Digital Entrepreneurship: Introduction to Digital Marketing

Search Engine Marketing – Can Customers Find You?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) allows businesses to be found online. With millions of businesses out there vying for the same eyeballs, SEM’s two main elements, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay – Per – Click (PPC) strategies can lead to online marketing success through discovery.

Imagine you have a brick – and – mortar store, and it has a beautiful store front, and you’re proud of the store. But it happens to be on the street that doesn’t get a lot of traffic, that will affect your sales. Now, the same holds true for a website. If the website cannot be found by prospects, that will definitely affect the businesses performance.

Digital vs Traditional Marketing Strategies:

Similarities:

•         Segmentation and positioning and knowing your audience
•         Promoting the products and services

Major Difference:

• Traditional marketing is about pushing products and services, it’s about reach. How many customers of prospects can we reach at one time?
• Digital marketing creates a community through two way communication between the business and its prospects and we call that engagement.

Greeting a Good Digital Marketing Strategy

 

But let’s look at some key elements of digital marketing and they typically involve all the things that are listed here to social media, the advertising, paid ads & SEO. The website itself, we’ll be discussing conversion marketing and that has to do with word of mouth, and that has to do with review sites as well. Email marketing, CRM, or customer relationship management and are we mobile device ready with our platforms?

Introduction To Digital Marketing 2023:
A beginner’s guide to digital marketing in 2023

Now let’s look at the concept of Search Engine Marketing. Why is it important? Well, if you look at SEM, how it relates to the consumer buying process. You’ll see the importance of it. There’s five stages to the consumer buying process. The first one is problem recognition and let just say that your problem is your iPad, or let’s just say your laptop computer broke. You’ve got the blue screen of death. That’s a problem, right? You need to try to solve that problem. The first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to information seek. This is where search engine marketing or SEM comes into play. Why it’s  important? Because without SEM, without a good ranking for your website, your customers are not going to or your prospects are not going to place you in the information seeking area. So you’ll miss out on that and then you won’t be part of the comparing alternatives or evaluation of options or finally, making the purchase. You want to be part of the information seeking stage, and that’s where you would research that the various types of laptops and make your decision. 

Introduction to Digital Marketing:
A guide on Digital Marketing opportunities and how to start a blog on your own Kindle Edition

Five stages the consumer buying process:

1. Problem recognition
2. Information seeking
3. Compare alternatives
4. Evaluate options
5. Make purchase

First of all, Search Engine Marketing is the head term here and then underneath SEM, we have Search Engine Optimization called SEO or Pay – Per – Click, which is PPC. In this example, you’re looking at a firm, a company, that sells floor covering. On the left you see the organically placed ranked placement of their company in a web search and then on the right, you have a placement as well. However, you see the ad insignia on the entry on the right. That means that they had paid to be placed at the top of the search. We call that Pay – Per – Click and that is a strategy. Is it the right strategy? It really depends on what we’re doing. But there are two strategies. The one on the left again is an organic placement and the one on the right is a paid placement. The key difference between SEO, Search Engine Optimization and Pay – Per – Click, PPC is that with SEO. It is basically organic. The website is placed there because it’s a quality website, it’s got the right use of keywords. It takes time for the results to work and take effect. SEO does not happen overnight, it’s a long process. To improve the website's searchability and doing the right strategies, it takes time. It is gradual. It requires consistent work. Then there’s a residual benefit that once you’ve designed your SEO properly, then the website will be visible. It’s not something you have to work on every day. There’s no escrow or money put into it like Pay – Per – Click. With Pay – Per – Click, after you set it up through Google AdWords and you’ve purchased the keywords, the results are almost instantaneous, but it does require management. The budget that you set up might be spent very quickly and that’s where the cost of it can go up. Then, once the bank is emptyor the escrow is empty, you set up with Google AdWords, the account. The results will immediately stop. In this slide, we show in the previous slide, a couple of slide ago we had an ad or a PPC placement, and we had an organic placement. This particular search for the branded keyword Coles Fine Flooring, which is what this business is. You’ll notice that they’ve got a ad, and they’ve got an organic placement concurrently. They do that because they want to lock some of their competition out. There are some facts that you need to be aware of and that is that for an ad, even though this is at the very top of the page, a lot of consumers are concerned about clicking on ads. In other words, if somebody is clicking, if a consumer is looking for Coles Fine Flooring, they put that in the search bar, there are only 20 percent of the audience or the prospects who will click on this placement for the ad, the one on the bottom, 30 – 40 percent will. That’s because there’s more credibility in an organically placed rank website. 

