web browsing, a photo by Heberger Site on Flickr.

The internet is largely the culprit for this change in buying patterns and behaviors. Consumers have the ability to gain knowledge of a product or service beyond the modes of communication means for which traditional marketing was built. The internet has made learning about a business, their products, history, and services very simple for the consumer.

The new consumer wants a part in creating their consumer experiences. They research brands to determine where local carriers of products reside. Consumers want to know what a retailer offers before spending their precious time looking for a service for which they have no previous knowledge. This makes a location’s local presence more important than ever. If you question your local online presence, check out http://www.local-ignite.com

Traditional marketing can also not rest on the past consumer referral to attract business. Referrals are happening in droves where businesses often cannot see. Social media and networking sites have provided opportunity for these referrals to happen beyond typical word of mouth. One quote that embodies the power of this referral system has been said by Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends”.

Though a consumer may not directly contact 6,000 people, social media sites have connected consumers in a common forum with access to thousands of other consumers. Consumers have more power in this realm than ever before. Imagine a past client displaying a positive message about their experience with your products and services…now imagine a negative comment. How many people will this message reach, and how fast?

Today’s ever-changing consumer simply doesn’t fit the bill for traditional marketing techniques. Just as the face of the consumer has changed, we must market to them in a way that is adaptable to their changing resources. Take the time to invest in online marketing. We know customers are gathering information on their own, why not capitalize on what they are already doing?

It’s official: Facebook Pages are now switch to Timeline! Have you adjusted your Facebook content appropriately?

If you’re currently using Facebook, you know the value it has brought you in generating buzz about your business, and providing information about your products and promotions. Having a complete and well-made Facebook page is already essential to communicating to your customers and potential clients given the ever-increasing number of consumers beginning to research companies online before buying.

Facebook logo , a photo by mcdordor2001 on Flickr.

The implementation of Timeline has made room for several benefits to businesses wishing to showcase a tech-savvy side without immense effort. Perhaps the most obvious visual change is the cover photo. Here you can showcase a large logo, view of your store front, or other creative photo showcasing a product or service you provide. This is the first visual your client or potential customer will see when visiting your page. Higher quality photos usually do work much better, but even an iPhone’s camera should provide an adequate image.

The timeline itself provides an opportunity for businesses to mark major milestones within the life of the company. Facebook will automatically record the founding date of your company to be the first event on your timeline. From there you can tag additions of products, employees, and events you wish to share. Being able to view the company’s history in this visual, interactive format provides an additional connection point to your customer. They will know more about you before even speaking with you.

If you post frequently, one other feature proving to be very helpful is that you can ‘pin’ a post to the top of your timeline. This feature could be especially important in the event of a sale or promotion going on in a given week – providing yet another way to promote your latest news.

If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to look into the changes involved in the Timeline switch, definitely take the time to do so.The switch is no longer optional, and will change automatically.

If you don’t update your page after the switch, you may find your page looking behind the times!

Be sure to take a tour on this first official day of Timeline. It will be worth your time (no pun intended…ok maybe a little).

For all the time you may already be devoting to social media, there is another emerging social media form gaining prevalence among businesses. Pinterest – an online pinboard where users can share images of their favorite recipes, clothing, pets, products, and more, has shown to be valuable to businesses. Pinterest users are able to categorize their loves and share them with fellow pinners. When first emerging, Pinterest was associated with predominantly female users wanting to share recipes and wedding ideas, but in the last few months it has boomed to much much more!

The visual nature of Pinterest already has a creative advantage over other social media forms. Pinterest must NOT be used as blatant promotion or advertisement for your business. The value I see for businesses, is to engage customers by creating pin-boards of your office favorites, favorite products, product lines, and perhaps even a board of your current clients. A user’s pin-board reads more as a virtual diary or blog than an outright statement or expression of your feelings. According to USA Today, because of the visual and highly engaged nature of this outlet, users are spending an average of 98 minutes on the site.

