by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 20, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Social media, if used correctly, can be an untapped treasure for marketers. All too often though, marketing departments treat social media just like any other channel they use to PUSH their marketing message. What they don’t seem to understand about social is that it’s about engagement and interacting with real people!
I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen, titled How Marketers Miss the Boat with Social Media Relationships that outlined 7 things not to do if you want to succeed with social media. Here are some highlights:
- Don’t talk about you – Talk with them, not to them. Be social and listen. Ask them questions and engage them in a conversation.
- Don’t speak in “marketese”– Marketing lingo is selling lingo and it turns people off big time. Talk like a human being. Pretend you’re at a cocktail party. Be funny, inquisitive, be human.
- Don’t force YOUR point of view – Listen to what people are saying through brand monitoring and respond accordingly.
- Don’t think you can buy customer trust – In the social arena, trust is earned. Pay attention to what customers are saying and if something needs fixed, fix it. There’s no better way of building credibility.
- Don’t knock your competion – It doesn’t work in the real world and it certainly isn’t going to work in this one. Focus instead on ways you can help your customer.
- Don’t think a social media relationship will result in a sale – Social prospects are not unlike a regular prospect. Not all folks you meet are ready to buy right now. You need to identify where they are in the selling cycle and give them the type of info they need to go to the next step.
- Don’t assume that social media relationships are limited to social media networks – Appreciate the fact that people have a life outside social media and have real life relationships. In those relationships, what they’ve learned in social media circles may come out in conversations. Wouldn’t you like it if they were telling their business associates about this great product they found or a solution to a problem they had and they were talking about your brand?
The bottom line is the marketing team needs to be on the same page and treat social media differently.
Do you have any other suggestions on what not to do?
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 15, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
We all like to know what our competitors are doing, and more importantly, what customers are saying about them. Until the advent of social media, it was hard to track conversations from customers. There are several platforms, tools and tactics that you can implement to help you keep ahead of the competition.
Adam Holden-Bache in a recent article in Social Media B2B outlines 6 Ways to Beat Your Competition Using Social Media. Here are some highlights:
- Do your research – Set up tools and key words/phrases to monitor both the competition as well as the industry.
- Identify opportunities – If you see a topic or trend gaining traction, promote your capabilities.
- Produce more educational content – Decision makers are doing more research online. The more relevant content you can provide, the better the chances of you being considered.
- Showcase your service and support – B2B companies that excel in providing prompt customer service should promote it as it will influence a purchasing decision.
- Ask for feedback, then use it – Customers can be a good resource for honest feedback.
- Engage your customers – If your customers like you, they will tell their friends and business associates. They are what we call brand advocates and they turn out to be one of your best resources.
Free Monitoring Tools to Track Your Competition (or Yourself)
www.Topsy.com is a real-time social search that lets you see what people are saying about a topic across social platforms which provides qualitative feedback.
www.socialmention.com is another real-time search that analyzes strength, sentiment, passion and reach, as well as provides averages, keywords, top users and other metrics that all show impact and reach of social activity.
www.google.com/trends analyzes search and news reference volumes for topics and produces the top regions and cities allowing you to see how popular a topic or brand is as well as where it is popular.
www.howsociable.com measures social visibility of brands allowing you to see how active brands are on 20 different platforms.
These are some ideas on how to monitor the competition. What are you doing using social media?
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 14, 2011 | Marketing Tools, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
Contractors are busy people and they rely more and more on devices that they can use in the field. Between smartphones, tablets and even internet cards for your laptop, you had better have a mobile strategy either in place or on the drawing board or you will be missing opportunities to communicate and connect with your audience.
No one could sum it up any better than Noah Elkin, eMarketer principal analyst for mobile, “The rapid expanding smartphone and mobile internet user populations raise the stakes for marketers and make mobile web more of an imperative than ever.”
Here are some facts you need to consider:
- Almost 100 million consumers will be on the mobile web this year
- Smartphones represent 38% of mobile users this year
- In 2010, 96% of all tablets were iPads (15 million)
According to Bill Siwicki, managing editor of Mobile Commerce, The up-and-coming web programming language HTML5 enables developers to create mobile web sites that are more like apps, and to create apps that require little modification to operate on a variety of mobile operating systems. However, an HTML5-based app can’t do everything an app written specifically for Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android can, he adds.
