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Success Means Narrowing Your Customer Gap *

Success Means Narrowing Your Customer Gap *

by | Jun 9, 2021 | Customer engagement

What is the Business Gap?

 

I’ve written about creating a gap between your company and your competition.  This is how most businesses judge their success in their relationship to competitors.  If you were widening the gap, it meant that you were outdistancing the competition and gaining market share.

 

Instead Narrow Your Customer Gap

 

It’s a pretty simple strategy to widen the gap between you and your competition.  Instead it might be a better strategy to narrow the gap between you and your customer.  

This isn’t about growing your market share and adding new customers.  It is about developing stronger customer loyalty.  Think about it this way.  The closer you get to your customer and the more you meet their needs, the smaller the gap becomes between and your customer.  

That ultimately puts a wider gap between you and your competition.  What a simple way of looking at building customer loyalty to your brand.  The closer you come to your customer, the more you will learn about your customers.  Very specific things such as buying patterns, special needs and more.  The more you know, the better equipped you are to deliver what you sell the way they want it.

 

It’s About Product Share

 

Market share may be about getting more customers, but “product share” is about a customer buying all of their products from you, and no one else.

 

It’s About Wallet Share

 

A stockbroker sells investments.  Market share for a broker would mean more clients.  But “wallet share” is about an individual client having the confidence and trust to invest with just one broker, who becomes the trusted advisor to take care of all of the client’s financial and investing needs.

 

It’s About Body Share

 

Coca-Cola sells soft drinks.  Market share was getting more consumers to buy their soft drinks.  Then they came up with the concept of “body share,” which is about how much Coca-Cola product is consumed by an individual.  

That is why Coke’s list of products continues to grow, even including fruit juices and water.  Their strategy is that if a consumer drinks anything, it should be a Coca-Cola product.

 

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It’s About Your Customer

 

Focus on what your customer wants and needs.  What are they asking for?  Narrow the gap between what you offer and what the customer wants and you will widen the gap between you and your competition.

5 Low Hanging SEO Fruits You can Harvest for Your Business *

5 Low Hanging SEO Fruits You can Harvest for Your Business *

by | Mar 11, 2021 | Search Engine Optimization

SEO Elements Improve Your Organic Search Ranking

 

Since I building my first website, my SEO hat has always been on.  When I assess any website, I focus on SEO as much as your design, your User Experience, and ADA compliance and general accessibility.  I’m always amazed by how often I find the basics missed. 

The SEO failures I regularly see, blow me away.  These are simple and easy things for the most part, yet are too often missed.  Google assesses over 200 different factors to determine their search ranking.  As Google has grown more sophisticated, now where it’s Artificial Intelligence understands natural language to assess a page’s theme.

These major algorithm changes shifted the focus of SEO experts from keywords to the quality and depth of the content.  Keywords remain relevant, but SEO providers have since needed to apply more finesse to ensure they’re not forced at the cost of “natural language”.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

 

Your HTML Title Tags Should be Unique

 

This is the first thing I check.   You won’t see this in the viewport of the browser.  You see it up in the tab for the page, and more importantly in the search engine results – where it is most prominent.  

 

Title Tags should be unique to each page, and accurately and briefly describe the page

If I see “Home”, or just the company name, or a marketing tagline, I know right away that an SEO professional has not worked on the site.  The title tag should be no longer than approximately 70 characters.  

 

Google Search Query Snippets describe individual web pages

Title tags should be unique to each page, and accurately and briefly describe the page.  Google displays these unique titles in the search query snippets.  Keywords should naturally be included.  Your title should begin or include your top keyword.

<H1 Heading Tags>

 

Headings on your page are structured H1, H2, H3, etc.  Your H1 is the most influential and for it to have the most impact, only use one per page.  Your keywords should be finessed and reinforce those in the title.

 

Your H1 is the most influential and for it to have the most impact

The main purpose of categorizing your content with different headings so that your design become more user-friendly and people will get a notion about your website more easily by just reading the Sub-headings.

Now we know H1 tag is most important tag so whenever you going to use it for your webpage heading just try to make it like that people get an idea about your website just reading your heading. So that h1 tag should be in that way which describes everything about your web page just in one shot.

