Twitter gave users a sneak peek at some changes that are in the works, including comment threads an online indicators. The post Twitter Tests Threaded Replies and Online Status Indicators by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post Twitter Tests Threaded Replies and Online Status Indicators by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Sorcerer Digital.
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Google answers if updating internal anchor text will negatively affect rankings. Then discusses using images. The post Google Clarifies Internal Anchor Text and Ranking Effects by @martinibuster appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post Google Clarifies Internal Anchor Text and Ranking Effects by @martinibuster appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. Take your link building to the next level with these essential tools for research, prospecting and outreach, and reporting. The post 12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential to Your Success by @_kevinrowe appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post 12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential to Your Success by @_kevinrowe appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. Want to make a great impression on your visitors? These 25 excellent examples of About Us pages will inspire you. The post 25 Creative & Engaging Examples of About Us Pages by @alexanderkesler appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post 25 Creative & Engaging Examples of About Us Pages by @alexanderkesler appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. Here's what content length the SEJ community recommends for a blog post to rank well in Google. The post What Content Length Typically Ranks Well? [POLL] by @A_Ninofranco appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post What Content Length Typically Ranks Well? [POLL] by @A_Ninofranco appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. Posted by DiTomaso Are you mindful of your customer's experience after they become a lead? It's easy to fall in the same old rut of newsletters, invoices, and sales emails, but for a truly exceptional customer experience that improves their retention and love for your brand, you need to go above and beyond. In this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday, the ever-insightful Dana DiTomaso shares three big things you can start doing today that will immensely better your customer experience and make earning those leads worthwhile.
Video TranscriptionHi, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm the President and partner of Kick Point, and today I'm going to talk to you about building better customer experiences. I know that in marketing a lot of our jobs revolve around getting leads and more leads and why can't we have all of the leads. The typical customer experience:But in reality, the other half of our job should be making sure that those leads are taken care of when they become customers. This is especially important if you don't have, say, a customer care department. If you do have a customer care department, really you should be interlocking with what they do, because typically what happens, when you're working with a customer, is that after the sale, they usually get surveys. – Surveys“How did we do? Please rate us on a scale of 1 to 10,” which is an enormous scale and kind of useless. You're a 4, or you're an 8, or you're a 6. Like what actually differentiates that, and how are people choosing that? – InvoicesThen invoices, like obviously important because you have to bill people, particularly if you have a big, expensive product or you're a SaaS business. But those invoices are sometimes kind of impersonal, weird, and maybe not great. – NewslettersMaybe you have a newsletter. That's awesome. But is the newsletter focused on sales? One of the things that we see a lot is, for example, if somebody clicks a link in the newsletter to get to your website, maybe you've written a blog post, and then they see a great big popup to sign up for our product. Well, you're already a customer, so you shouldn't be seeing that popup anymore. What we've seen on other sites, like Help Scout actually does a great job of this, is that they have a parameter of newsletter at the end of any URLs they put in their newsletter, and then the popups are suppressed because you're already in the newsletter so you shouldn't see a popup encouraging you to sign up or join the newsletter, which is kind of a crappy experience. – Sales emailsThen the last thing are sales emails. This is my personal favorite, and this can really be avoided if you go into account-based marketing automation instead of personal-based marketing automation. We had a situation where I was a customer of the hosting company. It was in my name that we've signed up for all of our clients, and then one of our developers created a new account because she needed to access something. Then immediately the sales emails started, not realizing we're at the same domain. We're already a customer. They probably shouldn't have been doing the hard sale on her. We've had this happen again and again. So just really make sure that you're not sending your customers or people who work at the same company as your customers sales emails. That's a really cruddy customer experience. It makes it look like you don't know what's going on. It really can destroy trust. Tips for an improved customer experienceSo instead, here are some extra things that you can do. I mean fix some of these things if maybe they're not working well. But here are some other things you can do to really make sure your customers know that you love them and you would like them to keep paying you money forever. 