Archives for July 2018

Your Customer’s Journey goes through these stages: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. There’s no telling how long they stay in one stage before jumping to the next. Sometimes the progress takes months, and others the jump is almost immediate.

Many websites concentrate on the ‘Awareness’ and ‘Interest’ stage without signals toward a purchase while others focus on the ‘Action’ stage without providing sufficient information.

ICU Marketing Associates ensures that your website speaks to your visitor relative to their stage in the buying process. Does your website’s navigation and content address all of the needs of your potential customers in every step of their journey?

Navigational cues such as menu buttons, bread crumbs, overview of next steps, suggested readings, and calls-to-action must guide your visitors from whatever buying stage they are in and on whatever page and content they are currently on to the next logical and intuitive step.

This strategy requires a deep understanding of your customer, what they need and how you meet that need. This means knowing what information in certain media formats they need to absorb to learn more about your offerings in a way that will resonate with their motivation to buy. This strategy also requires getting rid of all possible barriers to buying, making the actual purchase process as smooth and satisfying as possible.

Contact me at johnny@johnnymurray.com to learn how I can help you fix your website.

Johnny Murray
johnny@johnnymurray.com

Customer behavior has changed. Now they go online to research and evaluate brands, products, and services. Your potential customers have gone digital, and so you need to.

1. Your prospective customers look online before buying!
Did you know that 81% conduct online research before buying? If your products and services cannot be found online, then you are missing out!

2. It works!
Thirty-three percent of mobile users have purchased from a different brand after seeing advertisements on their mobile devices. So if your website is not mobile-friendly, you’re losing 33% of buyers!

3. It levels the playing field.
If you are a small or medium-sized business, you can take on much larger competitors. To the online shopper, the size of a business is not that important online. If they see you as a business that provides better value, then that is all that matters.

4. It’s cost-effective. You do not have money to waste.
Wouldn’t it be great if every lead who viewed your product or service was a serious buyer looking to purchase? With digital marketing, all your potential customers are targeted and looking for your product or service. Google states a 2.8 times higher revenue growth for companies that use digital marketing techniques.

5. Track potential customers.
You can track customers from the first interaction. Imagine if you could follow your potential customers around and keep promoting your product. Digital marketing will do that for you.

Creating and maintaining a positive reputation for your business is a vital and important aspect in creating a loyal customer base while building your brand.

No major successful or popular brand started out and became successful with a negative reputation. In fact, the reputation of a business has been proven to have a significant influence on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and trust.

Customer retention is something that the majority of big and successful companies thrive on. Customers that are happy are more likely to be return customers who spend more money, and in turn, tell their friends and family about their experience.

Having a reputation marketing strategy in place should be the first thing your company focuses on when building your reputation.

More and more businesses are encouraging their customers to go online and post reviews about their experiences. There are many big review sites out there and the data you get from them can be invaluable to your reputation marketing campaign.

Managing these review sites builds trust and authority for your brand and shows your transparency and accountability. Getting feedback about your business and your brand provides you with valuable insights on where your business is falling short, and how you can improve. Even good feedback can be improved on.

Believe it or not, there are many companies that have failed due to having a bad reputation, and either not knowing, or not doing anything about it until it was too late.

On the other hand, it’s worth mentioning that companies with a good reputation financially outperformed companies with bad reputations in every way.

With a good reputation marketing strategy in hand, your business will benefit from higher brand equity, exponential growth, and a flood of loyal customers with increased customer lifetime value worth 10 times as much as their first purchase.

Don’t wait. Take control of your reputation marketing strategy today, and get started building your businesses trust, brand, and reputation today.

Send me an email johnny@johnnymurray.com now to get started.
Johnny Murray

It seems that in social media lists, LinkedIn is always thrown at the end as another, lesser, option to the bigger sites.

However, if you are looking to make B2B connections and grow your leads there is no more effective social media platform than LinkedIn!

Unlike the other social media channels out there, LinkedIn was specifically designed for business leaders to share ideas and make connections.

