Now that you are writing content and posting it on your chosen social media channels, your writing skills are bound to be improving. Even if you were a great writer before, social media can help you become even better.

When you write content for business, your approach to the language should be totally different than it is if you are posting content for personal use. The language that you use for business is much more formal than when you are sharing it with friends and family. The chances are great that the quality of your writing is a lot better now than when you first started writing and posting your content. The approach that you now take is much less selfish and focuses much more on other people. It is geared to reaching out to them and addressing their needs and wants. The following points may illustrate the differences that you see from your original writing to your writing style now:

• More “them” and less “you”: You now write a lot less about what you need and want and how wonderful you are. Instead, you gear your writing toward how you can help other people to solve their problems. In other words, you practice the marketing principle of “WIIFM” (What’s In It For Me).
   
• Clear and concise: Your writing used to be verbose and unending. Now, you write clearly and concisely. You choose your words very carefully, knowing that your readers don’t have the time or the patience to read encyclopedias. At the same time, you want to give them something of value that they can benefit from.
   
• No editing required: You no longer see the value in big words that are only used for the sake of appearing impressive. They serve no purpose for your readers (or, in turn, for you). Knowing (or hoping) that your content will be shared by others, the last thing that you want is for someone else to have to edit what you post in order to make it suitable to share with other people. If your content needs to be edited, people will not make the effort as frequently to share it as they would if all they had to do was push to button to send it to other people.
   
• Social media appropriateness: Writing content for social media is very different than writing content for any other medium. You are now able to effectively communicate your ideas in short and compelling ways. If you have a lot more that you feel you want to write on any given subject, you use a different forum (such as a blog or Ebook) to do so.
   
• No more writer’s block: You used to experience writer’s block quite frequently. Now that you have been writing for a while, your creative juices are flowing more easily than ever before. One of your biggest sources of inspiration can be what other people are writing. Ideas for your content can come from many different sources.
   
• Interactive discussions: You are involved with a lot of interactive discussions based on the content that you are posting and sharing. Those discussions (on many occasions) result in ideas for more content. People love to know that their needs are being met and that their interests are being satisfied. If you write on topics that other people tell you they would like to read about, you will be building strong relationships and they will eventually become loyal customers of yours.
   
• Write everyday: The more you write, the better your writing skills will be. If you make it a point of writing something every single day, you will find that the effort will pay off for you. By writing everyday, you are forcing yourself to evaluate your work carefully and really hone your skills, including identifying both your strong and weak points.

Conclusion

As important as it is to be persistent and consistent when it comes to your writing online, it is also important to make sure that you manage your time effectively when it comes to your involvement in social media. You should make a commitment for a certain, finite amount of time and stick as closely to that as you possibly can. When you are not interacting (or doing other important, work-related, necessary things), you should continue to hone your writing skills. The more you write, the better a writer you will become. Other people are bound to appreciate the quality of your writing and you will be tremendously proud of what you have accomplished.

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The content that you share online is informative, educational, and valuable. However, it can also come from a marketing angle. Although your interactions with other people through social media are all about building relationships, ultimately, people will buy from you.

Nowadays, there are several different ways in which you can reach other people. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are three of the most popular social media channels. On Facebook, you can write as much as you like, although other people would probably prefer shorter (rather than longer) messages. LinkedIn has a lot of possibilities when it comes to sharing content as well. In this case, the relationships that are shared are business oriented. With Twitter, the messages must be short (140-character maximum). However, that doesn’t mean that they can’t have a subtle promotional spin to them. There are several effective approaches that you can take in order to write effective marketing content and tweets. Your success depends on not only using Twitter but also writing well. The quality and the precision of the writing should be quite specific.

