Customer Success – A win win story

In our pursuit to help startup and SMEs in their digital transformation journey, we often come across with very generic sales problems, and most of the problems are due to lack of basic understanding of customer engagement and pitching the solution or product poorly. In this post we have listed some of the points which we practice to overcome these problems –

Understanding the customer –

When you try to help the customer even before tagging them as customers, You should really understand them. That means you need to study the their environment and how they operate in their business ecosystem, their geographical situations and their pain points. We had our success rate increased multifold just by practicing this. To understand this better let’s get into what it means on the ground. One of our client who is an independent career counselor, a typical sales package looks like “A Promotional Website, Mobile Application and a lot of social marketing” at first glance. On a careful consideration it was realised that only doing this will not help them instead might increase operational overhead, hear us out how and why –

A Promotional website need to be targeted to audience and the place this client of our operates from, the audience are still not tech savvy which means their reach to technology is limited to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram at most and not even to twitter, hence a promotional website is going to be a dead investment for a long time. Same time an app may solve a lot of problem but is costly due to the fee they charge to their customers is very nominal and the profit is not enough to cover the investment. People who know about career counseling will agree that this job is difficult to manage remotely and therefor social marketing through electronic media will attract the leads which will be difficult to convert into sales.

Solving the real problem –

Now once we understood the customer portfolio, it is important to solve the real problem and one should identify it before that. The pain point is, it is not going to be obvious and customer wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact problem. If we rely on customer, almost all the time, all the customers have one single generic problem and that is “Sales not happening or Sales is not increasing as expected” that is it. If you take that problem and try to solve it, you will not succeed because that is never ending pursuit, it is a symptom not a problem. The actual problem may be wrong market segment, non-scalable business model, a generic product or non innovative solution, hence it is important to understand client really have sales not happening is a by product symptom of it.

Keeping the business always in context –

You understood your customers, you identified the problem too, you have a solution just right, however have you consider that make sense for business or not? For example there are all the great equipments and machines to do the farming, you get that to the farmers with subsidised rate all set to work and plow the field, but if the most fertile land and farms have water logging problem all your investment will sink into it and for sure that wouldn’t grow into any kind of corps, what could have been a better solution is to create a sustainable ecosystem of animal husbandry keeping livestock such as cattle, poultry and fish will yield better result and can be utilised in the fertile farms to do farming for double profit and that is what it means to keep the business always in context.

Offering real value –

Work towards the common goals and don’t promise unrealistic non-practical benefits. A website in any forms only has certain goals to achieve, it is not a silver bullet and can not make the business succeed overnight. As we always say “Technology is a business enabler” , it can only enable business to grow and sustain, for example, without proper research on main objective and content of a website,  which is to have engaging content and services to offer. it doesn’t make any sense to throw out a lot of add-ons like SEO, SSL mailbox and other because these doesn’t have any individual value of its own. The point is don’t sell technology in the name of solution. Offer them real solution which adds value to their business and let the technology facilitate and help achieving that.

Train them to utilise it for maximum gain –

Offering technology solution is just not enough. It is important to train the customer to use it. Not always your customers are going to be tech savvy and technology might be only solution in such case it is better to teach them how to use it effectivity. For example which phone would you suggest to a 60 + years of indian customer ? The answer is there is no phone which target this segment specially and this segment have their own challenges i.e touch screen phones doesn’t give them taptic feedback out of the box so they don’t know the action they took happened or not, on the other hand phone which gives taptic feedback i.e the phone with keyboards have really small display and due to their poor eyesight that means by the time they realise who is calling the call would be dropped. In this case the only solution is to teach them enabling taptic feedback present in the touchscreen phone with vibration and key tone and help them to adopt it.

5 Important elements of a successful website

“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

[State of the Union Address January 11 1962]

John F. Kennedy

 

When it comes to designing or planning for a website it is important to plan it carefully, a poorly planned and designed website doesn’t yields the desired result, despite of being important and crucial it is very simple and quick to start. We will share top 5 of the most common and most important element of a successful websites in this post.

Target Audience –

Do you know who are your target audience, this is the single most important factor and everything revolves around it. The logo, Navigation, Color and Shape, The content of your website and everything else depends on the target audience.  Always remember “You can’t please everyone”. It is better to focus only on whom you care most i.e your target audience and your market segment at large.

The Logo –

Logo is the second most important aspect of your website, we can not advocate enough of the importance of it. Just a google search of “Most costly logos” is enough to reveal the worth of these little colorful piece of art. This is created to create unforgettable, lasting impression on your target audience’s mind. It is about what story you want the audience to pursue  without event telling a single word about it. The logo is identity of the brand and if you are the brand of your business, which is in some cases i.e a lawyer or a freelancer e.t.c It is your identity too, so better craft and design a right identity because most of the time “First Impression is the last”.

Navigation –

A directionless navigation is nothing less then a nightmare. Bad navigation design confuses your audience and leave them frustrated to never return back. On the other hand a properly designed navigation is like flight navigation system, which is accurate and guides the user to exact coordinates where he want to land by conscious choice to takes an action which generate lead for business and start an engagement with the user to make him come back for more business every single time.

