Shane Barker | 5 Benefits of Using Chatbots for Customer Engagement

Constant improvements to chatbot technology allow more accurate bot interactions. As a result, chatbots have changed the customer service game. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Consider that chatbots allow quicker response time to customer queries and faster resolutions. In fact, a HubSpot study found 71% of people are willing to get assistance from messaging apps. So they want quick solutions to their problems.
In addition, a Facebook study found 65% of millennials, 65% of Gen Xers, and 63% of baby boomers would much rather send a message than call customer service.

Keep these customer preferences in mind. Businesses must start prioritizing the use of chatbots to engage their customers and enhance user experience.

Increase Customer Engagement With Chatbots
Check out some of the top ways in which chatbots can help you increase customer engagement.
#1: Available 24/7 for Your Customers
24/7 availability is one of the biggest benefits of using chatbots to engage your customers. Your support agents cannot work throughout the day and night. Even if you have teams taking different shifts to provide 24/7 support, it’s going to end up costing you a ton in wages and overhead. Chatbots are an inexpensive and effective solution to tackle this issue.

Your customers may have questions or issues that arise outside of your regular service hours. With chatbots, you can provide them with answers and resolutions at any time, even when your customer service staff is unavailable.

#2: Provide Quick Resolutions to Pressing Issues
A lot of people who contact customer support do not have a lot of time to wait for a response or resolution. Long hold times for phone support and slow email response times may quickly ruin the customer experience.

This is particularly harmful because 82% of consumers expect to get an immediate response to their sales or marketing questions. And 90% expect an immediate response when it comes to customer service questions.
In the case of chatbots, there is no wait time to start talking about your issues and to get a resolution. This allows for faster response times, which ultimately results in faster resolutions to customer support issues. You’ll be able to quickly engage your customers before they get frustrated.
In fact, a LogMeIn study found that 74% of consumers see the benefit of interacting with chatbots to get quicker resolutions and better support accessibility.

An Accenture study also found that chatbots could resolve 80% of chat sessions without the need to involve a human agent over chat or phone. So besides improving your resolution time, chatbots also free up time for your agents to handle issues that need human involvement.

#3: Provide Accurate Answers to Simple Questions
In some cases, customers may approach customer service only to get a quick answer to a simple question like information about their return or shipping policy, product features, etc.

So it doesn’t really make sense to send an email or wait for several minutes to speak to a support agent over a call. Chatbots can offer quick and accurate answers in these situations with zero wait time.

Normally, companies build chatbots with predefined responses and rules for basic and common questions. But aside from this, there are chatbots powered by AI and machine learning technology.

These chatbots can adapt and learn over time to increase the accuracy of their responses. They are ideal for increasing customer engagement as customers seek precise answers to their questions.

Amadeus, a leading solution provider for the tourism and travel industry, was able to start providing faster, 24/7 customer support service with the help of chatbots. They used an Aivo virtual assistant equipped with machine learning technology.

That technology allowed it to adapt and learn through every interaction. So it was able to provide precise and instant answers just like their customers needed.

They saw a 70% deflection of traditional channels, with the chatbot solving 3,300 cases a month. In addition, 78% of the answers it provided were effective.

#4: Ensure a Personalized Customer Service Experience
One of the advantages that chatbots have over human agents is that they are machines. This means they have the ability to process mountains of data in the blink of an eye.

They will be able to automatically collect customer details and history from your CRM, instantly providing them with a personalized response that’s relevant to their previous experience.

This is extremely important considering how human agents have to spend some time sieving through your customer database and find the most relevant information.
The LogMeIn study cited earlier even found that customer service agents end up spending 25% of their time finding relevant personal information about a customer.

Amazon’s chatbot, for instance, can instantly retrieve information about a customer’s most recent orders.

If you have any questions or issues with any of your past orders, you can simply select the relevant item and the chatbot will ask you what kind of questions you have about it.

This minimizes the need to go through the whole process of providing your order number to an agent, waiting for them to look it up, and so on.

#5: Cross-Promoting Relevant Products/Services/Content
Chatbots can also help you engage your customers through seamless cross-promotion. They can execute this in a natural and non-pushy way that’s relevant to the ongoing conversation.