• The system that you use for this particular type of communication is social networking and shared messaging
• Communication is your medium
• The  form of language is language itself
• Your content should speak about branding and marketing
• Your interaction is the call-to-action that you choose to give to the person with whom you are interacting

Promotional copy

Promotional copy is very different than it is when it is in print. The way to make promotional copy successful through social media is by sharing a great deal of it and sharing it very often. By doing that, you are doing several things at the same time. You are increasing your reputation. You are building your credibility. You are positioning yourself as a subject-matter expert (SME). And you are building your credibility and trustworthiness. These are all ingredients without which you have no chance at success. There is a viral element that comes with all of this. The more your word is spread by others, the more popular your ideas will be and the more people will pay attention to you. They will tell their friends, who will tell their friends, who will tell their friends, etc. The success of your business is very dependent on word of mouth. In that way, it differs greatly from other forms of promotion. With social media, you rely on other people’s willingness to engage with each other and their willingness to share your information with others.

Promotional copy and social media

Your content and tweets must reflect the way that people communicate and interact through social media. In this case, the relationship that you are trying to promote is between prospective clients and your brand. If you succeed at having people form those relationships, you will succeed at getting those people to buy what you are selling. Of course, social media is an extremely personal medium and the messages that you are giving to others uses the various social media channels as their vehicle. The delivery of the communication is direct and instantaneous. The way that you make your offerings appealing to other people is through words. You create images and ideas through your words.

Conclusion

Writing content and tweets that market your offerings will give you a great deal of mileage. You should think about it as an extended form of speech. The success of your content depends totally on how creative and how vivid you are able to make your ideas. You can design your content in whichever way you feel works as long as your promotion is subtle and in good taste. Just remember that above all, it needs to be informative, valuable, and educational. Most importantly, it needs to solve the problems of the people with whom you are interacting.

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You have established yourself as a subject matter expert in your niche. People continue to read your content because it offers answers to their problems. What they don’t want from you is to do a hard sell on them.

If you try to overtly sell anything to anyone, you will most likely not succeed and in the process, you may lose some very valuable business relationships. In fact, if your writing is about selling, they won’t bother to read your content at all. They will read other people’s content and become loyal to them instead of to you.

When it comes to your promoting your business, there is definitely an appropriate place and time to communicate about what you offer. In fact, it is appropriate to put your call-to-action in a resource box at the bottom of a blog article that you have posted and syndicated as well as putting some type of promotional content on your website’s landing page. Of course, it is not advisable for you to do this before you have established a relationship with your online connections that is solid and one in which those people find you credible and trustworthy. It is extremely important that your content is informational and educational and doesn’t in any way read like an infomercial.

Another good reason to steer clear of self-promotion in your content is that you will have a more difficult time getting it published, especially if you submit your articles to business directories. The reputable business directories have strict guidelines when it comes to what they will accept and what they will not accept. There are many ways in which content can come across as being self-promotional, which should be avoided whenever possible. The following are types of content that you would be better off avoiding:

• Mentioning money: Mentioning any money amount in your articles does not offer any real value to your readers. It doesn’t give them anything that they can walk away with. It is no different than the content that you would find in an advertisement. On the other hand, if you give people information that they want and need, they will keep coming back to you for more and more information.
   
• Dropping names: The only appropriate place to put your call-to-action in your article is in the resource box at the bottom of the page. The article body should be used for tips, hints, tricks, and other substantive copy. The concept is that you entice them with valuable information and once they have become interested in what you have to say, you provide them with a way to continue the relationship with you by giving them your contact information.
   
• Reviews of other products: It is perfectly acceptable for you to post unbiased reviews of other people’s products and services as long as you have no connection to them. Remember, of course, that it is important that you don’t provide a direct link to the owner of the products and services because that would be promotional on their behalf.
   
• No outline: Writing from an outline is a great tool. Once you have finished writing an outline that you feel you can depend on, you should stick to it as religiously as possible. The outline will keep you focused and on track in your mission to stay away from any sort of promotional content.
   
• Wishy-washy messages in your title: It is very important to have a strong article title (always) and to also make sure that your title ties in closely with the rest of the article. Your message should be clear and focused. Your goal is to get your readers to stick with you and read the entire article and then want to read more and more of what you are writing.

The heart of the problem with content that is self-promotional

The problem with content that is self-promotional is that its goal is to convert readers into customers right away. It is not a healthy relationship if your readers become clients before you have had a chance to develop a relationship with them in which they have come to trust you and consider you an expert in your niche or industry. Building credibility is critical to the success of your business. If you don’t have credibility, you won’t have customers. You need to make sure that if you go anywhere near promotional ideas in your content, you are subtle and you don’t make it all about selling. It is always important to make the other person feel that they are in control of making their own decisions and if you build a solid relationship with him or her and they eventually want to buy from you, they will do so wholeheartedly.

