Author: Franz Malten Buemann

  • An Increased In Total Organic Users By 555% and $30K/month for a client | SO CAN YOU! Read below.

    Did you know that over 90.60% of all web pages get zero organic search traffic from Google, according to the Ahrefs search traffic study? Content writers spend time and energy creating valuable content, which is only read by a few people online. What if I told you there is a proven way to create blog posts that get to the Google front page? As a marketer, I experimented with different content formats and styles for years before I learned how to create content that gets to the top search results. In 2021, I helped a UX agency to reach the top results in Google search for the “UX agency” keyword and double the organic traffic Link: marketingmindset.gumroad.com/l/seo submitted by /u/amanbhatia97 [link] [comments]

  • Social Proof: Katelyn Bourgoin on Knowing Your Audience

    Welcome to the sixth and final (for now) installment of Social Proof with Katelyn Bourgoin. Katelyn is an entrepreneur and creator who’s built several companies and agencies and even sold one successfully.She’s currently working as the CEO and Lead Trainer at Customer Camp, a company dedicated to helping its clients better understand buyer psychology. Her wealth of experience in marketing and customer research has earned her the nickname of ‘Customer Whisperer’.In this interview, we talk about how she grew her personal brand, with a newsletter called Why We Buy that has an audience of 10,000 people and a Twitter account with eight times that number.🖊️This interview has been edited and condensed for clarityQ: I’m so excited to have you on for Social Proof, Katelyn! What do you think about personal branding in general? And would you even call what you have a personal brand?Yes, I would call it a personal brand. I wasn’t very intentional about building a personal brand initially. What I knew was that I wanted to expand my audience beyond Atlantic Canada, which is where I’m based and where most of my clients are. But I didn’t want to be beholden to only working with companies from one region, so it made sense for me to work on building an audience beyond.I chose Twitter as my first platform because I like writing there – and I do some on LinkedIn now too. But I never went into it necessarily thinking, “I need a personal brand.”I just started sharing things that I thought were interesting and interacting with people I admired and thought were interesting. I found that it was such a fun place to both create content and meet people that I just started spending more time there. The audience was growing and then eventually was like, “Oh snap, I think I have a personal brand.”Q: There’s often so much fighting for our attention, which must be even more prominent for you running a company, publishing on LinkedIn and Twitter, and writing a newsletter. How do you balance all of those things? Do you adopt a consistent voice across all your channels and cross-post content with a focus on one over another, or do you have a strategic approach for each channel?It’s a mix that started with boosting traffic for our business. For example, initially, I wasn’t working with sponsors or doing any revenue-generation with my newsletter. I wanted to grow the email list, but I was using it as a channel to get the audience to discover the other parts of our business. I was also working on growing my social media following to grow awareness of the company more broadly. But I would say that since deciding to focus on growing the newsletter, I’ve become much more intentional about my social channels than before.Where before I stuck to the same topic of customer research because that’s our main product, now I’m finding that I want to create something more like a hub and spoke model that more broadly covers buyer psychology. So I’m educating the newsletter’s audience on buyer psychology and then on why they need to do customer research on their own customer base.Q: You already mentioned that it was the need to find customers outside your immediate region that led to you focusing on growing a personal brand. So chicken or egg question: would you say that it was a need to grow your business that led you to social media, or did social media inspire your business ideas?There are opportunities that I have now because of growing my social that I never considered a possibility. I knew that building my social would allow me to open doors that may not have been open to me before.But like with the newsletter, for instance, I never thought about growing my social so that I could one day have a newsletter that could become a revenue-generating asset for my business, but because I have the social channels and following. I knew at a high level that it would open up doors, but I didn’t know exactly what doors would open. It’s been a fantastic surprise to see it all evolve.Q: Which of the channels you work with have been the most valuable for growing your personal brand?I would say they each play a role. Twitter’s definitely the place where I have invested the most time and energy. And because of that, most of my newsletter growth comes from there in the sense that it’s someone finding the newsletter through Twitter and then recommending it there as well.Then the newsletter allows me to deepen the connection with those people from Twitter because I get to have this amazing spot in their inbox every week where I get their full attention, as opposed to being in the feed where there are lots of other things competing for attention.I’m fortunate to have both, and I’d much rather interact with my audience on Twitter than respond back and forth via email – I think it’s more fun for us. The conversations are more effortless and casual. I think that the two are used in different ways but are also symbiotic. They work together.Q: There is a question I like to ask which is can you define your personal brand in three words/phrases/terms?I’ve given some thought to this because I used to own a branding agency. So we’re very intentional about my brand, the Why We Buy brand. I want people to think about me in three words: ‘geeky’, ‘fun’, ‘marketer’.I get excited about the nerdy parts of marketing – buyer psychology and understanding people, but I also want to make it fun. I want to make it fun for me, and I want to make it fun for my audience. So I’d say if I had to sum it up, I’m a geeky marketer, but I really want it to be fun. I want the people learning about the sometimes dry and dull stuff that we teach to be entertained.Q: You have the label “Customer Whisperer” in your Twitter bio, which is so interesting. Is