Why fill in an assessment and get nothing out of it?

Customers are increasingly aware of sales and marketing techniques to generate new business leads and are correspondigly reticent to invite unwanted email spam or cold calls while they’re in the fact finding stage of the buying cycle.  This makes prospects reluctant to share their personal details with an organisation they don’t know.  However, there are very good reasons why customers should take a little time to engage with assessments as they provide a key source of value exchange  for both the customer and the company.  They might want your services; you might want them as a new company, but until somebody gives something the relationship can’t move foreward.

What is value exchange and what are the different types? 

Value exchange between clients and companies is one of the most basic concepts of 21st Century marketing. The deal on the table is a straight swap of a customers’ cash, time, or key information for a preferential customer experience.
It makes sense to view value as a trade-off between what a customer stands to receive from the exchange and what a customer is expected to provide your company with. The most effective type of exchange is one that gives the most benefit to your customers in exchange for the smallest amount of data, personal information, or whatever else you are expecting to gain from the exchange.
It’s generally regarded that there are three types of value exchange which benefit both parties as follows:

1. The Cash Exchange

The oldest form of exchange in sales and marketing, quite simply this is an exchange of cash for products or services.

2. The Data Exchange

The exchange of client data for a gift, reward or benefit. This is a highly effective way of facilitating business transactions and continuing customer loyalty and engagement.

3. The Promise Exchange

The customer provides data or feedback through a range of assessment methods such as, online or paper surveys, social media exchanges or apps, in exchange for the promise that their assessment data will help to develop strategies for improved customer service.
We’re going to focus on The Promise Exchange, as in the past, the promise exchange has largely been an afterthought – something it would be valuable for an organisation to obtain, but not essential. However, the promise exchange is becoming increasingly important and is currently one of the major goals in modern selling practices.

So what can The Promise Exchange do for the client and the company?

The promise exchange enables a company to facilitate deeper relationships and develop lasting client engagement. Information harvested during the promise exchange through surveys, feedback assessments and the like instils higher expertise in your staff, using customer intelligence to inform future customer practice, which in turn can help to ensure longevity of client to business relationships.

How can The Promise Exchange be facilitated?

The Promise Exchange isn’t always easy to facilitate, let alone sustain. In order for the exchange to be successful, customers are going to need to shift ingrained perceptions of how companies may use information provided through assessments, and begin to trust that the data they're sharing is going to be used in a manner that will be advantageous to them in the future.
Fortunately, the advent of the web and social media offers innovative new ways to gather and analyse client data – data that may be more valuable than you think  in improving customer to business relationships in the future. What’s more, customers are now much more willing to engage with companies using these methods as opposed to traditional marketing methods such as tele-marketing Consumers have a growing appreciation and understanding of the role they have to play in unlocking higher expertise from companies, and so are more likely to engage than in the past.

And lastly….

If you’re using assessments as a source of lead generation, remember to keep the company’s side of the bargain by delivering on your promise – provide meaningful insight in exchange for their participation, use the information sensitively to tailor your approach to the prospect, adapt and personalise your strategy so the customer knows you have valued the time they took to fill out the assessment, otherwise you risk losing valuable customers before you really get started. The Promise Exchange, like any promise, needs to be kept in order that trust is not broken and longer term relationships can endure.

 

How and What Social Media to Use

Love it or hate it, social media is everywhere. Whether you're travelling, shopping or dining out you're frequently assailed with invitations to 'check in', 'tag friends' or 'post a review'. Regardless of whether you use social media in your personal life or are still firmly resisting the allure of Facebook, using social media to promote and grow your business is essential in the modern business world. But what are the best social media platforms for your particular business? And how do you use modern social media to your advantage?
Before deciding which social media networks you’re going to spend time and resources on you'll need to decide what you want to achieve with social media. These goals should be specific and tied to a business objective. You can get more information about  setting your social media goals in this article from Social Media Examiner. Once you’ve drawn up a list of goals read through the descriptions and examples below and see which network(s) align(s) with your requirements.

Facebook

Best for:

The oldest and probably most famous kid on the block, Facebook still has much to offer. Facebook offers you the chance to build a community around your business, gathering feedback, passing on useful and interesting information and handling complaints. It has an ad platform as well, which you can use to promote your content, such as blog posts, and the products you want to sell. The biggest drawback of Facebook is its lack of organic reach. This means that even if you have built up a large following on the site, very few people will see your posts unless you pay to promote them.

Twitter

Best For:

Twitter is essentially Facebook for those of few words. The platform allows users to send and receive 140-character messages and post links. This brevity is both Twitter’s strength and weakness. It allows you to communicate quickly, but with so many messages flashing past your tweets can get lost in the noise.
It can be hard to promote your company directly on Twitter and many companies opt to use it for branding purposes. The site also has an ad platform, which you can use to promote content or sell products.

Instagram

Best For:

Instagram is an online portfolio of your pictures and short videos. If you have no physical product to sell, or don’t work in a visual medium, Instagram is probably not your best choice. There is some room for text, but don’t expect to be able to post long diatribes advertising your business. Showing, not telling, is the key to Instagram.

