It’s almost Memorial Day. This is a solemn holiday, and we should all stop, reflect on the sacrifices made by our military, and say “Thank you.” To our brave men and women in uniform: Dukky salutes you!
That said, it’s also become a tradition to get together with friends and family and celebrate the holiday around a hot, smoky grill. While we put together our own barbecue plans this week, it occurred to us that marketing is a lot like planning a cookout. Here’s why: Continue reading
Lead generation is not new to business strategies nor is it the product of new technological advances. It’s a tried and true strategy from centuries ago for securing new business. Whether driven through a handshake, referral, newspaper ad, tv ad, direct mail piece, email, or phone call. Annually businesses, organizations and institutions have focused strategies and resources to generate leads to drive new business into their stores or websites. Why? Because it works.
In 2012, where have you been focusing business resources to generate leads and how are you managing incoming leads so far? It’s time to pump the breaks, evaluate how things are going and make some tweaks to do better this second half so you can capitalize on your new leads. Continue reading
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” – John Wanamaker
You’ve no doubt heard that quote before – it’s pretty famous. But does it still ring true for you today? If so, it’s time to step into 21st century. Marketing analytics provide oh-so-much more than just cool graphs to spruce up your next presentation. They are the key to finding out exactly how well your marketing campaigns are performing and improving them. Continue reading
We are so fortunate to be living in the 21st century. Sure, we’re still waiting on the flying cars that “The Jetsons” promised us, but we’re blessed to have technology that makes our lives and jobs easier in so many different ways.
With that in mind, we’d like to share our top 10 favorite web apps and tools. We COULD live without them…but why would we want to? We hope you find something new and useful on this list: Continue reading
When it comes to customer relations the rules are simple. As Dukky continues to grow we’re constantly looking for policies to make the user experience for our clients the best it can be. For inspiration on the simple truths of dealing with customers and keeping them happy I turn to guru of relating to people – my dog.
Top 5 Reasons My Dog Would Rock at Customer Service:
A friendly reminder: Mother’s Day is this Sunday! It’s time to take your mother out for dinner and buy her something nice, but more importantly, it’s time to reflect on all of the things she’s done for you and taught you over the years.
With that in mind, here are five important lessons about marketing we learned from our mothers:
Always Be Willing to Listen
It doesn’t matter what the problem is. Your mom will always listen to you. As marketers, we need to cultivate that same openness to listening to and learning from our customers. Ask questions. Find out what they’re interested in. With this information, you can target your promotions more effectively, increasing response rate and customer loyalty.
Be polite.
Left to their own devices, children are naturally rude little creatures. It’s not that they intend to be, of course; it’s that tact and politeness are not innate. They must be taught, and that’s where Mom comes in.
Marketers, too, sometimes have a tendency to be inconsiderate, especially as we move into the social media arena. Lessons your mom taught you when you were little will serve you well here: Don’t interrupt. Don’t talk over people. Don’t make it all about you.
Mom makes the rules.
When I was little, Mom was the ultimate authority. She may have delegated some “enforcement duties” to Dad, but she made the rules.
In most households, she also makes the majority of the purchasing decisions. According to DM News, there are 75 million moms in America making 85% of household purchasing decisions. Ignore them and their concerns at your peril.
Don’t forget to write home.
When I left home for summer camp, the last thing Mom said to me was “Don’t forget to write!” Never mind that camp was her idea, or that I’d only be gone for a week and a half. Later, after I graduated high school, I went on a month-long trip without my family. You’d better believe she loaded me down with phone cards!
Don’t be so focused on getting new customers that you forget about the ones you already have. When it comes to personal relationships, people appreciate it when you stay in touch. The same holds true in marketing- as long as your marketing communications are relevant to your customers’ needs and timed appropriately, they’ll appreciate hearing from you!
Check Your Work
Mom wouldn’t let me stop working on my homework until I’d checked and double-checked my answers. She always held me accountable for doing my best.
Likewise, it’s important to keep your marketing accountable. It’s not enough to simply give every campaign you run an “A for effort.” As much as possible, you must measure the success of all of your efforts in every channel. Finding out what works and what doesn’t is the only way to end up with a successful marketing strategy.
Thanks, Mom!
