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Lauren Dowdle

Nashville, TN

A social-media-savvy writer and editor who loves to tell others' stories through a creative voice, I constantly pursue ways to improve my skill sets. Whether I'm editing videos, posting on Twitter, creating a catchy headline, packaging a magazine story or crafting a feature piece on a local business, I'm always looking for new ways to present information. My specialties include the landscape and construction industries, the South, social media, blogs, web articles, religion and interviewing.

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Online Marketing SEO Content Marketing Copywriting Journalism Magazines

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Content Writing

As an inbound certified copywriter, I've worked with marketing companies, small businesses and magazines to create compelling content that attracts views and helps close sales. I've worked as the editor of national magazines, a content writer and even a designer.

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Answers

Lauren Dowdle answered

How do you get access to the right people to validate an idea?

One of the best ways to get some much-needed feedback is with a beautifully designed survey (because something that looks good is going to be better than random Facebook messages). It also shows you're committed to the idea and professional. You could send the survey link to business pros on LinkedIn (normally has high engagement), through email or even your personal social media pages.

An easy-to-use survey option is Fieldboom: http://www.fieldboom.com. Their site also gives tips on getting feedback and how to build a small business (once you really get started).

Hope that helps!

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Market Research

Ideas

New Product Validation

Lauren Dowdle answered

What vendors can help me develop a rich target persona (demographic + behavioral + psychographic characteristics) and then find those people online?

You can use Fieldboom.com to survey your audience, which will, in turn, help you create your personas.

By analyzing various aspects of your customer base – as well as how these aspects relate to one another – you can start to get a more complete idea of who your customers are, and what they’re looking to get from engaging with your company.

You can find more info on how to segment your customer base in this blog: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/customer-segmentation/.

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Behavioral Targeting

Online Advertising

Targeted Advertising

Lauren Dowdle answered

How do I approach inbound marketing for my new business?

If you haven't already, you need to determine your marketing objective. Without clear objectives driving your marketing efforts, how can you tell if you’re moving in the right direction and implementing the right strategies along the way?

To define that, you need to know the specific marketing objectives you’re working towards before you can start executing against any sort of plan. One tried-and-true framework is the S.M.A.R.T. approach, which means all of your objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound. You can read more about that method in this blog I wrote: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/marketing-objectives/.

You can also use the inbound marketing funnel to meet your objective. The key to marketing is to realize that the funnel is a linear, sequential process. You can’t skip ToFu and MoFu and turn strangers into customers. Everyone has to proceed through your funnel in order. Top, middle, then bottom. No exceptions.

Basically, start with your marketing objective and then measure it.

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Sales

Marketing Strategy

Online Marketing

Lauren Dowdle answered

What simple tactics can you use to increase the perceived value of a product or service?

Start by figuring out what value your product gives to your customers and then see how you can improve each of these areas.

According to Builtvisible, there are nine factors to consider when determining the value your product or service provides your customers:

* Product function: What will your product or service do for your customer? What effect will it have on their life?
* Points of differentiation: What is your product’s unique selling point? What sets it apart from similar products on the market?
* Quality: Is your product durable? Is it made to last? Will the services you provide continue to benefit your customers over time?
* Service: What “extras” do you provide your customers once they’ve paid for your product or service?
* Marketing: Have you created a “buzz” around your product or service? Are the benefits of your product well-known?
* Branding: Is your brand a true representation of the level of quality you provide, and of the values your company stands for?
* Customers’ existing relationship with your company: What have your customers’ experiences been when interacting with your company in the past
* Personal bias from experience: Unrelated to your company specifically, what does your target customer think about the product you offer?
* Price: How much do you sell your product or service for? How does the price of your product compare to that competing companies’?

You can find more tips in this blog: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/customer-value/.

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Brand development

Product Strategy

Branding

Lauren Dowdle answered

How can I differentiate my product against competitors if potential customers view it as a commodity, without having to lower pricing?

You need to build value with your product and services for your customer.

According to Builtvisible, there are nine factors to consider when determining the value your product or service provides your customers:

*Product function: What will your product or service do for your customer? What effect will it have on their life?
*Points of differentiation: What is your product’s unique selling point? What sets it apart from similar products on the market?
*Quality: Is your product durable? Is it made to last? Will the services you provide continue to benefit your customers over time?
*Service: What “extras” do you provide your customers once they’ve paid for your product or service?
*Marketing: Have you created a “buzz” around your product or service? Are the benefits of your product well-known?
*Branding: Is your brand a true representation of the level of quality you provide, and of the values your company stands for?
*Customers’ existing relationship with your company: What have your customers’ experiences been when interacting with your company in the past
*Personal bias from experience: Unrelated to your company specifically, what does your target customer think about the product you offer?
*Price: How much do you sell your product or service for? *How does the price of your product compare to that competing companies’?

You can get more tips on building value (without lowering prices) in this blog: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/customer-value/.

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Pricing Strategy

Value Based Selling

Growth Strategies

Lauren Dowdle answered

What would be the best way to approach our customers and get them to realize how using our service could bring the a lot of value?