SEO 2024: Learn search engine optimization
with smart internet marketing strategies Kindle Edition

Ninety-three percent of all online experiences begin with the search engines. It could be Google, it could be other search engines. Google happens to control about 95 percent of searches. Seventy – five percent of users never scroll past page 2. That’s a very important fact that you want to be on the first page. A lot of prospects will not go past the first page. Seventy to Eighty percent ignore the paid ads. That’s why organic research is important.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of processes centered on boosting your site’s organic (unpaid) rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. The goal is to make your webpages more visible to users searching for topics or products related to what you offer. So you can generate more traffic to your website without spending money beyond what it takes to create that content.

Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies
(For Dummies (Business & Personal Finance)) 4th Edition

There are five main components of SEO:

1. Keyword Research – involves finding the terms and phrases people type into search engines when looking for information.
2. Content Creation – involves developing informative and/or entertaining materials intended for your target audience.
3. On Page SEO – focuses on optimizing your webpages for search engines and users.
4. Off page SEO – entails activities taken outside of your own website that aim to boost your rankings.
5. Technical SEO – is the behind – the – scenes work that optimizes your site for search engines.

SEO broken down into two areas. We have on – page and off – page strategies. Both are important. On on – page strategy, that’s the obvious one. We want to have good content marketing there. We want to have the right keywords, and we want to research our keywords ahead of time. We want to have the right keywords, and we want to research our keywords ahead of time. We want to have images that are clear that load quickly and the page speed has to be good. Otherwise, the audience will become less patient, and the could click off the site. Again, on – page SEO involves optimizing the content and all the things, the elements that you would do on the page. But there’s something called off – page SEO. That’s where you try to get other websites to link to your website. That actually reflects to Google. Let’s just say that we’ll use Google for now. Google looks at that as quality, because it sees that links are pointing to your website, and what that's tells Google is that, your website is in authority. You are blogging and you’ve got guest blogging and social media is off page. If you have really effective social media with a lot of followers, that can affect your SEO from off the page. Off – page SEO involves any activity to drive awareness and refer traffic to your site from other sites. It might be your own social media but that’s considered another site. Both of these put together, on – page and off – page SEO lead to better ranking for your websites, and that’s the key.

Ponderings of a PPC Professional:
A Collection of Philosophical, Yet Practical, Observations
to Help You Win at Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Now, we’re going to look at keywords because keywords are important. If you want to be found for a certain keyword in different examples but on that floor covering site, they want to be found for the term floor covering. Although that it’s not what we were searching before, but floor covering is important. That’s a keyword they need to be recognized for. They need to place that within their website in a fairly frequent manner but not overusing it. 

What is PPC?

PPC is an advertising model that involves paying a fee each time your ad is clicked. Search ads are a particularly popular form of PPC.

There are five main components of PPC:

1. Keyword selection
2. Bidding
3. Audience targeting
4. Ad copywriting
5. Remaining ad settings

You also might purchase keywords through Google AdWords. Than if you do that, then that’s where the PPC, your Pay – Per – Click comes into play. Now, there is something called the head or short – tail keywords, middle tail, and long keywords. What this chart shows us is that the higher you are up to scale with a short keywords, like for example, shoes or woman’s shoes, that would have a 

PPC Made Simple: Pay Per Click Strategies
For Dominating Google Adwords

very high search volume. But there’s a downside to it. There’s a low conversion rate if you look along the lower horizontal axis. Why? Because there’s so much competition for that, so you have a low conversion rate for that, so you have a low conversion rate for that. That means as far as actual purchases. In middle tail keywords that are a bit longer, you have less search volume but probably a higher conversion rate. Then a long – tailed keywords on the bottoms of the chart.

