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My Home Depot: The Go-Getters Guide to a Remarkable Experience

Customers don’t care what you do. They only care what they are left with after you’ve done it. Do you notice the customer experience you receive at a business you frequently visit? With most customers, the answer is yes if the experience is bad. The extreme endpoint of the service experience. Occasionally, however, customers make note of a customer experience design that is just average. And average experiences won’t help your business, will they? So businesses should be continually looking to improve customer experience, yes? I often take note of my home depot customer experience design and think about the changes I would make if I was in charge. This blog is a discussion of how my wife and I would improve my Home Depot customer experience.
my home depot
My home depot.
Check out our thoughts on customer focus.
We often get questions and comments on delivering great customer service and experiences. They are from both clients directly and customers commenting on our blog.
Many relate to customer service actions that are reminders of what we already know (but we occasionally forget).
These are big enablers of customer service. They usually won’t create Wow service on their own, but their absence is noted by customers and lowers excellent customer service to just good enough or less.
See our article on  Client Satisfaction …10 Secrets to Improve Customer Experience
What are the ways this Home Depot was just average in its customer experience design? Consider Home Depot’s explicit operations and design:
 
saving you time
Are they saving you time?

Saving you time

One of the most important needs of most customers is time … no one ever has enough and if you are a customer like me, you hate waiting for service in anything.
There two big-time wasters at the Home Depot.
The first is trying to find what you are looking for. This is almost always an issue for us.
Usually, when we ask directions we get a prompt answer to an aisle, which certainly shortens the search, but not enough in our mind.
The second is trying to find someone to help you. That also includes someone who can handle 90% of the answers. That rarely happens on the first try.
 

My Home Depot  … show the value

In their store, as well as on their website, you can never find product value statements or recommendations. If you want recommendations on the best value you must ask.
And when you do, you rarely get a convincing answer. No real unique selling points for the store as a whole, at least that was obvious to us.

 

 Store to web site integration

I visit Home Depot quite often and use their website even more frequently. In all those visits, I have been shown a terminal where the customer actually used it to answer my question only once.
My bet is that there only 2-3 computers in the entire store where a customer clerk could look online to get information and answers on products. And service for products is even a bigger issue. An area where small changes could provide big improvements

 

Customer education

 Home Depot used to do a decent job in educating their Do-It-Yourself customers by adding a learning center in both the store and online.
The online service is still better than average, but again, they could do a lot more by integrating online and in-store customer education.
Many of the employees are just clerks and know very little about products and do it yourself activities. 

  

My Home Depot … lots of help and directions 

All stage employees should be encouraged to be ‘assertively friendly’.  They should seek out those who look like they need help before they come looking for help.
But this rarely if ever happens.
The Home Depot stores are very large and directions can be confusing. The last thing customers need is to not be able to find what they are looking for. As a result, signs have to be super easy to navigate and offer simple ways to get from one place to another.
Wouldn’t it be easy to create store maps to give to customers in need?
Apparently not so easy.

 

Take nothing for granted

Don’t take a customer’s loyalty for granted, especially when dealing with first-time shoppers. The key to customer loyalty is not just by providing a quality service or product, but how you service and support it.
Meeting customer expectations in a first sale may not be enough. First-time buyers want to know you care.  For loyalty to endure, it must be noticed and acknowledged.
That means some top-notch unique actions on behalf of customers. Have you ever received any of these? We have not.
Again, Home Depot signals that they are happy with an average customer experience.

 

 

product choices
Your product choices?

Product choices

Have you ever been into a store that has more product options? I am not talking about product sizes here.
I am talking about different brands that do basically the same thing.
And that is not a customer benefit, because too many choices make decisions much more difficult, especially when Home Depot employees can’t tell you which product is best.

  

Stand tall on customer issues

Being a customer advocate is often tough for many businesses. Many overcome this by defining a customer bill of rights and displaying in the store and online.
No way to not follow these as they are predominantly displayed. Ever seen one at Home Depot? Nope, not us. But certainly at other brands.

 

 Build trust

When you save your customer time, deliver quality service, stand tall on customer issues, and always show your value, you definitely build trust.
And trust is the basis of great customer relationships and follow-on business.
A definite win-win.

  

Looking for customer feedback

As customers both my wife and I like to have a business seek out our opinions.
Shows they care. On the flip side, if a business never asks, or has no way to solicit suggestions, it shows they don’t care very much.
Where do you think Home Depot falls on this spectrum?

 

Immerse customers in brand 

At many businesses, you can look in any direction and see the branding all around. And we are not talking abound simple brand identity here.
We are talking about things that remind customers about things the brand believes in, or stands for, in the store or online.
It works to surround you with the customer experience at every moment.
Home Depot can do more to stand out in this area, much more.

 

Customer experience design certainly should show how much a business appreciates the importance of customers, shouldn’t it? It’s a culture they seem proud to stand behind.
Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.
 
Customer experience actions that are remarkable get talked about. And getting talked about in this light is a great thing, right?
No question. So ignoring well-known customer experience annoyances is a big no-no.
Here’s the thing, customer experience design isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s really a new way of running a business. Many businesses certainly have figured this out and are using customer experience to rapidly grow their business.
Home Depot needs to better understand this concept.
Related post: Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements

Summary

 

Remember one simple thing here: all employees need to view themselves as customer advocates, period.
Customer service actions that are remarkable get talked about. And getting talked about in this light is a great thing, right?
No question.
customer_experience_design
 
Do you have a lesson about making your customer experience better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
  
Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
 
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
  
More reading on customer experience from our Library:
Customer Orientation … the Worst Customer Experience Mistakes
Customer Experience Optimization … 10 Employee Actions that Lower It
Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success
10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence
 
Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
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Easy Ways to Find and Keep Your Best Customers

Starting a business isn’t always easy, but if you find that you don’t quite fit in the corporate world or don’t want to be boxed into a 9-to-5 schedule, entrepreneurship is a great choice. But as with all things, the first steps are the hardest. Even if you are the best in your industry, selling yourself – which is a necessity as a small business owner – can be intimidating. Once you’ve acquired those first customers, you’ll be more confident and can work to keep your best customers.
keep your best customers
Keep your best customers.

Start social

One of the first things you can do to get your name into the public spotlight is to go social. Sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook already have an audience, and you can target potential customers based on your preferred demographics.
CoSchedule explains that social media provides a platform upon which to create brand recognition and to get to know your customers. In addition to interacting with buyers and potential buyers, your social media accounts are a great way to promote contests and special offers.
Take steps to ensure your branding remains consistent across your social profiles, business web design, and other marketing materials.

Become a chameleon

Change is good. Keep that thought in your mind as you learn how to adapt your business to your customer base. Their taste will change, and you will have to learn how to react to these needs, much like a chameleon adapts to his environment to stay alive.
If you sell clothing, for instance, change or inventory up each season, and make sure to stay abreast of emerging fashion trends. Many wholesale clothing distributors even offer drop shipping options, so you aren’t stuck with last season’s products that you’ll have to sell at a loss.
customer retention tactics
Customer retention tactics.
You can also keep your customers happy by providing a selection of complimentary items that fit the theme of your business. In the clothing retailer example above, you might sell trendy jewelry in the summer and infinity scarves in the fall.

 

Expand and accelerate

As you continue to broaden your product line or service offerings, you’ll get a clearer picture of what your customers want. If you find their demands exceed what you are capable of offering with your current budget, you may be able to get a financial boost via crowdfunding.
Fundera asserts that offering your potential investors (your previously satisfied customers) incentives may encourage more donors to put their money into your business. Crowdfunding is a viable option for small businesses since it gives your customers a chance to weigh in on what you offer. It further allows you to take advantage of social media to appeal directly to your future benefactors.
Giving your customers a voice and rewards for supporting your endeavors is a great way to build loyalty for life.

Building Innovation

identifying best customers
Are you identifying the best customers?

Keep up with customer service

More than anything, do what you say. If you promise your customers a new style of swimsuit for summer, make sure it’s available in time for spring break.
If you truly want to keep customers for a lifetime, you will have to provide exceptional service with each order and interaction. When you make a mistake, admit it and take steps to rectify your actions.
Remember that customer service can literally make or break your business. Referral programs, repeat buyer perks, and small “thank you” notes or gifts are other ways to provide excellent service and strengthen the relationship between you and your customers.
There is no one-size-fits-all master plan for managing a business. For many, it’s a matter of trial and error. However, by meeting your customers’ needs and providing consistent service, you put yourself in a much better position to keep your current customers happy while building your client base.
More reading on mentoring from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Remarkable Lessons in Motivation Steve Jobs Taught Me
How to Create Honest Employee Trust and Empowerment
The Story and Zen of Getting Things Done
10 Positive Thinking Ideas from Peers and Mentors
 
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16 Ideas Neil Patel Uses for Storytelling and Story Marketing Tips

Neil Patel uses for storytelling
Are you using storytelling for marketing?
You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story. Awesome quote from Anthony de Mello, isn’t it? Neil Patel uses for storytelling marketing ideas.
While most ideas lead to nothing, some create enormous value. Calculus, the theory of evolution and the telephone made our lives better no matter who came up with them first. That’s not because of the idea itself, but what was built on top of it. Ideas only create a better future when they mix with other ideas. Innovation, to a large degree, in combination.
The stories of Alexander Fleming and Jim Allison are instructive. In Fleming’s case, it was scientists at another lab that picked up the initial idea and did the work to make it into a useful cure. Then they went to America to work with other labs and, eventually, pharmaceutical companies to do the work needed to go from milliliters in the lab to metric tons in the real world.
Like to hear a great story? How about telling stories? Employ marketing tips for stories and storytelling to rapidly spread ideas.
That is an important reason story and storytelling are your best assets.
Certainly, you have noticed the tremendous abundance of marketing strategy choices in the marketplace today. No needs go wanting, do they?
Consumers have everything they need and therefore their decisions are based on what they want. And what they want is driven by what they believe.
Related post: The Zen of Winning the Battle of the Content Plan
Great storytelling and stories are a very integral part of being persuasive. If you want to persuade your customers and create a memorable experience at the same time, you must master the psychology of storytelling.
 

