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Brand Reputation: How to Protect Your No. 1 Asset

Posted: 31 Dec 2019 09:00 AM PST

According to research, 45% of business owners aren't happy with their online presence. Unfortunately, most of those who feel this way don't know how to deal with the fallout from a public customer dispute or the actions of a disgruntled employee.

Your brand is who you are in the eyes of consumers. It's your biggest asset, and the most intangible one when it comes to how it's viewed. If you don't protect your reputation and brand image, your social proof, influence and capital in the marketplace suffer. 

As you go about the task of developing social proof as a business strategy, remember that social media is not without its barbs, which we'll discuss in more depth below. If you're not being cautious, a simple phishing hack can ruin your reputation in minutes and take months to recover from.

 Up to 97% of businesses are located via an online search, and 90% of people surveyed say they're influenced by customer reviews and word of mouth, no matter if they're positive or negative.

How hard is your online reputation working for you?

Reputation management in a nutshell

The business trends of 2019 may come and go, but what gets posted online about your company could haunt you forever. This is why you need to follow reputation management best practices and take proactive steps to present the best public face possible.

Brand reputation management involves engaging with the public in a positive manner, deleting false or inaccurate information, and tackling negative reviews or comments head-on in a way that promotes a win-win interaction. It involves transparency, authentic interactions and a certain amount of retroactive PR.

The ABCs of protecting your brand

Most of us are aware by now that anything we say or do could end up online. There are plenty of examples of hot mic mishaps, unfortunate holiday work parties captured on video, and people who just like to sow discord for fun or payback.

Aside from never attending a public event or leaving your office, there are some practical ways that you can control public perceptions and make yourself look good.

Keep your employees and associates happy

A major source of online negativity is disgruntled employees, vendors, and even competitors who want to torpedo your reputation. This can be avoided by conducting business honestly and with as much transparency and integrity as possible.

It also helps to keep your team and business associates happy.

Employee satisfaction is part and parcel of branding, and it should be part of your overall business strategy. Some suggestions include:

  • Initiating an employee satisfaction program
  • Creating a feedback culture that helps staff feel involved and engaged in the company's success
  • Developing a program for volunteerism or offering matching donations for causes that are important to team members
  • Picking a cause to support and getting the whole team involved

Google your business at least once a week

When was the last time you googled your business? The simple act of typing your company or professional name into a search bar once a week can uncover all kinds of things you didn't know.

When you browse the internet through the eyes of a customer, you may find online reviews that you didn't know about, someone gossiping about your business on social media, and a whole host of other public commentaries that pop up whenever someone mentions you or your business by name. 

If you can see bad reviews when you search for your business on Bing, Yahoo Search, or Google, so can potential customers. The good news is you don't have to let a negative comment sit there and ruin your reputation. Make it a point to monitor and take control of your online reviews in an organized daily process. 

Note the location and date of any bad or inaccurate information and delete whatever you can. If you aren't able to remove the information yourself, talk to the site owner to see about having it removed or allowing a rebuttal. Those that can't be removed can be dropped to page two search status by generating SEO optimized, positive content to replace it.

The only time you shouldn't delete negative mentions is when they are legitimate reviews or complaints from actual customers. These should be addressed publicly, quickly and with a satisfactory outcome as the goal.

Generate your own good press

Outside of customer reviews and comments, most of what is known about you online is coming directly from you. Heck, you can even control reviews and comments to some extent by engaging online and staying active in the forums. You can also leverage your online presence by using your social media accounts to post behind-the-scenes glimpses of your team in action, feel-good photos of your happy customers, and actively soliciting positive reviews or testimonials.

Generate evergreen content that ties your brand journey to your buyer's journey and address negative reviews or complaints publicly as soon as they come to your attention. Forty percent of consumers report having positive feelings about a company that shows concern for customer satisfaction and a willingness to take responsibility to right a wrong.

Monitor your digital footprint

In order to control brand perceptions, you should keep an eye on key metrics for abrupt changes that could be tied back to negative publicity. Your Google and admin dashboards for hosting show traffic spikes and help you analyze upward or downward trends.

