What can your website learn from Social Media?

Social Media is the internet success story, we all engage with it in some way shape or form, we love the social channels that we have signed up to, they keep us coming back several times a day; but what exactly attracts us to these sites, and what can we learn from them that we can implement in our own websites to keep visitors engaged and coming back for more?

Most social media sites have the same six attributed that make them successful:

They are Fulfilling – in that visitors can easy discover when they can and get immediate delivery of information and actions. Does your website allow visitors to get to what's important to them quickly and understand what they can/should do on your pages?

They are a Rich source of information – all sources of information at your fingertips, no digging around for what's important.  How does your website stack up? Do you supply rich data? Can visitors see content, price, availability, images, reviews, comments etc all on one page?

They are very Open - very easy to easy to sign up and start their fulfillment process; how is your sign up process? Can users sign up with with an email address and password or do you want their life story first?

Participation is welcomed - not only welcomed but it is positively encouraged in many ways - reviews, comments, ratings etc  Does your site see this level of engagement, so you make users feel that they can contribute and that their contributions are worthwhile?

Remixing the data - many social sites mix up their data a little, so in Twitter for example I can easy find other tweets that the people I follow find interesting.  It's yet another example of how social channels are providing a rich stream of relevant data even if it is pulled from different sources.  Do you supply just the data that you can on your site or are you mixing it up a little?  How about providing news from different news channels for example!

Personalised experience – these social sites are learning from individuals interactions and use that to suggest other things that you might be interested in; they know you are logged in, what you have done in the past and what you might like to do in the future - does your site touch any of that?


I'm not suggesting that your website does all of this - but learn from the social media sites that you use and ask yourself if you can take some of the great elements that you love and put them on your site.

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Eight Hour Marketing Plan™

Develop a basic Marketing Plan in only 8 hours with the 8 Hour Marketing Plan™
I first published my eight hour marketing plan in 2000 when I worked with a number of online businesses to try to get them to understand how easy it was to develop a simple plan.  This is a little out of date now and I will get around to updating it at some time; but I thought it was worth publishing anyway.

Hour 1 - Information gathering about your business

Get yourself a large box. Gather as much information as you can in one hour. This may not seem like long, but believe me after one hour you will be glad to stop ... and surprised at how much information you have gathered!.
Do not stop to read any of it ... this is the gathering phase. You may enlist others to help you in this or any other phase, but keep them within the same one hour restriction.

Your gathering should include all of your past advertising and marketing materials. Include items such as letterheads, envelopes, business cards, direct-mail pieces, magazine ads, Yellow Pages ads, invoices, statements, counter cards, sales samples, packaging materials, press releases, PR stories, promo items, print outs of web pages and anything else used to market your company.

Next, add sales statistical information available about your company. Place sales reports from the past three years in the box. Look for breakout information such as sales by year, month, product line, customer and geographical area. Place any target information or sales rep information in the box. When your time is up, stop. If you happen to run across something else, drop it in the box, but don't spend any more time on this. The secret is to keep to the time limit.

Hour 2 - Information gathering about your customers and competitors

Use a second box to gather information about your customers and your competitors, but again, do so within a one-hour time frame. Put in the box copies of your customer/client lists, details about your top customers, mailing lists, etc. If you have time, talk to your best customers and ask them why they do business with you.

Competitor information can be easily gleaned from several sources (web sites, in-house material etc).
Find copies of their magazine ads. Focus on the information that is readily available.

Hour 3 - Preparation

This third block should be used to compile the documents you have gathered into meaningful information. Again, give yourself one hours of uninterrupted time and, this time, you may want to consider getting away from your office or normal place of work.
Spread out all of the contents of your first box onto a table. With a note pad handy, start by looking at the sales numbers. Take a few moments to jot down the answers to these questions, as well as others you may have:

• Who are your biggest clients?
• What do they buy from you?
• What months are the most successful for you?
• What is your best product line?
• What are your sales trends?

Next, look at all of your marketing materials. Spread them out on the table. Think about each piece, as well as the entire collection. Obviously, you could spend a whole day critiquing your sales numbers and your marketing items. But by keeping the exercise to just one hour (remember you can build on this work later), you will better focus your attention. Here are some questions for this part of the exercise:

• What do your marketing pieces say about you?
• Is there a consistency to your approach?
• To whom are you speaking?
• Do the pieces tell the message you want told?
• How do your message increase sales?
• What relationship does your marketing team have with your sales team?

As you're making these notes, take one sheet of paper and designate it the "ideas page". As an idea comes into your mind ... no matter how crazy ... write it down.

Hour 4 - More Preparation

Now, put the sales numbers and the marketing materials aside.

Take the information and materials about your clients and your competitors and place them on the table. Select your three strongest competitors and your 10 best customers.

Spend a few minutes (3-4) thinking about each of them. Then ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do your best 10 customers choose you instead of your competitors?
• Do your competitors spend all their money with you or some with your competitors too?
• Do you offer your customers anything unique?
• Why are these competitors good? (if they are!)

This is the critical step in this process. An hours sounds like a long time on this, but it isn't!.
Once you have finished, put everything back in the boxes and stop (remember the time limit).

Congratulations ... you are halfway through the process.

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Get your notes (for this part you can refer to specific items in the boxes if needed).
Unlike the other sections, you need two hours of uninterrupted time to complete this next stage. Beginning with your notes, build a brief outline of where you are. To help in the process, I've put together the following questions; most questions should have between three and five answers:

• What were your sales in the past three years?
• What do you want your sales to be next year?
• Why do your best customers do business with you?
• Who are your main competitors?
• Why do our customers do business with someone else?
• If you lost 2% of your average sized customers, what revenues would you lose ?
• How many customers are you losing each year?
• What does your current marketing materials say about you?
• What is the single best thing you do to market your business?