Understanding stories and storytelling

Here are some story/storytelling characteristics that are useful in understanding this marketing technique:
Are authentic and people should never question this
They make a promise that has some meaning to the community
Are targeted to a particular community
They make subtle points … and are not overwhelming
They are a trusted marketing tool
Stories and storytelling appeal to our senses and not to logic
And most importantly they are told with the heart to appeal to emotions
 

Why stories and storytelling?

Facts often can be boring and overwhelming, can’t they? Stories, though, not nearly as much. They are much easier to understand and much more entertaining.
Therefore they are much better at spreading ideas.
Facts are meaningless without a contextual story. Don’t tell facts to influence, tell stories.
The more you improve storytelling, the more your influence increases… it is as simple as that.
Stories make it easier for people to understand. They are the best way, by far, to spread your ideas.
Especially when there is a large competition for people’s attention.
 

Neil Patel uses for storytelling … elements of stories

Here are some perfect examples of the elements of stories:

The point

The Wizard of Oz

Every story should have a point. How often have we been regaled with high drama and intricate detail, only to have no payoff?
Most of us have seen The Wizard of Oz and can sing out in unison Dorothy’s final words in the story, “There’s no place like home.”
Without that, and without her realization of what she values, her adventures are all for naught. Make sure you have a payoff in your own stories.

A dramatic question

 

Raiders of the Lost Ark

“Will Indiana find the Ark before the Nazis get it?” is the conflict of the entire story. Once that question is answered, the story ends. But wait: there’s more. A great answer to a dramatic question can have an ironic twist.
The answer usually is not merely, “Yes.” Instead, it’s, “Well, yes…but…” In Raiders the answer is “Yes, but the Ark contains inconceivable power…more than we care to handle.”
The final shot reveals the Ark stored inconspicuously in a massive warehouse. The irony is complete. You should develop stories with both dramatic questions and ironic twists if possible.

Content that includes emotion

 Apollo 13

The first time I saw Apollo 13 I was on the edge of my seat asking the question: “Will they make it back?” On the edge of my seat, I watched as the characters struggled, toiled, prayed to get the astronauts home.
Then I took a step back…:”Wait. I was there when this really happened. They make it back!” So what compels me to watch the remainder of this film every time it comes on? Ron Howard has the uncanny ability to make the audience care about what happens to the characters.
Whether it is through the riveting soundtrack, poignant conversations between husband and wife, or struggles between colleagues, we care.
Create stories that cause us to feel, to empathize, and to understand is critical. Emotion should be created in every facet of the story: words, images, voice, and music. That should be your objective.

Set a pace

 Lord of the Rings

Notice any emotional scene between Frodo and Sam, or characters that have romantic connections in the Lord of the Rings?
In this story shots are long in duration, the movement is subtle, and the soundtrack is smooth and peaceful.
Contrast that with the epic battle scenes: shots are quick with no transitions, quick zooms and sweeping panoramas of the battlefield dominate the scene, and the music: as powerful and relentless as the battle itself.
All of the elements come together to develop a consistent pace or rhythm of the scene, don’t they?
At times, however, an intentional contrast can achieve a great effect. Why would a director deliberately use slow motion and cut out the soundtrack at a particular point in a battle scene?
To draw attention, of course.

 

gift of voice
The gift of voice.

Gift of voice

 Stand By Me

Often times, people become reluctant about recording their voice for others to hear. Voice-over personalizes a story to an intimate level.
The narration of Richard Dreyfus as the adult Gordy LeChance, in the movie Stand By Me, adds a nostalgic tone of reminiscence to a bygone era.
Clearly, voice impacts emotional content as well.

6 Best Examples of Marketing Storytelling

Less is more economy

 Master Card “Badger” commercials

This is where the mantra, “Less is More” comes out. No one needs to be a more economical storyteller than commercial writers. The entire process must be completed in no more than 30 seconds in most cases.
The old Master Card commercials about the hard-luck dog badger attempting to get home are masterpieces of the economy.
Make your objective to use fewer images and words to convey meaning. This technique can pay big dividends.
powerful soundtrack
Use a powerful soundtrack.

Powerful soundtrack

 Jaws

Need I say more about the impact of the trademark “Da-dum. da-dum da-dum.” Don’t leave the soundtrack to an afterthought.
Its choice can make a huge impact. Choose the soundtrack as instrumental music in lieu of lyrical.

Neil Patel uses for storytelling … storytelling  how to’s

How do you make your ideas more compelling? Even if your message is true and important, it’s hard to reach a general audience with facts alone.
Tell awesome stories that are memorable – stories have the power to captivate and inspire people, from high school students, busy parents, or even members of Congress.
Awesome stories surprise us. They have compelling characters. They make us think, make us feel.
They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that numbers and text on a slide with a bar graph don’t.
Stories make presentations better. Stories make ideas sticky. They help us persuade.
Savvy leaders tell stories to inspire us, motivate us. (That’s why so many politicians tell stories in their speeches.)
They realize that “what you say” is often moot compared to “how you say it.”
 Here are 14 steps we recommend to create and tell an awesome story:
  

Step 1 Engage your audience

Your audience needs something to do. They need a reason to be there, listening. Stories, when properly practiced, pull people into a dialogue.
It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as an active a participant as the storyteller.
Ask the audience to think back to early passions and interests and bundle the story with specific experiences.
Show them this is important, this is remarkable and you are a part of it.

Step 2 Make the audience care

Whenever I am fortunate enough to see and listen to remarkable stories being told ‘live’  in action, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in, much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.
The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically.
But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all. There is no single answer.
One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.
Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings, like it or not, and to make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke in them some kind of emotion.
See our article on the Guinness storytelling strategy in this regard. 
 

Step 3 Explain why the story matters

Make it clear to your audience why what we were seeing and hearing matters. Even if it is not always explicitly stated, the message should be clear.
It is hard to choose just one element that a successful story must have, but if I had to choose just one, I’d say it is this:
Show clearly why your topic — or result, cause, mission, etc. — matters. What are the big picture and our place in that picture?
Pixar’s Andrew Stanton said something very similar when he identified the most important element of storytelling as ‘make me care’.
You must make the audience care. And you must let them know clearly why it matters.
 

Step 4 Make a promise

Very early on you need to get the audience to believe that this story is going to go somewhere, and that it will be worth their time.
The secret is a well told promise about the upcoming story.

 

Step 5 Construct anticipation

In a great story, the audience wants to know what happens next and most of all how it all concludes.
In an explanatory narrative, a series of actions can establish a narrative flow and the sense of journey that is created is one form of anticipation of what comes next.
Instead, a good story allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action.
This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys facts and information boring.

 

Step 6 Spark their curiosity

Your goal is to tell stories in an opening, an aperture of excitement. Ignite the fires of curiosity that will live within us all.
It’s a celebration of human curiosity and it matters to who and what we are. You don’t have to beat people over the head with your message, nor do you need to always make your message painfully obvious.
This is not about being vague or unclear, but it is about letting the audience work on their own a little to figure things out by creating some curiosity.
That’s one of your jobs as a storyteller. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that’s what we do in real life.
It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.

 

Step 7 Touch audiences with an emotional connection

The Google Reunion story  is about as emotional as it gets.
Stories like this provide a chance to experience a variety of emotions without the risk of those emotions themselves.
Emotions like wonder, fear, courage, or love can be tested out in the minds of those as they listen to a story. You may remember the feelings of emotions which can trigger memories or create resolve as a result of hearing such stories.
The experience of hearing stories can awaken portions of emotional lives that may have lain dormant or have not yet been explored.
Be dynamic with your stories like Google was in this story. Nothing is more important to narrative content than imagination, so give vivid descriptions and use emotional hooks and humor to get people fully engaged.
This story definitely engages us, doesn’t it? Be creative, not only with words and images, but also with the methods you use to convey them.
Like the music as well as the messages.
 

Step 8 Talk about memorable human interest

Storytelling is largely an act of curation. The greats detect stories as they move through life and then pull them together in ways that make us stop and think.

 

Step 9 Make it personal

Well-told stories can help us to learn about other cultures, ideas and ways of thinking. They can provide opportunities to know how past generations responded to challenges.
They can also let us know how new generations are encountering and dealing with similar opportunities or the new challenges they face.
Use a creative story that builds on some big forces such as politics, religion, geography, nationalism.
If you really listen to your customers, you can leverage their stories to drive your creativity.

