3 Keys to Turning Your Side Gig into a Full-Blown Business

Picography / Pixabay

Have you been thinking that your side gig is doing really well? Perhaps it’s just reached a point where you say to yourself, “Hey, with a little push, this could be a real business!”

That’s a great place to be. It’s a place full of surprise and optimism, and the idea that freedom is just around the corner. But what if you don’t break through?

You can increase the chance that your side gig will turn into a full-blown business when you pay attention to the following essentials:

1. Better Time Management

Perhaps the biggest key to turning your side gig into a full-blown business is taking stock of how you spend your time.

First of all, you need to figure out where you are most effective. Guidelines like the 80/20 rule can help you narrow down what you should be spending the most time on.

Consider that there are some tasks you accomplish that contribute greatly to growing your side hustle into a business. Look at how you’re using your time. Try to identify things you can outsource. Additionally, take some time to figure out if you are wasting time on things that aren’t really helping you.

Effective time management is about deciding where you will get the biggest bang for your time spent. As you focus on what has the greatest impact, you will see better results for your side gig.

2. Look at What Other Success Stories are Doing

If you want to turn your side gig into a self-sustaining business, it helps to see what others have done. Look at someone who has achieved what you want to accomplish in the next couple years. Then, try to learn from them.

You can talk to a business leader you respect and get some mentorship. Or just pay attention to what they’ve done. You can see clues of how they managed their businesses. Look at how they market themselves, the selling process, and other items. You’ll get valuable insights.

Even just applying a couple of the things you learn from someone who has a measure of the success you hope to accomplish can help you get that little extra oomph that can bring you the rest of the way to business status.

3. Put Together a Plan

My own business caught me by surprise. However, as things developed, I realized that I really needed to put together a plan. Planning is one of the best ways to ensure that your transition from side gig to full-time business is as smooth as possible.

Create a roadmap with the end result in mind. Start with what you hope to see from your business, and then list out the steps that will get you to that end result. Break it down into specific actions related to marketing, outsourcing, and other items that will help you reach various milestones.

When you create a plan based on what you learn from others’ success, and then use it to determine where you should spend your time, you have a better chance of success in the long run.

Source: B2C

3 Fearless Bits of Predictive Marketing Advice that Will Make You Want to Take Action

Raise your hand if you’ve already heard about predictive marketing. While it’s certainly not a new concept, predictive marketing is experiencing a boost in prominence thanks to updated technology which has made it more effective—and popular—than ever before.

Just check out the term’s popularity growth from December 2008 through December 2017:

And it’s popularity is expected to go even higher in 2018:

With that in mind, let’s kick things off with a simple, straightforward definition.

What is Predictive Marketing?

The use of data analysis to predict which marketing actions are most likely to succeed based on historical patterns, trends, and outcomes.

You’ve probably used predictive marketing in the past—or some form of it—without labeling it as such. Anytime you use data-driven research to make sales projections, design advertisements, or write a blog post, you’re using predictive marketing.

Here are three pieces of predictive marketing advice you can start using today.

1. Use Predictive Marketing to Improve Reliability

The idea with predictive marketing is to choose future outcomes with a high potential for profit based on the understanding that historical data confirms a reliable degree of performance results.

Basically, marketing actions with the highest chance of success are chosen by researching historical behavior patterns.

For example:

• Historical behavior pattern: People leave church at 12:30 pm


• Marketing action: Restaurants promote a lunch special on Facebook starting at 12 pm

To choose reliable marketing actions that will produce successful results you need to understand the 3 aspects of predictive marketing:

1. Identify a pattern, trend, or outcome


2. Determine the level of reliability


3. Make an actionable marketing prediction

Together, these three parts can be used to create accurate forecasts that improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities.

Check out this example to see how all three parts work together:

1. Identify a pattern, trend, or outcome: You have a segment of 1,500 customers that visit your website each year during the 3rd week of November to search for a special turkey seasoning.
   


2. Determine the level of reliability: Based on data from the previous 7 years, you find that 17% of customers purchase every year, 71% never purchase, and 12% add turkey seasoning to their shopping cart before abandoning the page.


3. Make an actionable marketing prediction: You make two predictions based on the reliability of your customer’s behavioral data. First, you predict that approximately 71% of your 1,500 customers—1,065—will have enough interest in your turkey seasoning to visit your product page next November. Second, you predict that approximately 12% of customers—180—can be classified as highly interested and likely to purchase with the right incentive.

If you don’t have the luxury of reviewing several years worth of historical data, the next best thing to do is look at industry benchmarks, trends, and reports. The more relevant data you have to fall back on, the more trustworthy and accurate your marketing predictions will be.

The accuracy of your predictions depends on the information you use. David Ogilvy once said:

“The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.”

While Ogilvy was referring to making ads that were highly informative to your audience, the reverse is also true when applied to your marketing process. The more informed you are, the more accurate your marketing predictions will be.

In this case, you’re using the data to inform actions that will dictate success or failure. Which brings us to the next piece of predictive marketing advice.