98 minutes on a single site means BIG potential to attract users! As Pinterest continues to grow I imagine that number will only increase. If you choose to use Pinterest for business, my suggestion would be to consider the time involved first. If you do not pin often with interesting and appropriate content, your customers and potential customers will not see the value in following you. Without a dedicated group of followers you will waste efforts.

Here are some basic suggestions if you’re a pinning newbie.

• Make a diverse pin-board base: Though having your products displayed in a pin-board or two is important, remember that you want to fully engage consumers. They deserve more than just seeing your product lines!
• Give ‘em something to talk about: As you post pictures of your favorite places, employees, and loves, ask your followers questions. They will be able to comment back with their perspectives and opinions.
• Show ‘em some love: Re-pin content from your followers. Not only will it save you some time in finding new and interesting content, but they will have an immediate connection with you!
• Get pin ideas from others: If you’re new to the Pinterest scene, no one will fault you for getting a few ideas from other users. Before making 15 irrelevant pin-boards, see what’s out there! Look at other users and businesses to see what will be relevant to you!

Let’s be honest, no one has the man-power or available resources to identify each customer’s position within the customer life cycle, along with their individualized needs. Though it would certainly be an accurate approach to selling, it’s simply not an efficient or realistic use of energies. The conversation of where to devote resources is certainly a double-edged sword. If one devotes too much energy to assessing each level of customer it’s tradeoff is not enough to justify success yet a lack of devotion to a particular customer type might end in wasted efforts.

My suggestion? Develop a target customer profile. Large corporations have had this tool in their arsenal for years, but this process seems to have been unavailable for smaller businesses in the past. You don’t have to have a large advertising budget or sophisticated marketer on your side in order to develop this profile.

Handshake, a photo by spring stone on Flickr.

No one knows your customers like you do. So when you’re ready to move forward with advertising and marketing efforts, who better than you to decide what kind of customers to target? Think seriously about who comes through your door on a daily basis:

•What is the typical demographic make-up of your customer? Name your target customer if you need to – developing a ‘real’ person will help to humanize your efforts.
•Put yourself in his or her shoes, what are their needs?
•Think about major sales you’ve had in the past – are there any trends?
•What, if any, complaints have you experienced in your past sales?
•And if you’re expanding efforts online, make tracking your customers easy by using a program such as Google Analytics

Using these questions to profile your customers before expending energy on advertising will keep your message focused, and allow you, and your sales team to further understand the customer coming in your store each day. Understanding this customer will translate into success with marketing messages and as well as future sales efforts – particularly with new hires!

We’ve all observed the stiff increases in online consumer buying habits each year. Though we’ve discovered this change in buying habit, there are other factors affecting consumer-purchasing behavior. We continue to see the increased development of mobile applications, increased number of shoppers online, and the increase of shoppers wanting online deals for stores in their local area. A new coined term that seems it will be gathering relevance in the coming year is “SoMoLo” for Social, Mobile, Local shopper.

This shopper often uses their mobile device to conduct searches in their local area, sometimes even choosing to purchase online rather than going into a retail location.

Though it is now coming to light that this new kind of shopper exists, one avenue that has not been considered by many retailers is that their online information may not be correct across all search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, or Yellow Pages. Customers are conducing searches on sites like these with a specific Zip code. For example, a customer looking for a recliner dealer in Greenville, SC may search:
Recliner, 29601
The search engine would of course direct the customer to all recliner sites in the 29601 area. What happens if the dealer has changed locations, changed the phone number, changed web addresses, changed ownership, or something else of that nature? The dealer could then have inaccurate information across multiple search engines, significantly decreasing SEO value and thus a lower listing amongst these sites. How can this issue be fixed?

Local Ignite.

DI’s Local Ignite helps consolidate many major search engines to benefit you!

After no less than seventy-two cups of coffee and many sleepless nights, our hard work has finally paid off, and we have developed the single-most important bit of technology in the twenty-first century.

