Bleap Blog

First, a recap of a blog written by yours truly published on 9th July 2017 – “GAME OF BOTS – READY?” Here we predicted 50% of low end telecalling jobs might be axed once AI collaborates with machine learning to create voicebots.

I never thought this will be true so soon. And that too in our own backyard. We recently developed a chatbot (No. Not a voicebot yet) for a Bengaluru based client (a micro-finance firm). Based on the underwriting rules briefed by the client, our tech team developed a multi-lingual (6 languages) chatbot that offered a personalized (almost human) chat experience to the prospective business loan seekers.

Here are the 5 features of the chatbot

1. Personalized chats in 6 languages.
2. Intuitive flow based on prospects response.
3. Follows complete underwriting logic. No human intervention.
4. Captures prospect’s name, mobile number, geo location, FB ID for future use.
5. Provides all data by prospect in the dashboard along with date–time stamp.

Well, what followed next was simply magical. Our Social Media Marketers created a FB campaign and integrated this chatbot with the campaign. The campaign has been running for a period of about 3 weeks across 6 cities. Here is the snapshot of results.

Benefits of Chatbot campaign

1. 1. As explained above, Chatbot lead is cheaper by almost 50% vis a vis a regular form based lead. Here is the maths of savings.

1. 1. What’s more? All the information including quantum of loan required, customer mobile, customer geolocation is captured by the chatbot. So time for field team to visit the customer and close the case is reduced to 1 day instead of an average 3 days in the earlier method.

1. The impact of this enriched information made available to the field team upfront enhances the productivity by 50 % (Source -client testimonial). The time from lead to disbursement gets reduced from 10 days to 5 days.

Downside of Chatbot campaign

1. It will be worthwhile to mention here that our chatbot based campaign stumps many prospects. They keep repeating the same question (e.g – I need a personal loan) thinking that there is human being replying to this chat. Probably what they expect is human consideration or at least empathy. In certain other instances the replies from the customers is out of context and our chatbot is dumbfounded.

This opens up opportunities for a host of industry specific applications like Overseas University admissions, Immigration services, Healthcare, Legal services, Credit Cards & Loans and many more. Who doesn’t want rich and relevant data about customers and prospects?

Hospital marketing is challenging to say the least. You can’t really inspire people to visit a hospital. You know they won’t. All you need to do is, subtly but consciously market your brand to stay relevant and approachable. Here are 8 great tips to help you create brand awareness on the Online space for your hospital (clinic / diagnostic centre included) with minimum investments.

How to market your Hospital Brand with great 8 tips

1. Get a Responsive Website

The first thing most potential patients will try to do is go through your website (until and unless it is an emergency and your hospital happens to be the nearest) and find out as much about your hospital as possible, online. So don’t just build a website that displays information about your hospital and your Doctors, but try building delight features like online OPD appointments, service satisfaction scores. Online can be great way to get appointment visits (well emergency cases will gravitate towards your hospital for obvious reasons) be it for health checkups or diagnostics. Focus on giving patients useful health information to take better care of themselves and their family. It’s a great idea to post short videos about preventive care.

2. Use Social Media Well

The world is on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes are the virtual places where you can reach to create brand awareness with potential patients (customers) as well as attract talent (even Drs. / Nurses / non-medical staff are all on social media). Appearing on social news feeds often will go a long way in keeping your brand in the mind of the users. Interesting posts keep people interested. You are in the most advantageous position to generate useful and credible health tips. And people read, remember, like & share useful tips and their source.

3. Don’t Underestimate the Power of SEO

You know your potential consumer is going to hit Google, right? When your potential patient (or his / her kin) searches for best healthcare procedure you want your hospital’s website to feature on the first page. This is the job that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does for you.

Truly speaking, a great SEO is the best ROI for your marketing investment. It is prudent to work with a hospital marketing agency which offers web development, content development and SEO all under single roof. This brings in accountability and action focus and saves you from the mundane co-ordination job between multiple vendors.

