Five Tips for Building Customer Relationships

“The customer is always right.”

This cliché has been preached to business owners for years, but is it true? Sure, building meaningful relationships with your customers is important, but how can you build these relationships to benefit both parties? Take a step back and put yourself in their shoes, and then adjust accordingly.

Differentiate and specialize. What makes your business better than your competitors? If you’re able to offer a unique product or service, you are given more power within your field. Customers will also have more of an incentive to go to you for what they need, simply because not many other people are providing it. This makes the customer feel as if you’re more attentive to their specific needs, which is a huge plus.

Give the people what they want. Customers want to see results. If you make a promise, they expect just that. Your customers have a certain expectation of your product or service, so you want to make sure you live up to that expectation and if possible, surpass it.

Be accountable. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to please everyone. If something doesn’t go as anticipated, you need to be held accountable for your actions. You want your customers to have a positive impression of your business, even if they’re thrown a curveball. Blaming the customer will only strain your relationship.

Value their input. The only way to get inside your customers’ heads is to ask. Have them fill out surveys rating their experience with your business, or ask them for testimonials. The only way to improve your relationship is to know what needs to be changed or improved upon.

Price needs to equal value. What you charge for your products or services needs to be equivalent to the value that your customers will associate it with. Keep your pricing consistent with the perceived value of your product or service to avoid over/under charging your customers.

To improve the relationships with your customers and for other integrated marketing services, please contact Sagefrog Marketing Group at 215.230.9024 or visit www.sagefrog.com.

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5 Ways to Optimize Your Content Marketing

Is your content marketing strategy falling short, or not living up to your expectations? It may be time to optimize. Creating valuable content is a good start, but there are other aspects to consider. Planning the ins and outs of both your current and future content marketing strategy is the only way to ensure success.

Sound overwhelming? Don’t panic – here are a few simple tips to consider.

Switch it up. Don’t get stuck in a rut –producing diverse content is the easiest way to keep your audience active and engaged. Exploring new ways to format and present your content also keeps you current and interesting in the eyes of your audience. Step outside of your comfort zone – don’t be afraid to try something new.

Produce quality over quantity. Mass producing content may seem like a great way to generate clicks, but in the end, people will see right through you. Practicing thought leadership and strategic planning makes your content more credible.

Put yourself in their shoes. Take a walk in the shoes of your target audience and use social listening techniques to keep current about what they are saying. The best way to understand what they’re looking for is to view your content through their eyes and have a clear understanding of their thoughts and opinions.

Take it up a notch. In the world of content marketing, you’re always competing with someone. In order to stand out, you need to make an impression on your audience – and sometimes this includes paying for a service such as paid search or advertising. Consider multiple options for promoting your content – the possibilities are endless!

Think about user experience. The format in which you present your content is just as important as the content itself. The experience users have while viewing your content is crucial – if they aren’t impressed, they may not return. Design accordingly.

For content marketing and other integrated marketing services, please contact Sagefrog Marketing Group at 215.230.9024 or visit www.sagefrog.com.

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Marketing as a Science

In this digital age, many marketing campaigns are comprised of several online tactics – search engine optimization, targeting advertising, pay-per-click advertising, social media, etc. So, it is not unreasonable to say that marketing has become very scientific. 

Here are four principles to marketing as a science:

-Data-Driven Decisions Making

-Empirical Pattern Recognition & Model Building

-Controlled Experimentation – Hypothesize, Test, Refine

-Cross-Pollination of Ideas from Other Scientific Disciplines 

What do you think – is marketing more of an art or a science?

For full-service marketing, contact Sagefrog Marketing Group. Visit www.sagefrog.com or call 215-230-9024. 

Reference: http://selnd.com/103YgSz

Tips for Reaching Your Mobile Audience

More and more, marketers and advertisers are seeing their target audience interact with their brand through mobile engagement. It’s not surprising since most people use their smartphone, tablet or other mobile device to access on-the-go information.

Since we know that our targets our using their mobile devices to access our content, it’s important to keep it optimized for mobile. Here are a few tips to do so:

-Be more thoughtful with your posts
-Add value to the mobile experience – don’t make them navigate too much
-Design for mobile first
-Test different mobile platforms and know the differences
-Analyze traffic

To effectively integrate a mobile strategy with your overall marketing campaign, contact Sagefrog Marketing Group. Visit www.sagefrog.com or call 215-230-9024.

Reference: http://bit.ly/ZqTB02

Social Media Errors to Avoid

With so many outlets to push content, and so many topics, social media isn’t always a formulated tactic. Successfully executing social media within your marketing plan requires fresh content, new ideas and the willingness to take risk. With so little rules about what you can and can’t discuss on social media, there’s a lot that can go wrong.