Since timeliness is an issue, there are tools that you can use to get real-time alerts whenever people are talking about you online.

Protect your privacy and networks

Nothing can sink a brand faster than negative press, especially when it involves a security breach that puts customer data at risk. You can prevent network infiltration by educating employees on security to reduce incidents of human error. While a virtual private network is one of the first recommendations security experts make, this technology is not without its share of scams. Some of the best ways to protect yourself include:

  • Using secure hosting platforms that offer encryption and leak protection
  • Limiting access through strong encryption and access controls
  • Keeping all devices, software and networks up to date
  • Installing a VPN on all networks and devices

Gather social proof

Consumers are more likely to listen to recommendations or warnings about products and services from friends than they are to believe paid spokespersons or ads. This is called social proof, and it is important to build social proof for your brand or company in order to build trust. 

Word of mouth advertising is very compelling, and it's usually free. You should be gathering and nurturing advocates of your brand by engaging a trusted influencer with a large following, deliver the best service, and encouraging social likes, comments and shares.

Remember to practice social media safety when engaging with these platforms. Unscrupulous actors use comments and info from profiles to launch phishing exploits and spread misinformation.

Design with user experience in mind

Your website is often the first interaction you have with your audience. Make sure that it's designed to put user experience (UX) and security first. This not only draws more visitors to your page, but it also keeps them there longer and makes a return trip more likely. Additionally, it helps elevate your ranking in the SERPs.

Your layout should be clean and easy to navigate, your website should contain useful, relevant content and links, and the checkout process should be secure, fast and hassle-free. Choose a reliable hosting service with a high uptime percentage, and use a content delivery network to improve speed and performance.

Get personal with your prospects

In the age of AI and other machine-learning technologies, human-to-human (H2H) interaction is getting lost. Employ advanced tech to streamline core functioning as it frees up your staff to focus on providing personalized service and addressing customer pain points.

This can be as simple as writing a personal email offering special discounts, starting a customer loyalty program or just sending out cards for holidays or customer birthday greetings.

Final thoughts

It only takes one bad interaction to tarnish your brand. With so much online competition and so many platforms available, trying to clean up misinformation or negative reviews could become a full-time job.

You could make this job easier by practicing proactive interaction, staying safe from VPN and other scams, and hiring a professional reputation management firm to monitor your brand presence.

Trends That Will Shape Market Segmentation in 2020

Posted: 31 Dec 2019 08:00 AM PST

Segmentation has been around since the early days of marketing. One size doesn't fit all has become the indisputable mantra of brand communication. Marketers have been racking their brains to identify the best way to categorize their audiences – and while more options bring more complexity, going the extra mile certainly pays off. 

Companies across industries increasingly rely on highly personalized communication and ultra-specific targeting. And they have good reason to, as email marketers have found a 760% revenue increase in campaigns that were segmented. So, it's only right to ask yourself, "Have I reached my segmentation potential yet?"

Even those who are true innovators at heart need to see how dynamically market segmentation changes. As we venture further into the future, there are constantly new factors at play, be it disruptive technologies, big data or the ever-growing consumer demands. Learning how to build your segmentation strategy around these factors is what defines the leaders of tomorrow – while the others are left behind. 

Here are the top five market segmentation trends for 2020 that will help your business stay ahead of the curve.

1. New ways to collect and process data

Data is the oil of our time, and that's even truer with data on consumers and client preferences, which is considered critical or important by 94% of companies. New capabilities, such as chatbots, forms, messengers or website actions bring more inputs and thus more data altogether. As companies race to extract as much valuable information as they can, the ways to go about it change radically.

In the future, companies are likely to focus on the untapped potential of UTM parameters, the simple tags added to a URL link which allows for powerful tracking. Not only can these be leveraged to understand where a lead is directed from, but they can also be built into the customer profile. With a simple script on your website, you can identify the visitor and once they fill out a form, they can be associated with their UTM parameters, allowing salespeople to see how exactly this person landed and provide a more personalized experience.

