And the more feelings and emotions you express, the more attention to your brand. And the more influence it can create. Not rocket science is it?
Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.
- David Freemantle
Tag: be consistent
5 Reasons Not to Write Your Own Law Firm Website Content
Not too long ago, a lawyer with a website automatically assumed the role of law firm website content writing as well. After all, you’re a professional who knows the law, and producing content for your website will be just like the share of documents you’ve drafted in your career.
Wrong.
Regardless of the industry, content writing for the web goes beyond the words you write down. If you are looking to generate traffic, engage, and eventually convert website visitors into clients, then writing your own law firm content is out of the question. Here’s why:
You Barely Have the Time
How many client meetings do you have on your calendar this week? Court dates to attend? What about the numerous documents you’re required to draft, review, or file?
When you are a lawyer, it’s likely that your days are full of professional and personal responsibilities, that you don’t have the time to sit and write your law firm’s content. And when you do, the work is likely to be short, sound rushed and almost always completed later than you anticipated.
As a busy lawyer, consider delegating these duties to professional legal content writers as you focus on running your law practice.
You’ll Not be Consistent
When you don’t have enough time to write your law firm’s content, it’s unlikely that you’ll stick to a consistent schedule. An emergency meeting or court date could arise and take priority on your to-do list.
Unfortunately, consistency is an important driver of content marketing. Without consistency, you’ll not be in a position to cover all your potential client’s pain points. Inconsistency will also confuse your audience, especially if, in the beginning, you introduced a pace that you can’t keep up with.
As a result, your audience will start looking for solutions elsewhere, including your competitors.
You’re Not a Marketing Expert
There’s a lot that goes into content writing. While lawyers learn how to articulate themselves better both in verbal and written format, nobody teaches you how to write for the web in law school. This only means that, unfortunately, you’ll be relying on sheer luck for your content to achieve your marketing goals, because its success is not based on the law content it possesses.
Besides putting up content, you also need to apply SEO (search engine optimization) strategies, to ensure that your audience can easily access it. Professional legal content writers also understand marketing techniques that are likely to make your audience take an intended action on your site.
Analytics is also a crucial aspect of content marketing. Knowing what’s working and what’s not bringing in results can help shape your future content. When you choose to write your legal content, you’re likely to miss some of these important points.
Furthermore, you’ll need to understand linking strategies, both on your site and off your site. That can get really complex, and be honest, consume a ton of time.
Lack of a Content Strategy Plan
Since you don’t possess legal marketing expertise, writing your website content equates to winging it. This also means that you likely don’t have a concrete schedule and a content strategy plan. Sure, you have an idea of what you want to talk about in your next article, but this is not enough.
Besides helping you plan ahead, having a content strategy ensures that your topics are carefully selected to cater fully and connect with your audience.
You Risk Writing Like a Lawyer
There’s nothing wrong with writing like a lawyer, only that it’s not likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
When a lawyer writes, they are likely to get lost in the technicalities and forget about the primary goal: offering solutions. The results are too much legalese and too little help.
Lawyers are also often guilty of using a lot of jargon. When potential customer encounters this, they are likely to look for similar content from other law firms that have hired legal content writers instead.
The Go-Getter’s Guide for Building Customer Advocates for New Business
The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers. So, ok … we have taken small liberty on Peter Drucker’s quote. We added the part about who creates customers. We are pretty sure Drucker would agree with us. After all, building customer advocates are one of the most important jobs of the business.
Let’s remind ourselves what an advocate is. An advocate is a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular business, cause, or policy.
For example, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are groups that work to publicize and find solutions for particular issues.
These advocate groups have a big impact on the issues they’re passionate about. Because of their passion, they have big power to influence how the public thinks and acts about responsible driving and animal treatment.
Research by Edelman’s trust barometer indicates that buyers, customers, and consumers often will trust each other far more than they’ll trust employees, sales or company.
While factual information about product specs, pricing, and usage will still be relevant on the corporate website, expect customers to do online research, and consider advice from their peers before they make purchasing decisions.
In his book, The Hidden Wealth of Customers, Bill Lee puts it this way:
“After a customer completes a purchase, what is typically left of the table is a gold mine of ways that firms can increase both the value they provide for customers and the profitability customers generate for the firm.
With the new customer value proposition, you essentially reinvent your relationship, transforming customers into what I call customer advocates, influencers, and contributors.”
