by tradespeopleinsights | Aug 11, 2010 | Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
I’m sure management has been asking the 64 million dollar question: How is social media helping our business? As marketers, we need to define those base line objectives to get answers to these kinds of questions.
More importantly, is Facebook getting us more action or is it YouTube? If we know where our successes are, then we can spend more time cultivating them.
I recently read a great article from Nichole Kelly in Social Media Examiner, 4 Ways to Measure Social Media and its Impact on Your Brand. I’d like to share some highlights:
You need to build a strategy to measure your goals. We need to agree on terms like brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable your brand is to your target audiences.
Three key areas to evaluate are exposure, influence and engagement. Nichole points out in her article there are many tools (some free, some you have to pay for) that can help you sort out the numbers.
- Exposure – track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals (eliminate duplicates)
- Engagement – how many people took some kind of action based on your message (most important)
- Influence – what was the outcome of the engagement (was it positive, negative or neutral)?
Those are my thoughts. What tools are you using to measure social?
by tradespeopleinsights | Aug 10, 2010 | Uncategorized
For those of you who follow me, you know that I’m a big advocate of LinkedIn for the B-to-B market. You also know that I believe it’s one of the most under-utilized social media sites.
I recently read a post by Jason Falls, How to Make LinkedIn Answers Part of Your Routine, that showed me yet another way to generate both thought leadership and leads. Under the “More” button at the top of your home page is where you’ll find the Answers tab. There are several industry categories you can choose to follow. Since I use Google Reader, I subscribed to the appropriate categories and had them sent to my reader via an RSS feed. I also created a folder called LinkedIn Answers.
Then every morning as I check my reader, I quickly run through the Answers folder to see if there are any questions that I could contribute to. If so, I respond accordingly. I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks now, but it’s surprising the number of discussions I’ve been involved in that I would have missed if I hadn’t been using the Answer page.
I’m always learning new ways to take advantage of this powerful tool. Would you like to share ways you’re using LinkedIn?
If you like this post, please pass it onto a friend.
by tradespeopleinsights | Aug 5, 2010 | Traditional Marketing
Habitat for Humanity does great work in local communities to help improve both individual’s lives as well as the community in general.
Sonnhalter Habitat for Humanity Tool Drive
Since
Sonnhalter’s major focus is on manufacturers who make things for contractors, we thought it would be a good idea to help support our local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, so we’re having a tool drive in the month of August to try to raise money, and more importantly, to gather tools (both new and used) to help in their building efforts, as well as to support them through their retail stores. If you’d like to join us in our efforts, please contact Anastasia Duller from Sonnhalter at 440.234.1812 x130 or
[email protected], or visit
www.Sonnhalter.com/ToolDrive for more information.
Or if you’re interested in finding a local chapter so you too can help out in your area, click
here.
Thanks in advance for your support!
by tradespeopleinsights | Aug 3, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
It’s been a tough 18-plus months for everyone in this channel, contractors, distributors and manufacturers alike. But manufacturers who pulled back their advertising and promotion budgets back then and haven’t restarted them, may be in for some surprises.
Tradesmen are still buying stuff. It may not be at 2008 levels, but not all contractors are sitting back at the office waiting for their phone to ring. And guess what? Americans have a short memory span, and if they haven’t seen or heard from you in a while, they tend to forget you exist.
They’re buying product, question is, it yours or your competitors? There’s a lesson to be learned here from history, and I’d like to share with you a conversation I had recently with someone in the industry.
I recently spoke with an editor from a key publication in the tradesmen market. While this was not the purpose of the call, the conversation naturally led to the topic that has been on all of our minds for the past couple of years – the economy. In discussing where we think the economy is going and how manufacturers that serve the tradesmen should react with their marketing and advertising as a result of the economic downturn, an interesting tidbit came out of this editor.
He mentioned that he has archives of his magazine that date back to 1920, before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. He has clawed through these issues and found it fascinating that the companies that kept advertising throughout the great depression are still around today – in some form or fashion. By that I mean they either got acquired or are still in business today under the same name that they operated under in the 1920s. Some of these companies are very well known brand names today in the tradesmen industry – companies like Kohler, Haws, Price-Pfister Brass Mfg. Co., Rheem and Crane.
The lesson from this is pretty clear – advertising throughout a down economy can help your business survive, and even thrive in some cases. These companies kept their marketing spend up and as a result, made it through the crisis. Companies that did not, for the most part, ended up closing their doors.
This can be likened to the old Wall Street saying “buy low, sell high” in that a down economy can be viewed as an opportunity instead of something to dread. When your competitors remove themselves from advertising and their target’s eye, it is an opportunity for you to stay front of mind, and to steal market share. And you better believe that if you are a market leader, that your share is threatened if you do not spend the money on marketing and advertising.
While we are seeing some light in this economy, if you haven’t already been advertising, you need to get your message out there and either defend your market share or steal market share from your competitors. Don’t become irrelevant.
