The goal of customer experience marketing should be that your customers have no idea it is even happening, and that they want more of it. A lot like how online content marketing works. Canyons does this beautifully.

If you have never been to the canyons before, there are two things you need to know. 1) You are missing out, and 2) It’s huge!

Where I noticed The Canyons knowingly (or unknowingly) doing customer experience marketing.

1. At the top of the most popular lifts there was a customer experience employee helping people read the trail maps to find the best way down for what they wanted to do.
2. At 10:30 AM every morning, Canyons does a FREE resort tour. I did not participate in this, but  as I observed it in action I know I was missing out. My buddy, who was there for his first time, was bummed we did not take it.
3. Comfortable patio chairs at the bottom of long runs to relax in and loosen up your boots. Of course, these chairs were strategically placed near options to buy food.
4. Free hot chocolate. WOW! I did not see this earlier this season, so I don’t think its a regular thing, but on this particular day they were handing out coupons for free hot chocolate. They got this brown bagger into smell the soups and pizza (Yes, I caved and bought a piece of pepperoni.)
5. Heated chair lift. Not on the most popular lift, but on the lift that would alleviate the most congestion. Smart thinking people!

What does all this customer experience marketing do?

• They made visitors feel comfortable and not overwhelmed by it’s massive size. This makes it easy to come back a 2nd time.
• They made it a no-brainer to hang out where they sell food.

In summary, the result of marketing to people who had already bought is that customer come back for more and spend more dollars while they are there. What business does not want that? The best part is, people want to me marketed to this way. We soak it up and ask for more.

My friends will gripe about how they hate it when businesses JUST advertise to them, and clutter up the wall or feed. Phrases I hear the most are: they are so annoying, they are dumb, why do they have to advertise to me there.

I follow up with this question, “But isn’t there even just one that you like?” More often than not, they will say something like, I really like it when company A does [insert content marketing tactic here]. They have awesome pictures / ideas/ videos /stories etc.

These experiences have led me to one bold conclusion: The biggest pet peeve about social media are businesses who act like businesses. I have a rule that I always follow when managing a clients social profile to help me avoid this pet peeve.

My big social media rule: Respect the purpose of the platform! I have never, not once, found a social media platform designed to replace a website, flyer, brochure, catalog, or anything else whose purpose is to sell. Have you?

Ask yourself, why do people login to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Youtube, GovLoop etc? What do they hope to achieve? If your social media strategy does not match those purposes, you are violating the emotional terms and conditions. Consumers do not tolerate it and you will not get the biggest bang for your buck.

I have found when I honor that rule, engagement, virality, and reach all increase.

What are social media rules that you follow?

For most of our clients we have seen significant upticks in pages viewed per visit as well as an increase in time spent on the website.

People come to a website to learn about a company. Here are 11 tips has contributed to our success:

1. Upon arriving at your home page, make the next step choices simple to understand, reflective of feeling (about solving their need or problem and take into consideration industry stereo types), and low in number? You want to guide the path they take, but at the same time make them feel like they are in control. Asking for contact info up front can scare people away.
2. Make sure menu items that are important to YOUR CUSTOMER are prominent and in obvious places. We (consumers) have been conditioned to look in certain spots on a website for navigation. Don’t be creative here.
3. Menu items that are important to you, should be in the footer. We can’t forget that SEO is a big part of web design. Many times we create pages that provide nothing but good SEO content, is important to investors, shareholders, or company leadership. All this stuff comes second to buyer need.
4. Your secondary pages should be relevant to the link the clicked on to get there, and not a trap to take them in a direction they were not expecting.
5. Call to actions are important. If you don’t ask people to do anything, they won’t.
6. Contact information should be prominent on every page.
7. Content quantity should follow the pyramid format. The deeper they go into your website, the more information they are looking for. So provide more content. For example. Page one might be a video. Page two might be a couple of short paragraphs and some pictures or an infograph. Page three could be an a diagram with a detailed explanation with an offer to buy.
8. If you sell products online, be sure to import product reviews from third party sites that give more credibility. If you don’t have any third party sites evaluation your products, make this part of your plan.
9. Be transparent. Your prospects are searching you out online because they don’t want to call and get haggled. The best way to be build trust and confidence is to be transparent. Transparency comes in the form of being open about your company culture, providing direct contact information, not forms, and information about the people in your company. Make it personable , not stale.
10. Make it about them. ” You asked for it, we delivered”, “When you want a widget made, you want it made right”, “Top ten reasons 97% of our customers are repeat buyers.”. Provide testimonials.
11. Video video video. Video gets 80% of the viewers attention, content gets attention from 20% of the people. When you can, use video. For those wondering, no we don’t have video on our site, and yes – we are in the process of adding some. Stay tuned.

*AxisPoint Marketing develops and builds template websites for businesses whose web needs are simple. For those companies who have advanced website needs, we assist in the buying process and recommend them to preferred AxisPoint Marketing partners.