For instance, say the customer needs more information about a certain product feature. The chatbot could direct them to a high-quality blog post or webpage that thoroughly describes this feature.

In some cases, the chatbot may even find it appropriate to cross-promote relevant products or services that go along with what a customer already has.

For example, let’s say the customer inquires about how to care for the new suede shoes they’ve recently ordered. Provide them with a useful guide, of course. But the chatbot could also recommend your brand’s suede cleaning kit.

Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are tons of ways in which chatbots can help you engage your customers more effectively. They can help you provide quick resolutions and prompt responses at all hours of the day even when your team isn’t working.

Since they can quickly access your customer, product, and content databases, they’re also exceptional at providing a personalized experience and cross-promoting highly relevant content or products.

So make the most of chatbots to start delivering a better customer service experience and watch your business grow. Got any questions about any of these points? Let us know in the comments.

Image: Depositphotos.com
Article Source: https://smallbiztrends.com/2019/08/customer-engagement-with-chatbots.html

Ankita Katurion | Why your Business Needs a Chatbot in 2019

The ongoing evolution in the digital landscape has completely changed the way enterprises do business today. Technologies are continuing to change the way we use the Internet, both at a day-to-day consumer level as well as on the business level.

Five years ago, digital marketing was all about apps or infographics, However, a new player has come into the spotlight: the chatbot. According to Business Insider, around 80% of all businesses will be using a chatbot by 2020.

Chatbots are rapidly making their way into mainstream enterprise adoption – failure to adopt now may cause businesses to get left behind. But let’s take a step back to understand why chatbots have become so popular lately?

 Understand where Chatbots fit in your business strategy
A chatbot is a service, managed by rules that you interact with via a chat interface. They are computer programs that mimic conversation with people using artificial intelligence. Facebook Messenger, Skype, Telegram Bots are all popular examples of chatbots.

The credit for drawing chatbots further into the limelight goes to Messenger by Facebook, when they made it possible to integrate chatbots into the platform.

Chatbots are proving critical for all businesses that want to step up their marketing game through messaging apps, considering the four biggest messaging apps reached about 4 billion users in 2016

With 1.3 billion monthly active users, Facebook Messenger is the most popular messaging channel of communication – making it a vital platform for reaching out to customers. There are currently 100,000 active bots on the Messenger platform.

This extensive active user count has led organizations to start envisaging strategies to introduce chatbots.

Messaging applications are very promising communication tools not only for social media but also as standalone tools. They offer a convenient alternative for companies to stay in touch with their customers.

While 80-90% of apps are used once and then deleted, messaging apps are thriving and account for 91% of time spent on mobiles in the U.S.

As user expectations continue to transform, it is imperative businesses put in the effort to stand out from the crowd.

As Flurry reports:

“Time spent in Social and Messaging apps grew by an astounding 394% over the last year, proving to be the driver that helped mobile achieve its year-over-year time-spent growth of 69%.”

Benefits of using a Chatbot for your business
Chatbots are everywhere. They are speeding up time to response on your customer inquiries, enhancing conversion rates on your landing pages, and unblocking the employee inquiry mailbox.



Immediacy: Chatbots provide companies the chance to have customer service inquiries of any kind answered at any time of day, from anywhere and even when companies are closed for holidays.
Easy To Develop: Chatbots are typically easy to build. It depends on what the business wants to achieve, of course, but businesses can design a simple chatbot based on Facebook Messenger without any programming experience.
Scalability: Chatbots can allow your company to manage more customers than before and  can help scale operations to new markets without having to worry about handling multiplying queries.
Company Brand & Image: When communicating with the customer, the chatbot represents the company, so from a marketing point of view,  it is a perfect expression of brand building.
Easy To Use: Finding information on a website or in an app is less intuitive. In most cases, it takes several steps until you have clicked through to the desired information. A chatbot eliminates the need for these superfluous steps.


