CompuKol Connection » Marco Giunta

Building Your Sales One Relationship at a Time

Marco Giunta — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:00:16 +0000

All markets have marketers in a huge number of niches. Unfortunately, people don’t like to be “sold.” What makes them buy eventually is based on a solid and trusting relationship. A relationship that is mutually beneficial.

Relationships don’t happen by accident. They need to be cultivated, nurtured, and tended to on a very regular basis. Once you have earned the trust, credibility, and respect of your prospective clients, you will see how much the relationship flourishes and that they will no only eventually want to buy what you are selling but will also want to tell everyone else about how wonderful your offerings are and why those other people should buy them also.

In order to devise a sales sequence, you must decide upon how you want to approach the prospective customer and how you want to proceed with your sales strategy. It is extremely important for you to understand how your potential customers think and feel and to approach the relationship carefully and sensitively so that you can build it and that it lasts throughout time.

Be Selective: There may be many people who respond to your promotional efforts but it doesn’t make sense for you to engage with everyone who enquires about your products and/or services. It is important for you to have a clear understanding from the beginning of the specific type of customer with whom you would like to interact. The relationship should be cultivated naturally and the connection that you have together should be authentic and meaningful. Your customer will feel your genuine interest and will begin to trust you.

Know Your Customer's Expectations: Not all clients are looking for the same level of service. If you don’t understand their expectations, you may not be able to meet their needs. Even after you have acquired them as a client, make sure that you stay up to date on what their needs are at all times. Continue to reassure them that they matter (through words and actions), and that you have not forgotten them once the deal was signed.

Let Them Know Where To Find You: As mentioned before, you should have consistent contact with your clients. The communication can be in several different forms, including newsletters, Emails, phone calls, etc. There will be many occasions in which you won’t be able to "seal the deal" immediately. You may have to wait. You must implement the sales sequence and not try to sell your services in one step. On average, you may have to initiate seven times before achieving a breakthrough.

Maintain open lines of communication: This is the most important step. Have a clear understanding of how often they would like to speak with you and understand which methods are best for reaching them, as well as how they can reach you quickly. It's all about building trust and maintaining respect throughout the entire business relationship, which will hopefully be a long one.

You must root yourself well as an expert and begin to think and act as one.

Conclusion

Once you really understand these five keys to relationship building, you will be set to devise an effective and mind-blowing sales sequence. Always remember that it is not only all about people and relationships but more importantly, it is about making sure that you are able to solve their problems.

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Building Your Social Media Connections

Marco Giunta — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Social media websites are a phenomenon today. Websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Blogger are some of the most accessed websites on the Internet. It, therefore, becomes important to leverage the widespread popularity of these websites and develop top social media strategies to expand your business.

The following are top social media strategies that can be considered:

Objective – The objective of your social media campaign must be pretty clear right from the start. Branding, consumer awareness, reputation management, lead generation, sales, marketing, etc, are all activities very much achievable using Social Media Optimization (SMO); however, they require separate initiatives.
Picking the right battles – There is no dearth of social media platforms available out there to begin your campaigns. Picking the right battle ie, selecting the websites, will hold the key to your success. You cannot be all over the Internet because constant engagements on every such forum would require a mammoth effort.
Meaningful connects – Try spamming and the results will not be encouraging at all. In order to make the most out of your social media initiatives, consumers will have to relate to your business in some way or the other. Work toward building long lasting relationships with people in your network and the results will be rewarding in the long run.
Web 2.0 – The term was first coined in the year 1999 by a consultant of information architecture. Today, it goes beyond the realm of only aesthetics and graphic design. Rich web 2.0 features, if included in your social media campaigns, will facilitate active information sharing and collaboration.
Human analytics – There is a wide variety of tools available today to support and track social media initiatives. Their utility cannot be undermined. However, no tool will be able to analyze the emotional relationship between the brand and the consumer. Human intervention is required to correctly analyze trends, data and defining key strategies.
Blogging – Start blogging about your business and create a genuine footfall of people wanting to seek information about your industry. Keep it information-driven and subtly introduce commercial elements to it such as customized signatures leading to your principal website (Calls-to-Action) at the end of every post.
Trend Capture –Website analytics are often the most ignored aspect of a social media strategy. The amount of effort that you put in on various social media platforms can easily be analyzed using tools such as Google Analytics that provide statistics on website traffic.
Encouraging Participation – Overdoing information dissemination can backfire and may not yield the desired results. The interaction has to be a 2-way process and you must encourage strong and sustained participation from your target audience to drive forward your objectives in an organic manner.
Leveraging Full Features – Vertically extending the Facebook profile photograph of your business page to its maximum permissible size of 200 x 600 pix, customizing the twitter image background and actively participating in question/answers on LinkedIn.com are some of the most underutilized yet effective ways to catch the eye of your target audience.