So the question is, what’s your plan? Don’t miss out on an opportunity to touch and engage your audience.
Here are some other posts that might be relevant:
Mobile Marketing to the Professional Tradesman: What Are You Waiting For?
56 Mobile Marketing Facts
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 13, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
One long-term strategy that folks sometimes overlook is that of leveraging content curation as a way of building followers and “expertise standing ” in your field. Content curation for those of you who may not know what I’m talking about is the art and science of finding and sharing quality content on a specific subject.
Most of our clients are manufacturers, and when they get into the social media scene, they are usually focused on original content so they can show the world how much they know and why their product is better than the other brands. While this content info may be good, most people who might follow you don’t always want to hear about you or get a sales pitch. What you may want to consider isbecoming a trusted and reliable source of info on a specific subject or market. The “go to” guy.
Manufacturers, for example who make several product lines, say for the plumbing market, could become the reliable source for industry info. Info that would be from the associations, wholesalers or contractors. I recently read a guest post from Neicole Crepeau on Convince and Convert site that outlines things to help you be successful at content curation. Highlights include:
- Identify your audience – for most of you that shouldn’t be hard to do. You can’t be a ” jack of all trades.”
- Focus on content sharing – share relevant content as 70% of people will only ever click on a topical category. 56% of all retweets contain links so it’s important that your followers are spreading the word (and links) to their contacts.
- Make sure content is impeccable – promote the gems so readers don’t have to sift through lots of content that may not be meaningful.
- Be consistent – you need to do this on a regular basis to build followers.
So if you’re looking for another way of becoming a credible source in your field, you may want to consider Content Curation.
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 8, 2011 | Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
Social media is measurable. Isn’t that the mantra everyone talks about? I think everyone would agree that social media is a little easier to get your hands around as to where the lead originated as opposed to traditional media. I sometimes think there’s too much info out there.
Social has several tools to help you measure and monitor your activities and hopefully help you take action. My question is collecting data is one thing, but what you do with it (or not) makes all the difference.
Are you looking at where your referral sources are? Are they from groups on LinkedIn that you belong to or from places like Stumbleupon? If they are coming through search, which engines are picking you up? What key words/phrases are being used?
emarketer.com recently had a post on How Social Media Marketers Can Make the Most out of Monitoring Tools that I thought was interesting. They cited a June 2011 study by RSW/US and Web Liquid of Senior Marketers. Not surprising, Google Alert was the most popular tool being used by them. It was good to see that marketers were indeed using these monitoring tools to take some sort of action. See the chart below.
Tracking is the first step, but it needs to be followed by actions. What are you doing with your social info?
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 7, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Hopefully everyone has jumped onto the social media bandwagon in some sort or fashion. But lot’s of B-to-B companies are struggling with how they approach this new media.
A recent article in AdAge by Noah Brier sums it up,“In a nutshell, they need to act less like brands and more like people.” You need to teach your brand to speak. Brands are not people, although their companies are made up of them. Most companies are driven by the traditional results orientated model of ultimately doing something that results in a sale.
A recent article in Social Media Explorer by Mark Ivey titled, Why Brands Can’t Connect, brings home issues that companies must address to insure the brand’s success in the social media arena. Here are some highlights:
- Don’t be concerned with the mechanics of doing 10 tweets a week or 3 posts a day to your Facebook account.
- Traditional marketing doesn’t work in the social setting.
- Stop thinking like marketers and start thinking like creative humans.
- Think about “What keeps your audience up at night”
- You need to understand that social means your ability to engage your reader, not preach to him on the features and benefits of doing business with you
- Brands typically have a narrow focus while people tend to look at the bigger picture
Noah Brier sums it up very well:
“So what’s a brand to do? For starters, brands can learn from the best publishers on the web, like Huffington Post or Gawker/Gizmodo. These outlets combine small amounts of stock content with large amounts of flow content. The former is used to attract new audience and the latter to keep them engaged. To achieve this, brands need to start thinking about their inputs, or who they pay attention to, as much as their outputs, how they look, act and talk. They have to think of their channels less as CRM and more as owned media.”
The big question is how are you doing?
