by Dotun Olagbadebo | Oct 6, 2017 | Business
Improving Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is the measurement of how happy your customers are. Improving customer satisfaction will help you increase revenue, reduce churn, boost customer lifespan and create more advocates. According to new report from CFI Group, customer satisfaction levels have experienced a slight decline over the past year. Data compiled from consumers across various sectors reflects a customer satisfaction score of 68 (out of 100), a four-point decline from the previous year.
This year’s reading is the lowest score since the report was first issued and it represents the uphill climb many companies face in satisfying increasingly demanding consumers. As it is Customer Service week here in Nigeria, I will be bringing you some tips to improve your customers’ satisfaction with your brand
- Our golden rule: never say no to a customer. If a customer service rep can’t deliver a solution for the customer, they escalate this to their team lead, so strategically we can resolve the root cause.
- Be positive… Let them see your smile even through the phone. A positive experience and a customer care representative that leaves a positive experience will go a long way. Customers can hear in your voice that you are smiling – it’s hard for a lot of people to be angry when the person on the other end of the phone is happy.
- Listen to those that are dissatisfied and act on their advice when it rings true. Find out as much detail as possible. Maybe the problem started on Twitter and has now taken an email and 2 phone calls. How can you improve overall, not just the end problem?
- Put the customer at the heart of your decisions and take a balanced approach. Be focused on problem solving, not on the process.
- Be precise and clear in your Terms & Conditions and customer communication, so you control the expectations you create. Keep your promises.
- If management is mostly about the processes, schedules and targets, leadership is mostly about behaviour. So, train team leaders, not team managers. Facilitate leadership sessions to train your team leaders to understand leadership styles, behaviours, decisions and reputation. This is key to them becoming successful and respected leaders. Good team leaders support their teams to perform and develop and thus get the best results possible from their team members.
Treat your customers like they are your boss. With no customers, there’s nobody to pay you! By taking this approach to every customer interaction you can naturally flip the angle on customer service.
- Did you know that 91% of your unhappy customers will never purchase services from you again? Measuring customer satisfaction can help you reduce the number of unhappy customers.
- No business is immune to unhappy customers. In fact, even companies with the best customer service in the world will still lose up to 9% of their customers to competitors. The good news is you can do something to stop customers defecting. Here are three common customer retention mistakes that are killing your customer satisfaction:
- You are ignoring customer feedback
- You are taking customer feedback to personally
- You are using long, boring customer feedback surveys
- Make Employee Satisfaction a Priority. Simply put, when your employees are happy, they can provide better customer service. Studies have proven that employees often perform better at the jobs when they feel appreciated.
While there’s no one solution for improving customer satisfaction levels, the key is to develop a customer-centric mindset that will help inform decisions and company direction.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Oct 6, 2017 | Social Media Tools
Can WhatsApp Boost your Business?
WhatsApp is the online instant messaging application for mobile devices that has revolutionised the way we communicate with colleagues and friends. WhatsApp was acquired in 2014 by Facebook at a cost of $ 19 billion and is a total success in terms of use and diffusion. Today, the app has over 1.2 billion active monthly users, 42 billion messages sent per day, and is available in 53 languages.
This powerful application allows video, audio, image, and text messages all through the internet. With more than 250 million daily shared videos, WhatsApp is the leading instant messaging application.The WhatsApp service is currently used in 109 countries. 70% of WhatsApp users use the app on a daily basis. Each day 100 million voice calls and 55 million video calls are made. 175 million people actively use the WhatsApp Status function.
It goes without saying that WhatsApp’s potential as a marketing tool is huge – it’s a platform where brands can connect with a massive global audience. WhatsApp can be a great tool for engagement and relationship building if used for customer service. Quicker response times and personal B2C interaction will only add to customer satisfaction.
WhatsApp works when there is an internet connection, which saves costs when it comes to contact a team member who is not in the office. With WhatsApp, communication is instantaneous and it is possible to even create groups to interact and share business updates, regardless of the location of the other team members.
As a small business owner, what better tool to serve your customers than the one that everyone is using? Your client will prefer to send a message through this app than to call your customer service number or to contact you via email.
It is an excellent channel to keep in touch with your customers on a more personal level. WhatsApp allows you to send short messages: from images to video and audio files related to your products.