 

Headings Tag – Hierarchy

Hierarchy on your web page should be like <h1> comes first which is followed by <h2>, <h2> followed by <h3>, <h3> followed by <h4>, <h4> followed by <h5> and <h5> followed by <h6>.  For better SEO of your web page, one should have to follow the hierarchy in this way.

Headings Tags with Keywords

Keywords are first and foremost priority of any SEO Expert. In the matter, we first do the research of best keywords according to the web page and then categorize these keywords into focus keyword, primary keyword, secondary keyword and tertiary keyword. Focus Keyword is always one for the web page. It’s better to include your focus keyword into the title, Meta tags, and h1 of the webpage.

Heading Tags Frequency of Use

It is recommended that one should have to use h1 tag per web page because h1 tag should be like a newspaper heading and other content should be structured with subheadings by following the hierarchy of heading tags. Using of subheadings depend on the way your content is structured.

Ex: Single page websites.

Well, Heading tags are crucial for the proper On page SEO of your blog posts. One mistake which is common among newbie bloggers is excessive use of H2 or H3 tags & at times skipping H2 tags & only using H3 tags.

 

Good Content – Pages & Blogs

 

In the history of SEO, nobody has ever said that content quality isn’t important.  Of course it is.  So pages with good, deep content that reflect the themes established in the title and H1 provide search engines with something to really sink teeth into.  

Make sure to add alt tags to all imags – both to comply with ADA/WCAG but also for a little SEO boost as well.   Use blogs to feed fresh and timely content. And content length also matters.  Go deep. 

 

Keyword Density and Keyword Intent

 

Since Google’s Hummingbird update, where AI began reading, density has played less of a role.  And there is too much debate about how much is “just right”.  Just be careful not to over do it. 

 

Web Page Speed

 

This is especially relevant for mobile search results.  While the influence of speed is still just for searches made on mobile, we know what’s coming next.  There are many steps you can make to improve speed.   Amongst the top of my list is to 

  1. Write clean efficient code.
  2. Optimize images (sized correctly, blurring, quality setting no higher than 70%)
  3. Responsive Server Side (RESS) to appropriately resize images at server for the device
  4. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to cache your content (images) closer to your visitors

 

My fav speed tester : Pingdom

 

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Improve Your Organic Search Rankings

 

Those are my top 5 SEO items that I’d consider the low hanging fruit to improve your organic search rankings.  If you need any help, give us a shout!

 

Building Your Brand Should Be Your Social Media Focus *

Building Your Brand Should Be Your Social Media Focus *

by | Mar 4, 2021 | Social Media

Build Your Brand Using Social Media

 

Branding is at the very core of everything you do to build your business.  You’re building your BRAND.  No matter how or where you spread the word about your business, your focus should be on creating a targeted brand image that your audience will easily identify.

3,000,000,000 people.  That’s how many people around the world use social media every month.   That’s an amazing number, that noone could have imagined when GeoCities went online in 1994.  Your target audience for most business owners is just a tiny fraction of those users.  Your problem is selecting the social media platform that works best for you and connects with the audience you need.

The graphic below, from Pew Research puts numbers to how people use the different social media platforms.  It shows that Facebook (68%) and YouTube (73%) dominate, especially with older users.  Younger users embrace a variety of platforms and use them frequently.  Instagram (35%), Pinterest (29%), Snapchat (27%), Linkedin (25%), Twitter (24%), and WhatsApp (22%) are also popular.

 

A Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that the social media landscape in early 2018 is defined by a mix of long-standing trends and newly emerging narratives

The first thing you need to realize is that it’s not always just about the numbers.  It matters who your audience is and what you are trying to accomplish.  If you are involved in B2B sales or services and interested in business networking, Linkedin might be a better fit for you than Instagram, Pinterest, or SnapChat.

There’s a lot of competition for user interest on all the social media platforms.  You have to decide which platform will help your brand stand out from all the other companies seeking attention from the audience that you need to attract.  It’s a lot like jumping up and down in a crowd and shouting “look at me.”  