It shows you that you’ve got lower search volume for it but a higher conversion rate. You want to try to use short and long – tailed keywords concurrently. Here’s an example, if you want to talk about a random topic like bed sheets. Bed sheets would be a short keyword and that would be on the very top. It would have a lot of competition from a lot of retailers online and brick – and – mortar, and 

Search Marketing: A Strategic Approach to SEO and SEM

you would have a low conversion rate but there’s a lot of volume. But what if you’ve used the keyword bed sheets that keep you cool? That’s a long – tailed keyword. You would have quotation marks around the whole thing. If anyone look for that online, if they searched for bed sheets that keep you cool, if you were selling bed sheets and that was your long – tailed keywords, you would have a very high chance of conversion because very few other retailers would show up for that bed sheets that keep you cool. That’s the power of a long – tailed keyword. Lastly, there are sites that you can go to that can help you look at any website. This is  a free site. If you to this and you put this in your search bar, it’s going to ask you for a website. You put in any website, it will actually score it for you. It will give you some scores. One is, it will look at you on – page SEO, and it’s going to look at links. This particular websites doesn’t have any links pointing back to it. That’s off – page SEO. They not have done a good job there, they need to correct that. Usability is okay, performance is okay. Social media is good. So it gives you like a radar chart that helps explain that. 

YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following
and Making Money as a Video Influencer

Social Media Marketing

Social media as it relates to digital marketing. The social media platforms by popularity in US. The chart shows that YouTube is number 1. It really has taken over the number one spot from Facebook in recent years. Facebook is number 2. The Facebook popularity has declined in most age segments, declined a lot with younger old segments. But it is still strong with older users. That is its core audience right now, is older users. Instagram over the years has grown the fastest. Over the last, say, 3-4, really 5 years, Instagram has really gained in momentum and is now number 3 on the chart. That’s something to keep in mind, a very significant trend. The social media frequency in the US. It continues to evolve. The Facebook has quite a heavy frequency. A lot of daily users on Facebook. The same with Snapchat, a lot of daily users. Instagram, same thing, of course. Twitter not as much. YouTube quite a few daily users. The fact that social media has become a daily activity with most Americans.

Engaging Gen Z: Lessons To Effectively
Engage Generation Z Via Marketing, Social Media, Retail, Work & School

If we want to look up and coming consumers, we look at generation Z. Generation Z, they’re effectively teenagers today. Instagram leads with generation Z. But Tik Tok is gaining popularity. They are actually right now with generation Z growing fastest.

Facebook is almost the last place for generation Z. The only one with with fewer users would be LinkedIn and that’s because it’s more of a business – to – business type platform. You wouldn’t expect a lot of teenagers to have LinkedIn accounts, although some do.

Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World

We’re going to be looking at a very important trend for businesses. Organic reach. Organics reach is how many consumers that you are reaching at a particular time. Reach means your content has showed up on their new feeds and they’re seeing it. Doesn’t mean they’re doing anything with it, consumers. But you have to reach in order to have engagement which is the target for social media marketing.

The problem is that since 2012, the organic reach has dropped significantly each year controlled by, in this case, Facebook and Instagram. If you have a business, you had a free ride in 2012. You could reach 17 percent of your audience just by posting anything. Today, this chart depicts 1,5 percent in 2018. It’s actually below one percent now in the current year. It’s sort of a scary concept for businesses because 5 – 7 years ago.

Social Media Marketing: An Essential Guide to Building a Brand
Using Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter,
Including Tips on Personal ... and Using Influencers (Brand Storytelling)

Even 10 years ago, doing very well with Facebook as a free platform and they were reaching a lot of their audience and gaining momentum. But that’s since the organic reach has been curtailed by the Facebook and Instagram. Along with that declined, you will see ad revenues increasing. It’s no coincidence that ad revenues are increasing because businesses are being curtailed as far as their organic reach so they have to buy reach. Because they have to buy reach, they are spending more each year in order to reach more audiences. It doesn’t mean they’re going to get engagement, it just means they’re reaching, but you have to have reach to have engagement. There’s a reverse trend and that’s something important to remember. That’s the same with Facebook and Instagram. Their ad revenues have increased along with the decline in organic reach. There’s a direct relationship there.

The 80/20 CEO: Take Command of Your Business in 100 Days

Daily potential reach for a particular business, this is for a hotel in the San Diego Area. Each day, they’re seven days listed, the highest day is 12,640 and the lowest day is 12,575 or actually 471,12641. What does that mean? That means that the answer pretty clear. The potential audience for this business to reach, and this is Facebook, is consistent throughout the entire week. There is no weekend drop off. It’s consistent through the week. But the image right below that looks like a whale in the ocean. It shows peak time of the day when social content will have the largest audience. Really, it’s right around 8:30 AM to 9:30 PM. After which time, the available audience plummets and then the lowest point is going to be around 2:30 to 3 AM. Then it starts building fairly quickly from there. The reason businesses have to know this is because you need to know when you should be posting. You want to post where you have the highest available audience. That way you’ll have the highest available potential engagement. So don’t want to be posting at 2:30 AM or 3 AM in the morning. 

