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Is It Time to Rethink Your Marketing Strategy?

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sales-marketing-shows-selling-e-commerce-and-offer-100291369When it comes to the world of marketing, you have either got it or you don’t.

The “it” factor is do you have a sound marketing strategy in place? If you do, you’re likely reaping the benefits of such. If not, you are probably thinking about how you’re ever going to get your message out to consumers.

When you stop and think about it, today’s consumer gets marketed by a wide variety of brands.

In order for your targeted consumers to come to and stay with you, your marketing strategy must be informational, exciting and something that the competition isn’t doing.

So, is it time to rethink your marketing strategy?

Always Be Thinking Ahead

In order to keep your marketing game on top, remember these tips moving forward:

  • Your audience – Your marketing game can’t and won’t succeed if you do not have a clear understanding of your demographics. It only makes sense that if you are marketing financial retirement products (IRA’s, 401K’s etc.), you should not be solely targeting senior citizens in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and above. Sure, you may find some on the lower end of that age spectrum who are interested in some of your products, but your main audience should be those individuals in their 30’s, 40’s and even 50’s. People in their 20’s typically are not yet focused on their retirement years, but it doesn’t hurt to market them some information to at least get them thinking about the day they retire. Those a decade or two older should already be saving money and thinking regularly about being able to retire comfortably one day. Know your audience in order to increase the odds of more sales;
  • Your efforts – Yes, you likely have a busy schedule which precludes you from doing all you want in a workday, but that is no excuse for dropping the ball on your marketing needs. Make sure you set aside the required time and efforts needed to get all your daily tasks done. A typical day should include reaching out to current and potential customers, looking at new campaigns to pitch, networking, and staying on top of your social media game (see more below);
  • Your socializing – While many marketers already have a social media presence, others have been slow to move towards social networking. For those in the latter group, now is the time to get caught up. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram or any number of other social sites, you need to be active. When you share and retweet worthwhile links from others, you not only increase the eyes to your marketing profile, but you stand to gain some potential new business. It is also a good idea to follow relevant people in the marketing industry (individuals, associations, trade publications etc.).

While there is much more to the world of marketing, take a few minutes to review your current strategy.

If it is lacking in a defined audience, time commitment and a social component, work on those three areas to get your marketing strategy back on course.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Miguel Salcido has been a professional search marketing consultant for over 11 years. He is the founder and CEO of Organic Media Group, a content driven SEO agency. He also likes to blog at OrganicSEOConsultant.com and share insights into advanced SEO.

Why You Should Want Better For Your Customers Than They Want For Themselves

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By Lindsey Tolino

Do your kids want pizza for every meal but you want better for them? I don’t have kids but I have been one long enough to know that they don’t always want what’s best for themselves. If we’re being honest, we’re like children in this too. We want things that may not be best for ourselves.

Sad Pizza

A little over a year ago, I was working at a bakery-cafe and a customer asked if the baked goods had trans fat in them. As a fairly fanatical trans-fat-hater, I was sad to say I wasn’t sure, so I pulled out the book of ingredients. I was astounded to read almost every single pastry was loaded with the stuff.

I was especially surprised since this bakery-cafe appealed to health-conscious, higher-educated consumers. The bakery-cafe fronted like it esteemed customer health, while it was sneaking cheap, artificial, poisonous fats into the fairly expensive baked goods. The customer that had inquired was viscerally upset.

The image of the bakery-cafe was shattered for me that day. I thought that they wanted what was best for their customers. Turns out, they wanted what was best for their bottom line. That day I thought about how a great business cares about what’s best for their customers, not necessarily about what their customers want.

The customer that inquired was the only one who ever asked me about it. People assumed or at least weren’t questioning to know. But that didn’t change the fact that the cafe should have wanted what is best for them. They could have used butter or another natural fat and still made it taste as good. Instead, they exalted their bottom line above what was best for their customers.

Businesses are responsible for what they know. If they know that something isn’t good for their customers, they should want better for them.

I go to Planet Fitness. I like a lot of things about it. But the thing I haven’t been able to comprehend is the monthly free pizza and bagels they give to customers. I think that Planet Fitness may have done a target market study and found that their customers like bagels and pizza (who doesn’t really?).