that an intentional personal brand label or a nickname that came about because of your work?Well, somebody called me that, so I didn’t come up with it myself. We offer training [at Customer Camp], and typically we would do it through partners here in Atlantic Canada. And one of our partners works for an organization that supports a whole bunch of different styles of businesses and helps them to export outside of Canada. And she started introducing me to the workshop participants as the Customer Whisperer.So I started using it, and I think it creates curiosity which is really important in marketing, but it also speaks to an evident desire that people have which is they want to have more customers, and they know that they need to understand them to be able to have more of them. I think that it just fits with everything that I want to be about.Q: That’s a cool example of the power of social proof in your personal brand – everything you’ve been communicating leads people to the conclusion you want them to have of you and your brand. You’ve done a lot of work with branding and understanding the customer psyche. Has that impacted how you communicate yourself and the projects that you work on or your achievements?Absolutely. I don’t consider myself to be a super customer researcher or buyer psychology expert, but I consider myself to be more like someone geeky about it and always learning. Oftentimes the topics that we’re talking about in the newsletter are presented like I have a high-level understanding. But really, we’re just learning about it ahead of teaching it to others. There’s a lot that I’m learning about only weeks before I’m sharing examples in my newsletter or on social.I love learning about these topics and then testing them in our own business and seeing what works for us and what doesn’t. It always makes me reflect back on our own marketing collateral or website or on messaging and see opportunities for optimization. We experiment and apply many of the principles we cover because our audience relies on our advice, and we want it to work for our customers.Q: Can you paint a picture of actions you’ve taken for your personal brand as Katelyn Bourgoin and not necessarily as Katelyn of Customer Camp? And what opportunities have these actions gotten you?I would say the most significant actions that have led to opportunities are engaging with people I admire.When we were still producing our podcast, most of our guests came through the interactions and relationships I’d built on social. I’d been engaging with people whose careers I admired, like Rand Fishkin and Bob Moesta, not for any ulterior motives but because I admired them. So when I reached out to get them on the podcast, they said yes. Then when we got to meet on the podcast, because we had so many things that we were geeky about in common, we would just start talking, and that led to other opportunities to get to work together. Bob Moesta and I co-hosted an event together, and Rand Fishkin invited me to a founder retreat he was doing in Italy. All of this came from getting to first start with very small interactions on social and amplifying their work, supporting them, and getting excited about what they were doing, which then led to real offline friendships with people who I only ever dreamed that I would get to talk to.The benefit for my personal brand was that the more I got to kind of be seen in association with these folks – authority figures in their industry – it acted as a form of social proof: Oh, Katelyn got Rand on her podcast, that’s amazing, or oh, she’s doing a webinar with Bob Moesta, she must know her stuff.The reality is it just came from starting to build a network on social and then turning that into a quick conversation and being excited about the same things and then turning those into friendships.Q: Would you say that Customer Camp relies on your personal brand a lot, or have you been able to separate the two? I ask this because in my research before this interview, I almost fell into the trap of constantly equating everything Katelyn with everything Customer Camp.If you asked me this question two years ago, I would have said very wholeheartedly, “I’m a champion of Customer Camp, but at the end of the day, I want people to know it’s bigger than me.” I had a larger team at the time. And so yes, people will associate me with the brand as the founder, but ultimately Customer Camp is what I want people to think of, and I want there to be a separation between us.In the last two years, my life has changed in many unexpected ways, some good and some difficult. So we had a baby, but at the same time, my husband ended up having two unexpected surgeries and was unable to work and lift our son. That caused me to make some changes to the business, and I had some plans of how I was going to grow Customer Camp that I reevaluated and changed.Now I’m actually in the process of focusing on growing Why We Buy as a media brand and me being the face of that. So I’m okay with people associating Why We Buy, our newsletter, with me because I plan to grow that asset, and I want to be the face of it in the same way that – and this is a crazy example I’m not comparing myself to him – Joe Rogan is the Joe Rogan Experience. You can’t just pop him out and put somebody else in and have the company be the same. I want to do that with Why We Buy, but that wasn’t always the plan.Q: With everything we’ve discussed so far in mind, what would you do if you were starting your personal brand today? What platforms or mediums would you decide to go with?I’d probably I would still do Twitter because it fits into my life and takes advantage of my personal strengths with short-form writing.I might also consider TikTok, but I could see myself getting into the weeds and trying to make the most elaborate TikToks ever. But I’ve intentionally stayed away from it because I just don’t need another thing to be addicted to.And I would throw LinkedIn in there as well. The nice thing is that you can repurpose most of your Twitter content. While I haven’t been as intentional with LinkedIn as I’m going to start being, I have been able to take years worth of content that I’ve been creating over on Twitter and modify it for LinkedIn.Q: Have you experienced any downsides in building a personal brand?I wrote a thread about this when I crossed 75,000 followers on Twitter, sharing seven lessons I’ve learned and five hard things that nobody tells you about but growing your audience.7 lessons I’ve learned on my way to 75,000 Twitter followers…(Plus 5 cautionary tales that no one tells you)— Katelyn Bourgoin ⚡️ (@KateBour) August 5, 2022

