Why You Shouldn’t Create a DIY Logo for Your Business

You’re 4 years old and riding in the backseat of your parents’ car. Much to your delight, they plan to stop and grab a quick bite to eat before they bring you to play with a friend. You glance up through the window as the car slows down and see golden arches. You know what those mean!

“McDonald’s!” you say. Whether it has been 20, 30, or 40 years since you were a small child, you probably still know exactly what those golden arches mean when you see them. Even when you were young, you were probably able to associate the symbol with a happy meal.

Logos are powerful. They can fill you with nostalgia, recognition, and even happiness. More importantly, they tell someone who you are and what you do through thoughtful design and carefully selected imagery. Your logo is only one aspect of your brand, but some would argue it’s the most important part. Creating brand recognition and helping form positive associations with your logo requires consistency, great marketing, and a great logo to start. Here are a few reasons why forgoing a DIY logo and working with a designer to create your brand is an important choice for your business:

  • A professional graphic designer will use color theory. Did you know that in the United States we consider red color of warning, whereas in China it’s used as a color of celebration and in South Africa it’s a color of mourning? A designer will keep your target audience in mind as they’re putting your logo together and use colors that will work well for your business.
  • You’ll receive a variety of logo formats when you have your logo done professionally. Do you know the difference between an .EPS, .JPG, and .AI file? A designer does, and they’ll be sure to provide you with multiple formats of your logo and tell you what each is best for.
  • A designer will create a timeless logo. It’s easy to get caught up in the latest design trends, however, a great logo should be visually appealing and timeless. Handwritten fonts, starbursts, and certain loud colors have no place in your logo design. Visual trends come and go, but a designer knows which logos, colors, and imagery will withstand the test of time. Creating a DIY logo may not necessarily lead to a timeless design.
  • They’ll make intentional design and imagery choices. A good graphic designer will create a logo that has certain visual cues that represent your business. For example, Canva, a visual design program, published an article about the hidden meanings behind famous logos and used Amazon as an example: “Amazon is a powerhouse when it comes to online shopping, and their logo reflects that. The yellow arrow in their logo starts at the letter ‘a’ and ends at the letter ‘z,’ implying that they sell everything from a to z. The arrow also represents a smile, with the arrowhead being a stylized dimple or smile line. The smile indicates the happiness people feel when they shop with Amazon.” These details may seem small, but they were intentionally made to help represent their goals and business model.
  • They’ll tell you how to use it. A designer has your best interests in mind. They’ll provide you with black, white, and color versions of your logo and tell you when you should use each. They’ll also explain distorting and skewing so you don’t make your logo look unrecognizable. When choosing a designer to create your brand, see if they will provide a brand style guide to help you consistently use your brand moving forward.

There are a lot of considerations to make when you’re deciding on a logo for your business (or you’re thinking about rebranding). Enlisting the help of a professional graphic designer instead of creating a DIY logo will make the process easier for you, and it will ensure that you have a logo that’s well-designed, timeless, and accurately represents your business.

If you’re interested in learning more about our logo design process at Pulse, we offer free 30-minute consultations and would be happy to talk with you about how we can help start your business off on the right foot

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5 Free Google Tools to Help Your Business

“World’s Most Popular Search Engine” I typed into Google (the default search method on Chrome, also owned by Google), knowing full well the answer I’d be given. It’s Google, of course. With 72.48% of the world’s market share of search according to Search Engine Watch, Google is a powerhouse when it comes to finding information on the internet.

As most of you probably know, using Google’s search engine is free – but some of you may not be aware that it’s not the only free tool that Google offers. As a matter of fact, there are quite a few helpful free Google tools to market your business. Here are five of them:

