In this blog post, we‘ll discuss the importance of using social media as a way to interact with your customers, how to increase your brand awareness through empathy, and build your company persona online.

Social media is one of the most efficient ways to reach a large audience, due to the sheer volume of people who use it. Based on the graph above, you can see the massive growth of social media use over the last decade.

Companies have a direct influence on their customers through social media – whether positive or negative – and they have the ability to engage in a dialogue on those platforms. And with functions like “sharing,“ “retweeting,” “commenting,” etc., that dialogue can go viral quite quickly and impact the way prospects and customers view the brand.

What Does it Take to Retain Customers?

Aside from customer interactions and news-sharing, what else can social media marketing bring to your company’s marketing goals? Let’s explore these five key ideas.

1. Increase website traffic
2. Elevate brand awareness
3. Create a brand identity
4. Learn from interactions with your audience
5. Turn traffic into conversions

Building empathy online

Connecting on a human level can be an effective way to create good will for your brand. Users who have a relatable – even humorous – online experience with a brand will likely relate to the brand positively. Just make sure to match the message appropriately to the company’s audience. The below Twitter exchange is a good example of adjusting the humor to the situation:

Make note of situations that are common to everyone, or reference current trending topics. The following example attracted a substantial audience with an effective pop culture reference:

“People buy from people” is certainly an oft-used phrase in the sales arena, but it holds true. Adding a persona behind your brand will allow customers to better relate to it. Photos of daily work life or from company events can be the entry point to gain trust from your customers.

Authenticity is also in high demand in social media circles. Social platforms enable a company to create an illusion, and you can select which types of content your audience should see. Build a more authentic presence by sharing the social aspects of your workplace. It doesn’t always have to be business-related. (Pro tip: Better avoid photos of your company’s Christmas party).

Here’s a great example from Oracle:

“Social media is no longer a marketing channel, it’s a customer experience channel,” says Broadsuite Media Group CEO Daniel Newman, in a Forbes article. It becomes clear that you have the chance to show the customer that they’re your priority. It’s important to have tools in place or a strategy to respond to your users’ interactions with your brand. If the customer gets an immediate reply and you’re able to respond appropriately, a happy customer will turn into a loyal customer. Therefore, make sure that the social media admins know at least the basics of customer service if you don’t have a dedicated customer service specialist in charge. Keep in mind the following steps for customer interactions on your social media platforms:

– Immediate responses
– Always follow up
– Personalize your response
– Learn from the feedback

Can the branding be turned into conversions?

So far we’ve discussed several strategies to polish the company’s image and elevate brand awareness. Though these are not direct revenue drivers since you cannot determine the revenue derived from a customer’s opinion of your company.

The methods above will help you gain a larger audience and more carefully tailor to your target audience. Depending on your industry, you can obviously try to generate direct conversions from your social media as well. The most direct way for companies with B2C customer goods available in an online shop would consist of referral links guiding to the website. But even companies who function as a third party or work with B2B customers who usually don’t use social media for any purchases (at least today) can contribute to the companies’ revenue through social media.

If you want to learn more about the ROI on social media platforms, we highly recommend one of our previous blog posts around this topic: Measuring ROI on Paid Social Ads.

After exploring these ideas, the strategy of your social media branding of course depends on your company’s overall strategy. Nevertheless we can’t think of a company where it would have a negative impact to show trustworthy people behind the company logo. Our audience also proved this to us via social media:

Keystone

Your social media audience doesn’t want to get bored with the same content every day. Social media is a business tool, but it is also a tool to engage and connect. A combination of informative content with a more human approach is the first step to establish your social media as a revenue driver for your company.

Jannis Jörger is an Online Marketing Coordinator at cleverbridge.

Learn more about Online Marketing and Social Media as a branding tool.

The post Leverage Social Media as an Effective Branding Tool appeared first on cleverbridge.

