Marketing Tools to Promote New Products

Having a large social media following is great when you need to get the word out. What’s the word? You have some new services or products that you want to educate people about. Whenever a business rolls out something new, sometimes one of the hardest parts is getting people on board. If you have a sizeable social media following, your job becomes exponentially easier.

There are a multitude of methods for doing this; here is a quick rundown of some suggestions for promoting your new product or service:

LinkedIn: Add to your services tab on your LinkedIn profile. All of your LinkedIn connections will see how your new service works. Additionally, your LinkedIn connections may already be involved with your business and may be more inclined to research your new venture.

YouTube: Depending on what your new item is, you may be able to create a video showing what your product is and how to use it. Video is a reassuring medium. You can have some of team members sit down and walk through the product. Explain how it’s used and how it can help businesses.

Discount/Giveaways: On Facebook and Twitter, you can use your following to get people to sign up for a discount or giveaway of the first product, trying to get some interest. By having the product in the hands of as many people as possible, it can increase the rates of positive feedback and testimonials.

Photos: If it is a product, create a photo album on Facebook. Show how to use it and some of its practical applications.

Special Website Page: On your homepage, create a new tab that advertises the product or service.

Ideally, your website gets a good deal of traffic through your social media sites and you can have all of the information you need right there on the page.

QR Code Campaign: By placing a QR code on your direct mailers, this will give you the chance to bring more information or discounts of the new product to recipients who scan the QR Code. Have the code direct to a mobilized landing page with more information and exclusive content for those who scan.

All of these tools can help you put together a fantastic multi-channel marketing campaign, by introducing the product in many different channels to many different audiences.

Inbound Marketing: Sharing is Caring

Sometimes, yes, your mother really did know best. Remember how she would tell you that you need to be generous with your things? Share your toys with your sibling? Share the playground with your friends?

Now, as an adult, your toys are likely expensive and you really aren’t required to share them. But sharing is still important, especially in the business world. Being a giver – a giver of information, a giver of resources, a giver of wit and personality – can get you quite far with your target market.

With inbound marketing, your website is your hub and you want your audience to not just visit, but stay and interact. To do this, you need to make sure that you are providing a wealth of information (without giving away the proverbial milk for free) and keeping your brand consistent. Hopefully, while you do this, you are displaying your ultra-cool company persona as well.

By sharing your expertise and know-how via blog posts, video clips and more, you will attract and encourage your audience to pass it along to their colleagues and acquaintances. In essence, you are inviting your audience to share your materials so you reach an even larger number of people over time.

But you can’t just throw things up on your website and assume they will be shared. You can’t just upload or post items and think that they will be received well and be the next viral email or Facebook post. Here are some tips to make sharing easy and encourage your audience to share your content over and over again:

  • Don’t assume that your viewers are already connected with you. Many will not be. So make sure that visible buttons and links are available on your website for the audience to hop on over to your various social media profiles and connect with you via Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn and so on. Having the graphic buttons on your HOME page with direct links to those profiles is a must. But don’t be shy. You can add them to every web page. You can also whip up a blog post discussing social media and inviting your audience to come and hook up with you via the social media platforms they are active on.
  • Make it easy. There are plenty of plug ins that will make it a simple action for the viewers to share your material. Ideally, every blog post will have the ability to quickly and easily be distributed across multiple social media platforms if the audience feels compelled to share.
  • Don’t be afraid to ask. It’s okay to ask your audience to share something that you feel especially important to pass along. You might not want to do this with every single thing you post on your site, as it may get old real quick with your audience. So do this selectively. But don’t be too shy about it either.
  • Make sure your items are share worthy. Not everything is. And that’s okay. But you want a majority of your material to be passed along. So try to be timely by tying material into current topics, a calendar item or hot button issue. Also, take a look at your headlines…are they eye-catching? You have a second or two to grab your audience’s attention. Make your headline work for you.
  • Talk to your audience. This is not monologue time. Think and post with a dialogue in mind, every single time. You are inviting interaction. You are nurturing a budding relationship. You want your audience to speak back to you, to pass along your amazing materials and spread the word about you. So don’t toot your own horn with every upload and offering. Ask for feedback. Ask for comments. Pose questions and start that conversation up.

Over time, you will come to see what types of items are passed along via social media platforms and what topics receive more interest and dialogue. As this happens, you should evolve your materials to fit that “need.” Remember, sharing is caring. So be a giver!

5 Customer Service Tips For Your Business

A lot goes into customer service. This is where we foster and nurture relationships, and really go the extra mile to ensure a long-lasting relationship with them. To keep your long-term customer service efforts going strong, here are five tips to use!