  1. Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the industry standard website traffic tracking and reporting tool. This free tool is easy to set up and relatively simple to use. Just sign up for a Google Analytics account at google.com/analytics, fill out the information about your website, and install a tracking code to start getting great insights about the traffic your website receives. You can find out how many visits you got over the month, which devices your audience uses, how much time they spent on a certain page, and more. By using this information, you can make improvements to your website to better cater to your audience.
  2. Google My Business. If you type “Concierge Marketing in Los Angeles” into Google, our Google My Business listing will pop up to the right of your screen. The listing has our address, hours, phone number, some photos of our work, a question and answer section, and more. According to Google, “businesses that verify their information with Google My Business are twice as likely to be considered reputable by consumers.” Try it out for your business!
  3. Google Search Console. Monitoring and maintaining your search presence is an important aspect of ensuring your business and your website remain relevant to audiences searching for you. Search Console is free and allows you to check your indexing status and optimize visibility of your website.
  4. Google Trends. If you blog for your business, Google Trends could be a huge help to you. Google Trends will tell you what search terms are trending so you can capitalize on the topic and, if you use it in conjunction with Google’s free keyword planner, keywords.
  5. Google Alerts. Tracking information about a specific industry or even your own business can be difficult. Rather than doing a search and scouring through the results every day, set up a Google Alert for a specific search term. You’ll receive an email in your inbox in the morning that has the results for that term, saving you some time and the effort of remembering to check every day.

These are only a handful of the free Google tools available to you. Try these out an see how they can help your business.

If you need help using these free Google tools or analyzing the information from them, contact us for a free 30-minute consultation.

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5 Ways to Find Content Ideas that Your Customers Want to Read About

Content marketing is an important aspect of successful operation for many businesses, but content creation can represent a real barrier to success. Good content should be engaging, informative, and most importantly, digestible to viewers. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to find ideas that will resonate with their current and prospective customers.

The internet is full of content, and that can be a problem because consumers are becoming savvy researchers. Good content helps brands stand out from their competitors. Great content writers are also great researchers. They do their homework to find out what type of content their audience is craving. If you’re not a professional content writer, or if you’re new to marketing content writing, you should start by looking no further than your current and potential customers. Once you consider their age, gender, and other demographics, it’s significantly easier for you to hit your target market with the most effective content. Also consider their pain points — what issues are they currently facing that your product or service can help solve? You need to be very familiar with your audience before you can best determine what type of content they want to read and how they want to consume it – writing format, short video, infographic, check list, podcast or other formats. 

Once you’ve established a target audience, here are five ways to provide content that they won’t be able to get enough of:

  1. Look at your successful industry peers, or competitors if you prefer that term, and research what they’re doing. Developing companies can learn a lot from the moves of a successful firm. Discover what content they’re putting out and decide whether that could work for you. At the end of the day, you’re only as strong as your strongest competitor.
  2. Provide content on current trends. For instance, the Millennial cohort is about to be a larger consumer group than Baby Boomers, and Millennials care about what others are doing or buying. According to a Qualtrics survey done by Credit Karma, nearly 40% of Millennials will overspend to keep up with their peers. Some examples of content relating to current trends might be a fitness apparel retailer publishing information about popular upcoming races, or a landscaping company blogging about the best plants for the season.
  3. Showcase a story of a customer about how you helped them either satisfy a need or solve a problem. You can ask customers to submit stories about using your product or interacting with you, and you don’t even have to do a lot of the content writing yourself. This type of content both creates a visualization of your product or service and establishes trust.
  4. Share photos that represent your product or service and if possible, a customer interacting with it. Doing so will increase your content usage by making it more consumable and user friendly. For instance, Facebook posts including a photo receive 87% more engagement than posts without one, and tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without one.
  5. Provide product or service tips for your current and potential customers. This type of content is useful, direct, and relevant. A customer likes to know that you commit to their satisfaction beyond initial purchase, and creating content that guides them through using and taking care of your product is an effective way to do so.

At the end of the day, knowing your customers is the ultimate key to optimizing your content. With your customers in mind, try utilizing the previously stated five possible methods to develop content that will resonate with them and create engagement. Are you stuck, or need help developing content for your brand? Concierge Marketing can help. Contact us today to set up your free 30 minute consultation!

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What is the Perfect Digital Ad Frequency?

Advertisement frequency is an important part of any successful digital advertising campaign, however it rarely takes the spotlight. Compared to more visible factors like powerful images, impactful wording, and accurate targeting, frequency is noticeably less glamorous, and is often one of the last pieces of a campaign to come together. After all, how much does the number of exposures to an advertisement really matter? Quite a lot, as it turns out. 

Unsurprisingly, being exposed to an ad only once is not enough to recognize a brand or offer. Brand awareness is developed through familiarity, which is only achieved by being repeatedly exposed to an ad campaign through frequency marketing. In other words, the goal of digital ads is reaching your audience as many times as possible, while avoiding fatigue that will reduce the effectiveness of the message. 

