Measuring customer effort: Is it time we moved on from Net Promoter Score?

CORMAC TWOMEY 

If customer satisfaction is directly linked to minismising effort, is NPS still a valid metric?

For many years, Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been a core metric for businesses, to quantify and monitor customer satisfaction levels and understand how this affects future behaviour. However, as with any metric the measurement is, by itself, just a means to an end. It is vital that brands are using NPS in the right way in order to deliver the most value to the business.

Ultimately, NPS measures brand loyalty, and is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.  The percentage of detractors is then deducted from the percentage of promoters to give the organisation its Net Promoter Score.

Effort equals experience

It is important to remember, in many scenarios, customers end up calling contact centres after failing to get the resolution they seek in-store, online or through other self-service options. This leaves the contact centre staff to face the brunt of the customers’ dissatisfaction, and having to rely on their professionalism, systems and efficiency to allay customer frustrations before turning a challenging situation into a positive experience.

NPS is undoubtedly a useful metric, but by its very nature, leads organisations into focusing their resources on delighting the customer by exceeding their expectations. This message has been emphasised for years: delight the customer and they will become your brand advocate and an asset that will help to secure potential future customers and growth. While this may be true, investing all your resources on creating more promoters could leave you vulnerable to the negative effects detractors can have on your brand.

Recent studies have shown that the impact of promoters and detractors is not equal, suggesting that one promoter will not make up for the damage one detractor can cause. A recent Convergys study found that eight in ten dissatisfied customers told others about their recent interaction, compared with just five in ten extremely satisfied customers. 

With many contact centres now measuring Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS), whereby customers are invited to rate their last interaction or transaction and not the whole brand experience, a wealth of valuable data is being captured that can be transformed into actionable insight to pinpoint root causes and drive improvements that will help to minimise the number of detractors.

When customers are asked why they are not satisfied with a recent interaction, the biggest drivers of their dissatisfaction were related to effort: had to repeat myself; had to call multiple times; took too long to resolve, etc. And the majority of top answers to what is important when receiving customer service also relate to customer effort – that is, how easy is it to resolve a question or issue or conduct a transaction using a service channel. This begs the question, are we using the right metrics in order to drive the improvements that will minimise customer effort?

Expectations are rising

This damage that detractors can do to your business is increasing as consumer expectations around customer service continue to rise, making the margin for creating dissatisfied customers larger. The increased use of technology and social media is a key factor. Customers now expect a different type of service and quite often organisations are falling short. In the Convergys survey, 20% of consumers reported that they started on a company’s website, but were dissatisfied and abandoned it, with 38% trying the web again and 23% switching to the phone. When digital deployment is dysfunctional, consumers often switch channels to get resolution, which could increase the number of interactions without reducing effort or improving satisfaction.

This means that service is expected through multiple channels and traditional channels such as the call centre are now being avoided. In fact, 47% of customers say they will do anything to avoid calling a contact centre.People are looking for a seamless service experience and brands that can solve their problems quickly with a minimum of fuss.

The focus for brands should therefore be on ‘closing-the-loop’ and identifying where the root causes of customer dissatisfaction lie. Often, the real drivers of customer effort sit upstream from the agents in poorly optimised self-service channels, policies that make it hard to do business, and siloed technology.  It is important that organisations have the technology and skills to deliver an efficient personalised experience, as this is critical to minimising effort by resolving customer issues as quickly and efficiently as possible in their channel of choice.

Prioritise to maximise ROI

While NPS will remain an essential tool for measuring loyalty, brands should consider how they are allocating resources in order to have the best possible impact on the bottom line. Given the ever-increasing expectation for multichannel communication and the larger influence of the detractor, a smarter approach to NPS might be required.

Delighting customers will always be the ideal, however, with detractors 60% more likely to talk about your brand than promoters, the penalty for not meeting expectations is greater – and is only likely to increase.  Often, the best way to add value to the business will be to focus on minimising customer effort, which should lead to a drop in the number of detractors. Conversely, placing a greater emphasis on the number of detractors will enable you to gauge how well you are achieving this

As brands and customer service teams look to adapt to the new realities of this multichannel world, they must make sure they are factoring these trends into their metrics. After all, as the saying goes, what gets measured gets done!

