New media may not be so new anymore. It is really a comprehensive approach to creating rich content and strategic use and placement of that content for prospects and customers alike. Where are you and how easy is it for your prospects and customers to find you? The granddaddy of media locations is a website, but a website alone will not engage you with you prospects and customers. In order to choose which media outlets you should actively participate in, you need a strategy that is broader than ‘build it and they will come’. Just because you build it, they will NOT come! Many companies believe their investment in a flashy website will instantly drive traffic to their website and convert browsers to shoppers but that is most definitely not the case. While an appropriately laid out website is a substantial part of the plan, the ‘design’ of the site isn’t what Google, Yahoo and Bing are crawling. When was the last time you did a website audit to determine the effective nature of your design, content and accessibility of your site? A website is the red door on your community. It is not just a corporate portfolio and online brochure. Web designers often attract their customers by their design skill, but design elements are secondary to the strategy. Here are 3 Must Haves for a New Media Plan 1. Dynamic SEO The underlying strategy for your online presence should include ONGOING search engine optimization. Browsers often search for informative terms where as a buyer has already performed the informative search and is moving toward decision focused searches. This customer maturity will adjust keyword phrases and your strategy should provide both levels of research to better accommodate the position your prospects and customers are in. As a customer segment becomes more educated their search terms change and so should your keyword profiles. 2. Dynamic Marketing Content Strategy In the same way you keyword phrases may change, so will your new media strategy. A foundational marketing plan will have the ability to flux as media opportunities arise. You may not need video at the onset of a project but as you move further through the funnel, it may become necessary to implement a video component. The key to a dynamic marketing strategy is to tie your products, overall business objectives and specialties to a comprehensive content development and production plan. 3. Active Customer Engagement Strategy The content and customer engagement strategy will include placement and participation in the appropriate social media sites, metrics and evaluations for change and adoption of relevant material and finally a comprehensive customer touchpoint strategy. Without the above strategies, your involvement in social media is just noise, and unfortunately that is all most businesses are today. In our next series of posts we will take a deep dive into each of these factors as they relate to specific verticals. Thanks for reading and as always, your comments are welcomed. I confess. I am guilty. I have been a lazy blogger. I have been lax. I have highlighted a subject and not given it a deep dive in to meaningful content. I have written for my pleasure, not always for the benefit of my audience. How about you? Have you fallen prey to the lazy writing habits of a busy professional? Here are 3 ways to rev up your content (and your business) and write like you mean it. 1. Imagine you have one hour to solve your customer’s biggest problem. Create a list of strategies, tasks, must-do’s. What will it take for you to make this problem go away? What do you need to research? What do you need to read? What is the bottom line issue? Now go find the supportive material to solve the problem. Get your Google on. 2. Write like you are in a writing bootcamp. When I watch shows like the Biggest Loser, I am always impressed with the focus and intensity of the participants and trainers. You are not allowed to slack off because there is someone always looking over your shoulder PUSHING you to keep going. To rev up your writing and create more demanding content, set a timer. Give yourself 30 minutes to complete 3 paragraphs of content. You cannot get up. You cannot look out the window. You cannot get a snack, answer a call, check email or lolly gag on Facebook or Twitter. You must write. [As a side note, that's how I'm writing this post.] 3. Do this EVERYDAY. I just read a very simple, but profound little book by Jeff Olsen titled The Slight Edge. Bottom line, the difference between successful people and those who are not comes down to the fact that successful people do ‘just that much more’ than everyone else and they do it daily. The small, compounded effects of those changes over time lead to life changing breakthroughs. You cannot expect to break the lazy writing habit if you don’t do something different. We can all rev up our content with a focused concentration on producing valuable, usable, business changing information. Sometimes we just need to hyper focus to break the habit. Sometimes we need to enter a self mandated bootcamp to regain focus. Remember: you only have 1 hour to solve your customer’s biggest problem, so get busy. Today a restaurant without a social media presence is missing a huge opportunity to engage with its customers. But that doesn’t mean that you should just plop up