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Tips for improving your business’s content marketing strategy

According to a recent survey, 82% of people said they developed a positive opinion of a company after reading content that was created by them. Furthermore, 70% said they prefer to learn about companies through blogs and articles as opposed to advertisements. Content marketing is less expensive (about 60% of the cost of traditional marketing) and generates three times as many leads on average. Because of these stats, content marketing has become a necessity for small businesses. But content marketing can be tricky. On the one hand, you don’t want to openly promote your brand as you would in traditional marketing--consumers will see right through it, but on the other hand, you want to produce high quality, accurate, and valuable content that will cause consumers to form a positive opinion about your brand. If your content marketing strategy is struggling, the following tips may be of help.

Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal customer. Depending on what it is your business does, you might create, one, five, or even ten buyer personas. The key to good buyer personas is that they describe a single person very specifically until you feel like you know them on a personal level. You don’t want to generalize and say “we’re targeting millennials” with this campaign as if all millennials are the same. With buyer personas ready, you’re ready to create content that’s tailor made for your ideal customers.

Keep an eye on your competition

There are several good arguments for watching your competition when it comes to content marketing. For one, it can give you ideas for different kinds of content you can be trying out. You can also see which keywords they’re targeting. But most importantly, you want to watch for mistakes or gaps in their content. These are areas where you can improve on their offerings and stand out from your competition.

Experiment with different kinds of content

Too many brands limit their content marketing strategy to a company blog on the company website. You can improve your content marketing strategy by using other channels such as Youtube for video content, social media for image,video, or text content, and SMS for micro content. You can also vary the types of content your write for your blog. Case studies, how-tos, listicles, buyer’s guides, product comparisons, and infographics are all great option that will diversify the content you’re creating for your audience.

Create a content calendar

Get organized and consistent by creating a content calendar where you can plan out for several weeks in advance the content pieces you want to create. On the calendar include a working title, a genre/medium, where you will publish it, who will write it, and of course, when it will be published.

Move beyond just words

Content that includes visuals whether it’s an infographic, a video, or even just some well-chosen images, are more likely to be engaged with by consumers. If you want people sharing your content on social media or on other blogs, think carefully about incorporating visuals into your content strategy.

Promote your content

The mantra: “If you build it, they will come” isn’t true for content marketing. Simply putting it out there on the world wide web doesn’t ensure anyone will seek it out and read/watch it. You can use existing marketing channels to share your content with your already established audience and you can reach out to a wider audience by paying to promote it to somebody else’s audience (affiliate or pay-per-click).

Form relationships with influencers

Influencers in your niche will often promote your content for free which can help you gain a much wider audience. While they don’t usually charge to review your products/share your content, you will have to establish a mutually beneficial relationship first. That means you have to engage with the content they’re creating and share it with your audience first. You may want to feature an important influencer in a blog post.

Write some guest blogs

In turn, you can write guest blog posts for other blogs. It’s free advertising for you since you get to tap into a new audience and it’s free content for the host blog that publishes it.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: smallbiztrends.com/2017/09/content-marketing-for-ecommerce.html

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Seven different uses for SMS marketing

SMS marketing is one of the most cost effective mobile channels but many business owners don’t use it to it’s full potential. If you’re looking to expand on the ways you’re using SMS for your small business, consider the following seven ideas.

Micro content

The goal of content marketing is to provide customers with valuable and interesting information so as to be seen by them as a reputable source for good information and a trusted brand. Typically when businesses engage in content marketing, it’s longer form content like blog articles. Micro content sent via SMS would consist of a one- or two-sentence tip that fits within the 160 character limit. It’s a great use of the SMS channel because customers will tire of self-serving promotion on the part of the business. Micro content is a way to give something without explicitly asking for anything in return.

VIP offers

Another way to offer value to SMS subscribers is to offer them exclusive offers that can’t be obtained through any other channel. Not only does this diversify the way you’re using SMS for your small business but it adds extra incentive to opt in to receive text messages since they know that there’s no other way to get those deals. It also adds an air of exclusivity to the channel so that customers feel more appreciated.

