Successful Blog

5 Ways to Build Connections that Make Loyal Customers

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Tara Hornor

Why Using the Golden Rule in Business Works

The golden rule in business is just like the age-old standard of care: treat customers how you want to be treated. It is important that, as a business owner, you always think of your customers and what they want, like, and simply prefer above everything else.

If customers are not interested in what you have to offer and do not feel a personal connection, they will likely not return again. You can send them an email newsletter or direct mail postcards each week, but if they do not feel your “love” for them, you can still lose them as a customer. It is always easier to maintain previous customer relationships rather than gain new ones. Instead of putting yourself through this headache of losing and replacing customers, you have to constantly make connections with your current customers, especially if you want an easy road to success.

5 Ways to Build Connections that Make Loyal Customers

Whether you operate your small business from a local store or your business is operated entirely online, it is not so difficult to build connections that make loyal customers as long as you follow a few simple steps, which include

  1. Ask questions
  2. Talk about what they are interested in
  3. Listen to what customers have to say
  4. Have patience
  5. Use social media

1.) Ask Questions

Ask your customers questions — about their interests, what they like to do, and what they prefer when buying certain products or using certain services. It helps match the customer to the products that cater to their specific wants and needs. Use surveys, follow-up phone calls, or direct emails to ask them how you can improve.

2.) Talk about Them

People want to hear about themselves. You can do this throughout your marketing content. Talk about their problems that you can solve. Highlight recent positive customer experiences. Fill your pages with solutions to their problems – don’t just talk about yourself.

3.) Listen Carefully

Make sure you provide plenty of options for your customers to get in touch, in case problems occur. And just as important, when problems arise make sure you follow up and listen carefully to what happened. Acknowledge customers’ concerns and act aggressively to resolve any outstanding issues. Use a direct email address, Twitter and other social media profiles, and phone to give customers easy access to you.

4.) Be Patient

Patience is important. Avoid confrontation, even if something negative is said. Stuff happens and a patient, caring tone with a customer is critical to long-term relationship building. No matter how exasperated you are or they get, stay calm and work to resolve issues. You may turn a customer who called with an intent of burning bridges into a powerful advocate for your business simply by patiently working through issues.

5.) Use Social Media for Feedback to Build a Connection

Social media is an excellent tool for gaining feedback from your customers, which is especially ideal if you are running an online business. Through social networking sites, you can stay in touch with your customers and communicate with them on a regular basis. Your goal is to make them feel appreciated, as if they are family, so be sure to respond to the comments they leave on your profile.

How you follow the Golden Rule in your business will determine how many loyal customers you acquire. Therefore, take the time necessary to treat customers well, to listen to their feedback and complaints, and to constantly improve your process of dealing with individual customers.

These are just a few ways that you can build connections that make loyal customers. Give these five a try. They will work for you whether you operate your small business from a local store or if your business is operated entirely online.

What else do you suggest to build customer connections that last?

Author’s Bio:
Tara Hornor writes about marketing, advertising, branding, web and graphic design, and desktop publishing for PrintPlace.com a company that offers online printing for print marketing media. Find her on Twitter as @TaraHornor .

 

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

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Colin MacDougal

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Creating a buzz on this ultra crowded web of people, information, and brands is a challenging task. Only by forming a smart strategy and then executing it do marketers succeed.

Know Your Customers

The very first step that marketers have to focus on is consumer research before they can board the brand wagon. It is mandatory that sufficient research be conducted before even the tiniest effort of brand promotion because according to Sun Tzu, ‘Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.’ And strategies can be developed only by someone informed. Demographic and psychographic details are used to develop a customer profile.

Create a Brand

Using information from the customer analysis, focus on the creation of the three following things:

  • Brand Essence – What is the one clear, crisp idea that the brand is about? The people behind Coke have worked to promote is as a brand that represents happiness, Lux is all about star appeal, while BIC characterizes disposability. Remember, a brand’s essence is the one thing about it that can never be change.
  • Brand Values – What values that surround the brand? In addition to being a symbol of happiness, Coke also symbolizes celebration, sharing, love, friendship, familial values, etc.
  • Brand Persona – If brand essence and brand values were personified, they would create brand persona.

Customer Internet Availability

Once the branding cycle is complete, probe into the web browsing behavior of the target market. The timing, the frequency, the websites/social media they use most to interact with others, the things they like to share, the things they enjoy but do not choose to share with others, the average amount of time spent on one sitting at a social networking site, etc.

Keep an Eye on the Competition

Along with details of web browsing behavior of the target market, knowledge about what the competition is doing on the Internet is also crucial. Find out what the industry’s leaders are doing and which and how new entrants in the market have been able to attract significant audiences at different social networking sites and other online mediums.