Personalization: Chatbot’s ability to synthesize metadata, can quickly and easily personalize the customer experience. This may take on the form of product recommendations.
Cost-effective and Time-efficient:  Visitor engagement becomes easy and quick with the use of a friendly chatbot. This further helps convert potential visitors into customers.
Types of Chatbots
Command based chatbots
This is the simplest type of chatbot. It relies on a databank of replies and heuristics and only takes place in pre-defined ways and directions. The bots reply by selecting an answer that matches the context of a query.

Command based chatbot appears in messaging apps such as Messenger or Telegram.

AI-based Chatbots
AI-Based chatbots can answer ambiguous questions. They offer flexible responses to the user’s questions. But it cannot understand more complex contexts or lead the conversation – it can only give answers.

For example, CleverBot is an AI-Based ChatBot that learns from each conversation and uses these experiences to answer future questions more accurately.

Mark Zuckerberg’s “Jarvis” was an interesting AI-Based ChatBot. He says —

“My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man. I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there. Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on. I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell.…”

Approach for Chatbot implementation for your business



Many companies leverage their own framework to implement chatbots. Their framework involves from ideation of bot use cases phase to continuous improvement phase. The following framework is leveraged traditionally for implementing chatbots:

Identify Goals: Identifying the goals that the company like to achieve by implementing chatbots and what pain points the company is looking to address.
User Stories:  Take requirements as user stories, and take into consideration the end users point of view, and use that to influence bot personality.
Business landscape understanding: Understanding the current business, identifying the suitable messaging platform to kick start implementation.
Conversation Design: After Prioritizing user stories, Conversation design is necessary to give a conversational voice to Bot and develop Bot Personality.

Implementation Stage: Leveraging the NLP libraries, intents, entities and develop, test, releasing the chatbot.

Continuous Improvement: Bot learns from a user’s behavior, monitoring performance and learns from each conversation and uses these experiences to answer future questions more accurately.

Conclusion
The future will be heavily directed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies which prominently includes chatbots. There’s a positive response to many chatbot benefits such as an increase in process efficiencies, decreased workload and improved customer service, but it’s important that a measured approach is taken to implement these technologies.

Article Source: https://www.thesmarketers.com/business-needs-chatbot/

Habits - The Big Secret to Marketing Success

What do you think you need more than anything else to attract more of your ideal clients?

Many people will say, "better information to show me how to do what works."

Others will say, "more motivation and drive to implement what I already know."

Another common answer is, "more time to fit marketing activities into my schedule."

And lots of people will say, "I need better goals and more clarity about what I want to achieve."

In writing this ezine/blog for the past 20 years I've talked about the importance of all of those.

But I'm finally understanding a factor that is much more important: good habits.

Over the past year, I've been a big advocate of the writings of James Clear. He writes a blog about success and habits. And he just came out with his first book, Atomic Habits, which is fantastic.

Even though James isn't a marketing expert, I'm convinced he's right when he says that the ultimate determinant of success is building positive habits.

This idea is simple but true: Self-employed professionals who establish regular marketing habits have a much better chance of succeeding than those who don't.

And the crazy thing is that the four items - information, motivation, time, and goals - I mentioned above don't actually make a huge difference.

Information. These days, we have access to more information about marketing than ever before in history. And much of it is free and instantly available through a Google or YouTube search.

The problem is that most of us have not established a regular habit of studying what we need to know to become better marketers. The information is useless unless we become proficient at implementing it.

And even if we pay good money for courses and programs, much of it goes to waste. I just learned recently online that 97% of people who buy a course online never complete it.

Motivation. If we measured motivation by intention, we are all motivated. Don't we all want and need to grow our businesses? But we keep getting distracted and don't follow through on our intentions. Again, the issue is poor habits.

Time. If only we had more of it. But unsuccessful marketers have just as much of it as the most successful ones. The key is that they dedicate more time to implementing regular marketing habits.

Goals. Nothing wrong with goals except that they are only a starting point for success. And they can get us stuck in the future, instead of doing what needs to be done today - the routine marketing habits that we perform every day or week.

"A habit or system beats a goal every time." - James Clear

The research is in and the conclusion is clear.

Establishing positive and consistent marketing habits have a bigger impact on marketing success than anything else.

