Getting Past Go

So many times we feel like our job in marketing is to simply make the phone ring or get a prospect to reply to our email.  The reality is that marketing goes way beyond the initial buying signals.  In fact, good marketing know that they need to manage the entire purchase and renewal process effectively to show lasting results.

Getting Past Go

Instead of thinking about lead generation, think about the entire customer experience.  Not only will you attract users to your product or service, but you will maintain them, communicate with them, and leverage them to continue buying from you long into the future.  

Focus on creating happy customers.  Many companies simply market on the front end, not after the sale.  If you focus on building strong relationships with your existing customers, they will often do the selling for you and become some of your greatest marketing assets.  Consider the type of communication you provide to your existing customers.  Are you simply contacting them to buy more?

What Annoys Me

I recently bought a product that I was really excited about.  It was a video training program that offered daily information.  No less than a week went buy until the videos, which were supposed to be delivering value (and something I paid for) started asking me to "upgrade" ad pitch the video to others to start earning affiliate revenue.  I don't know about you but it certainly made me unhappy with my initial purchase.

After about a week of this I cancelled the subscription and was glad a I did.  As marketers we need to be concerned with our messaging before, during, and after purchase.  If you're not, you'll find your job getting more and more difficult each and every year as customers become harder to attract and retain.

Focus on your marketing communications throughout the customer life cycle.  By thinking beyond the initial purchase, you'll develop a customer base that sustains and grows your business over time.

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Posted in: customer retention

Good Marketing Tip #229: Start a Blog

Today's good marketing tip is: Start a Blog.  By doing so you can quickly and easily improve search engine rankings, expand your reach and build a following.  There are many free and inexpensive ways to start a blog and it doesn't require a great deal of internet marketing knowledge.

Free services like Blogger and WordPress are well known in blogging circles. These two programs are used to create free blogs that essential work as content management systems allowing you to make posts, updates, control web pages, and come with tons of additional features.

There are many benefits to blogging.  The first is that by adding a blog to your website, you're creating additional exposure to your products, services, and information.  As your blog starts showing up in search results, you generate more traffic to your site and can quickly build a list of followers.

Individuals can choose to follow the posts on your blog via an RSS feed or via email. Each time you make a post, they receive a notification and can easily view your content.  This type of system allows you to push out valuable information on a regular basis - essential for building and maintaining customer loyalty.

In addition to building a following, having a blog can actually improve your search engine rankings. Search engines like Yahoo and Bing like to see social media sites related to a particular website.  This means that you are interacting with your audience and creating a great user experience.  Additionally, once you are posting original content on a regular basis, you start to generate inbound links.

In bound links are essential for improvements in your search rankings.  As sites attract more inbound links, Google and other search engines see this as a vote of confidence.  The more sites that are voting for you the more weight your site has and therefore will appear more readily at the top of search engine result lists.

Whether you've been blogging for a long time or are new to the blogging phenomenon, be sure to make blogging an integral part of your overal marketing plan.  Being found online is the first step towards building a successful business either online or offline.

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Posted in: blogging