Social Media Marketing not Social Media Networking

Here’s a newsflash for all you business owners out there:

There will always be more advertising and marketing strategies than you have time or money.

Success is about prioritization.  I see more and more business owners setting up fan pages for their companies on Facebook, activating Twitter accounts, uploading photos from the staff Halloween party on Flickr and trying to make new friends on LinkedIn.  On the one hand, it’s exciting to see business owners embrace new technology.  On the other hand, it’s painful knowing that many are only doing so because a friend or fellow business owner told them that they’re missing out.

Before you jump in the social media mix or send us a tweet about what type of coffee you’re about to have (hint: we don’t care!!), it’s important that you A) have clear, measurable goals and objectives for your social media activities and B) you understand the difference between social media marketing and social media networking.

Why are you investing your time (which should have a cost associated with it) in social media vs. other online marketing strategies like: online article submissions, PPC ads on Google, Yahoo and Bing, SEO, re-targeted display ads, email marketing, etc.?

If you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your social media activities (in measurable terms), you need to take three steps back before you move forward.

When I see a business owner with a fan page on Facebook, 20 followers on Twitter (when they’ve been on Twitter for several months) and a half-completed LinkedIn profile and I don’t see their business in the first few pages of Google and I don’t see them writing online articles or keeping a blog, I know that their making a colossal mistake.  They’re taking a “me too” approach to their online marketing and following the masses.  They are also probably engaged in more social media networking than social media marketing.

Each online marketing strategy has pros and cons – depending on the business you’re in – and can be used to achieve a particular result.  If you own a service business, you should never invest in social media before maximizing your visibility on the search engines – using a basic SEO and paid search strategy.  Search engine marketing will net you far more new customers (that is your goal, right?) than getting a few of your friends and family members to become your “fans” on Facebook.

Before you get started with social media, make sure that it’s the best place to spend your (limited) time – based on your big picture marketing goals.  After a quick review, you might determine that setting up a blog and an email newsletter are a far better way to achieve the result you’re seeking than constant status updates on Facebook and Twitter.  Alternatively you might find that the audience you’re targeting is only found within the LinkedIn community.

If, through your goal setting process, you determine that social media marketing is a priority for your business, make sure that you’re actually marketing and not just wasting time social media networking!  Social media marketing is using social media websites to find prospective customers, raise awareness with them and motivate them to take an action deemed desirable by you.  Social media networking is interacting with people via social media channels and unless it’s the result of a targeted social media marketing effort – it’s likely a waste of time.

There are many highly effective social media marketing strategies and most involve little to no networking interaction in order to achieve your desired goal.

A fantastic social media marketing strategy (IMHO) is as simple as:

1) Creating compelling content.

Give your prospects information that is truly valuable to them – information that they can use to make a better buying decisions.  Don’t worry about those that will take your “free” advice and do things themselves – they’re not your target customer.  Create content and share your expertise.

2) Sharing your new content via social media websites.

Think of the social media websites as an extension of your website.  Your website is like a large fishing vessel out in the ocean.  While you may have schools of fish swimming around your boat, there are other schools of fish miles from your boat and many will never find you if you stick to your current course (marketing strategy).  “Seeding” content on social media websites is like launching smaller boats from your main boat so that they can lure new fish back to the mother ship.  Compelling content is like well-baited hooks thrown from the smaller fishing boats!

Of course, the difficult part of this simple social media strategy is creating compelling content.

The reality is that for most people, creating great content is very difficult and often time consuming.  Doing it well requires the rare combination of subject matter expertise, the ability (and desire) to write, knowledge of your audience and a touch of creativity.  If you have these attributes, get busy writing (or recording – podcasts and online videos are great ways to create content).  If you lack some of the skills required to create great content, enlist the help of an expert.  All sorts of companies offer copywriting or online video production.

Killer content is necessary if you want to maximize your social media marketing return – there’s no way around it.

This leads us back to one of the openers of this post – there will always be more marketing strategies than you have time or money to implement.  For most small business owners, time is the most precious resource.  Remember this as you sit down to write your third draft of a blog post!

Today, marketing success often depends on ignoring the masses and focusing your finite resources on leverage points within a targeted niche strategies.  This might mean social media marketing, but it might also mean a geo-targeted ppc campaign or a vertical social media network on Ning.

Having trouble prioritizing your online marketing?  Enlist the help of a good business coach, consultant or an analytics and tracking service like Blue Corona.  The question of whether your time/money is best spent on pay per click ads, SEO, email marketing or social media can (and must) be answered.

Think about this next time you tweet to us about what type of coffee you’re about to drink this morning (reminder – we don’t care!!!)!

A Social Media Strategy for SMBs

If you own a small to medium sized business (SMB), you’ve no doubt been told that social media web sites are a great way to market your business.  In the DC area alone, there must be two dozen seminars a week on the topic.  What most of these seminars do is raise awareness and market the presenter’s social media marketing services – few leave you with actionable takeaways or DIY strategies (which is unfortunate, but understandable).

That’s the goal of this blog post – to outline a quick and dirty social media marketing strategy for the time-starved small business owner!

Before we get started, there are a couple of underlying points with respect to online marketing that you should understand (and embrace):

• Recognize that success marketing your business online is about content and real estate
• Just like in the real world, real estate online is all about location, location, location!
• Next to referrals from customers and direct sales, your website is your #1 sales/marketing tool
• Think of your website like a sales funnel where every visit is a prospect

Think of your main website as “the mother ship” – a large fishing vessel (or yacht if you prefer).  Each marketing strategy you employ could be thought of as a baited fishing line dropped off the side of the boat.  Even the smallest of businesses will typically have 2-3 lines in the water at all times (concurrent marketing strategies) – common examples include: Pay Per Click Advertising, Direct Mail, Email Marketing, SEO, etc.

