Great Customer Relationships begin with Great Data
In a world where customer expectations are spiralling upwards, Great Marketing & Great Data are increasingly becoming intertwined.
A rapidly growing percentage of marketeers are reliant on the insights from data to shape their marketing campaigns, but their challenge remains getting easy access to it.
And yet, the gap between the most successful marketeers & the rest, continues to widen … Why?
From what I can see, those that outperform the rest in their content marketing seem to have a few things in common:
- A clear Content Strategy
- Strong & easy to access in house data
- Insightful or educational content
- Targeted personalised content to different audiences such as demographics, personas, geos
- A real focus on Customer Centricity & Customer Experience not just within marketing but across the business
Getting all these parts of the jigsaw aligned seems to be really making a difference in the fastest growing & best performing businesses. Is it an integral part of your business?
Speak to us today about enhancing your Marketing strategy for a business that shows real growth and development.
Author Derek Findlayson
What do people want to see in LinkedIn?
If you look at the majority of LinkedIn profiles what do you see … a resume … packed with “historical information” – past roles, achievements education etc that never changes. Ok, there’s some merit to some of this, but think about why you’ve taken the time & effort to complete your LinkedIn profile in the first instance. For most people it’s not to “document the past”, but to stand out, look great, & BE FOUND to help success.
I love the way a past colleague describes LinkedIn as a “Flashing Digital Message board”. A digital message board is constantly changing, & providing fresh & relevant news & information to its audience. A “Stand out” linkedIn profile needs to do the same.
So, here are a few tips to make your LinkedIn profile Look Great and stand out from the crowd:
- Understand your Goals
Perhaps most importantly what is the purpose of your LinkedIn profile and the goals for being on this excellent networking tool
- Look Great
On LinkedIn, a photograph is important … Be sure to get a professional headshot for your LinkedIn profile. It’s money well spent …
- Know Your Branding
The Professional Headline area on LinkedIn (just under your name) allows for 120 characters … use them wisely to cover:
the title that best describes what you do
your brand statement
and the industries that your interested in.
This area is high in search engine optimisation …
- Be Aspirational
In your 2000 character Summary area, make sure that there are at least 50 keywords. In the Summary let people know what you desire, what your goals are and what you have accomplished.
- Summarize Achievements in the Experience Section
Don’t just copy and paste your resume into the Experience area. Look at your accomplishments and rank them based on what you want to do in the future.
- Highlight Successes
There are many new areas on LinkedIn where you can display your experience such as Volunteer, Honors and Awards, Publications, Organizations, Certifications, Courses and other sections of your profile.
- Show What you do & have done
In the “media-rich” formatting area in the LinkedIn Summary, Experience and Education sections, you can add links, videos, Presentations, PDFs or photos.
- Highlight Your Skills
The Skills and Endorsements area is important on LinkedIn.
You can add up to 50 skills. Make sure that the top 10 listed skills slots are the one’s that have the most endorsements. You can move these around by clicking ‘Manage skills’ and then clicking on the skill and dragging it to a new position.
Speak to us today if your looking to change your Digital Marketing focus to drive real growth & improvments in customer engagement.
Author Derek Findlayson
For those of you who think the pace of change has been quick in the insurance world, fasten your seat belts, as it’s about to accelerate to another level …
The end of separate “Siloed” markets?
For as long as I can remember the UK Insurance market has structured itself around how it wants to operate rather than “necessarily how customers want to operate”. Traditionally, Life, Healthcare, & General Insurance have been transacted in separate siloed businesses with at times complex processes, systems, & question sets that make the customer journey more complex than it could or should be & certainly less customer friendly than it is in some overseas territories.
