Social Marketing and Relationship Building

Posted on October 9, 2012 by concentreblog

Social 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.

Is Your Website Secure?

Posted on October 9, 2012 by concentreblog

With the recent GoDaddy outage in the news, it seems like a good time to think about website security. Although hackers, as initially reported, did not cause GoDaddy’s outage, news stories of computer-related crimes are becoming a daily occurrence.

Whether for business or personal use, computers have become a part of our daily lives. A company’s website has become its most important marketing and communication tool. Given a website’s importance, you may be surprised how often little or no thought is put into site security. Recent research shows businesses just don’t take website security seriously enough.

There are many ways in which a website can be hacked and for a number of different purposes. Sometimes hackers just want to deface your site. Sometimes they want to disable it, take it down or redirect the traffic from your site. Other times they attempt to lurk undetected, trying to capture personal or financial information from your customers.

No matter what the purpose, an attack can result in lost sales, costs associated with the restoration of your website, data loss, and a blow to your business’s reputation.

The following are a few tips you can use to thwart the efforts of hackers. While not a complete website security plan, these tips can help make you less vulnerable to exploit.

1. Update your software. This is one of the easiest ways to protect yourself. Keep your software up to date. Your website’s content management system, your computer’s operating system and your internet browser all play an important part in the security of your website.
2. Use strong passwords. We’ve all seen the unbelievably insecure list of the most used passwords. Ones like passw0rd, 123456, letmein, monkey, football, etc. If this is you – change your passwords right now. A strong password should be random, include upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
3. Don’t share login credentials. Each user should have their own login credentials that can be deleted when no longer needed.
4. Encrypt your login pages. So often the pages after the login are encrypted (protected by an SSL certificate). However, it’s the login form itself that is often most vulnerable.
5. Consider upgrading your shared hosting account. Even if you are careful and have adopted good security on your website, don’t count on all the website owners on your shared server having done the same. A VPS, or virtual private server, is inherently more secure due to the separation from the other sites. If you have a business critical website, it belongs on a VPS or dedicated server.
6. Back up. Back up. Back up. The only thing worse than being hacked is not having any clean website files to go back to. If you don’t have a current backup of your website, it will significantly add to the cost of restoring it after being exploited.

Responsive Emails Could Make the Difference in Your Email Response Rate!

Posted on October 9, 2012 by concentreblog

By now, you should have heard about responsive websites. We discussed this in our last newsletter, and you should consider making your emails responsive also.

Just as more and more people are viewing your website on devices other than a desktop (mobile or tablets, iPhone or iPads, as an example), the same applies to emails. In fact, client email opens on mobile devices rose from 4% to 20% in 2011; and by the end of this year, more people will be reading emails on mobile devices than on desktop computers. Moving forward, if your emails are not mobile friendly, your email newsletter or message could go from great to awful by appearing broken, or too small and become ultimately unusable. The end result could be a diminished rate in responses in your email returns.

So what are responsive emails and how do you build them?
Responsive emails are very similar to responsive websites in how they work, but also very different in how they are built in relation to websites. The similarities lie in that you build one email that “responds” or reformats itself to the viewer’s screen size, but they are very different in the backend details of how they are built. With websites, you can build responsive formats for many different screen sizes including everything from desktop and laptops, to tablets and phones. With responsive emails, there are currently only two available formats, one for desktop and one for smart phones.

And since email clients are very strict in what code will be accepted due to viruses and spam, the code for responsive emails is also very strict in that they are still using “old school” tables in html. If you are familiar with tables, they are basically a box of rows and columns usually using fixed widths to “hold” your copy and images in place. Websites used to be built with tables years ago. HTML5 and CSS3 have since replaced the strict, rigid tables with much greater flexibility.

So the challenge lies in how to use these rigid tables to become fluid and responsive for today’s smart phones and still work well on desktops too. Granted, this task is not for the faint of heart, but it can be done. To put this as simply as possible, you basically build your email the traditional way in tables with the standard 600 pixels wide. Then you add in the media query responsive code that only the devices that are capable of recognizing that code would then implement. In a nutshell, the media query will tell the smart phone that if your screen size is below 480 pixels wide, then view this table not at 600 pixels wide but at 300 pixels wide. Images can be scaled using the same concept. Floats, as an example will not work, but align=”right” in a table, with a thoughtful plan and some ingenuity, will. It will take a good bit of knowledge of what CSS code will work and what code won’t, and plan, plan, plan. Measure twice and cut once, as the carpenter always says.

The time is now!
Even though responsive emails may be challenging, they are also a great opportunity! Don’t wait until you lose your audience before you consider getting on board with presenting your company’s newsletter or email information in a format that your clients will truly appreciate.