2. Use Predictive Elements to Boost Your Marketing Results

In 2015, Peep Laja—founder of CXL—was hired as CMO for then-failing apparel retailer Karmaloop.com. The brand had filed for bankruptcy that year and was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. Incredibly, their marketing KPIs were green across the board just 3 months after Laja joined the team.

How did Laja’s team accomplish this? By using data-driven tripwire marketing. There are 3 steps in tripwire marketing:

1. Modeling desired customer behavior


2. Flagging deviations from that behavior (i.e., the “tripwires”), and then


3. Focusing your marketing time and energy on correcting those deviations

In the case of Karmaloop.com, Laja created two segments to help identify the most profitable, high-lifetime value (LTV) customer behavior.

• The first segment was made up of customers who purchased multiple times with low item totals, but almost never returned products.


• The second segment included buyers who purchased once, had low-value items and returned them often.

Laja identified the first segment as profitable with high-LTV, while the second segment was unprofitable with negative-LTV. Further research showed that the first segment made up just 1% of website sessions but accounted for a whopping 43% of revenue.

Long story short? Laja used segment one as Karmaloop.com’s desired customer model and created a variety of marketing actions based on their predictive behavior.

3. Use a Predictive Marketing Model to Create Actionable Items

This is a simple process. Just apply the 3 predictive marketing steps to your current scenario:

1. Identify a pattern, trend, or outcome


2. Assign a level of reliability


3. Make an actionable marketing prediction.

Your actionable marketing prediction is the key to creating a successful model. If it’s off even a little you could wind up wasting a significant amount of time and money on marketing actions that never pay off.

Going back to the example of the 1,500 customers that historically visit your product page during the 3rd week of November, we can see that two predictive marketing models were created:

1. 12% of people will abandon their carts


2. 71% of people won’t add products to their carts

So, how do you use these models to create actionable items?

Start by clarifying the purpose of your predictions for each model:

• The first model predicts that people who abandoned their carts will be interested enough in the product to purchase with some encouragement.


• The second model predicts that a percentage of people who never added products to their cart could be incentivized to consider purchasing.

Now, you can create a corresponding actionable marketing item for each model.

Let’s say you decide to create two promotions for the third week of November:

1. The first promotion incentivizes abandoned cart customers to complete a purchase using a free shipping offer.


2. The second retargets people who visited and left your site without adding products to their cart with a 10% discount.

It’s important to note that these promotions can’t be randomly chosen if they’re going to be effective. They must be chosen based on research and historical data.

For example, perhaps you create the first promotion because you know that 61% of people abandon online shopping carts due to extra fees—such as shipping and taxes.

Creating a predictive marketing model will help you uncover your most valuable customer segments and develop actionable items that produce reliable, successful results.

Final Word on Predictive Marketing

Predictive marketing is becoming more prominent thanks to the popularity of marketing automation and its ability to predict and capitalize on market trends. Many marketing tools—including HubSpot, Buffer, and Hootsuite—already use predictive technology to estimate things like the best social media posting times, leads that are most likely to become customers, and which keywords will have the greatest success as a blog topic.

Moving forward, AI will no doubt play a larger role in predictive marketing, especially as it relates to analytics because data as a marketing tool is becoming more important than ever before.

Check out what Growth Tribe has to say about predictive analytics in the video below:

Here’s the main takeaway—use data-driven analytics to discover which marketing actions have the highest probability of succeeding by looking for patterns, trends, and outcomes that are predictable and reliable.

This article was originally published here.

Source: B2C

Why CRM Should Always Be at the Center of Your Sales Plan

When a business puts together a strategy for their sales, there are many aspects that need to be given attention to in order to maximize profit in the shortest amount of time. Because of this, businesses can sometimes struggle with deciding what strategies they should be prioritizing, and which ones they can put less of a focus on. If you’re unsure of where that attention should be for your business, it’s time to let you in on a little secret: that CRM should be at the center of your sales plan, no matter where you are in the cycle.

Here’s why:

It’s One of the Most Affordable Types of Marketing

Today, businesses spend a lot of money on marketing. Whether it be through rebranding a product or paying for Facebook ads, it’s all costly. Spending so much money on all of this can be a bit preemptive, too, as one can never really know how those investments will pan out over time. Therefore, it’s important to find ways to expand your marketing strategy, without needing to take such a huge risk financially.

This can be done through your CRM strategy. It’s a known fact that good customer service doesn’t need to cost a thing. Once customers are satisfied (or even better, delighted), they are very likely to refer your business to others. And, with the way social media and review websites have taken over, this can be a great way to market your business essentially for free.

You’ll Know Which Leads are Worth Focusing On

If you’re having even the slightest growth in your business, then you probably already have a good idea about which leads have been successful and which ones have fallen short. Any person can gauge easily what strategies are working and which ones need improvement. But, instead of going back to the drawing table altogether, don’t get too discouraged; you just need to keep doing what you’re doing well — and, if you take a second to think about what that is, you’ll realize quickly that it’s your CRM.

So, when you look back on your successful leads, what was it specifically that you did right? Did you spend more time talking with someone before making a sales pitch? Did you provide a lot of value to someone for free via your content strategy? Or, did you give them incentives to join, like a discount or sign-up promotion?

It doesn’t take a marketing expert to see what all of these things have in common!

