Leveraging Your Best Customers

Your Best Customers are your most valuable assets – they’re worth their weight in Gold!

How do you identify your best customers?

Your Best Customers are 100% satisfied with your offerings. They are happy with the customer service you provide. If asked to rate you, these customers will not hesitate to rate you as 5 Star business. Most important, your best customers are profitable to you. You don’t have to give away the store to satisfy them. They value your regular service that you perform for everyone.

Leveraging these Best Customers by asking them for:

1. Referrals – Can you please refer any friends or family that can use my services?
2. Reviews on Facebook, Google +, Yelp and LinkedIn – this will improve Search Engine Optimization for your website
3. Testimonials on:
   • Facebook
   • Google +
   • LinkedIn
   • Written letter – post the letter as image of the letter with the testimonial text on your blog
4. 30-second testimonial videos (that you can take with your smartphone), so you can post it on your YouTube channel and embed it in your website or in a blog article.
5. Permission to use them as Reference Customers that you do business with – if they are a business publish their Company Names and logos on your website with a link to their websites as your customers
6. Blog articles as a Guest Blogger that does business with you – post these articles on social media.

In summary: the voice of the customer is more important than what you have to say — it’s not you blowing your own horn — it’s third party evidence of the value you provide.

Your Best Customers can promote your business better than you can because they are outsiders looking to get the best deal.

This is authentic feedback that other potential customers will believe.

The post Your Best Customers can Help you Bring in Business appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

Website Design is More than Aesthetics

I am a website designer. I have spent most of my career in Marketing Management. As an experienced Marketing Manager, I have led and collaborated with many cross-functional teams to achieve business success over the past 35 years. The type of marketing I am referring to explicitly is Marketing Management. Many business people today, still think Marketing is all about promotion and communications. This perception is only partially true but is missing the key point of Modern Marketing.

Since the advent of Peter Drucker, (considered the Father of Modern Marketing), Marketing has changed to be the practice of Creating Customers by Developing and Delivering Value for the Client and the Business. This new approach has relegated Marketing to be the responsibility of everyone in the business organization while at the same time providing management from the top down to accomplish business goals by being customer oriented. In large companies today, marketing is confused with promotion and communication are often discussed as part of Marketing Communication, Marcom. For forward-thinking companies today, Marketing is being identified and referred to as Marketing Management, MM.

The practice of Marketing Management is more akin to Project Management and Business Operations than the old way of thinking about marketing as just doing Marcom. The new way of thinking is an exchange of value between the business and the customer. The exchange arrangement is the business solves customer problems and continuously provides customer satisfaction in exchange for sales revenue and customer recognition of the brand and also testimonials accolades.

This new paradigm is different from the outdated belief of marketing as essentially a single one-way channel from the business to the customer. In the old marketing, products were made without customer input or feedback and for only a few customers willing to buy without extensive selling pressure. The new marketing delivers what buyers want and removes as much uncertainty as possible from the determination of whether customers naturally accept your offerings.

The new marketing is about deeply understanding both the customer and marketplace. In addition, it means opening a two-way channel with the customer by synchronizing your business to working with customers by using the Internet. This new marketing approach is thinking of customers as organic assets that deliver revenue streams. These organic assets, (aka customers), require customer stewardship by providing constant attention of care and feeding to different target segments. Hence, businesses are tied to customer satisfaction as a measure of customer stewardship. In general, statistics have shown that satisfied customers provide more revenue and stay with the business longer. Satisfied customers do most of the buying of products or services that are offered by up-sell and cross-sell.

As I alluded to the essence of Marketing Management or MM is the exchange of value. Thus, Marketing’s primary tangible deliverable is the creation of products or services and introducing them and educating the marketplace. If MM can only be funded to accomplish one thing, it must be able to create product and service offerings specifically design to solve identifiable customer problems and meet the needs of the target audience. Getting-the-word-out to educate customers about the business offerings is equally important as having the right offerings to sell. Thus, Marcom is an essential initiative to promotion offerings by ensuring the marketplace is aware the offerings exist and explaining the brand and product benefits to the target audience.

