4 Reasons Your Customers Are Better Marketers Than You Are?

Let’s face it fellow small business owners: the amount of information available to your customers today has deemed your traditional marketing efforts completely ineffective. When customers want to buy something they are more likely to talk to their peers or ask opinions on social media before they come to you. With this information shift, we as business owners need to take advantage of the power of the consumer. In today’s world, the consumer can be a better marketer that the marketing staff that you employ 9-5.

Here are 5 things that your customers can do for you that your marketing department can’t.

       

1. Fully Understand Your Buyers Needs

Nobody understands the wants and needs of your customers, like your customers. This may seem obvious, but most business owners today forget to ask for the opinion of their loyal customers. Encouraging customers to give their opinions on your products and service not only provides valuable insight as to what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and what they want to see next. Encouraging customers will also help them to understand, just how important their opinions are to the success of your business.

2. Truly Connect With Your Potential Customers

      

       90% Of Customers say buying decisions are influenced by online reviews. This statistic is proof that there is no more important source that the voice of the consumers peers!  Before stepping foot into your business, customers trust their peers to give them a full and unbiased opinion of your products or services.  As much as you try and delight your customers, your marketing and sales department can never connect with them on the same level their peers can.

3. Exponentially Boost Your Social Reputation

When you look at the current state of your businesses’ social media accounts, it is likely that you feel your current efforts are not enough. There is nothing you can do to change your social reputation faster that your customers can. Have your heard of the term trending? Well topics don’t trend because

a business posted a tweet. Topics Trend because of the massive amount of consumer interaction that the CONSUMER generates about the topic. Don’t be shy in encouraging your customers to comment and promote your brand on social media.

4. Help To Penetrate New Markets

Are most of your customers from a certain geographic area, or a certain demographic? If you answered yes and still don’t feel your marketing tactics are working,then it is likely that you are not utilizing the reach of your customers on social media. Your customers and thousands of friends and followers that could potentially be getting your message, most of which are of the same demographic. The best way to get your customers reaching out to their friends and followers, is to create great content. Generate great content that your customers can’t help but share with the world!

Thanks For Reading!

Randy Delling

Social Stride

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Setting Your Business Apart: Social Selling

 Whether you are a seasoned sales professional or are just starting out, it’s easy to see that traditional selling methods are just not working like they once did. My first career out of college was as a life insurance salesman. My mentor with that company’s philosophy was, “open the phone book and start dialing." It did not take me long to find out that I was wasting my time and energy making cold calls. What my mentor failed to realize was that in this day and age of caller id and spam blockers, the time one puts in to sending ghost emails and making cold calls is not an effective use of a salesman’s time. In 2015 access to information about people is easy to get. People now want to work with individuals that they have a connection with and can trust. Most importantly they want you to prove your worth and expertise before they even consider accepting one of your phone calls.

You may have already heard of the concept of social selling, a concept that every sales professional CLAIM they are using. They think  having a vague LinkedIn profile is enough. Then, they’ll wonder why they aren’t getting the leads from social media that they should.

If you want to succeed in this new way of selling you have to put the time in. Just like cold calling, if you only made 10 cold calls in a day you probably won’t net one worthwhile conversation.  Social selling is time consuming, but if done right can net amazing results!

Here are the three steps that make a great social seller in 2015:

1. Promote

When you reach out to a prospective client, the first thing they are going to do is look you up on social media and google to get as much valuable insight as they can into what you offer.  So, have it available!  A clearly defined personal mission statement, a detailed description of what you do, testimonials from clients that you have worked with in the past, gives a better idea of you personality outside of work. Consumers want to work with professionals they can see themselves having a drink with on the weekend.

Promote as if you had to buy from you. Who would you want to work with and what would you want to know about yourself before making a purchase?