Brands and Retailers Should Team Up in Emerging Markets

When companies “share the shelf,” everyone wins.
by Nikhil Bhandare, Pali Tripathi, and Aparajita Kapoor




Illustration by Benoit Tardif




Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and retailers are natural allies. They have many of the same objectives — increased sales, cost savings, optimized processes and systems, and happy customers — and already work together in many parts of the world. But in emerging economies, such collaboration has yet to take off. In a recent survey of 500 leading CPG firms and retailers in India, Strategy& and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry found that although 91 percent of respondents had participated in at least one collaboration initiative, most of these ventures were one-offs rather than sustained relationships. Only 15 to 20 percent of respondents reported that these collaborative projects had met their objectives.

It’s a huge lost opportunity. Across Asia, Latin America, and, increasingly, Africa, sales channels are proliferating, demographics are shifting, and individuals are gaining greater access to online information about companies and their products. These trends have taken their toll on revenue growth and profits. In India, for example, sales growth has leveled off since 2010; operating margins in both the CPG and retail industries are holding steady at best. Working alone, frankly, is not really working.

Collaboration, however, could yield quick wins and short-term benefits — and could ultimately transform the complex and fragmented consumer landscapes of many emerging economies into more sustainable, more efficient business environments. Even limited cases of collaboration between CPG companies and retailers have led to positive, enduring industry-level changes. In 2007, consumer giant Unilever joined forces with Migros, one of Turkey’s largest retailers. Through an in-store survey, the firms learned that shoppers perceived hair conditioner as unnecessary and expensive. Unilever and Migros set up price promotions and reorganized shelf space to put conditioners next to shampoos, encouraging shoppers to view conditioner as an essential companion product. Migros’s overall hair conditioner revenue grew by 25 percent, and Unilever’s by 36 percent.

When collaboration expands to include the automated sharing of point-of-sale (POS) data, the results can be even more dramatic. In 2012, Godrej Consumer Products of India set up electronic data interchange (EDI) interfaces to automate the exchange of such data with retailers. The company reported that revenues earned through these trade channels grew 28 percent during the second half of that year.

Although the benefits may seem obvious, setting up and sustaining these partnerships is difficult in practice. To make the process more manageable, CPG companies and retailers need to create the circumstances that will enable effective collaboration, and to establish robust and transparent systems that allow collaboration to endure. Of course, none of that will matter if both sides cannot see at the outset why they should be open with each other. This is no small matter: Lack of trust was the leading cause reported by our survey respondents of their firms’ avoiding or terminating collaborative initiatives.

That’s why the most significant collaborations are deliberately designed to foster trust, often by tackling daunting challenges — and demonstrating what each side can gain. For example, although retailers typically view e-commerce as a competing channel, it can also boost in-store trade if it’s designed to do so. Consider the “bloggers club” collaboration between Indian electronics retailer Croma and Toronto-based e-book publisher/tablet maker Kobo. This club invites Indian bloggers to post reviews of Croma products and outlets. It is designed to forestall complaints, provide customer support, and promote Croma through contests for Kobo merchandise.

The use of real-time POS data, in particular, can reshape how CPG and retail companies make decisions. A company might use such data to choose where to expand activity, or to manage product availability in a different way so that consumers are more likely to find the products they want in their local community. Better access to data from inventory tracking and demand planning can help remove bottlenecks in the supply chain, direct R&D investment, improve marketing, and maximize supply chain efficiency, all of which work toward increasing profits for both manufacturer and retailer.

Data-driven collaboration often includes sharing insights on market trends and consumer buying behavior. Our survey respondents said such sharing leads to better idea generation involving products and trade promotions, savvier use of e-commerce platforms, and more effective workplace management. The most useful technologies for gathering this data are those that enable direct interaction with consumers: customer relationship management systems, Web 3.0 (which uses natural language search, data mining, and artificial intelligence technologies), online applications such as digital media campaigns, and contests on social networking sites such as Facebook.

