Knowledge Base

What is a Marketing Audit?

goals strategy Dec 04, 2018

A Marketing Audit is a comprehensive, analysis and evaluation of your business' marketing. This includes your goals, strategies, tactics, and the results of your marketing efforts. This is the first step towards creating a powerful marketing strategy - knowing your current situation. Your market audit is a powerful way to get in touch with your brand, products, and services and refocus your marketing efforts.

In this article, you'll learn more about the marketing audit, its components and how it is used.

Evaluate Your Current Marketing Plan

To begin your marketing audit, evaluate your big-picture plans. What are your current goals or objectives for marketing? What marketing strategies are you employing? What is your marketing mix? Is your marketing team effectively implementing the marketing plan? Are the marketing objectives you set the appropriate ones for your business? If you have never documented the big...

Customer Communications + Productivity = A Smart CRM Strategy

crm customer relationship management strategy Nov 30, 2018

Planning, process, systems, segmentation, and automation...these seemingly mundane concepts are the true key to balancing your customer relationships with your day-to-day business operations.

Customer Relationship Management (abbreviated "CRM”) is a term used to describe your customer communications strategy. It also refers to the software most businesses use for implementing that strategy. Before you get excited about another tech tool (or run for the hills), a smart CRM Strategy begins with people and your customer communications.

How do you keep in touch with customers, prospects, vendors, and partners? Is it just as ideas pop up in your head? Do you have a specific system for maintaining those relationships?

For many of us, the answer to that last question is sort of or not really. However, maintaining regular communications with your vital business contacts is essential to the sustainability of your business in the long run.

Holiday Card Anxiety

If...

Customer Journey Mapping and Your Brand

crm customer journey Oct 29, 2018

Customer Journey Maps: Define the step by step experiences of your customer beginning with the initial discovery of your business, getting to know you, deciding to buy, and then becoming loyal. That is a customer journey. High-tech friends often talk about user experience, and that concept is tied specifically to the way a customer uses your website during their customer journey.

Most small business owners I speak with understand this concept of customer journey maps very well, but they have not taken the time to map it all out. Each step in the customer journey is a reflection of the business’ brand. Your business is under scrutiny by prospective customers at each step of the way. Why not put your best foot forward and present the business brand in the...

7 Steps to Creating Customer Personas

customer journey customer relationship management Oct 01, 2018

Would you like to…

Attract more ideal customers?

Increase your conversion rates?

Create marketing campaigns that generate engagement?

Provide useful resources for your loyal customers?

Build a feedback loop for improving your business?

If if your answer is yes, then continue reading, because this article reveals the powerful tool that so many small business owners neglect. It is highly effective, easy to use, and can completely shift the way you run your business.

What are Customer Personas?

Have you ever heard any of these phrases used before? Target Market, Target Audience, Buyer Persona, Marketing Persona, Customer Avatar

These are the phrases used to describe the semi-fictional character(s) who represent your ideal customer and ideal prospect. Businesses create these characters based on internal data on existing customers as well as external information gathered from market research. The Success of your business’ marketing, sales, product...

Case Study: Marketing Operations Improvements Using Zoho CRM +

crm strategy zoho Sep 18, 2018

What do you do when your business requires 30+ documents from the client for them to work with you?

Do you email them a list of all the documents and wait for a reply?

Do you repeatedly call the client and ask for the documents to be sent by a specific date?

This is a problem I recently faced in a marketing operations improvement project. The reason I describe it as marketing operations is because the client communication channels is key to the company’s reputation, which is their number one way of marketing themselves – strong processes and communications. The company was already a user of Zoho CRM, so making sure that the marketing operations improvements worked with that platform was important.

The Project Requirements:

Collect 30+ forms and documents ranging from a simple contract to detailed personal financial information
Get digital signatures on some of the documents
Make it easy to collect the documents
Make it easy to submit the documents
Create email...

CRM Systems: Managing Customer Relationships

crm customer relationship management Sep 17, 2018

DEFINE CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the business strategies, processes, and technology that businesses use to organize and improve relationships with customers and other key contacts such as vendors and partners. We collect data about customers, analyze the information, and use it to improve business relationships, boost customer loyalty, grow sales, and even make product improvements.

The most important letter in the CRM acronym is the R (Relationship). Whether you track relationships in a spreadsheet, a CRM software, or a notebook is not the largest concern. It is the focus on relationship building and developing empathy for your customers that is the highest priority. The collection and organization of data about those relationships shows up in your CRM system.

