How to Effectively Introduce Your Company's Updated Brand

Marketing a new brand is a big undertaking that involves a wide array of challenges and obstacles. But when done right, a brand transformation can bring exciting new opportunities for growth. Careful planning is essential. A conscientious focus on budgets and strategic milestones for implementation will help ensure an effective rebranding process that customers will understand and appreciate. If you've recently rebranded your business, here are some important guidelines to remember while introducing your new brand to your prospects and customers.

4 Free Tools To Take Your Customer Support to the Next Level

Every company wants to support customers, but few actually prioritize support. There's enough to do just to get a product and business off the ground to make it a focus. But it should be--timely, helpful, or personalized customer support can make the difference between a loyal user and a former one. And it's a lot easier to improve your customer support than you might think. To go from average to amazing customer support, you don't necessarily need to hire a bunch of new support staff. You need to find ways to build support into every part of your business.

4 Tips for Maximizing the User's Advertising Experience

2015, in many ways, was a year in which digital advertising failed the consumer, and many of these fed-up users finally took a stand with ad-blocking. From irrelevant ads to intrusive ad formats, it’s never been more clear that the industry could be doing so much better. This year, it’s way past time for brands and agencies to start putting consumers’ needs and their state of mind first when delivering mobile advertising. In the fast-paced digital era, consumers put a high premium on their time and attention, and expect to have control over their interactions with brands, on their terms, especially on their most personal device – mobile. The advertising world needs to recognize that, and there needs to be a user-first paradigm shift in mobile advertising that looks something like this:

6 Tools to Develop an Outstanding Social Media Marketing Strategy

In today's technological world, it seems that social media dominates everything. This can make it difficult for a company to stand out. Big companies as well as smaller companies and entrepreneurs will be all over social media, trying to gain the attention of customers. All of this can make it harder for the less social media-adept companies to get a foothold among their competitors.

All of these companies want to get in on the social media craze and use it to their advantage, to advertise and market themselves to all the users out there. But there are so many different social media channel out there, and so many different ways to market on social media. What can a company do to make themselves stand out among the crowd of other companies on social media? What strategies are there they could use?

How to Connect With Your Leads

Connecting with the leads that you have gained as result of your marketing efforts can be very hard for a multitude of small businesses. However, if you are interested in having a work from home enterprise that will prosper for a long time, you must learn how to navigate the deep waters of lead connection. The following article will delve into several ways to connect with all of your leads.

The simple fact of the matter is that we were all created differently. This means that no two leads are the same. These are not just names that you have obtained from your marketing activities, but people that are interested in the product or service that you have to offer.

Why the Best Companies Always Have the Best Customer Service

I have never heard of anyone who has had a bad customer experience with Amazon, Apple, Costco, or Salesforce. The aforementioned companies are incredibly successful due, in large part, to a material focus on the customer experience. Not surprisingly, the stock market has handsomely rewarded these four companies over the past decade. 

Amazon is so customer focused that it will literally send you a replacement for a lost package immediately without ever implying that the customer is at fault. The result is a consumer experience that is so optimal that Amazon is the only place where many consumers decide to shop online. 

Content Marketing Lessons for beginners

Ever since the age of digital marketing began, content marketing has become a signature outbound strategy. According to Content Marketing Institute's latest research, 88% of B2B and 76% of B2C marketers are doing content marketing.

According to Assignment Masters, a company providing essay writing services, as the strategy becomes more popular every year, more marketers are joining the trend. If you're a beginner at content marketing, here are 6 important lessons that can jumpstart your campaign's success.

Which channel serves you better?

Businesses make day-to-day choices in their operations. Decision-making is a very important aspect of daily business. As a matter of fact, whatever choice a business entity makes is essential and must play a vital role in the progress of the business. Let us take a very key department in any company, marketing; Marketing has evolved and any company looking to reach its target group must make conscious effort to make key decisions in marketing to reach its desired group of prospective customers. Due to the advent of technology, there is electronic and digital forms of marketing. Social media has made it possible for a new avenue to be created in marketing.

How Facebook is trying to bring on more small business as advertisers

On Facebook you'll find business Pages for cabinet makers, cupcake bakers, people crafting flower arrangements shaped like teddy bears, and so much more. And 3 million of those businesses now actively advertise with Facebook, up 50% from last year, with small businesses representing the "vast majority" of that number, according to a new company blog post.

More than 70% of those advertisers come from outside the United States, and Southeast Asia has seen the most growth. 

6 tips for positive brand building

When we launched the Credit Karma platform in 2008, we were offering free credit scores at a time when consumers were used to deception from other companies, often getting pulled into expensive subscription programs when they thought they were getting their credit scores for free.

Because of this, one of our first goals as a company was to elevate our name above everyone else's. We've done this while consciously attempting to avoid making negative statements about other companies, and we've tried to always put actions before words. It's left us battling competing impulses at times--accentuating our own positives, without directly calling out another company's negatives--but I think we've learned to walk this line well.