Because Without a Great CRM Strategy, Nothing Else Really Matters

It’s obvious why CRM needs to be the center of your sales plan. Customers are the sole driver of profit to your business. Without them, your business wouldn’t even exist in the first place. They are the ones in need of your products or services, and if you can’t make them feel special, they aren’t going to give you the time of day.

Having good and reliable customers can only be achieved when you prioritize your CRM above everything else. While it may seem that other aspects of your business need attention, CRM is truly the root of all of those other things — from your marketing to your content strategy, to your website’s accessibility, etc.

It’s Easy to Prioritize CRM with Email Marketing and Marketing Automation

In addition to CRM being the most affordable form of marketing, it can also be the least time-consuming. Because you can easily incorporate a solid CRM strategy into your email marketing, you can give your customers what they want in a click of a button. From sending welcome messages to shopping cart reminders, or birthday discounts, they should drive that content completely. This will give momentum to your business and keep the sales cycle going.

Luckily, creating all these emails is a walk in the park with marketing automation. Putting your customers at the center of every email you send out is simple. Set everything up how you want to well ahead of time. Then, automate it so you can go about business without needing to check your computer all the time. When you’re done, take a look at your reports. If you made sure that CRM was the focus of each email marketing campaign, it’s likely you’ll see positive results.

Source: B2C

How to Differentiate From Ecommerce Competitors and Boost Loyalty in 2018

Ecommerce is a fiercely competitive space to operate in. Thanks to the number of new tools and information that are made available each year, it’s never been easier to launch an ecommerce business. As more and more business owners continue to spin up brands and sell products that serve the same audience as you, it’s essential that you develop and put strategies in place that allow you to compete.

To continue building a sustainable and profitable ecommerce business in 2018, you need to spend time thinking about what you’re going to do differently this year, what you’re going to scale back, and what you’re going to double down on in order to attract, convert, and keep new customers over the next 12 months.

Here are 7 tips that will help you effectively differentiate from competitors and boost customer loyalty in the year ahead:

1. Know What Makes You Different

The best way to differentiate from other ecommerce competitors in your product category and industry is to understand what it is that makes you, your company, and your products different. In order to decide whether or not to buy products from you, your prospective customers want to understand what makes your business and brand better than all the others out there. You can get at the heart of what makes your brand and products different from all the rest by thinking through the following questions:

• What is your brand story? Why did you create your business? What problems are you trying to solve, and why did you choose to sell the products you’re selling?


• What is your company mission? What are the values that help guide the work you and your team does each day?


• Who are your customers? What type of person are you trying to reach with your products?


• What makes your products different than the products your competitors are selling? What makes them better? Why do people prefer yours over the ones your competitors sell?


• If your products are extremely similar to the ones your competitors are selling, what else are you doing or could you do to stand out? What kind of added value could you be bringing that you know your competitors aren’t (packaging, customer support, customer delight, community, etc.)?


• What do you want people to feel when they interact with your brand, online store, and products for the first time? How is this customer experience strategy different or better than what they might experience when they interact with your competitors?


• How are your products made, stored, and delivered?


• What are the specific reasons that your loyal customers give for buying your products instead of products from your competitors? How can you help prospective customers better understand those reasons?

Knowing answers to these questions can help you create the right messages on your website and in your paid advertising campaigns.

ACTIONABLE TIP: If you have a good grasp on what makes you different from competitors, consider creating a comparison chart or comparison landing page on your website. Instead of making your prospective customers waste time evaluating the options on their own, provide and package the information for them. Use the answers you came up with from the questions above to create compelling messaging and call-to-actions that you can incorporate into your landing page and comparison charts.

2. Build Trust with an Email Series

To boost more customer loyalty in 2018, you need to focus on creating and executing strategies that allow you to build trust and nurture authentic relationships with people. As an ecommerce business owner, your job isn’t merely to sell products—it’s to act as a resource and a trusted voice that people can turn to when they need help.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this blog about the value of content marketing, and I believe it’s still going to be hugely important in 2018. But I also think in order to see the ROI you’ve seen in past years, you’re going to have to start doing more than just publishing fresh, original content on a blog.

As more of your competitors launch blogs and hire writers to help them produce and share helpful content, it will become harder and harder to use your blog as a tool for attracting and building trust with prospective customers. These days, everyone has a blog and everyone publishes fairly decent content—so what can you do stand out?

To differentiate and position your company as one that provides more value and help than any others in the market, turn to email marketing in 2018. Specifically, I want to encourage you to create a topic-focused educational email series that interested future customers can only access if they subscribe to your list.

For example, if you sell running shoes, create a 10-part educational email series that offers running tips from professional athletes or seasoned marathon runners. If you sell cooking utensils, create a 10-part educational email series that offers tips on how to optimize grocery shopping.

The goal here is to create and offer content to people that they can’t get anywhere else. By providing this content in emails, you’re able to communicate with and nurture your prospects in a more personal and direct manner.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Think about the pain points your customers have and the questions they ask you most. Review blog and social analytics to see what content has been performing the best in the last few months. Think of the relationships you can leverage to create compelling content that people won’t be able to resist. Then decide on a topic, build an outline for your educational email series, work through the content creation, and build out the campaign in your email marketing platform. Promote the series across all your marketing channels and throughout your website. Help website visitors and prospective customers understand that you’re going the extra mile to help them solve their problems and answer their questions.