Photo Credit: 
Some rights reserved by Etsy Ketsy
Yesterday, we looked at the reasons why you should use landing pages instead of directing your traffic to your company website. Today, let’s take a look at the ”how,” with some easy, actionable tips that will help you leverage your landing pages to increase sales.
‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple…
Your landing page should have one goal, and one goal only: convince your visitors to convert. So, keep it simple. Anything, whether it’s content or visual elements, that distracts your visitor from that goal needs to be pruned ruthlessly.
To create a tightly focused landing page, get the messaging nailed down first. Remember, more words are not necessarily better. Create a simple, persuasive call to action that makes it crystal clear why your customer should redeem your offer. Everything else on the landing page should support the call to action, not detract from it.
Keep It Consistent
Establishing trust is a crucial first step toward convincing customers to follow through and act on your offer. Consistent design and messaging will reassure them that they are at the at right place and that you aren’t trying to trick them.
That means that the text in the ad that brought your visitors to the landing page needs to be reflected on the landing page itself. The headline, call to action and offer should all match. If it doesn’t, warning bells go off and conversions go down.
The design of the page and the imagery used should also be consistent with the original ad, and it should remain consistent across each page of the microsite.
Design for Conversion
Your landing page design should support your call to action. People are visual creatures- include attractive images that will inspire them to redeem your offer, like that mouthwatering burger in the Wendy’s landing page above.
Also, use visual elements to direct your visitor’s eyes to your call to action. As with text, less is more here. Use blank space to surround and set off the elements you want your visitor to focus on, as Stine does below. Don’t let the page become cluttered or busy.
Make it Shareable
Finally, use social sharing buttons to encourage your customers to share your offer with their friends and families. This exponentially increases the amount of exposure your campaign will receive, so you get more leads, more new customers and ultimately, more sales!
Daunted by the prospect of building landing pages from scratch? Dukky makes it easy with customizable templates that incorporate best practices and include social sharing, no coding needed. Plus, our killer analytics give you valuable information about your customers and your campaigns’ performance in a gorgeous, easy-to-understand package.
Are you directing your website visitors to your company home page instead of a landing page? You might want to reconsider your strategy.
Sure, your company probably invested a significant amount of time, energy and money into designing and developing that home page, and it’s only natural to want to send all of your traffic there.
Here are 5 reasons why you should resist that impulse:
Landing Pages Improve the Customer Experience
Even the most well-designed home page inevitably suffers from “jack of all trades, master of none” syndrome. There’s general information about your company and links to other pages on the site, and your customer may or may not want to sift through all of it to find information about the offer or ad that brought them there.
Microsites, on the other hand, can be targeted to specific subsets of your customer base. They also align with the campaign that brought the customer to your page in the first place, so they are always presented with a consistent message. Think of it as putting a welcome mat out for your customers.
Be a good host- Don’t just dump your visitors on your website and expect them to find what they’re looking for. Use a landing page to take them by the hand and lead them to the information they need to convert!
Landing Pages Help You Measure Performance
The days of marketing by instinct are long since over. Good riddance and rest in peace! Now, the more data you have about how your campaigns are performing, the better.
Landing pages are a key tool to help you capture that data and track the performance of your campaigns. Use landing pages to find out which offers appeal to your customers the most, so you can give them more of what they want and less of what they don’t.
Landing Pages Let you Get to Know Your Customers
The conversion form also provides you with an opportunity to get to know your customers better. Simply by asking the right questions, you can get valuable demographic information about them and learn more about their needs. Get the information you need to market to them effectively.
Landing Pages Are Dynamic
Creating a new landing page is much easier than redesigning your entire website. So, when you use landing pages, it’s a snap to change the information your visitors are presented with depending on the circumstances.
More Conversions
Landing pages provide a better experience for your customer. They also provide marketers with more data and more flexibility to act on that data. You don’t have to be a math wiz to see what that adds up to: more conversions, more leads and more business for you!
At this point, I can almost hear the collective groan issuing from the throats of overworked, overtaxed marketers everywhere: “We don’t have time!” We understand. We’re busy, too. That’s why Dukky offers support, training and a simple upload manager to make it easy to create your microsite, plus the ability to easily track the data you capture and viral peer sharing to supercharge your campaigns. Best of all, no CSS or coding is needed to launch your campaign.
Now that you understand why you should be using landing pages, tune in tomorrow to see how to leverage them to increase your sales!
