How NPS Can Collect Valuable Insight For Businesses Of All Sizes

How NPS Can Collect Valuable Insight For Businesses Of All Sizes

by | Dec 4, 2019 | Business Intelligence & Analytics, Insights

How NPS Can Collect Valuable Insight For Businesses Of All Sizes

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What is NPS, and why is it important? 

NPS. It’s an acronym you’ve likely heard tossed around before, but it may be something you’ve associated with larger companies, like Netflix, Starbucks, or Amazon. The reality is, though, that NPS can be just as effective for growing businesses of all sizes – and it’s something we at &Marketing often recommend.

Net Promoter Score (or NPS), measures customer experience and brand perception and helps predict a business’s growth. In other words, it’s a quick way to gather customer insights for your business. The calculation is based on the answer to a simple question where respondents answer “How likely are you to recommend company/brand/product X to a friend, colleague, or relative?” using a scale of 0 – 10.  0 represents “not likely at all” and 10 represents “extremely likely.

Respondents are then grouped into the following categories:

  • Promoters = respondents giving a 9 or 10 score

  • Passives = respondents giving a 7 or 8 score

  • Detractors = respondents giving a 0 to 6 score

The Qualitative Component

Just as important as the numeric component described above collected through quantitative questions, qualitative feedback can also be gathered from your customers through NPS. You can complete the qualitative portion either as part of your survey, or as a 1:1 interview. 

At &Marketing, we find that this is where you unlock the greatest value, as open-ended questions allow you to dig deeper and get more detailed insights from the people consuming your brand. These responses tend to be more actionable to a small or medium-sized business than the actual numeric calculation. If you’re interested in incorporating more qualitative components to your NPS framework, we’re happy to help.

The Pros and Cons

Let’s break down the pros and cons of NPS to determine whether these components might be able to contribute to the growth of your brand.

Pros

  1. It’s quick. NPS allows you to efficiently gauge areas for improvement, versus traditional surveys, which take a long time to fill out and can focus on areas that the customer doesn’t actually care about. It’s also quick for respondents. With a short survey, you’re likely to get more people to actually take it as opposed to a more time-intensive one. 

  2. It’s focused. You can hone in on the areas that drive customer satisfaction and referrals, in customer terms. Instead of asking several questions about super specific encounters with your brand (which might frustrate customers), you keep it high-level and focus on the bigger story. 

  3. It’s measurable. You can calculate a ‘score’ so you can understand if you’re doing well (high number) or have significant room for improvement (low or negative). 

  4. It’s easy and inexpensive. It’s a simple process to execute and comes at a low cost for smaller budgets.

  5. It’s almost immediately actionable. Are you looking to take your business to new heights in the new year? The data from NPS is a great place to start to put that plan into place. 

Cons

  1. It’s not scientific. Despite being numeric, NPS is not based on a legitimate scientific formula or statistical significance.

  2. All customers are seen as equal. The reality is, each of your customers is different — they might be different sizes, come from different backgrounds, and may have varying needs—  you’re not always comparing apples to apples with NPS. 

As you can see, the pros typically outweigh the cons unless you feel strongly about a scientific formula or a specific weighted structure to your results.

Now, let’s touch on a few quick reasons NPS is beneficial for growing businesses by focusing on three specific areas: change, growth, and results. 

You can monitor changes over time

Because NPS is a quick and effective way to take the pulse of customer satisfaction, you can use it to measure changes based on any important benchmark (business cycle, management change, new branding, new product, change in product, etc). 

You can recognize room for growth

You can use the insight from Detractors as an opportunity to learn about potential areas for improvement, which is critical when you’re looking to grow your business. 

You can get simple and direct results

Formal NPS methodology only requires one direction question, with a 1-10 answer. However, depending on your business challenges, we recommend implementing a few additional open-ended questions to gather more extensive feedback.

Are you convinced of its value yet? &Marketing can help implement NPS for your current or former customers to help discover what’s most important to them, and what makes your company unique.

Ready to get started implementing NPS into your business growth strategy? For more background on NPS and help with determining how to get the most value from it, please contact us. &Marketing prepares, conducts, and helps analyze NPS surveys both for ourselves and our clients 

About the Authors

As the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Rajat “Raj” Kapur strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings nearly two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

by | Nov 20, 2019 | Business Intelligence & Analytics, Insights

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

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Market Intelligence can address a wide range of business problems, such as improving a company’s marketing strategy during a period of changing or intensifying competition, setting a more effective pricing strategy, or determining whether to expand into new markets. The information available to companies to help solve any given business problem is often uncoordinated and unsystematic. As a result, companies suffer from unreliable, incomplete, and often contradictory information when assessing these business problems.