To get the most bang for your buck, let’s look at some best practices for attracting the right kind of visitors to your site. The first thing to do is decide which channels are best for growing online revenue. Consider focusing your efforts on the following activities:

• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Affiliate marketing
• Social media marketing

SEM, affiliate programs and social media marketing are three of the most effective ways to get your offering in front of as many eyes as possible. While you may already be utilizing these tactics, here are a few quick tips for maximizing your efforts.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM leverages a massive network of search engine services to drive visitors to your website. It primarily involves two components: organic search optimization (SEO) and paid search ads (PPC). To succeed with both SEO and PPC, it’s critical to keep keywords in mind. First step is to perform keyword research. Once you know which keywords are resonating with prospective customers, here’s how you get to work.

To drive organic traffic through SEO …

Create dedicated pages on your website rich with content that focuses on those keywords. This is a great opportunity to explain how your offering addresses your prospective customer’s pain-points and helps them overcome challenges.

To drive paid traffic through PPC …

Write display ads that use the same keywords to attract prospective users. Make sure you’re defining your audience appropriately, otherwise you’ll run the risk of paying for clicks that don’t yield leads of revenue.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates earn commission by referring their visitors to your business. Strategic affiliate partnerships boost your site traffic, brand recognition and overall revenue. What’s the key to building a successful affiliate network? It’s pretty simple. You and your affiliates need to have the same (or very similar) target markets. For example, if you’re aiming to boost sales for your cloud backup service, you should partner with sites that promote and review products in that specific industry.

Examples of those types of sites include:

Coupon sites | Download portals | Blogs | Review sites

Visitors to these sites are interested in learning more about the type of product or service you’re providing. Therefore, they’re significantly more likely to click through affiliate links and convert.

To form affiliate partnerships, you’ll have to offer competitive incentives for your affiliates. Reward your affiliates with commissions for free users who convert into paying customers. These commissions incent affiliates to keep your brand in front of their audience, creating a win-win situation.

Social Media Marketing

According to research by Deloitte, 75 percent of Americans online say that product information found on social channels influences their shopping behavior and enhances brand loyalty.

The first step for social media success is investigating where your target audience is most active. While creating profiles for your brand on all major social sites is a good idea, you don’t need to be active everywhere — focus on the networks that benefit your business the most.

Measuring the ROI of social media is notoriously tricky – but metrics are key to a successful social strategy. Here are some measurable goals for social:

• Increased referral traffic to your site
• More qualified leads generated
• Boosted online revenue
• Higher average order value
• More reviews and feedback left by customers

Less easily measured, but still useful:

• Increased company credibility
• Boosted brand awareness
• Better quality customer feedback
• Clearer corporate identity and culture
• New channels for customer service interactions
• Increased media attention

Keystone

Creating a plan to generate traffic is vital to having a successful business — and your best bet is a multichannel approach. Every business requires a custom mix of channels like SEM, affiliate marketing and social media. Strategize, monitor and refine this mix in order to boost the number of new users visiting your site and joining your customer base.

For further insight into attracting and acquiring new customers, check out our latest ebook: What Does It Takes To Acquire New Customers?

Ryan Greives is the Public Relations Manager at cleverbridge.

The post What Does It Take To Attract New Customers? appeared first on cleverbridge.

Facebook is the biggest player in the social media market. By its own count, Facebook has 1.18 billion daily active users on average for September 2016 and approximately 85 percent are outside the U.S. and Canada. According to this Experian statistic found on Statista, Facebook is far and away the most popular social network in the U.S. and worldwide.

There are five important tactics that affiliate marketers should use to successfully leverage Facebook as a business tool for affiliate marketing:

• Understand your target audience
• Create relevant and valuable content
• Cultivate proactive interactions
• Connect to influencers to amplify your message
• Expand your reach through Facebook ads

Understand Your Target Audience

Before you start posting or creating ads, you should first define the purpose of your Facebook Page. Are you trying to increase brand awareness or get people to take concrete actions like start a free trial or become a subscriber? When you begin by answering, “Who is this Page for?” you set the stage for a focused and effective Facebook presence.

