John Beasley, Technical Director at Washington Direct Mail, says: “When marketing, businesses are too heavily focussed on the products and services they want to promote, that they unintentionally neglect the most crucial point of their campaign – the customers. Therefore, businesses that are failing to hit their audience need to create an effective customer service strategy to truly understand their audience and communicate them in the most effective way possible.

With this in mind, John discusses how exactly businesses can create an effective customer experience strategy?  

Businesses need to know their customers

The first place to start is the obvious, that many businesses are failing or neglecting to understand. They need to conduct in-depth research on their customers and understand who they are, where they are, their interests, buying habits and how they’ve interacted with the business.

Personalisation

Once they’ve conducted the research, businesses should be able to understand the customer enough to create personas that their team can base their marketing efforts around, such as personalising their messaging to become more meaningful and engaging with the identified personas.

This is to be expected by customers, especially if they’ve already engaged with the business before. They also expect the messaging to align with their wants and needs that will encourage them to interact with the business. 

Define Pledges

Customers pay more attention to brands that have similar views to themselves, so if the business for example pledges to become greener and more sustainable, than they can demonstrate this within their messaging and connect with customers with similar views. More than half of customers claim they’d rather engage with brands that advocate sustainability. 

Beasley says: Making promises and commitments such as ESG is important for connecting with customers with these views. The messaging the brand creates, can then be passed on through and displayed by their customers using the product or service throughout their day to day lives. This converts customers to become loyal as your brand will become the go to for such products and services that help them express their greener views. 

No customer left behind

The whereabouts of customers matters to businesses as well to be able to reaching them. Beasley says: “the growth of technology and social media platforms, have caused businesses to develop more versatile marketing efforts to reach audiences across multiple channels and social media platforms, and while it is important to be flexible to maximise your reach across online platforms, there’s still room to utilise more traditional methods direct mail services to target those living with technology deficits.

All the above can help you create an effective customer experience strategy that will help businesses acknowledge who their customers are, where they are, their habits and motivations. This will ultimately help businesses to strategise their marketing efforts to be effective and reach out to all the right customers, across the online and offline platforms that will result in a better ROI. 

Source

https://www.statista.com/statistics/265267/digital-advertising-revenue-in-the-uk/

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2024/01/12/tackling-ad-waste-how-2024-all-about-quality-over-quantity

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-personalization  

https://www.wdmonline.co.uk/services/print/

The post Don’t reach out to the abyss: The Importance of a Customer Experience Strategy to Hit the Bullseye appeared first on CEO Medium.

Can you share more about your educational and professional background, and how have these experiences contributed to your success in the real estate development sector?

I grew up in an architectural and design-oriented family in Stuttgart, Germany. I began working at the age of 13 in a German architecture office for residential housing and new developments. In 2011, I was recruited as a 400m and 400m Hurdle Track athlete to a D1 school in the Nashville area. I studied finance and international management in college and have won financial awards. I quickly began to focus on real estate investments upon graduation. I have prior work experience in the European M&A group at Deloitte and in Equity Research of a $1.3bn fund at an Asset Management firm in Franklin, TN. Coming out of college and taking a real estate development and investment firm from essentially scratch to multi-millions has been a big personal accomplishment. I live for improving the lives of others and increasing safety in our neighborhoods.

How does Sapphire Development Group’s vertically integrated business model operate, and what strategies have propelled your rapid growth within the real estate industry?

I built Sapphire Development Group to be a vertically integrated real estate development and investment firm because I believe that the investor and client experience is much better when the same trusted team can assist all around with their real estate investment needs. My team delivers a one-stop-shop experience, from offering off-market deals and developing ground-up residential to helping others build and sell real estate portfolios. This means we provide our investors with a hands-on deal experience that includes access to off-market deals that can yield better returns, and also protect development investments as our Realtor Team, Your Sapphire Team, handles the sales aspect. Sapphire & Co. handles much of the real estate cycle in-house, which has helped the company grow quickly.

Based on your experiences, what key lessons would you share with aspiring entrepreneurs, especially in navigating challenges and building character?

Don’t ever quit. No matter how difficult something may seem, it’s worth the undertaking. Character is built during persevering tough times, and character is what will make all the difference in the world. I believe the saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” is what makes for successful entrepreneurship.

In what ways do you believe your vision for architecture and design, combined with an understanding of urban planning and human trends, has made Sapphire Development Group successful?

I believe it’s my vision for architecture and design that meets a deep understanding of urban planning and understanding human trends that have been inspired by having lived abroad in various cultures from Germany to China, as well as in metropolitan areas such as NYC.

