Social Marketing in 4 Easy Steps

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How do I Get Started?

More companies are using social media as a major part of their marketing mix.  If you are new to social media you may ask yourself, “How do I get started?”

Social media marketing isn’t a foreign concept.  These are normal social interactions and we do it every day without thinking as we meet with customers, answer questions, network and create business relationships.

Social media marketing is simply a variety of tools we can use to interact with more people more often, and like any new social situation it takes getting out of your comfort zone a bit with a commitment to join the conversation.

Here are 4 simple steps to successful social marketing.

1) Join the Conversation.

At first it may seem like just one more thing to jam into your already busy day but taking the time to engage in the conversation on a daily basis can pay dividends over time.  Take a realistic look at your daily schedule and decide how much time you are willing to commit.  With as little as 10 or 15 minutes a day you can be quite successful and with your mobile device it’s easy to squeeze a tweet or two off every day. Consider time waiting in line at the check out, riding the buss or the train as perfect times to get social.  Even 20 or 30 minutes a week is better than nothing.

2) Define your social marketing strategy

Ask yourself, “Why do I want to be a part of the conversation?”

Some common answers:

  •     I want to know what others are saying about me.
  •     I hear it can boost my search engine rank.
  •     I want to support my existing customers.
  •     It’s a great way to stay in front of customers and prospects on a regular basis.

All are good reasons to participate in social media.

Your social marketing strategy comes down to two simple things, what outlets will you use and at what frequency.  Only you can determine this based on your industry and how aggressive you want to be. However, if you’re just getting your feet wet, we recommend minimum Twitter, Facebook and a blog with two tweets per day, one Facebook update per day and two blog articles per month.  This will get you in the habit of being social but you may need to increase the frequency at some point to see significant results.

You can also use a tool or social coach like Utize (insert shameless self promotion here) that will help you set and keep goals, save time and keep it all organized.

3) Measure your results

With any marketing effort you should have a way of measuring results.  The ultimate measuring stick is revenue but with social media there are other statistics you can track on a daily or weekly basis that will tell you if your efforts are successful.
On twitter you will want to track the number of followers vs. the number you are following.  This number should say relatively close and there are a lot of reasons for this we can’t go into detail here but that is one thing to watch closely.  On facebook you will want to look at fans, daily weekly and monthly numbers as well as the number of wall posts.

These are just a few vital statistics that will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your efforts to stir conversation and build your business.

4) Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Just keep at it.  Think of it like starting a new workout or trying to form any new habit.  Your social marketing strategy will work if you stick to it.  Try it for three months and if you follow through and don’t quit you will see the results.

Tips to Social Marketing Success

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Step 1 – Join In The Conversation?
If you don’t have an online marketing or social media marketing strategy it’s time to get one.  Marketing your business is a daily effort and gone are the days of the social marketing wallflower when you could sit on the sidelines observe.  You must join in on the conversation.  After all if you don’t join in, your competitors will and the conversation will happen with or without you.
Step 2  - Offer Something Helpful
Offer some of your most helpful advice for free and it will leave people wondering: “If they give this away for free, the stuff I pay for must be spectacular.”  and it is.  This approach builds trust and loyalty among your fans.  (Just like I’m doing now)
Step 3  - Spend The Time & Be Creative 
Online marketing and social media marketing specifically, is about building relationships and like any relationship it requires a commitment of time to do it right.  Then keep your mind open to non-standard opportunities.  In todays small business world the lines are blurred between customer, partner and even competitors.   Forming relationships of trust will open doors of opportunity that you may not have known would exist.  I have seen cases where would-be competitors combine forces to win a larger contract, share resources and even collaborate on complimentary products and services.
That’s it for today.
Remember – together we can turn this economy around, one small business at a time.

Boost Your SEO With Twitter

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Twitter has become the largest micro-bloging platform in the world today.  When used correctly Twitter will boost your search engine rank.  When you post tweets that are targeted, relevant and when you have a good balance between followers and those you follow, your overall relevance and ultimately your search engine rank will increase.
Here are some simple tips for increasing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts on twitter.

1.  Use your brand name or the name of your service in your user name.  Your user name will be displayed each time you tweet and each time you are mentioned or re-tweeted.  The more your name is displayed the better.

2. Complete your profile.  Remember this is a social media people want to know more about you and what you do.  Also, don’t forget to include a link to your site.  This doesn’t need to be a link to your home page.  In fact, a link to a page other than the home page can be more effective.

3. Use links in your tweets.  A link back to your website or blog is one more thing that helps to increase your search engine rank.  The Quick Post tool in Utize, automatically creates a tweet with a link back for you.

4. Use #hashtags.  Hash tags are keywords proceeded by a # symbol.  #marketing, #smallbusiness, or #smallBusinessMarketing would be good hash tags to include if you want your tweets to be seen by others searching for these keywords.  It’s also a way to keep your tweets organized.

5. Mention others.  A mention is when you put the @ symbol before there user name.   It works like a voting system in Twitter so the more @mentions the better for you.  Remember the more you mention the more you are likely to be mentioned.