 

Step 10 Trigger a question

Good storytelling causes the audience to ask questions as your narrative progresses.
As the storyteller, you can ask questions directly, but often a more interesting approach is to present the material in a way that triggers the audience to come up with the questions themselves.
And yet we must not be afraid to leave some questions unanswered.
When we think of a story we may think of clear conclusions and neat, clear endings, but reality can be quite a bit more complicated than that.
There are an infinite amount of mysteries to ponder and puzzles to be solved. Many observations cannot (yet) be explained, but that is OK. This is what keeps us going forward.

Step 11 Emphasize the visual

 “Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway
Here visual does not mean only the use of graphics such as photography, video, animations, visualizations of data, and so on.
Visual also means helping the audience to clearly “see” your ideas through your use of descriptive language, through the use of concrete examples, and by the power and simplicity of metaphor.

 

Step 12 Make the tough choices about inclusion and exclusion

Whether you have 5-minutes, 18-minutes, or an all-day seminar in which to tell your story, it is never enough time to tell all that you know or to share everything in as much detail as possible.
Time can be a real obstacle, but it’s also a great enabler if you are willing and able to put in the time to think long and hard about what’s the most important and what’s less important for reaching your audience in a way that is honest, informative, and engaging.
You can’t include all that you know or all that there is to say. The secret is in knowing what to leave out.
This is not easy. Balance is key.

  

Step 13 Story is about change

We’re all learning all the time. And that’s why change is fundamental in a story. Remember, life is never static.
Think of change in two ways. First, the content of every good presentation or story addresses a change or some kind.
Second, an effective presentation or a story told well will create a change in the audience.
Don’t let the only change you create be in your audience be the change from wakefulness to sleep.

  

Step 14 Show a sense for the future

A good story is a mix of logic, data, emotion, and inspiration. We usually do fine with the logic and data part, but fail on the emotional and inspirational end.
Certainly, we need to infuse a bit of the future into our talks to inspire people to make a change.
Most importantly, a good story should not end when the speaker sits down or the class comes to an end.
Related post: 9 Ways Subway Blew a Direct Response to Social Comment

Neil Patel uses for storytelling … secrets of success

To be most successful, stories and storytelling must play to these secrets:
They must reinforce existing popular views.
Call attention to something new.
Focus on first impressions.
Tell only what YOU believe.
 Be authentic.

Key takeaways

Great storytelling and stories are a very integral part of being persuasive. If you want to persuade your customers and create a memorable experience at the same time, you must master the psychology of storytelling.
Give them a try today.
content writer
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
  
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
 
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
 
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
 
Do you have a lesson about making your social media better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
  
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  
 
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
20 Recommendations on How to Promote Your Blog
Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
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8 Things Steve Jobs Would Know About Your Social Media Engagement

Edwin Schlosser once said: The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. The more success you have with customer engagement, either online or off, the better your understanding of their needs and priorities. That is something Steve Jobs would know. Having the best customer insights makes it much easier for you to define your next moves and social media engagement as well as improve your odds of success.
Steve Jobs would know
Employ social media engagement.
I was recently sent a copy of KPMG Nunwood’s report titled B2B Customer Experience: Winning the Moments That Matter. The report is filled with some great nuggets, but I latched on to the phases of relationship connection and moments that matter.
How do you achieve relationship status with your customers? Do you know which moments matter most to them? And which are moments of failure?
Related post: The Zen of Winning the Battle of the Content Plan
When we engage with customers (or, when they engage with us), we are (hopefully) engaging for the long-term, developing a relationship. Some folks question the use of the term “relationship” when it comes to customers, but let’s just use Merriam-Webster’s definition, which tones things down a little: the way in which two or more people, groups, countries, etc., talk to, behave toward, and deal with each other; the way in which two or more people or things are connected.
That connection is what I’m referring to. We want to connect with our customers, not just transact with them. Relationships take time and work, every day; the focus and the desire to keep the relationship alive and strong should never stop because, when it does, the relationship will end. The connection is gone.
It has been said that to be a success in social media engagement you must be useful or entertaining (or hopefully both).  Have you ever seen the videos of Steve Jobs with his media presentations on Apple’s new product announcements? I am a big fan, I admit … but you don’t have to be a fan to recognize the genius in his presentation. They are simple, useful and, most of all, entertaining. They are something Steve Jobs would know.
Let’s examine the strengths of these presentations and apply them to improve your content marketing. Remember … the objective of your content is to create a context in which your audience can think:
focus on dreams
Focus on dreams.

Steve Jobs would know … focus on dreams, not products

… it is the end state customer utility that counts most

 

Social media engagement … create ‘Holy Smokes’ moments

… grab immediate attention with your title and lead paragraph sentences
 

Use heroes, villains, and drama

… tell a story to communicate your content whenever possible. Stories do a good job of giving a meaning that can be remembered

 

Steve Jobs would know … stick to the rule of 3

… focus on no more than 3 key messages
think simple
You must think simple.

 

Social media engagement … think simple

… communicate with simple words and messages for a broad audience

 

Rely on visual messages

… use images to convey your messages and re-enforce with words

Winning New Customers: Ideas You Should Use To Supercharge Growth

 

Create Twitter-friendly key points and messages

… more on the simple theme with rich keywords

 

Steve Jobs would know … share the stage

… collaborate and test your content and editing with others both inside and outside your business. Do include key customer advocates
To conclude, let me give you two excellent examples, one from the Marriott hotel and one from JetBlue Airline.

 

Marriott customer engagement example

I stayed in a new Marriott Courtyard hotel a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready. There were many problems, believe me, and it started as a significant customer failure.
But not only did the staff take care of the issues for me, the manager, once he got me back to ‘even’, continued to build the relationship with me. His techniques included exceptional, personalized service … using my name in face-to-face greetings, and continued follow-up and attention to detail.  He actually made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.
Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue. All customers deserve our best service … but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.
Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.
Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem. So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.
My perspective:
Why should any company not want to seize such an opportunity?
Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business. You will be amazed at the results.

 

Steve Jobs would know … JetBlue customer engagement example

This is a story of JetBlue’s customer engagement strategy built on its employee empowerment culture.  I experienced it first hand and was duly impressed.
The story started a while back while I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff. Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been canceled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing.  The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:
Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to comp everybody movies for this flight. We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing. And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.
The mood on the flight which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair took an immediate upswing. People joked and smiled and made eye contact.  They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed.  And I’m writing about the experience today and business travelers are reading about it.
What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement? Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked. I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.
We’re allowed to make almost any decision,  the flight attendant explained, as long as we can justify it on the basis of one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun or Passion. If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company.
My perspective:
What JetBlue is saying to its employees … if you act in support of the values that really matter to our business, we want you to take risks in order to care for our customers.
This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our own people? Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did. Start building your employee empowerment culture today.

 

The bottom line

To be effective in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares. We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.
We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.
There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement in brand marketing, independent of how well the business is doing. It seems we are all looking to take their success to a new level. This is an excellent time to make a statement about their brand marketing. Changing before you have to is always a good idea.
awesome content
 
 
Lots that we can apply from these eight lessons, isn’t there?
Please share an example or experience from your story vault.
 
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
  
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
 
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
 
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
 
Do you have a lesson about making your social media better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
  
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  
 
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
20 Recommendations on How to Promote Your Blog
Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
Featured

Creative Leaders: 9 Success Enablers You Must Develop

When your intuition is roaring, follow it. Do you often follow your intuition? Do you consider it a success enabler of highly creative leaders? Let’s investigate what these success enablers are.
creative leaders
Creative leaders.
Check out our thoughts on team leverage.
There is a wide consensus in industry and academia that creativity is a key requisite to master today’s business challenges. A recent CEO survey by IBM showed that creativity is the number one requirement of today’s managers for the next years to come.
To be creative under time pressure, however, is not an easy task. Ideas are often the result of insights or come about through the long incubation and development of dispersed insights. Yet in business contexts, idea generation must work ad-hoc, on-demand and often in group contexts, as diverse and distributed knowledge is needed to solve problems creatively.
Related: The Zen of Abraham Lincolns Leadership Lessons
To facilitate such instant creative idea sessions, various creativity techniques have been developed over the last decades. These techniques are supposed to help professionals be more creative and generate novel and feasible ideas, either individually or in teams.
Still, numerous scientific evaluations show that the most widely used method in business today, brainstorming, is not necessarily an effective tool. Participants may think too far out of the box so that their ideas cannot really be put to use, as they are not sufficiently related to the problem at hand.
Based on experience we have defined 9 success enablers of highly creative leaders, as discussed below:
 

Creative leaders … committed senior leadership

Leadership depends on senior leadership for support. Even more so when you add creativity to the equation. This support helps remove barriers to enhance organizational creativity.
While the truly inspired and creative may break through the barriers to success, an environment where help supports organizational creativity may reap benefits from many surprising sources and not just the Einstein’s of the world. All leaders own the role to remove barriers.

 

Examples of creative leaders … building a community

We all need to find people that have common interests and thinking. Connecting to others helps us uncover phenomena, patterns, and solutions more quickly— and in ways, we might not imagine on our own.
Additionally, creative ideas have a difficult time thriving in isolation. Your community can inspire, ask, plant seeds, bear witness, provoke, acknowledge and nurture—all elements of a collaborative venture.
The bottom line: Our ideas need communities of contributors, and we need each other. The more connections we have, the more powerful our creativity becomes. Building communities is a critical success enabler.