Conclusion

Incorporating top social media strategies in your scheme of things has become a must, especially if you are responsible for the growth of a business. This is one of the most cost-effective ways to achieve a wide variety of business objectives and a must try. You must be extremely cautious with the way that you delegate this critical aspect to a third party. Doing due diligence about the strength of the company in executing social media strategies can go a long way to ensuring profitability for your business.

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Keys to Building and Maintaining Long-Lasting Business Relationships

Marco Giunta — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Any given market has no shortage of marketers. In fact, most people are fed up with marketing schemes that are selling wares from toothpaste to insurance policies. As such, any marketing effort on your part may be taken as an intrusion by people who don't know you personally.

Building the relationship

The only way to gain access into people’s lives is by being their friend. Once they are acquainted with you and they are comfortable with you , you can convert them into customers by introducing your service or product.

In order to devise a sales sequence, you must decide upon how you want to approach the prospective customer and how you want to proceed with your sales strategy. You must understand how to gain access into the minds of your potential customers and build long-lasting relationships.

1. Be Selective. There may be many people who respond to your promotional efforts, but it would not be wise to engage with everyone who enquires about your services or products. You must have it clear in your mind about what type of customer you would prefer. Since you are being selective, the process of becoming your prospective customer's friend is natural and not coerced. Your customer will sense your genuine interest and begin to trust you.

2. Know Your Customer's Expectations. Every customer is looking for a different level of service. If you don’t know their expectations, you will always fall short and not be able to meet their needs. Even after you have acquired them as a client, make sure that you stay up to date on their needs at all times. Continue to reassure them that they matter and that you have not forgotten them once the deal is signed.

4. Let Them Know Where To Find You. As stated before, you must continue to be in regular contact with them via newsletters or other means of communication. Often, you can’t "seal the deal" immediately. You may have to wait. You must implement the sales sequence and try not to sell your services in one step. On average, you may have to initiate seven times before achieving a breakthrough.

5. Maintain open lines of communication. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP. Know how often they would like to speak with you and what methods are best for reaching them, as well as how they can reach you quickly. It's all about building trust and maintaining respect throughout the entire business relationship, which will hopefully be a long one.

Conclusion

YOU MUST ROOT YOURSELF WELL AS AN EXPERT AND BEGIN TO THINK AND ACT LIKE ONE.

Once you really understand these five keys to relationship building, you will be set to devise an effective and mind-blowing business strategy.

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Hot Selling Online in a Cold Economy

Marco Giunta — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:00:49 +0000

When it comes to stimulating sales, there are several “hot buttons” or motivators that influence how successful your business is at selling your goods and/or services online. Identifying and using them in this difficult economy will lead to business success.

Presumably, at this point, you have a well-established marketing strategy, which should include at least some of those hot buttons. Those hot buttons will ultimately be responsible for your success. They will be the element that brings your clients and prospective clients to the point of making a decision about whether to buy from you or not this time around. If you should happen to employ more than one hot button at a time as part of your marketing campaign, you may be in danger of not making a sale online. It is critical that you use the motivators effectively and with the correct intensity. The balance is extremely important. The last thing that you want to do is overwhelm or confuse your clients by offering them too much at once. Now, it is time to consider which motivators work best in an economy such as the one that we are experiencing currently. First of all, it is time to identify all of the motivators (or hot buttons). Your online interactions are critical to your business’s success and your understanding of other people as well as your approach to them are essential. After discussing the hot buttons, the correct way to use them will be discussed.

