How to ensure that your brand is the constant enabler of profitable, long-term, high-value relationships.
First impressions matter. We all know that. And many of us are outstanding at delivering that powerful and memorable first exchange, especially when it’s person-to-person. We’re really good at bringing the “wow” that kicks off what might be “the start of a beautiful friendship.”
All too often however, after lighting the spark of a great relationship we begin to slowly wander off the path. We take for granted the fact that a new customer or consumer relationship, once established, needs to be continuously tended to. While we may be great relationship igniters, we sometimes fall short when it comes to building and sustaining lasting high-value partnerships with our customers. Full disclosure – I’ve been guilty of this, too.
By the way, lack of existing customer communication is where we are often leaving money on the table.
While new business development should be a never-ending process, we find that the fastest way to smart growth comes from being more attentive to your current customers. In a recent survey, companies we spoke with said they could realize an additional 40% of revenue simply by communicating more effectively with existing customers. 40%! That’s significant.
Think about your customer relationships in three basic phases: initiate, build, and sustain. We often knock it out of the park when it comes to initiating relationships; building and sustaining them are where many brands need to do the most work. They can also realize the greatest ROI on marketing expenditures.
Please note, I’m not suggesting that once you have a customer, you bombard them with special offers, chances to buy more stuff, and daily e-mails. Consumer brands please pay special attention to this last point. What I’m suggesting here is that you recognize the three relationship phases, and align brand communications to further your customer’s journey to the next phase, en route to a lasting, mutually valuable relationship.
One of the biggest reasons that businesses have trouble adopting social media is that so often it can be difficult to measure the ROI. After all, how do you put a dollar value on a Re-Tweet? It can be difficult to do, especially if you don’t know where to start.
How Do You Track the ROI of Social Media?
In many cases, the direct ROI of Social Media is difficult to track. For example, if your social media activities are largely customer service and troubleshooting based, there often isn’t a clear metric that can be used to determine the ROI. This will usually need to be evaluated on a case by case basis depending on what you want to achieve. There are a few free tools that are now available which can be very helpful in tracking the ROI of your social media presence and provide valuable insights. Read more on “Tracking the ROI of Social Media” »
We recently had 20 minutes to present to a room full of CEOs on the top digital branding trends to watch in 2013. With little time to spare, we summed up the outlook for 2013 in three words:
How many of your customers are using their mobile device to access your site? If you can’t answer that, you’d better check your analytics and find out. It’s probably a higher number than you realize. New stats are in, and it’s more important than ever to understand the technology your customers are using.
According to comscore, smartphone penetration finally broke 50%. Of the smartphone population, 52.5% of users were utilizing Android devices while Apple accounted for 34.3%. Even though Android is outselling Apple three to two, that doesn’t mean more people are visiting your site through Android devices. What’s important to understand about these numbers is that Android and Apple users use their phones very differently.
We tracked website traffic and gathered real world stats from three different types of businesses – a law firm, a home services company, and a B2B packaging company. Here’s what we uncovered: Read more on “How Your Customers Use Their Phones” »
Mobile marketing initiatives are mission-critical for today’s brands. And it’s not just for consumer-facing brands – an ever-increasing population of decision-makers are using their mobile devices to conduct business. So how do you take advantage, get your message into the hands of your customers, and generate sales through mobile marketing?
I’ve had the privilege of speaking to hundreds of CEOs in my career. They range from outstanding to inspiring when it comes to speaking to the virtues of their companies and brands. That’s why I find it ironic when the topic of content marketing comes up, a great many of them have a litany of excuses as to why content marketing can’t work for them. Here are the top three “roadblocks” and why they shouldn’t be: Read more on “Top 3 Myths of Content Marketing” »
If your site is properly optimized for SEO, you can acquire more traffic and leads through search engines like Google. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad data out there, and listening to poor advice can actually hurt your site’s performance. If you’re SEO is based on bad information, the results can range from low rankings to a ban from Google’s search results.