Website Design is a development effort to build a business marketing tool to execute marketing tasks on the Internet. Thus, Website Design is more than just the aesthetic design aspects of website development. It requires a lot more skills, experience, marketing knowledge and business best-practices than someone that possesses only graphic design and software development skills. For your next website or the redesign of your current website, you need an experienced MM project leaders to build you website as a market tool to get business for you.

Superior websites are business investments that take the leadership of an experienced Marketing Manager with the skills to implement each website project as a reliable industrial platform to deliver promotional content. The website designer must have a detail hands-on knowledge of all the key cross-disciplines that include: marketing, business operations, sales, software development, copywriting and visual design. Developing and managing the website with an understanding of your Business Plan and Financials can not only build a better website but have the capability to yield better business results. Your website should accomplish your business goals with a focus to pursue your individual objectives of brand awareness, traffic generation, qualified lead submissions, sales revenue, market share and profitability.

I am a Web Marketing Manager and Website Designer with over 35 years’ experience with Marketing Management. I communicate value by visual design and using other content that’s artistically pleasing and contributes to your brand image and expression. The website I develop is built to achieve your business goals by implementing a reliable web platform as a practical market tool to allow you to create and execute marketing management initiatives to further your business. For a complimentary consultation, call me on (8i3) 856-3312 .

The post Website Design, What does it Take? appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

When I was at IBM, most of my career were focused on new product development. I spent most my time working as a team player in Strategic Business Units, SBUs. SBUs are created to create value. I like to think of SBUs as little factories that manage the creation of value as part of the product development process. The focus is to manage the value creation from the customer’s perspective. SBUs create new products that are wanted by customers to solve problems. If a new product proves to be effective, it can yield a good return-on-investment for both buyer and seller.

New product development has evolved from an in-house development centric process. The old way was looking inside the company to figure out what to build. The smart new way is to look outside the company to collect requirements on what to build. Today’s new product development is a business process focused on achieving goals with scheduled milestones and detailed documented procedures. Large companies have invested millions of dollars to successful implement and hone their own unique product development process as a corporate S.O.P. They have integrated the cross-disciplines of Marketing Management, Sales Operations, Project Management and Operations into a single process with controls. The results are the encouragement of new products by fostering entrepreneurial creativity, innovation and development of products that customers will love and want.

New Product Development and Website Design

So, what does this have to do with website design and development? Each new website I develop is a new product. Each new website has a target audience and a business owner that’s expecting some sort of return-on-investment or advantage from the website. However, a website is not a simple product. As mentioned in a previous blog post, your website is a pedestal for content delivery or you can think of it as a publishing platform.

The most important thing about your website is its content. People come to your website to get answers and find information. The success of your website will dependent on the ability to create compelling content that’s desired by the target audience. If you look at your website as a marketing and promotional tool to express your brand and present messages and information sought, it will be a never-ending task to keep it updated. This means the business must be involved with the content strategy and the development of content on a regular basis. Having a website is one thing and having the right content to help visitors is another.

The post New Product Development appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

Updates are Becoming More Frequent

Anyone involved with website design today should be aware of the extremely large number of changes being released for the open-source platform of WordPress.  This includes updates for  thousands of WordPress’ associated plugins and themes. WordPress enhancements are being delivered at a record-breaking pace. It seems the update rate is almost weekly. Many designer and developers are having trouble keeping up. These updates consist of security updates to bug fixes to new features to profound overarching architectural changes to WordPress such as an application API of JSON REST.

Hence, new website development must include the capability to easily incorporate updates without disrupting the current website’s performance or operation and allow a website to endure and grow with new functions if desired.