But I’m bothered by it, because they should want better for their customers. Though it’s a no judgement zone (which I totally can get behind), that doesn’t mean I want my gym to spur on my unhealthy behavior. Pizza and bagels may be what the customers want, but Planet Fitness should want better for their customers. Instead of investing in monthly junk food, it makes more missional sense for them to encourage healthy eating. People are there to get in shape and it’s confusing to have your gym seemingly sabotaging your goals.

I love businesses that I can trust. When my dad was in auction school, he taught me the phrase Caveat emptor, which means “let the buyer beware.” As a customer, I am generally suspicious of every business. I can’t trust them until they prove it to me.

I learned to trust my mom when I was little, after I hurt myself jumping on the bed when she told me not to. I discovered she had my best interests in mind, even when I didn’t. Similarly, I learn a business can be trusted when I discover that they want better for me than I want for myself. When I discover this, I naturally trust, support and praise a business.

When I find that a business implies that it’s for my health, but then hides trans fat in my baked goods, it has the opposite effect. Trust is broken. My interactions with the business becomes transactional and about what each party can get out of it. I am forever suspicious.

The way to gain customer trust is to want better for your customers than they want for themselves.

Customer trust is vital to the health of your business. Your mom wouldn’t give you pizza for every meal just because you wanted it. My mom didn’t want me to jump on the bed because I could get hurt. Don’t give your customers what they want, give them better than they want. A truly great business owner is looking for what is best for their customers before they even request it.

Image info: Royalty-free image from http://www.freeimages.com/photo/1196126.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino is an intentional creative who helps make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

How to use online reviews to boost your business

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By Diana Gomez

For small businesses, the world of online reviews can be a scary place – and that’s understandable.

I have friends who cringe as they open their company’s Yelp page, afraid of any negativity they’ll have to face regarding their beloved business. However, what you’ll often find is more compliments than you expected, plus you’ll discover ways to make the reviews help and grow your business.

So you see, reviews can be good for you, no matter how bad they are.

feedback notebook

Here’s what you can take from your online reviews: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Reviews can:

Provide Credibility

People trust reviews. In fact, an online, unbiased review is more trustworthy than a personal recommendation. And believe it or not, readers are often more trusting of a place with both negative and positive reviews rather than one-sided views.

Create Awareness

Building customer awareness is a great advantage of online reviews. At no cost, sites like Yelp and Google Places let customers brag about you to the world. It’s also a platform for current customers to engage with one another with suggestions that could lead to more product purchases.

Give Free Feedback

Occasionally, you’ll have to face the fact that no one, even your business, is perfect. It may be your favorite employee who has caused a customer to take to Yelp and unleash a tirade about their bad experience. But look at it this way: rather than having secret shoppers rate their experience to you, you’ve got regular people doing this – for free. Say two customers in a day complained about a restaurant hostess and her bad attitude. You can make that right. Same goes for any complaint.

Benefit Buying Choices

Knowing what is really working for your business can help navigate you in the market. A negative comment can help tell you what people don’t love as much, just as a positive review can tell you what people want more of.

Improve SEO

If content is king in today’s online world, then reviews should be welcomed by businesses. Google does take reviews into account when ranking, so whether they’re positive or negative, they’re doing you good in the search engines’ eyes. Merely showing that people are actively engaging in your business is proof enough that you’re relevant, and this can only help your ranking.

What should you do if the reviews are negative?

Take care of business – and fast.

Immediately address it online. Ignoring customers’ comments makes it look like you just don’t care. And letting the situation sit and simmer doesn’t help matters either. Address it as quickly as possible for the best possible outcome, and show that you and your company are considerate and well-mannered. Showing that you’re classy will raise people’s opinion of you, which can only be good for the business in the end.

Apologize.

Apologize for their bad experience, and assure them that you’re addressing it appropriately. If it’s super negative with a ton of details, try sending a private message as well. This adds an extra personal touch. Request that they try your product or services again, and once they do, ask if they’ll remove or update the review to reflect their latest, and hopefully positive, experience. If the situation can’t be resolved, be sure to publicly comment on all the steps you followed to address the issue and ensure it won’t happen again.

