Category Archives: Online Marketing
4 Tips to Help Your Brand Build Online Customer Loyalty
Whether you’re a startup just beginning to build an online community or an established brand with embedded fans and followers, it’s important to remember that vocal customers and potential customers carry an amplified voice online.
We all operate in a fluid, fast-paced world where social engagement with customers is now the norm. While this can seem intimidating for companies at first, developing a strong online customer engagement process doesn’t need to be overly complicated. The payoff? The potential for creating loyalty and quickly transforming customers into powerful online advocates.
Let’s take a look at an example. Recently, a coworker passed along the following exchange he had with car-sharing service @zipcar:
Kudos to Zipcar for their smart engagement and quick move to capitalize on transforming a vocal customer into a loyal customer. An engagement such as this never would have occurred unless Zipcar had taken some preliminary steps to maximize this opportunity.
So, how does a company go about ensuring that they engage and embrace customer advocates through social media? Here are a few tips to get started:
1. Listen & Assess
Obvious – it always starts with careful monitoring. Put your ear to the Web and carefully track conversation/keyword activity across your own social channels as well as overall brand mentions across the Internet. Whether you do this using a free approach with alerts and keyword monitoring in Google Reader or through a paid service such as Radian6, active listening and monitoring is essential. Over time, you’ll quickly see engagement and volume trends surface to help you plan for resource staffing.
2. Put a Process In Place
You need to have a strategy and process in place before you start engaging with customers through social media. This means having both a technical platform in place (e.g. a simple tool such as Get Satisfaction, established a separate support Twitter handle, defined FAQs, etc.) and an established flow chart that clearly outlines how inquiries will be handled as well as who has the necessary knowledge to address those inquiries. “Grow and adapt” is not a sound customer service approach.
Will engaging customers through social channels require more time and resources? Yes. But, I assure you that the investment will far outweigh the cost. Social channels exist and customers expect to be able to engage directly with your company through those channels. Provide the home and structure for them to do so efficiently.
Take a moment to think about how important first impressions are to everything we encounter on a daily basis. The success of your brand or product relies on A) providing value that meets or exceeds customer expectations and B) excellent customer service. Nail both these early on and you’re well on your way to building strong customer loyalty.
3. Move Quick
In most cases, customers just want to know that they are being heard. Think about your own customer service experiences – would you prefer to be left on hold or unanswered for a long period of time or regularly provided updates about your issue being worked on?
Even if an answer to a customer’s issue is not readily available, it is imperative that a company communicate progress and actually work as fast as possible to resolve the issue. As with any social channel, your interaction with one customer is often being viewed by many, many others. Engaging customers quickly in a public forum can set the tone for how your company operates and also be hugely beneficial for setting precedent on how to resolve an issue, thus eliminating need for further similar customer interactions on a specific topic.
4. Reward Customers for No Reason
I can’t harp this one enough. In the case above, Zipcar changed a satisfied customer into a powerful advocate through a simple Twitter exchange and small monetary gift. Companies often only think about rewarding customers following negative experiences. By following Zipcar’s proactive approach of rewarding supportive customers, you are enhancing your credibility and strengthening brand trust for a very nominal cost.
In the end, your customers will be happy when they know they can rely on a consistent, humanized customer service experience.
What other tips would you share to help companies set up for success with online customers?
5 Tips to Help You Create a Rockin’ Infographic
Who doesn’t love a great infographic? A simple, clean way to present complex data and tell an interesting story in a visual manner that is easy to digest? Sign me up.
The volume of infographics being produced has really started to spike the last couple years as companies have latched onto them as an effective communications channel. Of course, variations of infographics have been around for quite some time in the form of simple design and pared down data visualization. As I’m constantly studying the design space and creating infographics day in and day out for clients, I thought I’d share a few tips to make sure you’re taking your infographic from good to great.
1. Start With a Purpose: Seems obvious, right? You’d be surprised at how many companies and organizations feel they need an infographic simply to have an infographic. Bad move.