Website is a Pedestal for Content Delivery

For me, website development begins with the discovery the marketing requirements to solve a customer’s problem and achieve business goals. Before a new website is designed, a thorough analysis must be performed to understand the business needs and requirements of the website. This is the most important part of a website development. The design of the website takes a backseat to the primary function of content delivery, to create and deliver the right messaging to invoke action. The first priority of the website is content delivery by providing information sought by the target audience. The website purpose is to achieve business objectives. The website itself is only a platform base or pedestal  for content delivery.  The website as pedestal must be reliable and consistently contribute to the function of content delivery.

A Strong Pedestal means Strong Content Delivery

Starting with the concept design phase, websites must be developed to be modular, extremely stable and upgradeable. Serviceability and maintainability have become a key issue to preserve the customer’s website investment by lower costs for the long run. Website developers should be using a pedestal made with the most advanced infrastructure of technology available that will allow integration of future version changes and updates.  The new website design must use a “well-thought out architecture” with a layered structure. The website pedestal must be built on a stable framework of reliable components with the mechanism to optimize code execution using defined interfaces to add robust functional features economically. My  approach leverages the pedestal to ensure the website is at the latest level with quality software. To me, it’s inconceivable and strictly wrong to even think of developing a website otherwise. Some developers use an approach by code hacking by trying this and that, the results are websites waiting to break.

Selecting Right Working Pedestal

There is a profound elegance of creating a new website that’s both simple and powerful. My approach relies on the reusable framework of  Genesis, where most of the development planning and information organization is already done. Before the design begins, it reassuring to know I am using a proven infrastructure that’s very popular, used by thousands of websites and is continuously being updated by a team of smart and experienced developers. My approach relies on deploying a fully supported and operational pedestal. If this infrastructure didn’t exist, it would take literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop it from scratch.  Fortunately,  the pedestal of WordPress and  Genesis does exist as open-source products. The core competency I bring to the table is the expertise of marketing management. new product development and my ability to create content using the right pedestal that’s regularly updated.

Preserving Your Website Investment

During of my career, I have developed and launched a long list of products. I develop websites the right way using the right pedestal and my experience.  I have spent a consider amount of time evaluating and studying different infrastructures. The Genesis Framework is the  best. It provides  the light-weight simplicity, popularity, a large install base, robust functions, and is regularly supported with updates that align with WordPress. Genesis sits on top of WordPress. WordPress is constructed with a proven architecture using the most advanced technology and is being improved every day. Over 74 million websites are built with WordPress. It’s the most popular user-friendly Content Management System,(CMS) on the Internet.  I use WordPress with the Genesis Framework as my strategic infrastructure or pedestal.  The pairing of WordPress and Genesis is a powerful combination of value that will preserve your website investment.

Uniquely Designed Themes Mean More Effort

Website designers that create unique themes make beautiful websites. But, they are many times afraid to update them to newest level of WordPress. The one-of-kind designed theme sits directly on top of WordPress and may interact the wrong way when updated. If a problem occurs the website has to remain back-level until the theme is fixed. Thus, uniquely designed  themes that sit directly on WordPress mean more efforts needed to overcome adverse effects of updates and keeping the website from becoming obsolete.

In contrast, my approach (using pedestal composed of a “layered architecture” with the Genesis Framework), will greatly reduce the risk of adverse effects when updating WordPress. Please note, Genesis updates are tested with the corresponding new level of WordPress before being released. This can significantly reduce of risk of adverse effect. In addition, it will greatly minimize the effort of the individual designer to accomplish updates easily.

In summary, website development should be based on 2 distinct parts a pedestal and the content.  The pedestal must be a reliable layered infrastructure that furthers your ability to deliver content.

For more information regarding my approach and how I can help you, please call me on (813) 732-7312 or send me an email.

The post Can Your Website Survive Updates? appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

Unfortunately, most traditional marketing practices are centered on attracting new customers, instead of retaining existing ones.
Developing a strong bond and loyalty is based on building relationships that can result in reducing presales costs and improving profits from 25% to 85%. Retained customers can be developed to provide greater profitability.