6. Remember the 80 / 20 rule.   Share useful information and don’t become a “Me Monster”  It’s okay to promote your product or business but it should be 80% free useful information and 20% sales and promotion.

7. Pace yourself.  Spread your tweets out over the day.  Avoid the temptation to send one tweet after another, clogging up the feed and hogging the conversation.  ( see #6)

8. Link your tweets to your blog.  Assuming you have a blog, and you should, you can’t say a lot in 140 character tweet.  Linking to your blog will allow you to say more plus you get the added benefit of the link-back.

9.  Add a tweet button to your website and blog.  Make it easy for others to tweet about you.

10.  Be engaged in helpful in relevant conversations.  Not only will this build your search engine rank but it will help to build your brand.

Remember, together we’ll turn this economy around, one small business at a time.

5 Reasons to Setup a Facebook Fan Page Today!

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1. When followers come together on your facebook fan page you are building a community. This builds loyalty in your brand and your products and services. The key is to get your followers to engage in the conversation, post testimonials, Feedback and even make connections with each other.

2. Establishing a fan page will give you a boost in search ranking. Make sure your fan page includes backlinks to your business pages and your name is in the title. This is just one small part of improving your SEO or organic search ranking.

3. You can use Facebook Insights to track the interactions or what we call “conversations” your fan page is having with your fans. Facebook Insights includes a lot of valuable information that you can dig through to learn more about your fans.

4. Remember it’s a conversations so use your fan page to communicate with your fans and there are variety of ways so be careful and determine what is appropriate for your audience. For example: send an update. This appears as a notice on the home pages. You can even target a message to a specific demographic, age, gender even location.

5. Facebook is free and easy to setup. Add Facebook to your marketing mix and all you will need to spend is a little of your time up front and a few minutes each day to engage in the conversation.

Click here to setup your own facebook page and if you need assistance give the experts at Mosaic Team a call.

Until next time, together we will turn this economy around, one small business at a time.

Using a Call-To-Action Funnel

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If you have been following along, we have talked about designing for personality types and designing your site around a conversation.  Now that we have their attention let’s tell them what to do.

Give your visitors something specific to do.

Let’s assume there is something specific you would like a new website visitor to do when they find you online or you would not have spent all that time and money building the website. You hope to get a result or in other words you expect a visitor to do something when they get there. Preferably they buy your widgets or something specific like that. Ask yourself, how can they know what to do if I don’t tell them?

Now I don’t want to get into a whole relationship, man vs. women thing but, guys you know what I’m talking about right? “If you want me to wash the dishes why didn’t you just say, wash the dishes? And the women may say, “Can’t you see there are dishes to be washed? I don’t need to tell you, just wash them.”

Anyway, my point is it’s better to just say what you mean and when it comes to visitors to your website this is the call-to-action (CTA). Use clear active language in your CTA. eg. Buy Now, Register Today, Signup, Call etc. Be clear and leave no question in the visitors mind what it is you want them to do.

So what do we know at this point?

1. Your website should be more than just something pretty to look at.
2. Each website visitor will fall into one of four basic personality types: competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic
3. Each personality type may respond differently.
4. Follow a clear conversation on your website then design for personality types
5. Have a clear CTA

Now to put it all together.

Knowing that there are four personality types, and each has different and distinct purchasing habits, we need to approach the CTA differently with each.

1. Start with the spontaneous and competitive personalities at the top of the page and put your primary CTA there. In most cases, this gets the best results in the shortest amount of time. Buy Now!, Sign Up!, Start Saving Today! I know it sounds infomercial-ish but it works. Work with your designer and your primary CTA can be handled with style.

2. As you move down the page, use one or more secondary CTA(s) to capture the methodical and emotional visitors. Here are some examples: Like us on facebook, follow us on twitter, sign up for the newsletter and get a free gift, learn more about our team, etc. Now you are prospecting. These visitors may not move as quickly but can be just as valuable if not more in the long run.

Call To ActionTake your time, think it through. What is the number one thing you want a visitor to do when they come to your site? This is your primary CTA. What other things would be good if they are not ready to “do the dishes” Be clear, give them options and these become your secondary CTA. They don’t get as much real estate are usually placed lower on the page and may use size and color to differentiate them from the primary CTA.

Take a look at Hale Theater in Gilbert Arizona for an example.

 

I hope this has been helpful. Together we’ll turn this economy around one small business at a time. See you next time.

It’s Not Just a Website, It’s a Conversation

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In my last post we discussed the importance of designing for personality types. Today we are taking one step further and we’ll be talking about turning your website into a conversation.

In my business my best prospects come from referrals from our best customers. I would guess this is true with most small businesses. The fact is we live and die by the referral.

Think about these there simple questions:

1. Who is my best customer?

2. Who is my best prospect?

3. What would I like the conversation to sound like between these two people?

Once you’ve answered these questions, write a script around this conversation.

Here’s an example:

SETTING: Your are at the semi-annual meeting of the Power Business Brokers Leads Masters Networking Professionals of Greater Los Angeles (or PBBLMNPGLA for short).

