Better Social Media Marketing

Before embarking on any social media marketing campaigns, it is essential to set your goals and define your prospects or target audience. Without a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and who you want to reach, your promotional campaigns will not be focused and the results may be fragmented and weak.

Determining your goals and target audience is a fairly important preliminary process when it comes to social media marketing.
This is not just plotting objectives for the sake of being organized; your goals directly determine the best strategy to take and the community to target.
This article talks about the common goals for social media marketing and includes suggestions on how you can determine your target audience.
Social media marketing goals will often involve different overall strategies and social media channels. It is possible to market with the aim of achieving all the following benefits; they do complement each other and some results naturally arise when other goals are achieved (e.g., better brand awareness eventually brings links).

Let’s take a look at some of the goals you can strive towards:

 Increased Brand Awareness
Content can be created and spread through social media to improve public perception of your brand by evoking specific qualities that make it distinct from others. For new websites or businesses, this pervasive visibility generates brand familiarity. Social media channels can rapidly generate word of mouth and buzz for most brands.

Reputation Management
The goal here is to positively influence the way a potential and existing customer/audience perceives your brand. Work of this nature is less push-orientated and may involve the creation of social media profiles and wikis that rank well on search engines for your brand name.
This also includes monitoring public forums and feedback channels to track and address what is said about your site. Some view this as social media optimization, although I would classify it as pull-marketing.

Improved Search Engine Rankings
When considered within a larger SEO and link building framework, content can be creatively developed and promoted for the purpose of obtaining links from the members of the social news websites.
This means you should primarily target social sites with the highest potential to give you links, instead of smaller-sized communities which only offer interested traffic. While important, your site’s profile need not be entirely relevant to the social media website in question; content can be created specifically to appeal to different audiences.

Increased Relevant Visitor Traffic
If you are only interested in engaging visitors or users for your website, you should invest more time on social communities which have a high topical relevance.
The social site’s topical focus should be inline with what your site covers/offers. For example, instead of promoting your internet marketing articles through wide platform like Digg, try pushing it on more appropriate communities like StumbleUpon, because it will get you people who are more likely to follow your site.

Improve Sales for a Product (goods and services)
To effectively increase your product sales, you should release your offer through an influencer who is respected in the community or work through a sponsorship model (contests etc.). Hard selling a social media audience through an overtly commercial profile is not advisable because it will come across as marketing spam.
One solution is to segment the market and focus on being the number one solution for specific user problems. Naturally, you should mostly target communities which are highly relevant to your niche focus because this increases the likelihood for traffic to convert.
Having distinctive goals allows you to embark on mini-campaigns which target specific communities to fulfill individual goals. For instance, you can run a link building campaign through Digg while simultaneously building brand awareness by leveraging social video communities like YouTube.
Spitting up your campaigns will allow you to more easily examine the general ROI (returns on investment) for each community. Plotting and analyzing your achievements over time will allow you understand which social media channel fulfills your goals the best. This allows you to plan for future marketing initiatives.

Define the target market for your social marketing campaigns

After determining your social media objectives, you need to define your actual target audience. If your website or business has been around for a while, you should already have a rough idea of who you need to reach.
In the context of social media marketing, the goals you’ve chosen will partially determine your target audience as well. For instance, if you’re looking to increase overall sales conversions, you want a social media demographic that is profitable and potentially interested in your product or offer.
If you’re trying to build links, your target audience should be people with the ability to link or influence links. (e.g. bloggers, social media users). While your social media goals may partially determine the crowd to target, your business model is also an important factor to consider. What are you selling and who is likely to be interested?
Sometimes your target audience crosses many demographic segments. If you run a general technology blog your audience profile may be quite varied. You will have programmers, marketers and both male and female tech enthusiasts of all ages.
Some business models have in-built audience profile. Women’s magazines have a more defined audience which can be broken down by gender, age or even geographic location. The communities you target should have users of this mold.

Here are some questions to ask before you begin your social marketing campaign:

1. Who is likely to be most interested in my content?
2. Who do I want to communicate with and why?
3. What kind of audience does this social community have?
4. What are people currently saying about my website or business?
5. Which type of person is likely to purchase my product (goods and services)?
6. What tools or online services do my target audience use?
7. Which websites does my target audience frequent on the net?
8. What do my target audience have in common with each other?