    For one, social media becomes addictive and not in a good way. You’re constantly logging in and refreshing, waiting for more notifications – that’s not good for your brain. It’s not good for your relationships because like you’re way too plugged into what’s happening on your phone.Also, as your audience grows, it becomes more challenging to respond to everything and interact with everyone. Sometimes, I get hundreds of notifications – thousands if a post goes viral. I used to be able to interact with everyone, answer every question, and respond to every comment. Now I’m missing things, and it’s hard to ensure I’ve interacted with everybody.You’ll also start to have a lot more people reach out to you, asking questions, for advice, for your time, and often people who you’ve never interacted with before. I’d like to get to a place where I can respond to everyone, but I don’t see how unless I hire somebody to start managing my personal account. I don’t see how I could keep up with it all, especially as the audience keeps growing.And the final thing I talked about in the post is you start to compare yourself to other people. You compare yourself to other creators. You see people that are growing faster than you that are putting out a lot more content than you, and you wonder how they can do it all because they have a busy life too.Q: What would you recommend for someone that is trying to be intentional about not only building their own channels, whether that’s publishing YouTube videos or writing a newsletter, but also trying to deepen the connection with their audience on social media?I think you should go really deep into one channel and build an audience there, get good at creating content for that platform, and understand what works with your audience on that platform. Once you have an audience – and it doesn’t need to be a big audience – it might be time to get started getting people to sign up for a newsletter. Focus on publishing that newsletter every two weeks and getting your Twitter following to allow you in their inbox.What I think that people struggle with is they try to be on too many platforms at once with a too-small team. If you have a larger team, it makes sense for you to be across these different channels. But for many companies, they’ve got one marketer, and they’re expecting them to post to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Tiktok.Show up in their attention, and then get their trust enough that they’ll come to where you are and actually get value over in your place.Q: Finally, I’d love to pull on the thread of going all in and direct that to the topic of picking a niche. Would you say that focusing on customer research and buyer psychology was a valid initial approach for your content?It depends on what you’re talking about and who your audience is. For Twitter, I was really focused on understanding the customer – that was the thing I wanted people to associate with me. But I also identified my sub-topics in offering marketing tips and generally sharing things from my personal life. I’m very intentional about staying on topic, but I pepper in other things to see the response.With the newsletter, I tried to avoid a mistake I often see others make. They will pick a topic that aligns with the service that they offer or the products that they sell, but their audiences aren’t interested in reading about it every day. Or one that is only relevant to them when they’re doing a relevant project. I’ve seen people launch newsletters on writing sales pages, and it’s like, that’s a newsletter that people are gonna sign up for when they have to write a sales page. And then, three weeks later, they’re not going to open your emails anymore because it’s not relevant.So in my case, I could have written my whole newsletter about customer research, but in most companies, customer research is a project and not something they do every day. It’s not something that they always care about. But buyer psychology is something that, regardless of what you’re working on, it’s going to be relevant whether you’re designing a new landing page or whether you’re trying to convince your boss to give you a raise.When it comes to people’s newsletters or YouTube shows, you want to grow an audience that’s going to come back to you week after week. You want to make sure that the topic that you talk about is something that is going to be consistently relevant to them.TakeawaysKatelyn’s experience building a personal brand has evolved with her growth as an entrepreneur. She’s become so well-known for her knowledge in buyer psychology and customer research that she earned the nickname “Customer Whisperer.” Here are some of the top takeaways from our interview with Katelyn about building a personal brand that speaks for itself:Pick a niche that has lasting relevance: Katelyn’s – and Customer Camp’s – expertise and service is in customer research. But both the founder and the company are known for a deep understanding of customer psychology – a broader topic that has relevance regardless of whether the audience needs their service or not. Try to find topics that your audience will always come back to you for, regardless of whether they need your services immediately or not.Start with one channel and work your way up from there: As Katelyn said, people often try to be on too many platforms at once but end up being spread too thin. Grow an audience and develop trust on one platform – then carry them over to other channels as you evolve your personal brand.Adopt cross-posting for your personal brand: A sentiment we also heard from Jack Appleby is that you should be repurposing content across your social media platforms. It saves you time and is an easy way to connect with a new audience using content you’ve already created.🔌 Do you want to build deep relationships with your audience and show off your expertise? Start publishing consistently to your chosen channels with Buffer today.

