Yesterday during a meeting with HRB’s CEO, I learned a great deal about why some agencies are failing without the help of the economy. According to Jim, the main reason is because they don’t market their brand using the “funnel technique.” This is a tactic we have been using for our marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and advertising projects and telling our clients about to help them grow their business and improve their services.
The funnel technique involves three simple steps:
1) Determining a brand‘s mission and goals (putting ideas into the funnel)
2) Choosing the best strategic approach for marketing and promoting the brand (weeding out research and ideas so only the best ideas begin to flow through the funnel)
3) Actively engaging/re-engaging with customers and key prospects on behalf of the brand’s mission and goals (creating brand loyalty via a smooth transition between initial offers, additional services and added values).
At HRB, we are very careful to select only the best ideas to put into the funnel. We inspire team members to seek out new advertising venues, read new publications and avoid recycled content. We don’t use the economy as an excuse for failure, but rather as a challenge and opportunity to own an industry and trump competitors by pushing our creative juices to the limit. And it’s because of this attitude that our client retention numbers and our clients’ customer retention numbers are high—everyone’s hungry for fresh insight to throw into the funnel and the funneling process itself .
Throughout my internship I have used the funnel technique everyday. Whether I’m strategizing new ways to keep HRB’s audience and customers engaged in our blog, social media marketing platforms, website or growing portfolio, my job is to help promote the HRB brand and let people know that our ideas are revolutionary.
I think it’s so easy for me to promote this marketing technique because I believe in it. Recently I’ve been asked to spearhead the organizational and branding process for HRB’s seminar series, and I’ve had to strategize everything from advertising outlets to the presentation schedule and speaking topics to which customers and prospects we are going to target. I will need to think about the individual pieces that go into planning a seminar as well as how the pieces all fit together and continue to flow through HRB’s brand funnel.
Like my colleagues, I am motivated and excited to start the research for this project. So far I have compiled everyone’s ideas into a six-page strategic plan. My next steps will include:
1) Creating checklists for the steps we’ll be taking to plan and execute each 2011 seminar
2) Creating a master editorial calendar
3) Creating contact and media lists
4) Writing and posting weekly polls on our blog, Facebook® page, Twitter® stream, various advertising outlets and Web services.
The goal here is to research industry trends as well as the behaviors and thoughts of our audience, clients and prospective seminar registrants to determine what events/speaking topics they would like to attend, how HRB can improve about its seminar series and process, and how to continue engaging with the community. Simply being organized and having good research and ideas isn’t enough, though. Everything needs to tie together and flow smoothly through the funnel.
To quote Seth Godin in his recent blog, “Understanding the Funnel,” “Embracing the funnel changes the way you treat people. And treating different people differently is what consumers demand.” That’s what we hope to do and inspire our clients to do by offering our expertise in these seminars. Care to join us?