Trumpeting your message over and over on Twitter fails. It fails because Twitter is not a radio station and because true followers, the ones that interact with you and may someday become customers, will not respond well to a continually self-promotional stream.

Consider the broadcast radio model.

Radio stations broadcast news and entertainment that listeners want to hear. Every now and then, the station interjects its advertising in the form of station identification, sponsorship acknowledgement, and commercials.

On the one hand you have your content, and on the other, you have your repetitive brand messages.

Those brand messages repeat so that listeners absorb them and the brand becomes part of their consciousness.

Striking a Balance

Every radio station strives to provide the right balance of content and brand messaging. More brand messages can lead to more revenue only when those messages do not overpower the content that draws listeners in the first place.

If they dilute the content with too many commercials, the listeners go away and the ad revenue soon dries up as well.

Tweets Are Not Commercials

What happens when businesses get on Twitter is that they manage their tweets like they are managing a radio ad campaign. They will tweet the same message over and over, periodically, like they are running ads on the radio.

A tweet is not a commercial though, a tweet is the foundation of the content on Twitter.

Remember, your tweet itself is the news, information, or entertainment that will or will not attract people to pay attention.

The commercial message is right there too, in every single tweet, in the thumbnail and the Twitter handle. This message brands your content and cements your business in the customer’s mind.

Your challenge is to offer tweets so useful or fun, that followers recognize your brand in their Twitter stream as something they want to read and share.

If you would like to learn more about how a freelance writer can help you manage your Twitter and other social media streams, contact me today.

radio photo courtesy of S. Diddy

Do you struggle to strike the right balance between the high quality and low price your customers demand? You are not alone. Many businesses are feeling the squeeze as our economy continues to stagnate and customers are looking for low cost alternatives.

You Can’t Be Both

Let’s be clear on one thing. You cannot occupy both positions in the market – highest quality and lowest price – with the same product, unless you are willing to lose money. You have to choose a position and then work out how to present that position to your customers.

Low Price Race to the Bottom

If you decide to compete on price, you face two challenges: you have to sell more units to make the same revenue, and you remain vulnerable to competitors willing to undercut your pricing.

I hear about this all the time from those who are looking for freelance work. No matter where you set your rate it seems there is always somebody else willing to work for a little less, especially given the prolonged unemployment situation many face in the US. Those who get caught up in that race to the bottom end up sacrificing their reputation with low quality work. Many simply go broke a little more slowly than if they had just given up altogether.

Perception Is Reality

If you are among those who refuse to accept a price that does not turn a profit, you must position your products and services so customers understand why they have to pay more than the rock bottom prices others are offering.

You need to turn conversations about price into explanations of value. You need to create a desire in your clients for your minimum standard of excellence. Then you will find that they will gladly pay for the value you add.

So, whether you are an insurance inspection service based in Lowell or an appliance store in Bedford, the onus is on you to make sure your customer perceives that your offering costs more because it should, and it is worth every penny.

6 Word Positioning Statement

I like the example in the photo above. With just six words, the advertiser creates a perception of exceptional flavor. Using Quality as the brand name sets the consumer up to believe that all other ice creams have a non-Quality taste.

Would you like to learn how a freelance writer can help you communicate your value to prospects and clients? Contact Tammi Kibler today to learn more about marketing communication pieces that lead to better positioning in the marketplace.

photo courtesy of KB35

I thought a question like that deserved a whole post to answer, so here goes.

Seth Godin explained the allure of fancy soap stores in All Marketers Are Liars. He wrote about the story customers buy into when they purchase expensive soap in a boutique setting.

Whatever your product or service, permission marketing gives you all the time and space you need to tell your story. This communication strengthens brand awareness, increases repeat sales, and vastly extends the reach of each physical location.

If you are only telling your story to your shop’s visitors, then your reach is limited by:

• Your store’s capacity,
• The size of your staff,
• Your ability to attract customers,
• The time a shopper is willing to spend.

Your website does not have these limitations. Your rent does not double when you add new pages, nor do your utility expenses. Any emails you send will scale easily from a dozen to thousands of subscribers without skyrocketing in price.