Conclusion

The interactions that you have online for your business are key to your success. The relationships that you share with others must be cultivated, nurtured, coddled, and maintained on a regular and consistent basis. At the heart of those relationships is human emotions. The hard sell has no place in that phase of the relationship. The reason that people will eventually want to buy from you is that they trust you and believe that you will give them the best products and services for them based on your deep understanding of what they need and want.

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As  you get more and more immersed in writing and publishing content for business, you need to take your target audience into consideration is a big way. It isn’t enough to just write. You need to target your audience.

Your marketing plan

When you write your marketing plan at the very beginning of your social media marketing strategy implementation, your target audience will probably be mentioned. However, when you are working with social media, your target audience is not always a static entity. In other words, you may have identified a target audience initially but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will end up targeting the same audience over time. So, how do you identify the appropriate target audience for your business and how do you customize your content for those audiences?

• For your niche: One of the main focuses of your content is to gear it to your niche or industry. You can no longer rely on print media to share valuable and informative information in the broad and comprehensive way that it was once communicated but this has opened the door to a tremendous opportunity online. You can now position yourself online as a subject matter expert (SME) so that you can build credibility and the relationships that you form will prove to be valuable over time.
   
• For your clients and prospects: As is always the case, when you provide content for your customers and prospective customers to read, your content is offering them a solution to their problems and it is answering their questions easily and in a precise manner. That content is generally in the form of a blog post, which has effective and appropriate keywords and key phrases, can be found easily by your audience and is intuitive when it comes to giving them what they need and want.
   
• For your clients to make use of: Another excellent approach when it comes to your content is to offer content that is easy for your clients to use. You should think about the content as a type of sales tool. Your ultimate goal is to sell your products and/or services and in this case, you are not selling directly. Instead, you are getting your clients to sell for you. If your clients are loyal to you and your business, they won’t have any problem telling other people about your offerings. You will never run the risk that your clients are not being genuine when they speak about your offerings because they truly believe in what you are selling. Sincerity is an extremely powerful magnet when it comes to buying.
   
• For your consumers: As one business to another, you can gear your content to your consumers. Sharing content is an excellent way to reach them like you have never been able to reach them before. The messages in your content need to be very precise and it is of vital importance that you as the business owner build a strong relationship with them directly. No middle people are required. Even if your consumers are already loyal to your brand, you should make the effort to take the deeper dive into having a human relationship with them. It will enhance the entire business experience.

Conclusion

There are many different ways to target your content to your target audience. As is and will always be the case, you main objective is to fulfill the needs of others. It is of little importance how wonderful you and your offerings are if you are not able to solve the problems of your clients and prospects. Always remember to keep WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) at the forefront of your mind. If you do that, they will want to be involved with you and your business and they will eventually buy what you are selling. If, on the other hand, you let the needs of your clients and prospects go by the wayside, you will be holding yourself and your business back tremendously. If, on the other hand, you provide the right audience with the right content, they will want to continue to interact with you and will gladly accept what you are offering.

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The content that you write and share with others is critical to the success of your business. Does your content truly tell a story and is it persuasive? If done effectively, it will go a very long way.

The social media world and how it relates to business is entirely different than any other world. As a business owner, the most effective way to boost your reputation and exposure online is to share as much high-quality, informative, educational and exciting content as you possibly can. With that in mind, you need to ask yourself if your content is exciting enough to your readers and if it really tells your story.

It is well known that the success of your business using social media is based on the relationships that you develop and maintain. The next step after establishing a relationship is to get the other person interested in what you are offering. There are some key questions that you will want to ask in your effort of convincing others to be a part of what you are doing. Some of the answers that you will need in order to proceed are:

• What are the current opinions and beliefs of the members of your target audience?
   
• What reservations do they have before deciding to do what you are suggesting?
   
• Which factors influence them the most?
   
• Which factors motivate them to behave the way that they do?
   
• Which outcomes are they looking for?
   