How would Steve Jobs improve Customer Experience

Steve Jobs was a true customer experience and user experience thought leader, wildly and repeatedly successful at transforming the customer experience for millions of customers worldwide, through Apple’s computers, mobile devices, the experience at the Apple Store, and in many other ways.

And his approach was based on a very simple message that he drilled into his team over and over and over: You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology--not the other way around.

In other words, the technology sold by Apple, or used by Apple in support of the customer experience, doesn’t have to be invented at Apple. And the technology Apple has lying around at its disposal doesn't have to end up being used.

How to make personal marketing work?

Let’s face it — U.S. marketers spent nearly $60 billion in 2015 on digital ads, but the industry doesn’t do a great job connecting people with products they want. According to Christophe Primault, CEO of GetApp, just 10% of consumers find what they’re looking for when interacting with online content. The key to relevant messaging lies with data, but the challenge is no longer collecting it. Each day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Today’s challenge is using data to deliver customers more contextual, personalized impressions. Imagine a world where programs execute optimized, data-driven campaigns tailored to each consumer.

Selling is helping the buying

I was sitting alongside the MD of a European MNC’s operations in India. We were meeting a team representing a major American software company. The salesperson in-charge of the account walked in with his Country Manager, and a technology expert. The Country Manager simply hijacked the meeting by virtue of his seniority. He had a few things to ‘tell’ us about the product, and those chosen features were faithfully elaborated upon by his Techie Product Expert.

The fundamentals of marketing communication

Most of the verbal communicating you do is from one individual to another. This is true whether you’re in a family, social, or a work setting.
One-on-one verbal communication affords the greatest opportunity for precision, because immediate feedback can tell you whether you were understood accurately.

But communicating effectively involves more than just accuracy.

The purpose of most communication is to influence the attitudes and behaviors of those whom we address. Since the human race is composed of billions of individuals, each with a different way of responding, no one approach is universally effective. So it’s important that you learn to express yourself accurately and in a way that will accomplish your purpose toward the individual you’re addressing.

A remarkable story of customer delight

Ritz-Carlton Hotels are renowned for their brilliant customer service, and I often refer to them in my presentations on customer delight and the fact that all their staff have the authority to spend up to $2,000 to resolve a customer’s problem without having to refer to a manager! Well, here’s a wonderful story of this in action, and it involves Joshie The Giraffe!

When Chris Hurn’s family came back from their holiday at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island in Florida they unfortunately returned without Joshie The Giraffe, Chris’s young son’s ‘best friend’! They had left him behind, and as you can imagine this caused huge stress and problems sleeping!

Marketing 101 – Marketing blunders; How to avoid them

A few months back, Delta Airline came under serious criticism from social media fanatics for depicting Ghana with a Giraffe in a tweet the company sent out after the Black Stars’ defeat to the USA in their 2014 World Cup opener. The company had to apologise for something it could have easily avoided if it had committed to making the necessary enquiries. Would it have hurt for the company to do its background research before putting such information on Twitter, one of the most fertile social media platforms for business?      

In this modern age of digital communications, it is imperative for businesses to exercise extreme caution in the type of information they put out. You have to maximise efforts in ensuring that whatever advert or branding you put out connects positively with the target audience, especially when you are entering new markets. Here are a few pointers on what to do;

Is your Company at risk of losing data?

Data

According to the IT Trust Curve survey report by EMC Corporation, security breaches cost organisations several hundred thousand dollars more on average than other commonly occurring IT incidents.

While respondents reported an average financial loss of $860,273 due to breaches, incidents such as data loss and downtime also impacted organisations heavily – costing businesses $585,892 and $497,037, respectively, over the course of a year.

Common Marketing Mistakes

Marketing your company does not have to be difficult or expensive. There are many techniques you can use to draw attention to your product or service without having to break the bank. People want the advantages that come with good marketing but sometimes, they make some pretty silly mistakes. Here are a few of them.

Making the Uniqueness of your Brand Known

Imagine this; you have finally been called for an interview you have been looking forward to for months. Now is the moment of truth and you do not want to miss any detail;  you bring out the new skirt suit and shoes you have been saving for this special day; all necessary documents set and confidence hoisted;  you are indeed poised and set for action. You get to the organisation’s premises; you are ushered to the waiting room and then boom! It happens; two other candidates, all but their faces, are rocking the same outfit as you are. This was totally unexpected and you do not have any backup plan. What are you going to do? For some people, this will be like the derailing moment of their life or more like the Titanic sinking slowly with just twenty lifeboats onboard. Now the question is; how do you convince your prospective employers that despite wearing the same outfit as the others, you have something unique your fellow applicants do not possess? This is where advertising comes in. You need to create awareness about yourself; enough for your potential employers to take action, in other words, choose you!

Good Product vs. Good Marketing

The ultimate goal of a company is to deliver a product or service to its consumers. Having a good product is a given. Consumers expect your product or service to be good. But having a good product is almost certainly not enough to ensure success. As a general rule, sales and marketing success is a function of how your product or service is perceived by customers. It does not matter what you think about your product or service. It ONLY matters what customers think about it.