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Tag: marketing tips

How To Deliver a Personalized Subscription Experience

According to a recent Brightbank survey, “98% of consumers subscribe to a streaming service.” With so many people taking advantage of subscriptions, more and more brands are emerging with their version of this service, vying for the attention of millions of customers by providing an exceptional customer subscription experience. Video streaming services are the most popular, followed by mobile apps, news and box subscriptions.

If you’re looking for a way to stand out, start with personalization. Your subscribers may pay for and receive the same service/products, but they will use them differently. Catering to that is critical.

Provide a personalized customer subscription experience by implementing these five tips.

READ — 5 Tips for Overcoming Customer Service Obstacles as a Small Business

Grow What You Know About Your Customers

Personalization isn’t possible without a deep understanding of your customers. You need to know who they are, how they feel, how they behave, what they’re struggling with and what prompts them to make their decisions to adequately personalize their customer subscription experience.

The first step is identifying your data sources and ensuring the information you gather is filtered to a central platform. That way, you can access and study all your customer data in an organized manner.

You can use a single customer view (SCV) to help you with this. An SCV is a way to collect and combine all your current and potential customer data into one source.

You’ll get a holistic view of your customer’s journey with your business, giving insight into why someone signed up for your service. With this information, you can make suggestions and offer add-ons that they’ll resonate with and that will enable them to continue having the best experience with your service.

READ: Determining Your Business’s Target Market – Why It’s Necessary and How To Do It

Reward Engagement

Throughout the onboarding process, and any step in the customer experience, reward your customers whenever they engage with your brand. This engagement helps you learn more about them and how to better their customer subscription experience.

People are more inclined to engage with your business and give you information about them when they know they get something of value in return. So, every time a customer fills out a form, answers a survey, fills out their profile or engages with you on social media, reward them for it.

These rewards could be as small as shouting out a customer on your social media page or as big as a free month of your subscription service. Give your customer’s the rewards they’ll truly love but that are also financially feasible for your business.

The more engaged your customers are, the more you learn about them, making the personalization process much more manageable.

Focus on Accessibility

Accessibility must be a priority if the goal is to personalize every customer subscription experience. Everyone’s abilities, backgrounds and experiences are different. Ensuring your customers have access to functions and features that accommodate their needs only fuels personalization.

Not only should your service be accessible, but the communications and platforms you use to promote your subscription service should be too.

READ — 12 Ways to Repurpose Social Media Content for Email Marketing

Incorporating accessibility settings on your subscription platform is an excellent first step. Your customers can adjust these settings to accommodate the disabilities they’re living with, like turning on captions for a person living with a hearing disability.

In addition, those not living with a disability can still use these settings to better their subscription experience based on their preferences. For example, an individual who prefers voice search instead of typing in their query can enable this setting to make their experience more enjoyable.

Listen and Act on Customer Feedback

Welcome customer feedback every chance you get. Hearing straight from your customer’s mouths what’s working and what isn’t is one of the best ways to fast-track personalization.

Efficient marketing is a great way to drive meaningful feedback from customers. You can even incorporate surveys into the marketing platforms. Not only is this a great way to reach out to new customers, but it’s a great way to show that you care about your customers.

You can also spark meaningful one-on-one conversations via email. Connect with customers at in-person and virtual events. And leverage social listening tools to see what people are saying about your customer subscription experience on social media.

Conclusion

As more and more subscription services roll out, you must do everything you can to capture and keep your customers’ attention. Leaning into personalization can help you do just that. Start with the tips above to deliver an exceptional customer subscription experience tailored to each individual.

 

Indiana Lee Bio PictureIndiana Lee is a writer, reader, and jigsaw puzzle enthusiast from the Pacific Northwest. An expert on business operations, leadership, marketing, and lifestyle, you can connect with her on LinkedIn.

A practical marketing guide for your business

While it may seem obvious to determine your audience and goals before you begin your marketing journey, it’s a step in the process that often gets overlooked or rushed through without proper consideration.

