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Effective Public Relations in an Online World

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How is your business perceived on Yelp? Facebook? Twitter? Google? Amazon? Managing your online reputation should be a priority for your public relations team. Setup a workflow to track – and most importantly – respond to online reviews, comments and ratings. Remember, just one bad review can be enough to sink your business. You can’t stop bad reviews, but you can lessen the negative impact to your online reputation through a series of steps.

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Monitor your online presence

Reading Facebook comments once a week isn’t cutting it. To be effective, you need staff in place actively monitoring customer interactions on a daily basis. You also need a detailed plan of best practices to optimize your responses to benefit you and show your customer base that you are an engaged and open brand.

Our free white paper – Cyber Identity Guide: Managing Your Company’s Online Reputation – outlines three common online reputation tactics:

  1. IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO SIMPLY have a Facebook page – you should be using it to promote events, post pictures, and reply to customer comments or feedback.
  2. COMMENTS ON REVIEW SITES SHOULDN’T be left to sit unanswered – thank people for their positive feedback and work to resolve any complaints so others know you’re committed to their satisfaction.
  3. CONSIDER SUBSCRIBING TO POPULAR message boards where your brand, products, or services, are discussed. If allowed by that particular forum, participate in discussions regarding customer experience and establish a rapport with other members. These people have the power to become brand ambassadors or your worst enemies.
BAD REVIEWS ARE GOOD

Don’t panic when a customer posts a bad review. Instead, react. Respond to every bad review with a professional response. Don’t try to respond to the specific complaints or offer excuses on a public forum. Instead, apologize and post a phone number or email reply stating that your company wants to make it right and discuss the issue with the customer in private, offline.

Bad reviews serve another purpose – legitimizing your online reputation. Brands with overwhelmingly positive reviews are often accused of having fake reviews. Legit, negative reviews can actually bring a sense of trustworthiness to a brand.

Be professional but stay on brand with all interactions. It sounds simple enough, but you would be surprised how often brands panic and break good practices when interacting on reviews, comment threads and message boards.

WHAT IS YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION WORTH?

The tendency to ignore bad reviews or handle them incorrectly can ultimately ruin your reputation and your profits. Think about how much a single lost customer can cost you. Consider this situation:

Scenario A: A customer is eating at a restaurant and they find a hair in their meal. They contact the server, who brings them a new meal and apologizes.

Scenario B: A customer is eating at a restaurant and they find a hair in their meal. They contact the server, who brings them a new meal and apologizes. The manager/owner comes over to apologize again and takes care of the bill.

Scenario A likely ends in a bad review on Yelp. Scenario B, on the other hand, may or may not result in a review. If it does, it will certainly be a more favorable rating but will certainly mention the free meal.

So, what is your online reputation worth? With Scenario B, paying the customer’s bill probably prevented a negative review, and at worst, other potential customers will see that, despite the hair, the restaurant paid for the meal, too.That free meal could prevent multiple customers (and multiple meals) from going elsewhere.

Effectively managing your online reputation is an important – and often overlooked – step in the world of digital content marketing. First contact with a brand is often looking at reviews and ratings. Prioritizing the importance of your online presence in your overall marketing and brand strategy is key.

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Interested in learning more? Contact us!

11 Reasons Why Your Company Needs a CRM

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Let’s face it, lot’s of money is budgeted for sales leads generated from online advertising, print ads, radio, networking, Pay-Per-Clicks or whatever method your company uses to get them. Unfortunately most leads never materialize into a sale and the money spent to capture them is wasted. As an example, one of our local new home builders estimates each prospect who walks into their sales office costs an average of $700 to get them there! Your cost might be less, but the goal is the same for any business-to convert those expensive leads to sales.

Investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool

By no means are there only 11 good reasons to invest in a CRM, but we thought this list was a good start to show the importance of a CRM to help your team convert leads to sales. Let’s begin with what it does: the purpose of a business CRM is to act as a central hub for all of your company’s activities related to your customer interactions. It simplifies and organizes tasks such as customer follow up and notes, setting appointments, managing contacts, personalized steps required by your team for each prospect from start to finish, and monitoring any email marketing campaigns. A CRM pulls it all together in one place and provides you with analytics and reporting tools to oversee operations and to maximize your selling opportunities. Here are just a few reasons why you should consider choosing a CRM for your business in an infographic you can save for future reference or share:

11 Reasons Why Your Company Needs a CRM-01

The caveat before deciding on a CRM platform is that the returns will only be as good as the effort put into the program in the first place. Simply using a CRM as an address book is not a good return on your investment. There is a learning curve when implementing a CRM for the first time or when upgrading to a newer version, so training your team to properly utilize and maintain the many features a CRM has to offer your business is key. Once a CRM is utilized to it’s full potential, it can propel your company to a higher profit margin and surpass your competition with amazing customer service!