Customer evangelism is something companies, and marketing consultants have talked about for years.
Often though, the big companies get all the attention in this area. People assume small and mid-sized companies can’t create customer evangelists. But they’re very wrong.
Here are nine secrets you should know about creating customer evangelists no matter what size your company is:
Create a business cause
Great products and services don’t usually inspire your market. Great causes do. Apple stands for individualism. Disney believes in making memories. AARP’s higher purpose advocates for making life better for American’s over 50 years old.
What values run through your marketing strategy and customer community? Your organization will attract people who share those beliefs.
When customers buy into your big picture, they will not only fight to strengthen your community, but they will advocate for your business’s cause.
Talk to your customers
Have real person-to-person conversations with as many customers as you can. If you have a lot of customers relative to your employees, then you’ll need to prioritize your most valuable customers.
Find ways to have real, meaningful, and ongoing conversations with them.
This might mean inviting some to lunch. It might mean hosting get-togethers at your business. It might start with a survey and end with a phone call or a meeting. For others, it might be virtual conversations using email or Web 2.0 tools.
Get customers involved
Find multiple ways to get your customers involved. For some people, just a regular phone call or lunch will be enough. For others, you might get their help finding solutions to challenges you’re facing.
Create communities for your customers to participate in. Forums and blogs are great for this. Software and online companies have done this for years but so can small businesses.
One great way to do this is for your business to invite customers to submit pictures of themselves with their products and services.
Then post the pictures on their website. A very popular and successful example of building a community.
Building customer advocates … serve their needs
Of course, you’re doing this to make your company better. But everything you do in your customer evangelism effort needs to be useful from your customer’s perspective.
Educate them while you engage them.
Always do things in ways that are useful to and respectful of your customers. Keep that as your primary focus.
Help customers connect
Helping customer community members associate with like-minded people is a big part of turning customers into advocates.
When a customer is excited about your products, services, and the results that your company has helped them deliver, they are eager to share that experience with their friends.
Those who are receptive to these stories are most likely going to be potential advocates.
Provide online and offline opportunities for customers to connect with other customers. These could be customer events or online activities.
By making it easy for customers in similar positions to connect, you are teeing up your most passionate fans to find strength in numbers.
Building customer advocates … be open
However, you engage your customers in making sure you do it genuinely and honestly. Be open about what you’re doing and why.
Make the process as transparent as possible. The more open you are with your customers, the more open they will be with you.
Empower your employee’s participation. Don’t script them or micro-manage their involvement.
Let them get to know your customers and vice- versa. The more your customers know and like your employees, the more likely they will be evangelists for you.
The bottom line in creating loyal customers who promote your business is this:
You need to care about them.
Every action your company takes needs to show your customers you are there to serve their needs. When you do this, you will deliver an experience that your customers can’t get anywhere else.
So they’ll come back. And, they’ll bring others with them.
Deliver what you promise and promptly fix what goes wrong
This is an obvious starting point, which everyone knows, but many firms lose sight of over time. Marketing that’s based on customer advocacy and influence must keep this basic truth front and center.
These frontline actions are what underlie any genuine enthusiasm from a customer.
You can’t create or enlist a customer advocate without the solid foundation of an ongoing, responsive delivery and service relationship.
Help customers achieve their goals
The most important job of your business is to help your customers solve their problems and achieve their goals.
Aligning your customer strategy, content, and community management tactics with your customers’ most critical challenges is a surefire way to make your business indispensable to your customers.
The equation is simple. Satisfied customers are much more likely to advocate for your product, service, or company.
.
Be consistent in building customer advocates
When a company has an active customer advocacy focus, customers are sharing ideas with each other.
They are asking the company and its partners for advice. And they are responding honestly to communication from you.
This is fertile ground to recruit new members of your customer advocates.
Keeping the pipeline full at the early stages of their support is critical to building momentum in your market.
To put it as simply as possible … create customer evangelists by caring about your customers and showing it with everything you do.
The bottom line
Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable at building customer advocates.
In fact, most people aren’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway.
Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up and spread the word.
It’s up to you to keep improving your customer engagement and relationship building performance and creativity.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your customer service?