Google+ for Business

Best for:

Google+ isn’t the as widely used as many of the social networks, but it does have its uses. Popular among online marketing professionals, so if you’re targeting that demographic, then you’ll find it can be a great place to share content and make connections. You can set up Google+ for your business via the Google My Business page.
Businesses with a physical location may also find Google+ useful as you have a chance of showing up in Google’s local search results. Secondly, it’s a good platform on which to gather reviews.

LinkedIn

Best for:

LinkedIn differs from other social media platforms because its focus is business to business, rather than business to consumer. Companies looking to hire might find it useful to set up a page, and for sole traders such as consultants, the ability to build and maintain connections with past, current and future clients is the main benefit.

How to Combine Inbound and Outbound Marketing

You may recall in a previous post, we considered what outbound marketing was and whether it still worked. Outbound, we concluded, is a traditional form of marketing that largely involves cold calls, email blasts, TV, radio and newspaper advertisements. Although the Digital Age has certainly given way to the rise and rise of inbound marketing (i.e. strategies that draw potential buyers in through the effective creation and distribution of content), there is still a place for outbound marketing methods.
And so, this time, we’re going to be looking at some practical methods to combine inbound and outbound marketing, and how to get these separate disciplines working together to drive results. And we’ll do so by focussing on the strengths of each approach.

Inbound Marketing: The Strengths

The number 1 strength of inbound is in its broad appeal. Inbound marketing involves creating large volumes of content that is designed to garner the attention of many, many people online, who will then start to think about your brand and your business and visit your website.
Another core strength of the inbound approach is that it is non-invasive. Indeed, one of the perceived problems with outbound tactics is that they invariably interrupt people in order to slap them around the face with an unsolicited email, cold call, commercial or printed advertisement. Inbound tactics, by contrast, work like marketing magnets. They involve attracting prospects non-intrusively through the distribution of useful content that has value in its own right.

Outbound Marketing: The Strengths

Whereas inbound is about casting the net far and wide, there are certain outbound marketing tactics that take the targeted approach, and this is highly beneficial. Inbound may very well generate lots of traffic and attention, however not all of this will be relevant. By contrast, outbound tactics like PPC (pay-per-click) advertising and pixel-based retargeting methods (such as the Facebook pixel, for instance) can be used to directly target specific content to specific users who are displaying behaviours which indicate that they’re ready to convert.
Furthermore, if you’ve got some new offers that need mass marketing, want to garner contract renewals or win back old customers, then it is toward these types of outbound tactics that you must look.
And finally, the power that outbound methods have to raise brand awareness should also not be sniffed at. Branded, intrusive advertisements that are designed not to be missed will not be missed and deliver the brand lift you’re after. True, many users will not like having your messages forced upon them in such a way – which indeed is why a combination of outbound and inbound is important.

How to combine Inbound and Outbound marketing

Outbound and inbound marketing tactics both have their strengths, but the true power of them is released when put to work in combination. Indeed, when you get inbound and outbound toiling in tandem you will present a more well-rounded view of your company for your prospects to engage with. So let’s consider a couple of practical ways that you can combine the forces of inbound and outbound to best effect.

Targeting Inbound content with Outbound Tactics

As part of your inbound content strategy, you will of course be producing blogs and infographics and eBooks and videos and lots more besides. Some of these inbound content assets will be of more value to your MoFu (middle of the (sales) funnel) prospects than they will be to your broader ToFu (top of funnel) segment.
The trick, then, is ensuring that the MoFu cohort don’t miss these most valuable pieces. So, through the use of outbound tactics – such as banner advertisements, calls from sales reps, or promotional emails – you can target the people who have shown that they are ready to engage, and then deliver an eBook, infographic or link to a specific blog post directly to these people.
Retargeting pixels are of great benefit in this type of scenario. Let’s say you’re in business selling SaaS (software as a service) subscriptions to video editing software. With a retargeting pixel in place on your website, you can retarget anyone who experiments with your software across other channels on the web. I use this example, indeed, because I see it in action myself. I’ve personally experimented with the free version of Shakr – a video making platform. Since I’ve used the service, when I now visit Facebook, the following message is delivered to my news feed encouraging me to download an eBook:

Clearly, Shakr is using the Facebook pixel to complement its outbound marketing tactics and retarget users like me who have experimented with the platform. However, the eBook is also in circulation as part of Shakr’s inbound campaign – thus, providing us with a brilliant example of inbound and outbound tactics being used in conjunction.

Follow up communications

Another great way to combine outbound and inbound is to simply reach out with targeted communications to those that have engaged with you inbound content.
For example, those users who fill out a form before downloading an eBook or whitepaper can be contacted directly by a sales rep with a follow-up call or email. This way you know exactly who to target, and that they have already shown considerable interest in what you do and will therefore be more ready to buy.

Two sides of the same coin

You can see that inbound and outbound are essentially two sides of the same coin. By utilising the strengths of each you can make them work together to deliver better results. Indeed, a solid marketing strategy will encompass both inbound and outbound tactics and ensure that you’re targeting the right prospects with the right content, whilst simultaneously spreading the net wide with lots of inbound efforts, and creating brand lift through outbound.
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