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 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.

With the swarms of consumers blogging about everything under the sun, opinions spread like wildfire. It is imperative that companies respond promptly and adequately to negative conversations online.

Defending your brand has become more important then ever, so why are so many companies still not regulating these outlets? In a recent conference in New York, Ad Age columnist Pete Blackshaw, discussed how businesses can defend against negative press on the internet. Below are a few of his tips to remember when you begin to monitor your brand online.

1. “Empower the influencer.” Blackshaw emphasized the need to make information available to those who may be looking for it, like bloggers and social media users. Companies need to utilize search engines on their home websites and keep information up to date and positive. The likelihood of a negative blog decreases if there is an ample amount of information refuting the writer’s opinion.
2. Use tools to monitor what is being written about your brand on the internet. Free applications such as Google Alerts and Summarize make it easier for companies to keep an eye out. Check every so often to see who is talking about your company online and determine if a response is necessary. Keep in mind that with today’s social media landscape, replication is everywhere. It is no longer just a few hundred people reading a blog from the net, but rather, (possibly) thousands of people tweeting and re-tweeting harmful press about the brand.
3. Timeliness is everything. Making amends with a dissatisfied customer before damage is done is the key. Any number of people could have been influenced by the bad press before the company came in for damage control. The value of a customer (even just one) is great. Customers allow businesses to keep their doors open, after all.
4. Watch what the competition is doing. Learn from their mistakes instead of your own. If they are getting it right, take the opportunity to make sure your business is on par with offers.
5. No Customers? Just because a business may not have “traditional” customers doesn’t mean it should let the World Wide Web determine the integrity of the brand. Just like above, address the problem and take a stance.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn are all social media sites that are quickly becoming a part of the daily routine – and not just in the lives of individuals but to all types of businesses, both big and small. Social sites are being used for multiple purposes with one of the latest being to promote companies and connect with the everyday consumer. But it’s more than just showing up and being present, that’s the easy part. How can you, as a business, use social media to actually increase your bottom line and boost your overall sales?

Find Your Audience

The first step to successfully utilizing social media is inviting both current and potential customers to become a part of your networking sites. You want current customers to discuss and promote their experiences with your products or services and potential customers to learn about your business and what you have to offer. Finding your customers is the first step you must make to ensure your messages are being heard by the right people.

Know Your Audience

Connecting to your followers is a vital step in establishing your online presence. Help manage their expectations when visiting your sites by maintaining a consistent image and tone from page to page and try to not constantly repeat yourself. For example, if you are utilizing multiple social networking sites, don’t have the same exact message posted on Facebook as what you have posted on Twitter. Not only are readers going to become uninterested in your repetitive messages, but what you say to one social networking audience may not be right for another audience. Tailor your messages to your specific audience. What you say on LinkedIn shouldn’t be the same thing you say on Twitter, because the audiences are very different.

Engage a Conversation

Photos and videos are great ways to not only promote your products and services, but to also  showcase your business as a culture and demonstrate what a great work environment your business has. Be transparent enough so that you can relate to your customers and so they can feel like they are a part of your company. Use social media as a conversation piece with your current and potential customers to make them feel included. Keep up with the discussion boards, allow for client feedback, and keep the interactions open for constant discussions.

Provide Incentives

You should also give your social network followers something special that only they have. This can be exclusive coupons, promotions, notifications of upcoming sales, or anything that will give them more of a reason to continue to follow you and will give others reasons to join.

When using social media to promote your business, remember that it’s more than just creating a site. Just like any other marketing effort, it is best to know and find your audience and give them something useful and engaging to help build your brand and, ultimately, encourage sales.

]]> http://home.sharedmarketing.com/social-media-for-business/feed/ 0 http://home.sharedmarketing.com/nonprofits-find-following-in-social-media/ http://home.sharedmarketing.com/nonprofits-find-following-in-social-media/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:47:48 +0000 author http://home.sharedmarketing.com/?p=695