How to increase customer retention

While many business owners rightly channel all their efforts into roping in new customers, very few of them take customer retention seriously. However, customer acquisition can be 5 times more expensive than customer retention.

Let us have a look at some effective ways you can improve customer retention and loyalty -

•  Delight loyal customers with rewards and offers

•  Send personalized follow-up messages

•    Analyze customer purchase pattern and behavior to identify customers who are at a risk for leaving, and make suitable offers to prevent them from doing so

•   Take customer feedback and act on it seriously

•   Invest in CRM tools for improved customer service

As your existing customers are more likely to purchase from you than new ones, it is of paramount importance that you take steps to retain them. Customer retention, combined with customer acquisition can greatly increase your profits.

5 Best Career Opportunities in Digital Marketing

As more and more businesses are getting onboard the benefits of digital marketing in increasing brand awareness and conversion rates, there is a huge demand of skilled specialists in the various areas of this discipline.

Let us have a look at some of the many career opportunities that are available in digital marketing -

Digital Marketing Manager

This position is suitable for someone who has a solid, hands-on experience in executing digital marketing campaigns. As a digital marketing manager, you will be responsible for planning, developing and overseeing the execution of the overall digital marketing strategy for a particular campaign.

Content Writer

As a content writer, you will be responsible for drafting engaging content on various topics and in different formats such as blogs, emails, social media posts, newsletters, etc. Majority of organizations do not even demand a specific degree for hiring writers, as long as they are skilled and have a good grasp on the language.

SEO Expert

Increasing the online visibility of their website through Search Engine Optimization is a top priority for many business owners and digital marketers. Thus, SEO experts who can combine their knowledge of the way search engines work with various online keyword research and website analysis tools are in huge demand.

Social Media Executive

Social media marketing is an important part of any digital marketing campaign. Organizations are always on the lookout for social media executives who are familiar with the nuances of various social media platforms. They will be responsible for publishing suitable posts on all the platforms relevant to their organization.

Graphic Designer

From social media posts and emails to blogs, every piece of content needs an engaging visual to uplift it. So, if you are good at designing and using photoshop tools, the field of digital marketing has a huge opportunity for you.

Along with these, UX Designer, video editor, PPC marketing manager, search engine marketer, content marketing manager, and copywriter are some other opportunities in the digital marketing domain.

3 Simple Tips to Improve Your Social Media Activities

Social media marketing is one of the most favoured digital marketing channels for business owners; indeed, increasing your digital outreach would not be possible without social media platforms in today's interconnected world.

With nearly every business wanting to establish a firm footing on social media, it is essential for you to stay on the top of the game.

Let us have a look at some tips that will help you improve your social media campaigns -

Do not just use social media for promotion

Social media, at its core, is a way for people to connect and communicate with each other. Instead of just using social media for promoting your products or services, use it to actually talk to your customers, take their concerns and needs into account and improve your customer service. This will greatly help you increase social media engagement and strengthen customer relationships.

Shake up your content and posts

Publishing only similar types of content will quickly become monotonous. Keep your customers on their toes by adopting different types of content formats such as videos, infographics, slideshows, etc.

Involve your customers as much as possible

As we mentioned earlier, social media marketing has to involve a two-way communication between you and your consumers. This does not mean that you only have to limit your interactions to the comment section. Create and share posts such as polls, surveys and quizzes, and engage in live QA sessions. Engaging in open communication with your customers will increase your credibility and help promote brand awareness.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

What to Do if Your Social Media Efforts are not Paying Off?

You might have observed that while one social media platform is driving expected results, you are not getting enough engagement on another platform.

There can be a number of reasons for this disparity in social media marketing. Before taking measures to rectify the situation, it is necessary that you find out the cause behind it.

To start with, understand that the problem might not lie in your campaign execution or the content you are posting, but simply the platform itself. Not every social media platform is right for your business.

Check whether or not your target audience is using the platform you have chosen. If not, all your time and efforts will go in vain. Even if you are targeting the right audience, you need to pay attention to the demographics. If the platform is dominated by the older generation, they will prefer long form content like articles, blogs and guides. On the other hand, if majority of them come from the millennial and Gen Z club, you will have to reel them in with short, engaging and most importantly, visual content like videos and infographics.

Of course, the most major cause of concern is you are treating all the social media platforms in the same way. Duplicating your posts on every platform will not work for all of them. Each platform has its own unique characteristics, and you need to adhere to them if you want the expected results.

For example, Instagram is a visual platform ruled by short videos and high-quality images. Only sharing your blog links will not take you very far here. On the other hand, posting product demos, showing off your company culture and sharing user-generated content will help you increase engagement rates.