• What might stand in the way of their deciding to do what you are suggesting?

Once you have been able to secure answers to those questions, you can use the information as part of your social media marketing campaign. You can craft the information into a story that is complete and effective. Effective and compelling content is very powerful. It can take a nonbeliever and turn him or her into someone who is in full support of what you are doing and what you are offering. The entire decision is based on the effect that the content has on them. A wonderful way to reach your target audience and to turn around their thinking is by writing content that touches your audience members in a way that makes them believe that you will be solving their problems. By the way, you don’t have to confine your content to words only. You can also share video content, graphic images, events, etc.

There are several approaches that you can use when trying to touch your audience.

• Enhancing content: You take the original content, which contains your business proposal and customization, and you make it better and mix it up a bit.
   
• Content sharing: This is content that you promote by word of mouth, republishing, referrals, and sharing socially.
   
• Internalizing content: This is the persuasion of the change in the behaviors of your target audience to get them to come around to your way of thinking.
   
• Understanding the content: This is a deep understanding on the part of your audience members. It is a grasp of the big picture on their part.
   
• Engaging content: This is when your audience wants to get more involved with you and your business than merely reading your content. They interact with you by posting questions and comments on what you have shared with them.

Your storytelling content should include success stories that demonstrate the point(s) that you are trying to make. Additionally, as part of your social media marketing campaign, you should have a process in place from the beginning that engages prospective clients, converts them at the appropriate time, implements the work that you will be doing with them and promotes success. The stories of success can be a variety of different types, as long as they all express the same message. Once you have developed a relationship with your audience to such an extent, you should look upon them as people who can be strong advocates for you and your business in the future.

Conclusion

You have heard the expression “Content is king” thousands of times. It certainly is true. Your content must be compelling, creative, exciting and extremely helpful to others. It must make sense on a persona level to your audience. Your content needs to tell a story—the whole story.

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When visitors go to your website and/or social media profiles, the first place they go is your landing page. If they have an interest past your landing page, they will probably go to your “About Us” page to learn more.

There are numerous websites with all kinds of information and all kinds of looks and feels. When a website visitor decides to go to the “About Us” page, he or she is on a fact-finding mission, as well as looking for the “story” of your business. If your website merely speaks about your products and/or services, you are selling it short. People are interested in learning a great deal more than just that about you and your business.

Of course, different visitors are interested in different types of information. One of the first and most elementary pieces of information that your visitors are looking for is who you are and how you came to be where you are at this point. Your “About Us” page is an excellent way to communicate to your visitors who you are and to give them the confidence to understand that you and your business possess the skills and experience that they need to be able to solve their particular problems. Your “About Us” page should answer the following questions:

• Who are we?
• Why should you choose us over someone else (WIIFM – What's In It For Me)?
• What do we do?
• When did we start?
• How do we do it?

When you are speaking about who you are, it is a good idea to include photos of you and your key staff members as well as biographical sketches for each of you. The sketches should highlight educational background and work experience. That information is of great comfort to someone who might be on the fence regarding whether to buy your products and/or services.

When faced with the concept of why someone should choose to work with you instead of choosing someone else, you need to state a flawless case of what’s in it for them. How wonderful your products and services are and how nice everything that you offer looks is of little importance. All your readers are concerned about is what they will get out of a business relationship with you. They need to understand what you can do to help them solve their problems.

The page should have a description of your business, which answers the “What do we do?” question. It should also have a mission statement, which will explain they you do what you do. Of equal importance is to explain your business team, so that people can relate to you and your staff on a humanistic level.

If they see that you have serious training and work experience in the area about which they are interested, they will feel comfortable. Another good thing to communicate is how you came to where you are now, particularly if you have a unique and compelling story to tell.

The content on your “About Us” page must address all of the important points regarding your business; however, it is a great idea to throw in some tidbits that are not necessarily connected to what you are doing now but which add another dimension to your presence. Your content on that page needs to really communicate what is different about your business and should have a clear message as to why people should buy from you instead of from someone else.

You should communicate in a clear and concise manner. The information on that page says a great deal in terms of how it represents your business and what it stands for. You can’t separate what you are as a business from how you are represented online.

