What else do you measure when customer retention is good?

I am always asked this question by my peers –

The customer retention is organically good and the churn is below industry standards. What other KPIs can I set for my team to keep them motivated? 

Interesting question, isn’t it?

My immediate response was an applause! A loud one!

Achieving organic customer retention is definitely AWESOME! It shows the team is performing as per the customer’s expectations and the customer objectives are MET.

What further excites me is their willingness to go the extra mile and improve their performance so that they can be exceptional and continue their winning streak!

We always hear people quoting “make hay while the sun shines”. This question is the perfect example of being proactive – the key to becoming a valued Customer Success Manager 

Being proactive is the key to becoming a valued Customer Success Manager

As an answer, I have a consolidated approach –

  1. Create ideal customer profiles – 

Define your best customer! Find the behavioral patterns. Note down the product features or services utilized extensively. Include company size, industry, MRR, the workforce needed. Also include the duration required to achieve certain customer journey milestones like Onboarding, Product Adoption, Upsells/Upgrades, etc.

Once you consolidate all this information, share the ideal profile with your Marketing, Sales, and Executive team. This will help them generate quality leads, increase prospect conversions, and sales closures.

  1. Check customer’s product usage and adoption with a fine comb

Any lack of understanding/usage/inconvenience about the product at the customer’s end is an opportunity to upsell/cross-sell the customer. This can be done in the form of feature upgrades, paid team-trainings, etc. 

For this, proactively interacting with each happy customer on a regular basis is the key. 

  1. Review customer touchpoints post-sale

Check the communication that is sent to the customer during the entire customer journey on all the channels. Make sure the communication emphasizes more about meeting the customer’s objective rather than boosting your company.

Customer communication should emphasize more about meeting the customer’s objective rather than boosting your company.

  1. A Customer Advisory Board

Your happy customers are an asset. They not just love your product/service but will also help you with the information about why they love it. 

Form a customer advisory board and involve as many customers as you can. Collaborate with these champions when launching a new product, fine-tuning your existing products or services, beta-testing new features, or even for initial discussions regarding product roadmaps or customer journey maps. 

  1. Customer Advocacy

Every happy customer has the potential to be your brand promoter! And if requested politely they will happily oblige! Get lots of success stories, case studies, testimonials, video interviews ready with your successful customers. You can utilize these in your sales pitch, marketing collaterals, social media channels, customer onboarding pitch etc.

  1. Search for opportunities to delight the customer

Going a step ahead, check the processes at the customer’s end BEFORE and AFTER they use your product/service and search for opportunities to innovate, digitize, or simplify them.

For instance, if your product requires uploading files in certain format, provide the customers an option to

a. download a sample file in the required format

b. help them convert their file into the required format.

In short, putting yourself into the customer’s shoes and thinking from their perspective.

To conclude, customer retention if done wisely can perform as a separate profit centre for the company. It is essential to continue the retention efforts even when the times are good to maintain the loyalty in the minds of the customers.

With these approaches, I am sure you will stay one step ahead in your pursuit of being an exceptional customer success manager!

Do drop your feedback and let me know if you have any more different strategies that we can add to the above list!

AI – The booster bite for your Customer Success

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With increasing competition, delivering a robust and meaningful customer experience has become the priority of every organisation. A company can no longer ignore its Customer Success team and has to invest considerable amount of resources to enhance the customer experience and make a difference.

Customer Success (CS) is a new growth engine in B2B Saas companies. It acts as the lifeblood of the organisation.

To encourage the Customer Advocacy, the CS teams need to eagerly align the entire organisation to the customer’s needs. And doing this proactively is the greatest challenge.

Artificial Intelligence is currently the most sought after tech in the industry. It is powering nearly every user experience by making it smarter, seamless and personalized. With Customer Success becoming a key differentiator, it is vital to introduce AI in your gameplan.

In every customer journey, timing is everything. Companies need to understand the customer expectations beforehand in every step of the journey. No customer is alike. Some may judge you by your product, others may test your touchpoints and service. Even after delivering a flawless product and service, there are some customers who expect a wow factor! (“maza nahi aya” kind-of)

After all the tryst, humans tend to forecast whether a customer is likely to churn or help in revenue expansion. They often base their plan of actions on such predictions. These predictions may vary person-to-person and can cause major confusion making the entire process futile.