We may have great information, high motivation, lots of time, and clear goals, but unless marketing activities are performed regularly and habitually, the chances of success are slim to none.

The question you should be asking is, "How do I start establishing better marketing habits?"

James's Atomic Habits goes to great lengths to share a multitude of ways to become an expert habit practitioner. So I highly suggest you get his book. It could be the most valuable 'marketing' book you'll ever read.

But let me also give you my perspective on what it takes to establish new marketing habits.

The C - SPAT Model

This is a model I came up with for one of my marketing programs.

Coaching or Context. A coach declares the game, how it is played and how to win at it. And this creates the context in which you play the game. It helps if you have an outside source that can hold you accountable to play by the rules necessary to succeed.

This principle is why when you're working with a coach or in a program that you suddenly find it's easier to take action and form positive habits. The context of the game helps shape your behaviors.

Notice that all professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants go through rigorous training in the form of a professional school and internship. And in this context, professional habits and protocols are established.

As independent professionals, we'd all prefer to do things on our own, charting our own direction. That's nice, except that it doesn't always work very well, does it?

Study. A big part of the game is study and learning the body of knowledge necessary to perform effectively. Again, the information required to be an effective marketer is readily available, but you need some assistance in sorting the wheat from the chaff and studying what is most useful.

Planning. All successful marketing needs a plan. The alternative is implementing random marketing activities with little structure and direction. So it's not how much you know, but how you put what you know into action.

Action. Success doesn't come from being busy or doing a lot of things, but in doing the right things at the right time. This is where establishing regular marketing habits comes in.

To some, it might be writing an article once or twice a week. For others, it may mean setting up more meetings with networking contacts. Or it could be booking regular speaking engagements.

The secret to making this work is to leverage the first three steps of the model - Coaching, Study, and Planning, into marketing Actions that you perform as consistently as possible.

Tracking. What gets measured gets done. And when we fail to measure, habits don't tend to stick. When we measure and track habits, the chances increase dramatically that they are performed consistently.

It can take some time to establish positive habits. You know that's happened when you don't even have to think about it anymore; you just sit down and write that article every Monday or make five calls to prospects every week.

And when you're in action like this, you create a feedback loop, learning what works the best and what doesn't. This enables you to fine-tune and adjust over time until your marketing habits become more established.

So, stop putting so much attention on searching for the "perfect" marketing strategy, getting motivated, finding more time, and setting goals.

Instead, use the C - SPAT approach to establishing positive marketing habits.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10105413

The Five Pillars of Marketing Success

Does the following give a pretty good picture of your current marketing activity?

You have a website but you're not really satisfied with it. You go to networking events once in awhile. If someone asks you to give a talk, you're happy to do it. You post on Facebook and/or LinkedIn semi-regularly. When you find the time, you send an article to those on your relatively small email list. You occasionally set up meetings with colleagues to explore opportunities.

Now there's nothing wrong with any of those marketing activities. And usually, they will result in landing some new clients.

But this is not the approach that works to get a steady, predictable stream of new clients.

Please don't tune me out here, thinking, "Well, I really can't do more than this. I'm already stretched thin. If you give me too much to do I'll get overwhelmed."

I agree. It's not that you need to do more marketing, it's that you need to shift your marketing paradigm from one of "Randomness" to one that is "Focused."

Random marketing is just that; it's all over the place. You do a little bit here and a little bit there on an inconsistent basis. You are trying to keep your face, name, and message in front of your prospective clients but the results are unpredictable.

The Random marketing paradigm is not very effective because it doesn't gain a lot of momentum. You don't do enough of one marketing activity to grab the attention of your prospective clients and move them to take action.

The Focused Marketing Paradigm is very different. It's based on repeatedly communicating very directly to your target market with a very definite end in mind. It gets the attention of your prospective clients and they ultimately take action.

The Focused Marketing Paradigm has Five Pillars

Understand and implement these five pillars and I promise you'll see a shift in your marketing results.

Pillar One: Focused Goals

A Random goal is saying something like, "I'd like to attract a few more clients to my business." Not very compelling is it?

