Posts Tagged ‘branding’
The True Impact of Social Media
Posted on: April 20, 2011
Are your social media efforts paying off? Only if you know what to measure.
The proof that social media marketing works is not measured in ROI or sales but rather in retention and what happens as a result of your social media marketing efforts.
The frequent questions executives and business owners ask are: “How much money will I make?” and “How many new sales will I have? While logical, these questions are not necessarily the right questions. With social media, it is not how much you make but how much of a difference your social media efforts make to attract new customers.
Even though social media has great potential, many organizations do not properly integrate social media in their marketing and communication efforts. The underlining point is that social media is not a one-way communication channel, but instead a medium for listening, analyzing, and driving those conversations.
The companies that realize the full potential of social media are not only experimenting with multiple channels, but also creating metrics to measure impact and using new tools to understand how to enter into a new conversation with their customers.
How does an organization gain not only an understanding of their audience’s social network but know when and how to reach out to a customer or prospect?
- Listen
- Segment
- Engage
- Gain Expertise and Validation
Range of Social Relationships
Jen Roberts offers her scientific break-down from a customer perspective of their interest in being ‘friends’ with your organization as follows:
- Don’t talk to me. Ever. I’m still recovering from our last encounter.
- I don’t want to be your friend but I do need answers. Where can I find them?
- I like you and I’ve clicked a button.
- I like you and love discounts. Let’s talk.
- I love you and I want to co-create.
Benefits of Social Media
One of the benefits of social media is that it can help reinforce existing ties and that is one way of looking at consumer relationship; the strength of that tie between the consumer and your brand. Analyzing and filtering for consumer insights or preferences is a critical piece for surfacing consumer intentions that can provide a unique perspective on the degree to which a consumer wants to be engaged.
Having good customer service is absolutely critical for the success of your online business. You may have a great product and a strong customer base, but being able to solve customers’ problems as they come up can be the key to your success. Many businesses rely on computerized systems to deal with inquiries and the like, but this can actually prevent you from providing effective customer service.
Relationships
It is preached to the point of overkill, but customer service is really just a waste of time if you aren’t personally dealing with the customer. Developing a personal relationship with customers is important because of the amount of purchase hesitancy that is involved with online businesses.
If a customer ever has an issue, and inquiry, or a complaint, you as the business owner should invest some time into solving their problem. When people see individuals higher up on the ladder investing time in their consumer base, it sends a really strong message – that of a company that actually cares about the product they’re providing people.
Many consumers distrust online businesses because of the amount of scams out there. It’s easy for a business to set up shop online, make a transaction, and virtually disappear if that buying customer ever has any issues with the product.
Make Customer Service Unnecessary
While developing relationships out of your customer inquiries may sound like a lot of work, there are ways you can minimize the amount of customer coddling you’ll actually need to do. If your website is functional, simple, and informative, customers will be able to answer their questions themselves.
Your website should be well designed with easy-to-understand descriptions of the product, price, size, shopping carts, and anything else a customer might need to know during a purchase, like return policy or warranty information.
Your reputation is at stake when it comes to customer service. Consumers are quick to judge and often judge harshly. By demonstrating the willingness and ability to provide customers the answer they need, your brand reputation will be enhanced and consumers will affectionately recommend your brand to their peers.
If you are starting a business online, you should be using as many resources as possible. Entrepreneur.com is a great resource for aspiring small business owners and new entrepreneurs. Allen Moon, the founder of On Deck Marketing (an internet marketing agency that specializes in product marketing strategies, e-commerce and online marketing), wrote a great post specifying each step you can take to set up and run a business online.
I decided to use a few of the steps to help you prepare before you set up your online business. These three steps from Moon’s original post are the most fundamental things you can do before you’re ready to set up your online business.
Step 1: Find a need and fill it
Most people who are just starting out make the mistake of looking for a product first, and a market second. To boost your chances of success, start with a market. The trick is to find a group of people who are searching for a solution to a problem, but not finding many results.
Step 2: Write copy that sells
There’s a proven sales copy formula that takes visitors through the selling process from the moment they arrive to the moment they make a purchase:
- Arouse interest with a compelling headline.
- Describe the problem your product solves.
- Establish your credibility as a solver of this problem.
- Add testimonials from people who have used your product.
- Talk about the product and how it benefits the user.
- Make an offer.
- Make a strong guarantee.
- Create urgency.
- Ask for the sale.
Step 3: Design and build your website
Once you’ve got your market and product, and you’ve nailed down your selling process, now you’re ready for your small-business web design. Remember to keep it simple. You have fewer than five seconds to grab someone’s attention–otherwise they’re gone, never to be seen again. Some important tips to keep in mind:
- Choose one or two plain fonts on a white background.
- Make your navigation clear and simple, and the same on every page.
- Only use graphics, audio or video if they enhance your message.
- Include an opt-in offer so you can collect e-mail addresses.
- Make it easy to buy–no more than two clicks between potential customer and checkout.
- Your website is your online storefront, so make it customer-friendly.
Do you want people to bookmark your website? By that I mean do you want your website to be a site your customers visit everyday, just to see if anything new has been added? Read on if you are interested in improving your business’s website to have more loyal customers and gain new ones.