Greed: The concept of your wanting more and more no matter how much you attain. The funny thing about greed is that it often takes on a momentum that is hard to control. It is the motivator for a large number of people in business.
Fear: Fear motivates a lot of people to behave in ways that are often questionable. Many people fear that they have opportunities that they allowed to slip through their fingers. Another common motivating fear is losing some possession that they feel is important to them.
Lust: There is absolutely no doubt that sex is a big seller.
Vanity: Vanity is one of the most common hot buttons when it comes to selling. If people think that a product and/or service will make them look better in some way, they will move heaven and earth to possess it.
Jealousy: Human beings want what other human beings have. It is a natural feeling and it is a huge motivator for buying.
Laziness: Believe it or not, laziness is a significant motivator when it comes to people making a decision about whether to buy a particular product and/or service. Why would a person want to do more work in order to obtain something when they can do less work and achieve the same goal? In fact, why would they want to work at all if they can get someone else to do the work for them?
Pride: Another basic human desire is the feeling of being valued. Everyone wants to feel that they matter to other people. It gives them a strong feeling of pride.
Charity: Human beings feel very good about themselves when they are able to help others who are less fortunate.
Anger: Nobody wants to feel as though they have been taken advantage of by someone else. In fact, if the situation is extreme enough, they may want to get back at the person who took advantage of them.
Strength: Humans pride themselves on being strong and independent. Weakness is not an option for most people.
Justice: Justice basically means that revenge has been obtained.
Prejudice: Every human being has some prejudice. The issue is not that they exist within people. The issue is what people do about them.

Now that the hot buttons have been identified, it is important to understand which ones should be used for maximum results in business online. Of course, along with the hot buttons are desires (things that we want). It is important to bear in mind that not all of the desires can be satisfied at the same time.

They are:

Aesthetic beauty
Money
Time
Being comfortable
Being popular
Wanting compliments
Leisure time
Self-esteem
Pleasure
Health
Success
Lasting security

When the economy is in particularly bad shape, it seems as though the desires that were just mentioned are the strongest. Each of those desires are a distinct part of human nature and, in truth, they will always be a part of everyone. However, in an economy that is more of a challenge, getting what people want on a small scale will see them through to the point where things start to improve enough. From the business owner’s perspective, it is important for you to understand which motivators to use for the most effective results for your business.

All of the hot buttons will work; however, some will work better than others. For example, lust works great (any time you use it). No matter what, people will always lust after something and that certainly sells. Fear is an effective hot button but should be used discretely. You should use it to get the attention of your target audience and then abandon it after that. Fear will not ultimately sell your products and/or services. It merely acts as a catalyst. Another hot button that can be extremely effective is anger. A difficult economy makes people very angry and giving people a feeling that their anger is justified will make them bond with you on a significant level.

Conclusion

Human beings are very resourceful. Even in an economy such as the one that we are still experiencing now, there are ways to feel good and to motivate and be motivated. A great deal of it has to do with the attitude. Metrics, as one of the important tools, are important as a way to measure your business’s success online and knowing where you stand at all times is extremely helpful. If you and other people feel that there is hope and that the light at the end of the tunnel is within reach, they will keep striving to reach it.

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Social Media Marketing Defined

Marco Giunta — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Social media marketing is in addition to integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a multifaceted,organized marketing and advertising approach that organizations follow to connect with their target markets. Social media marketing programs usually focus on efforts to create content that draws attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. As this mode of networking has become more and more popular, it benefits in connecting with the world on any platform such as personal, political as well as business. Some of the features of social media marketing are as mentioned below:

