In its “5 Questions Marketers Should Ask in 2017,” Google challenges marketers to ask themselves, “Do I have a portfolio of customer media and marketing content assets that appeal to both the immediate and longer-term needs of my customers?”
Hammock Healthcare
Idea Ebook | Book 1
Using Content to Support Sales to Healthcare Providers
Successful marketing and sales to healthcare providers—and building enduring relationships—requires helping your customer along a journey from problem to solution. Developing lead generation content is the first stage in the customer journey, but an enduring relationship with customers goes far beyond this first stage.
The Ebook, Using Content to Support Sales to Healthcare Providers, provides ideas on:
Learn this and more by downloading Using Content to Support Sales to Healthcare Providers, the first in the Hammock Healthcare Media series, A Healthcare Marketer’s Guide to Enduring Customer Relationships.
By Rex Hammock
Since this is the last Idea Email of 2016 (we will be back on Thursday, January 5), I decided to save you some time by suggesting these four New Year’s resolutions for managers and marketers.
By Rex Hammock
“The KISS principle” was a short-lived business buzzword in the 1970s. Borrowing a U.S. Navy acronym (Keep It Simple, Stupid), it was the theory that business systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated.
On the Tuesday before each Thanksgiving,
we share this idea. And with it, we send our deepest thanks.
Not long ago, the most powerful word in marketing was the word FREE.
That era ended with the creation of filters that automatically translate the word into “spam.”
Now, the most powerful word in marketing is THANKS.
By Rex Hammock, Founder and CEO
Yesterday, the morning after the 2016 presidential election, I received an email from an investment company. Its subject line: “How could the election impact financial markets and the economy?”
Besides being a great example of savvy timing (it was the first such email I received) and an impossible-to-ignore subject line, the message demonstrated what a company must do to be perceived as an “opinion leader.”
By Rex Hammock, Founder and CEO
If you ever speak to someone in product development at the software company Intuit, you’ll hear this sentence within the first few moments: “We fall in love with a customer’s problem, not with our solution.”
I heard that sentence firsthand earlier this week, when I attended Intuit’s annual conference in San Jose, California. Most of the 5,000 attendees were accountants, developers and users of QuickBooks Online, Intuit’s cloud-based financial management platform. Attendees traveled from around the globe to spend two days learning about what’s next from a company they know will help them solve their problems.
Hammock Idea Ebook
Outcome Marketing:
Using direct-to-customer media and content to build long-term marketing relationships
In a marketplace of commodity products with similar features, the most powerful way to market a product or service is to go beyond selling and start helping customers use those features to reach their goals.
In Hammock’s new Idea Ebook, Outcome Marketing: Using direct-to-customer media and content to build long-term marketing relationships, you will learn about this powerful form of marketing that does not focus on products, services or features. Instead, outcome marketing focuses on the goals and outcomes that customers want to reach or accomplish.
This Idea Email breaks our long-standing practice of keeping this biweekly essay hype-free. But this week also marks the 25th anniversary of Hammock, so I hope you’ll forgive me.
I’ve discovered such a milestone generates comments like, “I bet you’ve seen a lot of changes during that time.” Or, if you are a parent of witty Millennials, “What was it like before electricity?”
Don’t worry: We’re not covering politics on the Idea Email. However, we are going to remind you of a political phenomenon we’ve touched on before: the “backfire effect.” Identified through the research of political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, the backfire effect can be summed up this way: When individuals declare their support for a specific candidate or cause, no amount of evidence or fact-checking will convince them that they are wrong. Not only that, but the more you tell these supporters they are wrong, the more they will dig in their heels and refuse to budge.