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5 ways to capture customer insights

When I first visit with a new client the first thing I ask is, "Do you talk with your customers?"  I am often surprised to hear that many don't.  This is one of the first check points or pulses in marketing  as this insight is pivotal to how you can strategically manage your business. This feedback shapes everything and so here are 5 ways to capture customer insights.

1. Ring your customers for a chat. Every one likes to be made feel valued and so to ringing your customers and asking them how everything is going and if there is anything they need or you can do to improve your service is a no brainer. Most small businesses don't do it. Make a time in your diary for every month to call at least 5 customers and ask them these questions. You will find the answers shape your business and open up opportunities.

2. Have a database. This is a crucial investment. Once central place to collect information about your customers. The more  you know about them the more you can tailor your services to their individual needs.  There are lots of great CRM products out there to hold your customer information but a simple excel sheet with their details, name, phone number, email address and what they have bought from you is a good start. You can then begin to segment your customers based on different criteria, how much they buy from you, $ value, products or services they buy. This information can then be useful when you start talking with your customers using other social medias including, blogs, newsletters, or lead generation campaigns.

3. Ask your staff for customer insight.I was chatting about this the other day with a client and we decided to put a big whiteboard in the middle of the open office space with Happy Customers, Upset Customers and then people could come and write down what they were hearing and seeing. This gave the CEO much greater visibility to customers and gave the staff some ownership over the customer satisfaction of their clients. So set up some forum where staff can discuss customer issues, good and bad.

4. Do some research. Research these days can be very quick to do and economical. There are a lot of free survey tools that allow you to create surveys quickly ie surveymonkey. When you need to test and idea, get some feedback then perhaps try a survey to your existing cliental. Very quickly you can get a feeling whether you are on the right track and as long as the survey is not too long, they can feel good that they were consulted.

5. Invite customers to your planning and brainstorming sessions. It is sometimes worthwhile to have a customer or a a customer advocate like a marketing consultant involved in your planning sessions for the business to ensure that the customer remains central to the focus of your buisness. This holds the business accountable and by having an actual voice at these forums ensures that the customer is really represented. Other option is to hold a focus group just with your customers around an important decision that you are going to make with the business, to test the concept or pilot it before you commit to it.

So there you go, 5 simple but effective ways to talk with your customers. Get started today, and let me know what you uncover...

10 tips on how do we get qualified traffic to our website or blog or other social media

May 3, 2009
Tips from Ty Downing.

1. Good content - original content. Authoritative content. Your ideas, your words, your audience. No matter where you are writing this, website, blogs, e-zines, ads, social media (twitter, facebook, Linkedin). All of these are getting index and crawled by search engines.



2. Don’t copy. Check this on www.copyscape.com. If you do Google will abandon your site and you will rank lower.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/wordpress/dCcq
3. For every 100 words you would use your key word or phrase. Google looks for these things and will list you on the search engine. This helps promote your ranking within the engine.



4. Images - tag them. Put a key word phase in this Alt tag under the image. So the key word would be on topic. This also helps search engine rank your content higher in their list.



5. Blog is a potential source of referral for your other communication methods. Search engines loves fresh content. So a blog is a great idea. Within your post link back to your main website. So you can cross market and you can anchor this link into both of your sites and that stream helps you get greater visability on the search engines. You can benefit from your hyperlinks not just others.

6. Track what is working with Googleanalytics and run it on each page. Then you can tweek things in real time. See if your conversion pages are working. Are people bouncing off your page immediately. Bounce rate: land on a page and then how long it takes them to leave. If your bounce rate is high then you are ranked lower in google search engine. So measure and review. Average bounce rate is 40%.



7. Track key words. SEObook is a free tool that allows you to do this. Word tracker - paid service. $59 key words in your content. Another one is googlesktool

8. Title tags and meta tags. Title tag is the title words at the top of you site. These should keep to your key message (70 characters). This is the most important text on your page as this is what the search engine uses first. Meta tag -(160 characters - your positioning or description). This should be done on each page for the best indexing and thus finding by search engines.



9. Backlink - this is a website is linking to you. You can return the favour by doing some outbound links. Backlicks - the more you get the higher up you go in the search engine crawler and ranks you higher.



10. Need a consistent home page address. Keep it consistently represented, one version of your key page. You can fix this by visiting Ty blogsite. This effects your search engine ranking.

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