Social Media Marketing has several components, and Facebook is just one facet of that. Good Social Media Marketing is goal oriented and incorporates Facebook Pages, Twitter, Blogging / Content creation, Viral Videos, targeted interaction with customers or potential customers online, and ore. There’s no exact blueprint for a successful Social Media Marketing campaign, and there are examples on both ends of the spectrum of great and terrible attempts. Crafting a successful Social Media plan for your business can be a matter of trial and error before you find the mix that works just right for you.

But with Social Media Marketing comes a more inherent ability to target your potential customers in a more specific way than SEM can accomplish.

I realized this first-hand as I was working on Social Media components for a new product. My Google AdWords were driving some traffic, but the keywords that seemed to be driving the most were the more general ones. And it cost me more to get prominent placement for them.

When I followed up to see what those clicks generated in my site, well, it was hit or miss. Many of the viewers were considered bounces and spent no time on the site. I had a higher success rate for the more targeted keywords, but there were MANY fewer searches for those. Essentially, my most successful ads for Google are the ones where people are looking specifically for the niche product I’m selling, and then they’re a more captive audience. But that does nothing to help me elevate the profile of this niche product that might be of great interest to some key demographics, if only they knew about it.

It was back to the age-old marketing challenge of Brand Recognition. I don’t have thousands of dollars to market this product, but the people who have seen it so far have loved it. I wanted to make it seen by those key potential customers without having to pay for views by people outside my target audience.

So first, I created a Facebook page for the product. I included some content from the main site, as well as some content unique to the Facebook page. And then, I placed a Facebook ad. The process was similar to that of Google Ads. You create the text of your ad, indicate where you want it to go, set your bid caps, your daily budget… but then, you set the demographics of the Facebook users you want to target.

You can target by interest, geographic area, gender, age, relationship status, language, education, connections, and more. While you modify your criteria, Facebook provides you with a count of how many members fit that criteria. You instantly know how many people may see your ad and can adjust your demographic requirements to instantly modify that target audience.

Unlike SEM, Facebook users don’t have to search for keywords related to your products. They’ll see the display ad, and if they’re interested, they can click through to your company page (and maybe they’ll even “Like” you).

What did I see when I started my ad? Within hours, I began to see results. You can view your impressions and your click-throughs (as well as your new “Likes”), and using Google Analytics on my main product home page, I was able to track the people coming through from Facebook. On average, they were spending six times longer on the site than my Google AdWords leads, and more than half of them clicked through to my action page.

Not everyone will see such a dramatic difference, and to be sure, some particular (though less searched) Google AdWord keywords did produce similar stickiness. But so far, we’re seeing better value per click for those Facebook ads, and it’s become a valuable part of the advertising for the product. At the very least, it does warrant consideration as you develop your 2011 marketing plan.

Social Media Marketing and Co-Op
We’ve seen many manufacturers careful about adding new media to their co-op programs, and understandably so. As a company who audits hundreds of thousands of claims a year, we’ve seen our share of vague invoices for some new media (and, to be fair, for traditional media, as well) that make it difficult for manufacturers to justify reimbursing for those expenses. At the same time, as the cost effectiveness of many traditional media dwindles (newspaper, for example), new media can offer a great alternative to driving business – if monitored properly.

We advise our manufacturers to consider adding support for these new media to their co-op programs, but to have solid rules behind what documentation is required as a proof of payment and proof of performance. We even internally offer services to many manufacturers to do that placement on behalf of retailers so we can prevent fraud and ensure expenses and invoicing are accurate.

We can help
If you’re a current SMS Manufacturing client and want to know more about incorporating Social Media Marketing support in your program, contact your Account Executive. If SMS does not currently manage your co-op program, click here to send us a message and one of our team members will be in contact with you to discuss your program and how we can help.

If you’re a retailer and want to know more about how SMS can help you with your Social Media Marketing campaigns, click here to contact us and one of our Retailer Media Support Representatives will contact you soon.

How does it work?

Google displays the new Places pages when it predicts that the user is looking for local information, and those listings include address, phone number, customer reviews, and links to your place page.

Previously, results included just the business name, URL, phone number, and the number of reviews available. Searchers had to click on each business listing to find out how many stars the business received in customer reviews and to see details like address and actual review content.

How do you make sure your business shows up?

To start, if you haven’t already, you need to make sure you claim your Google Places page using the following steps.