Such predictive analysis often leads to endless struggle to identify the customers with risk alerts. Also poor accuracy and visibility into the entire customer story with insufficient time makes it difficult to take an effective action.

With AI, the companies can scrap this entire process and focus all their efforts in engaging with the right customers with appetite.

AI can help in real-time predictive analysis, giving the CS teams plenty of opportunities to understand the customer’s next move.

Having AI at your disposal, you can capture every action of a customer. Thus, storing the entire individual customer journey helps in creating patterns, inclinations and behaviours of a customer. As this data is directly based on customer actions with no room for predictability, the analysis can deliver better and more reliable results.

It can also help you identify the areas of strength and improvement in a customer journey. You can further enhance the outcomes by providing personalized experiences to weaker areas and nurturing the stronger areas.

In short, AI can increase the possibilities of revolutionizing the customer success journey by enhancing the overall customer experience.

As the data is the new oil, igniting the customer success engine with the AI booster bite will definitely place your company as the forerunner. 

What are your Superpowers for Customer Success?

While being the mother to a 4-year-old, I always thought that my customers are my second babies. The ground rule for every mother is to trust her instincts and remember that every baby is different. Just like there are no tried and tested practices in motherhood, there are no tried and tested strategies in Customer Success.

Every customer is an individual. And every individual needs to be catered as a separate identity and nurtured with a distinct pace.

We need to learn and adapt to the working style, mode of communication and timing each of our customers prefer as swiftly as possible and then tailor our interactions accordingly. The better we adapt to their ways, the stronger the bond becomes. Afterall, strong customer relationship is the foundation of any business organization.

Putting ourselves in their shoes is the best way to get a second look at our services and understand their perspective. Many a time, forethinking and analyzing their behavior patterns help us a long way in meeting the customer satisfaction.

By having our finger on the pulse of the customer’s needs, we acquire the authority to control the situation without taking away the power from the customers.

There is no winning formula as such which can guarantee you the customer loyalty. Doing our best to make the customers understand that they are our priority, our center of the universe in the good times as well as the bad times, will definitely help you earn the much needed brownie points.

Turning your happy customers into your brand advocates is just a cake walk then!

As the competition heats up, it is always good to have a strong backing from your genuine customers who can go an extra mile to help you get the new business.

To make this happen, every customer’s journey should have a WOW factor to make it memorable. A magic ingredient which will make them cherish your service forever.

Below are few magic sprinkles that I keep using for my wonderful customers. Mind you, they are no rocket science but simple gestures that count! 🙂

  1. Onboarding Welcome Kit

Like the babies, any new customer always craves for constant attention in the initial stage. Breaking the ice and making a lasting impression here is the key.

As an ice-breaker I always make sure I send a warm welcome email to the client which not only strikes “assurance” chord but also gives them a sneak peek of the process ahead.

For this, an onboarding kit as a welcome gift always helps.

This welcome kit should include

  • A short bio of the CSM who will be managing this account along with his/her snapshot.

Having a face to the name whom the customer will be interacting daily adds a personal touch.

  • Introduction to the company, process flows, the execution lifecycles of the product/services the customer has bought, Instruction Manual
  • Project plan
  • TAT charts
  • Support Information
  • Relevant Video Tutorial links (if any) of the products or services
  • FAQs
  • Escalation Hierarchy
  1. Frequent Roundtable Interaction

This adds a lot of value to your retainer clients. Having frequent interactions with the client helps build trust.

It also gives the client a feeling that they are a part of something big!

  1. User-friendly Documentation

Always share the documents that are easy to understand. The language and the content in the document should be compatible and presented in a form which the user can comprehend and apply as needed. The documents should be clear, concise, accessible and complete.

  1. Mid-Project Surveys

Survey is an unbiased approach to decision-making. They help you understand the customer perspective and analyze where the service needs to improve based on the results.

Instead of conducting surveys at the end of the project, mid-project surveys help us gather insights into the ongoing project journey and convert the downers into customer happiness.

  1. LinkedIn – Add them in your network

As customers can be advocates of any business, they can be advocates of your personal brand too.

Impressing your client with a strong LinkedIn profile is the key. And as you collaborate with them for work, asking for recommendation at the end never hurts!