When this happens, even the best ideas and strategies don’t achieve desired outcomes. Companies should use clear processes to help determine their audience and goals, knowing that, once these are established, the tactics will more likely achieve overall marketing objectives. 

Determine the 3 Base Factors 

An effective process requires investigations into three main areas: primary business goals, primary and secondary audiences, and available resources. To identify the primary business goals, look at both immediate and long-term aims. Based upon these objectives, determine your primary audiences and any secondary audiences you need to consider and target. With goals and audience identified, delve into what resources are available or necessary, both monetarily and in human capital, to effectively reach your targets. 

The point of this examination is simple. By determining the three main base factors of goals, audience, and resources, you can define what problem you are solving, for whom, and whether it can be solved viably. With this baseline, the ideation may begin, and a comprehensive marketing strategy unfolds—all of which leads to greater ROI. In my experience, solving to the right problem always leads to better success. 

Goals 

To determine your business goals, the most important way to begin is by asking lots of good questions and listening—truly and genuinely listening. Marketing leaders often don’t ask enough questions of their team and begin to implement an approach before really understanding what problem they are solving. The art of good marketing involves asking the right questions, listening, and identifying the nuances of the problem so that a unique and effective strategy can be created. 

Example: If a donut shop comes to a marketing agency with the main goal of growing their business, some questions to ask might include: 

  • What do you mean by growing your business?   
  • Do you want to increase profits?    
  • Do you want to add stores?   
  • Do you want to increase brand awareness?    
  • Do you want more customers?    
  • How much do you want to grow?   
  • In what amount of time and with what resources?

By determining the answers to these questions, you can determine if you need to generate more sales, more profits, more customers, etc. For example, the goal might be to increase the price of each donut—or to sell more donuts to the same customer—or to attract more customers to whom you can sell more donuts, etc. Each of those possible outcomes would require a very different marketing plan. 

The important thing to remember is that goals, audience, and resources all work together, and a successful marketing strategy must take all of these factors into account. Solving solely for any single one of these factors doesn’t work because they are all interconnected, and the outcome of one thing has an effect on each of the others. 

Audiences 

Most business owners know that understanding their audience(s) is key to their success, but audiences often shift or evolve and it’s necessary to monitor those changes in order to reassess the primary target(s) of your business. Knowing your audience allows for more effective marketing strategies and, therefore, better outcomes. 

Example: If the donut shop wants to grow its business and it’s been established that their goal is a set financial amount within a specific time frame, then knowing their audience allows them to tailor a plan for that specific audience. For instance, if the donut shop sells to locals in the area, they might try a punch card to encourage repeat visits. On the other hand, if they sell mostly to one-time, drive-by traffic customers, they may look at ways to increase signage.   

Even with goals and audience clearly established, without a clear understanding of a business’s monetary and human resources, a strategic plan is still in the distance.  

Resources 

Understanding resources is not a purely financial consideration. It’s essential to acknowledge all aspects of what makes a business successful: employees, facilities, equipment, funding, etc. The marketing strategy needs to take into consideration a client’s entire resource profile to accurately deduce how it should fit together with goals and audience. 

Example: If the concept of new customers fits into the goal profile of the donut shop and the audience is easy to attain, the question of available resources is the last piece of the puzzle. Some questions at this stage might include: 

  • Is there room in the physical space to hold the new customers? 
  • Can the owners find enough employees to keep up with the demand? 
  • Are there enough friers to keep up with the demand? 
  • Can the manager manage the growth? 

Acknowledging capacity is critical. When creating a strategic marketing plan, if all these factors aren’t considered as a whole, then the outcome may be unsustainable.    You must find solutions that not only speak to your goals, audience, and resources but, importantly, to the intersection of all three. Finding that overlap is the foundation of any successful comprehensive marketing strategy.   

Ask, Listen, Ideate, Execute  

When asking thoughtful questions, listening well, and discovering the intersection of the three base factors of your business, solutions are inherently smarter and strategies and tactics more clearly designed to create better success. 

