Blogging
What is the secret to successful brand reputation management?
When we hear “Oprah,” the few things that pop into our heads are philanthropy, inspiration, and the queen of daytime TV. Similarly, Richard Branson represents foresight, success, and positivity. These are all fruits of dedicated personal branding. Both Oprah and Branson have spent decades finely sculpting their public personas via online promotions, TV scripts, talk show presence, and paid advertisements. While both of them are billionaires, the novice entrepreneur can craft an inspirational persona without pouring buckets of money into the endeavor. Developing a personal brand takes both patience and hard work. Without enough tenacity, you may end up with a half-baked personal presence like that of Lindsey Lohan or Paris Hilton. Even with millions of followers, controversies, and negative publicity stick to these celebs like bees to a pot of honey. How much can you lose without reputation management? More than 50% of regular customers out there don’t want to engage in business with corporations that do not have a strong and positive online presence. While an average brand in Fort Wayne cares about how its website looks and the frequency of posts on its Facebook page, it might fail to notice its mention on third-party sites like Yelp or GlassDoor. Monitoring the reputation of a brand is especially challenging since the repute of global executives, CEOs, and marketing heads contribute to the total brand reputation significantly. The concept becomes easy to understand once you consider the relationship between Tesla and Elon Musk. The recent controversies involving the rescue operations in Thailand and brash comments on Twitter took a considerable toll on the Tesla stock prices. What’s the trade secret of branding no one will tell you? A company is not an inanimate entity. The founder, CEO, and every other employee comprise a brand. Each of their online presence, interactions with the media, and social media presence can shift the spotlight on the brand name. Now, the kind of interactions determines whether the brand will catapult into fame or simply face the wrath of the public. The stock prices, sales figures, and globalization of any corporation depend intrinsically on its reputation. How to take baby-steps towards reputation management? If you have never given your relationship with your brand and its reputation among your Fort Wayne consumers a serious thought, you are not alone. Millions of budding entrepreneurs have not had the respite from thinking beyond sourcing funds and impressing investors. However, this is the perfect time to think about building your brand reputation, preferably from scratch – Beginning with the basics When you start scrounging through every paper trail and social media presence to learn about your reputation, it is time to invest in a thorough audit. Begin by Googling yourself. See what results show up. If there are negative comments and reviews, don’t worry, Fort Wayne SEO Company will tell you what to do. When you chance upon editable content that does not fit your brand image, immediately delete it. Establish profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. If your business already has a presence on social media, claim the same. Consult your marketing team in Fort Wayne or hire professional marketers in your area to draft a personal branding strategy. Establish your credibility as a brand The first sign of credibility for any company is a loyal consumer following. The presence of dedicated consumers brings in more consumers, who convert readily and contribute to brand reach. Place your brand name in third-party publications. Manage the comments. Respond to negative reviews with professionalism and offer to amend any mistakes made by brand employees even when the consumer is harsh. On social media, maintain regular posts and interactions with the real buyers. Over 92% of customers state that they purchase from enterprises that their friends, peers, or trusted reviewers mention online. Do not engage in controversies and altercations with consumers. When it comes to social media and third-party review sites, the consumer is always right, unless it’s a fake review from a competitor. To distinguish real consumers from fake ones, you might need dedicated monitoring, and that can require help from Fort Wayne SEO and reputation management companies. Seize personal branding opportunities If you or your branding team know where to look, you will find hundreds of branding opportunities online. When you are trying to enrapt a target set of audiences, you need to reach out to non-competing companies for experiential marketing stints. Any professional marketing team in Fort Wayne is well-aware of such event-based marketing opportunities in your vicinity. Connect with real people on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Research shows that 74% of all consumers prefer doing business with brands that respond to their queries and comments on Facebook within a day. For that, you will require social media listening and monitoring tools. Most importantly, whether you are on LinkedIn or leveraging a platform like Medium, do not forget to post informative content. Set up a schedule for posting fresh content at least once a week. Respond to comments and queries on older posts too. Smaller startups don’t have the resources to maintain a dedicated content team. In such a situation, you can think about outsourcing your content requirement to groups in Fort Wayne, who know your brand and the audience. Invest both time and money to build inbound and outbound links. Google sees strong links as one of the top three ranking signals. Links can not only push your website rank higher, but it can drive more organic traffic to your site by reinforcing its credibility on the SERP. The branding and reputation management processes are intertwined. It can take some amount of time for nouveau entrepreneurs to master the fine art of reputation management, especially when there are scores of social media platforms and third-party sites. However, it is not something you can self for later. When you do not have the human resources to deal with the flood of comments, queries, and mentions on social media, it is a