There are multiple ways a customer can be serviced. A curious mind and a will to serve better is all we need.

At the end making customers look like heroes is all that matters.

So, folks, how do you serve your customers? Do you follow any unique approach? What are your differentiators? Let me know, I am all ears!

 

I write, do you?

As an amateur writer I have always chosen topics which were amusingly unconventional. The subjects which I have experienced and thought about.

Today I have nothing.

A delusional feeling of chaos and emptiness in my mind. A constant buzzing stream of thoughts – in and out. A whirlwind of emotions.

With this burden of brimming pool, I finally decide to open the gates through my writing.

We are blessed with an extraordinary element in our body – our mind, which helps us be aware, be thoughtful and behave. It is a tool which we can control. If we allow ourselves, it will help us experience the most wonderful things.

Throw out all your fear, negative thoughts and tune your mind into the right direction, it will lead you to eternal happiness.

A person does not need to be rich, wise, competent or successful to be happy. He just requires a healthy mind.

 

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Writing for me is the step towards gaining a healthy mind. It helps me break the chain of thoughts and think sound.

Writing for me is always a way of exploring myself, my thoughts, my limits and my cherished memories. It is like sailing into the vast expanse of the sea of words, floating into the free air without being worried about the fall. An experience which takes me into a different world which flourishes through my writing.

It is also a way to declutter my thoughts and gain clarity. It helps me have a balanced way of thinking by weighing the pros and cons of my desired actions.

At the very beginning it all looks futile. But as I jump deep into my writing and tune everything else out, the magic happens!

 

The feeling that you are constructing something out of nothing is amazing. The words give you the power to do unlimited things on a page.

 

Writing helps you shape your thinking ability and unburden your mind from the overload of thoughts. It helps you have a clear, concise vision.

As a writer I always allow myself to explore different facets of my field. The research I do and the insights I gain transform into my writing and make me well-acquainted with the subject. It is the way of making myself a bank of the knowledge. The more I write, the wiser I get and the better I become.

I always make a point of writing everything I could until there is nothing more for me to write. And at last when I am done, the feeling of accomplishment is unexplainable. It is like you ran your heart out and touched the horizon!

So folks, if you want to get into the daily habit of writing for personal/professional use, here are three awesome tools that will help you get through –

  1. DailyPage – emails you a prompt every morning and you have all day for your response. Share it or keep it private, choice is yours!
  2. 750 Words – A gamification technique which rewards you with points if you write 750 or more words everyday consistently.
  3. Twords – A push app which keeps notifying you to write and monitors your writing.

If you are in search of trending topics, try Quora to crowdsource your subject and write what the audience wants to read.

Happy Writing!! 🙂

PC: Google

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leaner Pockets to Leaner Bellies

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Demonetisation: The impact was as heavy as this word sounds!

As an avid foodie, this subtle comparison was quite obvious for me to think! With no cash in hand, I had to compromise a lot of my food binges during this historic movement.

When I shared this so-called grief with my better half, he immediately snapped me back to the reality by sharing his “jogging” experience he had the other day.

“People should run every day, there should be a law where the government makes it compulsory for every individual to run at least 1km daily” he said.

And that struck me like a lightening!!!!

Thinking further, I really wondered what if tomorrow the Government seriously enforces this law. How will people react? The pace at which the Government is coming up with new and innovative reforms, I am sure that day is not so far.

And as I was thinking, my unusually imaginative brain could literally form a mental image of all the people I know right from my maid, milkman,my boss, my son’s school teacher and the shopkeeper across the street, running a marathon in numbered jerseys. 😛

Every individual whether weak or strong, should run 1km every day. May be an app similar to Paytm will come for our rescue. It will track your distance and report it back to the Government.

Similar to ATM queues we witnessed during the cash crunch, we might see long lines outside the city parks, gyms. The sportswear industry will boom and every one will run to grab their favourite pair of shoes to get them running. There will be innumerable TV shows and debates supporting/opposing the government. Social media will see a pool of new memes created. In all this mockery, only one good thing will happen – people will RUN and abide the law.

Going further down the chain of my thoughts, I remembered how China enforced the One-Child Policy in the past. (Please note: this policy is relaxed now).

Talking about the weight issues, Japan is one-step ahead of us. They already have a Metabo Law where citizens between the ages of 45 and 74 should measure their waistline once a year and seek medical attention if required.