A Focused goal is much more specific. "My goal is to land 3 new clients in the high-tech plastics business in the Houston area with an average project size of $30,000 each by the end of the year."

The more detail, depth, and specificity about the goal, the better. You've really thought through what you want to achieve and also have confidence that you could deliver if you did reach your goal. It's so real to you that you can taste it.

What is the Focused Goal for your marketing?

Pillar Two: Focused Program or Service

Random programs or services are generalized consulting, coaching or training programs. "I offer management consulting and training to corporations." Kind of vague, right? But this is what I hear all the time.

A Focused Program or Service is more tangible. "I offer the high-tech plastics industry Management Acceleration Programs for emerging leaders in the industry."

In my business, I've always offered programs: The Marketing Mastery Program, the Marketing Action Group, and the More Clients Club. And each program has very specific parameters, deliverables, and objectives. It sure makes intangible services easier to market and sell.

What is the Focused Program or Service you're offering?

Pillar Three: Focused Target Market

In the above example, the target was the "high-tech plastics industry." But it's more common to hear things like, "I work with large companies who want to increase productivity." This is too general and it makes it hard for clients to know if you understand them and can help them.

A Focused target market is where you are absolutely clear what kinds of people or companies can most benefit from your expertise. And then you articulate that clearly.

I worked with a financial planning company last year that targeted middle class families in the Buffalo New York area. Guess who they attracted to their practice? When people read about who they worked with on their website, they said, "That's Us!" and called them.

Who exactly is your Focused Target Market?

Pillar Four: Focused Message and Value Proposition

A Random message or value proposition tends to be too general and can be hard to pin down. It avoids making a promise that is meaningful to the prospective client.

Messages such as, "We offer the best service in the industry," or "Smart insights into great management," are meaningless to your prospective clients. The value is not immediately obvious.

A Focused message or value proposition zeros in on exactly what your clients get and what it means to them. I admit that this can be the marketing pillar that is hardest to pin down. Ultimately you have to test a number of different things.

For the re-launch of the More Clients Club, my current value proposition is: "Everything Self-Employed Professionals Need in One Place to Attract More Clients." And now, of course, I'm bending over backward to deliver on that promise.

And a marketing message or value proposition is much more than a sound bite. Your message must permeate every aspect of your marketing, from your website to the emails you send out. Your prospects need to be constantly reminded of the value you offer.

What is your Focused Message or Value Proposition?

Pillar Five: Focused Marketing Strategy

A Random marketing strategy is much like the collection of marketing activities I outlined at the top of the article. You're just all over the place, throwing something at the wall, hoping it will stick, with no organized system or plan.

A Focused marketing strategy is more like a putting on a theatrical production. You have the script, the actors, rehearsals, and opening night, all executed on a strict timeline.

Two examples:

For my Marketing Mastery Program, I held a series of introductory teleconferences, invited those interested to apply for the program, interviewed each applicant, and then converted 50% into participants. Over a 6-week period, I filled my business for a full year - four years in a row.

A career coach in one of my programs recently filled her practice in three months with a focused campaign of personalized emails designed to get appointments with her ideal clients. Then she converted a large percentage into paying clients.

That's the power of a focused marketing strategy.

You need to identify the right marketing strategy for your business, but even more important is the way you organize and implement the strategy.

Developing a focused strategy is the most complex and challenging of the Five Pillars. You can't just put together something haphazardly and hope you get the equivalent of a professional Shakespearian production.

What is your Focused Marketing Strategy?

If you work to build a focused plan with these five solid pillars, your marketing will work better and faster, attracting more of your ideal clients, usually at a higher rate.

I recommend you work on one pillar at a time. Write them out and fine-tune them until you feel confident and excited about them. Yes, you will need to do some research and study to make sure your plan is viable. But this is certainly better than spinning your wheels with a random strategy that is going nowhere.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10106361

How to Successfully Meet the Three Biggest Marketing Challenges

I like to think I'm a pretty good marketer of my professional services.

After all, I've been at it for 34 years, read hundreds of marketing books, thousands of articles and studied with the very best marketing gurus.