At Kompani Group we understand the importance of a strong business CRM, which is why we have helped hundreds of clients to integrate solutions such as Insightly and Salesforce to improve their sales process. We don’t just stop there; KG also trains and supports the sales team to optimize the many powerful tools these solutions offer.  Are you interested in learning more? Get in touch, and we’ll tell you how we can get you started with your new CRM solution!

7 Tips for an Effective Customer Service to Grow Your Company

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All too often customers are left with an uneasy feeling of frustration after speaking with a customer service representative. They hang up the phone and vow never to use your company again, and if angry enough they will tell anyone who will listen about their terrible experience. “Even bad publicity is good publicity” applies to actors, not to companies.

When companies are starting out it’s easy to think of customer service as a necessary evil to be executed with as little overhead as possible, because let’s face it, there are a lot of other things that require your attention and resources. But marketing and advertising costs are high, and finding new customers costs money. Your goal should be to keep customers loyal and hope they refer more people to you. It’s a more cost effective approach and will grow your company faster and with a stronger foundation.  

Here are 7 important tips for a better customer service experience:

  1. Empower your staff with information they need to handle the call on their own. Being put on hold several times during a call creates distrust and a feeling your rep is not equipped to help the customer. They may hang up on the call entirely, or be left with a nagging feeling their problem is not yet over.  This can result in multiple calls that will drain your resources. Get it done right the first time and leave the customer with a feeling of confidence in your company.  Remember, stuff happens, and your customers will forgive you as long as your customer support can reinstate confidence during the initial call.
  2. Train your staff to be proactive. In any sales training we are taught how to overcome obstacles thrown at us by our customers. Depending on your industry you can compile a list of obstacles with solutions for your staff, so they are not caught off guard and forced to respond defensively to negative situations.
  3. Create a mission statement specifically for customer service. Simply saying you want to be “professional and courteous,” or “create a positive experience for customers” is not going to cut it. Focus also on the reality of some calls going bad and change the mission statement to something like: “Creating fewer frustrated Customer calls.”
  4. Complete the call with a “Yes.”  Ask the customer if they are satisfied with the answers or solutions provided in that call. Do not disconnect the call until the answer is “Yes!”
  5. It starts at the top. Regardless of the size of a company, the commitment to excellent customer service starts at the top. CEO’s should still want to be in the loop.
  6. Your website should also provide help for your customers. Create an effective FAQ page to answer basic questions and provide solutions. A solid FAQ page can lower the number of calls to your company.
  7. Keep your customer service in house, or at least in the country! Outsourcing may cost you less, but in the long run may cost you customers. You want your customers to feel the people they speak with are connected to your company

 

Infographic-Effective Customer Service

SEO, HTML, SME – Content Marketing All Spelled Out

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In a world that is increasingly relying upon abbreviations and acronyms to streamline communication, it can be easy to forget that content is still what drives site traffic and web presence. In fact, any smart SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy will make use of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) text as its foundation. Since graphics don’t communicate as words to search engine indexing programs and abbreviations don’t always reflect the way people search, actual relevant content filled with words is the most reliable way to present yourself or your company as an SME (Subject Matter Expert). Want to learn more? See our most recent free report on the subject.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER – and a Great Way to Differentiate Your Business

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At Kompani Group we believe in empowerment.  Whether it is our clients or our own team, we view it the same way. We always strive to arm all of our stakeholders with the best tools and the best information.  As B2B marketing evolves at break-neck speed it becomes increasingly evident that CMO’s are buying into this philosophy.  The game is not about jazzy ads, but about delivering meaningful information to the marketplace.  Our good friends at Desantis Breindel have written a spot-on white paper on this topic.  In keeping with their philosophy that “content is the gift that keeps on giving,” we are sharing it with you.

www.desantisbreindel.com/whitepapers/content-the-new-creative-desantis-breindel.pdf

Give them a visit at www.desantisbreindel.com and follow them on Twitter

Marketing/Sales – Lead generation the old fashioned way

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In today’s world, relevant sales leads can be searched across the Internet and found in the most unexpected places: lists of group members, participants at events, recipients of awards, industry rankings, local listings are all publicly available for entry into your own database.  For most smaller to small-medium companies, e-marketing, cold calling, cold mailings and cold e-mailing, as well as on-line and off-line social activities, are still the most effective and most cost-efficient ways of building a pipeline of leads and new prospects.

