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Have you ever recommended a good movie to a friend on Twitter? Have you ever stayed away from a restaurant because someone posted on Yelp that they had a bad experience there? This is word-of-mouth advertising in social 
media and it can have a huge impact on your business.
In most cases of advertising, the business owner has control of how the ad looks, feels, and the message it conveys to the potential customer. The exception to this is in social media. With social media marketing (or good ol’ word of mouth advertising) , your prior customers have all the control over potential customers. If they rave about you, you’ll attract new customers. If they gripe about you, they will deter people from becoming your customer.
No matter how hard you try — you just can’t fake good customer service or sweep customer’s complaints under the rug. You need to be transparent , authentic and honest.
Good word-of-mouth advertising can work wonders for your business, and the best part is that it is free. Your prior customer may run into someone who needs your services, and if you have provided quality products or services, chances are they will recommend you. If you sought out ten customers through your own marketing efforts and they each told one person about you, who then became your customer, you would have doubled your customer base. Potential customers are much more likely to buy from you if you come recommended by someone that they trust.
Bad word-of-mouth advertising can have the same effect, only in a negative way. When you mistreat a customer or sell them a poor product, they will definitely let people know about it. They will blog about , tweet it , and share their story with just about anyone who will listen. When someone is spreading good word of mouth advertising, they will usually wait to tell the good stuff until someone specifically asks about it.
For instance, if they recently worked with a great graphic designer, they will be more than happy to recommend them when someone asks if they know of a good graphic designer. However, with bad word-of-mouth advertising, the hurt party isn’t going to wait for someone to ask if they know of a bad graphic designer. They are going to tell everyone and anyone , whether they want the information or not.
The fact that the angry customer is telling this to people who may not even be interested in hiring a graphic designer doesn’t sound so bad, but unfortunately, these people will probably remember the story. When they are asked if they know of a good graphic designer, they will retell the angry customer’s story. The person in need of a graphic designer will stay away from the designer who made the angry customer so angry in the first place.
You can protect yourself from the negative aspects of social media marketing by consistently providing quality products and great customer service. Of course, you cannot please everyone, but if the majority of your customers have only good things to say about you, you will start to see social media work for you instead of against you. You will start to develop lasting relationships with your customers and they in turn will trust you with their businesses.
80% of your business will come from 20% of your clients.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule), states that, for many things, 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. For instance, you wear 20% of the clothes in your closet 80% of the time. This equation also affects your business, as in 80% of your business will come from 20% of your clients.
Unfortunately, most people will spend 80% of their time dealing with the 80% of clients who are not bringing in business. You can use this theory to argue that only 20% of the tasks you work on will bring in the majority of your business. The following are some tips to help you streamline your schedule and spend time where it really counts.
Have you ever noticed that the people who ask the most questions or are the most difficult are the people who place the smallest orders? While it is certainly important to provide great customer service, you can place a limit on your time.
For example, let’s say you sell cosmetics and a potential customer wanted to know if the product was tested on animals. Once you researched the answer and got back to them, they wanted to know if only organic materials were used, so then you research that answer and when you get back to them they have another question and then another question and so forth. Sound familiar?
This exchange could go on for several days, and at the end of it, the potential customer may not become your customer at all.
If a potential customer is on the fence about a sale, go ahead and ask them for the sale, and if they hesitate, to let them know you are available to help them place their order, once they are ready.
It definitely feels good to get a sale and gain a new customer, but the time you spend chasing down small sales could be spent on the “big clients” who are willing to place large orders.
Another smart thing to do is create a thorough FAQ and standard answers that could be cut and pasted into a support email. Always direct your customers to your FAQ first, then support.
Email can be another big time waster. Setting aside a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening to respond to your email can save you time during the day. Another option is to hire a virtual assistant to answer general business email. There may be some things you need to respond to yourself, but the vast majority can probably be handled by someone else.
You may want to experiment by tracking the time you spend on various tasks to determine which ones are actually making you money. It only stands to reason that devoting more time to those activities will greatly increase your profits.
