Marketing Expert Rob Scott Discusses Successful List Building Techniques
January 18, 2013 5 Comments
My partner, and marketing expert, Rob Scott, talks list building and how to turn prospects into fans.
Decide If Social Media Is Right for Your Business
March 1, 2012 Leave a comment
Social media is often a big help when you’re developing your brand. It allows businesses to connect to customers on a more personal level. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every small business.
Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, believes that 9 million small businesses in the U.S. use Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook are useful in different ways. Twitter is known to be better for customer engagement, while Facebook helps funnel traffic to your site. Both sites help you better your search engine optimization (SEO).
Take three steps before launching Twitter and Facebook campaigns and decide which social media platform is right for your small business.
1. Is social media right for your company?
Remember the old question, “If everyone was jumping off a bridge would you do it too?”
The buzz makes everybody feel that social media helps their business. It’s likely that’s true, but it’s vital that you decide if social media is necessary for your business to succeed right now.
Though millions of small businesses have jumped on the social media train, your target audience might not be caught up in it. If you feel that’s the case, it makes sense to hold off. Or, perhaps you aren’t ready to make the most of social media’s benefits, so wait until your company is ready.
2. Timing is everything
Having a strong presence in social media takes a lot of time and a lot of resources. If you can’t dedicate the manpower to keeping up a quality profile, it might hurt your brand in the long run.
Look at your team and decide if your business can handle the workload. If it can, then be fully prepared to implement it. Like any good marketing campaign, your social media portfolio has to have a clear identity, and reach your target audience.
If you forge ahead, prepare the information you want to share each week. Figure out what time of the day your posts and tweets have the most impact by reaching your core customers.
3. Set goals and guidelines
In 2011, companies saw a 63 percent increase in marketing effectiveness. But businesses of all sizes are trying to establish a strong ROI when it comes to social media.
Setting goals for the next few weeks, months and years helps you decide if your valuable time is worth the effort and if you’re using social media successfully. It’s also important to set ground rules of who in your company will handle your social media sites.
Decide on what content is and isn’t appropriate to post. Learn how to handle customer interaction and what steps to take if something goes wrong. Then spend some time educating your staff before the first day of having a visible social media profile.
Once you have created a place for your business in the social media realm, look around your direct and indirect competitors’ pages. It helps you understand what the best practices are to engage customers.
Also research the different ways social media platforms are reaching out to help small businesses advertise. See if those steps are right for your brand as well.
In the end, social media is another tool for your company’s toolbox. It will only be effective if you can take the time to learn how to use it properly.
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14 Nice Things You Can Do For Your Customers
May 16, 2011 Leave a comment
By: Ian Lurie
I make no promises. But I suspect if you do some of this stuff, your customers will thank you. Or, they won’t notice the stuff that used to make them curse you:
- Make every page on your site load 1 second faster. Start by taking every image on your site and compressing it. Please. It makes a difference.
- Accept PayPal. Just because you hate it doesn’t mean they do.
- Do a little basic typography: Increase line spacing, use a bigger font. Make your site easy to read.
- Put no more than 15 words on a line. See above.
- Put no more than 5 lines in a paragraph.
- Break up your page. Use lists, images, subheads and such. Don’t give them one big blob of images or text.
- If they ask you a question on Twitter or Facebook, answer it.
- If they compliment you on Twitter or Facebook, say thanks.
- Instead of giving them a discount, give them a better product.
- Before you pay $45000 to redesign your web site, pay $4500 to make the existing site easier to use. Then use what you learned on the new site.
- Don’t even imply that your customers have to log in before they can buy. Put that stuff at the very end of the checkout process, on the ‘thank you’ page.
- Trade ‘elegance’ or ‘personality’ for ‘clarity’ and ‘obviousness’. Watch your sales go up.
- Remove one feature that you wanted, but your customers didn’t, from your site.
- Stop reading about marketing stuff and go do it.
