With online access so prevalent and easy to use by PC, tablet or smartphone, the shift to self service has meant losing the helpful sales person.  With retail, the advantage of shopping in-store was the ability to ask questions and have someone knowledgeable help you make a decision. Online, the move to searching for reviews or information about the item to buy can be more “convenient” but some risk.  The answer is often offering online chat or instant messaging. Are …

Find ways to let your customers/members easily do business with you and other retailers online to increase your revenue all year long!  Here are some items to consider:  Preferred Partners – Do you have a list of preferred partners that you can create affiliate links to such as Sprint offers a credit union member discount, insurance products, identity theft service, digital safe boxes or back-up options?  You can make revenue off of linking your customers/members to good quality companies who …

Remember that excitement in 2009 when Twitter and Facebook started to gain traction in the marketing space as the new answer to a highly competitive and congested marketplace? Well, years later, the biggest, loudest pundits to claim that every company had to have a social media presence or their company would fail, have started to shift their own marketing strategies. Here’s one agency owner’s opinion. Bob Hoffman, of Hoffman/Lewis, said in an interview on Digiday  “All I can tell you …

During a meeting with high school teacher and administrator for a client’s student branch, the teacher mentioned something that surprised me. He mentioned having videos in the yearbook. My client asked, “You put videos in a paper yearbook?” He nodded and said they had used QR codes to embed video links in last year’s book. Cool! They had taken a technology that was being used more for websites or special landing pages for promotion support and used it as a …

Creating marketing strategies and communications for smaller groups of your customers/members is demanding and time consuming. Actually, having multiple programs going on at once can be frenetic for the marketing department and confusing for front-line staff. Yet, there isn’t a better way to be more relevant to interest the most likely buyers of your products and services. For example, because we specialize in financial services, the first questions on any new promotions for our clients are: What is the goal …

For my Costco membership, I have the American Express credit card. For major holidays, I receive an email offer to get their AmEx gift cards for no additional fee. Having spent $4.95 or more for a service fee to get one at the grocery store, I consider that a great offer to a customer who has a relationship with AmEx online. How often have you signed up for an e-news or provided your email address to receive e-special offers and …

With the huge use of digital tools by consumers, from shopping to e-books, as well as the proliferation of new marketing channels from social media to online advertising, marketers have been inundated with pressure to switch their marketing strategy. How is it possible to make the right choice on these channels to reach consumers? Many people jumped online, disregarding any return on investment to be early to try new things, especially trying social media networks. “Social networks are not the …

The impact of social media on the marketing landscape has created a time management crunch. Already pressured with managing marketing projects and then add in social media initiatives. Because social media requires content and engaging conversational copy, it takes time. Especially, it takes time, creativity, and rewriting to gain an end result of engaging content. To be able to keep up, here are some tools that help: • Use a social media management platform to schedule tweets and posts for …

In today’s high-tech world, most people are constantly connected to a device whether a smartphone, cell phone, computer, laptop, or tablet. People are posting photos within seconds, responding to texts or emails, and Google-ing for answers to questions or finding a local restaurant – constant activity. So, to communicate with customers/members/prospects, marketers are in a constant flurry of activity trying to figure out what mediums still work. Thinking of marketing as having a conversation with someone to give him/her the …

Many marketing people and executives are looking to social media as a way to turn up the interaction with consumers. In particularly, there is the idea that social media is “free” except for intense personnel costs and that the e-marketing and direct mail costs can be cut back. Here are some of the comments from social media experts to help you make the best decision about how social media: “I’ll say that again: the quality and value of your efforts …