Do Customers Love You? (Inc)
What seems like a complicated concept can actually be addressed through five questions.

Does your company generate organic buzz? Do you provide your customers with a simple and compelling marketing message?  Do you fully understand your target customers? These questions are key areas to start for fully understanding how your customers feel about your brand.

Marketers, Agencies Locked in a Data Tug of War (Ad Age)
As if your data strategy wasn’t confusing enough, just wait until you start dealing with question of data ownership.

Numbers are marketing currency — and analytics are in higher demand than ever. Especially if you’re part of an agency, ask yourself this question: is data worth a fight?

Five of the Most Profitable Tweets Ever (WSJ)
Can you believe that some celebrities have witnessed paydays in the seven figures on Twitter?

Here’s a video to take you through some of those memorable occurrences. Some may surprise you  – shit my dad says, and some are more obvious (Kim Kardashian).

Solving the Internet’s Congestion Problem (HBR)
With innovation comes a crowded market. With the billions of people who access the Internet each day, there are bound to be technology consequences.

This blog post will walk you through them — in more detail than you’ve ever wanted to know.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

According to a new infographic by FreeWebsite.com, building a brand online can increase customer loyalty and awareness. It’s also makes it easier to figure out who your demographic is and target campaigns towards them.

Online content from brands should show that they are experts in a subject, along with information that shows customers ”how you can solve their needs better than anyone else.” According to the graphic, ”consistent brands are worth up to 20 percent more than those who aren’t.” Consistency means making sure that descriptions, contact information, pictures, and keywords match up and can be associated with one individual brand.

Online Retailing Blog also says a brand’s voice needs to be consistent on and offline: “Does your brand look and ‘feel’ the same in your printed marketing as it does in your online presence? If the answer is ‘no,’ or worse ‘I don’t know,’ then you probably need to consider your overall creative approach.” This doesn’t mean just copying and pasting, but it should have an overall similar creative direction.

A blog from The Web Shoppe agrees: ”Your 140-character tweets should be written in the same voice as your 500-word blog posts. Even your Instagram photos should use imagery that reflects your brand’s personality and voice. As with anything, this will take practice and some experimentation, but a consistent voice will make your brand stronger and encourage loyalty from your customers.”

Image courtesy of Victor Correia/shutterstock

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The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

The idea is that by presenting a company at face value and showing a bit of the operation behind the scenes, customers will be more endeared towards it and be able to relate to it.

“Social media has made everything more transparent,” says Doug Schumacher, a Facebook strategist at Zuum. “For brands, I think it’s about adapting to the changing media landscape. If you’re not transparent, you don’t feel relevant.”

The payoff for brands is that they’ll gain a customer’s trust.

“People won’t buy anything from your company unless they trust you,” says Brad Smith, founder of FixCourse. “It might be easy for large, established companies to avoid this because they’ve been around for years and everyone knows them. But small or medium sized companies have to work extremely hard to gain and keep trust.”

Posting pictures of employees and events is one way of working to establish trust, and will likely result in feedback if posted on social media sites.

Starbucks frequently updates its Facebook with photos of baristas at work images that shows employees participating in nonprofit work. On Twitter, McDonald’s employees sign the tweets they send out with their initials to give them a personal touch.

Smith says that brands can also give customers peek into the workings of the company by publishing ”team member profiles, conduct(ing) interviews with staff, [and] encourag(ing) employees to write blog posts and participate in social media. The president of the company could hold a monthly Google Hangout for anyone to join, or do a ‘town hall’ style Q&A.”

Domino’s greatly benefited from being open and real with customers when in 2010 they admitted that their product needed improvement and focused a video and social media campaign on fixing it. It posted negative tweets about the product on its site for the campaign called Pizzaturnaround.com. This increased profits by 8% over the course of a year.

“With the rise of social media, it is not hard for prospective customers to quickly learn the truth about your product,” says Marketing Experiment’s Daniel Burstein. “If you openly admit your weaknesses, you may be able to gain their trust. And, ultimately, every sale is an act of trust.”

Customers these days are bombarded by messages from businesses coming at them from all angles: On their cell phones, in their inboxes, and on their social media accounts. Transparency, personality, and being real helps brands stand out among everything and everyone else vying for a customer’s attention.

James Adams of Big Girl Branding emphasizes that being transparent will only help companies in the long run.

“Openness about your successes and failures will inspire your customers to trust you when they see that you do not try to make your business seem better than it really is,” she says. ”Just be honest about the condition of your business and you will be surprised at how your customers will respect you for it.”

Image courtesy of Maja H./Shutterstock

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

“No longer can you afford to rely solely on passive content, content that just sits on your site waiting to be discovered,” says Content Marketing Institute’s Gene Sigalov. “Your content needs to also be active, it needs to reach out to the consumer and truly engage them. … You need to generate a buzz… literally (in their pocket). You need to start sending texts.”

According to Sigalov, 90 percent of all text messages sent are read by the recipient within three minutes, and have an open rate of 97 percent (compared to 10 percent of emails). He suggests that companies send out short, easy to read content, such as tips and tricks, on these messages.

Just by texting customers once a week, he argues that marketers can bridge the gap between themselves and customers, since it’s more personal than email or social media.

Linda Doell of Ez Texting says that text messages should also be local to “help your customers feel connected.” Sending out a general cold text to every customer won’t exactly strengthen the relationship or endear them towards the brand.

Since texts are all about timing, Doell and Sigalov say that they must be sent out at the right time. Doell writes that text messages should be limited, so as to build excitement for when they arrive. Marketers can also text limited-time offers to “create urgency among customers.”