“There is nothing more necessary than good intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy and nothing requires greater pains to obtain.”

— George Washington

 

What is Market Intelligence?

At the very core, a market intel is an external understanding that was not previously possessed. The purpose of market intelligence is to generate insight, new understanding, and implications to support strategy choice and action. Insights help a business create a common understanding of both current and likely future competitive situations and provide early warning of market threats and opportunities.

The ultimate goal of market intelligence is to inform decision making and action. In addition to an understanding of the external operating environment, strategic action necessitates a deep understanding of an organization’s internal strategy to determine competitive context and opportunities. It is this combined, internal and external view that enables insight to outwit and outmaneuver your competition

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain

How are Insights Developed?

Market insights are developed through a process of data collection, synthesis, and analysis. Analytic methodologies and frameworks are often used for organizing, evaluating, and interpreting information. These tools focus on data gathering and analysis, and while they make it easier to spot trends and structure thinking, in and of themselves, they do NOT generate insights. The steps for developing insights include:

  1. Determine and articulate the business issue
  2. Human and published, internal and external information collection and synthesis
  3. Data analysis to identify insights – trends, patterns, and discontinuities
  4. Identification of implication through discussion of insights in context of the business strategy, current position, and capabilities
  5. Create the story and communicate to generate action

Business issues will vary depending on your unique market dynamics; e.g. speed of change, consolidation, level of disruption, new entrants, shifting consumer demands, new technology/product offerings, etc. Critical business issues are often overlooked as an organization’s focus too frequently rests on more tactical questions such as looking for details behind the latest news headline or competitor announcement. While perhaps nice to know, those tactical questions don’t provide the level of actionable insights that can be gained from identifying an underlying business issue. Understanding the root of the intelligence need is one of the first and most critical steps to developing actionable insights.

“Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant.”
— Gen. Alfred Gray

What is the Value of Market Intelligence?

First and foremost, market intelligence provides a business with a common and informed understanding of both its current and likely future competitive marketplace. Having this basis of common understanding creates a heightened level of market acumen across an organization, aiding it to foster strategies to out-think and out-perform competitors. Market intelligence informs decision making and action.

Additionally, having an improved understanding of your business’ operating environment also heightens awareness of and protection of your own proprietary information assets. This resulting counterintelligence mindset helps an organization in the discovery and ability to neutralize competitors’ intelligence activities.

“The greatest derangement of mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.”
— Louis Pasteur

 

Implications for Businesses

While every business needs market insight, businesses often struggle to commit the resources, time, and ongoing investment necessary to build a comprehensive market intelligence program. The developmental process for starting up an internal intelligence program averages 1-2 years; it takes another 3-4 years before that program is fully optimized and truly part of a company’s culture.

Intelligence is an investment, its expensive. That doesn’t mean; however, that it’s out of reach for any businesses. Creating internal networks or virtual teams to track and benchmark critical metrics for your business is a good place to start. Identification of 1-3 critical business issues the network can work to address, with or without the support of external consulting services, can provide a foundation from which to build improved information collection, sharing and insight across an organization.

“If you think intelligence is expensive, try ignorance.”
— David Jimenez

 

Want to learn more about how market intelligence could directly impact your company’s ability to generate insights and inform decision making? Contact an expert at &Marketing for a free consultation.

 

Contact &Marketing

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

How Growing Businesses Can Build A Modern Marketing Department In the Digital Age

How Growing Businesses Can Build A Modern Marketing Department In the Digital Age

by | Nov 12, 2019 | Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

How Growing Businesses Can Build A Modern Marketing Department In the Digital Age

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Are you looking to take your growing business to the next level, but feel unsure of how to build your team and find the right level of marketing support to stimulate growth? If so, you’re definitely not alone. Spear Marketing recently released the results of a “marketing talent crunch” survey that was conducted to determine how difficult it is to hire and retain strong marketing employees, which roles and skill-sets are in most demand, and what B2B companies are doing to address these challenges. The study surveyed more than 10,000 B2B marketers, and the key findings are compelling: 

  • 90+ percent of companies are having difficulty finding marketing talent 

  • More than 80 percent of open marketing roles take 5+ weeks to fill, and almost one-third sit vacant for more than 2 months

  • Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed said their marketing department is understaffed

The survey also found that there are a variety of skill-sets for which managers are facing difficulty in hiring. Among these, marketing technology (analytics and operations) is the most in-demand role:

Whether you’re looking to build a new marketing department that fits the scope of your small or medium-sized business, or want to supplement your existing marketing team with new talent, we’ve got a few recommendations. Here are some suggestions for strategic, smart ways to make that growth happen, using Spear Marketing’s research as a guide. 

