Social Marketing Requires Real Conversation

Social Media is the place where so many people go to ask their friends, family and acquaintances questions. We are starting to go to our social networks before going to Google to ask the fundamental questions about what we should be buying, or to find solutions to our problems. Hence, the admonition “Let me Google that for you.” is becoming a less effective come-back as people prefer to trust their friends and connections for information rather than Google.

The obvious social networks are Facebook and Twitter. But LinkedIn Answers is a functionality within LinkedIn specifically designed for this. And Quora was created solely for this purpose. The beauty of the explosive growth of social media is the proliferation of social listening tools.

Google Alerts was one of the earlier entrants into this space. While not really a social listening tool, it provided us the ability to “listen” to blog posts, web pages, and tweets according to pre-determined keywords you wish to track.

Then tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck and many others appeared. They let you to monitor, in near real-time, conversations on Twitter, and then expanded to the most common social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. By setting up alerts for keywords or questions related to your industry or product category, you could find out what is on your target audience’s mind. The mistake companies make, however, is when they answer questions with an invitation to come “try us out.” That’s just a sales solicitation to prospective customers, and will get you blocked.

It has been generally stated now how important blogging is in generating leads or web marketing. But the question is, why bring them on to your blog if you’re already doing such a great job of answering their questions on social media?

Because in this new world of ubiquitous content marketing, your customers want to find out as much as they can about the topics that are interesting to them.

Answering questions on Twitter or Facebook is limited, because the nature of social networks is transitory. We log on to Facebook or visit our Twitter stream because we want to quickly see what our friends are saying and doing. It’s not the place to provide detailed, in-depth answers to your questions.

But if your prospects want comprehensive information that answers all the questions they have about a topic they’re interested in, they will go to your website or landing page. Gently ask your prospects to visit your blog to learn more.

And please, don’t invite them to visit your product sales page. Your prospects are still in question mode. They are looking for information. They want to start a conversation about their problems and goals, not about your product or service.

Once you’ve answered your customers’ questions, don’t push it. Don’t try to sell to them, don’t push your product down their throat. But do provide them with an opportunity to find out more. Lead readers to your blog, but your blog should be an in-depth, information-rich resource that helps answers your customers’ questions. And don’t use your blog to push your products. Use it to start your conversation. When you approach your customers with the value mindset, everything else will fall into place.

Drive Customer Satisfaction With CRM's

To drive customer satisfaction, organizations deploying CRM solutions must think about the customer relationship in an integrated and comprehensive way. In today’s multichannel world, this is particularly important. Customer interactions take place everywhere. From sales, support, service, finance and on the web. Beyond traditional sales and support management, companies need to be able to see real time, cross channel views of all interactions to deliver superior customer service, whether the interaction occurred on the web just seconds ago or in person with a sales rep yesterday. This enables every customer interaction to be based on a holistic view of a customer’s history.

Self-service has also become a critical driver of customer satisfaction. Many organizations are deploying customer self-service portals to meet their customers’ expectations around the ease of doing digital marketing business with the company on the web. Customer portals enable customers to view outstanding quotes or orders, or even request returns, improving service while reducing the cost to serve. 

On the call center side, the support team can benefit from cross departmental customer visibility, with a detailed order history allowing the support team to check service level subscriptions. This also gives the team an opportunity to deliver customized up sell and cross sell offers that both anticipate customer needs and drive revenue.

For organizations whose business model requires delivering ongoing service for their customers, project management is a critical but often forgotten component of CRM. This includes the tactical aspects of creating jobs and linking them to specific customers, as well as tracking estimated end dates, percentage of work completed, actual end dates and the income and expenses associated with each project. Project management is particularly important for businesses whose models are predicated on customer renewals or subscription revenue.

The final area of customer satisfaction is billing. Billing errors can create significant customer attrition, and in many cases, billing errors may stem from manual processes in the original sale, project management issues or simply duplicate or out of date customer data.

Small Business Branding

As a small business, it’s a daunting task to stand out from competitors. You know you need to, but every other company like yours is also trying to stand out. And regardless of the size of your business, branding brand marketing or brand visibility, is so important that you can never just leave it to chance. It is just as important as product development, because of you get it wrong, your product will never sell or your serAs a small business, it’s a daunting task to stand out from competitors. You know you need to, but every other company like yours is also trying to stand out. And regardless of the size of your business, branding, brand marketing or brand visibility, is so important that you can never just leave it to chance. It is just as important as product development, because of you get it wrong, your product will never sell or your service will never be used.

Your customers’ brains are overloaded with new information every day. Done right, your branding will find a way of cutting through the clutter. Just think about the visual and auditory information that is assaulting their senses on any given city, street, television channel or website. Every aspect of your customers’ lives is like this. In all this ever changing mental clutter, a consistent company brand image is essential to any company’s survival in the 21st Century.

Your company branding should tell people who you are, what you do and why you do it. It should indicate your market positioning and your unique selling points. A customer should be able to see consistency across every channel they use to communicate with you, so should include every aspect of your business, including lighting, colors, ease of access and staff attitudes, physical and even virtual assistants, as well as the more obvious logo and name. Even the smell of your office or storefront is part of your brand.

