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.
Apr 22, 2022 | Reputation Management
We continue our series of articles for small business owners on the importance of reputation management. This is the third article in the series, where we will go over how to get more 5-star reviews for your small business. In the first article, we covered why small businesses need reputation management more than ever in 2022, and in the second we covered how to generate more online reviews.
Managing your business’s online reputation is essential to attracting new leads and building customer loyalty. In fact, 94% of consumers have avoided a company due to a bad review. So, if you’re not managing your online reputation, you risk missing out on a ton of business.
From marketing for small businesses to online reputation management, every component plays an important role in the overall success of your business.
Implementing an online reputation management strategy helps enhance how customers perceive your business online. This could be through social media platforms, reviews, blogs, and much more. One way to enhance your business reputation is by getting more 5-star reviews online.
Keep reading to learn more about the three strategies we take at EZtransition to help you get more 5-star reviews.
Why You Need More 5-Star Reviews
Many online shoppers look at customer reviews before making purchasing decisions. Up to 88% of shoppers use reviews as a deciding factor when choosing between your business and a competitor. While positive reviews are great for boosting your total SEO ranking, negative reviews can seriously hurt your business. Using EZtransition can help your business manage both positive and negative reviews to improve attract more loyal customers.
3 Strategies To Get More 5-Star Reviews
At EZtransition, we use the following tried and tested strategies to help our customers get more 5-star reviews.
1. Intercepting Reviewers Before They Get to Sites Like Google and Facebook
Our services aim to get you more 5-star reviews and provide a funnel to ensure your best reviews make it to the sites that matter. By intercepting reviewers before they get to the common sites, you can ask them specific customer questions about their experience and have control over your reviews and feedback. This leads to more detailed feedback and compelling customer success stories that let your brand shine in its best light.
2. Have Reviewers Contact You Directly Before Publicly Posting
Once a negative review hits Google, Facebook, or any other popular platform, the chances of having that review deleted are quite slim. Our service allows your customer service team to contact those leaving poor reviews before they’re posted, giving you the chance to apologize directly to the customer about their concerns and giving you an opportunity to right your wrong, so the customer will give you another chance. This can help your overall online reputation by limiting the number of negative reviews posted.
3. Make It Easy for Positive Reviews To Go to Public Sites
EZtransition helps you amplify your best reviews by posting them on the best public websites where consumers go to find out about businesses. In addition, we offer tracking services that offer detailed reports to keep track of all your important review metrics. Using these metrics, we can help you determine how many reviews you’ve gotten, your average rating, and other important considerations.
This may look something like sending customers an email asking them to leave you a review on common sites. If the review is 4 or 5 stars, it will go straight to publishing. However, if it’s three stars or below, a customer may get a pop-up box notification asking if they would like the issue rectified.
Grow Your Business With EZtransition
Get started with EZtransition’s reputation management service today! Our marketing agency in Atlanta specializes in online reputation management and can help every type of business improve its online reputation. If you’re looking for marketing for small businesses or reputation management in Atlanta, we can help you get more 5-star reviews for your business. Use the code “rep15” for 15% off your monthly subscription. Contact us today to learn more. We also specialize in marketing for child activity centers, so book a call with us today and find out how we can help you.