3. Create a Place for Your Community to Connect

In 2017, more ecommerce brands leveraged Facebook Groups as a way to foster community with their audience than ever before. These days, online consumers don’t just want to buy products—they want to be part of a movement. They want to connect with other people who are just like them, and loyal to the products and brands that they’re loyal to.

In an effort to meet this growing demand for more community among their customers, brands have started creating and managing closed Facebook Groups in addition to Facebook business pages.

Online consumers then use these Facebook Groups to ask questions about products, buy/sell/trade products, meet and nurture relationships with like-minded people, provide feedback on products and experiences relating to the business, and freely discuss other topics that align with their interests, hobbies, passions, etc.

In some cases, ecommerce brands will even allow a few loyal customers to manage and moderate these groups and set community guidelines, which promotes and allows for a truly authentic community experience and safe space to interact for members of the group.

Want to see an example, check out this Facebook group from Wildbird. It was created by the founder of the ring sling brand, and gives people the opportunity to connect with each other after becoming customers.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Create a Facebook Group for your ecommerce brand. Remember: the purpose of the group is not to sell your products. It also shouldn’t act as a replacement for a Facebook page. It’s simply a place for like-minded people to go to chat about your products, meet other people, share their experiences, and get answers to their questions (or provide answers to someone else’s question). Ready to get started? Leverage this helpful guide from Buffer.

4. Provide Unmatched Customer Service

You might find that you have ecommerce competitors who sell very similar or identical products from you. In situations like these, differentiation might seem like a real challenge—but there’s actually quite a lot you can do to stand out from the crowd.

For example, although you might sell the same products as another ecommerce brand, your customer service priorities and reputation could be vastly different from the company you’re competing against.

As an ecommerce business owner, it’s your job to help prospective customers feel confident that they will be getting a vastly better customer service experience than they would get from any of your competitors. Doing so will not only result in more sales, it can help with things like customer loyalty, AOV, and repeat purchases.

But how do you ensure that you’re providing an unmatched customer service experience for your audience? Here are a few tips:

• Make it easy for people to contact you. Realize that people have different communication preferences when it comes to needing to reach out for help. Some might prefer to call you, some might want to send an email, some might prefer messaging you on Facebook or posting a question on your Facebook page or sending you a tweet, and others might prefer talking to you in real-time through live chat. Give your audience lots of communication options, and make those options easy to find on your website.


• Make your policies known. Don’t leave anything up to the imagination for customers in terms of shipping policies, return policies, delivery expectations, or anything else that may impact the experience they have after purchasing a product from you. Post your policies in an easy-to-find place on your website, and refer to them throughout the checkout process.


• Use tools that allow you to scale efforts. Don’t try to manage customer support manually or by yourself. Adopt customer support tools that will allow you to easily scale, and start using them well before you need them.


• Get regular feedback from customers. Regularly go out of your way to ask your new and loyal customers for feedback on their experience buying from your ecommerce store and receiving their products. Find out where the gaps are and how you can improve customer support and experience going forward.


• Delight customers. Go out of your way to show customers how much you appreciate them by sending them handwritten thank you cards, personalized thank you videos, gift cards, exclusive promotions, surprise presents on their birthdays, etc. Want to learn more about the value of customer delight and read through more ideas? Explore this blog post.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Review the bulleted list from above and evaluate your current customer support strategy and initiatives. Are there areas that can be improved? Create a game plan, set deadlines, and loop in key stakeholders that you’ll need in order to achieve your goals.

5. Promote Experiences

I’ve written about this in blog posts, but I want to focus on it again here: in order to attract more customers and drive more sales in 2018, you need to focus less on selling your products and more on how your products relate and contribute to the experiences that people ultimately want to have.

Think about Nike, for example. At the end of the day, the company sells shoes and other athletic gear. But they’ve built a massive and loyal following by focusing less on what their products are, and more on what their products can help you achieve (win the game, get healthier, meet your fitness goals, run longer, run faster, etc).

Think about the experiences that your target audience cares most about, and how your products impact those experiences.

Another brand that can illustrate this concept that I’ve shared before on this blog is Herschel Supply Co. To differentiate from other competitors in the high-end bag and backpack industry, they feature amazing stories and photographs from customers who travel all around the world with their products. Their goal is ultimately to get you to associate travel with the Herschel bag so that the next time you plan a trip, you purchase a bag from them before you leave.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Think about how your customers use your products and why. What settings do your products appear in? What experiences do they help promote? When you have your answers to these questions, think about how you can highlight these types of experiences in your marketing material. Your goal should be to align with your target audience on a more personal level, and convince them that you’re not just trying to sell them a product—you’re trying to support the experiences you know they are interested in having.