Select Mediums

Keep in mind the selection of online media the target market uses and the different platforms used by the competition. There are two main strategies that marketers can go for – offensive or defensive. Campaigns with larger resources can afford to adopt an offensive strategy and establish their presence on online platforms that are already dominated by competitors. On the other hand, marketers may also adopt a defensive strategy by attacking the competition where it is not looking. In other words, it can establish its presence on mediums that the target market frequently uses but which haven’t been used by competitors yet.

Some of the most frequently used mediums and tactics for online marketing campaigns include application development, meta engines, online stores, PR engines, blogs, feed services such as RSS, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, social media and affiliate marketing.

Analyze Results

Having conducted the research, created a strategy, and then applied it, the last yet perhaps the most important step of the entire process is to analyze the results. Thanks to tools such as Google Analytics, the results of an online marketing campaign can be determined. The findings can be used to improve future efforts to promote a brand online.

Author’s Bio:
Colin MacDougal works with www.HostPapa.com company serving over 100,000 customers around the world. Since launching in 2006, HostPapa has offered reliable, budget-friendly, easy-to-use web solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. You can find HostPapa at http://www.facebook.com/hostpapa

7 Keys to Loyal, Lasting Customer Relationships

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Every Business Is Relationships

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It doesn’t matter what your role is in business.
You won’t get very far without the help of other people.

It doesn’t matter whether your work is solo or as one of thousands in a big corporation.
Your work will require you to interact with people.

To build a product, offer a service, tell people about that product or service, make a sale, solve a problem, or gather feedback. It’s hard to imagine a business situation where people aren’t involved. To be successful, some social skills are an imperative. To build a team or grow a business, we need to get other people engaged and involved.

Business is relationships and relationships are everyone’s business.

Transaction is not Connection

In some ways, every person we interact with — employees, bosses, vendors, partners, shareholders, family, friends — is a customer. Those interactions can be transactional. You do this and I’ll do that. Relationship over until the next offer.
We do the this so that we get that prize.

We see this and do this online and off.

  • “Like” our Facebook page, and get a coupon for a free taco.
  • Follow us on Twitter and we’ll retweet you 5 times.
  • Enter our contest and you could win!
  • Buy our product and get 10% more.
  • Buy from us and get a free hat!

The problem with that transaction — the quid pro quo agreement doesn’t develop a relationship.

Our attention is on the prize not the person or even the business who offered it. We earned the prize.
Unless they offer another prize, we don’t really have a reason to interact with that business or person again. If someone offers a better prize for less work or investment, they’ll get our time.

Transactions are not connections. It takes a connection to have reason for returning.

7 Keys to Loyal, Lasting Customer Relationships

Transactional business is tough. And it’s risky. It’s tiring and costly to keep reminding customers to come back and buy again. Another vendor can offer a better, or even the same, transaction and if the timing, placement, or prize is attractive when customers have a need to buy again they’re gone. How far will you walk to get a lower ATM fee?

But, build a relationship and the game changes. You’ve suddenly established context. Context shows people how you fit into their lives. Now that other vendor can’t replicate or replace what you’ve built. It takes a little more time and maybe some thinking, but the investment is worth it. Invest in people and they’re more likely to invest back.

If you want customers to form a relationship a fiercely loyal customer, stick by these 7 keys to a loyal, lasting customer relationship.

  1. Show up whole and human. Listen when people talk. We respond to generosity and compassion.
  2. Talk in your authentic voice. Let your values speak for you. You’ll attract people who share them.
  3. Tell your own truth. Tell the best true story about you — the one that gets customers to see that you’re like them.
  4. Have room for customers to tell their best story too. When they do, find a way to applaud.
  5. Don’t try to tie ideas up in a bow. Leave room for contributions, conversation, and growth through collaboration.
  6. Invite the best people to contribute. Let customers into your business to do things unrelated to buying, like swapping success stories, sharing their wisdom, and helping other customers have a better experience.
  7. Be helpful, not hypeful. . . . Make everything about them not you.

People make relationships with people, not with businesses. Investing authentic attention in customers, taking time to see, hear, and understand their needs, wishes, and wants, builds trust. Trust makes things faster and easier. We buy more and bigger things from people we trust.

Got advise on how to win your loyalty as a customer?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

5 Smart Ways to Differentiate a Successful Business

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Grant Tilus

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Did you know Americans create more than 500,000 new businesses every month? It’s true, but only 50 percent of those businesses will still be operational within five years. While the amount of new businesses every month is encouraging, our rate of failure is unfortunate and must be improved upon.