Fix it.

Don’t just say you’ll remedy it – do it! It’s one thing to get a couple of bad comments on one employee in one day (bad day?), but if a mountain of negativity piles up regarding one person or one particular product, you’ve got some work to do. A large amount of customers can’t be wrong. In this situation, you can actually thank the complainer for helping you maintain a business that satisfies.

Solicit good reviews.

Though a negative review can be beneficial, it can do much harm if it’s your only review. That’s why you have to do your part in gathering good ones by asking your best customers to review you. And yes, that one negative comment will then look far more credible than a business with nothing but rave reviews.

What if the reviews are positive?

Say thanks.

Of course positive reviews can help you out tremendously. Thank the person who’s taken the time to compliment you. Then use their comments to your advantage. Reviews can confirm what you’re doing right and help you look at say, menu items that no one seems to mention at all.

What negative review, in-house or online, helped your business recently? Please share your experiences in the comments!

Author’s Bio: Diana Gomez is the Marketing Coordinator at Lyoness America, where she is instrumental in the implementation of content marketing strategies for USA and Canada. Lyoness is an international shopping community and loyalty rewards program, where businesses and consumers benefit with free membership and money back with every purchase.

Evaluate your visual branding with this quick project

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Grab a cup of egg nog, some masking tape, and a Sharpie. It’s about to get old-school in here.

It’s the end of the year, and you’re hopefully knee-deep in planning your budget and strategy for 2015. You’re evaluating how your 2014 plans went (fistbump).

Here’s one quick branding project that you can do in about 30 minutes, and will help you spot any weaknesses in your branding picture.

Step One – Make a List of Online Outposts

Compile a list of every place your business has a presence online. Include social networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), review sites, your own web site.

Step Two – Fire up the Printer

Print at least the first page (anything above the fold) from each place on the list. If you send out corporate emails, print one of those too. If you placed any ads online, print them.

Step Three – Deck the Halls

Tape all of the items you printed on one wall. Tape up any pre-printed items too, if you have them. Include business cards, corporate brochure, direct mail pieces, a picture of your trade show booth, go nuts.

Step Four – Stand Back and Soak it In

As you step back from the wall, and sip some egg nog, what do you see? Is it a jumbled mess? What are the messages you’re sending? Are they the ones you want to send?

Step Five – Sharpie It Up

Use the Sharpie to circle and make notes where you see weaknesses. Do you need to add a cover image on LinkedIn (what, you haven’t done that yet?), do you have an outdated profile blurb on SlideShare, is your old logo showing up on that product’s Twitter page?

Step Six – Take Action

You can use the last week of the year to update and tweak these branding issues, consider hiring a branding expert to sort it out, or add action items to your 2015 plan.

You’ll be starting the next year with a crystal clear picture of your visual brand, and a plan to move forward!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

First Grade Jelly Donut Marketing

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By Lindsey Tolino

First grade jelly donut day was legendary. Our teacher put a jelly donut on each student’s desk. She explained how squeezing out a little jelly from the donut was similar to how we squeeze letters out of words to make contractions.

I have few memories from that age, but I will never forget sitting at my desk, in awe of the donut and my teacher’s wisdom.

jelly donuts

Every time I think of elementary school, unique teaching methods, contractions or jelly donuts, I think of my first grade teacher. I think of how she cared enough for us to buy us donuts and how she made a correlation to contractions that I will always remember. No other elementary school teacher is as memorable to me.

In grad school I learned that you need potential customers to see an ad a certain number of times before they retain it or it influences them in some way. After too many impressions, it essentially becomes white noise and makes no impact on them.

To have your customers truly remember your business, you don’t need to follow traditional advertising and bombard them with typical sales copy.

You simply need to create a personalized, memorable experience.

That seems impossible though, right? It sounds like you don’t have the time for that. But it actually can be more simple than you think.

I had a personalized, memorable experience at a business just the other day.

I don’t think I had talked to anyone that morning except via text. It was late afternoon when I parked at the cafe. I was going to do some work. I felt fixated, machine-like. I walked up to the counter.

