Seven Elements Every Inbound Marketing Campaign Needs

In recent years, outbound marketing (when businesses tried to cold call or reach out in some other way to potential customers) has taken a back set to inbound marketing (where businesses focus on offering value and letting customers come to them). Part of it is that consumers today are savvier and inherently suspicious of people trying to sell them something. Today’s average consumer prefers to seek out the product or service they need themselves. The following seven elements are all things your business’s inbound marketing strategy will need to succeed.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Long gone are the days of flipping through phonebooks to find local businesses. Search engines are the new gatekeepers in the world of business and your success will directly correlate to how far up or down the search results page your business is. It should be every company’s goal to be at the very top of the search results page. One option is to target specific keywords and pay to make sure your website is listed in the sponsored search results at the very top. But the most important way is to have a solid understanding of how these search engines’ algorithms work to prioritize certain websites over others so that you can increase the odds of being at the top of the list.

Social Media presence

After search engines like Google, social media platforms are the next place people go to find local businesses. Social media is no longer just for friends and family to stay connected. It’s a great way for businesses to stay in the public eye and interact with customers on a daily basis. You need to make it easy for customers to find you across all of the relevant social media platforms.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing

Though PPC could be considered outbound marketing since you’re paying to place ads, it has some overlap with inbound marketing since you’re usually trying to place those ads on influencer blogs where your ideal customers are already looking for info relating to your business’s industry.

Excellent landing pages

Whether they’re clicking on a link in an email or text message, clicking on a link from an affiliate site, or finding you on Google, when they click on that link to get on your website, the landing page needs to keep them from leaving. A good landing page will be rather minimalistic usually containing just one key call to action that you need to get them started on the path to eventually purchase and become a customer.

A good content strategy

A good content strategy is at the heart of an inbound marketing campaign because it’s where you’re offering value to your potential customers and asking for nothing in return. The goal of content marketing is to take the time to produce high quality, relevant, and valuable content that people will want to seek out and see more of in the future. You want people to subscribe to your blog and newsletters, and to go to you when they want an opinion from good authority about a given subject.

Email marketing

Through email marketing, businesses can compile a database of loyal customers who have given their permission to receive regular correspondence with a business. It’s a great alternative to printed mailers and newsletters and can be a great content marketing channel and coupon distribution method.

SMS (text message) marketing

Like email marketing, text message marketing (or SMS marketing) allows businesses to build up a loyal customer base. While it’s more expensive per message than email, it’s also much more effective because of the significantly higher open and click-through rates. SMS can be used to distribute mobile coupons as well as micro content, order status updates, appointment reminders, and any time sensitive information that a business might want to communicate with their most loyal customers.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/09/13/six-key-elements-of-an-effective-inbound-marketing-strategy/#131bdc88326f

Chatbots and the Hospitality Industry are a Match Made in Heaven

Businesses of all kinds are discovering the many benefits that chatbots have to offer them. One industry in articular that’s especially well-suited for chatbots is the hospitality. Here’s a look at five ways that chatbots can help with businesses in the hospitality industry.

Automated reservations

Making reservations at a hotel is already pretty easy thanks to the internet. Either visit the business’s site directly or choose any third-party booking site to make your reservation. But some people prefer the experience of talking through a reservation or they have questions that need to be answered before booking. Instead of having to call up the property and tying up a front desk clerk, the person could open up a messaging app on their smartphone and initiate a conversation with that company’s chatbot. The person can ask questions, compare pricing for different days, make a final selection, and make the reservation all with the help of that chatbot who will communicate that booking to the property’s reservations software.

User behavior analysis

Another advantage of chatbots over front desk clerks are their ability to remember every detail about every customer they help, ever. Chatbots can get a sense of a person’s preferences. Are they typically traveling with pets. Do they require a smoking room or a non-smoking? One larger bed or two smaller ones? This creates a more personalized booking experience as a chatbot can come into the interaction with a pretty good understanding of what the customer wants.