Lists that can be purchased from lead resellers such as InfoUSA and Superpages are not current, a waste of money, and create embarrassing ROI for all of us.

To keep the labor cost of data entry down, we have been testing the offshore companies that specialize in this function. Recently we have found very reliable and very inexpensive labor (in Pakistan, as it happens) who can take on multiple simple data entry projects for us and our clients. This means that any list, book, certain search criteria, links to zip code-generated searches, etc., can be cost-efficiently transcribed into a spreadsheet or a CSV file that can be used for export to any type of broadcasting, publishing or shipping application.

Here’s an example that makes the point: We began working with a national airline from a South American country 3 months ago. Despite having been in business for 54 years, they only had 400 names in their database, which meant that we had to start from scratch in building them a mailing list. Through research we found a zip code-generated database via a certain Tourism Authority, but despite several attempts to contact the association we were never able to speak with someone who could tell us how we could purchase the list directly from them. We then engaged our team in Pakistan to manually enter each zip code between 10,000 up to zip code 99,000 resulting in the full contact data (including e-mails) for 4,000 certified expert travel and tour operators in the United States with a specific interest in our client’s key destination.

In this case we found a database where each zip code had to be manually entered, and if registered travel and tour operators existed under this zip code our data entry team would copy and paste the information into a simple spreadsheet.

It’s hard to overstate how valuable these qualified contact lists can be. We suggest you speak with your team to learn if they can help us help you increase the size of your e-marketing/ mailing lists on a weekly basis. Speak with them about the importance of making it a habit for each employee to provide you with or enter their leads into your company’s CRM system (such as Highrise) or submit ideas, printed lists, and new search criteria ideas to the person in charge of marketing.

There are no short cuts in building great businesses, and it is the small, tedious and time consuming activities that generate results every time.

Sustainable green endeavors at Canyon Ranch Spa Hotel & Residences

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For the 2nd year Heinau at www.HeinauFlowers.com was retained to decorate the lobby at the Canyon Ranch Spa Hotel and Residences at North Miami Beach in Florida.  The spectacular end result is not justified by the images below, but we are excited about the installation and just wanted to share some of the images.  All the flower arrangements will be converted into full year arrangements once the holiday season is over, and most of the flowers (as you know) will last until the 2011 holiday season.  Talk about sustainability, green endeavors and a happy CFO at Canyon Ranch.

 

Communicate or Die

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Most people have a difficult time writing content for their websites, let alone email blasts. The easiest and simplest way to get your word on the email wire is to create a digest of your website’s content. Content? Yes… Blog posts. Wait a minute, he said blog posts. Yes ladies and gentleman, you work tirelessly to do a great job for your clients and run a ship shape company. We can hear you say, “I don’t have time for to write blog posts.” Many people try writing to their blog, then stop. The common thought is that the effort does not equate to $$$$. Below are some indirect ways that writing to your website will help with your business.

  • It makes you a thought leader, a knowledge powerhouse, with the potential of being perceived a leader in your field.
  • It shows the rest of the world that your doors are open for business. Imagine going into a store and all their products are covered with dust. That’s how it looks when you have a blog post or news item dated 2007!
  • Allow search engines to get more link juice by finding relevant content and associate that content to your business.

If you commit yourself to write at least one blog post a week.  You will have 4 great articles to post in your newsletter. It’s that easy.  Aim high, even if you only write two posts, that’s great content for your newsletter.

When you are ready to send your blast. Get a small excerpt from each post, the title and a read more link pointing to your single blog post.

Here are all the milestones you reached:

  1. This exercise keeps your website current.
  2. Not only will you get traffic from the search engines, but the newsletter will remind your prospects and contacts about your existence.
  3. If some of your blog posts are helpful tips (like this one) you pay it forward.
  4. And finally, the most effective e marketing systems will provide you with an abundance of intelligence and analytics about who actually read your newsletter, who they forwarded it to and what they clicked on in the newsletter.

