Apr 25, 2023 | Marketing
This is the fourth article in our ongoing blog series dedicated to helping dance studios understand the five steps of the local customer journey. In this article, we’ll review findability, SEO, and how to ensure your dance studio’s website can get in front of as many people as possible.
The simple truth is that a local customer journey can only begin if your website is found. As such, you must do everything to enhance your findability and search engine optimization. By deploying the right tools and techniques, you can ensure more customers find your website, learn more about your business, and ultimately enroll in your dance studio.
Enhancing Your SEO
These days, most local customer journeys begin with a customer finding a business or a website. As such, you have to maximize the findability of your website.
The basic components of SEO are the same across multiple industries. First, you should conduct keyword research to ensure that you are using the right search terms when someone is looking for your business, and you should incorporate those keywords in the text and metadata of your business. Next, regularly create content on your social media that links back to your website. If possible, seek links from other reputable businesses and directories. Finally, you must ensure your website loads fast and is mobile-friendly; doing so will boost your SEO.
Business Listings
Another key component of local marketing is listing your business in as many relevant profiles and directories as possible. As such, you should complete your Google profile to the maximum extent possible. You should also make sure to keep the profile updated and that you encourage customers to leave reviews. Leaving reviews is not only an excellent form of social proof, but regular and constant reviews make it more likely that search engines will pick up your business presence.
Of course, Google isn’t the only directory you need to pay attention to. There are also other major directories, like Yelp or Trustpilot. You should claim your business listing on these websites. Additionally, there may be local directories you can use. These directories are likely concentrated in your hometown area. Given the local component of these directories, filling them out is likely worth your time. Doing so can enhance your local marketing capability and make it easier for customers to find you.
GPS Listings
GPS listings are tied to the physical location of your dance studio. Filling out these listings will enhance your local findability. It will also ensure mapping programs can easily find your business. Individuals who try to look up directions can click on your location for more information. In addition, keeping your profile up-to-date will make it easier for others to find your business, and it has the ancillary effect of increasing your SEO.
There are many popular GPS listings, with Google Maps being the most popular. Google Maps also integrates with Waze. Other programs include Bing Maps and Mapquest.
Partner With EZTransitions
At EZTransitions, we get it: Marketing for dance studios is hard. We’re here to make it easier. Book a 30-minute call with us today to learn more about how we can help you master local marketing.
Apr 18, 2023 | Marketing
This article is the third in our series about how understanding the key phases of the local customer journey can help your dance studio thrive. This article focuses on how to build your reputation and turn your customers into advocates.
These steps complement each other. After all, you can’t turn customers into advocates unless you create an excellent reputation and service for them to help you sell. Customers are often viewed as more reputable, honest brokers of your brand than advertising, so this is a step you don’t want to skip.
Building Reputation and Advocates
The core building blocks that turn customers into advocates for building a positive brand reputation are the same in every business: You have to crush expectations, immediately remedy any customer service concerns your dancers may have, and ensure your clients are happy. You also have to listen to their concerns and respond appropriately to any challenges.
From there, you can take your most loyal customers and actively encourage them to become your advocates. By creating the right incentives and providing the right encouragement, you can use your customer’s positive experiences to build a positive impression of your brand.
Gaining Actionable Insight and Identifying Advocates
Building your reputation and finding your advocates requires a conscious effort and some in-depth analysis by your marketing team. During this process, you can also determine where your weaknesses are and what you can do to address potential customer landmines. Try these three tools to get started:
Surveys
Surveys are a great way to find what your customers think about you. You can give quick surveys via a QR code that leads to your website, enabling you to hear what your customers think of your business. Surveys should be brief and focused, so you get actionable data. Surveys can also be excellent marketing tools, since they show your customers that you value their opinion and want to improve.
Online Reviews and Social Proof
Customer reviews are hugely important: Customers are much more likely to give you their business if they see overwhelmingly positive reviews on a network like Google, Yelp, or Trustpilot. Conversely, if you have consistently bad Google reviews, you are much more likely to lose a customer’s business.
Why? Customer reviews are important forms of social proof. The idea behind social proof is that customers are more likely to have a positive impression of your business if they read about others having a good experience. Even better, one positive review is likely to influence the next reviewer.