If direct marketing strategies can be thought of as baited fishing lines off of the mother ship, social media websites might be more analogous to smaller boats launched from the mother ship.  Each of these smaller boats can also have fishing lines in the water thereby covering a larger swath of ocean and ultimately luring more fish back to the mother ship.

Make sense so far?

Growth seeking business owners should put as many well-baited fishing lines in the water as possible.  Once you have lines going off each end of your mother ship, you want to get more boats in the water to cover a larger patch of ocean and eventually you’ll probably want to get some additional fishing lines thrown in the water off of those boats.

With the basics covered, here’s your step-by-step, quick and dirty, social media marketing strategy:

1. Install website analytics

Simply put – You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score!  Is it better to blog or write online articles on Buzzle.com?  Should you invest more in SEO or PPC?  How many hours a week should you spend updating your businesses Facebook fan page?  All of these questions can be answered if you are accurately tracking the activity on your website.  But, not all tracking is created equal.  It’s critical that whatever tracking service you use provides you with your true visit-to-lead conversion rate (and for many businesses, this includes web generated phone calls).

2. Identify 3-4 keyword phrases that drive qualified visitors to your website

With website analytics in place, you can now identify the 3-4 keyword phrases that drive profitable business outcomes.  No visitors from search?  No problem!  Invest in a paid search campaign or hire a company (like Blue Corona) to do a one-time SEO project for you.

3. Brainstorm the “implied” questions people searching for those keyword phrases might be trying to answer

There’s an implied question or intention with every general keyword search.  Some people refer to Google as “the database of intentions.”  What questions could someone searching “water delivery bethesda, md” be trying to answer?  How much does it cost?  Who’s the closest water company to Bethesda?  There are tools available online that can automate this process, but there is a certain benefit to doing it manually.

4. Create 10-20 pages worth of kick-ass content related to those questions and keyword phrases

Answer the questions related to your top keyword phrases.  Make sure that you leverage your business expertise and add an element of personal flare!  Everyone says that content is king, but how king your content is depends on a number of factors – originality, tone, volume, relevance, etc.

5. Place this content on your website

Create additional pages on your website – one page per topic or question (from above).  Each page should contain at least 500 word and 1,000 – 1,500 is probably closer to ideal.

6. Seed the content across the social media landscape in a headline/tickler fashion

Once you have your 10-20 pages of new content on your website, chop it up into headlines, blurbs and re-purposed articles and start posting it, tweeting it and sharing it across the social media landscape.  Recognize the various social media sites and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each. Twitter is excellent for promotion while Buzzle.com and WordPress.com can be great platforms to share large amounts of written information.  If the information that you want to share is photographic or video, try Flickr and YouTube.

Popular sites include:

Here’s a quick example of how all this can work -

You identify “yellow page case study” as a keyword phrase that’s valuable for your business.  You write a 2,500 word case study on the efficacy of yellow page advertising for the plumbing industry.  You post that article or content on your website — on a sub-page of the site — something like “www.mywebsite.com/yellow-page-advertising-performance-for-plumbers.htm”.

Next, you place headline like blurbs from your case study on your businesses Facebook fan page and on Twitter.  Then you write a blog post that offers a slightly more opinionated version of your case study and you link that back to the main case study.  You might also tweet about the new blog post and tie your blog to your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

If you’ve done all this, congratulations!  You’re now the owner of a full-blown social media marketing campaign!

There’s one element that we haven’t covered, but we will in a future blog post – in order for any of this to work, you really need to build up your social media community.  Having said this, following the strategy above is a great way create a community!  Which comes first – the content creation or the community – is subject to much debate.

Generally speaking, we believe you should create the content as if you already have a huge community.  Truly valuable content is like a magnet.  Building a community based on very little information is not only difficult, but it is also somewhat unsustainable.

One thing that has probably become clear at this point is that while social media marketing has no direct cost, it has a very large cost in terms of time.  While no one knows more about your business than you do and there is a value in doing some of the work yourself, there’s no shame in outsourcing your social media marketing to someone else – like us!

If you’re interested in learning more about Blue Corona’s social media marketing / content marketing options, please contact us.

What Gets Measured, Gets Managed (and Improved!)

When it comes to marketing, do you have your priorities straight?

Is it better to run a pay per click campaign, try your hand at email marketing or invest in SEO?  Should you set-up a blog or post articles on Buzzle?  Should you invest in traffic generation or work to improve your website’s visit-to-lead conversion rate?

Few business owners and marketing executives have enough time to effectively execute or implement all the strategies available to them.  Prioritizing becomes critically important.  Successful marketers are adept at prioritization because they understand that they can’t do everything at once.

How do you determine which marketing strategy to test next?

One of the challenges faced by many growth seeking small medium sized business owners  is that they have no priority list.  Which would increase website traffic most: paid search or SEO; blogging or online articles; Twitter or a YouTube Channel?  If you have $2,000 to invest in marketing, should you do a direct mail campaign or put up ads on AdWords?  Should you hire an SEO firm or buy an email list and send them an unsolicited blast?

If you don’t currently track your marketing and your website, you can’t possibly have an accurate priority list nor can you make intelligent decisions as far as what you should do next.

Have you defined your key marketing metrics?  Do you review them daily/monthly/quarterly?  Do you have goals and actionable strategies in place to improve them?  What will determine success or failure?  Are you measuring the efficacy of your current marketing strategies including your website?

Do you think the leader in your industry operates without a plan and without metrics?  The answer, more often than not, is “no.”