Whether you’re a small business striving for growth or a seasoned B2B company looking to stay ahead, reviewing and updating your marketing SOPs and Best Practices can make all the difference. Here are five essential steps to ensure your marketing efforts stay relevant, effective, and aligned with your business goals.
Social media for businesses should not and simply can not stand alone. While social media is an integral piece of the marketing mix, unless you have other pillars of digital marketing (i.e. writing blogs, email marketing campaigns, other ways to drive traffic to your social media channels) to support it, don’t expect much of a ROI from social media. Additionally, especially for B2B companies, solely having viewers across your social channels may not mean much of anything beyond brand awareness, which is important, but again, don’t expect a surge of interested clients from little effort!
If you want something you can measure, the end goal must be to get users back to your website (or landing page) to complete an action (i.e. sign up for an email list, give an email address in order to receive an e-book, fill out a contact form). Some people view social media for business as fluff. If done correctly, social media can be a strong ROI. When your marketing and sales efforts are aligned, social media can be the element that enriches your brand and pushes you ahead of your competition. If you spend the right amount of time and energy creating a great plan and carrying out social media campaigns that convert, it could become your brand’s greatest asset!
When beginning to use social media for business, the first steps should be creating a content creation strategy followed by beginning to create content. Whether it’s blog writing for SEO, guest blogging on sites that your audience visits or creating infographics that will be featured within an industry publication, content strategy and creation should be the first steps.
In addition to having something to share across your social channels, content creation is also beneficial for SEO purposes. If Google sees that you are actively adding pages to your site and users are finding the content on these pages useful and relevant, your site will gain recognition as being a good answer to queries users are searching for. While creating great content is definitely not all that goes into SEO and fixing any errors, speed problems, etc, should be a SEO priority, content creation is still beneficial and can snowball if you’re doing it correctly.
Social Media is usually seen as an all encompassing term but it’s really just a piece of the marketing mix–a piece that brings everything that your brand creates in front of your audience. If you see a brand posting graphics on a social media channel they have implemented a content creation strategy by doing research to find out what their audience responds to the best. After concluding that a certain set of graphics were the right fit, they are posted across the brand’s social channels. Posting on social media is a step in a company’s marketing strategy.
In addition to deciding what exactly a brand should post on social media, there is also the strategy behind which users to follow and interact with. A best practice is to follow people within your audience, people who are interested in the types of content you’ll be posting and even competitors. One great way to strategize who to engage with on social media is to go after your industry influencers. Also, if your brand is location specific, for example, if your company is strictly baltimore based, follow and interact with a lot of Baltimore based users that meet your criteria.
When you create a strategy for which users to follow and interact with, eventually your profile, specifically on Twitter, will show up under the “Who to Follow” section. Because we post a lot about branding, marketing and social media, users who are interested in those topics will often see our profile in this section.
Additionally, when users who are interested in our content share our links their followers will see our content as well.
Did you know that
44% of email recipients
To do email marketing well, you have to think of it as a relationship-building activity. But the relationship you have with your subscriber is like any other relationship. It takes time and nurturing to grow.
At first, your prospect is unsure, and often too busy to take time to consider making time for you. There may even be doubts about your compatibility and commonality. You haven’t met and he or she has to evaluate you based on limited information. This is the time to help your subscriber get to know you better. Send emailers that tell him or her more about your company and what you do that’s different from other companies that are similar. Help him or her understand what you bring to the table. Be careful not to be too eager. Respect your potential prospect’s time and be appreciative that he or she is willing to receive your emails.
Remember that not everyone on your email list is the same. No matter what email interface you use (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, My Emma, Hubspot), it’s easy to create specific, targeted emailers for different client groups. Try to be as personal and targeted to their needs as possible. Keep him or her engaged with good conversation and content. Don’t waste someone’s time with repeated or dull content. Invest in the relationship. Take the time to think about what his or her needs are and focus your content on those needs.
Think more about giving than receiving. Offering something of value — an information packed newsletter, handy tips, an ebook, a discount, inspiration — is the first step in offering trust. You care enough about the potential relationship to give without expecting anything in return.
What happens when you spend a date doing all the talking? Nothing good, right? It’s the same here. Allow for the person to respond back to you. Ask for input, comments, email replies, interaction. It’s okay to push your content, but do everything you can to encourage return conversation. Give your subscriber a voice. Ask for reviews, polls, survey feedback. And listen to what they reply back to you. Even if it’s not all positive, it’s a chance to interact and create a real connection.
Don’t smother your subscriber with too many emails. You aren’t exclusive yet. They may still be dating other people. And that’s okay. It can be hard to know the right frequency, but err on the side of leaving him or her wanting more, instead of being over-eager. Try not to be threatened by the thought that they’re not ready for commitment. Take it slow and give it time.
