Social Media
Social Media Nuts & Bolts PDF Print E-mail
Social Media certainly is the new darling of the marketing world.  And, while it’s a mistake to dismiss it as just another flash-in-the-pan gimmick, it's also a mistake to think it's a magic bullet. It's time-consuming, albeit enjoyable, work to manage the various social media touchpoints like Facebook or LinkedIn, harder still if you're hosting your own groups or forums on various sites.  So, while the hard costs are minimal, the soft costs in terms of the human resources and time commitment necessary to keep up with the conversation.So there's got to be a quantifiable ROI attached to these social marketing efforts.For social media to be measurable, it must be grounded in the traditional concepts of marketing and have clearly-defined strategic objectives:  Identifying, Converting, and Retaining Customers.     Used effectively, social media can take your brand to an entirely new level as your marketing message goes viral.  Whether you establish a community of your own, create a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group, participating in these social milieus establishes you as a credible source of information.  This interaction lays a strong foundation for converting prospects into customers getting repeat business primarily about offering value building relationship. How can social media marketing help you achieve this?  By increasing your web-presence, you increase your prospect pool exponentially and your chances of connecting with those prospects at the exact time they are looking for a solution their problem or need. The objective in any social media marketing effort is three-fold: 

To offer visitors to your site something more than product or brand information.  

Rather than depending on marketing language, the content on your site should focus on the needs and interests of your prospects.

For example, let’s say your company markets a line of foot care products:  shoe inserts, corn and bunion relief products, and other home care remedies.   Let’s say I'm having foot pain when I run and I'm looking for information on what might be causing it and how I might alleviate it.   You know that the solution is a gel-based shoe insert.  But that’s not what I, the consumer, am going to type into my Google search.  I’m going to search using the keywords "foot pain while running" in hopes of finding the possible cause of my foot pain and potential solutions.   If the enough of the content on your site contains those keywords, and information about potential causes, chances are your website will be returned in the search results.  If not, your company will be nowhere to be found at the very moment that a potential customer is looking for the solution you provide.  

To rank as high as possible on relevant Google keyword searches.

As noted above, needs- or interest-based content allows you to serve as a valuable resource to potential customers.  It also helps you get noticed by Google, and the other search engines.  The more relevant content you have on your site, the better your website will do in search results, and the higher your Google page rank will be.   The other key ingredient to getting found is the strength of your online reputation.  Let’s say you add a physician or sport medicine person (or both) blog to your website who acts as an independent expert and discusses common foot problems and remedies for them.    In addition, the hope is that this content will begin to be referenced by and linked to by other people in the industry - which is the other primary factor Google looks for when determining your page rank and relevance to a particular online search.  If there are many people who are linking to content on your site, Google starts to consider you as a player, and will return your site higher in the search results than sites that have fewer links.  
 
To establish relationships with your prospects and convert them to long-term customers.   You’ve already started this process by tailoring your web content to address your audience’s pain points.  Now, establish some two-way communication.  You want to both communicate directly with your audience and get feedback from them about your products or services.  In addition, you’ll find that some of your customers may do your advertising for you via word of mouth, or viral marketing.  Create space on your site where people can talk about your product directly.   Be aware there is a potential down-side to this new communication.  Some people might not be complimentary.  But, if responded to properly, even negative comments are an opportunity to connect with your customers - and address issues they might have.  (That’s just good-old customer service, in a new package!)  You’ll get direct, real-time communication with your customers that traditional marketing venues cannot provide.
 

There are so many ways to use social media to connect with prospects, raise brand awareness and, ultimately, sales!  But like its more traditional marketing counterparts, social media marketing takes commitment to a long-term strategy to do well. 

 
Start Using Social Media to Engage with Your Customers PDF Print E-mail

Is your company suffering from social media anxiety?

You might feel as if the clock is ticking and you're running behind.  But, rest assured, most small businesses, and some larger ones, are still trying to figure out what social media marketing is all about, what's so special about it, and how to implement it.

Relax.  While social media is here to stay as a marketing discipline, it's not all that complicated.  In short, social media is about leveraging your website and the online community to engage with, listen to, and respond to the needs of your customers and prospects.

Word-of-mouth can be a small business' best friend, or worst enemy.  You customers and prospects are talking about you, your products and services.  What they are saying could be driving referrals or driving business away.  If you're not involved in the conversation, you can't capitalize on the benefits of a good reputation, or remedy the effects of a bad one. 

As with all anxiety, taking a few small steps is sometimes all you need to overcome inertia. 

Try implementing some of these free tools to move you forward and eliminate the paralysis you feel:

 

  • Find out what visitors expect from your site - and if they find it.

4Q is a free customer satisfaction survey you can set up and install in minutes with the addition of a few simple lines of code.  Define your questions, decide how often you want the survey to be served up to visitors, and use the reporting features to review and respond to the feedback you get. 

 

  • Start a conversation.

Adding a comment section to your content pages is an easy, low-pressure way to invite your customers to communicate with you.  And for you to respond back with comments of your own.  Most CMS, content management systems, allow easy implementation of comment pages.  But, if your site is still using static html pages, it's still possible to add a comments section.  It might just take a little more work, or the help of a programmer.  Quackit.com offers free code. It's not the prettiest, but it should get you started.

 

  • Do some market research.

Again, CMS platforms make adding polls quite easy with any number of free extensions.  If you're still using html pages, Micropoll offers free, simple, and customizable polls you can post to your site by adding a few lines of code.  Or embed them directly into your html.

 

The information you collect using these free tools might cause a different kind of anxiety, depending the feedback you get, but implementing them should be a breeze - and help you get the conversation started.
 


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