Photo Liza Prall Eliza Prall is CEO and founder of Prall & Co., a team of marketing professionals who have mastered the art of listening to their clients to understand what they think their challenge is, and then asking enough key questions to understand their true, overarching problem before designing what always seems to be the most simply elegant solution. She can be reached at 303-588-4174 or [email protected]. 

How to build a seasonal marketing plan for your business

Seasonal marketing can benefit you when you have proper planning for it. There are plenty of ways to get benefits from seasonal marketing in your business. But you need to make a master plan for seasonal marketing.

Are you ready with your plan? Don’t worry if you don’t know how to build a seasonal marketing plan.

This article will inform you about seasonal marketing plan. Do you know why seasonal marketing is important and what are the benefits that it provides?

Well, you are just about to get all this information. Keep reading this post to know more.  

Steps To Build A Seasonal Marketing Plan 

This article will help you build a seasonal marketing plan for your business, and help you generate some great ideas for this plan. There can be many ways to build a seasonal marketing plan.

But this article will make it simple for the users to understand. You just need to follow these four steps to accomplish something in online marketing through a seasonal marketing plan.

Here are a few detailed information about this marketing strategy.  

There are 4 steps to creating a good marketing plan: 

Follow the below mentioned four steps to make the best seasonal marketing plan.  

1.  Define the goal of the campaign 

Without having a set goal in your mind you cannot achieve success. Before you make any marketing plan or campaign, you need to define the goal that you want to achieve.

There are many ways to define the goal. The goal can be different for every business and must decide what you want from your marketing campaign. Do you need leads, traffic, sales, or brand awareness? Must decide on this.  

2. Generate Ideas 

Ideas are very important while making a marketing plan. You just need to make a plan which is full of creative and attractive ideas. There must be ideas for the content too.

Content planning is also an important part of marketing. Without planning content, you cannot run a campaign successfully. 

For this reason, you should hire only experts in writing. There are many freelance websites out there today such as Kolabtree, where you can find experts in writing especially those specialized in medical writing.  

 3. Create A Timeline 

The next important thing is to create a timeline. With a given timeline you can set milestones for your campaign. All the steps can be mentioned about what to do at what time. Without a proper timeline, it is not possible to manage campaigns effectively.  

 4. Create A Budget 

Creating a budget is also important. However the budget is not on the creative side of the campaign, but still, it matters a lot for online businesses. Must decide a budget and spend money accordingly. It would help you control the expenses and get an idea about return on investment (ROI).   

What Is a Seasonal Marketing Plan? 

A marketing strategy that is focused on a specific time of year or season of the year. It differs from other promotional strategies because it is tied to a specific time of year and it can be executed at a lower cost.

The seasonal marketing plan includes the following aspects: season, themes, colors, holidays, services, and products.

The first step of a marketing plan is to define the strategies that will be used to carry out the marketing plan. The seasonal marketing plan should be carefully devised and strategically executed. It should have goals set out according to the season, which is aligned with corporate goals.

Thus, if corporate goals are not aligned with different seasons, then the marketing strategy will fail. 

To help you design the right seasonal marketing plan you can get help from experts such as those from SEO Companies who can tell you how to build a seasonal marketing plan. 

Benefits of a Seasonal Marketing Plan

Marketing has been around for decades. However, with the changing trends of consumers, marketers are coming up with new techniques to target their audiences.

One of the most popular techniques is called seasonal marketing. One of the advantages of seasonal marketing is that it helps in better engagement with customers, it benefits and supports the reputation management as well. 

Seasonal marketing also benefits both online and brick-and-mortar stores because it helps them come up with content for their marketing campaigns.

Seasonal marketing is a great strategy to increase customer loyalty because it makes them feel special every time they visit the store or website. It also provides an opportunity for marketers to send personalized messages to customers who are more likely to buy from them again in the future.

A seasonal marketing plan must be carefully planned out before implementation because this technique can be harmful if not planned properly.  

