Customer Centricity Illustrated

Current Customers

Current customers are a valuable source of information. They entered the market for a solution like yours, made a decision to purchase your solution and now use it on a regular basis. Their feedback should be highly valued by the marketing and product management teams.

 

Churned Customers

Like current customers, churned customers bought from you but they ended the partnership. They may be even more valuable sources than current customers. Their rationale for ending the partnership can provide valuable insight into mistakes that were made or gaps in service.

 

Lost Deals

Lost deals are prospects who evaluated you, but elected not to do business with you. The decision must be respected, but it’s important to understand the reasons why. After an opportunity closes, request a win/loss call to better understand the research and decision-making rationale.

 

Current Evaluators

Evaluators are a tough group to speak with for obvious reasons: they’re still evaluating you. It’s not easy to convince a sales rep that you want to interrupt their opportunity for research purposes. But observing prospects as they evaluate is like watching Laird Hamilton size up a wave as he gets towed into it—there’s no substitute for seeing it live. Act like a fly on the wall and listen to the discussion. You’ll get real-time feedback on what prospects and your sales reps say.

 

Potentials

The toughest population to talk with may be your addressable targets that aren’t even in the market for a solution yet. Their feedback is important because they’re likely to be your next set of evaluators. The best place to start is by asking your sales team for their cold leads, those silent companies that rarely respond to marketing programs. They’re the ones that attend trade show sessions but won’t set foot in your booth. To open them up, try saying “I’m not trying to sell you anything and couldn’t even if I wanted to.” Who knows? Your cold lead might even warm up a bit.

 

The same ingredients that make a good surfer—patience, persistence and humility—are also critical to marketing success. Your market is bigger and stronger than you are. Although you can’t control it, you can learn about it by interacting with the market‘s constituents: those who have bought from you, those who are considering buying from you and those who haven’t bought from you yet.

 

Raving Fans

How to Turn Average Customers into Raving Fans

Even though your customers are happy with your product and service, you can still go the extra mile if you’re willing.

Delighting your customers will help you build stronger relationships, turning your average customers into actively engaged promoters of your business. They’re the ones who not only sing your praises, but they’re also shouting your name from rooftops to the world. And it’s not difficult to transform your customers into brand advocates at all.

Make a Great First Impression

Your parents probably told you first impressions were pretty important – and they were right! You always want to put your best foot forward when customers come knocking, which is why you should make it ridiculously easy for them to get in touch with you. That way, they’ll be able to reach out and get started.

Once you’ve unlocked that achievement, start thinking about what makes your company stand out.

Make sure you’re not only communicating these features of your business, but living them out every day. When you do, it’ll encourage more of your customers to leave positive reviews online, which might sway new people to engage with your business as well.

Another way to make a great first impression is by connecting with your audience on social media. Get involved in the conversation your customers are having. When you’re more invested, they will be, too.

Provide Incentives

Creating a remarkable experience for your customers may seem difficult at first, but providing a small gift might help get the ball rolling. Could an eBook or coupon code help sweeten the pot? Absolutely. Your customers will be more likely to sign up if they’re getting something extra in return. The pinnacle is a great affiliate program that shares the revenue. How about 50% of your ad revenue like Markethive does? Awesome!

Provide incentives for your prospective customer when they sign up. You’ll be surprised how far a small gift can go.

Swag is also a great way to acknowledge your awesome customers and make them feel valued. If a customer can’t stop talking about how great you are, whether it’s through social media or referrals, say thank you.

Here at Markethive, we’re are all about the swag. If a particular interaction really knocks our socks off, you can be sure that something fun is on the.

Be Responsible for the Entire Experience

Always remember that your customers made a choice, and they chose you! So, consider the ways you can go above and beyond for them and reward their loyalty. Not only will they feel appreciated, they’ll be reminded of why they picked you in the first place. A simple thank you message can go a long way towards letting your customers know you appreciate their business.

And of course, commit to providing remarkable support so they can get help whenever they need it. Just remember, keep it simple, timely and concise, and you’ll do fine.

If you find that a certain customer is really going the extra mile (think rooftop shouting), consider ways you can thank them for it. Try spotlighting a current customer on your blog (these stories are great customer testimonials!), or giving them a shoutout on Facebook or Twitter. Just remember to ask before sharing their stories – some people might not want the public acknowledgement.

Measure Their Delight

So how can you tell if you’re delighting your customers? If you’re doing a stellar job across the board, you’ll notice it in business growth.

But, if you’d like something a bit more concrete, many businesses will measure their Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric is tracked by asking your customers one simple question:

How likely are you to recommend [your business name here] to a friend or colleague?