Collaboration on demand planning enables CPG firms and retailers to set realistic targets, meet market demand, and minimize stockouts. For example, when one U.K. retailer and a global market leader in oral care initiated a joint business planning pilot several years ago, they took certain steps to foster their relationship. The enterprises’ leadership teams met monthly to discuss short- and long-term opportunities. They reviewed the performance against forecasts, planned the next month’s assignments and developed new forecasts, and agreed on changes such as promotions. The initiative has led to improved delivery rates, increased on-shelf availability, new targeted promotions, better margins, reductions in inventory levels, and streamlined agreement on other collaborative initiatives.

Finally, co-branded advertisements enable CPG firms and retailers to visibly market products together. For instance, Indian e-commerce retailer Flipkart and Motorola recently splashed marketing campaigns across television and print media for the joint launch of the Moto G phone. Collaborative advertising may be extended to include distributors as well: Apple in India co-brands its iPhone advertisements with pan-India distributors Redington and Ingram Micro. By outsourcing its advertising this way, Apple saves on costs and engages more actively with distributors. The distributors in turn benefit from association with Apple’s brand along with the higher margins they can earn on its smartphones.

If your company is considering a collaboration initiative, this may all seem daunting. But if both you and your partner have the right mind-set and process, collaboration can be successful. The foundation of any partnership has to be a shared vision of opportunities and challenges. The CPG company and retailer need to lock in specific agreements and expectations about targets, responsibilities, and accountabilities at the outset. A retailer, for instance, would likely be unwilling to share category-level data with a CPG firm unless the firm promised something in return, such as assistance in optimizing the retailer’s product mix to increase category sales.

Both companies need to find sponsors at the top leadership level. CEO and chairman–level endorsement is a key element, positioning you and your partner company to achieve common strategic goals and establish accountability. Further down the hierarchy, you’ll need to set up cross-functional teams, led by a key account manager. These teams could be organization-specific or cross-organizational, depending on the depth of the collaborative relationship. Members should come from the supply chain, logistics, marketing, and IT functions. If you are pursuing multiple initiatives with a target partner, to avoid ambiguous reporting lines or conflicting commitments, ensure that each initiative has a clear set of owners and a governance body, such as a steering committee or a higher-level council comprising CEOs of the two partners plus key members from both sides.

Wherever possible, set up common processes and technologies, with the goal of seamless integration, the incorporation of mobile devices, and a shared view of data. These can include common IT systems and back-end processes such as robust inventory tracking systems, to streamline the order-flow process and manage distribution information. You may also wish to align other systems such as those dedicated to billing, labeling, and EDI to enable real-time updates, the sharing of financial data, and the cross-management of logistics.

The collaboration can now begin, but the work is far from over. It is critical that both companies be able to track and measure progress as the project unfolds, using key performance indicators established by a joint team. Link them to performance of the joint account team members, so they serve as incentives for variable pay.

You’ll also need to ensure that you have the right talent in place as the partnership activities progress. In India, CPG manufacturing companies such as Coca-Cola, Dabur, Hindustan Unilever, ITC, and Marico have heavily invested in developing programs to help traditional retailers train their employees in specialized skills, such as operating credit card machines, maintaining inventory logs, and creating attractive merchandise displays. The goal is to create a dialogue with traditional stores, which make up 90 percent of India’s retail landscape. Thanks to such initiatives, these CPG companies have reached thousands of traditional retailers throughout the country. Intermediaries such as distributors, systems integrators, and resellers can also play a role in training and overseeing the retail staff. Through its Panasonic Partners program, the electronics company Panasonic introduces intermediaries to new products, business opportunities, and special commercial offers. These intermediaries use that knowledge to push sales independently with retailers, enabling Panasonic to build its channel community.

Finally, remember that trust in your relationship is something you will need to continually maintain. The importance of transparency with your partner company and adherence to agreed-on processes should be clear to everyone involved. Building trust should begin with your own organization’s behavior, not just what you expect from others. In fact, knowing yourself is a critical part of this process. Many companies are tempted to use collaboration to make up for gaps in their own capabilities. In practice, however, the most successful partnerships build on strengths rather than compensating for weaknesses. The best way to view collaboration is as a joint growth opportunity — a chance to develop more distinctive, stronger capabilities together.

7 MODERN MARKETING FRAMEWORKS EVERY STARTUP NEEDS TO KNOW

As a young marketer navigating the digital landscape, I love frameworks. Not only do they help me plan and prioritize, but they help me visualize how everything I’m working on fits together.