Studies have shown:

1) 92% of B2B Marketers leverage LinkedIn over all other social platforms.
2) 79% of B2B Marketers view LinkedIn as an effective source for generating B2B leads.
3) 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
4) 43% of marketers say that they have sourced a customer from LinkedIn.

So hopefully those statistics have pointed out to you why using LinkedIn is an effective choice for your business. Now, let’s focus on how you can best utilize the site.

Just showing up to the party isn’t enough, you are going to have to enter the conversation. In order to do that your company needs to begin posting engaging content for your target decision makers to read and share. Here are three points for you to think about regarding LinkedIn content:

1) 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content

Businesses are sharing tons information with one another and making connections. It is time for you to join in and boost your visibility by posting useful content for your future customers.

2) 10 pieces of content are consumed before a purchasing decision is made.

People are constantly taking in information and researching before buying, especially on LinkedIn. Now through the content you post, your business has a direct way to speak into their decision-making process.

3. LinkedIn SlideShare reaches 70M unique visitors a month.

The site is now among the top 100 most-visited websites in the world. The audience is already right there for you to reach out to!

We are ready and willing to help you create and post content that is going to make valuable connections and grow your business!

Contact us today at johnny@johnnymurray.com

There are many things you can do to get more traffic to your door.

One of the things that are surprising is that many local physical businesses don’t have, or don’t think they need local SEO, such as getting listed on major local business listings.

Not having some type of online presence is a big mistake for companies. Take into consideration that more people are closely connected to their mobile devices more than ever.

People use their smartphones to do everything from ordering pizza, to finding out who has the best price on the car part they suddenly need. And while this is just a small example, you may or may not be surprised that many people go online to check to see if a business has what they need, what the prices are, if they are currently open.

They do these things before deciding to drop by a store!

There are many things that a local physical business can start doing besides having a website online so that they can be found easily by new prospective customers. Getting yourself listed on Google My Business is free, and the page is likely to get indexed very quickly since it is Google.

The next best thing to do is get listed on local directories and review sites. Many people are using these sites to check business reviews and will be able to find your business quickly.

Some other things that you want to be sure to do are building links from local news sources, establishing partnerships with other businesses and of course, utilizing search engine optimization using locally targeted keywords which very well could be easy to rank for.

If all this sounds great to you, and you need more information on how to get started, then contact us now, and we can help you get your business in the important places that matter most and help increase your foot traffic.

johnny@johnnymurray.com
Johnny Murray

Social media is not a place that people go so that they can view advertisements, browse through all of the business pages, or read long technical updates about a company. Social media is a place to be social! This means that people want to be engaging in conversations and making their voice heard.

We at ICU Marketing Associates want to share with you some of our tactics to making sure that your followers stay engaged with your business and ultimately become your customers.

1. Initiate Conversation with your Social Media Followers

If you are at a social event and you want someone to talk to you, how do you do it? You have to talk to them first! Show them that you care about what they have to say by making the first move.

2.Ask For Feedback

Let your followers know that you value their opinion and that you want your products and services to be at their best.

3. Do Surveys and Polls

People love sharing their thoughts and opinions on the internet. The surveys can be things directly related to your business, or just fun questions to get the conversations rolling.

4. Organize Giveaways, Contests, and Promotions

This will get people excited about visiting your page! You can even gain more followers and recognition by having the contest entry include sharing the post or tagging a friend. Even for those who do not win, the excitement for the contest will now be associated with your business.

5. Live Q & A Sessions

Live sessions show your followers that you actually want to hear from them. It also gives you the opportunity to tell your audience the things that they actually want to know about your business instead of just guessing what questions they may be having.

The right digital marketing consultant will be able to incorporate all of these into your marketing plan so that you can see your followers begin to engage with your business.

Your website is your online shop window. It is the first impression you are giving to your new visitor regarding the credibility of your business. If a customer cannot navigate your website to find what they are looking for, they will have no faith in buying from you. You should want it to provide a good experience for your customers. Does it function correctly? Is anything broken? Have you checked lately?

1. What is your site speed? How long does it take for your website to load? If it takes too long, you may have just lost multiple visitors. If it’s not as quick as your competitors, you have just made a bad first impression.

