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How to Use Content To Build Trust

The post How to Use Content To Build Trust appeared first on HostGator Blog . Running a small eCommerce business is hard. Every day it feels like competing with the big guys is a bigger challenge than ever. You can’t afford offer the convenience and low prices of businesses like Amazon and Walmart, so how are you supposed to compete? One of the areas small businesses can win on is trust. But where past generations would develop trust by getting to know the person behind the counter each time they came in to shop, today you need to figure out how to build a comparable relationship online. For most businesses, the best option is with content marketing . Why Trust is So Important to Business Consumers have limited money to go around, so every spending choice they make has to count. If you’ve ever had the experience of buying something only to realize the product didn’t perform as needed or the business didn’t offer adequate support, then you know how emotional the experience can be—it can feel like a betrayal, even if the financial cost itself was small. Consumers want to buy from brands they can trust. This is backed up by research. PwC found that 43% of consumers name trust as an important factor when choosing a brand—falling only behind price. And if anything, finding ways to build trust is even more important for eCommerce businesses, since your customers can’t see and feel the products they buy before they hand over their money. How do they know they’ll receive their order and that it will be what they need? Or if it’s not, that they can work with the company for a painless return? They have to trust you.   How Content Marketing Builds Trust If your main source of interaction with customers is your website, you have to use that space to show your customers who you are and why you’re trustworthy. And telling them they should trust you isn’t as powerful as showing them. Content marketing is how you show rather than just tell. And it works. The Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2018 research found that 96% of the top performing B2B marketers say they’ve built trust with their audience, and 81% of B2C marketers that do content marketing say their audience views them as a trusted resource.   Content marketing successfully builds trust for a few main reasons.   It emphasizes helping over selling. One of the core tenets of good content marketing is that you can’t make it all about you. CMI’s research found that 90% of the businesses that are most successful in their content marketing efforts say they put their audience’s needs first . If you think about all of the people you trust in your life, you’ll probably realize that a key feature of those relationships is that they’re not all about what the other person can get from you. Good relationships include mutual care and effort. While the relationship between a business and a consumer is obviously different, this part holds true. If the only messaging your audience ever sees from you is pushing the hard sell, you’re not giving them any reason to trust you. But when you commit time and resources to creating content that’s genuinely helpful to them, you show them you care about them beyond the bottom line.   It demonstrates your expertise. This is especially important for service-based businesses. You can use content like blog posts, videos, podcasts, and ebooks to show your audience that you have the necessary skills and knowledge to do the work you want them to hire you for. Even for businesses that sell products, content gives you a chance to show your audience that you understand what they care about—a necessary step in providing products designed to better meet their needs.   It shows the humans behind the brand. People will never feel the same kind of connection to a logo or brand name that they do to another human being. But your business isn’t just a brand, it’s made up of people. Creating original content gives you the chance to show more of the people behind the business and humanize the brand for your visitors. When consumers associate names and faces with your business, as well as products, it makes you more trustworthy.   5 Tips for Creating Content that Earns Customer Trust Doing content marketing isn’t enough on its own to earn customer trust, you have to do it well . To help you put together a content strategy that will earn you the trust of your audience, here are five important strategies to employ.   