Do you plan on going to Dreamforce 2013 this year? This is by far the best cloud computing event of the year. Not only will you get insights into Salesforce.com but you will also get insights into many other business strategies. From the sessions, the networking and the various events you will be able to come back with ideas and strategies you can implement right away.

If you have never been and would like to learn more about it, then please let me know. I would be happy to share with you what we have gained from our experiences attending this great conference.

Save $100 on Your Registration

If you’re interesting in attending we have a special promo code we would like to share with you. When you register for Dreamforce please use promo code D13MVPREF which will take $100 off your registration cost.

We will also be putting together a social event so please let us know if you decide to go!

 An Introduction to CXM

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the fusion of multichannel strategies to deliver a full experience of your brand to your customers. CXM uses different technologies, aimed at specific audiences, to create engaging and lasting customer relationships.

This all sounds great, right? An entire ecosystem of digital strategies that will help attract, retain and convert customers! But where do I start, you ask?

After you read this blog post you will be able to understand:

1. What CXM entails.
2. How CXM improves conversion and increases your ROI.
3. The steps to create a more custom and consistent online marketing strategy.

I. Personalized Content

It’s a known truth that in the digital marketing landscape, updating your website with new content directly correlates to an increase in site traffic. With more traffic comes more opportunities for lead generation and therefore higher conversion rates. Examples of great content updates could be via blog posts, white papers, case studies or service offerings. This kind of content gets users excited about coming back to your site. With all of this new content though, it can be a bit disheartening for users to wade through and find what’s important to them. That’s when a personalized content strategy can be so beneficial to the customer experience. You can achieve this by using a number of Content Management Systems available today.

II. Content Management Systems

At Galvin, we offer our clients a Content Management System (CMS) called SiteCore. With SiteCore one can capture characteristics about a user that will help create that unique experience for them. This data is used to create “personas” that show details about site visitors, but also helps one understand how each type of persona relates to each other.

We can improve persona conversion and create these custom experiences with:

1. Recommendations on products & services
2. Targeted promotions
3. Pre-populated smart forms

With dynamic content, your strategy has now become much more effective by keeping customers happy and in-turn increasing the ROI.

III. Inbound Marketing

We now have a personalized content strategy in-place with the right tools and process to keep it updated. But how do you get customers to your site to provide them with this wonderful content? This is where Inbound Marketing comes into play. This CXM component uses digital resources at your disposal to earn, not buy, the customers attention. Inbound Marketing uses Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, white papers, infographics and videos to attract traffic to your site.

The Mediums

This step starts with a carefully planned strategy for each medium in the process. For each medium we would customize a plan that helps them work in unison and engage with your users:

1. SEO – An evolving effort that will pinpoint key terms to drive organic search traffic to your site.
2. Social Media – The best way to converse online with prospective clients, and at the same time, communicate your brand.
3. White Papers & Case Studies – These are a very powerful tool to illustrate your value to a lead. Use SEO and Social Media outlets to help distribute this information.
4. Video / Infographics – As white papers and case studies can become text-heavy, video and infographics can be a fun way to introduce leads to your services.

Converse With Your Customers

Inbound Marketing can also be used as a retention tool. Using Quora for instance, is a great way to reach out to your customer and provide them with continued support. Quora, Twitter and Facebook all have the ability to create and retain customer relationships that last. This bring us to our next factor in the CXM ecosystem…

IV. Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is a business concept used to ensure that you are staying in-touch with your customers. By staying in-touch with each prospective or current client, your sales team can understand where they are in the sales process and in their business timeline.

Nurturing Leads

With every lead you get, whether it be from trade shows, websites, salespeople, word-of-mouth or from Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation helps sales teams sustain these leads. By using automated email marketing workflows, Marketing Automation not only helps you manage all of these channels, but also personalizes these communications for every client relationship.

V. Customer Relationship Management

The Delivery of CXM

We now need a way to deliver these effective digital communications, enter Customer Relationship Management (CRM). At the core of our CXM ecosystem is the ability of a CRM to streamline and automate sales processes by collecting and analyzing data about every potential customer. This data comes from directly integrating it into your business processes, connecting it with your Inbound Marketing efforts and implementing it into your entire business process.

It’s About Trust

CRMs enable you to gain trust from customers by listening to what they need and providing a delivery mechanism to respond. At Galvin, we offer consulting and integration for the CRM platform, SalesForce.com. SalesForce transforms the way you engage and collaborate with your customer. These engagements show your customers that you are here for them and can deliver something beneficial to their business goals.