Two ways to strength customer retention is by

1. Creating a switching barrier
2. Delivering high customer satisfaction

Switch barriers making difficult to switch by using loyalty discounts and make it extremely easy to do business with you.
The best way to keep customers is by delivering high customer satisfaction. This makes it harder for competitors to capture your customers even by offering lower priced offerings. The task of achieving high customer satisfaction can be done with Relationship Marketing.

Relationship Marketing embraces those efforts to know and serve better-valued individual customers. This involves The Customer Development Process.

• Prospects – strongly interested in the offerings and have the ability to pay for it
• First-time customers – convert to Repeat customers, may continue to buy from competitors
• Repeat customers – convert to Clients, may continue to buy from competitors
• Clients – convert to Advocates, only buy from the company in relevant categories.
• Advocates – convert to Partners, praise the company and encourage others to buy from it.
• Partners – the customer actively works with the company to get customers or improve the business or opportunities.

The challenge is to keep the customer satisfied and reactivate dissatisfied customers with win-back strategies.

5 levels of investment in customer-relationship building are:

1. Basic Marketing – salesperson sells offering
2. Reactive Marketing – salesperson sells the offering and encourages the customer to call him back for questions, comments, problems & complaints
3. Accountable Marketing – salesperson sells the offering and after the sale, he calls the customer to check if he met expectations, to help and resolve any problems
4. Proactive Marketing – periodically calls the customer about the improved products uses, helpful tips, understand & listens to customer, invites customer to events, offers promotions, etc. – building an on-going relationship
5. Partnership Marketing – works continuously with the customer to discover ways to effect customer savings, benefits, and performance, provides finder fee, resell your product in his sales bundle or subcontracts you

The goal of all this is to develop more loyal customers and increase sales revenue. However, the company must spend more to build greater customer loyalty. The correct levels investment in customer-relationship building with the Customer Development Process will yield more profitability for some companies than in others. Investing should be done on an individual customer basis. The question boils down to “How to anticipate those customers that will become Clients, Advocates, and Partners?” and “Who are those customers with least amount of maintenance with higher sales?” Most companies practice either the Basic Marketing or Reactive Marketing because the investment doesn’t justify the gains if the unit profit margins are too small. Even if customers don’t convert to the stronger loyalty positions in the Customer Development Process, the overarching objective is to keep profitable customers for a lifetime and this may require some invest.

The post Retaining Customers appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

WordCamp Orlando is Ready to Receive You.

There are still tickets available for this awaited WordPress event on Nov 13 through 15. The WordCamp Orlando is always a well-planned WordCamp. I am never disappointed. It will be a fun filled event. Don’t miss it.

WordCamp is a combination of education, hands-on training, entertainment, technical & business exchange of information, networking,  social gathering and food & drink. All rolled into one event for a very trivial price. The common thread of this event is WordPress, the world’s most popular Content Management System. WordCamp is a worldwide grass-root movement that’s coordinated by WordCamp Central, a nonprofit organization connect with WordPress. Each WordCamp is planned, developed and executed by local volunteers.

WordPress is an Open Source infrastructure for some of the Internet’s largest websites and it allows for the development of full-function websites, e-commerce and Internet publishing.

WordCamp Orlando has an lineup of WordPress Professors that are respected in the WordPress Community and knowledgeable. So, you will definitely walk away with some valuable information.

This year’s theme is about the Magical World of WordPress. It starts on Friday with WordPress Wizardry Workshops and followed by Opening Remarks and two days of extraordinary break-out sessions of magical interest! The sessions are divided into a variety tracks: Design, Development, User, Business, Panel and Workshop.

As you may know,  I am part of the leadership team that just delivered our WordCamp Tampa in September. I highly recommend attending WordCamp Orlando as a rewarding experience. If you are a designer, developer,  copywriter, blogger, WordPress beginner, business person or just thinking about using WordPress, you should seriously think  about attending this event.

I’ll see you there. Tweet me at this event – so we can touch base.