Over the next year, we will also see companies reaping the benefits of cookies well beyond first-party data. Companies will continue sealing partnerships to share anonymized second-party data, but we are likely to see a flourishing of third-party inputs. When visiting an unrelated website, you can connect the customer's activity there to your offer. For example, by using platforms like Salesforce Audience Studio, you can track a person that showed interest in traveling and use this information to offer them travel insurance.

Privacy regulations, such as GDPR, will maintain its importance. The right to erasure – aka the "right to be forgotten" applied in EU countries is one of the rules worthy of particular attention. It claims that customer data can't be stored if there's no legitimate reason for it. This means that while companies may be sitting on a gold mine of data, if they aren't using it to run campaigns, they might need to delete it after some time to comply with the law. Making sure to navigate such regulations without suffering hits into their valuable databases will be a priority.

Such complexities will bring additional focus on data processing and management strategies. Automation will play a key role in maintaining databases, but as forward-looking companies realize the importance of data, we will see new monitoring systems in place, including those complementing automation with human check-ups. For example, when triggering the deletion of certain customer data given certain conditions are met, the automation can be set up to deliver reports that can be checked before the action is carried out.

2. Refined segments bring customer behavior to the forefront

With the boom of powerful platforms, marketers can track customer data across different channels and better understand the behavior of their audience. For example, just by tracking mentions of your company on social media, you can enhance customer records and use the information to create very specific campaigns for high engagers.

Smart insights coming from different inputs will be further leveraged for event-driven marketing: real-time, one-on-one campaigns that deliver content relevant for the lead in the exact moment of their buying journey. Behavioral data will also present a greater opportunity for lead scoring. With each triggered action, you can not only send emails but also set up a system of internal notifications based on the customer profile that guides you towards treating them with different degrees of priority.

On the other hand, something we are likely to be seeing less is the "preference center" feature in newsletters. Letting people manage their opt-ins didn't prove to be very effective and overall received little engagement. Considering how complex this setup can be – both for the technical side of the process and deciding what the opt-ins should be – we will see preference centers further fading away.

3. Hyper-personalization on the rise

Personalization has been a trending topic in marketing for a long time – and yet, it's largely misunderstood. You may feel like you're doing personalization when using Dear <First Name>, but that's not the case. Smart marketers know that this doesn't actually matter much – it's all about giving content relevant to customers' interests. 

That said, personalization can mean different things. Let's take a look at the example of email marketing, the crowned king of online marketing. One of the approaches companies take is a behavioral driven one, with specific messaging based on a lead's past activity. These can be short and sweet newsletters with the primary aim of staying on top of leads' minds over time. 

In this respect, companies will be abandoning the idea of excessive marketing pressure. While you shouldn't be sending out spam messages, if the messages give enough value to the lead, it will succeed. According to a MarketingSherpa survey, 91% of Americans want to receive promotional emails. But as there's no magic number that tells you how many emails you should be sending, you might need to test it out to find your sweet spot. 

Another increasingly popular approach to email personalization is the content-driven focus. Companies design email templates with columns and fields that are populated with personalized content based on a unique customer profile, such as product launches, seasonal offers, updates and recommendations. For example, car owners can get maintenance reminders and discounts on accessories that are specific to their vehicle. By leveraging machine learning to optimize the content over time, the recommendations become highly accurate.

4. Expanding platforms vs. new lines of thinking

The sheer volume of data is increasing constantly. Companies use dozens of apps for data collection, which often results in a very fragmented IT landscape. In such cases, there's a need to integrate various stand-alone databases, which is both a challenge and an opportunity.

Some organizations aim for CDP (customer data platforms). While various providers offer a comprehensive 360° view with unified customer profiles, there's still a lot of IT effort needed to carry out the segmentation. You might need to integrate data using rules which you need to define. Such expensive, time-consuming, and laborious tasks mean that while CDP is considered the Valhalla of data, it still requires data-savvy people to do the heavy lifting.

Another challenge of CDP platforms is customer mapping. For example, if you already have a robust consumer profile and a form gets filled out with an email address of that person, there's no certain way to verify it's really them. It could easily be someone who is also using their email or someone who just misspelled their own address – so getting one flawed piece of information could completely discredit the entire profile that you have been building.

