actionable marketing guide

Take a page from Jermaine’s playbook:

• Hire people who are at their best when they’re scheduled to work. Don’t hire a nigh owl to be your front line staff at 8:00am in the morning. It’s a recipe for disaster.
  
  
• Connect with your customers as directly as possible. Get to know who they are and help them get whatever they need.

I learned to address sales people by their first name from my mid-western born husband. A lesson that continues to reap benefits in the form of sales employees going out of their way to help me.

Copywriter Bob Bly made this point during his SMMW17 workshop: The sweetest word in the English language is your name, especially when said by someone else.

This is the reason personalized email and postal mail perform better. Unless of course you call your recipient, “Resident.” That’s a title even a 5 year old knows isn’t personal.

Customer experience was an important theme of SMMW17. While that might surprise some readers, the reality is social media enables you to deliver a better, more personalized experience to your prospects, customers, fans and followers.

Even better, a responsive customer experience distinguishes your business in your customer’s mind. This has key financial benefits every marketer should care about as much as their financial team does.

To acquire each new prospect, you must invest in content and ad creation, media spend, other distribution (like search and social), and conversion.

Once your prospect signs up to receive emailings or catalogs, you don’t have to pay to find her again.  As a result, your marketing cost is lower as well as more effective. This is the reason prospect email acquisition is marketing nirvana.

To improve your marketing profitability, consider what you can do to improve your customer experience. Specifically how can you treat your prospects and customers better so they’ll continue to buy your products and use your services.  

Don’t just speak to your employees. They’re likely to tell you what you want to hear.

Instead, talk to your customers. Reach out to them for their honest feedback. Don’t forget to thank them for their time and input.

If possible and if you’re willing to hear the good, bad and ugly, ask customer about returns and gripes. It may be difficult to hear but it can help you improve your business. Besides, it’s better to hear it first hand than on social media.

BTW—Here’s one of my favorite uses of photographs from SMMW17 by Flipboard. As many of you may know, I love the use of photographs as conference and event give-aways. Check out these red couch wonders of speakers and attendees.

Happy Marketing
Heidi.

Heidi Cohen
Actionable Marketing Guide

​​​​​​​Spring Cleaning Your Digital Life Including Social Media

30 Killer Blog Post Titles For Spring

• Steve Rayson gave Heidi Cohen a shout out in his SMMW17 round up post: 26 Lessons From Social Media Marketing World 2017.
  Rayson also wrote a great summary of my presentation, How to Create Quality Blog Posts Consistently. Nine Powerful Insights from Heidi Cohen at SMMW17
  
  
• Top Rank’s Lee Odden, the master of influencer marketing, does it again with a great post: 50 Social Media Marketing Influencers to Follow in 2017 . It’s worth your time to help you fill your Twitter lists. 
  

10 Useless Things To Cut From Your Digital Marketing Budget Right Now

The digital marketing landscape is noisier than ever & it's easy to accidentally squander budget chasing after the next shiny object. Here's 10 money-wasters to consider slashing in 2017.

The fast-paced world of digital marketing has theoretically made marketers’ lives easier. We have more options, tools, and resources to be better, faster, and stronger.

But the flip side of the coin is that marketers are overwhelmed.

There’s no time like the present to take a look at your marketing and figure out what’s working, and what isn’t. 

Download this ebook & discover what many marketers waste time & money on... So you can eliminate it for good.

From WebMechanix                              ( Limited number available – act now! )