by tradesmeninsights | Oct 7, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
I’m totally amazed when talking to people that they complain that they’re not getting anything out of LinkedIn. LinkedIn, like anything else, responds to someone who is active. In other words, you need to participate and engage people in order for the network to be effective. For those of you who follow me know that I personally think LinkedIn is one of the most useful business tools out there.
I recently read a post by Stephanie Sammons on Social Media Examiner entitled, 5 Ways to Develop a Meaningful LinkedIn Connection where she’s highlighted and given examples of how to take the connection phase to the relationship phase. Here are some highlights of her 5 suggestions:
- Timing is everything – Once you make a new connection, then it’s the time to try to engage them. Ask a question or give a compliment.
- Leverage events – If you see that a connection of yours is going to an event that you’re planning on attending, send them a message and let them know you’re going and see if you can’t meet face to face.
- Sync Geography with travel – Using the “my connections” tab, you can find where people live and if you’re planning say a trip to Dallas on business, you could let your connection know you’ll be in town and see if you might be able to meet for coffee or breakfast.
- Ask for advice – What a great way to engage people. Most people love to give their opinions.
- Be a resource – It’s better to give then to take. If you can offer real value, you’ll become a resource for people which will help you move from online networking to offline conversations.
The biggest issue facing us all is to challenge yourself to participate. LinkedIn works for those who work at it.
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by tradesmeninsights | Oct 6, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Blogs are still a very effective way of reaching an audience, especially if you’re in a niche market. While it may be true that social networks and microblogs have outpaced the traditional blog, the opportunity for you to build thought leadership and branding is better served by blogs.
More than 50% of web users will read blogs this year. According to eMarketer, by 2014, 150 million Americans, or 60% of the population of the U.S., will be reading blogs. Blogging has become an accepted part of the online media landscape and blogging is easy to do.
“Trends in blog reading are expected to maintain an upward course as blogs continue to gain influence in mainstream media,” said Paul Verna, a senior analyst with eMarketing and author of “The Blogosphere: Colliding with Social and Mainstream Media.”
What’s the upside for someone looking to make an impact using social media: think about doing a blog.
Here are some other posts about blogging you might find interesting:
Pros and Cons of Starting a Blog
6 Tips to Make your Blog More Successful in Reaching the Professional Tradesmen
LinkedIn: Great Tool to Drive Traffic to Your Website
by tradesmeninsights | Sep 29, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Your company may see the value in social media, but they may not have yet taken the first step. The real question is, are they ready for it? You don’t want a READY-FIRE-AIM strategy.
I recently read an article from Lee Odden in the Online Marketing Blog titled, 19 Questions to Determine Corporate Social Media Readiness that I thought was appropriate for this audience.
Identifying a company’s current state of social media readiness helps them establish a baseline on which to build. There are a number of either free or low cost tools out there that can help you identify your company or brand’s current social activity level. It’s important to get a handle on the difference between how social the company is and will need to become so you can put together a strategy and plan.
Lee outlines 19 questions you should be asking. I’ve highlighted the top 5 that got my attention:
- What goals do you want to achieve with social media as part of your marketing effort?
- How will you measure/evaluate social media?
- Are you conducting a formal effort at monitoring social media channels?
- What are your current social media channels and destination websites/pages?
- Is there a particular business unit or product that can serve as a test case?
I’d be curious what questions you’d come with to add to the list.
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by tradesmeninsights | Sep 22, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Your Blog is a repository of helpful content that can effectively attract a large number of prospective customers.
Here are 5 simple steps and suggestions to improve your company’s blog as a major tool for fueling new business leads:
1. Creating
Each new blog post is a new opportunity for you to be found online by your best prospects. Some quick suggestions:
- Write to a specific target audience and provide answers to their advertising/marketing challenges.
- Write consistently: is important to creating regular readership. Write at least 3 to 5 posts per week.
- Post should average 350 to 450 words and be pleasantly scannable to the eye. Break up long paragraphs, use bullet/numbered list when possible. Highlight key words and thoughts.
- Write in the inverted pyramid style, lead with your conclusion. People read differently online than they do for print. They tend to scan much more.
- Identify and consistently use key words in your post title. You want to be able to dominate these words in Google search.
- Let your reading fuel your writing.
- Write 1 original post to every 4 to 5 resource posts. You’ll never be considered a thought leader without original content, but you won’t generate much traffic if all of your content is just your original thought. A balance of both needs to be provided through your blog.
- Write with an “evergreen” style that will have a long shelf-life and provide a great return on your time investment.
- Provide the “Readers Digest” version for your writers. Do the work on behalf of your readers and pull out the nuggets in simple language that is concise and easy to read.
2. Optimizing
- Carefully think through your blog’s heading. A “heading” is a stand-alone phrase that describes your blog’s content that appear below it. I usually advise clients to create a blog descriptor statement for the header that lets a reader and search engines know the purpose and intent of the content. Mine is “Marketing to the professional tradesman in the construction, industrial and MRO markets.”
- Be sure you own your domain. A person that still has “wordpress or blogspot” in their domain won’t be able to change blogging platforms without losing traffic.
- Be sure your site is indexed with Google. If your pages are not indexed, then Google is not crawling them.
- Build quality inbound links. There are lots of online business directories where you can just submit your URL, agency’s name and a description of your services. There are also many social media sites where you can simply build links to your site. Writing guest articles and posts and optimizing our press releases can build links. The best way however, is to produce valued content and create a blog that is a repository of helpful information for your target audience.
3. Promoting
- Make sure your content can be easily shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, as well as social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon with Share buttons.
