Keeping the Customer-Centric Business Model in Focus

Businesses cannot succeed without their customers. That’s an obvious statement of fact yet many businesses are not upholding this core value. In order to succeed, it is vital for companies to activate a customer-centric business model.

The Financial Brand recently posted an article highlighting today’s typical customer service representative’s mindset. Most associates in the workplace are showing lack of care or empathy for customers. They simply do the minimum task of answering a client's questions with an inadequate answer. Very few are really going above and beyond to make the business succeed. Reasons for this can be attributed to low wages, poor positions, and lack of training. Businesses need to be equipping representatives with the skills that allow them to handle day-to-day client interactions effectively. These skill sets help to empower representatives which results in them being proactive and attentive in helping out customers. This, in turn, attracts and builds more business.

One major contributor to low work ethic is the constant changes occurring all around. Representatives on the frontline are forced to adapt to quickly changing company standards as well as shifting product lines. At the same time, they are charged with learning to handle a clientele base that is always changing its preferences. This prevents representatives from forming a solid relationship with their customers.

A recent survey indicated that 30 percent of industry representatives do not believe that their companies put customers first. They believe that products and sales are the primary concern of a company. While it is important for a business to ensure a steady cash flow, it should never lose site of where the revenue is coming from – customers!

Companies can immediately benefit by enforcing a more customer-accommodating sales practice. Offering solutions with a client-centric approach, as opposed to a product-first approach, is what will transform new clients into long-term clients.

6 Success Tip-Offs for Getting Started with Social Media

Like it or not, social media is a major force in the business marketing world now, with online conversations about a company having a huge impact on that company’s image and reputation.

Creating positive conversation about a business on social media platforms can do wonders for that business’s marketing endeavors. Even if the conversation is negative, companies are getting feedback on how to address their image going forward. But if there is no mention of a business at all in these spheres, then there is nothing to work off of. Growth is stunted.

Get started as soon as possible. The more involved a company is online, the greater control they have over the discussions happening around them and about them. Not only does this mean more opportunity on which to capitalize, it also means that the business will be more prepared to grow and protect its online reputation.

6 Tips to Start Getting Social.

Figure Out Marketing Goals

Before you can create any sort of social media marketing strategy, you have to know what it is you want to achieve with your efforts. What are your primary goals with your social media campaign? Do you want to create more loyal customers? Generate more sales? Offer customers a service? All of the above? The type of activities you partake in and the content you generate will depend on your answers.

Get to Know the Audience

One important distinction that all businesses need to make is that social media marketing does not just mean posting traditional marketing efforts online. First and foremost, you’re connecting with an audience. Find out where that audience hangs out, what their needs are, and what they find most interesting or relevant. Interact with them and get a feel for which approach will work best with them.

Review Available Resources

Like any other type of marketing, social media marketing requires a dedicated team to work most effectively. When setting up a social media strategy, you’ll need to decide who is going to maintain the accounts and create the content. You’ll also need individuals who can write well and represent the business in online discussions. And if nobody on your current staff has these qualifications, you’ll need to either hire on someone who does or be willing to teach or learn the necessary skills.

Develop a Social Media Schedule

Social media marketing activities are easier to stick to when they are allocated to a definite schedule. This can be as simple as setting aside five or 10 minutes at the beginning or end of the day to devote to Twitter or other social sites.

Create Worthwhile Content

The most important component of any social media-marketing program is of course the content itself. Creating and controlling the content about your business online is the core of marketing.

Once a business has researched their audience and allocated the proper talent for responding to them, they should be ready to give their audience the type of information and discussions that will prove most effective. Quality of content matters more than quantity, but it is also important to offer it to your audience as continually as you can. The more quality you deliver and the more often you deliver it, the more loyal your customer base will be.

Let It Go

Once your content is out there, make sure that you are able to give up control of it. Social media marketing is interactive, meaning that you need to release your content into your audience and allow them to do with it, as they will. This will allow your audience the room to develop an attachment to your business and your brand organically. Watch for negativity, but otherwise, don’t try to lord over every discussion you encounter about your business.

New Study Finds Nearly Half of Consumers ‘Always On.' How do these Consumers Impact Business Success?

An ‘always on’ consumer is defined as one who owns at least three internet-capable devices for personal use, goes online from at least three physical locations, and is online multiple times a day.

A recent study by the Vivaldi Partners Group turned up a surprising fact: these ‘always on’ consumers make up nearly half of all adults.

Increasingly, businesses are realizing how much time potential customers spend online, and working to reach out to them there, but what happens to the business owner who lacks the technical know-how to reach Internet audiences?

It’s certainly not as simple as deciding the customers are online, and having a website or Facebook page thrown together in an afternoon, then waiting for the customers to show up. A business owner needs to be able to have a proactive plan to reach out to customers, and provide engaging information about the service or goods offered.

Of course, there are different customers, and different approaches. This is as true on the Internet as it is offline. No single online marketing method can reach every type of online customer. The Internet opens a world of marketing techniques, from social media pages, to video campaigns, to promotional codes.