Create Relevant and Valuable content

After determining your target group, you can concentrate on consistently delivering high quality content. There are three things to consider when developing your Facebook content strategy:

• Variety of posts
• Frequency of posts
• Effectiveness of posts

Even if the main purpose of your Page is to drive downloads or purchases, you should still engage your target audience with a variety of content. Find a good balance between posting entertaining and informative thought leadership content, sharing content from influencers, posting self-serving business messaging, and promoting your partners’ products.

Then decide how often you will post each type of post. But your job isn’t over; you need to see how effective your posts are.

To determine the quality of your posts, monitor engagement metrics to see “what’s working and not working on your Page, understand the people who like your Page and engage with your posts, and make decisions about the best ways to connect with your audience.”

Cultivate Proactive Interactions

Proactive interactions are very important to your success in the Facebook community. The four main interactions on Facebook are:

• Likes and other reactions
• Shares
• Comments
• Follows

One way to generate these interactions for your Page and posts is to keep in mind that “you get what you give.” People will take note of you when you interact with them. Besides reacting, commenting and sharing posts from other people and Pages, it is also good to join or even create Facebook groups and community pages on relevant topics. These actions will lead to visibility, awareness, trust and reach.

Connect to Influencers to Amplify Your Message

It is crucial to connect with influencers or partners who already have an audience. The phrase “you get what you give” is also useful here. When you are more visible to your industry’s influencers, you are in a better position to tap into their extensive network. This increases your chances of them sharing your posts or mentioning you in their posts. Start by sharing and mentioning these influencers on your Page. This is part of creating a productive and mutually beneficial social media relationship.

Expand Your Reach Through Facebook Ads

Another way of growing your reach and achieving your business objectives is through Facebook Ads. These Ads are cheaper than Google AdWords and allow you to customize targeting to achieve a broad reach with minimal effort. Your Ads will be shown in other people’s feeds even if they do not follow your page and have never been in contact with you before. In fact, Facebook ensures that Ads are more visible to users than their organic friends posts. The range of your advertisement depends on the amount of money you are investing — the more money you invest, the larger the audience you can build.

The different social media platforms have a lot in common since all of them are based on leveraging your audience and encouraging interactions with your content. Therefore, you can adapt these five affiliate marketing tactics for Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

Keystone

Facebook, and other social networks, are increasingly used by businesses to raise awareness of their brands and capture new customers and revenue. In order to leverage these networks successfully, make sure you define your target audience, create engaging content, and amplify your reach through influencers and Ads.

Jannis Jörger is an Online Marketing Coordinator at cleverbridge.

Learn more about Managed Affiliate Services at cleverbridge.

The post Five Social Media Tactics to Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business appeared first on cleverbridge.

This trend will only continue as digital natives become the core consumer group. While 16 percent of customers will voice dissatisfaction with a company online through product review pages or social media, among 16 to 34-year-olds that number jumps to 53 percent.

Valuing Customer Realtionships

The companies that value their customer relationships are busy providing world class customer support. Companies with a bad reputation need to find those areas where they can improve, or they risk significant consequences from the market.

Providing inferior customer experiences means being left behind in the world of subscriptions. Since your company must maintain a positive relationship with customers over time, ensuring continued renewals and recurring revenue, neglecting excellent customer support will result in lower customer lifetime values and increased churn.

In addition to the negative impact on your company’s revenue, there’s an added incentive to keep customers happy: Their voices are getting louder. Because of social media, any negative feedback a customer wants to provide, either to your or with their network, is amplified and remains online forever. If the interaction is negative enough, it could even go viral, like this infamous Comcast customer support call. If your poor customer support is becoming a meme, your company is losing the battle for positive customer voices.

Check out the full infographic below.

Supporting customers means understanding their subscriber journey. Download our complimentary guide today.

The post Customer Voices Are Getting Louder [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Leverage Social Media — Choose the Right Channels

Source: GIPHY

The social media landscape is volatile and changes quickly. Just look at the scattered wreckage of Myspace or Friendster. Some commentators were even sounding the death knell for Facebook in the last few years. But as social networks have matured, they have established their individual spaces in the marketplace. Determining which networks to target and how to target them deserves consideration. Which channels have the highest potential for online sales? Who is actually using these networks?