The open rate for WhatsApp messages is 70 percent. So instead of calling customers for feedback, you can create questions for your group that will deliver answers that are relevant to your business. This is marketing research at its best, and it is free. With the feedback you receive from your customers, you can respond to their requests and improve the products and services you provide.
With the new Status feature, you can create special promotional codes your customers can share to redeem at your business. Using the instant photo and location feature, Status can let everyone in your group know about the promotions you are running. This could include a two hour flash sale or a one day special to drive in traffic and create buzz. Based on interaction levels, you can expand the promotion with WhatsApp-Status exclusive coupons or promotions.
The instant interaction capability of Status means you can provide special access to events you are holding and send a live feed. If you have a special guest chef in your restaurant, a musician in your music store or a renowned architect in your firm, you can share this news with your audience.
WhatsApp, as a communication tool, continues to evolve and add more features — like Status — with more likely in the future. It is a versatile platform that lets you send files, images, and short video clips about your products and services.
But the key to using WhatsApp effectively is to avoid abusing the relationships you build with your audience these. Measure your interactions so each message you send has value. Don’t make every conversation about making a sale. Remember other users have the power to delete your message with a single click.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Oct 6, 2017 | Social Media Marketing, Social Media Tools
Give your brand a Personality via InstaStories
Instagram Stories or as i like to call them, Instastories, allows users to post multiple streams of photos and videos in a slideshow format to create their unique “story” for that day. Like Snapchat, the content is ephemeral so content posted in Stories will disappear after 24 hours however, the difference between InstaStories and Snapchat is that new stories in the home feed are sorted by who you interact with most, not according to the time stories have been updated. Content posted via Stories does not appear on your regular Instagram profile grid or feed. As a brand, you can add flavor to your Stories content using text and drawing tools to show more of your brand’s personality. Read below the ways to show your brand’s personality via InstaStories.
Instagram Stories provides new opportunities for businesses to bolster relationships with their followers, humanise their brand and get fans involved. Instagram Stories is the perfect outlet to showcase more of your brand personality, helping to build that “know, like and trust” factor. how have you defined your brand? Do you use specific colours, tones, or moods? What’s the tone of voice you use in your other marketing?
One of the best ways to get fans involved in your brand is through Instagram contests. Get them active in your stories by encouraging them to send messages as a contest where their answers could win them a prize. Make it a regular event so they return to your Stories on a consistent basis.
Also, you can use both still photographs and videos to create Instagram stories. Your videos don’t have to be anything spectacular. In fact, videos can be a great way to show your audience a unique view of the day-to-day happenings at your business.
In addition, use Stories to expand on a recent post shared on your feed by giving followers behind-the-scenes access to your event. Sharing a continuous stream of visual content that provides more depth can add another layer to your content and help bring it to life, giving your followers more ways to connect with your brand.
Instagram Stories can also be used as an additional outlet to creating campaigns that build awareness about upcoming events or new product launches. Each day provides a new opportunity to create promotional content for your next big thing with Stories, and you’ll never overwhelm your followers feed with your messaging.