If you like this post, please pass it onto to a friend.
by tradespeopleinsights | Jul 29, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Since anyone can be a spokesperson on social media, your company should have established guidelines that outline rules for online engagement.
If you’re in a larger company, that means getting everyone from the executive suite to HR, and of course, customer service and marketing. If you’re a smaller one, you still need guidelines, but maybe not to the extreme of larger companies.
The first question is where to begin. You can look at what other big companies have done like IBM or Intel and cut and paste from publicly shared sites. Or you can look to associations like the PRSA or HR sites to give you guidelines.
Another option is developing your own set of guidelines. In reality, you’ll probably do both. The key when developing guidelines is to borrow from the best and adapt them to your company.
You need to find a balance because you are writing guidelines for a media of which you have no control over. This isn’t like writing a HR policy where you can dictate terms/conditions. Social is an open sharing of information and is one’s opinions on a subject which falls under the freedom of speech and privacy issues. Yes you as a company have the right to protect trade secrets and other proprietary info.
Here are some things you need to consider:
- Define who will be the “official spokesperson” for your company and outline the topics they can speak about.
- Define a process for crisis issues like a Twitter storm on a specific product.
- Identify internally who will be responsible for granting permission on industry trends, new products, etc.
- How can your employees engage in conversations without speaking for the company?
Here are some links that might be helpful:
by tradespeopleinsights | Jul 28, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
I’ve been talking about the benefits of social media in the B-to-B space now for almost 18 months and yet there are some companies out there that still don’t “get it.”
I wanted to share a success story with you of a traditional trade association, the PMPA (Precision Machined Products Association) and their results from starting a social program a little over a year ago (disclosure: they are a client of ours). These types of associations aren’t very sexy and they have plenty of competition out there for members to help them run their business better.
To better position themselves within the metalworking world as a thought leader and as part of a new business strategy, we recommended they jump on the social media bandwagon.
They did, and the following is an article written by Miles Free (Director of Industry Research and Technology, and principal contributor to their blog, Speaking of Precision) in their monthly magazine to members and potentials advocating they too jump on the social media bus.
PMPA content has been before people who are interested in it over 1,500,000 times in just one year at next to no out-of-pocket cost…
In just one year, we can document over 65,000 page views on PMPA’s Blog, SPEAKINGOFPRECISION.COM.
We’ve used Twitter to help connect people to our Blog content, and we’ve made hundreds of thousands of contacts using that tool. Once a week, one of our selected Blog topics gets uploaded to LinkedIn, where it is seen and shared by over 25,000 people in the machining, medical defense, and aerospace markets that belong to groups on LinkedIn. We can conservatively say that PMPA content has been before people who are interested in it over 1,500,000 times since we started our social networking program a year ago.
And on our blog we’ve posted some pretty good content – our posts on austenitic grain size, welding resulfurized steels, bar straightness, temper color, and material impacts – these all come up on page 1 of Google search results. Often in the top handful of non-paid links.
Page one on Google is the gold standard for information in the information age of today.
These social networking tools have helped us connect with members, potential members, your potential customers, suppliers, and the larger market for Precision Machining. The out-of-pocket expense was very small, trivial really. And the staff time required once we set it up is just a few hours a week.
So why haven’t you picked up these Social Networking Tools You Can Use? We’ve demonstrated that they can create connection, start a conversation, and introduce us to new clientele. Our getting topical page one rankings on Google shows that the knowledge that your shop has is just as likely to command attention in the Marketplace of Ideas online. Certainly you have special capabilities and expertise that when properly shared and targeted can help those people (and companies) who need and want to find you, to connect.
For several years, we’ve been working on the idea of connecting. Our member surveys always show Networking as a highly valued PMPA deliverable. Networking is done by connecting.
We’ve just had a one-year demonstration of what social media tools can do for an industry association. The numbers are as impressive as the costs are low. We hope that you will follow our experience by using these new tools to connect with tomorrow’s buyers who haven’t yet figured out that you can help them, and won’t take your salesman’s call if he finds them.
Social Media tools make you bigger in your market. The 30,000 people who see a message from us weekly are larger than the few thousands of people who were already in the PMPA “tent.” And they have conversations and network with people with similar wants and needs. Of course you want to reach them!
Consider social networking. Not just an email blats of a newsletter. A blog perhaps or enhancements to your website. At the very least, you need to be on LinkedIn. Join relevant groups. CUSTOMER GROUPS. Industry groups, any group that might conceivably be related to your business. Develop content. Share it weekly with your new Network. Do it now.
From PMPA’s first-year experience, there may be a million and a half or so of your potential followers, customers, and maybe even potential employees out there waiting to find you. And, perhaps, 60,000 or so opportunities to teach those who are really interested in what you might have to say – the stuff that makes you an expert and that they really need to know.
Social networking. It’s not about selling. It’s about cultivating your market. Connecting. Establishing your expertise. Finding your voice. Being found. Connecting.
Social Networking – it’s Tools You Can Use. Pick your tool. Give it a try.