 Importance of Seasonal Marketing 

A seasonal campaign is a marketing campaign that focuses on specific times of the year and Christmas or Thanksgiving are perfect examples of it. Seasonal marketing is important because it attracts consumers who are interested in this type of product. It also helps to promote these products. For example, some retailers will even change their store themes according to the season. 

Seasonal marketing is important for online businesses. You can see all the online or offline businesses are utilizing this opportunity perfectly.

Are you also doing the same or just waiting for the best time? You can also get benefits from seasonal marketing, but it is not possible without proper planning. You need to plan everything in a way to makes it beneficial for your online business.

In just four steps you can make a seasonal marketing plan for yourself.  

Why I take boring marketing personally

As the pandemic began to wane around two and a half months ago, I started noticing something bizarre. Several times a week, I’d see young, apparently healthy people riding their bikes with masks but no helmet. And often, they’d be wearing over-ear headphones to boot.

We all have weird ways of assessing risk that we tend not to be aware of. But the risks associated with willfully muffling your hearing and forgoing a helmet are vastly greater than the (vanishingly low) risks of catching COVID-19 on a bike ride.

Wearing a mask and no helmet on a bike is like wearing a helmet and no mask at an asbestos mitigation site. It’s a weird risk assessment.

People also make weird risk assessments in marketing—especially B2B marketing. In particular, they overestimate the risk of alienating clients by sounding colorful. And they underestimate the opportunity costs of coming across as tooth-achingly boring. Because the world is full of capable, credible, undifferentiated companies. The world is full of reliable but undifferentiated products.

Boring, rhetoric-driven marketing makes my hair fall out.

It makes me want to shave my eyebrows.

It makes me want to sell all my possessions and join a polyamorous, sun-worshipping cult.

I’ve done a lot of soul-searching in the last year and came to a very simple conclusion about my work: I’m at my best when I’m thinking of my job as making people not boring.

Everything else I do falls under this umbrella. Concise language is less boring than verbose language. Vibrant language is un-boring; jargon is boring.

Copywriting shouldn’t be boring, ever.

I take boring personally, like Woodie Harrelson takes zombies personally in Zombieland. I literally think even instruction manuals can and should be reasonably interesting.

That’s why my new motto is “don’t be boring!”

Seriously, I don’t care if you’re in finance, logistics, household products, public relations or any other field. Give people a damn break. Give yourself a break!

Don’t be boring.

You’re gonna die one day, and on that day, you’ll meet your inner child. And they’ll say, “Were you boring?” And you might have to admit that you were.

Or you might say, “I worked in an un-sexy industry, but I celebrated my humanity. I spoke plain English, I had a clear sense of purpose, and occasionally I let out a big belly laugh.”

If you even have a vague suspicion that your brand is boring, it almost certainly is. Fixing it (assuming you do it right) will not only prove profitable, it will make your work more fun!

Don’t be boring.

John Garvey is a copywriter, marketing consultant and StoryBrand Certified Guide, bringing together business impact and belly laughs through story-driven marketing.

Get a free copy of John’s marketing guide, 7-Point Checklist for Websites that Convert, by using this link or texting “Garvington” to 33777. 

Why story-based marketing works

When I was in 3rd grade, I had an experience I should have learned from sooner. It had nothing and everything to do with marketing.

My class had been learning about plant biology—specifically how plants draw water up from their roots into their leaves through transpiration and cohesion. (Yes, I had to look that up.)

To demonstrate this visually as a sort of quasi science experiment, my teacher brought two bundles of white carnations to school, which we’d be dying by adding food dye to the flower vases. You probably remember doing something like that in elementary school.

It was also decided that we’d vote on what color to use, because…America.

Someone piped up first with the idea of making a rainbow bouquet by mixing all the colors together. Naturally, everybody thought this was a great idea.

When I pointed out why this was actually a dumb idea, people said, “You just don’t like the idea because you didn’t come up with it, Johnny.”