For a business owner who is new to the online marketplace, all of this can obviously be overwhelming. What are the customers doing online? Where are they? What are they looking at? How can you reach them?

That’s where marketing firms and specialists can help. They do the research, figure out the things that will get a consumer’s attention, the places to put an ad to catch the consumer’s eye, and the things that will draw customers to the business’ website, social media pages, and eventually, physical location or online shopping cart.

For instance, the same consumer study determined that ‘always on’ individuals could be divided into five main categories, based on how much time they spend online, what they do while they’re on the internet, and what will influence them to purchase a product or service.

 The groups were broken down and labeled as ‘Social Bumblebees,’ ‘Mindful Explorers,’ ‘Deal Hunters,’ ‘Focused Problem Solvers,’ and ‘Ad Blockers.’

An ‘Ad Blocker’ consumer, for instance, isn’t going to be reached by bright flashing banners or pop-ups, because those consumers are ignoring ad content, rarely allowing themselves to be influenced by advertisers’ assertions.

A ‘Social Bumblebee’ consumer, meanwhile, is apt to incorporate reviews by other purchasers into his decision, and buy within a day of first noticing the product, according to the Vivaldi study.

The study further defines the ‘Mindful Explorer’ consumer as one with brand loyalty, who will usually only buy what is on his list, and will stick with a brand long-term once it has earned his trust.

The ‘Deal Hunter’ is a listener and observer, who watches for coupons and special buys, and makes about one purchase per week.

The ‘Focused Problem Solver’ will stick to brands she’s comfortable with, and would rather make her purchases in a physical store. If she buys online, it’s probably a needed household item.

That’s a lot for a small business owner, who just wants to sell the purses she designs or promote his landscaping business, to keep up with.

Yet, when these ‘always on’ consumers make up so much of the customer base, it’s absolutely necessary to incorporate the ways they make purchasing decisions, and what they will buy once they make the decisions, into marketing strategies.

This necessity becomes even more pronounced, since the study also finds that these consumers tend to be above-average in income level, with 80% of them making more than $40,000 a year, placing them firmly in the demographic of consumers who can afford to purchase products.

Hence the marketing group, who takes over these tasks and helps to figure out exactly who the company is trying to market to, what these consumers want, and how to make sure the consumers know that what the business is selling is exactly what they want and need.

This new information shows the changes that are coming to marketing. It’s no longer enough to hang a sign in front of your store and place an ad in the weekly paper. People are becoming a bustling, multi-tasking mass, who are moving great chunks of their lives onto the Internet, and if the Internet is where people are living their lives, well; the marketing has to be done where the people live.

As Vivaldi Partners Group’s CEO and Founder, Erich Joachimsthaler, explains it,

‘Our research shows the need for marketers to come up with new ways, methods and approaches to understand consumers, what matters to them, and how they view brands through the new technologies that are available to consumers and to brands.’

Consumers are changing, and businesses that don’t update their advertising methods will lose out to those who are more connected to their customers.

4 Simple Steps for a Sales-Bound Marketing Plan

A great idea isn’t going to get off the ground without people knowing about it, wanting it and making a purchase. If a company cannot persuade its customers to give it their business, then nothing else that company may be able to accomplish can save it.

This is why marketing is so essential to business. Marketing is what informs customers about the products or a service offered by a business and persuades them to use it. And for marketing to be most effective, it has to re-inform and re-persuade customers new and old alike again and again, time after time.

Use these 4 easy steps to create a marketing plan that will help drive sales goals:

Step 1: Set Realistic and Measurable Objectives

First off, businesses need to drill down on what they want their marketing initiatives to accomplish for them. It’s important to set realistic and measurable objectives so that you’ll be able to reach them and know it when you do. Gaining one new major client every month or increasing monthly sales by 25 percent are both good examples. These will act as motivational benchmarks by which to measure your success.

Step 2: Get Specific on How to Achieve These Objectives

This is the hardest part of the marketing planning process. You want to write down as many things as you can, as specifically as you can, about how you can achieve each of your specific marketing objectives. The more work you do here in this step, and the more specific you get, the more effective your marketing plan will ultimately be.

For example, “placing some ads” is not a specific enough plan to reach an objective of increased sales. Instead, businesses need to go into detail about the type of ad being placed, where it is going, what it is promoting, and so on.

Step 3: Check This List Against Marketing Objectives

Once you’re finished brainstorming your list of potential activities, review it. Check each activity against the marketing objectives that you’ve set and see how they measure up. Choose those activities that will best target your potential customers and clients.

Step 4: Decide the What and When

In addition to specific details of what to do, businesses also need to keep a detailed time frame in mind when crafting a marketing plan. This means getting out a calendar and deciding not only which activities to pursue but also when to initiate them. Additionally, include in your marketing plan, calendar notes on estimated budget allocations for each activity as well as which objective each activity is related to.

Part of the planning process may be driven by budget availability and or phasing.  Put your time and budget investment in to initiatives that you feel can do the most for your business in the immediate term. Use a “test budget” on each activity and monitor results. Once you gain an understanding of what your customers are responding to, continue to scale your budget in to those activities that return the most sales.