Colors and Shapes –

The colors used in the website plays a crucial role in the user engagement, use a lot of bright and shiny color and that will reduce the audience’s attention span significantly and make the user leave your website as quickly as possible on the other hand excessive use of dark color and serious tone will leave the user depressed and make your website look dull and boring. It is also important to consider the age group and other UX Design factors before making a choice of colors.

The shapes used in your website also engage the user’s subconscious mind, every shape has a different story and triggers a different sense, which influences the decision making power of the user i.e an oval or circle gives the user an impression that you are smooth and balanced in your approach but may be a bit less on the stability front at the same time square shape tells the user that you are balanced straightforward and sharp at times in your approach. So it is very important to use shapes in website wisely or be ready for otherwise consequences.

Content –

Last but not the least content is the hero of whole story, it posses the power to engage the user in your website and keep them coming back for more and also to drive them away. As discussed in previous point the content has to be very user focused and targeted. Stop writing generic content and wasting time to please everyone and just to be with the tide, i.e if you search for AI and Machine learning or Deep learning you will find tons of useless blogs and post written by so called wannabe data scientists, who fail to address one single point that Machine Learning and Deep Learning are subset of umbrella topic of Artificial Intelligence.

The Basics of On Page SEO

On-page SEO has never been more important than now. Unique content is definitely the most important factor to position your website better in rankings but Missing SEO factors can drags it down more often than not. For example no or minimal use of H tags, Ineffective use of the bold and italics in SEO optimisation. Since the latest Google update on-page SEO has gained lot more attraction. This small article is geared towards making you familiar with on-page SEO in less than 10 min. So let’s jump into the technicalities

Use of keywords

keywords

Keywords must appear in the title and then it must appear in the URL. You have to optimise the keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

 

 

Header tags

tags

Spread of H1, H2 and H3 tags should be nice enough in the article, without the compelling headlines very well researched content might get unnoticed. Keyword must appear in first and in the last sentence of the page. Relevant usage of bold and italics should be there.

 

Internal link

internal-linksThere should be one internal link to a page on your blog/website. Image alt attribute should have the keyword as well if possible. URL should be descriptive which can give the idea about page content.

 

 

Social networks

social-networkGet social. Sharing is caring, have the popular and widely used social network icons for the audience of your post. Post contents to LinkedIn and generate more traffic of intellectual crowd.

 

 

Device agnostic

device-independantPage should render in all devices screen and every popular browser. It should be developed in responsive manner which scales up to any device size easily and smoothly. The current trend is mobile browser so keep that in mind and design your site with “Mobile First” concept.

 

Keep yourself updated

updatesThere are some other measures which should be applied carefully such as quality of links in your page, page loading speed, content length and usage of https. Keep yourself updated with positive and negative impact of google algorithm updates.

That is it, we hope it was simple. Do let us know your thoughts and stay tunes for updates.

Local SEO Utility Or Commodity?

Local search engine optimization is more important than ever in this age of neck-to-neck competition. Most often it seems like a commodity however, depending on the nature of business it can be most beneficial utility. Scope for any business is very wide and practically covers almost all business sectors due to variety of benefits it can bring. In the actual means it’s no longer an add-on, businesses who are serious about their web presence are considering this as mandate and implementing it at the earliest. Here in this article we rest our case by addressing the most asked and pressing query i.e. why do we need local SEO?

 

To show your existence in the top –

ExistenceWe have to tell the customers that we exist and available when they need us. This is the digital revolution era and customers are using very sophisticated hand held devices and wearable gadgets, as a modern generation business we need to publish the important business notification to the subscribers, this has become very important. Who does not want to gain customers confidence by leveraging low cost technical solutions.

 

 

 

 

Are we recognizing the growing mobile searches?Searches

Smart phones are computer with ability to make calls, Mobile based search has increased with several magnitudes, what it says is, mobile has become the preferred search device and customers would like to take its help to locate you, when you are not appearing in the mobile search you are clearly missing some serious gains. When smart phone user searches for product or services Google shows result which are close to the user, Mobile phone GPS makes it possible. This is technology and when you do not take advantage of Local SEO most likely you will miss customers who is very close to your business proximity.

 

 

 

So how to approach it?

Approach iTKey Information about our business like address, offering, service name and important tags in the web are not consistent, managing these effectively is the first step towards being SEO equipped. Not having SEO is as good as not having the presence, you are hiding yourself and keeping distance from the potential customers. This becomes important especially when your competitor leverages feature of local SEO. It becomes fairly easy for them to turn the internet traffic towards their business and eliminate other competitors.

Maintaining the local search engine optimization is not the rocket science provided we follow some guidelines and more to the point, google does automatic listing as your consistency across all the references ages and with every search your business listing improves

 

 

Important steps to consider

  • Name, Address and Phone Important Stepnumber consistency across the digital marketing websites and advertisements.
  • Local reviews for your product and service is must in order to top the chart. This includes google reviews as well.
  • Choose correct categories for your business.
  • Upload relevant pictures.
  • Having an embedded google map to locate your business.

 

 

 

There are lot more on this. This may sound simple; however, this is not as easy as it looks. Professional who have good command over the local search engines functionality and who knows how to make your business top the chart can be real help in improving the ranking of your business. If you need any help about fixing your local SEO remember we are always within reach.