What have you learned about the importance of communication and authenticity in business, and how has this understanding shaped your entrepreneurial journey?

I’ve learned that communication in business is everything. It’s vital as an entrepreneur to be able to communicate during great as well as during difficult times, whether that’s with investors, clients, or employees. I also have come to the realization that most people don’t know what they’re doing and that we all are just trying to figure things out as we go. We’re all in this human experience together looking for opportunities to grow, unfold, and be. The more authentic we are, and the more we feel connected within our community, the more successful our journey will feel as an entrepreneur.

What personal skills and attributes do you consider critical for your success, and how have they helped you adapt and thrive in various circumstances?

As a person, I’m very adaptable, open-minded, and durable. I’ve had to pivot and restart several times which has built character and perseverance. I love learning and get bored easily so I try to stay super active in whatever I do. I’m just a generally curious person; curious to learn about others and curious to figure out how to unfold my full potential in building businesses.

Why do you believe mastering online marketing and diversifying business models is crucial for entrepreneurs today and in the future?

I believe that attention is the new currency and that we, as entrepreneurs whether digital or more traditional entrepreneurs, need to learn how to market online well in order to stay relevant over the next 10+ years. I also love the diversification of business models within a business umbrella.

Can you tell us more about the Sapphire Developer Academy and how it aims to empower real estate professionals with the knowledge to succeed in development?

I recently launched “Sapphire Developer Academy” in which I coach Realtors, Wholesalers, and Investors on how to break into real estate development. In this program, I share the exact strategies that I’ve used to build a multi-million dollar company and how they can too.

To discover more about Joséphine Saffert’s journey and Sapphire Development Group’s projects, explore these links:

Company Website: https://sapphiredevelop.com

LinkedIn & Instagram Handles:

– LinkedIn: @josephinesaffert https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephinesaffert

– Instagram: @josephinesaffert https://www.instagram.com/josephinesaffert/

 & @sapphirdevelop https://www.instagram.com/sapphirdevelop/

More on Sapphire Developer Academy: 

Sapphire Developer Academy

https://academy.sapphiredevelop.com/developer-academy

Podcasts Joséphine has been featured on:

-Spotify Episode

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5vU2QrsBYqVsTlXmo0nhGW?si=BDwXOiSbQMSh6GE0YduZTA

– Spotify Show

https://open.spotify.com/show/3p1JTW0mx9auFQxns4vL7Z?si=lKEeBfBqQO6BbqPkvn1jew

The post Sapphire Development Group: Joséphine Saffert’s Blueprint for Success appeared first on CEO Medium.

CEO Medium shares a few tips to help you enhance your marketing strategy, like studying for a business degree, partnering with other companies, and leveraging social media.

Consider Going Back to School

 Lots of seniors actually choose to go back to school during retirement – and if you want to learn more about business management and marketing, this might be the right choice for you! You might want to earn a bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, accounting, or communications. By enrolling in an online program, you can tackle your studies while building your business! Look into colleges that have special programs for senior students.

 Form Business Partnerships

 Partnering up with another local business for a marketing campaign can be mutually beneficial. You’ll be able to network and appeal to each other’s customer bases. It’s important to partner up with a business that doesn’t directly compete with yours – instead, they should offer complementary products or services that your customers would also enjoy. When it comes to partner marketing, New Breed recommends establishing mutual goals and providing clear reporting so that you can ensure that the campaigns are benefitting both parties.

 Use Social Media

 Social media is a powerful marketing vehicle! Creating accounts on popular social media platforms will give you the opportunity to promote your business for free. Lots of business owners love social media marketing because it costs nothing to set up accounts and share content about your products and services!

To grow your business’s following across different platforms over time, MarketVeep suggests creating short, educational content, and maintaining a consistent posting schedule. If you have room in your budget, you may want to hire a social media manager to oversee your accounts. This will free up more time in your own schedule!

 Give Out Freebies

 If you want to reward your customers and thank them for supporting your business, hand out freebies once in a while! You could give out free samples of new products around the holidays, include fun stickers with a customer’s first purchase, or hold a contest so that people can win certain products or services. If you’d like to give out branded merchandise, you can order t-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, or pens with your company’s name and logo.

 Print Marketing

Today, lots of businesses emphasize digital marketing and invest heavily in this area. But don’t assume that print marketing is out of style – it’s still a fantastic way to reach people, especially those who don’t spend much time online! By neglecting print marketing, you might miss out on chances to advertise to customers who aren’t on social media.

