content strategy

How to Use Newsletters for Awesome Customer Service

Newsletters are an ideal way to connect with your customers. If a customer has opted in to your newsletter, they want to hear from you. You want to make the best use possible of that indication of interest and trust.

Newsletters speak directly to your customers and help build a relationship. A great strategy for achieving this is to send out a customer service-oriented newsletter that shows your business’s dedication to their needs.

Here are some ways to do that in your newsletter:

Provide news and updates that are relevant for the customer

You know it’s great that your company got that award and all, but that should not be the feature story of your mailout. The top story (which is the one that customers are likely to see if they click open your email) should be about something that will help the customer solve her problems.

The more often your customer sees copy that helps him, the more likely he is to click open your next email, and your next, and he might even start scrolling down to see your other stories — like that one about the award that shows how amazing your company is at doing what it does.

Show how your product or service can benefit the customer

Pop quiz! Which works better:

A) We’ve just released a new social media feature. It works with Facebook and Pinterest, and you can find it in your Dashboard under Social.

B) Save time! We have just released a new Facebook and Pinterest posting option that will cut your status updating time investment by a third.

Clearly B wins, but why? Because A was a description of the features, and it didn’t explain why the client should care. The second version works because it describes the benefit to the customer. Your customer service newsletter should always provide information about your product or service in terms of the benefits it offers.

Show how your business affects the community at large

If your business has a presence at local events, fundraisers, and other community activities, this is perfect content to include in your customer service newsletter as a second or third story. Your participation in the community lets the public know you have an interest in matters beyond your business. The contributions your business can make to the community show your dedication to maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers.

Feature an employee

To help build the relationship you need with your customers, make your business real! Small writeups about the people at your company adds that human touch and it will help customers build a strong emotional connection with your company. Customers will see that there are actual people in your business who care about their needs.

Update customers on internal changes that affect them

If your company changes policies, it’s a good idea to inform your audience of these changes via your newsletter. This includes good news and bad news. Indeed, proper handling of bad news (e.g., getting out in front of the story, explaining what you’re doing and why, etc.) will make your company even more trustworthy, because you’re being transparent. It’s always reassuring for customers to know that you care about their interests too, not only about the revenue they provide.

Ask for feedback

Building a relationship requires effort from both sides, which is why it is important that your business try to encourage customers to interact with the newsletter. By making your business open to constructive criticism, you can generate a public response that will indicate if you’re meeting customers’ needs. If you’re not, you can change your business in various ways to try to satisfy the customers and maintain their interest. Encourage them to respond to your newsletters with feedback, and then act on the feedback. This will show that your business is committed to keeping your customers satisfied.

Good customer service is an important part of making your business successful, and a great way to ensure that your business is providing the best possible service is through your newsletter. Newsletters dedicated to customer service will help build solid customer relationships, show that your business is constantly working for the customers, and can help improve your bottom line.

How to Create a Content Strategy

Before you can begin marketing your business online, you need to create a strategy that outlines exactly how your marketing will work. Just like any goal, establishing an online presence is a process that needs to be planned out, step by step. This way, you can use the content to spread your business’s name and help your business grow. A content strategy is a plan that you can use to determine what content you publish, when to publish it, what platform you use to publish it, and what it will achieve.

Creating content is a great way to promote your business. And methodically planning out what content you will present to your customers will help you shape the message you want to convey. This a huge part of building your brand.

So how can you create an effective content strategy? Here are four steps to consider:

Determine your business’s goals

The best way to plan out a content strategy is to start with very, very specific goals. Why specific and not broad? Beginning with the end in mind will help you to work backward and create clear, actionable steps to get there.

A good goal might be something like: I want to have a ten percent increase in leads for product X by the end of next quarter.

Do you see how that immediately makes everything so much clearer? Instead of floundering around wondering what content to produce and then hoping it somehow goes viral, you’ve already made some decisions. You now know that if you’re going to get an increase in leads for product X, you’ve got to create content related to product X. And you also know that if you want to increase leads by a specific number by a certain date, you’ll have to produce Y amount of content and promote it by Z amount.

To be sure, there are still a few unknowns in the preceding paragraph. For example, it can take time for content to help your organic search traffic, and it might be difficult to estimate just how many pieces of content you’ll need to bump the lead count. You’ll have a better idea of how your content is received as time goes on. But by basing your content strategy on business goals, rather than using the so-called “spray and pray” approach, you’ll get results much, much faster.

Determine your audience

Choosing a specific demographic group for your content is an extremely important part of disseminating your message. Figuring out the exact target group can help you determine what types of content should be shared, what medium you should share it through, and even the specific phrases you need to use.

Specific phrases? Really?

Definitely!

If you want your audience to be your customers, then you have to speak their language. For example, let’s say you sell high-end audio equipment, and you’re trying to grow your sales revenue. You could create several highly technical articles targeted at the sound geeks who get into heated debates over the best speaker cables to use. But are those the people who are coming to your store, or visiting your website? What if the people doing that are saying things like “I want something really good, but I don’t know where to start” or “All of this seems so intimidating!” If you use similar language when creating a piece of content that solves a problem your audience has, your audience will feel that you are speaking directly to them.

Your content needs to cater to the needs of your audience, so you need to keep their interests in mind when you plan the content you intend to share with them. The more you know about your audience, the better the experience they will have when engaging with your content.