Constantly communicate
Entrepreneur.com agrees with me in that blogging everyday should be a no-brainer. If you feel that your homepage should stay the way it is for a while and you have nothing additional you need to add, you absolutely should be blogging everyday. Posting something new and fresh each day will give people incentive to visit your website at frequent intervals. However, you won’t get returning browsers unless you offer something new and exciting with each post. The content you create with blogging and updates should be dynamic, unique, entertaining, valuable, and easy to understand.
Try highlighting a customer every week. Interview them, get some feedback, and then write a post on how your product is continuing to help them. Or talk about how your product got started, what mistakes you’ve made and how you’ve fixed them. There are so many different angles you can take to keep driving customers to your website.
Create a community
If you have dabbled in social media marketing, you understand how important it is to the success of any online location to build a community. Communities have a certain language, people within a community provide information to each other and engage in conversations about certain products and brands. If you encourage a sense of community around your website, you will increase your customer loyalty and provide a sense of belonging to new customers who are considering your product.
Encourage discussion and devote time to ask for feedback and provide answers to those who ask questions. Source people who give you feedback as often as possible. You can even provide an opportunity for customers to submit ideas or designs for your next event or campaign. If you make your customers feel like they are a part of your brand, your customer base will stay strong and continue to grow.
Start-Up Mistakes To Avoid
Posted on: January 31, 2011
It’s the start of a new year and maybe you have decided to start your own business. Or perhaps you’re already through the start-up phase and you’d like to see your business grow. New business owners often make the same mistakes, you should know which ones to avoid and which ones you might already be making.
Don’t set your prices too low
When you first get started it can be difficult to set a price for your product. You might not be one hundred percent confident in your price range and it’s important to be very careful in price territory especially if you are in services. If you are just beginning, setting your prices too low can be disastrous because you might not know exactly how long projects can take or what kind of unexpected expenses might come up. So learn to be proactive and think of all contingencies before setting your price.
Be careful with details
You have to be meticulous about your records. Organization can be the key to the success of your business. If you are a service-based business, jumping right into the project without a signed contract or at least an outline agreed by both parties can be detrimental to the end result. Be aware that you can get burned and you need to cover all of your bases before offering your services to anyone.
Update your business model
Your business model should be an ever-evolving idea. Every day you should experience things that give you an idea of how to better your business model. Customers like proactive companies that are continuing to try and get better. It will increase your brand equity and consumer opinion if you ask for feedback and update your business model. If you are too stubborn to quickly abandon something that clearly isn’t working, you’re setting yourself up for business failure.
If you ever get discourage because you knew you made a big mistake and it set your business back significantly, remember this: “failure is compost,” there’s no better way to grow your business than on the foundation of mistakes you learned from and improved upon.
Owning your own small business entails a lot of responsibility. Truthfully it can be a very lonely path. You have to have all the right things going for you, the right personality, the right skill set, the right exposure to the right industries. It’s all very complicated.
But! It can be simple. You just have to understand that your role as a business owner is completely different from that of an employee. You have to think bigger than just deadlines or driving traffic to your business website.
How to think big
Before you choose to start your small business, you have to use the kinds of skills and habits in your every day life, even if you’re still working under someone else. Chris Brogan puts it in better words than I can:
“I took on challenges that other project managers didn’t find interesting. I took on messy projects that had a high possibility of failure. And sometimes I failed. But because I stepped up, I was noticed, and I got more and more power.”
That’s just it, stepping up. Having been a competitive athlete my whole life, I’ve heard it all. I’ve heard just about every motivational quote out there. The one that sticks with me most because I can apply to my daily routine is:
“Success comes from taking on tasks no one else wants, and completing them well.”
How to seek opportunity
In order to be successful in your business venture, you have to see the opportunities when others don’t. You find dollar signs hidden within your customer’s complaints. Your main priority should be solving your customer’s problems, or making yourself more accessible to customers and their needs.
Your business should represent who you are as a person. If you decide to own your own business, you need to market yourself and your brand as a resource to customers with specific problems. If you find a way to better the quality of life for you customers, you have found the perfect opportunity.
Starting your own business can be difficult. What’s even more difficult is getting the attention of your consumers after you’ve established your business. Developing a brand reputation is tricky business. Thankfully, there are some answers.
Building your brand is so much more than having a solid business website and a Facebook page. Many new business owners tend to focus on the aesthetic appeal of their business’s presentation. If it’s online however, you should be focusing more on interacting with your customers than your appearance.
It’s a 2-way street
I was told the other day that advertisers are starting to omit the word “advertising” from their strategies. It’s now “strategic communication,” the point being – it is now a way to communicate the benefits of your business to your consumers AND to encourage communication from your consumers themselves.
In order for people to consider your company worth associating with, they need to be able to trust you. Customer skepticism and competitive clutter is worse than ever before, so you should be giving your consumers every reason possible to trust you.
As for social media, it’s not enough to simply have a Facebook page with your business information on it. It’s more about the social media experience for consumers who visit your page.