Flash sale notifications

Especially good offers but only available for very short periods of time are especially effective at driving foot traffic. On a slow day or during a slower time of day when employees are being paid to stand around, a flash sale sent via SMS can get people to come in. SMS is an especially effective channel for flash sales because approximately 90% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent.

Order status and shipping updates

If your business routinely ships orders to customers, the option to receive order status and shipping updates will be attractive to many customers. Emailed shipping notifications are often accidentally deleted unread or are filtered straight into a junk folder where they’re never seen. Signing up for these notifications could be a great way to introduce new customers to your SMS channel and get more opt ins as well.

Restock and new product updates

If you’ve recently got new stock of a popular product that had previously been sold out or if you’ve added a new product, sending a text to notify your most loyal customers about it will be appreciated by them and help boost sales of those products as well.

Appointment reminders

If the nature of your business includes the scheduling of appointments, SMS can be used to send appointment reminders a day, or even hours, ahead of the scheduled appointment time. As with order notifications, appointment reminders are an ideal use of the SMS channel because of its time sensitive nature. This is not only another way to make life easier for customers but it helps your own bottom line as well since fewer missed appointments translates to less lost productivity.

Mobile coupons

Last but not least is the most tried and true use of SMS: the mobile coupon. It may not be original but it’s a safe bet since the redemption rates for coupons are several times better when they’re sent via text as opposed to email or as print mailers.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source:mediaupdate.co.za/marketing/142273/five-innovative-sms-techniques-to-tackle-new-technology

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Three ways to see a better ROI with your content marketing efforts

Content marketing is a very different form of advertising that many businesses fail at because they approach it with the same strategies that they use for more traditional forms of advertising. Content marketing is different in that the number one goal isn’t promotion of the brand but rather, getting and holding your audience’s interest in a topic related to your business. The end goal: getting the audience to become customers is about the only thing content marketing has in common with more traditional advertising. Many businesses don’t even attempt content marketing because conversion rates can be harder to track and the return on investment may not be initially apparent. But if you do content marketing right, you can see great ROI. Here are three tips that can help.

Have a plan

Any content marketing effort is doomed to fail if you don’t have a plan. If your only content marketing strategy is to start a blog on your business’s website where you’ll manage to publish an article every once in a while as time allows, you aren’t going to get the results you want. A good place to start is to take a look at your marketing budget and decide on how much you plan to allocate to content creation. You can stretch your budget further by creating the content yourself or adding it to the workload of an employee but it may be wiser to invest more for professional content creation done by people who can dedicate more time and attention to it. You will also need to consider specific goals for your content marketing efforts or you’ll have no way of measuring success. Be more specific than “get more customers.” Are you targeting a certain demographic with your content marketing efforts? Are you trying to generate interest in a specific topic? Other questions to ask include, “what kinds of content will you need to create to accomplish your goals?” and “how often will we publish new content?”

Know your audience

If you’ve followed the advice from tip number one, then you should already have a specific goal (or goals) in mind and a general idea of who your audience but before you can dive into content creation, you have to get to know your audience even more. Researchers who’ve studied customer behavior have found that they tend to follow a very specific path before completing a purchase. This is called the marketing funnel and it begins with interest in a product, service, or some subject connected to a product or service. Some who are interested will move down to a narrower section of the funnel where they will more carefully consider specific products or services with the intention of possibly buying. Finally, at the narrowest point of the funnel are those who decide to go through with the purchase. A big part of knowing your audience is knowing where they are in the marketing funnel. Are you trying to generate awareness about a topic that a target demographic may not really be thinking about or do you want to try to create more in-depth and engaging content to pull in those already interested who are considering whether or not to buy? The channels you use and the types of content you create will depend on where in the funnel your audience is.