No, I won’t be talking about (and I’m looking at you, classically trained marketers) the 4Ps, Porter’s 5 forces, or SWOT analyses. Sure, those frameworks have their place, but they don’t provide much direction for startups looking to focus their energy on growth. Plus, they’re getting pretty old.

The frameworks below were developed by modern marketing gurus. Together, they’ll help you make a growth strategy, select traction channels, and influence your customers’ behavior.

Growth Frameworks

Let’s start off with some growth frameworks. These models will help you determine how to grow, when to grow, and what metrics you should be tracking.

1. The Startup Pyramid

Sean Ellis (CEO of Qualaroo, godfather of growth hacking) uses this framework when thinking about startup growth. This one is great because it gives you a rough game plan depending on what stage your business is in. The pyramid is comprised of three stages:

• Product/Market Fit: Appropriately at the base of the pyramid, the first and most fundamental part of the model is achieving product/market fit. The idea behind this is that you should never waste resources on growing something that people don’t want. If you go down that path, you’ll just die trying.
• Transition to Growth: Once you know you have something people want, it’s time to transition to growth. This part of the model involves understanding what makes your product valuable to people and how you can get more people to experience this value. More specifically, you’re setting yourself up for success in the next phase by maximizing your conversion rate.
• Growth: Now you’re finally ready to put the gas on some growth channels and bring on the traffic. This stage begins with testing channels and analyzing their performance. After that, you’ll want to optimize and double-down on the high performers. As for selecting channels in the first place, I’ll dive into some other frameworks that will help us with that later.

(http://www.startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/)

2. Pirate Metrics: “AARRR!”

Dave McClure (Founder of 500 Startups) developed Pirate Metrics to guide startups on their quest to acquire and convert customers. I love this framework because it’s easy to see how a user might go through this funnel, and it shows you where your metrics are suffering the most.

Let’s take a look at the basics:

• Acquisition: How do users find you in the first place? Think of your growth channels. This could be from paid search, a Facebook ad, a piece of content, etc.
• Activation: Did users actually do anything once they landed on your site? While user activation will be defined differently for each business, this could be as simple as signing up for an account, to something more involved like completing a profile.
• Retention: Do users come back? Here you’ll have to define what it means for a user to be inactive. For your business, this could mean a user that hasn’t made a purchase in a two-month period. Calculate your churn rate and, as a starting point, make sure it’s at a good level for your industry.
• Revenue: How do you make money? Of course, all of this is pretty pointless if you don’t have a way to make money. Here you can look at metrics like customer lifetime value(LTV), conversion rate and shopping cart size.
• Referral: Do users tell others about your product? If they do, you’re benefitting from some degree of virality. This magnifies the effect of any of your acquisition efforts, and is particularly useful if you engage in paid acquisition. It effectively lowers your customer acquisition cost (CAC) because every user obtained brings on more users themselves.

(http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics.html)

3. Lean Analytics Stages

In their book Lean Analytics, Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz present their own framework called Lean Analytics Stages. Their model combines elements from a number of different frameworks, including the two above. In their view, startup growth is best broken down into five key stages:

• Empathy: The purpose of this stage is to inform the development of your minimum viable product (MVP). The metrics at this stage are mostly qualitative, since you’re empathizing with your customers and listening to their feedback. You’re ready for the next stage when you’ve identified a problem that you know you can solve profitably in a sizeable market.
• Stickiness: Now you need to build something that keeps people coming back. Engagement and retention are the focus here as you iterate your MVP to optimize these metrics. You’re ready for the next stage once you’ve got an engaged user base and a low churn rate.
• Virality: Before throwing money into advertising, you’ll want to maximize the growth you get from existing customers. As I mentioned before, virality helps you get more out of your marketing dollar. Once you’re seeing a good amount of organic growth, you’re ready for the next stage.
• Revenue: Once again, you’ve gotta make some money. On top of that, you need revenue coming in to fuel customer acquisition efforts. This is where you’ll be tweaking your business model to prove you can make money in a scalable way. CAC and LTV are important metrics here as you ensure customers bring in more money than they cost to acquire. When you’ve reached your revenue and margins goals, you’re ready to scale this thing.
• Scale: As a company that now knows its product and market very well, efforts will now be focused on making more money from your current market and/or entering new markets.

