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What is the best way to achieve your goals in your company? The answer is: To solve daily problems and provide value to your customer in the process. What does “solve daily problems” mean? It means what it is supposed to mean. As a business owner, you stumble upon an issue that needs to be taken care of. You tackle it and make it disappear as fast as you can. If you do it consistently, you create a habit. That habit brings your clients results, and they will return for more. Big Example: Say you run a small restaurant. This restaurant has 16 tables, and it is free seating. What this means is that the moment a patron comes in, they may choose where they want to sit. Now, this is what it would look like if customers were allowed to select their seats: A patron comes in, and seeing decides to sit on the opposite side of your staff, right at the end of the restaurant. Another customer comes in and sits on the opposite side of the first customer. And that repeats for two more parties that enter the restaurant.  What would be the consequence of this free seating policy? If you are working with a tight crew, they have a higher chance of getting tired faster. They would also be running on the floor randomly (based on the order of the clients’ arrival), and when they put a ticket to the kitchen, they have a higher chance of missing it. The kitchen runs based on the flow of orders. If they come in on a random orderly fashion, you will experience customers getting their food later, or maybe a table getting their food partially, etc. Is this a problem? I believe it is. How to solve it? Look at the map below.  If we can organize the tables in sections, and we place a greeter or host in the entrance of the restaurant to escort the patrons to their table, we can organize the space of the floor and thus the inflow of orders and food. How could we fix this issue? On the map, we divided the same number of tables in 3 sections. When the first customer comes in, we will direct him to table 1. When the second customer comes in, we’ll place them on table 2, the third to table 3, and so forth. We will only allow a customer to go to table 7 if the original six are full. So when you deal with the seating issue, you can focus all your waiters’ efforts in one area of the restaurant. Your service will be faster, food will arrive on time, and you will help the kitchen by being organized. In this case, by organizing the flow of customers, you can provide better service to them! That is efficiency in solving problems. In our company, we cater mostly to small businesses, which means deal directly we the business owners, talking strategy, and discussing what to do and not. What we notice in dealing with them is that if we can give them more than they are expecting and get the results they want, their satisfaction improves, and they will gladly refer you to new clients. What does this mean? Usually, this is how you hire an online marketing agency: give them the scope of the project, they will provide a detailed blueprint of what they can do, and they can’t do, you agree with the terms and start working together. It’s not uncommon that unpredicted issues in the scope determined by agency surfaces and needs to be dealt with to achieve the results you had in mind when you hired that very agency. Most of the agencies (this is also from my personal experience as a client) will say: “I can’t do this” or “That’s not within our scope” or “We need to hire someone else to do it.” Now bear with me, I am not talking about new software implementation, or something massive as adding a new social media in a super-specific language like Mandarin, for instance. I am talking about…” hey, something interesting just happened in the neighborhood, can we talk about it on our social media within the hour? Can you please create a post about it?” These types of things. Those agencies often neglect them because they were not in the scope, but as I see it, this agency is not solving the clients’ problem. I have learned over the past years as a business owner that my best service partners are the ones that were doing extra without me requesting or knowing it. And that is fantastic because I never feel like IO have to bug these partners for little things, which puts a strain on the working relationship. I don’t even bother to bug those partners, which I would if results were not happening, and I noticed they were not proactive in their role.  Of course, there’s a gray area. It’s not fair to online marketing agencies to expect their work to deviate so drastically from what they planned just so the customer can get a load of free services. However, it’s also not smart to see a strategy not going through when you know that if you add a few things or two to your daily activities, it can improve the results of your work. As SEO experts, we learned how to reverse engineer websites, data, and social media channels so we can funnel the traffic to our client’s business online. Looking at the big picture, it makes sense to reverse engineer the approach on Customer Service! How we cater service practices should be “everything in your power to bring those customers to the client”! Examples: Work on Sundays, overnight, add that paid feature to your client, write content when your client can’t give you, add that extra post on his social media channel, he is not giving you the material to finish your assignment? Figure out a way to help you in this regard, don’t just wait! MAKE THINGS HAPPEN! For your client and the sake of a prosper partnership! In the long term, you are continually solving their problems, you are generating value to their business, and you become an essential partner for their success! It pays off!!! Leo
