Your Communication Mix

Over the past several days, you should have gotten a really good idea of who your customer is and why that person IS your customer. You should have a damn good idea of where you stand in the marketplace. By now you are sensitive to your customer’s experience.

Notice I have not talked about your competitors. We all have competitors. If you did a decent job of shopping like your customers, finding their pain points and what they really wanted, you had to trip over quite a few of your competitors. I even pointed out that you yourself could be the one putting up the barriers.

You don’t “deal” with your competitors. Price alone is rarely a key factor in the buying decision, although price can often be the tiebreaker. What you have to do is take everything in your communication mix and use it to build your reputation with your customer at every touch point, although this will be different for each and every one of you.

Today’s gift is a touch point matrix. First, I want you to separate the interactions you have with your customers between those that come in to you—e.g. customer walking in the door, client calls, referrals, twitter followers, subscribers to your blog—and those that you send out—e.g. your location, web site, forum participation, advertisement, direct campaign. List everything you can think of that you spend time, money and resources doing.

Then, for each interaction on your list I want you to assign a value of either high or low importance for your business. I waited to give this to you because you need to use all the data you have been hard at work gathering to be able to do this.

Based on the importance of each, compare this information to your communication budget. Are you spending the appropriate amount of resources in the areas of the greatest importance?

Advertising, PR, marketing and social media all have a purpose and place in your communication mix. This is not static information. The difficult task is getting and keeping it in balance.

Share with me what you are doing to build your reputation.