  • Calculating Absenteeism in the Call Center

    There’s nothing that destroys a perfectly good call center schedule like unplanned absences.
    Don’t get us wrong—we’re in full support of call center agents taking time off and embracing work-life balance. But scheduling shifts becomes tough when absenteeism rises, leaving the agents who did show up to bear the brunt.
    Unplanned absences have a ripple effect that can impact everything from customer satisfaction to agent attrition to contact center KPIs—and that’s something you shouldn’t ignore. If you’re consistently finding your team short-staffed, you may be overlooking this key area of your call center’s performance.
    How to Foster Agent Engagement in Today’s Contact Center
    What is Absenteeism, Anyway?
    Absenteeism is also known as “absence rate” in the call center. This figure stands for unapproved time agents spend away from their workstation. This doesn’t include planned absences from work (i.e., booked vacations, paid holidays, jury duty). Rather, it should include the following:

    Sick leave
    Personal days
    Unexplained absences
    Extended breaks at work

    That’s not an exhaustive list, but it covers the most common instances of unauthorized or unplanned leave. Your absence rate can be used to highlight general areas of improvement around productivity or identify employees who may need support with time management.
    Common causes of absenteeism can include:

    Work stress or burnout
    Insufficient support at work
    Frequent scheduling issues
    Poor culture fit
    Negative work atmosphere

    If you’re struggling with these issues in your call center, you should begin tracking and logging absence rates. Which brings us to our next topic…
    The Magic Formula: Calculating Absence Rate
    Absence rate is a relatively simple figure to calculate. To determine your team’s monthly absenteeism rate, use the formula below:

    Monthly Absenteeism (%)
    = # hours absent this month / Total # hours scheduled for the team this month x 100