So, you have a business and you’ve gotten your budding empire signed up for a Twitter account and a Facebook page (and perhaps a Google+ Business profile in the future too?). Go you! You’re part of the social media revolution. Cake and champagne for everyone!
Fast forward a few months and you may find yourself asking what’s this actually doing for me? What’s the value of social media? How can I get a ROI out of it? It’s a popular question on a lot of professional minds these days, especially in the case of B2B marketing. “Ok,” you say, “I got on board this train, where’s it taking me?”
Ensuring your business has a presence in the virtual world is an essential part of any successful marketing plan. With that said, it’s easy to get lost in social media. Between looking up relevant industry articles to load up the Tweetdeck and responding to comments on your Facebook page you can start to feel like you’re spending a lot of valuable time and resources keeping up a presence that isn’t necessarily turning into dollars.
Or is it?
I like to think of social media as a networking tool. I know, that sounds rather obvious but if you take a look you’ll see a lot of businesses aren’t utilizing it the way they should. Effective networking leads to sales, especially in the B2B market. Social media can be a great B2B sales tool, particularly Twitter, you just have to change the way you approach networking and sales.
Ever see a business you’d like to pitch your product or service to but had no inside connection? As any salesperson worth their salt will tell you, pitching to someone you’ve built a relationship with is easier, and usually much more successful, than cold calling. You just need a way to get a foot in the door, to get in their good graces, to endear yourself to them, and then the sale will follow. That’s how it happened in the brick and mortar days of sales, right? Well, Twitter can be the tool that gets those lines of communications flowing. The key is to pace yourself and to not be…..sales-y.
It’s important to remember that there are just as many spammers and cold tweeting annoyances out there as there are telemarketers. No one wants to talk with them. So sending a tweet to a new business you’d like to sell yourself to 5 minutes after you start following them isn’t going to hack it. You’ll be written off. Lines of communication will go cold.
Twitter isn’t about broadcasting, although a lot of people seem to think otherwise. It’s about listening. It’s about conversations. It’s about building a relationship. Take your time. See what sort of things they tweet. Retweet the ones that are pertinent to your business and add a short encouraging message in front of it. For example, “Talk about a dog day afternoon! RT @ChicDesigns It’s bring your dog to work day at the office!” Continue reading
Welcome to the August 10th edition of “What We’re Reading”, a weekly series where we report on stories that get our marketing, social media and workaholic brainwaves going. What’s on this week’s docket of must reads? Well, small business owners can be confusing, cubicles suck, an office should be like a dinner party and the Twitter world rallies to help clean up jolly old London. So grab that morning coffee and read on!
Apparently an overwhelming majority of small business owners in the U.S. don’t think social media is vital to their marketing. According to a study by small business insurance provider Hiscox, many SMB owners say they don’t see the value in being active on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Oddly though, the same group of business owners polled said they relied heavily on word of mouth marketing. Um, what’s this? What’s the word we’re looking for here? Oh yeah, conundrum. Read the fully confusing stats here.
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It’s infographic time! And who doesn’t love infographics? Today’s design covers the rise of the mobile workforce. Team Dukky is all too aware (and we’re sure you are too) that the days of the 9 to 5 job is over and working from a mobile device is taking a greater hold. Who needs a cubicle when you have an iPad and a smartphone, am I right? Check out the stats compiled by Cisco here.
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I don’t know about you, but sometimes a blog post comes along and makes you take a moment to lean back in your chair and say “yes”. That’s what I did when I read this particularly refreshing post by Amy Taylor on the Brains on Fire blog. In it, she compares a dinner party to the workplace and asks us all to take a moment and remember that real life happens offline. Would you attend a dinner party thrown by your company? Something to ponder.
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We got to hand it to the good people of London. They’ve dealt with a fair amount of terror and craziness the last few days. But as we’ve continued to see in the wake of social revolutions in the Middle East, natural disasters the world over and now on the streets of London, people are using social media for good. Using Twitter to organize their movements, the Britons came out in droves with brooms, bags, gloves and smiles to show the shop keepers and home owners that were looted that the city has not forgotten them. So let’s hear it for the socially minded, digitally connected good people of old London town. Say it with me – hip, hip, hooray! Read some of the inspiring tweets here.
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