Entries Tagged 'social media' ↓

As a business owner you want and need customers.

Ideally those customers will be of the happy variety that come back time and time again and bring all their friends along too.

But how do you make sure your website and customer service can generate that level of customer satisfaction?

When shopping online, people want speed, simplicity and a warm and fuzzy feeling once they’ve completed their purchase.

Other than tracking them all down and giving them a hug, how can you achieve this through your website?

Here are a few ideas.

Speeding it up

Your customers want to reach your site, find their product, and add it to their shopping basket and pay. So making that process as slick and fast as possible is essential.

Let’s start at the beginning.

1. Loading your site

Your website must load as quickly as possible because your customers aren’t going to hang around waiting for you. By reviewing all the images on your site and compressing them you’ll shorten the load time.

2. Payment

Jumping to the final stage of the buying process, you’ll need to offer a range of payment choices. Paypal is a must as it’s fast, safe and very convenient.

Simplicity

A mistake made by many companies is that their website is full of images, graphics, text and adverts making it impossible for the reader to navigate because there’s so much going on they don’t know which way to turn.

Keeping your site simple eases navigation and understanding.

3. Review your text

How readable is your text? By slightly increasing your font size you’ll make your site more readable.

4. White space

There’s nothing worse than a website that contains masses of solid text. You might think it conveys to the reader everything they need to know but that’s rather counterproductive because they won’t read it.

If you want someone to look at your site, its content has to be attractive. You can achieve this by:

• Shortening your paragraphs (5 lines or less)
• Add bulleted lists to highlight benefits
• Use sub headings
• Use images

But make sure you mix all these elements up to add variety and interest to your page.

Warm and fuzzy

This is probably the hardest one to achieve. How do you give them that warm and fuzzy feeling?

5. Social media

I’m assuming you’re using social media within your marketing strategy (if not why not?) so make sure you monitor your Twitter stream and Facebook page so when customers  ask questions about your products you respond to them quickly.

The other site of this is you’ll also be aware of compliments that come through your social media accounts (because you’ll be monitoring them) so make sure you say thank you.

There’s also a possibility that you’ll also get the off negative comment but because you’re monitoring your social media accounts you’ll be able to instantly make contact with the customer and put the situation right.

6. Get personal and obvious

Many companies get so wrapped up in looking professional they end up projecting a cold and impersonal image.

Customers want to buy from someone they like so by creating a website that shows your personality rather than a stale corporate image will get you noticed.

Being obvious doesn’t mean plastering your website with “buy now” in big red letters. Obvious means making your navigation simple to use so anyone can find their way to the page they want. There’s nothing worse than finding a website that sells the product you want but being unable to fathom out how to buy it.

7. Be chatty

When creating the copy on your website please don’t ‘we’ all over it.

Now sure what I mean? Well it’s quite simple. Take a look at your website and count how many times the word ‘we’ appears. In an ideal world there won’t be any.

Your customer couldn’t give two hoots about you; they want to know what you are going to do for them. So review your content and change the focus. If you’re not sure how to do that, find a professional copywriter who can do it for you. You’d be amazed at the difference it will make. You will instantly become:

• Approachable
• Customer-orientated
• Trustworthy

So there you go, 7 simple but effective ways you can change your website’s effectiveness overnight.

Try them out and come back and tell us how you got on. Do you have any other ideas? If so leave a comment below.

This is a question that most of the bosses in the world want to know.

Resistant to taking on this new marketing form, their usual argument is:

“Sure, we’ll use social media if you can quantify its ROI to me.”

Hmm…there lies a problem – how can you work out the ROI of something that doesn’t seem to have one?

Does Social Media have an ROI?

Recently, Finextra’s international series of social media events was kicked off at Thomson Reuters’ London headquarters. A gathering of participants from the financial services industry chewed over the opportunities and pitfalls presented by the likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

A flurry of tweets ensued including one that caught my eye saying “There is ROI in social media, finding it is the Holy Grail!”

In my humble opinion, social media is more about the ROR (return on relationships) than ROI. How can you put a value on the relationships you build with your followers? This revelation  then prompted another flurry of tweets between myself Sean Clark, Huw Sayer and Gary Dickenson and prompted Sean’s blog post What’s the ROI on Conversions?.

Sure, you can monitor the work your social media activities generate but that’s not what Twitter is about for me. It’s an incredible tool for communication. By listening to what people are saying you can be there to instantly offer advice when someone needs it. If you monitor it you will get to know when something goes right or wrong with your service so it’s an excellent customer service tool. Not only that but it also helps as part of your SEO strategy.

In short, your ‘ROI or ROR’ will depend on what you’re trying to get out of it. And that’s going to be different for everyone.

What about numbers?

That’s all well and good but there are still a number of CEOs out there that are going to want numbers. So you have to determine precisely what it is you want to get out of your social media strategy.

It could be:

• To drive sales
• To drive enquiries
• Boost brand awareness

Once you know what you’re trying to achieve you can then attempt to quantify your effectiveness.

Maths was never my strong point so I was interested to find a post on Social Media Examiner that addresses this issue.

So if you’re adamant you have to have numbers to quantify your social media activities take a few minutes out and read A Simple Way to Calculate Social Media Return on Investment.

Do you have other ways of measuring your social media effectiveness?

Do you think having a numerical measure is important or do you prefer to see it as a way of building and nurturing relationships?