The post 2015 WordCamp Orlando appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

Complete Website Redesign for a New Face

Sylvia Thomas Center has a new Internet face. This new face is a complete redesign with refreshed content and new features.

The new website is build on the newest Open Source technology of WordPress and the most popular Content Management System, CMS, available on the worldwide web today. It’s recognized as the defacto CMS standard of the Internet with over 74 millions websites built with WordPress. This CMS allows the Sylvia Thomas Center staff to manage their own website and publish content by themselves. This advantage can drastically reduce the total-cost-of-ownership of the website by doing everything in-house. Thus, saving them money and ability to timely publish new information.

The new website uses the same web address since 2001, sylviathomascenter.org. It has been redesigned to allows visitors to communicate and gain information  using a smartphone or tablet. This means it’s extremely easy to find the date and times of Support Groups and get directions, while on the road. In addition, the new site includes news, blog articles and the option to leave  comments.

The website content has been revamp to explain what the Sylvia Thomas Center does in Hillsborough County and its major Programs. The key website improvement are:

• Event Calendar
• News
• Blog
• Fundraisers
• Donations

Please visit the Sylvia Thomas Center Website to learn more.

The post Sylvia Thomas has a New Internet Face appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

The Small Business Challenge

What is this Primal Business Challenge?

Let me give you a hint:

It’s as old as the very idea of the “open-air market” where merchants would bring their wares to sell. “Open-air market” actually date back to thousands of years to the beginning of civilization. The ultimate business challenge that occupies many waking hours of business owners, today, as well, as the dawn civilization. It’s a driving force denoted by basic need and fear. It’s both a means-of-survival and a necessity for the growth of the business. And, without it you have no business or not for very long.

I am talking about the ability to acquire new customers and keep existing customers and have them returning to buy your stuff. The customer should be considered the asset of  business. Without the customer, there is not business. The existing customer base that currently buys your products or services is a critical performance measurement that determines the health of the business and expected  revenue. The worth of your business may be calculated by your customer base and annual revenue. The bigger the customer base the larger the potential value of your business.  When you decide to cash-it in and retire by selling your business, it can be quite a nest egg. Your customer base will dictate the gross amount of revenue that can be achieved by return business, upsell and cross sell. Year-to-year expansion of the customer base will definitely grow the business revenue.

Sole Proprietor and  Mom & Pop Business

When I think of my artist friend and mentor, Josef, about his opinion about getting customers to buy his paintings, I instantly know his strongly views against doing any kind of selling. However, Josef’s One-Man-Shows are a testimonial if you want to eat and buy paints and canvas. — You need to get customers to buy your stuff!

It’s an important chore you must initiate and be involved with from start to finish on a periodic basis. Yes, it’s a necessary evil that will take you away from the actual work you enjoy. But, every business owner must embrace and  understand – it has to be done to generate the flow of revenue to stay in business.

Getting customers has always been a challenge that stands in the way of doing the real work that craftsmen, artists, tradesmen, freelancers, and consultants love and do to make a living. Too many small businesses struggle with efforts to get new customers. For many business owners, it has always been a mysterious game of hit or miss and a painful experience accompanied by worry. The challenge is compounded by bigger businesses with more resources that competing with you – it  becomes the classic struggle of David versus Goliath. I believe (that despite competitive conditions are not in your favor), you as a sole proprietor, mom & pop or even a relatively small local business can still flourish against large established firms with over 20% market share. The reason you can flourish in one word is “Brand“.

Customer-Brand Relationships

The reason someone will buy from you is because they hold in their mind a concept about you and your business. This concept can be described as your Brand. Your Brand is the total experience of doing business with you and is composed of  your reputation, confidence in you, trust in you, results you produce and a good feeling about you.  It’s the customer’s perception of you that’s identified with your Brand.  When they see your logo, business card, website, business name, invoice, an ad, sales flyer or even a picture of you — it’s your Brand image that’s perceived. In either a good, bad or indifference way of thinking.

