How to create an inbound marketing strategy - some case studies of tools and tactics
I've found setting up and running a small business is both daunting and exciting in equal measure.
The combined economic downturn and increasingly crowded competitive landscape mean the need to promote your business and get your message ‘out there’ is as important as ever.
The small business marketing challenge
Marketing is a huge challenge for small businesses, particularly start-ups with no established customer base or community around them.
Traditional advertising is an absolute necessity to let people know who you are.
But if you’ve limited money and resources, what other options do you have to get your message about your fantastic new business out there?
Inbound marketing is one strategy I would highly recommend.
An introduction to inbound marketing - ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’
For any business, large or small, there are three key media types you can use to connect with consumers;…
To grow your online community you need to engage it
For many brands, social media is becoming a significant part of, if not central to, theirdigital marketing strategy.
This being the case, the question of whether or not to grow a brand’s online community is often likely to be a matter of when rather than if.
Having recently gone through this thought process with a couple of the brands, I thought I’d share some of the insight from this experience.
The advantages of organic online community growth
Growing an online community organically, whether on facebook or anywhere else, has two great advantages. First, it’s inexpensive to do. Second, it will usually attract people who are most interested in a brand.
This can lead to a community full of brand advocates and customers who have engaged with a brand’s social media at some point in their buying…
Is crowdsourcing a solution to your content problems?
We've posted before about the importance of engaging with users, about earning the permission to market and the importance of social objects for user engagement and amplification. By engagement, I'm referring specifically here to engaging people with content to fuel sharing and search marketing.
The problem
We know that quality content is central for attracting and engaging site users and in turn convincing them to convert into customers. Creating quality content is also expensive and must be maintained. It's easy to let the content well dry up... Similarly, with social media you can run out of integrated ideas to get your users or consumers involved with the brand in any meaningful way. Crowdsourcing is a potential solution to solve both of these challenges.
A crowdsourced solution
Where user-generated content (UGC) is most often associated with ratings, reviews, forums, sharing video and images - crowdsourcing can…
The use of Net Promoter® (NPS) score as a way to collect customer feedback has been available for years although it's perhaps better known and applied more widely in the US.
We're always interested to find more about new methods to better understand customers, so wanted to alert you to another tool. CustomerGauge, surveys customers continuously and provides the necessary reporting analytics to tie the feedback back to your process improvements.
At the same time, I thought it could be useful to explain some of the principles of NPS since it's not known so well in the UK.
Robert Kerner of Customer Gauge is in a good position to help here. Rob has worked in process improvement for the last 15 years in various business functions: finance, marketing and sales.
I…
Approaches to increase the value of your email messages Part 2 When resources are scarce
When we try to make email more valuable for subscribers, we tend to focus on technical and transactional optimization. Which means we focus on making the actual offer/content more targeted, mainly using tools like segmentation, dynamic content personalization etc.
That's a good thing.
But there are two limitations to this approach.
First, we forget that value doesn't just lie in the relevancy of content and offers.
Second, the required tools, data and/or resources for technical and transactional optimization aren't always available to marketers with budgets to care about.
Part 1 of this article explored how you might use personality, human voice etc. to address the idea of emotional value: building an emotional connection that keeps people engaged even when the content or offer misses its mark.
In Part 2 I suggest five relatively simple concepts you can use to build more…
This report contains useful perspectives from a range of engagement specialists which are useful to review. There are also statistics from over 1,000 client and agency side respondents.
Here are the main results from the research:
Email newsletters (72%), presence on social networks (48%) and micro-blogging (46%) are the tactics most likely to result in a tangible improvement to companies"€Ÿ online customer engagement.
Significantly more companies than last year are planning to increase investment in usergenerated content (+13%), on-site branded communities/forums (+9%) and rich on-page interactive experiences (+8%).
The vast majority of company respondents (73%) are planning to invest in the mobile channel in 2011. This compares to 60% who said they planned mobile investment at the same stage a year ago.
The vast majority of company respondents (73%) are planning to invest in the mobile channel in 2011. This compares to 60% who said they planned investment at the same stage last year. Less…
Applying the crowdsourcing approach to improve content quality
I've written before about I like the forward-thinking approach to involving customers used by Penguin in Spinebreakers, a new site created separate from the main Penguin domain to engage teenagers.I think it's a great example of the power of digital channels to target a new audience, involve and engage them in novel ways through web, email and mobile.
In this post I'll pick out some of the success factors as I see them which I think apply to all social media and content strategy initiatives
What is crowdsourcing?
In my Digital marketing books I define crowdsourcing as:
"Utilising a network of customers or other partners to gain insights for new product or process innovations and to potentially help promote a brand".
This shows how crowdsourcing can combine insight and learning with promotion of products.
Here are the…
In a commercial world that understands the power of word-of-mouth it continues to puzzle me at how slowly business are catching on to fully leveraging the web to build their brand online (aka "€œthe fluffy stuff"€). Looking beyond search engine marketing, for example, as a means to drive targeted traffic.
This post by sixrevisions.com felt topical and started me thinking about how important community building is for sustainable and defensible traffic building.
In my mind, communities are a place for fans (fans of your products, services, ideas, beliefs or brand) to connect. They might be customers, but don't have to be. Commercially, they represent a place where you can interact and earn the right to re-convince fans of your brand"€™s worth.
The sixrevisions.com post asks three questions and then lists the answers of five highly experienced community builders. Remember, "€˜community"€™ does not necessarily mean building your own walled garden, community can…
By
March 17, 2010
It"€™s perhaps hard to imagine now, but even just four years ago, talk of customer engagement was a bit of a rarity. It is only a couple of years ago I did an interview with Dave where we discussed definitions and the scope of customer engagement.
There are many excellent reasons why businesses now focus on engagement. This year"€™s Annual Customer Engagement Report reveals some of the most important, for example "€˜increasing customer value"€™, "€˜gaining customer insights"€™, "€˜increasing value delivered to the customer"€™ etc as shown in the chart below:
However while any or all of these are excellent outcomes from engagement they are rarely the best place to start when developing a robust customer engagement strategy. For that we need to understand the four main challenges to engagement that have come to define customer relationships this millennium.
1.…
The 4th Annual cScape-Econsultancy customer engagement survey is released today - this post is a preview featuring my contribution. You can download the full survey and read the introduction from the cScape site - this is worth downloading since as well as the research it has commentary from many well-known UK and US experts making recommendations in areas of engagement such as social media (of course), mobile, employee engagement and customer service. Here is my contribution.
Reviewing your opportunities for audience participation
In each of the four years of the cScape-Econsultancy customer engagement surveys, I have been struck by the diversity of aims of organisations in managing customer engagement. But with results now being reported we can see clear, common benefits. Analysis of this years survey of benefits achieved, suggests that the benefits are greatest where active audience or customer participation occurs. The three…