  

Highly creative leaders and curiosity

Curiosity is the cornerstone of learning and creativity. Hands down the most important to creativity in our opinion. Think about answering these curiosity enablers: When did we stop asking questions?
What happens to our habits of inquiry and knowledge-seeking as we get older? What barriers shut down curiosity, and what reignites it?
In order to reclaim curiosity as a collaborative habit—and model the way for others—it’s necessary to embark upon a personal investigation to unravel perceptions and conventions that get in the way of a curious, open mindset and enable it.

  

Open communication and information sharing

Open communication and information sharing are another of the essential success enablers. Our understanding of organizational decisions and policies, opportunities to voice concerns, and a sense of ‘being heard’ all enhance leadership creativity.
For me, one of the barriers to creative collaboration is an environment where people undermine each other, information is not shared, and there is no credit given for creativity. It is essential to have access to information as creativity is often spurred on by hitchhiking on new ideas that flow past the alert mind–often converting them to a new situation or application.

 

reflection
Reflection is always wise.

 Reflection

We need leaders to engage in continuous reflection, be aware and open, and challenge their assumptions. And certainly, gain from continuous learning. On a collective level, we want leaders to share and support while trusting and being vulnerable as part of a creative journey within a supportive community.

Combine and transform

To be a successful leader and thinker, you need to also be an accomplished learner. By participating in combining and transforming, we must recognize the importance of acknowledging and recognizing those individuals and works that have influenced our thinking. And learn from them.
Practicing the habit of combining and transforming is about embracing a new form of learning and finding your creative voice. It allows us to form powerful connections with other people and to engage in social learning.

 

Empowerment

The empowered have much freedom and authority to initiate change. Some gave it to themselves while others waited for it to be given. Often many see the anxiety that at times accompanies empowerment. Ideally, the empowerment of people results in increased initiative, involvement, enthusiasm, innovation and speed.
learning through failure
Are you learning through failure?

Learning through failure

 Failing forward is a key habit of creativity. Failing fast, failing intelligently, and learning from those failures makes room for imperfection, iteration, and experiencing joy in the process.
One of the ways to practice failure is through a “crash and burn” exercise. A crash and burn is an attempt to do something with a 5 percent or less chance of success. It might be sending an email to someone who is famous and asking for help on a project or attempting to sew a dress even though you don’t know how to sew on a button.
This exercise allows the learner to stretch their comfort zone and pay attention to their failure response. By practicing failing well and observing our inner dialogue when doing so, we recondition and empower ourselves. We get a chance to examine and shore up our identity, take risks, and become better versions of ourselves.

 A creative solution

The need for creativity in leadership requires innovative solutions. Creativity is not a singular skill that can be developed in one way or even in several ways. As leaders, we must create the conditions that allow creativity to flourish; keeping in mind that creativity will manifest itself differently in everyone.
One way for leaders to learn how to create these conditions is to develop a mindset that allows them to be aware of their own creative abilities. This then creates conditions for a ripple effect of awareness and appreciation of creativity in others.

The bottom line

“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

For some reason, many of us have been conditioned to be more afraid of failure than we are of inaction. However, failure, in addition to being inherently valuable as a learning process, contains within it the chance of success. And no matter how small that chance is, it’s better than the chances of success when we choose not to even try.

My journey as both a learner and leader has shown me that those that are able to interact and manage their learning environment so much better as leaders than those who don’t.
I believe there is a direct link to creativity in this relationship. Building on it greatly strengthens the highly creative leader’s success enablers.

create_website_design

 

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion.  There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of great leadership. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
 
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to lead. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, history may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
 
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
 
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
  
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Leadership Characteristics that Improve Influence
10 Leadership Competencies You Should Not Live Without
Building Collaboration and Sharing Skills in your Staff
How to Create the Best Leadership Accountability
The Zen of Abraham Lincolns Leadership Lessons
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Featured

Facts on Innovation: 6 Amazing Ones You Need to Know

Charles Darwin said: It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. From Dan Pink’s Blog, we found the following facts on innovation that we would like to share with you:
Check out our thoughts on building innovation.
facts on innovation
Awesome facts on innovation.
This is important: Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
A study of the top 50 game-changing innovations over a 100 year period showed that nearly 80% of those changes were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.
Wow!  80% created by someone outside the field where innovation occurred!
 
What other innovation facts and conclusions can we derive from this?
 
Innovation, while often depending on the new invention, is more about application than invention.
already been accomplished
Already been accomplished?
Often the application of something similar has already been performed in the other field, usually in a different way.
When working innovation, it helps to draw on various skills; experience sets …diverse crowds.
And finally
open to new ideas
Are you open to new ideas?
We need to be constantly open to new ideas, particularly in different fields of endeavor.
Probably the most persistent — and damaging — myth about innovation is that it’s about ideas. It’s not. Tremendous amounts of time and energy are wasted thinking up radically new ideas that never end up going anywhere. Middle managers never seem to tire of complaining that their ideas are ignored by the powers above.
The truth is that nobody cares about your ideas. They care about what problems you can solve for them. So if you want to innovate effectively, don’t go looking for a great idea so that you can dazzle others with your brilliance, look for a meaningful problem and get to work on solving it.
The secret to innovation and creativity is curiosity. You generate lots of ideas to find the best of the best. By creating ideas, you start by asking lots of questions. By being curious. By thinking widely and not discarding ideas too soon.  By convergent thinking. All of which help us to understand better and define the problem we are attempting to solve.
Without the question “why?” there can be no here’s how to make it better. Or no game-changing innovations.

https://digitalsparkmarketing.com/creativity-ideas/

So we want to share a story to illustrate the value of why you need to ask why.
We are always on the lookout for good stories. Stories to show points we are emphasizing. So we read a lot. Today’s story is about generating ideas. Ideas from convergent thinking.
The story is about why you should ask why. It comes from Ideas Champions. A consulting company like us (but bigger and more well-known), who specialize in creativity, innovation, team building, and leadership. All favorite topics of ours. So we keep up with this team.
The story is a big problem with one of our favorite monuments … the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC.
Simply put, birds in huge numbers were pooping all over it, which made visiting the place a very unpleasant experience.
Attempts to remedy the situation caused even bigger problems since the harsh cleaning detergents being used were damaging the memorial.
Fortunately, some of the National Parks managers assigned to the case began asking WHY  as in Why was the Jefferson Memorial so much more of a target for birds than any of the other memorials?
A little bit of investigation revealed the following:
The birds were attracted to the Jefferson Memorial because of the abundance of spiders, a gourmet treat for birds.
The spiders were attracted to the Memorial because of the abundance of midges (insects) that were nesting there.
And the midges were attracted to the Memorial because of the light.
Midges, it turns out like to procreate in places where the light is just so and because the lights were turned on, at the Jefferson Memorial, one hour before dark, it created the kind of mood lighting that midges went crazy for.
So there you have it: The midges were attracted to the light. The spiders were attracted to the midges. The birds were attracted to the spiders. And the National Parks workers, though not necessarily drawn to the bird poop, were attracted to getting paid, so they spent a lot of their time (and taxpayer money) cleaning the Memorial.
How did the situation resolve? Very simply.
After reviewing the curious chain of events that led up to the problem, the decision was made to wait until dark before turning the lights on at the Jefferson Memorial. About as simple a solution as you could get. Right?
That one-hour delay was enough to ruin the mood lighting for the midges, who then decided to have midge sex somewhere else.
No midges, no spiders. No spiders, no birds. No birds, no poop. No poop, no need to clean the Jefferson Memorial so often. Case closed.
Now, consider what solutions might have been forthcoming if those curious National Parks managers did not stop and ask WHY:
Hire more workers to clean the Memorial
Ask existing employees to work overtime
Experiment with different kinds of cleaning materials
Put bird poison all around the memorial
Hire hunters to shoot the birds
Encase the entire Jefferson Memorial in Plexiglas
Move the Memorial to another part of Washington
Close the site to the general public
Technically speaking, each of the above solutions was a possible approach, but at great cost, inconvenience, and with questionable results. Not great solutions.
Key takeaways
What problems are you facing that could be approached differently simply by asking WHY. And then WHY again, and then WHY again … until you get to the real definition of the problem?
If you don’t, you may just end up not correctly defining the problem. Not good. Nothing worse than solving the wrong problem. So put in enough time in understanding and describing your problem. Don’t leap to problem-solving before you do. Lots of whys help us explore and thoroughly identify the problem.
INTEGRATED_MARKETING_STRATEGY
Do you have an Integrated Marketing Strategy?
What conclusions does your business derive from these facts on innovation?
Remember … all new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
 
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options for innovation workshops to get noticeable results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
 
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
 
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
  
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
The Secrets to Building an Innovative Culture
 
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
 
Photo Credit: opensource.com via Compfight

Learning Creativity,  Change, and Our Education System

Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference are pretty low.

–       Tom Peters

Have you ever done any reading about learning creativity or ways to improve our educational system?

One of the outside interests of this agency is learning creativity. We want to start this article with a very creative 3 minute video done by a young student. His subject?  The need for change in our education system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwYSMwrAczo    

We are ones that believe that not enough is being done to increase the learning of creativity in our schools. So therefore, we like to read and engage in discussions on ideas on learning reform and creativity in our schools.

Change and learning creativity.

Banks used to open and operate between 10 and 3. Now, who can bank between 10 and 3? The unemployed. They don’t need banks. They got no money in the banks.