Although all the content marketing hype lately is about the iPad and smartphone apps, text messaging is a powerful, almost foolproof way to disperse a message among consumers.

Image courtesy of cozyta/shutterstock

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

But on the consumer side, these emails can be intrusive and annoying, and the opposite intended outcome could happen: Customers may become frustrated and shy away from doing business with a company.

Like many people who sign up for Daily Deals, Business 2 Community‘s Jessica Doban said that she actually took advantage of a very small percentage of what she was emailed. Out of 1,300 chances to purchase something, she only took action three times.

Doban argues that coupons may get customers in the doors once, and that listing a business on a daily deals site might just be a quick fix.

“A healthy amount of research about your actual customers may provide more valuable opportunities for you to get them back through your doors,” she says. ”Strategy is the key to properly allocating your resources. After all, a coupon may bring people to your business once, but that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll ever be back.”

Customers on these daily deal lists are “price sensitive” and are customers of the sites, not the businesses on it, says Get Busy Media‘s Mike Loiacono. He also mentions that businesses face being understaffed and overwhelmed with the new influx of customers coming through the door for a daily deal–an instance that isn’t uncommon.

A study by Rice University reported on by USA Today, 44 percent of restaurants earned money by using daily deal sites like Living Social and Groupon, while 56 percent of businesses in general gained revenue.

As Doban pointed out, businesses should work smarter when targeting new or returning customers with coupons. Marketers need to nurture their already existing fan base or new subscribers by giving out coupons via email. The customer knows what they signed up for, and willingly wants to receive information from the business.

The same goes for social media sites. Look at Dell, which created  Twitter account @DellOutlet to alert customers to deals on its merchandise and has 1.5 million followers. Targeted marketing is always the key to a successful campaign.

Image courtesy of Bruce Clay, Inc/flickr

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Once customers click on ads, they should be taken to websites that deliver content the ad promised.

This consistency, according to ClickZ’s Nathan Richter, will promote higher conversion rates, and customers will begin to associate certain looks and feels with the brand.

Brands should track how visitors arrived at their websites as well as their locations and whether or not they’ve been to the site before, says Richter. This will be key in determining what types of messages are displayed.

“For example, first-time visitors should be presented with your top selling products, while returning customers who are more familiar with your band should see new arrivals,” he says. ”More specifically, a footwear brand should display hiking boots to visitors from a region like Colorado and open-toe options to visitors from Miami.”

If customers arrived at a website through Facebook, a company should target them with comment-enabled pages, the ability to like products, and access to social login.

In the case that a customer came to the site from a niche blog, marketers should track which blog it was and offer products that relate to the customers, writes Richter.

Using analytics and finding out where customers came from, as well as why they decided to click on an ad, will greatly help marketers shape their advertisements and landing pages.

Image courtesy of slgckgc/flickr

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Business 2 Community‘s Ken Mueller recently was reminded that this effort can have an impact if done right.

After attended a Baltimore Orioles game, he received a follow up email from the team ”offering me a recap of the game and thanking me for attending.

The email included the basic box score, a link to video highlights, a survey to offer feedback, and the chance to purchase tickets for future games.”

He says that even though he realized the email was part of a marketing effort that went out to all fans, the follow up, because it was well done, made him feel special.

Even though “the game was over and I’d moved on,” he writes, “they weren’t done with me. They wanted to remind me of my time at the park and nurture me along to become a repeat customer.”

Mueller points out an important fact: Customers need to be cared for, even if the sale is complete.

Companies can use information from questionnaires to improve their products and how they deal with customers.They can also see the follow up as an opportunity to sell customers additional products that may be similar to their purchase, writes blogger Miles Baker.

Image courtesy of Keith Allison/flickr

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

The metric called ‘lifetime value’ does just that. It is a net monetary value associated with each customer relationship. It allows companies to access better acquisition details and provides for a faster feedback loop.

At the Daily Deal Summit East earlier this month, industry experts emphasized the importance assessing lifetime value for accounts. Jake Stein, co-founder of RJMetrics, said at the April 18 panel, “If you can use the metric to make some decision or take some action, then it’s useful.”

Knowing Which Data is Worthwhile

Advertising executive John DeMayo joined Stein at the summit in praising the value of metrics, explaining how to assess a data set’s decision-making potential. They said that marketers should ask, “What are we trying to accomplish?” Then, “Is it possible to get this data?” If data is going to cost extraordinary amounts of time and money, it may not be worth the effort, they said. Remember, the point of data collection is to improve productivity.

Lifetime value is generally an effective metric to consider, Stein said. “It’s very actionable,” he said. ”You can use it for a lot of tactical decision making.”

Calculating Lifetime Value

How does one go about creating these miraculous data sets? It probably requires making friends with people like DeMayo and Stein. But for those interested in crunching the numbers themselves, Stein explained that lifetime value can be calculated through cohort analysis, “the view of how specific, unchanging groups of customers behave over the same periods in their respective customer life-cycles.”

Then, start at the highest level of the data set (with the most amount of information), and “drill down until you lose statistical significance,” Stein said.

DeMayo suggested isolating company trends versus media trends. “Consider looking at your email rates and click-through rates as a proxy for revenue,” he said.

When long-term customer satisfaction is at the forefront of a business plan, it’s worth spending the time and money to track customer behavior, they said. With due consideration, tactical relevance, and helpful data filters, metrics can help turn a company’s trudging pace into a spirited gallop.

Image courtesy of hddigital/shutterstock

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently