August 2010 Biz Talk Articles

Feature Article:

Three Social Marketing Myths Busted Social marketing offers plenty of benefits for small businesses, but there are a number of common misconceptions that may be holding you back from embracing this new form of marketing. Here are three common excuses used to avoid using social networking as a business marketing strategy, and the reasons these excuses are really nothing more than myths.

1. “Our customers don’t use social networks.”
   Really? Facebook has 500 million users, with half of active users logging in every single day. In addition to that, each Facebook user has an average of 130 “friends” in their own personal networks. Combine that with Twitter’s more than 100 million users and LinkedIn’s 60 million users, and it would be difficult to imagine your customers not among these millions of users!
   
   The reality is that consumers today are online using social networks, and you need to meet your customers where they are.
   
   
2. “I (or my staff) don’t have time to update a bunch of social networking profiles.”
   Adding new marketing tasks to your already full to-do list may seem impossible, but there are ways to make it fast and easy to add social to your regular marketing mix. By integrating your social networking profiles together with each other and with your website, you can create a system that lets you “write once, publish to many” automatically, saving you time while extending your marketing reach online.
   
   For instance, you can use Facebook widgets to pull information from your Wall and display it on your web site automatically. Or, you can use an RSS feed to display your Twitter “tweets” on your Facebook page. By integrating your profiles, you can share new information automatically, saving you the time and effort of posting and maintaining the same information to multiple separate profiles.
   
   
3. “I don’t know what to write about.”
   Well the good news is that you probably already have lots of material just waiting to be “recycled” as social content, you just need to know where to look. Your monthly newsletter is an excellent source of social marketing material – you can divide it up over the course of a month and post a different article or tip each week. Or, why not share the latest news you just read in a professional journal or from an industry website?
   
   The truth is that you don’t need to write original content to share with your followers, you just need to share useful, interesting information to keep them engaged.

No More Excuses

If you’re still finding excuses to avoid social marketing for your business, you are missing an important opportunity to promote your business and reach countless new consumers online. When properly integrated, a social marketing system can be easy to use and takes very little time and effort to maintain, but you have to commit to incorporating it into your regular marketing routine. Your customers are already using social networking as part of their daily routines, and if your competitors are not already there, they will be soon.

Don’t let social marketing myths hold you back from implementing a strategy that helps you connect with customers, brings in new leads and prospects, and drives additional traffic to your website and your business.

NOTE: If you are looking for an integrated social marketing solution for your business, check out Five Sparrows’ ConnectPLUS Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)® services.

Marketing Tips:

Got E-Marketing?

Of the hundreds or possibly thousands of marketing messages consumers are bombarded with each day, e-marketing is still one of the most effective marketing methods available, in both the online and offline worlds. In fact, a study from Forbes Media last year found that e-marketing generated the most conversions, second only to search engine optimization. Offline, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) reported that e-marketing outperformed all other forms of direct marketing last year as well. So the data clearly shows that e-marketing works for reaching (and converting) customers today. But why?

A Broad Reach

One of the reasons e-marketing works so well could be that it has a very broad reach, since almost everyone today has an email address, and many have more than one. Spam-compliant e-marketing services (such as Constant Contact or Vertical Response) are readily available and very affordable, meaning you can easily reach your entire customer base using email. If you are not regularly e-marketing to your customers, you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity to keep your name and products/services in front of customers and remind them of the value you provide.

Taking Action

Also, e-marketing makes it easy to enable recipients to take some type of action. Whether it’s clicking through to an optimized landing page or printing out a coupon, your special offers can be delivered directly to your customers’ inboxes where they can interact with your message and take the desired action. Just be sure to use a clear call-to-action and provide recipients multiple ways to engage with you (including links to your website, email links, phone numbers, social networking links, etc.).

Targeting, Tracking, and Measuring

Targeting your messages is also easy with e-marketing, since you are sending directly to people who have opted-in or given you permission to contact them with your information. You can even segment your e-marketing list into specific groups based on interests, gender, time of year, or any other criteria that may be useful to your business. However, you cannot segment your list effectively if you are not keeping accurate stats and tracking your results. Most listserv services provide very detailed data on who opened your message, what links they clicked on, if they forwarded it to another person, etc. This level of results measurement is simply not possible with other more traditional marketing methods.