Which print marketing methods deserve your attention? You might want to put up flyers in local businesses, hand out business cards, or take out a print ad in a local newspaper or magazine. You may also want to get in touch with local journalists who are interested in talking to senior business owners.

Stand Out With Attractive Signage

Whether it’s inside your business in the lobby or outside, don’t underestimate the value of attractive signage. It can be the key to making a great first impression on your clients, so choose something classy. You can start by finding metal letters for signs, which are available in a number of materials including aluminum, brass, bronze and stainless steel.

If you’re running a small business in retirement, you can build a loyal customer base through effective marketing and top-notch customer service. It takes time – but with consistent effort, you’ll notice increased sales! Whether you’re interested in taking college marketing classes, hosting giveaways, focusing on print marketing, or using stand-out signage, these tips can help.

CEO Medium covers the best stories of visionary entrepreneurs and influencers from around the globe and shares their experiences with the world. Read more informative articles today!

The post 6 Simple Marketing Ideas for Senior Entrepreneurs appeared first on CEO Medium.

In the age of the internet and social media, however, having a global marketing strategy is no longer only in the realm of the biggest companies. Almost any business can employ similar tactics and grow its global customer base. For example, by making localized social media pages or websites. 

Here, we’ll investigate some of the most successful global marketing strategies, why it’s so important, and how businesses can develop their own.

What is a global marketing strategy?

Those who have studied an international business management degree will know that, in short, it’s a marketing strategy that encompasses several countries. This aims to plan and coordinate marketing efforts so that they can be adapted to different markets and audiences, while remaining consistent with the overall brand. 

For some brands, their product will have a universal appeal that transcends borders or language barriers. But for all, it’s vital to get to know the local culture and population and use that to inform a marketing strategy. 

What are the common methods of a global marketing strategy?

On one side of the spectrum, there is standardization, which means the same approach to marketing will be taken regardless of country. On the other end is localization, where communications are adjusted depending on the area and audience. 

This can also include using either a centralized or de-centralized team. Having a centralized team means that all marketing efforts are standardized across the world. Decentralized, on the other hand, involves employing separate marketing teams for different areas. These will often be made up of people who are local to the area, the idea being that they will be better placed to make marketing decisions.

Whether a business chooses between standardized, localized, or some combination of the two can be dependent on its brand, what markets they want to reach, and its overall goals. 

What are the benefits of having a global marketing strategy?

While there are some challenges that will need to be addressed, such as language barriers and local laws, there are many benefits to a global marketing strategy. 

First and foremost, it gives businesses a chance to grow and gain new customers. Looking at how a business can expand globally also helps to home in on the values that are core to the brand and concretize its identity. It can also build the reputation of a business in different countries, establishing trust with customers across borders. 

Here are some of the companies that have aced their global marketing strategies. 

Airbnb 

Founded in 2008 in California, Airbnb has grown into the third most visited booking platform in the world. Globally, Airbnb currently has around 5.6 million active listings and 4 million hosts. 

For their global marketing strategy, Airbnb uses a combination of localised and standardised approaches. The overall message remains the same, “made possible by hosts”, a campaign launched in 2021. But by putting the focus on the hosts, Airbnb is also able to feel local. 

As part of its campaign, Airbnb captured photos and videos from some of its properties to create a sense of a more localised holiday experience. Getting locals involved as much as possible is a great way to create content that is far more appealing and relatable to other locals.

McDonald’s

The iconic golden arches of McDonald’s are well-known across the world. In fact, McDonald’s currently operates over 40,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. While the brand’s visual identity remains the same, McDonald’s also adopts localised tactics to appeal to different tastes. 

It mainly does this through region-specific dishes that offer takes on local favourites. For example, in Hong Kong, you’d be able to order the Ebi Burger or the McArabia in Saudi Arabia. Even Ronald McDonald has a different name in Japan because it is difficult to pronounce in Japanese (he’s known as Donald McDonald instead). This approach means McDonald’s can have worldwide appeal but also offer menu items tailored to the local market. 

Red bull 

Much like Coca-Cola, Red Bull relies on a single stand-out design that helps build recognisability across borders. Where Red Bull’s global strategy really excels worldwide is through sponsorship of local extreme sporting events. From soap box racing to BMX championships, these sponsorships solidify Red Bull as a high-octane, high-energy brand. 

The genius of this is that Red Bull’s overall brand message is tied to the excitement and thrills of extreme sports, which won’t ever be lost in translation.