According to Drew Hendricks of Inc.com, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have proven to be high converting channels of social media selling. But not every channel connects with every audience. They each have their own character and each demand a tailored approach. With over a billion active monthly users, Facebook is the largest social media network. If you want to get in front of the largest social media audience, Facebook is your destination. Twitter is great for learning about consumers’ likes, interests and online activity. So to educate the market about your brand and to learn more about your own customers, establish a Twitter presence. Whereas LinkedIn attracts people engaged in business and thought leaders from different industries. Target LinkedIn to reach B2B prospects.

Leverage Social Media — Generate a Quality Following

Creating accounts on these networks is only the first step. Now begins the hard work of building a quality following on each platform. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut if you want your following to be truly engaged (i.e. valuable). By interacting with consumers and joining the online discussions happening in your industry, you can build up your social media credibility and contribute to the 17 percent of users who feel more connected to brands they see on social networking sites.

According to Frank Brogie at Resply, you can engage your audience by:

• Interacting with consumers by liking and commenting on posts
• Following and sharing posts from thought leaders in your industry
• Searching for trending industry-specific hashtags

Although building an engaged audience is a gradual process, once you have found your niche in these online communities, a whole wealth of knowledge about consumers’ demographics and buying patterns becomes available.

Leverage Social Media — Use a Posting Strategy

You’ve found your channels, and you’ve begun to build a following. But don’t simply post ad after ad. Social media is a virtual gathering. Just like a real gathering, if someone at the party is only talking about themselves or trying to sell something, they won’t be so popular. The same holds true for your social media accounts.

Posts should be diverse in content. A good rule of thumb is to follow the social media 4-1-1 rule:

4 — Share four pieces of new, relevant content from influencers in the market.

1 — Re-share one piece of content from someone in your existing audience.

1 — Share one post that is self-promotional and action-oriented.

It takes discipline to stick to this rule. Maintaining a monthly promotional calendar can help you develop your 4-1-1 practice, while also ensuring you don’t repeat content. A promotional or social-editorial calendar also helps coordinate any seasonal discounts or promotions you plan to offer. We know what you’re asking, “If 4-1-1 is so much work, and limits how much I can promote my own content, why should I use it?”

Why 4-1-1 works

By showcasing articles written by trusted thought leaders in the industry, you can position yourself as a thought leader as well and gain credibility in the social media space. The authority of the sources you promote is transferred to you in the eyes of your readers, so choose content that’s in line with the type of authoritative voice you want to cultivate.

Re-sharing content from people in your existing network helps deepen engagement with them. Valuable followers are active followers. Additionally, you help them by sharing their content with your network. In the future, those people in your network whose content you have shared will be more likely to share your content in return. After promoting thought leaders and other members of your network, you can share a self-promotional item with confidence that your audience will receive it well.

In terms of the self-promotional content, include information about products such as features and benefits they bring to your target market. What are the problems they face and how does your product or service solve those problems? Offering infographics about the product, demos and free trials are also proven techniques to attract more customers.

The call-to-action posts should vary in delivery by using the following selling tactics demonstrated by Shopify’s Mark Macdonald:

• Scarcity – A one day only discount, announcing a discount that will occur at a later point in time, and providing a promo code only for social media users
• Reciprocity – Including a free gift with a purchase
• Social proof – Posting testimonials about your affiliate website and the products you’re promoting

Keystone

Building a solid presence on social media is a gradual process. You must select the appropriate channels and build a genuine following there. And you must stick to a disciplined posting strategy that deepens your influence as you promote your products or services. To gauge your progress, use tracking parameters to determine which social media selling tactics work best for you. Through a steady and disciplined approach and being responsive to metrics, you will establish a foothold that will burnish your brand online, leading to a more loyal following and more commissions.

Learn more about Managed Affiliate Services at cleverbridge

The post Performance Marketing — Three Ways to Leverage Social Media appeared first on cleverbridge.

Every touch point counts. No matter what your product or service is, your customer support team should be treated like another essential feature. Afterall, whether a customer is interacting with your website, your product or a support representative, they are constantly assessing the overall experience with your company. The best product ever created will fail if customers feel disrespected or left out in the cold.