1. Adopt new hiring models 

Remote Employees

While remote work wasn’t always the norm, the digital revolution has completely transformed the way we communicate and get work done. We are far more efficient with technology, as there are plenty of digital platforms available to make virtual communication just as effective as being in the office. In fact, Mercer’s 2018 Global Talent Trends study found that one in three employees feels more productive when working remotely. Not only that, but 51% of employees wish their company offered more flexible work options. The trends show that remote work is becoming today’s new normal, so don’t fight it! By embracing remote employees, you’re opening yourself up to a wider pool of talent (by the way, &Marketing is a fully virtual company, and we love it!). 

Freelancers

Freelancers typically operate as their own business and are particularly beneficial for short-term assignments when there’s a hard stop on the project. Additionally, if a project is finished ahead of schedule or cut short due to budgetary constraints, a freelancer has the flexibility to move on and find work with another organization. On the flip side, if you hired a full-time employee for this role, you’d be obligated to pay their salary despite having limited work for them to complete. Not exactly the best bang for your buck!

Along with a fresh perspective, freelancers also bring with them their own benefits and devices. If you hire freelancers in a city with a lower cost of living, there’s also an opportunity for you to save money. By hiring them, you’re not only filling a void in your business, you’re doing your bottom line a favor.

Contractors

Some contractors function as freelancers, while others work through a third party or agency. Contractors tend to be different from freelancers, though. Typically, contractors will work for a single company for a long period of time, while freelancers tend to work for multiple companies at once. 

Contractors are useful if there’s an immediate need for a very specialized skill-set, whether it be SEO, graphic design, web development, or copywriting. With a contractor, you wouldn’t need to spend the time training them, as they could hit the ground running right away. While contractors do tend to charge more hourly than your salaried employees would, you’ll save money on healthcare costs and other expenses that full-time employees incur. 

2. Outsource technical marketing roles (even if you feel hesitant to do so)

Although some companies are hesitant to outsource technical help, Spear Marketing found that the challenges of hiring in-house talent are so high that these concerns will be ultimately outweighed by business priorities. Worth noting, too, is that according to the Consumer Technology Association’s Future of Work Survey conducted last year, flexible working is a key retention benefit for 86% of tech hires. By outsourcing support through a contractor, freelancer, or remote worker, chances are high that you’ll retain them, which saves you time, energy, and costs in the long run. 

3. Supplement your existing team with skills you need but don’t have  

In some cases, an organization lacks a marketing team altogether and has a need for just about every marketing skill-set, from content development, social media, and SEO, to graphic design, analytics, web development, and project management. In these instances, hiring an outside organization is much more effective than hiring several independent contractors. By hiring such a team, you get a group already familiar with working together, with its own processes to collaborate and drive results for you. 

In other instances, a company may have one or two marketing employees, but need to supplement their team to broaden their skill-set.

At &Marketing, supplementing is our bread and butter. The “&” in &Marketing signifies a partnership. We cover everything from strategy, to storytelling, to business intelligence and analytics, to planning and execution, and we consider ourselves an extension of your team. It’s us & you! 

Interested in learning about how &Marketing can help you solve this talent crunch and take your business to the next level? Drop us a line here and we’ll get in touch! 

About the Author:

As a Marketing Director at &Marketing, Paul Ferguson uses his 14 years of B2B marketing experience to help clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences. Paul graduated from La Salle University with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and a double minor in Marketing and Business Administration. Visit Paul’s LinkedIn.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

by | Oct 3, 2019 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

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A Legacy of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment 

One of my proudest professional accomplishments to date is the creation of the Kind Like Joey Website (https://www.kindlikejoey.org/).  

Why does one website, when my team has worked on several dozen (if not 100+) get this accolade? Some explanation of the circumstances around why this website was ever needed in the first place may help.  

