“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

– Sam Walton, Walmart

What is your company’s greatest asset?

A lot of business owners and managers like to think their employees are their most valuable asset. Others think it’s their intellectual property that gives them an edge.

Sam Walton had it right: It’s the customer.

Why you need a customer advocacy program?

They say “the customer is always right” for a reason. It’s the customer that has the power to make or break our businesses, especially in the era of social networking when everyone is a potential influencer, and we’d be foolish to forget that. But many people see the customer as only a threat, and they spend their time trying to limit the potential for their customers to complain about them instead of giving them a reason to sing their praises.

In many cases, the customers want to help. They love your brand. And they want to spread the word by recommending it to their friends and family. It’s just that sometimes they need a little push, which is where customer advocacy programs come in.

What is a customer advocacy program?

A customer advocacy program is a marketing initiative that is designed to turn customers into spokespeople for your brand. A formal customer advocacy program does this by offering customer incentives. By doing this, you can encourage your best customers to take time out of their busy lives to spread the word about your company.

Don’t show them the money, show appreciation.

You can achieve customer advocacy through a variety of ways, but money is not one of them. In fact, it’s a bad idea to outright pay people. Doing so will send the wrong message and attract people with undesirable motives.

Instead of merely buying their loyalty, the goal is to offer a token gift of appreciation to reward the people who are already loyal to your brand. The goal is to make them take one more step by recommending you. Instead of looking at it as a transaction, treat it more organically like a relationship. You’ll find yourself developing the right customer advocacy program in no time.

Why turn customers into advocates?

Customers make for great advocates because they lend your brand credibility. Nobody trusts a nameless, faceless company when it tells them how great they are, but they do believe their friend Dave when he talks about exceptional customer experience in a Facebook post. It’s called social proof, and it’s the reason why we take the time to look at product ratings and to read customer reviews.

Another thing to remember is that a brand advocate will continue to spend money with your company. If you can take someone who’s just made their first purchase and turn them into a brand advocate, their lifetime value for your business will go through the roof. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that they’ll also do your marketing for you at no extra cost.

All in all, creating brand advocates can be a low-cost way to spread your message through word of mouth to the people who it’s most likely to resonate. It’ll cost you less and be much more useful. What’s not to love?

How to Create a Customer Advocacy Program

Now that you know what a customer advocacy program is and why you might want to deploy one, the next step is to get started. The problem is that if you’ve never created a customer advocacy program before it can be difficult to know where to get started. That’s why we’ve done the hard work for you and distilled the approach down to five easy steps. Let’s go.

Step #1: Prepare yourself

One of the most common mistakes that people make with customer advocacy programs is that they dive right in without taking some time to prepare. For example, they’ll start up a customer advocacy program where they have to log the data manually, and then the advocacy program will take off, and they’ll end up processing vast amounts of data by hand.

Dedicate an employee to manage your customer advocacy program

On top of that, you’ll need a solid strategy in place which outlines exactly how the customer advocacy program will work, including how you’ll communicate the news about your customer advocacy program to the people who’ll be interested in taking part. You’ll need to do the same thing internally, too. In fact, you’ll need to pick out an employee and assign them the responsibility of managing the customer advocacy program and making sure that it happens.

Give your customer advocacy program credibility and resources.

For best results, it’s often a good idea to spread this responsibility across a team that encompasses employees from both marketing and customer service. Give them the time and the resources that they need to future proof your customer advocacy program and to adequately plan it out before you deploy it. Otherwise, you could be wasting your time and even doing more harm than good.

Step #2: Identify the right advocates

Ready to go out of your way to create and reward brand advocates? You’ll want to make sure that you’re targeting the right people. Not every customer will make a good brand advocate, and some will be more active than others. It’s usually a good idea to try to work with those who are already engaged in your industry. And if they are a busy and successful blogger or an expert with a following on social media you might just hit a home run without trying.

To do this, you’ll need to go to find people wherever they’re already spending their time. It might be social networking sites or on industry blog sites, and they might even be more comfortable to reach out to offline at in-person events. Creating a brand advocate follows many of the same principles as content marketing: you need to reach out to them at the right place at the right time with the right message.

The very best brand advocates will already have a reputation within the community. They’ll have an established history of participation from long before you reached out to them, and they should also have an existing social media following – if only a small one – that they can sing your praises.

Step #3: Develop a relationship

Now that you’ve got your infrastructure in place and a list of potential advocates to reach out to, the next step is to get in touch with them and develop a relationship. Don’t make the mistake of looking at this as purely transactional. Instead, think of it as a friendship and don’t be afraid to put some time in and to listen to what your advocates are saying. The conversation should be a two-way dialogue.