Reach versus Engagement

Becoming A Digital Marketer:
Gaining the Hard & Soft Skills for a Tech-Driven Marketing Career

Photos reach more than links, the photo will get higher reach, the link will get the lower reach. Also with that lower reach, the link gets less engagement. If you are going to link to a video or something that’s on the outside, you’re not going to get the engagement you probably want. Photos do a lot better and videos do well also. The social engagement pyramid, it is a pyramid and it starts with the base of the pyramid. You can not have a pyramid unless you have a base and that’s where it’s starts and there’s a next level and and then the top level. The bottom part starts with reach and reach is the goal of traditional old media advertising or marketing. How many eyeballs can you get in front of? It doesn’t mean they are paying attention attention to you, but it just shows how many eyeballs you have reached. You have to have that though. If you are the community manager, which is what a social media manager is for a business, you are called a community manager, you have to reach. But if all you are getting is reach, you are not going to keep your job that long because you have to have reach and you can buy reach, but you can not buy engagement. There is a direct correlation between the number on reach and the numbers of engagement. In other words, if you have a few reach, 1,000 potential customers or 1,000 people, that’s your reach. But the engagement might be 25 or 30. Those are people that actually are engaged. Actually click on like, comment or that level of engagement. Let’s say you have 30 people engaged. If you had 100 reach versus 1,000 , you might have two or three people engaged. That’s why there’s a direct relationship between the amount of reach and the engagement. Engagement is how a community manager’s job is measured on engagement. But then if you look at the very top of pyramid, you have with sharing. Sharing is another level of engagement. If somebody is sharing your content, what that is saying is that they really buy into the content. They really believe it’s valuable and they are going to share with their network, there is an exponential growth potential there. That’s how content can reach a million people through sharing. That’s really the highest level of engagement. But you really need the mid level for sure and that’s how you are going to be judged as community manager. How do you get more engagement? There is the 80/20 rule. It’s about thinking value first and sales second. 80/20 rule has been out a number of year now and there’s been different variations of it that have been positioned by different marketing people but the core premise of it hold true for today. There’s some psychological and consumer behavior of issues going on here and that is that the consumers will unfollow a brand that promotes incessantly or every post is promoting their brand. Consumers will unfollow that, 46 percent will. Marketers need to find the balance between selling and offering value and entertainment to the audience. The one thing I think community managers can lose track of and businesses can lose track sometimes is the fact this is an entertainment medium. You need to keep people entertained. Entertainment in the context of the 80/20 rule has to do with education, information, valuable information, something that appeals to people’s interests, something that’s inspirational. That’s the 80 variety of this breakdown, then the 20 breakdown, the 20 percent variety is promotional and driving sales. If you try to sell with every post, every communication, you will actually lose your audience. They don’t want to be sold to, they want to be entertained. Something to keep in mind, another way of positioning the 80/20 rule, 80 percent of your social message should focus on engaging your audience and only 20 percent should be directly promotional, so don’t oversell. How does the 80/20 rule work? It’s a psychological concept based on consumer behavior. So WIIFM, W-I-I-F-M, What’s In It For Me. You always have to ask as community manager, what’s in it for me? Meaning, what’s in it for audience, what do they get out of it? It’s not what i am trying to do marketing wise, it’s what they get out of it. It’s not what I’m trying to do marketing wise, it’s what they get out of it. Audiences don’t like being sold too. If you do it too much, you lose your audience. Audiences desire entertainment and informative content, that equals value to them. That’s why they come back to you. They don’t come back to you to keep getting sold, they come back to you because you are offering something over and above that. That’s the essence of 80. You make sure that most content is informative and entertaining and direct promoting and selling of the brand should be kept at a minimum. 

