Week 13: The Pillars of Delight (MKTG 348)

Hey guys!

Why is customer delight so important? According to the Inbound Methodology customers will be promoters of your business and will help you get more business. It all goes back to trust and building your trust from the beginning  is going to delighting your customers. The 3 Pillars of delight to follow is helping your customer achieving  the goal, solving the problem, and exceeding expectations. Everybody of the team needs to understand that customer service is everything and providing the best for your customers is going to make them want to come back and even tell their friends about your company. It is said that 65% of customers cut ties with brands with a single poor customer service experience. Your customers are everything so providing them with what they need and overall helping them is going to promote your business. Working in retail has given me the experience of helping customers and providing them with exceptional customer service. Building relationships with your customers brings them back to shop.

So how do you delight your customers? Build trust throughout the whole process not just the beginning you need to allow your customer to see how your always there to help them. You also need to be innovative and teach your team to always innovate and providing your customers with solutions. You also want to have communication and being personal is better than being impersonal. Lastly you want to educate your customers. Managers should take the time helping their team educate customers. It is not ones job to teach customers its everyone. A customers experience is based off their experience so having a delighted experience is going to build a long lasting customer.

Week 12: Taking Your Sales Process Inbound (MKTG 348)

Hey Guys!

Well the topic I will be discussing today will be about Inbound Sales. According to New Breed Marketing, "Inbound Sales is the process of focusing on individual buyers and their personal needs, points of pain, frustrations and goals. It is essential that you understand your customers and prioritize their needs first. In the world of Inbound the sales process is changing because the buying process is changing. Giving the customer what they want in a delightful experience is a good inbound sales approach.

Here is a list of great ways of transforming the way you sell. Number one, you want to make sure you are targeting the right people. This is goes back to your buying personas and knowing who you are trying to target. Research your leads and check social media and the companies information. You want to know the basics like their size, revenue, what they sell/who they sell to, etc. Understand the  company with in the news side and check social media. Companies with social media are more successful than ones that don't use it. Next is connect with accounts by building trust and being unbiased with your prospects and understanding their approach to their company. Lastly, transform how people see you as a sales person and listen to them. You can't seem to be someone who is just interested in selling something you need to make the prospect comfortable and being trusting is going to seal the deal. People buy from people who they trust so once trust is established then you are able to help your customer. So guys I thought I would keep this one short however sales is very crucial to Inbound and keeping an open mind will help the growth of your business.

Week 11: The Top SEO Mistakes (MKTG 348)

Hey guys!

As I was exploring on the web for more content on Search Engine Optimization I came across this helpful site on mistakes when optimizing your site. The Top Shameful SEO Mistakes on wordtracker talks about these issues. Number one is keyword stuffing. According to www.wordtracker.com , "Keyword stuffing refers to the shady tactic of stuffing a web page full of words and phrases in an attempt to manipulate a site’s rankings in Google’s search results." The number 2 mistakes is broken links. Nobody likes a broken link and Googles doesn't like it as well. Google is known to penalize you for providing broken links and giving your site a bad reputation. Number 3 is Copying another sites work and ripping off their original content. Google sees this and can put your site to the very bottom and even make it so hard for people to even find your site. Number 4 is duplicate content and having multiple pages with the same content you risk your self with being ranked lower so when you are presenting content keep it informative and don't talk about the same thing or reword something in multiple places. Number 5 guys we are half way there! Links from non-credible sites are where to watch it.  "A link from an authoritative blog is more likely to boost your rankings and traffic than a couple of hundred links from low quality sources" (wordtracker).

Number 6, refers to meta keyword tags and to avoid using them! Number 7, is avoiding analytics. This is something you don't want to do. How are you to measure your sites traffic? You need to be aware how your sites doing and measuring what on your site is doing well and whats not doing well is crucial. Number 8 is not optimizing with the right keywords. Your keywords are everything. They are how people find you so once you know who your buyers are think of words that are going to create you traffic. Number 9, is not allowing your site to be crawled. If your content is difficult for a search engine crawler to find then Google will dismiss it and wont rank it because it can't be indexed. Alright guys, the last one is irrelevant anchor texts. Tailoring your anchor texts is tedious however it will help you with your ranking. So guys I hope this helped a little. Don't fall into one of these many mistakes, make your site the best and be ranked to the top!

Week 10: The Power of SMarketing (MKTG 348)

Hey guys!

It is all about the power of SMarketing otherwise known as Sales + Marketing. Hubspot defines the term as, "The process of aligning the sales and marketing teams around common goals within a business or organization focused on improving revenue." SMarketing is critical to Inbound success and 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative. Sales is often describes simple minded, incompetent, and lazy. Marketing is said to be arts and crafts or irrelevant. So companies with strong Marketing and Sales have 20% more annual revenue growth. A happy team makes a happy team is what I think of. If you are able to have both teams work together and understand one other will help the company and can help string along ideas. Also are both teams rewarded the same because the last thing you need is to have your team fall apart because everyone isn't treated the same way. 