This is a debate that’s going to rumble on for a while yet so please take a few minutes to share your views by leaving a comment below.

Sally Ormond – Copywriter, Blogger, Social Media Fan

Social media is great for marketing your business and raising your profile – every one knows that.

But it’s also a great relationship builder and customer service tool.

Monitoring your name and brand on the various social media grape vines helps you identify what people are saying about you, alerts you to any potential problems (such as customer service issues) and also tells you when you’re receiving a big thimbs up from your customers.

The problem is hearing all of that through the background noise.

You can use Google Alerts (although they are limited in their effectiveness) or use various paid tools that are available.

But wouldn’t it be great if you could build your own tailormade social media listening device for free?

Well you can.

Tony Ahn has written this incredibly useful post and how-to guide on Social Media Examiner which takes you though the steps required to create your very own social media listening device.

Now you too can monitor social media to find out what people are saying about you.

Take a look now and learn How to Build a Free Social Media Monitoring Dashboard

Thanks Tony!

David Murton has been helping companies build and maintain their online relationships with customers since 2006. On a more personal note, David is an avid piano and accordion player, drawn especially to music of the classical and romantic periods.

The author’s views are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.

Serious SEO services and bloggers realize the importance of using both SEO tools and social media to increase their online visibility. Embracing both methods to enhance recognition is more effective than using either approach alone.

An event involving Rebecca Black of SEOmoz is a good example of what social media can accomplish. She was unhappy with Verizon Wireless and spoke with a customer service rep to correct the issue, but to no avail. She tweeted her dissatisfaction and promptly received a tweet in return, by a different rep that solved the issue. Social media made that happen because of the connections it creates.

Benefits of SEO

• Link building
• Keyword research
• AdWords
• Analytics

In short, SEO is strategy. Any kind of website can be well-known in certain communities, but without an effective link building campaign spurring traffic, competitive sites who build links see more visibility. Keyword research is an effective aspect of increasing rank, especially thorough long-tail keyword research, contributing to conversion rates. AdWords is paid advertising links. Google Analytics is a robust set of marketing tools that monitors activity and measures everything.

Benefits of Social Campaigns

• Digg
• Reddit
• Stumbleupon
• Blogging networks
• Similar communities

Websites and blogs at the top of the SERPs don’t get there by SEO alone. They have strong communal ties, discussion boards and other interactive aspects. Social news websites like Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon allow the dissemination and sharing of links to content, as well as commenting and voting.

The Left Brain / Right Brain Approach

Lefty:

SEO is the left brain, logically categorizing data. The left brain analyzes website dimensions and metrics, collating all that data to form a strategy that will appease search engine spiders and visitors. “How do I optimize R = S / V?” “I have to increase PS = (N – W) / S!” That is SEO, tactically building an online presence geared a little more toward feeding code to search engines than reaching out to people.

Righty:

Social media is the right brain, seeing the bigger picture. Holistic synthesis is a tool of the right brain, imagining several components working in harmony. Social media is about making new connections, building an online presence that leans more toward sharing with responsive people than churning out code for unfeeling search engines.

Websites can be effective, entertaining or informative with a low rank, and without an SEO strategy in place. Conversely, websites can rank fairly well due to good SEO, yet be ineffective, unfunny or uninformative. Both types of websites do not fare well in the long run. Competitors to such sites lead the way because they implement SEO while leveraging the power of social media to their benefit.

Everyone Benefits

Not long ago, social media and SEO were separate entities, serving different purposes. Once businesses from large corporations to indie labels learned how to generate buzz, social media/cyber-public relations became an effective partner to SEO implementations, essentially fusing with SEO. The goal of social campaigns is brand recognition.

Whether your brand is a product, service, or just you – many times it’s all three – remember that people drive your business. Opening 20 different accounts on social sites and leaving them to gather dust does no good. The social sites themselves add no value to your brand, nor do they generate traffic or revenue. Recognition, traffic and revenue come from people, the new acquaintances made during a social campaign. Like building links, a social campaign is promotion that’s done offsite. Also like link building, a strong social campaign is an ongoing process rather than a quick remedy.

1. Use SEO to tweak code, enhance conversion rates and increase search visibility.

2. Add social campaigns to drive more traffic to your well-oiled machine.

3. Reap the rewards.

As a self-confessed Twitterholic, I’m always on the lookout for great advice on how to get the most out of the social media revolution that is Twitter.

One of the questions I get asked a lot by people who are just starting out on their Twitter journey is how do you find people to follow?

Once they set up their account, follow friends, family and colleagues they suddenly hit a brick wall. Where do they go now? Who should they follow?

I began using Twitter in 2008 and I’ll admit to not understanding it all to begin with. It took quite a while before the penny dropped and I worked out how to use it, how to find people and that it was OK not to follow everyone back who followed me.

I used various search tools to find fellow tweeters in my industry (copywriting), those involved with marketing and social media and those who just seemed interesting.

But what I would have found really useful was a list of tools that could be used which would have sped up this process.

Luckily for you I came across Leon Widrich’s post on SocialMediaExaminer.com which shows various tools you can use to find interesting people on Twitter who you’ll want to follow.

His post shows you some of the tools to use and how to engage with your followers to make the most of your Twitter experience. Whether you’re new to Twitter or have been tweeting a while it’s well worth taking a few minutes out of your day to have a read and discover how you too can build your Twitter following.

Thanks for the tips Leon.