Thus, it is the combination of the right target audience and playing by a particular platform's rules, along with providing value with your content, that will decide how you will fare on it. If you are having problems with a particular platform, analyze your audience data and experiment with different kinds of posts to see whether it can work out for you in the long run.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Why does transparency matter in B2B marketing

Today, the average buyer's journey has changed drastically from a decade or so ago. With the entire World Wide Web at their disposal, they put in much more efforts in researching the product or service they need.

Customers not only wish to inform themselves about a particular solution, but also the organization that offers it. As a natural instinct, they want to be sure that the brand they are purchasing from and entering into a partnership with, is authentic and trustworthy.

Thus, along with publishing and promoting content through digital marketing, you also need to be completely honest and open about your prices, and company processes.

Doing so will enable your customers to make informed purchase decisions with a peace of mind.

Brand transparency is especially useful for B2B marketers, as more often than not they look to form long-term business relationships with their customers.

Do you blindly follow every digital marketing trend?

Every year, we are greeted with a host of articles that outline the latest digital marketing trends. Nearly every one of them has a tone of urgency that implies you have to implement the trends, or risk getting left behind in the competition.

Yes, it is important to keep yourself updated of the current trends, but it is very impractical to hop on every one of them. Not every one of them can be right for your business. A trend might suggest you to start creating shoppable posts on Instagram, but what if your target audience does not use the platform?

Before adopting any new trend, consider whether it will be beneficial for your target audience, and whether you have enough time and resources to effectively implement it. Take some time to gauge its effectiveness before you try it.

Of course, the most important point is not to discard any traditional marketing strategy that has fetched good returns for you in favour of a new one. Implement any new strategy in incremental stages after careful consideration and research, in a way that complements your old ones.

5 Useful Ways to Extract Value from Customer Data

Often, it is not the gathering of customer data that is the problem. Digital marketing campaigns make sure that you have plenty of it. The problem is not knowing how to extract actionable insights from it.

Let us see some of the ways you can sift through the plentiful data and extract the useful information -

Use automation and data analysis tools

With the amount of big data generated on daily basis, it is humanly impossible to make sense of and extricate just the right information. Automated analysis tools will help you handle large volumes of data and pull out only the relevant insights. Your employees will have more time to focus their efforts on putting these insights into action.

Make use of historical data

Many marketers often mislabel historical data as outdated. However, data from five to ten years ago can give you plenty of useful information. It will help you track and analyze the buying pattern of your customers, and even a particular timeframe in which your sales increase or decrease.

Study your churn rate

Doing so will help you pinpoint a particular action, or lack thereof, that led your customers to take their business to your competitors. You can even identify the time period for which your customers remain loyal, before moving on. Once you understand why they are leaving, you can take the appropriate actions to increase their loyalty and lifetime value.

Take advantage of social media platforms

Social media is the place where your customers freely communicate about their needs, expectations and experiences. Keep an eye on these social media interactions to understand exactly what they are looking for and provide it at the right time.

Make sure data is easily accessible

The data should be available to every concerned employee, and not only the marketing teams. The data should freely flow between marketing and customer-facing teams, like the sales team and customer support team. This will help improve their interactions with the customers, improving their overall experience.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Why is PR important in the B2B Landscape?

There was a time when factors like advertising, brand awareness and visibility were strictly depended upon the brand’s budget. The only thing that mattered was publishing information about a product or service's features, benefits, prices and comparisons.

However, as the Internet brought people closer and made information more readily available to the general masses, consumer behavior changed dramatically.

Competition for the consumer attention increased, but the cold promotional messages from B2B brands no longer appealed to them. Brands needed to shift their sole focus from selling to bringing more emotion into their content strategy. This led to the increased importance of Public Relations (PR).

With the help of PR, you can create a brand image that will make you stand apart in the crowded marketplace, especially if you are a budding brand. It helps you strengthen business relationships by connecting with your customers and industry experts. PR can help you increase the trust quotient among people, leading to shorter sales cycles and increased ROI.

Press releases, personalized emails, getting featured into popular industry magazines or review sites are some of the most popular PR strategies.

Why should you focus on hyper-targeting?

Customers have long grown immune to the barrage of advertisements that they are daily subjected to. You have to know exactly who to reach and what to say for successful conversions.

Hyper-targeting can help you achieve this objective. It is a strategy that allows you to send highly relevant messages to your customers, in all the places they are likely to be found. It involves creating in-depth buyer personas, including their age, profession, goals, challenges, buying habits and much more.

These personas are further segmented into smaller groups based on a predefined criteria such as their demographics, geographical location, professional roles, etc.