Who created that business model? And it went on for decades. You know why? Because the banks didn’t care. It wasn’t about the customers. It was about banks. They created something that worked for them. How could you go to the bank when you were at work? It didn’t matter. And they don’t care whether or not a customer was upset he couldn’t go to the bank. Go find another bank. Yes and they all operate the same way, eh? 

Now, one day, some crazy banker had an idea. Maybe they should keep the bank open when people come home from work. They might like that. What about a Saturday? What about introducing new technology?

And  so technology can contribute to change. Things can change. Yet not in education. Not even with the introduction of technology. Why? 

Poor kids lose ground in the summertime. The system decides you can’t run schools in the summer. Why?

You know, I always wonder, who makes up these rules?  Did we ever do it? Well it just turns out in the 1840s we did have, schools were open all year. They were open all year, because we had a lot of folks who had to work all day. They didn’t have any place for their kids to go. It was a perfect place to have year round schools. So this is not something that is ordained from the education gods.

So why don’t we?  

Educators and those who want to contribute, there’s some stuff  we can do. And we’ve got to do better. We have to start with kids earlier, we have to make sure that we provide the support to young people. We have got to try new things much more often. We’ve got to be creative and we have to let the students be creative to learn creativity. We’ve got to give them all of these opportunities. 

Here is another short 2 minute video we would like to share. It is  about the next generation learning in our education system. Also done by children. Even younger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0pZE8WW_Ro&feature=youtu.be

Kids bring to the curriculum vast differences – differences in gender, maturity, personality, interests, hopes, dreams, abilities, life experiences, situation, family, peers, language, ethnicity, social class, culture, probable and possible futures, and certain indefinable qualities, all combined in dynamic, continuously evolving ways so complex they lie beyond ordinary understanding.

Today’s reformers seem unable or unwilling to grasp the instructional implications of those differences and that complexity. They treat kids as a given, undifferentiated except by grade level, with the core curriculum the lone operative variable.

It’s dumping creativity on the street.

So here is the thing. Our students recognize the problem. Why can’t education leaders?

Remember … we can truly understand facts about learning only in contrast to other facts.

Please share some of your ideas on improving student learning and education with this community.

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Read more from Digital Spark Marketing’s blog library:

Aware of These Amazing Facts on Innovation?

Can Prototype Testing Help You Experiment With New Ideas?

Creative Collaboration is the Solution for the Toughest Business Problems

Want To Improve Your Creativity? Develop These Five Skills

Are you looking to improve your breakthrough thinking? Don’t believe you are creative? Creativity is often defined as the ability to connect ideas that are seemingly unconnectable. Connecting ideas are how new ideas originate … it is the basis to improve your creativity.

Contrary to what most people believe, creativity is not limited to the gifted ones of the population. It can be taught, nurtured, and enhanced. So what are the skills you need to acquire and/or develop to improve your creativity?  Consider these five:

Observing

Carefully watch things around you to help gain insights into, and ideas for, new ways of doing things. Pay particular attention to areas outside you natural areas of interest.

Pick a business you admire to observe and follow. Learn all you can about the what and the how.

What ideas can you transfer and enhance?

Questioning

Ask questions to understand how things really are, why they are that way, and how they might be changed or disrupted.

Brainstorm questions about the problem.

Create a list of 50 questions and pick the best 10 to explore further.

Associating

Connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields.

Imagine how someone from a different industry would look at your challenge from an entirely new perspective. What is different?

Experimenting

Constantly visit new places, try new things, seek new information and understanding, and learn from new experiences.

Join new social / professional activities beyond your normal groups and spheres of influence.

Networking

Go out of your way to meet people with vastly different backgrounds and perspectives from your own. Examine different views as a means to expand your knowledge and stretch your thinking.

Go to breakfast or lunch with someone new every week.

Look for ways to combine these skills in new and different ways. Don’t be afraid to fail … stretch yourself and your thinking.

Practice often.

Do you have learning experiences that you would like to share?

3 Tools to Create Social Media Content

Are you looking for new ways to create social media content? Interested in tools that can help you? In this article, I’ll provide 3 types of tools to create and share social media content.

#1: Convert Long Form Content to Slides

Presentations are great for readers who need a little more time to digest bigger pieces of content. They also let you introduce your business in a more visually appealing way. Break your content into slides and share your professional presentations with these tools.

SlideShare

LinkedIn’s SlideShare gives you a platform to build, upload, and edit presentation decks and share them on social media. The list of sharing sites includes Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and of course LinkedIn. Email, links, WordPress shortcodes, and iframe embedding are also available to share your work.

Cost: Free

SlideBoom

SlideBoom can convert your PowerPoint presentations to Flash so you can share them with colleagues, prospects, and customers. As private or public, SlideBoom lets you share your presentations with just the right audience.

Cost: Free and paid versions

Convert your PowerPoint presentations to Flash with SlideBoom.

Prezi

Prezi is available for your desktop or as an online editor. It makes creating an effective presentation a snap. Browse the knowledge base or upload your own presentations. You can add animations and share your content on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Cost: Public accounts are free and will be viewable, searchable, and reusable. Pro accounts run from $5-$20 per month.

Create dynamic presentations with Prezi.

SlideSnack

SlideSnack is a presentation-sharing tool that lets you easily upload presentation slides accompanied by voice overlays. You can share them with Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, My Webs, Weebly, Jimdo, Tumblr, Hi5, Orkut, and YouTube.

Cost: Free

Upload slides and add voice overlays with SlideSnack.

#2: Present Your Business on Video

Video is perhaps the most important medium for sharing and presenting content online. YouTube is the top dog with over 1 billion unique users each month, but other top video-sharing services look to take some of the market share.

Could your bustling business benefit from these top online video tools?

PowToon

PowToon features a user-friendly presentation interface and minimalist design. You can use it to create branded video and share it with prospects and customers.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

PowToon lets you create branded video that you can share on your social channels.

Magisto

Magisto lets you synchronize audio and visual aspects to make an emotional connection with the viewer. Share your videos on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, or your own blog.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

Magisto lets you turn images and video into short movies.

WeVideo

With WeVideo, you get worry-free cloud access to your media, Ken Burns-style animations, voiceover capabilities, and a library of licensed music to make video editing stress-free. Sharing capabilities include Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

WeVideo is a cloud-based video editor.

Wideo

Wideo works in tandem with your marketing strategy to create videos in minutes. You can create professional videos online and share them on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If you prefer to have Wideo create your video, graphic designers are on hand to assist with your marketing needs.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

You can create video in minutes with Wideo.

Share Your Video Content

Once you create your video, here are some places to upload and share it:

YouTube

Just about everyone is familiar with YouTube for its public and private video upload freedom, customizable thumbnails, and monetization capabilities. An incredible 300 hours of videos are uploaded every minute, and according to a recent report from Digiday, there is something for everyone.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

Vimeo

Vimeo’s platform is similar to YouTube and is ideal for video sharing, discovery, and sparking creativity. You can get inspired by individuals and businesses that are passionate about video.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

Dailymotion

Live and on demand, Dailymotion is the place to watch videos of sporting events, hilarious bloopers, fashion shows, and more.

Cost: Free

Metacafe

With a youthful tone and appearance, Metacafe showcases short-form videos, gaming, television, and music.

Cost: Free

#3: Show Your Story With Infographics

Give your content a huge boost with infographics, which encourage engagement. According to Content Desk, an infographic is 30 times more likely to be read than a purely text article.

In fact, the state of visual content has grown in importance from key marketing decision-makers worldwide, supported by a recent report from eMarketer and the communications firm Lewis. They report that 94% of marketing decision-makers produce visual content.

The reasons behind the popularity of visual content may come as a surprise. According to the study, the top reasons for visual content production are not its aesthetic appeal, but its ability to encourage engagement, the social media requirements, and the customer’s reduced attention.

There are easy and affordable ways to stand out visually on social media. With minimal training, these top infographic websites let you create and share craveworthy content.

Easel.ly

Easel.ly lets you easily edit and customize infographic templates. You can share your new canvas immediately on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Cost: Free

Easel.ly lets you edit and customize a variety of infographic templates.

Piktochart

Piktochart lets you create innovative, design-intricate infographics complete with icons, images, charts, and interactive maps. Once finished, save and publish your newly minted content directly to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube, and even convert long-form infographics to multi-slide presentations on SlideShare.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

Design innovative infographics with Piktochart.

Canva

With Canva, you can quickly create infographics, along with presentation covers, social media images, online advertisements, flyers, and more. Canva lets you share your work on Facebook and Twitter.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

Choose from Canva’s library of design sizes and styles.

Visme

With Visme, you can easily create beautiful presentations, infographics, reports, web content, and wireframes all in one place. Share your content online as a URL or on social media, embed it on your website, or download it for offline use.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

Visme lets you create presentations, infographics, reports, web content, and more.

Share Infographic Content

Here are some platforms where you can share your infographics:

Cool Infographics

Cool Infographics is free to marketers in the design community who want to submit their work to a forum for review. In addition, the service lets you self-publish, connect, and discover visual content. It’s a way to drive more traffic to your business.

Cost: Free

Submit Infographics

Do you have an infographic you’re proud of and want to submit it for review? On Submit Infographics, you can publish and share branded designs to be stored in the site’s visual content library, which is available for the viewing pleasure of the site’s large audience.

Cost: Free and paid versions available

Online Writing Tools for Boosting These Skills

We’re living an age where online writing tools make learning writing skills much easier and more fun than it’s ever been. Learning such skills is and always will be an important part of a student’s education. In fact, you might say that today it’s more important than ever. Online writing tools make it easier to achieve, too.

