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I received this email welcoming me to the Google Authorship program.

Google Authorship Program Welcome Email

The Google Authorship program is part of their plan to connect a piece of content with the Google+ profile of its author in order to identify quality content creators and eliminate low quality sites from its results pages.

What does this mean?

Google Authorship has important benefits to content creators. If you spend time creating quality content, whether it is text, audio or video, you need to associate your original content with your Google+ profile to identify you as the true and verified author of this content. Why?

• Improves the visibility for your content – Including author information in the search results increases the visibility of good content and encourages searchers to click on your link. Note that all the links in the screen shot below pointed to a copy of my post. Because I was the verified author, my link came up first and is very visible.

  

  Google Authorship – Increased visibility for your content

• Increases the level of trust in your content – Your personal association with your original content adds a level of trust and confidence. Searchers will assume that the content behind the link with your picture is of better quality than those without. Which link in the above screen shot would you click on if you were presented with this search engine result?
• Creates a centralized hub that points to all your content – You should edit your Google+ personal profile and include links to all content you write. If you click on my name in the results above, it is linked to my profile, taking you to one resource for all of my online properties.
• Adds extra links to the search results after “back” button click – If a user clicks on and reads an author-tagged article, Google will display three additional links to articles by the same author if the user returns to the search result page.

How do you set up Google Authorship?

If you have been avoiding Google+, now is the time to take it seriously to ensure you get the credit you deserve for your content.

First create your profile. Click on the blue “Edit Profile” button and fill out your profile. Include a quality image of you and provide links to sites where you contribute content.

Google Authorship – Author Link and Contributor Links

The “Other profiles” section can include links to your social media profiles. When you verify your authorship, a link to your “About” page on your website is automatically included. You also should include the link to your Google+ Page for your business.

In the “Contributor to” section, include links to all websites where you contribute content. On those sites, make sure your author bio contains your Google+ profile link.

Both of these sections are important and should be filled out completely.

Add your Google+ link with rel=author to your website

If you have a single author blog, you can easily add author tags in several places. I’ve included a G+ icon in the sidebar that is linked to my profile so that it shows up on each page. I also linked the author information on each blog post to my profile. If you use WordPress, go to your single post page (single.php) template and look for the following: ?php the_author() ? and link it to your profile like so:

a href=”https://plus.google.com/117611371289222365526″ rel=”author” target=”_blank”?php the_author() ?/a

If you use WordPress, take a look at the authorship features offered by WordPress SEO by Yoast. Joost de Valk has made implementing Authorship easy for both single author and multi-author blogs.

Once you have linked your content to your profile, test it using Rich Snippets testing tool to make sure you’ve properly configured rel=”author” for any pages you author.

And if you noticed at the bottom of the email sent to me was this statement:

Did you know? Signing up for Authorship means you can now learn how often your pages are appearing in Google search results. Learn more »

In Webmaster’s Tools, under “Labs” you will find “Author Stats” showing you how your content for which you are the verified author is being found.

Google Authorship – Webmaster Tools Report

Below the graph, you get a list of pages and for each page, impressions, clicks, click through rate and average position – really useful information that can help you optimize your content even more.

Google Authorship is important to get right as it can be the difference between you being found and you hiding behind your competitors. Have you set applied for authorship yet?

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/google-authorship/

Marketing Personas – Better Define Your Target Market

Marketing personas are fictional representations of the different segments that make up your ideal customer. You define your specific personas by analyzing your customers – their demographics, behaviors, needs, goals and concerns. By understanding the unique characteristics and needs of these segments, you can structure your web presence – website, blog and social profiles and inbound marketing activities – content, social and search, that will better support the goals of each segment of your prospective buyer.

How to Define Marketing Personas

Most businesses sell products and services to multiple customer types. For small businesses, keep it simple when creating your set of marketing personas.

• Use information you know about your current customer base to establish a basic understanding of your buyer – key demographic information such as age, gender, location, job and the psychographic profile – lifestyle, interests and preferences.
• Analyze your current customers to understand what motivates them to buy from you and not your competitor.
• Analyze the type of visitor you see coming to your website, where they spend time and what actions they take.
• Write a story about each segment based on your experiences that describes their needs, goals and concerns.

How to Use Your Marketing Personas

Once you have identified your marketing personas, use them to plan marketing activities that are customer-focused and relevant to your ideal client. Get started by implementing some of the following:

• Blog content – What are the questions and concerns that each persona has that your business solves? Use this information to develop a list of blog topics that turns you into the expert that your ideal client will go to for answers.
• Website navigation – Use the information from your personas to speak to your visitors directly with messages that are meaningful to their needs, guiding them through your website. When your visitor sees that you understand their needs, they will follow the path you set for them. At each step of the way, include the appropriate call-to-action that will take them to the next step in developing that important relationship with you and your business.
• Website content – Once you have the navigation paths established for your various personas, now you can write the content that will appeal to their needs. Knowing what your ideal client needs enables you to write content about your products and services that doesn’t sell but educates your visitor.
• Call to Action Offers – Knowing what your target audience needs help with allows you to create an offer that helps them solve this problem. Put this offer behind a form and generate leads for you, helping both your target market and your business in the process.
• Search Engine Optimization – Defining marketing personas helps you understand how your target market searches for solutions and therefore, helps you determine what important keyword phrases you should be using to optimize your site.
• Content curation – In addition to you providing relevant content via your website and blog, you can focus your selection of quality content to post on your social sites, helping your audience get the information they need without having to search for it. This adds to your value and keeps you visible as an expert resource.