About a year ago, my good friends Dan and Marina lost their 14-year-old son to a sudden and tragic auto accident. This was especially sad because we knew the family so well, and Joey was an exceptionally polite and respectful young man. But what happened after his passing is what makes this story truly exceptional. We found out later that their son had built a reputation as an extremely kind individual. Dan and Marina were inundated with letters and stories of their son helping others without ever worrying about getting credit. Walking kids to their locker and classes so they wouldn’t get bullied. Talking friends through rough periods. In a world full of negativity and bullying, here was this wonderful young man doing great things under the radar, taken from us too soon.

What Good Can Come of this Tragedy? 

In the days and weeks that followed Joey’s passing, the community was struggling to find solace. So we decided to build on Joey’s legacy of kindness. We created a Facebook group that has grown to 900+ members and an Instagram that has 1300+ followers, many of whom are Joey’s peers. We also held a golf outing in Joey’s honor in May 2019, and we’re proud to say it sold out and crushed the original fundraising goal thanks to the overwhelming response from local businesses, friends, and complete strangers. We’re now going to make it an annual tradition.  

Then we decided to take it a step further to formalize as a 501(c)(3) — a process that took several months and was made official a couple of weeks ago. The Foundation’s mission is to honor Joey by encouraging others to spread random acts of kindness, to offer a college scholarship annually, and to provide assistance to families that have experienced the sudden loss of a school-aged child in the Greater Philadelphia area. The college scholarship doesn’t ask the typical GPA and activities types of questions. The criteria revolve more around living up to Joey’s legacy of kindness. We’re proud to say that we were inundated with amazing stories of kindness that we gave out several scholarships in May to graduating seniors at Joey’s high school (see the picture of our board members at the award ceremony).

So How Can You Get Involved?  

Some specific activities that our Foundation has taken on need regular support.  

We regularly send checks to families who have suffered a similar sudden loss to cover unexpected funeral expenses. These expenses can be well into the tens of thousands of dollars, which most families cannot readily cover.  

  • We host and cover the cost of a therapist for a monthly bereaved parents support group. 

  • We support other foundations to increase awareness of their work.  

  • We run ‘kindness rocks’ campaigns to spread kindness (see our Facebook and Instagram pages for examples!). 

  • We offer student scholarships based on Kindness

  • We promote a “Kindness day” on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to encourage people to do a random act of kindness in their community in Joey’s honor.

We are also excited to promote a 5K on October 20th in Chalfont, PA.  Even if you don’t run, there will be many family fun activities to help bring the community together.

 

 

These are a few of the reasons why the website the &Marketing team created is my proudest accomplishment.  It has the chance to positively impact the most people and leave a legacy of which I’m incredibly proud.

“In a world where you can be anything, be kind. ”

— ANONYMOUS

About the Author:

About the Author: Rajat “Raj” Kapur is the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, and a board member of the Kind Like Joey Foundation.  After a career working with large, global companies, he’s dedicated to providing small and medium sized businesses unparalleled marketing support. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Define the Stakes (Lead Your Hero to Their Happily Ever After)

Define the Stakes (Lead Your Hero to Their Happily Ever After)

by | Jul 8, 2019 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

Define the Stakes (Lead Your Hero to Their Happily Ever After)

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In our first post in the Narrative Marketing series, we looked at this roadmap from Building a Story Brand:

We’ve already covered sections one/two and three/four in our last articles, so let’s now focus on sections five, six, and seven: 5) And Calls Them to Action 6) That Helps Them Avoid Failure 7) That Ends in a Success. There’s a lot to unpack in these last three steps, so let’s dive in.

And Calls Them to Action

After you have settled into your role as a guide and given your customer (the hero) a clear game plan, the rest is up to them, right? 

Hardly.

Imagine a story where Frodo just wakes up one day and decides, “it’s time to head to Mordor and destroy the ring.” Frodo packs his bags, leaves a note for Gandalf in case he stops by, and takes off for Mordor by himself. 

In any good story, the hero NEVER acts out of their own volition. The reason why is that everyone instinctively knows the hero doesn’t make major life decisions unless someone or something challenges them. It’s like Newton’s First Law of Motion: a body at rest tends to remain at rest until an external force acts upon it.