Let your brand do the preselling for you. This is how names like Apple manages to sell so many devices, as people are buying the brand. Many buyers do not care if the product will last beyond the guarantee period, they must have it because the brand is part of the image.

It takes time to establish your brand’s unique selling point, but once established it will enable selling to your target customers come easy enough. They will have decided to buy your product before ever contacting you about the details. This is the power of preselling.

How To Use Robots

Your Robots.txt file is what tells search engines which pages to access and index on your website on which pages not to. So if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don’t want the search engines to be able to access your forum page, as an example, that page won’t be able to show up in the search results and web users won’t be able to find it. Keeping the search engines from accessing certain pages on your site is essential for both the privacy of your site and for your SEO strategy. 

Search engines send out tiny programs called spiders or robots to search your site and bring information back to the search engines so that the pages of your site can be indexed in the search results and found by web users. Your Robots.txt file instructs these programs not to search pages on your site which you designate using a “disallow” command.

To demonstrate, the following Robots.txt command:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /forum

It would block all search engine robots from visiting the following page on your website:

http://www.yoursite.com/donotcomeinhere

Notice that before the disallow command, you have the command:

User-agent: *

The “User-agent:” part specifies which robot you want to block and could also read as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot

This command would only block the Google robots, while other robots would still have access to the page:

http://www.yoursite.com/donotcomeinhere

However, by using the “*” character, you’re specifying that the commands below it refer to all robots. Your Robots.txt file would be located in the main directory of your site.

For example:

http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

There are three reasons why you might want to block a page using the Robots.txt file. First, if you have a page on your site which is a duplicate of another page, you don’t want the robots to index it because that would result in duplicate content which can hurt your SEO.

Second, if you have a page on your site which you don’t want users to be able to access unless they take a specific action, like if you have a forum page where users get access to specific information because of the fact that they gave you their email address, you wouldn’t want people being able to find that page by doing a Google search.

And most important, you’ll want to block pages or files is when you want to protect private files in your site such as your cgi-bin.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

In all of these cases, you’ll need to include a command in your Robots.txt file that tells the search engine spiders not to access that page, not to index it in search results and not to send visitors.

The Call To Action

One of the first steps in starting your own online business is making a website. This website is your place of business over the internet, but must be treated the same way as your actual store or office, if there is one. Here, potential customers will visit site and can decide within seconds if they will stay or go. Turning these quick browsers into buyers is one of the major obstacles in Digital Marketing.

Do not make your site a maze for your visitors. Have a simple, clean design with that’s easy to navigate back and forth between pages. Use short, straightforward sentences and use easily read text fonts. Make all your pages uniform and professional.

Graphics can help increase sales, but unless your business is about children, then do not use childish looking cartoon clipart. Use professional, well designed graphics. There are some sites where the cartoon clipart will fit but most will need sharp, clean professional graphics.

Telling your visitors what to do can help turn their indecisiveness into action. So give them clear and concise instruction or a Call To Action. And of course, a good reason why they should follow your instructions. Tell them why they should buy from you and that they should "Buy Now". Tell them to “Click Here” to make the purchase.

One sure way to lose a customer is by having a long, drawn out ordering process. Having to click through too many pages to order will have your potential customer clicking to another site. Be sure your shopping cart is secure and doesn't give your customers arthritis while in the process of check out because of too many things to type and click.

And of course, since you want people sending you those emails or calling you, then you should always have your name and contact info on every one of your web pages. Be sure to write an About Us page too. People will not trust you if they do not know who you are. And make up a Privacy Policy page so your visitors feel secure, which will add to that trust.

                                                                                                                            

The Panda In SEO Habitat

Good SEO is all about finding a balance between your content, on page SEO and the amount of links you build. Because without the proper balance, an SEO campaign can hurt a website far more than it helps. To explain, if you build too many fishy links and point them at your homepage, the odds are, your website will get penalized by Google once noticed. 

Before SEO became a common practice in the field of Marketing, Google’s algorithm ranked websites naturally. This means, it is based on how many people enjoyed the content of a website, which means they will be referenced and shown by the number of backlinks. And websites with authority in their niche naturally ranked on page 1.

As internet marketers learned to play with system, Google found their rankings were being overrun by low quality SEO sniper websites, which are sites designed to rank well for one specific keyword. And as a result, they’ve made significant algorithmic changes over the years in an attempt to get only the most high quality websites to the top of the rankings.

Although they’ve struggled with this in the past, when they released the Panda Update, and it looked like they may have finally found a solution. Because the Panda update is so effective due to its approach. Instead of using external factors or backlinks to completely gauge rankings, Google now determines how much value a specific website offers its viewers. By keeping bounce rates, average time on site, and new social media votes, such as those from Facebook and Twitter, as a factor when ranking websites, the Panda Update seems to be working well for the time being.

Although social votes may replace backlinks in the near future, right now, backlinks are still a great way to get your website ranking. The Panda Update changed the game completely, but by playing along with Google’s rules and naturally building links, we can push our websites to the first page of Google for the majority of keywords.