5 Smart Ways to Differentiate a Successful Business

One way you can increase your business’ chance of celebrating its five year anniversary is to differentiate your business among your industry peers. Stand out from the crowd. Use these five ways to differentiate to build a smart and successful business. Each key point provides real-world examples of what you can do to improve your business.

1. Focus on the Customer

The best and often the most successful entrepreneurs create businesses they are so passionate about they will do anything for their customers. Over time many business owners tend to lose focus and begin straying away from having the needs of their customer be a top priority. However, by maintaining a customer-centric focus you will create a positive customer experience that will allow you to build your brand all while creating a loyal base of repeat and new customers.

Example: Stuffed Giraffe Shows What Customer Service Is All About

2. Be a Social Media Juggernaut

In our digital world social media cannot be ignored by even the smallest of businesses. Focus on creating a unique social community by engaging and educating your customers about your brand in a way that’s both entertaining and helps them feel connected to your business. We all know it’s easier to keep customers rather than finding new ones; social media can help you do both.

Example: Impressive Small Business Facebook Pages You Can Learn From

3. Don’t Focus on the Competition

Every smart business owner has conducted a SWOT analysis for their business venture. Far too often business owners get caught up in the threats of competition, which causes their own business to suffer. However, by focusing on the unique opportunities your business has to offer you will help it stand out among the rest as a clear and distinguished option for your targeted customer base.

Example: Your Competition, Isn’t

4. Make It Personal

Creating personal connections is part of human nature. In the midst of creating a business we subconsciously hide our own personality, and that’s not necessarily the best thing to do. Customers need ways to connect with businesses beyond the advertisements and sales pitches. By being transparent and humanistic your customers can begin to create a relationship with your business and become more than just a customer. Tell your story and learn your customer’s story as you build your business.

Example:


Papa John Telling the Papa John Story

5. Keep Things Fresh

Changes within your target market, technology, and the economy often require your business to make adjustments. In order to stay relevant and continue building a successful business it’s important to assess and refresh your business’ activities. The businesses that are comfortable maintaining the status quo are the ones that are failing to prepare for true longevity. As a business owner you need to be asking, listening and responding to changes in the market and your customer base in order to succeed in the long term.

Example: Living Business Plans Help Businesses Flow with Future

Differentiate your business in 5 smart and social ways to build success. Use social avenues to focus on and connect with customers personally by sharing stories. Then you can let your competition worry about you.

What successes have you had with differentiating your business in smart and social ways?

Author’s Bio:
Grant Tilus is an Inbound Marketing Specialist at Rasmussen College. He creates superior content and blogs about accelerated bachelor’s degree programs, other online business school degree programs or inbound marketing best practices. Feel free to connect with Grant Tilus on Twitter and Google+.

What Is Perfect in Business Thinking?

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Stardards Are Agreed and Repeatable.

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When I was in publishing, I spent a lot of time with editors, designers, marketers, sales reps, finance folks, and C-Suite executives. Each of them had different goals for success. Each had different ideas of what drives a successful business. Almost all of them wanted to do a great job for the company and for themselves.

But young product designers and builders that I worked with often had unrealistic aspirations and goals. They set a standard for the products they worked on. Their standard was that the products be perfect.

A standard is an agreed, repeatable way of doing something.

Perfect isn’t a standard. Perfect isn’t a repeatable way of doing anything.
Just as important, they would have been hard pressed to get the rest of the company to agree to their definition of perfect.

That idea of a perfect product worked against them.

What Is Perfect?

Those designers desperately would explain how to design the perfect product. Meanwhile, the sales reps, finance folks, and C-Suite executives each had their own definition of what perfect means in that context.

Perfect is in the eye of the beholder —

  • to the product builders — a writer, editor, illustrator, coder, programmer — a perfect product is structurally sound, without error, and elegant
  • to the designers a perfect product is aesthetically pleasing, easy to use, elegant
  • to the marketers a perfect product is new, compelling, and innovative
  • to the sales reps the perfect product is one that sells and stays sold
  • to the finance folks, a perfect product sells and makes money at the same time
  • to the C-Suite executives a perfect product seems to be one that does all of those things
  • to the only ones who count — the customers — a perfect product meets their needs, makes their lives easier, faster/simpler, or more meaningful.

Clearly the idea of perfect wasn’t the same from one team to another. Perfection is experience and perception, not a standard.

What Is Perfect in Business Thinking?

A quest for perfect is unattainable. What perfect judge would decide when we’ve succeeded?

The stress of perfection makes us less human. Our flaws and foibles, expertise and experience round out our thinking and define our appeal as unique beings. Perfect in business thinking is both strong with vulnerable. It takes wonderfully imperfect humans to truly connect a business to its customers.