I was overwhelmingly outvoted.

Well, you know what happened? The “rainbow” experiment failed; all of the flowers turned brown. That’s what happens when you mix more than two or three colors together. It was very frustrating. And I’ve been a curmudgeon ever since.

In business—and B2B marketing in particular—we know what we bring to the table and we too often talk about it in purely rational or rhetorical terms. Nobody forgets to mention their credentials. We realize that we have to be able to rationalize our pricing.

There are also tangible things that demand our attention day-to-day. We’re wrapped up in the nuts and bolts of running our businesses. So we can fall into a very analytical mindset, and it shows up in our marketing.

You get in your own way a lot by doing this.

As entrepreneurs, we’ve all gotten pushback on our ideas. Some of it was useful, earnest criticism. Some of it revealed blind spots. But some of it was just reactionary: “If it ain’t broken, why fix it?” It’s very frustrating when you can’t convince someone of an idea with obvious merits.

When our marketing is based on rational appeals or marketing rhetoric, we get dumb objections, just like I got dumb objections when I tried to explain basic color theory to my class. The idea of a rainbow bouquet was enticing enough to get them to ignore reason, and I didn’t have a good story to counter it. I had facts.

Rational appeals don’t work well in sales and marketing, just like they didn’t work on my classmates all those years ago. People buy on emotion and rationalize it after the fact. They buy because they feel some sense of shared purpose, warmth, or trust.

Forget about your “what” for a little while. Sure, your credentials, product features, years in business, processes, and “commitment to quality” (or whatever) are all important.

But when your “what” gets in the way of your “why,” you’re missing out on some of the greatest opportunities to differentiate yourself. Your would-be customers end up with an inferior vendor who knew how to communicate more simply, tell a story, and connect on a deeper level.

Story-based marketing works where rhetoric fails because it’s imbued with emotion. Whether they know it or not, humans make decisions on emotion. You do. I do. Your clients do.

I have a lifelong grudge against carnations. I can’t rationalize it away; I can only laugh at it. Don’t be like I was. Learn how to tell a good story that brings your marketing to life.

Or hire someone who will (ahem).

John Garvey is a copywriter, marketing consultant and StoryBrand Certified Guide. Garvey helps purpose-driven entrepreneurs elevate their marketing through storytelling, humor, and clear strategic messaging.

Get a free copy of John’s marketing guide, 7-Point Checklist for Websites that Convert, by using this link or texting “Garvington” to 33777.

Business storytelling blunders to avoid at all costs, part II

Last month I opened a three-part discussion on how to avoid common business storytelling blunders. I usually keep my writing aspirational, but sometimes the most effective way of teaching business storytelling techniques is to highlight common missteps.

After all, a love of stories (which is almost universal in our species) doesn’t always translate to being able to tell them well.

The good news is that this second lesson has some entertainment value.

II. Fatal error II: You’re using “overdog” protagonists

Nobody relates to overdogs—not even other overdogs. As authors Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace state with characteristic elegance in Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World, “When human beings survey their place in the world, they instinctively feel that they’re up against overwhelming forces that stretch from the unpredictability of love to the inevitability of death.”

People want to appear competent and reliable so they tend to emphasize their creds. But aside from being potentially alienating, that does little to distinguish you. On the other hand, if people see you as someone who shares their frustrations and values, it will inoculate you against lower-cost competitors.

Tidal: A case study in bad marketing

“The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.” – Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace, Storynomics

Jay Z invested $56 million and recruited 16 high-profile musicians to acquire and promote Tidal, a musician-owned music streaming platform. With a mission to “get everyone to respect music again,” Tidal would allow musicians to pocket a greater share of music royalties.

Ensuring that artists get a “fair” share of royalties is worthy, if vague. But the narrative seemed to be about ultra-rich musicians rather than music lovers or even aspiring artists. It garnered no sympathy, but worse: it garnered no empathy. While Tidal has stopped reporting (and may have overrepresented) its subscriber numbers, it appears to be treading water, at best.