One way to develop a relationship is to show people that you trust them. Invite them to come to your office or allow them to try products before they are released. All you want in exchange is their feedback. You’ll also want to remember that relationships don’t spring up overnight. Just like a marriage, it’s something at which you’ll need to work. If you don’t put the effort in then, people will soon get bored and move their loyalty elsewhere.

Another common mistake is to think that you’re somehow done developing relationships. Building trust between your company and your customer advocates requires a continuous, ongoing effort. If you start to get complacent, then you risk allowing those relationships to stagnate. If you only ever reach out to people when you want something, they’ll notice.

Step #4: Facilitate communication

A customer advocacy program is all about communication. And that conversation can flow in different directions. Your advocates can act as a filter between your company and its customers by occupying the grey area in between, but they can also channel information the other way. Take this opportunity to listen carefully to what they’re saying. You’ll be able to take their feedback and pass it on to your research and development team. Hence the program will also allow your customer advocates can help you to improve your products.

It’s your job as the brains behind the customer advocacy program to make sure that your advocates have access to a platform that allows them to make their voice heard. This platform could be a blog, a forum or a Facebook group. It could be a mixture of all three and more, or a bespoke solution from a specialist software provider. Don’t just set it and forget it, though – you’ll need to invest some time of your own to moderate these communication platforms and to make sure that the information is up to date.

Remember that communication is vital, and that holds true even if someone’s unhappy. Negative feedback is still feedback, and you’d be crazy not to investigate it also if it turns out that there’s nothing in it. And you never know, you might examine a piece of critical feedback from one of your brand advocates and find out that they have a point. If that’s the case, you’ll want to take steps to fix it and to stop the problem from happening again.

Step #5: Make it the new norm

Once you’ve set up your customer advocacy program and started to see results from it, the final step is to fully integrate it into your way of working by making it a part of your protocols and workflows and offering full recognition to the advocates who change the way your business works for the better. Much of this will happen naturally, but you’ll also need to make a concentrated effort to keep the momentum going.

For B2C companies, this may mean inviting brand advocates to submit ideas for new products and even bringing them in-house to work with an R&D team. For B2Bs, it might involve empowering brand advocates to become public speakers and to attend events and conferences on behalf of the company. It looks different for every company, but you’ll know once you’ve got it right. Once customer advocacy becomes the new norm, it changes the way that you do business.

The great thing about customer advocates is that they’re a gift that keeps on giving. As long as you remember to put some time into your relationship, they’ll continue to use their voices to sing the praises of your company. After all, if you give someone a positive customer experience, then they tell their friends about it. A well-designed customer advocacy program just grabs hold of that concept and takes it to the next level.

Ten ideas to show appreciation in your customer advocacy program:

1. Give recognition in the form of leaderboards and shout outs on social networking sites.
2. Provide early access to new products and invite their feedback.
3. Give them a t-shirt or other wearable promotion that displays your brand.
4. Invite them to an exclusive event to meet your team
5. Create unique graphics badges that advocates can use on their blog or in social media
6. Encourage advocates to promote your company or product by asking them to post a photo on social media. Then re-post or retweet customer social media posts to show thanks and give recognition.
7. Involve advocates to coming up with ideas for new products and give them credit when you use their approach. Yes even if you already had planned on doing it anyway.
8. Ask for help to improve the way you do business. You might uncover issues you did not know about that are hurting your brand.
9. Have an essay or art contest. Publish the creative works and results on your website and social media.
10. Give thanks and show appreciation back for every effort your advocates make. Respond professionally and in a positive way to every comment.

Conclusion

Customer advocacy programs can be an exciting way to level up your marketing and to create a network of brand advocates who do your marketing for you. Just don’t make the mistake of relying entirely on a customer advocacy program. You’ll need a balance

Customer advocacy programs are best when used as part of a broader marketing mix.  This mix should include marketing automation and a process for managing the customer journey.   Used correctly, it can integrate with content marketing campaigns, SEO, social media marketing and all sorts of other online and offline marketing channels. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As the customer’s voice continues to gain importance, it’s pretty clear that well-executed customer advocacy programs have a firm place in the marketing mix. This approach is most useful for companies that specialize in niches and dealing with specific types of customer.

If you sell Warhammer figures, for example, then the chances are that every gamer you reach knows a dozen more people who don’t just play Warhammer – they live it. All you need to do is give them a reason to sing your praises and your product will sell itself. Customer advocacy programs are here to stay.

