Production Blog Reviews

The Last Word : Word of mouth, facing out – Martha’s Vineyard Times

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

The Last Word : Word of mouth, facing out Martha's Vineyard Times In the olden days - "Beauty" was published, gasp, 16 years ago - I had little or nothing to do with marketing or publicizing the book other than making ... and more

5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Share 5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer This content from: Duct Tape Marketing Constantly seeking feedback from your customers is a great way to learn how to market your business more effectively. If you’ve never done this before, do it immediately as it is one of the best ways to discover what you do that actually differentiates you from your competition. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a small business that had no idea what its competitive advantage was until we heard it right from the mouths of happy customers. Seeking feedback is also a great way to get better and plug gaps. I can tell you that if you’re not receiving a large amount of your business by way of referral or word of mouth, you’ve probably got some gaps in your processes. Below are five questions I like to pose to customers as they can provide a great discussion base for getting at what’s truly important to you and your customers. Create a form and get in the habit of surveying a handful of customers every month. I think you’ll be rewarded with tremendous insight and you’ll also find that your customers enjoy being asked what they think. One word of caution, don’t accept vague answers like “you provide good service.” While that may be true and good to hear, you can’t work with that. Push a bit and ask what good service looks like and maybe even if they can tell you about a specific instance in which they felt they got good service. 1. What made you decide to hire us/buy from us in the first place? This is a good baseline question for your marketing. It can get at how effective your advertising, message and lead conversion processes are working. I’ve also heard customers talk about the personal connection or culture that felt right in this question. 2. What’s one thing we do better than others you do business with? In this question you are trying to discover something that you can work with as a true differentiator. This is probably the question you’ll need to work hardest at getting specifics. You want to look for words and phrases and actual experiences that keep coming up over and over again, no matter how insignificant they may seem to you. If your customers are explaining what they value about what you do, you may want to consider making that the core marketing message for your business. 3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you? On the surface this question could be looked at as a customer service improvement question, and it may be, but the true gold in this question is when your customers can identify an innovation. Sometimes we go along doing what we’ve always done and then out of the blue a customer says something like, “I sure wish it came like this,” and all of a sudden it’s painfully clear how you can create a meaningful innovation to your products, services and processes. Push your customers to describe the perfect experience buying what you sell. 4. Do you refer us to other, and if so, why? This is the ultimate question of satisfaction because a truthful answer means your customer likes the product and likes the experience of getting the product. (You can substitute service here of course.) There’s an entire consulting industry cropping up around helping people discover what Fred Reichheld called the Net Promoter Score in his book The Ultimate Question . Small businesses can take this a step deeper and start understanding specifically why they get referrals and perhaps the exact words and phrases a customer might use when describing to a friend why your company is the best. 5. What would you Google to find a business like ours? This is the new lead generation question, but understanding what it implies is very important. If you want to get very, very good at being found online, around the world or around the town, you have to know everything you can about the actual terms and phrases your customers use when they go looking for companies like yours. Far too often businesses optimize their web sites around industry jargon and technical terms when people really search for “stuff to make my life better.” Bonus: I’m a big fan of building strategic partnerships and networks. Another question I would suggest you get in the habit of asking your customer is – “What other companies do you love to refer?” If you can start building a list of “best of class” companies, based on your customer’s say so, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a list of folks you should be building strategic relationships with. Image credit: Karen Elliot Related Posts: What's So Scary About Marketing Strategy? Get Closer to Your Customers Now Why would someone come to work for you? The Ultimate Social Marketing Question Discover the most relevant conversation Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer

The Socialization of Email Marketing

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Follow me on Twitter! Become a fan on Facebook! It seems that everywhere you turn, businesses, media properties, and brands are asking us to connect with them in the social Web. Whether it’s on TV, in press materials, advertising, or email, brands are vying for our “friendship.” In July 2009, Bill McCloskey in partnership with StrongMail, analyzed the email marketing campaigns of top brands and how they integrated social profiles into the marketing presentation. McCloskey observed that top brands were reviving email campaigns with the inclusion of links to social profiles, specifically Facebook, Twitter, and also MySpace. McCloskey reported that top brands such as Nike, Intel, The Gap, Pepsi, Sony, HP, Home Depot, Lane Bryant, Circuit City, Saks Fifth Avenue, Polo Ralph Lauren, Lands’ End, and J.C. Penney included Social Media within email marketing messages. As expected, since 2007, the number of email campaigns that contained links to Facebook and Twitter dramatically increased, becoming the two most prominent links integrated in all email marketing initiatives in 2009. As of June, the number of campaigns that included a link to the branded Twitter account grew to 41,399, with 41,052 for Facebook. As 2009 gave way to a new decade, the StrongMail team published an updated report, “ 2010 Marketing Trends .” The survey documented that nine in 10 planned to either increase or maintain their marketing budgets in twenty ten (2010).  And what was at the top of the list? Email marketing… What was second? Social Media… Reviewing the list of marketing programs that will benefit from increased commitments, it seems that almost every element for generating presence through outbound and inbound marketing is set to expand this year – and most likely over the next several years. The democratization of media and the equalization of influence require brands to reassess their strategies and objectives for earning attention, steering perception , and growing a community of loyal customers and advocates. Marketing Programs Expected to Receive Increased Budgets 69% – Email marketing 59% – Social media 42% – Search 28% – Advertising 22% – Mobile 21% – Direct mail 20% – Tradeshows and events 19% – Public relations While marketers believe that customers will increase their spending in 2010, conservative and skeptical executives are also reducing programs that don’t align with adapted ambitions… The socialization of email marketing will continue to fuse social networks and the inbox until one day, they become one. After all, email is technically the largest, untapped, social network in the world. According to the report, over 40% of executives plan on integrating social and email marketing in 2010. How that expands beyond the obvious “follow me” or “become our fan” on Twitter and Facebook intrigues me. Thankfully, StrongMail asked the question that needed to be asked… Are you planning to integrate Social Media into your email marketing campaigns in 2010? 27% – Yes, we have formulated a strategy and have already implemented our program 24% – Yes, we have formulated a strategy and are researching tools for implementation 18% – Yes, but we don’t know where to start 11% – No, but it sounds intriguing 5% – No, I don’t see the value in integrating email marketing with social media 11% – I don’t know 4% – Other Once integrated programs are deployed, measurement dictates the future of our social programming. 42% of executives reported a lift in email campaign performance after integrating social and email, 35% realized zero improvement, and 23% aren’t sure how to measure their results. Clearly, there is room for growth, education, and evolution. Over 50% of marketers believe they are on the right track and already either have plans to execute or directives to discover solutions to place into effect. But again, simply asking people to friend or follow us is not enough. We must convey a sense of purpose and define and spotlight the rewards for clicking through to our points of designation. There must be life beyond the connection. We must package and deliver an experience, cultivated by a series of calls to action. It is through the definition of action that provides us with the foundation to establish and measure activity. And as we’re already realizing, traditional email isn’t the only form of “email marketing.” Many service providers are automating the ability to mass-broadcast content to the inboxes of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. With Social Media comes great responsibility… Sometimes the ability to connect and inspire action is driven less by quantity and cultivated through an informed, targeted, and genuine outreach program where less is indeed more. Connect with Brian Solis : Twitter , LinkedIn , Tumblr , Plaxo , or Facebook — Get the new iPhone app! — Click the image below to buy the book/poster : — Image Source: Shutterstock

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The Socialization of Email Marketing