What’s your end goal? Are you working to drive traffic to a blog/site to beef SEO or to serve as a pitch asset for media and bloggers? Is your best option a standard infographic or do you have the budget and would your audience be more likely to engage with a video infographic? Think through your intended niche audience and don’t try to craft a universal pitch piece that applies to everyone. As with most successful online marketing, it’s not about generating a piece that sells you but rather about creating creative content that your audience feels compelled to share and learn more about.
2. Gather Your Data -> Build Your Storyline: Data and storytelling naturally go hand-in-hand in infographic world. The most critical part of any infographic is taking ample time to do your research and cover your bases to ensure you are presenting accurate, interesting information. From there, you need to strap on your creative thinking cap and come up with a unique storyline and method of presenting the data. Depending on your intended format, visual.ly, coolinfographics.com, infographicsshowcase.com and videoinfographic.com can serve up some solid inspiration.
3. Make Your Design Dyn-o-mite: Bad design will turn readers away in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, great design will have readers sharing like mad and clicking through for more good content. Pay close attention to your careful balance of color coding, graphics/icons, and framing. Stay attuned to natural human tendency to scan left-to-right, top-to-bottom and focus on captivating attention via graphics size variance.
4. Provide a Conclusion: All too often, I come across infographics that lack any storyline and are instead merely a splattering of facts and figures bunched together into the equivalent of an online poster. Fine if you’re just looking for a creative way to present stats, but without a logical storyline, a reader is left without a conclusion, key learning or call to action that helps paint the whole picture. Don’t force readers to piece together their own takeaway.
5. Promote Yourself and Share Like Mad: Anyone that tells you that infographics are quick and easy to create is lying – or selling you on what is bound to be a disappointing final product. Great infographics take time to plan and design no matter what. As such, you should ensure that you’ve added your logo/URL to the bottom to get credit for your hard work. When it comes time for distribution, make sure you’re checking off every option possible such as the following:
- Utilizing as pitch asset for media and bloggers
- Posting on infographics showcase sites
- Sharing on own site, incorporating into blog post, sharing via e-news
- Sharing across your own and partner organization social channels
What tips do you have to share about creating great infographics?
Augmented Reality Is About to Become Your Reality
Gearing up to take that fun summer trip? Trying to gather together some maps of that great location? Concerned this image below may end up being you?
Given the quick advancements happening in the world of augmented reality, you may soon only have to rely on the device that already sits by your side all day long.
Mashable’s post today on the topic (Why Augmented Reality is Poised to Change Marketing) officially made me a firm believer that we’re on the brink of something big. In short, application for augmented reality is endless. Just over the course of the past few months, I’ve found myself thinking about various applications of the technology:
Ski Shopping - I live in a city. Mountains are quite a distance away. What good is it for me to stare at a $600 pair of skis and just trust that this is the pair I want to buy? Sure, I can demo the skis, but why not just let me hover over a tag above the ski rack and watch a quick demo video on my mobile? Ultimately, some quick hunting landed me on the video above but I can imagine few ski shoppers having the patience to hunt around online while in the store.
Record Shopping – Yes, yes, we all know it’s a miracle that record shops still exist. In many respects, I love it. I love sifting through CDs, looking at vinyl cover artwork and checking out hard to find zines. At the same time, digital music dominates the market. Why not provide record store shoppers with an easy way to check out sample music with a quick hover over an artist’s name in the CD rack?
Hiking – Assuming our state parks stay open, how great would it be to have the ability to scan tags along portions of a hike to update you on highlights along that portion of the trail or what lies ahead?
Relationship Status Scanning – I’ll stop there. Living in Seattle (where men are notoriously shy in their approach to women) I fear a city suddenly full of creeps pointing devices at each other to scan for whether someone is single or not. Saved heartache? Sure. Creep factor? Out the roof.
As you can imagine, beyond the personal and social applications, the opportunities for increased brand marketing engagement are endless. Check out this great demo video below and feel free to leave a comment below on whether you’re a AR fan, hater or drumming up your own creative idea for putting the technology to use.
Image courtesy of juzblurbs.