1. Follow them on social mediaSo the first thing is following them on social. So what I really like to do is use a tool such as FullContact. You can take everyone's email addresses, run them through FullContact, and it will come back to you and say, “Here are the social accounts that this person has.” Then you go on Twitter and you follow all of these people for example. Or if you don't want to follow them, you can make a list, a hidden list with all of their social accounts in there. Then you can see what they share. A tool like Nuzzel, N-U-Z-Z for Americans, zed zed for Canadians, N-U-Z-Z-E-L is a great tool where you can say, “Tell me all the things that the people I follow on social or the things that this particular list of people on social what they share and what they're engaged in.” Then you can see what your customers are really interested in, which can give you a good sense of what kinds things should we be talking about. A company that does this really well is InVision, which is the app that allows you to share prototypes with clients, particularly design prototypes. So they have a blog, and a lot of that blog content is incredibly useful. They're clearly paying attention to their customers and the kinds of things they're sharing based on how they build their blog content. So then find out if you can help and really think about how I can help these customers through the things that they share, through the questions that they're asking. Then make sure to watch unbranded mentions too. It's not particularly hard to monitor a specific list of people and see if they tweet things like, “I really hate my (insert what you are)right now,” for example. Then you can head that off at the pass maybe because you know that this was this customer. “Oh, they just had a bad experience. Let's see what we can do to fix it,”without being like, “Hey, we were watching your every move on Twitter.Here's something we can do to fix it.” Maybe not quite that creepy, but the idea is trying to follow these people and watch for those unbranded mentions so you can head off a potential angry customer or a customer who is about to leave off at the pass. Way cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one. 2. Post-sale monitoringSo the next thing is post-sale monitoring. So what I would like you to do is create a fake customer. If you have lots of sales personas, create a fake customer that is each of those personas, and then that customer should get all the emails, invoices, everything else that a regular customer that fits that persona group should get. Then take a look at those accounts. Are you awesome, or are you super annoying? Do you hear nothing for a year, except for invoices, and then, “Hey, do you want to renew?” How is that conversation going between you and that customer? So really try to pay attention to that. It depends on your organization if you want to tell people that this is what's happening, but you really want to make sure that that customer isn't receiving preferential treatment. So you want to make sure that it's kind of not obvious to people that this is the fake customer so they're like, “Oh, well, we're going to be extra nice to the fake customer.” They should be getting exactly the same stuff that any of your other customers get. This is extremely useful for you. 3. Better contentThen the third thing is better content. I think, in general, any organization should reward content differently than we do currently. Right now, we have a huge focus on new content, new content, new content all the time, when in reality, some of your best-performing posts might be old content and maybe you should go back and update them. So what we like to tell people about is the Microsoft model of rewarding. They've used this to reward their employees, and part of it isn't just new stuff. It's old stuff too. So the way that it works is 33% is what they personally have produced. So this would be new content, for example. Then 33% is what they've shared. So think about for example on Slack if somebody shares something really useful, that's great. They would be rewarded for that. But think about, for example, what you can share with your customers and how that can be rewarding, even if you didn't write it, or you can create a roundup, or you can put it in your newsletter. Like what can you do to bring value to those customers? Then the last 33% is what they shared that others produced. So is there a way that you can amplify other voices in your organization and make sure that that content is getting out there? Certainly in marketing, and especially if you're in a large organization, maybe you're really siloed, maybe you're an SEO and you don't even talk to the paid people, there's cool stuff happening across the entire organization. A lot of what you can bring is taking that stuff that others have produced, maybe you need to turn it into something that is easy to share on social media, or you need to turn it into a blog post or a video, like Whiteboard Friday, whatever is going to work for you, and think about how you can amplify that and get it out to your customers, because it isn't just marketing messages that customers should