6. Give Customers a Reason to Brag About You

If you’ve been struggling to differentiate from competitors—or help your target audience understand what makes you different, you might just need to spend more time doing things that give your customers a specific reason to brag about you. This is a pretty wide open recommendation because what you focus on will ultimately depend on what you sell and who your customers are, but here are a few ideas that you might be able to use to get your audience talking more about you:

• Support a cause. Consider donating a portion of your proceeds to a charity, nonprofit, or cause that aligns with your products or your customer base. Show people that you aren’t just in it for the money—that you’re willing and interested in helping make the world a better place.


• Collaborate with another brand. Partner up with a like-minded brand that you know your customers would be excited about. Collaborate on a limited product or a bundled product idea.


• Share more stories. Give your audience a behind-the-scenes look at your operation. Don’t just be a no-name company that has no personality or human component. Help your prospective customers understand who the people behind your business are, how your products are made, what’s in store for the future, etc.


• Delight with packaging. Go the extra mile when it comes to the unboxing experience you provide to your customers. Don’t just send your products in utility boxes. If you have the budget, create something truly unique and memorable when it comes to your product packaging and any marketing material you include within.


• Ask. Finally, go out of your way to ask your customers for help spreading the word about your business and products. Include messages in order confirmation emails and delivery confirmation emails that invite people to share the news with their friends on social media. Include marketing material within your packages that encourage customers to share photos of their product on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram using a specific hashtag.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Pick one of the ideas from above and move forward with it!

7. Test Something New

Finally, test something new this year that you’ve never tried before in order to grab the attention of people within your target audience. Not sure where to start? Focus on something that none of your competitors are doing (or doing very well)! Here are a few simple ideas:

• Do Facebook Live videos every week that allow you to interact with your community in real-time.


• Try launching a temporary pop-up shop in a city where you know you have a lot of existing and loyal customers.


• Create a podcast and talk about topics that relate to your product category, industry, and the audience you serve. Interview customers, influencers, and other entrepreneurs with products that align with yours.


• Hire infleuncers to help spread the word about your brand and products.

Actionable Tip: Get out of your comfort zone and try something new this year. Think of a marketing campaign or idea that you think would get your brand a lot of buzz and attention. Set a budget, create a timeline, then execute. Try to be creative with this one!

Over to You

What else are you doing to differentiate from competitors this year? Share your ideas and strategies in the comments below.

Source: B2C

How to Differentiate From Ecommerce Competitors and Boost Loyalty in 2018

Ecommerce is a fiercely competitive space to operate in. Thanks to the number of new tools and information that are made available each year, it’s never been easier to launch an ecommerce business. As more and more business owners continue to spin up brands and sell products that serve the same audience as you, it’s essential that you develop and put strategies in place that allow you to compete.

To continue building a sustainable and profitable ecommerce business in 2018, you need to spend time thinking about what you’re going to do differently this year, what you’re going to scale back, and what you’re going to double down on in order to attract, convert, and keep new customers over the next 12 months.

Here are 7 tips that will help you effectively differentiate from competitors and boost customer loyalty in the year ahead:

1. Know What Makes You Different

The best way to differentiate from other ecommerce competitors in your product category and industry is to understand what it is that makes you, your company, and your products different. In order to decide whether or not to buy products from you, your prospective customers want to understand what makes your business and brand better than all the others out there. You can get at the heart of what makes your brand and products different from all the rest by thinking through the following questions:

• What is your brand story? Why did you create your business? What problems are you trying to solve, and why did you choose to sell the products you’re selling?


• What is your company mission? What are the values that help guide the work you and your team does each day?


• Who are your customers? What type of person are you trying to reach with your products?


• What makes your products different than the products your competitors are selling? What makes them better? Why do people prefer yours over the ones your competitors sell?


• If your products are extremely similar to the ones your competitors are selling, what else are you doing or could you do to stand out? What kind of added value could you be bringing that you know your competitors aren’t (packaging, customer support, customer delight, community, etc.)?


• What do you want people to feel when they interact with your brand, online store, and products for the first time? How is this customer experience strategy different or better than what they might experience when they interact with your competitors?


• How are your products made, stored, and delivered?


• What are the specific reasons that your loyal customers give for buying your products instead of products from your competitors? How can you help prospective customers better understand those reasons?

Knowing answers to these questions can help you create the right messages on your website and in your paid advertising campaigns.

ACTIONABLE TIP: If you have a good grasp on what makes you different from competitors, consider creating a comparison chart or comparison landing page on your website. Instead of making your prospective customers waste time evaluating the options on their own, provide and package the information for them. Use the answers you came up with from the questions above to create compelling messaging and call-to-actions that you can incorporate into your landing page and comparison charts.

2. Build Trust with an Email Series

To boost more customer loyalty in 2018, you need to focus on creating and executing strategies that allow you to build trust and nurture authentic relationships with people. As an ecommerce business owner, your job isn’t merely to sell products—it’s to act as a resource and a trusted voice that people can turn to when they need help.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this blog about the value of content marketing, and I believe it’s still going to be hugely important in 2018. But I also think in order to see the ROI you’ve seen in past years, you’re going to have to start doing more than just publishing fresh, original content on a blog.

As more of your competitors launch blogs and hire writers to help them produce and share helpful content, it will become harder and harder to use your blog as a tool for attracting and building trust with prospective customers. These days, everyone has a blog and everyone publishes fairly decent content—so what can you do stand out?