    The resulting percentage shows how much time your agents spend away from their workstations during working hours. You can use a variation of this formula to track individual agent absenteeism as well. This can be a helpful figure to discuss during employee performance reviews.
    Here is the formula for calculating monthly individual absenteeism—it’s very similar to the formula for calculating team absenteeism:

    Monthly Individual Absenteeism (%)
    = # hours agent is absent this month / # hours agent was scheduled this month x 100

    How Absenteeism Impacts Your Call Center
    We’ve explained what absenteeism is, as well as how to calculate absence rate. Before you roll your eyes at yet another performance metric to track, consider the KPIs directly affected by absenteeism:

    Cost of operation
    Staffing and scheduling
    Customer satisfaction (CSat)
    First call resolution (FCR)
    Abandonment rate
    Agent satisfaction and attrition

    The Only Call Center Agent Performance Metrics You’ll Ever Need
    High absenteeism impacts your contact center operations in the same way short-staffing does. The workday will be more challenging for the agents who do show up and it becomes difficult to maintain a positive customer experience. Metrics like first call resolution and abandonment rate may start to tumble.

    Cost of Absenteeism ($)
    = # unauthorized hours absent / Average agent hourly rate

    The formula above helps track the cost of absenteeism. It’s an approximation, but this figure can help management understand the full impact absenteeism has on the business. If your call center agents are salaried, note that you’ll need to take an extra step to calculate their hourly wages.
    Analyzing Your Absence Rate: What Does it Mean?
    Calculating absenteeism is the easy part. The hard part is next: drawing conclusions from your new set of data.
    By measuring absence rates on a monthly basis, you’ll be able to identify trends and patterns from the resulting information. But a simple percentage figure doesn’t say much on its own—here are a few things to keep in mind when assessing your data.
    Monthly versus annual tracking
    You may have noticed that the formulas we provided above focus on monthly absenteeism reporting. While it’s less work upfront, annual reporting doesn’t give you as many data points, making it more difficult to identify patterns and causes for high absence rates.
    Also, keep in mind that you may see shifting absenteeism patterns throughout the year. Does your absence rate spike during certain months, and drop during others? Remember, by putting in the effort to collect this information, you’ll be much better positioned to address any challenges your call center faces.
    Separate short- and long-term absenteeism
    Absence rate can be a bit misleading if you don’t know what to look for. That’s because some instances of absenteeism carry more weight than others. For example, it’s acceptable for employees to call in sick to work if they aren’t well. It’s extended unauthorized use of time that you’ll want to address.
    Martin Jukes at Mpathy Plus recommends breaking the absence rate into two categories: short-term and long-term. Short-term absenteeism consists of absences of up to five consecutive days. Any absences beyond that would be considered long-term absenteeism. By separating this information, you’ll be able to see which types of absences are most common in your contact center.
    Identifying group trends
    Another way you can break down your absence rate is by group. Your contact center is run by many different departments and teams, each with their own specialties and skills. By assessing each group’s absence rate individually, you can find out which teams are contributing the most to your absenteeism.
    Let’s say you have a low employee absence rate of 5%. While this is great for your department overall, you may find that one team is contributing to much of that score. That’s an insight you won’t have if you don’t break down your data.
    What is Call Center Shrinkage?
    Reduce Absenteeism with These Tactics
    Once you’ve identified key areas for improvement, it’s time to formulate a plan of action. The following tips are great places to begin:
    Offer immediate feedback to your agents.
    Don’t ignore unauthorized leave. Agents will form habits based on the feedback they do or don’t receive. What’s more, letting this type of behavior slide may encourage other agents to follow suit.
    It may be tempting to hold onto this feedback until a formal review comes along, but by that point you may find yourself with a bigger problem on your hands. Take the individual aside and share your feedback to nip any problems in the bud.
    Improve working conditions.
    Look at your contact center and ask yourself: “Would I be productive in this environment?” If your workplace is drab and dreary, it may negatively impact your team’s productivity levels, leading to absenteeism. Consider investing in office lighting, ergonomic equipment, and other things to make the environment more welcoming.
    But don’t just stop at aesthetics—consider the tools that agents rely on to do their work. Investing in call center technology that automates the monotonous parts of their job can make things easier for them. And the easier it is to do their work, the more likely they’ll be at their workstation supporting callers.