Digital market research firm comScore found that roughly 20.1 million people scanned QR codes with their phones in a three-month average period ending October 2011, vs. 14 million in June 2011. As QR code generating websites make it easy for even small-business owners to get onboard by generating QR codes for free–placement and functionality of the technology is getting more creative.

So how can QR codes be used to build a company’s brand name or equity ? Here are some creative ways that company’s use this growing trend

PROMOTIONS, DISCOUNTS, AND GIVEAWAYS

You could create promotions, discounts, and giveaways that are specific to the QR codes. You could run these codes in advertisements or post them throughout your store. You could even turn them into a “retweet” so that your shoppers share their discount with their followers.

Mountain Dew and Taco Bell partnered on a promotion in which customers scanned QR codes on drink cups to get free music downloads. They knew their customers: younger people interested in popular culture. The campaign earned the companies over 200,000 downloads.

SCAVENGER HUNT

Again, for some reason this appears on every list of QR code marketing ideas. Probably because scavenger hunts are fun and engaging, although a lot easier to write about than to administer. Still, for destination marketing, a  scavenger hunt approach can be a great way to get visitors to check out places they might not otherwise go.

Red Door devised a QR code mobile scavenger hunt in which participants could use their mobile devices to locate and decipher simple, but engaging clues. These clues were designed to drive foot traffic through ESET’s immersion campaign installations at SXSW and provide concentrated exposure to the brand. Through the use of QR codes, They achieved the campaign goals of active engagement across multiple locations, product trials and lead generation.

Use QR codes to get Likes and Follows. You can create mobile-friendly landing pages with Facebook like buttons or lead them to your Twitter page for a quick follow. The name of the game is engagement, so a like or follow can create a long-term marketing opportunity. Caveat: so far the Like buttons that QR tags generate lead to the Facebook website rather than the mobile app.

Here is an excerpt taken from their blog.

“Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.”

What does this mean for business?

It means that Google just got more business friendly? Now to most SEO specialist that sounds almost like heresy, Google, business friendly – hardly and not likely. Well, it’s true, but only if you follow this one simple rule.  Include content in your website the is current, relevant, important to your customers when searching for their solution online, and is connected to your business.

Ask yourself these four questions:

• What do my prospects need to see online that will make them want to engage further?
• Do I have content that solves their problem?
• Is my content narrow and specific?
• Does it take very long for visitors to know what we are all about and how we are relevant to them?
• Are we manipulating content to give what we think people want to have, regardless of its relationship to our business model?

At it’s core, if you help Google do their job, you will rank higher in natural searches. This change to Google search will help those that do.

With search engine optimization becoming a virtual must-have in order for successful businesses to stay relative during a down economy and competitive in an ever shifting market. But what are the secrets to generating traffic to a website or produce desired visibility on a search related result? How can utilizing search engine optimization accomplish goals and boost profit for a business? Here are some tips that experts say, will get results.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it? The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords says, insider business.com

Also remember, putting ridiculous amounts of keywords on your site will get you labeled as a spammer, and search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of “keyword-stuffing.” Be strategic in your keyword use.

Content Matters

Your content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.

The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are full of oft-updated, useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline.

One way to ensure that your site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog. “Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless!” the Search Engine Journal suggests.

An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.

Linking done right

An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites.

Experts suggests that personally asking the webmasters of well-respected sites if they’ll include a link to your site on theirs. Be sure to return the favor — then everyone wins!

Make certain that your partner has a good web-reputation, of course. Experts warn against getting tied to a “link farm” whose bad SEO habits could bring you down.

Overall, search engine optimization proves vital when businesses want to stay competitive and relative in a ever changing marketing world. Plus, by utilizing some basic search engine optimization tips will not only get more traffic to your site, but establish and maintain growth to your business.

The buzz going around is that is a good move, for business. While I think businesses will like this, and signs are showing they already do (timeline view is available right now,  but still optional), I also think this is bad for business.

Here’s why. Timeline view starts off looking like a web site. I am not a fan of that. The marketing and advertising world has conditioned the users so much that consumer timespans are incredibly short and and cynical. If we look like something we are not, we lose trust. If we look like a website, we lose engagement.

In a recent sampling of teenagers, regarding Facebook fan pages, the most common statement type can be summed up by one person’s remarks, “I hate those fan pages, I wish they would all just go a way and leave me alone.”

The irony is that the teenager had to have liked the page at some point to be exposed to the fan page posting. The sad part is, somewhere along the line the business stopped engaging and started doing something else, like selling, talking only about themselves, forgot to follow up to a promotional campaign or give-away.

This is why I dislike the fan pages. If businesses can’t sustain engagement now, a new website like image will only make things worse.

Of course, a savvy and smart business knows all of this.  They will take advantage of the screen wide banner to reflect their customers feelings and how they prefer to be engaged, followed up by a content strategy that validates those feelings.

But experience says, that won’t be the norm. Which is why Facebook has a lot to fear from sites like Path and Pinterest.

What do you think of Timeline View for fan pages? Will they help or hinder?