World class customer service is intuitively a good idea and its value is borne out by the numbers.

Customer Service by the Numbers

This infographic from KissMetrics explores where companies fall short when it comes to customer service and how customers actually respond to what they consider good or bad service. Their numbers prove the value of excellent customer service — and the pitfalls of getting it wrong:

• 50 percent of consumers give a brand only one week to respond to an inquiry before they stop doing business with them.
• 26 percent of consumers with a negative customer service experience will post about it on social media.
• But when a brand responds to their complaint, 51 percent of customers had a positive response.
• Bad customer service costs businesses an estimated $338 Billion world wide.
• 70 percent of consumers are willing to spend an average of 13 percent more with companies that provide excellent customer service.

Check out the infographic to learn how your company can create memorable experiences to keep customers happy and coming back.

Learn more about nurturing customer relationships in our complimentary guide, Retaining Subscribers & Optimizing the Renewal Process. 

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — Why Do Companies With Great Customer Service Succeed? [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Here are a few simple ways to leverage the billions of opportunities both of these channels represent for your ecommerce business.

Marry Your Product to Social Media Messages

Social media users love quotes. In fact, Buffer’s data reveals that tweets with quotes get retweeted almost 20 percent more often than original material.

Consider ways to integrate your digital products with quotes that help you leverage social media and your site simultaneously.

If your ecommerce site offers digital books, for example, free software like Recite allows you to copy and paste compelling quotes from books you sell. You can quickly transform these quotes into an aesthetically pleasing image that’s primed for sharing on social media. Major brands like Bloomberg have already integrated this approach into their posts on Twitter. The tweet below from Bloomberg uses a relevant quote and a GIF to entice followers to click through to their thought leadership content.

Hedge funds just nailed their short bets on U.S. stocks: http://t.co/2u3jp7LVaG pic.twitter.com/tmK0645HKA

— Bloomberg Terminal (@TheTerminal) August 25, 2015

Let the Customer Visualize the Experience

Images get noticed in today’s world of selfies and short attention spans. Aside from the fact that Buffer’s data reveals that tweets with photos get retweeted 35 percent more than those without, images allow you to build your brand on popular social media channels like Vine, Pinterest and Instagram, which use images as the primary means of engagement.

Ecommerce businesses used to be challenged with the hurdle of creating a visceral customer experience without the help of a tangible showroom. The popularity of video and images on social media now give customers a way to experience your ecommerce brand and its digital products — even though they’ll never physically touch, see or smell it.

As AdWeek recently reported, the music streaming service Spotify successfully used Twitter’s Periscope app to create a live streaming video of a performance of the popular Irish folk band, The Villagers. Because Spotify provides its users access to the artist’s music, the video indirectly promoted Spotify, and it gave the audience an idea of its brand and the type of listener it wants to attract.

Invite the Customer to Be Influential

Whether you post videos, text posts, images or quotes, invite your customers and prospects to be more than bystanders to your ecommerce business. If you’re launching a new digital product, for example, invite social media users to weigh in on the details. Ask them for suggestions about product names, or consider holding a naming contest that will encourage the social media audience to get involved in the voting process.

Companies like Intuit (which offers the cloud-based accounting software QuickBooks) have used social media to hold “Love a Local Business” contests that invite small business owners to apply for a monetary award that they’ll use to fuel their growth.

The applicants (who may or may not be QuickBooks customers) tell the story behind their business by completing an online application. Intuit then highlights various contestants on its social media channels — and encourages applicants to share news of the contest with their social networks, who can vote for them to improve their odds of winning. Like Spotify’s approach, the contest doesn’t overtly promote Intuit’s digital products — but it certainly builds awareness of them to audiences who may be a perfect fit for them.

Think Surround-Sound

How did Angry Birds — a $0.99 downloadable mobile game that was released to the public in 2009 — explode into a billion dollar franchise that now includes merchandise, video games and apparel? The founders of Rovio Entertainment made a commitment to have “an active and continuous relationship” with the customer, reports Wired UK.  They created a video trailer on YouTube which has since generated more than 17 million hits; they committed to answering every customer interaction, including letters, and any and all social media engagement. Eventually, all that grass roots social media marketing led to an established digital brand.