A technology for everyone: Unlike the period where everything was exclusive and paid for, technology such as this is free for all to use.
Making World Wide Web much bigger place: Since social media is an online process the use of internet helps immensely in reaching out to a wider audience.
User-generated content: Content such as pictures, videos, blogs, news, information or any other kind of data used to be the specialization of a privileged few. Well, not anymore as advancement in online technology makes it easier for anyone to float content on a social media platform.
Is handy and scalable: Accessible to the public, social media can now be used by a diverse set of users. This not only provides people with tremendous opportunities, but also provides easy to access information and tools to work for the person’s convenience.
An information diffusion mode: The process changes how people read share or collect information and thus social media is very much capable of distributing information on a faster pace.
A constructive way to build relationships: With the help of social media marketing, people can easily share information with others. This ensures that a better relationship is built with social media as the base.
Connecting with others: There lies a tremendous opportunity to make real and meaningful connect with prospective customers. It provides a better perspective to human relationships. This personal perception thus helps many companies to find a way to establish the network with their customers and promote their message in a better fashion.
From content readers to content publishers: Consumers are not only content readers but with respect to social media, they are also the content publishers. Hence a valuable platform for people, to share any kind of relevant content with their network of followers.
Brand power: The best way to promote or publicize a brand or a product. What drives the media is the amalgamation of technology with the creativity and thus a whole new world for social media marketing is available for anyone to use.
Provision of customer service and relayed feedbacks: With the help of technology a person can easily respond back to the customer’s feedback or even provide services by coordinating with his employees.
Influencing a generation: Convincing a person to follow a brand or a product is altogether another story. Right from suggesting the idea, to its implementation and then its successful execution marketing can be an influential force in the industry.
Gain of goodwill: With the help of social media, goodwill can easily be generated for a company or a brand.

If used in a correct manner, social media marketing can be the next biggest revolution in the field of marketing. Hence its advantages can sure be a boon to the industry with exponential benefits as a result of its use. The process changes how people read share or collect information and thus social media is very much capable of distributing information on a faster pace. A constructive way to build relationships: With the help of social media marketing, people can easily share information with others. What drives the media is the amalgamation of technology with the creativity and thus a whole new world for social media marketing is available for anyone to use.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is a critical part of your business strategy. It is one of the many essential cogs in the wheel of your business that will help you to achieve success for your business.

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Leading Social Media Tips for Business

Marco Giunta — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Correct use of technology and web tools can be executed in order to assist any kind of social networking research. Profitable results can be easily achieved from social media campaigns if the professional carefully follows important social media tips.

Well-planned social media marketing: By following these social media tips, you can have a successful online brand building strategy
Accessibility: Accessibility of social media networks is the reason that social media is frequently used for brand promotion and sales strategy
Clarity: Social media strategy must be clearly outlined from the beginning and progress regularly while being monitored
Promotion: Well-planned promotion helps the organizations overall Sales and Marketing Strategy
Profitability: Profitable results can be easily achieved through social media campaigns
Being part of the discussion: Be a part of discussions with the interested consumers who engage in conversations on platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
Ongoing effort: Social networking is an ongoing effort and daily engagement to establish that sensitive connection with your target audience is a must

Some of the top social media tips are as follows:

Social media strategy must be clearly outlined from the beginning and progress must be monitored regularly. This will ensure that all of the activities are in line with predetermined objectives
Omgili is a tool that results in finding discussion threads, concerned communities, and message boards. Tools such as these are used for the specific market segments that act as a point of discussion for the interested consumers who engage in discussions on famous platforms such as Twitter or Facebook
Another popular social media tool Tweeetreach. The tool works by measuring the extent of how a tweet can act as a potential influence to the related followers and other tweeters. Hence, it is a probable and appealing implementation
Social networking is one ongoing effort and a daily engagement to establish that critical connection with your target audience is a must. First, the social media marketing can be done based on the initial set of goals so that the targeted customers can leverage the brand image to make a purchase. Also, it encourages more purchase power and results in improvement of brand image
Be patient and don’t expect immediate results
Widen the range of influence by monitoring the social media conversations, blog spaces, forums, and discussions. Try and reach the world by maximum use of the technology and Internet by participating in useful blogs and engaging in current brand promotion communities.
Make sure that the people who contributed to the social media campaign’s success are not left out of the celebrations. The responsibility of the campaign should not lie only with an individual but with the whole group, which made it successful with their contribution
There is no denying the fact that content drives the Internet. An informative post of discussion forum always acts as an added advantage for the brand or the product involved. Right from publicizing useful information to building a positive brand image, content plays an important role in the social media
Accessibility of the media is another reason that it is highly used for brand promotion. Mobiles, PDAs, and other handheld devices are the reason that a single brand can influence a prospective buyer situated at the world’s end as well
A well-planned, distributed network of information can help target people who share similar interest and are likely to support the brand. The process can be executed with the help of online tools such as Google mail, Gravatar, and Posterous where postings and sharing of content can be easily accomplished

Conclusion

The tips that have been offered here are basic and easy to employ. They will help you to improve upon what you are already doing. You have the option to choose to use all of them, some of them, or none of them. Hopefully, you will find them useful and you will enjoy greater success because of them.