1. Put the customer first. It’s human nature to think about your own needs and priorities, but when it comes to content marketing, you have to put real effort into putting your audience’s needs and interests first. Take time to understand who your audience is and what they care about. Then craft your content strategy around them . That means not centering your products and services (although you can mention them anytime doing so is useful to your audience). Focus first on providing value and building a relationship with your audience, and only later on selling. If you build trust first, you’ll be more successful when you do make the sales pitch.   2. Create unique content. This was one of the main suggestions Cathy McPhillips, Vice President of Marketing at the Content Marketing Institute, offered on a recent call. She’s noticed way too much content out there from different brands that cover all the same topics. “Why would you trust one company over another if they’re pushing out the same information?” she asks. There’s no room for differentiation if you’re repeating information someone else has already provided, and it doesn’t give your readers any good reason to trust you over another brand. So look for gaps in the information that’s out there. Or make sure that if you do tackle a topic your competitors have already covered that you bring a unique spin or angle to it.   3. Use your subject matter experts. This is another point Cathy made: marketers aren’t always the best experts on the industries they’re working in. “Just because they’re the best writers and the best communicators in the business does not mean they know their product the best,” she pointed out. But you don’t have to create content entirely on your own. “Lean on your other departments,” Cathy said. “Use all your internal resources to help you be an expert and be someone your customers trust.” As an example, she brought up  Indium , a company in the specialized and highly technical industry of solder supply. The marketing team there will never understand the products and industry as well as the engineers in the company do. So they made the engineers a part of their content by creating video interviews . The video content provides valuable information to their audience while also positioning the company as experts in the industry. 4. Be authentic. People can recognize pandering. If it looks like you’re trying too hard to relate to your audience—while they always know that just underneath your actions is the desire to sell you something—it will drive them away. That means you have to find the right mix of focusing on what they care about, while also staying true to yourself in your marketing. If your research suggests your target audience is full of people likely to love Star Trek, slipping a reference into your marketing can be a way to connect with your audience on a more human level—but only if you’re also enough of a fan to get the reference right. Do try to incorporate the language and interests of your target audience into your marketing, but only insofar as you can do so naturally. If a marketing choice feels forced, you’re probably better off not using it.   5. Be transparent. People have come to expect the worst from many companies they work with. When you hear about a big company covering up a data breach or attempting to silence employees that complain about harsh working conditions, are you ever surprised? You can set yourself apart by embracing radical honesty . Some brands are already doing this with their content marketing and seeing great success. Publishing about your failures, providing the numbers about where your earnings go, sharing employee salary information, or even highlighting use cases where your competitor’s product is a better choice are all ways to boldly tell your audience who you are. Someone who’s just as upfront about their flaws as their strengths will always be more trustworthy than someone’s who’s all bluster. If you’re not ashamed to admit the truth, even in areas where it’s not entirely flattering, that shows your audience that they can trust what you have to say.   Build Trust, Build Business For the customers that will never meet you in person, you need to find a way to still connect with them as a human being. Content marketing provides that opportunity and enables you to build relationships with your audience while demonstrating all the reasons they can trust you. That’s more valuable than just making a sale, it’s the path to creating loyal customers.   Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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How to Strengthen Your Content Strategy with Customer Input

