S3 Blog

Customer engagement is a term that is given when customers engage with a brand or company and it is based on interactions that are repeated and enhance the psychological, physical and emotional investment on that brand or company. When a business gets it right customer engagement can work to create lifelong customers for that business and during a recession customer engagement is essential. Many companies traditionally believed that customer engagement stemmed from television-based advertising, but now thanks to the recession and the emergence of Web 2.0 technology companies are now seeing the usefulness of the Internet in increasing customer engagement.

For customer engagement to continue and survive the recession it is important that businesses realise they need to find cost-effective ways of engaging their customers with their brand. There are several different ways in which this can be done with massive success such as:

- Blogging - today most businesses which have their own website will also have a business blog through which it can inform its customers of any news relating to their products and services or are just fun for customers to read. Adding to this every few days means that the customer will return to a website time and time again and become further engaged with the brand or company.

- User generated content is also a great way to increase customer engagement as people like to have their views on their opinions up on websites for other customers to read and comment on. This method is customer engagement at its best and it encourages more customers to become engaged with the brand by creating their own content on websites.

- Social networking sites are also helping to increase customer engagement during the recession as millions of people all over the world are members of such sites. By joining these sites a business can engage frequently with their customers and at a fraction of the cost that advertising previously used. The use of social networking sites can also help a business to attract more investment from its backers as its potential is so huge.

- Customer feedback on websites is also a very useful form of customer engagement which helps customers to feel valued and as though their opinions are welcomed by a brand.

- Many companies also using smaller blog sites such as Twitter to increase customer engagement and for many this is a yet to be explored avenue which can help to increase customer engagement even further.

As shown, customer engagement during the recession is possible and it can even provide savings for any business who chooses to use the Internet to their advantage. Businesses that have not developed an Internet-based strategy for customer engagement during the recession (and to continue after it) will find that their customer engagement plummets. So any business that wants to raise customer engagement and help to increase their profits even ensuring a recession needs to get Internet savvy and start to utilise the potential of this huge marketplace.

Blogs are a type of online journal (blog is short for web-log) which is written periodically and can be about any topic under the sun, some people write them about their lives and this type of blog is more likened to a journal, some people write them on a particular topic and some are written for businesses. If you want to increase the traffic to your business’s website having a blog is a good way to attract people. On it you can put new developments, ideas and so on all that relate to either your business or the area of business that you are in. Blogs are such a good idea as they are easy to update, are to the point and hold the interest of readers as each blog entry is not too long.

Maybe you are wondering about starting a blog for your own business and don’t know where to start. If this is the case here are some aspects about starting a blog that you might like to bear in mind;
1. What is your blog about? This is the most important aspect of your blog as this is the basis of all the content placed on it. If it is about your business make this clear in the title so that readers are aware of the topics covered.

2. Where are you going to place your blog? Many people will put their blog on their business website so that customers can access it easily. You could decide to have your blog hosted on a dedicated blogging site, this is a good idea if you want to place links back to your site on the blog. There are plenty of different blogging sites that you can choose from but two of the most popular are Blogger and Wordpress, however it is up to you to choose which one you would prefer to use.

3. Put some features on your blog to make it more interactive – how about the option for guests to leave feedback, or include some images or even imoods.

4. Write a few posts to test what your blog looks like and publish them, then if you don’t like the style you can easily change it so that your blog looks exactly how you would like it to.
Visit other blogs and see if you can leave your link on them – in exchange for placing a link to other blogs on your site. This is an effective method of driving traffic to your blog and one which the majority of bloggers will use.

5. Send the URL of your blog to as many people as possible and make sure that you place a link to it on your business and personal websites, you could also place a link to it on your MySpace or Facebook page as once again these more good ways of increasing the traffic to your blog and getting more readers interested in what you have to say.

Happy blogging!

Happy New Year!
We thought we would kick start the New Year with some tips on starting a blog.