Your branding strategy is just part of the solution.  That’s why your social media strategy should build brand recognition, rather than just advertising your products or services.

 

Your Brand Needs to Be Familiar and Predictable

 

Using social media provides you with the opportunity you need to connect with your customers.  By making an emotional connection with your audience, they’re more likely to share your content with others and expanding your reach.  Playing on their emotions helps build their loyalty toward your brand.

When your users connect with your brand emotionally, they feel that they are developing a relationship with you.  Become predictable, post at consistent times and with the same voice and personality.  Being consistent applies to your posts across all the platforms you’re on.  You shouldn’t be humorous on Twitter and serious on Facebook.

Trying to consistently post on varied platforms is difficult.  You need to schedule your social media posts ahead using a robust social media planning tool.  This allows you to easily stay on top of promoting your posts across multiple social media channels.

 

You Should Market Across Multiple Channels

 

Think about how you market your brand in real life and online.  Online, using different social media platforms allows you to communicate your message effectively to the diverse audiences found on the different social platforms.

Offline, tell people about your social media presence.  Share specific hashtags in real life and invite users to snap an image and upload it with the hashtag.  Your goal should be to excite your online users about your offline presence, and vice versa.

Using Google’s social media analytics helps you determine how effective your social media efforts have been in attracting your audience.

 

Raise Your Voice Above the Noise

 

It’s not surprising that more than 88 percent of businesses market use social media.  We are all bombarded with ads everywhere we go.  Many respond by just tuning out those ads.  A strong brand voice allows you to highlight your business and grab the attention of overwhelmed users.

Self-promotion hardly ever works.  Imagine what your customers pain points are and how you might solve those.  Using educational, or entertaining videos helps you engage people using your social media.  You need to imagine what you’d want to know if you were the consumer, then deliver the answers on social media and elsewhere.

 

Wayfair highlights their products but makes the posts unique by tapping into the humorous side of life and entertaining guests.

Wayfair highlights their products but makes the posts unique by tapping into the humorous side of life and entertaining guests.  They mention you might burn the waffles, but your guests won’t care when they see your beautiful patio set.  

Their image grabs your attention, and Wayfair keeps their branding strategy intact by using the same lighthearted communication they use on Instagram.  

 

Create Special Offers for Unique Audiences

 

Marketing on social media provides the unique opportunity for you to create special offers for different and unique audiences that you are trying to reach.  Offering a discount or free trial encourages people to try your brand.  After taking your product or service for a “test drive,” they’re more likely to become fans than if they never experience your brand at all.

A big part of branding is finding ambassadors who love what you do and want to tell everyone they know. Identifying your “brand fans” is easier than ever.  Thanks to influencers on social media, who often try and share their feelings about products or services it is much easier to spread your message.

 

Ipsy uses inspirational sayings and events and offers discounts which appeal to their core audience.

In their social media posts, Ipsy uses inspirational sayings and events and offers discounts which appeal to their core audience.  In the example above they use a witty marketing ploy tied into an inspirational meme likely to get shared with others.

 

Relevant Giveaways Engage Your Audience

 

Social media platforms are the perfect location for contests and giveaways. However, if you want to attract targeted leads, you must make the prize something relevant to your target audience. Think about your company’s mission, as well as what types of things your customers purchase already.

You should give away part of your product or service or something related to the mission of your brand. Brand every giveaway with your company philosophy and appearance.

 

Loot Crate sells fandom subscription boxes, so their customers are most interested in certain types of events.

Loot Crate sells fandom subscription boxes.  Their customers are interested in specific types of events.  Loot Crate often offers event tickets as part of their giveaways and as a way of attracting new followers.  The offer of Wrestlemania tickets in the screenshot above, provides a strong incentive to participate.

 

Plan Your Year’s Posts

 

It’s easy to get into a rut, finding yourself repeating information over and over on social media?  You can keep your posts fresh and engaging by planning your annual marketing calendar.  

Examine each month and think about the content you’ll be sharing.  Develop a theme for your posts to write your posts to answer questions your audience has about your chosen theme.