The post 5 steps to creating a successful customer advocacy program appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

       You hired a web developer that did it all. They registered the domain name, set up hosting, built the website, and set up email for you and your company. You worked together and picked the best domain. It was the exact name of your business. (i.e. your business dot com). This would usually be considered good news but don’t celebrate just yet. 

At some point, you learn that the web developer you hired registered the domain in his name, and not yours. 

You ask the web developer why they registered the domain name in their name. They tell you it was because it was easier to do, fast and affordable. After all, domain registration is “First come first served,” and if no one owns the domain, it is best to grab it up as quickly as possible. What the web developer does not tell you is that putting the domain name in his name also gave them leverage over the entire relationship. This power grab happened before you even hired the web developer, and the web project hadn’t even started.  

How did Hiring a Web Developer get this complicated? 

Here’s what happened next. You paid the developer several thousand dollars, and they started the job. Unfortunately, you didn’t have a detailed scope of work, and now you can’t agree on anything. The web developer is doing a terrible job. You just wanted to say goodbye and start over. But now you realize it’s not that easy to start over because the domain is not in your name. Your developer won’t give the domain name up until the job is done and you make the final payment. 

Now the web developer has full control over your domain and your website and you have not completed the project with them. 

Yes, the lousy web developer has total control over everything; the domain, email, hosting, and your website. You also learn that it is next to impossible to get ownership over a domain name registered in someone else’s name. You may have no proof that the web developer registered the domain for you. Since it was only a small amount of money, the web developer may or may not have even included it in his proposal and contract with you.  

You failed to create an escape hatch in your web developer contract that will go into effect when the relationship with your web developer turns sour. 

This situation is common for small business owners because they don’t have the resources to hire an attorney to review the web design contract. If a web developer hijacked your domain name, the only option you might have now is to get a new domain and start from scratch. What a mess!

Eight steps that can prevent a web developer from getting control over your domain name, email, and website. 

1) If you are working with a web developer to select a domain name, ask them to add your name, email, and contact information as the owner and registrar.  

Typically, a web developer will register it in their name and then put the domain in your name after you have paid them for it. If this happens, you should immediately make the domain name a separate transaction. Pay the web developer for the domain name straight away. Then you should quickly make sure they list you as the owner. 

2) Verify that you are the owner of the domain and not the developer.

You can verify that you own the domain by looking at the domain’s ownership in the public record with almost any domain registrar. ( Except when someone uses private registration, then you can never find out)  

Use this WhoIs search tool to look up the ownership of a domain. Type the domain name you want to look up in the search bar and hit enter. The results will show you the public record of the person or company that owns the domain.    You can also visit GoDaddy.com or networksolutions.com or any domain registrar. Click on the Whois link at the bottom of the page. If you don’t see the results then the domain name might be registered with a private filter on the name of the owner.

3) Transfer the domain name to an account that only you control.

To put the domain name in an account that you control, you will need to open an account with a registrar like Go Daddy, Register.com, or Network Solutions. Once you have an account, you need to set up a domain name transfer.  

Furthermore, you won’t want to trust the web developer or anyone else with the responsibility of renewing your domain. If you do, you might end up waking up one day and seeing you no longer own your domain name. Losing your domain name will impact more than your website; you will no longer have your company email address. Yikes, that’s not good! 

4) Register the domain before you contact a web developer

You can avoid having to go through the trouble of having the domain name transferred if you get the domain name by yourself. After all, if the domain name is the name of your company, you won’t have someone else owning the domain if the relationship turns sour. Therefore be sure to get full ownership, regardless of how the project with your web developer turns out.  

5) If this article is over your head, get a person you can trust to help manage your Domain Name and Domain Name Server (DNS) 

DNS records are the keys to your online security. They control your email, website, and digital security. We recommend keeping your domain name servers (DNS) records with the domain registrar if possible. Don’t transfer your domain or management of your DNS records to your hosting company.  

6) Once you have ownership over your domain name, you will want to set up website hosting, not the web developer.  

After you set up hosting, you can give your web developer enough access to do the job and no more. Some website hosting companies provide the ability to assign web developer guest access. This feature lets website owners assign limited access to a web developer or IT company. This feature allows business owners the ability to maintain ownership and control. As a result, you can have your web developers help you without giving them ownership of your account and the domain name. 

7) Set up your domain name, email, and website hosting with separate companies. 

