There are many facets to running a successful event including preparation of content, scheduling speakers, venue hire & setup, agenda creation, coordinating sponsors, organising catering, promotion, ticketing, and registration. Within each facet, there are numerous tasks required to make things run smoothly on the day, and many of which often require different skill sets to complete. The sheer volume of varied tasks required can be quite daunting, and often scares many small businesses off the idea of hosting their own events. But events are one of the best sales tools you have at your disposal, so what should you do?

One option is to outsource as much as you can to organisations that do this all day every day. However, it is rare that you will be able to outsource the entire thing. For example, you might leverage an event management company for components related to running the event on the day, which includes things like room setup, registration & catering. In my experience, those organisations don't typically get involved with the initial promotion of the event by marketing to your existing customer base and engaging new prospects via social media; those sorts of activities might be done in house or outsourced to a separate marketing agency. Likewise, creating content as well as coordinating speakers & sponsors are other areas that often require a different set of resources that are usually found inside your own organisation. In addition to the project management required to coordinate the multitude of outsourced providers involved, another factor to consider is the cost of outsourcing - it can add up, especially if you plan on running multiple events. So how do you find the balance of not biting off more than you can chew, but also keeping costs down?

This is where technology comes to the rescue... 

Customer Consulting Group recommends for clients to leverage an event management software application called Zoho Backstage. It helps you create memorable experiences with everything you need to succeed including website building, ticketing, event promotion, attendee registration, and more. It makes many of the tasks associated with planning an event simple. So simple that you might think twice about outsourcing elements of the overall event. You can still leverage external help where required but having a centralised point where everyone collaborates gives you a much greater chance of avoiding those unexpected mishaps. Below is a short video that gives a high-level overview of the capabilities, and we are always here to help you learn more about how you can leverage tools like this to Find More Customers and Nurture the ones you already have.

Despite the rise in social media offering more ways to communicate with your target market than ever before, email marketing still should play an important role in a marketing strategy to Find More Customers and Nurture the ones you already have. 

Email is considered a primary method of communication and that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. According to The Email Statistics Report, 2018-2022 that The Radicati Group produced, "In 2018, the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 281 billion and is forecast to grow to over 333 billion by year-end 2022." 

As I mentioned in my blog post "Keep your website visitors coming back", email marketing allows you to provide a personalised message that will generally remain accessible for the intended recipient to view well after you initially sent it, which is really important for those people that are just too busy to keep on top of everything all the time (which happens to be most people). Social Media on the other hand is somewhat reliant on a bit of luck from a timing perspective that the person happens to be scrolling through their news feed not too long after your post, unless of course they are actively searching for your company or something that you have mentioned in your post.

There are a lot of email marketing tools out there these days, and a large portion of business are now using them, however, I am often surprised at the effort marketers regularly go through to get the recipients into the tool, get leads from the campaign out to sales people and deliver meaningful reports to management. This usually entails a lot of manually importing and exporting data as well as manual intervention for lead distribution, and a whole lot of assumptions being made related to to the correlation of an initial marketing campaign in a closed deal, which often results in a disjointed relationship between sales and marketing.

At Customer Consulting Group we implement email marketing tools that are integrated with your CRM. This removed the need to manually import and export data, and the analytics to show if the email has been delivered, opened are displayed right within the contact or lead record in your CRM along with information to let you know if they clicked on a link within the email. In addition, lead distribution can be automated and once the deal is done, the email marketing campaign can be easily associated with the opportunity to give you a far more accurate Return on Marking Investment (ROMI).

Attracting repeat visitors on your website should be a key part of your strategy to find more customers. This way you can keep people up to date with your latest news as well as present prospects with multiple opportunities to engage and become a customer. 

One attraction method is to create a blog that inspires people to return regularly and review the latest posts; Another is posting on social media with links to pages on your site where they can learn more; similarly, you could leverage a slightly more traditional method of email marketing also with links to pages on your site. 