Ed Roach, founder of The Brand Experts, a brand management consultancy in Ontario says:
“Social media has one very important perspective to share with brand management—the conversation. Like branding, social media is all about the conversation and building effective relationships. They are perfectly suited to one another.”
The online market
Having your business available online is extremely crucial. However, you need to be tactful and smart because the online marketplace is extremely crowded and heavily cluttered with junk. It’s important to be persistent when marketing your brand online.
“Marketers struggle with differentiation because they give up too soon,” says Derrick Daye, managing partner of The Blake Project. “They think that this can’t be differentiated, it can’t be unique.”
You have to be creative with your marketing strategy. Figure out what makes your company different, and zero in on those attributes.
The world of social media is vast and growing. Facebook with 500 million users leads the revolution that is disrupting advertising professionals, marketing experts, and small business owners alike. However, if you can embrace the power of social media and use it to your advantage, you might be able to see your small business jump ahead of the race.
If you use social media the correct way, that is to build and strengthen relationships, you can build brand awareness, loyalty, and generate word-of-mouth marketing. What better way to sell your product than to have your customers sell them for you?
Susan Gunelius of Entrepreneur.com gives some insight on how you can use social media to build your brand.
Branded online destinations
According to Gunelius, you should use the most effective social media channel as your “core destination.” For example, if you want to use Twitter over Facebook because you think it’ll reach more people in your target audience, have your ads and other promotions direct customers back to your Twitter page for the real information you’re trying to portray.
“Of course, for small-business owners without the manpower to effectively manage too many destinations, you should consider testing each of these to determine which social media service you’re most likely to stick with over the long haul,” Gunelius says.
Locate your target audience and bring them back with you
You need to figure out who your target audience is, where they spend their time, what their trends and preferences are. You may be thinking – Geez that sounds like a ton of work – and to be perfectly honest, it is. If you want your marketing strategy to work, you need to put the appropriate amount of effort into the research portion of it.
According to Gunelius “One of the most important aspects to accomplishing this with your branded online destinations is to continually publish meaningful content that adds value to the reader’s experience.”
Customer referrals can be one of the most powerful ways to build your company’s reputation. We all know how quickly one dissatisfied customer can contribute to a damaged reputation.
It is crucial to remember how much your brand name and credibility directly relates to your revenue flow. Companies who don’t have returning satisfied customers will suffer in comparison to companies who have a loyal customer base.
Here are a few ways to build and maintain your reputation in order to build a loyal customer base.
Never bad-mouth your competition
Of course it is beneficial to talk about your strong points with your clients, in your advertisements, or on your website, but always avoid degrading your competition. It can even be beneficial to you to compliment your competition. Say things like “they’re great companies, and I’m sure you will be happy with any of us, but I think you will be happiest with my company.”
If a client mentions a company you don’t necessarily respect, you can back out of bad-mouthing that company by saying something like “that company isn’t really a competitor of ours, but the others are pretty good competitors. I just think you would be happiest with our services.”
Be positive at all times
Even if you do lose a sale to a competitor, be able to own up to it and move on. It is understandable if losing a client to a different company angers you – but you need to be able to get over it and look towards the future. One poor reaction to the loss of a client can go a very long way. You should never take short cuts if you feel like you’re going to lose a client. It is very important to always be accommodating for difficult clients, regardless or not if you make the sale.
Social media is exploding in the business market. More and more business owners are starting to recognize that they need to put some effort social media marketing. In many cases, that’s where the understanding ends. Because social media is so new, it is difficult to measure exactly what to do, how to do it, and why it works.
Tony Zambito, Founder and Principal of Goal Centric, wrote a fantastic brief on Focus.com detailing what social media is used for, how to use it, and why it’s effective. Read the key points below and learn why social media marketing could be the next best thing for your small business:
Listening Post
Social media represents the new “listening post” to buyers. Buyers have always by nature gravitated towards a listening post. From the old western frontier saloon to the modern day conferences buyers have listened. Social media has created a widespread availability for buyers to listen in on what is new, what others are saying, and for good sound advice without having to reveal who they are.
Online Education
We are hearing much these days about content marketing, content curation, content creation, and the likes. A read on this from a buyer’s perspective and how it is changing the buying experience is that buyers expect to be educated. In reality, B2B businesses are learning to become a new breed of online educators. Buyers, when confronted with problems, issues, and initiatives, are impulsively online seeking to educate themselves about what confronts them. If this “thirst for knowledge” cannot be filled, on they move until a source is discovered that can. Social media can represent such a source for education.
Peer Review
Social media platforms, in an alternative form of the traditional means, represent a new mode of peer review for professionals in B2B domains. This is much different than peer-to-peer networking per se’ for it alludes to establishing a form of reputation, credibility, and subject matter expertise. Peer review within social media platforms is transforming the buyer experience by creating a “collegiality” atmosphere to the overall buying experience.
Brand Advocacy
Social media represents a new fountain of advocacy for a particular brand. An all-encompassing advocacy of a brand and the experience they represent. The key difference is that buyers will contribute to brand advocacy organically versus being asked to through whatever promoted means designed to “compel” them to do so. While B2C promoted advocacy can catch on, B2B buyers are astute in differentiating organic advocacy from promoted advocacy.