Do you have a lesson about making your customer relationships better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to 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.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
10 Next Generation Customer Service Practices
Handling Customer Complaints … 8 Mistakes to Avoid
Customer Service Tips … How to Take Charge with Basics
7 Ways to Create a Customer Service Evangelist Business
Mike Schoultz likes to write about the topics that lead to small business success. He also likes to share his many business experiences. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Improve Employee Motivation: How to Completely Change Techniques
Is your goal to improve employee motivation and engagement? And do it in the way that makes them want to do it? A quality of a top notch leader isn’t it? Well remember this: good leaders are reliable and yet not predictable. And they should be consistent without being predictable. Not rocket science is it? But without these leadership traits, you will be losing the ability to motivate your team.
What skill matters most if you are a leader of a small business? Or perhaps for any business leader? We believe it is the ability to motivate and engage. For a small business, to develop the best motivational leader qualities is more critical to the daily operations than larger businesses. Why? Because there is much less leadership to be involved. And fewer employees so you need everyone fully engaged and motivated.
Can you change? Of course, you can. Everybody changes every day. But how versatile, agile, and quickly can you adapt yourself and your organization to stay relevant in today’s society?
Organizations are always evolving. What’s different now, is that we set new speed records of change on a daily basis. Technology gives us unprecedented possibilities. And this sea of opportunities is pushing the traditional bureaucratic, controlled and hierarchical organization into an identity crisis.
Your personality and attitude make a world of impact on those around you, don’t they? Making motivational improvements for you and your team should not be rocket science … it is usually the simple things that make you most effective.
So … you need to pay attention to the development of your own motivational leadership abilities if you are a leader of a small business. Here are some things that you need to do to motivate and engage your staff:
Improve employee motivation … providing challenging work
Wondering what the most important part of being social is? It is listening, hands down in our opinion. And listening means hearing. So if you don’t start with great listening, you will immediately turn off many of staff.
I learned this one quite early in my leadership and management career. Remember your first step in team motivation is making listening the backbone of your conversation. And then give everyone meaningful work tasks and cross train.
Storytelling in communications
Have you noticed how much employee motivation has changed in the last decade? Most people have. So when you use just traditional communication techniques, employees imagine you are stuck in time. Not a good thing.
One new communication technique we think is most important is storytelling. Think about the stories that you were told as children. They are etched into our subconscious. Use pictures and videos to communicate your stories in creative new ways. Ways that will be remembered and talked about.
Be consistent
Do you know your employees well and their likes and dislikes? If so, this in your guide to consistent personal conversational topics.
Always be consistent in the subjects you know your employees are interested in. Select the new variants but stick with their interests.
Show your personality
Everyone has a personality or at least 98% of the populace. Your business reflects the personalities of its leaders either by choice or by accident. You know which is best, don’t you?
Every successful leader has a specific tone of voice. One that relates to the personality of the business. And yes, of course, a business and its leadership have a distinctive personality. Decide what personality you want and let your tone reflect it in your leadership style … consistently. Employees love the personal touch.
Be flexible
It is often difficult to be flexible with all the decisions required in the marketplace. So if you want to be more flexible and still be consistent, you must pay attention to even the small details in dealing with employee decisions.
Make your employee interaction stand out with simple messages and involve employees in as many decisions as you can.
Listen and hear
A Chinese proverb once said if you don’t like to smile don’t open a shop. The same goes for being a person who doesn’t like to deal with people. Nothing is more damaging to a business.
Listen, hear, and observe closely. Find the unspoken messages. Make listening and observing your core competences. You don’t gain insights by talking. Ideas can come from anywhere, so it’s important to keep your ears open to new ideas and insight.
Leaders need to be good listeners for everyone, from customers to employees to business colleagues. They need to listen to what other people say and not just hear it. Listening also helps a leader get multiple perspectives. When making a decision, a good leader always listens to a number of different people. They know they own the final decision but always make sure they get input from multiple people.
Always learning
Now more than ever, things are changing at blazing speed. Employees notice businesses that are stuck in time, refusing to learn.
There is only two ways to keep up. They are continuous learning and applying what you learn. Spend time understanding changing trends and patterns. Apply them as often as you can. And most importantly, solicit the help of your employees.
Communicate clear expectations
Don’t like networking either on or off-line? Not sure why you are in business, are you? This is true for employees and customers
Don’t be fooled by the deceptive simplicity of being social on-line. Building an effective network takes a lot of time, energy, and resources. Schedule time to make it happen and devote the energy required. Get your employees involved.
