Logos and brand names can be fun to create, but having too many may be confusing to your customers. Logos and brands help create associations with certain attributes or features within customers’ minds. Using different names or images for the same brand can make it difficult for customers to know what associations they should have. The same may be true if you’re using different profile names and identities with social media.
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Dec
01
2010
Social Media as a Vital Customer TouchPoint
When you’re thinking about your customer touchpoints, are you considering other ways customers may try to communicate with you or about you? Are your company or products mentioned on social media by customers having problems? While you may have the greatest customer support process in the world, it’s only good if people are actually using it to let you know about problems. Even if you’re not doing any other type of social media outreach, at the very least, monitoring for mentions of your company and products can go a long way for improving your online reputation.
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Nov
23
2010
Considerations for Using Facebook for Business
Businesses get really excited about Facebook when they see news like:
The amount of content consumption taking place on the popular social network has also grown substantially where nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com for the week ending November 13, 2010. The market share of page views for Facebook.com was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube.com with 6.39%. – Facebook.com generates nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US | Hitwise
Nov
11
2010
Storytelling for Brand Loyalty
Think about the really successful brands. Apple. Coca-Cola. Harley Davidson. Nike. These brands are more than a set of products or a marketing campaign. They connect with customers on an emotional level because they’ve been weaving a compelling story. People want to be apart of those stories. They want to incorporate the brand story into their own personal story (and vice versa). Irresistible storytelling by these companies has lead to amazing brand loyalty.
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Nov
10
2010
Stop Negative Public Relations Before It Happens
Heard the latest example of a company receiving negative public relations via the web and social media? Alaska Airlines apparently gave a paying customer’s ticket away to someone on standby because that customer had to run to the bathroom to change her baby’s diaper. That customer service error led fully fledged public relations debacle: Alaska Airlines Hates Families After reaching a dead-end with the company, the couple turned to the Internet to air their complaints (which seem reasonable). All this negative PR could have been easily stopped before it happened, without any fancy technology or marketing — provide good customer service.
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Nov
09
2010
How Much Does Each New Customer Cost?
How much does each new customer cost your business? Businesses love to dump money into Google AdWords campaigns, but then they ignore what the results are telling them. A lot of companies are spending more on a acquiring a new customer than that customer is giving them in return. Cost per acquisition is a valuable statistic for understanding whether you’re actually getting something for all the money spent in advertising.
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Nov
08
2010
Understanding the Value of Your Customers
Most business owners know the average purchase amount they get from their customers (amount of sales divided by the number of purchases), but few bother to understand how much value customers give over the lifetime of their relationship with the company. Advertising and marketing is vital to the growth of any company, but knowing how much a customer is likely to spend while they’re doing business with you is important for setting the proper budgets (and expectations).
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Nov
03
2010
Review: Real-time Social Media Monitoring with Social Mention
Keeping up on what’s being said about a company or brand can be difficult with so many different channels. It’s even more challenging when people expect real-time responses via social media to problems and issues. A lack of response when there’s a problem can be more harmful than the problem. Social Mention makes it easy to monitor, not only what’s being said, but also who is saying and what the general sentiment is towards the company or brand.
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Oct
26
2010
Blogging in a Vacuum
I had a meeting with a client yesterday who was getting very discouraged because he hadn’t yet received any comments on his blog. His discouragement meant that he wasn’t blogging as often as he should because he wasn’t seeing the value in it. Unfortunately, this sporadic blogging can lead to a downward spiral which will lead to a self-fulfilling failure. While blogging at first can feel like you’re talking to yourself, patience and dedication almost always pay off.
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Oct
25
2010
14 Basic Blog Measurements
Once you’ve started blogging, you want to know how you’re doing, especially if you haven’t had much interaction (yet). Starting to blog can be frustrating since there’s not much feedback right away. Like other marketing efforts, blogging will be more successful if you measure results to see what’s working (and what’s not). Here are 14 basic blog measurements to help you get an idea of how your blog is doing… Most of these statistics are available in Google Analytics.
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