Customer Development Articles

What is Customer Engagement?

By No Responses

Are your Customers Engaged with your Content? The best marketing strategies have one concept that define them. And while there are many concepts out there, if customer engagement isn’t at the forefront of your current marketing strategy, it should be. Customer engagement — in a content marketing context — boils down to the value customers receive when consuming your content. If there’s no value there or those customers aren’t interested in what you have to say, then your messaging is likely to fall on deaf ears. After all, if your customers (or prospective customers) aren’t consuming your content, does it…

Doing Everything to get Your Company Blogging

Via The Customer Collective on No Responses

Creating a culture at your company that believes in blogging is no easy feat.

It requires a lot of planning and selling them on the merits of blogging. One point you should be sure to mention in your sermon is the benefit blogging has on inbound marketing. Its incorporation will drive customers directly to you with little additional effort. It’s truly a complete approach that should be a key cog in any marketing strategy. “The Inbound Marketing” book by HubSpot’s founders offers a lot of insights on – as the…

Get Crankin'! 7 Tips to Improve Your Company Blog

Via ChrisBrogan.com on No Responses

Image provided by: hawkexpress

How’s your company blog coming along? Not so great? Take a look at Chris Brogan’s pointers on his own blog — they might come in handy for your content marketing or inbound marketing strategy. Here are a few: Dedicate yourself to a schedule: Write when you find time — but always try to make time as well. Utilize multimedia: If your blog is text-heavy, chances are people aren’t making it all the way through. Break up your content with pictures and videos (and sometimes audio, though that can be annoying). Brevity is…

Get Crankin’! 7 Tips to Improve Your Company Blog

Via ChrisBrogan.com on No Responses

Image provided by: hawkexpress

How’s your company blog coming along? Not so great? Take a look at Chris Brogan’s pointers on his own blog — they might come in handy for your content marketing or inbound marketing strategy. Here are a few: Dedicate yourself to a schedule: Write when you find time — but always try to make time as well. Utilize multimedia: If your blog is text-heavy, chances are people aren’t making it all the way through. Break up your content with pictures and videos (and sometimes audio, though that can be annoying). Brevity is…

Great Customer Service Pays Off

Via TheCustomerCollective on No Responses

Image provided by: Phil Dowsing

It’s time to ramp up your customer service. According to a new poll from Harris Interactive: 84% of customers would be prepared to pay 5% over the standard rate for a superior customer experience, 62% would pay 10% more, 25% would pay 15% more and 11% would pay 25% more. With this in mind, it’s time to consider: how good is your customer service team? Are you offering the level of care that’ll have people paying more? Adrian Swinscoe at TheCustomerCollective advocates taking this data seriously. He offers 8 ways…

Are You Maximizing Your Prospecting Effort?

By No Responses

Is Prospecting Part of your Sales Process? In almost everything you do as a business, operating efficiently and at maximum capacity is key. That’s never more true than at the start-up and expansion stages, when both financial and human resources can be limited and time is of the essence. Sales teams must maximize every conversation they have with a prospect. Call volume is obviously a key indicator of prospecting success. But asking those prospects key questions and exploring each contact’s potential is essential to maximizing the practice of building a sales team. Here are the five pillars of prospecting: Pillar…

Narrowing the Focus on Your Target Customer

Via Cindy Alvarez on No Responses

Often times, we ask ourselves the wrong questions while searching for the right answer.

Image provided by: jm3

In marketing, on occasion, we’ll ask “who” instead of “why.” When considering our target customer, this will convolute the answer that’s most important to us. But if you want to narrow your focus on your customer, opining on the “why” will result in a more focused picture. Instead of thinking of your target customer as a product manager in the high-tech industry, you should think about that customer’s qualities. In the end, it’s their tendencies that will result…

When is it the People and when is it the Process?

Via The Sales Blog on No Responses

When there’s a derailment on the sales track, do you know what its true origin is?

Image provided by: JFeister

People can make mistakes, but processes can often be the root cause of their stumbles. A faulty sales methodology can be just as problematic as the salespeople that execute it. This is especially important if you need to look at yourself at some point to figure out what’s going wrong. As such, before you get carried away on an inner analysis, the first place you would want to look at is the sales process. Ponder of…