If you have been in the marketing industry for a while, you’re probably familiar with the ‘rule of seven’, which told us that people needed to see our ads at least seven times to fully resonate with the message and brand. Today, this figure has increased to 8-10 times, depending on the target audience. As consumers in the digital age, we need to see an ad more times to process the message because the number of advertisement channels have substantially increased in the last decade, which consequently creates an abundance of media noise.  

On any given day, Americans are exposed to approximately 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements (including print, broadcast, and digital media) on average–depending on their lifestyles and locations. It’s impossible to pay attention to every ad, never mind remember them all!

In 2017, Nielsen found results indicating that a frequency of digital advertising ranging between 5-9 exposures helped to improve branding, and increased consumer resonance by an average of 51%. Ad frequency appeared to correlate directly with improvements in click-through rates (CTR) and decreased cost per action (CPA), though poorly tuned frequencies may have the opposite effect.  Showing an ad too few times will fail to leave a lasting impression with your audience. On the other hand, showing an ad too many times can attract negative feedback. 

The takeaway from this study: ad resonance and intent increases with exposure until it hits a point where ad fatigue overwhelms the benefits of branding and resonance begins to decline, signaling decreasing effectiveness of the ad campaign.

Ad fatigue is a combatable problem — updating your ad on a monthly basis could be a simple way to combat ad fatigue and keep your audience engaged. You don’t need to start from scratch every time. Consider simply changing your image, background color, and rewording your call to action. These simple changes are enough to avoid fatigue during a digital campaign. To keep your audience engaged, you should look to completely change your campaigns every 90 days to stay fresh and relevant in the market. Remember, there is no one size fits all strategy when it comes to ad frequency and campaign duration–depending on your industry, audience, and goal, you may be able to stretch your campaigns longer, or reach a higher frequency without negatively affecting your results. Testing is the key to achieving the best results for your campaign.

Looking for help with strategizing your next ad campaign? Concierge Marketing offers the largest menu of digital marketing services in Maine! Your first consultation is free of charge, so contact us today to schedule a consult. We’re here to help because we want to be a part of your success story!

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How to Use Inbound Marketing to Provide a Personalized Experience to Your Prospective Customers

We’ve all likely experienced some sort of personalized marketing online, regardless of whether or not we are aware of it. It might be an email with your name entered in the subject line, a Facebook ad in your news feed for a product you recently viewed online, or even a direct mailer with a coupon for a follow-up service. No matter which tactic was employed, this kind of personalization is now becoming the norm for big and small brands alike. One very effective way to achieve this is through inbound marketing, which allows brands to hyper-personalize their messaging to a degree that has never been possible before.

Inbound marketing works by attracting new leads, cultivating relationships, and turning those leads into customers through content marketing, social media, and other channels. This pull marketing technique aims to draw consumers to you organically through brand content, such as blog or resource, and nurturing leads with targeted email campaigns to turn them into customers. Inbound marketing requires investment in order to purchase a software license for a tool (such as SharpSpring or Hubspot) that will work for your organization, as well as staff resources to manage and fulfill your inbound strategy. However, if executed well, an inbound marketing approach can be an effective method of bringing customers to your organization.

Here are some ways to use inbound marketing to provide a more personalized experience to current and potential customers:

Website personalization — If you use a robust inbound marketing platform, you likely have the capability to personalize your website content to each user based on information you have gathered about that person. Say, for instance, you are building a relationship with a lead who has filled out a form on your website to request an infographic that you’ve created. The next time that user is browsing your site, you don’t want them to be bombarded with calls-to-action (CTAs) to download that same infographic again. Instead, you may want to use dynamic CTAs that automatically change depending on the user IP visiting your site, displaying content relevant to your visitors. This way, you can help ensure that any time leads are on your site they are viewing content that resonates with them, increasing likelihood of conversion.

Email automation — Personalizing emails has been a practice for a long time, but not quite at the level you are able to achieve with inbound marketing software. Not only can you include merge variables, such as the contact’s name, company name, and other custom field details, but you can also have certain actions trigger the sending of other customized emails to a contact. For instance, say you have a page on your website dedicated to your service prices. You may have included a CTA on that page for users to request more information or schedule a call, but not everyone will notice or take action. You can set up automation so when a user visits that pricing page one or multiple times and does not fill out the CTA form, an email is sent to the user with messaging around pricing and taking the next step (assuming the lead’s contact information is known). Instead of simply asking the contact to schedule a call, the email could include a resource that speaks to the cost benefits of your service–this personalized approach is a great way to educate your prospects and nurture a relationship with them.