“Hi, is that your white car out there?” the cashier asked.

Expecting her to say my lights were on, I replied “yes” and looked outside at my car. No lights on.

“Oh, are you from Pennsylvania?”

“Yeah.” Oh, she had seen the license plate.

“Me too…”

We talked about where we were from, why we moved to Raleigh and how we were liking it. Through that short conversation, she moved me out of my one-minded, lonely, mechanistic mentality into feeling like a human again.

I was so thankful for her initiating that conversation. It was such a simple thing she did and yet it felt profound and memorable to me.

Traditional marketing has value, but creating a personalized, memorable experience for your customer is incomparably better.

So what is the key to creating a personalized, memorable experience for your customers?

The simplest, and perhaps the best way — you treat them like people.

My first grade teacher didn’t see us as students that she was obligated to teach contractions to. She saw us as children with senses (taste!), emotions and abilities. She created an experience she knew would be memorable for us that fit with her teaching objective.

The cashier didn’t see me as simply a customer she was obligated to wait on. She saw me as a person, from Pennsylvania like her, with experiences and a story. She reached out and connected with me as a person, when she wasn’t obligated to.

We simply need to see that our customers are not obligations to serve in order to make money from them. They are people with senses, emotions, abilities, experiences and stories. They are people that desire connection, respect, relationships and love.

If you thoughtfully care for them as people, you will naturally create personalized experiences for them. When customers feel cared for by you, it will be memorable.

They will come back because they will remember you.

Jelly donuts changed my world in first grade. A simple conversation with a cashier changed my perspective that day. It may take a smaller action than you think to be memorable to your customers. The key is simply caring for them as people.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino is a young creative who helps make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino (https://twitter.com/LindseyTolino) or connect with her on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/108697943813402809826/posts).

Image credit: via Steve Campisi (http://www.freeimages.com/photo/758304).

Ice More Business with Solid Digital Marketing

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amarketerUnless you crawled out from under a rock, you had to have heard about the recent ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

You may have known someone who participated. You may have even been challenged yourself. It was so widespread that you couldn’t miss it, especially if you spent any time on Facebook or YouTube.

Businesses should pay close attention to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

They can learn something about marketing from it. In fact, it was a brilliant way to promote a cause.

Here are some tips you can take from the challenge and apply to your own business….

1.  Single Goal

One main reason the campaign was so successful is that it focused on a single goal – to raise awareness and money for ALS.

The early expectations were not that it would go viral but that it would benefit a cause the originators cared about. They were personally involved and knew someone with the disease.

Businesses must set goals they care about and focus on those instead of getting sidetracked with too many ideas.

2. Simple Rules

The Ice Bucket Challenge was simple.

You didn’t need a lot of fancy equipment or to go to a special place. Just a bucket of ice water and a video phone would do. Since most people have a social media account, it was easy for them to participate.

Businesses must make their marketing campaigns simple with rules that are easy to follow. They can appeal to more people if the challenge isn’t difficult. It gives the mental message of “anyone can do this.”

3. Short Deadline

Perhaps one of the biggest secrets to the Challenge’s success was that you only had 24 hours to do it. This was long enough that anyone could find time to participate but not so long that it would be forgotten.

Businesses must promote a sense of urgency with their marketing methods. If there is no deadline, there will be little motivation to do anything. In the person’s mind, he or she can always do it later. This often results in not doing it at all. Any successful marketing campaign should include a deadline.

4. Make It Fun

As the article, “18 Reasons the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is Your New Standard in Digital Marketing”, says, it’s important that the challenge is fun. After all, who wouldn’t want to be doused with ice cold water on a hot summer day?

The fun doesn’t stop there.

Every participant can be a little creative in making the video as long as the basic criteria are met. And when it is over, you get to challenge your friends to do the same thing.

Businesses must remember that it is easier to get people to do something that they want to do. Convince them that your challenge is fun and they will get on board.

You may never achieve the level of success with any digital marketing campaign that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge had, but you can learn a lot from it.

Use those tips in your own marketing efforts and you will see better sales results.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Joyce Morse is an author who writes on a variety of topics, including business and marketing.