Did you know that a fantastic fulfillment and customer service strategy can grow your business faster than a good marketing strategy? Most business owners assume that business growth is all about marketing, and it is. But they forget that a business is always marketing itself.

No matter what you’re selling or who you’re selling to, your customers are always evaluating your business. They’re evaluating it before they buy your product or service. They’re evaluating it after they buy.

Marketing, in the traditional sense of the word, usually refers to the marketing that’s done before a sale is made. It’s about connecting with prospects and turning those prospects into customers. But the other side of marketing is turning your existing customers into loyal promoters.

That’s done, not through marketing, but through customer service and fulfillment. THIS is the secret to creating explosive business growth. It turns your customers into an army of the most trusted sales people money can buy…but you don’t have to pay them!

Let’s look at some data from Liveperson.com which was gathered from some consumer polls and surveys and see how your customers define great support and service…

The Facts on How Customer Service Drives Business Growth

Lack of customer support is a factor which contributes to high shopping cart abandonment rates online. According to LIveperson.com, 37% of online shoppers claim that they abandon their purchase because they couldn’t contact the vendor. 30% of them abandon carts because they have a hard time getting help on the website. These are probably sites which were well marketed, but poorly supported.

Customers also claim that speed is important during a customer service experience. Over 71% of consumers expect to get support in five minutes or less, 31% expect immediate assistance. 48% of shoppers who aren’t helped right away will go somewhere else to make their purchase. 56% of online consumers expect to have their problems solved in one interaction.

The statistics also show that hiding behind an FAQ page, email ticketing system or support forum instead of allowing your customers to talk to a live person via chat or phone is a costly mistake. Nearly 60% of consumers want to have a choice about how they contact brands online. Nearly 60% of online consumers also prefer to speak with someone over the phone.

That’s how great customer support can increase your sales and make your marketing more effective. Now, let’s debunk a popular myth about the “expense” of customer service.

Customer Service, an Expense or an Investment?

It’s a mistake to think of customer service as an expense. Sure, it costs money to provide live support. But it’s costing a lot more to let your customers abandon their purchases, never to return to your site again. And how about after the purchase is made?

If customers expect quick and efficient support during the sales process, how much more will they expect it after they’ve spent money with your company? If you spend money on marketing to get customers to your site, yet lose them because of bad support, your marketing dollars become less effective.

But if you invest in great customer service, you can not only increase your sales, your customers are also more likely to tell people about the positive experience they had with your company. A happy customer is a great sales person, and you never had to pay them a commission. It’s 100% done for you marketing.

So if you want to grow your business, invest your money into creating exceptional customer service instead of just marketing.

Customer service departments can be like disaster zones. Dozens, hundreds or even thousands of calls and emails flood in every day. Customer service representatives do their best to handle every situation using the resources they have. Some problems get solved, others slip through the cracks.

Other times, the problem gets solved but the customer still isn’t happy. The customer service team gets locked into survival mode, doing only what they can to keep customers from leaving.

Perhaps this is why, every year, poor customer experiences costs US based companies an estimated $83 Billion in losses per year (Source: Parature Customer Service Blog).

If you want to avoid being victim of this grisly statistic, here are three things you’ll want to do right away…

#1 Make a Price Increase

Increasing prices gives you higher margins. If you invest those extra profits into building, equipping and training your customer service team, you’ll get more business than you would by investing the extra profits into marketing.

Happy customers talk. They leave reviews online. Word of mouth marketing starts working on your behalf. Before you know it, customers are coming to you instead of you having to go out and find them. So a price increase is a great way to create a better customer service department and increase your profits.

Don’t worry about what the higher prices will do to your sales either.  According to the RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report 2011, 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.  This data was gathered during the peak of the global economic crisis. People ARE willing to pay for value, and they measure value based on how you treat them.

How many times you have you gone to a competitor and even paid a higher price in order to get better service? The key is to “sell” the price increase to your customers by telling them that you’re doing it to invest more into creating a great experience for them. If you deliver on your promise, they won’t mind the higher prices.

#2: Get Better Systems

Even the best customer service agent can be confined to mediocrity if you don’t give them the right tools. Call recording and monitoring and archiving systems and a great system for tracking tickets and follow ups can make a stunning difference in your customer service team’s performance.