You should therefore work to amplify positive Google reviews. You can do this in a few ways. First, ask your customers to leave good reviews. You can put reminders in emails to clients, lesson invoices, or any materials your dancers take home. Then post those positive reviews on your social media by sharing them directly and/or making them into attractive graphics. You can also link to review sites on your website, enabling customers to leave reviews easily. Finally, you should always respond to reviews — positive or negative — to show that you value your customer’s opinions.
World of Mouth / Referrals
You can turn your customers into active advocates by getting them to recommend your studio to others. The first step is simply to ask them to recommend you to their network. From there, reward those customers with a discount or other social proof showing you truly value these referrals. This incentive makes it more likely that other customers will make more referrals, creating a positive cycle.
Ready for the Next Steps?
At EZTransition, we want to help your dance studio expand its business, and we’re here to help you improve your local customer journey. Call today to book a 30-minute call.
Mar 28, 2023 | Marketing
Advocacy is the final stage of the local customer journey and one of the most important. This is the stage where you focus on building loyal, repeat customers. These individuals have already become paying customers and are pleased with your goods or services. Now is the time to transform these repeat customers into advocates for your company.
Why is Customer Advocacy Important?
Developing customer advocates is not only important, but it’s also critical to future business success.
Repeat Purchases
As a small business owner, you know how important each sale is. You also know how long it can take to convert a potential customer into a purchasing one. Loyal customers don’t typically require the same time commitment. They often make repeat purchases with little to no coaxing. They are the first to attend sales events and participate in special promotions.
Recommend to Other
Customer advocates are also more likely to recommend your store to others, leave positive reviews and engage in social media. These factors are so important. According to a Nielsen study, 80% of Americans seek recommendations from their family, friends, and peers before purchasing. Without loyal customers to provide these recommendations and boost your store’s reputation, you risk losing out on these sales.
Boost Sales
If you’re looking for long-term success, your business cannot afford to overlook the power of customer loyalty. Between their repeat purchases and bringing in new customers, your most loyal customers have the potential to impact the success of your business significantly. One study reveals that your business could receive up to a 200% increase in revenue business growth with just a 12% increase in customer advocacy.
How to Develop Customer Advocates?
Now that you understand customer advocacy’s importance, you can build a strategy to develop customer advocates for your business.
Encouraging Repeat Purchases
Don’t take your most loyal customers for granted. Sure, they may not need as much coaxing to make a purchase, but they still need tending. These customers should be the first to know about upcoming promotions and sales events. You can direct them to these special offers and new products and services when they visit the store. If they’re shopping online, marketing tools, such as automated messages or special promotions at checkout, can help.
You can also encourage your most loyal customers to provide online business reviews on sites such as Google, Facebook, and Yelp. These reviews can serve as a promotion for your business and reach a larger audience.
Offering Customer Loyalty Rewards
Customer loyalty programs are among the best sales tools for building customer advocates. Not only do these programs give you a chance to thank your customers for their loyalty, but they can make your customers feel special and appreciated. There are many types of customer loyalty programs, including points-based, punch card, tier-based, and cashback. It’s recommended to choose a reward program that offers the best business alignment.
Providing Exceptional Customer Service
Your customer advocates are crucial to your business’s ongoing success, and you should treat them as such. Consider offering a special customer service number to your most loyal customers to ensure you handle any issue promptly. You also want to consider noting these customers’ premium status in your CRM platform to ensure they always receive exceptional customer care.
Our EZtransition’s all-in-one marketing platform can help you engage with customers, foster these relationships and convert your most loyal customers into lifelong advocates.
Book a 30-minute call to discuss our fully integrated platform, designed with robust customer features to guide you to follow up with your leads throughout your business’s local customer journey.
Mar 21, 2023 | Marketing
This article is our fifth in a series that seeks to help educate you, a small business owner, in the local customer journey. This journey refers to a five-phase cycle that explains how a customer goes from being aware of your business to making purchases and serving as an ambassador for your brand.
Converting a prospect from considering doing business with you to paying for your products or services is critical. Indeed, it is arguably one of the most critical transitions a customer can make. Fortunately, your business can reduce friction and convert prospects with the right marketing tools.
What Is Conversion?
Conversion is the fourth of the five-phase business cycle. A proper understanding of conversion and how to achieve it will help you develop the business growth you need.