Your customer needs you to provide a clear and direct call to action (CTA), or else they won’t act. If a customer visits your website, do they know what you want them to do? Your website needs one button in the top right with a clear CTA and another front and center so they can see it before they even begin scrolling. Some examples of a direct CTA are:

  • Order Now

  • Call Today

  • Schedule an Appointment

  • Register Today

  • Buy Now

You might be afraid to be that direct with your customer, but by failing to have a prominent and direct CTA you are indirectly communicating a lack of belief in your product or service.

Paired with your direct CTA, you also need a transitional one. If the direct CTA is asking “Will You Marry Me?” then the transitional CTA is asking “Will You Go on a Date with Me?” Some examples of transitional CTAs are:

  • Download our PDF

  • Attend our Webinar

  • Get a Free Trial

  • Try a Free Sample

Transitional CTAs allow you to show your expertise and generosity, while also creating an opportunity to follow up with a potential customer. Both your direct CTA and transitional CTA need to appear prominently on your website, as well as on any piece of collateral.

However, in order to truly get your customer to act, you also need to clearly define what is at stake.

That Helps Them Avoid Failure

To be clear, communicating the consequences of a customer not doing business with you is not fear mongering. Instead, it’s answering every customer’s subconscious voice that asks, “so what?” 

In Building a Story Brand, Donald Miller writes:

Prospect Theory, as it was called, espoused that people are more likely to be dissatisfied with a loss than they are satisfied with a gain. In other words, people hate losing $100 more than they like winning $100. This, of course, means loss aversion is a greater motivator of buying decisions than potential gains. In fact, according to Kahneman, in certain situations, people are two to three times more motivated to make a change to avoid a loss than they are to achieve a gain.

– Miller, Donald. Building a StoryBrand (p. 111). HarperCollins Leadership. Kindle Edition. 

What loss are you helping your customers avoid? Remember the four main resources people don’t want to lose:

  • Time

  • Money

  • Health

  • Status

That Ends in a Success

Once you’ve clearly communicated what resource your hero stands to lose, the next step is to articulate what they have to gain from using your product or service. You need to paint a clear picture of the ‘happily ever after’ your product or service can provide.

One way to think through this is to imagine your customer’s life before and after they use your product or service. Here are four good before/after questions to consider:

  • What do they have?

  • What are they feeling?

  • What’s an average day like?

  • What’s their status?

Here are three of the most common happy endings in stories:

  1. The hero gets a new power or position (Neo becoming “The One” in The Matrix).

  2. The hero is reunited with someone or something that makes them whole again (Frodo reunites with Gandalf to sail to the Gray Havens and be at peace in Return of the King).

  3. The hero has a moment of self-realization that provides inner peace/wholeness (The panda Po discovers how to do kung-fu his own unique way in Kung Fu Panda).

Beyond Happily Ever After

So you’ve come to the end of this series. Now what? Donald Miller’s roadmap offers a heaping plateful of information to digest. In order to help you successfully lead your hero down the path to their own happily ever after, &Marketing has broken down this roadmap into easily digestible bites. Download our free guide to narrative marketing for a simple breakdown of each step of Donald Miller’s process along with the questions you should ask yourself in order to effectively lead your hero to their happily ever after.

Create Your Hero's Journey

If you want to create a journey that can lead customers to your product or service as their happily ever after, &Marketing can help. We love partnering with our clients to tap into the power of narrative marketing to engage their audience and experience success. 

“At &Marketing, we believe in the power of narrative marketing and its ability to craft an epic story that places your hero at the center. Our team works diligently to support our clients in creating and showcasing these stories. As the trusted guide, you can create the solution to your customer’s struggle to help them find their happy ending.

Let us handle the marketing in order to shine a spotlight on the incredible work your business is already doing so you can focus on what you do best.”

— MATT VINCENT

About the Author:

Matt Vincent is the Creative Director at &Marketing. He has worked in digital illustration and graphic design for over 6 years. During this time, he has worked for a variety of clients, including IGN Entertainment and Salesforce, and a host of smaller & medium sized companies. As a self-taught graphic designer and illustrator, he is constantly learning and growing his repertoire of creative skills, and sharing those with the world. His primary passion is equipping creatives to be storytellers; to see the narrative threads and archetypes that exist in all things, and to tap into them to get their audience to think, grow, and act.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast-paced world, many small and medium-sized businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.  

If you’re ready to dive into narrative marketing, why not let our team at &Marketing help you craft the unique story only your brand can tell? 

&Marketing (www.and-marketing.com) provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals.  Our unique partnership model allows us to launch or augment our client’s existing teams in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.