How to Lose Customers – Quickly
Did you know national surveys indicate that “feeling neglected or unappreciated” is the #1 reason businesses lose customers?
This seems like an easy statistic to change, but it’s not. Most entrepreneurs and many businesses are simply too overworked and overwhelmed with day-to-day duties to think about customer appreciation and client retention strategies.
Industry surveys indicate that customer satisfaction is tied directly to employee satisfaction. One way to keep ahead of the customer satisfaction issue is to survey both your employees and your customers regularly – at least once a year. Learn what makes them happy or unhappy, and you’ll get meaningful information on your products and services, as well as your customer service. Customer and employee satisfaction surveys are an integral part of guiding a company, its products or services into the future. Understanding what steps to take to improve attitudes and perceptions is key to keeping a healthy company. Have you thought about asking about the health of your brand? This goes beyond questions such as “Was the sales staff courteous?” Evaluating your brand will give you insight into your reputation, awareness level, company vision and the momentum of your brand.
Would it Pay for Your Firm to Advertise on Facebook or LinkedIn?
Starting to create a Facebook ad.
How do you determine if that’s a viable strategy? HRB is introducing a new service to help clients determine the viability of advertising on Facebook or LinkedIn. To maximize the value of social media, consideration should be given to your targeted audience that can be reached by advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn. HRB researches audience segments on the sites to determine whether the effort would be viable for reaching the right audience.
HRB performs an analysis of targeted paid advertising on both Facebook and LinkedIn and deliver a forecast of expected results and costs. The benefit is understanding the potential of paid social marketing efforts specific to your market. Upon completion of the analysis, the deliverable to the client is a written report outlining the findings and recommendations. The analysis is performed by Stephanie West, our Director of Internet Operations, who is a Certified Social Media Associate.
Businesses are Missing Email to Social Collaboration
Extend your email marketing beyond your email list.
According to The State of Email Marketing in SMBs, based on a study by GetResponse, most small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) have mastered the basics of organic email list-building, making use of Web-based sign-up forms and even offering incentives to encourage subscriptions, but fewer than half use any type of email-to-social collaboration, limiting the potential of cross-channel marketing.
The report notes that the weak implementation of social media integrations, especially given the buzz it creates in the context of email marketing. Only 50% of the researched marketers use any type of email-to-social collaboration. This means that, even if their brand is present on various social networks, cross-channel marketing is practically non-existent.
Communication mapping can help you figure out this complex system and make sure you are not missing out on an opportunity. Mastering the use of multiple mediums and the integration of cross-channel marketing, which is essential to successful message delivery to target audiences in today’s complex communications environment is strategically important for any business or organization.
If any of these topics are issues you are addressing at your business or organization, contact HRB for a free consultation.
Direct marketing to a tightly targeted, database-driven audience has long proven its value. However, “database” has new meaning when it is attached to the 800 million names of people using Facebook. Did you know that you can target ads on Facebook directed to a geographic area, even a ZIP code? And based on sex, education level, age, gender — and even areas of interest, like “Iowa Hawkeyes” or “camping,” or from “toddler teacher” to “professor?” What if you were a local cake decorator or florist and knew you could reach a significant audience who identifies themselves as “engaged?”
To acknowledge those big changes in our industry, we decided to make a small but important change for ourselves. So we engaged the services of 
Marketing that defines brands and drives business growth. That’s how we describe what Henry Russell Bruce does for its clients.
As a Web design and marketing firm, HRB is receiving more requests from its clients to develop websites that generate leads and sales.
You might understand traditional media like the back of your hand. But when it comes to new or “newer” media channels, you probably have a difficult time discerning where your time and money is best spent. In fact, the Web 2.0 terms and its growing number of channels will just keep coming before you can figure out what they are, let alone how to use them.
I suggest you start incorporating Web 2.0 elements into your plan right now. After all, social media isn’t going away. According to the Nielsen Co. (2010), Americans spent 23% more time on social networking sites and blogs in 2010 than they did in 2009. The category has seen — and continues to see — exponential growth.
We’ve all grown accustomed to the idea that search engines take a word or phrase that you write, and then retrieve a list of results the search engines have determined is the most relevant to your search. One thing international businesses should take into consideration is these words and phrases change when they’re in different languages. Searching for something in english shouldn’t return results in a different language since the user won’t be able to get anything out of them. Not even the introduction of 