Sometimes the web developer will get full access to all the email accounts without needing a user name and password. With ownership access to your domain, a web developer can read your email and impersonate every employee in your company. Therefore hosting your email on the same server as your website, may give your web developer too much access.

8) Don’t email your user name and password to anyone, call them on the phone with the password. 

I wish I had a dollar for each time a new customer emailed me the login credentials to their Go Daddy account. The superuser credentials control everything at Go Daddy. Since Go Daddy provides one-stop shopping for domain registration, hosting, and security, they make it easy to do everything with one account. An unethical person with access can do anything they wanted.    

If website technology and security are outside of your comfort zone, get help from someone you can trust.   

It is common for a business owner to be unfamiliar with website security. However, you will need to provide credentials for a web developer to work on your website. Unfortunately, web developers typically get more access then they need, and this can be a problem if you hire the wrong web developer. 

If you are having problems with a web developer, our consultants are here to help. No job is too small for our team if you already hired a developer and want a company to manage the relationship we can do that also. Contact us to schedule a free consultation.

Here is a real story about business owners that got their domain hijacked.

If you liked this article you may want to read this story about Jenna and Robert Lazar, owners of Epoch Trading Company, an Asbury Park business. They hired an overseas web developer online to work on their website almost destroyed their business. The developer redirected domain traffic to a porn site. The couple claim he stole their domain name and faked ownership of the site so digital companies couldn’t give it back to them.   

The post How to hire a web developer without getting hacked appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

As you prepare to launch your new cleaning company, you need a marketing plan that answers a few key questions:

• What consumer needs does this service fulfill?
• Fore what customers are your services designed and suited?
• How are your services better than your competitors?
• What are the long term and short term goals of your cleaning company?
• What different ways will you use to promote and market it?
• How much money are you willing to spend on the company’s marketing and promotion?

As we learn how to create an effective marketing plan for a cleaning company, you will see that each stage answers one or more of these questions and many others.

1. Know Your Business: What Consumer Needs The Business WIll Fulfill?

The more you know about your business – its strengths and weaknesses – and the clearer you are about the business objectives, the more comprehensive and goal-oriented your marketing plan can be. Sometimes a marketing plan is about a single goal — for example, the rebrand of your cleaning company logo. Sometimes your logo is more far-reaching, like a marketing plan to launch a brand new cleaning service.

No matter why you need a marketing plan, be clear about its nature, end goals, and objectives.

A well thought out marketing plan is indicative of a business that knows itself. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to layout in terms of figures, numbers, and facts the nature of your business, what your business vision is ten years down the line, and how it helps your consumers.

2. Niche Target Audience: Who Your Business Serves

Who your prime audience is will drive a large part of your marketing plan. For example, the target audience for a car wash service and a house cleaning service might be quite different. The latter will require you to offer a more personalized service, flexible timings, and the ability to deal with last-minute schedule changes. For the former, your approach will need to be much more fast-paced and professional.

Knowing your target audience will also tell you the communication channels to use. Perhaps a lot of your target audience, working mothers for your house cleaning company, are more active on Facebook. If so, you don’t need to design an email marketing campaign to drive your sales or generate leads.

Similarly, to attract customers for your car cleaning service, a personalized email marketing plan may be the thing that works. A marketing plan that has a grasp over who its prime market is distributes efforts more strategically. Your business stands to gain more benefits with seemingly less work.

3. Know Your Rivals: How Your Cleaning Company is Better Than Others

The niche target markets are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and mature. To convince the potential consumers to buy from you and not from your competitor, you have to offer them something of value that your competitor cannot.

To know the limits of your rival company, you need to know their business almost as well as you know your own. You need to know where their weaknesses lie, the areas that they aren’t paying attention to, and discover opportunities that they aren’t.

It takes time, won’t happen overnight. It also takes a lot of work which you should be willing to put in. But once you have this thorough knowledge, you can create a marketing plan that answers the most relevant customer problems and lets you capitalize on your strengths much more effectively.

4. Marketing Objectives: Short-term and Long-term Goals

For a cleaning business marketing plan to work, or any business for that matter, it is crucial to set some objectives, long term and short term goals against which you can gauge how well (or not) the plan is going. Ideally, your cleaning company marketing plan should cover the marketing efforts, activities, and strategies for at least the first year, if not two.

This approach will help you break down your goals in more strategic compartments, and measure your progress in a much more organized way. For example, the first year to offer discounted pricing for households; the second year, reach out to corporate customers; third-year offer bundled packages; and so on. It will also help you detect flaws and pitfalls, and you can modify your path accordingly.