Customer relationships are not simply about a one-time interaction, so use social media to keep communicating with them.

Keystone

Social media is a cost-efficient way to breathe life into your ecommerce business, and can help you reach new audiences on a shoestring budget. Experiment with the different social media channels and tactics to find the ideal fit for your audience —and watch the shares (and ecommerce sales) roll in.

Kristen Gramigna is Chief Marketing Officer for BluePay, a credit card processing firm. She has more than 20 years experience in the bankcard industry. Check out her previous post on cleverbridge, or follow her on Twitter at @BluePay_CMO.

The post Four Ways to Use Social Media to Create Ecommerce Opportunities appeared first on cleverbridge.

But it is not enough to increase spending. You have to also develop more sophisticated strategies in using these channels. The infographic suggests integrating email and social for an effective one-two punch. For example, use email to send commercial messages that drive revenue, but use Facebook to drive email signups. Or, use a click-to-tweet link in your emails to create a flurry of customer activity on Twitter. In both cases, you’re creating a positive feedback loop where a bigger social audience creates a bigger email audience which creates a bigger social audience, and so on.

Tell us how you’ve used email to bolster revenue from social media and vice versa in the comment section below!

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — Email and Social Integration [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

According to Google, the page, ” … includes transactional data collected from 42 thousand Google Analytics properties with Ecommerce tracking enabled, across 8 countries, over an 11 month time period (purchase paths that concluded on 45 randomly selected dates from October 2013 – September 2014). ”

The tool begins by letting users select a company size (small, medium or large), an industry (e.g., auto, books, or computers) and region (e.g., U.S. or Germany). Based on this selection, the tool visually displays different marketing channels a customer typically goes through along their purchase path and at what stage of the path they go through them.

For example, customers of a large travel company in the U.S. typically start off with a click on a display ad, followed over time by social interaction, and then a click on a generic paid search ad. From there, the customer might return to the travel company’s website through a referral site, organic search, email, or a branded paid search ad. Finally, the customer will pay a direct visit to the company’s site before completing a purchase.

On the other hand, for a large Internet company, the path to purchase most often begins on social media. This visit is followed by one through display and generic paid search ads. Then comes referrals, organic search and paid branded search. An email is the penultimate step in this journey, which is completed, once again, by a direct visit.

Of course, not every customer journey ends with a direct visit to a company’s site — a significant number of customers might pay a direct visit in the beginning or middle of their journey. The next portion of the web page lets users investigate where each marketing channel tends to occur in the customer journey using the three qualifiers of industry, region and company size. In fact, a significant amount of direct visits for large U.S. computer companies occur in the middle of the customer journey (43 percent).

Go ahead, and visit this page yourself. Play around with it, and compare its findings with your internal data to see how your business measures up.

The post The Customer Journey to Online Purchase [Interactive Web Page] appeared first on cleverbridge.

• Landing pages from advertising and social channels
• Product pages
• Shopping carts and checkout processes
• Confirmation pages
• Marketing emails

Each of these touchpoints is an indispensable part to each stage of the sales cycle and your online goal of winning more customers. However, it is not easy to create compelling visuals on your own, and so, companies often turn to professional services to take help them maintain a consistent look for their brand.

But what if you can’t afford professional services for all your needs? Or, what if you’re thinking about a rebrand and you want to brush up on your basic design strategy and available tools?

This webinar and slide deck from Peg Fitzpatrick and HubSpot are perfect for thinking about how to best approach the visual elements of your brand, which, as we said before, is crucial to earning the trust and dollars of your customers. You will learn all about:

• What makes a compelling visual element
• Where to spend money on visual design
• Successful DIY brands
• The tools that will help you get your visual design elements off the ground
• The ins and outs of creating a successful image for social media posts on the most important social media platforms

Tell us how you use visual elements to convert visitors into customers!

Use the comment section below!

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – DIY Design Hacks [SlideShare + Webinar] appeared first on cleverbridge.