What format and why?

One of the most cost-effective pieces of content to produce is an article, especially if you outsource the writing part of it to allow your team to concentrate on their core skills. However, other types of content might be appropriate to your audience. You could produce an infographic, a video, an ebook, or an email course. Again, think of your audience and their needs. What format best serves them?

How will you share it with your audience?

To reach your demographic, you need to share your content in a place that your customers will frequent. If your audience doesn’t know a Tweet from a twit, there isn’t a lot of point spending time promoting your content on Twitter, is there?

Take the time to find out where your customers hang out. You can do that by asking your sales staff, your customer service teams, checking your referral logs in your website analytics, and even just straight up asking your customers via a poll, or in a direct conversation.

Having a good long think about these factors will help you figure out your content strategy. And remember, a long term strategy beats short term tactics any day.

How to Write Content That Actually Generates Leads

It’s tough to be a businessperson in the digital age. While you might think that the Internet makes it a breeze to find loyal customers, the ease of communication between business and potential customer has made competition with other businesses tougher than ever.

Online lead generation is akin to fishing in the midst of thousands of other people hoping to catch the same fish as you are. To be effective, you must not only use the best bait, but you must also have the best tackle to reel in the catch.

In marketing terms, it’s important to develop content for your website that draws people in and converts them into customers.

This, of course, is much easier said than done.

We developed this resource to give you some simple tips to instantly improve your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and conversions.

Since many start-ups and small businesses are new to the wonderful world of SEO, here is a brief introduction to the term. For more veteran content creators, feel free to skip down to the tips list below.

SEO refers to increasing your website’s visibility in search engine results (primarily Google) and thereby increasing traffic and (hopefully) sales.

Optimizing your website can get quite nuanced, but much of it has to do with useful and clear web copy and the appropriate use of headings and tags, which allow search engines to index the site more easily.

SEO (bait) and conversion rate (tackle) exist in unison. Content on your site should draw traffic to your site, but it should also motivate visitors to action.

The following are the top five must-haves for web content that converts:

1. High-Quality Content

When asked whether writing matters in blog posts, author and digital marketing expert Guy Kawasaki replied, “This is like asking if the quality of food in a restaurant matters. Writing is the primary determinant of the success of the post. Everything else—timing, graphics, frequency—is secondary.”

High quality doesn’t just mean that your posts are grammatically correct and free of spelling errors. A good blog post will be grammatically correct, but it will first and foremost be of use to your audience.

The Internet is already so full of content that if you are posting for the sake of posting, you are just adding to the noise. Listen to your audience and learn what they want to read about.

In addition to great writing, don’t forget to include great-quality graphics that supplement the main points of your post. This is especially important to get viewers of your post to click the preview on social media or the front page of your website.

2. Keywords

High-quality content will help you move up in the ranking of Google’s search results because the most valuable currency in SEO is trust.

However, great content, while necessary, won’t get you very far in terms of driving traffic to your site. To make your content visible in searches, you need to understand the importance of keywords.

Google’s Keyword Planner (available for free online once you create a Google AdWords account) is a great tool to help you understand what words and phrases your clients are searching for and incorporate those terms into your content.

3. Post Length

Another very important factor in SEO is the length of your posts, titles, and meta descriptions.

A good rule of thumb is that title tags should be 55 characters or less, while meta descriptions should be 155 characters or less.

The length of a blog post itself is a bit more variable, as optimal post length has long been debated by content marketers and SEOs. Keep in mind that the length of a blog post is really more about usefulness and trust than actual word count, and longer posts tend to have more detailed and reliable information.

However, as Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide for Creating Ridiculously Good Content, explains, “Ideally, you want to worry less about blog post length and more about being useful to your audience. If you can be useful in 300 words, go for it!”

4. Design

While many web content how-to articles focus on writing (which makes sense), they often overlook the very important aspect of visual appeal.

You’ve done all this work to bring visitors to your site by producing trustworthy writing that contains well-researched keywords and is of optimal length, but you still aren’t meeting your lead generation goals.

The problem might be your website’s design. Our first impressions of websites are often subconscious, but there is no doubt that design and aesthetics play a major role in gaining a visitor’s trust.

Evan Bailyn, author of SEO Made Easy, puts it this way: “Websites are like commercial buildings: If you walk into one and feel surrounded by symmetry, calm, and beauty, you feel comfortable transacting with the business.”

5. Call to Action

This is perhaps one of the most important, and often forgotten, aspects of content writing. You are writing a post not only to provide your audience with useful information but also to educate them about your organization, product, or service.

The majority of business owners started their company because they believe their product can make a difference in the lives of others, whether by saving time, providing entertainment, or solving a common problem. Don’t forget that many of the people who clicked the link to your site could benefit from the products or services your company provides.

Within each blog post, and on each page of your website, make sure to reserve a specific section where you can place a button, link, or clear direction for the customer to follow to learn more about your company or to make a purchase. With blog posts, this typically occurs at the very end. Be sure that, wherever you place the call to action, it is related to the content of the page it is on.

By approaching SEO from the perspective of generating leads and customers—not just increasing traffic—you’ll be even more effective at harnessing the power of your website and blog, resulting in a measurable impact on your bottom line.