Self-publishing is on the rise, and job markets are far more competitive than they’ve ever been. These are just two examples of how a student’s ability to communicate with words will affect how successful they can be.

Writing is an essential part of effective communication in so many areas of life beyond school and business.

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Being a better writer can:

  • help you to promote yourself to a potential employer or business partner.
  • help you to generate actionable ideas and goals that you’ll stick to.
  • showcase your intelligence and expertise.
  • make you more persuasive and trustworthy.
  • assist you in being better understood by others.

Below is a list of online writing tools that can sometimes slip between the cracks of our awareness, which makes them hidden gems in their own right. These tools will help students hone their content and generate beautiful ideas as they become the great writers they were meant to be.

Editing

Wordcounter—Wordcounter ranks frequently-used words in any given body of text to help you see if you’re overusing any particular words, or to help locate keywords.

Hemingway—Hemingway helps you write like the great man himself; simple, clear, and bold.

Cliche Finder—Like the name suggests, use this tool to help you spot any cliches in your content.

Grammark—One of three copy-and-paste tools featured in this post to help you perform a simple and fast grammar check on your writing.

Grammarly—Grammarly helps you hone your writing skills by finding and correcting many more errors than a standard word processor.

Grammarcheck—Paste in your content and do a free check for spelling errors, style suggestions, or grammar suggestions.

Autocrit—This is an online manuscript tool for fiction writers. Quickly self-edit your work anytime, anywhere.

Writing

Calmly Writer—Distraction-free writing tools like this will surprise you with their simplicity. Don’t let the blank white screen fool you—click on the icon in the top-left corner for options, or begin typing your thoughts right away.

Quabel—A free tool with a clean user interface that lets you concentrate and focus on your best writing.

Writeapp—A free private online notebook app to save and protect all your drafts and ideas right online.

My Writing Spot—This clutter-free online writing workspace features autosave capability, a word counter, a built-in dictionary/thesaurus, and document groups for organization and collaboration.

Ohm Writer—The original distraction-free ambient writing space, and still a favourite with writers of all kinds all over the world.

Focus Writer—This one has a hide-away interface that you access by moving your mouse to the edges of your screen. Available in over 20 languages, it features timers and alarms, daily goals, customizable themes and sound effects, spellcheck and autosave, and much more.

Ilys—Unlock your creativity by locking yourself in! Tell Ilys how many words you want to write, and then be warned—once you begin you can’t go back, delete, or edit anything until you have reached your goal. It may sound frustrating, but it’s an incredibly useful and challenging exercise.

Write Space—This is a Google Chrome plug-in that provides a fully customizable text editor right in your web-browser.

Brainstorming

Stormboard—A versatile multicoloured collaborative space where you can add sticky notes, photos, and videos to a shared wall.

Wridea—Wridea is a web service that lets you share, organize, and improve writing ideas collaboratively.

Bubbl.us—This is a fun and simple mind mapping tool that lets you organize and plan ideas and present them to colleagues in a clean and stylish manner.

oTranscribe—This transcription tool lets you use long voice memos or interviews. Add an MP3 or WAV file and start playing it; all controls are located right inside the app, which means no need to be switching between your sound file and your word processor while you transcribe.

Collaborize Classroom—Collaborize Classroom is a free feature-rich online education platform that lets your students have meaningful conversations and collaborate on creative projects.

Marketing Lessons from Amazon

Amazon is the largest retailer on the planet. It’s also one of the few companies to survive the first dot-com bubble. In other words, it’s doing a lot of things right, and one of the key drivers of the company’s success is the ability to market its brand and its products, which touch just about every category you can think of. Here are six marketing lessons from Amazon.

Creative still counts

When we think of Amazon, we tend to think about deals and shipping. Everyone from your neighbor to your grandparents knows that Amazon probably has the best price on anything you could want to buy, and they know that the company’s bread and butter is shipping it to you as quickly as possible. In other words, nearly every consumer out there knows what Amazon is about.

But that doesn’t mean we know, or even care about Amazon. If you really want to know a brand, if you really want to create a meaningful emotional connection between brand and consumer, you need great creative. And while Amazon certainly dedicates a huge portion of its advertising budget to cookie cutter display ads for the products it sell, the company also provides a valuable lesson in terms of how creative drives affinity.

Here’s just one example, Amazon’s most recent TV commercial for Prime.

Two pizza team

Marketing is a team sport. There’s even a cottage industry around building marketing tools that help teams function better. While we’re at it, there’s also a cottage industry of writing tip-driven pieces about how teams can be more productive. But when it comes to teamwork, Amazon has a novel rule.

Known as the two pizza rule, the idea is to limit the amount of people at a given meeting or on a particular team. But rather than set a hard numerical limit, Amazon has a rule of thumb — how many people can you feed with two pizzas? The answer is the same number of people that should be at the meeting or on the team.

When you think about it, the rule makes perfect sense. More than two pizzas and you probably have more people than could easily participate in the same conversation. Two pizzas or less, you have a small dinner party. Three pizzas or more, you have a full-on party, which can be fun, but probably won’t ever be productive.

Earn customer loyalty, don’t reward it

Customers are fickle creatures, and your competitors are only a click away. Not surprisingly, a lot of marketers look for ways to emphasize loyalty. It’s not unusual for loyalty initiatives to take the form of customer rewards. And in theory, rewards are a good idea. Who among us hasn’t justified a purchase because of the points we hope to accumulate? But then again, who among us hasn’t felt cheated or frustrated when we go to cash in those points? Often times, rewards programs look good from a distance, but when it comes to using them, customers either take the time to become experts at navigating a complex set of rules, or they just give up.

So what does Amazon do? Well, in theory, it also offers points because it participates in credit card issuer reward programs. But as Forbes contributor Jonathan Salem Baskin pointed out, the real way Amazon secures loyalty is by earning it.

“I got an email a few days ago from Amazon, telling me the price of the book I’d ordered had dropped, so it was passing the savings on to me,” Baskin wrote. “I think it was all of 16 cents. But that small sum is why I’m a loyal customer.”

Sure, you could say that customers are loyal to the lowest price, but Baskin thinks there’s something deeper at work here.

“It’s not the amount, but the gesture that matters. It’s transparently voluntary on its part, and it doesn’t require me to do anything that overtly benefits the company. It just screams honesty and integrity in one simple, little, inexpensive moment. Those qualities are what make me a loyal customer.”

Celebrate your history

Broadly speaking, there are three ways for a brand to get attention — paid media, owned media, and earned media. While Amazon certainly buys a huge amount of online ads around specific product offerings, the company is also skilled at making its own fun through owned and earned media.

Consider the recent example of Prime Day. Sure, it was basically just a Black Friday rip-off, but Prime Day also had a noteworthy hook because the company framed it as a celebration of its 20th birthday. The event, staged on July 15, was an example of an owned media strategy — Amazon essentially made the news itself. But Amazon also understood that people love talking about deals just as much as they love the deals themselves, and so the reach of that announcement grew exponentially because publications gleefully carried Amazon’s birthday news for it .

Could another brand adopt the same strategy? Of course it could, although the scale will no doubt be determined by that brand’s footprint. Still, it’s certainly worth asking what internal milestones your brand can share.

Personalized email

Email is pretty much the workhorse of today’s marketing mix. It may not be sexy, but it’s hard to deny its efficacy. Even among millennials, who we tend to think of as email-averse, the platform still represents an important point of connection between brand and consumer. But if you want to make the most of email, you need to make it personal, and that’s where Amazon really excels.

Email marketing company Vero offers a  compelling breakdown of Amazon’s approach to email. Unlike a lot of marketers, Amazon eschews the typical blast email to tell customers about a particular product. Given the number of products Amazon sells, that make sense. But if they wanted to, Amazon could certainly blast out an email for a deal on purses, for example, to every female customer. The reason why Amazon doesn’t do blast emails is that while a blast may move the needle, it also dulls the reaction for the customers who wouldn’t find that offer relevant.

Instead, Amazon’s approach is all about tying behavioral data to the emails a customer receives. A number of marketers do this too. But the real takeaway is that Amazon’s email marketing isn’t trying to be everything to everyone — its goal is to provide value on the most personal level possible.

Principles for Complex Business Partnerships

Business partnerships have become integral to modern companies, regardless of their size or industry. Yet, managing complex business partnerships can be challenging, requiring organisations to establish clear communication, plan carefully, and understand the principles underpinning successful collaborations.

In this blog, I will cover the fundamental principles that can help you manage complex partnerships effectively. Whether you are a small business owner looking to establish strategic partnerships or a seasoned executive managing complex collaborations, this blog will provide valuable insights and strategies to help you build and maintain strong, mutually beneficial partnerships that drive growth and success for your organisation.

1. Build a shared definition and vision of success

Imagine embarking on a journey without a clear destination in mind. You might enjoy the scenery along the way, but ultimately, you will not know if you have succeeded or failed. The same principle applies to business partnerships. You set the relationship up for failure without a clear definition of success.

You must have a shared definition and vision of success when entering a partnership. While profitability may seem like the obvious goal, it is essential to identify each party’s vision and idea of success and work towards harmonising those visions.

Managing business partnerships between organisations can be incredibly complex, as each company has goals, processes, and a vision. It is crucial to have complete transparency and honesty about the desired outcomes without making assumptions about what each partner wants from the partnership. Both parties need to agree on what they want to achieve. It is not enough to have a vague idea of success; you need to be specific.

