Eight Tips to Help Small Businesses Get Serious About Reaching Connected Consumers
By Annie Tsai
Are your customers “connected consumers?” Do they use technology to help make buying decisions, to stay in touch with your company, and to share their experiences with others? Many small business owners don’t think so. What’s more, they assume all technology users are comprised of the younger generation and NOT their customer base. As a result, small businesses don’t maintain a healthy online presence. For many, in fact, it’s little more than an afterthought. But that’s a big mistake. Statistics show that more and more consumers in general are online and actively navigating virtual marketplaces as well as social spaces. And online consumers are not always who you think they are — in fact, a little over half of Americans over age 65 use the Internet and email, and 70 percent of those use the Internet on a daily basis.
If you’re avoiding connecting your offline business with your online presence, you may be forgoing a lot of profit. Just having a basic informational website doesn’t cut it anymore. No matter what industry you serve or how small your company is, it’s crucial to make it as easy as possible for connected consumers to interact with you.
Now that consumers have found their digital voices, business owners who want to stay in business can no longer ignore the social media landscape. In a global marketplace that’s more connected and competitive by the day, customers aren’t limited to only one or two methods of communication. If you don’t interact with them in the way they prefer and expect, you won’t be around for long.
What’s happening online should be an accurate reflection of what’s happening offline, and vice versa. The following are eight specific tactics to help you connect your online presence with your offline business:
1. Synchronize your efforts… You should pre-plan your promotional efforts in all marketing channels — specifically: website, social media, business directories, in-store, offline, and email. All of these channels should complement each other by supporting the same goal or goals. Synchronizing your offline and online marketing efforts will ensure that your message has the maximum exposure to consumers and will save you time and money because you won’t have to do the same work twice on different occasions. You’ll also be able to constantly test how effective each channel is with your specific customer base.
2. …and stay consistent. You need to offer consumers consistency online and offline. Too often, small businesses hastily throw together an online presence merely for the sake of having one. This does more harm than good, because it can be a big turn-off to curious connected consumers. In order to effectively represent your brand online, you should invest time and resources in creating a well-designed website, carefully curated social media presences, and thoughtful emails that mirror your offline branding.
3. Ask the right questions about your website. Having made the case for a strong online presence, you should zoom-focus on your website specifically. Pay attention to look, feel, and wording with the end goal of creating a website experience that’s the equivalent of what you’re trying to deliver when buyers walk through your doors. Your website is your online homestead, the place to which email and social media will funnel consumers.” You should ask yourself three specific questions:
• Does the website’s look and feel represent what I feel when I walk through my business’s front doors? If not, what’s missing? If you’re using a website building tool, you may be able to find a template design that effectively represents your business’s look and feel; if not, consider investing in a designer or hiring a digital art student interested in building his or her portfolio.
• Does my website tell the story I want my customers to know about my business? Am I using images that effectively help do that? Try not to use a lot of stock photo art on your website. Instead, use photos of your storefront and employees to make your website experience more personal. Highlight products and services, your interior and exterior space, people, and events that showcase your business’s personality and involvement with the community.
• Do I want to have more of a social voice on my website that mirrors my business’s Facebook page, or do I want to keep things more professional? You can do a little bit of both — use more professional language in your website content, and simply add a Facebook Plug-in that displays your Facebook post feed. It’s perfectly fine to maintain a professional voice on your website; just make sure your social voice isn’t so far off that your customers and browsers receive a disjointed experience across those channels.
4. Don’t be too generous with online offers. As you start to incorporate online channels into your holistic marketing efforts, you might be tempted to run several simultaneous promotions and be extremely generous with discounts. After all, your goal is to draw in as many new customers as possible, right? Well, yes…but not at the expense of longer-term success. Don’t go overboard with offering online discounts and deals. You don’t want to condition new customers to constantly hold out for better deals or disillusion loyal customers by making them think that you offer incentives only to new buyers.
5. Prepare your team… Happy customers start with happy employees. And happy employees are the ones who are prepared to do their jobs well and deliver the “experience expectations” you’ve set via your online and offline marketing efforts. Happy employees are also more likely to encourage add-on services, thereby increasing average revenue per customer for your business.
It’s a shame when well-crafted marketing efforts are rendered moot by disengaged employees. To make sure that doesn’t happen in your business, build a set of “standard operating procedures” into your marketing plan — with specific guidelines on communication, positioning, experience delivery, and product or service upselling if relevant.
6. …and pick their brains. Bring your employees into the fold of designing and executing great marketing plans for your business whenever possible. If you don’t have to follow specific franchise marketing guidelines, you and your team can collectively decide on the most effective way to pitch the promotion through all channels. The more you encourage your employees to share their ideas, the more involved they’ll become—and the more successful your promotion will be.
7. Define your social voice. Since different social media sites have different official and unofficial “rules” and tend to attract different types of users, you’ll have to pay special attention to how you’ll market your promotions within each one. Overall, though, remember that your social style should reflect your offline experience, and vice versa. Some businesses prefer to maintain a more professional tone through their social channels. Other businesses prefer to lighten their tone through social channels, using them as an avenue through which to inject some spice into their customer interactions. Carefully communicate the tone you want employees to use on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social profiles you’ve chosen to establish.
8. Be willing to evolve. When it comes to technology (and the relationship you and your consumers have with it), change is the only constant. Keep in mind that it’s okay to evolve. Even if your initial online strategies were spot-on, you may find over time that your customers’ preferences have changed. If (and more likely, when) that happens, refine where you spend your energy and adapt your voice and tactics to be more in line with their expectations. As long as you keep your listening skills sharp, you and your team will have no trouble reading your community and tweaking your approach to keep customers satisfied.
Maintaining consistency across all of your marketing channels is critical to delivering a winning customer experience. No matter how your online shoppers interact with your business, they should feel a sense of consistency when they convert to buying offline. Commit to serving your connected consumers. Don’t wait —get social and start winning offline and online fans. HBM
Annie Tsai is the author of The Small Business Online Marketing Handbook: Converting Online Conversations to Offline Sales (Wiley, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-118-61538-6, $25.00). She is chief marketing officer at Demandforce, an Internet marketing and communication company that advises small- to medium-sized businesses. She and the team at Demandforce have worked closely with small businesses for over a decade to understand how to leverage online tools to maximize return. Tsai has prior experience designing global customer experience and retention management strategy and managing sales, sales engineering, and social and email marketing strategy design and implementation. Her blog about customer experience and life in the San Francisco Bay Area is immensely popular.
Originally posted 2015-03-16 09:00:24. Republished by Blog Post Promoter