Upselling

Upgrades like a room with a better view or a multi-room suite complete with jacuzzi tub are where many businesses in the hospitality industry really make their money. But customers are wary of upgrades especially when they can sense the urgency in a reservations specialist’s voice. Live representatives can get a little anxious about upselling when a commission is at stake. Chatbots don’t need a commission and they can offer various upgrades to customers in a less-pushy tone.

Top-of-mind awareness (TOMA)

Top-of-mind awareness (or TOMA) is something that every brand strives for, even if they’re not familiar with the term. TOMA is about being the first company on a person’s mind when you mention the industry that company belongs to. When a customer thinks “hotel,” you want them to think of your brand immediately. Chatbots can help with TOMA because they’re ever present on customers’ favorite messaging platforms and are always just a couple of taps on a smartphone away.

Customer support

Finally, chatbots are great for the hospitality industry because it’s an industry where customer service is especially crucial. Customers are quick to write a bad review for any business who doesn’t provide excellent service. Need to modify or cancel an existing reservation, a chatbot can walk you through it. Already in the hotel and need something brought to the room, tell the chatbot. This frees up hotel staff to handle only the most challenging situations since chatbots are taking care of everything else and keeping guests happy.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter .com

Source: rnews. co. za/article/16228/chatbots-and-the-hospitality-industry

Eight Things Your Small Business Needs To Be Doing To Increase Content Marketing Engagement

The goal of any content marketing campaign isn’t to get readers to read any one specific article, you want to create loyal followers of your brand who will await every new article or video you publish, who will share your content with friends and family across various social media platforms. To create this kind of user engagement with the content you publish, you need to do more than just create awesome content. Here are eight other things you need to be doing.

Faster loading times for webpages

In marketing lingo, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing just one page on that site. Ideally, when someone ends up on a blog article, they read another and another. Or even better, they go to other parts of your website to learn more about your brand and maybe check out your products. The bounce rate doubles when load times increase from one second to six seconds. People don’t want to stick around if they have to wait more than a few seconds every time they try to click over to another page.

Mobile website load times

If you think load times are important, on traditional websites, it’s nothing compared to the importance of load times on mobile websites. Half of website visitors bounce after a load time exceeds three seconds. Mobile users are less patient than their desktop/laptop counterparts.

A high quality, mobile friendly website

Even if your content is attracting people to your page, they’ll have a negative opinion of your brand if the quality of your site doesn’t measure up to the quality of your content. Your site needs to be well designed, following principles of symmetry and organization but also contrast with an attractive color scheme. Your site should be easy to navigate so that the most important things are displayed prominently. You either need a completely separate mobile version of your website or at the very least, a responsive design site that will properly display your website on mobile devices. Images need to be of a high quality–no stock photos and no low resolution images that will appear blurry on larger screens.

A second set of eyeballs

Establishing trust is a huge part of content marketing. You want readers of your blog to see you as a reliable source of good information. If your content has typos or mechanical/grammatical errors, it reflects badly on your brand even if the content itself is solid. Even if you’re choosing to tackle the content marketing yourself, you should be paying someone else to proofread it before publishing.

Clear key performance indicators (KPIs)

One of the challenging things about content marketing is that it can be hard to measure the direct effects that your content marketing efforts are having on your brand. Part of the problem is that many companies start a company blog because they know it’s what they’re supposed to do but they don’t really know why and what they’re trying to accomplish. A good content marketing strategy will have well-defined key performance indicators that are monitored to track effectiveness of the content marketing. If new customers are what you’re after, then unique visitors is going to be a more important metric than total website visits. If a solid, loyal customer base is the goal, then fewer unique visitors and higher overall website visits is what you’re striving for.

Cast a wider net

Just because you’re publishing great content, it doesn’t mean your target audience is finding it. You need to make sure your content is reaching the people you’re targeting. You may need to do some influencer and affiliate marketing so that bloggers social media personalities with a more established viewership can help you get recognized.

