1. Going Directly to the Sale: 

Sometimes when the users do not know your service, they first want to check out your website. You must know how to approach them and not go directly to the sales process. A live agent can be very helpful so you can start a conversation with the person and aim at getting to know the potential customer and his goals. Doing this helps create rapport with potential customers, and you can even get to a point where people come back to your site just so they can talk to one of your live agents.

2. Too Little Visual Content: 

When talking to a human being, gestures and facial expressions help understand the person. When you write a message online, you don’t get those visual cues, so talking to a chatbot is often impersonal and even boring. Think about how you communicate online using text: we normally use some emojis, stickers or GIFs to show a recipient our emotions but what we cannot show are our gestures.

Share videos, images and even presentations wherever possible to convey human and emotions and connect customers to your brand.

 3. Believing that the Chatbot Will Solve All Your Problems:

Conversational Marketing is not just chatbots. It is the way you can connect live agents with your customers in ways that are simple, useful, and effective. Chatbots are great tools for answering FAQs that would otherwise take up expensive agent time, as well as being effective filtering tools to get the most promising interactions in front of your live agents.

Consider this for website chat, text messages, messenger, WhatsApp and other means of communication.

4. Not Updating the System From Time to Time:

Glitches and errors are very common in a chatbot. A successful conversational platform is one which is maintained and updated regularly. It is highly recommended to establish a periodic critique and maintenance schedule to guarantee this optimum level of success.

After you have given the customer a certain amount of essential information, evaluate his response times, analyze cases of misunderstandings, make sure you are able to decipher the queries, even when they are very long or misspelled, and ask the users if they have received a satisfactory answer to their question.

Remember that your interactions via your different media and tools reflect your brand and its values. Give your customers exactly what they need exactly when they need it. To satisfy your visitors, you must know them well, master their language habits, and learn from the interactions that have resulted in a high satisfaction rate. If you continue to enrich your knowledge of your market’s goals, you will notice a definite increase in interactive marketing success.

Your business brand is a collective concept with many forms, including visual, reputational, and emotional. How you present your company will directly affect your success, which is why it is crucial that you focus on creating a cohesive, well-planned brand. Here are a few branding best practices that can help your company identify itself.

Identify Your Target Market

One of the most important efforts in market research is identifying your target market. First, you want to know your customer base and competition. Start by looking at specific characteristics of the demographic you want to reach. For example, determine the age, income, gender, and geographic area of the customer. Then look at the industry as a whole and the structure and finances of the business in the industry. What are consumers buying, and what are they missing? Then you can find your niche and your target audience from there.

Hire a Graphic Designer

Some elements of your brand you can do on your own. For example, you can figure out your mission statement and how to relay what you stand for as a company. However, there are specific elements better left to professionals. A graphic designer is a great place to start. You need someone who can help you create a professional visual brand that stands out and isn’t dated. When working with them on design ideas, be sure to keep information organized using a free PDF editor tool to combine images. You’ll be able to send files back and forth with the designer and make notes, highlight important concepts, and add text to imagery when you want to, without worrying that elements will be lost in lengthy emails.

Communicate Sustainability Efforts

Sustainability is not only important for the environment, but it is also important for brands as well. Consumers expect companies to do their part to communicate and practice sustainability. This means making a statement visible on your website discussing the importance of using sustainable practices and how your company intends to do it. For example, you can discuss your intent to use recycled packaging. Maybe your company pledges to use local resources only. Transparency is key to this part of your brand. Don’t be afraid to share behind the scenes of the production. Because consumers are becoming more conscious of company morality, you can make a name for yourself just by showing how you run your company. 

Focus on Social Media

Social media is a vital element of marketing. It’s one of the best ways to get your brand out to the public and reach your target audience. It is also the best place to establish your visual brand. With the help of your graphic designer, you can create an online look using your logo, brand colors, and tagline. Given the importance of social media, you may want to hire a social media marketing expert. Research shows that the most effective way to reach your market is to post with clear intentions.

Be Accessible

Want to make a name for yourself quickly? Start with the customer service. Be accessible to customers. That means making sure you answer all inquiries quickly and be honest about mishaps.

