Six Tips for Creating a Great Interactive Experience with Your Website:

Know your audience
Who you are speaking to will influence what type of website you create or better yet, allow you to target the vehicle that your audience is most likely to use:

Baby Boomers – Boomers are used to going to a physical site to find the information they are looking for and they don’t mind digging for it.  Whether it’s a landing page, a content site, or a Flash-driven experience, as long as it contains the information that they’re looking for they’ll dig it.

Young Professionals–Young professionals in their 20s and 30s want quick and easy access to information. Enhance your brand experience on social sites like Facebook to reach these people.

Generation Y – These coming of age consumers are on the go and their mobile device is where it’s at.  Be sure to have your WAP page or mobile applications ready for this audience.

Get social
Regardless of your target audience; chances are good they are involved in some type of online community.  Simply provide them with the necessary tools and let them go to work for you – sharing the information they like. Site add-ons like “Add This” give developers quick access to the tools that make it easy to share any content on your website. Social sites are also coming out with their own set of sharing tools that allow you to easily integrate your content so you can see what your friends have “liked” – providing a great new way to quickly see what products are popular within a particular demographic.

Get the most bang for your buck
Utilizing multiple touch points through an integrated network – rather than a website alone – enables you to engage a much wider group of consumers through a more interesting, integrated, interactive experience – and get more out of your marketing dollars. Consumers rely on many different digital devices to search for information, so once you figure out where they are you need to keep them engaged. You can do this by making sure the various ways you communicate with your customers (blog, website, Facebook, Twitter, mobile application) are connected and lead to each other.

Keep them coming back for more
Rewarding the users who are influencing your brand will keep them engaged and active, and most importantly – talking.  Be sure your fans and followers are the first to know about new offers or company information. Creating exclusive content, offers, and promotions will help develop a sense of community and ensure they keep coming back.

Let your users drive the content
Fan suggestions, surveys, images, and videos will be the natural result of a growing social network and won’t require too much work on your part.  It is important that your fans are just as involved in creating content as your internal team. Make sure you are providing the means of gathering this type of content and in some cases reward those who participate in content generation and brand discussions.

Participate
It’s no secret that people like to talk and your brand is the topic du jour. Most comments will be neutral or positive but at some time or other there will be a negative comment to deal with.  More than delivering good feedback to improve your brand, the careful monitoring of the social sites you are involved with gives you the opportunity to guide conversations and potentially turn a negative comment into something positive.

We can help you create more than just a “website”. Let us help you deliver a great interactive experience that will keep your customers coming back for more.  Contact us today!

Sounds easy enough, but with consistently low customer satisfaction ratings for cross-channel customer experiences, it’s obvious that businesses are struggling with this. Why is that? For one, it is enough of a challenge to merely keep a company website up-to-date, never mind ensuring that is also delivers an excellent customer experience. Add to that the growing number of web-enabled mobile devices and the rise of social network usage and companies face a real challenge when it comes to creating a seamless and personalized experience for each user. The goal is to figure out how to communicate, not only constantly, but consistently with customers across all these intersecting channels. We have listed several ideas below to get you going.

Optimize your website for all mobile devices
We’re talking more than just resizing the screen and calling it a day! This requires getting in tune with how you want customers to move across the various channels and devices they use to interact with you. Customers on the go using their smartphone to get quick information have different goals than customers accessing your website from the comfort of their office. The key is to tailor the experience to what customers want, when they want it – quick answers to specific questions or a more engaging experience where they can browse and search. This allows you to recognize the customer as an individual and customize your content to them regardless of the way they choose to access it.

Make it personal
By addressing the customer’s context as opposed to just the channel or device they happen to be using, you are able to create a personalized experience. This means it’s not just enough to know how they are seeking information, but in what situation they are seeking this information – the who, what, where, why, and when. All these factors will help you to present relevant, timely, and highly- targeted content.

Make communication a two-way street
Communication needs to be a give and take to be effective and customers need to feel that their opinion counts. An easy and effective way to do this is to use your website to invite comments, ratings, and reviews. This lets customers know you are committed to improving customer satisfaction and provides them with a forum for discussion with you and with other customers. This provides many benefits for you too. Your best sales team may very well be your customers, so why not unleash the power of all those happy customers, as they interact and communicate to help sell your products? Customer comments and blogs allow you to directly respond to customers and address issues before they affect more customers. The feedback from ratings and reviews lets you get into the heads of your users and find out what they are seeking so you are guaranteed to hit the mark when you go to market with new products and services – a win-win for all.

Help them to help themselves!
Ease the call volume of contact centers, decrease costs, and increase customer satisfaction. Sound good? As long as it is intuitive and appropriate to each channel and device, offering web self-help can really, well, help! The key is understanding the potential problems that users encounter and providing the right help at the right time.

Providing a forum that allows you to tap into your users (many of whom enjoy helping others deal with issues they too have faced) not only builds a powerful database of solutions and takes the pressure off your own call center employees, but builds a customer community that works to increase customer loyalty. The most important thing is to ensure a smooth transition between channels. If customers don’t have to repeat information their frustration and the time your agents need to serve them will be greatly reduced. Also be sure that your call center number is still easily found on your web site so that customers can contact you on their terms.