Your customers are then broken down into three groups: promoters (someone who actively promotes your business), neutrals (someone who uses or engages with your business, but doesn’t promote you) and detractors (someone who actively speaks out against your business).

This kind of information is super handy, as it provides concrete information that can help you gauge how your customers really feel about you. You can look for patterns as you peruse their replies, and focus on ways to improve on anything that stands out. If your detractors repeatedly complain about an issue they’re having with one of your products, you’d definitely want to look into ways to change it.

Continue the Conversation

Your customers are the people who stand behind your business. As Bette Midler says, they are “the wind beneath your wings,” so be sure to give them the remarkable experience they deserve.

Markethive

Join the Revolution

 

Customer Centricity Illustrated

Topics in Mobile Redirect Issues Part 6: SSL- Redirect to Mobile Redirect-Problem & Solution

Glenn E. Fleming, MD, MPH, Contributor, MarketHive

(Reposted from Patrick Sexton, https://varvy.com)

There are four common types of redirects that affect how your users and Google see your mobile pages. Each of them is bad for performance (speed). They include:

            * Initial Redirect – canonical (www.example.com vs example.com)

            * SSL-Secure Pages Redirect

            * Redirect to Mobile Version

            * Content-Driven Redirects

Content-Driven Redirects

Problem

Content-driven redirects are not required to display a page. These redirects have been added because mobile and desktop versions of a given webpage may not display the same content.   Thus, some mobile pages are redirected to other locations.

Bottom-line: Content-driven redirects are more of a design issue rather than a technical issue.

Solution

The use of content-driven redirects should be avoided if possible. The solution here is to utilize responsive web design. This will ensure that both website versions (mobile and desktop versions) display the same content with no need for a content-driven redirect.

Topics in Mobile Redirect Issues Part 6: SSL- Redirect to Mobile Redirect-Problem & Solution

Get Found using Inbound Marketing

Get Found using Inbound Marketing

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide advice for building your own Inbound Marketing machine- a requirement for most businesses today.

The web has forever changed people’s buying habits. Instead of needing to rely on sales people to send them information, buyers now have Google and other search engines to research products, find competitors, and see how other people rate those products in blogs and reviews. Furthermore they are greatly influenced by individuals that have emerged as experts in particular subject areas who use social media to get their messages across.

This sea change in buying behavior requires vendors to re-think how they go to market, and optimize to make sure that they will get found by buyers using search engines, blogs, reviews, and social media. The term Inbound Marketing was invented by the crew at Markethive (When they were Veretekk), when they developed the techniques and technologies that are needed to get found by buyers, and to make sure that the reviews and blogs around your industry segment cover what you are doing. (Markethive provides great software tools, plus education to help you automate Inbound Marketing. The founder, Thomas Prendergast has written many great  books on these topics (dating back as far as 20 years ago) “Automated Marketing”, Customer Centricity”, Building a Better Website”, “The Power of the Social Network in Search Engines”, Conference Room Advantage”.

Markethive produced this great humorous video that highlights the hopelessness of the old techniques of the Outbound Marketing moron:

As further evidence of this change in buying behavior, I was recently talking to the CIO of a large pharmaceutical company, and he told me how he hates spam emails from vendors, and how he had developed a canned email response to them. I asked him to forward me a copy of that email, and have excerpted a couple of paragraphs from it that quite clearly describe the carnage:

“Please understand that I get dozens of these types of messages a week. I simply do not have time to read them, dig into them, follow-up on them, or reply to them. The most effective solution to this problem is for me to ignore the messages, which is what I usually do. …

… Finally, a small comment. As a customer, I find this type of approach to sales to be largely annoying to me and unproductive for you. We learn far more about what we want to purchase by searching the web, looking for customer references in blogs and forums, word of mouth, and by finding white papers on your site that concretely describe solutions to problems we are having.”

Remarkable Content is King

A key part of getting found is making sure you show up on the first page of a Google search. The lazy marketer’s approach to doing this is to purchase Google Adwords, and pay by the click (referred to as SEM, Search Engine Marketing). However 85% of people ignore the paid ads, so to be really effective, you will need to perfect your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills.

SEO requires you to develop great content that your buyers will find sufficiently interesting, different or insightful, that they will want to remark on it. (The authors of Inbound Marketing refer to that as remarkable content.) When your readers remark on your content on-line, using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc., they spread the word virally to other readers and broaden your reach. These comments lead to links back to your site, which lead to ever increasing page ranking in the search engines.

 

To be successful at this, you will need to keep the content fresh.

Traditional web sites don’t work in this regard, as they don’t change frequently enough.