Recycle your content across various channels

You can get a better return on your investment by spending less in the first place while still getting good results. A great way to do this is to recycle some of your content. For instance, you might publish a white paper on a subject which would be a longer form type of content creation. You can write shorter blog articles that focus on more specific aspects of that larger paper which you can then publish on your company’s blog. You can take some of that content and create video content or infographics. You can even take a single interesting point condensed into one sentence, and send it to the customers who’ve opted in to receive text messages. All of these recycled uses of content can of course link back to the longer form content for those who want to learn more.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: huffingtonpost.com/entry/increase-your-content-marketing-roi-with-these-3-tips_us_599644cfe4b02eb2fda31e8e

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Ten things your customer service chatbot will need to succeed

The chatbot marketplace might not be too crowded yet but it soon will be. Companies of all sizes are beginning to recognize the value that chatbots offer and are rushing to deploy their own. If you want your chatbot to be noticed and used, it’s going to need to stand out. Here are ten things an effective chatbot will need to have. Good natural language processing Without some good natural language processing power behind your chatbot, it won’t be able to understand what people are saying to it unless they use the exact wording you teach it to recognize. Human speech is complex and there are hundreds of ways to word the simplest sentences. So there’s lots of room for your chatbot to fail if it can’t determine meaning from syntax. Proactivity Chatbots are still new technology and many customers won’t think to reach out to your chatbot. Your chatbot is going to have to be proactive and able to initiate conversations with customers. Integration Your chatbot will need to have access to relevant information and may need to be able to assist customers with completing purchases depending on what you’re using it for. That means your chatbot will need to be integrated with social media platforms and ecommerce tools. Simple, well-defined features If you try to program a chatbot to do too many things, it will fail spectacularly at all of them. Chatbot programming is very complex so you’re better off developing a chatbot that handles only a few simple and well-defined tasks. At least at first. Later on you can add more features while ensuring that it doesn’t become less effective at doing what it was programmed to do initially. Ability to deliver on promises A chatbot that can’t do what you claim it can do is going to do more harm than good. If it fails at 50% of customer service interactions, it’s going to hurt your brand and tax your human customer service agents who will just have another thing people are calling in to complain about. Logical structure Think about how customer service interactions progress naturally with a human. You want to mimic that experience with your chatbot. You don’t want to overwhelm customers by having your chatbot present a list of options right up front. Instead you want it to ask the right questions and progress logically down a certain path to accurately help the customer. A fail-safe You don’t want your chatbot to get stuck in a cycle. For instance, if your chatbot goes down the wrong path, either because of a mistake on the customer’s part or a failed attempt at natural language processing, you want it to be able to back up a step, or, if necessary, transfer the customer to a live agent that can assist over chat. Predictive capabilities A good chatbot will keep improving over time. It will learn from failed interactions and begin to pick up on patterns so it can predict what a customer is getting at more quickly and provide faster assistance. Personality One of the trickiest things about programming a chatbot is programming it with a personality. Psychologists have been studying personality for more than a hundred years are no closer to understanding what it is and how it develops not to mention that everyone has different preferences when it comes to personality. Your goal should probably be a bot that’s pleasant and helpful but overall neutral in the personality department. Frequent optimizations A chatbot is not something you set and forget. It will need constant monitoring and fine-tuning. By regularly releasing updates and optimizations for your chatbot, you’ll ensure that it gets better and better at assisting your customers. Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com Source: entrepreneur.com/article/297707

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Five chatbots that are making mobile banking easier than ever

This is the age of the chatbot. Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate human speech. They have implications for customer service since they can help automate these processes especially in industries involving well-defined and narrow procedures. Banking is prime example of this since most customers are transferring funds, checking their balance or scheduling automatic payments, etc… Mobile Apps are one way to do this but it involves going to an App marketplace and downloading an app first which takes up valuable storage space on your phone. Chatbots, on the other hand, are deployed via SMS to customers need only save the number for the banking chatbot on their phone and the chatbot can assist them with their banking needs. Here are five banking chatbots that are already making people’s lives easier.

Swedbank’s Nina

In recent year’s Sweden’s banks are having a major customer satisfaction problem with only 20% of Swedes reporting they’re satisfied with their bank and many banks are turning to AI and chatbots to fix this. Swedbank developed Nina, a female banking chatbot with the help of Nuance Communications. Nina has approximately 40,000 conversations a month and she accurately resolves 80% of these conversations herself. That’s 32,000 phone calls to the bank averted and countless hours of productivity saved for bank employees who can use that time for other things.