I  like to send some of these questions to a few friends or colleagues and compile their answers. Each individual has a unique perspective and different ways of using the web and their answers will give you a good general idea of your potential online customers and their preferences.
Once you create a general outline of your audience, you can more easily select the social media channels to target. This brings us to the end of the preliminary preparations for your social media marketing campaign.

Understanding the limitations of social media marketing

Social media channels can certainly get you traffic, attention and links but keep in mind that a big part of your potential customers/readers may not know about or use these social websites. This is certainly the case for geo-specific small businesses.
If you’re a plumber in Los Angeles,  they are not going to go on YouTube to find a plumber.
What you can do is to use dynamic content to set up multiple funnels that direct traffic and attention to your website. This may involve creating a blog and producing content which gives you an excuse to be disseminated on high traffic and wide-focus channels like YouTube or Digg.
Your sales page won’t fit in but a humorous article or video about a plumber’s trade is relevant to the general audience. The plumber is just an example. Most businesses will benefit from dynamic content which can be spread through online communities.
The marketing equation and strategy for small businesses goes something like this:

social media visibility = brand awareness + word of mouth = new customer

This is an indirect method to increase sales and your customer base. While extremely powerful as a tool to spread brand awareness, social media marketing should be integrated alongside traditional search marketing goals; you should always try to improve the visibility of your website in the search engine result pages.

Conclusion

Done correctly, social media marketing will get you more customers and increased sales. The results will just not be as immediate as direct response marketing. Patience is a virtue and it is very important to have a lot of it in this situation.

http://www.compukol.com/blog/better-social-media-marketing/

What Honeybees Can Teach Marketers

Honeybees are social insects, always exchanging information with each other for the success of the hive. When a bee finds an attractive new flower with a good supply of pollen, it flies back to the hive and performs a sophisticated waggle dance for the other bees, communicating the distance and direction of the flower from the hive, the type of flower it is, and the potential magnitude of the find. Other bees watch this dance, then navigate to the flower themselves to harvest more of its pollen, which is good because producing a single pound of honey requires roughly two million bee-loads of pollen.

So now imagine for a moment that your company operates a flowerbed, and you are in the business of “selling” your pollen to bees. Your first task is to attract an exploring bee to land and take a look, and for that you need to be sure that your colors are bright and your scent is attractive. That’s advertising.
But the bee is part of a social network, so when it returns to the hive after visiting your flower it’s only going to send for the other bees if your pollen was good. And that’s customer experience.
Advertising and customer experience are both important elements in making your business a success. You can’t grow and prosper without a steady stream of new customers, but you also have to be sure the customers you acquire are in fact satisfied. And the more social your customers are – the more they communicate and interact with each other – the more important the customer experience becomes, relative to advertising.
If customers don’t communicate among themselves, then advertising is all you really need. With an attractive look and a good smell you should be able to get a steady stream of new customers. But once your customers begin to interact with each other, you’ll only prosper if the customer experience you deliver to them is acceptable.
This is the key reason why delivering a truly frictionless customer experience has become so vital to every company’s success in the e-social era. Customers are technologically connected to each other more and more tightly, as social and mobile technologies proliferate.
We’ve all heard of Moore’s Law, of course, attributed to Intel founder Gordon Moore. Fifty years ago Moore noticed that the number of transistors that could be squeezed onto a square inch of silicon was doubling every 18 to 24 months. So every 20 years, computers were becoming a thousand times more powerful – that is, a thousand times faster in processing power and memory, per dollar of cost.
A corollary to Moore’s Law is sometimes known as Zuckerberg’s Law: Every 20 years we interact a thousand times as much with others.
And when it comes to managing the customer-facing side of your business, you can extrapolate this to Peppers’ Law: Every 20 years, customer experience becomes a thousand times more important to a business’s success.

• Moore’s Law: Every 20 years computers get a thousand times more powerful.
• Zuckerberg’s Law: Every 20 years we interact a thousand times more with others.
• Peppers’ Law: Every 20 years customer experience becomes a thousand times more important to business success.