By understanding more about your ideal client, you can make better decisions on your marketing activities. Something as simple as adjusting your service hours to accommodate their schedules, adding solutions to their most pressing issues or making sure you deliver your content in the form that they prefer, can increase your value in the their eyes.

How can you use marketing personas to gain more visibility with your target audience?

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/marketing-personas-better-definition-of-your-target-market/

Relationship Marketing – Build Loyalty Trust to Build Relationship

In a recent guest post by Laura Briere of Vision Advertising, she offered 6 Tips to Turn Your Internet Marketing into Relationship Marketing to help you develop a strong foundation and build quality online communities.

Let’s take relationship marketing a step further and talk about what it is and why it is important for every small business.

Relationship marketing is not a new concept but has increased in importance because of its effectiveness in attracting the attention of your target audience. The use of social media has put a spotlight on your business making it vital that you provide value to your clients while demonstrating integrity and trustworthiness. This ensures you have a loyal, happy customer base and a quality reputation.

What is Relationship Marketing?

Relationship marketing is a strategy that focuses on building brand loyalty through customer satisfaction rather than focusing on transactional sales. Implementing a relationship marketing strategy requires a plan that:

• Provides the right information to your audience at the right time

• Builds credibility, customer commitment and loyalty
• Makes prospects and customers feel comfortable and connected to you.

The goal of relationship marketing is to move the prospect through various stages of the sales process while building a rapport that becomes stronger and more valuable over time. These stages include:

Suspect Prospect Customer Partner Advocate

So how do you help people determine whether they want to do business with you?

Build Strong Relationships

As a small business, you can develop strong relationships with customers and prospects by focusing your marketing activities on:

• Establishing credibility – Position you and your business as an expert in your industry by supplying information that is useful and relevant to your audience. Content marketing is an ideal relationship marketing tactic because it educates your audience with useful information. Most content marketing is delivered through your blog, social media or email. When a suspect is researching a solution, you become the go to resource for the information that can help them decide on a solution. If you’ve answered their questions through your content, they are more likely to come to you when they have other questions. This sharing of information begins to build a relationship that is valuable to them.
• Enabling connection – Connect with your audience by offering something of value that will get them to take action. If action is taken, you now have moved a suspect to the next stage – prospect – where you can continue to develop the relationship. At this stage, you supply them with more useful and practical information for their business. As you continue to develop the relationship, some of these prospects will see the value you offer and become customers. Once they do, you continue to strengthen and nurture the relationship, but now based on trust and loyalty.
• Building loyalty and trust – Focus on the customer’s needs rather than your own in order to build loyalty, gain trust and keep your brand top of mind. Your business will be judged by the perception of how you treat your customers. By providing superior customer service and helping them succeed, you turn a customer into a partner. When you have reached this type of relationship with your customer, you can then determine if you can turn them into a brand advocate – a resource that speaks highly about your company, shares your information with their peers and works with you to promote your products and services through reviews, success stories and referrals.

Once you have turned a prospect into a customer, you must continue to add value to the relationship so that their connection to you continues to grow. It is far less expensive to cultivate your existing customer base than it is to seek new customers.

When you develop a strong and loyal relationship with your customers, they will speak highly of you and provide referrals to your business. How are you building relationships with your target audience?

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/relationship-marketing-connecting-you-with-your-customers/

Greetings! Thanks for visiting Masterful Marketing. You’ll find a lot of content about marketing your small business in the blog, so you may want to subscribe via the RSS feed or email so you won’t miss any valuable information.

Customer service is more important to your marketing strategy today than many business owners realize. Because of brand exposure via social media, marketing needs to be concerned with the entire customer experience. Companies that provide excellent customer service strengthen their marketing by simplifying the task of tracking and managing the perception of your brand. If your customer service is brilliant, marketing becomes the process of staying visible to your customers and prospects.

We Appreciate Your Business – Tom Fishburn, Marketoonist

When your customer service is lacking, marketing then has an added burden of reputation management – tracking and responding to negative reviews.

Customer Service is Critical to Reputation Management and Effective Marketing

With review sites such as Yelp taking prominent positions in the search engine results for local business searches, businesses must know what is being said about them and why. It has become too easy to submit reviews for the world to see, but when you have a disgruntled customer, negative reviews are a given. In a world where consumers trust online reviews more than company marketing messages, people will scour the Internet to get help when trying to decide which product to buy or service to hire.