What is needed is a blog that you update regularly.

 

Your blog cannot simply be a sales pitch for your product, but needs to be about topics that your buyers care to read about. The tone could be educational; or humorous; or controversial. But above all it needs to be highly engaging and relevant to them – i.e. remarkable.

When you post a new blog entry, you will see your site traffic surge for a few days, then die back to a level slightly higher than before. The more you post, the faster your traffic will build. But in the end, it is the really great articles that you post that will have the most impact.

And meritocratic blog system like Markethive (actually only Markethive) produce all of the above in a simple atmosphere of massive content curation that is immediately reward or rejected, building amazing content is King results, or something like that.

Once you have interesting content, you can use social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. to get the word out (Uh ummmm again, Marketing simplifies this to a level of excruciating results, but then like EST (You remember EST Erhard Seminar Training), you need to experience. No word, even from me, can truly do it justice.). Your goal is to get other bloggers to link to you, and to have people tweet about your content.

An interesting thing about a marketing department that focuses on Inbound Marketing: it will place a high value on people that know how to write and develop content that draws in an audience. A silver lining to the damage that the internet has inflicted on the publishing industry is that there are plenty of very talented journalists seeking employment, and they possess the perfect skills for this job!

SEO versus SEM

Like most of things that are good for us in life, SEO requires work and patience before it will payback. So it can be tempting to take shortcuts, and just use SEM (paid search ads). However if it is done right, the results will continue to build, and you will start to build your own audience, and own your own traffic.

We have also seen that the cost of paid search increases as the need to scale the lead volume grows.

The Power of Free

Another extremely powerful way to create inbound traffic and qualified leads is to use a free product or service. A great example of this is the The entire Inbound Marketing Platform (Valued in excess of up to $10,000 per month) service from Markethive. (If you haven’t tried this, I recommend giving it a try now. It will only take a few minutes to join.) Markethive has a couple of interesting attributes that are worth studying:

 

It is free of charge.

It takes very little work by the customer to get some very valuable results

 

It provides its results in the form of a score out of 100. Human beings are very competitive, and when they don’t get a good score, they want to find out how to improve their score. That leads them to wanting to find out more about Markethive which can help them improve their score.

It allows them to compare themselves to their competitors. All businesses care about how they are doing relative to their competition. If they are doing worse, this is a powerful motivator to drive them to change.

Think hard about your audience and whether there is an opportunity to build a similar free web service that would draw them in, and provide great value.

If you are interested in learning more about how Free products and services can help your marketing, please refer to this section: The Power of Free.

Building your reach

Once you have great content and possibly a free product/service, you will want to find ways to drive the maximum traffic to that content. In the last couple of years we have seen some powerful new tools emerge to help with this process in the social media space. Get yourself accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and join in the conversation. (For Twitter, I also recommend downloading the Tweetdeck application.) Start by listening. Watch what people are talking about in your topic areas, and take note of their interests. Once you have an idea of how the conversation works join in. Be careful not to take a sales stance to promote your products, as that will rapidly lose you your audience. However you can draw your audience in with short url’s (Another one of Markethive’s great free services) that link to your blog posts and other non-sales oriented content.

This short paragraph is not going to be enough to fully educate you on the ins and outs of using social media to build your audience, so if the topic interests you, I recommend going here to learn more:

Internet Marketing Webinars (see the calendar in Markethive after you join for free of course).

Influencer Campaigns

In every product area, there are usually already influencers that write the most about that area, and have the largest audience that follows them. To conduct a successful social media campaign, you will want to identify those influencers, and reach out to them to get them to write about your product/service.

To get them to pay attention to you, you will first need to understand what they care about. Read their blog posts and tweets, and try to get inside their minds. Try to determine what appeals to them, and what has clearly turned them off. Then prepare your pitch, and use social media to engage with them.

You will then want to monitor the results by tracking their blog posts, links to the articles, tweets, etc.

For more information…

Inbound marketing is a rich topic area that would take more than a single article like this to describe. For more information, consider yourself a friend of Markethive:

Markethive

Thomas Prendergast

CMO Markethive Inc.

 

 

Get Found using Inbound Marketing

Markethive Vision Statement

Markethive Vision Statement

Markethive is Inbound Marketing combined with a dynamic vertical social network funded by advertising. Not only makes the entire Inbound Marketing system cost free, it also allows you to leverage huge results when you build groups to facilitate the platforms via the social network.
Markethive is next generation technology from a 20 year old Inbound Marketing platform called Veretekk. Built by the same entrepreneurs, innovation is our DNA.
We invented Inbound Marketing back in 1996.

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