Your information should give the right amount and type of information and you shouldn’t worry so much about giving too much away. If your visitors are truly interested in going further in your relationship together, they will. Always remember to include a call to action, which enables your visitors to get a hold of you, either by phone or by Email.

Your online presence is all about relationships and interactions with people. The more you interact on a personal level, the easier it will be to build relationships with your readers and eventually, they will become your customers.

Conclusion

There are many different types of visitor who check out your “About Us” page. There are first-time visitors, regular visitors, people who want to share a relationship with you and work with you and potential customers. With every type of visitor to your website, you want to be able to offer enough informative and useful information to persuade them to establish a much stronger connection with you and your business (such as becoming a fan, user, or customer).

Although not everyone who visits your website will end up visiting your “About Us” page, you need to make sure to entice those people who do click on the page. You will accomplish this by having content that is insightful, interesting and eventually makes your visitors believe that they can’t live without what you are offering.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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“All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary – it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.” Somerset Maugham. As a business person with an online presence, you write for the Web.

It doesn’t really matter which type of business you are in. If you have a website and/or a blog (which the majority of business people do nowadays), you either write the content yourself or you have someone else write the content for you. So, how do you get your web writing to stay consistent and compelling over time?

Which style guide should you follow?

The answers that you get to that question will vary, depending on whom you ask. There are several style guidelines to which web writers defer. Among them are the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook and the much newer Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.

It is interesting to understand the differences between the style guides and the motivation behind why Yahoo felt compelled to release a style guide when AP has been considered the “gold standard” for such a long time, including the approach on a large number of commonly used online terms. The bottom line for you as a writer is that if you have integrity about the content that you are offering to others, you still care about editing, attribution and the assurance of reliable and credible sources of information.

Yahoo says that their style guide is different because it offers guidelines exclusively for writing on the web and that it discusses web-related topics, including topics on how to help people optimize web pages. The big question is whether AP and Yahoo can work together successfully to truly help people to write their web content and not confuse anyone.

The Associated Press and Yahoo style guides both offer useful guidance for everyone who consults them. The combination of the two books gives comprehensive advice on traditional writing as well as optimization for the web. People may be inclined to go to the AP Style Guide more often because it offers broader guidelines for the English language, grammar, punctuation and usage. The Yahoo style guide, on the other hand, targets a much narrower audience and focuses on the particular needs of certain writers.

Some people are of the opinion that the Yahoo style guide is not necessary because people have deferred to AP for such a long time. However, it is important to think in a more flexible and open-minded manner with the popularity of social media and peoples’ heavy involvement with online communications.

Which style guide should you consider the “gold standard”?

The AP Style Guide has established standards that, if followed, give the writing a journalistic voice, which also works well for the web. Short, clear and concise writing not only appeals to readers of print media but it also appeals to readers of online content. People don’t have the time or the patience to read long, complicated, involved content no matter how it is delivered.

Of course, there is some overlap between the two style guides. The most sensible approach may be to consult the AP style guide first and if there is some issue or question that has not been answered by AP, you should consult Yahoo. In other words, use AP as your primary source and use Yahoo as your secondary source.

Conclusion

Two reputable style guides have been discussed here. Both guides offer valuable advice, with one offering guidance that is more traditional in nature on the whole and one that is more contemporary. They are both essential to achieving consistency in your online writing and in presenting writing that flows, is well written and that appeals to the readers and makes them want to continue reading whatever you and your business offer them.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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At the root of content marketing is a clear understanding of what your customers need and the ability to satisfy their needs in an informative, compelling manner. Your content should be engaging and should promote further discussions.

There are many ways in which to market content effectively. One of the reasons why content marketing is effective is because it is not pushy. The information that you publish is educational in nature and you don’t ask for anything in return. You can expect people to be receptive to this type of marketing because they don’t feel threatened in any way.

