Month: December 2014

Why is so important to know your business before starting social marketing

Content marketing seems to be the key for the 2015. But a lot of companies forget that the first step in order to have a strong social marketing strategy is about knowing better processes and market of their own businesses.

“Bring me more customers”. My answer usually is: which customers?

Because the ultimate goal of a social marketing strategy is not to bring more customers but to do more profit. 

So let’s see what you need to know very well before starting a social media plan.

1) Business model

Do you sell a single expensive item or do you sell a subscription?

You sell cars: your customer has to make a decision to buy an expensive product that will keep for an average of 3 years. Your problem is first how to show the product in order to sell it, but then you have a customer that will not buy anything from you for a long time that must be kept happy because he could be a returning customer in 3 years.

You sell an online subscription based service: your problem is completely different. You need to keep engaged that users otherwise he will cancel the subscription and never come back.

ROI changes too: a social marketing campaign to sell cars needs to focus on conversion. Executing a social strategy for an online service needs to focus more on retain customers because if the business acquires a customer and lose it after 15 days there is no profit

The key elements to consider are: sell value, churn rate, recurring sales.

2) Target

Which is your customer? Your right customer?.

Businesses need to understand a lot about the customers they should have before setting up a social strategy.

How the customer can be reached?
Which is the cultural and social level of the customers?
How the customer looks at the company and the product/service it sells?

If the business is mainly a local one, some channels cannot be effective like others. If the business is a highly professional company the kind of communication cannot be based on prices but mostly on showing the high level of skills of the persons that are in the company.

The key elements are: which are the elements customers use to make their choice, which is the customers’ profile, where is the customer

3) Product/Service communication style

Is your product described through words, images, slogans or what else?

Both the channel you are going to use both the content you have to focus more change a lot based on the kind of product/service you have.

A construction company must show what it is capable of and therefore images are very effective. A CPA firm has to focus more on text and numbers because this is what customers are expecting more.

The key elements here are: how can you describe at best your product/service, how a customer can understand your product/service.

There are other elements to consider afterwards but those three are the main important.

If you are going to hire someone to take care of your social marketing, be sure he is able to understand and help you understanding your business. It is the most important thing to check.

The 5 Gold rules of content marketing

Everyone speaks about content marketing, but are you ready for this?

1. Context

Content must be related to what you do but it doesn’t speak only of what you do. In sales do you do free promotions? I guess so. Same you should do for content: you give free content (useful ones) to potential customers to attract them

There is nothing worse for an user to search for something, to think finally he found it, click the link and understand after 5 seconds that the content is completely useless for him. 

2. Customization

Content must be customized for different users especially if you have a broad range of products and services. Make possible for users to find immediately what they are looking for, create different landing pages, interact with users when they come to your website

3. Update

You have a blog: awesome… not really. You need to update it continuously. It is an hard work but it must be done. You don’t want your showroom empty and outdated for sure. Customers think about a content not updated that you don’t care about yourself and probably neither about them

4. Interaction

If you talk to someone, he could answer: this is a general rule. And he can say good things or even bad. You need to interact with your audience. It makes you more human and more reliable. If you think that nobody can talk about you forget the content marketing

5. No overselling

A content marketing strategy is different from a sales strategy. You cannot speak only about yourself and your product. Customers come to you to have more information than simply your products/services. Readers want stories more than numbers.

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Marketing trends in 2015

We are at the end of 2014.

Therefore it is a good moment to do predictions about what will be the major marketing trends in 2015 

As any other prediction (especially speaking about marketing) they will be wrong probably but it is worth a try.

1) Content marketing

Content is already a key factor in marketing and it will continue to be even more in 2015. Consumers are attracted by content and engaged by personalized content  There will be a huge effort by companies to empower their content marketing trying also to add a high level of customization

2) Visual marketing

Content is not only text. Nowadays an image speaks more than a text. So far visual marketing has been considered something connected to corporate image but now businesses must be able to communicate also through images. Pinterest and Instagram already showed their role in marketing in 2014 and there will be more next year.

3) Mobile

If it was true in the past that everyone had a PC, now it is definitely true that everyone has a mobile phone (and most of them a smartphone). And everyone is using more and more it as unique access to Internet. Companies will need mobile content. It doesn’t mean the “mobile” version of the Web content, it means something different because accessing content through mobile is a completely different experience

4) Customer emotions management

CRM (Customer relationship management) changed a lot in the last year. Support doesn’t mean anymore simply helping current and potential customers, it is really a sales force. But the approach will be more and more customized and a big role will be the management of customer’s emotions. As everyone knows emotions have the primary role in the purchasing process

Let’s update at the end of 2015 to see if at least one of the prediction will be right.

