In April of 2018, our very own Linda Lullie attended POLYCON, the ICPA's annual conference of manufactures and suppliers to the Cast Polymer Association. She was there in two capacities: one to photograph the event for the association, and two, to conduct two break out sessions on marketing. The article below is a summary of those presentations by Genilee Swoop Parente, GSP Publishing. Reprinted with permission from the Cast Polymer Connection, Summer 2018.
Although small-to medium-sized companies sometimes view social media, search engine optimization, website design and maintenance, blogs and other modern channels as a superhighway they dread, “any company today needs to know what it’s like to conduct business on the internet,” Linda Lullie, the founder of Inspired 2 Design, LLC, told POLYCON attendees. They also need to connect what they do in the digital world with their entire company’s marketing efforts.
The place to begin the journey is to identify and consistently showcase a company brand.
“When we talk about brand, we’re talking about who you are as a company and what you believe in,” Lullie said. “If you exist to be an innovator in design in kitchens and bath, for example, or if you exist to make it easier for your customers to do business, these values should be outlined in a mission statement or statement of values or goals and carried through in all you do.”
Once core values are identified, they become a guiding light on the journey to success, she said, and they can be used at all levels of communication.
“Your brand is who you are,” she explained. “Marketing is what you do with that brand.” Lullie referred to a quote by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, who said “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
“So how do we get people to say good things about us?” Lullie challenged the audience.
Be consistent in presenting your message
Once a company has identified its brand, it needs to ensure the brand is presented in every company message. That means online, in brochures, how employees answer the phone, how the logo is presented, what is said on the web, etc. “Over time, this creates an emotional connection with your customers and your audience,” she said.
For example, Amazon prides itself on “fast and anything you want” while Visa “is accepted everywhere,” she said. These companies put a lot of resources behind those words, but they also stress everywhere in their operations and their dealings with customers that their services are built around “fast” (for Amazon) and “everywhere” (for Visa), she said.
Carrying the message of a brand also means recognizing what customers truly go through every time they interact with the company, she said.
“It’s all about the experience today. Everyone is touchyfeely, and they want you to stand for something,” she said. That experience begins before a person ever enters a shop or showroom. Lullie said companies need to consider: “How did they [customers] find you: your website, google maps, did they see a sign on the road, did that sign have the same color and design as your website? When customers call: do they get put on hold? Do they have to go through multiple levels or channels for phone interaction? When they make it to your location, was your parking lot clean, your facility welcoming? None of these individual things are what’s needed; however, the consistent message needs to follow through on multiple channels,” she said.
The reason all of this is so vital is because the digital world is moving at lightning speed and people are bombarded
today with so many messages that individual attempts to communicate have become complicated, she said.
Know your audiences
Another challenge in the digital world today is that there are so many channels over which to communicate—from Instagram to YouTube to Facebook to chatbots. “The internet is not a static tool anymore and it’s changing rapidly every day,” she said. One way to narrow it down is to recognize which audiences use what channels. For example, Facebook used to be for a younger generation, but that’s no longer the case. “People under the age of 30 are probably not going to be on Facebook; but if you’re looking for homeowners over 40, it’s a good place to establish a presence,” she said.
Meanwhile, millennials and younger generations have created their own ways to communicate via texts, memes, emoticons, hashtags, videos. Also, the younger generations today are much more cognizant and demanding that companies be socially responsible and that as consumers, they are dealing with a business where real people are running the company.
“It’s a challenge for those of us who own businesses, because even if they [millennials and younger] are not our main audience today, we have to talk to them at some point. They are the generation about to own homes—we have to know how to appeal to them,” she said.
Be aware of what’s said
Another challenge today is to track how your brand looks to its audiences. “We as businesses have a lot less control than we ever did because customers are much more informed and autonomous. They make decisions often before they ever talk to you,” she pointed out. Search engines are the leading way people today find a company—Forrester Research reports that three-quarters of consumers do more than half of their research online before making any offline purchases, Lullie reported.
That’s why reviews can be so worrisome, yet important. “Customers can either be your greatest advocates or your worst critic,” she pointed out. Companies need to lose their fear of reviews and simply be aware of what is being said, even when the comments are negative. When they are negative, they should find proactive ways to react. “It all stems back to who you are as a company. If your goal is to provide the very best customer service and you’re getting bad reviews, something needs fixing,” she said.
Know your channels
Lullie classified today’s companies into three probable categories: those that are old school and have a website that’s been static for years; those that are presently catching up with the times and may even have a mobile presence, a blog and make changes to their web sites occasionally, and those that are forward thinking. The forward thinkers keep their sites up to date sometimes by using outside experts, have fresh content on their sites, and have a look and a site that translates well into mobile applications such as tablets and phones. No matter where a company is, however, establishing the brand and carrying it through is the backbone to moving forward.
“We all have a footprint. It starts with tools like our logo, our brochures, our signage, but it extends out into social media, our web presence, how we appear in search engines. The most important factor in learning to deal with this new digital era is to recognize our own brand and make sure that, no matter where it’s presented, we are giving out the message we’ve chosen,” she said.
GENILEE SWOPE PARENTE is executive editor of Cast Polymer Connection. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..