The following are some tips that will help you to accomplish your marketing goals when it comes to online content:

• Establishing trust: Without trust, people will not buy what you are selling. The first thing that you need to do is to listen to your customers. The easiest and most effective way to understand their needs is to ask them questions. Once you understand what their issues are, you can solve them. By offering them useful and informative content, you will be doing just that. The more helpful content you offer them, the stronger your relationship with them will be and the more they will trust you.
• Listen: Listening to what is being said about your company, your customer service, your brand and your competition is the start of your content marketing campaign. Traditional marketing methods for accumulating data for your business include focus groups, customer surveys, and other tools for acquiring customer feedback. Online discussions, however, can be tracked and measured with free tools such as Search.Twitter.com, Google Alerts, etc.
• Pay attention to analytics: It is very important to pay close attention to what people are searching for online. There are tools that allow you to understand which keywords are popular. Web analytics tell you which specific keywords drive traffic to your website and exactly which pages people go to when they want to find answers.
• Stop selling: If you push your products too much in your online content, you will turn off your customers and potential customers. Your customers want to be educated in some way. In other words, they want to learn something from you that they didn’t know before. Not only do they crave the education but they want it with no hard sell attached. No strings attached! When you offer high-quality content to your customers and potential customers, they will start to trust you and to feel that you are credible.
• Publish great-quality content: Content that is well written as well as educational is like a nugget of gold. The content, if written correctly, is enticing and entertaining and it makes the readers feel that they want to return time after time for more. With that in mind, your content marketing campaign must contain top-quality content, which is written by writers who really know how to tell a story well. It is important that you be selective when it comes to deciding which content to publish and make sure that the quality of the content that you publish is always the very best.
• Offer tips: The content that you offer must be informative, insightful and useful to your customers. You should make sure that your content contains helpful tips and sound advice. Tips are very important because very often they turn prospects into customers. Your tips will often either solve your customers’ problems or improve the quality of their lives in some other way. This will cause them to gain more trust in you.
• Talk the talk: It is extremely important for you to have a good handle on how to “speak” with people in your industry. You need to be certain that you have the perfect voice for your audience. You should do a thorough amount of research before you even think about establishing a voice. If you do that, you will be able to connect with your audience more effectively as well as having a better chance of being recognized favorably by the search engines.
• Solve your customers’ problems: You should offer content to your customers that specifically communicates how your products can solve their problems. Always make sure that you follow the marketing principle “WIIFM” (What’s In It For Me?). You can offer the most amazing products and/or services in the universe; however, if those products and services don’t solve your customers’ problems, it won’t matter.
• Write regularly and frequently: It is important to get as much content as possible out there. You should make sure to work content writing and publishing into your weekly schedule. No matter what frequency you choose for this, make sure that you are consistent each week. People will start to look forward to seeing your fresh content on certain days of the week each week.

Conclusion

Content marketing, along with the other types of marketing (online as well as traditional) are all important elements that make up a successful marketing campaign. You should consider that all of the parts need to work together to make the campaign a great success. Content really is an important part of the success of your business. The more useful information you share with your readers, the more they will appreciate your expertise and credibility and the more they will consider you trustworthy.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Having powerful and successful marketing messages for your business is essential for success. Your core marketing messages need to make your potential clients understand that you can solve their problems. This will make them decide to hire you.

As surprising as it is, there are many solo practitioners who don’t put the same kind of effort into their marketing messages. They may have a website built, which explains in great detail how they are able to solve their clients’ problems. Based on their Internet presence, very few people are paying attention to them and they don’t understand why.

You must have a very well-developed and well-defined core marketing message. The core marketing message is the message that you want to get across to your potential customers.

It is the message that will convince your potential customers that you have the answer to their problems. In other words, you have answered the question: What’s in it for them? Your business’s success is totally dependent on your marketing message being extremely clear and effective.

Marketing, whether it is online or traditional, is still marketing. One of the common marketing principles, which is an easy principle to follow, uses the “4 Ps”: price, product, positioning and promotion.

Your Internet marketing strategy is the main principle that you want to bring across, which you have personalized for your potential customers. Just as in traditional marketing, your online marketing campaign must identify the needs of your potential customers. In an Internet marketing campaign, as is the case with a traditional marketing campaign, you will always speak directly with your potential customers.

An important factor that is unique to Internet marketing is privacy. When it comes to the Internet, people are very concerned about their privacy. They need to be able to feel that their information is secure and safe. They need to be able to feel that they can trust you with their information.