1.) Do a search for your business. In many cases, it may already show up with a generic places page that has been created automatically by aggregating web content. If it does, under your business name, you’ll see a “Place Page” link. Click it. (If your business doesn’t have a “Place Page” link, go to Google.com/places and click on “List your business” on the right. You may need to create a Google account if you don’t already have one.)

2.) If Google has created a place page for you, you’ll see information about your business, whether it’s near public transportation, a map of its location, reviews, and more. Toward the top of the page, you’ll see two links: “Edit this place” and “Business owner?” (if you see “Owner-verified listing” instead of “Business Owner, you can skip to step 3). Click on “Business owner?” to Edit, Suspect, or Validate your listing. Click on “Edit this listing” to update information about your business. It’s also a good idea to follow the steps to Validate your listing so you can have more control over the content of your Google Maps listing.

If you don’t have a Google-created Places page yet, you’ll want to click on “Add another business” on the Dashboard page and you will be guided through a series of steps to create a validate a page for your business.

3) Once you’ve located or created your page, you’ll want to optimize it. Google doesn’t reveal the specific details on how it ranks the pages in these search results, but Places pages with good information, numerous reviews, and elements like images or videos are likely to help with those rankings.

Short of reviews? Add a review yourself, encourage your friends and fellow business owners to do the same. Even consider running a promotion encouraging customers to provide feedback online. Not only will the feedback be useful for your location ranking, but it will provide valuable feedback to you about your business, too.

And Google seems to constantly add new ways to enhance your content. Consider adding Google tags, which can highlight coupons, videos, and whatever you consider to be most important about your business. Google Boost Ads are being rolled out for select categories in certain cities, with more to be added in coming weeks and months. Those ads allow you to draw attention to your Google Places listings. Google also offers the ability to post to your place page, so if you’re having a sidewalk sale, a book signing, or even just want to highlight news about your business, you can keep your Google Places page an interesting and useful destination for your potential and current customers.

Your Google Places page can also act as a secondary website, and it offers QR tags if you want to share your Place Page with your customers. And on the right rail of your Places page admin screen, Google even shares helpful hints on getting the most out of your page.

Best of all, the service is free (with the exception of Google Tags and Google Boost ads). Optimize your Places page today and make sure your potential customers can find you.

Both James and Best Buy found themselves in a hard place for completely different reasons and causes, but the impact upon each just goes to show that brands can self-inflict damage in a real hurry by misjudging the audience. Google the term ‘Brian Maupin’ and you’ll get about 1,780,000 results. Seems like a lot. You don’t need to go past the first two to get to the bottom of Best Buy’s problem. After Maupin (a Best Buy employee) created a video mocking a customer looking for the new iPhone, Best Buy decided to shelve Maupin’s career at the electronics giant. (For what its worth, the video is really about how we blindly follow brands and was never intended to be a commentary on Best Buy or its customers). Regardless, a groundswell of sympathy erupted on internet for Maupin and his video which had over 3 million views before being pulled down. So much so that Best Buy backtracked, issued a hasty and somewhat ill-conceived PR release to explain why they let Maupin go, and eventually offered to re-hire him. A classic “David versus Goliath misstep.

James on the other hand, learned that a little hubris can go a long way, and lack thereof can be reason enough for people to burn your jersey and tear down your likeness. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you know the story of LeBron and his one-hour “Decision special” so there is no need to recount that episode. His defenders will point out that Ad exposure was off the charts for the special (true) and that we’re still talking about it so he’s won the battle for buzz (also true – James literally knocked the World Cup and BP off the news headlines). However more importantly, his jersey sales are now at an all-time low, his image is at an all-time low, and people are questioning the integrity of the league he plays in to the point that the commissioner had to explain with a grave face at his own press conference that perhaps James show was “ill conceived” and  “the advice that he received on this was poor”. Its going to take some time to recover from this and there is no guarantee that he ever will. He might have inadvertently donned the proverbial Black Hat for the foreseeable future.

In short, never underestimate the power of little ripples to turn into large waves and take care not to let your message get lost in the method.

How Friendly is Your Website

The setup of your website is extremely important, not only to the visitors, but to the search engines.  SEO or search engine optimization is all about making your website friendly.  Is it easy to navigate through?  Are appropriate keywords strategically placed throughout your web pages?  Is it clean and fresh?  These are things that the search engine spiders will use to rank your website and should not be overlooked if you want to get to the top of the rankings.