One good practice for good SMarketing is getting on the same page by having both teams have the same goal. It should include a marketing pipeline and a sales quota. When both Marketing and Sales Teams have a understanding and have the same goal is when you start to be successful. Everything in marketing always goes back to your buyers and alignment around your personas helps you solve for those personas. Going through the buyers journey will help you along the way. This section had tons of information and if your interested for more visit Hubspot Academy.

Week 9: Email Marketing (MKTG 348)

Hey guys!

So I wanted to switch our attentions to an important tool we use everyday which is email. Email is still a part of our daily lives. Some of us use it on our laptops or tablets however majority of email users always take it to go and have it on their mobile phones. A lot of people think getting emails from marketers is spam and that could hurt their reputation especially if a customer were to unsubscribe because once they unsubscribe you lose them forever. However there are a few things you are able to do in order to engage your customers or potential leads.

Some people wonder whether email is still effective? The answer is yes. There are 4.3 million email accounts today and majority of people are using email everyday. Email is personal which people like. Sharing an email with another person without posting it everywhere is also something they like because its private. Email is a channel that you own and you always have a one person relationship between the person you send it to. Email is growing and according to the Direct Marketing Association, " 76% of marketers say that they use email more than they have used in the last 3 years. The best part of email is versatility. Primarily you are trying to target customers and nurturing your audience. To send the right email to the right person you need to know your audience and have the right content.

 An important thing to remember is having the right content plus the right audience plus right timing will equal success. With this, knowing your buyer personas will help you outline your audience and you will know who is on the other side reading your content.  In the image below is an example of a successful email. Since majority of customers are mobile users then make it easy for them to read and choose the right template and choose the appropriate text. Another tip is remembering bigger is better so avoid using small text so your buyers are able to read and understand your content. 

Finally, in order to achieve email perfection you need to define a clear goal for your emails. Why are you sending this email? You need to consider these questions because this engages your customers. Educating your customers essentially what you are trying to do in a personal way. Just having the name of your customer shows them that email is just for them and how many people like getting emails that say hi valid customer? Not me.. to me that just sounds like a spam and having personalizing helps in the long run. So guys, to wrap this up email is still effective and isn't going anywhere so know your customer and your content.

Week 8: Search Results (MKTG 348)

Hey guys!

So last time I talked about what Search Engine News teaches you and what it entitles like bots crawling the web and a little bit of a overview on the topic. However, I am going to break it down a little with the types of search results. According to SEO Fundamentals on the SEN site, it states " Today these search engines make use of many sources of information to web pages to generate a search results. Majority of times we refer to this as a universal search." If you want to rank highly in these results you need to really break it down and dissect what they are showing and figuring out where those results really came from. These are other ways to be on the top of the search results. As for personalized results it might be different according to location. What you and your friend see might be different if you are from Illinois and your friend is from New York. Universal search means any given search query can generate results from many sources. Depending on the search engine it could be images, videos, Twitter, and many more. Sometimes Google will answer the questions itself. For example if you were to put in your search results Superbowl times it will base it off according to your location it will give you the time of when it will play as an instant result. It didn't come from a website or anything like that it was simply Google answering the answers

Many search results end up with organic search results when you were to ask it a question. These results are more detailed results and can be personalized as well. The next type of result is partial local results and Google sometimes mixes up the results with organic and local information. Google just thinks that you want local results but mixes the two up. Say for example you were to type in Pizza. Google is going to go based off your location and give you results from around the area. Google comes up with local results because it is certain your results are local and will have place page listings from Google Maps. How convenient right?

As I wrap this up, a key point I want to lay out is according to SEN keywords are the cornerstone of search engine optimization. Don't assume how people search for your product. Highly traffic doesn't automatically mean high profit. The last keywords used before purchase is usually the one that converts to sales. So I hope all of this was informational. See you guys next time.  

Week 7: Search Engine News (MKTG 348)

Hey guys!

So we are switching it up a little and instead of Hubspot Academy I'm going to switch your attentions to Search Engine News. SEN is a professional tool to give you more information about Search Engine Optimization. If you had to rank out of importance of these sites which one would you rank the most important? Google, Microsoft, Ask, AOL, or Yahoo? I personally thought Microsoft at first but then after reading on SEN ranked Google number 1 with where you should spend  majority of your time. Google is said to be 91.5% of worldwide mobile search market shares.

So when you hear spiders, crawlers, and bots you must wonder what that has to do with SEO well we are not talking about the little critters that we freak out seeing on the floor. However it is referring to a sophisticated computer program. SEN says, "Bot’s are designed to crawl the web to discover new and updated pages then save that content to their index". The Bots "crawl" the web by following pages they already have knowledge about. The bots start to crawl where there is a seed set. A seed set is a very specific starting point to discover the best content on the web and to discover new pages. They start to crawl with the highest trust and authority of a page. Search Engines take this in account so the more authority your site has that is where it all begins.
 
This is just an introduction to what I will later explain in the next posts.

See you guys next time!