Posting on social media often delivers great results, however, it is somewhat reliant on a bit of luck from a timing perspective. If your subscribers become busy shortly before you make a post, and don't happen to catch up on their social feeds for a day or so, the likelihood of them seeing your post is pretty slim, unless they are actively searching for your content. Also, the public nature of both social media posts and blogs mean that the messaging can't usually be personalised for a specific individual. Email marketing on the other hand, allows you to provide a personalised message and will generally remain accessible for the intended recipient to view later even if they have been busy for weeks. However, to send someone an email, you firstly must capture their email address, and consent to market them. 

Common ways of capturing email addresses include allowing visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, as well as completing a "Contact Us" form on your website. You could also promote additional content, such as a white paper, that is only provided to people that complete and submit an online form. 

A lot of the time these web forms provide a structured format for the visitor to enter their information, however, when the form is submitted, it is transferred through as text within an e-mail. This means that someone then must manually extract the information and put into a marketing database, spreadsheet or CRM tool before it can be used effectively. This is not only inefficient, but also leaves room for error.

At Customer Consulting Group we help clients improve the process of capturing data from their website visitors by implementing Zoho Forms. Zoho Forms not only stores the data in a structured way for improved retrieval and reporting but also integrates with other applications such as Zoho CRM and Salesforce.com to increase productivity even further. In addition, the rules engine, wide range of field types and multi-page structure enable businesses to build sophisticated yet easy to use forms that allow you to capture even more data about your visitors which in turn will enable you to provide a more personalised customer experience. 

An increasingly large percentage of Australians are using Social Media platforms on a regular basis. According to socialmedianews.com.au Australia now has approximately 15,000,000 active Facebookusers, 9,000,000 active Instagram users, 4,700,000 active Twitter users and 4,500,000 active LinkedIn users, not to mention the multitude of other social media platforms that are used every day. This presents businesses with a huge opportunity to get in front of their target audience by implementing a social media strategy, but where do you start?

First thing is to understand that there is no "right way" to leverage social media as such. There are certainly ways that have more success than others, however the specifics will vary based on the goods and services you are offering, your target market, and your desired outcome. In other words, a company that is wanting to expand their customer demographic to include young adults by selling tickets to an event would have quite a different strategy to that of a company that is wanting to offer advice to their retiree clientele on ways to make the most of their existing investment. Sometimes developing the strategy can be quite daunting, especially for those that aren't avid social media users themselves. As such, if you need help in developing your strategic plan, Customer Consulting Group recommend taking a look at the events and services that KerwinRae provide. 

One factor that is common in a lot of successful social media strategies is to redirect traffic from the social media platform to somewhere that they can find more information and ultimately capture their contact details, so you can in turn communicate directly with them via email. A website is generally the best place to do that because, as I mentioned in my blog post about the importance of having a website, you have far greater control over the overall user experience on your own website, and can have specific landing pages with forms that capture specific details that will help you sell or service the enquirer.

Customer Consulting Group help businesses implement their social media strategies by leveraging tools such as Zoho Social and Microsoft Social Engagement that allow you to manage your social media accounts in one place, engage with your prospects and customers, as well as monitor keywords across public posts in multiple social media platforms. Below are some videos that give a high-level overview of some of the capabilities of these tools

There are a lot of similarities that can be drawn between a buyer's journey on a website, and in a physical place of business, however, most businesses don't treat them the same way.

Imagine if you were walking down the street to buy something you were really excited about, but when you got to the shop, you found it was old and run down, or there wasn't anyone available in the store to help you with your purchase, or the people in the store were so hard to understand that end up with more questions than answers. How would you feel? Would you think twice about buying from them? 

Now think about what you would do if there was store right next door that sells the same product. Would you go in there and see what they have to offer?

Similar experiences happen every day on the web where people search for a product and are presented with a list of places that they can buy it from. This list is just like a whole bunch of shops sitting next door to one another.

After deciding which website (store) to enter, unfortunately, far too often the website that they visit are old and run down, not optimised for mobile devices, don't have enough information, have too many acronyms and technical language, are difficult to navigate, and/or don't offer individualised help via live chat. Luckily, the visitor usually has ample choice and therefore simply pushes back on their browser and moves on to the next website. The question is, does your website offer the right experience to either keep visitors there, or to engage with them in some other meaningful way before they move on to one of your competitor's website?