Soap Stories

A permission marketing stream is easily begun by requesting email addresses at the point of sale. Some stores also tuck a card or flyer in with each purchase inviting customers to visit a website. That website continues the soap story told in the store. An email opt in on the website then promises to share information about specials or events.

Along with the specials and events, a store will tell the story of its soaps. Some soaps are designed to treat specific ailments. Others use aromatherapy to affect mood. Some have ingredients sourced in alignment with a customer’s worldview. Each soap has a collection of stories that will better acquaint the reader with the product and ignite the reader’s desire to own it.

Soap Surveys

New soap fragrances can be introduced in emails. Not through scratch-n-sniff technology, of course, but good copywriting will excite the senses and create a desire in the readers for new products.

With regular email contact, a store can learn in advance what fragrances interest customers. Many brands let subscribers vote on new products or recall discontinued scents they would like to see return to the shelves. This is almost-free market research.

Pulling In Repeat Customers

If a store is located in a mall or downtown district that hosts events, emails inviting subscribers to the events would serve to remind customers where the shop is located and drive repeat foot traffic. At any rate, every email reminds customers of the brand and strengthens their association with it.

If there is interest, a store can branch out to online sales.

Or not.

When you work a good permission stream, you can set some of the rules.

If your business moves enough capacity via stores, email can help increase the attraction and keep driving foot traffic while you steadfastly refuse to go global.

Online Case Study

After I wrote the first part of this post, I decided to see if there was an example of a handmade soap store using permission marketing techniques. I found an in-depth case study about Rocky Mountain Soap. It details the company’s position and marketing strategy in 2006. It’s a good read if you are in the business of selling soap.

The description of their brand positioning is similar to that which Lunn suggested. They were relying on their store personnel to sell the story of their 100% natural soap. In fact, they once discontinued a distribution plan with a store chain that couldn’t “provide customers with knowledgeable service and information about the products.”

Permission Marketing Sells Soap

However, according to this case study, Rocky Mountain Soap already understood the importance of permission marketing for selling their soap. They allocated only 3% of sales to advertising in 2006, and they “relied heavily on the Internet” for promotion. They were sending a monthly email newsletter and birthday promotions to customers. Apparently, they believed that a website and email marketing strategy gave them the same opportunity they would get in the storefronts to tell their brand story.

They even committed to charging more for their products online to preserve the integrity of the store and wholesale pricing. (I think that’s a great example of a rule you can make when you are attracting customers.)

Growing In a Shrinking Economy

At that time, they had three stores and were planning an aggressive growth strategy that would be adding seven stores a year by 2008.

A visit to the Rocky Mountain Soap website today reveals that although growth hasn’t been as expansive as planned five years ago, they have grown from three to ten locations. Not bad for a bricks-and-mortar business these days.

What do you think? Is there a business model that you believe would not benefit from permission marketing?

handmade soap photo courtesy of necrocake

Mining for Gold

Once you have the words, you will find many ways to reuse your business blog content, especially if you have assigned categories and keywords to filter posts by topic. For example, at the bottom of this blog, you could click on Marketing to see all the other posts on this blog in this category. Alternatively, you could click on Blogs in you wanted to see those posts instead.

You can gather together topical posts and create:

• An e-book you use as a giveaway for growing your email list;
• A webinar for prospects or colleagues;
• Educational materials for new employees.

The next time you need copy for a brochure or video, you can review what has struck a chord on your blog and use that content to shape your copy.

Evergreen Is Easier to Recycle

If your blog publishes a lot of news instead of evergreen content, you might find it takes a little more effort to recycle content. Still, when you report news, you are likely to have a lot of useful source links that give you a jump on researching a subject in depth, and in the right hands your news content can be shaped into something fresh and informative.

No matter what type of content you have on your blog, you can find ways to reuse your posts and make your blog work even harder for you.

Contact Tammi Kibler today to learn how a professional freelance writer can help you manage your blog and connect with your customers.

This is the eighth in a series of 10 benefits of blogging for business.

Many sites also include testimonials on sales or products pages so interested prospects do not have to simply take their word for it.