More channels

Another way to cast a wider net is to diversify the channels you’re using to publish content. The company blog on the the company webpage is often the only form of content marketing that a company invests in when this should be seen as just one part of a wider effort. Video content can be uploaded to Youtube or directly to social media platforms. Live streams, tutorials, infographics, and even micro-content sent via SMS are all great ways to diversify your content marketing and reach a wider audience. You can even recycle some of your content to reuse it on various channels.

A “you’re-never-finished” attitude

Even when you’re pleased with the results you’re seeing from your content marketing efforts–you’re getting plenty of web traffic, customers are coming back for more, and your posts are being “liked,” commented on, and shared across social media platforms, you can’t stop improving your content marketing efforts. You should always be paying attention to metrics and fine-tuning your strategy.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: inc.com/molly-reynolds/7-impactful-ways-to-increase-content-engagement.html

Five Ways To Make Your Content Marketing Stand Out from The Rest

The sheer amount of digital content that we create collectively each day is staggering. Approximately 2.5 quintillion (that’s a million trillions) bytes of data are created every single day. In any given day, Facebook users will share 2.2 million pieces of content, Twitter users will send more than a quarter of a million tweets, and Instagram users will upload 216,000 photos. To say that the internet is a crowded place is a huge understatement. With such a vast amount of content being created and shared online every day, how can you expect your business’s content to get noticed by the right  people? It is possible, but you’re going to have to work hard to make sure your content stands out from the rest. Here are five ways to accomplish that.

Be concise and be yourself

Much of the content that is created for the purpose of marketing sounds stilted or unnatural. Content writers mistakenly believe that they need to adopt a certain formal tone in order to sound knowledgeable and credible.

But this kind of writing is uninteresting and it blends in with everything else that’s written in the exact same way. Feel free to use humor. Break grammatical rules with the situation calls for it. Use fresh and interesting language and never include any words that don’t need to be there or your writing will be overly wordy.

Don’t neglect visual content

The saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” is not only cliche, it’s a huge understatement. A great image can communicate emotions in a way that no amount of words can. Posts that include an image are forty times as likely to be shared on social media as posts that don’t include one. Just as you want to avoid cliche or boring writing, you want to avoid stock photos. Infographics are an underutilized visual element that you may also want to consider.

Try creating some video content

Even more underutilized than images is video content. You may feel that you don’t have the expertise to create high quality video content. You don’t need a high end video camera, lighting, and other special equipment, although that might help. The occasional live stream or even simple how-to videos or interviews with influencers is usually enough to make you stand out from the majority of your competitors.

Get your content out there

If you’re relying solely on your website’s blog or your social media pages to publish content, you’re not casting as wide a net as you could be. Make it a goal to get published outside of these places. Submit guest posts to online magazines and newspapers that your audience is likely to encounter. Build relationships with influencers who can mention your brand in their blog posts or YouTube videos.

Be willing to experiment

Finally, find ways to experiment with your content creation. Not everything will work but some of your ideas will. One trend in content marketing that you can get ahead of is micro content marketing. Think one or two sentences sent via text as opposed to a several hundred word blog article or social media post. Micro content is a great way to offer your SMS subscribers value beyond the mobile coupons they’re accustomed to getting.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: netimperative.com/2017/08/cutting-clutter-creating-engaging-social-media-content/

Six Digital Marketing Trends Small Business Owners Need To Be Aware Of

As a small business owner, you know that on any given day, you will wear several different hats. Small business owners don’t have the luxury of hiring an in-house IT specialist or a human resources team. You often have to fill in for sick employees so you might be a cashier or an assembly line worker or a customer service agent all in the same day. It can be hard to manage your small business’s marketing needs when you can’t afford a content strategist, a social media marketer, and a website designer. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of six digital marketing trends you should be aware of since you probably don’t have time to stay on top of the ever-changing world of digital marketing yourself.

Mobile

Mobile devices are becoming an increasingly important part of our day-to-day lives and it’s the single most important channel into a prospective customer’s life. You need a mobile optimized website at the very least and you may want to invest in some in-app marketing as well since the average person spends several hours a day on mobile apps.