Like greatest showman on Earth, P.T. Barnum, who turned 200 years on July 5th 2010, always used to say: “What happens when you stop promoting ………absolutely nothing”

What exactly is online social marketing?

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Social Online Marketing is one of the up-and-coming Online Marketing tactics. Social Online Marketing is done by using Social Networking websites, which is part of the Web 2.0. Social Online Marketing is not only a popular and effective strategy of marketing, but it is easy and fun. By promoting yourself and your company into the online community (outside of your own website) you are participating in Social Online Marketing.

So what exactly is Social Online Marketing? Social Online Marketing requires the use of Social Networking sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Digg, Blogger, Twitter and YouTube to add/edit content for others to be able to access. Information placed on such sites allows consumers to not only view it, also link to it and/or post their own comments about it.  The end result of Social Online Marketing is to increase visibility on Social Networking Sites, create inbound links, and increase traffic to your website which can be tracked through analytics software.

Not only are Social Networking sites useful for Social Online Marketing, their content can also be informational to their viewers. Social Networking sites can allow people to catch up on trends in the Internet world. There are many blogs for example that offer information solely on Internet news. Social Networking sites don’t just give information on the Internet; they can also give readers access to almost any information imaginable.

Although consumers are in control of Social Networking websites, they don’t have full control; Social Online Marketers can also participate in these sites. Customers don’t necessarily want to be marketed to all the time, but they want to be communicated with, which can be done through online discussions. Consumers are out there expressing their thoughts, opinions, recommendations and complaints about your products regardless and not accessing/engaging in these conversations is ignoring an excellent opportunity. By engaging in conversations with your customers and hearing their thoughts, you can get feedback on what changes/improvements your product can use as well as give you an opportunity to address their views through your comments. All the hype of Social Online Marketing is causing an exponential growth in users and its possible uses as a powerful online marketing tool.

Before starting your Social Online Marketing campaign it is important to think about what exactly it is that you are marketing. Brainstorming about your Online Marketing goals should include research of your target demographic and your key competitors.

Once able to locate your target audience it will enable you to answer key points that define what Social Online Marketing tactics will be successful. The following are questions to keep in mind about your users when determining how to proceed in your campaign: where do they spend a majority of their time when online? (or sometimes even when offline) and what are their hobbies, interests and needs?

By researching your leading competitors you can gain knowledge of how they have tackled Social Online Marketing. Whether competitors have published in wikis, posted on blogs or created a Facebook Fan page they should all be easily traceable through their website. Many Online Marketing attempts can be found just by performing a link search of their website.

You can create a custom Social Online Marketing plan for your website since you now know who your consumers are, information about them and what your competitors have done.

Although Social Online Marketing is relatively easy to perform, it is nearly impossible to engage in every single website out there, nor is not necessary (in most situations) to use every form of Social Online Marketing. The more relevant avenues your campaign exhausts the more likely you are to have a successful results, which more often than not means the more time you have to spend on your Online Marketing campaign the better your results will be.

There are massive amounts of Social Online Marketing websites currently available, with literally hundreds of new ones emerging each month making it even more impossible to access them all.

Examples of Social Online Marketing websites include, but are not limited to:

  1. LinkedIn is a Social Networking website that revolves around networks of professionals. Your professional network of trusted contacts gives you an advantage in your career, and is one of your most valuable assets. LinkedIn exists to help you make better use of your professional network and help the people you trust in return. Their mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. They believe that in a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depend upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.
  2. FaceBook is another Social Networking website that gives users the ability to keep in contact with friends. People can publish notes, upload photos, view news from friends, join networks and so much more. By posting a photo of your brand on your companies FaceBook page it allows friends to view your product and hopefully generate traffic to your website.
  3. YouTube is a video sharing/distributing Social Networking website. It allows visitors that don’t register the ability to watch videos or those who do register the ability to access the websites full potential, offering many of the applications that sites like Linkedin do. YouTube is one of the fastest growing and largest Social Networking communities currently available, so it is a great avenue to perform Social Online Marketing.
  4. Blogger is one of the more popular blogging networks. By commenting in open-ended conversational marketing it allows the community to have a lot of control over conversations. Social Online marketers can create their own blog to share specific information to the community and plug their own product/brand.

In most Social Online Marketing communities it is recommended to not start out by promoting your brand or website. If you start out by “spamming” you are likely to get kicked out of that social community. Not only could the site administrators ban you from their site, but it could also scare consumers away from your direct online marketing tactics.