2. Does the content on your site accurately describe what you are selling? This is not only important for your site visitors; even before anyone else sees it, Google has to value your website to ‘rank’ your business site in the search results.

3. Does your site work properly on mobile devices? Have you checked? If not, you are losing a lot of potential customers interested in your services.

4. Are parts of your site broken? Obsolete? What effect are these broken bits having on the overall performance of your site?

Want to find out what else may be improved? Hit me up at johnny@johnnymurray.com.

LinkedIn has many marketing tools that can be used to grow your business. Using these tools to raise awareness for your business, its credibility, and its impact will put you on the path to building your brand in an organic way. Here is a brief guide on some of these tools and how they work.

LinkedIn Company Page

Catch the eye of your prospective customers with a Company Page. It should be a place where you can engage your target audience with things relevant to them such as links to your best white papers, e-books, case studies, how-to content and thought leadership content. Your Company Page should spread your company’s overall message by publishing content you know your target audience will want to see.

Showcase Pages

You love your business and think of many different parts of it as equally important in their own ways, but does your audience know that? Showcase pages are for creating a distinct platform for each aspect of your business that has its own message to share with its own target audience. By giving each part of your business its own distinct voice, you can extend your LinkedIn presence to reach the audience it needs to reach.

Long-form Posts

Should you go long on LinkedIn? The answer is yes! Publishing long-form content can position you as an expert and thought leader on the subject, giving your business credibility and authenticity. Another benefit to writing your own posts is giving a chance for like-minded professionals to interact and contribute while simultaneously spreading your message. If your post becomes a hot topic of discussion it will be a trending topic where it can be distributed and recommended to a much broader audience, giving you even further reach than before!

These tools and more are part of a larger LinkedIn toolbox that can help your business grow in an impactful way. Contact us at johnny@johnnymurray.com to learn more about how to use them!

Johnny Murray
ICU Marketing Associates

LinkedIn has many marketing tools that can be used to grow your business. Using these tools to raise awareness for your business, its credibility, and its impact will put you on the path to building your brand in an organic way. Here is a brief guide on some of these tools and how they work.

LinkedIn Company Page

Catch the eye of your prospective customers with a Company Page. It should be a place where you can engage your target audience with things relevant to them such as links to your best white papers, e-books, case studies, how-to content and thought leadership content. Your Company Page should spread your company’s overall message by publishing content you know your target audience will want to see.

Showcase Pages

You love your business and think of many different parts of it as equally important in their own ways, but does your audience know that? Showcase pages are for creating a distinct platform for each aspect of your business that has its own message to share with its own target audience. By giving each part of your business its own distinct voice, you can extend your LinkedIn presence to reach the audience it needs to reach.

Long-form Posts

Should you go long on LinkedIn? The answer is yes! Publishing long-form content can position you as an expert and thought leader on the subject, giving your business credibility and authenticity. Another benefit to writing your own posts is giving a chance for like-minded professionals to interact and contribute while simultaneously spreading your message. If your post becomes a hot topic of discussion it will be a trending topic where it can be distributed and recommended to a much broader audience, giving you even further reach than before!

These tools and more are part of a larger LinkedIn toolbox that can help your business grow in an impactful way. Contact us at johnny@johnnymurray.com to learn more about how to use them!

Johnny Murray
ICU Marketing Associates

Do you have a system to track your Digital Marketing ROI?

Do you have a way to quantify how your digital marketing efforts contribute to the bottom line?

MarketingProfs reported that 71% of marketing leaders and providers say attributing social and content to revenue is a top challenge to showing ROI.

49% say that aligning KPIs with overall business goals ranks as the next biggest hurdle, followed by 47% fail to track leads to revenue.

The figures above also suggest that 29%, 51%, and 53% respectively don’t have that problem.

So the top 3 problems are:

Attributing social and content to revenue.
Aligning KPIs to revenue.
Tracking leads to revenue

Are you having the same challenges?

Do you find a compelling reason to learn more about this?

Contact us and get advice.
johnny@johnnymurray.com