Since the pandemic hit, the last two years have been tough for small business marketing. It brought a sudden economic halt due to which many small and medium businesses (SMBs) have been operating with tightened budgets and reduced staff. SMB leaders now need a marketing strategy on a budget to bring them back into the game.
If you are running a small business, it’s time to get your marketing strategy in order. Limited resources don’t mean scrapping plans — you just have to work on adapting. Here’s how to think about marketing your business in 2022.
A lot has been changed during the pandemic, so firstly you need to reflect on it. Have any of your competitors closed? Have other businesses expanded? Or have other businesses just stepped in to fill the void?
Moving forward here are some strategies that you can follow.
You can start by doing some localized market research. Find out what your customers want and see how your business is delivering to their expectations.
Just like your business got disrupted, so have your customers’ lives. This makes it a good time to check in with them. Take time to listen to what they like, don’t like, and what they expect more from you.
You need to conduct an audit of all your current marketing activities. This will help you to stay informed about where you’re currently investing your resources, and what return you’re getting back.
Evaluation of your marketing strategy, current programs, and spending will allow you to determine the appropriate marketing budget for the marketing investments you’ve planned for future campaigns.
Work on creating a lead nurturing program. The idea here is to develop strategic messaging to maintain effective relationships with customers at every stage as they research or make their purchases.
You can even collect your customers’ emails and plan to send the same to them on a regular basis so your business always stays on the top of their minds.
The ongoing digitization and advancements bring out one question front and center: How approachable are you online?
There are some easy ways that can help you enhance your online presence and make it easier for your customers to reach out to you. Try adding a contact form or even better, if you work with Salesforce, consider using a web form to lead routing.
Also, stay active on your official social media profiles to quickly react to people who connect with you and comment on your posts.
When you are aware of where a majority of your customers are online, it makes it easier to invest in those channels for effective communication with customers.
You can do lookalike targeting (aimed at prospects who are similar to your customers) even with a small budget that will help you to reach new audiences and potential customers.
From Instagram Live to Zoom, broadcasting has never been more mainstream. You can host a digital event that will attract new customers and even celebrate existing ones.
You can always make it fun! Get creative and plan interactive virtual events — giveaways are always appreciated and well-received.
Conducting marketing for a small business takes time and work, but it doesn’t have to mean a big budget. These marketing tips will help you to get started under your budget. With some disciplined editing, careful thought, and using a few new digital marketing skills, you’ll have a budget-friendly marketing plan at the ready.
And if you need more help for planning your marketing strategy on a budget, feel free to get in touch with our certified Salesforce experts to help you strategize your marketing in an effective way.
Service teams always work to meet customer expectations fast and flexibly, and they use digital customer service channels to do so.
When there is an unprecedented increase in customer queries, digitally managed customer service channels can help the team to manage it all. The team can also use FAQ pages, chatbots, mobile, and web chat to reduce call volumes, enabling self-service.
Customer support has now become all-digital, available for customers all the time. According to the Salesforce State of Service report, channels like messenger apps, online chat, and video support have witnessed a double-digit adoption gain in 2020 from 2018.
Customers nowadays have become smart and have increased their use of digital channels to connect with a brand. Because of this shift in customer service engagement, organizations have to rethink their channel mix, or they might risk falling behind.
Here are some of the top digital customer service channels that you can consider for your business.
Mobile devices have become the asynchronous service option that keeps the conversation with the customers going. Mobile help to record past interactions and streamlines conversation, thus making it a convenient option for customer service.
Agents also use mobile to deliver personalized customer experiences. It allows agents to work with multiple customers at one time, enabling them to refer back to past interactions on mobile options.
You can also automate routine customer requests using chatbots on SMS, WhatsApp, and other messengers.
You can connect your service and marketing with social customer service channels that would give you a complete view of the customer data. This will help agents with the consultation before they have to respond to any customer request.
Social channels help with quick case resolution. As soon as a customer replies to a post with a complaint or issue, your team would get aware of it and could immediately work to resolve that case.
Many service professionals have found that customers are increasing their use of self-service. Self-service channels can include your, FAQ page, help center, knowledge base, and customer portals.
Such portals allow customers to log in and access their information like purchase history. It is important that you keep your self-service channels up-to-date. You must regularly review your case information. What are customers ask routinely? Are you aware of any new trends? Track all these insights to create content that can help address common customer requests.
You can consider a chatbot as the extension of your self-service. It helps you to analyze data with artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly resolve common issues. Many customers these days prefer using chatbots to ask simple questions, like checking their order status.
Service agents can use chatbots to offer a personal touch to digital customer service channels. You can use natural language for programming them.
Voice holds among the most-used channels by businesses. You can consider combining your CRM with CTI using Service Cloud Voice to make voice a digital channel for your business.
This technology puts all customer and calls information on the agent’s screen. It also transcribes the interaction carried out with customers so that agents don’t have to scribble notes.
One-on-one support for routine requests these days has been simplified with Visual Remote Assistant. It can allow agents to handle anything from how to reset a home TV to a system reboot.
Being easy to use, this channel is very much preferred by customers. It enables remote assistance without having to go to service centers.
While you use all the above-mentioned customer service channels, regularly review your data to ensure your teams always meet expectations and deliver fast and quality service. Also, which channel you choose depends entirely on your business; what works well for a retailer may not work for a manufacturer.
And if you need help to know what works for you, get in touch with our certified Salesforce professionals.
Well, we have been well aware of the fact that social media platforms are taking over people’s lives at a quite rapid rate. They have been transforming people’s perspectives of looking at certain things differently. There have been various social networking platforms which are used by the majority of the people on a regular basis. These media networks have now become an irreplaceable part of our lives. Knowingly or unknowingly, people have started depending upon all of these for most of the things they do in a day. Considering this popular influence by these sites on people’s live, businesses have been planning to use these for their major benefits too. Even, some of them have already started doing it. In the present era, businesses are well aware of how to make profits using social media and their beneficiaries. The blog highlights some key points on the same, let’s have a look.
1) Getting More Audience- Generally, businesses have a limited audience to target upon for their respective products and services. When it comes to taking help of social media, it increases their range of the target audience many-folds which promises wide-area coverage, and hence, guaranteed increased results.
2) Getting More Tools- Usage of social media makes you equipped with more advanced tools with the help of which you can work in a smart manner to come up with innovative ideas to generate greater sales. After all, the present-day market is offering almost everything to you by itself.
3) Much Improved marketing Strategies- Using social media sites for marketing and brand awareness can take your brand to the next level. It is even better than what you would get from hiring a marketing consultant in an all different manner.
4) Going Viral is the Trend- Being frequently active on social media may give you enough ideas on how you can go viral to get yourself up in the zone of latest trends so more and more people may know about you and your brand.
5) Seamless Customer service- Social media platforms may help you provide your customers with the best customer support which ensures their satisfaction every time they raise a concern.
On a concluding note, it can be said that social media platforms have now become an essential part of our lives, whether it be personal or professional. People have been heavily relying upon their usage in the present era due to the increased demand and the desired output which they are getting every time they make use of it. Even CRM systems support the usage of social media for all kinds of business enterprises in order to help them to make huge profits. Not using the CRM platform yet? Well, it’s high time that you start using it straight away. 360 Degree Cloud is a certified consultant and ISV partner of the world’s most dominant CRM software, i.e. Salesforce. Wish to try out on us? We would be more than happy to help. Connect with us now and get started.