Having a help desk on your site is the key to providing great customer service
Customer support, no matter what your company sells products or services , is critical to customer satisfaction. Happy and satisfied customers creates repeat business – one of the crucial factors of a successful business.
Having a Help Desk on your website can help you accomplish this and customers can always either call you or email you. Of course, they can but also know that customer service requests can fall through the cracks. Emails can be lost , forgotten about in the many emails you get daily … not to mention that calls can be dropped, messages lost,etc. All of this puts your customer service efforts to chance and who wants that??
If you don’t have great customer service, it doesn’t matter how great your product/service or the amount of advertising/marketing you do.
Help-desk software helps you manage your business’ help-desk operations. The program assists you in keeping track of emails, so you don’t lose any. It also makes your website look more professional, and it provides an easier way for you to communicate with customers – people often hate waiting on hold for phone support or navigating a huge array of menu items via the phone.
Simply put , having a help-desk allows the customer to easily and succinctly relate their issue to you. The best part is that many help desk programs are web-based , so you and your staff will always have access to it, no matter where you are.
There are many choices for Help Desk Options. Many business’ are opting to use PHP-based which are free. You can get many of these if you have CPanel hosting. (another perk to having your own hosting for your website) I personally use OSTicket for BrandReady Media and generally what we recommend to our clients. I found it had everything I was looking for but your business needs may be different.
When looking at help desk options for your company , you want to make sure that you have several features:
- Web and Email Support – tickets can be created by email, online forms or by staff.
- Auto-responders & Template Replies
- Internal Notes for Staff and User History – notes that only your team can see as well as what has been done previously
- Ticket Assignment Routing – you have the ability to assign incoming tickets to the right person/department
- Help Based Topics that you can write to address some of your customer’s frequently asked questions
Are you maximizing your opportunities to truly engage with your customers online?
As recently as a few years ago, companies that dipped their toes in the waters of social media were the exception rather than the rule. Now the converse is true — it is rare to find a company that has not established at least some media presence online beyond their website – whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, or some other social media platform, business owners are finally starting to realize that it’s important to have an online presence.
However, just having an online presence isn’t enough. When a brand establishes itself on Facebook or Twitter, it would be well-served to realize that true successes abound for companies who do more than shout into the ether. A customer’s perception of YOUR BRAND may at one point hinge on their experience with you online.
- Are you responsive to questions?
- Do you engage in conversation?
- Are you open to constructive criticism?
- Are you hearing their feedback and then seeking to improve your product or service based on the response you get?
The world’s eye was recently turned to the very subject of social media and customer service recently when writer/director Kevin Smith was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight for being “too fat to fly”. Immediately, Smith took to Twitter with tweets (most expletive-laden) about his experience. Quite understandably, he was frustrated, embarrassed and angry. It was clear that fans were sending tweets on Smith’s behalf when the Southwest Airline’s agent sent a general tweet on the Southwest account assuring Smith’s fans that she had seen Kevin Smith’s tweets and was working on it.
Southwest had a real opportunity to step up to the plate and fix this situation – but somehow stumbled initially, posting a somewhat snarky post that wasn’t quite an apology, as well as divulging Kevin Smith’s purchasing patterns – information that one would think would be considered private. They later wrote a second post in which the writer stated that she’d “learned a lot” and that they were working to make the situation right.
If you take a look at Kevin Smith’s tweet (pictured above), you’ll also see that it was retweeted by over 100 people. That is over one hundred negative impressions of a company based on the tweets of one man (who happens to have over a million followers). That’s one tough stumbling block to overcome.
In your organization, the person responding to comments and tweets has an opportunity to change a negative experience into a positive. Twitter offers you the opportunity to speak not only TO your audience, but WITH them. Engage in discussions, seek feedback, find out what people really LOVE about your product and service, and when they’ve had a negative experience find out why.
The time you spend in your online tasks are not just so people can hear YOU, but so you can hear them.
Want to learn about how you can start this conversation with your target market? Contact Brand Ready Media to determine the best marketing strategy for your company.