Whether you’re just getting started with inbound marketing or you’ve been using it for a while now, there are always opportunities to make your customer experience more personal. Take a look at your marketing materials–your website, emails, and resources–and consider how they would look to someone who didn’t know anything about your brand. Put yourself in the shoes of different types of people viewing your site, whether they’re in a different buying stage or have different pain points that they’re looking to solve. Does your marketing speak to them? How can you personalize each viewer’s experience to make it as relevant as possible? Taking these answers into consideration as you tweak your inbound marketing strategy will put you on the best track for success.

If you need help formulating an inbound marketing strategy, or are looking for ways to add personalization to your marketing, contact Concierge Marketing today to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.

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5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Marketing Efforts

Regular upkeep is an important part of any marketing strategy, but it can be difficult to make time for it. As a result, many businesses fall into a rut where they fall behind on updates that could save time or money in the long run.

Luckily, spring is a time of new beginnings! With the new season comes the opportunity to revisit your marketing efforts and find ways to improve their effectiveness. Keep reading for five easy ways to get started. 

  1. Refresh Social Media

When was the last time you changed your profile picture or cover photos on your social media accounts? If you can’t remember, or if it was a long time ago, now is a perfect time to make an update. Be sure that these images are consistent among all of your social media platforms, as this is not only important for a strong brand identity, but can also make your brand feel more credible. It also gives followers an opportunity for engagement as they react to your fresh new look! While you’re updating graphics, double check your contact information and other descriptions to make sure everything is up-to-date.

  1.     Evaluate Your Website

Even if you have a smaller website, return visitors will notice if images, content, and news on your site is out of date. Not only does having accurate content on your website help maintain strong search engine optimization (more about this in tip #5), but it also shows web visitors that your brand is active. Update images so your visitors have a new experience when they visit your site, keep your calendar up-to-date with upcoming event information, and do a thorough sweep of your website to be confident that there aren’t any broken links or outdated information. If your website is older than two years or you feel that a complete rebrand is necessary, you could consider an entire redesign. For many businesses, having an up-to-date website is a critical part of maintaining your customer base.

  1. Update Passwords

Did you know that one of the most important elements of cybersecurity is often forgotten or overlooked? Not changing your passwords, or using the same password for every program you use, leaves your business vulnerable to a cyber attack. In fact, 50% of people haven’t changed their passwords in more than a year, and 20% haven’t ever changed them! The last thing you want is to have your accounts hacked or disabled. Change those passwords this spring, and set a schedule for changing passwords regularly in the future.

  1. Review Contact Lists

If your business uses contact lists to keep track of emails and phone numbers of media contacts and current and prospective customers, it’s important to have the most up-to-date information possible to help you keep in touch with them. To start, remove any undeliverable email addresses from your contacts. Take a look at the email addresses that have bounced and make sure there are no syntax errors. If you have long-standing contacts that you don’t communicate with regularly, ensure that the contact information you have for them is correct. No one wants to call a wrong number!

  1. Update SEO Strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to getting your company’s website noticed and visited online. To do this, you’ll need to ensure that your website has strong readability, as well as optimization around Google’s search algorithm. Typically, a good place to start is to present your web pages with strong, clear titles and captivating meta descriptions so site visitors know what to expect from your website. Content for each page should reach at least 300 words, and it’s usually a good idea to include inbound links within the body text to encourage visitors to explore other pages on your website. All images on the page should have alt-tags, or a short description or keyword, so that crawlers are able to identify them. Lastly, and most importantly, verify that your website’s keywords align with the website content, as well as your company’s brand and services. Include any relevant keywords that you believe your prospective customers would be searching for.

Maintenance is an important component of any marketing strategy, and you don’t want to fall behind! These tips are a good place to get started, but there’s always more to consider. If you’re not sure where to start, or need help updating your brand, we’re always happy to help. Contact Concierge Marketing for a free 30-minute marketing consultation. Happy Spring!