Nobody gets excited about overdogs, so avoid using them or being one.

Elevate your brand with stories, not “bories”

Revisit your company’s story and ask yourself the following questions:

  • Am I leading with credentials or empathy?
  • Are we trying to cajole people into hiring us by lording experience and expertise over them? Or are we seeking to educate them so they can make informed choices?
  • Do customers see themselves in the stories we tell?

Once you’ve considered these questions earnestly and acted on these insights, you will begin to elevate your story-based marketing.

 John Garvey is a copywriter, marketing consultant and StoryBrand Certified Guide. Garvey helps purpose-driven entrepreneurs elevate their marketing through storytelling, humor, and clear strategic messaging.

Get a free copy of John’s marketing guide, 7-Point Checklist for Websites that Convert, by using this link or texting “Garvington” to 33777.

Should you elevate your marketing with humor or play it safe?

Suspicion creeps into relationships little by little.

My wife started taking a Wednesday evening painting class a few months ago (before the End Times). At first, I was supportive, but every week she left a bit earlier and came home later. Finally, I decided I’d had it. She came home over two hours late one night and I confronted her.

“Sara, is there something I need to know?” I asked. “You have this new group of friends I’ve never met, you’ve been really distracted lately, you duck into the other room to read texts and you come home later every week. What’s been going on?”

“Oh honey,” she said. “I should have let you know. I was on my way to class tonight and an emergency came up at work. I’ve been at the office scrambling to fix someone else’s mistake before a big client meeting in the morning.”

“Oh, so you haven’t been out with your boyfriend?” I replied.

“Of course not!” she said in a tone suggesting what an extraordinarily stupid question it was.

“If I had been with my boyfriend, I would have come home with a smile on my face.”

Ba-dum ching!

While this isn’t the kind of joke you’d tell in a marketing campaign, it has all the elements needed to demonstrate the relationship between humor, persuasion and memory.

Incongruity-resolution theory

I just made your brain do a bunch of work without realizing it. If you “got” the joke, it because your prefrontal cortex kicked into high gear, allowing you to reconcile a preconception with a punchline that defied it. Either I was being neurotic, or my wife was attempting to keep an affair under wraps. A blithe confession would seem off-script. (By the way, this joke was fictitious.)

Scientists call this incongruity-resolution theory.

Our prefrontal cortex interprets and moderates complex social situations, and it sends signals to the nucleus accumbens and the supplementary motor area of the brain, which play their own roles in humor and laughter. The prefrontal cortex jumps into action as soon as we hear someone mention a rabbi and a priest walking into a bar.

Humor tricks your brain into doing all this extra work, but it feels like play.

The ‘guffaw cocktail’

If you’ve ever laughed at a bad joke out of kindness, you intuitively know that laughter is a social signal of acceptance. Here’s why that matters from the standpoint of both trust and memory.

When we laugh, we release oxytocin, which is simplistically referred to as the “trust” hormone or the “cuddling” hormone. Not only does oxytocin boost trust, it improves short-term memory. Even without necessarily needing to elicit laughter, humor releases feel-good neurotransmitters (such as dopamine) that also improve learning retention. If you tell a joke at the beginning of a presentation, or a transition point, it has been shown to improve attentiveness and learning.

Humor is like supplemental oxygen for your brain.

There are obvious caveats to this. It’s just wrong to try to make light of some things, and humor runs contrary to the image you probably want to achieve if you have a luxury brand. Trying to sell an $1,800 pen? Trying to raise awareness about childhood malnutrition? Keep the googly eyes at home.

But appeals to logic are overused and overrated, even in logic-driven industries like logistics and professional services. Although we may think otherwise, we make decisions on emotion and intuition. We only rationalize them after the fact.

Elevate with humor (when you can).

In summary, jokes defy expectations; good jokes delight. Humor involves complex, cognitive processes that make your brain do a bunch of work without you realizing it. And because you did all that work, your brain assigns a high value to the information.