This article will be the third in our series dedicated to ensuring your business understands the local customer journey and develops comprehensive knowledge of how that customer journey will impact customer experience. Specifically, this article will discuss the findability stage of the customer journey. This second stage focuses on ensuring customers can find your business when looking for it.
Findability is the second of the two stages in a local customer journey. This five-step cycle determines your customer’s awareness of your business and how likely they are to use your products.
In the findability stage, a customer is aware of your business, although not necessarily ready to start giving you their hard-earned money. However, they may be looking for you and doing this both in person and online. If a customer can’t find you when they are looking for your business — or even if they are looking for a local business in your industry — they will ultimately be unable to buy your products. You increase the odds of earning their money by making it easy for a customer to find you. In the long run, doing so will boost sales.
How Can You Increase Customer Findability?
To increase your findability, you must ensure business alignment over various areas of a customer’s sales journey. To achieve this alignment, you need the right marketing tools and sales tools.
Findability usually (but not always) refers to customers finding you online. Perhaps nothing is more important to your findability than increasing your search engine optimization. Increasing your SEO means your website has to be appropriately tagged with the correct keywords and metadata. This allows search engines to find your website.
Local business listings are a critical aspect of the findability stage of the local customer journey for several reasons. Firstly, they provide customers with a comprehensive and up-to-date directory of businesses in their local area, making finding what they are looking for easier. By having a presence on local business listing platforms, businesses can ensure they are visible to potential customers searching for products or services they offer. Secondly, local business listings help improve the accuracy and consistency of a business’s online information, boosting its visibility in search engine results pages. Finally, local business listings also offer customers valuable information such as business hours, contact information, reviews, and ratings, enabling them to decide which businesses to engage with.
However, SEO is about so much more than the right pieces of information. It also refers to ensuring your content is fresh, constantly updated, and geared toward customers looking for you. These days, local search has become much more important for business growth. Individuals are much more likely to find search results based on their area. You must ensure a local audience can find your website with the right content. Local search also makes it easy for customers to find your contact information.
What Do You Need to Increase Findability?
Increasing findability is all about using the right tools and expertise. As such, you need to ensure you have the following:
Robust knowledge of who buys your products and services. You must know what your ideal customer looks like, what messages they respond to, and what social networks they spend their time on.
An understanding of optimizing your SEO so these customers can find you.
Appropriately targeted social media content on the networks where your ideal customer will spend most of their time.
As you can see, increasing findability is about much more than having the right technology. You also have to build the right knowledge base about who your customer is, where you can find them, and where they can find you. So, are you ready to learn how to maximize your business’s findability and learn more about how it impacts your local customer?
Book a 30-minute call today and learn how our all-in-one marketing platform can help increase your findability. In so doing, you can learn more about how customers can move from awareness to findability and become regular customers and brand ambassadors for your business.
This post is the second in our series dedicated to ensuring that your business fully understands the local customer journey and develops comprehensive knowledge of the five phases of a customer experience. This article will focus on the importance of the awareness stage, the first stage in the local customer journey.
Awareness is the first phase of your local customer journey that will lead to business growth. This journey refers to the experience of all customers as they transition from being completely unaware of your business to becoming its most prominent advocates.
In the awareness phase, a customer knows who you are and what products or services you sell. This awareness means the customer understands the most basic information about your business. This information may include what you do and where you are located. With the right information, customers are more likely to move further along their local customer journey with your business.
How Can You Increase Customer Awareness?
Once upon a time, building awareness was a matter of having a big billboard on your local main street. This broad-based ad, combined with other paid advertising efforts in a local newspaper, used to be enough to give a customer an idea of who you were and what you do.
Of course, those days are long gone. New tools, including targeted advertising, Google ads, and online reviews, are all critical to increasing awareness and will allow you to boost sales. Increasing awareness generally relies on at least two specific marketing tactics, including the following.
Establishing a Strong Online Presence
An online presence means you have a powerful website that uses appropriate SEO strategies and can connect with your customers where they are. It also means you have marketing tools to create a robust social media presence. You create value-added and useful content for the right markets, enhancing your business’s awareness among relevant and appropriately targeted customers.
Using Targeted Marketing
You don’t want to advertise to customers who aren’t likely to do business with you. Instead, you want to market to customers who are most likely to buy your products. As such, you use targeted marketing, potentially taking advantage of extremely targeted SEO opportunities or paid ads on social media platforms. For example, you may purchase Google Ads for individuals searching for your product or service if an individual is in your service area. You’d also look at buying Facebook ads for people who have been to your website.
What Do You Need to Build Awareness?
Every business is on a limited budget. Managing resource constraints means ensuring you get the most “bang for your buck” when engaging in a general awareness campaign. As such, you need to consider the following:
What sales tools do you invest in, and how do they operate with your other marketing platforms? You must ensure that your tools will easily integrate with your existing operations.
How are your marketing, sales, and financial planning efforts aligned? Have you achieved business alignment in these areas?
Do you have a consistent idea of who your customers are, where they spend their time, and what messages they respond best to?
Are you ready to learn how to maximize your business’s customer experience and build more awareness among your customers? Book a 30-minute call today to learn how our fully integrated, all-in-one marketing platform can help increase your business and ensure that more customers know who you are as they start their sales journey with you.
This article will be the first in a series dedicated to ensuring that your business fully understands the local customer journey and develops comprehensive knowledge of the five phases of a customer experience. Understanding how awareness, findability, reputation, conversion, and advocacy can impact your business — and how to get customers through all five steps of this journey — is critical to your long-term success.