100 Practical Ways to Improve Customer Experience:
 Achieve End-to-End Customer Engagement in a Multichannel World

If you are a business promoting your brand through social media, you are a community manager, imagine yourself in that chair. You don’t have to exactly 80/20. It might be 70/30, it might be 60/40. Sometimes we have had clients where the business is heavily promoting an event that is very, very important to them. So, they are going to use more promotional posts during that time. Their ratio may be closer to 60/40 versus 80/20. So it can vary based on the needs of the business, for the strategy of the business, but most of your posts, they have to be 80, but most of your posts need to be adding value to the lives of your audience. Some live examples, a hotel, they have a post where they are selling something, they are selling a yoga event which you sign up for that. This is the 20 percent variety. They had three engagements, they reached 369, which is the bare minimum, three engagements and no likes. Then if you look over here on the right hand side of the page, there’s a picture of President Kennedy back in 1963, because this is a historic hotel and one of the unique selling point is this history of it. It shows President Kennedy and his motorcade going by the hotel. There’s a brief story around that. If you notice, instead of zero like it’s got 36 likes and engagements of 268 and shares and comments and 1800 people reached versus 369. The more interesting the content, the more interested the audience is. The social media algorithms take effect at some point and they expose the post to more of your audience. If the small sample of your audience resonates with them, they allow more of your audience to see it, and that’s what happened here, this was not paid reach here. 

80/20 Sales and Marketing:
 The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More

It’s a story, We tell a short story and it resonates. Again, it shows you that you will be successful if you use some version of the 80/20 rule. You notice they have a Black Friday sale again, heavy promotion right there selling that. They had 37 likes which for Instagram is not very good. This one was more just showing the one of the unique selling propositions of the hotel. They have a beautiful Olympic – size pool. They are showing that, they are not sell anything, they are just showing the picture of the pool with a beautiful background. They had 336 likes versus 37. That’s another indicator of what’s going on. Then two more instagram ads. A lot of proof of concept here. Here you have a sale, this is the Hotel’s restaurant is on GrubHub so they are promoting that, had 16 likes which is very low for Instagram. Then for this slides which shows a sign outside their front door, were not selling anything, they’re just showing a really cool – looking sign with a beautiful sunset. It’s called the Boulevard, there on Boulevard, shows Boulevard 247 likes and that was another. It’s proof of concept that’s how the 80/20 rule works. This is actually for a brewery, for a well – known brewery called Stone Brewing. We have got the 20 percent variety, had 48 likes which is pretty low and there we have people. I want to make the point now that of the 80% variety, value, entertainment, interesting things, showing team members does resonate well with audiences. The team members resonates. That’s something that you want to keep in mind when you develop 80 variety of the 80/20 rule is the fact that team members is part of the 80. It shows team members having fun, it personalizes, humanizes the business. That’s really important. The last is about storytelling, if you can tell a story in social media, you will get more engagement. Again, because it’s a hotel in their unique selling proposition is all about the history of te hotel. This shows some of the famous guests they have had at the hotel, Frank Sinatra, people like that. Then they have again, President Kennedy, a story about his last visit to San Diego. It’s a story that resonated with a lot of people. Look at the likes first, look at the likes here. Both of these had more likes than normal. This one had a lot, but it told a really cool story and 45 shares which is astronomical. I just want to tell you that storytelling is important. If you have chance to click on Airbnb, Airbnb tells a great story on You Tube so stories resonate with audiences.

 Reputation Management

An area that has emerged in recent years of great importance to digital marketing is reputation management. The company’s reputation can be built up over extended period of time. It can also be destroyed in a very short period of time. Reviews or customer reviews are an essential element of

The Glowing Reviews Profit System: One-Page Blueprint to Generate More Reviews
and Increase Revenue for Your Small Business

reputation management. That’s what we are going to discuss here. Why are reviews so important and why should we manage them? There’s more reasons to manage them than most business people currently know. There are some of the research that supports that.

First of all, reviews can come in two ways. They can be positive reviews or negative reviews. First, let’s look at positive reviews and why they are so important to manage for a business. How can positive reviews improve a business? Well, they affect the brand’s reputation, which is fairly obvious but true. Another point is that search engines will rank a business based on its review ratings. If you are looking for a better website ranking, better SEO reviews or customers reviews and how they are managed can affect that. Another key point is that happy customers feel valued when they receive sincere management responses to what they reviews, and sincere in italics because they need to be originally written responses by management, not just copy and paste that thank you very much responses. Think about yourself when you post a review for, it could be Amazon product, it could be a restaurant, a hotel, could be almost any experience you have a customer. If you write the review and spend time doing it, and if it’s a positive review, you might include images to take it to the next level, and you have received a sincere response back to management. What it does is it reinforces and cements the relationships. It gives the company a chance to retain you as a loyal customer. That’s incredibly important, that’s the last point here.

Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook:
How to Build and Sustain a Successful, Enduring Enterprise (HBR Handbooks)

We also have to manage negative reviews. Negative reviews can affect a business in a number of ways as well. They can also a brand’s reputation, which is fairy clear. Negative reviews are opportunities for improvement. Some people move forward thinking business managers believe that negative reviews are a gift because they tell businesses, it is the voice of the customer. It tells them what they should improve in the way of opportunities for improvement. Search engines will rank of business based on review ratings including negative reviews. It’s going to have an influence there. Unhappy customers are more motivated to share a bad experience, and that’s a consumer behavior principle that some behavioral scientists have found that a customer with a negative experience will tell 10 times as many people about the negative than a positive one. The theory behind that is that positive experiences are expected negative are not. So there is a bias for posting negative experiences. Too many bad reviews can lead to prospects discarding the business as a viable option. If you are going to perhaps stay in hotel, you look at the star rating and you see a fairly ow star rating below 4.0 on a hotel, you might start looking at some of the reviews and that could seriously impact your decision to stay at that hotel.

The Digital Experience Company:
Winning in the Digital Economy with Experience Insights

What’s the importance online reviews from a management standpoint? First of all, most businesses do not answer all of their customer reviews. They should, but they don’t. Here’s why. Because the second here, the quality management responses can equal 15.4 percent increase in Google ranking or SEO. That’s a very important statistic. Because if a business manager ignores customer reviews, they are leaving a real potential benefit on the table, and that’s a bump in Organic Google ranking 15.4 percent. We believe that answering all reviews is important in a sincere way and being involved with them. The third point is 85 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations of friends. They consider them peer reviews if you will, or a peer opinion as opposed to a paid advertisement. Ninety seven percent of customers believe that reviews influence their buying decision. You are looking at the star ratings. Even if you don’t evolve yourself too heavily in reading a lot of them, you are still looking at star ratings. Ninety - three percent of consumers find reviews important when making a selection, so there it is part of the selection process. Now on average, customers read as many seven reviews before trusting the business. What’s going to happen is that if you want to go to a restaurant, you might read as many as seven reviews. The more reviews you read, likely the more high – involvement the purchase is. In other words, if it’s an important purchase, a laptop computer, a new smartphone, something like that, or

a car, you are going to read more reviews than if it’s a low – involvement purchase, and that only make sense, that’s a level of research. I have established why they are important. Now I would like to just go over a couple of reviews. First of all, how not to respond. Like I said before, a negative review, and that’s what it is, a negative review is an opportunity for improvement. The last thing you want are customers leaving your business dissatisfied and never telling you about it. In this particular case, I have posted some actual reviews from clients of ours that I am going to share this with you, but I am not going to read every word because I know it’s going to take too long. But in the first one from Megan and this is from a floor covering company, “I had a terrible experience with Cole”. That’s the name of the Company. “I had arranged to have floor covering installed in my entire condo. The job was going to be under $10,000, I paid $3,000  deposit, and I am no longer confident it will be returned. I am contacting my lawyer today. Please return my deposit, Coles. This is the way the business responded. They said, “We are unaware that you wanted to cancel your order. When we arrived last week on the day of the installation, your home was not ready,” and so they make excuses there, viable or not, “we have issued the refund this morning less the restocking fee for the special order material.” This is in the public forum. This was a review in public forum. Was that an appropriate way to answer that negative review to become defensive? Here’s the recommended response. It is that Dear Megan, this is going to be a key point going forward. Always try to call the customer by their first name. Dear Megan, this is our recommended response, I convened our sales and support team to review the activities and actions of Coles as related to your experience. We have already refunded the deposit but I am including my email address and would like to extend my personal apologies and discuss corrective actions we have undertaken. “Again, this is by no means an explanation and by no means an excuse for the unfortunate and a typical treatment you received. Should you have any additional questions or concerns, please email me at,” and there’s hotlink to an email address. Two things happened here. Number 1, call them by their first name. Do not blame them for the issue because, remember, it’s a public forum. Other people will be reading this. If you notice, under the bad review, five other people voted for the review as legitimate. This is a very bad thing. Now you have, not just one customer, but five other ones read this initial review and could be taking action by not using this company for their floor covering needs. Again, a best practice, apologize. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the customer or consumer. Call them by the first name, leave a hotlink for them to email you. Don’t leave your phone number. They are going to much more apt to click on a hotlink. This is another. You can read this one. I am not going to read every word. But again, this customer was very upset. I will just read it quickly because it’s short. “The sales plan is to call back and tell you the smallest kitchen remodel they have ever done is 24,000 without knowing anything about our project or seen our house. No, thanks.” They were blown off. Now, this company responded, but they did not apologize for potentially blowing them off and they put a phone number. Did not call them by their first name, put a phone number down, which we don’t recommend. Our recommended response is, “this is not how we do business and we are disturbed by the scenario you described. “Please, email us.” Again, a hotlink to an email. We would like to communicate with you further and signed, “The Team at Coles Fine Flooring.” We signed it as the team. Those are some ways to answer negative reviews, excuse me. This is a way to answer positive reviews. What are we doing here? We are calling them by their first name, we are thanking

