Protecting Your Online Presence and Reputation

Everyone is out there doing it — busy building their online presence. They are building a profile for themselves, boosting their brand and making inroads into valuable customer communities. To be smart about your online image, you have to be just as smart about how you handle what others say about you as you have to be about what you say about yourself. Rightly or wrongly, your reputation can be in tatters in a matter of minutes given the speed at which online resources can fuel communications. You have to be one step ahead of bad comments and be ready to act and react accordingly. Protecting your brand and your reputation can be a full-time job for dedicated marketing resource, and it shouldn’t be something to look on as a ‘nice to have’ extra. If you spend all your time loading content and making comments but never dealing with what comes back to you, then you could be doing a lot of damage to your reputation and brand rather than the positive impact you intended. However wrong you may feel a customer comment or post might be, you would be wise to view them all as opportunities to enhance your image. How you respond to and rectify an issue will leave a much longer-lasting impression than the initial issue raised. If your response is nothing, the unaddressed complaint will live on and its impact can grow out of all proportion. However, handle it well and appease the complainant and you will find yourself with customers who are more loyal than they were before the problem was aired. It is well to remember that publishing content to the web is what it says — a form of publishing. There have been many stories in the news relating to what individuals have said on social media platforms which have landed them in hot water. Learn what the dos and don’ts are and the difference between a genuine customer complaint and slander or liable so that you know how to react accordingly. If you are managing an effective online presence, then hopefully you will be generating mostly a positive range of feedback. With positive comments and postings you will rightly want to make the most of them. To do this, you need to make sure that your online and social media activities are integrated with your overall marketing strategy. Co-ordinating your content development, communications and PR can be the perfect mix for boosting your positive brand profile across all media. Don’t let your online presence suffer or do your business damage through lack of dedicated resource. Speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire about the available talent who can help protect your brand and help enhance your online presence. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire will have a range of skilled candidates who could meet the needs of varying role types in your business. And if you’re not sure what the role profile should be to cover this or any other area of marketing work, then they can help you with that too.

Are Your Emails Relevant, Responsive and Readable?

Emails are still a popular form of customer contact, but if you are still churning out the same old ones it’s time to think again. You especially need to revisit your approach if you are seeing numbers fall off your data lists. Emails can be ideal vehicles for snappy updates or summary newsletters, but if your focus is wrong or your content is unreadable then recipients will turn away in their droves. In today’s busy world many people will view their emails when they have a spare minute, which is often when they are on the move. This invariably means that they are viewing emails on a device which does not have the full display screen of a desktop computer or laptop. However, it would be a mistake to assume that all your customers are using a hand-held device. Not everyone has a smartphone and if you treat all your contacts as though they have, you will start to lose previously loyal customers. If you have ever opened an email on your phone and been faced with just a web link where it should be showing onscreen content, you will know it is worse than not getting the email at all. It is like venturing to answer the phone only to find the person at the other end has hung up — it is an annoyance and a frustration. To avoid irritating your contacts, you need to invest in making your email communications suitable for as many hand-held devices as possible. In short, if you want your content to be read, it has to be visible. Once you’re sure your content will be readable, you need to make sure it is relevant. Content really is king, so where possible you need to be tailoring your content to your ideal customers. You need to make sure they stay engaged with you, and to do this you need to keep appealing to their interests or delivering something they want. To remain relevant you need to know your customers. If you don’t know their likes, dislikes and engagement behaviours, then you won’t know how to tailor your content to make it relevant to them. To keep your e-communications top-notch, you need great skills across CRM, data analysis, market intelligence, copywriting, e-comms, responsive design and e-campaign management. Whatever skills are missing from your team, marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry can plug the gap. Whether you want to try out temporary positions or move straight to permanent, marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry can help.