 

Planning your posts allows you to get on a regular schedule, but also shows what tasks you need to complete and when

Planning your posts allows you to establish a regular schedule.  It also establishes what tasks have been completed and which you need to complete.  For example, if you plan an educational series, the articles or webinar must be ready to go well before you start promoting to your networks.

You can always shift your calendar to accommodate changes, but without a schedule, your efforts will not have the necessary focus and may mostly go to waste.

 

The best times to post online courtesy of Blog2Social

Blog2Social is the social media management tool I have chosen.  It integrates seamlessly with the DIVI theme for WordPress.  It also has features which ensure that my posts go live at the best time and day for each of the social media platforms that I use.  The above graphic shows when posts on each of the different platforms will reach their optimal audience.

 

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Your Brand Is Everything

 

Your brand is your businesses introduction to the world.  Every action you take impacts your vision and how others see your company.  You need to spend your time thinking about the best ways to get your message across on social media.  

Study what your competitors are doing, and offer something different for your followers.  Planning your marketing campaigns is the key to winning new customers and creating lifelong fans.

 

Your Marketing has to be Memorable Remarkable and Relatable *

Your Marketing has to be Memorable Remarkable and Relatable *

by | Jan 13, 2021 | Marketing

Word of Mouth Marketing Defined

 

According to the Business Dictionary, Word of Mouth Marketing is:

 

“An oral or written recommendation made by a satisfied customer to the prospective customers of a good or service.  Considered to be the most effective form of promotion, it is also called word of mouth advertising which is incorrect because, by definition, advertising is a paid and non-personal communication.  “

 

The Better Business Alliance Defines Word of Mouth

 

Here at the Better Business Alliance, we define Word of Mouth Marketing a little differently:

 

“Turning your customers into your most effective sales and marketing asset by doing something they don’t expect, thus giving them a story to tell.”

 

As a practical matter, that’s not quite nuanced enough either.  Because even when you succeed in getting your customers to talk about your business, there are still two different types of word of mouth.  They are reactive word of mouth, and proactive word of mouth.

 

Word of Mouth Creates a Conversation

 

To achieve either type of Word of Mouth, you need to first understand that competency doesn’t create conversation.  When you do exactly what your customers expect and anticipate you will do, they do not mention that to anyone because there is no STORY there.  

You need to do something remarkable, unexpected, and memorable to kick off the Word of Mouth conversation that you are hoping to create.

 

Word of Mouth is About the Extraordinary

 

I have never said to anyone, “Hey, let me tell you about this perfectly adequate experience I had recently.”  That would be a terrible story.  Not interesting to tell, and not interesting to hear. Word of mouth requires story crafting.  

Word of Mouth is not something that can be brainstormed in a meeting.  WOM will rise out of the customer experience which you create in your business.  Word of Mouth is part of your customer experience, it’s something your business does which will make your customers excited and they will tell their friends about it.

 

What’s Your Story Catalyst?

 

Once you have a story catalyst, we call them Speech Triggers, you will prompt one or both of the two types of word of mouth.

To demonstrate the difference between reactive word of mouth and proactive word of mouth, let’s use one of our favorite examples, the chocolate chip cookie at DoubleTree Hotels.  Every day, for nearly 30 years, DoubleTree has given each guest a warm, chocolate chip cookie at check-in.

Those cookies are GREAT.  And people tell stories about those cookies constantly.  Research found that 34% of DoubleTree’s guest have told a story about the cookie.  That means that given that they give out 75,000 cookies each day, the story is told approximately 22,500 times every 24 hours.  That’s a LOT of word of mouth.

And that’s why you don’t see much advertising from DoubleTree.  The cookie is the ad, and the guests are the media.

 

Reactive Word of Mouth Definition

 

Reactive Word of Mouth is when your customer mentions your product or service when prompted, in the midst of an offline conversation, an online exchange, or similar situation.

For example, if I was with some friends at dinner and someone asked, “We’re going on a trip to Houston, any idea where we should stay?”  I might chime in with “Yes!  The DoubleTree at the Galleria is terrific, and the chocolate chip cookies at the front desk are the best.”

I am reacting to the situation and am making a recommendation in that context.  “Referrals” is what reactive word of mouth is called in some instances.

