Category Archives: Marketing

Building Your Brand

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With the increasing number of places that your stakeholders can interact online and offline today, it’s more important than ever for you to develop cutting-edge brand strategies that deliver results.

Many companies –

Build brands by launching strategic initiatives that define their brand strategy.

Organize brand portfolios.

Develop identity standards that include core key communication messages and visual elements.

Afterwards, the company typically launches a brand-building plan. While these branding components show encouraging signs of enhancing the business’s image, the most important part of branding – being your brand – remains tenuous.

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Email Marketing – Easy To Do And On Your Budget

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Are you using email marketing? You should be! It’s an effective business tool to incorporate in your customer-relationship strategy for communicating and interacting with customers. You must maintain a dialogue with your customers to improve their experience with your company and to keep them loyal to your brand, products and services.

Email is far less expensive on a cost-per-contact basis than other advertising options, such as banner ads, print advertising and telemarketing. It’s fast, inexpensive and easy to use as a marketing strategy. It’ll keep customers engaged, even when they’re not buying.

Reviewing emails is part of your customers’ daily routine and allows them to immediately act on your delivered messages. With many of your customers now using smartphones and tablets, they get your message when and where they want it. One of the greatest benefits of email marketing is that your message is delivered very quickly. Reader response times are generally within 48 hours.

Email marketing builds brand awareness. Keeping visible to your customers continues to build relationships and interaction with your customers. This assures that when they are ready to buy, they will think of your company.

It’s important to remember that a successful email campaign requires that you create a message that is compelling to those who receive it. Create the desire to have them open your email with a strong, informative and want-to-know-more subject line. Show your customers that you care about them. You need to craft clear messages to customers, based on criteria around their needs. If you do, you’ll see real, measurable results – right away – in building customer relationships, without investing a lot of your time and money.

For your existing customers, send them service reminders, special offers, updates about new products or services and expert information on topics of interest. It’s a great way to stay in front of current customers and reconnect with your customers that haven’t purchased from you in a while. For your prospective customers, let them know who you are, what your business is all about, what you stand for, what you offer, how you work and the products or services you offer.

With email marketing, you can create marketing campaigns consisting of a series of emails to reinforce your message. It costs little to maintain your email-marketing program. Email creates an interactive connection and helps to nurture customer relations.

You’ll be able to track your click-to-open rates, and send automated messages to new subscribers. Your email campaign’s effectiveness can be easily measured when you use a good email template system and software. By being able to quantify the success while in progress, you can adjust your strategies to improve results. It can also drive traffic to your website. Using links embedded in your messages, customers can quickly be directed to your website.

If managed properly, email marketing is very effective. First, you have to build a contact list of people who want to hear from you – called permission marketing. This will ensure that you are not spamming anyone. If you get your customers’ permission, your marketing efforts are better targeted and help ensure that your emails get through to those on your list.

A well-planned, email-marketing campaign is a win-win marketing strategy. What more could you want? Once it’s set up, it’s easy to do and on your budget!

Social Marketing and Relationship Building

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Social Media IconsSocial marketing is all about building relationships. Using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube are great additions to your customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Staying social allows you to stay in touch and engage with your customers.  Social marketing is all about strategy, listening and community engagement. All brands need to engage with their target audiences.

As with any marketing medium, the first step for any social strategy is to identify what your business priorities are and align them with the social tactics that your customers use. Once you’ve figured out what social communities your customers use, you need to convey warmth and sincerity in your social media content. Picture first the reader. Try to imagine the subject from the reader’s viewpoint. Use the word “you,” but don’t overdo it.

Know what your customers want. Before buying a product or service, people weigh the benefits that would come from the purchase against the hierarchy of their wants and needs. Many factors go into this decision – convenience, price, quality, speed of delivery and other variables. Knowing precisely what your customers want from you, what influences their buying decision is key to effective marketing and posting great social content that builds ongoing customer relationships.

Use the right information. You need to have the right information to use it well in your posts, tweets and videos. The right information means the right amount and level of detail. You need to ask yourself: Can I (therefore my customer) make informed decisions based upon this information?

Focus on clearly identifiable market segments. Marketing and communication today is all about me, myself and I. It’s a one-on-one conversation. What particular combination of factors will define a group with significantly different buying patterns that are relevant to your business? By focusing on the common denominators of your target groups, you can develop information specifically tailored to your customer’s need. This will allow you to zero in on information that your customers want and need.

Make an offer your prospects find hard to refuse. To succeed, an offer needs to be perceived as tangible, clear and appealing to your target market. In fact, the presentation of your offer is almost as important as your product or service in stimulating sales. Link your name with a strong customer benefit.

Clarity is important in getting people to accept your offer. You should leave no doubt in their minds about what you want them to do and how you want them to do it. They need to know exactly what they are going to get if they respond. Make it clear.

As with most of us, I find it much more fun to create amusing and witty posts. Unfortunately, the fact remains that they usually don’t work as well as clear, benefits-oriented statements.

The key to using social media is to build customer relationships, and keep interest and engagement to encourage continual customer collaboration.