4. Stress on Internal Marketing too

That’s right. Every employee of your hospital is your spokesperson. Get your HR Head to make the employee experience at your hospital great and get them talking good things about the hospital. Housekeeping, Maintenance, Catering, Nursing, Insurance, Billing are all too important from the patient’s point of view. They are all assets to market your hospital to the world and create that differentiation for you vis a vis your competitors.

5. Give Patients a Chance to Say Wow

Branding is not what you tell your customers, it’s what they tell each other about you. Enhance patient care, and they are sure to remember it for a long time. Give them care and attention and they will speak for you. Start a rating Get your Operations Head to work towards giving the patient an exceptional experience. Nothing works better than Word of Mouth.

6. Shoot Emails

Emails are effective. Get your IT team to maintain a subscriber email list and share helpful informative emails based on the patient’s illness. It tells your patients that you care for them even after they leave your hospital. Maintaining communication with useful, helpful and high value information is key to building a good hospital brand.

7. Showcase

Get your good work out there as testimonials, videos, patient stories etc. Post on your website, post and re-post on social media, show it on the LED screens in the hospital waiting areas. Talk about break through treatments in interviews, conferences and public forums.

8. Automate your operations

The patient and the family is already stressed when they are in a hospital. Use the lens of patients and care givers to design your internal Hospital Information Systems. We are in the business of of giving superior and hassles free healthcare experience to our patients. So your priority has to be to automate as many areas of hospital as you can and link them all to create a dashboard for the patient under single patient id. You may decide to expose a few of these areas to the patient and others may be kept out of bound. But this simple philosophy will ensure that all your teams will look only in one direction – Patient Care.

With no guard man or sales person to guide customers through the e-store, unveiling a full-fledged ecommerce store is definitely equivalent to opening a couple of retail stores with many operational and executional challenges.

So, what’s the most challenging part in this entire e-store setup? Some say its setting up the back end, while some claim it’s the design and there are many who deliberately argue that online marketing is the fundamental challenge and experts gladly nod their head in agreement with everything mentioned here. The reality is, every single component from User Interface [UI] to User Experience [UX], from Google AdWords to Social media marketing & Search Engine Optimisation contributes to the success of the store. Next comes the many questions that only data can answer. What is the entry source for my customer walk-in; what is the exit source for customer walk out; why haven’t they bought my products, aren’t they interesting and appealing, were the products expensive. Data actually answers all these questions and how best the marketing exercise has been effective.

Let us look at some interesting tips for building an e-store and effectively marketing them as well.

a. Responsive web design: No matter what your store sells, always have the customer’s experience in mind. Today, most of the online purchase happens only through hand phone and in our experience data proves 95% of people browse for shopping through their smart phones. Hence, ensure your e-store is responsive for multiple devices. Navigation is another major influencer for purchasing decision, so, ensure the pages are navigated with a single click approach and customer is able to browse across category in a seamless manner. Other aspects that can create a wow factor in customers mind therefore he become regular to the e-store are appropriate call to action button, easy to understand cart page and a single payment gateway that satisfies all Credit & Debit card requirements.

Our designer’s tip on e-store build:

“Follow brand colors and most importantly online shoppers don’t get to see, touch, feel or smell your product, so the best thing is a crisp, clear product image which shouldn’t entirely cut corners on photography. Offer simple information related to the buying process, don’t build walls”

b. Development:

E-store without a defined back end [content management system] is a loud no-no. First challenge is in choosing the right platform which does not expect you to spent lot of post going live maintenance time. Ensure proper planning at the product category level, categorize your product assortment, connect all the products with the right category and offer a structure which helps customer to find the product easily they are looking for.
Ensure your e-store is functionally strong. This means, at every step the customer moves around, make his browsing journey gratifying, examples are, an exciting offer for making a purchase right away if he is around the cart page, a discount on purchase value if he registers with his email id and not doing a guest log-in, refer a friend and get a 10% off on any purchase…and the list can go on as long as you make business sense in gratifying customer. Most importantly, ensure the site is hosted on a server farm, which ensures site down time is nil, unless for some maintenance.