It doesn’t matter whether our offer is a product or a service. If we focus on the work, it’s easy to forget the people. Yet, we’re do the work to attract, connect with, and serve people. Solid business thinking defines perfect work by how well it delivers value.

We can build in shiny bells and whistles that we decide will make our work perfect. If the folks we’re serving don’t see, need, or want the noisemakers we’ve built in, we’re not adding value. We’re adding cost — our time and energy to build them, their time and energy to avoid and ignore the ringing and whistling. (Unless they miss them completely, which is benign, but still a drain on our resources.

There’s no such thing as a perfect product. Even if we could achieve one, I’d go for the a product that attracts, delights, and serves customers. If a product serves the customer exactly as the customer wants and needs it to … To me that is perfect in business thinking.

When the next project comes — or even as your move forward on this one — here are a few imperfect suggestions that will get you closer to perfectly satisfying those customers …

  1. Unravel any rigid definitions of a perfect outcome to make room for new thinking. Don’t confuse wrong and different.
  2. Remember that perfect isn’t about you. Don’t define what’s perfect for customers. Let them tell you.
  3. Ask questions. Ask the people you serve to describe their “perfect” outcome. Do this before, during, and after a project. Do it often when you’ve encountered a problem.
  4. As you gather information from the people you serve, use it to set a true standard. Then live UP to it. An agreed upon, repeatable, and predictable standard makes business easier, faster, and more meaningful.
  5. Pay attention and keep tweaking until you’ve aligned your goals with your customers. Do more of what works. Stop what doesn’t.

Don’t try for perfect work. Like the young product builders and designers, any definition of perfect work will be flawed if leaves out customers. Perfect work in business thinking is outcomes and solutions that fit your customers’ needs as they see them. Show up consistently with generosity and your best reasoning. Be outstanding at seeing, hearing, and responding to people.

Make things easier, simpler, and more meaningful. Your work will be better than perfect. It will be irresistible.
And that’s perfectly appealing.

What’s your definition of perfect in business thinking?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Blogging Tools of Engagement that Attract Attention

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How to blog series

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Grace Nasri

6 Tools of Engagement

There are currently billions of webpages indexed across the world today; as the number grows, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate one blog from another. The six sites below have created tools to help bloggers increase engagement, attract attention, and differentiate their blog from the rest.

1. FindTheBest’s Interactive Widgets: Adding interactive widgets to blog posts is one of the best ways to drive user engagement and increase time spent on your site. FindTheBest () a data-driven comparison engine, offers hundreds of product and service widgets to enhance posts and reviews. The interactive and customizable widgets (http://www.findthebest.com/widgets) have an added bonus of being monetizable—bloggers receive 100 percent of all affiliate revenue.

2. Visual.ly’s Infographics: Infographics have grown in popularity over the past year, partially because it’s easier for most people to consume and retain information presented in the form of an image or graphic rather that pure data or text. Visual.ly allows bloggers to create customized infographics for their blogs. Other sites like Stat Planet, Tableau and ManyEyes are starting to pop up that make it easy to build customized infographics.

3. Flickr’s Photos: Posts with photos, graphics or other illustrations not only look more enticing, but they can also drive traffic from image searches; when photos are saved with relevant keyword tags, they will show up in an image search and when a user clicks on the image, they will be taken to the affiliated blog. In addition to Flickr, sites like WikiMedia’s commons and Google’s image search are also great sites to find relevant images and graphics, but be sure that the licensing allows for republishing.

4. Pixlr’s Photo Editing Software: For bloggers who don’t have Photoshop but want tools to be able to edit their photos before posting to their blog, Pixlr’s Editor provides online photo editing tools for free.

5. Vimeo’s Videos: People consume and digest data through different formats and channels, while some are more drawn to text and data, others find video content more engaging. Sites like Vimeo make it easy to upload, share and post videos. But Vimeo isn’t the only video sharing site. Site like Blinkx, Vimeo, UStream and YouTube are some other great places to find engaging videos relevant to your blog post.

6. SpeakerText’s Video Transcription Service: Video content, while highly engaging, is not easily searchable by search engines. Video transcription services like SpeakerText specialize in transcribing the content on your video, which helps search engines index your content.

Maybe you’re using one or more of these already. Try the rest. Keep alert for tools that will raise the engagement on your blog.

What tools of engagement fuel your blog?

Author’s Bio:
Grace Nasri is the managing editor at FindTheBest, a data-driven comparison engine. Her articles have been published in The Huffington Post, Reuters, VentureBeat, The Street, Technorati, Asia Times and more. You can see a full list of her articles at GraceNasri.com and can find her on Twitter as @GraceNasri