Virtual Relationships Are the Way Forward

Customer relationship management used to be about how businesses kept in touch with identified customers and prospects through received or acquired contact details. Now with the rise of social media, relationships can be built up effectively through communities of online users all subscribing to the same communication forums. However, despite individual relationships not being the focus of the communications, trust is still the number one factor in establishing a connection and gaining loyalty. To make the best and most lasting impact through social media marketing, your brand values have got to be at the centre of your online strategy. Whether you are finalising the detail of your entire web content representation or posting a quick update via Twitter, your brand values need to be clear and consistently relayed. Customers and prospects need to see consistency in all their interactions with your company and its products or services in order to trust who they are dealing with and know what standards to expect. Your online presence needs to be constantly monitored, and problems need to be responded to and rectified immediately in order to limit damage. The speed and visibility of complaint management can actually boost a company’s reputation rather than damage it, so it pays to be on the ball. If you are new to community building online and are used to dealing with contacts via emails, phone or face to face, then you may at first feel that it is all a little impersonal. However, you will soon see how open communications can be and how quickly you can build up relationships and gain ‘followers’, ‘likes’ and genuine advocates. Consumers are faced with many choices and are becoming ever more discerning in where and how they will spend their money. Don’t be surprised to find consumers wanting to get to know and test your company's reputation before parting with their hard-earned money. Gaining recommendations from online communities and service users is the new version of a trusted recommendation from friends or family. It is the word-of-mouth marketing equivalent that companies strive for but for which they can now add a helping push in the right direction. The transparency which the internet now brings to business and consumer experience means that companies have to work doubly hard to generate and maintain a good reputation, but the rewards of doing so can be great. Comments, feedback, re-tweets and sharing your content are all consumer behaviours which offer valuable learning experiences for your company to get to know the personality types of your customers and online communities. This in turn should help you position your content and messaging to appeal to the right audience and the ideal customer. All this is only possible if you have the right resource in place to manage it. When you need expert skills and the right experience to boost your marketing implementation, marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire can lend an expert helping hand. Attracting the best talent to your company can be difficult if you don’t know where to start, so let marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire bring the talent to you.

Integration Is the Key to Successful Social Media

Social media roles should not be stand-alone in the marketing department. As the fastest-growing and now most popular activity taking place on the internet, it is more important than ever that your social media strategy forms part of your overall brand strategy. It is not just a form of communication or a useful platform, as managed correctly it can be the cornerstone of your online marketing presence. It might be the case that some marketing professionals who have grown up with social media have specialised in this area as a discrete discipline. It might also be the case that you have more experienced all-rounders from the marketing profession who know a little about these platforms but to whom it is still relatively new. By integrating social media expertise into your central marketing team, you can start to build and share a broader knowledge to support and drive your marketing activity. If you do not already have specialist social media resource within your marketing team, it is well worth investing in training for your current staff, or if head count permits, to hire in new talent to complement your existing skill sets. To maximise your social media marketing impact, it needs to work together with your PR and search marketing efforts too. Content and communications are the driving forces behind most effective online strategies, so you need to have the right talent at all levels to address these requirements. You need to have effective planners and strategists who can weave the work streams together into a cohesive strategy, and you need the skilled implementers to make it all happen. Finding the right skills, experience and expertise can be tricky. However, working with marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands can make it easier. Good marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands will be able to help you define the correct role profiles when you are creating new roles and need to combine an effective range of skills into one position. They will also be able to advise on focussed specialist roles to complement your existing team’s capabilities. Before taking on new resource to drive forward your online and social media strategy, it is worth clearly defining that strategy first in order to recruit the most appropriate skills to make it happen. If you wait to define the strategy once the social media resource is on board, you may find yourself with a strategy limited to their area of experience. Seek support from specialist consultants to help you define your strategy first if this is beyond your normal scope of work.

