When Social Media Goes Bad

How to minimize the damage and bounce back when your Brand is ‘Not Liked’ on Social Media.


Social Media is great. It puts businesses in direct contact with millions of prospects and customers, worldwide. It strengthens the brand presence on the web and helps in viral marketing. The good word about a business can spread real fast on Social Media Networks. But, what happens when there’s a bad word? It can spread even faster. In this issue we put forth some tips that you can use to contain the damage when your brand is getting beat up on the web.


Analyze: There are times when the business really makes a mistakes and times when there’s a misunderstanding or mistake on the part of the customer. Analyze the situation and understand in which category it falls. If the business is at fault, make amends; make them publicly on the same medium that the irate customer used. However, if the situation falls in the latter category, speak up for your brand and make your stance clear. That way you present your side of the story to others.


Don’t Whine: So someone gave you a bad review. Be calm and collected. Don’t whine in response. Whining and mud-slinging at the reviewer will present your brand as rather immature and even give the impression that you did really mess up.


Timely Response: Respond to negative comments promptly. Ideally, the response time is less than an hour because of the viral nature of Social Media Networks.


Respond Right: While timely response is essential, a wrong response written in a hurry can be catastrophic. Refer to step one—analyze, know the facts and then respond. Be clear and on-to the point.


Be a Person: Personal touch is an important element of social Media Marketing. Bring it into your interaction when responding to negative comments. Respond as a person, not as a company. This brings in the element of accountability to your words.


Too many times one bad review can spur an epidemic of bad remarks with many people joining-in on the conversation with a “Me too!” The aim should be to arrest such unpleasant developments before it begins to erode the brand value online.

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5 Ways To Building Better Customer Relationship

Having good client relations is important for your brand value and for revenue. Here are a few simple steps that you can take to improve them.

Personalize: Gather all information about your customers and develop a personalized communication approach towards them. Make sure the messages you send are relevant and add value to your customers.

Stay in touch: Cross selling and up-selling is great, but it is even better to stay in touch with your customers for no reason at all. You can do so by sending them greetings for during holidays and other special days like birthdays. It sends the message across that you really care about them, and that they are not just another name on your marketing database.

Accommodate: All businesses have policies, and they are needed to keep the business functioning smoothly. However, sometimes it helps to walk that extra mile and bend the policy a little bit to for the benefit of its customers. Suppose you have a return policy of 10 days, but your regular customer walks in on the 12^th day with a request for a replacement, try to accommodate them. A little step can go a long way in such cases. Not only will you retain the customer, but you will be more likely to be recommended over your competitors.

Pricing: Take a second look at your pricing policies from time-to-time. How do you fare among your competitors? Has a customer ever complained about your pricing? If yes, reconsider what you are charging. There may be times when you cannot always compete on price—then play the quality card. Ensure what you are providing is worth every cent that the customer’s paying.

Feedback: Maintaining customer relationship demands that you listen to your customers. Send feedback forms to your customers. Have your salespersons call them up to check if they are experiencing any difficulty using your product or have a customer care executive place a call to check their satisfaction level with your service. Once you get the feedback, make sure you put it to use. Maintain transparency between your marketing, sales and customer service functions so that the gap between customer expectations and product/service delivery is tightly closed.

For more information visit www.newplans.com or e-mail at support@newplans.com

6 Tips for Better E-Mail Marketing

E-mail is a low-cost and fairly uncomplicated medium to connect with prospects. Here’s how to ensure you get maximum advantage from it.

Start on the right note: When a prospect signs up for your e-mails, send them an effective welcome message. This should be crisp, up-to-the point and convey clearly what the reader can expect in future, from your e-mails.

Go easy on images: Images do make e-mails look more interesting, however not all e-mail clients display images. Sometimes, e-mails with too many images are filtered as spam. Hence it’s advisable to have a good mix of rich content and some images to your e-mail.

Give valuable information: Prospects sign up for e-mails hoping to gain some value. If your e-mails are always about your business or products, the prospects eventually lose interest. Make sure that the e-mails are adding value to the readers by offering useful information. That way, if you occasionally send e-mails about a new product launch or upgrade, readers would be interested in knowing more.

Know when to send: One thing you need to make note of, as an e-mail marketer is that your recipients are not always into their inbox. Depending on who you are targeting, your prospects may be checking their e-mails twice a week. Tweak your e-mail marketing strategy to suit recipient behavior. An e-mail everyday can be frustrating if someone’s checking their mails on weekends.

Optimize for mobile devices: Android phones and tablets are changing e-mail marketing as well. With executives mostly checking their e-mails from their smart phones there’s a need for e-mail marketers to ensure that the e-mails are optimized for mobile devices as well.

Analysis: It is essential to know the results of your e-mail marketing efforts. Even if it is just a monthly newsletter, you should know exactly how many recipients were targeted, how many received the e-mail, what is the bounce, unsubscribe and click-thru rate and so on. Such details will help you understand how the recipients perceive your e-mails.

For more information visit www.newplans.com or e-mail us at support@newplans.com 

5 Tips for Effective Marketing Collateral Creation

Prospects draw up an image of the company based on its Marketing Hence it’s important that the company’s Marketing Collateral is created such that it sends the right message to the recipients. Here are 5 steps towards creating effective Marketing Collateral.

Know the target

Understand the audience well and then structure the marketing collateral to suit their taste. For example, the CFO of an organization is the chief target; it makes sense to include statistics and numbers as to how the product can help the company cut costs. On the other hand, if it is someone in the administrative department, then the collateral should emphasize on how it can help them save time.

Look from the target’s perspective

Many companies make the mistake of talking about themselves in their Marketing Collaterals. Marketing collaterals should contain information about the company’s offerings, but it should emphasize on how these offerings will be of use to the target.

Why you?

Marketing Collaterals should bring out the company’s unique selling points. Why should the targets choose your company over others? Give them a compelling reason to do so.

Personalize

Personalized communication always yields better response than mass communication. Customize your Marketing Collaterals to suit your target’s tastes and perspective.

Keep it Simple

Marketing Collaterals must be concise and clear. Cramping too much information into marketing collaterals only makes it tiring for the recipients. Keep the content lucid and easy to understand.

For more information visit www.newplans.com or e-mail us at support@newplans.com