During the 4 days I was there I and my ward-mates were looked after by a number of nurses of differing skill levels and ages. The student nurses were the most enthusiastic, friendly and generally interested in talking to us patients. They needed guidance from time to time, but hey, that’s why they’re students. The recently qualified were similar, efficient, and very personable. Those who had been in the job more than a few years were professional, thoughtful and helpful, though they’d seen it all before so getting into involved chats with patients wasn’t their thing.

The ones that stuck out like a sore thumb (pun intended) were the ones that must have been pretty close to retirement. It was clear that they viewed patients as an imposition on their TV time, they coughed on patients, ignored requests (from a guy confined to his bed!) for as long as they could, passing the buck onto the other. It was clear that they’d become jaded with the job, so bored that they seem to have turned it into a game with points going to the one who can treat patient the worst.

What does this have to do with marketing? Simple: It’s all about ‘guest experience’. Take a look at the people in your organisation. Have any of them become jaded, phoning in (or worse) their effort? Have customers become an inconvenience to them? Does giving anything more than the bare minimum seem like needless over-achieving?

Take action to either incentivise or just fire these people. They’re bringing the perceptions of your organisation right down. Your customers are facing a pot-luck as to whether they have a great, good, or awful experience with you.

Not sure how to test this?

• Look at whatever KPIs you can to compare staff
• listen to interactions (though they may raise their game just when you’re around)
• survey your customers (better still, survey the customers you may have just lost).

As you do this, give praise to the people doing it right, learn from those that go above and beyond, put the spotlight on them and get everyone to raise their game.

Above all make sure that the ‘guest experience’ that people get from your company is the one you had assumed they’re getting.

Image credit: slightlynorth via Creative Commons on Flickr

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You may wonder why I’m mentioning this. It’s because I’ve noticed a fair number of websites recently using content management systems set up with no thought whatsoever to the SEO value AND usability benefit of having a well crafted title tag. Repeating the domain name is a waste of time – it’s already in the location bar of the browser anyway. Imagine calling Hertz and the phone being answered by someone parroting the number you’d just dialled: “Hertz, 08455 19 15 36″, completely pointless.

Take a few moments to check through your site. Your title tags should be:

1. Keyword rich
2. Non-repetitive
3. Written for humans, not used as a replacement for the meta keywords tag
4. Devoid of your domain name. Please.

The site title/company name should in there, but put it at the end – ranking #1 for your company name is easy.

Image credit: Carlos Lorenzo via Creative Commons on Flickr

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When you see an advert for flatscreen TVs offering a ‘free Blu-Ray player with selected TVs’ – what’s your thought process? Is it ‘ooh, I’m gonna get a free Blu-Ray player’ or is it ‘I bet the one I want doesn’t come with a free Blu-Ray player’. How about a sale sign that offers ‘Up to 50% off’? I guess it depends on whether you’re a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person. Maybe you get a nice surprise or maybe you’re disappointed. The one thing that word ’selected’ doesn’t do is fill you with confidence because it immediately creates a doubt in your mind.

Customers don’t know what ’selected’ means in that context, they don’t know what a company’s ‘primary service areas’ are. All they know is that the company wants their offer to sound good whilst leaving some wiggle room. Customers don’t care about a company’s ability to squirm out of providing something. They want what they’re promised.

Under-promise, over-deliver
That’s what we should aim for. That’s what gets customers telling their friends about us. The opposite can make people talk about us for all the wrong reasons.

If you’d prefer to state up front everything people can expect from you as part of your service or offering, then go ahead, but don’t hide behind puffery and ambiguity. If there are limitations, don’t be afraid to state them – you’ll only be called on it later if you don’t.

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There are however a number of simple ‘off-page’ domain-related factors that you can control and that search engines consider when ranking sites:

1. Age of domain
   You can’t fake this, but you can buy up older names, sometimes it’s worth making an offer, if the domain you want is up for sale. If it has been registered for a few years, that may help you rank higher, even if it’s not currently in search indexes. Just do your due diligence first – check it doesn’t have a chequered past.
2. Domain ownership details
   Many domain name registrars offer a premium service of domain name anonymity. Google and other search engines aren’t so keen on this. They figure you have something to hide. If you’re worried about privacy and don’t want to put your home address, you don’t have to – nobody’s going to be posting anything to that address (or at least nobody you want to hear from).
3. Domain expiry
   Most people don’t pay for things until they have to. So you wait till your domain name is up for renewal and renew then right? WRONG! A domain with less than a year remaining till expiry is considered as a potential drop-out. Most domain registrars offer multi-year discounts and you don’t have to wait till your name is due for renewal to secure it for 3, 4 or more years more. At around $10 a year for a .com it’s a false economy to hold off on renewing your name till you start getting email reminders.

Now go get your domain in order!

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Not so fast!
That’s all nice and simple but there are a few things you could be doing to make sure you’re getting the maximum juice from the squeeze.

Google is your friend. Sort of.
Google wants you to get some traffic, Google even provide you with tools to measure that traffic optimally. They even push you to do the most you can with the traffic you’re paying for, but the last thing Google are going to do is voluntarily reduce the amount of revenue they make.

