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A Winning Formula For Collecting Customer Intelligence
Jan 17th
The recent downturn in the economy has wreaked havoc in every sector of life, including Internet businesses, which, even if not as badly effected as other sectors of the economy, still haven’t been spared the rod.
This means that consumers have less to spend and are being much more careful about where they spend it, which, in turn, means that business owners need to be much more aware of the internet marketing needs and preferences of the consumer in order to be able to connect with them in a meaningful and productive way.
Web Sites Need To Become A Customer Intelligence Tool
In order to connect with customers, it’s now necessary for internet businesses to gather as much internet marketing information as possible about them, their attitudes, their preferences, interests, etc., in order to be able to target their offerings to them and turn them from potential to actual customers.
This can be achieved by turning your web site into a customer intelligence-gathering tool by applying the following phases:
- Keeping your web site and its content fresh to encourage return visits
– Personalising your site so that visitors feel that it’s all about them and what you can offer them
– Tracking how visitors interact with your site and what works and doesn’t work, how visitors reached your site, which content they browsed, where they exited etc.
Utilising this approach will give you the insights you need to make your visitors’ online experience meaningful and develop customer loyalty.
Four Steps To Gathering Customer Intelligence
Here’s a four-step approach you can utilise to gather the customer information you need to help make the internet marketing of your site as attractive and appealing as possible.
1. Feel Their Pain
People visit a web site to fulfil a need or to fix a problem, so being able to identify that “pain point” and offer a solution will keep your visitors happy and coming back for more.
2. Make Sure Your Site’s Ready To Engage Visitors
Visitors to your site are probably already very knowledgeable about the products and services you’re offering, so you need to stay several steps ahead of them and set yourself up as an authority figure. If a visitor looks at the price of an item on your site, that’s a good sign they’re thinking of buying and your site should be ready to allow them to do just that.
3. Check Visitors’ Readiness To Buy
By assigning a score or weight to each piece of content on your web site, you can determine what your visitors care about and even what stage they’re at in the purchasing process. Which pages your visitors browse and which images they click on helps build a profile of your customer and their intent – or otherwise – to buy.
4. Gather Data And Track What Works
The way visitors interact with your web site can give you some invaluable data about their attitudes and behaviours that should be compiled in your database. This data, combined with offline customer data and interactions, can be used to measure successful outcomes, which can then be repeated to improve the customer experience.
Accumulating and utilising data about your web site visitors’ behaviours and attitudes throughout their interactions with your company can help you refine and improve your marketing efforts for both your Internet business and your offline endeavours, and thus improve the overall customer experience and your relationships with your customers.
An Internet marketing service can provide the expertise you need to turn your web site into a customer intelligence tool and take your Internet business success to the next level.
Facebook Is Fast Becoming As Important As Face-To-Face Consumer Interaction
Dec 20th
Despite the importance attributed to it by internet marketing experts, many internet business owners are still not fully committed to putting much in the way of resources into implementing social media as an integral part of their search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.
But, data supplied by e-mail marketing company Constant Contact from a recent survey shows that things are changing and that more and more business owners are beginning to recognise the fact that social media should start playing a more prominent role in their internet marketing strategies.
Social Media Numbers On The Rise
The numbers from Constant Contact’s survey show a sizable increase in small business owners’ interest in the use of social media to boost their online marketing efforts.
Let’s take a look at those numbers, resulting from a survey of 1,500 small business owners:
- 63 percent stated that Facebook was a major factor in their marketing efforts during the autumn. That number is up from the previous survey conducted during Spring, when 50.5 percent responded similarly.
- 30 percent of the same respondents said Twitter was their main focus among social media platforms during the same period. Again, that number is up from the previous survey conducted during Spring, when 26.5 percent responded similarly.
Digital Marketing Numbers Generally On The Rise
Social media numbers are obviously on the rise, but numbers for other forms of digital marketing were also shown to be on the rise, according to the same autumn Constant Contact survey.
The increases in other, more traditional forms of small business marketing, i.e. event marketing, online surveys and email marketing, were more modest, but still on the up, whereas other non-digital, less cyber-centric forms of marketing (in-person interactions, direct mail and telephone conversations) showed modest declines.
While face-to-face contact still plays a major role in the day-to-day operations of most small businesses, interaction via the internet, social media and other forms of digital media is becoming the preferred method of communication for many business owners due in large part to its immediacy. To illustrate the point, 62 percent of small business owners responding to the survey claimed that having a presence on Facebook is just as important to their businesses as dealing with consumers face-to-face.
Inter-personal communications will always play a vital role in how small business owners conduct business, but it’s mainly a change in the medium via which the communications are being conducted that is being seen, especially in the rapidly increasing use of social media, Facebook in particular.
This survey shows that making sure your internet business has a social media presence, particularly where Facebook is concerned, is of vital importance for your business’s future success.
If you’re still on the fence where social media are concerned, a UK internet business coach can go over the benefits of establishing a presence for your business on the social media networks, and can work with you to take full advantage of the marketing power of Facebook and the other social networks.
Online Shopping On Track To Reach Record Levels Over Christmas
Dec 18th
Despite how bad the global economy has been, internet business owners are hoping that sales over the Christmas period will help take their business and the economy out of the depression they’ve been in.
In the period leading up to Christmas, sales have been brisk, giving business owners hope for a turnaround in their fortunes over the upcoming Christmas shopping season. According to comScore, online business owners have no cause for concern because they’re predicting online sales will break all previous records.