be seeing. They should be seeing all kinds of messages across your organization, because when a customer gives you money, it isn't just because your marketing message was great. It's because they believe in the thing that you are giving them. So by reinforcing that belief through the types of content that you create, that you share, that you find that other people share, that you shared out to your customers, a lot of sharing, you can certainly improve that relationship with your customers and really turn just your average, run-of-the-mill customer into an actual raving fan, because not only will they stay longer, it's so much cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one, but they'll refer people to you, which is also a lot easier than buying a lot of ads or spending a ton of money and effort on SEO. Thanks! Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! The post Building Better Customer Experiences – Whiteboard Friday appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. Google Search Console Made a Change to Data Calculations as of August 19 by @MattGSouthern8/30/2018 Google recently informed site owners that changes were made to the way Search Console tracks certain sets of query data. The post Google Search Console Made a Change to Data Calculations as of August 19 by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post Google Search Console Made a Change to Data Calculations as of August 19 by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. An update to Google Ads now allows users to make changes to their campaigns directly from the Overview page. The post Google Ads Lets Users Make Campaign Changes from 'Overview' Page by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post Google Ads Lets Users Make Campaign Changes from 'Overview' Page by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. Google's dominance in online search may be the subject of investigation, as a US Senator calls for an FTC investigation. The post US Senator Asks FTC to Investigate Google's Search Dominance by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal. The post US Senator Asks FTC to Investigate Google's Search Dominance by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. Let's face it…
When you're working for someone else, it's really, really hard to ASK to spend their money.
Especially when it comes to attending a conference.
The ticket cost, airfare, hotel, and other expenses start to add up in your boss' head before you can mutter the words, “Can I go?”
The absolute WORST thing you can say to try to persuade your boss is, “It will be a great experience…”
Although I'm sure they care about your life experiences, what's going to ultimately win is the ability to prove your experience will positively affect the bottom line.
Speaking of experiences that positively affect the bottom line…
Today, we're sharing with you 3 ways to convince your boss to send you to a conference.
So whether you're writing a request letter or pitching the idea in-person during your next one-on-one with your manager, this post will give you the blueprint to prove to the decision makers that your presence at Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 will be one of the best decisions they make all year.
Even better, we're giving you a template letter to swipe (no opt-in required) that will get the conversation started when you're ready to make your case.
Let's start with…
1. Focus on the Business Benefit
When you're writing your request letter or pitching the idea to your boss, be sure to include how your organization will benefit from the event.
How do you do that?
Tell them what makes this event unique and WHY that matters to your company.
For instance…
Traffic & Conversion Summit is more than your typical “Rah! Rah!” pump-you-up conference.
It's the largest marketing event in North America, focusing on the latest in digital marketing.
It's 3 days of actionable strategies and content. In fact, DigitalMarketer has a strict “no theory” policy when it comes to their sessions.
Our goal is to provide the best content in the digital marketing industry.
Period.
After attending, you'll have something to “show” for it… and we're not talking about a hangover!
We've spent every day since Traffic & Conversion Summit 2018 testing so we can present our best findings and strategies at our 10th annual event in 2019.
It's not outdated, run of the mill, big-idea concepts…
You'll learn tactics that you can take back to the office Monday and implement immediately. ← This is important to your boss.
Most importantly, industry experts who actually DO this stuff present each session-our focus is on strategy, not fluff. So you'll be learning from the best.
2. Describe How You'll Get the Most Out of the Event
Remember to present the conference as an opportunity for your organization at every point in the conversation. It's your job to illustrate the value this trip will deliver.
So do your homework.
In your pitch, work these benefits into your letter or conversation…
Top 3 Reasons to Attend Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019
You should also touch on the power of networking.
Traffic & Conversion Summit brings together thousands of professional marketers, from small business owners to agencies to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
And if you're looking to take your marketing to the next level, what better way than by rubbing shoulders with the smartest marketers in the room?