ACTION: You sign in and place your “Hello may name is..” badge over your left shirt pocket. As you enter the room, you notice one of your best clients and long-time friend across the crowded room. You waive and start walking his way.

You: “Hey Joe! It’s good to see you. How’s business? Hows the family?

Joe: “Great! That [thing you did for me] is working out great!”

You: “Glad to hear it. Who do you know that could also benefit from [the thing i did for you]?

Joe: “You know I think Judith over at XYZ corp could use [the thing you do]. Let me introduce you.”

ACTION: Joe glances up and sees Judith a few feet away and gets her attention by waiving her over.

Joe: “Judith I want you to meet [your name].”

You: “Nice to meet you Judith.”

Judith: “Nice to meet you too.”

Joe: [you] really made a difference in my business by [the thing you do - raving praise] and I thought you might be interested”

Judith: “That sounds interesting and coming from Joe that says a lot. We should talk.”

ACTION: exchange card and setup a time to discuss business

EDITORS NOTE: Insert stale joke, laughing face, freeze frame and roll the credits with really bad 80′s tv theme music up and over, fade to black.

So now what?

This is more or less the ideal situation and may not happen often, or maybe happen every day. Either way let’s look at how this is applied to your website design

First  Your website should be your number one advocate. It should be in the role of Joe from our story, working night and day singing your praises sending your referrals.

Second: Don’t talk about how awesome you are. Of course you’re awesome. Everyone is awesome, your competitors are awesome. Get over it.

Third: What you do is boring

Third & 1/2: What your clients have achieved as direct result of [what your do] is exciting.

Fourth: Stay focused on results and benefits “[The thing we do] increased sales by 15%” or “Our widgets save our clients on average 20% on their power bill.”

Here’s the bottom line:

Identify [the one thing you do best] then script the conversation around it. Use the (somewhat over simplified) script above and remember Joe = your website and Judith = your visitors. With this in mind take a look at your site, read the copy and and see if your website is having the right conversation.

Now combine this with what we learned about designing for personalities, and you have some new tools to a more effective layout and site design.

Next time we will be talking about using, space color, font and words to increase conversion rates with the right call to action.

I hope this has been helpful.
Remember, together we can turn this economy around.  One small business at a time.

Design For Personality Types

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When designing your website, remember, your website is having conversations on your behalf on a daily basis. These potential customers have buying behaviors that vary widely from person to person. Just like everyone else we all like to think we are unique and special. “There’s no one quite like me.”, and you are right. You are special. (At least that’s what your mom said.) However, for the sake of this discussion let’s lump every human on the planet into four basic personality types.

Competitive – Competitive consumers want to price shop, see the value before they will move. They want to be certain they get the best deal in town.

Methodical – Methodical consumers take their time, get the facts, research and make an informed decision.

Spontaneous – Spontaneous consumers are focused on the when. They want the instant download and are more likely to make an impulse purchase.

Humanistic – Humanistic are focused on the who. They want to know the people behind the company, the history and establish personal attachment to your brand or product. These consumers tend to be very loyal.

So how does this affect my website design?

1. Place your value statement / competitive advantage and a clear call to action high on the page.

2. Be sure to give your call to action a healthy share of the real estate. Use Color, spacing and font choice to ensure your value statement and call to action are easy to see and read.

This will capture the competitive and spontaneous users first. They tend to move more quickly to a buy, click, subscribe or follow decision.

As soon as the user scrolls down the page, we know we are probably dealing with a methodical or humanistic consumer.

These consumers will be looking for more information. They will take more time and will need to feel good first. It’s like sticking a toe in the water first. Then, only after determining the water temperature is optimal, they will jump in the pool. And because they take more time you have to keep their attention or they will get board and go to your competitor. Give them something that builds confidence. Testimonials, product ratings, company history, meet our team etc.

Remember we all different but the same. Learning to design your site for all personality types will get you a better conversion rate where visits turn in to prospects and prospects into customers.

I hope this has been helpful. Check back often and together we’ll turn this economy around one small business at a time.

 

Getting The Most From Your Busy Day

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We all know as a small business owner you wear a lot of hats. That’s why we build http://www.utize.com. With just a few easy steps you can manage everything from your website to customer relationships, social media and more. In fact, I am posting this blog article from within @utize right now.

The social media content syndication will automatically post this out to Facebook, my twitter feed and my blog all at once, saving me time and that saves me money.

Now I realize this is shamelessly self-promotional however, in this first of many articles to come I wanted to demonstrate how easy it is and how much time you can save as a small business do-it-yourself marketer.

Utize is free for 14 days and there are not setup fees. (at least for now ) All we ask is you give us some honest feedback on what you, as a small business owner, would like to see added so we can make the Utize DIY Marketing System as good as it can be.

This concludes this overly self-promotional rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Articles to come: “Choosing the right call to action”, “Designing for personality types”, “setting up your conversion funnel”, “why small business is the key to turning this economy around” and more. We look forward to working with you to grow your business.