Innocent 

Innocent currently operates in 15 countries across Europe, but this company is a good example of how to retain a consistent approach to marketing and branding. The way Innocent does this is through its tone of voice, which is consistently humorous and quirky. 

This allows Innocent to be captivating and entertaining across social media, which builds awareness and its reputation overseas as a light-hearted, fun-loving brand. 

Spotify 

To build its global marketing strategy, Spotify has taken advantage of the very nature of its product, which allows for an extremely localised marketing strategy. 

Thanks to the huge amounts of data Spotify collects about what its users are listening to, it is able to be customised not just by country or region but by individual users. Each user is served with their own personalised ‘daily mix’, which helps introduce users to new artists and for artists to reach audiences outside of their country much more easily. 

Data is also what drives Spotify’s yearly event Spotify Wrapped, which started in 2015 and went completely viral, gaining over 1 million shares. In 2020, that figure had risen to 60 million. 

Spotify Wrapped uses all the data from the year to reveal each user’s favourite tunes and podcasts. Through games, sharable statistics, and a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour, the success of Spotify Wrapped has made it a best-in-class example of how to do a global brand strategy. 

There are many benefits to building a global brand strategy. And although most businesses don’t have the reach or awareness of the likes of Spotify or Red Bull, they can still use similar tactics. Dependent on the brand, its products and its overall goal, a global marketing strategy is extremely useful and even necessary to widen its audience and find success across borders.

Sources

https://www.statista.com/statistics/219454/mcdonalds-restaurants-worldwide/ 

https://www.mashed.com/656224/the-reason-ronald-mcdonald-has-a-different-name-in-japan/ 

https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/airbnb-statistics/ 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1215457/most-visited-travel-and-tourism-websites-worldwide/  

https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/when-is-spotify-wrapped-2022-b1030452.html 

https://variety.com/2021/music/news/spotify-wrapped-marketing-shares-1235139981/ 

https://veracontent.com/mix/global-marketing-strategies/ 

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/global-marketing-and-international-business 

The post How to Build a Global Marketing Strategy  appeared first on CEO Medium.

Forgotten Marketing Approaches

While many businesses have focused their marketing efforts online, there is still plenty of room for more traditional means of advertising. People who view paper ads are more likely to remember which company placed the ad, yet research cited by Marketing Evolution shows that 85.4% of internet users search at least monthly for information online. 

Tried-and-true methods of marketing include postcards, flyers, coupons, stickers, billboards and yard signs. Paper advertisements can be paired with digital forms by including a QR code that can be scanned by potential customers for additional information on your company. 

Creating Catchy Slogans

SCORE notes that one way to ensure your organization stands out from the competition is to create catchy slogans. They help your business stand out from the competition and establish your brand. A slogan is essentially a catchphrase that is simple yet helps consumers remember your product and company name. Some steps to help you get started on establishing a memorable slogan include:

• Refraining from using too many or complex words
• Creating a list of words related to your company and industry
• Utilizing words that evoke emotion
• Testing a few potential slogans to see which is best-received

Providing Offers and Discounts

Nothing brings in new customers quite like the potential to save money. Offering promotions and discounts can help you build your client base. Quality goods and services help you to retain those consumers. Your company can advertise special offers or discounts both online and via traditional marketing methods such as flyers, local bulletins or papers and postcards.

When you speak with new customers, be sure to ask how they heard about your company. This can help you to identify where to focus your efforts on engaging even more clients in your target market. Perhaps you have been focusing efforts on email marketing when most of your current customers heard about you through their church bulletin ad section. 

Tools for Marketing, From Slogans to Logos

Do not fret if you are a marketing novice, there are plenty of tools available to help you design marketing materials to give your company an edge over the competition. The various design tools available can help you with everything from developing that perfect slogan to creating a brand image that sticks. This includes tools that give you the ability to generate a logo online, a handy way to quickly and easily come up with an eye-catching graphic that communicates your brand and vision. Other tools help you format paper and virtual advertisements in addition to creating videos outlining your enterprise’s unique product line and services.

Remember to use an array of marketing tools to reach the maximum number of people. Focusing too much on one type of advertising can limit your sales potential by restricting the number of individuals who see it. A marketing plan should be fluid and continuously analyzed to determine whether it is still relevant and working as intended.

Even though today’s consumers spend a lot of their time in front of a screen, traditional marketing can still bring in business for your company. Whether it is advertisements in newspapers or lawn signs in your neighbourhood, seeing physical reminders of your business tends to stick in the brains of potential clientele.

The best stories of visionary entrepreneurs and influencers are told on the CEO Medium blog. Read more informative and entertaining articles today!

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