But marketing is still challenging for me and the majority of independent professionals. If it weren't, we'd all have more clients than we could serve, they'd be paying us high fees, and we'd never having to worry where our next clients would come from.

And we wouldn't need the thousands of marketing coaches and consultants like me offering services of all kinds to help you attract more clients.

So, why is marketing so challenging?

There are many marketing challenges, however, if you look at marketing closely, there are actually only three big challenges that give us the most trouble.

Learn how to meet those challenges and your marketing will become more successful, easier, and fun.

Here are those three marketing challenges:

Challenge #1. Clearly communicating the value of what you are offering. Someone will not buy your services if they don't see the real value to them. Your message can't be vague or confusing; it must be clear and beneficial.

One way to zero in on the value of your service is to define the top three attributes your service possesses. One or two is not enough; five or six tends to dilute your message.

So, for instance, a sales training company might want to emphasize that their training is guaranteed to increase sales, improve sales confidence quickly, and can be delivered virtually in 45-minute online modules.

That's easy to understand and obviously beneficial. That kind of clear and valuable message is likely to generate attention, interest, and response.

Seems simple, but not so easy to do. In my experience with thousands of independent professionals, their messages tend to be vague, not specific, and weak in terms of value.

And if that value is not clear, prospects won't respond.

Taking the time to work on your message, fine-tune it, and test it until it gets a favorable response is one of the most important things you can possibly do in your business.

To succeed at this task you must get inside the heads of your ideal clients and ask what they want the most, what problems they struggle with frequently, what isn't working for them, and what could make their jobs easier and more productive.

Jaynie L. Smith of Smart Advantage consulting says that 90% of companies don't really know what their clients value the most. No wonder marketing messages are so bad.

You can improve your marketing messages by reading and research (ask Google), sending questionnaires to your clients (Survey Monkey), or conducting a virtual focus group (via Zoom Video). Ultimately, you want to find out their biggest challenges and what they value the most.

When you have that marketing intelligence, it will be a lot easier to come up with powerful marketing messages.

This is challenging because it takes time and deep thinking. But if you realize its importance, you'll invest your energies to come up with a powerful message that makes your service attractive, interesting, and compelling to your ideal clients.

Challenge # 2. Making your business visible with repeated impressions of your message over time. It can take several impressions before someone responds to your marketing message.

Just today, I noticed a message that one of my first level connections had sent to me on LinkedIn. When I checked the message, I noticed that he had sent me a total of 13 messages over a one-year period.

The messages were actually very good. They had the right tone and great calls-to-action. It's just that I don't pay a lot of attention to my LinkedIn messages and had completely missed the first 12!

He understood the value of repeat impressions over time and had developed a system within LinkedIn that had enabled him to send a unique, personalized message every month for a year. Pretty impressive.

If he had only sent one or two messages, the chances are good that I wouldn't have seen them.

Again, my experience with the majority of self-employed professionals is that their marketing visibility is, at best, random and inconsistent, and at worst, non-existent.

As you may know, I've sent out an email newsletter to my list pretty much every week for 21 years. That's visibility. It's really quite simple, but not so easy.

If you want to be effective at your marketing, you must identify marketing strategies that enable you to get your message in front of your prospective clients consistently.

And again, this is challenging. What is the best marketing activity for you, your personality and talents? How can you fit something into your schedule and do it consistently, not for a few weeks but for years?

The question is not just what marketing strategies to use. Networking, speaking, blogging, email newsletters, webinars, social media, and direct outreach can all work.

The more important question is what strategies will work the best for you and how exactly you can implement those strategies without spinning your wheels.

You're looking for proven, step-by-step instructions so you can evaluate if a strategy is right for you and something you can fit into your schedule on a regular basis. Remember, sporadic implementation is a waste of time.

Implementing visibility strategies takes commitment and persistence. Is growing and succeeding in your business important enough for you to make that kind of effort? If it is, you'll succeed at finding the best strategy for you.

The final challenge may be the most important of all to overcome.

Challenge #3. Maintaining the right marketing attitude and mindset over time, despite setbacks. If you can't maintain The 3 R's of success - responsibility, resourcefulness, and resilience, your marketing will never achieve the results you want.

