LB Water Service, Inc.

Knowing the Customer Before Setting the Strategy

At its core, marketing is solely about the customer. Every decision you make, campaign you deploy, email you send, etc. should be with your customers in mind. How will this help my customer? How will this information benefit them? Who your customer actually is in every situation might change though.

For example, one campaign might be targeting a specific customer persona or customer geographic location (people actually purchasing from you) while another might be more focused on your vendor partners and how they perceive your brand with information or content focused on “why should you do business with me.”

In order to make sure your marketing strategies align with your business growth and customer needs, there’s a few things that need to happen,

1) You and whoever you’re working for (client, organization, nonprofit, etc.) need to make sure you’re aligned on what your growth strategy is. You can’t make sure you’re aligning your marketing strategies with business growth if you don’t understand what the overall goal is.

2) You can’t be sure of your customer needs unless you ask them. Most of us have a good understanding of our customers, but don’t discredit quality research. Quality customer research can come in the form of external surveys, salesmen focus groups or by simply asking them face-to-face.

Making Complex Products Easier to Understand

We see this often in the Waterworks Industry, where incredibly complex products are implemented to solve very technical problems that require a general understanding of how a waterworks infrastructure distribution system works. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by this, but there’s incredible power in understanding the different learning styles and how you can take the same piece of information and present/display/communicate it in multiple different ways, but still get the same message across. My rule of thumb is simple, start with identifying what problem the product/service solves and take it from there.

Trust Is Built When Sales Delivers on Marketing’s Promise

I think it’s really hard to build a customer’s trust through marketing alone. As marketers, we rely heavily on our sales teams to deliver on the message we’re putting out. We’ve all heard the old saying, “A man’s only as good as his word,” and that rings true here. We can create all the flashy videos, emails and social media graphics you want, but if we deliver on what we say we’re going to do and deliver on that consistently and exceptionally, that’s how we build trust with our customers. That goes both ways too. There’s nothing that will destroy our customers’ trust in us faster than pulling the old bait-and-switch.

It goes back to pure psychology and human nature, if 9 times out of 10 you did what you said you were going to do, it’s safe to assume that I can trust your word and vice versa. This is why it’s so vital to have a great relationship with your sales team and ensure that communication flows both ways. They need to know the messaging and brand strategy that’s being pushed to their customers (and support it!) and we need to understand their needs and support them in every way that we can. Your Sales/Marketing relationship needs to be one of symbiosis. Neither can successfully exist without the other and you need to humbly remember that you’re only ever as strong as your weakest link (on either side!)

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Moving Waterworks Marketing Beyond Traditional Channels

I always joke that the Construction Industry as a whole, which Waterworks falls under that broader umbrella, is about 10 years behind the rest of the world. Things that the rest of us have been doing for what feels like decades is “groundbreaking” in this space. The biggest marketing trends I foresee shaping the future of the Waterworks Industry is the integration of social media as a strong customer touchpoint, streaming platforms and customer-support apps that are accessible via smartphone. The “changing of the guard” is becoming clear (not just within our industry) but within society as a whole. Millennials now make up the majority of the U.S. labor force and they’re moving into positions of power.

The somewhat archaic way of thinking within this space is starting to become a thing of the past and leadership is starting to recognize and embrace that “the way we’ve always done things” may have gotten us here, but it’s not what will take us to where we’re going next. Customer touchpoints aren’t just paper billing statements and a Word newsletter anymore, there are so many more avenues and opportunities to explore that are finally being implemented and embraced, which is an exciting new challenge.