If you have any doubts about your systems for managing customer service procedures, a change probably needs to be made. Make it. Don’t force your customers and your representatives to settle for mediocrity.

According to the RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report 2011, nearly 90% of consumers went to competitors after having a poor customer service experience. Good customer service reps are also less likely to stay where there’s chaos.  So while getting by with faulty systems might save you a few bucks, maybe hundreds, it will lock your business into a purgatory of mediocrity.

But with great systems, you can create the economic growth which will justify the extra money invested in those systems.

#3: Clean House: Hire and Fire

Once you have the extra money to pay great customer service reps and once you have systems in place the will help them win, hire people who WANT to win. If you have people on your team who are comfortable with just getting by, get rid of them. Don’t try to motivate them. Find people who are naturally motivated, people who have customer service in their DNA.

When you work with winners, and you pay them well and you give them the systems that will help them win, chaos disappears.

Remember that bad customer service will cost you more money than bad marketing, but great customer service is 10x more powerful than great marketing. It will put customers to work for you. In the age of trust based marketing, this is the most valuable thing you can have going for your brand.

Content marketing is one of the big buzz words in search engine optimization. Is it just another fad that will vanish with the next Google update?

If you’re curious about this and if you want to attract steady streams of traffic regardless of what updates the search engines roll out, this might be one of the most important articles you’ll read this year…

Why Content Marketing is the Future of Marketing

According to iMedia Connection 78% of internet users claim that they use the internet for product research. More than 46% of the searches conducted on a daily basis are people searching for information about products and services. The key word in that last sentence is “information.” Web users are looking for content, not advertisements. This is the first clue as to why content marketing IS the new SEO.

The goal of search engines is to give people what they want. People want content that will help them learn about which products and services are best suited for them. So if you want to reach these people, you want them to find your content when they type your keywords into the search bar.

The only want to do this is by publishing content that people will find just as interesting and useful as the content they read in their favorite magazines.

Makes sense right?

People are addicted to good information, always have been. It’s advertising that turns them off. So here’s where content marketing fits into this picture…

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing isn’t new.

It’s been around since before the internet. Every single magazine you’ve ever read has used content marketing to build a profitable business. Here’s their simple business model:

1.      The media company puts together a publication that’s full of valuable and relevant content.

2.      They sell advertisements to companies who want to market their products and services readers.

Simple right?

In the information age, you simply use content marketing to do the exact same thing that media companies have been doing for years. So here’s the only difference between “old” content marketing and information age content marketing:

1.      YOUR company puts together a publication that’s full of valuable and relevant content

2.      YOU advertise your products and services to your readers.

Simple enough right?

How to Use Content Marketing in Your SEO Strategy

Just like the old methods of search engine optimization, there’s a right away to do content marketing and there’s a wrong way. The wrong way is to talk only about your company, your products and your services using the same generic, keyword optimized language that everyone else is.

That’s not content marketing, that’s direct marketing. The right way to do content marketing would be to provide content that has intrinsic value. In other words, the content itself has to provide enough value to your readers that they’d be willing to pay for it just as they might pay for a magazine subscription.

That’s the primary difference between having a content marketing strategy and simply publishing content and hoping it gets picked up by the search engines. Spend 90% of your time creating and delivering this kind of content, and tone down the direct advertisements.

Start thinking like a media company and remember that content marketing has already been working for decades. The only difference is that today, it’s quickly becoming a requirement for companies who want to stand out in the information age economy.

Why are you reading this article right now?

Probably because of the irony. Here’s a marketer TELLING you that he’s out to make a sale. It’s a little out of place isn’t it? Yet, this is exactly what your customers see when they read articles that just talk about your company and what you have to offer.

People don’t care. Sorry to be so blunt, but we all know it’s true. When customers search for information online, how many of them are saying:

“I sure hope I find a great advertisement so I can buy something.”

People want useful, verifiable information that will help them solve their problems and make smart buying decisions or that will entertain them. That’s why people read trade magazines, websites, review sites and articles in the newspaper.

People LOVE to buy things, but they hate advertisements. That’s one of the primary things to keep in mind when you’re writing your search engine optimization content. Ultimately, what you’re after is trust, not rankings. TRUST builds rankings. Trust makes you an authority and earning trust can help you earn a ton of money.

