Time for a Change

austin freelance copywriter

If you’re here, then you’ve probably already noticed that the writing and marketing blog of Kristen Hicks has changed from Hicks Marketing to Austin Copywriter. You may have also already seen the new and improved Austin Copywriter website.

In the past year of offering freelance copywriting and marketing services, I’ve gained a greater knowledge both of where my personal strengths lie, and the services likely to be of the greatest value to small businesses. The shift to the new Austin Copywriter brand is indicative of these realizations.

Quality content is the key to increasing online visibility and defining how consumers perceive your brand. The change to Austin Copywriter conveys an increased emphasis in my offerings on the importance of content marketing to generate new leads and foster ongoing relationships with customers.

Check out the new website and contact me with any questions, suggestions or to discuss ways I can help your small business.

 

Understanding Consumer Behavior: Signaling

The way people make purchasing decisions isn’t always logical. Consumer behavior is determined by a great number of factors. One of the challenges of good marketing figuring out the best methods that appeal to how most people think when they’re shopping.

A recent article in the New York Times takes a look at some of the eccentricities in how people choose their favorite brands. The basic argument of the piece suggests that for most consumers, decisions are made via a mix of reasonable research and emotional impulse.

The writer, Davidson, offers the example of his decision to purchase a more expensive baby formula, largely because the company’s been around longer than many of its competitors. This signals to him that they care about their reputation enough to consistently offer a quality product. This is an assumption based on little evidence, yet one many other consumers are likely to understand.

For certain purchases, especially for items that influence the health of your family and more costly purchases, people want to feel confident that they’re choosing an item of the best quality. Whether or not they know that the product’s the best matters less than how they feel.

For many small businesses, it isn’t too complicated to ensure that your company is well represented in the research phase of consumer shopping. Any business that cares about its reputation knows already to only offer quality products and consistently excellent customer service. It’s the more emotional side of consumer behavior that can present a challenge.

Many of the examples the article cites of successful signaling by brands consist of larger companies demonstrating their success by spending lots of money on advertising. If they’re already successful, the thinking goes, clearly they’re already doing something right and consumers should have confidence in their product.

So how can a small business use this knowledge of consumer behavior on a smaller scale?

  • Include customer testimonials on your website, to give people confidence that you’ve provided quality products and services in the past. If one of your customers is known and respected in the community, all the better.
  • Are you a member in a trade organization? Have you earned any awards or received favorable reviews? Show that on your website. It lets visitors know that your business cares about its reputation and as such will strive to offer quality goods and services.
  • Make sure your website looks professional. If it looks sloppy or poorly designed, people are less likely to trust that it’s a legitimate business. It’s worth it to spend a little money on a good graphic designer.
  • Don’t go too low in your pricing. Some people will always take what looks like the better deal (and little by little learn that this often means having to replace the original purchase soon thereafter), but others will choose to look for the higher quality product rather than the cheapest one.
  • Offer a money-back guarantee or warranty. It’s much easier to feel confident in making a purchase if it doesn’t feel like an obligation.

When in doubt, think of your own shopping tendencies and talk to friends and family about their consumer habits. What turns them off to a potential purchase? What helps them decide to go ahead with it? Consumer behavior is varied, but there are enough trends and tendencies to help businesses make effective marketing decisions.

Marketing Strategy: Positioning

The first step to developing an effective marketing strategy is determining the positioning of your products. You might know your product in and out and be able to make a convincing case to someone that they need it, but in order to understand the best approach to take in your marketing, it’s important to have a good grasp of how your product’s strengths measure against those of similar products in your industry.

The questions you want to answer are:

  • Just what void in the market does the product fill?
  • How exactly does this product match up against others that offer something comparable?
  • What features and benefits does the product have that others lack?
  • Is there something that the product’s the best at? Is there a way to offer evidence of this?
  • How does your pricing compare to that of similar products?

Although you might feel you know the answers to some of these right away, it’s likely that in the course of doing further research you’ll find some surprises.

To get a clear, comprehensive sense of a product’s positioning*:

1. Create a list of your closest competitors. In addition to those that easily come to mind, do some Google searches for relevant keywords to find those you might be overlooking.

2. Start a spreadsheet that lists the features and benefits of your product

3. Visit the websites of each of your competitors to fill in which of the features and benefits listed they have, and which they don’t. Add additional features and benefits to your spreadsheet based on those they have listed.

4. To make it easier to identify the comparison, make the spreadsheet color coded so that all of the features and benefits a product has are in one color, and all those they don’t have are in another.

Once complete, you have an easy visual analysis of just how your product compares to those of your competitors.

Are you the most experienced, do you offer the most features for the price, have you been voted or called the best by a third party?

Try to figure out a positive superlative that fits your business and make it your new tagline so people will see right away what makes you unique, and why they should consider you over any competitors.

The spreadsheet you’ve put together can be used as a powerful sales tool when a potential customer can’t decide between your product and another.

More importantly, having a clear understanding of your company’s positioning helps with every other step in an effective marketing strategy. It helps you know the greatest strengths to emphasize and allows you to develop the best marketing strategies to draw customers towards what you have to offer.

*Thanks to Ted Finch at Chanimal.com for tips on the process.

Great Customer Service as Marketing

Marketing is about reputation. Creating one amongst those not yet aware of your business, and maintaining a positive one for those already familiar with you. Hands down, the number one thing a company can do to ensure a consistently good reputation is to provide exceptional customer service.

People remember their best and worst customer service experiences and are quick to talk about them to friends, colleagues, and sometimes a much larger internet audience. Companies can now be made and ruined according to their reputation in online forums.

Social media and online review sites have made what was always true much more so: customer service is crucial to good branding and marketing. While providing acceptable customer service will help you to avoid the PR disasters of bad online reviews and social media rants, if you want to really stand out from the competition and turn customer service into a form of marketing, you’ll have to resolve to go above and beyond.

One particular example of a company that’s gained a lot of positive attention based purely on their reputation for customer service is Zappo’s.

When it comes to buying shoes or clothes online, some may still be skeptical, concerned about finding the proper fit or paying for shipping. Zappo’s alleviates those concerns with free shipping on many orders and a free 365-day return policy for all items. In addition, many customers have publicly shared stories of Zappo’s going above and beyond to help them out, fueling one of the best word of mouth branding successes in recent business memory.

How did they achieve this success? For one thing, company CEO Tony Hsieh has acknowledged that the company made a decision early on to treat customer service as a top priority. They’re picky in hiring service positions, making sure not only that the candidate is qualified, but also a good fit for company culture. Perhaps most importantly, in contrast to many large companies, Zappo’s is willing to spend more on customer service to get better results, rather than seeing it as an area to cut costs. As a result, customers can get ahold of a competent, friendly representative anytime they need help, and the company inspires articles like this and this, without having to put money into marketing.

If your customer service is good enough, your customers will do the marketing for you.