Recent research by Google, in fact, does show a distinct and dramatic rise in the volume of social interactions that surround individual buying decisions. In just the last two years, for instance, the percentage of consumers who say they consult the opinions of their friends and connections prior to making a purchase doubled, from 19% to 37%.
And guess what? When customers ask their friends about a product, they aren’t asking about the advertising. They’re asking about the customer experience.
They want to see the waggle dance.

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130809103036-17102372-what-honeybees-can-teach-marketers?trk=tod-posts-art-

So You Want To Be An Entrepreneur?

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Have you ever had a great business idea and wondered, “could I build that?” Or dreamed of starting something that makes a big impact on the world? Entrepreneurship is a lofty aspiration, but we’re living in a new era in which technology is making it easier than ever to start a business.This new “access” to entrepreneurship is unprecedented. In the not-so-distant past, starting a business required an often-prohibitive amount of capital and resources. You had to rent office space, buy everything to furnish it, and find initial employees who were willing to work like crazy to get your venture off the ground.

Today, thanks to the new roads in to resources that technology provides, people are starting businesses with nothing more than a laptop, an Internet connection, and an idea. The startups of today are more likely to resemble Facebook’s founding story than Hewlett-Packard’s — and that’s primarily because of technology, and especially on-demand resources.
Software-as-a-Service (think Dropbox, Skype) and Platform-as-a-Service (think Amazon EC2) started the shift towards on-demand resources. But the on-demand movement is rapidly expanding, and today even includes talent.
Brandon Nolte is quietly building a startup from scratch, honing his entrepreneurial skills in suburban Philadelphia. While still working full time, the 26-year-old got the idea to build his own mobile app business, supported entirely by online resources. He started hiring a team of online freelancers to create apps (since he personally has no coding experience). Brandon just sent me a note that his business is doing so well that he was able to quit his full-time job two months ago. He mentioned the role online resources played, saying he was able to “bootstrap my small idea and grow it little by little until it was a self-sufficient business.”
Brandon’s not alone. People like him are building businesses everywhere today, not just in Silicon Valley. They’re starting businesses in Wichita, Kansas (which Forbes actually just named as having the third-highest capacity for innovation in the U.S.), and Springfield, Missouri, and Nashville, Tennessee to name a few U.S. cities, and of course all over the world from Berlin and London to Sydney and Toronto.
Largely because they are fueling entrepreneurship worldwide, on-demand resources represent an increasingly larger part of the economy (for example, businesses have spent $1B hiring online freelancers on oDesk).
It may be easier than ever to tap into the resources you need to start a business, but the reality remains that starting a business is really hard work. It’s never going to be an easy road. From my experience, keeping these things in mind can help:

• Ensure a product-market fit. Passion is a critical part of entrepreneurship. Building a business is difficult, and it’s nearly impossible if you don’t feel strongly about what you’re building. However, unless you’re creating a non-profit or prioritizing social entrepreneurship, passion has to coexist in balance with potential profit. The best way to make sure passion doesn’t obscure smart business strategy is to pay close attention to product-market fit — do your homework to make sure customers will actually want your product or service and be willing to pay enough for it to represent a viable market for you.
• Get help — you’re going to need it. Just like raising a child, building a venture takes a village, so don’t try to go it alone. Remember that your ‘team’ is broader than just your direct team members; many people can provide counsel, from advisors and friends to board members and consultants. In addition, delegate whenever possible. You can’t be expected to do it all, and you shouldn’t — no one person is good at everything, so leverage experts who bring skills that would have you pulling your hair out. This is often where startups benefit from hiring contractors, enabling the founding team to focus on critical projects best suited to their expertise.
• Keep an open mind. Not every startup has to look the same to be taken seriously. Want to forego seed funding and instead do Kickstarter? Go for it. Not sure you will ever need an office? That’s fine — plenty of established companies don’t even have them. Entrepreneurs are inherently innovative and disruptive, so don’t be afraid to have your company’s structure reflect that.
  
  http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130805134515-758147-so-you-want-to-be-an-entrepreneur?trk=tod-posts-art-