Ways To Build Brand Loyalty

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Brand loyalty: for many companies, it’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Customers who are loyal to a brand can ensure the future of that company for years to come. But where does brand loyalty come from, and how does one develop it?

Give Consumers What They Want

It may sound obvious, but an article in Forbes.com recommends that companies who wish to build brand loyalty start by offering relevant, well-made products. Don’t sacrifice quality for a good bottom line. Customers will return for products that last, work harder, perform better or offer value that just can’t be found elsewhere.

Innovate

The world does not stand still, and neither should your company. It’s not enough to develop a single product or service that customers want. Do more. Make more. Develop more. Companies that offer a stagnant product line will eventually lose the interest of their client base.

Develop a Corporate Identity People Like

People like to buy from companies that have attractive corporate identities. There are two ways to build a favorable corporate persona:

  • Give your brand likability. Whether your company’s identity is based on trustworthiness, respectability, ingenuity or overall quality, your corporate goal should always be focused on building that identity. Smart marketing is one part of this equation, but equally important is living up to the name your company builds for itself.
  • Philanthropy. In this day and age of social awareness, consumers like to buy goods from companies that do the right thing.

Listen to Your Customers

It sounds easier than it is: solicit feedback from your customers, and then listen to what they have to say. If you’ve recently released a product or service that your customers are unhappy with, customer feedback will guide your company down the right path. Take action before you lose customers. If your customers are demanding a new product, make it. This type of behavior strengthens the bond between your company and your customers, makes customers more likely to recommend your products, and gives them incentive to return.

Best Types Of Posts For Businesses To Share On Social Media

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This is business marketing, not personal chat. That is what you don’t post for marketing and promotion. The function of social media for business purposes lies in nurturing the ability to enter into new relationships relevant to your business. The objective is not specifically to directly push a product or service. It is to expand reach.

As in all relationships that you want to nurture, you provide what they want. Promotion of your brand with social media is about providing content that has value to your audience. They will make the connection and your brand will be enhanced without any direct sales attempt on your part.

But while you do not want to support personal chat, you do want to be social, in as much as you contribute to relevant conversations. The most important factor in the success of this marketing strategy will be in how frequently you interact and post content.

Post benefit-based information that draws the reader to your business website. Information about new features or changes to your product/service is excellent. So are pricing discounts and special offers with promotional codes to be entered on your site.

Provide informative content or link to external content to offer needed information in your industry. That may seem to be a monumental task, but finding such information is no longer all that difficult. As they say, there’s an app for that.

Look to any of the following for help in finding relevant content on the Web. SproutSocial.com, Mention App, and Feedly.com all locate content for specifically targeted subject areas. You can also contract with content professionals to provide content that you specify. Whatever you post, know that the important part of this process is in the establishment of trust and ongoing relationship with your clients. The conversation is of paramount importance, not individual sales. Those sales will follow. You need to focus on developing a community.

How To Increase Customer Engagement Online

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These days, running a successful business online is all about setting yourself apart from the competition by engaging your customer base. However, if all you’re doing to reach out to your customers is maintaining a website, you might not be doing enough. Here are some simple yet effective tips for increasing customer engagement online.

Set Up Social Media Pages

According to Convince & Convert, 58% of Americans these days report that they have at least one online profile with a social media website. Therefore, if you don’t have a business page set up for your company on a social media site like Facebook or Twitter, you could be missing out. By setting up a page and updating it regularly with photos, polls, and contests, you’ll better engage your customers and prospective customers while spreading the word about your business in the process.

Offer Special and Exclusive Content

Today’s consumers love receiving special recognition, so if you’re not already offering exclusive content to your customers, you might want to start. For example, consider sending out a special promotional code to customers who have purchased from you in the past few months. Doing so encourages loyalty to your company while rewarding your customers in the process.

Encourage Feedback and Participation

Believe it or not, your customers want to feel like they have a say in your company’s decisions. Therefore, you should start including them in some of the choices you make. For example, if you’re a candle company thinking about offering a new scent, why not ask for your customer’s suggestions or hold a contest where the winner gets to pick the new scent name?

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to better engage your customers online. Be sure to give some or all of these a try; you just might be surprised by the results.

Compelling Direct Mail Designs

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The key to a successful direct mail design will always include a few important elements. Arguably the most important, however, is that the content must be compelling in the first place. If you plug all of the appropriate information into a direct mail design template and send your message off to your mailing list, you won’t stand a chance of making it past a reader’s inbox if you aren’t giving them something worth reading. To help make sure that your direct mail design is as compelling as possible, there are a few key things you need to keep in mind.

