by kitzmillermedia | Jun 5, 2020 | Business, Social Media
[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” overlay_strength=”0.3″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]The more a potential buyer interacts with a company, the more likely that person will actually become a customer. Client engagement is one of the most important business metrics to master in order to grow your business. Here are a few simple steps you can take today to make your customer interactions as productive as possible.
Utilize Social Media
No business can ever have too much social engagement, and it can always be improved upon. The more responsive your audience, the closer you’ll be to reaching your goals for social media.
In order to improve your engagement, it is important to first measure your current level of interaction. with social media Then, utilize strategies in every post to encourage customer responsiveness.
Incorporating images in your posts is a great way to increase engagement as are videos and context-rich posts. However, taking your social media a step further can make a real difference. Get creative and even a little funny with your posts. Let your personality shine so that your customers feel like there is a real person behind those posts. Also, creating events, such as giveaways or live broadcasts, can be a great catalyst in elevating customer interaction.
Keep Them Informed
Reminding your customers of how important they are should consistently be a priority in your business. This should be addressed in every marketing campaign and communication. One of the best ways to make your customers feel important is to keep them informed. Utilizing newsletters, blog posts and other communications to increase awareness and let your customers know what is happening with your company from time to time will help to encourage client interaction. Try increasing the frequency of your most impactful campaigns in order to keep your customers more engaged.
Focus on More Than Sales
Putting the time into creating an overall great customer experience can absolutely change your business. In order to do that, you also have to put time into understanding who your customer is and what they want. Marketing and customer interaction should always center around your core demographic. Study your current business model and try to find ways to bring exceptional service to your clients. Amazing customer service creates trust, and trust encourages sales.
Your customers need to know that you are hearing them and paying attention to what they want and need in your business. If you can provide a product or service your clients are looking for packaged with great customer engagement, you will likely keep your customers for the life of your business.
Still having problems? Read What to Know About the Effects of Social Media on Your Business and see if your social media isn’t helping you as much as you thought![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
by kitzmillermedia | Apr 3, 2020 | Business, Websites
Your website is a powerful tool in the online marketplace. It gives you a platform to create awareness of your products or services and attract more traffic to grow your business. Ideally, your website can help gather customer insights to guide you in decision making. It can also improve your credibility and SEO to help monitor your marketing strategies. However, to achieve the best results, you need to invest in features that can give you high returns. Here are some of the best website investments that pay for themselves.
User-Friendly Interaction
According to Brainleaf, a poorly designed website can turn away potential customers. If at all you want to grow your business, make sure your website is user-friendly. Remember that the primary purpose of your site is to generate more leads, but if people find it difficult to interact with it, then you may not achieve the intended goal. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate functions that are customized to suit your specific business to allow potential customers to reach you faster and easier.
Relevant Content
In many cases, customers are searching for helpful and informative content. Similarly, when potential customers visit your website, the first thing they expect is answers to their questions and not read about your story. However, the bottom line about relevant content is to develop content that can engage your audience and change their perception of your brand. That is, to educate, help, entertain, and keep them informed.
Webchat Service
Proper communication is vital for the success of your business. It is essential to connect with your audience using the method that works best for them. Apart from other interaction tools such as email and phone, webchat service is an integral part of your communication strategies, especially in this digital era. Alternatively, using software tools can also be beneficial. For instance, according to Podium, many types of CRM software have a high return on investment that will help your business grow.
Optimized
Online marketing is dynamic and requires businesses to flex to meet ever-changing customer demands. One way to achieve this is to optimize your website and content for different search engines, browsers, devices, data speed, and users. If your website does not support these features, customers may not want to visit your site, which will harm your business.
Building your website is beyond making an online presence. You need to go extra miles to ensure you develop something that cannot only benefit users but also give you a high return on investment. You should incorporate features that can make it likable and easy to use. The investments mentioned above are some of the best that can give high returns.
If you need help building or managing your website, we can help! Request a quote here.
by kitzmillermedia | Dec 26, 2019 | Business, SEO, Social Media
About three million people worldwide are active social media users. Businesses can take advantage of these people to grow their brand awareness, connect with customers, and grow sales. 90% of businesses agree that social media can have both positive and negative impacts on a business. Businesses that are not yet leveraging the power of social media in their marketing strategy will find it hard to survive the competition. So, let’s find out how social media can impact your business positively.
SEO
Any business that has been active on social media knows that there is a significant connection between search engine optimization and social media. While social media shares may not likely result in higher Google ranking, your profile may help you create a stronger presence. A strong social media profile can get its way and rank on the first page on Google. What this does to your business is to make it easy for people to find you online and connect with your brand. If you always share valuable content on social media, potential clients will easily notice and search your website. You will no doubt increase traffic to your website and rank better on SEO.