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Remember you have two hours to complete this Outline stage, if you are asking the right type of questions, and really thinking about the answers, honest, truthful answers .. you need the two-hours.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

This is another two-hours stage.

Use your notes and the items you have in the boxes to help with this final stage. You are now going to prepare the first draft of your marketing plan.

The idea is that you now have enough information and ideas to put together your marketing plan.  Don't worry if you find you cannot complete yours as shown here, just do what you can with the information you have, use your plan as a start of your activities and go from there.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

Remember that this is another two-hours stage.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Continue working on the plan on a day by day basis, NEVER let it gather dust, you really need to revise the plan at least every quarter to get the most from it, and next year, it may only take you one hour to completely revise for the new sales year!

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How to deal with negative comments on social media sites

If you are unlucky enough to find an extremely negative comment on one of your social media accounts (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc).  How should you deal with it?

Even if you have spotted it quickly, then the chances are that other have also seen it; in the case of Twitter, within moments of it been sent it could have been ReTweeted 100 or 1,000’s of times (and I bet that your competitors will jump at the chance to publicise it or capitalise on it in some way).

In any case, a negative comment from a customer or prospect is a negative comment and it needs to be dealt with fast.

Ultimately, Social Customer Service is all about immediately addressing your customers' concerns quickly.  Where possible you should immediately respond with a holding statement to let the complainant and anyone else that see’s the comment know that their concern has been acknowledged and that you are dealing with it.

If you haven’t got all the facts from the negative comment that has been posted then politely contact the complainant asking for more information on the problem.

You should plan to fully respond by the end of that business day, and absolutely no longer than 24 hours later.  Failure to deal with any problems effectively could mean that it goes viral very quickly!

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Killer Social Media Strategies

Social media allows businesses both large and small to have a lot of impact and power, here are just a small number of things that you can do.

1. Q&A's

Social media has been developed to engage with your potential customers and customers alike, but may businesses have no idea how to do this easily.  The best way is to hold scheduled Q&A sessions – let your Followers and Fans alike ask you anything they want about your business, products and services.  You may even quickly discover problem areas or new product ideas; this approach will also do wonders for your brand too.

2. Solve Problems

By doing regular searches for your brand name, product/services or market sector you will quickly discover people who are asking questions on Social Media platforms about things that you should be an expert in. 

Respond to them, answer their questions; don’t answer with your sales hat on unless the question specifically warrant you suggesting your companies services but try to answer with your customer services hat on.

In fact this approach goes beyond traditional customer services and you’ll be seen as active within the wider community; this is huge for your brand.

3. Promotions/Offers and Competitions

You will have lots of loyal Followers/Fans, and it’s nice if you can reward then from time to time for being there for you.  Give special offers, promote events, provide competitions – anything to further your engagement with your market/community.

Give value and you’ll have a Fan for life!

4. Value added links

If you are a business that just provides links to your homepage or your products and services pages then you are missing a huge trick; provide links to useful resources/news items (whether on your site or not); this will continue to add value to your brand and your wider community.

Work SMARTER, not harder!

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Customer Retention

It is absolutely true that it costs more to find a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, anyone in business knows that, but the big questions is … how can you retain your customers?

I found the following statistics recently and they make for interesting reading:

• 4 percent of customers leave a business because they have moved location.
• 5 percent simply change their purchasing habits.
• 9 percent decide that they like the competition better.
• 14 percent leave because they become disenchanted with a company's overall service.
• 68 percent stop doing business with a company because they feel unappreciated.

Customer retention is all about customer satisfaction, if you can satisfy your customers (or even delight them!), then you stand a great chance of retaining them, so how do you provide this customer satisfaction?

There is a simple formula that I always use, and I have found that it works incredibly well in all situations:

Customer Satisfaction = Good Reputation + Good Customer Relationship +Good Service

You build a great relationship with them (above and beyond simply being their supplier), then you never give them a reason to leave you (you surpass their service expectations).

Once you realise and accept this Customer Retention formula is everything starts to fall into place.

Lets look at these factors in a little more detail:

Reputation

Public Relations

• It’s predominately the responsibility of Public Relations to improve a businesses reputation in the market
• Customers ask themselves ... do they feel happy buying from a business like yours
• Is the corporate identity and key corporate messages sending the right signals to the market?

Relationship

Communications

• Ensuring a great relationship with customers is all about the communications
• After a major purchase, customers often feel that they have made the wrong choice, that why reassurance messages need to presented often (these can be via face to face meetings, telephone calls, or electronic messages (email, ezines etc))
• All the customers’ touchpoints inside the organisation need to be well managed to ensure that customers get a consistent message and level of service.
• Use marketing budgets wisely, and treat your very best customers, never underestimate the power of hospitality

Service

Service is a huge part of customer retention The key service elements are pre-sales, sales and post-sales:

Pre-Sales

• The reputation and friendliness of the pre-sales team/process
• Their ability to provide first-class advice and solve customers problems

Sales

• Win/Win negotiations (ensure the customer gets something from the negotiations)
• Delivery/Supply (on time)
• Installation (clean, tidy and working first time)
• Invoicing (correct)
• Payment (effective systems)

Post-Sales

• Good after sales support
• Plenty of reassurance
• You listen to new development requests

It’s worth checking your business to see that you have the ability to influence these areas, as they are critical to customer retention.

It’s also worth investing in a Customer Satisfaction Survey. If any of these core retention standards start to slip, the chances are that the first time you know about it is when a customer leaves you.

You need an annual survey so that trends can be captured, and any weakness in a particular area investigated and corrected.

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