That's why an alternative has emerged. Some companies are realizing that the idea of creating a "unique customer record" is simply unattainable. Instead, they focus on the things they actually can do. CDP certainly has a lot of potential, but it may not be the golden bullet – and it was this precise idea that prompted a new line of thinking that we are likely to see more in the future.

After all, you may not always be able to match customer data to a specific individual. Relations between customers and brands become more ephemeral: temporary, short, and loose. Marketers that realize that they don't need the full picture to do effective marketing may be able to carry out more flexible campaigns without the complexities of a CDP.

5. Segmentation in the hands of marketers

In the future, marketers will also be looking at how to utilize the data they have in the most effective ways. It's common that companies have valuable information in their CRM and separately from other important inputs such as purchase histories. Learning how to connect these to get the full picture will continue to present a major advantage.

In spite of the advanced business intelligence (BI) tools on the market, making insights actionable for marketers remains a challenge. The tools are often extremely complex and require solid knowledge – marketers need to create manual exports and transfer the data, while matching data files together. Added to that, writing sequels (SQL) in itself is painstaking because of the need to constantly double-check and de-bug when necessary. But that's only if you know how to write SQL in the first place – if not, you will create a lot of communication overhead with someone who does. 

Simplifying these processes will be the key to future success. There are already a few solutions emerging, including powerful add-ons or internal data warehouses. The latter work with "marketing partitions" that allow BI specialists to analyze the data and pass the relevant datasets on to marketing automation to be consumed for campaigns. Despite the hard IT work, this empowers marketers to make smarter choices. Various solutions on the market show that companies can access intuitive segmentation features that bring segmentation back in the hands of marketers.

Over the next year, we will see new exciting concepts shaking up the ways marketers approach segmentation but don't just stick to passive observation. By looking at how to incorporate these trends into your own operations, you can ensure that your marketers are well equipped to deliver strategies worthy of the upcoming decade.

How to Ace Your Next Investor Briefing

Posted: 31 Dec 2019 05:00 AM PST

For small businesses, there are always a ton of ways to catch the attention of investors. From that chance encounter at a business dinner party to a well-timed cold call or email, there's no shortage of ways that entrepreneurs can use to secure that critical first meeting.

Still, getting your foot in the door represents only one half of the equation. It is equally important to sell your business to potential investors and actually get them to commit capital, which can be quite challenging without a comprehensive investor briefing. An investor briefing is an important event that guides your first interaction with a potential investor. Depending on the business, an investor briefing might come either in the form of a clear and compelling write-up that sells the strengths and values of the business or as a visual presentation with key points designed to make a lasting first impression.

However you chose to do it, an investor briefing should play an important role during your first official interaction with an investor, especially if you're wooing a private investor. So, here are a few ways to help you craft an awe-inspiring investor briefing that will get you closer to an investment deal.

1. Perfect the art of the presentation

Despite how simple it may seem to come up with a persuasive presentation, packaging your investor briefing into an attention-grabbing presentation can be quite a challenge. Unlike banks and other institutional investors that often go for financial statements and business plans when making lending decisions, private investors will be more interested in things like your vision, why your particular product or service is a good fit for their portfolio, and other personal elements that can only be articulated within a presentation.

That's why it is crucial to get your first investor presentation right. For starters, customize your presentation for individual investors, keeping in mind that no two investors are the same. Copying and pasting presentations often result in boring, non-inspiring presentations and are among the leading reasons why investors fail to bite, even with a promising product and business idea.

Other things to look at here include careful use of live demonstrations and visual aids, limiting presentations to a maximum of 30 minutes, and making sure your presentation stays relevant to the content your investor would want to hear. You'll further want to hone your communication abilities so your presentation comes out as organized and clear as possible.  

2. Be clear and concise when it comes to expected ROI and terms of engagement

You should also use your investor briefing to outline the basic structure of a future business relationship between your business and the investor, in case they come on board. In addition to setting the foundation for any future business relationship, this engagement proposal should incentivize the investor and set expectations for both the investor and your business before drafting any final, binding agreement.