Ok, maybe it doesn’t change the world, but we are very pleased to announce a new feature in the Dealer Ignition application for dealers. The new feature is a widget (that is designer speak for a really awesome tool) called “Your Performance”. This performance widget allows dealers currently subscribed to our program to view statistics for their individual website.

If you use our promotion or catalog components, this provides an overview of how your promotions and catalogs are performing each day. You’ll have immediate access not only to your all-time statistics, but also a look at your real-time daily statistics.

If you are already subscribed to our application, the widget is installed on your dashboard, so to access it simply log in and you’ll see it immediately.

We’re very excited about this installation and its place in the future of Dealer Ignition. We feel it will help convey a visual representation of the technology we have developed for our dealers!

Log in now to see how you are performing.

Not yet a part of the program? Sign up today.

Our marketing illuminator took a picture so you could see what we look like; Tony on the left, Justin on the right. (And actually, Tony doesn’t drink coffee…)

The importance of online shopping applications has continually been proved, but for those of you who prefer a tactile approach to sales, you are not in the wrong. The dramatic increase of online holiday shoppers actually gave way to an all-time high for post-holiday season returns.

It seems that actually touching an item during the purchasing process makes consumers much more likely to associate ownership of the item, and thus more likely to buy. The recent book, Brandwashed addressed the phenomenon. The Brandwashed team investigated a Barnes and Noble store in which sales people were instructed to take a specific approach to selling.

One method of selling involved helping a customer find a book by walking them over to the book’s shelf and pointing to the book. The other method involved walking the customer to the shelf, picking up the book, and then placing it into the hand of the customer. The customers who had the book placed directly in their hands were significantly more likely to buy than those who had simply been shown the book.

Bottom line – though the consumer pattern has consistently been shifting towards shopping online, the physical retail location still plays a key role in purchase behavior! If you, as a store can have a website intriguing enough to draw your customer from the web to your physical retail space – you’ll find great success.

Dealer Ignition is here to help you do just that.

http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/10/the-secret-cause-of-buyers-remorse/

Impressions to Expressions

Impressions are great for assessing the number of times something has ‘impressed’ a viewer, but this number is really passive in assessing what they actually thought about the page, document, or post.

Enter social media.

Social media has enabled us greater understanding of the consumer’s mind, but we must have a more active system to assess what these impressions mean to us. A suggestion by some Coca-Cola marketing gurus is to more actively track comments, ‘likes’, and fans of a product or service. Tracking opinions will then translate into active users and an available opinion board. After all, consumers can spread our desired message exponentially faster than we could ourselves.

Useful ‘Insights’

If you happen to have a company Facebook page (if you don’t yet, you should!), Zuckerberg has set up a fairly easy-to-use system for viewing these active “expressions”. Facebook’s ‘Insights’ tab lets the page’s administrator see the number of unique users (those who have ‘liked’ posts, ‘shared’ posts, or created a ‘story’ about one of your posts) engaging with your page each day. This feature provides great insight (no pun intended) to the mind of the consumer, and lets the administrator at least attempt to improve the relationship users have with the company’s page.

When we allow our consumers or subscribers to act as marketers for us, we greatly increase our potential customer base and online presence. By capturing the opinions and feedback consumers are providing, we are taking those passive “impressions” and turning them into something much more intuitive.

Online marketing has consistently proven its worth, (particularly for us at Dealer ignition!) in both the product-oriented and service fields. Online marketing is often treated as an entirely different animal, but in reality, the same logical steps we take in traditional marketing efforts can be applied to that of online marketing and social media. Whether those messages be from a social media outlet such as Facebook, or direct emailing marketing, we can track their progression with modern software to qualify the customer into different stages based on participation level.

Let’s take the example of email. Predictible Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler, gives us a great example of how this logic can be applied to an email marketing campaign. We can divide customers by their level of discovery within the campaign, down to our “sales active” – ready-to-sell customer to make sure we gain the most out of each stage of our campaign efforts.

When approaching online marketing, we don’t have to start from zero and create an entirely new effort. We can often breathe new life into classic sales and marketing illustrations by simply breaking them down and reassessing their value contribution.