With these tactics, you can deliver marketing messages that are actually useful for your audience. It prevents you from sending out irrelevant messages that will get treated as spam. Thus, you will have higher chances of generating a greater number of quality leads that can bring about increased sales. This also helps you establish a better long-term relationship with your customers and improve your retention rate. 

Tips for creating shareable content

With so much content already present on the Internet, and new information getting added daily, users have become very selective in the kind of content they share.

Contrary to the popular belief, shareable content is no longer only about creating infographics and videos.

Be relevant

To create content that your audience will want to share, you need to make sure it is relatable to them, and not just to your own brand. Content that focuses on solving the common business problems of your audience will induce more shares on their part.

Create smart headlines

Most of the time, the decision of whether or not your audience will open your content hinges solely on the headline. Listicles, or "How to" headlines tend to encourage more opens and shares than any other kind.

Simply ask!

Sometimes, all you need is to ask. Include a clear CTA in your posts that encourages audience to share content. If it is useful and engaging enough, they will be happy enough to oblige.

Why do B2B marketers need AR?

The way businesses connect and interact with each other as greatly changed over the years. Even in B2B, the customer experience plays just as important role as the business value of your solution. While Virtual Reality (VR) has made great strides into the B2B landscape, Augmented Reality (AR) is still seen as a trendy tool more suited for the B2C space by many marketers.

However, AR can help you greatly influence your buyers' journey. During trade shows or sales demos, a 3D and interactive AR model will let your customers see exactly how your product will work in real life, better than any presentation or pamphlets. It will increase their confidence and trust in your product. Not only this, they will add a certain 'wow' factor that will make you stand out from your peers, and make sure that your brand will be remembered when they are ready to purchase.

Thus, B2B marketers can use AR to greatly improve the buying process, leading to quicker purchase decisions, shorter sales cycles and increased revenues.

How can psychographic segmentation help B2B marketers

B2B marketers often segment their target market based on various factors such as geographical location, age group, and job role. However, they often neglect psycho graphics, i.e., considering your buyer's beliefs, interests, lifestyle, social status, etc. As the B2B buying process is more logical than B2C, these factors are deemed unnecessary.

However, you cannot forget that the B2B buyers are still humans. They also seek a personal value and connection in their purchase decisions. Knowing their personal and professional likes and dislikes will help you positively influence the sales, and nurture a strong sense of customer loyalty.

It can be difficult to categorize a large group of customers through digital marketing, but you can segment your audience based on psychographics more easily through CRM softwares.

What is experiential marketing and why do you need it

In the present digital space, customers are seldom impressed by advertisements. As majority of users are demanding a personalized experience, marketers are increasingly turning towards experiential marketing. The idea is to engage and immerse your customers completely in your brand. Rather than advocating your solution, the focus remains on your customers’ experience with the brand.

How can experiential marketing help a digitalmarketing company -

Customers interact with brands though emails, company website and social media. However, these exchanges seem impersonal. Through experiential marketing, customers can experience authentic and one-on-one interactions with your brand. Such positive experiences make you stand out in their eyes and induce them to return to your brand. 

Most importantly, this approach influences word-of-mouth sharing. People trust peer reviews more than any printed or digital advertisements. A strong customer experience can greatly boost your inbound marketing efforts.

For effective experiential marketing, it is imperative that you know your audience, their pain points and their expectations. Once you do this, you can gain greater insights into the kind of experience you need to provide, that will resonate the most with your audience.

Why should you pay more attention to your online reputation?

Armed with smartphones, it does not take more than an instant for the millennial generation to express their opinion or experience on social media. This opinion, whether good or bad, spreads like wildfire all over the Internet.

In the age of digital marketing, businesses rely heavily on the word-of-mouth, and negative reviews can cost you a lot. Thus, keeping tabs on your online reputation is something you cannot afford to ignore.

Moreover, there is always the danger of a deceitful party setting up a fake account in your business' name. Thus, the first vital step for you is to claim your business across all social networks and even local map applications.

If you are ignoring any negative reviews, it is high time you stop doing so. Not only they afford you a chance to improve your service and turn the negative situation into a positive one, but you can also spot and remove any fake reviews that malign your reputation unfairly.

You can further improve your online reputation by encouraging reviews and testimonials from your recent customers. Along with acting as a vote of confidence for new customers, they will also help boost your organic search engine ranking.

4 Simple Tips for Getting to Know your Customers Better

With consumers increasingly giving preference to a personalized experience during the purchase cycle, and even beyond it, it is imperative for businesses to get to know their customers better.

Doing so will help you to anticipate their needs and wants to drastically improve your customer service, cementing customer loyalty. In fact, 96% of consumers around the globe are of the opinion that customer service plays an important role for pledging their loyalty to particular brand or business.