The Review Cycle: The four-step model to mastering your online reviews.

them for their five star recommendation, and we showed them that we read their review. “Perhaps, next time you will be able to stay longer,” with a smiley face. Two things we have done: we have put their name in it and we also put the name of the hotel, the client in there. The reason we do that is because, this is now searchable. We want consumers to be able to find our five stars reviews. This was a five stars review, so we want them to be able to find it. That’s why we did it that way. Again, this is pretty much the same treatment here. I won’t read this, but we are showing that we read their review, we are mentioning the people they recognized, back to them, and we are calling them by their first name and we are putting in the name of our company because again, we want this to be searchable. Moving on, This is how not to respond to a positive review. This customer left a review for a restaurant and it was fairly detailed. They actually were nice enough to put a picture in. This should have been answered with some though, but instead it wasn’t. The Manager, he said, “Thank you so much for your comments, hope to see you soon.” This Manager copied and pasted that from another review. If I left this review and I got this, I would assume these people don’t care, don’t value what I said because they are just copying and pasting a review. That doesn’t reflect anything that I said here. “We are glad you liked it”. What they do is they probably alternate copy and pasted responses. That’s a bad way to do it.

Reputation Management: Strategies for Building
and Maintaining a Positive Image in the Digital Age

We recommend don’t respond at all than just short copy and paste the reviews in. It’s better not to respond at all. Let’s review the strategy here, what we just look at. We respond to all reviews, good and bad. We use originality, we are original. We are actually going to repeat something back that the customer told us to prove that we read the review. Repeat something back to them. Perhaps they said “We had a short stay”. We said, “Perhaps the next time you could stay longer”. Or, repeat the names of employees that they recognize back to them. Any further communication should be via email. That’s really important because you never want to get into an argument with a customer online. You don’t want to have a defensive tone and have them write you back in an open forum saying, “You are wrong, I disagree, This is terrible”. Any communication should be via email. In all the reviews sites, there’s a way to reach out inter – personally. That includes if you are going to offer them anything. If you are going to offer them something free to make up for a really bad experience they had and they have a legitimate reason

Glassdoor Review Removal Secrets:
 A Guide For Quickly Removing Negative & False Reviews Harming Your Recruitment

to be complaining, you would want to reach out to them privately on that. The reason that is because you don’t want to be putting them in public forum because then other potentials customers could be trying to get more free stuff out to you as well. Use their first name if you can, make sure the business name, your name, is mentioned in a five – star review. Remember, when you are dealing with positive reviews, It’s an opportunity for CRM , Customer Relationship Management. The negative reviews can be challenged under certain circumstances. If there’s some comment that is racist or they use profanity in a negative review, it can be challenged and taken away by Yelp for example. They will actually take the review away. Also you can have reviews removed. If you offer the customer something, they can go in and change their review, those are some ways you can do it. One quick story is that if it’s a hotel, and the hotel’s got bad reviews over a number of years and they just complete a new renovation where they completely renovated the hotel, and a lot of those reviews were based on a poor product, almost all the old reviews can be taken away. That has to be done with the review platform directly, and you are going to have to offer proof of that. But that is one thing that we have done. The last point is about search engine optimization.