7 steps to understanding your customer journey
7 steps to understanding your customer journey Unless you understand your customers’ journey, your venture won’t last very long in the current competitive world of business. Some may ask what is a customer journey? To put it simply, the journey defines customer behavior and how they interact with your brand at various touchpoints. The best way to understand the customer journey is to create a visual presentation of the entire process. This technique is also known as customer mapping. The following are some of the steps that you can use in knowing more about customer journey. Create a Set of Objectives Before you begin the mapping process, you have to figure what exactly you want to know about the customers’ journey? Are you interested in identifying the big or small touchpoints or both? A touchpoint is the point of contact between the customer and your business. An example of a minor touchpoint is a customer entering your store and looking around. A major touchpoint happens when the client becomes interested in buying one of your products and starts negotiating. Another objective could be to find out how the store set up and employee behavior affects the customer’s journey at both the minor and major touchpoints? Setting objectives is good because it gives you a sense of direction. Define the Extent of your Research You have to know how you are going to achieve the customer journey objectives. You can do this by defining the kind of research that needs to be done. Are you going to monitor your customers quietly or are you going to actively engage them by asking them a few questions related to the touchpoints. If you decide to engage the customer directly, be careful about how you approach them – you don’t want to come off strong and give the impression of being too needy. You may decide that you want to examine the online touchpoints. In that case, decide on the tools and software that you’re going to use to analyze the data. Consider the Secondary Sources As you define the extent of your research, you should be aware of the fact that you are not the first business to try to understand the customer’s journey. This means that your research should also cover secondary sources. Look into previous research conducted by other businesses on understanding the customers’ journey. In most cases, you are likely to discover the same things. Therefore, it’s better if you familiarize yourself with what you are likely to encounter. Involve Everyone in the Organization This is the step where you tell everyone what you expect from them as you try to understand your customers’ journey. You can assign different roles to each employee. For example, the sales attendants could try to gauge the customers that walk into the store. They will be helpful as usual. However, this time around they will be more interested in what the customer has to say. When they do that, the customer will be more open to answering questions on touchpoints. The IT department could be tasked with collecting online data on the website’s touchpoints. You have to know that your employees are your number one asset, and you need to involve them in any project that affects them if you want the undertaking to be successful. Create the Customer Journey Map After you’re done collecting and analyzing the data, it’s time that you create a visually appealing customer journey map that explains your findings in the simplest form. You can use simple graphics to show the customer’s journey from the moment they begin to gain an interest in your product to researching online to know more about your business to making inquiries through your firm’s social media platforms to making the actual purchase. Of course there are some touchpoints in between, but you get the picture. Give your customers different personas in the journey map. That way, your employees can differentiate the different types of customers and their journeys. Share the Journey Map with Other Stakeholders Not all members of the board will be available for your live presentation of the customer journey map in the office. You have to take responsibility and see how they can get such information. If your organization has a customer experience software platform, you can post the journey map there for everyone to see. However, there are other stakeholders that may not be on that platform. In that case, you may have to send them the journey map through email. The reason why it’s so important to involve stakeholders is because they are the ones that will approve any new tactics meant to improve the overall customer experience. Make Improvements The final step in understanding the customer’s journey is to make improvements. If you discover that some customers leave your store because they can’t clearly see the price tags, take the necessary steps to make sure that the price tags are clear. Perhaps some customers have never seen your website in the search results, and that’s why they don’t make online purchases. You can hire Joel House Brisbane SEO to help you improve your sites content for greater visibility. When you do your best to improve the customer’s journey by acting on the pain points, you increase loyalty. The customers will appreciate your efforts by making more visits and buying more from you. Conclusion The customer journey is what the customer does before actually deciding to buy your products. It includes online research, asking friends about you, and even visiting your store. Use the above steps to understand how different touchpoints influence purchase decisions and work on improving the pain points.
