Don't Fear Your Marketing Competitors. Learn From Them

Regardless of the products you're trying to market, the audience you're trying to cater to, or the industry you happen to be operating in, all businesses face competition. This is just a fact of life. But it's important to realize that a competitor isn't just another company that is trying to go after the same pool of customers that you are. Competitors are invaluable learning opportunities that are just waiting to be taken advantage of, provided you approach things from the right angle.

Learn About Your Audience

One of the most important lessons that you can learn by taking a closer look at your marketing competitors has nothing to do with your competition itself and everything to do with the shared audience you're both going after. For the sake of argument, let's say that your number one competitor offers products or services that are very similar to yours.

How is your competition marketing those products and services to that audience? What types of print materials are they designing? What tone do they use when speaking to them directly? What prices do they charge, and why do they feel like the market can sustain that? What values do they choose to single in on when representing their brand?

All of these choices, along with the public reaction to them, can tell you a great deal about what your audience is looking for. Marketing is all about making a connection, and if you can pick up something through observation that you can adapt and make your own to strengthen that connection, you should absolutely take that opportunity.

Learn About the Competitors Themselves

The second lesson you can learn by taking a closer look at your marketing competitors comes down to how they choose to run a business that is very similar to yours in many ways. This goes beyond just the products or services they provide. Look at how they choose to distribute and deliver those products. Look at the steps they take to enhance customer value or build loyalty. Have they recently instituted a rewards program with great success? If you were thinking about doing one yourself, congratulations, someone else just did your trial run for you.

Perhaps the most important thing you should be watching out for when it comes to your marketing competitors is how they react when they make a mistake. These days, everything is essentially an extension of your marketing arm - from the print collateral you're putting out into the world to customer service interactions on a site like Facebook. Everything is taking place in the public space, which means that other customers (and you and your associates) can all see everything go down in real-time.

Did your biggest competitor have a particularly nasty public interaction with a customer? What factors caused it to occur in the first place? How did the customer react? How did the business react? What did the rest of the audience have to say at the end of the day? Remember that mistakes are only a bad thing if you choose not to learn from them. If you can get someone else to make a mistake and arrive at the same lesson, you come out all the better for it.

Competition in the world of business (and especially regarding marketing) isn't going away anytime soon. However, it's not something you should let get you down. Instead, look at it for what it is: an incredible ongoing education into your market, your industry, and even your own business that someone else is paying for.

Leadership Sometimes Means Showing You're Human

Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, has seen her share of tough times. She took on the CEO mantle as one of the first female company leaders in the auto industry, only to get slapped with a faulty auto ignition switch recall.

Barra had already done her time in the trenches while going through the GM bankruptcy in 2009. However, when Barra faced down her first big CEO challenge with an ignition switch that was being attributed with killing consumers, she did something no one expected - she apologized.

The Road That Leads to Trust

Barra's apology rang the auto industry like a deep bell of the apocalypse. Everyone heard it, everyone saw it on TV, and everyone was in shock. Her apology wasn't the end of the matter, of course. She had to go through multiple congressional hearings, fire managers and engineers she had known and trusted for years, and put the reins on employees to turn the company around. But her leadership was and continues to be rooted in a basic, inherent level of decency to do the right thing. To this day, Barra's choice to take the harder road has been remembered as well as solidified her as GM's CEO for a good number of years to come.

Company leaders only get a few opportunities to define themselves and lead the company through a major challenge. After that the die is cast with regards to overall confidence in the leader's capabilities. Those who succeed gain the invaluable loyalty of staff and supporters through far more challenges in the future because trust is solidified. Those who fail usually see their support begin to erode and, after a few years, have to start planning an exit unless they produce some major new revenues or get lucky.

The Humanness Factor

The success of a leader, as Barra's example has shown, is rooted in humanness, the ability to come across as a real person. CEOs and leaders often get a bad rap for being distanced from the working floor and aloof from the problems of the average person. Their higher salaries and compensation don't help matters either. Barra's apology, however, shows how a CEO can cross such perception barriers and be the right person for the job when it counts. When people need to see someone take responsibility to move things in the right direction they look to a known leader commodity. If that person fails at that moment to be decisive, people then begin to fall away and worry about their personal stake. That can drive away extremely important people assets and potentially kill a company.

Granted, the first thing an attorney will advise is to admit nothing, and tow the party line. However, as Barra has shown, society does forgive serious mistakes if they can trust those in charge.

How to Take the Lessons Learned in Online Marketing and Apply Them to the World of Print

Print marketing isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Over the last few years, people are coming to the realization that digital and print isn't an "either/or" scenario. Many use one to supplement and compliment the other to great effect. Despite this, people still tend to think of them as two different mediums, thinking you have different rules that you use online than those that you follow in print.

Because online marketing has become so prominent, it has taught us some very valuable lessons. One of which is that those lessons aren't reserved only for the digital market. You can apply those lessons to your print collateral and come out all the better for it.

Marketing Is About Intimacy

Perhaps the biggest lesson that various digital and online marketing channels have taught us is that at the end of the day, you're not trying to "sell" to someone at all. You're trying to connect with them. The best marketing reaches out to customers and prospects in an intimate way that establishes the type of bond that turns prospective customers into buyers, and buyers into loyal advocates.

On the internet, this often takes the form of various social media and related techniques - after all, what could be more intimate than contacting someone on a small device that they carry around with them all day? The key takeaway, however, is that you DO have a way to maintain this intimacy in the world of print marketing, too.

According to a study conducted by the United States Postal Service, sixty-nine percent of people who responded said that they felt direct mail was more personal than internet mail. Emails may be great and efficient, but an actual letter (or in the case of a marketer, a flyer or brochure) is something tangible. They can hold it in their hands, pin it up on the refrigerator and share it with their friends and loved ones.

Optimizing Print Campaigns Through a Digital Lens

So how do you take full advantage of this fact and build the type of intimacy and emotional connection you can online? Simple. Take the rules that the internet forced marketers to adopt and apply them back into your print campaign.

Don't just tell the story of a product or service, tell the story of your entire organization. Bring people into the fold and let them see who you are, what you're all about, and why you do what you do. According to Millward Brown, physical materials forge a stronger connection inside the human brain than digital media ever can.

You can also take the valuable data you're gathering about your audience from the digital world and apply that back into your print collateral. Marketing has gotten hyper-specific. By using various software, you now know precisely what type of white paper, blog post, or video to send to someone at just the right point in the customer journey to help nurture that lead and guide them through to the desired outcome. Taking that one step further, you can also use the same insights to know exactly what type of flyer someone needs to receive in the mail, or take a successful visual element from social media and transform it into your next poster.

Print media is a format that people are naturally wired to engage with. If you can provide them with materials that are worth engaging with, similar to and combined with what digital agencies have been doing over the last few years, you're in an incredibly powerful position as a result.