Combine interviews and other tactics to tell an engaging story to highlight company events and milestones. Your business probably has more stories than you realise. Treating them like exciting events is a great way to humanise your brand and keep your customers interested in what you do.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Sep 26, 2017 | Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing
Seven Quick Ways To Use Snapchat As A Brand
With over 100 million daily active users and 400 million snaps per day, Snapchat is one of the fastest-growing social networks and is fast becoming a vital part of global marketing strategies. With Snapchat, you can increase community engagement and brand awareness through innovative marketing campaigns. As a business, Snapchat can help you build an engaged following, increase loyalty, and boost your brand visibility through daily stories that engage and excite audiences. Snapchat stories, which last only 24 hours, are a string of snaps used to create a video narrative. There are over 1 billion views of Snapchat stories each day. Below are seven quick ways to use Snapchat as a brand. 1. Share Milestones When your business is on the verge of something big—finishing a major project, achieving a new milestone, or preparing for a big event—the last thing you have time for is marketing. However, these are definitive moments of your business that reveal personalities and culture. Snapchat stories are a great way to fit some quick and easy marketing without spending hours finding the perfect photo to post. This will let you stay connected with your audience without missing a beat in your bigger event. 2. Pull back the curtain once in a while Use Snapchat to give your customers a look at what goes on behind the scenes at your company. Buyers still like feeling as if they know the story behind your company. With Snapchat, you can provide behind-the-scenes content to your community, which helps create and engage a strong following. Show off your company and make sure to have fun with it. Capture birthday parties, Friday afternoons or company outings. The sky’s the limit on showing how your brand differentiates itself with company culture. 3. Promote Your Other Social Media Platforms Another way to use Snapchat for your business is to provide instructions in your Story for action on a different social media platform. For example, you can have them send you a Direct Message on Instagram with a promo code that you provide only on Snapchat or tell them to follow you and comment on a certain post on Twitter in a particular way with a specific hashtag and they get a free coupon or some other prize. 4. Provide Access to Live Events Snapchat is perfect for real-time social media marketing because it can give the audience direct access to live events. You can use it for product launches, trade shows or one-of-a-kind events like the 1,000th customer to shop in your store. Snapchat gets your audience excited because you’re providing a different, more authentic view of what’s going on at the event.5. Deliver Private Content
You can also use Snapchat to provide special content to your audience that they might not receive on other digital platforms. Think of something unique to surprise your community of followers.6. Offer Contests, Perks or Promotions
Everyone loves social media giveaways and promotions, so think of ways you can keep your followers coming back for more. For example, you could offer promo codes or discounts to the fans who watch your entire Snapchat story, or ask them to take a snap while holding your product or You can get your followers involved with Snapchat-exclusive coupon codes or other exclusive promos. Make it fun and your brand’s reach is sure to grow!7. Drive Traffic to Your Website
You can use Snapchat to drive traffic to your business website. Though like Instagram, Snapchat doesn’t allow you to post clickable links, You can instruct users to go to specific URLS, but they should be easy to remember, or easy to copy and paste into their browser. by Dotun Olagbadebo | Sep 26, 2017 | Online Marketing
Running a Successful Google Ad Campaign
There is no doubt that Google AdWords is one of the most impressive success stories in tech history, and it’s largely responsible for Google’s $600 billion-plus valuation. Running a successful Google Ad campaign requires intelligent work. You can’t simply throw money at Google and expect to get leads. Instead, you need to do your homework and leverage the targeting (and other) tools the AdWords platform puts at your disposal. You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot on AdWords to get a lot out of the pay-per-click advertising. But even if you have a small daily budget, you want to make sure your money is not being wasted — or at least try to ensure that the right people are clicking on your AdWords campaigns.
- Understand What AdWords Is For. Before investing a dime into an AdWords campaign, it’s important to understand its strengths and weaknesses. While AdWords is excellent for highly targeted, measurable and rapid results that lend well to lead and sales generation, on the other hand, AdWords requires a significant and ongoing investment, and every impression or click is paid for. It is typically not a cost-effective tool for brand awareness. When designing your campaign, keep the platform’s strengths and weaknesses in mind, and save brand awareness for your other marketing efforts.
- Have a clear goal.
The most important part of any search engine marketing (SEM) campaign is to have a clear goal in mind. The point of almost any AdWords campaign should be to grow sales, as opposed to merely generating brand awareness. With that in mind, you need to know what specific action you are trying to get your target market to perform. Is it completing a lead form? Calling an 800 number? Making an online purchase? Before you go live with your campaign, make sure you’ve identified that goal and know how you’ll measure the results.
- Keep your target customer in mind when writing your ads.
That is, make sure your ads follow the AIDAS of advertising. Your ads should attract the (A)ttention of your audience, raise customer (I)nterest, convince customers that they (D)esire your product, lead customers towards taking (A)ction (include a call-to-action) and provide (S)atisfaction if they end up choosing your website.
- Don’t mislead customers.
Don’t mislead your audience! Make sure that each ad group is entirely relevant for the landing page you’re promoting and that it’s only being displayed for relevant queries.
- Use negative keywords.
Always remember to include negative keyword targeting Negative keywords are keywords related to other keywords in the campaign that are not related to what is being advertised. This further qualifies the ads within a campaign, ensuring ads do not show to users who would not find them relevant anyway. Negative keywords help to streamline your ad, presenting it on more relevant search result pages. This drives better quality traffic and leads to your landing pages, while also improving your Google AdWords Quality Score.