Know who your customer is – all the time
With more and more customers accessing you through different channels at different times, it is becoming increasingly important to take an integrated approach that provides a snapshot of key customer information across all channels. Not only will this allow you to address customers on a personal level as they contact you through a new channel – making them feel important – but it will help your sales team to easily identify cross and up sell opportunities.

Be a social butterfly
Go ahead, spread your wings. With social networking on the rise – 46 percent in 2009 according to Forrester Research – social networks offer a new way to get in touch with your customers, drive web traffic, get customer insights through candid conversations, and provide real-time information to your organization – allowing you to increase the size and loyalty of your audience and maximize your communication efforts. Just be sure to stick to social networks that are relevant to your audience, otherwise you are wasting time with something potential customers will never use.

Mix it up
Make these different channels work for you. By mixing your various channels together and having them play off each other, you can create integrated marketing campaigns to liven up your marketing efforts, differentiate your company, and get your target audience to sit up and take notice.

It’s easy to get hung up on the task of managing the many channels, devices, and social networks that we have today. Instead look at this as a unique opportunity which offers many new ways to approach customers and allows you to differentiate your business through multi-channel, innovative campaigns that spark interest, ignite desire, and most importantly keep your sales engine running.

Listen up and don’t be shy about it
At the end of the day you can do all the work you want creating integrated, personalized communication and it would be all for nothing if you do not actually listen to what your customers are telling you. You do this by taking real steps to improve your business based on the feedback and advice garnered from your customers. But what good is this if your customers don’t even know that you have listened? Take it one step further. Tell them. It goes a long way to toot your own horn and actually tell your customers that you have listened to them and let them know what you have done as a result. Think: You asked, we listened. And since you’ll already have the communication channels set up to do just that, it should be no trouble at all! What a great way to not only communicate, but demonstrate, to your customers that they are important.

Need help creating an effective and innovative integrated communication strategy? Look no further, contact us today!

Whether yours is a small or midsize company, nonprofit, or public institution, if it’s not yet in the social-media space you should know up front that entering and playing in that space is going to take an investment of time and effort.

And even those organizations that have been tweeting and networking for a while should stop chasing social media without the following three essentials in place.

1. A Professional Website

Although some marketing experts claim that blogs are quickly replacing websites, most people will visit company websites to learn more about your products, services, or mission. Your website’s landing pages are also the destination point from external links in online news releases, published articles, videos, or any social-media entries and blogs in which you’ve posted a URL or other hyperlink. If your site isn’t ready for prime time, you can lose those visitors in seconds—and reduce the odds that they’ll come back.

Your organization’s website should have the following elements to attract and retain visitors:

• A professional and consistent design and look that are easy on the eyes
• Easy-to-read text
• The organization’s name and a clear explanation of what it does
• Menu options that are easy to navigate
• Contact information or contact links on every page
• Content that is compelling, informative, credible, authentic, and relevant— focused on the “customer” and error-free
• Few bells and whistles that take too long to load
• Working links

Although 63% of consumers and small-business owners turn to the Internet first for information about local companies, and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online, according to research from WebVisible and Nielsen.

Participating in social media can help your organization build brand awareness and possibly generate leads; but before you post links to your site (or landing pages) to entice target audiences with more information, ensure that your site has all the essential components to make it professional and functional.

2. An Understanding of the Social-Media Rules of Engagement

If you jump into the social-media space without a solid understanding of its rules and best practices, you may commit social-media suicide without even realizing it. There are certain protocols that will become evident to you as you read and observe others. Learn from them first, and you’ll avoid alienating your audience.

Here are some valuable rules:

• Know your online identity. “Knowing your online identity as well as letting others know up front who you are is important in establishing trust among the online community.”
• It’s not about you. Social media is about community; it’s not about what you do and what you market. Show interest in others and offer value, or others will see through your self-interests.
• Do not jump in and promote your products, services, or mission. Wait and build your reputation on the networking site first before you begin to promote anything. Contribute to the online community, help solve users’ problems, and develop friends and followers.
• Read and learn first. Observe users and get a feel for their interests, attitudes, and personalities. Take the time to “listen” and learn before delving into the community.
• Don’t mix business with pleasure. Keep your friends and family profiles separate from those that you use for your organization or company. Friends won’t care about your latest promotional effort, and customers won’t care what you did on the weekend.
• Be positive. Don’t say anything that will come back and bite you, and avoid getting defensive when someone says something negative about your organization. Take a deep breath and wear a public-relations hat when you respond.
• Go slowly. You don’t have to join every social-media site at first. Take it slowly, and establish your identity on the one or two sites where your target customers are before you take on more. It’s better to participate more frequently in fewer sites than infrequently in many.

3. An Understanding of Available Online Tools

It’s important to know the available online tools, particularly those for beginners and intermediate participants. If you are unsure of what’s out there, or what you can use – talk to us, and let’s know how we can help you.

Again, start slowly, using the tools that you find easy to learn. You can build on your knowledge and engage other tools as you become more proficient.

Although millions of organizations and companies participate in social media, many have overlooked the aforementioned essentials before taking the leap. If your organization hasn’t yet begun, take the time to develop a social-media strategy that will help guide your participation and content as well as build a foundation for better results. And if you have already been engaged in this space, evaluate how many of those essentials are in place. There’s always room for improvement.