Simple social media marketing
Social media marketing is a black art for many companies.
Engaging with your customers online can be very scary if you haven’t done it before. Although it has its challenges it can offer brilliant insights into what they think of you. It can also give you the opportunity to head off issues before they get out of control and win support from a sophisticated and sceptical audience.
Beyond the simple idea of talking to your customers in the way that suits them best (which has to be good), it also extends the reach of your organisation way beyond the bounds of your own website and can add a lot of value in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO), which is something I’ll discuss in a later post.
In a previous post I discussed talking to your customers with Twitter. In this superb article, originally posted on Marketing 2.0, Lois Kelly offers another 12 ideas to try.
“Many companies still think of Facebook or blogs when they hear ’social media’. Here are 13 approaches and my assessment of their value and cost.
Shareable content
1. Social tagging: add social media bookmarks/functionality on every page of your site. This will increase your keyword relevancy and organic search rankings, reducing paid search costs. Value: High/Cost: Low
2. Social mediafy your campaigns: create content people want to share; tap into right social media rigger points, places and people. This will increase viral effect, getting greater reach for less than paid media, traditional PR. Value: High/Cost: Moderate
3. Badges, widgets, ringtones: make it easy for people to promote your company ‘wearing’ badges, sharing branded music. Value: Low/Cost: Low
4. Embed customer reviews/recommendations in your site: Online reviews are second only to personal advice from a friend as the driver of purchase decisions. So why not make it easy for people to decide when they come by your site? Value: High/Cost: Moderate
5. Create a YouTube channel, strategy: We live in a video world. Marketing needs to, too. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate to High
6. Take blogging to the next level: move from corporate mouthpiece to more of an online media property with high value to customers and prospects. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate
7. Use social sharing sites: Got great content? Share it and tag it where people can find it. Like on Slideshare.net. Value: Low/Cost: Low
Engaging
8. Create a Twitter channel, strategy: There’s a reason why Twitter, which has grown from 4 million 54 million users ini the past year, is disrupting Facebook, email and blogging. Head on over to Pistachio to get all the stats and good business cases on this trend. And then just get on so you experience what it’s all about. Value: Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate
9. Create ambassador programs: So many of your employees and customers want to help your company by commenting on blogs, Twittering, facilitating communities. Figure out a way to make it easy for people who love you to share the love. That’s word of mouth at its best and social media makes it easy to activate. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High
Insights/Ideas
10. Create a system to monitor social media conversations: Track issues and trends good and bad to be able to react; ’see’ how campaigns working or not and adjust; get competitive insights, nip problems before they’re big problems; inject Web 2.0 into customer service function. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Low to Moderate
11. Tap into the wisdom of your crowds: hold webstorm brainstorming sessions and online raves to get ideas from employees, customers, partners on how to solve problems small and big, how to do things better, how to stop doing things that aren’t so valuable. You’ll be able to cut costs, prioritize more easily, find new ideas. Plus when people participate and feel heard they’re more likely to share positive word of mouth about your company. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Moderate to High
12. Map your social media ecosystem: use social analytics to understand what’s being talked about in your industry about your company; your social media hot spots; who your advocates and detractors are, and what content your audience likes. Value: Low to Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate
Communities
13. Bring people together: develop specialised communities for like-minded people to share advice, get help, offer help, learn, solve problems, be entertained, create new business models, or change the world. One of the secrets to community success: tapping into deeply-felt and/or widely-felt issues. Check out The Tribalization of Business site, with results from last year’s study and the 2009 survey to learn more about communities. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High”
Most of these ideas cost very little and present little or no risk to your organisation. Some might not be for you but I would suggest that at least one or two of these things should form part of every company’s social media strategy.
Ursus Media can develop your digital marketing strategy, help integrate it with your overall marketing approach and help you engage with your customers in many different ways. If you’re not sure where to start we run regular courses in social media for business and can teach you how get the maximum benefit from your social media efforts.