What Are the Five Phases of a Local Customer Journey?
In a way, this is the hardest part of doing business. With so many demands on your customer’s time and attention, awareness simply means that a customer is aware of your business and may have some knowledge about what you do and how your services can impact them. Building awareness requires an appropriately calibrated marketing strategy that accurately targets potential customers.
Findability
Anyone looking for your business — including your social media, phone number, or website — should be able to find it. Appropriate findability demands that your website has appropriate SEO tools and that your other online content is easy to discover.
Reputation
In this phase, a customer is aware of your business but wants to know the experiences of others. As such, they will check out online reviews or ask their friends about what kind of service you were able to provide.
Conversion
A customer knows who you are and what you do. Thanks to the reputation you have built, they have faith in your ability to get the job done. As a result, they are now ready to move from a prospect or lead to a sale.
Advocacy
Your customers are the best advocates for your brand. In this phase, customers encourage others to use your business. As such, customers leave positive reviews and tell their friends about the benefits of your products or services.
If a customer hits the advocacy phase, you should respond to these efforts and reward them. Doing so may mean something as simple as thanking a customer for their positive review or going out of your way to financially reward customers who do what they can to help your business grow. Even a small gift card can go a long way to encouraging a business advocate.
Why Does This Approach Matter?
There is no question that every business has a different approach and uses marketing tools throughout these five phases. However, achieving business alignment with these five phases can be vital to your business’s success. This means you ensure that all marketing and sales tools are aligned with these five steps to boost sales and enhance business growth.
How does this specifically impact your business and the tools you use? Consider the following:
Different tactics require different sales tools and technological platforms. If you have the appropriate sales tools at your disposal, you’ll be able to connect with customers at different phases, meet them where they are, and ensure that you are approaching them the right way.
Advanced online tools allow you to target customers based on their current position in their local customer journey. However, you must have the right technology to match the tactics to the customer.
You can use this approach to detect marketing problems. For example, if you can’t convert customers once you have built a solid reputation, you may discover something wrong with your brand. This information can better inform your advertising and marketing efforts.
Are you ready to learn how to maximize your business’s local customer journey? Book a 30-minute call today to learn how our fully integrated, all-in-one marketing platform can help advance your business and improve your customer experience and sales journey.
As we continue our series of articles about online reputation management for businesses, in this sixth article, we will explain how to track, analyze and take action based on review sentiments over time. Our first post explained why small businesses need online reputation management more than ever in 2022, while the second piece reveals the trick to earning more internet reviews. The third post discussed how to achieve more 5-star ratings for your business, and the fourth one explained how to respond to Google reviews in a short time. The fifth article highlights ways to amplify the best google reviews and enable them to appear everywhere.
Online reputation management and marketing for small businesses play a significant role in ensuring the success of a business. Basically, it involves tracking and analyzing your customers’ sentiments. Afterward, you have to take action based on those reviews to improve your customer experience.
Read on to learn more about tracking, analyzing, and taking action based on online reputation management principles and reviewing sentiment over time when marketing for child activity centers.
What is Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is an automated procedure that helps analyze texts and interpret their feelings. It uses algorithms and machine learning technology to classify statements into negative, positive, and neutral categories.
Often, this process is used by businesses and brands as a social media monitoring strategy to handle massive volumes of data and obtain consumer insights. This way, you can understand more about consumers’ attitudes towards your business and what your competitors are doing.
How Sentiment Analysis Works
Sentiment analysis tools work in three important steps:
Gather and prepare Data
The first step in sentiment analysis and online reputation management is gathering data from customer feedback or review rating sites. After collecting the data, you need to convert it into an XLS or CSV format.
Use the Review Sentiment Analysis API
Take your input data and run it through the sentiment analytics API. It will instantly produce sentiment ratings ranging from negative one ( -1) to zero (0) and positive one (1). A negative one represents negative sentiments, while zero shows neutral sentiments. Finally, a positive one represents positive sentiment.
Sentiment Analysis Dashboard
After getting the sentiment scores, you can choose to transform them into visual reports using data visualization tools such as Tableau. These presentations contain tables, graphs, and charts that can help you identify the patterns and trends in your market.
How to Make Positive Changes in Your Business Based on Real Data
Real data can help you in marketing for small businesses and make positive changes, as discussed below.
Know Your Customer
All customers are unique, and each of them has specific needs. Reputation management Atlanta requires you to use real-time data to identify your customers and know what they want easily. This way, you can attend to your customers’ needs, allowing them to remain loyal to your business.
Promote Different Products Depending on Insights
If your business deals with different products, it is essential to tailor a marketing strategy that suits each product depending on insights. As a result, you can easily connect with your audience and attract more customers.
Easily Identify What is Working or What is Not
Marketing agency Atlanta professionals are not perfect. There are times when they may use campaigns that are not effective. Using real data, they can identify the strategies that are working and those that are not, allowing them to make adjustments.
Importance of Analyzing Repetitive Reviews Keywords
When analyzing reviews, you need to analyze repetitive keywords. Analyzing these keywords helps you to know what your customers want. These keywords can also help you better understand what you are doing to improve further and retain your customers. Finally, these keywords can also help you develop effective marketing campaigns and boost your business.
If you are looking for a marketing agency in Atlanta, contact EZtransition. Our company specializes in reputation management in Atlanta, enabling you to attract more customers. Additionally, our company offers marketing for child activity centers. Get started with EZtransition’s reputation management service today, and use the code “rep15” for 15% off of your monthly subscription.