a Facebook page and hope for the best. It is not ‘build it and they will come’ with regards to social media and customer engagement. You must have a strategy for engaging with your customers. Here are 4 tips to engage with your customers: These four ways to use social media will engage your customers, connect them to your restaurant and keep you at the front of the list next time they are deciding where to eat. Oh, and make sure your website, your menu’s, table signs etc. have your social media contact information on them so customers start connecting right away. Image: Carlos Porto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Do you ever wonder what events and conferences are worth attending? One way to evaluate what event you may want to attend is to look at your collective friends and followers to see what they have going on. A cool search tool called Plancast allows you to connect your existing social media profiles and search upcoming events based upon keyword searches that you define. Check them out at www.plancast.com Today, it seems like a lot of small businesses are fixated on their social media pages and image. While that is very important, it’s not necessarily the number of fans/follower/circles/zebras or whatever else you are measuring that matters most. When it comes to crunching numbers, make sure you include the following: Location based services like Yelp, Google Places, Facebook Places, Foursquare and the like are gaining popularity with consumers. With such services, consumers post reviews, check-ins and tag friends which helps to establish social credibility for the poster and business. What this means to service based businesses is that you have an opportunity to reap the rewards of FREE advertising and up to the minute reviews of your product or service. Consumers are more likely to visit a restaurant or bar that a friend or family member has recommended or raved about. In addition, with the ability of people to search reviews on smart phones, these location based services provide instant feedback and approval when a consumer is looking for a peer review of a business or service. Not to mention that Yelp, Foursquare and Facebook allow businesses to post coupons, frequent visit discounts and rewards programs right on the site. This entices customers to revisit establishments because of the freebie or discount offered. Restaurants, bars, clubs, fitness facilities, personal trainers, specialty stores, recreation facilities, special event locations, golf courses, hotels, spa and beauty salons, entertainment locations…basically business that wants to share the experience of their product or service. These sites are very easy to set up, generally easy to maintain and monitor and most are free. You can do this yourself, but if you would rather have someone do it for you, we can help. 4 Reasons Why You NEED a Customer Engagement Program Customer engagement is a term that’s generating buzz in marketing, public relations and social media circles. A simple definition is that CE is the total of all interactions with a potential customer or existing customer and the subsequent interactions, relationship building and measurements of those interactions. Wikipedia defines Online CE as: Online customer engagement refers to: The key here is that a systematic CE program is designed influence customer behavior and increase customer engagement. There are 4 main reasons why your business needs a CE program. When it comes to customer love, nothing says I Love You like sticking around. Customer retention is the foundation of building a business today and increasing retention has been hard to do, until now. A 58% increase in customer retention based upon a CE process utilizing social media gives a business tangible reasons to actively integrate their own CE program. Gallup shows that world-class organizations can see significant increase with actively engaged customers by utilizing a CE program. Gallup’s customer engagement ratio is a macro-level indicator of an organization’s health that allows executives to track the proportion of fully engaged to actively disengaged customers. In average organizations, the ratio of fully engaged customers to actively disengaged customers is 0.8:1. When you consider the premium that fully engaged customers deliver to your organization, isn’t it vitally important that you understand, develop, and sustain optimized customer relationships? http://www.gallup.com/consulting/49/customer-engagement.aspx Having a vibrant CE program is like having a money dance at a wedding reception that never stops. With a 44% increase in sales, you can definitely say that CE is a hit. Actively engaged customers are social megaphones for your brand. Think of a CE program as a way to put social media on steroids for your brand, and it can be done for a fraction of the cost of traditional media marketing. Certain types of businesses can see greater benefit by using a CE program, like service based businesses, experience focused businesses, restaurants, personal services and community driven businesses. Increasing sales provides reason enough for most businesses to engage in a CE program. At Success Coaching Group we have created CE plans that cost a business less than $35 per day. It can be that affordable. Getting someone to spend