Channel Selection Frameworks

With so many possibilities and a million things to do, it’s hard to decide where to put your marketing efforts. These frameworks will help you find your killer acquisition channels.

4. The ICE Score

Here’s Sean Ellis with another dose of genius — the ICE score. I love this one because it’s a quick and dirty way to evaluate potential growth channels. All you have to do is ask yourself three questions:

• What will the impact be if this works?
• How confident am I that this will work?
• How much time/money/effort is required?

Let’s put this in context. When Airbnb first came up with the idea to integrate with Craigslist, the potential impact was undeniable. If this worked, they’d tap into Craigslist’s massive user base. They were confident in the idea, since they had team members that could pull it off, and no user would say no to more traffic on their listings. However, this plan would require a fair amount of effort from their team to get the integration up and running. Ultimately, Airbnb went for it due to the potential impact and their confidence in the idea — and it definitely paid off!

There’s two ICE frameworks. This one helps you prioritize what to test first by: measuring the impact of the test (impact), confidence level in the test working (confidence), and how easy the test is to implement (ease).

The second ICE framework helps you prioritize by: measuring growth and company benefits (impact), determining the cost of implementing (cost), and understanding the amount of resources required to test (effort).

5. The Bullseye Framework

The Bullseye Framework, developed by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares for their bookTraction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers, gives us a more in-depth model for channel selection. Their five step framework breaks down the process of finding the one channel you should focus on (bullseye!):

• Brainstorm: Naturally, you’ll have biases towards certain traction channels. To avoid missed opportunities, they suggest thinking of at least one idea for each of the 19 traction channels. I won’t list those here, but Traction covers all of them in detail!
• Rank: This step has you thinking critically about your mountain of ideas. The goal is to categorize ideas as either high potential, possibilities, or long-shots.
• Prioritize: Now you want to re-think your categories once again, carefully selecting your top three high potential channels.
• Test: With your three ‘high potentials’, you can now devise cheap tests to gauge feasibility. The goal here is to find which one of these channels is worth your undivided attention.
• Focus: Armed with your test results, start directing resources towards your most promising channel. You’ll want to squeeze every bit of growth out of this channel by continually optimizing results through experimentation.

Behavioral Frameworks

To close out this list, let’s take a look at two frameworks you can use to influence user behavior. You’ll notice these tie in nicely with key growth concepts we talked about earlier — stickiness and virality.

6. The Hook Model

User psychology guru Nir Eyal presents the Hook Model in his recent book, Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products. He suggests that the products we use regularly work their way into our lives by cultivating habitual user behavior. He also believes that these habit forming products follow a similar iterative cycle:

• Trigger: Bringing a user into the cycle starts with a trigger. At first these will be in the form of external triggers such as push notifications, but as the cycle repeats they will convert into internal triggers that will continue to drive the user forward. Since negative emotions are often internal triggers, one example would be a pang of loneliness followed by the urge to jump onto Facebook.
• Action: The easier it is to do something, the more users will do it. Habit forming products make action easy.
• Variable reward: To create a habit, it’s necessary to reward the action that was triggered. However, research shows that humans are motivated by the anticipation of a reward. By adding variability into the reward system, you increase anticipation. Think about the sweet sweet anticipation that you might have a notification waiting for you on Facebook.
• Investment: Finally, to solidify the habit, users need to invest themselves in your product. On Facebook we build a network of friends, and on Instagram we have collection of photos. These investments make it hard to leave.

7. STEPPS

Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and creator of STEPPS, says it best: “Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. There’s a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even.” Luckily, you can use this formula to create your own contagious content:

• Social currency: People care about how they are perceived by others. Use this to your advantage, and people won’t be able to resist talking about you. Invite-only web apps harness this by making users feel like insiders.
• Triggers: If people are frequently reminded of your product, they’ll talk about it more. Jonah notes the example of Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” having a huge spike in plays on — when else? — Fridays.
• Emotion: Content is more likely to go viral if it is highly emotional. The type of emotion matters too — something that evokes anger (a high arousal emotion) is more likely to be shared than something that evokes sadness (a low arousal emotion).
• Public: The more public something is, the more likely people will talk about it. Think about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: the creators were able to take something that was normally private (donating to charity) and make it very public. Genius.
• Practical value: People like to share things that are useful. Make high value content and they’ll pass it on. Like this article for instance! 
• Stories: People like to tell stories. Jonah describes stories as your Trojan Horse—build compelling narratives, and they’ll carry your idea along for the ride.