Engage

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

UPDATED I’m truly excited to share a bit of news with you… While this isn’t the formal launch of my new book, today represents a significant milestone for me. As of today, Engage is available for pre-order on Amazon.com , Barnes and Noble , Books a Million , and Borders , with shipments expected to arrive sometime in mid-to-late February. Other sites will go live soon. This post represents the first time that I’ve publicly released the title…Engage. And, I also join good friends Chris Brogan , Steve Garfield , David Meerman Scott , Marsha Collier , Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah as a fellow author at Wiley. This book also serves as a touchstone in its own right for me personally. If you notice, the branding and title of my blog has changed. I’ve done so to intentionally reflect the true positioning and value of this book. It’s written for champions and executives alike in business, marketing, branding, interactive, service, and communications. It’s designed to help bring everyone to the table. I’ll write more about it later…but in the meantime, I wanted to share the news… Connect with Brian Solis : Twitter , LinkedIn , Tumblr , Plaxo , or Facebook — Get the new iPhone app! — Click the image below to buy the book/poster : — Image Source: Shutterstock

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Engage

Removing the Blindfold that Prevents True Engagement and Measurement in Social Media

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

MarketingProfs recently published a fantastic report on the equality of B2B and B2C adoption and practice of social media. In “ The State of Social Media Marketing ,” the 242-page report shared how over 5,000 marketers and business professionals use social media to create award winning campaigns, measure ROI, and reach audiences. Jay Baer offers an interesting analysis at Convince and Convert . More of my thoughts on the subject of B2B and B2C social media are shared in my post, “ The Business of Social Media .” One of the more interesting charts shared was a look at company policy as it relates to social media use during business hours.  On average, about 60% of companies polled maintain a “common sense” approach to at-work usage of social media. As MarketingProfs observes however, that an increasing number of companies are banning access to social networks in general. As Stowe Boyd recently observed: Management often responds to the adoption of social tools the way that public policy has responded to texting while driving: they make it illegal to be social while working. The far-sighted response will be to make it easier to gain the benefits of social business, and to rethink the organization and management of work around human nature instead to persisting in trying to ‘rise above’ what makes us people in the first place. Removing the Blindfold By all means, you will find the MarketingProfs report interesting. My area of focus, for this post specifically, is on the data shared in two charts specifically. The intent of the graphics was to share the distribution of attention and resources between B2B and B2C organizations across social media channels. The reality is that they also demonstrate a confined view of activity across the entire social web. As a result, most brands concentrate time, energy, and budget on identical social media strategies and tactics… 1. Facebook 2. Twitter 3. LinkedIn 4. YouTube In 2010, executives will measure ROI and the direct impact of social media marketing on the P&L. In order to do so, management will experience three phases. The first will reveal that measuring social media marketing, as practiced to date, is essentially meaningless.  Documenting the growth of friends, followers, and fans does not represent loyalty or advocacy. Increased pageviews and clickthroughs doesn’t equate to an increase in revenue, improvement of products and services, nor a reduction or elimination of outdated or inefficient processes. Second, management will grasp the true cost of social media. In 2010, social media will cease to be free. Twitter will offer commercial services , service vendors will offer more sophisticated sCRM ( SRM ) solutions that will adapt to the new internal infrastructures that will have to be built in order to scale, and there are very real costs associated with human and intellectual capital. Management will have the prowess in 2010 to measure the cost of a tweet and the expected return on targeted engagement. Third, as the entire organization socializes affected departments, strategists will embrace a holistic and informed approach to engagement. Audits will become standard in 2010, where each team analyzes relevant activity and conversations using the Conversation Prism or similar map as a guide to exploring all social networks and discussion forums. By documenting the frequency, volume, reach, impact, and state over a period of time, brands will amass the intelligence necessary to prioritize networks while also revealing the influential voices within each community. As a result, social media marketers will shred the cookie-cutter manual and expand the focus based on real world activity. This is social media marketing with a purpose. You ask who owns Social Media…your customers, prospects, and influencers define your markets, focus, and attention – where and when they congregate and communicate. Connect with Brian Solis : Twitter , LinkedIn , Tumblr , Plaxo , or Facebook — Get the new iPhone app! — Click the image below to buy the book/poster : — Image Source: Shutterstock

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Removing the Blindfold that Prevents True Engagement and Measurement in Social Media