The post How to Strengthen Your Content Strategy with Customer Input appeared first on HostGator Blog . One of the first things you learn when you start doing content marketing for your business is how important it is to learn who your audience is. Marketers use a lot of different techniques and tools for this—reviewing analytics, turning to market research tools , investing in social listening . But surprisingly, research from the Content Marketing Institute found that 58% of marketers are skipping the most obvious tactic of all for getting to know your audience: talking to them directly. The Importance of Talking to Your Customers Analytics can show you trends in what products customers buy, or which content topics they respond to, but they can’t always tell you why. And social listening can alert you to complaints about your products online, but they often leave out key information you need to understand the problem and provide a satisfying solution. Most of the tools and tactics you can use to learn about your audience are second hand. They can help you see overall trends, but they leave out important context. By asking your customers direct questions—or even better, actually having a two-way conversation with them—you can fill in the gaps in your knowledge and hear directly from the source.   How to Get Customer Input The why of talking to your customers is pretty self-explanatory: you want to get to know who they are and what they care about. The how is what makes it a challenge to do at all and, more importantly, do well. For those in the 58% of marketers that could use some help to start communicating with your customers, we talked to Cathy McPhillips, Vice President of Marketing at the Content Marketing Institute for some tips on how to do so.   1. Make sure you ask the right questions. First things first, if you’re going to make an effort to start listening to your customers more, you have to be strategic about the questions you ask. “Definitely have questions planned in advance and definitely take those questions and cycle them through the whole organization,” Cathy recommends. One person shouldn’t be deciding what to talk about in a vacuum. Consulting other departments ensures you’ll get a wider view of what you need to know and that you’re not overlooking important information other people in the company need And don’t just stick with that same list of questions as you go. Each person you talk to is unique, so tailor the questions you ask where relevant. And use the feedback you get early on to make changes to your questions that make them more useful.   2. Use social media. “The easiest way to [start getting input from customers] is to start using your social media and use places you’ve already started building an audience,” Cathy suggests. The whole point of social media is to be social, so treat it like a platform for two-way communication with your followers.  Ask questions via LinkedIn groups or Twitter chats, or wherever you’re already connected with people. Listen to what they say and make an organized record of what you learn. Social media may be a good place to hear from your audience, but it’s not the greatest place for organizing that information or finding it again later. You definitely don’t want to stop with social media, but it can be a good place to start communicating more directly with your audience and may help you spot some of the best customers to reach out to for more detailed conversations.      3. Conduct a survey. A survey is one of the easiest places to start getting more direct feedback from your customers. If you’re worried about getting people to actually spend a few minutes taking a survey, Cathy has two main suggestions: Give them a clear time frame upfront of how long it will take (and make sure it’s a pretty short time commitment —5 minutes or so). Offer to enter them in a drawing for a $50 gift card. That lets people know that the commitment is low, and the possible reward is high. 4. Identify and call your most devoted customers. Social media and surveys can be good for playing the numbers game—you can reach a lot of customers at once with minimal effort. But to really fill in the gaps in your knowledge and learn the context behind the answers you get there, you want actual conversations over the phone or in person. To identify the best customers to talk to, look to your data to learn who your best customer advocates are. They’re a good place to start because they’ll often be happy to give you their time. “I’ve spent 30 minutes on the phone with people before and they want nothing in return other than knowing that we’re caring enough to listen to what they have to say,” says Cathy. Your happy customers can supply you with valuable information on: How they use your products The specific problems they solve The specific products or features they like or use the most Any new products or features they’d like to see What type of promotions they’d be most likely to respond to What types of content they appreciate the most What their day to day looks like Other products they use and like If you come into the call prepared, you can usually cover a lot of territory in a short amount of time, but you might want to leave your schedule open in case they have a lot to say.   5. Identify and call your least enthusiastic customers. Another important category of customers to talk to is those that aren’t happy with your products. You may think getting them on the phone to talk would be a hard sell, but Cathy suggests you might be surprised. “If someone cared enough to listen to why I wasn’t taking an action, I feel like to most customers that’s enough of a reward for them,” she says. Your unhappy customers can provide some of the same type of information your happy customers do, but with some additional valuable insights about what doesn’t work for them and how your products or service would need to be different to satisfy. The call may give you room to help save the relationship, but even if not, it can help you either better clarify who your target audience is by excluding the people your product isn’t a good fit for, or identify opportunities for ways to improve your product or services to better meet people’s needs.   6. Use what you learn. Once you’ve done the hard work of gathering all this valuable information, you won’t get anything out of it unless you put it to use. Record all the answers you gain throughout the process and get it all into a database or other format that makes it easy to organize and sort. Make sure you get the right information to the specific people in the company it will benefit. Any feedback on changes to the product should go to your product development team, and complaints about a customer service experience need to get in front of your customer service department. For marketers, commit to spending time using what you’ve learned to: Update your personas to improve their accuracy. Re-work your content strategy to ensure you answer the common questions that came up and address the topics your customers expressed interest in. Identify content pieces that should be updated based on the new information you’ve learned.     The better you know your customers, the more successful you’ll be at creating content they care about . But only if you make an effort to actually listen to them, and incorporate what they tell you into your content strategy. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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Should I create a reseller program