Our developer’s tip on e-store build:

“Online shoppers need quick access to products & its details and most of them access their likes through phones, hence, ensure that pages all well optimized for multi-devices. “Keep in touch”, this phrase is more important and vital when you have first time user or a multi time user. Keep mailing them about product purchase, dispatch details, track your order and offer details as emails. This will help top of mind recall for brand name in customers mind.”

c. Marketing:

Am sure your tech and design team has spent hours of focused build time to make your e-store a grand success with great UI / UX. But wait, have you thought about e-marketing for your e-store. If you haven’t, then start right now. Customers can be reached through non-paid & paid models. To reach them organically and drive footfalls, optimize your e-store with Search Engine elements in each and every page.

We all agree content is king, so, write relevant content on each product pages with appropriate key words for Google to index your web pages and bring in people organically. Next is paid campaigns. You can try Google adwords, Facebook and Instagram ads.

Our e-marketer tip on e-store build:

“Spend money wisely is the key mantra. When you run a paid campaign in Google or Facebook, ensure that you optimize your campaign for key words appropriately therefore, you don’t spend money for clicks which does not result in sale conversions. Understand that, this is an on-going task, hence be patient and witness optimization delivering the best results over a period of time. Keep refreshing promo creative to avoid fatigue and also to show case the product category varieties. And also remember to carry out off-page submissions to maximize organic traffic.”

Trust the above information has helped you in understanding the basics of the e-store build. There’s more. Call us or write to us and we will come back to you.

When you own a restaurant, you know. You’ve spent your hard earned earnings and umpteen hours of hard work to put it up together. However, when it comes to marketing, most restaurateurs are confused what to do? Partnering with a restaurant marketing agency so you can take some of the work off your plate makes a lot of sense – it saves time and produces a better return. But, then how to be sure the agency you choose is a good fit for you and your business.

Here’s simple set of questions you need to ask before you sign the advance cheque. Use them to interview the potential hires shortlisted by your team and make an informed decision about the restaurant marketing Agency you want to hire.

1. DO THEY LOVE FOOD?

Give them your signature dish complementary. Ask them a question – What do they find unique about your dish vis a vis others. Ask them what’s their favourite dish and why? If the answer to these questions gives you an indication (Come On! you can smell people who know food) that the guys (and gals) love their food, hire them. Else say a polite no and move on. Learning is simple yet profound. Those who love their food will market your food well.

2. ARE THEY AWAKE WHEN YOU SLEEP?

Ask them what their working hours are. Mostly they will fall in 10 am to 6 pm regime. As the next question – Up to what time would they be available to communicate with you? How – Phone, What App, e-mail? You don’t use email all the time (Isn’t it?). Ask them if they will take your calls at 7.30 P.M just before your restaurant is readying itself for the hectic evening. Ask them if they would be available to work on Sunday afternoons.

You want to partner with the agency that fits your communication style. If you want your agency to be available whenever you want to pick up the phone and call them, you need to look for an agency that takes that approach too.

3. WHAT DO YOU NEED FROM ME?

Restaurant marketing agencies specialize in different areas, even though there’s a lot of overlap between firms. However, it’s important to understand what the marketing agency you ultimately hire will do and what they will expect you to do.

You are a businessman and not a trained marketer. It’s very likely that you may not have detailed and documented consumer insights, don’t know where your customers come from and don’t have an articulation of your brand, it might be very difficult for any agency to help you. If this is the case, you’d be served best by working with a street smart and cost conscious agency that can help you lay this foundational groundwork by collecting consumer insights through setting up small experiments like talking to drivers in the parking lot to find information about your guests.

If you do have this information, then you need to make sure the agency you hire specializes in what you need. For example, if you have a great food photographer doing mouth watering photography of your signature dishes, then the agency needs to find a great food blogger who matches up with quality content. This combination of great pictures and reviews can weave the magic and get you great press coverage, almost free.