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Strategic Marketing Segmentation & The 6 Consumer Segments
November 2, 2010 Leave a comment
By: Josh Druck
Marketing Segmentation & The 6 Consumer Segments
Segmenting markets is a foundation for superior business performance. Understanding how buyers’ needs and wants vary is essential in designing effective marketing strategies. Segmenting markets may be critical to developing and implementing market driven strategy.
Buyers vary according to how they use products, the needs and preferences that the products satisfy, and their consumption patterns. These differences create market segments.
Marketing Segmentation is the process of identifying and analyzing groups of buyers in a market based on similar response characteristics (like their frequency of purchase). Recognizing these differences in your consumer base, and how they change, better and faster is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage.
The most specific form of market segmentation is to consider each buyer as a market segment. This is the structure needed for better overall brand reputation management . Such fine-tuned analysis is now possible due to mass customization techniques, which offer an exciting new approach to serving the unique needs and wants of individual buyers.
Custom designed products now satisfy individual buyers wants and needs at prices comparable to mass produced products. The growing adoption of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that integrate all the information about each individual customer into a single location provides amazing opportunities to lean about customer needs based on actual customer behavior.
Finally, it is important to recognize that segmentation has an international dimension nowadays in many markets.
Based on interviews about core values with 1000 people in 35 countries, 6 global consumer segments are considered to exist to a varying degree:
1) Strivers: Place more emphasis on material and professional goals.
2) Devouts: Tradition & duty are very important.
3) Altruists: Interested in social issues & social welfare.
4) Intimates: Value close personal & family relationships.
5) Fun Seekers: High consumption of restaurants, bars, & movies.
6) Creatives: Strong interest in education, knowledge, & technology.
The global study found that people in different segments generally pursued different activities, different products and also consumed/used different kinds of media. Be sure to consider this before choosing your market and consumer base to target.
Social CRM Strategy (CRM Strategy 102)
July 6, 2010 Leave a comment
Who Is the Social Customer?
- The social customer consumes information in a different way, and learns about breaking news through Twitter and Facebook, favoring what their network has curated and surfaced as important information.
- The social customer learns about new products and brands through social channels and trusts their social network to provide honest feedback about it, as opposed to a brand’s one-way advertising message.
- The social customer is savvy, doesn’t respond well to unsolicited SPAM in their social networks or overly promotional tweets, but is open to relevant information that meets their needs at that particular moment.
- The social customer expects brands to be present and active in the same social venues where they hang out, listening to their feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.
- The social customer expects you to listen and engage with them, not only when it coincides with an e-mail blast or new feature release, but rather when they need you. And you better respond fast, in real-time, or they will either move on to a competitor, or tell their friends about their bad experiences.
Because the social customer can talk to a brand through many channels at the same time, they expect everyone they talk to from your company to have the same background on the issue. For example, if I complain about an airline on Twitter, I want the representative who engages me there to know my itinerary and the full history of our interaction through various channels.
Bottom line: The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn their trust.
What Is Social CRM?
Paul Greenberg, an author and leading authority on SCRM, stated that Social CRM is “…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company response to the customer’s owning of the relationship.”
Michael Fauschette says: “Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc…”
In the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you call Social CRM or how you define it, as long as you understand it and know how to apply it to your organization. It’s all about the execution. At Attensity, for example, they developed the “LARA” framework, which addresses the end-to-end process of Social CRM:
- Listen to customer conversations
- Analyze those conversations
- Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
- Act on those customer conversations
Top 7 Social Media News Headlines
- How to Sync Your Facebook Contacts to iPhone May 24, 2013
- Forget Twitter: Puma Campaign Wants You to Communicate via Dance May 24, 2013
- With Lumia 928, Verizon Finally Gets Its Flagship Windows Phone May 24, 2013
- 5 Tools to Help Plan Your Next Meeting May 24, 2013
- Rumor: Sense-Free HTC One in the Works May 24, 2013
- How a Computer Model Could Help Fight Terrorism May 24, 2013
- 'The Guardian' Is Moving to a New Domain May 24, 2013
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