Archives for June 2014
How to Encourage Word of Mouth Marketing
While it's always important to engage in marketing through a wide variety of channels, there will never be another form of marketing more powerful than word of mouth. If you can get people to start talking about your business and recommending it to others, you'll much more easily bring in new customers and encourage longer, more lucrative business relationships.
But how do you get people to start talking about your business in the first place? Here are some tips that should help you to encourage word of mouth marketing:
- Go above and beyond expectations. You can't just settle for “good enough” if you want people to recommend your business to others. You need to go above and beyond expectations in the quality of your products, your services and your customer service. You should strive for excellence in every area of your business. People will notice when you are making an effort to be great.
- Ask customers to spread the word. If you're looking to get referrals, sometimes the best way to accomplish this is to simply ask your current customers to spread the word. You can ask them to write reviews about products, pass along information to customers or whatever else you think would be appropriate or effective; you'll almost definitely get some referrals you wouldn't have otherwise received just by asking!
- Reach out to those with influence. Whether these people are clients, celebrities, other professionals in your industry or people with a large following on social networks, people with influence can be a great asset if you can get them to recommend your product. Seeing an influential third party recommending a business makes people more likely to give that business a shot and pass the word along themselves.
- Refer your clients or customers. If you do work with other businesses, consider referring them in hopes of getting a referral in return. This can help both of your businesses to grow together and develop a stronger relationship.
And of course, remember that word of mouth advertising doesn't just take place on social media (although that can certainly be a big part of it); it's very much about forging real connections with your customers.
For more tips about encouraging word of mouth advertising and to help put the spark back into your business, work with us at Viral Solutions!
Website Items to Check Before Launch
Whether you're launching your business's website for the first time or you're completing a major overhaul, it's important that you do your due diligence in making sure it's completely ready before you put it live. The last thing you want is to run the risk of having a clunky, ineffective website on the internet for even just couple days.
Here are three of the biggest categories that you should concern yourself with before launch:
Functionality of your site's measurement tools
As important as the functionality of youlr site itself is, it's also extremely important that all of the ways you use to gauge its effectiveness are working well. Make sure all of your analytics tools are properly installed and running. You should be able to figure out where your traffic is coming from, when it's coming, how long people are visiting the site, total number of site visits and plenty more information.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
For the most part, you can easily adjust keywords on your site over time without having to do a whole lot of extra work in making the edits. However, one of the biggest SEO-related steps that people tend to skip over before website launch is examining every single one of the links on your website. All links should work. This is especially a problem if you originally had your website on a staging area, and forget to change links over to the correct destination. Visitors will quickly get frustrated with your site if you have broken links, and it makes your website and your business seem unprofessional. Click through every link on your site before taking it live, just so you can be sure that they're all working properly.
Visitor experience
Are all of the forms on your site (contact forms, order forms, etc.) working properly and located in the correct place Are all of your pages, forms and other content easy to understand? Is the content on your website interesting, engaging and helpful? Do all of the special features and plugins on your site work properly? These are just a few important questions that you should ask as you make your final checks before launching your business's website. You should aim for an outstanding user experience, and sites with malfunctioning features or sites that are difficult to navigate only serve to frustrate the visitor.
We at Viral Solutions are pleased to help you fine-tune your website before launch. Contact us today for more information about the last checks you should make before putting your site live!
Using Text Snippets with Social Media
Do you ever find yourself answering the same questions or discussing the same benefits on social media? It’s not all that unusual as your customers will likely have a lot of the same questions. While the answers may be readily available on your website, many social media users prefer to ask a real person on Facebook or Twitter. A personal response is always preferred to a canned one; however, using text snippets as a starting point can make you more efficient and ensure that you deliver the accurate information each time. Here’s what you need to know.
What are Text Snippets?
If you use email signatures in your email client software, you’re using a text snippet. Text snippets are stored words, phrases, or even paragraphs of frequently used text. They’re usually associated with a keyboard shortcut.
Working with Text Snippets
Text snippet applications, such as Text Expander and Phrase Express, allow you to associate longer snippets with keywords. For example, you could associate different email signatures with the words “sig,” “sig1,” and “sig2.” Any time you need to add one of your signatures to a message or document, simply type the keyword and let the software fill in the details.
Note: Make sure to select uncommon but memorable words or abbreviations so that you don’t accidentally insert text inappropriately. You may even want to use a semicolon in front of your keywords such as: ;signature, ;bio, and ;greeting.
You can also use your word processor’s auto-correct feature to create text snippets. However, these snippets will only work in your word processor. If you intend to use text snippets on social media, you’d need to copy and paste the expanded text from your word processor to your social media interface. Thus, you may want to invest in a text expander app that works across your entire operating system.
Using Text Snippets on Social Media
Once you have a text snippet application, it’s time to start using it. Let’s start with the basics. For example, you might want to create snippets for the following:
- Greeting / acknowledgement – When someone asks a question or posts a comment on social media, it’s polite to start your response with some sort of a greeting or acknowledgement. It could be as simple as “Hi there. Thanks for reaching out to us on our Facebook page.” In order to not sound like a broken record, you may want to create several stock greetings. Use memorable shortcuts such as ;greet1, ;greet2, and ;greet3 (note the semicolons).