Brand Awareness
Social media is a powerful tool for businesses that want to boost their brand awareness. To leverage this power of social media on your business, you should find out the exact platform where your target audience is using. If they are on Facebook, most of your marketing efforts should be focused there. Once you know where to find them, ensure you attract their attention so that they become aware of your brand. You can do this by sharing valuable content with them, using eye-catching visuals, creating a conversation, and building authority. If you do all this right, it will be impossible for your business not to gain the brand awareness it desires.
Word of Mouth
Social media is the new word of mouth for your business. Businesses no longer go out there to try to spread the word about their business to the target audience but rather leverage the power of social media shares. There are booming online communities that help with this. Many people now depend on social media to give them reviews about a product or service they intend to buy. According to research, 71% of people take those online reviews as personal recommendations and are likely to make a purchase following a positive product review.
Customer Retention
Social media is not just a tool for attracting new customers; it is also a good platform for retaining the existing ones. Businesses thrive on building long-lasting relationships with customers and gaining their loyalty and trust. You can achieve this by engaging and connecting with your customers through appropriate communication funnels. Statistics show that if a customer reaches an answering machine, roughly 35% will never call that business again, so creating multiple funnels which allow communication between your business and your customers can be helpful.
Generate Leads
Social media is a fun way to generate leads to your business. Through the use of social media, a business gets access to different social networks that offer advertising formats to collect leads. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are lucrative platforms for getting lead generation ads. Businesses use both organic and paid social media platforms to promote their content and get desirable leads. When businesses follow lead generation best practices, they will benefit from the power of social media lead generation.
Customer Connection
Attracting new customers, using them to generate leads, and building loyalty is a long process. Social media is a good platform to create a business to customer connection and making all three possible. Social media enables a business to connect with their customers, monitor their needs, and address their problems. Through these connections, businesses interact easily with customers and get their feedback on various products and services they offer. Through social media, businesses provide personalized services and respond to their customer queries without delay.
Boost Sales
Social media is now a good platform where businesses can boost their sales. Social media sites create a good sales funnel where businesses can easily turn their page visitors into customers. All the new leads that social media pages attract every day; some percentage turn out to be buyers. Even if they don’t buy immediately, just having them around seeing your products/services every day slowly incites their interests, and they end up buying in the long run.
With the power of social media on business growing every day, it is evident that these social networking sites are not going anywhere soon. They are instead continuing to grow, and the earlier businesses make use of them, the more they’ll gain a competitive edge. Businesses should, therefore, recognize that social media is a powerful tool for engaging with their customers, increasing traffic to their websites, and making sales.
Here’s another article you might like: Two Free Social Media Tools to Help you Keep Up
by kitzmillermedia | Nov 4, 2019 | Business, Shop, Social Media, WordPress
[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” overlay_strength=”0.3″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]We’re sharing this article for shop owners and designers who are using the Facebook for WooCommerce WordPress plugin and ran into some issues with the Check Out on Website button. By default, the button takes customers to the cart page. Not a bad solution considering how easy it is to connect WordPress to Facebook, but for us, the link skipped important configuration options each of the products require before checkout.
Kitzmiller Media recently designed and launched a wonderful new WooCommerce WordPress website for Dave Samuel with Samuel Pen Co. Dave sells gorgrous hand-turned custom pens. We were able to incorporate product addons that allowed visitors to select unique pen configurations including pen materials, pen tips, engraving, packaging options and more.
One goal of the online shop was to integrate the website catalog of products with Facebook and Instagram. Fortunately there is a plugin from Facebook that makes it reletively easy. While it doesn’t allow for much customization, it was able to integrate our entire product catalog into the Facebook shop page.
Unfortunately, the checkout button took customers to the cart. As we mentioned earlier, these products required customization before getting to the cart.
It wasn’t immediately obvious where we could adjust this link. The solution turned out to be incredibly easy and prevented us from rethinking our Facebook and Instagram marketing stategy.
To change the Facebook for WooCommerce check out button destination from the Cart to the Product Page follow these instructions.
- log into your Facebook Page as an admin
- Click settings
- Scroll down and click Shop
- Turn off Use Checkout URLS
That’s it. The button will now take customers directly to the WooCommerce Product Detail page on your website. Screenshots are below to help you find the correct setting. Let us know if it worked out for you!
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by kitzmillermedia | Sep 19, 2019 | Business, Inspiration, Productivity
[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]As a business owner, making time to actually enjoy the holidays should be a priority, but you have to start early. There are some ways to make it less stressful. Start by taking a broad look at operations and marketing. These five focus areas should help you get a head start.
Five tips to prepare Your business for the holidays include.
- Stock up and staff up
- Delegate responsibility
- Freshen up your website
- Plan a marketing campaign
- Put things on autopilot
- Bonus tip: Don’t stop in December
Stock up and staff up
If you’re in the retail space this is a must. The crush of holiday shopping will be upon you before you know it. The last thing you want is to be under staffed or understocked. Same goes for online retailsers. Many manufactures and wholesalers offer holoiday specials weeks and momnths before the shopping begins. Take advantage of their deals and stock up on merchandise.