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5 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Ranking

Although the exact algorithm for search engine ranking remains a mystery, over the years we have learned a lot about what best practices can help improve your ranking through search engine optimization (SEO). Keep in mind that any one strategy will not instantly bring your site to the top, but over time a combination of factors can help bolster your site’s ranking. Also, most SEO strategies have the added benefit of making your site more informative and user-friendly to your website visitors. Ready to get your website on the right track? Here are 5 ways to improve your website’s search engine ranking:

Update content regularly

Your website’s content shouldn’t be “set it and forget it.” Adding new content or reworking old content will show search engines that you are an up-to-date resource for information, and may help your pages show more frequently and at a higher position than a site that has stale content. If you feel that your page content is already working for you, think of other types of content you can add to your site–such as customer testimonials, reviews, or a blog (which leads us to our next SEO strategy).

Create a blog

One of the best ways to make sure you have fresh content on your site regularly is to create a blog. A company blog can help answer customer questions, talk in detail about products, explain your services, or discuss trending topics in your industry. Once indexed by search engines, any of your blogs can help drive traffic to your site as users search for this type of content online. Remember the quality over quantity rule as you develop your blog strategy. While it’s a good idea to have a  minimum of 300 words per page, it is important to keep your blogs relevant to your visitors and easy to read. If you wish to explore a more in-depth topic, consider splitting your blog into multiple parts rather than writing a blog so long that readers can’t make it all the way through.

Develop a linking strategy

While using internal links (link from one page on your site to another page on your site) throughout your content is beneficial, getting external links to your website are said to be one of the most important factors to gain a high ranking on search engines. External links are those that link from one domain to another domain, and they can be very difficult to attain depending on the nature of your website. That is where updating your site regularly, especially through a blog, can help. As readers find your content and share it on their own sites, those external links may provide value to your own website by showing search engines that many people have found your content relevant and useful. Of course, there is a possibility that an external link could negatively affect your website if they are spammy or untrustworthy sites. We recommend using Google Search Console to review the external links pointing to your site and disavow them if needed to avoid harming your search engine ranking.

Add metadata

As you add pages to your website, remember to use metadata to let search engine crawlers know what your content is about. This should include a page title, description, keyword, ALT tag for images, and slug/URL that are all related to your page. Ideally, the keyword you choose for the page should be included in each of the other places. Keep in mind that there are recommended lengths and other best practices for your page title and meta description, so it may be helpful to use a plugin such as Yoast SEO to help you set up your metadata to best increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines.

Reduce page load time

It’s been nearly 10 years since Google announced that the speed of your website may affect your search engine ranking, however we still come across sites today that take seconds to load, often due to high resolution images and videos, large code files, lagging servers, and more. One easy way to see if page speed, and therefore site speed, could be negatively affecting your search engine ranking is to use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool, which gives you an overall score for page speed on mobile and desktop, and provides ways to help improve your speed if needed.

While this list hopefully gives you some ideas of things you should address to get your site into shape, it isn’t an exhaustive list that will grant you #1 placement on Google. There are many other factors that contribute to your site’s ranking that should be considered depending on the website. Of course, improving your site’s SEO not only takes time, but it also can require a lot of time to manage. Here at Concierge Marketing, we can work with you to create a plan to get your website on Google’s good side. Contact us today for a free consultation.

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How Location-based Targeting can Help You Reach your Audience

Over the last few years, location-based targeting has come to the forefront of marketing through a number of different technologies which allow marketers to target more specific audiences than ever. In a similar vein to other digital marketing tactics such as remarketing and user-id targeting, location-based targeting excels through its ability to target specific users and devices that are more likely to convert, allowing for an advertising budget to be spent more efficiently.

However, as powerful as location-based targeting is, it can be difficult to envision exactly which strategy would be most effective for a given business, especially when there are so many options available nowadays. If you’re in this position, we’re here to help– here are a number of ideas to get you thinking about how you can use location-based targeting as a core part of your marketing strategy.

IP Targeting and Brand Recognition

Brand recognition is a powerful idea and unconsciously steers much of the way that consumers make their purchase decisions. When given the choice between a brand that they are familiar with and a brand they are not, consumers more often than not lean towards the brands they recognize and understand. However, brand recognition isn’t instantaneous– it’s built on the back of repeated exposures. This is where IP targeting can come in. Essentially, IP targeting takes a list of users’ physical addresses and pairs them with their associated IP addresses, allowing for the purchase of ad space on a much more granular method than any traditional marketing method. For brands, this means an opportunity to target exposure on a user-by-user basis, significantly expediting the brand recognition process and priming the audience for further marketing efforts.