An effective CRM integration can improve:

1. Online support
2. Client satisfaction
3. Client retention
4. Understanding of new opportunities and help you engage more appropriately
5. Business processes by using cloud technologies

VI. Brand Strategy

The last factor that comes into play is the delivery of your brand message to the digital world. Each time you create something about your company there is a message attached to it. This message is visual as well as conceptual. There are many elements attached to a great brand message; brand voice, typography, colors, illustrations, photos, etc. If all these are consistent throughout your CXM efforts the brand will appear professional and instill trust into it’s customers.

A Successful Digital Strategy

Consumer engagement has shifted into the digital space. Therefore marketing professional need to shift their strategies here as well. These 5 key factors that make up the Customer Experience Management platform will ensure these strategies are implemented successfully.

CXM encompasses:

• Personalized Content: to excite users and create leads.
• Inbound Marketing: gives you pathways to draw these leads to your brand.
• Marketing Automation: collects data from these leads so you can nurture them into customers.
• Robust CRMs: to manage all these strategies and push you to support and understand your client’s business goals.
• Strong Brand Strategy: that is visually and conceptually consistent to exude trust and competency.

With all of these business strategies and technological resources marketing professional now have the tools to create the best possible online customer experience for their brands.

Want to learn more about CXM?

Register for:
Attract – Retain – Convert : Using CXM & SiteCore to Engage Your User

When: June 20, 2013
Time: 5:30 – 7:00pm EDT
Location: JW Marriott : 10 S West St. Indianapolis, IN 46204

Our four speakers will be discussing specific topics related to Customer Experience Management and how you can utilize   these key ideas for a successful brand experience.

Three times a year Salesforce.com comes out with releases with new enhancements to the Salesforce.com platform.  Recently Salesforce.com announced the release of Summer ’13.  Just like each release before this one there will be a slew of enhancements all throughout Salesforce.

The full feature release can be downloaded in this printable PDF.  But if you don’t want to read 273-pages of notes I would recommend downloading this 24-page document which gives you a general overview of all the new features.

Here are a few highlights that we think are exciting.

Mobile with Salesforce Touch

Forrester Research, in its report, “Why Web Sites Fail,” reveals that every customer with a bad experience on a site shares this experience with ten other people. Now imagine what would happen if each one then shared it with five more people? One slip-up could become a nightmare you may never wake up from.

Why does user experience matter?

The principal aspect on which any business runs is simple – it will grow based on the satisfaction level of those who buy the products or services. So, when a customer visits your site, it’s up to you to convert them for life, providing the best online experience they’ve ever had.

Ever visited a site where the first thing you see is an Ad on the center of a page? Dealt with captchas that don’t work? Has your patience been tested by endlessly long sign up forms? On many ecommerce sites, you’d need all the acumen of a detective to find what you’re looking for. Remember, if a user’s experience is tedious, he or she will find another site in no time at all.

So, how do you offer your customers the ultimate user experience?

Understand your customers

Behavior research is now a pre-requisite when it comes to knowing your customer. Figuring out what they want is essential to turning your brand into an online success story. Brands often fail because companies fail to translate their consumer understanding into an effective user interface. Therefore, a thorough evaluation of your business and the target audience should help you design an optimal user experience.

Anticipate their needs

By anticipating what your customer is looking for, you can quickly take charge, and deliver just what is required. A thorough understanding of how and why they are at the site will ensure a quick, seamless and satisfactory user experience.

Responsive interaction and design

A methodological web structure that prioritizes the customer’s needs, and bases the page hierarchy on it makes for a smooth user experience. Responsive web design is one aspect that can help achieve this. An ambiguous platform drives out many customers on the first visit itself. SEO is a must, driven by the intelligent use of commonly searched keywords. This also allows search engine listings to feature your site near the top and increases the chances of interaction, and subsequent conversion.

Enable quick getaways

After the customer decides to purchase, an easy as well as secure purchasing experience  is imperative. A quick and simple checkout is what everyone looks forward to, and it greatly enhances the buying process. Optimization of this procedure requires improving at least the cart mechanism, the payment methods, and the refund system in case of failed purchases.

Test to perfection

The user experience is too critical to be left to chance. Which is why testing is as important as your strategy and design. Ensure that your site is maintains its equilibrium irrespective of the device it is viewed on. A good option is to test it with real-time users. Use rigorous analytics and implementation to ensure a technically robust platform that guarantees user satisfaction at all levels of usage.

Some common mistakes to avoid are:

• Web pages that take up ages to load
• Broken links
• Difficulty in finding your way back to a page visited earlier
• Absence of concrete contact information

Remember, a good website takes the visitor on a pleasant journey. In the process, one builds trust and confidence, to culminate in an unforgettable user experience – one that keeps him or her coming back for more. And better yet, one that’s happily shared among peers.

How do  you ensure you provide your customers with a unique and user-friendly web experience?  Share your comments with us.