Delegate responsibility
Even if you’re a solopreneur you need to lean on your resources for help this holiday season. The best way to delegate business and marketing todos, is to know exactly what those todos are. Start by making a list month by month. Be as detailed as you can about each item. Ask yourself honestly if each item is something you need to control personall. As long as the item has a clear path forward, send it off to someone else.
Freshen up your website
Since you will be lighting up social media with fresh marketing material, it makes sense to freshen up your website while you’re at it. Nothing says, “closed for business” like an outdated website. Focus on these five improvement areas:
- Update the copyright date in the footer 2011 was a long time ago!
- Add a new blog post
- Add or change the call to action on the home page
- Update the about page if necessary
- Check all your pages and links for errors
Plan a marketing campaign
The obvious choice is a holiday themed campaign promoting your products or services. People are very attracted to discounts and special promotions. Here are a few examples.
- Offer free consultaiton
- Bundle several of your more popular services to create savings
- Create coupon codes for your online store
- Ask for referrals and create referral bonuses
The marketing around your holiday campaign should be three-fold. First, create a blog or add a new page to your website with details about the promotion. Create some holiday imagery or graphics that compliment your brand. Canva is a great tool.
Once you have the messaging on point, plan on promoting it on social media and through email marketing. Sketch out a series of posts with highlights of the promotion. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself on socail. It’s a crowded place and your fans might miss it.
Send out an email campaign to your audience. If you got a head start on all of this, plan on sending one campaign each month.
The most important part of all of this is to create a schdule and stick with it.
Put things on autopilot
Automating some of your marketing and business tasks will help free up time to focus on activities that cannot be automated. Email autoresponders are a great way to handle incoming contact forms and can buy you some time to respond. Redirtecting direct emails with filters can help delegate tasks.
Social media apps like Buffer can help you automate posts. For me, Buffer is essential to keeping my schedule full of social media posts for all of my profiles.
Invoicing and reporting is another where automation can save you time. Here at Kitzmiller Media, many of our billing tasks are automated. Even payment reminders go out automatically.
Some flavor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is going to be immensely benificial when it comes to automation. We use Hubspot at Kitzmiller Media and it’s a critical component of our day to day opperations. We can keep close tabs on prospects and customers and even track deals and communication threads.
Bonus tip: Don’t stop in December
There is no reason why you can’t keep things going when the holidays are over. The lessons learned over the holidays can help build out an entire year’s worth of activity. Once you become familiar with these holiday business stategies, implementing them throughout the year will become much easier. Naturally, we are here if you have any questions. As always, thanks for reading![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” enable_gradient=”true” color_overlay=”rgba(30,115,190,0.11)” color_overlay_2=”rgba(238,238,34,0.11)” gradient_direction=”left_t_to_right_b” overlay_strength=”0.8″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”padding-4-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
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by kitzmillermedia | Aug 5, 2019 | Business, Services, WordPress
[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” overlay_strength=”0.3″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]A while back I reached out to my contacts with an offer to improve or add a privacy policy to their WordPress website following the big GDPR update in late 2018. Many of them did just that. However, the static policy we implemented may not be enough to protect their interests any longer.
You have three options to protect your business with a Privacy Policy:
- Head on over to Termageddon and sign up for their Privacy Policy generator. Fill out the online forms and place the code snippet on a new page on your website.
- Purchase one through Kitzmiller Media and we’ll handle everything.
- Contact your attorney and ask them to write one up for you. I will place it on your site for free.
New laws on the horizon
As you may or may not be aware, many states are implementing laws to protect the privacy of its citizens. Some of these laws will even allow citizens to sue businesses anywhere in the US just for not having a compliant Privacy Policy.
Over the next six months, two privacy laws will go into effect (Nevada on 10/01 and California on 01/01). In addition, there are about a dozen other states that want to pass similar laws in the near future, which will require you to not only have a Privacy Policy but continually update it as well.
To be proactive about this issue, Kitzmiller Media has partnered up with a Privacy Policy service called Termageddon. After we implement the proper code, they will automatically update your WordPress website’s policies when the laws change, and they do it at a fraction of the cost of an attorney.[/vc_column_text][divider line_type=”No Line” custom_height=”20″][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/pk1aIrArbyw” align=”center”][vc_column_text]You can click the following links to take a look at our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions page. These are automatically updated by attorneys as the laws change.
Please let me know if you would like to have us set you up with Termageddon’s auto-updating policies, plan to use an attorney, or are choosing to go with what you already have.
As your web consultant, It’s important for me to at least let you know about the changes I’m seeing online. As always, I’m here if you have any questions.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” enable_gradient=”true” color_overlay=”rgba(8,174,234,0.2)” color_overlay_2=”rgba(8,174,234,0.52)” gradient_direction=”left_t_to_right_b” overlay_strength=”0.8″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-4-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” overlay_strength=”0.3″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
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