Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next.

What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

What Is An Advanced Strategy?

The definition of an advanced social strategy is a technique that goes beyond the normal social media presence. It introduces or reinforces a marketing message while pushing a user to another profile or business site. Before moving forward with an advanced strategy, it’s important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess a basic understanding of online marketing.

Strategy 1: Multimedia Usage

The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. Consumers are now using the web to look for product pictures and videos; they want more information and want to see what they’re considering buying. The good news is that it’s easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures.

In addition to taking photos of products, you can also take pictures at office events as a way to highlight company culture. This not only helps convince others to work with you or to buy from you (consumers see that you are down to earth and one of them, instead of a stuffy company), it also helps your HR department recruit new employees. Who doesn’t want to work for a company that celebrates birthdays and has a good time?

Videos are useful for explaining complex how-tos or concepts. Showing step by step directions can have a greater impact than even the most well written article. Businesses don’t have to invest huge sums of money to create good videos, either. I highly recommend the relatively cheap Flip camcorder, which takes great videos and is easy for even a non-technical marketer to use.

Multimedia can break down the faceless business-to-consumer sales flow and make your company appear friendlier. Use videos and images to show that your business is fun, you care about your employees, and most importantly, that you care about your customers.

Example: WorldMusicSupply.com

WorldMusicSupply.com, an online retailer of musical instruments and accessories, has used YouTube to build a strong online community. Their channel has built over 7,000 subscribers and has over 260,000 views.

Strategy 2: Integrate Offline and Online Advertising

Many small businesses do some sort of offline advertising, whether it be radio, print, or cable. Social marketing allows a business to extend their offline sales pitch.

Including your Facebook Page or blog URL in offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to see your community and increase trust in your business. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community. Introducing potential consumers to your social profiles means they may join your community now and buy later.

Strategy 3: Message Adaptation

As businesses start to become more sophisticated with social media they are starting to leverage more online platforms. However, most deliver the same message over multiple platforms instead of tailoring communications for each individual site.

Social platforms each have an ecosystem of their own. What might be acceptable on Tumblr might be considered spam on Facebook. A specific style of writing might spread on Twitter but fail on FriendFeed. Understanding that each site is different and then customizing your message ensures they do well on each respective site.

Not only does customizing messages across sites help the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications. Be sure to maximize your potential by sending a user that follows the business on Twitter and Facebook two different messages, instead of the same thing.

Strategy 4: Local Social Networks, Beyond Yelp

For a small business, local search can be a big win. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Make sure your site is included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you when they need you. Sometimes finding many sites can be difficult.

First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to. Also, make sure your business has been added to Google Maps, using the Local Business Center.

Take the time to include all the information you can and update any old news. For many consumers, this will be their first interaction with the business.

Example: Bella Napoli in New York

Bella Napoli is a small pizzeria in New York that has done a great job of making sure they appear in as many local searches as possible.

Strategy 5: Contests and Discounts

Building a community is only the first part of social marketing. Using that community to drive sales, propagate marketing, or crowdsource operations is the true power of social media. One way to excite the community is to collectively do something to create a contest or offer an exclusive discount (i.e., the contest can create competition between users). Not only does a contest build buzz organically but if contestants need to, for example, publish an article that gets the most comments in order to win, the contest itself becomes viral.

A good social media contest should include some sort of sharing or virality as a requirement for winning.

Discounts are also a great way to connect with your community. By giving exclusive coupons to your social community, you’re rewarding and reminding them that you are not only a brand to engage with, but also to buy from.

Example: NetFirms.com

NetFirms.com decided to make it easier to register a domain by allowing people to do it via Twitter. Those who participated or spread the word by tweeting were also entered into a prize drawing.

Conclusion

Creating a basic social media presence is easy enough, getting your community to actually do something is more difficult. Taking advantage of these strategies can help you build your community, make your marketing more effective, and incentivize buying.

Source: mashable.com

How To Measure Your Organization’s Social Media Success

Your organization or business knows that it’s important to measure the progress you’re making with your social media program or campaign, but what do you measure, why and how?

There’s no single, simple answer, but today we’ll offer a framework to guide you through the thicket of differing approaches you should consider before implementing a metrics program. (If you have other approaches that have worked for you, please add them to the comments!)

