As much as we love social media – and as great as they are for engaging customers and prospects to build trust – email remains a highly effective tool for targeted messages to get a response for a specific reason. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Generating a response only…
Back in the old days of marketing – the 2000s – businesses pushed out a lot of messages to customers, clients and prospects. That approach doesn’t work as well anymore.
While you still need to push out information to introduce yourself and feed the marketplace as well as the search engines, it’s the conversations in the communities of your customers and clients that help people trust in your business. The community dynamic is something you need to understand and embrace as part of your Continuous Improvement Process.
Technology has always played a major role in how businesses communicate, starting with newspapers and magazines.
We’re all proud of our products and services, which we work so hard to develop and market to grow our businesses in the true spirit of entrepreneurialism. But sometimes, we get so wrapped up in what we offer that we lose sight of one key fact: The product or service has to work for the buyer. And here are some tips to help you connect to your prospects and customers.
To get your customers interested in what you’re selling, make sure your sales message about them. The question they want answered is: Will this solve my problem? How will it benefit me?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” is the first part of the famous opening sentence to Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities. It’s also the start of an answer to classic discussion about determining the best time to send an email blast or newsletter for your email marketing campaign.
Email can be a powerful tool for reaching customers and prospects, and it’s still one of the primary ways for us to communicate even in an age with so many social media channels. You always improve your odds for success by sending that email – whether to a single person, a tightly targeted group or a huge mailing list – on the best day at the best time for that target to be receptive.
If one thing hasn’t changed in the last 10 years, it’s that you constantly need to innovate and change to compete.
Lew Platt, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, said in a speech 10 years ago: “You must anticipate that whatever made you successful in the past won’t in the future.” He made the statement in a speech that Industry Week characterized as “a bit of sage advice for guiding an organization in a time of rapid and turbulent change.”
If you go back and read the article, well, you’ll find that 10 years later, much remains unchanged about innovation, entrepreneurialism and change.
We’re well into a new year, but along with credit card bills, we have another leftover from the holidays – with a good marking message for small businesses.
Google recently shared an ad promoting its organic search capabilities that warms even the hardest of hearts. While we have all been entertained by comical ads through the years, the ones that stick with us often have a deeper meaning. Yes, online search is very, very powerful.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing has established itself as one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways for small businesses to get out the word about their products and services. In today’s highly connected world, a good word-of-mouth strategy combines a number of techniques that are all designed to develop pathways that lead back to you.
Back when the Internet was coming into its own, word-of-mouth marketing was mostly a function of networking groups, some of which functioned – and still do – as lead-generation groups.