These 3Rs are absolutely essential.

Responsibility is the stance that the buck stops with you. You are the only one who will find a way to attract clients and you won't give up until you find that way. You won't make excuses or blame circumstances, but instead will be accountable for making results happen.

Resourcefulness is the skill to utilize your talents, and abilities to quickly find smart ways to overcome difficulties and find solutions. And to be resourceful, you can't be full of doubts and fears of failure or rejection. A responsible person commits to finding a way; a resourceful person tries every way possible until they discover the best way.

Resilience may be the most powerful trait of all. It's what enables you to bounce back from adversity, setbacks, and even failures. And if you're working to attract great clients, you'll inevitably experience all of those many times. People who are not resilient don't even try, let alone succeed.

All of these essential qualities are in short supply. But if you work to grow those qualities persistently, over time, they will help you succeed with the first two challenging things in marketing - messaging and visibility.

Despite these three marketing challenges - messaging, visibility, and mindset - there is good news.

Improving your skills or abilities - even a little - in any of these three challenge areas will increase your marketing effectiveness.

There is no perfect way of tackling all three challenges and you can't do it in big leaps that get you there overnight. But you can work on all three slowly, with persistence, making small gains every week.

When you improve your messages, you'll start to see a better response in communicating to your prospects. Marketing then becomes like a game that starts with the question, "How can I communicate my value more clearly and powerfully?"

When you increase your visibility, you'll also notice a better response because to some degree, marketing is a numbers game. Your question might be, "How can I get my message in front of more of the right people this month?"

And when you enhance your responsibility, resourcefulness, and resilience, you'll find that playing the game becomes easier and more fun. The 3Rs are the fuel that enables you to persist with the first two challenges.

Where do you start?

You start by admitting where you are now and then committing to a purpose (your WHY for being in business in the first place), a goal (a specific thing you want to achieve), and to taking action (the actual steps you'll implement to get there).

Yes, marketing is challenging. But meeting those challenges is absolutely worth it.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10110078

How To Start Marketing Your Business

To new business owners, starting a business is often its own reward. They are thrilled to be able to be their own bosses, and to successfully get a business up and running. Often they are happy just to keep the dream alive.

But every business needs to grow. That doesn't mean you have to reach out to a larger market - it means working toward increasing your share of the one you are targeting. This will keep your business healthy enough to survive obstacles such as tough economic times.

In order to keep moving forward, we need to market our businesses constantly. We need to dedicate a certain percentage of our resources to building our brand and reaching our target market. Here are some simple things you can do to help your business grow.

Have a clear picture of your target market.

Find out what types of people use the products and services you provide and respond to your business philosophies. If you're not marketing to the right people, all will be lost.

Research, research, research.

Determine how to best reach your target market and what they expect out of your offerings. Study your competition carefully, and make note of what they're doing right and wrong.

Choose your marketing channels wisely.

If your target market rarely reads, there's no point in advertising in a magazine. Use what you've learned about them to find the best possible outlets for your message, and focus your marketing efforts there.

Give your advertising a chance.

Studies show that consumers require repeated exposure to a product before they will even consider buying. So don't be surprised if one ad run doesn't bring spectacular results. If you've done your homework and found a viable way to reach your market, run the ad at least two more times before you evaluate the results.

Take advantage of free publicity.

Sending out press releases and finding other ways to attract the media will give you high-quality exposure, and it won't eat into your budget.

Keep track of the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

If what you're doing is working, you should be generating more revenue. Use some of that revenue to do more marketing. If it isn't working, make adjustments and try again.

Sometimes you'll have to take a step back with your marketing plans. But that's not a sign you've failed. It's a sign that you're a smart marketer. Sometimes the market changes, and it's up to us to monitor those changes and adjust our marketing plans accordingly. No successful company markets the same way forever. By evolving with our target market, we can make our marketing work better.

Every successful business owner and entrepreneur has made mistakes with their marketing at some time or another. It's all part of the learning process. Although mistakes are going to happen, you can avoid a number of common marketing mistakes. Download my free checklist, The 10 Most Common Marketing Mistakes at https://jonallo.com/mistakes



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