- Jumpstart traffic by repurposing your blog’s content through an email newsletter that is sent every-other-week. This is an easy thing to do. Since you already have the content and can create an email template that is reused, it will take literally minutes to prepare the newsletter and send.
- Build a sizable Twitter following that is targeted using TweetAdder and repurpose your blog content to your Twitter account using a program such as Social Oomph.
- Write guest posts, invite others to guest post for your blog.
- Comment on other blog posts and online articles, sites such as STAFDA or HVAC Professionals on LinkedIn, etc. Select those sites that are frequented by your target audience.
- Write content for searchability.
- Publish new blog content to your other social media accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Conduct your own primary research using your blog; generate links and traffic through press releases using your groups on LinkedIn.
- Be proactive in facilitating speaking opportunities by creating a Speakers Page for your blog, list the topics and titles that you can speak to. You can also provide links to your past speaking engagements through YouTube, post photos through your Flickr Photostream.
- Pull blog content together, expand SEO opportunities, creating Slideshare Presentations, Whitepapers, etc.
4. Converting
All of this activity isn’t worth the time investment if it doesn’t turn visitors into leads.
- Place your RSS Subscription Feed button above the fold, near the top of you blog’s homepage. Visitors who subscribe will automatically receive updates every time you publish a new post either through an RSS Reader or through their email inbox. I would suggest setting up an RSS feed through Feedburner.
- Also place a subscription for your email newsletter within your blog’s sidebar to create Opt-Ins from site visitors.
5. Measuring
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Fortunately you can measure a lot online and continually hone your program.
- Review your blog site’s analytics daily to see what posts are generating the most traffic, what search terms are being used, where traffic is coming from, who is linking to you, links readers clicked on, page views, etc.
- Utilize your email newsletter analytics to improve open and click-through rates. Test the day of the week your email newsletter is sent, time-of-day and subject line copy.
- Create a first-step call-to-action for your readers to know how to initially engage you. This could be something similar to my Industry White Papers. Make it something simple and of value that doesn’t take a lot of consideration but does separate to qualified prospects from those that just want to glean what they can from you for free.
- Use this suite of tools to analyze your marketing efforts:
by tradesmeninsights | Sep 21, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Traditional Marketing
Sometimes we get caught up in selling product and making quotas and we lose site of what we’re really selling. If we’re just selling widgets, we’d better have one no one else has. If not, why should someone buy from you?
Today we have a guest post from Alan Sipe, President and General Manager of Knipex LP in Chicago. Alan is a dear friend, an old client and knows a few things about selling high-priced hand tools. Alan will share some thoughts with you regarding Value Propositions.
A lot is written about the topic of presenting your company’s Value Proposition and surely you have passed this along to all the semi-professional golfers and lunch buyers in your sales department…haven’t you?
So how do you know if your sales team has read the articles, thought about and formulated a basic company Value Proposition statement to use in their daily sales calls?
Simple…grab the first sales team member that walks by your office door and ask this question:
- “If a customer were to say to you that generally our prices are a little higher overall than our competitors,” how would you reply to that statement specifically?
- Be quiet now and don’t help them with an answer.
- Do not let the salesperson ask you a whole bunch of qualifying questions!
- Have them answer that specific question.
Hopefully your salesperson will have a quick and precise answer like:
- We maintain heavy stocks on the inventory you need and buy from us.
- We deliver on time and packed correctly.
- Our invoices are correct the first time to save your accounting office time and money.
- We either have or have quick access to the product technical answers you need.
- I bring you new ideas and products to help you do your job better.
- We have the best repair shop in town.
- You can count on us to be here when you need us, we have been in business for XX years.
- And maybe even…We stuck by you with a good credit line when the business was tough.
If you get an answer like any of these, you have work to do:
- Let me go back and review your pricing.
- We give you the best prices we can.
- Our suppliers are raising their prices to us.
- Let me think about that and get back to you.
- What competitor is cutting their price?
- If I give you a 5% discount overall, would that help? (If you get this answer, you really have problems and give your team way too much pricing authority, but this is an article for another day)
Put on your sales manager’s hat, write down a list of your company’s Value Propositions and make sure your sales team can rattle them off quickly and with conviction. Don’t be a sissy…make it happen!
What are your thoughts on Value Propositions? Does your company have one? Do you know what it is?
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by tradesmeninsights | Sep 16, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Twitter
Used in the right way, Twitter can be one of the best social media tools to be used to generate traffic and leads for your new business.
For the past 18 months, Twitter has been the leading traffic generator to my Tradesmen Insights blog. It definitely needs to be part of your overall social media marketing strategy.
For Twitter to be effective for new business, the following are seven of my personal tips:
- Don’t be afraid to use Twitter differently from the way it was originally intended to be used. Twitter is more of a broadcast tool that most would admit and current research validates. Treat it as a broadcast tool through reach and frequency of your content marketing efforts and generating the best return on your time investment by repurposing your content through tools such as Social Oomph.
- Build a targeted Twitter following. Research Twitter lists such as Mashable’s Twitter List Directory, third-party programs such as TweetAdder.
- In addition your own blog’s content, be sure to supplement your Twitter posts with resources from others that are of help to your target audience.
- Pay-it-forward. As others are so kind to publicize your content, also help to promote theirs.
- In addition to Twitter being a broadcasting tool, it must be utilized as a networking tool for you to have success. Content helps build awareness but it is up to you to turn awareness into relationships. The efficiency of these kinds of online networks should be all that is needed to motivate you to participate. People want to work with other people that they know, like and trust.
- Use third-party Twitter tools like CoTweet and HootSuite to minimize your time and maximize the effectiveness of your Twittering.
- What you learn to do for your agency can be used for your clients. There are a multiplicity of benefits from your involvement.
