What Is Personalized Marketing?

Personalized marketing is tailoring your marketing message to an individual. Personalization ranges from personalized video to personalized emails to customized product recommendations and everything in between! With the advancement of technology, customers now expected personalized or customized marketing messages. Read on to learn how to do it right.

How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign That Gets Results

Is email marketing dead? Not if it’s done right! The key is doing your homework before you even start: identify the goals of the campaign, define your audience, determine how you will engage that audience, and build the best possible target list. Many businesses struggle with email marketing, but a well thought out plan often leads to success. Obviously, the email should look good, but more important are an effective subject line and engaging copy. The call-to-action should be prominent and unambiguous and spell out exactly what you want your audience to do. Whether it’s a one-time eblast or a longer-term lead nurturing campaign, make your emails timely, relevant, interesting and valuable, and your audience will begin to look forward to your next mailing!

Everyone Is Not Your Customer: That’s OK

Have you found your niche customer segment? Being able to find the “right” customer for your business is critical to your success and will help you focus on the right marketing mix. The first step is to create a buyer persona – a fictional ideal customer. Armed with this information, you can make informed decisions.

Surveys, Complaints, and the Value of Regularly Scheduled Listening

Who doesn’t get excited about survey responses, right? Right?!

In case it’s not coming through on screen, that was written in a sarcastic tone. Creating and managing customer surveys online (or paper, or phone surveys) is rarely earthshaking. Survey response rates are often low, and responses tend to roll in rather slowly. But the insight from even a very small number of respondents can be invaluable to planning and executing your marketing and sales strategy.

Customer Surveys Are Worthwhile

Low response rates do not necessarily indicate failure. The voice of the customer always has value. An ongoing collection of input (and responding to that input) positions your company to be successful in several key areas.

Our advice? Keep asking questions. And even more important: Listen.

Of course there are things you can do to improve your customer surveys and response rates. See below for tips to improve your surveys and feedback forms. But remember, how you handle the process and what you do with the responses is every bit as important as the collection process. To put it simply, you need to make listening to the customer a habit.

Customer Stories = Marketing Gold

If you don’t already monitor your “listening” channels, make a list and check it twice (or more) in the coming year. A robust website should have several touchpoints or data collection tools. Consider how you use those on your website:

• RFP/RFQ Buttons
• Contact Forms
• Social Sharing icons
• Sign up for newsletters/promotional communications
• Thank you for shopping with us auto-responders
• Sale cancelled/abandoned cart follow-up emails with surveys

Employees, Vendors and Partners Have Stories Too

Speaking of the voice of the customer, one thing we hear repeatedly from our small business customers is how valuable it is to have regularly scheduled marketing meetings with a team of people – both internal staff (a cross-functional team is great) and in-sourced marketing experts. In monthly marketing meetings with our clients, we consider all customer reviews, complaints, survey results, anecdotes, and other input, and discuss it briefly in the opening few minutes of a monthly marketing meeting. That input informs not only marketing strategies but often, also the company’s overall business direction.

Hidden Value, Surprising Benefits of Using Surveys in Your Business

We say surveys are a marketing “gold mine” because surveys –

• Provide a mechanism to listen to customers
• Personalize your brand
• Strengthen your relationship with your customers. (Even if they don’t complete your survey, making one available creates a line of communication.)

Listen, and Share

While constantly running promotions and discounting your products is not recommended, listening all the time absolutely is. We’ll go so far as to call it a best practice. But, listening isn’t enough. Listening and using customer feedback to improve operations isn’t even enough. You have to share, too.

By the way, this is one of the reasons why we like Yext Ultimate Reviews so much – the powerful tool makes getting client reviews and adding them to your website easy and attractive – and because of its design, businesses that use it see increased natural search traffic to their sites. More on that in a future post.

Letting your customers and prospects know what you’ve learned from them is part of the process. People like to know that they’ve been heard; they’re interested in hearing what others think about the same thing; and they LOVE IT when a company makes changes based on their imput. So sharing on your website, newsletter, social channels, and in face to face marketing events (like trade shows or at point-of-purchase displays) is critically important to getting the best ROI on your survey program.

When you continually seeking feedback, ideas and other input from customers you’ll gain insight that will help you make good business decisions. You’ll also gain a reputation as a company that’s receptive, and easy to work with.

Not a bad way to start a New Year.

Regularly-scheduled meetings are a hallmark of the JointSourcing client relationship. We are committed to listening to our clients, and to their customers, in order to recognize and respond quickly and wisely to changing market demands and opportunities. Need a partner to help you listen and respond to your customers in order to grow your business? We’d love to help you start a conversation with your customers – and meet your sales growth goals.

Best of Growth Spurts – Focus on Maximizing Your Content Marketing Efforts

In this month’s content roundup, we’ve focused on different ways you can get the most out of your content marketing and blogging efforts. After all, content marketing is often one of the biggest components – in both time and dollars – of many small business marketing budgets, so it makes sense to maximize that investment.

To be successful, it’s important to see content marketing not as a silo tactic, but rather something that is just one component of your overall integrated marketing strategy. So, a single blog post can be used to support your SEO, email, social media, PR, and retention efforts, to name just a few. The goal is to get the most out of every piece of writing, whether you share it on social media, link to it in your email signature, syndicate it, create a companion download, or even pay to promote it.

Here are 5 timely and relevant posts that look at maximizing your content marketing efforts.

How to Reuse Old Content to Boost Your SEO and Keep Your Audience Engaged, marketingprofs.com – Does your content plan include “evergreen content”? While it’s critical to have a steady flow of fresh, quality content, you can often maximize your impact by including at least some content that doesn’t “expire” (in other words, it will still be relevant a year from now). This content can then be re-used and repurposed for SEO and social media. Read the full article here.

How to Create Content That Keeps Earning Links (Even After You Stop Promoting It), moz.com – Content + linkbuilding = powerful SEO strategy. And the key? Creating something that people will find and link to when they’re in need of sources to cite. This puts you in a good position to earn a lot of passive links.

This article describes the content types most likely to satisfy people in need of sources and tips on how to execute these content types. Read the full article here.

7 Ways to Ensure You Maximize Your ROI from Content, quicksprout.com – From “picking 1-2 channels and designing around them” to “never stop promoting, ” this post offers solid advice for getting the most out of your content marketing efforts. See all 7 ways here.

How We Grew Our Organic Traffic by 43% Without Publishing a Single New Blog Post, hubspot.com – An interesting approach one company took to maximizing its content marketing efforts by putting into place a strategic plan that included the whole staff. Read the case study here.

28 Ideas for Content Upgrades to Grow Your Email List, sumo.com – Get more out of your content creation efforts – whether you’re doing the writing or have hired a writer – by creating a companion “upgrade” or bonus (tip sheet, checklist, video, slideshow) that you can promote and give away for the “cost” of an email address. See all 28 ideas here.

The variety of ways a business can get the most out of its content marketing efforts can be overwhelming. Sales Renewal has programs that can help, from our comprehensive JointSourcing Solution™ to our guided Marketing Essentials Solution™ to our on-demand Flex Marketing™. Get in touch today.