What’s a CRM System?

A CRM system is a term that’s often used interchangeably with the term CRM software....

Find Your Ideal Customers Using Google Analytics and Zoho CRM

crm customer journey zoho Sep 14, 2018

How do you use Google Analytics and Zoho CRM to Create a Profile of Your Ideal Customers?

We all know Google Analytics is a powerful tool to understand what is happening on your website. The data is all anonymous, but it provides us with such interesting insights about website visitors and their behaviors.

Your Zoho CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software has a different kind of power. The data you’ve collected about the people you already know is in a centralized place where you can pull reports and see patterns.

How do you use these two business tools to create a profile of your ideal customers? There are three key areas to look into: Demographics, Behaviors, and Sources. This article looks at these areas and how you can use them to learn more about your best customers.

WHO: Customer Demographics

Figuring out the demographics of your ideal customer is relatively easy. There’s data from your own business experiences as well as Google Analytics...

Managing Your Marketing Campaigns

content marketing Sep 07, 2018

For many small and medium sized companies, the hardest part of marketing campaigns is simply managing all of the different pieces of the marketing mix. The first step toward organizing the potential chaos is to plan and schedule specific marketing campaigns.

Definition: A marketing campaign is a sustained effort to promote your product or service through a defined series of activities.

What Makes for Good Marketing Campaigns?

A good marketing campaign follows a theme, and it includes a series of touch points through each channel. While I wish that a single marketing campaign was enough effort for someone to take action, but that’s not realistic. The average consumer can take anywhere from 3 to 21 touch points before actually making a purchase. Since there is so much noise in the marketplace, repetition of a message in different channels is important.

The American Express campaign of Small Business Saturday utilized several...

NEW TRAINING: Zoho CRM and Integrations for Improved Productivity

crm partners training zoho Aug 29, 2018

Beckmann Collaborative is now an Authorized Zoho Partner!

What is Zoho? It's is business management software that is cloud-based and can be fully integrated into every nook and cranny of a business. If you're interested, you can read their story and more about Zoho here.

What does being a Zoho authorized partner mean? It means that we have worked with the many different Zoho applications long enough to officially help other small businesses to use it.

At Beckmann Collaborative, we love marketing operations and improving processes. It's how we found Zoho. After using it within our own business for several months, we started to see how it could make our client's workflows much smoother and improve their productivity. So we've been helping several clients to implement it... so far it's going great.

The best "bang" for your buck, in our opinion, is Zoho One. This is your master-key to access all of the Zoho products. The reason you would want...

Marketing Dictionary of Industry Jargon

Uncategorized Aug 27, 2018

This Marketing Dictionary Includes Some Common Industry Terms Used (sometimes abused) by Marketers

Every industry has jargon used to define the key pieces of that profession. This marketing dictionary lists out the commonly used jargon that marketers often say. Like any other industry, some terms are used so often that we forget to explain ourselves better. On behalf of all marketers out there, I would like to apologize for the abuse of marketing jargon.

What's Included Here:

Content Marketing
Digital Marketing
Customer-Driven Marketing
Lead Generation
Other Jargon

Content Marketing Dictionary of Jargon

Content Marketing – A strategy that uses the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant and consistent content (i.e. blog posts, news articles, videos) to engage your audience. (Read More from the Content Marketing Institute)

Call-to-Action (CTA) – This is a copy you use to instruct your audience to...

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Evaluate Your Current Marketing Plan

Planning, process, systems, segmentation, and automation...these seemingly mundane concepts are the true key to balancing your customer relationships with your day-to-day business operations.

Holiday Card Anxiety

Would you like to…

Attract more ideal customers?

Increase your conversion rates?

Create marketing campaigns that generate engagement?

Provide useful resources for your loyal customers?

Build a feedback loop for improving your business?

What are Customer Personas?

What do you do when your business requires 30+ documents from the client for them to work with you?

DEFINE CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

What’s a CRM System?

How do you use Google Analytics and Zoho CRM to Create a Profile of Your Ideal Customers?

WHO: Customer Demographics

What Makes for Good Marketing Campaigns?

Beckmann Collaborative is now an Authorized Zoho Partner!

This Marketing Dictionary Includes Some Common Industry Terms Used (sometimes abused) by Marketers

Content Marketing Dictionary of Jargon

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