 

Proactive Word of Mouth Definition

 

Proactive Word of Mouth is when your customer introduces or inserts your product or service into a topically unrelated offline conversation, online exchange, or similar situation.

For example, if I was at the same dinner, with the same people and someone asked, “Anyone do anything interesting lately?”  I might answer  “Yes! I was in Houston last week.  I stayed at the DoubleTree, and you would not believe the amazing chocolate chip cookies they hand out at the front desk.”

In this scenario, I am not waiting for the topic to come around to hotels before mentioning DoubleTree and their famous cookies.  Instead, I am inserting the cookies into a broader conversation and turning the topic toward DoubleTree.

 

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Which Word of Mouth is Best?

 

Both types of word of mouth are important.  Because, word of mouth is the most persuasive and most common way that people are influenced to make buying decisions.

However, proactive word of mouth is the more desirable type because it requires your customer to be enthralled with your product or service.  They feel compelled to find a way to bring it up in conversation, even if it’s not on topic.

 

Word of Mouth is all About Telling a Story

 

Telling a story when asked is one thing.  Telling a story without being asked is something else entirely.  It requires more conviction and more passion.

To make sure the word of mouth about you is proactive as much as possible, you need to make certain that your Speech Trigger is truly unique, remarkable, and memorable.  You have to do something different, that your customers do not expect, and then find irresistible.

 

How Amazing Content Energizes Your Digital Marketing *

How Amazing Content Energizes Your Digital Marketing *

by | Dec 6, 2020 | Marketing

What is Content Marketing and Does it Matter?

 

Traditional marketers for many years have used content to disseminate information about a brand and to build a brand’s reputation. A great early example of content marketing was Poor Richard’s Almanac, first issued by Benjamin Franklin in 1732.

In the early 20th century, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. mail-order catalog was the ultimate content marketplace, much like Amazon is today.  You could even buy a house straight from the catalog.  You just picked out the home you liked and Sears would deliver it just for you.  From 1908 to 1940, Sears sold between 70,000 to 75,000 homes, so there are plenty of these homes still out there.  To find them, you just need to know where to look.

 

What Type of Content Does Your Marketing Need?

 

You need to be focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your targeted online audience.  As an important component of your digital marketing strategy, your content must attract visitors attention and generate leads to help expand your customer base.

Your content marketing main function is to generate leads.  Accomplishing this will increase online sales while building brand awareness, reputation and credibility.  Content marketing is also a great way to create engagement within an online community of users.

 

Your Content Marketing Needs to Attract and Transform

 

Great content marketing attracts new prospects and transforms them into loyal customers.  It also helps create brand loyalty, provides information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products.  

This is a relatively new form of marketing which does not involve direct sales.  Instead, it is designed to build trust and rapport with your visitors.

 

 

Your Content Marketing has to Anticipate Needs

 

Unlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting a new or existing customers need for information, as opposed to creating demand for a new need.

In a Mashable Article James O’Brien about Red Bull wrote, “The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.” 

Content marketing requires you to deliver large amounts of content, preferably within a content marketing strategy.  You have to take a unique approach to content marketing while keeping in mind another statement O’Brien made in the Mashable article, “Red Bull is a publishing empire that also happens to sell a beverage.”

 

Your Content Marketing has to Focus on the Customer

 

It’s an important step when you decide to use content marketing to grow your business.  When you make that decision it mandates that your main focus has to be on your prospect or customers needs.

After you have identified the customer’s needs, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, e-books, email newsletters, podcasts, how-to guides, blogs, etc.  Most of these formats are part of your overall digital marketing strategy channel.

 

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Your Content Marketing is an Evolving Process

 

Digital content marketing is a management process that uses electronic channels to identify, forecast, and satisfy the content requirements of a particular audience.  It must be consistently updated and added to in order to influence the behavior of customers.

 

 

Your Content Marketing Opens a New Conversation

 

Your marketing is designed to open a conversation with your visitor about your product or service.  The only goal of this conversation is to establish rapport and cause your visitor to act by purchasing whatever you are offering. A great way to kick-off that conversation is by asking questions?  Are you asking your visitors enough questions?

 

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