How to Write a Successful Multilingual Blog?
When starting your blog, you are always very excited and you want to produce more and more content. When you’re bilingual, you might want to start writing and creating content in both languages and you truly believe that this might work to your advantage since you will be able to attract people who speak both languages. While this can really work out for you, you will need to keep in mind that you might need some help in order to achieve your goals. Running a multilingual blog might be a little bit more demanding than you might imagine. Here are some things you should keep in mind in order to make it truly successful. Making the time to write for all the languages When writing for a multilingual blog, the very first thing you need to keep in mind is how you organize your content. While there are topics that you can simply write for one language and then proceed to translate to the others, there will always be a topic which you won’t be able to translate as it will either not be relatable for the natives who speak the other languages or it will simply be too complex to translate because of the many native words and phrases. This is why you should always make sure to keep the content that you wish to upload organized. The best way to go about this is to use your Google calendar to your advantage and write down the days that you want to be posting and the title of each blog posts you are intending to post. You can arrange to have days where you will post one article which will be translated into both languages and you can also have a day every week or every other week where you will create a post on different topic for each language. Not only will this help you keep your content in order and allow you to make time to write for all the languages, but you will also be able to attract more locals and native speakers who will want to keep coming back to your blog each week in order to read something that is relatable and meant specifically for them. Working only with native translators One of the things that are important when it comes to running a multilingual blog is online translation services. While it is possible to run a bilingual blog all by yourself, it can become almost impossible to do so when you start putting more languages into the game. Translation services will allow you to work with professional translators who will not only be native speakers but will also help you organize your content and make sure that you didn’t make any mistakes while writing. When managing more than two languages, it is truly very easy for you to make mistakes while translating. Not only is it impossible for you to know more than a handful of languages well enough to make great translations but you will also not be able to avoid making simple mistakes. Translation services will help take a huge burden off your shoulders and allow you to get things done a lot faster and with more ease. Not only will you be able to pick writers who you think will be able to work well with your schedule but you will also be able to work with natives who will know the languages well enough for your blog to reach out to all the native speakers in your audience. This way, you will be able to keep uploading content consistently and not leave any of your chosen languages without any new posts for too long. Translation services will help you keep your blog running and becoming more and more successful as the time goes by. Hiring and working with professional writers When you are looking to expand your blog and add even more foreign languages into your page, it is a good idea to start working with more writers. While translation services can surely help you out with translating your existing content into more languages, professional writers will help you create fresh and diverse content in more languages too. One of the biggest benefits of working with professional writers is that you can save a lot of time on your side when it comes to creating new content. All you’ll have to do is give them a title and description of what you wish for the article to contain and then let them do their job. In order for you to make sure that the person truly is doing a good job, you can always send their finished articles over to your preferred translating service and see if what they wrote is grammatically correct. A thing to look out for when it comes to working with writers is to make sure that they are native speakers or at least bilingual in the language they will be writing in. This is very important for you as it will save you a lot of money and time and you won’t have to keep correcting their mistakes on an everyday basis. This will also help you keep the status of your company and help your blog look professional and well put together. Using social media to your advantage Creating good and consistent content is only one part in owning a successful blog. Another thing that is very helpful and essential when it comes to giving your blog more publicity is to promote your posts through social media. While there are many different social media platforms out there for the world to use, the ones that are usually the most preferred by blog owners are Twitter and Facebook. Facebook can be a great place to promote your content as you can very easily create a page for your blog where you will only be posting content related to your niche. You can also very easily create polls in order to ask your readers
The guide to setting up ad-sense page-level ads in BlogSpot