2. Discuss the work each business will complete

A lack of shared responsibility can lead to failure in any business partnership, so each partner must contribute equally to avoid feelings of inequity and resentment. A perception of unfairness can quickly become the downfall of your partnership.

To prevent this, you must clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each business. Establish specific processes and procedures for executing each partner’s assigned tasks to minimise friction resulting from unclear roles.

Commitment is crucial to a successful long-term partnership, especially during challenging periods. Even in difficult times, partners should respect the terms of the agreement and fulfil their obligations. Therefore, it is essential to outline penalties alongside the roles to have measures in place should a partner fail to execute their responsibilities.

3. Conduct your due diligence

You must not overlook the necessary due diligence on your potential partner. Remember that your partner will likely conduct their own due diligence on you, so it is in your best interest to do the same.

The partnership type will determine the information required for the due diligence exercise. For instance, a financial partnership may necessitate an investigation into your partner’s financial statements and credit. In contrast, an intellectual property partnership may require an assessment of the value and ownership of its intellectual property assets.

I recommend prioritising transparency throughout the due diligence process. There is no need to keep it a secret, as due diligence is a regular business activity. Being open about what you are examining and your findings can foster trust and transparency between partners, laying a solid foundation for the partnership. Your partner will appreciate your diligence and likely reciprocate by sharing their findings about your organisation.

4. Create your measurements for success

After defining success and assigning roles in the partnership, the next step is establishing a means of measuring success. Although increased profits may be the obvious benchmark, assessing profitability in the short term can be challenging. Tracking incremental gains attributed to the partnership’s efforts can be difficult without suitable systems.

To establish a reliable method of measuring success in your partnership, you must create practical, quantifiable goals that can serve as benchmarks when assessing performance. You can use the SMART goals method to ensure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. These benchmarks will also assist in determining equitable compensation, bonuses, and incentives for each partner.

You must obtain a commitment from all strategic partners to adopt the partnership’s methods for measuring success. So, everyone is informed of their performance standards and committed to meeting them.

Furthermore, reliable indicators must be in place to detect underperforming partners before it is too late. This necessitates the establishment of protocols for systematically addressing underperformance from partners without jeopardising the partnership.

5. Decide how you will end the business partnership

Every good thing eventually ends, and your partnership is no exception. When the partnership has achieved its goals or is no longer advantageous for both parties, it is impractical to persist in allocating time and resources to manage it.

It is best to have this discussion before entering into the partnership. If the partnership is time-sensitive, both parties should agree on an expiration date and incorporate it into the contract. However, if the partnership is potentially indefinite, the agreement can include clauses allowing annual meetings to review the partnership’s performance and terms. Based on performance, the partners can continue, make adjustments, or terminate it if it no longer benefits both parties.

Terminating strategic business partnerships can be costly, so your organisation should establish contingencies if your strategic partner ends the partnership. You should have a cost-sharing policy that fairly divides termination costs without jeopardising the existence of either organisation.

Conclusion

Managing complex business partnerships can be challenging, but following these five principles can increase your chances of success. By building a shared definition and vision of success, discussing the specific work each business will complete, conducting thorough due diligence, creating measurements for success, and deciding how to end the partnership, you can build strong and productive partnerships that deliver results.

How To Use Behavioral Data to Improve Customer Experience

It’s a hot summer afternoon, and you know your customers are probably parched and looking for a cold drink, but how do you improve customer experience to get them to come to your restaurant? McDonald’s in Turkey thinks the key is using beacon technology to send real-time offers and coupons to customers’ phones. Turkey recently served as a proving ground for the technology, and McDonald’s is using factors, including location and weather to customize its offerings, raise awareness of new products, and increase sales. Beacons provide real-time data that allows companies like McDonald’s to integrate themselves into customers’ lives in ongoing and relevant ways.

The fast food chain tested similar initiatives in the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan, using its app to market products based on customers’ habits, locations and the time of day. In Sweden alone, the approach yielded a 700-percent rise in redemption rate, with app users ordering twice as often and spending nearly 50 percent more than they previously had.

Driving personalization to the drive-thru

After decades of mass-market consumerism, people are now looking for personalized experiences — even when it comes to drive-thru dining. Beacons are helping companies respond to that demand.

San Francisco Soup Company uses beacons and data collection to track customers’ preferences and push relevant offers their way when they’re within range of its stores. It also uses the app to create individualized rewards program experiences, enabling them to become a more frequent part of customers’ regular routines.

Restaurant franchises already tailor their offerings to different communities. McDonald’s doesn’t sell beef burgers in India, and many other chains create menu items that align with local cultures and preferences. Big data allows chains to take that concept one step further by building offers around customers’ individual habits and circumstances. Companies can also use beacon data to select new locations for development based on foot traffic and geographic quirks.

3 benefits of behaviorial data

Beacon and behavioral data can revolutionize how chains do business from the big picture to the day-to-day. Let’s look at some ways behavioral data impacts daily operations for the better.

1. It improves staff scheduling to build a great customer experience. You need great customer service for your business to thrive, especially in the food industry. Attentive servers and quick order-processing times can make or break your franchise, and because staff costs constitute some of the highest expenses restaurants face, tracking foot traffic and peak customer engagement will help you create important, accurate, and cost-effective forecasts for your human resource needs.

Behavioral data can help determine which times are slower and which times require extra hands so you don’t have employees standing around with nothing to do. This enables you to make weekly and monthly staffing decisions and predict how holidays and local events will affect your sales volume.

 
 

2. It targets nearby customers with special offers. Traffic data enables you to measure the number of clients coming through your door during different time periods, allowing you to properly allocate resources and distribute fliers and coupons throughout the day. You can then compare activity rates on different offers and even the level of interest customers express to your staff about your initiatives.

If your business has a mobile app, you can use behavioral data to send push notifications to users in your vicinity that entice them to head your way. Ask users to allow the app to pull location, travel, and purchase data to enhance their customer experience, then use that information to tailor offers to their circumstances and preferences.

Outback Steakhouse uses geo-location data to woo potential clients away from competitors. The company has established geo-fences within five miles of its own buildings and 10 miles of its competitors’, placing ads on location-based apps to showcase promotional offers. Outback saw an 11-percent conversion rate increase with these geo-targeted campaigns.

3. It builds effective marketing campaigns. You can harness the power of your big data measurements to map out traffic and purchase patterns on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. You can develop more aggressive or creative marketing campaigns for low-traffic periods, and you can design interesting daily promotions to maintain a steady flow of customers. Train your management team to regularly cross-check client flow against your various campaigns, and adjust strategies and staffing decisions accordingly.

Customers demand personalized experiences, and beacon marketing helps restaurants create them. This information allows companies to understand and anticipate their clients’ needs and meet them in seamless and effective ways.

Franchises that want to stay competitive in an increasingly data-driven market need to embrace beacon technologies. With this data in your tool belt, you can let customers know that you’re listening — and they’ll reward you for it.

Facebook Successful Posts Tactics

If you feel challenged by Facebook successful posts marketing these days, you should know you’re not alone.

In an increasingly crowded news feed, Facebook’s  algorithm updates can make it tough for brands to get much notice.

In fact, brands are now responding to plunging organic reach on Facebook by  posting more content to Instagram than they are to Facebook, according to a report by research firm L2.

But don’t despair; there’s plenty of life left in Facebook yet. We’ve been scouring the web to find out what’s working on Facebook right now—all the tactics, new additions and post types you need to know today.

Here are 8 top tactics to take a look at adding to your Facebook marketing toolbox.

1. Post native videos

Our Number One strategy for your Facebook marketing right now? Video.

We got this tip straight from Facebook queen Mari Smith back in February , when she said:

“Let’s talk about video: Facebook is absolutely taking traffic from Youtube right now with video.

What happens with autoplay, it’s all psychology. They come in through your newsfeed, start to see a tiny bit of movement, boom, it draws them in. They’ll stop and play your video. Make it short, quick and easy, with a call to action.”

Since then, even more evidence of video’s prowess has emerged.

Social media analytics company Socialbakers looked at more than 670,000 posts by 4,445 brand pages to find that video posts had organic reach of 8.71% , far higher than text-only statuses’ 5.77%, link posts’ 5.29% and photo posts’  3.73%.

Here at Buffer, we’ve seen the video effect firsthand. Notice anything about the two posts from our Facebook Insights with the highest reach and interactions? Both videos!

3 ways to use video on Facebook:

Post it natively:  Posting directly to Facebook seems to provide better results than linking to video from sites like YouTube or Vimeo

Choose a featured video:  Facebook allows you to pick one featured video that gets a prominent place on your Page. Here’s ours right now:

Create video playlists:  Group related pieces of content together in a Facebook video playlist (Note: This one may not be available to everyone just yet)

2. Share quote photos

A tactic that is still going strong is creating and sharing quote photos. Mike Gingerich, writing at Social Media Examiner, does a great job of explaining the perennial popularity of these pics :

“People love inspirational quotes that  motivate them or elicit a particular emotion , which in turn can lead to post interaction, especially shares.

A Facebook share plays a huge part in social proof and can result in many new friends of fans finding (and liking) your page. These new eyes are an opportunity for you to start the relationship-building process.”