SMS

SMS is really just a subcategory of mobile marketing but it’s important enough to deserve a separate mention. It’s the cheapest and most effective mobile marketing channel thanks to SMS’s 98% open rate so it’s really a no-brainer.

Social media/video

Almost all social media platforms today have some kind of integrated video playback feature and nowadays, posts that are just words or pictures no longer cut it. You don’t need a huge, expensive video production team, but the occasional live stream can go a long way it boosting social media presence.

Influencers

As a small business owner, you probably can’t afford to hire Beyonce for a 30 second TV spot, you probably couldn’t even afford to pay her to mention your brand in a tweet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pay for influencers. It may be a niche blogger or Youtuber who regularly reviews the kinds of products you sell. You may even be able to pay him/her with free products in exchange for a fair assessment of those products that will be posted in places where prospective customers will see it.

Personalization

It’s not enough to start of a mass email with your customer’s first name. You need to be gathering data on customer’s online behavior and segmenting your audience to provide a more relevant and personalized advertising experience.

Metrics

Finally, you need to have access to the metrics that can clue you into how effective or ineffective your various marketing efforts are. These metrics are often built into the platform itself whether it’s your business’s Facebook page or your bulk SMS provider so you can see how many people are seeing your posts, opening your texts, clicking on embedded links, and redeeming special offers.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-digital-marketing-trends-for-busy-small-business_us_598b5e95e4b030f0e267c97a

A Closer Look at the Evolution of Chatbots

Chatbots are predicted to change the way business and customers interact. But what exactly are chatbots? They’re computer programs designed to simulate conversation with a human. Chatbots can speak with an actual voice, or they can be entirely text-based. Most of today’s chatbots are text-based programs that people can chat with on various messaging platforms like SMS (texting) or Facebook Messenger. To better get a sense for what chatbots are, what they can do, and what they will be able to do, it’s helpful to look at their evolution.

ELIZA: The first chatbot

The first computer program that could be termed a chatbot was ELIZA. ELIZA was created by MIT professor, Joseph Weizenbaum to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between man and machine. Ironically, ELIZA ended up demonstrating the exact opposite. Though ELIZA was fed scripts in order to “learn” how to form intelligent responses to statements or questions, ELIZA was not communicating from actual intelligence. Despite Weizenbaum’s insistence that ELIZA was not intelligent, the people who spoke with the computer program came to believe it was and often attributed emotions to the program.

Mobile digital assistants

Today’s mobile digital assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa are simply advanced versions of ELIZA. Like ELIZA, these digital assistants can simulate human intelligence and can even come across as having personality and emotions but they are only selecting set responses drawn from information stored online or within mobile applications. They are also programmed to give a number of humorous responses to questions that their developers predicted they would be asked by curious users. Like ELIZA, they are not truly intelligent.

Task-specific bots

We are now living in a time when the popularity of chatbots is exploding. The majority of chatbots being deployed across messaging platforms today are more advanced in some ways, and less advanced in others as compared to earlier chatbots. Today’s chatbots are more specialized to do a specific task such as booking travel, making dinner reservations, ordering pizza, or managing a person’s calendar.

Chatbots as digital friends

As artificial intelligence researchers discover the secrets of machine learning, natural language processing, and machine learning, they will be able to create more incredible chatbots that are capable of learning and developing intelligence. These chatbots of the future may be capable of building rapport with humans even forming emotional bonds. Businesses that can develop and use such tools will have a huge step up when it comes to customer service and all other business-customer interactions.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: entrepreneur.com/article/293439

Three Ways To Build Your Brand With Mobile

In 2016, smartphone’s market penetration finally surpassed 80%. That means more than 80% of mobile phone users are using a smartphone as opposed to a more traditional mobile phone. Gone are the days where talking on the phone was the primary use of phones. The vast majority of time spent on smartphones is spent within applications.

In fact, Americans now spend more time using mobile apps than watching television–more than five hours a day on average. Mobile social media use, TV/entertainment, mobile gaming, and texting all surpass talking on the phone as well. Because of this trend, businesses are starting to put more and more of their marketing budget into mobile and that trend is continuing into 2017. If you’re not focusing on mobile yet, you need to be. Here are three ways you can build your brand through mobile.