In fact, there are plenty of common errors that brands often make, including:

-Taking on too much. Instead attempting to be involved in every trend, target differently on various networks. For example, post pictures and infographics on Flickr, Instagram and Facebook; share thought-provoking articles on LinkedIn and Twitter.

-Using the same social media profile for both professional and personal. It’s OK to have personality in your professional posts (tone of voice, etc.), but keep overly personal opinions, pictures, quotes off of professional profiles. Sharing your opinion on an emotional topic with your network of work professionals or coming from your brand, can diminish your credibility as a thought leader.

 -Not planning how to convert engagement into business. People may like or share your posts from time to time, but are they engaged enough to use your services? Drive social media audience to specific landing pages so they will be more likely to convert to a customer or client.

-Posting only company updates. If your audience thinks you are always selling through social media, they will stop enjoying your posts. Share some company updates, but also be sure to comment on trending topics and industry-related articles.

-Thinking one size fits all. Just because most companies have a Facebook and Twitter, doesn’t mean that those have to be your most popular social media networks. Think about your goals – if you’re primarily business to business, LinkedIn may be a better place to focus more of your social media energy on.

For social media marketing, and all other marketing services, contact Sagefrog Marketing Group. Visit www.sagefrog.com or call 215-230-9024.

Resource: http://prdaily.com/Main/Articles/14060.aspx  

Tips for Content Development

The hardest part about social media and blogging for most people is generating the content. It can be hard to find and tends to get redundant if you’re not constantly looking for new and clever ideas.

And viewers don’t want to visit your blog and continue to see the same types of posts. Ragan.com recently posted an article filled with some easy tips to keep your content newsworthy and exciting.

Tips from the article include

• Subscribe to SmartBrief newsletters, a company that pushes out a lot of content around one topic on a daily basis

• ·         Subscribe to Google Alerts to get emails when your selected topics are mentioned

• ·         Read comments on your blog and on other blogs – listening to feedback from people who are actively responding to blog posts may help you generate new ideas

• ·         Follow current events and comment on recent newsworthy event. Just reading the daily news may help generate content ideas

For more information, view the entire article.

For social media marketing, and all other marketing services, contact Sagefrog Marketing Group. Visit www.sagefrog.com or call 215-230-9024.

Discovering Email Marketing Success

If you’re an expert in something, you should share it. So today, we’ve discovered a gem of an article by Econsultancy that reveals the three secrets of experienced email marketers. It’s no secret that email marketing can be an effective channel to reach consumers and business professionals, but here are the three tips that email marketing experts.
Here are three important things, according to this article, to remember when you’re conducting an email marketing campaign:

• Send more than one email. It’s a common misbelief that we all fall victim to – you send one email and think that the phone will ring 5 minutes later with leads. It’s not the case – the best way to reach your target is to send a few emails. Start with an HTML, follow up with a personalized email & send a reminder.
• Don’t try to be too clever with your subject line. According to the article, the strategy for email subject lines changes daily. But, most experienced email marketers stick with keeping their subject line simple and explain to the receiver the benefit of opening the email.
• Don’t give “above the fold” so much credit. This article says that placing your call to action lower within the email may actually entice viewers who are interested to click-through. By the time they’ve reached the call to action, they have the information the email was sharing and haven’t dropped off, and should be considered a more quality lead.

Read the full article here. For email marketing campaigns, and all other marketing services, contact Sagefrog Marketing Group. Visit www.sagefrog.com or call 215-230-9024.

Email Marketing Still an Effective Channel

With social media and online marketing becoming increasingly popular, marketers may start to feel like email marketing has been forgotten. However, according to this infographic, email marketing remains an active – and often successful – channel.

The infographic shows that 83% of consumers who receive email marketing spend more money when shopping. And the average ROI for email marketing is $44.25 for every dollar spent. Some other noteworthy statistics to check out – especially for b2b marketers – is how chief marketing officers rated the effectiveness of email marketing: 76% effective at nurturing new prospects, 69% effective at driving lead generation, and 75% effective at increasing customer retention.

For more insightful statistics about email marketing, check out the full article.

For effective email marketing campaigns – and all other marketing services – contact Sagefrog Marketing Group. Visit www.sagefrog.com or call 215-230-9024.

We've Won an Award

Sagefrog is proud to announce that we’ve added another award to our collection! This time it’s for the website development and design of Hussian School of Art's website (view award details and criteria here). This WordPress website for our Philadelphia-based client features rotating image and message panels on the homepage, social media links, custom photography, an impressive galley of student artwork, prominent feature areas on the homepage, a blog, news and events section, and easy navigation. Make sure to check out the Hussian website by visiting www.hussianart.edu.

 

Want to make your website an award-winner? Contact Sagefrog Marketing Group. Visit www.sagefrog.com or call 215-230-9024.