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Social Media Campaign Strategies That Work

Marco Giunta — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Success takes time. Social media is an ongoing effort that requires a lot of meticulous planning and a sustained effort toward the predetermined objectives. The rules of such campaign are not defined and hence, some of the possible and effective strategies that can be made for a social media campaign.

The following are some of the possible approaches that you might want to take:

Find a suitable and befitting social media channel that can complement the image of your brand. The channel should be able to understand the value of the product or the services that is being promoted using the medium.
Plan and choose the team that can build the brand image. It is imperative that the professionals working on this project have the required skill sets and believe in the product’s brand power. Right from the PR agents or the staff members, the team has to be chosen carefully.
Make content the king. As an important part of the social media campaign, the content should focus on promotion of the benefits of the products and not be offensive or outrageous.
Carefully target the online users. Do your homework well and try to find out as much as possible about your targeted online users and then promote the brand to the users who use it more frequently. The promotion campaign can be altered per the audience and, subsequently, necessary actions can be taken.
Be aware of the brand scrutiny. Once the brand has being introduced to the market, the concerned team should be well aware of the pros and cons of the steps they have taken for its promotion. Hence, keep your eye on the conversations, posts, chats, or even the forums taking place with respect to the product.
Always be as original as possible. Use of social media channels as a method to promote the product has to be done carefully and in an original way. Use the possible benefits and reward system process for the marketing of the product in a better way.
Constantly measure the performance of efforts being put in to make sure these are in sync with the goals. It is only when the goals are achieved and return on investment (ROI) expanded that it can be estimated that the campaign was a success.

The following are some of the most famous social media campaigns of all times:

Threadless building brand love was an example of the widespread coverage of the brand on the social media channels.
Dunkin Donut’s new product campaign on Facebook.
Promotion of new Fiesta by Ford. The campaign saw use of social media to correctly target the audience in a very impressive manner.
Promotion of Xperia X1 by Sony Ericsson.
The unique formulation of the sea World’s Whale social media campaign is the best example of intelligent social media marketing. It demonstrated that a marketing campaign can be made successful even out of the realms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
These and many more successful marketing campaigns are the example of how social media strategies can be made use of to the best of their ability.

Conclusion

Social media campaigns must be designed to derive continuous engagement from the users and should also have beneficial results for the sales department. Smart allocation of resources can ensure better ROI in the event that your social media campaign is successful. Setting up short term goals and constant revisions should be the right approach to the whole strategy.

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Niche Blogs Help You to Win More Customers

Marco Giunta — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 09:00:00 +0000

When you think of having a web presence, the first thought that probably comes to mind is establishing a blog. Most companies have a blog by now whether it’s updated on a regular basis or even just now and again. But if one blog is good, wouldn’t more be better? A blog can be an excellent tool to not only set you apart but also to leave your competitors in the dust. So how do you establish more than one blog? Get vertical.

More than likely, your business can be approached from several angles. You may have a product that can serve multiple uses or crosses several industries. Each of those multiple uses can be the subject of a blog. It’s called niche blogging and it’s a great way to expand your influence. Let me give you a few examples. If you sell flowers, you can have a company blog that informs customers about everything related to the flower business. Then you might consider starting a garden blog.

In that blog, you don’t want to talk about your business, instead, you want to talk about gardening. Discuss different flower varieties, offer helpful growing tips and generally be helpful about the subject of flowers. With each post, you can link to your main website if you wish. For instance, if you write a post about growing different varieties of daisies, you can link to your main website and the product page where you sell daisies. If you are talking about a certain soil that helps things to grow, provide a link to your main website where interested gardeners can buy that soil.