Hello, I am the president of Xenon Cloud Inc, we are a non-profit web hosting and cloud computing provider. We have not released our clou… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1728280&goto=newpost Continue reading

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The June 2018 Tech News Stories You Need To Know

The post The June 2018 Tech News Stories You Need To Know appeared first on HostGator Blog . June 2018 Tech News & Trends to Watch It’s hot outside, but that hasn’t slowed the tech world, which is posed to bring as many new stories of controversies, product updates, and IPOs as usual. For all the professionals too busy to keep up with it all on their own, we bring you our update on tech trends to keep an eye on for June. 1. Companies Worldwide Strive for GDPR Compliance By now, everyone with an email address has seen a slew of emails announcing privacy policy updates. You have Europe’s GDPR legislation to thank for your overcrowded inbox. GDPR creates rules around how much data companies are allowed to collect, how they’re able to use that data, and how clear they have to be with consumers about it all. Companies around the world are scrambling to get their business and its practices into compliance – a significant task for many of them. While technically, the deadline to get everything in order passed on May 25, for many companies the process will continue well into June and possibly beyond. Some companies are even shutting down in Europe for good, or for as long as it takes them to get in compliance.   Even with the deadline behind us, the GDPR continues to be a top story for the tech world and may remain so for some time to come.   2. Amazon Provides Facial Recognition Tech to Law Enforcement Amazon can’t seem to go a whole month without showing up in a tech news roundup. This month it’s for a controversial story: selling use of Rekognition, their facial recognition software , to law enforcement agencies on the cheap. Civil rights groups have called for the company to stop allowing law enforcement access to the tech out of concerns that increased government surveillance can pose a threat to vulnerable communities in the country. In spite of the public criticism, Amazon hasn’t backed off on providing the tech to authorities, at least as of this time.   3. Apple Looks Into Self-Driving Employee Shuttles Of the many problems facing our world, the frustrating work commute is one that many of the brightest minds in tech deal with just like the rest of us. Which makes it a problem the biggest tech companies have a strong incentive to try to solve. Apple is one of many companies that’s invested in developing self-driving cars as a possible solution, but while that goal is still (probably) years away, they’ve narrowed their focus to teaming up with VW to create self-driving shuttles just for their employees.  Even that project is moving slower than the company had hoped, but they’re aiming to have some shuttles ready by the end of the year.   4. Court Weighs in on President’s Tendency to Block Critics on Twitter Three years ago no one would have imagined that Twitter would be a president’s go-to source for making announcements, but today it’s used to that effect more frequently than official press conferences or briefings. In a court battle that may sound surreal to many of us, a judge just found that the president can no longer legally block other users on Twitter .  The court asserted that blocking users on a public forum like Twitter amounts to a violation of their First Amendment rights. The judgment does still allow for the president and other public officials to mute users they don’t agree with, though.   5. YouTube Launches Music Streaming Service YouTube joined the ranks of Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon this past month with their own streaming music service . Consumers can use a free version of the service that includes ads, or can pay $9.99 for the ad-free version. With so many similar services already on the market, people weren’t exactly clamoring for another music streaming option. But since YouTube is likely to remain the reigning source for videos, it doesn’t necessarily need to unseat Spotify to still be okay. And with access to Google’s extensive user data, it may be able to provide more useful recommendations than its main competitors in the space, which is one way the service could differentiate itself.   6. Facebook Institutes Political Ad Rules Facebook hasn’t yet left behind the controversies of the last election. The company is still working to proactively respond to criticism of its role in the spread of political propaganda many believe influenced election results. One of the solutions they’re trying is a new set of rules for any political ads run on the platform. Any campaign that intends to run Facebook ads is now required to verify their identity with a card Facebook mails to their address that has a verification code. While Facebook has been promoting these new rules for a few weeks to politicians active on the platform, some felt blindsided when they realized, right before their primaries no less, that they could no longer place ads without waiting 12 to 15 days for a verification code to come in the mail. Politicians in this position blame the company for making a change that could affect their chances in the upcoming election. Even in their efforts to avoid swaying elections, Facebook has found themselves criticized for doing just that. They’re probably feeling at this point like they just can’t win.   7. Another Big Month for Tech IPOs This year has seen one tech IPO after another and this month is no different. Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi has a particularly large IPO in the works. The company seeks to join the Hong Kong stock exchange on June 7 with an initial public offering that experts anticipate could reach $10 billion. The online lending platform Greensky started trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 23 and sold 38 million shares in its first day, 4 million more than expected. This month continues 2018’s trend of tech companies going public, largely to great success.   8. StumbleUpon Shuts Down In the internet’s ongoing evolution, there will always be tech companies that win and those that fall by the wayside. StumbleUpon, a content discovery platform that had its heyday in the early aughts, is officially shutting down on June 30. Since its 2002 launch, the service has helped over 40 million users “stumble upon” 60 billion new websites and pieces of content. The company behind StumbleUpon plans to create a new platform that serves a similar purpose that may be more useful to former StumbleUpon users called Mix.   9. Uber and Lyft Invest in Driver Benefits In spite of their ongoing success, the popular ridesharing platforms Uber and Lyft have faced their share of criticism since they came onto the scene. One of the common complaints critics have made is that the companies don’t provide proper benefits to their drivers. And in fact, the companies have fought to keep drivers classified legally as contractors so they’re off the hook for covering the cost of employee taxes and benefits. Recently both companies have taken steps to make driving for them a little more attractive. Uber has begun offering Partner Protection to its drivers in Europe, which includes health insurance, sick pay, and parental leave ­ ­– so far nothing similar in the U.S. though. For its part, Lyft is investing $100 million in building driver support centers where their drivers can stop to get discounted car maintenance, tax help, and customer support help in person from Lyft staff. It’s not the same as getting full employee benefits (in the U.S. at least), but it’s something. Those are the main stories we can see coming in June, but there’s sure to be a lot of tech news this month we can’t predict. Check back next month to see what tech stories to look out for in July. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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HostingCon Global 2016 Countdown: How to Find Your "Voice" (And Why it Matters)

DreamHost Vice President of Brand & Community Brett Dunst wants you to know that if you come to his session at HostingCon, all of your wildest dreams will come true. Now how’s that for conference return on investment? Continue reading

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