You'll meet over 5,500 peers who are also passionate about digital marketing. In every session and in every conversation, you'll be collecting new ideas for working smarter-ideas you can bring back to the office the very next day.
You'll also have the unique opportunity to speak one-on-one with DigitalMarketer staff at the DM booth and at official cocktail parties. We would love to hear what you're working on in your business, how we can help, and how we can ensure that you get the most out of your time at the event…
3. Determine the Expenses
Price out your travel expenses BEFORE presenting this idea to your boss. It will show that you're prepared.
Now, you don't have to include all the expenses for the event in your request letter, but be prepared for your boss to follow up on the cost of the trip as a whole.
So don't only know the ticket price of the event, look into the cost of the…
…and have an estimate for the trip as a whole.
If finances are a concern for your boss, it's time to budget travel.
Travel doesn't have to be expensive!
Instead of staying at the event hotel, use sites like Airbnb to book a private room in San Diego or to rent someone's house or apartment. This is usually much cheaper than staying in a hotel.
Or, if you're a DigitalMarketer Lab member, ask to split a room with another member in the DM Engage Facebook Group.
Not a member of DM Lab?
Our greater DigitalMarketer community is also a fantastic resource to find inexpensive places to stay.
Check out the Traffic & Conversion Summit Facebook Page to connect with other attendees and find room share and rental opportunities.
Use sites like Jetradar to book cheap flights to San Diego. Luckily, San Diego is usually pretty easy and cheap to get to from most cities in the US.
For commuting through the city, there are several rideshare options that are cheaper than taking traditional taxis everywhere. Download the apps for Lyft, Flywheel, or others to save some money.
How does all that sound? Now, you're ready to start the conversation. You just need to…
Write Your Request Letter
To help you get your request approved, we've put together this template request letter you can customize and send to your boss. Be sure to fill in the details and adjust it to your own voice and company culture.
And don't forget to swipe the letter template here.
Subject: A Plan That Will Positively Impact [Your Company Name]
Hi [Your Boss' Name],
I would like to go to DigitalMarketer's Traffic & Conversion Summit on February 25-27, 2019, in San Diego, CA. Attending will have a positive impact on our business. Here's why:
T&C is the largest marketing event in North America, focusing on the latest in digital marketing. And it's more than your typical “Rah! Rah!” pump-you-up conference. It's 3 days of actionable strategies and content. In fact, DigitalMarketer has a strict “no theory” policy when it comes to their sessions.
I'll hear from marketers and business owners who've actually done it, gaining insight from keynote speakers like Daymond John, Dr. Robert Cialdini, Dave Asprey, Mari Smith, and [List Speakers You're Excited About].
And this is why I'm really excited-to go to T&C and bring that knowledge back to our company. To bring back a plan that will have a positive impact on our business that we can start implementing on the Monday I return.
Plus, with 5,500+ attendees every year, the event will also give me a unique opportunity to connect with thousands of other marketers, business owners, agencies, and the DigitalMarketer team at nightly networking events. I'll be able to exchange ideas and get solutions to the challenges our organization is facing.
Right now, they're running a promo and T&C tickets are $895. If we jump on it now, we can save $1,700-that's the price of another ticket plus food… basically pays for [Name of Coworker You Want to Join] to go, too!
I've also estimated the total cost to attend-from travel expenses to food-which I can send your way if you're curious.
T&C is a worthwhile investment. I will be able to discover new ideas, create meaningful connections, and learn new skills that I can apply in my day-to-day work and help move [Your Company Name] forward.
What do you think?
[Your Name]
This could be the next big “thing” that accelerates your career.
(NOTE: Reserve your seat today for Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 and SAVE 65% with Super Early Bird pricing. But hurry! This discount is for a limited time. Learn more here.)
The post 3 Ways to Convince Your Boss to Send You to Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 appeared first on DigitalMarketer. The post 3 Ways to Convince Your Boss to Send You to Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 appeared first on Sorcerer Digital. |
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