in Online Marketing

Five Creative Ways to Use Your Blog as a Marketing Tool

by Carolyn Howard Johnson

Your business can benefit greatly from using your blog to as a marketing tool.

Here are our favorite techniques for creating a successful blog:
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in Online Marketing

Instantly Increase Sales with Online Marketing

by Melissa M. Kellogg

Christi Tullis, owner of Ambiance Interiors and Gifts in Suwanee, GA took a big gamble a year ago when she decided to exclusively use online marketing—email, website and social media—to promote her store. Luckily, the gamble paid off; so well so that she attributes over 27 percent of store traffic to the store’s social media activity. Using online marketing Tullis can now instantly reach 10,000 customers that have requested to receive her email marketing and over 2,400 customers that follow her store using social media, like Facebook and Twitter.

Using online marketing, you too can launch more effective marketing and create a more loyal and lucrative customer base. Online marketing, including email campaigns, social media and your website, provides the ideal environment to build loyalty and have conversations with your customers even when they are not in the store, says Doug Fleener, president of Dynamic Experiences Group, a retail and customer experience consulting firm based in Lexington, MA. Using social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you can increase loyalty and store traffic by having fun contests, sharing snippets of information of interest with your customers and taking polls to help you create a better shopping experience. Tullis uses social media to drive traffic to her store with contests, product announcements, and exclusive offers.

Your website and email marketing can provide added value to customers by offering information, customer reviews and offers tailored to their interests. Tullis uses email marketing to offer decorating tips, advice, and new product information. She also partners with other local businesses to provide special discounts for her customers, which she includes in her email newsletters. Your social media marketing, website and email marketing campaigns need to all work together to provide value, maintain a conversation, and build relationships that keep customers coming back, says Bob Negen, author, retail expert, and founder of WhizBang Training, based in Grand Haven, MI.

Social Media
Start a Facebook fan page for your store and begin using it to get to know your customers by asking questions and offering information of value to them. Facebook is a great place to begin conversing with customers—with over 120 million users in the U.S. and 50 percent of them visiting the site daily you are likely to find many of your customers already there. Social media, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, provides an ideal way to create a consistent two-way conversation with customers, which enables you to provide value, foster relationships and learn what your customers want to keep them coming back, says Lynn Switanowski, retail expert and founder of Creative Business Consulting Group, a retail consulting firm based in Boston, MA. “Our guests love the immediacy of Facebook to learn about new product arrivals at Ambiance the moment they come in,” says Tullis; “social media allows us to ‘talk’ to our customers and build long-lasting relationships, all while introducing them to our fabulous line up of products.” Tullis began using social media in 2005 to connect with 13 to 17 year-olds but soon found they were not her only customers using social media. Their moms, middle-aged women and also Ambiance’s customers were using social media to keep up with their kids, says Tullis. So she started using social media to reach out to them too and now her store has almost 1,400 Facebook fans and over 550 followers on Twitter.

When using social media, consider relationship building as the goal rather than selling products. “Applying traditional marketing approaches to new media marketing does not work,” says Fleener. Create a community with your customers around common interests like writing postings about your town, parenting, gift ideas or whatever is of interest to your customers based on your store’s expertise and products, says Negen. You can increase participation by offering free gifts or having contests. Tullis recalls what she says was a successful campaign her store launched, called “Spot the Dot.” Customers that took a photo or video with Dottie, the store’s polka-dotted Hummer H2 SUV, and posted it on MySpace received a gift card. “With that campaign we learned that social media had an instantaneous effect that no other form of advertising such as print, television, or newspaper could offer,” says Tullis.

Remember that a conversation goes both ways, so regularly ask questions of your customers and read and comment on responses, advises Negen. It is a great way to get input in making store decisions. “Our customers love being able to give their opinion in an open forum,” says Tullis; “we pay attention to what our customers like and what they don’t like, which gives us major insights to our upcoming buys,” says Tullis. You can use Facebook to survey customers and learn more about their tastes, preferences and how you can offer greater value to them. Allowing your customers to be involved in store decisions helps them feel more emotionally invested and will keep them coming back.

What about negative comments? Tullis says she does not worry about unflattering comments. “Every once in a while people will post unflattering remarks and believe it or not, I find it entertaining because our other fans handle it for us. They are typically the ones responding to the comment. If the customer writing the unflattering words is an existing shopper, we will pick up the phone and call them.” She says she has never had to delete a negative comment and has found that one negative comment typically leads to many positive comments posted by fans responding to the negative post.

Email marketing
Tullis began using email marketing as one of the first steps in her store’s transition to online marketing by replacing her print newsletter with an electronic version in 2003. Her newsletter now reaches over 10,000 people and she says is frequently shared on social media websites and forwarded to friends by the recipients. Email marketing is a great tool to keep in touch with customers and offer added value by sending out regular communications, like an email newsletter. Tullis sends out an email newsletter weekly plus one or two product or event related promotional emails per week. She says “the enewsletters keep customers informed of happenings both at Ambiance and in the local community as well as new product arrivals, coupons, tips and advice regarding products that we sell.”

To build her list of subscribers, Tullis created a rewards program. “We do not simply ask them for their information,” she says; “we explain the benefits of being in our ‘A-wards’ program, which includes $10 back for every $200 that a customer spends with us, plus coupons via email, and advance notice of all of our events. We have a 99.9 percent success rate in getting customers to sign-up. Everybody loves getting something for free” says Tullis.

Website
Use your website as the online destination that brings together all of your online marketing by providing links to your social media and a place for visitors to subscribe to your email list. Using your website to provide instruction and showing customers how others are using your products is a great way to add value, says Fleener. You can provide tips, advice, product reviews and store information of interest to your customers. Let your website be the hub of your online presence, the place for more detail about your store, your products, and another place for customers to shop with you using ecommerce.

Tullis is in the midst of a website re-design and the new website, she says, is slated to launch later this year. She says her new website will give visitors the feel of being in her store by featuring images of her gift boutique and showroom showing their award-winning in-store displays and many other Ambiance features that make the store unique. The website will also provide links to the store’s Facebook fan page and links to the other social media sites they use. Consumers will have the opportunity to communicate directly with Ambiance staff using the website and “there will be multiple blogs and forums our guests can subscribe to covering home design and sharing our fabulous fashion expertise,” says Tullis. In 2011, she says, the store plans to offer online shopping on its website.

Online marketing can help you build deeper customer relationships and add value to your customers’ experience with your store, which in turn can increase sales, says Negen. You can build a more loyal customer base by shifting your thinking away from “how can I sell this product?” toward thinking “how can I know my customers better and provide products and services to fulfill their needs?” Facebook fans tend to spend the same amount of money per store visit but end up visiting more often and generate more positive word of mouth than nonfans, says a Harvard Business Review study, published March 2010. Consider increasing the use of online marketing to promote your store and shifting the focus of your marketing strategy from products to relationships with customers and you can enliven your customer base and in return grow your sales.