter Hanschke
Feb. 14: Why I heart tech marketing, by Francis Moran
Feb. 28: Why I hate tech marketing, by Francis Moran
Feb. 19: Do your PR people suffer from telephobia?, by Leo Valiquette
Image: February2013CalendarPrintable.com