It hasn’t been long since the page-level ads have been rolled out. They are now available for use for all webmasters out there. These ads allow you to display AdSense ads even on mobile templates for your blogger. So, you can make money from mobile templates as we well, just like you did with Google Admob Ads in mobile apps. Before moving any further, let us have a look some interesting facts about these Page-level Ads: 1. They are shown by AdSense at optimal times. This helps to increase revenue. Plus, it provides a better user experience 2. There are two new ad formats: vignettes and anchor/overlay ads 3. These ads can be used along with the content and link units. So, you no longer need to count towards your 3 ads per page limit 4. Can be visible only on mobile-optimized sites 5. Are mobile Responsive! Now let us move further on the available Page-level formats. How can you add code to the blogger template? And, how can you test the ads to know whether they really work on your sites or not? Formats for page level ads 1. Anchors Also called as overlay ads, these are mobile responsive. Such format sticks to the bottom of the screen. After the ad gets loaded, the anchor starts to display at the bottom of the page. So, the user can easily dismiss these ads using the toggle down button at its top. 2. Vignettes These are full-screen mobile ads. You can use them to cover the entire web page interface. And, they work similar to the popular Admob’s Interstitial ads, which have been used for mobile apps for both android and iOS operating systems. Talking about the vignette ads, they appear popups between the page loads in your blog. So, the user gets a choice to either it out, move to the destination or simply close it and return to the previous page. The fact that these ads contain a call to action button and are larger in size makes them a great option as compared to anchor ads. Some of the things that you must know here are – · Out of the two formats, vignettes are only when the user leaves the page, and not when someone visits it. · To give a good user-experience, these ads are limited in terms of number per user. How to implement these ads in your BlogSpot Blogs? It’s fairly simple – 1. Log in to AdSense Account 2. Follow the link – https://www.google.com/adsense/start/ 3. Click on the toggle buttons to turn the Anchor/Overlay and Vignette ads 4. Scroll down to select Get Code option 5. Copy the code 6. Now, go to Blogger > Template > Backup your template and edit HTML 7. Search for code <head> and paste the generated code just above it 8. Save the template and that’s about it! *DON’T FORGET TO REPLACE THE ATTRIBUTE async WITH async=” To test whether the ads have been implemented or not, you can add #googleads to the end of URL for your Blog and open in any mobile browser. You can then select the format you want to test from the tabbed box that appears on the screen. So there you have it. The all new page-level explained to you in a simple manner. If you haven’t tried them yet, then I’d recommend not to waste any time further.
Companies are tracking you on FB. Did you know that?
Companies are tracking you on FB. Did you know that? We all love to sue Facebook. Don’t we? Well, just like you I and millions of others who use FB on a daily basis don’t spend quite some time on this social media platform and share our personal information on this tool. However, not many of us are aware of the fact that the information that we are sharing here is being sold by the company to advertisers. Comes as a shock, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, this article will help you to avoid this shock and save you from being tracked by marketing companies on Facebook. Well, the answer to this comes in the form of blocking ad-tracking! Blocking Ads Now the question that comes here is how you can block this option? Following these steps mentioned below will help you in the cause – 1. Click on the lock icon on the Facebook page 2. Go to the settings menu 3. Select the ads option 4. Click on the edit option in individual section of ads This will reflect how your ID is being used in the ads seen by people. And, at the bottom of the window you will find there is a drop down menu named ‘pair my social actions with ads for’. From the drop down you need to select ‘no one’ as the option. That was all about ads! Now, let us drift towards apps. Blocking Apps Here are the steps that you need to follow for blocking apps from using your account in FB – 1. Click on the lock icon on the Facebook page 2. You can either choose to view the walkthrough (a blue dinosaur will help you in it) 3. Or delve deeper into the matter by going to settings and then selecting the apps option. 4. This will put forward the list of company apps which apparently are following you on Facebook 5. Click on the show all option to ensure that you have the entire list in front of you. 6. Hover the mouse on individual apps to edit apps’ permission settings or simply delete it. That’s about it! Apart from all this, there’s another piece of information that can help you stay safe from this breach of privacy. Apps other use (in the settings) This option will reflect you the data your friends see, which is being seen by the apps used by your friends. You can simply uncheck the boxes to share only that information which you want others to see. Sounds fairly simple? So, what’s the wait? Pick up your personal computer and start with process of making your profile free of ads and apps. With a little effort, you can eventually get it all done!