Branding has plenty of room for innovation. Follow these proven best practices, but don’t be afraid to explore ideas. As long as you make a positive impact, your brand will stay strong.

At present, Google Chrome is one of the most widely used web browsers and it is being used by more than 1 billion people worldwide due to its speed, functionality, display of web pages, user-friendly design, etc. Google chrome extensions or plug-ins are something that makes this browser even more useful especially for marketers and bloggers as it allows them to do a lot of things much faster with digital marketing tools.

However, there are more than 10,000 chrome extensions and the best 30 Google chrome extensions have been assembled in this post.

1. Grammarly

2. Keywords Everywhere

If you don’t want to use Google Adwords every time but would like to know the volume of searches for a particular keyword, then Keywords Everywhere would be the extension to use. Besides Google search, it is compatible with Google trends, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and many others.

3. ScribeFire

ScribeFire is an easy-to-use editor which allows you to make necessary changes and update a blog that you have already published. This Google Chrome extension provides you this option even if your blog published without proofreading.

4. Email Hunter

If you want to find the email address present on a website easily and quickly, then the Email Hunter extension is what you need. This chrome extension is very useful for marketers since it allows them to contact various companies through their blog or website.

5. SEOQuake

SEO Quake is a free plug-in that enables digital marketers to perform SERP analysis, monitor important SEO metrics, SEO audits of webpages, URL comparisons, and other functions. Marketers can use this digital marketing tools to monitor their website.

6. Boomerang for Gmail

Boomerang helps to manage your email marketing campaigns. The most important feature of this extension is that you can send pre-drafted emails at a later date, find out when a subscriber reads an email, and track messages. It will help you to boost Web Sales.

7. LastPass

LastPass is an award-winning password manager that saves passwords for several usernames and allows you to access it securely. This free extension allows to control and administer access to many apps and websites easily.

8. Link Miner

This is the best chrome extension for finding broken links and fixing them quickly and easily. This saves time as you don’t need to click every link to see if the correct web page is displayed. You need only click on the button instead.

9. Buffer

Buffer is a user-friendly platform that allows you to share any post, video, or image on social media sites Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter directly from the website. It allows marketers to manage multiple accounts on various platforms.

10. VidIQ Vision

Vid IQ Vision increases your video marketing potential as it helps to get more views. It displays a complete report helping you to understand the way videos rank and the status of the video in terms of YouTube SEO optimization.

11. ColorZilla

With ColorZilla, you come to know about the color at any point on the browser once you click on the extension. Some of the other features are Eyedropper, Advanced color picker, Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator, and Webpage Color Analyzer.

12. What Font

This great Google chrome extension enables you to find out the font of any website without being a web designer. If you like the font on any webpage and want use the same on your site, this extension can provide the font information.

13. What Runs

What Runs is a Google Chrome extension that provides various information about a particular website. It tells you about the analytics tool, WordPress plugins, fonts, and framework that has been used in a website.

14. Similar Web

The Similar Web extension provides data related to overall website traffic, website ranking, and the source of traffic enabling businesses to measure their web presence and Boost Web Sales.

15. Similar Site

Similar Sites is suitable for digital marketers performing a lot of research. It is similar to YouTube recommendations and it efficiently searches for and filters sites that are in the same line of business you are browsing. You can use this digital marketing tools to find our relevant competitors which can help you boost web sales.

16. Follow.net

Follow.net is a very popular extension that helps to perform competitive analysis on other relevant sites within a few seconds. Clicking on this extension will display the traffic estimates, SEO strategies, user demographics, reverse IPs and other valuable information.

17. Screencastify

Is a Google extension that allows you to record, edit and submit videos from a browser tab, web cam or PC desktop view . Using the editor, one can embed a microphone and a webcam, set the FPS, add a spotlight on the mouse and use the pen tool.

18. Save to Pocket

Save to Pocket is an extension with which you can save a video or an article to view or study later from any other device. It is simple but valuable for digital marketers.

19. Facebook Pixel Helper

This extension is required for posting Facebook advertisements on your website. It tells you about pixels fired, and pixel events and indicates errors. It helps to boost web sales.

20. Awesome Screenshot

With Awesome Screenshot, you can fully or partially capture a website. This excellent plug-in allows you to add comments to a screenshot, take screencast videos and blur sensitive information.