So there are countries who take into account not just the welfare of the people as a whole but individuals and families. Addressing such very-personal rather distinctive potential issues, the country will progress in a healthy way leading to a healthy society.

Instead of just axing the black money, the real effort should be put on axing the black thoughts. And what better way than enforcing PHYSICAL EXERCISE to every individual. Exercise releases endorphins which are responsible for the positive feeling in the human body. If all are happy and positive, I am sure the economy will rise and shine. I know it’s not that simple as we think but then neither was India’s independence!

“One small step for the man, one giant leap for the mankind” – Neil Armstrong

(Image Courtesy – Google)

What generates more demand – Following the consumer or leading them?

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“If you don’t have an IPhone, you don’t have an IPhone!”

 

When Apple rolled out this commercial, they made a history by creating a substantial demand for their phone.

The commercial did nothing but scratched the ego of the buyers and subtly declared that no phone is better than IPhone! The brand led the consumers with a new product which they never thought about having!

The move was risky but brave.

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” —Steve Jobs

 

Customer acquisition is a tough objective and when the competition with your peers is unstoppable, it becomes a herculean task.

To drive your prospects and convert them into your customers, you need to understand their needs, interests, problems they face and the environment they dwell in.

 

What is Demand Generation?

The concept of creating a need for your product or service in the minds of your prospects is called Demand Generation.

Every market will always possess some kind of selling. But the aim of any marketer should be to make the selling surplus.

Demand Generation is a multi-step process:

  1. Identify the interests, problems, needs of your target audience
  2. Provide them a solution that fits them and sells itself
  3. Make your solution stand TALL among your peers

 

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Apart from the theoretical definition, I would like to branch out the concept of Demand Generation into two categories:

  1. Creating a need and leading the consumers:

Leading the consumers with a new product rather than asking them about what kind of product they want and creating a need in their mind is a new way of driving the demand.

This involves installing a new idea in the minds of the consumers and educating them about its benefits and the positive influence it will have in their lives. So instead of doing a lot of market research, a new market for the product is created.

Apart from creating the awareness, engaging the prospects with the product right from the inception to the launch and of course post launch is really important.

During this period, the behaviour of your target audience will determine a lot about the future of your product. Their involvement will also help you gauge their expectations and enhance the product better.

 

  1. Following the need and the consumers:

The second category talks about following the already existing need and providing a better solution.

Innovation is the booming trend in the market. With in-depth market research, lot of new businesses and startups choose to innovate the existing product. They either enhance the feature or skew the target audience.

Launching a customized solution answering the needs of the prospect in a particular domain is a new way how startups plan their foothold in the market.

In this scenario, your prospect is already well-versed with the concept of your product and hence very little efforts need to be put to educate them.

The majority of the efforts are put in to establish the product as a BETTER and IMPROVED version of the other products in the market.

 

Flipkart, Snapdeal are the best examples of innovation. They are the India’s reply to Amazon and Alibaba.

 

Choosing to lead or follow the consumers entirely depends upon one’s will and ideas. Most of the marketers opt to follow the need and begin their journey on the lines of innovation. Very few risk to invent and pave their own paths.

Demand generation process requires a systematic planning and implementation. The current scenario shows that consumers rely a lot on search engines and social channels to make a buying decision.

Whether lead or follow, marketers need to devise a robust strategy that will help their brand to be a part of the digital and social selling experience.

There are many different strategies available for increasing the demand. To lighten the workload and minimize the time and investment, the best solution will be to channelize majority of your marketing efforts to Social Media.

Considering the stats reported by HubSpot, Social Media generates more leads at half the cost as compared to any other outbound marketing channels. For any marketer, more and cheap is always a good mix!

Other than Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, Online Paid Ads (SEM) and Email Marketing are the other channels which can be utilized wisely.

With a pool of opportunities in hand, limiting oneself to one’s own imagination will be a mistake.

Stay tuned for my next blog where we will explore these opportunities together. 🙂

(Image Courtesy: Google)

 

 

 

4 Secrets to attract prospects to your brand online

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For any budding entrepreneur, it is natural to feel overwhelmed about following the right marketing strategy to launch and highlight his company in the market.

Also considering the initial financial crunch, it is always better to take your business online and follow an inbound methodology.