According to Builtvisible, there are nine factors to consider when determining the value your product or service provides your customers:

*Product function: What will your product or service do for your customer? What effect will it have on their life?
*Points of differentiation: What is your product’s unique selling point? What sets it apart from similar products on the market?
*Quality: Is your product durable? Is it made to last? Will the services you provide continue to benefit your customers over time?
*Service: What “extras” do you provide your customers once they’ve paid for your product or service?
*Marketing: Have you created a “buzz” around your product or service? Are the benefits of your product well-known?
*Branding: Is your brand a true representation of the level of quality you provide, and of the values your company stands for?
*Customers’ existing relationship with your company: What have your customers’ experiences been when interacting with your company in the past
*Personal bias from experience: Unrelated to your company specifically, what does your target customer think about the product you offer?
*Price: How much do you sell your product or service for? How does the price of your product compare to that competing companies’?

Here are more tips on how to bring value to your customers: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/customer-value/.

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Sales

Cold Calling

Lauren Dowdle answered

Is there a good system for employee engagement and retention for a startup?

Here's a blog I put together that covers 17 of the world's top companies and examples of how they engage their employees: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/employee-engagement-activities/.

Examples include how Zappos has built such a high level of engagement. Zappos created several ways to engage its employees, including Zappos Zollars. Employees can earn the company currency by going above and beyond in their work and the Zollars can be used for branded goodies, charitable donations or in raffles for bigger prizes.

Their employees can also participate in their Grant-a-Wish program, which allows them to suggest and grant wishes for their team members. It’s a great way for employees to express gratitude to other people in the company and give them a fun experience – whether that’s dance lessons, riding in a hot air balloon or taking a mini vacation.

The company’s emphasis on engagement starts from the moment someone is hired. After their initial training, they participate in a scavenger hunt that helps them get to know other employees.

For example, they may be tasked with finding someone wearing a Zappos hat and asking them about their job, so they can get to know them. Simple but mighty effective.

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Human Resources

Recruitment/Retention

Lauren Dowdle answered

What is the best software to use for adding a poll into a newsletter?

I'd suggest using www.Fieldboom.com to create beautiful surveys, forms and polls. It walks you through the steps in minutes, and you don't need any other experience to be successful with it. Fieldboom tracks and reports your responses, keeping your info all in one place and easy to find.

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Enterprise Software

Digital Marketing

Surveying

Lauren Dowdle answered

How do I approach potential clients to give me feedback on my product?

You've got several options, and what works best will depend on where your clients prefer to engage with you (ex. email, phone, social media, live chat, etc.).

We’ve all seen them: pop-up messages or slide-in CTAs that appear as we scroll through an article or open a new page. Why not put these tools to good use and ask your customers a question or encourage them to fill out a survey? You can even offer them an incentive to give feedback like a free downloadable whitepaper.

An even more instant option, live chats are a great way to get the conversation started in real time. While live chats are an ideal outlet for customers to ask you questions, you can also use this feature to send a few their way. Maybe the chat box pops up when they visit your site and asks how they found your business or what they are looking for. It’s like a two-for-one sale where you can improve their experience and collect feedback.

Here are more tips on how to ask for and use customer feedback: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/customer-feedback/.

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New Product Validation

Customer validation

Lauren Dowdle answered

What are the methods for the 2 steps marketing funnel?

You need to be able to target the customer exactly where they are in the funnel. Customer lifecycle marketing is a marketing approach that targets individual customers where they currently exist within the customer journey.
A proper customer lifecycle marketing strategy can:

* Increase consumer trust in your brand
* Increase customer retention and loyalty
* Reduce instances of customers abandoning shopping carts
* Reduce customer churn rate

Ultimately, all of this leads to a major increase in profitability. Not only is it inherently profitable to have a solid base of recurring customers spending their money on your products or services, but retaining customers is also much more cost-efficient than acquiring new ones.

You can get more on the how and why of lifecycle marketing in this blog from Fieldboom: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/customer-lifecycle-marketing/.

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Sales Funnel Optimization

Online Lead Generation

Digital Marketing

Lauren Dowdle answered

How can a customer leave me feedback?

The answer really depends on what your client prefers, whether that's replying to a survey, posting on social media or chatting live on your site.

If you have a product you want their feedback on, try the Likert scale. The Likert Scale is best used to measure and evaluate customer sentiment on a specific product, service or experience.

Likert items that center around the same topic should be grouped together in your survey, creating what’s called a “single-topic” Likert scale.

The scale itself, regardless of whether it uses numeric or text labels, should be consistent on each item; this prevents confusion for your customers and simplifies the analysis of their answers for you.

The most valuable Likert item sets include additional questions that capture open-ended feedback to tell you more about why each customer chose the answer they did.

Here's how to use this scale to collect customer feedback: http://www.fieldboom.com/blog/likert-scale/.

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Feedback

Customer Service

Reviews

Member since January 2017