Urgency and Call to Action

One of the most important things that you can do when creating a compelling direct mail design is to create a sense of urgency in the copy as a whole. Inform the reader of the problem that they’re currently having that can be solved by the product or service that you’re offering. Entice the reader to want to learn more about how your company can fit into their lives and make it better than it was before.

At the end of the message, you also need to make sure to include a call to action to let your reader know what to do next. This can be as simple as including your phone number so the reader can get in touch, or can even involve adding a link to your website where the reader can find out more information.

Brevity

Another important factor that you’ll want to consider is one of brevity. Keep your sentences as short as possible while still being direct and to the point. Use a lot of white space and embrace bulleted lists with active words, as these are great tools for readers who want to skim your mailing but still need all of the important information.

So long as you make sure to include a few key elements, you’ll have a direct mail design that will improve your responses in a significant way.

How Does Blogging Benefit Your Business?

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When the Internet first gained ground, websites were the main way a business could interact with customers online. Today we have several forms of social media that encourage open, community generated exchanges. One of these forms is called a blog. Blogging allows you to set up a website that is updated on a regular basis, which encourages a more active readership. The more web viewers that check out, return and spend time reading your blog, the better your blog’s site will rank in search results. Here are steps you can take to ensure your blog is benefiting your business.

Using a Blog for a Business

As you set up a blog, which you can do for free using many cookie-cutter blog services, you need to have a set goal. In order for a blog to work for a business, you must be able to measure the results. For instance, perhaps your goal for blogging is to share news related to your latest products. To measure the success of your blogging efforts, you would want to know how many readers are returning to your blog more than once. You also want to know how many of those readers are looking at your products and possibly purchasing these. By setting measurable goals with numerical values, such as the number of visits or the length of time spent on your blog, you can determine if your time spent on your blog is worth it for your business’s needs.

Social Engagement

Whereas SEO, or search engine optimization, once was the key to gaining better page rankings, social engagement is becoming more important. Social engagement goes along with social media sites, such as blogs and Facebook, where social interaction between viewers promotes ideas, products and services. In order for your business to best benefit from a blog, you want to provide plenty of avenues for social engagement. Add a forum and encourage its activity, and respond to all of those comments posted to your blog no matter if they are positive or negative. You should also encourage interaction between your blog and others in your network, as a way to gain exposure for your business to a greater audience.

Importance of Consistent Blogging

In today’s interactive society, it’s necessary for a company to blog on a regular basis to remain competitive. Blogging is a way for you to build your business brand, establish yourself as an authority, provide value to the community and connect directly with both existing and potential customers. When you aren’t blogging consistently, your organization is not accomplishing any of these things.

The dynamics of business has changed. Back in the day, a company could set up shop, mail out a few fliers and throw an ad in the paper every once in a while. Now-a-days, clients expect organizations to engage them. Blogging provides a catalyst for you to accomplish this.

How Often Should You Post

Tumbleweeds are a big turnoff to readers. For this reason, you should post to your blog at least once a week. Anything less and it will be tough to get site visitors to return. Readers love predictability. So when you choose a posting schedule, stick to it.

Write your posts when you have free time and have them scheduled to post on different dates. If you don’t have the time to write the posts yourself, hire someone to do it for you. In addition, always update your blog when your business is about to have special events or offer special promotions.

When it comes to blogging, consistency is the key to connecting with your customers and building your business brand. The more content you have, the more visitors you are likely to get. However, never sacrifice quality for quantity. When readers visit your business blog, they want content that offers them something of value.

Your Business Blog and the Fine Art of Posting Frequently

There’s a thin and very high wire the business blogger must traverse. At one end awaits the mighty search engine whose attention you must capture as often as possible. At the other end, your busy readers are pacing. They want to read your content, glean an epiphany or two and still have time to get to the post office before it closes. One slip of the keyboard can send you tumbling endlessly into a blogosphere devoid of both. How does the business blogger find the happy balance between blog consistency and post overload?

The accepted norm for business blog posts hovers between one and three posts per week — enough to pique the interests of the major search engines without alienating your readership. There are two main points to keep in mind:

Don’t Bury Your Subscribers

No one wants to wake up to a mailbox full of company posts. Even if you have top writers creating content that’s lively and packed full of juicy business pointers — if you inundate your readers with 50 posts over a two-week period, there’s a high probability that you can kiss the majority of your subscribers goodbye.

You’ll gain the attention of major search engines with every post, but remember to balance this against the loss of 200 loyal readers.