Inbound marketing is the most effective way to promote your business online through quality content and pull the right audience towards your company. Of course, the content needs to be in tune with the interests of the target audience.

With the inbound methodology, earning the attention of your customers becomes easy.

To start off, the first step in the Inbound Marketing Technique is to Attract the relevant people and convert them into qualified prospects and ultimately into happy customers. 🙂

And with the availability of various online tools, this becomes an easy job!

Blogging:

“Content is always the king”- educating your visitors about your product or service is the best way to enhance their loyalty towards your brand. And if you have a quirky style of writing, you can keep your visitors glued and convert them into your subscribers!!! A total win-win!!

SEO:

Google being the major vendor to showcase your website and of course your company, your SEO strategy needs to be really strong.

And by this I mean REALLY STRONG! 😉

Pick the right set of relevant keywords, study your competitors thoroughly, create highly optimized pages, build highly searchable content and build links which are easily definable for your buyers. And while doing all this, DO NOT forget to keep your audience in your mind and try to answer their queries through your content in the best possible manner so that you appear prominently whenever they search for something they have questions about.

Website:

Start by developing a multi-page site. The content of the multi-page site needs to be well structured making it easy for visitors to understand. The UI of the website (home banner) should strike the emotional chord of the prospects – through catchy taglines or image or a video!

Add an online Live Chat widget such as Olark to the website. People who are more comfortable to chat and who are at their work desk but need quick answers to their questions without having a call will benefit immensely via the Live Chat Widget.

Another way of grabbing the eye balls will be to have a virtual number on the website. Virtual number helps in call tracking and recording which can be later referred to improve the product quality and customer experience.

And yes if you have more money to spend add a fancy animated video which explains the product very effectively.

Do not forget to make your website browser and device compatible so that a seamless experience is delivered to people who are willing to notice you.

In short, the website should be the welcoming door any visitor would like to enter after he gets familiarized with the brand, product or service through the content.

Social Media:

With the world going abuzz about the major social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, I bet you cannot ignore them. If the website is the face of your company, I am sure Facebook can be termed as the eyes of your company – the eyes with a sparkling vision!

Social Media lets you put important and valuable content related to your brand and helps engage with your audience.

Facebook for example provides the ocean of opportunities to showcase your brand, conduct live demos, events online, share important notifications across, helps you build an online store within the page and sells your product through beautiful, easy to understand adverts to your qualified prospects – a one stop solution for all your marketing needs.

To build a quality audience and have a good level of engagement, following a content calendar is always a best practice. The content calendar should humanize your brand by striking the emotional chord with the prospects. Your page should be able to entertain, provide vital information, engage and promote the brand and product.

02_8To summarize, the real secret to attract the target audience is to publish the interesting content through various available tools.

The key is to make your content address the needs of your buyers and mind you if there is no “need” to address, you have to create one! 🙂

Wondering about how to create the need? Stay tuned for my next blog!

Meanwhile do drop your comments below….

(Image Courtesy: Google)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is your organization social enough?

As I interact more and more with my clientele, I do get a feeling that entrepreneurs and brands are still skeptical about choosing Social Media as one of the marketing channel. Even if they do, they lack consistency and give up easily without exploring the power and reach of social media.

When a brand decides to go for social media, it faces multiple challenges. Right from the basic establishment on the social networking platform to lead generation, with an ever-evolving field like social media, keeping one abreast and churning out maximum ROI(Return of Investment) is a herculean task!

To begin with, at the inception point, the brands should create a unified approach. This strategy should include inputs from customer services, PR, marketing and other relevant departments of their business.

While devising the social media strategy, companies always face questions which seem easy but are rather difficult from the business point of view.

Few of them are listed below –

  1. What different sites should a company target for their social media efforts?

It depends on the following factors –

  • The business segment of the company, whether it is B2B, B2C oriented or both?
  • Goals, visions and objectives a company stands for
  • Culture, location also plays a vital role

If B2B – the company ought to rely extensively on LinkedIn, Google Plus and Twitter. They should also pay attention to lesser known sites like Quora and Toolbox as they have few but targeted audiences.

If B2C – the company should place Facebook as its primary priority, followed by Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube etc. B2C business segment has a lot of options to choose as it is not limited to any major group of people and can avail lot of opportunities, various generic social media channels can offer.