Likewise, you can also address the wedding industry in another blog. Devote the entire blog to wedding flowers. Talk about what flowers go best with what color schemes, which ones make the best bouquets, and why. And always place a link back to a related page on your main website.

Niche blogs accomplish a couple of different things when used in this way. They allow you to add links back to your main website, giving your site the appearance of being what is called an authority site. Proper links to your website from seemingly unrelated sites can help your main website in the search engine rankings. So, provided that you are posting valuable information on the niche websites and linking to related pages on your main website, those links will help the search engines to consider you an authority site and, therefore, push you up in the search engine rankings.

Niche blogs also set you up as a repository of information and they get the attention of new audiences. A gardener will look online for information first but that’s not the first place they will go to buy flower seeds. Their first inclination is to get information online and then head over to the local garden shop. Few would look up the information and then do another search for a flower business to see if you have the seeds they are after. However, if you give them both the information they want and the product that can offer the solution they are after, then you have a potential new customer. A bride may operate in the same manner. Maybe she researches flowers online and then asks around for a local florist, and your name may or may not come up. But if you offer all of the information that she could possibly want about wedding flowers and then she sees that you have those flowers and you are local, you’ve again won a new customer.

Once you get the hang of it, it will become easier and easier to think up vertical markets that you haven’t tapped into yet. Corner those markets with a niche blog and you’ll be way ahead of the competition. That might be a challenge in itself. Sure, you can come up with a lot of different ways your services or product can be used that you hadn’t thought of before, that’s the easy part. The hard part is deciding who is going to fill those new blogs with content and maintain them on a regular basis.

Conclusion

Making full use of niche blogs is an excellent business approach and one that will give you a great deal of mileage when it comes to your business gaining more and more popularity and a greater number of people paying attention to what you are sharing. The more you diversify, the greater your audience base will be and, of course, that will eventually lead to greater success for you and your business.

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Blog Commenting – The True Value

Marco Giunta — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 09:00:00 +0000

One of the best things about promoting your business online is that a lot of it is free. Not only is it free but it’s accessible and allows you to reach a huge number of people at once.

There are so many easy ways to convey your message, attract customers, or build your brand that many people no longer pursue offline business and concentrate on online business. The fact is that even if your marketing budget is tight, you can still get noticed online with some no- or low-cost techniques.

How do you get the word out online about your business? Some popular approaches include link swaps, search engine optimization (SEO), and promotion through social networks. You may already be familiar with some of those methods and maybe you already use some of those techniques. Building links, keyword usage, and social media profiles all have their place in online brand promotion; however, there is another way to get your company noticed that is often overlooked. A blog commenting campaign is an excellent tool to get you noticed but so many online promotional campaigns forget to include this wonderful, free publicity.

A blog commenting campaign

What is a blog commenting campaign? A blog commenting campaign is a concerted effort to seek out blogs to comment on in order to highlight your company. With so many blogs in your industry and within related industries, there are countless opportunities to plug your company. That’s the fantastic thing about blogs; unlike a website, they are usually open for commenting. You can add your thoughts on a particular blog post, read the comments of others, and even comment on another comment. Bear in mind, however, that all that talk should be productive. A great deal of information can be passed around this way. In other words, it’s a great way to promote yourself.

Of course, you don’t want to be a blatant self-promoter in the comment section of someone’s blog. Instead, you want to establish yourself as a knowledgeable source, as someone who is part of the conversation. You need to make sure that you are commenting on the right blogs, to the right audience, and with the right message. That’s not an easy task. It takes finesse and subtlety to get your message out there while at the same time adding value to the conversation. Without this balance, your comments may get swept up in the spam filter.

So what is the best way to make your comments count? Ideally, you want to find the right blogs with the desired audience. Search for blogs that are within your industry. Include niche blogs that talk about specific products you may offer. For instance, if you sell boats, find blogs about boats on which to comment, but also search for blogs about boating, boating accessories, and anything related to boating. But don’t limit it to those blogs; check out the blogs in related industry like camping or travel. You can even check out the blogs produced by your competition and comment there. Then find a blog post that you can add information to or offer another perspective. You can even offer a counter position. Then, if possible and applicable, offer a link to your blog—but only if it’s related to the topic at hand and will add value to your comment.