In this instance, conversion refers to turning a prospect into a sale. This means ensuring that the customers follow the appropriate steps to go to your website and pay for a product or service.
How Can You Increase Conversions?
Increasing conversions on your website or for your business isn’t a matter of snapping your fingers. It requires intensive planning and acquiring appropriate sales tools to convert customers appropriately.
Some specific methods you can use include:
- Creating a seamless website design will give your customers the easiest and most frictionless digital experience possible. Customers should be able to find products and services easily. From there, they should be able to do so in a simple manner that still exposes them to additional products or services they may want.
- Retargeting marketing efforts that enable a business to get a user back to their website.
- Appropriately calibrating marketing messages and calls to action that make it clear and easy for your customers to follow through.
- Creating an active social media presence. Your social media content should create evergreen content that can attract the right customer to your website.
What Sales Tools Do You Need to Increase Conversions?
All of the above techniques require data and technology.
On the one hand, you must have the appropriate data. You must know who your customers are and what they are looking for. It would help if you also understood where they spend their time and what messages they respond to best. Since discussing conversions, you must know what website design works best for them. This information will ensure that you optimize your website appropriately.
Furthermore, you need the right technology that makes it easy to obtain this information to apply what you discover. Having data at your fingertips won’t do you any good if you aren’t sure how to act on it. For example, you may know who your ideal customer is. Do you then know what content they are looking for, what website design suits them best, and what information you can collect to maximize your chance of selling to them again?
More often than not, you can boost sales by using the right tools. This information should allow you to track customers through their local business journey and ensure that you are targeting them appropriately. Ready to get started?
Book a 30-minute call today, and learn how our all-in-one marketing platform can increase conversions and ensure you can appropriately achieve business alignment along all five phases of a customer’s sales journey.
Image credits: By Austin Distel on Unsplash
Mar 14, 2023 | Marketing
This article is the fourth in our series dedicated to ensuring your business understands the local customer journey. Reading all articles in this series, you can develop a healthy understanding of the local customer journey, how it impacts the marketing tools you purchase, and how to maximize the customer cycle to achieve business alignment.
Specifically, this article will discuss the reputation stage of the customer journey. This third stage focuses on your online image.
What Is Reputation?
In this context, online reputation refers to what customers think of your business and how they discuss it online.
Imagine the following scenario: A customer who knows your business exists, is looking for your products or services, and finds you online. If they use many search engines, like Google or Yelp, they’ll see reviews of your business. If they see a slew of five-star reviews, they will likely do business with you.
As such, you must understand that reviews are critical to a customer’s sales journey. You must do whatever you can to ensure satisfied customers leave good reviews.
How Can You Increase Your Reputation Among Customers?
Online reviews and reputation are among the best sales tools you can have. When used properly, online reviews can boost sales and convince more customers to do business with you. As such, you should engage in the following behaviors.
Actively Solicit Reviews
Every business should engage in a series of steps to get them more five-star reviews. Examples of specific tactics include reaching out to prospective reviewers before they review a website, having them contact you before making a post, and ensuring that these reviews are easily publicized. If you have satisfied customers, you should ask them to leave positive reviews.
Respond to Reviews – Positive or Negative
By responding to reviews, you can incentivize people to leave good ones while also addressing any concerns brought up by negative ones. Responding to reviews is almost always good: It shows customers you value their opinions and care about their satisfaction.
Monitor for Reviews
Monitoring for reviews is critical. After all, there are many websites — including Google, Yelp, Facebook, and more — where customers can leave reviews. Your challenge will be to track this information, which can be impossible without the right technology.
What Tools Do You Need to Increase Reputation?
Increasing your reputation is all about using the right tools and understanding where your customers spend their time. First, you need to ensure you have the following:
- The right technological tools — so you can track customer sentiment and determine what customers are saying about you
- A formal process in which you respond to reviews and address any concerns mentioned
- Appropriate business incentives for individuals who leave positive reviews
- A process in which you encourage individuals to leave reviews
As you can see, increasing your online reputation is not just about asking nicely. It involves creating multiple business processes and using the right tech tools to track customers’ opinions. At EZtransition, we can help build a formal process that enables you to engage in this process. Book a 30-minute call today and learn how our all-in-one marketing platform can help you respond to customer reviews, seek positive reviews, and achieve business growth.