- Target your ads.
Implement all three types of keyword targeting — exact match, phrase match, broad match — into your targeting strategy. Bid the most for exact match keywords and the least for broad match keywords. Separate ad groups by keyword type, in addition to category, to keep the campaign well-organized. You can also target ads according to type of website. And you can target prospects by certain Web behavior, like often visited websites that are relevant to your business.
- Don’t ignore mobile users.
Ensure that you are using mobile-preferred ads within your enhanced campaigns. This allows for customized message and mobile specific calls-to-action (CTAs) that will speak directly to your mobile users.
- Always be testing.
Once you identify your AdWords campaign goal/action, plan various tests to try to maximize your outcome. These tests should span the entire funnel, beginning with identification of keywords to bid on and which ad copy to use, to the design of the landing page and any follow-on email marketing campaigns. Test, test and then test again. You can only guess what might work best, as it’s impossible to predict exactly what your targeted market will consider as being most appealing and trustworthy. Sometimes one single word can make all the difference.”
- Implement conversion tracking.
Being able to see what keywords are triggering a sale or a lead is huge in bid management and optimizing the account to increase ROI. Setting up conversion tracking is critical. For your business a conversion may be a purchase, a sign-up or a lead. It is the action or actions that you want your visitors to take on the website. Without proper tracking in place, you cannot trace and promote the successful keywords, ads or keyword themes.
In addition, if you don’t have conversion tracking code on your website, you can’t know which keywords or text ads are effective and ones are bad to pause. Some actions you can do with Google Analytics, but as an advertiser, you need to know what happened after a user clicks on your ad. Did he purchase your product? If yes, which keyword/text ad/ad group/campaign triggered the conversion. By this way, you will know which part of your campaign worth to bid on.
- Monitor and tweak your campaigns.
AdWords settings can be adjusted throughout the duration of each campaign. Take advantage of the opportunity to make changes while the campaign is running. Make search term reports your best friend. Your search term report can help you identify low click-through rates, higher cost-per-click keywords, decreased time on site and a host of other issues that can negatively affect your bottom line. Using the search term report, you can then clear out keywords that have become obsolete or are low performers- and replace them with new keywords that will hopefully perform better.
- Use Google’s Remarketing feature.
Don’t neglect Google’s Remarketing option. As long as you’ve configured it correctly in Google Analytics, Smart Lists leverages Google’s big data capabilities to track who has visited your website by any means (including AdWords campaigns), and identifies who is statistically most likely to convert. Google then pushes that data back into AdWords for you to use in your AdWords campaigns for remarketing. It’s a powerful tool that not many people know about or have talked about for making the most of your ad dollars.
- Set up your Adwords campaign with a proper plan.
Many people create their Adwords campaign themselves without a proper plan and lack of knowledge about how to set up a successful campaign, which leads to many problems of their Adwords account. Use descriptive names for your campaigns and ad groups based on product category or campaign network (display network and search network). Make sure one campaign targeting only one product category. One ad group only targets one product/service with a group of keyword theme. Also, an ad group should contain no more than 4 text ads.
13. Optimizing for Cost Per Click (CPC).
For obvious reasons, your CPC is extremely important to your bottom line. Each individual keyword will have a unique CPC and conversion rate. This gives each keyword a varying effective CPC. Depending on the cost of goods sold, the range can be wide, and it will be up to you to calculate this number.
A few ways to optimize for a targeted CPC range include:
- Lower max bid. If you want to lower your CPC, lower your max bid.
- Improve ad copy.Review your ads and optimize your ad copy to improve keyword relevancy.
- Create more targeted ad groups.Taking ad optimization a step further, you can segregate targeted keywords into specific ad groups.
- Target less competitive keywords.More competitive keywords typically have higher CPCs. With a little research, you can find lower-funnel keywords with less competition and a lower CPC.
- Optimize landing pages.Part of the Ad Rank equation includes the relevancy of the landing page. With a better-optimized landing page, you can lower your CPC.
When you put all these steps together, you’ll find that you have a hot and highly effective Google Ad campaign running.
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