    TIP:
    Fonolo’s call-back solutions eliminate the need for hold time, keeping call volumes manageable and improving both customer and agent satisfaction. Win-win!

    Update your absenteeism policy.
    When was the last time your management team visited your absenteeism policy? With more contact centers embracing remote and hybrid work, it’s important to keep these standards current so they align with your present-day operations.
    After analyzing your absence rate data, you may need to add or adjust your policy to better serve your needs. Be sure to clearly communicate these changes to your agents and be ready to open the floor to any questions or concerns they may have.
    Conduct return-to-work interviews.
    For long-term absences, it’s always a good idea to check in with your agents over a return-to-work meeting. This is an opportunity to document the reason behind the absence and offer support for their transition back to the workplace.
    Incentivize good attendance.
    Consider offering incentives for consistently strong attendance to reward agents for their time management skills and dedication. This could consist of anything from cash bonuses to paid time off. Be sure to clearly outline and communicate the requirements to your agents.The post Calculating Absenteeism in the Call Center first appeared on Fonolo.

  • For the upgrade

    The phone in your pocket cost $600, but that was two years ago, so now, it seems to be free and fully paid for.

    The upgrade has a slightly better camera and a slightly faster processor.

    Here’s the question: “If you could have chosen between the phone you have now and the phone you want now two years ago, would you have paid $700 more for the newer one?”

    Most people would not.

    So why do we upgrade? Software, phones, cars, houses…

    It’s because we’re not making that simple choice. Instead, we’re embracing the wisdom of the choice we made years ago at the same time we’re focusing on the glaring defects that status and affiliation relentlessly point out.

    They’re not trying to sell you a phone any longer. Or a house. They’re spending all their time selling you an upgrade.

  • What is Hyperpersonalization and What Does it Mean for Email Marketing?

    People receive over 100 emails daily, and I am no exception. Like others, I spend some minutes scrutinizing my inbox, marking some as spam, deleting some outright, unsubscribing from some lists, and even marking some as important so that I remember to pay more attention to them later when I have time.  How do you…
    The post What is Hyperpersonalization and What Does it Mean for Email Marketing? appeared first on Benchmark Email.

  • Automating Customer Service Analysis

    Hi all. We are working on a product for people in the Customer Experience to help them analyze their clients customer feedback data and manage brand reputation using data coming from review, surveys, NPS, etc.. So here is how this works: 1.) You bring in your own data that you want to do analysis on (Google reviews, Reddit, Twitter, 3rd party sites, NPS, etc.) 2.) We extract all relevant themes and topics along with sentiment and emotions for each of the reviews in Step 1 3.) We then populate our dashboards with visualizations and analysis that can be helpful to get a complete 360 degree view of what customers are actually talking about your product. What are your thoughts around this and how can we add features to this product to help solve your problems? submitted by /u/miteshyadav [link] [comments]

  • I will build digital marketing plan and strategy for your business

    Hello, You are Highly Welcome to My Business Plan/Marketing Plan Service I will provide you with the needed strategic support and business plan to grow your business and boost your SALES. If you are planning of starting a business, or Your business is not growing well, maybe you still want to broadcast your business on the social media platform. You have got covered by order this Service. I will render you a Highly Profitable and results-oriented Marketing Plan which includes: Competitive Analysis Targeted Marketing Opportunity Effective Traffic Channel Store Upgrade and SEO Ranking Customers Feedback Analysis Social Media Strategies Store Growth Tracking Analysis. Kindly Contact Me Now Or Place an Order To get a Productive Marketing Plan with Fully Application. Best Regards View Poll submitted by /u/Johnmarketer462 [link] [comments]

  • What marketing and sales persons should know about online lead generation?

    Ask for the Link….. submitted by /u/linked_camp [link] [comments]