All marketers welcome a shortened sales cycle. A shorter sales cycle means less work and the possibility of engaging with more prospects in the available time, leading to both increased efficiency and better volumes.

The key to shortening the sales cycle is to earn the prospect’s trust. Easier said than done, right? Here are some tips on how marketers can build trust with their prospects and in turn, develop long lasting relationships.

1. Ensure consistency. Today’s consumers access marketing content from multiple channels. Telling prospects a product may deliver a return of “x” percent on one channel, and a return of “y” percent on another channel is sure to have the prospect thinking. This might also make them more prone to cross-verify and hesitate.
2. Utilize social media. Generally, people tend to trust people they know, even if remotely, compared to total strangers. In this sense, social media can help marketers. An introduction or endorsement from a prospect’s contact will go a long way in establishing a relationship that will shorten the sales cycle considerably.
3. Remain connected. The best way to develop trust is by becoming more familiar to the prospect. It is possible to increase familiarity with your prospects by having a strong online presence, following the prospect in social media, sharing content, initiating a conversation, and inviting the prospect to an event.
4. Be relevant. Offer the right content at the right time. Make sure the prospect receives the appropriate content for their specific stage of the marketing lifecycle.
5. Avoid the hard sell. While cold calling and highlighting the product’s good points may be part of the marketer’s job, the overriding intention should be to build a relationship and provide value to the prospect.

Staying connected, tracking prospect activities, and, most of all, providing the prospect valuable content are all ways in which organizations can build trust with their customers. Marketing automation, when used appropriately, can accomplish all three of these key tasks and, as a result, play a major role in helping companies build trust and shorten their sales cycle. To learn more about lifecycle marketing, check out our recently published ebook.

But within minutes of everything that was happening I received several alerts on my iPhone from various news apps that I have installed. As I visited various news websites I could tell that the story was still developing as each website only had a paragraph or two detailing the situation.  So I decided to visit Twitter and I searched on the hashtag #bostonmarathon and quickly saw many tweets about the situation.  I saw photos, videos, people asking for prayers and people commenting on the situation.  Through Twitter I was able to get a much better understanding of the situation going on in Boston.

I can also think of two situations here in Indianapolis where I was notified of emergency situations via Twitter - the stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair Grounds and the home explosion in Richmond Hill subdivision.  In all each of these situations I noticed stories were developing faster on Twitter than they were on the news outlets.

Earlier today I spoke with a friend and we got into a conversation about how social media could help with emergency situations.  The original thought was to allow people to upload photos of a situation to a specified location so emergency officials have various vantage points to view.  But we quickly realized that would be difficult for people to adopt.  We then realized that people already broadcast emergency situations out already via Twitter and create hashtags around the emergency such as #prayforboston.

Could the Emergency Broadcast System or local emergency crews adopt Twitter as a means to broadcast messages?  Could events publicize an emergency hashtag indicating “In the event of an emergency use #EMBoston (for example)”?  I don’t know if this could work and I foresee a system like this being abused.  But, for example, if people prank call into 911 wouldn’t they get in trouble with the police?  Maybe if people abuse an emergency hashtag then that too has legal ramifications.

Could the Emergency Broadcast System build a relationship with Twitter so that when there are situations in a certain geographic area those people, who are registered in that city, get direct notifications and where they can go to for help.

At the end of the day I am not sure if something like this would work.  Although there are many obstacles around it potentially being abused it could have potential to help those in emergency situations.

What do you think?

Marketing automation has come a long way in popularity and acceptance. Sirius Decisions estimates the adoption rate of marketing automation to increase by 50 percent by 2015.

But success of the marketing automation tools depends on having clearly defined goals in place. This becomes even more important since the marketing landscape is moving away from the traditional ways of acquiring leads, such as increasing visibility and adopting innovative campaigns. With 50 percent of prospects not ready to convert immediately, the automation program needs to incorporate not just all the different lead generating activities but also the entire scope of lead nurturing components.

Learn more about these and other metrics from leading experts in marketing automation via this easy to understand infographic.

Click to view full infographic

The marketer, for instance, needs to identify the specific need of a prospect, have a clear cut understanding of the solution offered, and the message to be communicated. The marketer also needs to understand the ideal prospect, and figure out methods to approach him or her. A good rule of thumb is to profile the specific characteristics of top 20 percent of the customers, who normally account for about 80 percent of all sales, as ideal prospects.

With these parameters in place, the marketer can then apply automation to find out where a prospect stands in relationship to the brand and make suitable engagement interventions aimed at nurturing the prospect. Ways to do so include applying the automated solution to score the prospect against the ideal prospect, and to score the effectiveness of the engagement initiatives versus the responses.

