Building Competitive Motes With Marketing (Hint Help Key Constituents With Their Marketing)

By Rob Pace, Founder, HundredX

Several powerful forces are converging to fundamentally alter the landscape of marketing. These same forces when applied creatively can be used to differentiate businesses and establish competitive motes across many industries.

With the ubiquity of the Internet and social networks, the power customers have to personally impact a business is clearer than ever. Through a simple post, tweet or text, customers can share their experiences and opinions with their relationships — a hyper-personal network. The feedback that they publicly share is branding for companies — both positive and negative.

A related and emerging trend in marketing with massive strategic implications is the positive shift in what I call the net value per connection or “NVC.”  Simply put, NVC is the value created from positive connections minus the cost to establish them. Few would argue that establishing deep connections with customers and employees drives loyalty, referral traffic, and an effective marketing tool for any successful business. What is changing is the declining cost to develop these relationships compared to the increasing benefit due to the network effect.  This economic shift is enabling companies to implement highly tailored digital initiatives including personalized targeting, marketing, feedback, response, and chat solutions. In essence, the positive NVC era is fueling the era of hyper-local marketing. 

Managing and utilizing this power to create deep customer and employee connections via low cost technologies will help companies better market themselves. It also creates unique strategies to solidify key partnerships in the process.

As the founder of a digital customer express feedback and diagnostics company, I am seeing more and more companies adopt strategies that leverage technology to collect feedback and directly engage with customers in order to maximize the NVC.  As companies begin to execute a hyper-local engagement strategy, they also collect insights at the individual and community levels. As customers are given the direct and express opportunity to provide feedback to companies,, we have found a surprisingly high percentage of comments are positive and include great testimonials and content that companies can monetize strategically.

For example, a client who is a fast growing fitness chain has over 90 percent positive feedback, collected by class and instructor, via their new mobile app. Top instructors, who are independent contractors, have been recognized over 50 times. The fitness industry is characterized by intense competition for top talent and high turnover. Our client aims to change this challenging retention dynamic by packaging and distributing positive customer testimonials in ways that direct helps instructors grow their business too.  It’s the ultimate win-win, as each party benefits and leverages our client’s marketing budget, the cost of their app and the embedded feedback system. 

We are seeing a similar opportunity in healthcare. Physicians are busy and notoriously poor marketers. However, device and other companies who sell products to them can collect great testimonials from patients that include success stories about their products executed by brilliant surgeons. Here again, specific feedback can be used for diagnostics and to drive revenues for both parties.  These two examples are not edge cases.  Realtors, insurance brokers, financial advisors, hair stylist, and even Uber drivers all share a critical interdependent relationship with a sponsoring business. Most B2B companies can also benefit from employing a version of this “help my customers look good too” localized strategy.

Superior talent and important business customers will always have leverage and many options.  However, helping key contractors, agents, partners or business clients succeed using creative marketing strategies can drive higher profits for both parties, leverage fixed costs, increase retention, and fundamentally alter the nature of critically important relationships. By providing consumers opportunities for direct and express feedback and building deeper customer connections, companies will organically produce compelling content and word-of mouth marketing. Companies need to capitalize on the power of community marketing for their benefit and key partnerships. 

Rob Pace is the Founder of HundredX, a people-sourced diagnostics and activation company dedicated to multiplying positive outcomes.  He is a former partner at Goldman Sachs.