Create a mobile app (maybe)

It’s already been established that mobile apps dominate mobile phone usage. Developing a mobile app can be a great way to establish your brand on mobile. But you shouldn’t do it just to do it. The majority of apps are downloaded and used once or twice, then never again. Experience has shown that the apps that stick around and that people continue to use after downloading are the ones that offer real utility. Don’t spend valuable marketing budget money developing a gimmicky app that offers no real value to your customers. So while a mobile app can be a great way to build your brand on mobile, it’s not essential and there are a number of other ways that are probably more cost effective.

Get seen in existing apps

Whether or not you want to develop your own app for your business, you can still capitalize on all the time people are spending in mobile apps. Though Facebook and Youtube aren’t exclusively mobile platforms, they are increasingly being accessed via mobile device more than desktops or laptops. Creating and maintaining an effective Facebook page and Youtube channel where you’re regularly posting and sharing content are going to help establish mobile presence since those platforms are so inseparably connected to mobile. Things like infographics, short videos, and live streaming will get you noticed.

Use SMS

Short message service (SMS), or texting as it’s more commonly known is a great introduction into the world of mobile marketing because it’s one of the least expensive forms of mobile marketing and it’s also easier than developing a mobile app or managing a Facebook page or Youtube channel. Through a bulk SMS marketing service, you can automate the process of obtaining permissions and managing a database of numbers. You can craft your message and then set a time for it to go out and then stop worrying about it. Best of all SMS, is something that works on regular cell phones in addition to smartphones.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: huffingtonpost.com/entry/3-mobile-branding-tips-for-your-business-to-consider_us_59569dc6e4b0c85b96c66174

Use Chatbots to Supplement, not Replace, Existing Customer Service Efforts

Chatbots are one of the most talked-about mobile trends in 2017 with many predicting it will be the future of business-customer interactions. With the growing popularity of chat platforms like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp and the steady popularity of SMS (or text messaging) brands are trying to communicate with customers where they already are. Millennials don’t like to call customer service hotlines, they like to interact with short, to-the-point text interactions via SMS or messaging applications and brands are scrambling to make that possible.

Chatbots are computer programs that are designed to simulate a human chatting via SMS or a chat app. They use varying amounts of artificial intelligence and machine learning to figure out what people are asking them, and then they attempt to generate an appropriate response.

Companies are designing chatbots that can make dinner reservations, book flights, buy movie tickets, complete online purchases, offer product suggestions based on customer preferences, and even resolve customer service issues. There are a growing number of chatbots and chatbot stores across all chat-based platforms and the majority of brands that don’t yet have deployed chatbots are working to develop them. So with all the excitement, is it worth jumping on the bandwagon?

What chatbots can and can’t do

It’s important that brands and customers both recognize the limitations of chatbots in their current state. The technology for chatbots to perfectly simulate conversation with a human simply doesn’t exist. Humans might be fooled initially but they catch on quick that the “person” they’re chatting with isn’t a person at all.

According to one study, 70% of customer service interactions via chatbot required human intervention at some point. Just three in ten were able to have their issue resolved without human help. This tells us that we’re still a ways off from replacing live customer service representatives with computer programs.

You may be wondering, if chatbots fail 70% of the time, why invest in developing them at all. The reason is because they can learn. With each failed interaction chatbots get better at interpreting and replicating human speech. They’re worth investing in because they will get better. Even in their current state of development chatbots are worth the effort. Chatbots are most effective when they’re used to automate some of the more simple parts of the customer service interaction such as pulling up account information or answering simple questions that have little room for error and then passing them off to a live agent for additional help.