The Power of Geofencing

Geofencing is a powerful tool that many businesses are starting to tap into. To explain briefly, geofencing puts a virtual barrier around an area that you choose, allowing ads to be served to anyone whose cell phone signal enters the geofenced area. While the most common application for this kind of targeting is driving traffic to brick and mortar stores, there’s a lot of room for creativity here that businesses are just starting to explore. For example, targeting competitors locations with offers and promotions is a good start for businesses where people shop around or aren’t all that attached to a particular vendor, like a car dealership or a fast food restaurant, but you can also use geofencing to drive in-store participation as well. Sephora uses location-based targeting in combination with their mobile app to enhance the user experience, and some retailers have started offering coupons digitally to customers already inside their store to encourage them to increase their spending. The sky’s the limit with geofencing, and there are all kinds of creative applications waiting to happen.

Proximity Marketing and Beacons

One location-based strategy you may not have heard of is proximity marketing using beacons. Where geofencing is all about creating a virtual boundary to refine your adserve, proximity marketing is all about tracking the way that individuals move within an area through use of a physical object (a “beacon”) that tracks users through bluetooth signals. While there is certainly an opportunity to market directly to those users in the same way as you would through geofencing, the real power of proximity marketing is in analytics. This is because, compared to other methods of location targeting, beacons are more accurate and can map real-time customer movements through the area. This data can then be used to track customer in-store behavior and further refine your marketing strategy. For businesses looking to optimize the customer experience based on empirical data, beacons can be an extremely effective and affordable tool to do so.

Location-based targeting may be powerful, but there’s certainly a learning curve as well. In today’s world of marketing, technology is evolving so quickly that it can sometimes be hard to keep up. This said, location-based targeting is here to stay and presents a wonderful realm of possibility just waiting to be tapped into. Not sure where to get started? Need help implementing your location-based strategy? Concierge Marketing would love to help. Contact us today at (800) 980-7962 to schedule your free 30-minute consultation.

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Five Ways to Nurture a Relationship with Your Customers

Communication is an essential part of any relationship–even with your customers! As a business you may view your relationship with your customers similar to that of a personal relationship–one that needs to be cultivated, respected, and, of course, mutually rewarding. Without these qualities a customer may become dissatisfied and look for alternative places to do business, namely your competitors. However, with proper care and nurturing, you can build a relationship with your customers that will last a lifetime and may even turn them into ambassadors of your brand. Here are five ways you can nurture a relationship with customers and hopefully keep them coming back: 

1. Be personal

Personalization, while not a new trend, is definitely a good marketing habit that will help nurture a relationship with your customers. Being personal shows that you care about your customer’s preferences. For example, if you’re a local store and you send an email blast with a subject line regarding a dog toy discount you’re offering, it’s likely that recipients who don’t own a dog won’t even open the email, and just send it to the trash or even mark it as spam! However, if you segment your email lists based on information you’ve gathered about your customers, and send emails tailored to their preferences, they’ll be more likely to value the content you send them and look forward to messages in the future. This way, you’ll be able to give your customers information that’s more relevant to them and they’ll feel more valued as well.

2. Send notes or special gifts

Whether you are thanking them for their purchase, congratulating them on an accomplishment, or simply reaching out to ensure all is well, sending a card or email to your customers shows that you are thinking of them and you appreciate their business. While this may be more difficult in some industries, you may be surprised how well this can be incorporated into your current relationship-building processes. To make a little more of an impact, think about sending a gift as well to help them get the message and feel like they’re a valued customer. Depending on the occasion and your relationship with the customer, a simple note or gift can go a long way, especially if they aren’t expecting to receive anything. If your message lands well, your customer may even share their experience on social media or with their friends–exposure that can help you build more relationships!