Communicate – Strong communication skills are vital to a long lasting relationship. You can’t possibly know what is going on with your client if you don’t talk (or email). Make sure you stay in contact with your clients. Let them know you are thinking of them. Send them some resource materials. Mention that article you found online that you thought would be of interest. Whatever you do, stay in touch and let them know that you are available and interested. You want that virtual door to remain open so that your client can feel completely comfortable coming to you.

Show the love – Everyone likes to feel appreciated. How do you show your clients that they are truly appreciated? Do you provide them with special discounts? Do you send them notes or tokens of appreciation from time to time? It’s important to show that you care for your clients and are grateful for the business.

Be faithful – Yes, we are usually the ones who want our clients to be faithful, right? We don’t want them falling for the next best thing that just happens to be a few bucks cheaper, a little shinier…But the same goes for us. We must be faithful. Faithful to our marketing messages, with which we must stay consistent and reliable. And we must be faithful to our clients in providing them top notch service that they can depend on.

Be supportive – If you don’t provide support to your clients, you will see them leave. One by one. Because everyone wants support. No one likes to feel like they are not listened to, or that they have no one to lean on. Once the sale is made, now you must provide the support necessary to show that you really care and that yes, you are there for your clients. 110% there.

Have fun – Don’t forget to have fun with your clients. As you get to know them, understand their likes and dislikes, then make sure to incorporate that into your phone and email contact. Business doesn’t have to be stuffy and impersonal. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Your clients are people too. And they have senses of humor and interests. Use this to further develop your relationship and let them know that your business has personality too!

Developing Relationships with Online-Only Customers

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You may create opportunities for more business by developing relationships with customers that only order online. These relationships might enable your business to help the customer with their other needs.

Here are 5 ways that you may be able to build greater relationships with your online-only customers:

The Order Confirmation E-Mail
When someone places an order from your site, they certainly expect to see key details in the confirmation email. But don’t be afraid to put a personal touch on it. This may include placing your logo in the email, choosing a “friendly” font, and also phrasing the email in a way that makes people think of the humans that will be fulfilling the order.

Also, you should add links that make it easy for people to check on the status of their order, as well as to check out your company’s social media pages.

Send a Thank You Note/Gift
Alright, we know that you may not be able to do this for everyone. But from time-to-time, send a thank you note to people that have done business with you. By doing this separately from the confirmation email, you are reaching the customer multiple times but in slightly different formats. If you can send this “Thank You” in the form of a hand-written note, or accompanied with a small gift, you may make a lasting impression on that person.

And since they are already comfortable with being online, perhaps they’ll talk about your kind gesture on their social media pages.

Cross-Promote on the Web-to-Print Storefront
Certainly, you do not want to overly distract people while they are placing an order on your online storefront. However, you may reap benefits by cross-promoting other products and services in under-utilized

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real estate. This may entail putting a banner advertisement somewhere in your site that highlights something else that you offer.

Connect via Social Media
After someone places an order, take some time to search for their social media profiles. Chances are, you will find a great majority of people on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. You can use these channels to learn more about your customers, and perhaps identify ways that you can offer additional value to them in the future. This may start by simply saying “Thank You”. Or, you could comment on or “Like” content that they have posted. Also, if you add their profiles to your CRM solution, you will provide valuable data to your customer service team and marketing department in the future.

Invite them to Opt-In for Further Communications
Does your company offer a free eNewsletter? Do not hesitate to mention this to people when they are registering to use your online storefront. If they’ve enjoyed your company enough to order products from it, they may also be inclined to receive helpful information from you in the future.

Marketers, Prepare Yourselves!

We all love answers.

If our boss asks us a question, we feel really good if we have one.

If we are doing the question-posing, a satisfaction itch should be scratched at least a little bit, even if the answer wasn’t exactly what we wanted. (For example – Q. Can we just order pizza tonight for dinner?   A.  No. We are having broccoli and salmon.  [JUST KIDDING])

The Questions that Marketers Need Answers To

If you are in the marketing world, you must be prepared to answer a lot of questions.

However, questions involving data may be tougher to answer than others.

Think for a moment about your own situation. If management or the sales staff asked you these questions today, could you answer them? And, how long would it take to actually produce the results?

  • How many people are on the current customer list? Can I see it?
  • Do we have a list of previous or dormant customers?
  • Where are the prospects and new leads from Trade Show [InsertNameHere]?
  • In our pipeline, how many people are from this industry? Or that industry?

The questions involving the actual data will certainly lead to additional questions.   If you have the records, the next questions may be:

  • Do we need invest more time and money attracting attention among a certain vertical?
  • Have we reached out to our dormant customers lately?
  • What has been done to follow-up on the leads from the trade show that we spend tens of thousands of dollars on to attend?