However, these are rather passive places to leave positive buzz waiting for readers to find it. Your blog is the perfect place to pat yourself on the back from time to time and share the nice things people are saying about you and your company.

When someone thanks you for a successful transaction, a well-written blog post can include a reference to the customer’s appreciation without sounding like one long hooray for me horn toot.

Perhaps you can provide a case study or simply work the compliment into an explanation of what prospects can expect from doing business with you.

Depending on your business, testimonials may inspire other customers to share their success stories on your blog as well.

Even if you do not write testimonials into your posts, creating a friendly climate on your blog will prompt some customers to thank you in the comments. Just as your blog can attract unhappy customers, it can also draw praise that persists.

Contact Tammi Kibler today to learn how a professional freelance writer can help you create a blog that connects with your customers and promotes your business.

This is the seventh in a series of 10 benefits of blogging for business.

Customers who follow the conversation and contribute to the choices you make will feel invested in your products when they are released. They will feel like co-creators and will promote your offering.

Yes, you can get all that from your blog.

Instead of wasting money on focus groups and dubious marketing polls, you can go straight to the source and find out what your customers want most.

Involve Customers From the Start

As soon as your company starts considering a new product or service, drop some hints on the blog. Not only will you sow the seeds of interest with your readers, you will also leave breadcrumbs that people can go back and find when they wish to trace the genesis of your creation. Along with the steps you take to bring a new product or service to market, you write the story that will sell it.

Give the People What They Want

Poll your following for insights into their needs. Let them tell you what they want, so you can tailor your creation to meet an actual gap in the market. Launches fail to live up their promises when they satisfy the creative urges of their makers rather than the actual needs and desires of potential buyers.

They Will Put Words in Your Mouth

If you can get customers to share their deepest desires, some of their requests will inspire the copy you will use to sell your new product or service.

Imagine, you ask your customer what he wants, and he tells you exactly what he wishes someone would create. When you create that something, his original request will be a good description of your product. Furthermore, his words will sound completely authentic.

I know, it’s pretty cool.

Telling the Whole Story

Once you start creating, you will want to offer updates from time to time to keep readers aware of your progress. Take advantage of any opportunity to include them in decisions. Are you creating a product that will come in three colors? You could involve your readers in choosing one of the colors. Remember, the more involved they feel in the creation process, the more invested they will be in the success of your launch.

Heading for a Happy Ending

As I said, the entire process, from conception, to surveys that refine the creation, to the launch and success of the product or service, will become one of the stories that you tell on your blog. Your creation will be a narrative that blog readers will feel like they lived along with you, about a product they will feel they helped design.

Here’s a little ninja trick for your blog – when you launch your product, go back to all those early breadcrumbs and link them forward to your sales page. The search engines love when your pages are interlinked, and you will give every new reader a short cut to the product page.

Contact Tammi Kibler today to learn how a professional freelance writer can help you create a blog that connects with your customers and promotes your business.

This is the sixth in a series of ten benefits of blogging for business.

Your website is like your switchboard years ago, only now customers can navigate themselves. You can fill your site with resources that are available 24/7,  and which do not require a live person to be immediately available to answer questions.

Let’s get a few objections out of the way:

I’m not big enough to need a website.

Everyone is big enough. You are clipping your own wings from the outset if you do not allow your enterprise to market online from your self-hosted domain.

I have a free blog on Blogspot.com or WordPress.com

Oh, I know. It’s so tempting to launch a site on a free platform. I did it myself last year. I had a great idea and I launched on Blogspot. Two months later, I knew I had a good thing going and I made the move to self-hosting.

I exported all the content to my new domain, but I couldn’t transfer the search engine juice. I had to start all over with a fresh domain, and suddenly, I was competing with myself. To this day, some of my crappy-looking Blogspot posts still outrank their counterparts on my optimized site.

Sure, I thought about killing the old posts, but each page carries a link to my domain, so they are not a total loss. I just wish I’d had the courage to commit from the start. Everything could have grown so much faster, and I would never have suffered the loss of momentum you get when you hit the reset button.

Who Makes the Rules?

