Putting Your Customers' Needs First

• Employee Newsletters – Employees are sometimes “an after-thought” in many companies when it comes marketing and sales functions, but we felt that employee communications should be taken just as seriously as communications to our customers; thus, we also published a quarterly employee newsletter to every single employee. This was NOT an HR or Human Resource authored document but generated by Marketing Communications for the expressed purposes of sharing our marketing and sales efforts about our customers with each employee. While not every employee’s job will be in direct contact with a customer or prospect, they will at least indirectly impact your company’s ability to serve the customer or to make a good impression on them. The more your employees know and understand your customers…the better position they will be in to serve their needs! company as well as for its products and services is to be featured in the various trade journals or publications that serve your industry. John DeFazio, my Marketing Communications mentor and friend at Westinghouse taught me many things, but this was one of the most important ones. Build and maintain a relationship with the trade press; we would take annual tours across the U.S. every year to the major publishers … McGraw-Hill, Penton, Cahners, IEEE, etc We would visit their editorial department, their creative/art departments and, of course, their advertising departments. The key was to become acquainted with their personnel, get a copy of their annual editorial calendar so you would know what they monthly features would be that they are planning so you can dove tail your product/service offering to accommodate THEIR needs as well as YOURS! It pays to spend time with their creative people because these publications are always looking for ways to make their publication stand out with their readership. I was a one-time author myself…my article made the cover of EDN Magazine on August 5, 1974. My six-page article “How to get the most out of high-powered rectifiers and SCR’s” made the cover for TWO reasons: 1) Spectacular photograph for the cover 2) Good general interest article of semiconductors. As my first and only article garnered the cover of their magazine, I promptly retired from writing magazine articles as my career could only go downhill from here! • Trade Journal Articles – One of the most powerful ways to get recognition for your

When I was Marketing Communications Manager, the Application Engineering manager came up to me one day complaining that his engineers were spending more time on my marketing communications projects than they were on

their regular work assignments. I said that sounded good to me! I said the reason for that is that I can give them two things that you cannot: 1) I pay them $50 per page for every article they get published in a trade magazine (they already get your pay so my pay to them is simply a bonus for them (you need to remember that in the mid-1970’s that $750 or $800 per month was a regular salary back then) 2) they get the “prestige” and “recognition” of being published in a national