Content is King

The content of your website is what keeps visitors coming back, so you want to provide up to date, good quality content related to your niche market.  The keywords should be used sparingly, but stand out so everyone will know what you are promoting.  The most important thing about content is that it should be original.  No one wants stale content, so; if you are not a good writer, consider outsourcing the task.  There are tons of services that will write content for your web pages at a very reasonable price.  Not only do the search engines love fresh content but also so will your audience.

The Importance of Links

Once a website is up and running it is not seen until it is indexed through the search engine spiders.  These spiders crawl sites and rank them based on the quality of the content and the relevance to the targeted keywords.  Manually submitting your site to the search engines can take weeks, but linking to another quality site will get your site crawled faster.  Since the spiders crawl established sites faster; linking to them will get your site crawled as well.

How do you get linked to other sites?  Contact the webmaster and ask.  Your site should be in a relevant niche but not deemed a threat.  If your content is good, some will agree. Many sites have “Link to Us” pages but the quickest way to get linked to the more established websites is to post comments on their blogs.   Commenting on the content of another blog and inviting them to visit your site will get curiosity seekers to your web pages.  Do not forget to add your URL so they know where to go.  Remember building links it not about the quantity, but the quality of the links.  They should be niche-related to hold any weight with the search engine spiders.

Get Your Site Seen With A Blog

If your website does not change very often, you might want to consider adding a blog.  A blog linked to your website offers fresh content that is updated on a regular basis.  This works well in any niche market and you can offer tips and other information in your niche.  Most blogging platforms are simple and easy to use even for the beginner.

Learning how search engine optimization works is essential for anyone who wants to have a successful website.  What your visitors think about your web pages is only one piece of the pie; what the search engines think about your site should be a bigger concern.

How do you say “Hello”?
How do you and your employees greet your customers when they walk into your business? Do you approach them right away, offering help? Do you offer a passing greeting while letting them find their way around your store? Do team members only say something once customers make eye contact with them?

How you greet your customers is often the first touch you have with them (that day, anyway). Make sure your message engages them the way you would want to be engaged. Do your employees have the proper training to be able to offer help to customers and find them the products or services they need? If customers don’t feel like you understand what they need, they will go somewhere else to find someone who does.

Make sure all employees know what is expected of their customer interactions, and make sure you have ongoing training to keep their knowledge as polished as possible. If your customers have confidence in your employees, you have a better shot at them having confidence in your business.

Do you know what you could be doing better?
What you’re doing might have been working for years, but what happens when your customers’ expectations change? Do you really know what your customers think about how you stack up to your competition, or even with other non-related businesses?

You can engage your customers informally during checkout or by picking up the phone and calling after their visits. If you want more formal answers, send them an email invitation to take an online survey (if you have their permission to email them), or email questions directly to them. If your Point-of-Sale system allows it, include a couple of questions at the bottom of your receipts with an email address where they can send their responses.

Most importantly, if you’re going to be soliciting feedback, you should be willing or able to make some changes. If your customers do have a problem AND they know they’ve told you about it, they’re going to expect you to do something about it (or at least to address it with them). If you ignore it, you could end up frustrating your customers even more.

Get involved in helping your community
Do you know about organizations or other businesses in your neighborhood who are helping in the community? And do they know about you? Are you doing what you can as a company to inform your customers about how they can help in the community? Are you getting involved in the fundraisers and events going on right around you?

Many major manufacturers have millions of dollars they can spend on philanthropy. And it works! But playing a role that helps people in your community doesn’t need to cost much – or even any – money.

Find local organizations or causes that align with what your business does or causes you believe in. Own a neighborhood shoe store? Contact a local group coordinating a 5K fundraiser, and volunteer to hang posters, accept / process sign-ups, and host a pre-event shirt / chip pick-up. Have a store that closes early or opens late? See if any groups can use your parking lot for a concert in the evening or a neighborhood garage sale early in the morning. (Just be sure to make sure your insurance covers you for such events). Promote the event inside your store in the lead-up to it. Think creatively about what you have to offer, and find a cause that can use it. Odds are, there’s an organization out there who’d love to take you up on your offer.

Engage online
Do your customers know how to find your information online? Do you know what is being said about you on business review websites? Are you getting the pages views you were hoping for out of your Search Engine Marketing efforts?

In all of these situations, engaging online can improve your presence and drive more customers your way.

Take advantage of free services such as Google’s business listings to have your location, contact information, and hours readily available for users who look for your store online. To improve your chances of being listed in organic searches, make sure to create a site map of your online site and submit it to the search engines. Find blogs or other sites that offer information about the type of goods and services you offer, and use your expertise to offer valuable comments on those sites. Visit customer review sites, such as Yelp, often to protect your brand reputation online.