So, let us see how you can get to know your customers on a deeper level -

Encourage conversations

Of course, starting up an honest conversation is the simplest and most effective way to understand your customers. Ask them open-ended questions about how you can further improve their experience about your product or service, and what kind of content/messages would they like to receive from you. You can even conduct surveys or polls for this purpose.

Analyze your data

Digital marketing leaves a lot of consumer data at your disposal. Analyze your website traffic, the responses to your emails, and social media behavior of your consumers to understand their preferences and dislikes.

Conduct or attend relevant events

Events are a great way to meet your consumers in person and forge a connection. You can either conduct your own events, or attend an event which is sure to be attended by a majority of your customers.

Take time to respond to reviews and testimonials

Provide a personal response in a timely and courteous manner to all your reviews, including the negative ones. This will not only help you connect with the person who left the review, but also increase your credibility in the eyes of new customers.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

What are the Key Differences Between B2B and B2C Strategies

The differences between B2B and B2C marketing run a lot deeper than the type of audience they target.

Let us have a look at the main differences you should be aware of -

Language and tone of messaging

B2B buyers are most likely looking for a solution to a business problem. Thus, they look for content that adds to their knowledge and gives them a way to overcome their issue. Thus, the B2B messaging is more focused on industry related terms and jargons, and appeals more to the logical side of the key decision maker. The content is also usually tailored to a very specific audience group for more relevance.

The B2C content, on the other hand, targets a broad category of individual consumers. The messaging intends to delight them, and appeal to their emotional side than the logical one. Thus, the tone is more lighthearted and conversational than B2B.

Customer relationships

B2B places more emphasis on customer lifetime value and customer loyalty for a long-term business relationship. Thus, B2B marketers focus on cultivating a personal relationship with their customers, both during and after the buying process. This relationships also spur positive word-of-mouth marketing, enabling your business to generate new leads.

B2C prioritizes customer experience, but does not focus much on actually getting to know each and every customer. Thus, the nature of B2C marketer and consumer relationship is of a more transactional nature than personal.

Buying cycles

As the B2B buying process is more governed by logic, and ROI is an important concern for the purchase decision makers, the B2B buying cycles are typically longer than the B2C ones. B2B buyers require more nurturing to move through the sales funnel than their B2C counterparts.

Social media channels

As B2C marketers target a vast audience base, they can use nearly every platform for promoting their content. Visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are especially dominated by B2C.

On the other hand, B2B marketers have to be very selective about their choice of platforms, based on whether or not their target audience spends time on them. LinkedIn, the platform of choice for businesses, is obviously the most preferred by B2B marketers. It is closely followed by Facebook and Twitter. However, the last few years are seeing a steady rise in the usage of Instagram, as well as Pinterest, for B2B content distribution.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

4 Simple Tips for Getting to Know your Customers Better

With consumers increasingly giving preference to a personalized experience during the purchase cycle, and even beyond it, it is imperative for businesses to get to know their customers better.

Doing so will help you to anticipate their needs and wants to drastically improve your customer service, cementing customer loyalty. In fact, 96% of consumers around the globe are of the opinion that customer service plays an important role for pledging their loyalty to particular brand or business.

So, let us see how you can get to know your customers on a deeper level -

Encourage conversations

Of course, starting up an honest conversation is the simplest and most effective way to understand your customers. Ask them open-ended questions about how you can further improve their experience about your product or service, and what kind of content/messages would they like to receive from you. You can even conduct surveys or polls for this purpose.

Analyze your data

Digital marketing leaves a lot of consumer data at your disposal. Analyze your website traffic, the responses to your emails, and social media behavior of your consumers to understand their preferences and dislikes.

Conduct or attend relevant events

Events are a great way to meet your consumers in person and forge a connection. You can either conduct your own events, or attend an event which is sure to be attended by a majority of your customers.

Take time to respond to reviews and testimonials

Provide a personal response in a timely and courteous manner to all your reviews, including the negative ones. This will not only help you connect with the person who left the review, but also increase your credibility in the eyes of new customers.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

The art of B2B website design

If you are one of the marketers that still think only content is important for a B2B website, it is high time to re-evaluate your approach. Over the past few years, marketing experts have been stressing on the importance of a "sales-ready website design".

As the buyers have grown more independent, the recent studies have shown that the vendor website is the topmost source of their information. Moreover, the website is visited throughout the sales cycle. And, B2B cycles can last a long time. In such situation, user experience forms a crucial part of the purchase decision.

Ask yourself the following questions regarding your website -

•  Can your visitors easily find the information they are looking for?

•   Is it aesthetically appealing for the visitors?

•   Does it offer an interactive user experience?

If you have answered 'No' to any or all these questions, you need to redesign your website to be more friendly to your prospective customers.