Is there buzz surrounding your brand? Do customers see you as an authority in your industry? If there isn’t talk about your company in the blogosphere, a blog commenting campaign can get the buzz started. Commenting on the blogs that your customers frequent can help build awareness of your brand. It’s a technique that works and acts as a great benefit to your brand awareness; however, blog commenting can be a time-consuming process.

For a business owner it takes up valuable amounts of time to seek out the right blogs, read the content, and add to the conversation. For best results, commenting should be done on a regular basis to many different blogs. That time is usually better spent focusing on running the business. We can target the right blogs where your potential customers are and start getting you the attention you deserve.

Conclusion

It is critical that you get as much of a sense of what people are saying about your brand as possible. If you know what they are saying, you can focus on what is working and strengthen that aspect of your brand and work on improving what is not working as well. In any case, having the direct contact with the people is absolutely critical to the success of your business.

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Getting Your Customers to Spread the Word

Marco Giunta — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 09:00:00 +0000

One of the attractions of social media is that it gives customers a way to get more personal with your company. It allows them to feel that they are special because you are making yourself accessible to them. Even if you aren’t sharing your company’s most closely guarded secrets with your customers, merely reaching out to them through social media goes a long way toward building better client relations. When customers see that business with you means a two-way relationship, they are more inclined to continue with that relationship.

Building the bond

Blogs and social media profiles are wonderful ways to build this bond with your customers. Through your web presence, you can spread your message to customers, build trust, and win their loyalty. It is an excellent platform to control your public image by providing customers with insight into your company that they can’t get anywhere else. Let them in on the inner workings of your business. Share with them your business goals for the year. Give them a peek into what they can expect in the coming year. These social media marketing methods may seem unorthodox to traditional business practices but they are a new approach to doing business online.

Online, it is all about sharing. Still, most of these methods are one sided. To really be social, the discussion needs to be a two-way street. Of course, you allow (and even encourage) comments on your blog and yes, customers can also post to your Facebook page. If you take it one step further and add a forum to the site, suddenly you not only have customers and potential customers talking about your brand, they are talking and sharing within your brand. And within your web presence. With a forum or message board, you’ve instantly brought them into your world and given them the tools and encouragement to start their own discussion about your business.

Forums

A forum or message board is primarily a tool for use by your customer base. Unlike your blog or other social media channel, a forum isn’t the place you want to push your agenda. Think of it as a sign of goodwill toward your customers. It becomes another sign of trust. Opening up that forum on your site is the ultimate demonstration of transparency. For relationship building, transparency is critical and encourages trust because it shows that you have nothing to hide. And yes, it does take some resolve on your part. Anyone can say anything within that forum. However, just as easily as customers can share positive experiences, a disgruntled customer can join the forum and share negative comments with others from the inside. Of course that’s a worst-case scenario.

Although the idea of a forum is that it is primarily run by the users, the beauty of it is, however, that you still have some control. You have the ability to engage with customers and encourage positive talk. You also have the ability to engage with someone who may have had a negative experience. Engaging that customer gives you the power to possibly win them back and leave a lasting, positive impression.

So what kinds of topics can you cover with a forum or message board? You definitely want to give visitors to your forum the freedom to come up with their own topics but there is some room for you to steer the conversation. Your customers will naturally want to exchange ideas with other customers and share experiences. While it’s great for your customers to build a relationship with you and your company, it is also beneficial for them to build relationships with other customers. It helps to create a sense of community and that breeds brand loyalty. If you have a product that you sell, customers may want to see how others use the product. Ask customers to post their positive experiences with your brand. Just to show that you strive to make your company the best it can be, also ask them how your company can better meet their needs.

You can help the discussion along by suggesting other topics as well. Invite customers to post how they’ve used your products or how your services have helped them. Pose questions and ask customers to answer them or share their experiences on the topic.

Conclusion

When it comes to your business and social media, continuing discussions and interactions are both critical to your success. It is also essential that your online connections have a comfortable and safe place to discuss and interact. The easier you make it, the more people will want to be a part of your business experience.

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