Always, always put employees first
Employees should always come first, they are your business. No matter what the job is, leaders always want to look for the best people and then take care of them. They are the lifeblood of the business. They then will take great care of customers.
When you’re leading a business or an organization, you’re leading people. Many leaders work to have relationships with their employees. Taking them out for coffee and getting to know them better is common, an important element in being a leader. Here are two additional perspectives from exceptional business leaders:
You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.
– Walt Disney
You have to treat your employees like customers.
– Herb Kelleher
Being socialable
Be social … walk around and connect on multiple levels. Connected leaders quickly become multiplier leaders. Multiplier leaders know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is not the lone genius, but rather the leader who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone around them.
Inspire and energize
Share your passion. Show compassion and share positive energy always.
A quality of great leaders is being able to clearly articulate ideas and get people excited and inspired about them. It’s not selling people on an idea, it’s inspiring them.
Getting a person to work with a leader when they’re not obligated is more than just inspiring them. It’s about ensuring people have fun and are energized with passion. Many charities get people to volunteer for them by inspiring and energizing a noble cause. They say that if you donate, you’ll be spending your time working toward something greater than yourself. This inspires people to take a few hours to work for a charity promoting a cause they believe in.
Coaching and mentoring
Mentor and develop self-esteem and a positive attitude. We have written on employees’ positive attitude on several occasions. Employee attitude is so critical that it can’t be overemphasized. It often trickles down from leaders, but it needs to happen more by design. Your business can never be what it can be if you don’t focus on employee happiness.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll have dozens of people criticize you. Customers, current and former employees (whether you know it or not), and family and friends may give you constructive criticism. It can be stressful to hear or read, and it can be easy to pass on criticism to employees. But it doesn’t help that much. As a leader, you should ensure employees have high self-esteem in their job.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enablers for success for yourself and your employee team?
Need some help in finding ways to motivate and engage your employee team? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
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 continually improving your business learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your 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 how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
9 Things to Know About Creative Visual Design Content
8 Presenter Mistakes That Are Rarely Made Twice
Know These Great Secrets of Collaboration and Co-Creation
How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?
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, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Followers Twitter … 7 Ways to Get Followers without Following
Twitter has rapidly become the ‘go-to’ platform for sharing and exchanging information, including link content. For both bloggers and brands, Twitter, now in its eighth year, is rivaled by only Facebook as the most effective way to build website traffic for your marketing campaign. Is your business goal to get followers to twitter without following? If so, this blog post is for you.
Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.
Keep reading: 6 Fantastic Facts about the Changing Social Media Landscape
So what are the best ways to build an engaged and relevant social media community using Twitter for your business marketing?
Related material: 11 Updates to Starbuck’s Creativity and Innovation
Consider these tips for customer engagement and marketing using Twitter (note I am currently doing some twitter work for a Finger Lakes Tourism client … so I will use some examples from this work):
Twitter followers check …. think like your target community.
Make your tweets relevant and interesting to this specific community. You should do minimal to no selling. For the Finger Lakes client, he is sharing facts on the history of the Finger Lakes, the most popular State Parks, and the regional wineries and wines.
Start conversations by asking insightful questions.
Participate in relevant conversations. In the case of the Finger Lakes client, he has prepared many questions on wine production, types of Finger Lakes grapes, and details on the Finger Lakes themselves.
Followers twitter … add value with every tweet.
Remember there is a very fine line between tweeting frequently and spamming. We recommend 1-2 new tweets (not counting responses) every other hour in non-peak times and 2-3 tweets every couple of hours in peak hours. Note that tweets and tweet subject material should be semi-prepared ahead of time.
Craft a distinct voice and personality for your brand.
Use it consistently. Show your emotion, enthusiasm, and passion.
Be a member of the community you are building.
Be an active listener and dialog participant. Don’t become a one-way broadcaster.
There are many aspects to your company
Use ideas from all of them. For example, use some of the social charities and issues that your business supports and highlight your efforts.
Be consistent
… in your value-add and dialog to discriminate your voice from the crowd.
Related post: About Social Media … Ways to Use Social Media for Learning
The bottom line
In summary, find ways to have fun … and let it show in your tweets. People will certainly notice!
What is your business doing with its Twitter account that is especially effective that you would share with this community?
Lots of ideas here that can be easily replicated … which ones do you feel could benefit your business?