3. Give a shoutout/recommendation on social media

Recognizing your customers publicly is a great way to build a relationship with them and thank them for their business. As a B2C company, such as a restaurant or specialty store, you could share a photo of a customer (with their permission) as they visit your store or after they’ve made a purchase. For B2B companies, think about tagging a vendor that has helped you successfully launch an event or new product, or even just shouting out a business you’re interested in working with in the future. One thing to remember is that when you post on social media, you aren’t just building a single customer relationship anymore–you’re sharing the relationship you have with your customer and adding a layer of social proof.  This way, you can help show your support for the community as a whole and start building relationships there as well.

4. Hold a special event

Another way to help build a relationship with your customers is by holding a special event in their honor. Maybe your business is celebrating a milestone and you want to thank those who helped you get there, or you simply want to share a special promotion for your most loyal customers. Hosting an “invite only” event will make your customers feel that they are part of an exclusive group and that their relationship with your business is valued.

5. Listen to them

Like any personal relationship, it’s important that both sides of a business relationship feel that they are being listened to. While you can listen to your customers through their online reviews and comments, and any comments made to your representatives in store or over the phone, you need to be able to show that you are listening by how you respond. While not every suggestion will make sense for your business, there are likely ways that you can incorporate customer feedback, perhaps through staff training or procedural changes, that will make a noticeable impact to your customers. You can also show you are listening by actively asking for feedback. Send out a survey to your customers within a few days after they’ve purchased from you so their experience is fresh in their mind and they will be able to give you more valuable feedback. By simply giving your customers an avenue to share their experience, good or bad, and taking their feedback into consideration, you’re helping them feel valued–an essential component of a productive relationship.

Building a relationship with your customers doesn’t have to be difficult–just a few steps can make all the difference! If you need assistance nurturing a relationship with your customers, whether it’s through email campaigns, an event, or another channel, we can help! Contact Concierge Marketing today for a free 30-minute consultation.

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How Google Analytics Can Help You Make Smart Marketing Decisions

If you have a website, chances are you’re currently connected to Google Analytics (GA). GA is an analytical tool that is extensively used worldwide and available for free. If you don’t have GA and would like to start tracking valuable data on your website, follow these basic instructions from Google.

Having an analytical tool connected to your website is extremely important as it helps you analyze your website traffic, which in turn helps you understand the behavior of your customers while they’re on your website. In the most basic sense, GA records various activities of your website visitors and matches them with the attributes of their Google accounts (when they’re searching the web while logged in) such as IP address location, user demographic information, and interests. GA aggregates all of this compiled data and offers you with an easy to read dashboard with information that can help you identify which online campaigns are working best, which websites or social media channels are referring the most traffic to your own website, which keywords drive the highest volume of organic traffic, and much more.

Google Analytics offers a wealth of information to be analyzed and transformed into valuable marketing insights. By learning how to read and interpret this information you’ll be able to make better marketing decisions to help you convert more customers and make more money. Here are five important metrics you should analyze:

  1. Demographic information--knowing the gender and the age group of most of your visitors will help you craft content that will best resonate with them. For example, if 60% of your web visitors are males between the ages of 25-44, your website layout and content should be created to deliver the best experience to this age group.
  2. Geographic information–if you start noticing an increase in traffic and conversions from a specific geographic area, you know that there’s an need for your offer in that region. This information can help you focus your marketing dollars on geographic regions where you’d have greater chances to generate more business.
  3. Mobile Traffic–monitoring the volume of mobile visits and conversions is very important because you want to make sure your website is performing well on mobile devices. You also want to make sure that your site speed is as fast as possible so that your mobile visitors can have a good experience from landing to conversion.
  4. Referral Traffic–knowing where your traffic is coming from is crucial information to help you understand what type of marketing tactics are working best. This category excludes paid traffic as well as organic search.
  5. Conversions–setting up goals and tracking your conversions in GA will help you assign a value to your marketing efforts–both paid and unpaid. You can track sales and assign a dollar value to each transaction as well as assign a ‘funnel’ value when someone fills out a form, for example.

Google Analytics may seem a bit overwhelming to a new user. To learn more how to navigate this wonderful tool and make sense of the data it is collecting, consider taking this GA course from Google. You should also consider connecting Google’s Search Console to your website to be able to view more in-depth information about your site performance as well as how Google is indexing the content on your website.

Take advantage of GA to make wise marketing decisions using data collected on your website! If you need assistance connecting your website to GA or making sense of your data, give us a call at (800) 980-7962 to schedule a free 30-minute meeting or fill out our online contact form.

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