- Stock answers to common questions – What are your store hours? Where are you located? How long is your warranty? These are but a few questions you may find yourself answering time and time again. Create text snippets for your most common questions and save yourself from having to look up the details and type in the information over and over. Use descriptive shortcut phrases such as ;location, ;hours, and ;warranty.
- Product benefits – When users have questions about your products, it’s helpful to include a few of the product’s benefits. Create a benefit list for each of your products using a consistent shortcut convention such as ProductNameBenefits. For example, if you sell cosmetics, you’d have shortcuts such as ;MascaraBenefits, ;LipstickBenefits, and ;FoundationBenefits. While your text snippet may start off as a long list of product benefits, you don’t necessarily have to include the entire list. Use it as a starting point and edit the expanded text to suit your needs.
- Thank you / closing – Finally, create a few text snippets to close out your messages. Again, these can be as simple as, “Thank you for the opportunity to be of service. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.” Create several closing messages so that you can vary your sign offs.
Once you have a nice set of text snippets, you have a fantastic starting point to respond to questions on social media. The next time someone asks where you are located, you can simply call up a few text snippets by typing:
;greet1 ;location ;thx1
Your text expander software would then fill in your message such as:
Hi there. Thanks for reaching out to us on our Facebook page. We’re located at 123 Main Street on the corner of Main and First Street. If there’s no street parking, go through the alley to the rear where you’ll find plenty of parking and easy access to our store through the bright yellow doors. Thank you for the opportunity to be of service. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Remember, your text snippets can be edited as needed to ensure that you don’t sound like a robot. Feel free to address the customer by name, too.
Aligning Your Offer with Your Customers’ Pain
Whether developing a new service offering, crafting a sales letter, writing an “about us” page, or communicating with customers on social media sites, understanding your target audience’s pain points is essential to your success. In short, you need to know what problems your customers have before you can possibly solve them. Likewise, this same understanding brings empathy to your message and helps customers to better relate to your company. It can build trust and help you to position your product or service as the solution. Use the tips below to align your offer with your customers’ pain.
- Identify problems your customers have that your solution solves. For example, let’s say you sell inkjet printers that have large ink tanks and are much less expensive to operate due to their ink efficiency. Some of the problems your customers might have include: constantly having to replace expensive ink cartridges, concerns about the mess involved or possible warranty issues when using cheap ink refill kits, inconvenience of running out of ink, and low-quality printouts because they use draft mode all the time in order to conserve ink.
- Identify what your customers really want in relation to these problems. Your customers want solutions but may not realize it per se. They could be living with their current problems without having articulated what they really want. Go ahead and do it for them by identifying what they want. For example, your customers may want a printer that keeps on printing with minimal user intervention. They may want to print gorgeous, full-color newsletters without worrying about running out of ink or how much the print run is costing in terms of ink. They may want to be able to refill ink without worrying about staining their favorite suit.
- Identify the features and benefits of your solution to each of the problems you’ve listed. Features are the actual properties or functions of a product while benefits are the results customers receive because of the feature. For example, high capacity ink tanks are a feature while fewer ink cartridge changes and lower ink costs are benefits.
Now that you know what problems your customers have, what they really want, and the features and benefits that solve your customers’ pain, you can create an effective story, advertisement, campaign, social media contest, or other message that clearly positions your product or service as the solution.
For example, you could create a campaign around messy ink cartridge refills featuring ink-stained office workers, ruined business suits, and splotchy printouts. From there, you could reinforce the benefits of your printer’s high-capacity ink tanks and stress that users will never need to resort to messy do-it-yourself ink refill kits ever again. You could even show a side-by-side cost comparison that shows that not only does your solution eliminate the mess, it’s also cost effective. If customers come out money ahead, even better!
Knowing your customer’s pain points allows you to address them and position your product as the solution.
How to Be a Better Listener
It's certainly important in the business world to be a good talker, but one could argue that it's far more important in business (and in life) to be a great listener. True leaders know that active listening is a valuable skill to have, and practice certain skills to make sure their colleagues or employees know they are listening to and care about what they're saying.
Here are some tips on how you can be a better listener in the working world:
- Stay focused. Remove all distractions and give whoever is speaking your full attention. This means close your book, turn away from your computer, put down your phone and look right at the speaker. This simple gesture alone says a lot about your desire to hear what the speaker is saying.
- Keep your inner voice quiet. While it's natural to have a voice in your head providing commentary or analysis of any conversation, you need to be able to tone it down so that you can remain focused on what is being said. Depending on the type of conversation, a good strategy for doing this is taking notes. That way, the person talking will see that you are invested in pulling out information from what they are saying, and you will avoid letting your inner voice take over and block out the messages you're getting.
- Restate what's been said. To make sure that you've understood what the person just said, and to show them that you were listening, feel free to restate the most important part of their message in your own words. You could also begin with a question, such as “So what you're saying is…. ?
- Ask questions. If you need something clarified, speak up. It's better to ask for more information than to sit in confusion, and it will show the person speaking that you are focused on getting all of the information correct and that you care about what they're saying.
- Discuss what action to take. At the end of your conversation, talk to the person and determine whether you need to take any action going forward based on the subject of your conversation. This shows that you are happy and prepared to help with their issue.
Remember: it's important that you actually listen, and are not simply waiting to talk. You will establish much more effective channels of communication with colleagues, employees and customers in this way.
Christine Kelly | Queen Bee | Viral Solutions LLC