I Just Got A Negative 1-Star Review. Now What?

They are ranked 15th out of 295. By answering all the reviews and focusing on the reviews that were negative and positive. The negative ones gave us opportunities for improvement and we corrected some things that they were  going wrong. The positive ones, we would ask the customer to tell us their story in the form of a review if they are happy. We encourage more, we took care of the positive ones, took care of the negative ones, and there you go. This shows you that the Lafayette Hotel, this is a generic term, in San Diego, which is where the hotel is. You notice that their organic ranking is very high. Here it is right there on the first page of a rea basic keyword, hotels in San Diego. They are there because of SEO, because of the fact that their reviews are so strong. That has given them a bump in SEO. That’s really one of the real benefits of answering all reviews. 

Content Marketing Strategy: Harness the Power of Your Brand’s Voice

Content Marketing

What is Content Marketing

• The creation and distribution of digital marketing collateral
• Its goal can be to increase brand awareness
• Or to improve search engine rankings
• Or to generate audience interest

Content Marketing – Storytelling

• Storytelling make the audience feel something
• Stories have a narrative structure that our brain follows very easily
• This narrative structure is something that we recognize
• Telling a story is powerful because it has excitement and tension built in
• Storytelling appeals to emotions
• The more emotional we feel about a product, the less likely we are going to feel cynical

Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results

The “why”

The why statement should be able to inspire your team and your customers alike to contribute to something larger than themselves.

Some companies have a clear purpose and others don’t?

Understanding the “Why”

• Why – this is the core belief of the business
• How – this is how the business fulfills that core belief
• What – this is what the company does to fulfills that core belief

To determine your “why”, ask yourself

• What is the business’s purpose?
• What is the cause we are working toward?
• What is our core belief?

People don't Buy what you do. They Buy why you do it: Lined blank notebook

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it

The “why” to storytelling – Nike

Nike stands for athletic excellence – not sneakers or sports equipment

The “why” to storytelling – Disney

Disney stands for family happiness – not theme parks or movies

“The mission of The Walt Disney Company is to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling, reflecting iconic brands, creative minds and innovative technologies that make ours the world’s premier entertainment company”

The “why” to storytelling – Patagonia

“At Patagonia, we appreciate that all life on earth is under threat of extinction. We aim to use the resources we have  - our business, our investments, our voice and our imaginations – to do something about it”

Storytelling in Social Media

The one thing about social media is that you can tell stories in social media. The storytelling is important because it expresses the “why” statement about a business. In this case, this is a hotel. The why statement of this hotel is to offer their guests a world – class experience, but that’s really not their why statement, that would be their mission statement. The why statement is, they want them to feel something and they feel it through storytelling. This hotel has a lot of history. 

Storytelling in Business: How to Use Brand Storytelling in
Social Media and Presentations to Grow Your Influence as a Leader and Entrepreneur

The history is the unique selling proposition of the hotel. What they want to do in their social media is to try to tell stories as much as they can,  that incorporate their why statement into their content marketing. You would see if you look at this Company’s website, if you look at their social media, one of the key elements is their history and that’s where they focused their storytelling around the history. Their history of related social media content is the most well – received and the most popular content in their social media.

That’s their purpose. That’s their mission. That’s part of their why statement. Again, the Top Gun part of it was filmed there, some really key scenes in the movies. There’s a storytelling based around that. Then John F. Kennedy drove in front of the hotel in his motorcade the year he was assassinated, so they like to tell that story too. We looked at content marketing and we broke it down into areas that you really should focus on and that is, every business company should understand their why statement. Not only should they know what they do and how they do it, every business knows that in total view, but why they do it. Then integrate storytelling into the why statement and then you have a more powerful effect for content marketing. 

Social Media Strategy: A Practical Guide to Social Media Marketing
 and Customer Engagement

Why storytelling should be a priority for marketer:

• Storytelling enables marketers to develop a deeper connection with the audience. Storytelling is a fundamental human experience that unites people and drives stronger, deeper connections.
• Storytelling is a powerful method for learning.
• In addition to being an important strategic tool, storytelling can be an important tactical tool that lets marketers engage consumers in a fragmented media world.

Source: https://www.coursera.org/