4. WHAT’S INCLUDED IN YOUR SERVICES?

With this question, you’re essentially asking who does what. It’s very important to know what role you’ll play in the partnership as well as what you can expect your restaurant marketing agency to do.

It might be helpful to create a list of items you need a marketing agency to take over for you before you initiate a dialogue. Try to get specifics here, because it’s easy to think you’re both on the same page when speaking in generalities.

For example, if the restaurant marketing firm says they’ll create a new website for you, make sure you know what that means. Will they come to your restaurant and take photos to put on your site or do you need to hire a photographer and submit photos to the agency? Will they create custom videos for your site or do you need to pay a third party to create them for you? Will your new website be mobile responsive and will it have intuitive features like seeking reviews as soon as the guests step out of the restaurant and are relishing the after taste of the rollicking food they had in your restaurant.

5. WHAT WILL YOU DELIVER AND WHEN?

Ask this question blunt? Ask how many reviews will you deliver? Will you work with the team to solicit genuine customer reviews? How many bookings will happen through the website? What will be the restaurant ranking in the google / yahoo / bing search? How many blogs will be posted in a month? Will special events / festive offers / food festivals be marketed as part of monthly retainer? Ask them how many FB likes and shares will be delivered in a month?

6. WHAT EXPERIENCE DO YOU HAVE WORKING WITH RESTAURANTS?

A lot of questions will be answered by an agency who has worked with Restaurants in the past. Also companies who have served food delivery clients, food stuff companies will understand the category well. In the online world your restaurant is not just competing against your neighbour but also fighting for getting guests from Swiggy, Zomato and Food Pandas of the world. Experience counts.

You should inquire about their experience with local SEO and online reputation management as these are two essential components of restaurant marketing. Of course, you also want to get ahead of bad press if it were to occur. So, if online reputation management is something that you’re looking to have an agency take care of, you’ll want to make sure they have experience in public relations (PR).

So if the answer to these 6 questions (or the majority) is yes. You are well on your way to get the best ROI for your marketing budget.

GO AHEAD. SIGN UP!

Now without much delay, set up meetings with potential restaurant marketing agencies. You are well stocked with the ammunition to ask these 6 questions and hire the best Restaurant Marketing Agency for your business.

Let’s start with, the need of SEO. Why does your business need SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the foundation of any digital business. SEO brings visitors to your website organically.

Organic leads convert 3 times more than any other type of leads – paid, social, email and referral.

Also revenue per organic conversion is 120% more than any other conversion type.

Get ready to develop your own step by step SEO.

SEO Audit & Keyword Research

Research your audience, key competitors, and key word profile. Perform comprehensive audit of your beta tags, URL structure, site speed, internal and external links, duplicate content, and keyword density.

• • Learn thoroughly about the HTML tags used for describing your web pages on w3schools.
  • For creating SEO friendly URL structure, use keywords in URLs.Separate folders & page with slash. Separate keywords with hyphens. The Image below is the perfect example of SEO friendly URL of Hubspot.
  • Site speed is the time in which the content of your website gets loaded. There are many different aspects to have a faster site speed.
  • Your internal links are the one which redirect visitor to one of your own website page.
  • Your external links are the one which redirect to any external webpage. Refer this image by Moz.

When your website content appears on more than URL it is termed as duplicate content.

Your duplicate content can divert traffic to different pages, which can make you lose traffic. A perfect example of duplicate content can be this.

There are number of tools out there. Some free, some paid — that help you to look at all the aspects of SEO as per the Google’s algorithm.

• • Keyword Density plays an extremely important role to push your specific page higher on Google. Keyword Density is the number of times a particular keyword is appearing on your page.