Besides, there are limits on WordPress.com and Blogspot.com as explained in the terms of use. They decide when you cross the line and leave you without recourse to a third party. You can be cruising along thinking everything is fine, and one day, someone decides your activity violates their terms of service, and it is gone.

Seriously, it happened to Problogger, Darrin Rowse. In June 2011, YouTube (a Google property, as is Blogspot) decided to discontinue videos in the “make money online” niche and shut them all down, including the blogger that many consider the authority on building profitable blog businesses. Of course, he found recourse, he wields that power. For you or I, that channel would have been lost permanently.

I have a Facebook Fan Page

Please, do not believe your Facebook fan page supplants your need for a website. Your Facebook fan page has a lot of the limitations of an old fashioned ad in a phone book.

Yes, the phone book was great for getting your ad in front of 20th century customers and urging them to pick up the phone and call a number for more information. In the same way, a Facebook fan page can be great for getting your message in front of your customers, as long as you use it to direct them to take the next step and visit your website.

Changing the Lingo

Facebook frustrates when they change their format. From time to time, Facebook makes a change to their fan pages that requires page owners to redesign their pages. Remember when the “Become a Fan” button changed to “Like”? Every company that had invested in ads that said “become a fan” had to change to “like us.” Television ads, billboards, and landing pages had to be changed to reflect the new wording. And there’s nothing preventing Facebook from changing it again in the future.

No platform is free once you invest your time or money designing your presence on it, and nothing on Facebook guarantees you will not someday be asked to pay to keep your page.

As long as you are on Facebook, you have to put up and shut up, and be prepared to redesign as often as they choose to upgrade.

Which is fine, I suppose, as long Facebook sends traffic to your website, and it is not the basket that holds all your eggs.

Who Owns the Content?

Did I mention content issues too? No? Well, we don’t have time for that today. Suffice it to say that you want to put as much content as possible on real estate you own outright – your self-hosted domain.

If you need help setting up a website, shoot me an email message (tammi at tammikibler dot com) and let me know where you stand. I can help you set up your first website and get you started on the WordPress content management system. Your site can be the first stop on your prospects’ journeys to becoming paying customers.

mansion image courtesy of Doug Wertman

Your blog can be a beacon to those who need customer service. The sooner unhappy customers get to you, the sooner you can resolve their issue.

Otherwise, they could end up on some review site where they with connect trolls who want to add fuel to the fire. Sometimes, an adverse situation with a simple solution finds the right voice to blow it all out of proportion.

Blog Can Offer Advice

If they find your blog first, unhappy customers may find the answers they need to resolve their issues. Minor dissatisfaction could be turned around in minutes.

Blog Provides a Forum to Be Heard

If they don’t find the answers they need, at least your blog can be that forum where customers express their displeasure, and you get an opportunity to make them happy. Between your contact form and your blog comments, visitors may have several options for getting a message to you.

Negative feedback is a gift when you can contain it on your site and respond in a way that improves customer service.

Blog Reminds Them You’re Human

Often, the reason problems escalate online is because the warmth of human conversation is missing. People who can’t find an immediate solution begin to think of the situation as “us vs. them” where them is a corporate logo.

Your blog can offer the reminder that behind the logo are real people trying, succeeding, sometimes missing the mark, but always striving to make it work for the customer.

You Can’t Hide in 21st Century

If your products or services have issues, people are going to hear about it in a world where bad news travels at the speed of Twitter.

Transparency is key and it’s better to face criticism head on. Your blog can attract unhappy customers and either give them the help they need or give them a way to contact you. With issues safely contained, you can keep complaints from getting out of hand.

A freelance writer can help you start and maintain a blog. Contact Tammi Kibler for help with your writing and marketing strategy.

This is the fifth in a series of ten benefits of blogging for business.

The search engine giant has always stressed the importance of providing AdWords landing pages that are relevant for the keywords. The whole point behind the Quality Score has been to reward quality landing pages and punish those that do not deliver what searchers expect. A higher quality score means you can win higher page positions with lower bids.

This new tweak is designed to give even more credit to those pages that Google believes searchers will find most satisfactory.