If you deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time, you might just have a match made in heaven. And a customer for life.
— Chris Quinn, principal and brand strategist
Photo credit: PeterJBellis/Flickr/Creative Commons
Just the term “customer retention strategy” sounds intimidating and complicated. But it doesn’t have to be.
A customer retention strategy can be as simple as following up with customers at the critical points when customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) tends to occur. The follow up can be in person, via email (or html emailer) or phone, and it should include an inquiry about their satisfaction and some reinforcing information about the benefits of your service.
The inquiry about their satisfaction should be sincere, not perfunctory, and you should certainly be prepared to fully handle any dissatisfaction reported. But the true key to success is to develop steps and processes to handle issues before they occur.
Start a list of all the customer issues that have come up in the past year or so. It might seem like a long list at first, but you are guaranteed to see common threads that will reduce that list to something manageable. Then, reverse-promote those circumstances — in other words, anticipate them ahead of time and provide action plans on how customers can address them either on their own or with your help. Either is fine, as long as you provide them with a plan on what to do.
For example, if you are a management consultant, and you know that customers tend to struggle at the following points:
1. When they first have to apply the principles learned in a practical circumstance.
2. When they have to repeat a practice with multiple employees at at time.
3. Down the road, when the problem reoccurs and they don’t remember how they solved or addressed the issue last time.
You can prepare an email correspondence to auto-send that would coach them on how to handle the issue, so they have reinforcement of it when they need to repeat it or need apply it to different circumstances down the road.
The simple act of anticipating problems that might occur is very reassuring for customers. It reminds them that you are the expert and that you know what might come up. It reminds them that you care and are willing to help if a problem occurs. In a large percentage of instances, just empowering customers to know what to do on their own de-escalates the problem to a manageable level and gives them the ability to address the issue on their own.
Making such an investment in your customer increases the chances of them becoming an ongoing, repeat customer who will refer you and build your brand reputation. It might be the least expensive way to make repeat sales out there.
Now out to you. How is your customer retention policy working?
— Chris Quinn, principal and brand strategist
Photo by pixelperfectdigital.com
I was recently surprised to see a web development company I have a great deal of regard for move to marketing their services with plain text email over HTML email. In case you’re not sure of the difference, HTML email looks like ads or brochures with images and nice looking text. Text email is plain text without images, like email you use every day to correspond with business associates.
I was quite intrigued to see a technology company making the choice for a lower-tech approach. It draws me to a few conclusions:
1. Businesses are not taking any consideration off the table when trying to figure out how to best communicate with their audience. That’s a good thing. There is certainly a place to go back to square one and rethink what we take for granted and make sure the assumptions we acted upon originally are good ones.
2. Businesses, even in technology, are frustrated with spam filters that can’t distinguish between true spam and junk email and welcome communications. I can relate. Even our newsletters sometimes get blocked and we comply with every concievable restriction.
3.
[Editor’s Note: This post was recently featured in Social Media Today. Well done, Tara!]
As some of our previous posts have detailed, LinkedIn is an extremely useful tool for recruiting, job hunting and networking. Now with Company Pages, LinkedIn can also be used as a powerful tool and enhancement to your content marketing plan.
I recently read something that truly shocked me. And I am not easily shocked. Four words nearly guaranteed to get your email opened are “You Are Not Alone.” It’s known to bring an average open rate of 90%, often stretching to even 100%, and for a wide range of audience groups and subject areas.
Now, isn’t that interesting? I think it says something we, as marketers, should pay attention to.
The most common piece of advice about email subject lines is to identify the company sending the email. It’s a matter of integrity and transparency. Above all else, it sets a context for the communication by saying first who it’s from. We generally advise against trying to be “cute” in subject lines. They so often confuse or turn people off. Clarity should be the priority. But “We are not alone” breaks that rule and yet still manages not to sound salesy, pushy or unwelcome, and it completely breaks the clarity rule. So why does it work so well?
It seems that not wanting to be alone is a universally recognized feeling that everyone can relate to. It resonates and, as a result, people feel a connection to you and will click to satisfy their curiosity about it.
Reassuring your customers and customers-to-be that you understand what they’re up against and have the expertise and knowledge to get them passed it is what they seek most. You have to be careful not to trivialize what they have to accomplish yet, or make it seem unrealistically simple to solve. But by setting the tone that you feel for and empathize with them, you create connection and commonality between you.
Also interesting is that fact that “You Are Not Alone” also has a very high email response rate. It seems to appeal to a person’s sense of human connection and community, which prompts interaction and response.
If we take it one step further, and take our email and other marketing messages as opportunities to relieve our customers feelings of isolation, doesn’t that offer a fantastic way to connect to our customers and customers-to-be in a very human and authentic way that can help us build trust with them?
Where will the connection break?