If both – the company has to thoughtfully choose the social media channels and divide the work in proper steps with a time frame for each.

The steps can be –

  • Initial Buzz and Awareness
  • Branding Campaigns
  • Reach and Penetration
  • Nurturing the reach
  • Sales Based Campaigns etc.

The efforts should be well directed and focused towards building a robust brand presence online.

  1. What are the biggest mistakes that companies make when it comes to social media?

With increased Internet usage, more and more companies are indulging in online marketing and promotional activities. But very few follow the correct path

  • Little Understanding of Social Media

Social media being dynamic and ever-evolving, very few companies actually take efforts to make the best possible use of the medium. Social media is often regarded as a place of leisure. Brands are very casual in their attitude towards social media and overlook it, thus ignoring the golden opportunity where the crowd is already buzzing! It is more about building your presence where your target audience is!

  • Vague Objectives

Often start-ups and small companies are unclear about the objectives which lead to inappropriate selection of social channels, unplanned efforts, investment and content.

  • Lack of knowledge about ROI

Investing time, efforts, man-power and money without proper knowledge about the actual ways of measurement and ROI (Return of Investment) is another big blunder companies do.

  • Being social and ignorant don’t go hand-in-hand

To maintain the loyalty of the customers, the brand should be prompt and polite in their response to the queries and concerns. One negative remark may cause havoc if gone viral and thus tarnish the brand’s image. Keeping in mind the “open to all” communication aspect of social media, the brand should ensure that they have swift customer care service.

  1. What is the best social media software?

Judging the software can be entirely done based on one’s needs and requirements. A lot many options are available in the market from basic free tools to advance enterprise solutions.

With advancements in technology, every social networking site upgrades itself to a new level every day! Moreover new SNS with innovative concepts are jumping into the market. To gel up with the existing and incorporate the new ones, the social media tools need to improvise regularly. It needs to meet different requirements such as Social media postings scheduling, feeds aggregation based on keywords, CRM features, Customer Support, Conversation tracking, Sentiments analysis etc.

According to me, Hootsuite is one of the best social media software. It is a dashboard which helps you manage multiple Social Media Accounts of Multiple clients in a single interface. The ease in usage, user friendly interface, advance scheduling system, analytics, insights, reports, streaming is a lot a software offers.

Hootsuite is the only software which is being improved day by day. New social media channels are added and management work of all the networks is simplified in very few steps.

  1. What questions should an entrepreneur ask before hiring someone to manage their social media for them?

Before asking the questions, it is the sole responsibility of the entrepreneur to explain his business segment, target demography, future plans, objective of the Social Media Marketing campaign, and expectations, to the Social Media Team.

Then the questions can be:

  • Which are the Social Media Channels that can be leveraged for my business segment?
  • How much amount of the efforts required meeting the goal?
  • Does the Social Media Team follow White Hat Techniques and support genuine and honest work efforts?
  • What is the cost estimation and the budget required? Can I also have the cost breakups?
  • How is the work process followed?
  • Who will be my point of communication for regular updates about the work? Will that person be available as per my time zones?
  • How frequently can I review the performance? Weekly? Monthly?

  1. How does an entrepreneur know if he is getting a good service from his social media providers?

An Entrepreneur should have major focus on the ROI – Return of the Investment. ROI should not be misunderstood as ‘Profit’. ROI is actually the money and the efforts you put in the Social Media activities and the return you get in terms of Likes, Shares, Buzz, Branding, Traffic, Passive Sales etc based on the net profit of the business. He must ask for the ‘measurement matrix’ to the service providers, to understand on what grounds he can measure the success.

Also, an Entrepreneur should also give priority to the quality of work and service. The Social Media Providers should be independent enough to perform their work with perfection. Frequent performance reviews should be done after giving ample time to the provider to start and stabilize the work.

Basic measurement is done on two broad parameters as

  • Qualitative Measurement: in terms of Likes, Shares, Buzz, Branding (artwork, tone of content) and user engagement.
  • Quantitative: Number of fans/followers, increase in traffic/visitors etc.

  1. What tips / advice can you give relating to social media campaigns?

Tips –

  • Be humans and remember there are humans at other end too.

A social media campaign needs to be User-oriented. The users must find the content valuable, only then they will perform some action on the page.