If You Build it RIGHT, They WILL Come

You’ve probably heard SEO experts and web design companies squawking at people for having the “if you build it they will come,” mentality. They claim that if you assume your website will automatically attract visitors, you’re making a mistake.

Excuse me, but have you noticed that this still happens…even today?

Take sites like Facebook and Twitter. Someone built those, and people came. A WHOLE LOT of people. Billions of users flocked to these social media hang outs and the numbers are still growing. So apparently, you can build a website that people just come to.

But you need to give people what they want.

You need to give them useful content that’s relevant to their lives and that helps them make smarter buying decisions. You might not even have to talk about your products or your services at all. If you build trust with your readers, and if they represent your target market, the sales will come, here’s why…

Create Trust and the Rankings Will Follow

If people come to trust you as a source of dependable and entertaining information, how easy will it be to earn their business once they decide they need your products or services? Pretty easy. Just look at how easy it is to sell advertising in a popular magazine that has high readership. The people trust the content in that magazine, and the advertisers make sales.

If you create content that builds that level of trust with people, you’ll become your own media company. You’ll make money through your own advertisements. But it starts with publishing trustworthy content. People buy from companies that they trust. That’s been true since long before the internet was ever created and the internet hasn’t changed that.

The internet HAS, however, made it easier for customers to do business ONLY with the companies they can trust. This is why earning trust with your content needs to be your number one priority.

So get Your Google author account set up, start a solid content marketing strategy and start giving people what they want. The time will come when those readers are ready to buy your services, and if they trust you, you’ll be the first person they come to.

Of course you want to rank on the top page of Google, who wouldn’t?

Over 50% of the organic search traffic is gulped up by the top three ranking web sites. From that position, the traffic decreases exponentially. And if you’re on the second page? Forget it. You might as well be invisible.

That’s where the nifty art of search engine optimization comes in, but according to the data, search engine optimization is anything but free and it’s STILL a mystery, even to some experts.

Marketing Charts.com reported that 21% of businesses who outsource SEO are with the results with the results. Of those who opt to handle their SEO in house, only 11% are satisfied with the results. Those aren’t very encouraging numbers, especially considering how expensive SEO services can be. The data also shows that SEO is one of the fastest growing industries in today’s marketplace.

Conductor Blog reported that job postings for SEO specialists on sites like indeed.com have increased nearly 2,000% over the past few years. Yet, only 21% of people using SEO agencies are happy with the results? That doesn’t exactly make you jump up and down and say “Look at me! I need SEO Services! Who wants to help?”

If you’re outsourcing your SEO, you’d better make sure the company you hire knows what they’re doing. You want someone who has a track record for getting results. But more important, you should ask yourself if your company really deserves to be on the front page of Google yet…

Cashing in On SEO Starts with a Reality Check

Let’s do a quick experiment which I guarantee will increase your traffic over the next year. Open up another tab on your browser right now and type your keywords into the Google search bar. Then, go to the top three sites in the search engine results. What are they doing that you’re NOT doing?

If you were a customer looking for a trustworthy company, which website would you choose…yours or one of our competitors? Unless you’re 100% positive that you’d choose your website, it’s time to do some work on your on page SEO.

Make a checklist. Look at your copy, your design, your site structure and your content. Is your website doing your company justice? Is it positioning you as an authority in your industry? Are you consistently posting useful information and positioning yourself as a trusted content source?

If not, you might be interested to know that 78% of internet users say they use the internet to research products. Well over 40% of the daily searches are searches for information on products and services (source: iMedia Connection). People are shopping for products and services online. People love to shop, but they’re not looking for the same things they look for when browsing through the mall.

They want information. GREAT information that will help them make smart buying decisions. So if you want to hoist your website to the top page of Google, you’d better start giving people what they want. Otherwise, you’ll have to sit at the bottom of the search results, hoping for a few crumbs to fall from the table of your competitors.

More and more businesses are talking about “content marketing,” but few businesses know what it really is and how it impacts search engine rankings. Simply put, content marketing is positioning yourself as a trusted course of authority content FIRST, and letting that reputation attract more qualified customers.

Marketing isn’t’ just about advertisements anymore; the information age has changed that. Today, people want content. Nearly half of the searches that take place today will be conducted by people searching for valuable content? Is your website delivering?

If you have doubts, call MSI right now and let’s talk about getting your site worthy of the Google page one rankings.