What is the next step? Initiating contact with your customers is important, but it is just as useful to continue to keep contact with them. You can’t just start something and not finish. Starting posts on a blog is great, but you need to show users that you are not just visiting, but are there often to listen to them. Customers are likely to add comments or thoughts to your posting which would in turn require a response from you.

Social Online Marketing sites are useful, but their content needs to be easily accessible by searchers. By making access to your Social Online Marketing attempts possible through a link on your website it makes less work for your users to view them.

So you were able to define your audience, locate your customers on the Internet, build a social relationship with them and promote your brand and website through Social Online Marketing. How can you tell if your Social Online Marketing techniques are working? Most analytic software allows goals to be set up and allows for the monitoring of conversion rates. (Note that you need to know what you are measuring first)

When just beginning your Social Online Marketing campaign it is recommended to perform one technique at a time. If using more than one Social Online Marketing technique it could be hard to tell which one elicits what results. To be certain which tactics work best, you should start your campaign by performing one Social Online Marketing form at a time. If you start a multitude of tactics at one time it will more than likely give you an excellent result, but will leave you wondering which one is better for me.

On the other hand, if you are familiar with Social Online Marketing and know which forms are necessary for your campaign it is best to perform more than one tactic at a time. By promoting multiple forms of Social Online Marketing at once it will give you quicker results than marketing just one at a time.

At Kompani Group we offer monthly online social marketing maintenance services. Ask us about what we can do for your company.

The BlackBand viral marketing campaign

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Case study: Blackband project

Owner: Camacho Cigars, Authors: Dylan Austin, Gianni D’Alerta

Background/Introduction:

Before we started this project we planned and built the following two sites for Camacho cigars – www.camachocigars.com and www.socialcigar.com (at first we did not reveal that Camacho was behind this site). Through the two sites we built a subscriber list of 4,500 people in less than one year. Since then we have also built www.room101cigars.com, and we are currently working on a new revolutionary social networking platform and corporate site for Camacho Cigars/Davidorff.

Kickoff of the BlackBand project:

To start off, here is an excerpt from the press release, post project:

“The campaign objectives for Camacho included the creation of an engaging, opt-in viral marketing campaign, a successful permission–marketing opportunity as an outlet to sample yet to be released products. A four-part web-series was created without mention of Camacho until the final “reveal” episode. The viewers followed the satirical Independent Cigar Review Bureau, a fictional agency, whose sole purpose was to educate the world about cigar selection, as they used humorous, guerilla-style tactics to enlighten three characters that represented the most common cigar misconceptions”

Process:

  1. We launched the site with this page: http://www.blackbandproject.com/home-temp/
  2. We blasted Camacho’s mailing list of 1000 and the social network we created while I was at Propeller of 3500 people, not as Camacho but as the fictional company. The amazing thing was that the idea was so interesting that we had a very low spam report.  We also ran rich media banner ads that actually played a trailer of the project on the websites the banners resided.
  3. Once the person signed up they would get one episode a week that would build upon the myths and misconceptions of cigar smoking. The Buzz just keep mounting… people passing the links to their friends… it was huge… in the online cigar world.
  4. After they registered they immediately received their first “mission” http://www.blackbandproject.com/d57s-1/
  5. A week after that http://www.blackbandproject.com/6ku6-2/
  6. A week later http://www.blackbandproject.com/hr4s-3/
  7. And then the conclusion http://www.blackbandproject.com/b7x3-conclusion/

Results:

  1. We gained 15,500 new subscribers! With that permission to market to them anything in the future. They are already expecting more from Camacho, and we won’t disappoint them.
  2. Every cigar website was buzzing about the project, we even got more hits on our Black Band Project site in one month that Cigar Aficionado.
  3. After the last video was sent… a month later people got 3 cigars in the mail. So for a whole month, every week… the conversations where about the black band project. Then when the cigars shipped, another huge buzz.

Another Excerpt:

“From day one, the campaign captivated the cigar industry and generated sweeping buzz across the country, with thousands of cigar enthusiasts discussing who was behind “The Black Band Project” on social media outlets, including Twitter, Facebook, and cigar-industry message boards and blogs.

End results:

  1. 15,000 leads
  2. 4,000 people got the cigars (people who watched all the videos)
  3. 15% overall sales increase after the launch of the new product.