How to Beat the Online Trust Crisis

Online Reviews - Warning Deep Water

90% of consumers read online reviews

Being trusted by prospective customers is essential but there’s a consumer trust crisis. We all know that the internet is awash with frauds, fake news, scams and poor content.

Consumers are more cynical and savvy about marketing than they’ve ever been.

Nearly 9 in 10 consumers have read online reviews to determine the quality of a local business (BrightLocal). Similarly, 90% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, which means that having good, recent reviews is essential for effective marketing.

Successful businesses need to be trusted; you need to build ‘trust capital’. This is a valuable strategic resource. If your business has high trust capital it reduces the’ trust gap’.

You can achieve this by having a secure website (with an SSL certificate), easy navigation, up-to-date content, a strong team section (because it’s one of the top 5 most visited pages on many websites), an authentic sustainable approach to the environment, offering online chat, a privacy statement, engaging social media presences and good search engine rankings.

Do you have a customer review strategy?

And, of course, you should also have very good customer testimonials and reviews.

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10 Essential Email Marketing Tips

Love It or Hate It, Email Marketing Is Powerful

Email newsletters, flyers and alerts used well with a high quality, opt-in list can be very powerful.

Email marketing is one of the most measurable ways of retaining and keeping in touch with your customers. Done well as part of a content marketing strategy, email marketing can be cost effective and deliver high returns (ROI).

But, as you know, email done badly is spam and can easily annoy your customers. You must follow the rules and best practice.

Here are 10 Essential Email Marketing Tips

1. Build high quality lists

The quality of your list is really important. Build your own email marketing list of customers and prospects. Use a double opt-in process, ideally, or, at least, a single opt in process.
I’m not a fan of bought lists, particularly big, untargeted lists. Using these could result in you being black-listed.

Be fully aware of the laws affecting email marketing, and comply. Recipients must be able to opt out easily from any email. This is a legal requirement.

Review your list to see who hasn’t opened or clicked on a link for the last six months. Provide them with a compelling offer to re-engage.

Speak to Christopher Lamotte for advice about your email marketing. I can create and send out your email newsletters.

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‘Content Marketing’ and Why It’s Critical to Online Success

View East Lothian - Content Marketing

All Marketers Tell Stories

Seth Godin 6th August 2015

Commit to Content Marketing

To make your website and digital marketing work for you, you must commit to publishing content. ‘Content marketing’ must be an integral component of your overall marketing strategy and is critical to online success.

“However, creating good content takes time, and not everyone likes writing or is good at it,” says Christopher Lamotte from Real Marketing. “I find a surprising number of people struggle with writing blogs and articles, due to lack of time or a (perceived) lack of writing skills. So, here are some content marketing tips and suggestions.”

Firstly, what is ‘content marketing’? It means creating content that would be of genuine value to your customers – stories, news items, email newsletter articles, social media posts and videos – to answer their questions through blogs, email, social media and video channels.

Content marketing promotes your business subtly and teaches at the same time. It is two-way and delivers trust. Today, this is essential for generating online enquiries and sales.

The art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyers more intelligent or perhaps entertaining them to build an emotional connection.
Joe Pulizzi, Founder of The Content Marketing Institute

Joe Pulizzi, Founder of The Content Marketing Institute 5th September 2015

The content you create should not be salesy, about your products or how good your service is. Your content should be about achieving two key objectives with your target customers:

  • educating them &
  • building trust

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