You should specifically make it clear to investors how you intend to cater to their interests within your organization. Things like voting rights, patent and business registration rights, how your board – if present – is constituted, liquidation preferences, and other elements of control will be crucial for the investor, especially considering how easy it can be to legally mount hostile takeovers in many states. According to New York state legislation, for instance, a shareholder with at least 20% of outstanding shares can petition for corporate dissolution, effectively closing down the company. For investors, this is a significant consideration as it critically affects their bottom lines.

In addition to the terms of engagement, it is important to show investors how your business will become profitable and how they'll get their money's worth by investing in you. To this end, include in your investor briefing details of how you plan on using your investors' money, detailing estimates that will go into salaries, marketing, and other top-level expenses. Remember to also include financial projections that illustrate your best and worst-case scenarios, including your anticipated break-even point.  

3. Highlight the uniqueness of your business model

In a business world where most startup industries are heavily saturated, a unique business model offers the best way to stand out from the crowd. Investors don't want to invest in another ordinary or "me too" startup whose only unique offering is lower pricing or some wacky discounts. Your business model must look and feel fresh, and your investor briefing should clearly illustrate this unique element. 

There're two ways you could model your business idea into a unique offering, even if your product or service has been in the market for years. The first involves finding a unique channel to get into the market – or a go-to-market strategy, which on its own, could see your business thrive in unchartered territory with pools of potential customers. The second follows a successful go-to-market strategy and involves establishing your business to take advantage of these unique channels, making sure you saturate the market and lockout potential competitors.

So, evidently, being unique doesn't necessarily mean being the first to do something, but being the first to get it right. By showing investors how your go-to-market strategy is both unique and scalable, you'll be delivering an investor briefing that's built for success.

4. Infuse the human element into statistical data

It's easy and often quite tempting to get fancy with numbers when trying to sell your business to potential investors. However, putting too much emphasis on the numbers and not enough on the emotional aspect of your business strategy can make your investor briefing uninspiring and unlikely to capture the attention of seasoned investors.

Metrics, such as conversion rates and customer demographics, will not mean anything to investors if they don't see an emotional element that explains why customers would want to buy into your brand.

Take for instance your conversion rate, a key metric used to analyze the number of buying customers. On paper, a conversion rate between 3% and 4% is considered acceptable for most industries. However, without breaking down your customers' actual problems and buying behaviors, you'd be hard placed to convince your investors your conversion funnel is built for success in the future. In fact, one study found that businesses that identified problems with user experience, one of the many problems that customers face, saw an increase in conversion rates of up to 75% after making adjustments, which shows just how much you stand to gain by aligning statistical data with practical applications.

By identifying these problems and showing investors how you're equipped to solve them, you stand a chance of creating a convincing business case that's likely to get funded.   

5. Show how individual investors will add value

When making that first pitch, it is important to constantly remind the investor that they are a value-addition to your business, and not just in terms of the money. Private investors, particularly venture capital and private equity investors, usually bring a ton of entrepreneurial experience to the table, with resumes that often mimic those of successful serial entrepreneurs.

Most private investors will usually sit on multiple boards as a way to offer their expertise while keeping track of their investments. From this vantage point, they carry a unique understanding of the inner workings of management and board relations, which you can use to navigate through the complexities of investor-management relations. Investors can also come quite handy with things like future rounds of fundraising and recruiting, thanks to accumulated experience within their lines of work.   

So, when preparing your investor briefing, remember to include discussion points that target specific opportunities for value addition that you believe the investor can help with. For instance, if you feel a particular investor will be of value to your recruitment efforts, include discussion points that mention a specific challenge you've had with talent recruitment that, when solved, will have a significant impact on your bottom line. Of course, this requires your core business case is a solid one and you've done exhaustive research into your investor's background.

Once you've strengthened the core of your investor briefing with relevant content, remember to bring it all in with charisma and authority, making sure to follow up with the potential investor after the briefing.

If you don't get an immediate response after the briefing, check in with them after a couple of days, taking care not to badger them with incessant calls and emails every other day.
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