What can service marketers learn from consumer brands?

Designing a demand generation program from scratch is a great opportunity to examine which best practices can be borrowed from other disciplines. I am working to develop a demand generation program for a packaging design firm and I wanted to look at successful consumer brands for ideas.

Here is a short list of ideas that struck my interest at a first glance:

Sample the goods: I had the privilege of serving P&G as an account executive many moons ago. One of the lesson’s I learned from that experience was to always consider consumer insight as the anchor of all sales and marketing related activities. For a professional service firm, having your customer at the core of your business means you need to genuinely care about solving their problems. Your new business acquisition strategy has to demonstrate that you understand their world. The way to do that is to deliver relevant content and do it consistently. Your demand generation program has to deliver value in order to build trust. This means sometimes you have to share your expertise and knowledge with your audience for free. You will become an expert in their eyes before you even pitch for their business.


Develop familiarity: I love Target stores. They are like a home away from home when I travel. I can always count on the store layout to be exactly as it is in the store near my hometown. I go there to buy few items that I might need but I come out from the store feeling grounded because everything is so familiar. Service firms are faced with the constant challenge of having to go between “feast to famine” when it comes to work flow. No matter how strapped for time you are, it is essential to keep your content consistent. You can hire a demand generation professional or run the program yourself but avoid interrupting the flow, changing look and feel or the tone of voice of the content too often.

Build an emotional bond: You may be a purchasing agent at a manufacturing firm looking to buy a multimillion dollar machine but the same relationship discipline applies as in the way you select which dentist to take your kids for their dental appointments. People like to do business with people they like. If the approach of your demand generation program is cold and calculated, you are telling your customer to treat you like a vendor instead of a trusted advisor. You must breed life into your content and make sure it reflects personality, not only expertise.

There are a number of tools and strategies out there to continuously improve performance of your marketing efforts. These few basic best practices will help keep your demand generation program humming along, generating leads while establishing your service brand.