Bank of America’s Erica

Erica (cleverly taken from the word “America”) is Bank of America’s female chatbot. Not only can Erica automate simpler banking transactions like transfers and payments, she even provides some financial advice to customers. She tracks your monthly spending habits and can suggest how much you should be paying down your credit card each month to reduce the amount you’ll pay in interest.

Capital One’s Eno

Capital One took part of their name (One) and came up with the anagram “Eno” as a name for their chatbot. Capital One chose to make their chatbot gender neutral. Ask it what it’s name is and it will reply that it is binary. Like other chatbots on this list, Eno assists customers by giving them requested bank account info and helping out with credit card payments.

SEB’s Aida

Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB for short) is the second Swedish bank on this list. Their customer service chatbot, Aida, is actually the second chatbot they’ve developed. They already had an internal chatbot named Amelia that assisted bank employees with IT issues. In just three weeks Amelia held over 4,000 conversations with more than 700 employees solving a majority of their problems unassisted.  SEB is hopeful that Aida can do the same thing, but for customers with banking issues rather than employees with IT issues.

Wells Fargo’s still unnamed chatbot

Wells Fargo hasn’t named their chatbot yet so at least for the time being, it’s genderless as well. For now, the functions of this chatbot are limited. It can use natural language processing to tell what a customer is asking it, usually customers are asking for the nearest ATM or for the current balance in their bank account or on their credit card. They hope to add more advanced features soon that will dive deeper into customers’ banking behavior to analyze patterns and be able to offer suggestions.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2017/08/06/5-ways-chatbots-can-improve-customer-experience-in-banking/#64cfff3d7148

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How Realtors Can Benefit From Mobile Marketing

As is the case with virtually every other industry, real estate is growing increasingly mobile. By that we mean that home sellers and buyers are more likely to go their phones first when creating or searching for listings. Could we have imagined just a decade ago using our phones to buy and sell homes? Just as the internet changed the way we create and view home listings, the existence of smartphones and mobile applications have changed it again. Real estate apps like Zillow or Realtor make it easier than have to search for homes and 44% of smartphone owners say they’ve done just that. For those in the real estate business, they can no longer afford to ignore mobile. And with each passing year, ignoring mobile will mean you’re missing out on more and more potential business. With that in mind, here’s how realtors can use mobile marketing to achieve more success.

Invest in SMS marketing

Gone are the days when buyers waited for the realtor to show them ones. More than half of home buyers find online listings on their own before even reaching out to a realtor. You can save yourself a lot of time by setting up an SMS campaign where each property you sell as a registered shortcode and prospective buyers can send off a text containing a keyword to that shortcode to get on the list to receive updates about that particular property. This way, your list of interested buyers is managed automatically by themselves and they can remove themselves by opting out so you don’t have to keep spending your time trying to reach people that are no longer interested.

Adopt a mobile first approach to web design

Though DIY website builders like Weebly and Wix have come a long way when it comes to mobile-friendly design--you build from a template and the website host detects the device being used to view the site and adjusts accordingly--you can do even better by adopting a mobile first approach. Think about what your mobile customers are trying to accomplish when they use their smartphone to view listings on your website. People are five times more likely to leave a website if it’s not easy to navigate on a mobile device. Make sure any links are far enough apart that people won’t actually click over to the wrong page and make sure your contact information is displayed prominently throughout the website. Make sure your phone number is click-to-call so you make it as easy as possible for prospective clients to go from your website to speaking with you on the phone.

Get on all the right apps

Nearly 70% of home buyers will use a mobile app at some point to look at listings. That doesn’t mean you need to go out and create an app for your real estate company. In fact you probably shouldn’t. But you should make sure that your listings are appearing on the most popular real estate apps out there or a sizable part of your target audience may never see them if they’re using apps and not your website.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: realtybiznews.com/mobile-marketing-tips-for-realtors/98743528/

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Is a text message marketing campaign right for your business?