Creating goals to advance your mission

First off, don’t obsess about metrics. In fact, forget about the data altogether. What you’re really trying to do is advance your organization’s mission. Metrics are just a tool to help you do that.

Before assigning someone on your staff to take ownership of metrics, ask yourself: What are the key items we need to track to determine if we’re moving the needle? Have I clearly formulated a set of goals to advance my organization’s strategic or business objectives? Once you have a set of goals in place, then, and only then, should you begin considering which tools to use for your measurements.

Start by listing a series of specific, concrete, short-term, measurable, achievable goals that advance your long-term mission. Most of these goals should be short-term and modest in scope. Your organization may want to:

• Grow traffic to your website or blog
• Grow your newsletter list
• Motivate people to donate
• Move people to take a specific action, like signing a petition
• Turn supporters into volunteers
• Increase sale of a product or service
• Build visibility and authority for your brand or cause
• Solicit micro-loans
• Boost your following on Twitter or Facebook
• Spur people to register to attend an event
• Reduce operational costs by crowd sourcing tasks
• Test the efficacy of one donation button vs. another
• Enhance your site’s search engine rankings
• Increase the number of blog comments people post
• Reduce your site’s bounce rate (and increase stickiness)

All of these goals can — and should — be measured. And you’ll notice that while social media will be used to pursue and measure your progress in achieving many of these goals, others don’t involve social media at all. That’s OK. Social media should fold into your overall metrics program, not the other way around.

KPIs: How you’ll measure progress

Now that you have a list of goals, you’ll want to map them to Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. A KPI is simply a metric that you track to assess whether you are accomplishing your business goals. There are literally hundreds of KPIs that you could be tracking in a spreadsheet, but your team will want to identify only a handful that matter most — the ones that will specifically help you achieve your goals.

For instance, if you want to grow your list of supporters, you’ll be able to measure the number of newsletter or RSS subscribers. If you want more interactivity on your blog, you can measure the average number of comments that people post.

Following is a partial list of KPIs/social interaction metrics

• Blog comments
• Downloads
• Email subscriptions
• Likes or Fans
• Favorites (add an item to favorites)
• Followers (follow something / someone)
• Forward to a friend
• Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)
• Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc.)
• Personalization (pages, display, theme)
• Ratings
• Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
• Reviews
• Time spent on key pages
• Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)

There are dozens more, but you get the idea. Some of these social interactions may map to multiple goals. Last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a document detailing social media metrics and definitions.

Get strategic: Determine formulas for calculating success

We know of a lot of nonprofits and companies that simply maintain a spreadsheet, check it occasionally to see if the numbers are trending in the right direction and pay little heed to what they could be learning if they dug a little deeper. That’s what the rest of this article is about.

In an April 2010 whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified and the Altimeter Group, the authors propose aligning KPIs to social business objectives and offer formulas for calculating success.

They set out a simple framework of four Social Business Objectives and associated KPIs:

• Foster dialogue: Share of Voice, Audience Engagement, Conversation Reach
• Promote advocacy: Active Advocates, Advocate influence, Advocate Impact
• Facilitate support: Resolution Rate, Resolution Time, Satisfaction Score
• Spur innovation: Topic Trends, Sentiment Ratio, Idea Impact

How to measure: Yes, social media can be quantified

You may have heard the cliché that social media can’t be measured. Let’s bust that myth. Here are some practical metrics methodologies to get you on your way:

Super Six Steps to Measurement

• Set your objectives
• Define your stakeholders
• Determine which metrics to use
• Benchmark against yourself over time or your competition
• Pick your measurement tool/technology
• Analyze the results and start over

Don’t overlook keyword search

Finally, don’t forget keyword search! It’s one of the key components of search marketing and should be a part of any metrics program you undertake. By analyzing your site and social media accounts for key words and phrases, you’ll be able to correct bad keyword choices and begin to drive more traffic from people searching for information about your cause or sector.