To differentiate and position your company as one that provides more value and help than any others in the market, turn to email marketing in 2018. Specifically, I want to encourage you to create a topic-focused educational email series that interested future customers can only access if they subscribe to your list.

For example, if you sell running shoes, create a 10-part educational email series that offers running tips from professional athletes or seasoned marathon runners. If you sell cooking utensils, create a 10-part educational email series that offers tips on how to optimize grocery shopping.

The goal here is to create and offer content to people that they can’t get anywhere else. By providing this content in emails, you’re able to communicate with and nurture your prospects in a more personal and direct manner.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Think about the pain points your customers have and the questions they ask you most. Review blog and social analytics to see what content has been performing the best in the last few months. Think of the relationships you can leverage to create compelling content that people won’t be able to resist. Then decide on a topic, build an outline for your educational email series, work through the content creation, and build out the campaign in your email marketing platform. Promote the series across all your marketing channels and throughout your website. Help website visitors and prospective customers understand that you’re going the extra mile to help them solve their problems and answer their questions.

3. Create a Place for Your Community to Connect

In 2017, more ecommerce brands leveraged Facebook Groups as a way to foster community with their audience than ever before. These days, online consumers don’t just want to buy products—they want to be part of a movement. They want to connect with other people who are just like them, and loyal to the products and brands that they’re loyal to.

In an effort to meet this growing demand for more community among their customers, brands have started creating and managing closed Facebook Groups in addition to Facebook business pages.

Online consumers then use these Facebook Groups to ask questions about products, buy/sell/trade products, meet and nurture relationships with like-minded people, provide feedback on products and experiences relating to the business, and freely discuss other topics that align with their interests, hobbies, passions, etc.

In some cases, ecommerce brands will even allow a few loyal customers to manage and moderate these groups and set community guidelines, which promotes and allows for a truly authentic community experience and safe space to interact for members of the group.

Want to see an example, check out this Facebook group from Wildbird. It was created by the founder of the ring sling brand, and gives people the opportunity to connect with each other after becoming customers.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Create a Facebook Group for your ecommerce brand. Remember: the purpose of the group is not to sell your products. It also shouldn’t act as a replacement for a Facebook page. It’s simply a place for like-minded people to go to chat about your products, meet other people, share their experiences, and get answers to their questions (or provide answers to someone else’s question). Ready to get started? Leverage this helpful guide from Buffer.

4. Provide Unmatched Customer Service

You might find that you have ecommerce competitors who sell very similar or identical products from you. In situations like these, differentiation might seem like a real challenge—but there’s actually quite a lot you can do to stand out from the crowd.

For example, although you might sell the same products as another ecommerce brand, your customer service priorities and reputation could be vastly different from the company you’re competing against.

As an ecommerce business owner, it’s your job to help prospective customers feel confident that they will be getting a vastly better customer service experience than they would get from any of your competitors. Doing so will not only result in more sales, it can help with things like customer loyalty, AOV, and repeat purchases.

But how do you ensure that you’re providing an unmatched customer service experience for your audience? Here are a few tips:

• Make it easy for people to contact you. Realize that people have different communication preferences when it comes to needing to reach out for help. Some might prefer to call you, some might want to send an email, some might prefer messaging you on Facebook or posting a question on your Facebook page or sending you a tweet, and others might prefer talking to you in real-time through live chat. Give your audience lots of communication options, and make those options easy to find on your website.


• Make your policies known. Don’t leave anything up to the imagination for customers in terms of shipping policies, return policies, delivery expectations, or anything else that may impact the experience they have after purchasing a product from you. Post your policies in an easy-to-find place on your website, and refer to them throughout the checkout process.


• Use tools that allow you to scale efforts. Don’t try to manage customer support manually or by yourself. Adopt customer support tools that will allow you to easily scale, and start using them well before you need them.


• Get regular feedback from customers. Regularly go out of your way to ask your new and loyal customers for feedback on their experience buying from your ecommerce store and receiving their products. Find out where the gaps are and how you can improve customer support and experience going forward.


• Delight customers. Go out of your way to show customers how much you appreciate them by sending them handwritten thank you cards, personalized thank you videos, gift cards, exclusive promotions, surprise presents on their birthdays, etc. Want to learn more about the value of customer delight and read through more ideas? Explore this blog post.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Review the bulleted list from above and evaluate your current customer support strategy and initiatives. Are there areas that can be improved? Create a game plan, set deadlines, and loop in key stakeholders that you’ll need in order to achieve your goals.

5. Promote Experiences

I’ve written about this in blog posts, but I want to focus on it again here: in order to attract more customers and drive more sales in 2018, you need to focus less on selling your products and more on how your products relate and contribute to the experiences that people ultimately want to have.

Think about Nike, for example. At the end of the day, the company sells shoes and other athletic gear. But they’ve built a massive and loyal following by focusing less on what their products are, and more on what their products can help you achieve (win the game, get healthier, meet your fitness goals, run longer, run faster, etc).

Think about the experiences that your target audience cares most about, and how your products impact those experiences.