Create a quality brand reputation through superior customer service

• Include customer service in your marketing plan. Create a total customer experience that includes providing excellent customer service, from answering emails quickly, returning phone calls and resolving complaints quickly and professionally. Do you know how your current clients view their experience with your business? Do you go out of your way to provide something of value that strengthens your relationship with your clients and sets you apart from your competition?
• Nurture your current clients to ensure future references and testimonials. If you want to land new clients, use your relationship with your current clients and ask them to provide reviews for you on these review sites. Who better to tell the world about you than your existing, satisfied clients?
• Create a customer experience that is worth talking about. So many small business owners tell me how they feel “nickel and dimed” by their service providers. They avoid calling to ask a question because it results in an invoice regardless of the type of question asked. I’m not suggesting that you give your services away for free but can you create service packages that include access to you via phone and email for those burning questions that only you can answer? A great example of superior service is a real estate attorney I used who charges a flat fee for a closing. The fee may be a bit higher, but having this attorney available when needed without wondering if I was going to be charged was not only liberating, but it made the closing process that much less stressful.
• Monitor your reputation online and respond to negative reviews professionally. Businesses will never please all customers all the time. Those who have had a bad customer experience will be vocal about their concerns. You can run but you cannot hide so respond to these reviews professionally, honestly and humbly whenever you can. If the only review visible on the Internet is a one star negative review, your business will feel the pain. But surround that one bad review with several quality reviews and it will fade away.

Having the best marketing being executed to drive inbound leads and new clients is a wonderful thing. But if paired with average customer service, one bad review or customer experience can turn all your marketing into a wasted effort. Before your business finds itself in this situation, make it a priority to provide an experience that your customers will be happy to acknowledge publicly with quality reviews and referrals.

How does your company add “WOW” to its customer service?

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/customer-service-marketing-factor/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=customer-service-marketing-factor

Greetings! Thanks for visiting Masterful Marketing. You’ll find a lot of content about marketing your small business in the blog, so you may want to subscribe via the RSS feed or email so you won’t miss any valuable information.

Guest post by Laura Briere, president of Vision Advertising.

A good relationship with your loyal customers is worth a fortune. Hence, relationship marketing should be at the heart of your business.

Why is relationship marketing priceless?

Internet marketing = Relationship Marketing

When everything you do revolves around your community – customers, fans, followers, employees, etc. – the answer is clear. You will have the reputation, loyalty and love that keeps your business alive and thriving. You will have a connection with your audience, and that’s the key to success for your company.

Take the focus away from the dollar signs attached to your products and services, and focus on what’s really going to affect your sales: relationships.

Relationship marketing online is a fine balance of technology and personality.

Something that has remained constant throughout the years is the power of relationships in business. Relationship marketing these days is just present in a different arena – online.
There are people who may insist that there were no problems of disconnect until the Internet came along. This simply isn’t the case. Technology is not the cause of this disconnect; the cause is the people behind the computers.

If your online presence is genuine and your brand is “real,” relationships will blossom.

And since nearly 90% of consumers use search engines to make purchasing decision (Digital Influence Index), you better believe that a strong community presence will feed your bottom line.

Relationship marketing from the ground up

To create a healthy community online, set up a steady foundation for your relationship marketing.

1. Understand your audience. Identify your niche market and how you plan to solve their problems. Have a clear vision for who your products and services are going to help so you can target them more directly with a message that resonates more powerfully.
2. Engage with your audience. Write with your audience’s wants and needs in mind. Listen to their feedback – good or bad – and give them a say in the conversation. Conversation is a two-way street, and there’s a difference between talking to people versus talking with them.
3. Be a part of your community. Be present in conversations about your own brand and your industry. A good relationship marketing strategy covers all aspects of a community – from customers to competitors. Find ways to join in on relevant conversations, offering your own opinion, experience, expertise and input. Just be sure you have something worth saying.
4. Demonstrate your expertise. One component of your relationship marketing strategy must address the fact that there is competition for what you’re offering. People will respect and listen to you more intently if your language is confident, clear and beneficial. If you’re not the expert in a certain area, that’s okay. Seek the advice or help of a non-competitor who knows the subject through and through, and give them credit for their knowledge.
5. Answer questions. Create free downloads, pay close attention to what people are asking on social media sites, and set up a blog dedicated to helping visitors find the answers to their most common questions. Your customers want to be acknowledged and appreciated.
6. Provide excellent service. Don’t just stop online with your relationship marketing. Continue the process offline and really show your customers that you appreciate them. Treat them with respect before, during and after a sale.

Final thoughts

The purpose of relationship marketing is to put the “people” back in business and ignite that “warm and fuzzy” feeling. It’s about having actual human beings dedicated to nurturing your online presence and every person that is a part of it.

Take the focus away from profits, put it back on relationships, and trust that the profits will come as a result. That’s relationship marketing in a nutshell.

Are you building relationships with your internet marketing?

This is a guest post by Laura Briere, a marketing expert, colleague and friend. Laura is the President of Vision Advertising, an internet marketing company focused on search, social, email and reputation and public relations marketing.

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/relationship-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=relationship-marketing