2. Educate

Your potential clients want to know what your skills are, and they want you to prove it to them! The best way to do this is to educate them. I believe that this is the most important aspect of the social selling model. I also know, that this is the part of social selling that most professionals skip, and is the reason they are not successful getting business opportunities through social media. There are many ways of educating your customers. Some of my favorites are: blogs, webinars, YouTube videos, e-books, and white papers.  Writing one blog per week or hosting one webinar per week is not time consuming and can make all the difference in your customer’s eyes. Educating your potential clients will give you a leg up over your competitors.

3. Delight

The final step to social selling is delight. Your potential clients want to get a pat on the back every once in a while, so give it to them! If they have a birthday, make sure to send them a message, if they just had a new baby reach out to congratulate! Those are the obvious ones. But if you really want to impress them you have to customize your delightful messages. Once a month, try sending them some information about something that you learned about them on their social media accounts. For example, if the person is a baseball fan. Send them and e-mail and tell them you read an article about baseball and it made you think of them and send them a link. Consumers will appreciate this small gesture more than you think.

Thank You For Reading

Randy Delling

Social Stride

4 Tips on Using Pinterest for your Business

Pinterest is the 2^nd largest social source of traffic=people love Pinterest.

This means, although Facebook and Twitter are great/amazing/easy/whatever else, you NEED THIS. 

According to research, 50% of business occurs after 3.5 months of posting, which means it’s worthwhile to pin!

You may think your business doesn’t need to pin because you aren’t selling clothes, shoes, or anything tangible. This thinking is very outdated!

Check out these features of Pinterest and great tips to get your business thriving!

1. Make Rich Pins

This means, when you click a pin for information, the Pin includes extra information on the pin itself.

There are 6 types of “rich pins:” app, place, movie, recipe, article, and product.

App Pins: include an install button, so Pinners can download without ever leaving Pinterest.

Place Pins: a map, address, and phone number of business is provided.

Article pins: Include headline, author, and description of article.

Product Pins: Include pricing, availability, and location to buy while providing notifications of price drops.

Recipe Pins: Include the entire synopsis of recipe and cook time!

Movie pins: Include Ratings, cast, and reviews.

For those not very technical (like myself), check out this site on how to create rich pins:

  Click HERE

2. Know Photos

·      Clear, clean product images that are natural are usually pinterest-worthy.

·      Images without faces usually are repinned, 23% more

·      Pins with multiple dominate colors are pinned more, so stay colorful (red-orange hues get about twice as many repins as blue-green)

·      Taller images are more likely to be repinned and images should be close to the maximal image size of 763 pixels

      3. Pin when your Audience pins

Timing is everything. If your customers pin when they are going to bed, as an evening time-waster, pin 6-11pm. That, along with 2-4pm, works well for most pinterest boards. However, if you are a business blogger, you may want your article pins before and after lunch hour, and 3-5pm when business workers are browsing the interest before leaving work.

      4. Sell the Lifestyle

Inspire your audience, don’t just sell to them. This is the whole reason to use pin. Great pinterest boards compliment their product by being subtle that they are selling, while inspiring your audience to feel the need of having your product in their life. Know who you are selling to, what those people want, and be a friend with great pin ideas. The selling will sell itself.

Not every pin should be a product; you want a board of amazing content. Your product pins should shine a little brighter, and you will sell. 

This is just a little PINspiration for you to understand the beauty in this social media platform. It should not be ignored; every type of business can use it.

Thanks for reading,

Lana Sache

Social Stride

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How To Find The Time For Social Media Marketing

As a small business owner, you are always looking for ways to save time. And let’s be honest, marketing through emails, social media, and your website can be very time consuming. For this reason, most business owners will neglect the attention that social media and other online marketing outlets need in order to maximize marketing potential.

Well I’m glad to say that that this problem has been solved.

Enter, Marketing Automation. What is this Marketing Automation?  It refers to software platforms that are made for businesses that more efficiently market and automate repetitive tasks on multiple online outlets including email, social media, and website. Some of these software options include Hubspot, Marketo, and Infusionsoft. Usage of Marketing Automation Technology is expected to Rise 50% by 2015 (via Sirius Decisions).