It’s all about the conversions
If you’re not paying attention to the conversions (whether that is orders or leads) that you get from your Adwords spend, you need to, right now. You can track things internally if you like – assuming your content management system’s lead forms or your e-commerce platform show you all the ways someone got to your site (for extra credit, not just last-click tracking too). If that’s not possible, Adwords provides conversion tracking for you. You set up a conversion, add a bit of javascript to the conversion page (final page of checkout or contact form sent page) and you’re done. Conversions will be tracked right down to the campaign, ad group, ad variation and keyword that brought you the sale or lead. Once you know what’s working, do more of that, and less of the keywords and ad variations that are bleeding you dry.

Coming in to land
Landing Pages are REALLY important. Seriously, so important that I’m going to say it again. REALLY IMPORTANT. Got it? Good, let’s move on.

A landing page is, very simply, the page that the user arrives at immediately after clicking on your Adwords ad. Your ad is a highly targeted ad for blue widgets. Do you bring the user to…

1. your home page
2. the contact us page
3. a page about blue widgets, with a ‘buy blue widgets now’ button and a ‘contact us if you want to know anything more about blue widgets’ button

Is it 3?
Well done. Gold star. Bringing the user to anywhere that creates a disconnect between what they searched on and what is on the page is a bad idea for two reasons.
1) Google checks the quality of your landing page – that thing it does with the animated abacus when you enter your destination URL? It’s checking two things – one, that your destination URL exists and two – what’s on it. It also re-checks periodically in case you’ve changed it. Google uses the content of your landing page, and the behaviour of people who have clicked on your ad to determine a quality score. A higher quality score equals a lower cost per click.
2) Users don’t like having to work out where to go to find the information you were promising them. You have mere seconds to impress a visitor.

Apple and Pears
Imagine you’re at a market. You hear a stallholder shouting ‘lovely golden delicious apples, get ‘em here, two euros a kilo’. You’re shopping for apples anyway so you go over to his stall, except he’s gone, and you can’t see the apples. Do you stick around, or go to another seller? Now why would you want to do exactly that to someone on the web?

Sure, it takes time, and sometimes money, to craft landing pages for every ad you want to run on Adwords but if you don’t do everything you can to get every click to convert, you’re wasting your money, and you end up chalking your Adwords spend down as some kind of Google Tax, where it’s your way of paying them for all that organic traffic they bring you.

For some quality tips on landing page design, read this from SEOmoz. If you’re having problems optimising your pay-per-click strategy, get in touch and I’ll let you know how I can help.

Image Credit: Paolo Camera via Creative Commons on Flickr

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I wrote a piece last year about why you might want to help out those who you might consider competitors. I’ve just seen first hand what can happen when a company’s neighbour goes out of business: a much more serious competitor can move in.

My local sandwich shop, a small independently owned business has been serving baguettes, salads and paninis for over 5 years. Later this month a sandwich-shop chain is opening up in place of a cafe, just three doors away. They should have them beaten on price, unless the new shop gets aggressive and goes after their loyal customer base of office workers from around the area. As it stands they’ll attract business just on the basis of curiosity.

Now is the time for the little guy to raise their game, whether they broaden the menu, encourage loyalty (the chain already has a loyalty discount card) and raise their service level: offer delivery, take pre-orders – all the things the chain isn’t willing to do.

If that situation sounds familiar to you, now might be a good time to reach out to them and work on some co-marketing efforts – banding together to ward off a bigger threat.

Image credit: Chiceaux via Creative Commons on Flickr

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The customer is always right

Even when they’re not. This has been done to death. You never win an argument with a customer. If you win the argument you’re likely to lose the customer. Of course there are times when you might actively seek to end a relationship with a customer, but there are subtle ways to do it and wantonly destructive customer service is not one of them.

Never ask a customer to do something you wouldn’t do yourself

Ask yourself if your company’s customer service polices are designed for the organisation’s convenience, not the customer’s. Are they designed to stave off enquiries rather than make customers happy?

The only timeframe that counts is the customer’s

Your internal metrics might be based on things like average time to respond (not necessarily solve) to customer queries. That’s important, but it’s everything. If you’re doing things in the background like tracing a late delivery for a customer, keeping them in the loop makes sense – at least they don’t feel ignored, but until they have the product in their hand there is still a problem in ther mind.

The only outcome that matters is that the customer is satisfied

Customers make decisions about whether to recommend a company and whether to do repeat business with them based on the level of service they receive. If anything goes wrong that counts even more. Handling complaints quickly and to the customer’s satisfaction should be your primary aim. You can do as many lifetime value and acquisition cost calculations as you like, there’s no way to know just how much damage an unhappy customer can cause you.

Customer Service is Marketing

In many companies, the customer services department is still seen purely as a cost centre, where the aim is to get the customer out of your hair, as quickly as possible. If that sounds like your company, and you’re in the marketing department you need to take control of the situation and demand more involvement. Every touchpoint with a customer is an opportunity to strengthen or weaken the relationship. Do you even know what your CS frontline staff are saying to your hard-won customers? Marketers need to make sure that the whole customer experience is the best it can be.

Image credit: bthomso via Creative Commons on Flickr

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