For the short term goals, you can focus on brand awareness and brand recognition. For long term goals, you should perhaps think about establishing a solid brand identity, increasing profits, and future growth.

5. Budget: Set Aside a Realistic Amount

Your marketing budget and the different marketing channels you’ll use to promote the cleaning business are the two factors that hugely influence each other. How much budget you need depends on how many channels you will use for your concentrated marketing plan. Furthermore, what and how many of those channels will you be able to use depends on your budget.

So sit down with your finance team or accountant and determine a realistic amount on which you can all agree. As we talk more about the different marketing channels in the next point, you’ll be able to have an idea of how much marketing budget you’ll need.

6. Communication Channels: Different Ways to Market the Business

Communication channels for a marketing plan include both the traditional marketing platform and a multitude of digital ones. A comprehensive marketing plan for your cleaning company must involve both.

Before you can begin marketing, traditional or digital, you’ll need to hire a web designer to create a professional website. A professional cleaning website will cost between $3,000 and $5,000, so you will want to budget accordingly. Not having a website will limit your growth opportunities and prevent you from reaching your marketing goals, so you will want to make a website your top priority.  Contact one of our Web Designers for a quote.

Depending on your business size, niche market, and budget, your marketing plan should be a balanced mix of promotions through billboards, TV/radio ads, bench marketing, flyers, and the digital channels such as:

• Paid search
• Pay per click ads
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Email marketing, and more.

7. Leverage FREE Directories and Local SEO  

Apart from these, one of the most important aspects of online marketing for small businesses and startups is local SEO. For cleaning businesses, especially which is dependent on the neighborhood, they should use local SEO to get as near and accessible to customers as possible. 

One way to do this is to get your business listed on major directories, including Google My Business, Care.com, HomeAdvisor.com, and Angie’s List. When your company has a listing in such directories, it would be easy for your customers to search for you the next time they need your services. Select the proper service locations for your business including neighboring towns and outlying cities near to your town. Try to get as many online reviews as possible, which will strengthen your reputation and add to your bag of leads for future business. 

There are other tweaks that you need to do to make your online presence felt for which you can hire a local SEO consultant or someone who specializes in home improvement and cleaning business SEO. 

8. Contract with competitors

Another way to make your cleaning business accessible to customers is by contacting and contracting with large cleaning companies and franchises in addition to the direct consumers. It may prove less profitable, but expanding your sources of revenue would ensure that you have a continuous flow of customers as well as a steady stream of income. Franchises can also provide a great reference and name recognition to help you grow your brand as a trusted name in the cleaning industry.

9. Use Free Small Business Resources

Cleaning companies are considered small businesses and typically have just one location. Fortunately, there is a multitude of free and low-cost options for small businesses today. For example, Mailchimp offers a free account for small business owners so you can do professional email marketing to customers for little to no cost. 

10. Measure your success with Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

It is generally is easy to roll out a marketing plan and measure progress with fewer locations to consider. To measure your plan’s success across each of these different channels, you should set some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It will help you distribute your efforts and resources more effectively and in a more focused way.

11. Promotional Calendar 

Creating an organized marketing plan for your cleaning company will have a higher chance of success only because it produces less confusion among the team, and can be followed through in a gradual process.

Therefore, you will want to create a promotional calendar where the steps of the plan are recorded and presented visually. Documenting your marketing plan in a schedule will help you see whether all the activities you have planned are spread most effectively or not.

12. Launching the Marketing Plan

The launch of the marketing plan is essentially the announcement of your new cleaning business. Therefore, it should be impactful, with a clear message, and must contain your CTA – call to action – asking the customers to take action: to call now and make a housekeeping appointment, or book your cleaning or click on the link to know more.

Make sure that different people responsible for carrying out different parts of the plan are clear about their goals and objectives. Create procedural guidelines, KPIs to follow, and must be consistent in their brand communications, whether they are answering phones, replying to emails, communicating over your Facebook page, or handling your Twitter.

Consistent, and cohesive follow-throughs during each stage of the marketing plan will ensure that your business is a success.

Final thoughts

Creating a marketing plan can be quite daunting and complicated, especially if you’re just getting started. But let us assure you that it can also be some of the most creative, intense, and fun experiences of your job as a marketer.

Very few things speak as vocally as a successful marketing plan in your resume.

Author Bio

Brianna Jensen is a content specialist who curates, writes, and promotes content for online businesses. Connect with her to discover a world of content types, fit for your organizational needs.

The post How to Create a Marketing Plan for a Cleaning Company appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.