No Interruptions

E-marketing is also less intrusive than other types of advertising (like TV or radio commercials or the dreaded telemarketing call at dinnertime). Recipients will see your message when they are checking their email, and if you have done a good job of providing valuable content, they will look forward to what you have to say when they see your email in their inboxes. If you send too often or send only self-serving promotions, however, they may simply delete your message without reading it, or possibly unsubscribe or block you altogether, so be smart about the types of content you send and how often you send it.

Because It Works!

The bottom line is that e-marketing works, and is an easy, affordable way to market to your customers and reach them directly with valuable content and special offers they may be interested in. E-marketing also averages a return on investment (ROI) of $43.62 for every dollar you spend, which is a convincing reason to add it to your marketing mix in the first place.

By using e-marketing regularly, your business becomes more visible to your customers and regularly reminds them about your products, services, and value, and can trigger a flurry of renewed interest every time you send.

Building Effective Web Sites:

Anatomy of a Google Results Page

Have you noticed a change in your Google results lately? Google now lists results from all types of media from all over the web – including social sites, videos, images, paid listings, news sites, local results, shopping sites, even book results – all on the same search results page.

You do know what this means, right? It means your website is no longer competing only with other websites, it is competing with results from multiple sites and sources. The image below contains the results for a search on “mobile phones”; and as you can see, the organic results are only one of eight different types of information pulled onto this particular search result. So how can you get the best rankings for your business?

A Solid Foundation

First and foremost, your website must be properly optimized for the search engine spiders – that has not changed. Lots of great page content with correct keyword densities, meta data, HTML elements, valid code, and quality inbound links are still essential to showing up in the organic listings. Web architecture is also important (no template sites, Flash, or frames) and clean, optimized code will make it easy for the search engines to read and index your pages. Be sure the search engine spiders can also find every page of your site by using search engine-friendly, readable navigation links and sitemaps (XML and HTML).

Social Networking and Real-Time Results

A fairly new development in the world of search is that search engines now index content from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. A quality social marketing strategy can mean more content for the search engines to find and index for your business, and can also drive additional traffic to your site. Being active on the social networks is not only a powerful marketing strategy all by itself, but it also strengthens and supports your SEO efforts.

In The News

Another effective SEO strategy is to send press releases to online news outlets and news sites. Not only does this help build inbound links and improve traffic to your own website, but it can also mean that your business may show up in the news section of the search engine results as well.

Videos and Images

When posting videos to your website, social profiles, or YouTube, be sure to apply SEO techniques such as keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and complete author information whenever possible (the same goes for images). This can help your video be found more easily on sites like YouTube, but it can also boost the overall placement of your website in the search engines.

Local Search

Search engines have been delivering localized search results for quite some time, displaying results based on the physical location of the computer on which you are searching, and also taking your past search history into consideration when displaying results. For instance, if two users in two different cities perform a search on the same search terms, they would likely see two different sets of results based on their physical locations. By adding geo-tag meta data to your website code (GPS coordinates that identify your physical location), you can help ensure that the search engines can correctly include your location in local search results.

Another good local search strategy is to make sure that Google has correct, up-to-date information by customizing your business' Google Places Page. All businesses have one of these, whether they know about it or not! It’s far better to customize your listing and add keyword rich, optimized content than to ignore it and let Google just fill it in with whatever it finds online about you. When the local listings are displayed on a results page, you want your business not only to be included in the list, but you want your information to be correct!

SEO Is Not Enough

Today your website faces some pretty stiff competition in the search engines, even if it’s properly optimized. And while correctly optimizing your site is just as important today as ever, SEO is no longer enough by itself. There are new opportunities for promoting your business and being found in the search engines, and smart companies are pairing SEO with other online marketing channels for even better results. A well-rounded online presence that includes multi-media, social networking, and a solid search engine optimization strategy is the best approach to take for search engine success.

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