Another brand that can illustrate this concept that I’ve shared before on this blog is Herschel Supply Co. To differentiate from other competitors in the high-end bag and backpack industry, they feature amazing stories and photographs from customers who travel all around the world with their products. Their goal is ultimately to get you to associate travel with the Herschel bag so that the next time you plan a trip, you purchase a bag from them before you leave.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Think about how your customers use your products and why. What settings do your products appear in? What experiences do they help promote? When you have your answers to these questions, think about how you can highlight these types of experiences in your marketing material. Your goal should be to align with your target audience on a more personal level, and convince them that you’re not just trying to sell them a product—you’re trying to support the experiences you know they are interested in having.

6. Give Customers a Reason to Brag About You

If you’ve been struggling to differentiate from competitors—or help your target audience understand what makes you different, you might just need to spend more time doing things that give your customers a specific reason to brag about you. This is a pretty wide open recommendation because what you focus on will ultimately depend on what you sell and who your customers are, but here are a few ideas that you might be able to use to get your audience talking more about you:

• Support a cause. Consider donating a portion of your proceeds to a charity, nonprofit, or cause that aligns with your products or your customer base. Show people that you aren’t just in it for the money—that you’re willing and interested in helping make the world a better place.


• Collaborate with another brand. Partner up with a like-minded brand that you know your customers would be excited about. Collaborate on a limited product or a bundled product idea.


• Share more stories. Give your audience a behind-the-scenes look at your operation. Don’t just be a no-name company that has no personality or human component. Help your prospective customers understand who the people behind your business are, how your products are made, what’s in store for the future, etc.


• Delight with packaging. Go the extra mile when it comes to the unboxing experience you provide to your customers. Don’t just send your products in utility boxes. If you have the budget, create something truly unique and memorable when it comes to your product packaging and any marketing material you include within.


• Ask. Finally, go out of your way to ask your customers for help spreading the word about your business and products. Include messages in order confirmation emails and delivery confirmation emails that invite people to share the news with their friends on social media. Include marketing material within your packages that encourage customers to share photos of their product on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram using a specific hashtag.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Pick one of the ideas from above and move forward with it!

7. Test Something New

Finally, test something new this year that you’ve never tried before in order to grab the attention of people within your target audience. Not sure where to start? Focus on something that none of your competitors are doing (or doing very well)! Here are a few simple ideas:

• Do Facebook Live videos every week that allow you to interact with your community in real-time.


• Try launching a temporary pop-up shop in a city where you know you have a lot of existing and loyal customers.


• Create a podcast and talk about topics that relate to your product category, industry, and the audience you serve. Interview customers, influencers, and other entrepreneurs with products that align with yours.


• Hire infleuncers to help spread the word about your brand and products.

Actionable Tip: Get out of your comfort zone and try something new this year. Think of a marketing campaign or idea that you think would get your brand a lot of buzz and attention. Set a budget, create a timeline, then execute. Try to be creative with this one!

Over to You

What else are you doing to differentiate from competitors this year? Share your ideas and strategies in the comments below.

Source: B2C

Tracking the Conversation Around Amazon Go

After a year of delays, Amazon finally opened its cashless and cashier-less convenience store to the public last Monday, and the initial reactions have ranged from curiosity to bemusement, to confusion and just about everything in between.

Amazon Go is a simple concept: shoppers first enter the store through turnstiles, scanning their phone on a screen so that purchases are linked to their Amazon account. From there, sensors and cameras located on the store’s ceilings and shelves track shoppers’ purchases as they pick items off the shelf. If they change their minds and put an item back, the app removes it from their virtual cart. At the end of the trip, shoppers merely walk out the front door with their purchases – no need to check out anywhere or speak to anyone. The order is simply charged to their Amazon account.

Ironically, the store that’s meant to eliminate lines opened to a massive one.

So far, the only Go store is in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, where employees have already been shopping for a year. The company hasn’t said whether it plans to open more stores in the future, or if it will implement the tech in its Whole Foods locations, but that almost seems inevitable, doesn’t it?

Naturally, the story made a big buzz in business, tech and consumer media. The reviews of the actual in-store experience were mostly positive – it seems Amazon has worked out most of the kinks to deliver a frictionless shopping experience, as promised.

There was at least one minor hiccup: CNBC reporter Dierdre Bosa tweeted that she accidentally shoplifted an item that the store’s cameras evidently failed to pick up.

I think I just shoplifted?? #AmazonGo didn’t charge me for my Siggi’s yogurt #nolinesnocheckout #freestuff pic.twitter.com/RDPhC5ryXD

— Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) January 22, 2018

No hard feelings from Amazon, which said Bosa could keep the yogurt on the house. Interestingly, Amazon VP Gianna Puerin admits the company hasn’t even built a functionality for customers to report these types of errors, because they’ve occurred so rarely during their tests.

You have to wonder if that low error rate will hold up as the store scales even in its single location. Will the cameras really track every single purchase with 100% accuracy during even the busiest shopping hours? Amazon hasn’t explained the nuts and bolts behind its machine vision technology, so we’ll have to wait and see.

