Archive for August, 2020

Creating Customer Journey Maps

Saturday, August 29th, 2020

Marketers often speak of the “customer journey.” It’s a concept that describes the various decisions customer make and the interactions they have with a company from the point where they’ve identified a need until the point when they make a purchase—and beyond. A customer journey map is important because it helps marketers visually depict the customer journey and identify areas that may represent barriers or risks of loss. It provides a documented, explicit vision of how customers will interact with your company and is a good tool for sharing with employees to help them understand the journey and the role that they play in engaging and retaining customers. (more…)

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Market Research

Wednesday, August 19th, 2020

Women considering yes, no, maybe optionsMarket research is definitely something that even very small businesses can do on their own but there are a lot of myths and misconceptions related to research that can cause them to make decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information. While it’s impossible to cover everything related to doing research well, here are some general strategies and best practices that businesses of any size can put to use to leverage the value of gathering market research to improve their business offerings and marketing effectiveness.

(more…)

6 Tips for Using Social Media as a Lead Generation Tool

Tuesday, August 4th, 2020

We launched Strategic Communications in 2008, at a time when the country was plunging into a deep recession. It wasn’t a great time to land new clients. But it was a great time to take a deep dive into something that was relatively new at the time, at least from a business perspective–social media. At the time there was an interesting talent gap that represented an opportunity for us. Most businesspeople didn’t have experience in using social media channels for marketing purposes and colleges weren’t yet educating students about these new marketing tools. So we were early adopters and spent quite a bit of time learning about and experimenting with the tools that were best positioned in the business-to-business (B2B) space: LinkedIn and Twitter.

Since that time we’ve built our social channels organically and have helped a number of clients do the same. There’s no real magic to this. In fact, the basic tenets of effective marketing via social channels are really the same as they are for using any marketing tools. We recently responded to a reporter’s inquiry about our top tips for marketers using social media as a lead generation tool. We pointed to six:

(more…)