As the co-founder and marketing director of DROID, I am responsible to strategize marketing activities for the company.

I decide the share of annual budgets to invest in every possible channels that could bring our brand value to global recognition, generate quality sales leads, and activate truly sustained business partnerships.

Looking around the common marketing practices of our peers on the run to buy more attention, burning a hole in the pocket could be such an easy-win: 20% of budgets goes to fancy off-line exhibitions, 80% is budgeted to be the favored advertizer on all types of B2B / paid search ads  in order to rank top in search results.

From my perspectives, customers coming through traditional outbound marketing funnels benefit least as a huge sum of advertizing costs are already hidden in the commodity pricing. Meanwhile, vendors are more likely to end up wrapping themselves in comfort bubbles where limited budgets and manpower are assigned to the design of customer experience that should have been heavily invested in.

Paying for ” presence” on a global scale is a low hanging fruit. It’s a no-brainer to upload tons of videos to YouTube and “tell”people your product is value for money, hassle-free or your service is better than your competition. It’s too easy to make marketing promises beyond what you are able to deliver. Yet we have to understand our brand is no longer what we tell people it is. It’s what our customers experience, how they feel about our brand, and, most importantly, what they tell other people about their experience. Great brands know their customers and create an experience that resonates.

As a wet wipes machinery manufacturer, delivering quality customer service throughout a buyer journey in the pandemic year 2020 has been a huge challenging to us when face to face communication becomes a pipe dream.

Meanwhile, we have seen a spike in global demand for disinfectant wet wipes making machines in 2020. Unlike our peers who chose to expand their sales team trying to close more deals and win more margins, we took a road less travelled.

We started to recruit more staff to streamline overloaded customer service; to get the operational basics sorted in delivering consistently good products before we invest in more sales conversations.

Seth Godin once described a dominance trap: The larger a company’s market share, the greater the risk it will take its customers for granted. As the money flows in, management begins confusing customer profitability with customer loyalty, never realizing that the most lucrative buyers may also be the angriest and most alienated.

Driven by our primary working principle that Customer experience should be the biggest priority, we tend to stop focusing on “the two in the bush” (prospects) and take care of “the one in our hand” (our customer) and provide them memorable and remarkable experience. Word of mouth is absolutely key to your growth. When you provide your customers with a distinctive experience, they’ll bring you the customers you want.

By saying so, our international business department strategized to select only 13 customers to work with out of 600 annual sales leads in 2020.

Although we intend to build our signature customer experience, We must admit that We are far from becoming a perfect organization where customer experience is 100% living up to our marketing promise. In fact, we also run into several typical operational limitations last year (e.g. delay in delivery in busy seasons; failure in quality management on outsourced components), that result in delivery that fall short of desired standard.

There are a lot more work to do on the way to become a built-to-last company.

Because of that, I constantly challenge my teammates to see what was possible, and then take it a step further … and then a step beyond that.

Most of My colleagues are under mounting pressures working with me. They once questioned me why go to the trouble of making everything better when “good enough” would have sufficed?

For me, nothing less than the best was acceptable when it bears my name and reputation, and I would do whatever it takes to give my customers more value than they expect to receive for their dollar.

All in all, our primary focus in 2021 and beyond remains on building over-the-top customer experience throughout a buyer journey.

A goal or a vision is the start of everything, yet when the foundations are solid, the vision will take care of itself.