Your privacy policy, which will give your customers and potential customers peace of mind, needs to be easily accessible. You should never assume that your customers know about your privacy policy. It is your responsibility to tell them about it.

Introduce yourself

The reason that you are marketing your business in the first place is so that people will choose to hire you. As basic as that concept is, it definitely should never be overlooked. You need to state who you are in your marketing message. All of your marketing materials should have the name of your business on them. You do that so that your potential clients will remember your business’s name, even if they don’t make a commitment to hire you right away.

When you introduce yourself, you should keep it simple. You don’t want to speak about yourself too much because that could distract your potential customers and, in the worst-case scenario, push them away. Your potential customers are much more interested in what you can do for them than who you are.

Identify problems

Another very important factor to focus on in your core marketing message is the actual problem that needs to be solved. It is essential because that is how your marketing messages will touch people. It will make them feel that you can solve their particular problem. They will feel that you are personally taking care of them.

Offer an outcome

After you have been able to identify the problem, you would normally offer a solution and explain the process that you would follow to get to that solution. However, what people with problems really want is for you to offer them a positive outcome. You need to make your potential customers understand exactly why they need you. It is essential for you to identify specific outcomes. You must learn what your potential clients want to get out of the situation, figure out if you are able to provide it for them and offer it to them.

You need to take each of the problems that you have previously identified and incorporate them into your core marketing message. With each problem, you should ask yourself “What is the best outcome that your potential customers are expecting?” Once you have been able to identify the outcomes, they will serve you well as marketing tools in your core marketing campaign.

Of course, before you discuss an outcome with your potential customers, you need to make sure that you have a process in place that will back it up and ensure that the outcome will occur.

Putting everything together

Building a comprehensive core marketing message that identifies you, pinpoints that problem that you are able to solve and gives your potential customer a strong sense of how his or her life will be after the problem is solved is essential to the success of your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Your business makes a promise about your brand to your customers every time they interact with you. Whether they buy online or in a physical store, you are responsible for thanking them.

Many businesses don’t properly leverage their thank you page to build relationships with their customers and to reinforce their brands. The relationship between a business and its customers goes beyond the website and its content. It continues onto the thank you page and all of the way through to the delivery of the product and/or service to the customer.

Many business people who sell their goods and services forget to say thank you after someone has made a purchase from them. It is a simple gesture that goes a long way. We know that we must say thank you in our personal lives so why do we forget to say thank you in our professional lives?

The customer comes across your website, takes time to look around at what you have to offer and makes a decision to buy something from you, sign up for a whitepaper or register to one of your seminars. What then pops up is an unbranded, somewhat generic default thank you page that leaves the customer feeling rather empty.

Your thank you page is an extremely important tool that you should make full use of when you are trying to connect with your customers.

Re-engage your customers

You should use your thank you page to re-engage your customers by letting them know about your new products and services. You should discretely entice them to indulge in your new offerings and encourage them to return to your website with a coupon for a future purchase.

Because the customer already trusts you enough to buy from you, it will be easy to introduce them to your new products and services. You need to make it very attractive for them by offering some sort of promotion. At the same time, take the opportunity to tell them about offerings that will be available in the near future. You might also want to run a contest or event. You can provide them with a link so that they can participate.

Reinforce your brand

Your thank you page is a wonderful place to reinforce your brand. You can also use the page for marketing messages, commitment and education of your customers. You can provide them with helpful information that they can apply to their own business. You can also offer a free gift. This offering will let your customers know that you have something of increased value for your customers.

The main goal of your thank you page is to leave a lasting impression on your customers. If you make it really unique and very connected to your brand, it will absolutely achieve that goal.

If customers are sent to a thank you page that has the same look and feel as the rest of your website, they will have a feeling of continuity. They will not experience that warm, fuzzy feeling if they are taken to an impersonal, generic thank you page.

A common mistake that many businesses make is that they have a great and extremely effective website, which has great and valuable content and successfully convinces people to sign up for what they are offering. However, their thank you page totally falls short. You should take this opportunity to stand above your competition and leave a strong and long-lasting impression on your customers through your thank you page.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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