For advertisers who currently offer highly-relevant landing pages with content related to the keywords, this change should improve their Quality Score, leading to higher page placement and lower cost-per-click.

Google will be releasing this algorithm and crawling all the AdWords landing pages over the next few weeks. They predict you may see some adjustments to your Quality Score while the algorithm gets applied. Once they complete the update later this month, the system should be fully in place and scores will steady again.

Need help writing relevant landing pages? A freelance writer can help you find the words that convert. Contact Tammi Kibler to learn more about copy that sells.

Your business blog posts can share important details, like maintenance schedules and do-it-yourself tips, that help your customer get the most value from your product or services. This increased value will lead to an increase in customer satisfaction.

Troubleshooting Tips Increase Customer Satisfaction

I don’t know about you, but the minute I need help with an appliance or a bit of software, I start searching online for information. I want to know:

• Can I fix this?
• Why did this happen?
• How can I prevent this in the future?

No matter what THIS is, I know I will probably find answers online. I will find answers, but business owners may hate the answers I find.

The answers I find may not be correct. They may not solve my problem. Worst of all, from a business owner’s standpoint, the answers may disparage the manufacturer or seller of a product or service. (Your dinglewhipper broke because XYZ whips are crap!)

If you provide a product or service that may malfunction someday, you should consider putting information on your blog about potential issues. In some cases, you will inform customers ahead of time so they know what they need to do when a problem arises. For the rest, when problems occur and they search online, you want them to find your solutions so they get the best, professional information to satisfy their needs.

Storage and Maintenance Advice Increases Customer Satisfaction

When you sell products that require proper storage and maintenance, your blog is a great place to remind customers about these best practices. For example, a home improvement store might run a post in autumn advising customers how to store their yard tools and lawn mowers for the winter.

A lot of consumers are certain that manufacturers design products to break easily so these items will need be replaced more often. Your business blog can help assure customers that your products will last for years if treated properly. You can also warn about the dangers of ignoring tune ups or expiration dates.

Off-Label Uses

Doctors will often prescribe new medicines for “off -label” uses. In these cases, the doctors believe the prescriptions have value for symptoms or dosages that have not yet been studied or approved by the FDA.

In a similar manner, some creative customers will develop off-label uses for non-pharmaceutical products they use.

If a customer informs you of a secondary use of your product not mentioned on your label, you can share that information on your blog. The more ways a customer can use your product, the more satisfied that customer is likely to be.

More importantly, if you have concerns about these off-label uses, you can warn your customers and protect them from dangerous uses associated with your products.

Preparation

Many services involve meetings or visits. Maybe you visit the customer’s home (landscapers and painters) or they visit your office (accountants and dentists). These visits are most successful when both parties are fully prepared.

Of course, you will be fully prepared. That’s your job and you are good at your job. Customers, though, don’t always do what they should.

Blog posts can contain friendly reminders that help customers prepare for your visits, leading to a more satisfactory outcome for both you and them.

Transparency Increases Customer Satisfaction

Not every product or service is perfect. Sometimes adding one feature compromises another. Lowering cost often means sacrificing a benefit.

Your business blog can address those imperfections honestly and explain them fully. Again, it is better the customer hear about issues from you rather than someone else who is trying to be sensational.

Explaining clearly the trade-offs and the reasons for them can increase customer satisfaction with a purchase.

Accessories and Add-ons Increase Customer Satisfaction

Finally, many customers would be better satisfied if they purchased the accessories or upgrades that allow a product or service to fully meet their needs. Blog posts can make this clear without a hard sell.

Away from the sales floor, a clear explanation of what other customers accomplish using a fully-upgraded or -accessorized product or service may lead to more of these add-on purchases. When the add-ons enhance the customer’s experience, then customer satisfaction will increase.

Blogging for Business Increases Customer Satisfaction

For all these reasons and more, blogging for business can help increase customer satisfaction leading to better word-of-mouth advertising and more repeat customers.

Contact Tammi Kibler today to learn how a professional freelance writer can help you create a blog that connects with your customers and promotes your business.

This is the fourth in a series of 10 benefits of blogging for business.