If the answer is no, then it's probably worthwhile investigating what you can do about your website to help improve it, but where do you start?

Sometimes the answer is obvious, your website hasn't been updated in many years and just needs a refresh of content, some new imagery, or maybe introducing some new functionality on your website such as Live Chat. But other times you really don't know what it is that is going to help you. You might have done a recent revamp of your website, but you still haven't seen the increase in conversion you were hoping for. This could be due to the way the site is structurally laid out with important content being put too far down on a page or hidden within a complex menu structure. It could also be that the specific choice of words used to encourage people to take actions isn't hitting the mark.

In a physical place of business, you can sit back and watch how the people flow through your store, which shelves do they typically look at first and if they pick up something extra based on its proximity to another product or the point of sale? In the wonderful worldwide web people can interact with you from anywhere in the world, but you typically wouldn't get the same level of insight into their specific experience with your site. A large portion of businesses utilise tools like Google Analytics to determine how visitors came across your site along with the subsequent page visits and how long they spend on each page. However, most of those tools don't tell you what the visitor didn't see...

Customer Consulting Group help customers get valuable insights into their website visitors experience by leveraging Zoho PageSense. It allows us to determine how far your visitors are scrolling down each page on your website, and how often they are clicking on specific areas. But not only that, it allows you to create alternate versions of pages to test if changing the content and/or layout help increase conversions by running A/B testing. The below video gives a quick high-level overview of how this works.

Having a successful campaign that drives traffic to your website is only one part of the customer journey. You now have what a lot of people think is one of the most difficult tasks ahead of you... Converting someone from initial discovery into active consideration.

Traditionally companies have utilised tactics such as banners, pop up windows and special offers, to entice buyers to progress through the buying journey, however, as buyers become more educated, and the market diversifies, buyers often seek more information to help them make their decision. FAQ's can service this to a degree; however, there are only so many questions and answers that you can think of in advance. And buyers in general are under more and more pressure to get the answers they seek as quickly as possible, so they don't want to be searching through a whole heap of text to try and piece the answer they seek together. Ideally they want to ask a question and be given a specific answer. "Well they can always pick up the phone" you might say, and yes that is true, however, people are becoming less and less inclined to do so, especially if it's just a quick question.

This is where a live chat facility on your website can help. 

In essence, as people are navigating through your website, they are presented with an option to connect directly with someone that can answer their question immediately via a chat window.

This sort of service not only pleases your website visitor, because they are able to get the answers they seek in a shorter period of time; but, it is also a cost effective way for you to service your customers.

If a customer calls you, each person in your business that answers that phone call can only service one customer at a time. On the other hand, an experienced agent can typically service 2 or 3 people at a time with relatively fast accurate responses through live chat. In addition, with capabilities such as automated language translation, agents can service people from all over the world!!

Customer Consulting Group help customers setup this capability on their websites utilising a tool called Zoho Sales IQ. And guess what? They actually have a version of this that is completely FREE!!

Watch the below video of a happy Zoho Sales IQ customer to learn about some of the benefits that they have experienced by using the platform.

These days having an online presence means different things to different people. To some, it's having a Facebook page, for others it's selling products on eBay, and others is having a listing in an online directory such as yellowpages.com.au. All will help customers find you, but I feel that all of this choice has meant many businesses are forgetting about the basics, a website.... 

Recent studies conducted by Telstra suggest that only 50% of small businesses have a website. However 62% of customers will stop considering a business if they can't find information about it online... And where do most people go to find a business first? That's right Google or Bing.... Both of which are optimised to show websites over social media pages, online directories and generic online selling platforms. So if you don't have a website, you are missing an opportunity to be found! 

It's also worth keeping in mind, that you have a lot more control over the experience you provide to your visitors on your own website.

It doesn't have to be complex and cost and arm and a leg. It can be as simple as a one page informational website that informs visitors about what you do, where you are located and how to contact you.

Customer Consulting Group offer a range of tools and services to help you build your online presence. Contact us to discuss how we might be able to help you Find More Customers!

CRM is a term that many sales and marketing managers use, but what is it? How can it benefit you? And what benefits can it help solve? This 6 minute video will explain.