When a Bad Customer Experience Is Just What You Need

There are times when your marketing campaigns may need a bit of a boost, or you think you’ve tried all the promotion routes available and then you are hit by a customer complaint. Don’t panic and hide your head in the sand. You should celebrate, as this is the opportunity your company has been waiting for. While complaints aren’t to be celebrated in themselves, it is what you can do to remedy the complaint that can benefit your company. An opportunity to turn a bad situation into a good one is an opportunity not to be missed. However, you need to make sure that the complaints-handling team in place are skilled in the best possible customer service to start the ‘repair’ process from the minute they are contacted. Having a complaints process which is difficult and makes the customer feel stressed will make matters much worse. Good customer experience can sometimes go unnoticed and unappreciated, simply because that is what the customer expects. So a poor customer experience which is turned into an excellent one is going to be much more effective and memorable. It will be a talking point for good word-of-mouth promotion, which is hard to generate at the best of times. A complaint handled well can become a great case study for your marketing team to develop. A complaint can give you the opportunity to show that you can listen to customers and act on their comments. You can demonstrate that their bad experience is not standard practice for your operations, and you can more than exceed their expectations as you proceed to set it right. Customers will respond well to a company that shows it cares and can admit it has underperformed or got something wrong and genuinely wants to make amends. A complaint handled well can turn the customer into a more loyal customer than they were before they had the experience which caused them to complain. A complaint is only really going to go from bad to worse when those in the wrong fail to recognise it and refuse to do anything to repair the damage. Complaints should be welcomed as direct prompts to service improvement, which would normally form part of your continuous-improvement process. By challenging ‘the way things are done’, complaints can bring about a change in organisational behaviour with far-reaching effects. Investigated thoroughly and analysed to develop the best solutions, they can be the catalyst to lift an organisation’s overall performance and enhance the customer experience for all. If you have an eye for a great communications opportunity, or you can see benefits where others only see disaster, then a career could be waiting for you in the marketing industry. Speak to your local marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham to see how you could apply your skills to various elements of the marketing mix. Registering with marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham could be the start of an exciting new career.

Positioning Your Product

It could be said that if a product is good enough it could sell itself. Theoretically, that might be true, but even with the most ‘must-have’ products the potential for easy sales can be sabotaged by the simplest of moves. Should you misjudge the positioning for your product, you can undermine its quality, uniqueness and desirability very quickly. Identifying your target market is key to getting your product out to the right places. You need to know where your customers shop or where they do business and therefore where they are likely to come across your product. Whether it is a geographical location, a type of store or a location within a store, a specialist market or a trade show, you need to decide where best to position your wares. Getting your product in front of a customer is one thing, but getting them to stop and notice it and pick it up is quite another. Packaging can make or break a potential sale. It doesn’t have to fly in the face of environmental concerns and be elaborately wasteful. It just has to cleverly catch the eye of the customer and speak to them as something they may want, or better still, need. So you have what you think is the right packaging to appeal to your target audience and you have identified outlets for its sale, but what harm can be done if it is placed near the wrong goods? If your product is a high-end quality item with a price tag to match, it may get quickly dismissed as too expensive if it is placed alongside similar but lower-value products. Similarly, if you are selling direct from a fair and showcasing your quality hand-made items but your pitch is squashed in between bric-a-brac and jumble, then you are not positioning your offering correctly. The environment will be one of low-value bargain hunting, with people unlikely to appreciate the value of your goods. Knowing how to position and present products can be the realm of the marketing department or the sales professionals, depending on individual company organisational structures or the type of product you are selling. Within the whole sales process there can be discrete jobs for different stages of the sales and marketing cycle, with professionals focussing on different areas of expertise such as packaging design, account management, promotion or market analysis, to name just a few. If you are a small or start-up business, you may find yourself doing all of this yourself. If you are just starting up a business, you might find that the selling can be a bit of a mine field, so your big decision will be whether you should persevere trying to sell it yourself or whether you should call in the professionals. Planned correctly, hiring sales staff can quickly start to pay for itself as the orders start rolling in. However, you need to ensure you have hired the right people — those who can effectively bring in the business. If this is new to you, then you could benefit from using the services of expert sales recruitment agencies in Staffordshire. Good sales recruitment agencies in Staffordshire will continue to work with you after you hire to ensure that the placement is successful.