21. WiseStamp

WiseStamp extension enables you to incorporate a visually appealing professional email signature. This allows you to share your work, add links to social networks, promote blog posts, etc.

22. Nimbus

With Nimbus, you can capture screenshots efficiently and quickly to include with descriptions and titles made in your posts. The captured screenshots can be edited, and customized and new designs can also be created.

23. Honey

The extension Honey can be used to provide coupon codes automatically with purchases made while online shopping. The coupon code can be added with just a single click.

24. Spots

Spots is a Google Chrome extension that helps to organize the home page of a website in an efficient and effective manner. It is an excellent tool for web page development on android devices.

25. Word Count Tool

This is a simple yet powerful tool for bloggers which helps to know the word count of specific content on any website. You just need to select the text, right-click and choose the tool.

26. Headlinr

Headlinr is a headline generator tool and it can generate email subject lines, social status updates, and headlines for blog posts and sales copy. You just need to enter a target keyword and this extension will generate a headline automatically.

27. Ever Note Web Clipper

EverNote Web Clipper helps to clip a webpage or part of it quickly or take notes from it. The notes get saved in the EverNote account and can be accessed even when offline.

28. ExpressVPN Chrome Extension

If you require private and secure internet access during critical web transactions, then ExpressVPN serves this purpose. It provides an added layer of protection and the ability to check VPN status quickly.

29. Stay Focused

As the name implies, this tool is a productivity extension that helps you to stay focused on work by restricting distractions in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. You can configure the extension to block or allow entire sites, specific subdomains, specific paths, specific pages, even specific in-page content like videos, games, images and forms.

30. Google Translate

Google Translate is a chrome extension directly translates articles from a website. If you want to read texts in languages other than your default language, you just need to select the text to translate, right click and select the chrome extension.

These chrome extensions are worth trying and if you know any other extension that is useful, don’t forget to share it with us.

Keep learning about industry topics…

To win a sale a product must be at the top of the consumer’s mind at the time of consumption; the consumer needs to be thinking of the product when making his purchasing decision to consider it and then pull the trigger. So, the question for marketers then is, how do you get to be top-of-mind at the right time? The answer is simple, but the execution is not. For products to be, or to rise, to top-of-mind at the time of consumption, products must be (i) recently seen; (ii) the brand must be intimately connected to the need in the consumer’s mind; or (iii) the consumer must have a strong emotional connection to the brand.

Points (i) and (ii) involve marketing strategy and advertising volume and quality, while point (iii) involves creating marketing experiences for audiences. Creating experiences is more than just marketing, but also involves product or service delivery and customer operations, which means a higher level of corporate strategizing and coordination among multiple corporate departments. The definition, creation, and execution of the customer experience is difficult to implement because of its complexity and explains why most companies get it wrong, especially the big ones.

Our new digitized world has warped corporate marketing strategies, growing larger digital branding and advertising budgets at the expense of the digital customer experience, where the focus has been on using technology to reduce expenses; these companies are taking money out of strategy (iii) to reduce overall expenses, but adding some back into strategies (i) and (ii) to compensate. This expense reduction has largely been done by removing the human interaction from the customer experience and replacing them with bots, AI, and self-help tools, at the expense of the customer’s time and service quality. Customers are frustrated with convoluted or non-existent support processes, and companies continue to frustrate their customers because they believe that pricing and better social media are the only ways to compete in today’s world. However, Starbucks would have ceased to exist if that were true; people are willing to purchase a $5 coffee to get the total Starbucks experience, and our new digitized world has not changed that. Exchanging the baristas and comfortable couches for automated kiosks would destroy the experience and the brand.

At WebToq we believe the real value of AI is not to remove the human experience, but to focus and enhance it; to use AI to make the sales and support process faster and more effective via data sharing, processing, and delivery to both the support agent and the customer. Think of how Starbucks uses a mobile app to share their menu and allow people to pre-order their drinks before going into the store, mixing technology with human delivery for a more effective solution; WebToq is busy inventing similar tactics online. The customer experience is the last interaction a customer will have with a brand, and if it involves a human interaction, it will be the most emotional, and thus the most memorable because of both the recency and strength of the memory.

