With the shift toward social media, it's important not to overlook some of the more traditional approaches when interacting with customers. For customer relationship management (CRM), the experts at Forrester Research recommend first establishing tools that focus in on traditional CRM engagement.
Here's a glimpse into the basic CRM ecosystem:
Customer targeting: Helps marketers define and develop new products, prioritize markets and communicate offers.
Customer acquisition: Helps salespeople sell by simplifying the applications involved in customer attainment.
Customer retention: Supports customers after the sale, including installation, repairs, billing, diagnosing problems and routing customer inquiries.
Customer understanding: Collects and analyzes feedback and customer interaction with companies.
Customer collaboration: Works collaboratively with customers, enabling them to interact with and support each other.
Clearly defined business objectives, combined with the right CRM strategy, make for a powerful duo that can increase customer loyalty, and opportunities.
For more information, review this article from BtoB online.
"With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
While people often express a desire to "live in the now" and enjoy the present, the online world has changed our expectations of the real world. We now want everything to happen in real time. Consumers are looking for instant gratification — and their definition of "instant" is changing rapidly.
Vending machines now dispense everything from fresh produce and medication, to swim trunks and bicycle parts. Cookie Radar and Baker Tweet software send customers email alerts and tweets when batches of cookies have come out of the oven at their local bakery.
So what does this mean for your brand? Yes, it's important to adapt by getting online and joining the real time, but the world of social media marketing is becoming more than just having a Facebook or Twitter page. It's about engaging your customers with real-time information and following through by offering them products and services in real-time as well.
Living in the now is no longer enough. It’s time to get real.
Read the article here.
When Vice President Joe Biden announced on national TV earlier this year that he wouldn’t recommend taking a commercial flight or riding in a subway car because the swine flu virus can spread in confined places, he touched off a major uproar, particularly among those working in the travel industry. He didn’t mean to say what he did (in fact, he issued a statement a short time later backing off), but the damage was done.
The vice president certainly had good intentions — to warn Americans to avoid restricted spaces if sick. His comments, however, suggested that Americans avoid planes and subways altogether.
An unfortunate choice of words? Yes. Could he have handled it better? Definitely. How? By being more focused and specific in his comments. Whether talking to a journalist or speaking before a group of business associates, one needs to follow these simple, but very important rules:
Are you a professional who plans, organizes, directs and controls company resources to complete specific objectives? That makes you, by definition, a "Project Manager." Though that might not be your title, and you may not even be trained as such, if that's what you do, that’s what you are.
Writer Kim Garard points out that, "It's no longer enough to get things done. You have to get them done faster, cheaper and with fewer heads than ever before." Sound familiar? So how do you accomplish this? She has some great ideas that include:
Truth is the most powerful selling tool of all. Consumers are proving it every day online. Peer-to-peer, friend-to-friend, these voluntary truth sharers can make or break a company because their words are objective, unbiased and believable. "Great flick, go see it!" "Food was okay, but it took 40 minutes to get served." "Avoid this book like the plague!" Clearly, the truth well told sells better than exaggerated hype or irrelevant attention-getting tactics. As marketing communications professionals, we need to strip away the slick commercial patter and become part of the real conversation. We can be far more successful if we stop selling and just start telling - the truth.