  • Know your desired actions

Prompting the users to take some action by using different Call to Action elements. It can be asking them to ‘tag friends’, share, fill the form and register for events etc.

  • Try to initiate conversation

The variety in content with a great visual appeal helps in getting the attention. Write stories, fun, humor, informative posts etc to initial conversation. Knowledge sharing is the great way to attract more users.

Asking questions, initiating debates and discussions is also a trendy way to increase user engagement.

  • Be Consistent

Consistent efforts are required to keep the page or accounts active and the engagement rate constant. Inconsistency may lead to low performance of the page.

  • Learn to Map the trends and keep talking about them

People will agree/disagree and will comment about their opinions. Its an easy way to build engagement.

  • Re-share the customer feedback, testimonials or brand related content shared by the customers. Customers love being treated as friends and they will respond in a very positive way.

Making the users take actions on the page or the accounts the way you want them to take is a knack. Triggering the right emotion in the minds of the audience should be done to sync the thinking process of the audience with the brand. If this happens, the customers will not limit themselves in showing their love for the brand.

So people, are you still apprehensive about social media?? I hope not…. 🙂

Please feel free to drop your questions and opinions in the comments below.

Image Courtesy: Google

8 steps to build an effective social media strategy

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After choosing the right mix of social channels for your business (refer: How to choose the right mix of social channels for your business?), comes the important part of any social media campaign – building the right social media strategy.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
A blueprint that shows how a company/brand should plan to use social media to help achieve its business objectives. It also throws a light on the exact steps that will be taken to achieve the goals.

What does a Social Media Strategy include?
A. An executive summary which briefly explains the key objectives and recommendations, without going into much detail.
B. A comprehensive analysis which shows the current strengths, weaknesses and problem areas that the strategy will focus upon.
C. The key objectives which are the business goals that the strategy aims to achieve
D. The actual strategy which consists of elaborate explanation about types of content, recommendations, content calendars, tactics and tricks.

What are the major steps to be followed when building a social media strategy?

Step 1: Laying the Concrete

A strategy should be treated as an AIR that free flows in the company rather than WATER stored that everyone needs to fetch. A cross-functional team will contribute diversely rather than a single department owning it.
Open brainstorming sessions with different logical perspectives contribute immensely in building a robust strategy.

Step 2: Keeping your ears open

Broadening your social listening beyond your brand name is one way you can listen clear and deep what your customers and competitors are trying to convey you by their actions and behavior.
Listening is an old advice but cannot be ignored however new the circumstances might be.

Step 3: Pre-defining the goals

Why do you want to use social media for? Brand awareness? Lead Generation? Sales? Branding? Loyalty and retention? Revenue?
Social media does help achieve multiple things but pre-defining the goals help the strategy produce the best results.

Step 4: Choosing the success metrics

Selection of success metrics largely depends on the business goals pre-defined in the strategy. Number of likes, engagement, traffic, ROI, revenue. These key measures help you gauge the effectiveness of your strategy. Monitoring the measures and optimizing the strategy based on their response is a vital step of any social media campaign.

Step 5: Understanding the behavior of the target audience

Every brand has a niche audience. Understanding their behavior to the current market trends is one cautious step towards building an effective strategy. The strategy needs to address and nurture the characteristics of brand’s current as well as prospective customers. Understanding the volatile nature of the market, a strategy should be impactful and influence the minds of the audience uniquely.

Step 6: Discovering and polishing the brand’s USP

What do you want your brand to be known for? Which is the thing that will make your brand stand out among the rest? How are you planning to appeal to the heart of your audience?
When Bisleri replaces the word “water” and Xerox becomes the common man’s interpretation to “photocopy”, you know how deep the brand is rooted in the minds of its loyal audience.

Step 7: Humanizing your brand

People befriend each other and not the machines. A brand whether personal or company, needs to humanize and behave like a person. The invention of robots (machine with a human appeal), showcasing of aliens in movies in a manner similar to human physiology are all instances that show brand’s inclinations towards humanizing their products and ensuring they have huge mass appeal. Social media is no different! Brands need to be friendly, open and easily accessible the way real friends are!

Step 8: Defining the milestones

Setting the milestones with clear objectives and time duration is another important task that helps the brand to monitor its progress time-to-time.
Monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annual milestones are also the best way to generate a repository of your ideas. These ideas can be referred later for planning the campaigns, contest or any other event in future.

