Simply put, switching costs are the costs that will pass to the consumer as a result of changing products, suppliers or brands. The truth is that even though the vast majority of switching costs are expressed in a monetary way, there are other types of costs such as time-based, effort, and psychological.
Let’s say that you want to switch your supplier. The switch cost will pass to the customer in many different ways. You will take time to find a new supplier and this time may lead to high cancellation fees since you may not be able to find a good replacement for your products during this transition period.
Brands have been focused on this
The truth is that big companies such as Rolls Royce, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, among many others have already realized that just having a good product or service is not enough to continually attract new customers. They need to have a good business model that allows them not only to attract but to retain customers as well.
What these companies discovered is that when they implement strategies that build in ties to their services, they are lowering their customer acquisition costs and, at the same time, they are making more money from returning customers. On the customers’ side, they stay locked into the ecosystem because it is more expensive and time-consuming for them to switch.
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Think about this on personal level.
Whether you have an Android or an Iphone you have already entrenched yourself to the applications and services most of the time without even realizing it. If you are into entertainment for example. You have a music collection on Itunes, maybe you have bought a few episodes of a tv shows, movies or even audiobooks. If you have ever considered switching to an android phone, the extensive psychological as well as financial impact this has regarding efforts to transition all of your media over to the google platform is untenable.
The same rings (pun intended true) for those on Android phones with extensive content spread across the Google ecosystem. This is a very personal example of the power of integrating more and more products or services into your customers routines and lives. The prohibitive cost of change both from a time, financial and complexity perspective is most often just not worth it.
Different Types Of Switching Costs
Depending on the existence of similar products of the competition as well as on the ease of transfer, switching costs can be classified as:
#1: Low Switching Costs:
When a company is offering services or products that can easily be replicated by its competitors at the same price level, it has low switching costs. One of the best examples that we can give you are apparel companies. If you think about it, there are many different stores where you can buy clothes and you can easily compare their prices. In addition, the Internet has made their switching costs to be even lower.
#2: High Switching Costs:
When a company is able to create a unique product or service that have almost no competition or that require a significant effort to replicate, it has a high switching cost. Just think about Intuit bookkeeping software, for example. As soon as you are a customer, you will need to take time to learn their applications as well as you have training costs. So, it will be hard to switch away from the company.
The Main Benefits of Raising Switching Costs
The truth is that you have a lot of benefits when you increase your switching costs. The main ones include:
- You will become the go-to company. Since you face none or low competition, you can be sure that your company will be the first one that the customer remembers to solve his problem.
- You will decrease the cost of acquisition of new customers. When you are able to create a unique product or service, people will come to you. In addition, you will have a lot more returning customers which end up reducing your acquisition costs for new ones and as an added benefit overall customer retention expands manifold. That’s #metaleadership. If you can implement this strategy into your current business or organizational practices you will definitely reap the benefits thereof.
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If you take a look around the Internet, you will see that most websites use videos. And there is a very good reason for it — they are perfect in what concerns user engagement. Images, sound and text (if done right) all in one nice package. Easy engaging and similar to the allure that television use to wield without rival. But alas, video has out smarted a single box!
In case you are still having questions or concerns about whether you should use videos or not, the short answer is that you are late. Not that all is lost though.
While you may think that using video in your landing pages or that using a video marketing strategy is just a trend that will be over soon, you need to think again. The truth is that landing pages that include a video can see their conversions increase up to 80% when compared with traditional landing pages that only use text. And in what concerns video marketing, it may be a surprise that these also increase conversion rates. The reality is that the answer is pretty simple: when you use a video, you are establishing a higher level of trust with your audience. You are showing up in your video, you are humanizing your brand.
Users Love Videos
Ever since Google bought YouTube, we keep seeing more and more people spending a lot of time watching videos. Whether your delivery systems of choice is Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat or others. The fact is that you more than likely get your “Moving Picture” content from various providers on various screens depending on what your current environment is. Well, your potential customers are doing the exact same thing.
Just to give you an idea, back in 2016, more than 500 million hours of videos were watched on YouTube every single day. In addition, and according to a prediction for 2020, online videos should be responsible for more than 80% of all the consumer traffic.
As you can see, video is the leading tool that brands have to interact with users. So, as a good marketer, business owner, content provider or puyveyor of goods and services its long overdue that you get your “House” in order and use all of the aforementioned attention predators to your advantage.
How Video Enhances Customer Engagement
The criticality of enhanced and evolving user engagement is and will continue to be the life blood of all organizations. After all, this is the best way that you have to gain their trust, provide a quick and digestible delivery means for your particular message, so then they can pass from simple leads to customers. In addition, hands down videos are one of the most effective ways to do that.
However, not all videos are the same and they don’t all return the same results.
In case you are looking to create a video for user engagement, you want to make sure that:
- Your videos last, at least 2 minutes. In case you considering publishing your video on Facebook, you should keep in mind that 45% of people who watch the first 10 seconds of the video will watch it for at least 30 seconds.
- If you are considering using video and you are wondering where you should publish it to get the most engagement, then you should definitely choose Facebook. According to Animoto Blog, this is the social media platform that has a larger amount of users watching videos.
#metaleadership
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The Impact Of A Video On Purchasing Behavior
The truth is that whenever a user has the possibility, he prefers to watch a video than to read the same information. Besides, since on the video you will show up and users will see your face, there will be an immediate trust because users are seeing the creator of the product or service.
The reality is that the impact of a video on purchasing behavior is more than you can imagine:
- According to ThinkWithGoogle, around 60% of YouTube subscribers will follow the advice of their favorite creators instead of movie or TV show personality.
- According to Animoto (again), 4 out of 5 millennials search for video information to make a purchase decision. In addition, near 70% of them will watch a company video when they are shopping online.