Unfortunately for your business, traditional marketing just does not work in today’s tech friendly environment and does not produce the ROI that it once did. In 2015, people can easily perform product research on multiple easy-to-navigate websites, skip through commercials through DVR, and do  not accept phone calls from phone numbers they do not recognize.
 It’s time to face the facts, and set up marketing automation for your business to get back the reach that your traditional marketing efforts had in the 1980’s!

Here are 10 Marketing Automation statistics that will have you ready to take your business to the next level.

1.  79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. (Via Gleanster)

2.       B2B marketers who implement marketing automation increase their sales-pipeline contribution by 10%. (Via Forrester Research)

3.     58% of top-performing companies (defined as those where marketing contributes more than half of the sales pipeline), have adopted marketing automation. (Via Forrester Research)

4.   25% of Fortune 500 B2B companies have adopted marketing automation. (Via ClickZ)

5.       63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation. (Via The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups)

6.  CMOs at top-performing companies indicate that their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation is to increase revenue (79%) and get higher quality leads (76%). (Via Gleanster)

7.  Companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates (initial response-to-MQL) than non-users, and an annualized revenue growth rate 3.1% higher than non-users. (Via Aberdeen Group)

8.  78% of successful marketers cite marketing automation systems as most responsible for improving revenue contribution. (Via The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups)

9.  B2C marketers who take advantage of automation – which includes everything from cart abandonment programs to birthday emails – have seen conversion rates as high as 50%. (Via eMarketer)

10. Companies that use marketing automation are 3 times more likely than companies without automation to track and attribute their content-marketing efforts to multiple touchpoints (36% to 11%). (Via The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups)

Thanks for reading!

Randy Delling

Social Stride



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Top 5 Tips for Social Media Customer Interaction for Small Businesses

People go online for three reasons. To connect with other people, to be educated, and to be entertained. When building your social media strategy make sure that you are fulfilling all of these. Although you may find running a business and building your social media following stressful, it’s where your customers are! It is important that you are building a social media strategy that will effectively and efficiently reach as many potential customers as possible. Before you start building your Social Media presence there are 5 points to keep in mind:

1. Be Available

Not only do people learn about businesses through social media, they also want their questions about your products of services answered in a timely fashion. With this in mind, it is important that you set expectations for your customers, outlining when you are available to answer questions on your social media sites. One way is to make a “available to reach time” for questions to be answered (9am-11am for example) within during normal business hours. That way you can glace at your computer for an hour or two and reach maximum clients.

2. Consistency

Consistency is key to building a loyal customer base on social media. So many people start off posting multiple times a day but over time, start drifting off. Also, if you say you will be available to answer questions during certain times doing the day, make sure that you are following through on your promises. Just as in any aspect of business, you are only as good as your word so be consistent and reliable.

3. Don’t focus on all platforms

You can’t be everywhere at the same time. After all, you do have a business that you need to focus on and social media can be very time consuming. If you focus on using too many platforms, your social media strategy will not be effective.  Start with one, like a Facebook page or Twitter.  Your customers will notice the high level of customer service they receive on those platforms. You can always add another platform once you get comfortable with the one you are currently using.

4. Promote products in creative ways

Every business is on social media. Most of them use social media to post special or promotions and leave it at that. If you want to create an effective social media presence you need to think outside the box. The reason for being on social media is to RELATE to customers, not ANNOY. People are more likely to refer their friends to businesses that are generating awareness. Stop trying to sell, instead, help people buy. Some great examples are photos of your business, behind the scenes actives in your business, and blog posts on past events that your company has been involved with. Think outside the box.

5. Organize your thoughts

An effective social media strategy needs to be organized. At the start of every week, take ten minutes to write out a list of topics that you can generate content for social media with. Using this tactic you will avoid having to think about possible content that you want to post and instead will be ready to get your content out there for everyone to see.

Follow these steps and comment below on how it's changed your business' social media!

Have a great one,

Randy Delling

Social Stride

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