We believe the companies of the future will use focused human interaction as the primary way to differentiate their brand, rather than relying only on marketing. After all, when all other companies have forced their customers to IVR bots and self-help wikis, it’s the company with the warm and personalized delivery that will stand out.

Are you WebToq’ing yet?

22 years after the Dot.Com bust and there are still armies of would-be entrepreneurs looking to build eCommerce businesses by throwing together a catalogue of drop-ship products, electronic shopping carts, and customer review systems, thinking that this lean business model will allow them to compete successfully on price and become digital millionaires. It is actually quite easy nowadays to build an eCommerce business using online templates and plug-and-play modules; however it is exactly because it is easy to do, building these lean-template businesses, that makes it difficult to differentiate, defend, and ultimately make profitable.

It is accepted, albeit controversial dogma in business school that Discount Pricing is not a strategy, but a tactic. Michael Porter, the godfather of contemporary business strategy, made the case that competing solely on price was a tactic that was easily copied, since any business could reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and boost volumes, without being able to build some sort of defendable walls to keep competitors away. These walls take time, effort, and/or capital to build, grow, and reinforce for the business behind the walls to be protected from competition so they can raise prices, and ultimately raise margins.

Strong brands, unique services and service delivery, intellectual property, unique resources, and unique talents are among many ways of adding extra value for the consumer and building defendable walls that make, mark, and show a difference for the business, its services, and its products versus those of competitors’. These value-adds bring in the consumer while the walls make it difficult for competitors to copy and compete with the business. But again, those walls or barriers to competition take money to create and grow, which means higher expenses, which then means higher prices and hopefully higher margins as well.

Apple with its strong brand; Starbucks with its unique service; Microsoft with its patents; and LVMH with its unique talents all command high prices and very high margins. They are highly differentiated businesses with highly defendable competitive positions. Whether traditional or digital, businesses need to find a defendable way to be different from the competition; a way to be able to add extra value to the consumer so they can justify higher margins and higher prices.

Want to know how to build a value-added and defendable digital strategy? Talk to one of our agents.

Are you WebToq’ing yet?

Original story from Advertising Week 360

Consumers are being barraged with advertising and branding messages online, which means businesses must rise above the noise to etch themselves in the minds of consumers to be top-of-mind at the time of consumption or get lost with the crowd. Businesses can execute two strategies to be top-of-mind: high-powered messaging or frequent messaging.

In this article, we will focus on high-powered messaging, although frequent messaging is rather straight forward as businesses engage in frequent, cross-channel advertising to catch the consumer near or at the point of consumption. High-powered experiences, on the other hand, are largely defined by the emotional impact felt by the consumer at the time of the experience, since the strength of memory, and therefore the strength of the attachment to a brand, is explicitly defined by the strength of the emotion felt in the instance of the experience. For an experience to be high-powered, it must be relevant and emotional.

So, how does a business make a digital experience high-powered?

1. Make it relevant. Businesses need to organize their websites based on the problems and demands of their customers, along with the proposed solutions, rather than along meaningless product categories or business departments. Consumers have reached a business because they feel a need or frustration; talk to those frustrations to catalyze the emotions behind them.
2. Add customer stories. Add customer testimonials and cases to your advertisements, websites, and landing pages as much as possible, focusing on short videos that talk to specific issues. You are more likely to connect to a lead if they can empathize with one of your videos.
3. Resolve customer issues quickly and completely. A company’s best chance to create an emotional impact is to resolve a customer’s issue to great satisfaction. Customers already start with an emotion, a negative one, which means the memory is already charged. They are annoyed or frustrated by an issue, and usually do not have great expectations since most companies fail to get this right. By resolving the issue to great satisfaction, you are embedding two emotions into the experience, the original frustration and the eventual satisfaction, and their contrast makes the experience stand out.

The third point is especially important online since most companies force a customer to switch channels if the contact originates online, to the customer’s frustration, forcing them to call in. Businesses should always meet the customer at the point of origination; face-to-face if they visit physically, via the phone if they call in, and virtually if on the website. Chat boxes are helpful in this regard, but we have witnessed the best results when businesses use cross-interactive platforms such as CrozTop to communicate with the customer, which allows instant bonding and resolution via video calling and media sharing.