Chatbots and the future

Chatbots very well may be the future of business-customer interactions and though the technology that would enable chatbots to fully replace live customer service representatives doesn’t yet exist, it can one day. Early adopters of chatbots will be instrumental in advancing the technology and they’ll be a step ahead of those who are hesitant to get on board.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com
Source: business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/small-business/0508-biz-eb-erin/wcm/ebfafa19-087f-43bf-a6a6-71145ce69cf9

Chatbots and the Uncanny Valley

The term “uncanny valley” was coined by notable robotics professor, Masahiro Mori, in 1970 to explain the phenomena of unease in the presence of humanoid robots. Mori, and other AI and robotics researchers since then, have noticed an interesting trend in which people start out with a positive view of robots but grow increasingly uneasy the more closely they resemble humans. Then at a certain point when the robots are practically indistinguishable from live persons, the unease subsides.

Much psychological thought has gone into this phenomenon but it is still unclear what exactly causes it. One thing is clear, however, when robots resemble humans but there’s something a little off, we notice it, and it creeps us out. This is one of the biggest problems facing artificial intelligence and robotics researchers today.

Though chatbots are not humanoid in appearance—they’re not machines at all, but rather, computer programs—the uncanny valley is still a phenomenon that has been observed with them.

A history of automated customer service

When companies first began using automated phone answering systems to more efficiently route calls, the voices were obviously robotic and the customer on the other end knew it was a machine. They knew what the system could and couldn’t do and it didn’t resemble a conversation between two humans in a way that made people uncomfortable. As time went on, however, these systems became more advanced and the line between machine and human were blurred. The majority of automated phone answering systems today still use a more monotone, robotic-sounding voice though the technology exists to make it sound more like a human.

The problem for chatbot developers

The first chatbots were simple programs that were able to respond with a handful of pre-written sentences. But as more artificial intelligence goes into the programming, chatbots are being developed that can engage in small-talk and can even simulate personality. While some may respond positively to this, others prefer their chatbots be more obviously robotic in their conversations. For chatbot developers, that means walking a fine line between creating chatbots that aren’t seemingly rude in their directness but not overly human-sounding either, at least until the technology advances enough to make chatbots indistinguishable from real humans.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/uncanny-valley-digital-assistants/523806/

How To Use Chatbots To Generate More Leads

If you’ve ever had to call a customer support number, you’ve encountered that all-too familiar voice reading off a list of options and which numbers to press to record a response. They often ask a series of questions designed to either give you the information you need, or transfer you to the person who can best help you. Often they’ll automate the some of the process by getting your account number information so the live person won’t have to go through those routine questions at the start of the call. These digital phone assistants free up human resources and improve productivity for the live customer service agents. They’ve become commonplace so much so that we expect to get one when we call customer support and are surprised if we don’t.

Though there are still some that don’t like interacting with these phone robots, overall we have a positive view of them and they’ve becoming fairly accurate at getting us to the right person quickly. We also recognize the need for their existence.

The internet now has its own version of the automated phone assistant in the form of chatbots. Chatbots are designed to do the same kinds of things but they operate online, on mobile devices, and within messenger apps.

The challenge presented by chatbots

Just as customers were initially hesitant about the growing use of automated phone assistants, many have misgivings about chatbots preferring to speak or chat with real people. But just as automated phone assistants overcame these obstacles, chatbots will as well.

One issue people have with chatbots is that they’re too-robotic or impersonal. Chatbot developers are constantly working to counteract this stereotype by developing a chatbot with a pleasant personality and the ability to engage in some small talk as a human would.

How to best use chatbots on your website

User behavior suggests that consumers don’t appreciate chatbots that are overly intrusive or annoying. Chatbots shouldn’t show up on the homepage in the form of annoying pop-ups. On the other hand, you don’t want to bury them in a place customers can’t find them when they want to. The ideal use for a chatbot would be to try and anticipate when a customer is likely to have a problem finding information or to have a chatbot that can recognize based on user behavior (long pauses between clicks or frequent clicking between pages) and initiate communication then. In this way, website-based chatbots can be used to generate leads and conversions when they otherwise might have left the site in frustration.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: forbes.com/sites/ajagrawal/2017/05/25/bot-hype-how-to-use-chatbots-to-get-more-leads-for-your-site/#5976e9af24c1