I really love the awesome job Kim Garst of Boom Social is doing with shareable quotes. Check out the engagement she gets with images like these::

At Buffer, we believe so strongly in the future of social media images like these that we  created a new tool to help you make them quickly and easily.

We’ve also written about  lots of other image-making tools so you can be sure to find the best one for you.

Note that there’s some evidence that  posting photos to Facebook might not be the best strategy right now, so your mileage with this tactic could vary.

3. Target your organic posts

If Facebook is limiting your posts to a smaller audience, why not make sure it’s exactly the audience you have in mind?

Targeting was once more of an ads feature, but since  Facebook has rolled out new tools for publishers, more brands seem to be experimenting with targeting audiences for even organic posts.

Social Media Examiner did some experimenting  with mixed results: They discovered that some targeted posts “definitely had higher engagement than posts that didn’t use targeting.”

The authors at SME concluded that this tactic seems to have potential particularly for smaller pages.

If you might fall into that category, here’s a great guide to getting started targeting from Social Media Week:

Jon Loomer has quite an in-depth guide  if you’re interested in diving into this topic at length.

4. Engage your CTA button

Late in 2014, Facebook  introduced a call-to-action button designed to bring a business’s most important objective to the forefront of its Facebook presence.

For visitors landing on your page for the first time, make sure you make the most of this addition and add the most appropriate CTA available.

At present, page admins can select from seven calls to action:

  • Book Now
  • Contact Us
  • Use App
  • Play Game
  • Shop Now
  • Sign Up
  • Watch Video

5. Try dark posts

Dark posting on Facebook is publishing a post that does not appear on your page’s timeline. Instead, these posts are targeted to a select audience of your choosing.

Why might this be helpful?  Split testing is one great use of dark posts.  You can create three or four different variations of the same post, then send them out to see which type performs best (without flooding your timeline with each and every variation).

Here’s how to find this Facebook tool:

Click Power Editor in the left column of  your Facebook ads manager . (Note: Power editor is only available for Chrome browsers.)

From here, you’ll want to click Download to Power Editor at the top of the page to download the accounts you want to manage.

Strata Blue has put together a list of very detailed instructions on where to go from here in order to build your dark posts. You can follow their instructions to try this out.

6. Zero in on your key topics

A recent Moz whiteboard Friday focused on the topic of  driving traffic from Facebook and included lots of solid tips from Buffer pal Rand Fishkin.

One I’d like to highlight here is Rand’s tips to learn what works for you on Facebook by using Buzzsumo:

“Learn what does work in your topics in Facebook. There’s a great tool for this. It’s called BuzzSumo. You can plug in keywords and see the pieces of content that over the past six months or a year have performed the best across social networks, and you can actually filter directly by Facebook to see what’s done best on Facebook in my niche, with my topics, around my subjects. That’s a great way to get at what might work in the future, what doesn’t work, what will resonate, and what won’t.”

You can search for specific keywords on BuzzSumo, or filter by your own domain to see what you’ve created that did well that you could drive inspiration from:

7. Up your posting frequency

Another no-nonsense tactic to counter lowered Facebook reach is to simply up your posting frequency.

Writing on Social Fresh, Dennis Yu  observed that overall, total interactions per day on Facebook increase linearly with posts per day.

At the same time, negative feedback doesn’t seem correlated to posting more frequently:

Dennis notes that some pages post 30-40 times per day and get less negative feedback as a proportion of total engagement.

If you’re able to keep a close eye on your Facebook Insights, why not try upping your Facebook frequency?

8. Get creative with Trending Topics

As Facebook moves ever closer into real-time when it comes to Trending Topics, I find myself clicking on these newsy topics more and more often.

And when I do, I notice that right below the details of whatever news item I’m checking out are more posts from others I’m connected to or even a few degrees away from. For example, checking out the latest news on “The Walking Dead” brought me this post from marketer (and future Buffer Social guest post author!) Jeff Goins.

Jeff’s post is a great example of taking advantage of Trending Topics in a way that feels personal and organic, not spammy and forced. Could you something similar?

Successful Email Marketing Strategies

Social media marketing maybe the talk of the business industry nowadays, but content marketing and email marketing strategies are not dead.

Content marketing is here to stay for the indefinite future because of the adage “content is king,” but email marketing does not convey the same level of confidence and prospect.

Nevertheless, email marketing provides a more personal, more targeted level of interaction between the marketer and the audience than social media marketing as of now.

Bloggers may use various email marketing strategies that may or may not be covered in the following list but each of these tips is a good head start.

Consider user-generated content.

Among the most valuable, popular user-generated contents are contests and giveaways or freebies.

Promotions may help obtain volumes of emails from potential customers, increase brand visibility on targeted social media platforms, and boost social shares as fast as possible.

Discuss topics related to your industry.

Scour the Internet for industry-related discussions that may later turn into potential sales or contracts.

Web seminars, or “webinars,” prove that not all powerful forms of conversations or discussions are done in writing.

Webinars have the capacity to draw volumes of emails in at least less than one week, and only requires the right promotion before the allotted time.

Webinars are used to share expertise to people who want to know more about your brand, and to generate leads.

Collect email addresses through social networks.

You may publish or post content through social media platforms such as social networks and collect the email addresses of page visitors, and communicate or engage with them if you have a targeted offering.

Social networks are among the most effective ways to tap onto the interest of potential customers or clients and interact with them, especially as people search for freely available content.

Ask and take feedbacks from visitors or customers.

Brand development takes place when a concept or idea is created by top management, usually after they gather suggestions or feedbacks from various departments and customers who connect with the brand.

Customer feedback empowers your product or service in a way that it improves the quality provided to the target audience.

Send customers those information that they have good use of.

A blogger has to think about catering to the needs of customers based on their interests, intentions, or actions.

If a customer paid for a product or service, deliver the item he or she purchased as soon as you confirm the payment.

Test your sales transaction first to check, track, or observe whether or not there is a failure or drawback in the payment system.

Offer direct links to your online accounts.

Make good use of the email signature option to include links to your social and online accounts in email templates, especially for a more personal outreach, since it enhances credibility to the blog or brand.

Avoid excessive use of images in email templates.

The creation of email templates similar to those of print or webpage postal mailers is among the major mistakes in email marketing campaigns.

Visuals convert visitors and readers to customers only when these catching images are properly placed within the email.

Inserting photos, graphics, and images in emails may become your main problem if the end users cannot see it due to presentation and formatting problems.

File format problems often lead to emails landing in spam folders.

Give at least one good reason for the target audience to sign up.

When you sell or promote a product or service, remember that the key to successful branding or marketing is for the brand or blog site to address or fix concern or problem of the end users.

If you think you are the best in the industry but you are not providing enough solutions to problems related to your business, competitors will the get the better of you.

Send emails if you have announcements.

The best strategy arguably is to send emails only when you have to announce a product, service, revision, giveaway, contest, event, and other significant information.

How to Improve Your Critical Thinking

I recently helped my 9-year-old son to complete a homework project for his class that had him analyzing a news article, answering questions, and then translating it into a different language. The purpose was to know what’s happening in another part of the world and then write about it in the language of the people affected. This was all about intoducing the concept of critical thinking for the students.

I watched my son work, and realized he copied and pasted, ran things through Google translate, and submitted it.

Asking him what the article was about, his response was tell-tale. “I don’t know, I just answer the questions and then translate it. I don’t really think about it.  I need to finish it so I can get to the next task. Now sign here, so I can move on.” He pointed to a neat horizontal signature line.

Hold on a second, I said. I then proceeded to ask him questions that required real thinking and processing. He was stunned and reluctant. “You’re slowing me down.”

The next day, he came back heartbroken. “All that work, and I got points taken off, because it was on the wrong kind of paper.” What did my child learn? It’s more important to have the right paper than it is to think critically.

Do we inadvertently squelch critical thinking in their students? How can we look more toward critical thinking than teaching to the test? What strategies can we follow to to bring the best out of your student population? How would you train your teachers toward critical thinking?

Here are some thoughts:

1: Critical thinking has to be shouted from the rooftops. Not that it should replace and do away with factual learning (lower-order thinking), but students thinking critically on their own is the pinnacle of the accumulation of knowledge and experience.

This flies directly in the face of teaching to the test, but it’s important that we make the distinction. Give to the testers what is theirs, but give back to students their freedom to think.

2: Encourage project-based learning. Solving real-world problems gets kids out of the classroom and into the real world.

3: Encourage collaboration, if not just in your classroom with other students, but also with the surrounding community and all the interesting professionals that are at its heart.

Think about collaboration along the lines of using technology to reach out to the global community. Don’t just invest in technology. Remember the end game is students collaborating, thinking critically, and solving problems that are relevant to their world.

4: Teach the 6D’s of  solution thoughts as a process for working through a problem to its solution

  • Define  the driving question. Ask questions to clarify, focus and understand what the problem is.
  • Discover  all aspects of the problem. What’s being done currently? What exactly is the nature of the problem? Be observant.
  • Dream  and brainstorm directions to approach the solution. Imagine the problem through different points of view.
  • Design  the product. Create a blueprint of the ideas and workshop them thoroughly.
  • Deliver  the goods and put the solution to work in a practical application—that is, generate the product and test it out against the problem.
  • Debrief  and review the process and look realistically on the product or solution.

5. Whether you choose to use the language of design thinking or that of solution thoughts, take a look at step-by-step through planning incredible project-based learning experiences for your students. Play with it and plan your own professional development with it.