7 Reasons to blog for business
From a business point of view there are lots of good reasons to write a blog. The best business blogs give their readers a more personal perspective on sometimes impersonal corporations and allow them to engage in real dialogue with those in charge. A good blog can foster a loyal following of fans that will help you market your business in ways that would otherwise be impossible.
Here are 7 reasons to blog for your business:-
1. Become established as a thought leader in your industry.
This will appeal to customers who will visit your site or even subscribe to you as source of reliable knowledge and to potential customers who will see that you have your finger on the pulse and you understand what you’re talking about.
2. Foster a community.
You never know, you might end up engaging some of your competitors in conversation and find that you could work together. This happens a lot in creative industries; why should yours be any different?
3. Share knowledge.
Well why not? Educate and inform people and you’ll quickly find that they have a greater understanding of what you do. Take this article for example; after you’ve read this you’ll have a better understanding of blogging for business. If you ask us to build a website you’ll at least understand why you should consider adding a blog to it. If you do decide to write a blog you’ll have thought about what it needs to do for your business and maybe even have a content plan in place.
4. Court the search engines.
The search engines love websites that have lots of regularly updated, relevant content. If you blog little and often it will massively help your websites ranking on the likes of Google. If you link to other relevant sites and they link back to yours you’ll get even more of a boost.
5. It’s a ready-made PR channel.
Every so often you can insert a bit of exciting news about your company. The people that follow your blog and find it interesting will be pleased to hear the odd snippet of good news about you. We’ve just launched a special offer and moved offices and I’ve blogged about both. Now though we’re back to business – something useful for you. Don’t overdo the ‘news about us’ angle. It can backfire. Blogging is a type of social media so you give something to your readers and with a bit of luck they’ll give you something back maybe some free feedback or a community of eager testers.
6. Building relationships.
Let’s be honest, your website exists to help you sell. Your blog however is a forum where your main objective is not to sell. It can help you establish a more personal relationship with your customers some of whom will engage with you much more deeply and on a less formal footing. They’ll see your blog as a way to talk to you on a level playing field and you should embrace this. These people will be your most loyal supporters.
7. You might learn something.
Seek out information and write stories that interest you. Expand on them – maybe turn these stories into a series. You might learn something useful in the process and be able to add even more value to your company’s offering. Think about your readers and what you can give them.
I think these are all pretty good reasons to write a blog. If you can think of any more or even if you disagree with me (cough splutter), let me know.
Writing for the Web
Writing for the web is a skill that is often neglected. For a number of reasons it’s not the same as writing for print media so sadly you can’t just recycle the copy from your brochure.
A few key things to remember when you’re writing for web are:
- Capture your audience’s attention: You have to capture you reader’s attention almost immediately – believe me if you haven’t got them interested with the first few words they’ll probably move on. Use the inverted pyramid technique and start with the conclusion and follow with the details.
- Less is more: Be clear, be concise. If you can pare an article down to a headline and a series of bullet points then maybe you should.
- Make it meaningful: Don’t waste your reader’s time. If you’re going to tell them something, make it accurate and useful.
- Have a call to action: Users time is precious so you might as well make the most of it. Ask them to buy, donate, download or simply comment. If they go on and follow your call to action you’ll get another useful insight as to whether or not your content is working.
- Don’t forget the science: Writing content for the web has another more scientific dimension. Copy must be written in such a way as to make it more attractive to search engines like Google. Of course this can be overdone and it mustn’t compromise the integrity of your message. This science bit is a facet of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and I’ll cover this in a later post.
If, forgetting for the time being item 5, this all seems very easy then why don’t you try a little exercise? Take a 1500 or 2000 word article, maybe something from a corporate brochure and edit it down to 500 words. You still have to include all the salient points and it still has to make sense.
Harder than it sounds? Let me know how you got on by leaving a comment at the bottom of the page.
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