Spending Reaching Pre-Recession Levels
Consumer spending has begun to pick up this year and that fact is borne out by the numbers recorded so far this year. Let’s look at some of the figures to get an idea of what’s going on:
- The research by comScore shows that shoppers in the US spent more than 9 billion dollars over the first 3 weeks in November, which represents an increase of 13 percent over the same period in 2009.
- comScore anticipates spending to exceed 32 billion dollars by the end of December, which would surpass the total set over the same period in 2007 before the recession set in.
- The total amount spent in 2010 up to and including the month of October was almost 110 billion dollars, which represents an increase of 9 percent over the same period in 2009.
Online Consumer Spending On The Rise
A separate report produced by MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse shows that consumer spending in general is on the rise, with online spending showing particularly strong signs of significant growth. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers from this report:
- Internet sales for the early part of November showed an increase of 11.4 percent over the same period the previous year
- August and September showed very strong growth of from 7 to 8 percent over those same months from the prior year
- Online spending over the Christmas shopping season looks set to be on a par with the best results ever recorded in 2007, which is a dramatic recovery considering the doom and gloom of the past couple of years
One very important point to note for online internet business owners is that, according to the people polled for comScore’s report, 33 percent of online shoppers claimed they would only purchase goods online during the Christmas shopping season if shipping was free.
The main thing to take from both of these reports for online retailers is the fact that consumer confidence appears to be almost back to where it was during the pre-recession era and, as a result, so are sales.
A UK internet business coach can work with you to take advantage of these trends and of the impending Christmas shopping season.
New Advertising Method Enhances Both Your Web Site And User Experience
Dec 14th
Have you got unused or underutilised real estate on your internet business web site? If so, you may want to take a look at a new form of online advertising that is currently in vogue on the internet.
Online advertising has generally been regarded as intrusive and, overall, generally as more of an irritant than a help, with users more often than not either just ignoring the ads or skipping right by them as soon as they can. But, that may all be about to change.
Introducing A New Form Of Advertising
A new method of presenting ads on the web is becoming very popular thanks to its unobtrusive nature. In fact, it’s so unobtrusive you may have come across it without even realising it.
This new form of online advertising is known as Ambient Point of Action, or APA, advertising, and each ad covers the entire page of a web site while a user is working on a specific task, such as entering a search query or logging into a web site.
Unlike online ads you’re accustomed to seeing, which require that the user either close the advertisement or wait until it transitions to the next step of the user’s desired end result, APA ads remain in the background and are displayed until the user completes the task they’re working on, at which point the ad disappears. These ads are exclusive, in that no other ads are displayed while they’re being shown; they are also interactive, in that they’re triggered by a user action. But they aren’t intrusive, since they don’t cause any interruptions in the user’s work flow.
Making Good Use Of Vacant Real Estate
This type of ad can be installed on any page that requires some kind of temporary user interaction, typically a login or search page. The login page for Yahoo! e-mail provides an excellent example of an Ambient Point of Action ad, where the actual login area is quite small, leaving the rest of the page (previously empty, unused web page real estate) available for an ad.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, unlike rotating or flashing banner ads or ads that take up the whole page and prevent the user from completing the task at hand, APA ads may actually enhance a web page’s design while allowing the user to interact with the web site immediately. Hard to believe, isn’t it – an ad actually enhancing the user experience!
If your web site has vacant real estate, an advertiser may want to take advantage of it to promote their business reasonably cheaply while at the same time enhancing your own internet business with ads from reputable merchants.
A UK internet business coach can help you implement this new, unobtrusive form of advertising and enhance not only your web site but your user’s experience.
Use Yahoo! Clues To Discover Search Trends
Dec 6th
Knowing what people are searching for, the keywords they’re using, the search volume, etc., are important aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) for any internet business. Up until recently there haven’t been too many tools that could be used to measure trends when it comes to search terms, other than Google Trends.
Discover Trending Information
That is, until now. Yahoo! has decided to delve into its massive database to provide a tool that not only supplies search trend data, but enhances it and takes it to a new level. Say “Hello” to Yahoo! Clues, Yahoo!’s new web based tool that can be used to explore trends in a visually appealing and interesting way. Using this tool allows you to discover trending information and then make comparisons using the data you just discovered.
Many Interesting Features
Not only does Yahoo! Clues provide search volume charts but it does so much more in addition, including displaying maps, demographic graphs and even searches related to a demographic group. In fact Yahoo! Clues is so all-encompassing it makes Google Trends look like child’s play by comparison.
Apart from the aforementioned, other interesting features include a time filter, which allows data to be filtered for 1, 7 or 30 days, comparison of two terms and various categories of information, including location, gender and income.
There’s More To Come
Yahoo! is working on more search tools, including a feature they’re tentatively calling “Search Flow”, which looks at search patterns and attempts to predict the next search term following on from a previously entered search query. You’ll also be able to see “related searches”, which will be a boon when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), which will go beyond “Search Flow” by providing related search terms commonly used across the entirety of Yahoo! Search.
Yahoo! Clues looks like it will be an excellent tool all around, especially the new “Search Flow” feature, which will provide data based on concrete evidence rather than mere guesswork. The only thing that might improve it is to provide trends for more than 30 days, preferably up to a full year. This will provide internet marketers with another fine tool to add to their arsenal to provide additional search engine optimisation (SEO) ammunition.
For help with all your search engine optimisation (SEO) needs, contact a UK internet marketing consultant, who will get your internet business web site optimised for success across all search engines.
