Month: January 2015

How to understand your marketing consultant is the right one for you

Everyone wants marketing. Everyone wants the best marketing consultant. Everyone wants to spend close to nothing.

Now please you stop dreaming and let’s go to understand how you can “understand” if your marketing consultant is right for you.

Somebody can now say: it is simple, if he brings results he is good otherwise not. But you have results only after he started to work (and being paid) and sometime results is not the perfect parameter to consider.

There is a big issue that any marketing consultant should manage first: he doesn’t know your business.

You are the “king” of your business, you know market, customers, business model, goals, needs. He knows nothing about that.

So here are the rules to follow to understand if that marketing consultant really cares about your results:

1) First questions he does are about your business

If he starts talking about the past results he did with other customers, I would try to understand if he applies standard model to any customer. In this case sometime he is lucky, sometime not. In your case maybe he will not be lucky

2) He spends time with you to understand what you want really

It is not true that any company wants to grow:it is different for each company how they want and they can grow. A good marketing consultant helps you to go where you want to go, not where he thinks he is right to go

3) He explains you the “why”

He knows nothing about your business but probably you know little about digital marketing. The difference here is that you are paying him. So it is important that he is able to share with you the reasons why he is planning to do something. It is a way to make you able to review him

4) He admits mistakes

Everyone does mistakes. Then there are people that find a culprit for everything. But they never learn from their mistakes. Others they know they can do mistakes. In this case they learn from the, they know how to repair what they did wrong.

How to deal online with disappointed customers

 

Dealing with a customer is really different if you are face to face or if you have to deal online.

A lot of people feel that Internet is a place where they can speak freely and they are usually more sincere and even aggressive. In case of a bad experience with a business or a product, the first feeling they have is to “punish” you. They trusted your product/business and they feel themselves betrayed. For this reason customers are usually more aggressive online then offline.

Any company has to deal with customers that review their business and sometime in a bad way.

How to deal with them?

  1. Calm down

Nothing is personal, even the customer (especially in the case of small businesses) tries to talk at a personal level. So don’t react like you have been personally attacked. It is a business matter. Speak to the customer at a persona level but don’t react at the personal level.

  1. Understand

Doing business is hard and doing it perfectly (without mistakes) is close to be impossible. Therefore try to understand if the customer is right even partially, it can help you to understand the real level of frustration the customer went through and how to solve the issue

If there had been a problem, you can think how to solve it, if not (and you are sure of that) it could be you have in front of you a “troll”, someone that it is trying to have visibility and maybe some advantages reviewing you badly. Your behavior will be completely different.

  1. Answer

This is very important.

Internet is a place where fake news are able to propagate very fast. One of the reasons of that is because of the lack of a two-way communications.

Also if social networks are a platform to dialogue, if one of your friend posts something, you assume that is true because it comes from your friend.

This means that whatever is written is assumed as true.

You begin to doubt that the information you are reading is accurate only if somebody answers to that statement and try to give another opinion about the subject.

Same thing happens with a bad review: if it is unanswered everyone thinks it is completely true, if there is someone else (even the business owner) that gives another opinion about what happened, we judge it differently. Also if the fact described is true and the business owner assumes his responsibility the review becomes less interesting for everyone.

A bad review is like a bomb with a lighted fuse, if you answer it becomes an unexploded bomb.

  1. Don’t escalate

Internet is not a good place where you can dialogue. Writing is different than speaking and it is easy to misunderstand each other. The communication is asynchronous so it is very hard to be able to explain yourself.

Therefore talk to your disappointed customers but don’t dialogue with them because it is easy to make things even worst.

Avoid any “but”, go direct to the point. If you made a mistake, say “sorry” but don’t explain too much. Your goal is to solve the problem not to give more reasons to your disappointed customer to continue his crusade. That customer is very frustrated and you don’t want to escalate his frustration.

  1. Don’t panic

A lot of good businesses have some bad reviews. You cannot make all the customers happy.

So don’t panic if you have a bad review, it will not destroy your reputation and credibility.

If you have only bad reviews, there is something wrong with your business. But having some of them means nothing. Learn from your mistake and consider a bad review a possibility to improve your processes and your relation with your customers.

If you show how good you are in managing your customer, you will be granted by a positive effect, probably higher than having only good reviews.

What is a Business Community?

What is it a community? It is a group of person sharing the same interests and living desires. A business community is all around a company but it works in the same way.

A community is a multiplier of needs and solutions. In fact a man alone is weaker than a community. We face that every day, even in our neighbor communities. A business community is a powerful instrument both for your external clients both for your internal clients (the employees). It is the first step to transform your company into a community able to share information, put in common stories and business practice and create a two-way communication channel with all the persons that surround you