Texting has surpassed phone calls as the preferred method of communication. Don’t believe it. How many times have you found yourself not answering an incoming call only to text the person who was trying to call and asking what they were calling for. Texting is preferred because it’s convenient. When we’re busy and we don’t want to get drawn into a phone conversation, we sometimes text instead because it’s fast, convenient, and easy to keep things to the point. We also have a little more freedom to ignore or respond a text on our own timetable whereas several minutes of silence during a phone call would be socially frowned upon. All of this adds up to a startling statistic: Americans spend twice as much time texting as they do talking. What does this mean for businesses? If you want to reach Americans, the best way to do so is through their mobile phones and the best channel is SMS, or texting. Here are a few other things you should consider.

Text message marketing is extremely effective when done right

While open rates for promotional emails have dipped below 20%, the open rate for text messages has remained constant at about 98%. Not only are people far more likely to open and read your message when you sent it via text instead of email, they’re more likely to take action on it as well. If you include a link to your website, an invitation to like your Facebook page, or a link to an online directory like Yelp or Google where customers can write reviews, only about 3.5% of people will click on it if it’s included in an email. If it’s sent via text, that number is about 35%. People are literally ten times more likely to click on a link via text. If you send a coupon or some other special offer via text instead of email, people are approximately four times as likely to redeem that coupon or offer.

Cost of text message marketing

Not only is text message marketing one of the most effective mobile channels, it’s one of the least expensive as well. The exact cost can vary widely according to one bulk SMS platform you use and what features they offer. It works out to just a few pennies per text message and the cost per text is a little lower the more texts you’re sending.

Getting started

Finally, text message marketing is a great introductory channel for mobile because it’s one of the easiest to learn. You can sign up with a bulk SMS platform that automates opt-ins and opt-outs for you so you’re compliant with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). You select your keyword and shortcode and compose the text messages. Then you simply set the time for the message to send, the SMS platform does everything else. They also give you metrics which you can use to track the effectiveness of your efforts.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: business.com/articles/text-message-marketing-for-retailers/

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The three biggest mobile marketing mistakes your small business can make

Mobile is the future of advertising. With more than three-quarters of American now owning smartphones, it’s become the most effective way for businesses to communicate with and market to their audience. As businesses rush to keep up with the ever-advancing mobile technology, it’s easy to make mistakes along the way. That’s inevitable. But these three mistakes are the worst of the worst and should be avoided at all costs.

Not optimizing for mobile

The year 2016 was the year mobile web traffic surpassed non-mobile web traffic. With each passing year, mobile web traffic will put distance between it and traditional web traffic. In short, more and more people are accessing the web on tiny screens as opposed to bigger ones. Despite this, there are still many business websites that are designed solely to be viewed on computers or laptops. This creates an unpleasant experience for people trying to access it from a tablet and especially a smartphone. Pinching, zooming, squinting, and waiting for slow loading times wear out smartphone users quickly and many will leave the website never to return again. Every day your website isn’t optimized for mobile is a day you’re losing potential customers. Not only do non mobile-friendly sites annoy customers, they’re more likely to be ignored by search engines like Google that utilize advanced algorithms to give preference to websites over others and one of the things they look at is mobile optimization.

Not using the SMS marketing channel

Of all the mobile marketing channels out there, SMS is the oldest and most effective and important. While some may see it as old fashioned and pass it up in favor of in-app advertising or even developing new apps, SMS marketing needs to be a part of your strategy--a big part. Texting is far cheaper than the cost to advertise in apps or to develop an app. It’s also more effective since 95% of all texts are opened and read within three minutes of being received.

Not allocating enough of your marketing budget for mobile

Mobile marketing needs to be getting the majority of your digital ad spending. Businesses will spend more than 100 billion dollars globally on mobile marketing in 2017. That accounts for just over half of all digital advertising spending. By 2020, mobile marketing will account for 75% of digital ad spending or more. Businesses are recognizing the power of mobile and any business that wants to keep up will have to do the same.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: techworm.net/2017/06/3-brutal-mobile-marketing-mistakes-can-wreck-business.html

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How to grow and retain your SMS marketing opt-ins