• • For starters there are free tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Check My Links. They are good.
  • Pro SEOs can use tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush which agencies like Bleap use.
  • Make your own Audience Research Template which helps you understand your audience, your industry, your competition (direct and lateral) well enough to draw a context.
  • Buyer Persona – Develop buyer persona and buyer journey for your business to get a clear idea of keywords you use for SEO.
  • Certain customers search by broad category while others by long tail search words including brand, product, size, colour etc. You can refer this template by creative companion and create one for defining your buyer’s persona.
  • Device diversity (mobile vs. desktop) also adds a new layer of complexity.
  • Ethnographic and Cultural insights also determine buyers’ persona. Study this data and trends to design a customized experience for every persona. The better you know your customers and their search behaviour, the better you are able to drive conversion and revenue through SEO.
  • Keyword Research – Keywords research is the core activity that helps in displaying your website at the top position in the search engine.Get into the skin of your customer and draw a comprehensive list of target keywords that helps customers find your category and brand easily and organically. This is an ongoing and an iterative process. Your buyer’s persona is the basis for your keyword research.
  • Competitive Analysis – Competition as seen by you could be different as seen by your customers. Customers more often than not are looking for solutions to their problems. In this process, they search across categories and that’s the real competition.
  • Backlinks – It is important to build relevance and recency for our brand through building relationships with relevant and more searched sites. This is an ongoing process and takes time and patience. Periodically it will improve your brand awareness and I recommend it.

Upon understanding your category, buyers’ persona and website user experience journey, create an SEO campaign strategy with specific goals to achieve and start working. Write down these goals. Have a strategy for both On-site as well as Off-site optimization.

Not only improve your website’s search rankings but also the overall site experience for your customers.

On-page optimization(SEO):

• • Technical Optimization – Optimize URL structure, site map, title tags, Meta tags & description, image tags, XML sitemap, keyword density, page download speed, internal and external site links, site navigation, domain authority and page authority.Your site map is a model of your website design which will provide navigation to your visitor. It will decide the experience of your users on your page.
    The Title tags are the title of your webpage displayed on the search page of Google. Only 50-60 words of your title will be displayed on the search engine page. To have a good title tag have a proper title length, have a unique title for every page, put keywords first, write your customers need.Meta Tags provide the description of your page under title tags.

    Your Meta Tags will decide the click through rate (CTR) as they give the brief description of the page and its content to the visitor.

    My advice to you for Meta tags is; have an aligning description to your title and blog content.

  • Content Optimization – Content is King. Content when optimized is the Emperor. Revise, rewrite and optimize content on your site to improve both user experience and SEO. Never miss on having all the required keywords in your content.

Off-page(SEO) Optimization:

What’s the quickest and the easiest way to get better search engine rankings? That’s right, Off-page SEO. It’s a combination of various activities like directory submission, social bookmarking, article submission, blog posting and back links building. Google may deny it, but their ranking algorithm still relies heavily on the quantity and quality of referring domains. The more you have – the higher you climb.

The truth is, getting high rankings turn out to be a real headache, especially after yet another Google update.

Follow these 4 steps for making your off-page strategy effortless.

Step 1: Do a thorough keyword research. Use proprietary tools to arrive at a comprehensive list of targeted keywords.
You can use keyword research tools like – Google adwords: Keyword planner, Google correlate,
Keyword In, SEMrush, Moz

Step 2: In order to rank higher on Google, navigation and user experience play the most crucial role. Ensure that the URL structure of your website is balanced and clear.

Step 3: What are the top 10 keywords for your business? Which competitor of yours is running behind those keywords? Do an in-depth study and plan your SERP journey accordingly. Focus your efforts on identifying the right niche and bring your site up the Google search in an affordable manner.

Step 4: Prepare a detailed backlinks building plan. The more quality backlinks your site has, the higher rankings in Google it receives.

Conversion Optimization

Optimize your Search Engine campaigns for both users and search engines. Conversion optimization is a strategy to increase how many visitors to your site actually convert into customers. Optimizing your site for conversion can dramatically improve everything from your bounce rate to your ROI. Whether this is through A/B testing on key landing pages, or improving your CTAs, the options are limitless.

Analytics & Dash boarding

The unavoidable part of your SEO journey. Never miss on analysing the results.

Track all the search data and resultant analytics on all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, Ask, AOL and Baidu and analyse the results.