While this is just a quick overview of some of my favorite modern marketing frameworks, you probably have an idea of how each one might apply to you. I’d recommend diving deeper into each one and thinking about how you can apply them to your business.

Lloyd Alexander is a recent marketing grad who’s excited about technology and digital marketing.

8 Simple Digital Marketing Ideas For Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses

You can have the best product in the world but if nobody knows about it, it isn’t going to do anybody any good. Digital marketing is a necessity whether you’re a multinational corporation, a mom-and-pop shop, or a lone entrepreneur striking out on your own.

1. Analytics  – The most important tool for any marketer is data. When done properly, an analytics platform can tell you key insights about what marketing efforts are performing, will identify customer problems with you your product/site, and will force you to think about what the key metrics for your business are. When you have pile of money and unlimited ad budgets, digital marketing is easy. When you’re a small company, choosing how to spend your marketing dollars and time become a lot more important.  Although there are thousands of marketing options out there, here is a list of options that are cost efficient, should drive customer growth, and should set you up with a solid marketing infrastructure. Resources: Google Analytics (free), Kissmetrics (plans start at $150/month), RJ Metrics (has special plans for startups).

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Organic search is a highly cost effective marketing channel for most businesses.  Despite this, a lot of people take for granted that the search engines will just be able to find and index their site. While this may be true to some extent, you can improve your chances of appearing in results for key phrases by applying a few search engine optimization tactics. A good first step is to set up your site in Google and Bing’s webmaster tools, which will help to identify any issues of the site that are preventing it from being indexed and will also give you insight into the types of keywords for which your site and content are ranking. Resources: Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Moz, Search Engine Land

3. Start a Blog – A blog can educate users about your product and services, help to establish you as a thought leader in a particular field, and can help your site appear for key terms in search engines. When setting up your blog, think about the type of customers you would like to reach and what sort of information would be useful to them. Experiment with content to see what resonates and drives conversions. Resources: WordPress, Blogger, Hubspot

4. Video Search – When people think about Search engines, they typically think about text.  But written content is only one part of the search universe. Youtube is actually thesecond largest search engine in the world.  It’s very easy and inexpensive to set up a video channel. In terms of content, you could created simple videos featuring product demos, tips and tricks, how-to videos, customer testimonials, webinars and Q&A events. Resources: YouTube, Vimeo

When people think about Search engines, they typically think about text.  But written content is only one part of the search universe. Youtube is actually the second largest search engine in the world.

5.  Social Media – 73% of online adults use some type of social media network. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin can be great vehicles for connecting with targeted audiences, gaining customer feedback, for inserting yourself into relevant conversations, and for managing your brand’s reputation. Resources: Facebook, Twitter,Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn

6.  Trending Topics – Most social networks have tools that tell you which topics are especially popular at a given moment. When a topic is trending, it means that there is a big audience discussing it.  If your product or service is in some way related to a particular trending topic, you might want to consider inserting yourself into that conversation —  just be mindful that you do so in a respectful and appropriate way. Resources: Google Trends, Facebook Audience Insights, Twitter Trends

7.  Online Community – No matter what industry you work in, there is bound to be an online community based around that subject. If there isn’t, create one.  Online communities can be a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader in a particular industry as well as a way to gain insights about how potential customers talk about your product or service, how they view similar products, and understand what their industry concerns are.  If someone in an online group asks a question that is relevant to your company, feel free to mention your service, but just be sure that you understand the tone of the community and that you are actually answering the question and not just plugging your product. Resources: Quora, Linkedin Groups, reddit, Google Groups

8.   Partnerships – Look for organizations, publications, companies, podcasts and websites that are complimentary to your services. Reach out to them to see if you there is an opportunity for you to work together. Some examples would be offering to host a webinar or participate in an ask-me-anything session on the company’s social media channels, or to guest blog an article. Resources: Vary by industry

http://www.shakelaw.com/