SMS is a unique marketing channel in that every single person you reach out to via that channel must first give their express permission for you to do so. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. It can be difficult to grow your database of numbers when customers have to take action in order to get on that database and it can be difficult to retain their permission when every text must include directions for opting-out. On the other hand, these regulations on text message marketing also ensure that the people you’re texting (and you are paying per text) are only those who want to receive them and are therefore more likely to act on them. Still, you want to grow your database and retain your opt-ins as much as possible, the following tips can help you accomplish this. Offer real value People won’t give you unrestricted access to reach them via text unless they perceive real value in doing so. The occasional 10% off coupon won’t be sufficient for the vast majority of customers. Value also doesn’t have to mean deals and discounts. Appointment reminders, shipping notifications, and advanced notice of restocked items are additional ways you can use text messaging to make life more convenient for those who opt in. Integrate SMS with other channels Registering a shortcode and keyword makes it as easy as possible for customers to opt in since all they have to do is text something like “SIGNUP” to a five- or six-digit number. It also makes it easier for you to advertise your SMS channel for customers. You can very quickly provide customers with instructions for opting in on your website, on banner ads in store, near the point-of-sales in your store, and across various social media platforms and other digital and print channels. Don’t be annoying It takes a lot of work to build your SMS database and almost no time at all to lose it. Smartphone users can be an impatient group and the moment they perceive that opting-in is more of a burden than it’s worth, they’ll reply to a text, “STOP,” and you are no longer allowed to text them. Texting too often or at inconvenient times such as weekends, holidays, or too early in the morning or late at night will result in more opt-outs. Also, if every single text is a promotional message, they may feel that you’re taking advantage of the relationship you’ve established to constantly push products/services on them. Promotional content should be no more than half of the texts you send. Stay compliant with regulations As already established, SMS is a highly regulated marketing channel and the regulations are updated from time to time. While most bulk SMS marketing platforms will ensure you’re staying compliant and stay on top of new regulations, it’s still a good idea to keep up on them as well since an infraction can result in a fine and repeated infractions could even lead to a lawsuit. Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com Source: bdaily.co.uk/articles/2017/06/30/tips-on-crafting-a-valuable-retail-sms-marketing-campaign

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How to use SMS Marketing to Drive User Engagement

SMS is a channel unlike any other in the world of marketing. Yet too many marketers and business owners are using it just as they would any other digital marketing channels. Mobile marketing isn’t digital marketing for smaller screens because consumers use mobile devices like smartphones and tablets in very different ways than they use a television or computer. The most effective mobile marketing strategies take advantage of the unique qualities of mobile devices including user engagement. Mobile, and by extension, SMS should be encouraging interaction between brands and customers, but so many are just using it to push for sales by offering deals, coupons, and promotional messages. Here are some different ways to use SMS marketing that will lead to more user engagement. Embedded hyperlinks Most people know that SMS boasts a much higher open rate (98%) compared to email (about 20%). But many forget that SMS also has a much better click-through rate, about 36% compared to email’s 3%. For whatever reason, consumers are 12 times more likely to click on a link when it’s included in a text as opposed to an email. Including a link to a mobile-friendly website or a social media page in a text message is an invitation to customers to engage with the brand on another level. It will lead to “likes” and better social media presence as well as increased web traffic and sales. Two-factor authentication Another level of security beyond just having to enter a password greatly increases the security of credit card information and any other sensitive information on a private account. Your customers will appreciate a two-factor authentication where a text message comes through on their phone that includes a four- or five-digit number that they have to enter on their computer to complete the login process. It’s a small thing but it’s just one more way that customers are asked to complete an action in response to a text. Customer-satisfaction surveys Short surveys where respondents can give their answers by simply typing in a number between one to ten are a convenient way for customers to offer feedback. Not only do you get valuable information about your customer base and how you can better meet their needs, you also are getting them to interact with your brand as opposed to just being a passive recipient of promotional material. Contests Contests are another great way to get your customers to text you rather than the other way around. Rules for entry might include sending a photo via text or perhaps a one or two sentence explanation as to why they love a certain product or service. Winning photographs or statements can then be used as testimonials for your brand. Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com Source:mediaupdate.co.za/marketing/135767/using-sms-messaging-for-your-business