With a new year comes new goals — both professional and personal. If you haven’t already, now is the time to get your goals in place and use my free goal tracker to make them happen.
Related: Take Stock and Plan for Your Future
Now’s the time to think through what you want your professional life to look like a year from now and set out a roadmap to make that a reality.
Whether or not your prospect buys from you comes down to their experience.
Every time a consumer makes a decision to buy (or not to buy) a product, that decision is influenced by a zillion different little factors—all of which make up the overall buying experience.
While product, service, messaging, visual brand, and overall communications strategy are all crucial pieces on their own, even more important is how they work together to create an overall customer experience.
An effective buyer’s journey maximizes this experience. It integrates all the working pieces in a way that educates, builds confidence, provides motivation, and proactively addresses customers needs.
Unfortunately, this is a difficult thing to see in context.
We’re often so close to our product or service we suffer from the curse of knowledge. We don’t look at how our customers experience their journey through the buying process. We don’t consider the buyer’s journey.
To avoid this common pitfall, read on.
Is “brand consistency” code for “have a boring brand?” Let’s see …
Imagine going to a new restaurant.
You walk in and are greeted by a pleasant hostess, who seats you at their best table.
The food smells amazing, and you can’t wait to order.
Unfortunately when you open the menu—it’s in Japanese.
There must be some mistake. You wait for the waitress to come and ask for English menus, only to find she speaks French!
At this point, you are so fed up (not to mention hungry) that you just leave and head to the pizza joint down the way.
The restaurant lost a customer (possibly a loyal one—or even a brand ambassador), and your customer experience has been ruined.
I’m very happy to feature a guest post from Laura Petrolino today. Laura’s a sports fan, as we saw in this post. I loved her take on what the best NBA players can teach us about business, and I hope you do, too! –Pamela Wilson
Today, the NBA is half sport and half soap opera, with a cast of characters complete with both divas and criminals (all with really big feet). However if you look beyond the hype, you’ll find a few shining examples of extremely talented leaders. Players who succeed — not just because they know how to play the game, but because they know how to lead.
As a former Portland, Oregon resident and long time Trail Blazer fan, Brandon Roy is the epitome of leadership. His role with the Blazers over the last five years can provide leadership insights for any business owner.
So if you want learn how to run your business like Brandon Roy, strap on a pair of size 12 Nikes and take note:
I’m very happy to feature a guest post from Laura Petrolino today. As you’ll see, Laura has a favorite past time: football. When you read her bio at the end of the post, you’ll ask the same question I did: “how does this woman have time to watch football?” She does, though, and this post is proof that she gets a lot out of it! –Pamela Wilson
Football is like life — it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority. –Vince Lombardi
Football is more than a game. It is about strategy, about fully utilizing your resources, about adjusting to sudden change … and, of course, about pleasing your fans.
We can learn a lot about life from the game of football. Whether it be business, personal, spiritual or psychological; many of life’s great questions can be answered by analyzing the way things are done on the field, and marketing is no exception.