In our second part of this series, we will dive into the business impacts of marketing automation (shortening the sales cycle and building trust).

Over the past several years, companies have truly adopted technologies that drive people to their website.  Whether it be social media, content marketing, blogging, videos or a plethora of downloadable whitepapers companies are fighting to win the attention of their prospect online.  Companies know that prospects are educating themselves about a company long before they are even engaged with a sales person and they are doing it all online.

With this technology comes data that marketers either didn’t have their hands on before or had a tough time obtaining.  These data points are now allowing for decisions to be quickly made or strategies easily adjusted.  Thus, one of the convincing reasons marketing departments are adopting more of a digital marketing strategy is because they have the numbers (data points) to back up the case to the executive level.

CRM + Content Marketing

In the near past, it was common to see customer relationship management (CRM) software packages reside within a silo in a company and it typically resided in a sales department.  It was typically viewed as a tool for sales people to manage their pipeline.  But today CRM solutions, such as Salesforce.com, provide insights to not only the audience that responds to content marketing initiatives but which of those individuals that resulted in sales.

With CRM tools not only are sales people able to manage their sales funnels but marketing departments are now better able to understand the direct impact their content marketing strategy has to a sale.  The data points that companies receive from social media, blogging, PPC or CTRs (Click-through-rates) can now integrate into a CRM.  Therefore, when an online content campaign is developed and new content gets created that will attract new prospects we are able to convert them into a lead in the CRM.  With that lead comes data points as to what content they read, how they got to your website, their activity on your website, their engagement with your company socially and much more.  In addition, these online activities can also tie into any corresponding to sales people.  Executives can now see, for example, not only how many times a prospect has been on your website or what search terms drove them there but also the phone conversations or face-to-face meetings with sales people.  Companies now see the full scale of activity with a prospect or customer.

Without a CRM, like Salesforce.com, in the mix of your digital strategy you are missing a critical piece of the data.  In addition, sales people may not be fully engaged with the initiatives that marketing is doing.  For content marketing to be successful it needs to integrate with a CRM.  Companies must be able to tie content marketing investments to revenue so they know what works or what doesn’t work. The more data points we have on our prospects and customers the more compelling content strategies we can put in place.

In conclusion,  your content marketing strategies plus your website conversion strategies must accompany a CRM strategy as well.  All three of these must integrate with each other.  IT departments and marketing departments will collaborate more but they need to include the sales team as well as customer service team into the mix.  Galvin Technologies encourages companies to embrace a full Customer Experience Management (CXM) model that ties all this together.

Recently,  RainToday Contributing Editor Jill Konrath, created an eBook called “Cracking the LinkedIN Sales Code”.  Essentially, Jill explains what top sellers are doing on LinkedIn that you’re not!

Earlier this year, Jill created a survey on LinkedIN as well as leading sales people on how they use LinkedIN.  She compiled these results in her recent ebook.

In Cracking the LinkedIn Sales Code, you’ll get the inside scoop on:

• LinkedIn’s capabilities that top sellers use frequently
• Their strategies and mindset that lead to more business
• Action steps to better leverage LinkedIn for prospecting

Download the ebook today from Jill’s website

You can also view more resources and insightful information by visiting www.jillkonrath.com/

Website pictures
On both your blog and website, pictures should be used to illustrate the main point of your page or post. This helps in the processing of the information and can also enhance your writing. Pictures on your site can also effect search engine optimization. By attaching alternate text or ALT text, this allows search engines to see you are providing services to those who cannot see your image, and as a result adding one more positive point to your SEO.

In addition, pictures should also be considered on your page or post to enhance the social sharing of your pages or posts.

Social Media
Sharing images can serve as great conversation starters. They can allow you to more easily initiate your relationships online. Postings on Facebook with images and links to blog posts or web pages are more likely to get clicked on than simple links or a short description.

Pinterest has seen a major boom in growth over the last 18 months and is becoming one of the top image sharing services online. Pinterest, with its unique image sharing board, quickly surpassed its competition due to the creative nature of the images shared and with the easy way users can discover new images. At this time, 15% of all internet users are sharing pictures on Pinterest.

Mobile Apps
A discussion of using pictures online would not be complete without discussing mobile applications. There are many applications out there to take pictures with, but none have seen the popularity or sheer volume of sharing as Instagram. In two years and an acquisition by Facebook later, Instagram is the powerhouse in mobile photo sharing. More than 50 million users share 300 million pictures a day to Facebook alone. Instagram allows you to take pictures, add a filter to the image, add a message, and blast it out across Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr. This allows you to engage audiences in those channels as well.

What are your favorite ways to use pictures? How do you share them? Leave us a comment below or join the discussion on our Facebook page.