money on your product or service can be a challenge, getting them to continue to spend money AND spend more of it each time they purchase, well, that’s like a honeymoon that never ends! A fully engaged customer will continue to seek ways to interact and spend money with your business and they will spend more each time they purchase. Repeat purchases are like anniversaries. A 33% increase in repeat business is a clear indicator the there is still plenty of love to go around. Each time your customer purchases, your business has an opportunity to proclaim undying affection and love. With an active CE program you ensure repeat purchases and referrals. Yet another reason to invest in a CE program. Bottom line: Get down on your knee and put a ring on it, or rather invest in a comprehensive CE program if you want to engage your customers and increase your revenue. The businesses that use an active CE program will reap the rewards of relationship building. Let us know if we can help. Check out our services and process, then give us a call. by Lisa T. Goodwin, Success Coach and Entrepreneur When I was growing up my mother wasn’t much of a risk taker. That governed how she felt about my taking risks as well. She wasn’t the kind of mother that encouraged climbing trees, running around or getting into things. Most mothers don’t encourage getting into things, but you get the idea, she didn’t want us taking risks. I was a good girl and followed my mother’s advice most of the time…except when I didn’t. Usually there was evidence that I broke the rules that looked like stubbed toes, bloody knees, dirty faces and the occasional cry for help. It was only then, when I stubbed my toes that I realized my potential. By challenging what was safe, or in most cases, what was easy, I learned how to break free from my limitations. So stubbed toes and cries for help, they are evidence that you stretched beyond your comfort zone and the comfort zone of others to TRY something new and different. That is why I believe there are 3 reasons to LOVE risk taking. 1. You will never know what you are capable of until you go beyond your perceived limits. One of my favorite stories about risk taking is about a man named Larry Walters. I first heard about Larry when my mentor and friend, Rich Hurst used his story in a sermon. I then found a great recap of the story in a book by Robert Fulghum and his version provides a classic parable that I have paraphrased in a video about living the life of your dreams. Basically Larry Walters’ story is this: he dreamed about being able to fly so instead of taking pilot lessons, he conjured up this idea about attaching helium weather balloons to a lawn chair. He flew alright, he risked his life for his dream. If you want to hear the story and see actual pictures, go to my video “Living the Life of Your Dreams”. The bottom line is this; learn to love the stubbed toes and bloody knees. They are evidence that you actually get up off your rear and try for something bigger and better or maybe just different, and that is, after all what needs to happen if you want your dreams to come true.
3 Must Haves for a New Media Plan: Engaging prospects and customers with new media
With solid SEO and dynamic content you have two pieces of your media plan that tie into an over arching customer engagement strategy that will guide and direct all aspects of your new media involvement.
Stop Being Lazy: 3 Ways to Rev Up Your Content
One of the toughest industries in the US? Yep. Lot’s of competition? Yep. Will you be successful without a customer engagement strategy using social media? Maybe. Can social media help you? Absolutely.
Tips and Tools You Can Use: Plancast
Are You Crunching The Right Numbers? Measuring Growth Opportunities
Why Your Business Needs Location Based ServicesThere are a few things you need to keep in mind before you go and set up your pages:
Remember, each time your customer posts to a location based service, it is often re-posted to their Twitter or Facebook page, which means you get FREE advertising to that customers followers. You really have nothing to lose (unless you have a bad product or bad service…fix that first) and a lot of free exposure to gain.Types of businesses that should consider using location based services:
If You Liked It You Should Have Put A Ring On It!
1. Increase Customer Retention
In world-class organizations, the engagement ratio is 8:1.
Business units that score above Gallup’s database median on both customer and employee engagement significantly outperform units that rank in the bottom half on both measures.2. Increase Sales
3. Increase Revenue Per Customer
4. Increase in Repeat Purchases
3 Reasons to LOVE Risk Taking
In business our stubbed toes, bloody knees, dirty faces and occasional cries for help look more like ideas that didn’t take off, expenses accrued in the hopes of making it big, late nights and long hours and a cry for help still looks like a cry for help. BUT… there are reasons we do that. There are reasons beyond reason that cause us to risk all of those sorts of things and more. Reasons that sometimes only we understand, and let’s face it — even we question why we do what we do when times get tough.
2. Inherent in risk is inspiration.
3. If you want to live the life of your dreams, you CAN’T JUST SIT THERE!