For a small local business, essentially it boils down that you are your Brand. Brand development is an important aspect of you business that shouldn’t be overlooked. Many small business owner are completely oblivious about their brand. The best and most cost-effective way to develop and maintain your Brand is through your website. The marketplace is continuously changing. It requires the continuously task to refresh your website  with compelling content that  answers to the fundamental question, “Why should I buy from you instead of your competitor?”

The purpose of your website is to create Customer-Brand Relationships. This is a never-ending effort and a challenge for as long as you’re in business. I could write an entire book describing and recommending what to do to achieve a strong Brand relationship. But, it’s beyond the scope of this brief article.

Now, I ask the question again, What is this Primal Business Challenge? In the beginning we said the obviously answer is to acquire new customers and keep existing customers. To get those results that’s clearly about getting customers to “buy your stuff” means being focused on developing Customer-Brand Relationships as part of your Business Plan. Hence, the true primal business challenge is to create strong Customer-Brand Relationships and the care and feeding of those relationships.

The post Primal Business Challenge appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

On March 19, I gave a Website Introduction Meetup in the Brandon area at the Bloomingdale Library. The session was geared for beginners that are developing a new website for the first-time.  It was a 2 hour session covering things that should be considered before doing any design or starting the website development process. The session was mainly about marketing, branding, messaging, SEO and preparing for the the design of a new website.

I recorded the session, but was only able to capture the first hour due to the camera’s battery didn’t have a sufficient charge. The following is the video of the first hour of that Meetup session.

The post Website Introduction Session appeared first on Creative Web Actions.

Tampa Bay WordPress Meetup now has a satellite location in Brandon

The nearest WordPress Meetup to Brandon is either in Tampa or Sarasota. Our new Brandon location is a welcome opportunity to invite new visitors to become acquainted with WordPress. Our Brandon Meetup will make it convenient and easier for those that live in eastern Hillsborough county to learn more about WordPress and exchange information related to WordPress as it pertains to solving business issues and blogging.

Our Brandon Meetup is a networking group devoted to WordPress and with no obligations except whether you want to attend. Normally it’s without any cost to you.  However, the extent of your involvement is entirely up to you; whether you want to contribute your time or donate money or even the degree of your participate. Also, you may want to participate or volunteer for WordCamp our 2 day special WordPress event at Tampa. Our Brandon Meetups are devised to deliver the subject matter to satisfy our local Brandon members and visitors. All WordPress Meetups using the Hillsborough Library Facilities are free without any entry fee and open to the public.

We are constantly asking our audience for suggestions for new topics and any requests they have for hands-on presentations or demonstrations they want to see.  The level of technical expertise at each meeting will vary between beginner to advance depending on the audience or the pre-arranged Meetup agenda. We encourage peer discussions and expert participation from the audience. Our focus is to provide information about WordPress (by Automattic) as a free Open Source Software platform for use in websites, blogs and applications, as well as, provide education and help the user community to use WordPress more effectively free of charge.

Our first WordPress Brandon Meetup will be held on February 26, 2015 at 7:30 PM at the Bloomingdale Regional Library. This will be an awesome first step in bringing together the WordPress community in the greater Brandon area to exchange ideas and information about WordPress.

Our WordPress Brandon Meetups is hosted by Alison Foxall, Andrew Norcross and Alphonso Montibello and will be held regularly once a month at the Bloomingdale Regional Library, unless specifically stated in advance. We expected an interesting series of WordPress Meetups that will include guest speakers during the year to benefit our Brandon area user community.

Please RSVP for this Brandon meeting by clicking on Tampa Bay WordPress in Brandon .

If you have any comments, suggestions or recommendations, please complete comment form for this blog article or email me at atm@creativewebactions.com with subject titled “WordPress Brandon Meetup Feedback”

I will see you at our first WordPress Meetup in Brandon!

The post First WordPress Meetup in Brandon appeared first on Creative Web Actions.