Any of these efforts stands to improve your standing within organic searches on the major search engines, and that improvement in content quality may also improve the performance (and decrease the cost) of your purchased search engine ads. We’ll be featuring more articles in the coming weeks on how to improve your placement in search engine results.

Analyze your numbers
Do you know what subset of your customers bought your highest-margin items last year? Do you know how successful your advertising last year was in bringing you new customers? Do you know how many people are visiting your company website each day, and what percentage of those potential customers are buying from you?

Analysis is the key to understanding what is and isn’t working within your business, and how to improve on the areas that need some work. And while it can be pricey or time-consuming to do a full-scale analysis of all areas of your business (and it’s often worth it), you can start small by first coming up with a few questions you want answered and trying to find the answers to those.

First take a look at the basics. What ARE your highest-margin items? Do you a have loyalty program (even if it’s just a basic one) that affords you a bit more understanding of who your customers are? Even if you only have basic information, you can often have that augmented with pay list services, or do it yourself. The customer satisfaction surveys mentioned earlier in this article can be a great way for you to ask a couple of targeted questions about your customers (do they live in the neighborhood? Do they have kids? Do they own or rent their homes?) Once you know that, you can figure out how to target other people like them to buy your targeted products.

Consider email campaigns for some of your advertising so you can measure how many customers responded to that communication. Think about adding something like Google Analytics code to your business website so you can see where your customers are coming from, what they do when they get to your site, and how many of them are buying your products.

Even if you don’t think you have a lot of data, you can learn a lot, even from a little. If you start small, you may be surprised at what you can learn.

And that’s the case for any of these ideas. Starting small (and having goals for each initiative before hand, so you know if your efforts are working) can have a real impact on the success of your business. With most of these ideas being free – or close to it – it can’t hurt to try.

We’d love to know what affordable (or free) marketing strategies you’ve tried to improve your business. Let us know some of them in the comments. If you have questions about how your business may start with some of these strategies, let us know.

The social media site has replaced “Become a Fan of” with “Like,” a move that MediaMemo says is based on leveraging the already popular “Like” feature to increase clicks. That site says Facebook users currently use the “Like” button nearly twice as much as its “Become a Fan of” counterpart.

As Facebook makes changes to increase traffic to business sites, you, too, can follow some simple tips to getting more and more Facebook users to “Like” you.

Become a resource
Are you a car dealership trying to build a following for your Facebook page? Offer helpful information about things like vehicle maintenance, how to change a tire, what different octane gasolines mean for your car. Are you an athletic apparel retailer? Provide seasonal hints for getting the most out of your workouts or how to avoid injuries. Adding valuable tidbits makes your page more relevant to a broader base of people.

Grant status to your Facebook users
Creating offers or coupons that are only available on Facebook will not only give potential customers a reason to visit your page, but it can also give users a sense of being an insider with your organization. Announce sneak previews of upcoming sales or events first to your fans. Cultivating a sense of belonging will strengthen your relationship with your customers.

Know your audience
While targeting one type of customer may seem to be a good way to increase users initially, your “like” base will grow more consistently if you target multiple groups. Especially for local businesses, connections will be finite if you don’t broaden your page’s appeal. Keep in mind that when one person is a social cluster “likes” a business, that message is broadcast to his or her friends. You don’t want to spend time targeting users who are unlikely to be customers, but you do want to make sure your page content has a broad enough appeal to be relevant to many social clusters.

Stay in the picture
Update the content on your page often enough that update alerts keep your business top of mind for those following you. But don’t overdo it. There’s a fine line between being perceived as providing timely updates and being seen as a spammer. Updating content and status every few days is enough to keep your page fresh without annoying your followers.

Engage your Fans
Brands and businesses who are using Facebook well create great content that invites interactivity. Videos, games, applications, posts, and other elements can generate feedback and comments from your fans and can provide you valuable information about your fans. For example, posting information about a neighborhood 5K of which your business is a sponsor is relevant and local, and can get people talking. When your fans DO engage, be sure to respond and stay active in those conversations.

And don’t be afraid to post information about other local (non-competing) businesses and to have them do the same for you. Conversations that make your fans feel part of a community will keep the coming back.

Do you have approaches you’ve used successfully to build your Facebook base? We’d love to hear them! Please post your stories in the comments.