Blogging is one of the most popular ways that many businesses use to reach a wide audience and get them to find out about what that business does and keep their readers up to date with anything new. So what are the top 10 things to remember when starting a blog for your business?

1.What is your blog about – this may seem a little obvious as you would think “My business” but you need to decide what you want your blog to tell people about your business.

2.What is your aim – if you want your blog to bring you more customers then add special offers for blog readers, make people want to read it by giving them a little something back for doing so.

3.Who is your audience – once you have decided on your audience you can then write the content. If it is aimed at your customers you don’t want to bog it down with too much industry jargon and things that only someone in the same business would be interested in so keep it relevant to your readers.

4.Keep it relevant – all blogs tend to be on a certain topic and this is why people read them as they have an interest in that particular topic. Going off on a tangent on your blog will make people wonder what you are talking about – so keep all your blog posts relevant and suited to your audience and they will come back for more.

5.Keep posts short – blog posts should aim to be around one page long at the most, the majority of people do not like to read endless paragraphs when they sit down to read a blog so make sure that you do not ramble on in your posts.

6.Have reciprocal links – these are links to and from other blogs and websites that can help to drive more traffic to yours. To many people this seems like a way of giving custom away but it is not – you don’t have to link with other sites that do exactly the same thing as yours, just have something in common. Have reciprocal links and see your traffic soar.

7.Post regularly – this will keep people coming back for more. Irregular postings will lead to disinterest and a fall in traffic to your blog.

8.Allow comments – these can help you refine your blog and improve on it. It also helps to build a mini community around your blog which generates even more interest.

9.Link to your own website – some people do not have blogs on their own website and if this is the case make sure that there are plenty of links back to your website on it. Otherwise all your hard work will be for nothing!

10.Enjoy yourself – writing a blog should not be a chore, it should be something that you enjoy doing and if you do this will show in your posts – and once again this will lead to more readers.

Happy blogging!

Blogs and blogging explained in the commoncraft animation format.

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Regards

Dean

RSS explained in the commoncraft animation format.

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Regards

Dean

Twitter explained in plain english with a commoncraft animation.

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Regards

Dean

For anyone who doesn’t know blogging is another term for the phrase ‘web log’ which is very much like an online diary. However unlike a diary a blog can be seen by anyone as they are published on websites for other people to read. Blogs can be about anything and there is no limit to the amount of posts the owner of a blog can make each day or week. Many blogs have links within them which will direct the reader to another website which may be selling goods or services, often for the purpose of turning this visitor into a customer.

As the success of blogs is rapidly rising it is no wonder that businesses are recognising just how valuable a blog can be to promote themselves and create more customers in the process. If you are wondering what the benefits are for marketing your business with a blog here are some of them:-

1. Blogging is free – the only thing you have to spend on a blog is your time, or you could get one of your employees to run your businesses blog for you.

2. Blogging is easy – there are an abundance of blogging sites on the internet all of which are straightforward to use, the majority even have mini tutorials about how you go about setting up and running a blog.

3. You can reach a much wider audience then before – there is nothing wrong with having a great deal of presence online and the more people that read your blog the better. Research the market and see what other kind of blogs are out there.

4. Blogging is instant – you can write your blog in the morning and have it online almost instantly, so anyone who reads your blog will be able to see these updates.

5. Blogging can help you to build links with other websites and blogs – this means that your network can grow as you place more links on your blog all pointing back to your businesses website.

6. Blogs are one of the most popular forms of communication on the web and any business that has a blog is seen to be keeping up to date with technology and this is seen by consumers as a good thing.

As you can see creating and running a blog can be highly beneficial for a business as not only is it a very cheap form of advertising but it can quite easily generate more visitors to your businesses website who will hopefully spend money there.

So why not set up a blog for your business and see how many new customers it can create for you. Things might be slow to begin with but the more posts you have on your blog, the more chance there is that people surfing the web will see it and want to know more about what our business does. If for some reason your blog doesn’t do as well as you would have hoped don’t worry – you won’t have spent money to find this out.