Stick to a Schedule

Darren Rowse at Problogger has done significant research on the effectiveness of business blogging. He recommends bloggers, “Find your blogging rhythm and stick to it.” Often bloggers start out all fiery and inspired, pounding out two posts a day, only to lapse into silence a month down the road after they’ve exhausted their vocabulary and keyboarding skills.

Nothing disappoints your readership more than your disappearance from the planet after weeks of posting engaging content. Don’t let this happen to you.

3 Tips for Keeping an Active Blog

It can sometimes be daunting: sitting down at the computer screen with a blog assignment and a critical case of writers’ block. This is when having a well thought out strategy for your blog is just as important as having a strategy for the rest of your business. Here are some tips on how to keep the content coming in your blog.

Come up with a plan.  Create a document with forty or fifty ideas to blog about. You don’t have to use all of them, but having some direction is the best way to start a blogging content strategy. Sitting down with the intention of blogging and having no preconceived idea of what to write about is dangerous. You will find yourself out of ideas very quickly.

Don’t be alone.  Have various team members at your business available to blog. Blogs from different perspectives and areas of expertise create a more diverse, interesting blog. Plus, the weight of the entire blog on one person’s shoulders can become tiresome. Have two or three dedicated bloggers, and hit a wide range of topics.

It’s more than just text.  Don’t think you have to write the next great American novel with every blog post. Create videos with your team members about relevant topics or industry trends. A three minute video can have just as hefty an impact as a well-crafted 1,000 word blog post. Also, breaking blogs down into countdowns or subheadings, much like this post, can also be effective. Choose your words wisely, captivate the fleeting audience.

2 Steps to Successfully Use Targeted Keywords

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Is it more important to post content frequently or to post content about the right topics? Creating content with targeted keywords and phrases is vital for companies. Below are two important steps to ensure that you can do that successfully.

Identifying the Right Keywords

The first step in identifying the right keywords involves answering the question, “What should I create content about?”

Oftentimes, we look internally for those answers. What do I want to write about? What am I passionate about? While those questions are important, we need to always consider the overall goal. Typically,

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that is to build an audience and to drive traffic to our website.

Thus, we must ensure that the topics that we want to create content about also match up to the interests and passions of our target audience.

At that point, we should find a way to build a list of the words and phrases that are associated to those topics. These items do not need to be stored in a fancy, complex system – you could simply keep them in a document or spreadsheet! But the bottom line is, make the list! Do not rely on yourself to try to remember the words and phrases that you should use when creating content.

Promoting and Sharing the Words and Strategy

The list of keywords must certainly have a big presence within the walls of a marketing department (whether those walls are physical or virtual). But they also should be shared among employees from all departments. Why?

Well, more and more, people from all walks of life and backgrounds are creating profiles on social networks. Perhaps they primarily use their accounts to talk about personal topics. But if they occasionally interact with a customer or prospect on those channels, or if they link to your company’s website, or simply list its name in their bio, they are representing your brand.

By sharing the list, you will be creating opportunities for all employees to build awareness of your company’s products and services.

Oftentimes, there may be an employee that wants to contribute to the online conversation about your business, but they are just not sure what to say. Sharing the list can be the spark that ignites more conversations about the topics that are vital to you and your audience.

Content Marketing Checklist

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Content marketing is becoming a big player in the marketing world. It is the act of indirectly selling your products and services through educational and informative materials, such as blogs. Blogging is a great first step for those who want to take advantage of the benefits of content marketing. Whether you are new to this strategy or you want to make sure you’re covering all of your bases, take a look at our checklist!

  1. Make sure you have the right tools in place. Your blog should live directly on your website and your website should be on a search engine-optimized platform, such as WordPress!
  2. Determine who will write your posts. This can include you, employees, colleagues, or ghost writers.
  3. Decide how often you will publish a new blog. Consistency is important, whether it is daily, weekly, or even every two weeks.
  4. List out all of the topics you want to write about. Each blog doesn’t have to be high-level and generic, they can be customized to each of your targeted audiences and can
    highlight how your products and services can be used in different ways. Also, see what current news is happening in your audience’s industries, you may be able to use current events to spark interest from your prospects.
  5. Distribute your blog posts through multiple marketing channels. You can share your blog posts through social media, email, or highlight them on your website’s homepage.
  6. Create content in various media forms, it doesn’t always have to be copy-driven. Audio clips, videos, and images can all be great ways to mix up your blog posts and keep everything fresh.

Once you accumulate a number of blog posts, remember that you can repurpose them! Combine a few related posts together to make an eBook, or reformat the content in a different media type.

Blog posts can easily be the fuel to your content marketing strategy, so give it a try today!