To become top-of-mind, a brand must deliver high-powered experiences to audiences or messages frequently. Mastering high-powered experiences online are rarely done well, conveying an explicit advantage to those companies that do.

About the author:

Jason Junge is an MIT/Kellogg-educated Business Strategy expert in high-tech that has worked with companies ranging from new startups to Microsoft, to craft and execute successful growth strategies. He is currently CEO of PointerTop, an innovative Remote Sales and Service Software company based in Tempe, AZ.

1. Redesign your website to drive visitor engagement: Keeping the content rich and up to date on your site helps build trust between you and your customers. Customers go and take a look to your website for useful information on whatever market you are in. Updated information also helps build domain authority.
2. Follow up with all visitors via emai, text, calls, etc: Having a multichannel strategy will help you and customers having a more closely communication. Also this help building different types of strategies depending the channel with more possibilities.
3. Upgrade your web tools to make navigation and communication easier: Adding new tools and making it more consumer friendly will increase the possiblity to have clients/potential and don’t lost them in the journey.
4. Put out content via blogs, webinars, and social media posts: Giving the information they are interested in will build loyalty and make them stay keeping them aware of your social media channels.
5. Participate in forums: there are direct and inderect benefits in participating in forums you got to be very careful about it. It takes a considerable amount of discipline and verbal know-how to carry out this activity effectively.
6. Interview influencers: This is a good option but only depends that it maches you strategy and that the influencer aligns with your brand and values.
7. Create videos and add them throughout your website: Videos are one of the best content ideas, they are easy to digest and a more catching way present how-to’s, promote customer testimonials, live-stream events and deliver viral (entertaining) content.

How Local Businesses are Thriving Online During Pandemic

Local businesses have been hit especially hard by the commercial restrictions imposed on them by governments in the US, as well as by a general slowdown in commercial activity as people hunker down at home from fear of contagion. Staying afloat has been difficult for these businesses, and yet some have managed to thrive by going online and developing a strong digital strategy, while reducing brick-and-mortar-related expenses. Following are five common themes we have witnessed from businesses in general, and our clients specifically, that have been of great benefit to them as they reinforce their digital presence.

Having a well established inventory

First is creating an inventory of a company’s products and services to determine which ones are best sold offline and which ones online. Physical locations versus ecommerce stores have their strengths and weaknesses that are better suited for selling certain products and services versus others, and dividing inventory according to those strengths and weaknesses will yield more focused marketing campaigns and processes for better effectiveness.

Combined customer service

The second theme we have witnessed is that small businesses are better able to outmaneuver big box stores in synchronizing their offline processes with their online ones. Stores can stand out if they offer customers the ability to browse online and then pick-up in-store; buy online and return and exchange in store; or buy online and service offline, for example. Having their ecommerce warehouses and/or staff co-located with their stores makes it easier to have synchronized inventories, purchasing processes, and post-purchase service.

Strong service-based digital experience

The third theme is creating a strong service-based digital experience that stands out from the competition. Big companies tend to make it difficult for customers to get access to customer service as a way of saving on labor costs by adding virtual receptionists and chatbots without clearly defined exits, and these tend to frustrate customers since the implied message is that the customer’s time, energy, and satisfaction is not important. Small companies tend to have more productive salesforces and can use that as a source of competitive advantage by maintaining high levels of customer service across the board. Having clearly defined direct-dial phone numbers throughout your website; consistently and expertly manned chat boxes; and adding PointerTop’s own cross-interactive service platform CrozTop will allow your company to extend your customer service to your online presence and stand out from the competition.

We have an auto dealership customer whose showrooms were closed for several months due to local pandemic restrictions. The dealership changed strategies by focusing their website and digital marketing strategies on (i) sales of high-margin accessories, while (ii) using CrozTop to visually walk web visitors through their showroom to show off their inventory and book test drives in advance of their reopening. The dealer was able to generate enough cashflow to survive the closings as well as ensure an explosive reopening to get them back on track.

Written by: Jason Junge, CEO of PointerTop 

Original story from North Phoenix Family