Once all the steps are done, a plan for each channel can be created individually based on the facilities provided by the channel. Every channel can be utilized for varied purposes. The best choice of channels, activities, frequency and time of publishing the content can be done depending on the business goals.

The above steps can be further categorized elaborately for major brands but the thought process remains the same.

Establishing a brand with systematic planning and in-depth knowledge of social media channels is the basic requirement. If this is achieved, I am sure devising a strategy would be easy.

How to choose the right mix of social channels for your business?

With multiple social media platforms available, its obvious for one to get overwhelmed before choosing the right ones for his business.

Selecting the right mix of social media platforms is like building the foundation on which you plan to construct your brand image.

Once the platforms are chosen, devising the strategy becomes easy.

And for that, one must have a deep understanding about the features and offerings of major social media channels available in the online market.

To make it easy, the social media platforms can be categorized in following ways –

1. Must-haves for any business 

Facebook, Twitter and Google+ fall in this category. As the name suggests, these three channels are essential for all and every type of business.

Facebook vanity URL has gained the equal status to that of the Website. Twitter is the new name for Customer Service Center. And after conquering the SEO kingdom, Google + has emerged as the new biggie.

You cannot afford to avoid any one of these.

2. Visual Marketing

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Restaurants, Fashion, Beauty, Health and Fitness, Education, Clothing, Real Estate…phew!!!!!!

Visual appeal is the most important thread for all these segments to flourish on social media.

A single image speak thousand words and a video can provide the feel of a new world more stunning than simple plain text. Customers crave more for visual content and hence social media channels such as Pinterest, Instagram and Youtube are more popular.

Pinterest offers the facility of open online catalog where all the brand products can be categorically listed with their price tags. Instagram helps the customer understand WHATS TRENDING and pushes the customer to be a part of the trend through its glamour.

Youtube is on the other hand an Online TV where customers can be given the virtual feel of the brand through its ads and other informative videos.

3. Content Marketing

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Every business has multiple facets. These facets need to be well projected and explained to the target audience. Here content marketing comes into the picture.

Sites like Tumblr, WordPress, Newsletters form the part of content marketing.

Content is always the king and the basic driving force in attracting the audience. Relevant content will help you gain trust and loyalty from your customers.

Sharing the information about the brand, its story, formative features, elements, the vision and achievements, current offerings, sales and discounts can be done through blogs.

Along with that, publishing blogs about How To’s, Brand’s take on the new relevant updates in the market, Educating the customers about things in which the brand is expert in also help to make your readers the regular visitors.

Newsletters are more about “Customer Relationship Nurturing”. They keep your customers connected with your brand and pursue them to participate in brand activities and developments.

Here the key is to offer maximum value to the users and keeping the promotional aspect moderate.

4. Location-based Marketing

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Location based promotions is the new powerful method of attracting your audience. Business segments who have their retail outlets at different locations can make the best use of this method.

Sites like Foursquare, Yelp and Google Places are strong players in this category. Restaurants, Salons and Spas can explore these social media channels.

Features like Location-based recommendations, Reviews and Ratings, Check-ins, location based listings, Short-tips and messages are something to look out for.

5. Professional Marketing

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Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram are all Casual form of marketing. Here the tone, language and projection of the brand is friendly and casual.

But few businesses also need a professional tone, look and feel.

LinkedIn being the pro, followed by Google+ are the two major platforms in this category.

As the business builds up via professional networking, LinkedIn makes it easy for the companies and organizations to collaborate, build strong ties with each other and do business.

Various features such as Groups, Discussions, Showcase Page and Inmails help companies to project a professional image and network with like-minded individuals and businesses.

Recruitment and Staffing Agencies, Software and Mobile App Developments, Real Estate are few major business segment that fall in this category.

The five categories listed above do not cover the entire social media world but they do help the newcomer to categorically place his business and choose the channels.

With constant and continual upgrades and advancements, new social media platforms with different concepts and ideas will emerge, unique features, facilities will be integrated in the existing ones….Its easy for a new entrepreneur to get engulfed by the waves but the key is to ride the tide….

If one is accustomed to the basic definitions of the above five categories, I am sure selection of the right mix of social channels will be just a cake walk. 🙂