Are You Sweating Yet?

If you are involved with marketing, those questions may possibly be causing a few beads of sweat to appear on your forehead. You may even be visualizing (or having a flashback of) your boss demanding answers to those questions recently.

If you are in the position where you cannot produce the answers easily, or the data, then here’s a solution.

The Solution

Build, manage, execute, and measure your marketing initiatives across multiple channels, and make sure to collect data from those channels for your marketing database.  Segment your data across specific fields and demographics, and then view your reports to see how each segment is faring.  This allows you to slide and dice data, view the big picture of the campaign, and then make the next marketing effort even better!

Do You Have an Effective Marketing Strategy?

“Tactics, Tactics, Tactics…. Everywhere I look, all I see is tactics!”

Perhaps you have also felt that same way recently. We hear about tactics across nearly every marketing channel out there. QR Codes. Personalized URLs. Augmented Reality. SMS/Text-Messaging. Mobile Email. Social Media Advertising.

Those are just a few of the terms that we hear and talk about quite frequently in the marketing world. I know that I can often get quite excited about them!

But, while there is nothing wrong with diving in and understanding specific tactics, we run the danger of thinking of those things as bright and shiny objects that can solve all of our problems!

Instead of falling into that trap, we must be willing to increase the amount of effort and focus that we put on having a strategy.

Long-Term Solutions Come From Having a Strategy

Because we provide marketing services to our customers, we certainly need to pay close attention to new tools and technologies that could improve our offerings.

However, we must ensure that the services we do add (for example, a QR Code or PURL on a postcard) are not treated simply as add-ons. Rather, we focus on integrating them into the overall marketing strategy that supports our customer’s goals.

Often, the development of a strategy will consist of us asking critical questions. The answers to those questions will not only help us decide which tools and technologies should be used, but also, how should we best use them.

Yes, some of our customers come to us with a fully thought-out marketing strategy. But in today’s world, we understand that many CMOs are running around at a frantic pace; thus, they could benefit by having a service provider, like us, offer some consultation and suggestions.

If you do you have a campaign coming up, here are 4 steps that could help you develop and/or analyze a marketing strategy for it:

  • Describe your business: This sounds simple, but it’s crucial. It may help you to define key characteristics that affect branding and messaging.
  • Define the goal: The goal will help avoid using a new tool or tactic simply because it’s new. Rather, it will help ensure that the the decisions that are made are done for a reason.
  • Understand who the audience is and where they are: Think about QR Codes for a second. If your client is going to be placing print advertisements inside of a subway station where there is no cell service, do QR Codes really make sense? Or, if you are going to send information that is highly sensitive or private in nature, will a personalized URL actually cause people to not respond?
  • How will you measure success?: As a service provider, we may be constantly looking for ways to demonstrate and prove our value. However, in the rush to incorporate a new tactic, we may overlook what steps are necessary to help us measure the effectiveness of a specific tactic. By answering this question ahead of time, we will increase our chances of being able to present valuable data to our customers during the marketing campaign.

These are just a few of the questions that can help us to develop and deliver solutions that increase our revenue now and in the future. I hope that you find them find helpful! Yes, there will be always be new tactics that catch our attention, create some buzz, and get us excited (me included!). But no matter what the tactics are, having the right strategy will help to put us on the right path.

Enhance User Experience with Landing Pages

When designing and building a landing page, we typically have a specific purpose in mind. For example, let’s say that we have a goal of registering 100 people for an Open House event. We may promote it through direct mail, emails, and a banner ad. All of those medias will point to a landing page.

When people hit it, we certainly want them to be able to easily figure out how they can register for the event. We may take steps to ensure that there are not too many distractions on the response form. We may limit how many fields we require, or how many questions we ask of people. These types of decisions can have a positive effect on the percentage of people that do respond to our offer.

However, once someone clicks the Submit button, we can take a slightly different approach. Many times, we may be tempted to simply put up a “Thank You” message and call it good. If so, there is a chance that we are losing out on an opportunity to capitalize on an interested audience.

If we only say “Thank you”, then we have created a dead end. We may have accomplished our specific goal, but we are pretty much guaranteeing that they are going to close the browser or go visit another website. However, by using that Thank You page as a way to further communicate and engage the responder, we may find greater success.

Here are a few possible ideas for how to “extend” a user’s experience with a landing page:

  • Put a link to your corporate website, and a compelling reason to visit it
  • Embed a YouTube video that is associated with your company
  • Link to your social media sites (add the social badge, or simply promote one of them with a big logo and reason to click: “‘Like’ our Facebook page”)
  • Encourage people to share what they just did on their social media pages (i.e. “Tweet This: I just RSVP’d for ABC Company’s Open House on the 23rd”)
  • Invite them to subscribe to your newsletter
  • Are you selling something? Put a link to it.
  • Deliver a personalized experience — based on how they responded, display a custom message (in the form of text, pictures, or video)

These are just a few possible ideas.

Sure, not everyone will click on the links that we provide on our Thank You pages. But we will never regret putting forth an effort to extend someone’s engagement with our brand.

(If you’ve had success with extending your landing pages, please feel free to leave a comment on this post.)

Improve Your Marketing Campaigns with QR Codes and PURLs

QR codes offer a number of benefits for marketers. One of the most important benefit is the ability to tie together the print, mobile and web channels to increase the response rates on multichannel marketing efforts.

Since QR codes make it easy for people to jump from print to the web, this intelligent tool can add to the success of your personalized URL (PURL) campaigns, too.

QR codes have the ability to lower the barriers often surrounding customer response which, in turn, leads to an increase in overall campaign response rate.

Here are several benefits that can be easily achieved by coupling QR codes with PURLs to boost the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns:

Providing one-to-one communication
PURLs can be embedded right into QR codes, so when a customer or prospect scans the code, they are taken directly to their personalized landing page.

Once a recipient is at that personalized page, you have the opportunity to engage with them and have a one-on-one dialogue.

Making it easy to respond
QR codes make PURLs portable. They allow the recipient to access each individual PURL without the need to sit in front of a computer.

Because people are on the go, and many carry their phones with them at all times, this portability is ideal in increasing the response rate.

Additionally, QR codes eliminate the need for a recipient to type what may be a rather lengthy PURL into their web browser.

By simply pressing one button on their smartphone, your prospect or customer is automatically directed to their own personalized website. This eliminates the chance of typos and

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decreases the amount of effort required by the recipient to access the information.

Tracking and measuring
Every marketer knows there is nothing more important than being able to measure the success of a campaign.

PURLs provide the ability to track which recipients visit their personalized page and, depending on the level of the PURL, gather additional contact information about each individual.

Similarly, various software programs have been developed that will also record the amount of scans per day, what time those scans took place, the location of the scans, and the type of device being used to scan the code.

Together, QR codes and PURLs can provide a more complete picture of which recipients express interest and which leads are the hottest.

QR codes will only enhance the value PURLs already bring to campaigns, becoming a logical extension of the PURLs you may already be implementing. Use them to fill the gap that other cross-marketing tools cannot.

Add Value to Your Marketing Campaigns with Variable Data

Are you using your customer data to the best of your ability?  Are you not satisfied with your return on investment for all of your direct mail marketing efforts?  Utilizing variable data may be your answer to these frustrations.

By using this particular service, it will help you create more customized marketing campaigns for your customers depending on what information you have about them.  By creating and delivering more customized and personal messages to your audience, you can be sure to see an increase in your marketing response rates!

Here are some of the ways variable data can add more value to your marketing campaigns:

  1. Create personalized messages by using your customer’s name and company in your online and offline marketing campaigns.
  2. Add coupon codes for specific services and promotions.
  3. Use it for the numbering sections for invoices, and cross-promote related products if applicable.
  4. Take advantage of their order history to promote related products to them at a later date.
  5. Utilize their address or location for geographical promotions if you have more than one store.
  6. Add a personalized URL to track who went to the correlating landing page.
  7. Graphics can be different depending on what types of clients you are sending your promotion to.
  8. Just like graphics, text can also be adjusted to help your marketing message relate to your audience more.

As you can see from these examples, you can understand why these tactics will help make your marketing efforts stand out more to your targeted audience.  If you have data that can help you make more specific marketing messages to your audience, take full advantage of it!

If you would like to learn more about how you can start incorporating variable data in your marketing campaigns, give us a call!

Benefits of Repurposing Content

There are very few marketers out in the world that will confess to having “enough time”.

Marketing departments are typically full of ideas and excitement – but they face the same clock as the rest of the world.

Their file cabinet may have marketing strategy documents… their whiteboard full of plans and action items…. and their desks may be covered in sketches.

However, the best intentions in the world do not always mean those projects will see the light of the day. Thus, when you do get a project done, you need to capitalize. Take full advantage of the content that you are pushing to the world.

For example, you may want to launch a campaign that promotes your eNewsletter while getting insights from your customers.  One strategy you can use to accomplish this is by using a landing page that features a quiz.

Respondents can be entered to win a prize after they submit their quiz answers and contact information, but can also be asked if they’d like to subscribe to your eNewsletter.

Yes, there are other ideas for campaigns that would specifically drive newsletter subscriptions. But here, you can take advantage of a campaign that did see the light of the day, and use it to help drive eNewsletter subscriptions.