Source: www.socialbrite.org

Ten Advantages of Online Marketing Vs. Traditional Media

A lot of small business people are very curious about online marketing, but they don’t understand how it can directly increase their business. Many of them are seeing less return from their advertisements in traditional media like The Yellow Pages, newspapers and direct mailing campaigns, and are looking to explore new ways of expanding their market share. When the advantages of online marketing are laid out, it is easy to see how it is oftentimes a more cost-effective marketing solution for small businesses.

These are some of the many advantages that online marketing offers over traditional media outlets:

1. Reduced Cost

The starting cost of online marketing is only a fraction of the thousands of dollars that Yellow Pages, television and radio ads cost. For example, you can get a free listing on Google Local that will be just as effective as a costly online Yellow Pages ad. In addition, while traditional ads may only run for a short time, a search engine optimization campaign can deliver long-term results. You can also save money with online Pay-Per-Click advertising where it is easy to experiment with small ad volumes until you perfect your strategy and then expand your marketing budget when you are assured of a positive sales return.

2. Everything Is Measurable

When you place an ad in the newspaper or a magazine, it can be difficult to assess the direct sales impact for your business. With online marketing, everything can be tracked and illustrated in detailed graphs that illustrate traffic growth, leads and sales conversions from your specific search marketing campaigns. Using a free traffic analysis tool like Google Analytics, it is easy to calculate your return on investment (ROI) so you can appreciate the excellent value generated from your online marketing budget.

3. Brand Engagement

In the crowded market, you need to establish and maintain positive brand awareness and client loyalty. Apart from word-of-mouth and leveraging your personal relationships with your established clients, a website is the most important marketing tool a business can have. A regularly updated website with well-written content that maintains people’s interest is essential to showing people exactly how your business is distinctive – and how you offer the best value to your clients.

4. Demographic Targeting

The degree to which an online marketing campaign can target and measure the response from specific demographics and regions is often astonishing to business owners who normally use traditional media. New demographic prediction and online advertising platforms allow you to specifically target the specific consumer demographics most likely to buy your products. In particular, if you want to target young people between the ages of 16-30, you’ll need an online marketing strategy to reach them where they spend the bulk of their time: On the Internet and on social media sites.

5. Real-Time Results

With online marketing you don’t have to wait weeks to see a significant boost in your business. With a paid search marketing campaign you can experience real-time results that enable you to fine-tune your marketing message to achieve your desired effect. If your marketing strategy isn’t working effectively, real-time monitoring tools allow you to easily pin-point exactly where you are going wrong.

6. Easily Refine Your Strategy

Using online marketing analytics and tracking tools you can test conversion rates at a fraction of the cost of a traditional media campaign. Online marketing levels the playing field and allows savvy small businesses to compete in competitive niches that previously would only be open to large corporations and their massive marketing budgets. If your marketing strategy is not bringing in the return on investment (ROI) that you desire, you can work to perfect it without having to launch an expensive new campaign as would be required with most traditional media outlets.

7. Long-Term Exposure

The benefit of an organic search marketing campaign that optimizes a website for specific keywords is that you will achieve a long-term return on your investment. Once your website’s visibility is well-established with search engines, it is easy to do regular low-cost maintenance of your strategy. The early adopters of new online marketing platforms like social media marketing will have a significant head start over their competition.

8. Product Information

Today’s savvy consumers want to compare reviews and opinions of friends, trusted bloggers and industry experts before they make a decision. If you can provide quality, linkable information that is what people are looking for, then the next step of converting users into paying clients can be very easy. With social media networks like Facebook and Twitter re-enforcing the value of positive word-of-mouth exposure, trust is more important than ever in the marketing field.

9. Less Intrusive

Most savvy consumers dislike intrusive traditional marketing methods like direct mailing, print ads and television advertisements. When someone buys a newspaper or magazine, they want to read interesting articles not are bombarded with irrelevant ads. While mediums like television can still be useful for maintaining awareness of large corporate brands, it is not an effective medium for most small and medium-size businesses. With online marketing, you can target consumers precisely when they are searching for products and services that your business can provide.

10. Holds Their Attention

When people read the newspaper or a magazine they may scan over the advertisements beside the article but there is no way to engage their attention. With online marketing you can encourage them to take action, visit your website and read about your products and services which results in vastly increased “stickiness” of your marketing message.

Source: www.marketingsmartt.com