Customers needs & expectations are changing & increasing
But interestingly, the worlds changing. A sizeable proportion of today’s customers, & a growing proportion of “Tomorrow’s customers” EXPECT:
- to be able to access all of their insurance needs in one place
- to access their insurance Solutions through their preferred communication channel
- a simpler & better customer journey using through using Data Smartly
Using Data smartly
The use of Big data & the Connected world creates a fantastic opportunity to enhance & reinvent the traditional insurance customer journey through:
- Reducing the question set the customer needs to complete where the information is available through another data source
- Using connected real time data to enhance dynamic pricing models
- Significantly reducing the impact of fraudulent activity in the market
and perhaps most importantly:
- Making it much more easy for customers to access all of their insurance needs at each lifecycle stage in one place …
Impact of Emerging Technologies
A final thought. New technologies are & will continue to have a significant impact on how Insurance products are, Designed, Distributed, Priced, Serviced, & delivered. Here’s a few that should be on your radar:
- Wearables will drive unique behavioural insights and help insurers design unique and personalised services
- The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect an ecosystem of devices and wearables to the Internet and allow enhanced decision making
- Drones will enable efficient claims management and processing
- Driverless cars will transform the way insurance is rated
- 3-D printing & Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help prioritise and replace things that need replacing, fast.
Those organisations, be they existing providers or new entrants, that grasp this as an opportunity will be the one’s that set themselves apart from the rest …
Author Derek Findlayson
The Benefits of Business Blogs for Marketing
If the whole world of business blogging is a mystery to you, here’s a few thoughts to hopefully demystify what it is & make the case for why you should use blogging as a very cost effective marketing tactic.
What is business blogging?
Sounds complicated but it’s not. Put simply, business blogging involves creating short form content posted to your website about a particular subject, to help you increase your “online visibility” i.e. making it easier for you to be found on the internet.
Why should you use blogging as a marketing tactic?
- It helps drive traffic to your website
If your like me, you want to find cost effective ways to drive more visitors to your website. Yes, you could rely on people typing in your name right into their browser, but typically the people that do this already know you. You could pay for traffic through purchasing email lists but often this is illegal, or by placing paid ads, but both can be quite expensive. So, how can you cost effectively drive any traffic? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines.
Keeping your website fresh & relevant can be challenging. Think about it, when did you last change, add new, or refresh your website pages? If your like most businesses it’s not an every day occurrence! Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which makes it easier for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in any organic search.
Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest — expanding your potential audience.
- It helps convert that traffic into leads
In the same way that every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads by simply adding a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post to things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials …
- It helps establish authority & credibility
Customers are interested in content that answers their common questions. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes.
If prospects find answers to their common questions via your blog posts they’re much more likely to:
- Come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past.
- Enter the sales process more educated on your place in the market, your industry, and what you have to offer.
So Blog posts also help move the sales process along more swiftly.
I hope these thoughts encourage you to either start a business blog or make this a larger part of your marketing strategy.
Author Derek Findlayson
Wouldn’t it be great if everything you did got a great big thumbs up from your employees? Then of course, we’d have nothing to complain about! The great thing about the real world of business is that your employees do push back against decisions that you make, consciously or not. Some of these aren’t always that helpful (we all have that employee who is convinced you don’t see him slink into the office at 9:07am every day with a Starbucks in hand…). The good news is some of the things that staff push back against are great warning signs.
Many of the businesses we help are in the middle of planning a business strategy, perhaps revising an existing plan, rejigging one, or looking at creating a new plan.
One massive mistake we see is that sometimes these plans are not run through the staff until they have been set in stone, shipped and delivered. There are 2 reasons why this is a bad idea.
The first one is that your staff will definitely have some clear ideas about what will and won’t work. Bearing in mind that process management, planning, KPI reporting and many other business functions are a top down initiative; getting buy in for the process is critical.Here are some oversights we have seen in businesses before:
- Duplication of effort –Multiple spread sheets, online reporting systems, email reports and meetings
- Product failures not identified – poor competitor & customer research
- Technical issues and software failings not being identified early enough
…And we could go on.
The key feature here is that asking the right employees in your business key questions before you get to the stage of signing off your latest business plan / new guidelines.
The second mistake is that staff buy in is so critical.
Even if they were ignored when they were asked about the latest initiative, the right leaders and managers in the business being consulted can produce a culture of trust which in turns leads to the initiatives having a much stronger chance of succeeding if they do need to live and breathe on the sales floor.
So – homework for you – what can you ask from your employees today that will potentially have a real effect on your processes and procedures?
We hope you get some interesting answers!
Speak to us today about changing your strategy for a business that shows real growth and development.
Author derek Findlayson
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