The evidence is abundantly clear, Video (when done properly) cannot be beaten when it comes to user adoption, preference and distribution of your kind of “noise”. Take the time to adjust your progressive web application and embed videos across a variety of distribution channels and watch your engagement grow!
SEO comprises of different parts; therefore, businesses can find it easy to oversee some of the minor steps to performing good on-site SEO. However, every little thing you need to do to increase your website’s ranking can make a tremendous difference, most notably, things that other sites may be overlooking –no matter how small. To make your site more competitive on search engines, you need to invest some time on image search optimization. This is an essential step to make your business stand out among others.
What is Image Optimization?
Image optimization is about reducing the file size of your images without losing quality so that your page load times remain low. It’s also about ranking the images on your website so that they can stand out on search engine result pages –preferably, page one.
The Relevance of Image Optimization
Image optimization is one of the crucial steps to take under your SEO umbrella. A complete SEO campaign comprises of a calculated plan for optimizing images that will be of value to your audience. Google recognizes the importance of imagery on websites and has suggested some useful tips on image optimization on their guidelines for image publishing.
If you own an online store, image optimization is what you need to bring your products ahead of your competitors so that prospects who are searching for that product can find them via search engines. Thus, image optimization is required for building a successful e-commerce website.
Why Images are Important for SEO
It is understood that SEO is mainly about keywords and texts, but many people fail to realize that images also have a very vital role to play. Images increase the chances of winning your audience’s attention and keeping it; it improves engagement, and just as we are dealing, it enhances the ranking of your website.
Research attests that people are 80% more likely to read content with an image and 64% more likely to remember it afterward. Human beings are attracted to images –and motion pictures as well. You can’t imagine finding yourself on a webpage with plain texts on a white background looking like a word document; it would look repulsive and very dull, as it may be. So, images are needed to keep a webpage alive.
How this affects the website’s Google ranking is understandable. Google crawlers and algorithm, as much as they are very fast paced, they take into account how your website visitors behave when they visit your site. Do they get out of the site immediately they get in or do they spend some time and get engaged in the contents of the website? Whichever the case may be, it affects the ranking of your website.
Tips for Image Search Optimization
So far, optimizing images for search engines is not rocket science; so it can be quickly done. Here are a few tips to get you ahead on your game.
1. Use relevant, high-quality images.
This is very important for SEO user experience. A badly cropped or blurry image will make your page look unprofessional. Images are meant to provide a better illustration for the contents on the webpage; otherwise, it is irrelevant. The best is to use an image that’s related to the content on the page and looks clear.
2. Customize the filename.
This step is straightforward, but it’s surprising that very few people know about it. Take your time to customize the image’s filename before it to your website. Rename the file using keywords that are related to the content for which the image is intended.
3. Use alt tags.
This is one part of webpages that lots of visitors won’t see, but of course, search engine crawlers go through it. Alt text can be provided for every image added to your website. This alt tags (or texts) will show up faster in cases where the browser is having troubles loading the images, and they will be replaced by the image immediately the connectivity permits. This text makes it easier for search engine algorithms to take note of the content of the page.
4. Find the right quality-to-size ratio.
This is one complicated part, you don’t want your image to be big so that it won’t slow down your website, but you want it to look great. Site speed is one of the search engine ranking factors. Website visitors would be glad to spend so much time waiting for your images to load and as such may not show much interest in the website; further translating to poor website ranking.
5. Choose the right file type.
There are three essential kinds of image files fit for websites. Understanding the different file types can help you choose the best one for your needs.
Those are just some introductory tips for you to get started, please do your own due diligence and ensure that adequate steps are taken by those tasked with your digital marketing campaign.
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#metaleadership
When you think about the most important things that you need to do to grow your business, you never think about attention. However, attention is the most valuable resource anyone can give you. And this is becoming more important every day.
The reality is that you are competing with the entire world, with 24–7 global news, with news feeds with clickbait, with the latest Internet outrage. So, as you can imagine, the number #1 marketing challenge marketers need to deal with today is related to getting traffic and leads.
The truth is that in the old days, getting more traffic and, subsequently more leads, was only a matter of publishing more content. However, today, this hardly makes any sense. If you look at the rock bottom of this issue, you are looking for attention. And this is more and more rare and scarce.
There have always existed people who we believe lived ahead of their time. And this is exactly the case of Herbert A. Simmon who, back in 1969 (50 years ago), wrote: “Now when we speak of an information-rich world, we may expect, analogically, that the wealth of information means a dearth of something else — a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
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So, How Can You Grab Attention?
#1: Personalization:
One of the things that you can do to get the attention of people is to personalize your messages. However, and in what concerns content, this is what marketers have been doing for the last 5 to 10 years. If you take a closer look at the blogs and businesses out there you will see that you have specific ones for each industry. In our opinion, this is a trend that will continue.
#2: Immediacy:
When you are learning how to sell a product or service, one of the things that you will immediately learn is that you need to create a sense of urgency. And this is exactly what works when you are trying to get the attention of your readers or potential buyers. Just take the New York Times or The Washington Post examples. Whenever there is a breaking news, you will get a notification. So, like most of us, you click on the notification and you end up in the front of a paywall.
#3: Interpretation:
Another great way to gather the attention of the reader is by using guidance and support in the specific area they are looking for. These type of content can be divided between training and certification courses, curation, community, and research.
#4: Authenticity:
You can be sure that you will get a lot of attention with authenticity. One of the best examples that we can provide you is real advice from real people. And this is when you can take advantage of your social media presence.
Let’s say that you know that most people have a common issue. So, one of the things that you can do to grab their attention is to create a video, for example, where you explain everything about the issue and how to solve it. You will then publish it under Snapchat Stories, Instagram Videos, Facebook Live, among others.
#metaleadership