And if not? We are marketers we are used to change opinions :)

CRM: how to engage after a purchase

CRM is the process that creates a relation between a customer and a company through a product/service and describes how this relation should be managed

Usually everyone focuses on the first phase when you have to attract the customer and increase the conversions and therefore sales. 

After the purchase everything seems to be around the word “Support” and most of the companies believe that through a good Support and Service we can keep the customer.

This is definitely true but it is a necessary condition but often not sufficient.

Purchase is a human decision let’s try to analyze what happens in the human mind during that process.

Mostly of the purchases are emotional with a little rational component related more on things like an affordable price, features but undoubtedly the emotion rules the purchase process.

We consider the purchase like the decision to marry someone. We noticed each other, we dated to know each other a little bit, we fall in love and finally we marry.

The first period after the marriage is a honeymoon. So everything is perfect, if there are problems we can go over them, but after a while the excitement fades away a little bit.

The customer bought your product/service and he has been using it for a while. At the beginning there was excitement but after some time customer changes relationship with the product/service. He begins to criticize it if it doesn’t perform very well, the relation with the company is more  demanding, he cannot forget the little troubles he could have.

So how the company should react to that?

We believe support and service must be different for a new customer and an old one.

A new customer aims is to keep the excitement so relation must be mainly emotional, we need only to avoid disappointments but it is easy to manage. This is the also best period to try to sell something new. We need to think to that customer like a honeymoon: avoid disappointment, be enthusiastic, have fun. 

An old customer is different, he is more rational, he is demanding more, he begins to think that the first love is gone, he wants more reasons to stay with the company. He could be happy but he is not in love anymore, so he can criticize and sees the things without the filter of the honeymoon.

Now he is asking attention and we must provide it very fast otherwise he begins to look around to see if he can find something better.

To the new customer we can try to sell any new product we have. To the old one we need to sell only what he needs.

We need to make able the support process to act differently based on the customer we have in front of us.

New

  • Keyword: excitement
  • Support: fast to avoid afterthought
  • Focus: selling
  • Emotion Focus: joy and gratitude
  • Support Role

Old 

  • Keyword: disappointment (also without reasons)
  • Support: rational and effective
  • Focus: taking care 
  • Emotion focus: hope and appreciation
  • Support role: caregiver

image

Knowledge and business success

The common definition of knowledge is “facts and information acquired by a person by experience or education”. Pretty generic but knowledge is the main thing that makes human being so advanced and effective.

The question here is if there is a relation between knowledge and business success. The answer is very simple: without knowledge there is no business so therefore there is no business success.

A business is an entity that provides to potential customers products and/or services that are created, realized, designed with the knowledge of the business owners.

Without the knowledge of the people that created, developed and that are running the company there could not be a business because there is no product and/or service

So it seems clear that knowledge is the base on any business (like it is the base of any human activities) and the reason of that is because through your knowledge you use your skills to perform what the customers needs.

We must pay attention that there are two knowledge that are equally important: the product/service knowledge and the customers’ knowledge. Sometime businesses have an outstanding service or product but it doesn’t fit customers’ needs and they fail. And sometime businesses are successful with a crappy service only because this is what customers need.

So the combination of knowledge of what we can do and of the need we can satisfy is the base for any success and we must have both otherwise it is an issue.

So far everything seems clear but what happens when the company expands his business? 

Usually the knowledge and the skills are focused on the business owner(s), the person that had the idea, started the business and they made it successful. But when the company becomes bigger, that knowledge must spread out over the spine of the entire company, because the new employees don’t have at all that knowledge.

And this is often an issue that block or even damage any attempt to expand the company.

Marketing companies usually propose to businesses to expand but they don’t care most of time if the company can stand an expansion. And we are not speaking about find and hiring new employees or being able to produce more, we are speaking about the biggest issue of all: the knowledge management.

A company can expand only if it is able to clone itself becoming an unique organism able to have the same DNA. There are many analogies between a company and an organ.

An organ is made by cells, all of them able to do their tasks with the same skills. For example if the liver is damaged is able to heal taking new cells that already know what and how to do.

A business should be like an expanding organ: able to incorporate new cells that are already able to perform. You can do that only if you are able to share the knowledge of the first cell of the organ.