Written by Leo Ang @ Ingols Digital Business! Partner at Ingols Digital @ingolsdigital and Ingols Imports. How to be found online is a question we are very familiar with! When we started our online business we built our website and waited for sales to happen. We waited and waited and waited, until we learned to develop a clear message, how to leverage social media into our favor, maximize our websites and SEO, amongst other things. It’s the same for almost every client we’ve met through our digital agency – they have a website that doesn’t rank and has no traffic OR they want to build a website and think that alone will generate leads for their businesses. Well, being found online isn’t as easy as it may seem! Now more than ever in our time, your website should be your most important source of business. Customers of all age groups are interacting more with businesses today than they were a year ago and. The average monthly website traffic has increased by 13% in the month of March, compared to February, reports Hubspot.  Average monthly website traffic has increased in March compared to February Despite the surge in website traffic and marketing and sales team engagement with the public, the Hubspot report shows there was a lower response to those efforts. “Average marketing email volume increased 29% the week of March 16, while open rates increased by 53% the same week. Across the month, the open rate increased by 21% overall”. Even though businesses are facing many challenges now, there are also lots of opportunities to boost your business’ digital performance and get you to actually be found online, which is the first step in creating a profitable business. If on one side potential clients are wary of spending their money at this time, on the other, they are spending more time online and prospecting, exploring their options, looking to connect with the businesses they may eventually buy from. That is a great opportunity to educate your potential clients on your products or services. Offer free content, engage with your audience on your social media channels, and build the connections that will hopefully convert into sales in the future. WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR BUSINESSES AND HOW CAN YOU TURN THESE PIECES OF INFORMATION INTO ACTIONABLE STEPS TO BE FOUND ONLINE? 1. MAKE YOUR MESSAGE CRYSTAL CLEAR Is your message clear? Is it intentional? Having these attributes is key to be found online and standing out from the pack. You can easily do that by narrowing down the scope of the information you put out there! Do this by defining your customer avatar or buyer persona. If you don’t already have a template you can use Hubspot’s free “Make my Persona” tool! Organizing your potential client’s information with the prompts below will help you quickly build your customer avatar and maximize your chances of making your message clear to your target audience!
2. BE STRATEGIC WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE Social media can be overwhelming if you don’t have a clear strategy to integrate your message across all the channels you use. Asking questions like “Am I promoting a brand, a product, myself?” or “Am I interested I building a community of like-minded people or potential clients” will help you decide which platforms best suit your strategy to be found online. Consider these steps in order to craft a clear strategy:
 Tools available to support your social media managing and planning 3. HAVE A KILLER WEBSITE As we said before, having a website is no guarantee to be found online! You need to make sure your website is maximized for optimal navigation – you don’t want your visitors to get frustrated because they can’t find what they are looking for! The most important elements for a successful website are:
 Optimal navigation structure for a website 4. MAKE SEO A PRIORITY The most important attribute of a website is its capacity to be found online! We see a lot of websites that are great portfolios but are far from being the cash machine any website should potentially be. By making SEO a priority you’re giving your website the best chance it can get to not only be found but to bring in sales! Building your Google ranking through SEO takes time and this is why it’s important to start working on it now! Google has over 200 ranking factors but some of the most important are:
 SEO should be a priority in your strategy We hope these actionable steps will help you to be found online and with wok and dedication ramp up your website visits and conversion rates! AuthorWritten by Dani Rodrigues @ Ingols Digital Small Business Listener! Partner at Ingols Digital @ingolsdigital and Ingols Imports. |
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Our Blog is constantly updated by Dani or Leo. We talk about ways to improve small businesses marketing using tools related to Technology, Websites and Social Media. Yes, we cover some SEO as well! ArchivesCategories
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5/10/2020
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