It will also be interesting to gauge initial consumer reaction. Several reporters, including The Sun UK’s James Beal, said that at first, they couldn’t help but feel like they were shoplifting. It just feels weird to leave a store without handing over cash or swiping a card, but New York Times reporter Nick Wingfield says you’ll feel better once you receive an email receipt confirming that you are, in fact, not a thief.

Writing for the Washington Post, writer Rebekah Denn described “Orwellian angst” on her first trip through the store, although her 15-year-old son didn’t share her concerns: “It’s not as creepy as Alexa,” he argued. Still, will shoppers feel comfortable with hundreds of cameras tracking their every movement in store, even as Amazon insists they won’t use facial recognition technology to monitor purchases?

Still, the concept does come with larger moral concerns. Shopping at an Amazon Go would move consumers even further away from the “pain of paying”, marketing professor Manoi Thomas told the Chicago Tribune. Research shows that cashless payments encourage impulse purchases, meaning Amazon Go could result in shoppers spending more money, especially on unhealthy foods.

Restricting purchases to people who own a smartphone and have a credit card also cuts out an entire portion of the population. And, of course, a cashier-less convenience store puts Amazon back in the conversation around technology stealing human jobs – there are 3.5 million cashiers in the U.S. making an average of $9.70. Amazon counters that its stores won’t employ fewer people, but rather re-focus those roles toward other in-store activities, like food prep and stocking.

Clearly there are still some things to be worked out, but the buzz around Amazon Go has been mostly positive, with some optimism for the future of physical retail mixed in. Amazon’s learnings from this pilot store will also influence how this type of shopping experience develops in the future.

Source: B2C

George Soros Saying His Life’s Mission Is To Destroy The United States Is A Fake Quote

Did George Soros say that his life’s mission was to destroy the United States and all of its citizens with it is a fake quote. Despite a circulating meme on social media suggesting that the Hungarian-American billionaire of liberal cause made an outrageous desire to destroy the United States and its people, there is no concrete evidence that Soros ever spoke those words.

Soros founded the Open Society Foundations (OSF) which financially supports civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. Since its founding, OSF reported expenditures of over $11 billion. Soros has been the victim of many fake memes, news, tweets and photographs. This is another one in a long list of them.

Now, some users on social media are suggesting that Soros made an evil quote much like a villain from a James Bond film. The fake quote reads: “I’ve made my life’s mission to destroy the United States. I hate this country and I hate all of the people in it.” Where did this quote originate? Well, here are some examples of people sharing the fake Soros quote on social media.

“I’ve made my life’s mission to destroy the United States. I hate this country and I hate all of the people in it.’ George Soros 1979 pic.twitter.com/vzUaihrHV8

— Lori Hendry (@Lrihendry) August 14, 2017

“I’ve made it my life’s mission to destroy the United States. I hate this country, and I hate all the people in it.

-George Soros pic.twitter.com/8l6p6VKafl

— Salem Poor (@salem_poor) November 6, 2017

“I Hate this Country and I Hate all of the people in it!” … “I’ve made my life’s mission to destroy the United States!” … George Soros said in Newsweek 1979…

Pure Hate!

Why can’t something be done to bring him to Justice for all of the Evil he’s done? https://t.co/9d3YUJQvjn

— Go Trump !! (@dslideman) November 19, 2017

Nasty disrespectful ungrateful un-American Globalist hate is eating him up! ‘I’ve made it my life’s mission to destroy the United States. I hate this country and I hate all of the people in it.’ -George Soros #SMH award

— Godsgirl (@God_sgirl) November 19, 2017

“I’ve made my life’s mission to destroy the United States. I hate this country and I hate all of the people in it.’ Soros 1979 Newsweek

— Apostolics_together (@IowaBruce) October 17, 2017

I’ve made my life’s mission to destroy the United States. I hate this country and I hate all of the people in it. —George Soros, 1979

— Ezekiel Mind (@Ezekielmind) October 11, 2017

While the meme claims that Soros made this quote in an unspecified issue of Newsweek in 1979, Snopes found no evidence that the quote ever existed. Rather, Snopes reported a variant of the Soros quote from an August 2011 Breitbart.com article in which the author blames attributes to Soros of having said “Destroying America will be the culmination of my life’s work.”

Although this quote was shared among far-right blogs and web sites in 2010 as seen in The American Jingoist, in which they wrote that Soros gave an interview to The Australian saying, “America, as the centre of the globalised financial markets, was sucking up the savings of the world. Destroying America will be the culmination of my life’s work.”

Snopes noted that what Soros actually said can be found in his 2009 interview with The Australian. You can decide from this interview, what point Soros was exactly trying to make. Nowhere, does Soros directly state that he is working to destroy the United States as part of his life’s mission.

Soros wrote in the introduction to his book, “The Age of Fallibility,” that “changing the attitude and policies of the United States remains my top priority.” In 2006, Newsweek reported that Soros has promoted political change around the world, particularly in the former Soviet Union, but has not yet succeeded to crack the conservative hold on American politics.

What did you think of the fake quote that Soros was quoted saying that his life’s mission is to destroy the United States? Did you believe the fake quote or see people sharing it falsely on social media? Let us know in the comments section.

Photo Credit: Source

Source: B2C