Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy
When I devoted an entire chapter in my book, Marketing 2.0, to developing a social media marketing strategy, my intent was to inspire marketers. In other words, I want marketers to avoid making the most common mistake, which is the mindset that you need a Twitter or Facebook strategy. You don’t. You need a social media marketing strategy!

Consider assembling the marketing team and your CEO and asking these questions:
•    Why do we think we need a social media strategy?
•    What is our objective?
•    What will the costs be?
•    What are the staffing requirements?
•    What are the risks?
•    What are the opportunities?
•    What are our competitors doing in social media?

Old School Meets New School
While Marketing 2.0 is a new-school marketing paradigm, there is no substitute for old-school research to gain valuable insights before you develop your social media strategy. Begin with research about your customers, target customers, competitors, resellers and influencers. Take no less than a few days (at a minimum) to study the landscape in your industry. Conduct searches in Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for the names of the CEOs of any company in your industry that is relevant. Include your competitors, your suppliers, and any other relevant company, including analysts and publications. This research should provide valuable insight into where your customers and relevant community are spending time on the social web. You’ll learn what they’re talking about and what groups exist by topic or by company. You’ll learn what your competition is doing or not doing. Eventually, you will gain valuable insight that will drive your social media strategy.

Why Do We Think We Need a Social Media Strategy?
This question is somewhat akin to asking, what business are we in? When you consider why you need a social media strategy, you should take some time and revisit this question about your core business.  A social media strategy serves one simple purpose; it enables your company to engage in authentic conversations with your community so you can improve your ability to attract, retain and serve your customers.

So Begin Your Social Media Strategy by Listening!
On one hand, it’s obvious why we should be listening. It’s the same reason we should be reading industry news—to stay informed. But remember that News 1.0 came at you from only one direction. The people whose job it was to deliver the news wrote it, and you read it. That’s where it ended. In News 2.0, we are empowered to participate in the story. When you listen to the comments made by people who react to a news story, you are listening to your market in real time.

If your top competitors are actively producing content in social media, your risk may be greater if you choose not to. Your absence from online conversations may damage your brand. In short, competitive pressures may influence your decision to become a content producer.

What is Our Objective?
You’ve done your research, and you’ve identified why you need a social media strategy. Now, it’s time to clearly define your objectives. Your objectives should fall into one of these categories:
•    Competitive differentiation
•    Market share growth
•    Expansion of your brand

Competitive Differentiation
A competitive differentiation strategy requires you to increase your visibility on the social web in your market segment through online content commenting and new content creation. Identify the best sources of web-based content in your industry, including vertical industry media and associations. Task a member of your staff to monitor the content and the conversations in these online communities. Identify the subject matter experts in your organization who can get engaged in the conversations in these online communities or contribute new content. Consider a blog strategy if you have the staff to devote to it. Find a voice for your organization that can become a consistent voice in your market, delivering a consistent message on specific topics. Allow this voice to be active and free with ideas and valuable insights into the things about which the people in your industry care. Remember, this is not a direct sales strategy, though your management team may view it this way. Your differentiation goal is to allow the market to see how you think, how you serve, how you listen, how you respond, and generally how you add value to your market. Talking about your products in ways that interest your community is advisable. Shouting to them about features is not. Your goal is to make it easy for others to learn how your organization is different from your competitors.

Market Share Growth
In setting out to grow your market share, you must be committed to proper staffing and producing diversified content on the social web. You must do proper planning and be willing to experiment, even if it means taking risk and failing some along the way. The objective is to attract more of your community to your organization. To do this, you need a bigger footprint on the web. If your differentiation strategy was primarily based on a blog, you may need to expand your strategy. You might commit to producing videos. Groups are available in social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook and can offer very easy ways to expand your reach. Similarly, you may find groups in industry-specific social sites where your staff can participate. This requires commitment, which carries with it some staffing implications. But this can be accomplished by adjusting your staffing requirements, cutting nonperforming marketing activities and reallocating staff resources to producing more social media content.

Brand Expansion
To expand your brand using social media requires a big commitment and carries some risk. The content strategy is the key to success in brand expansion! You’ll need to decide which social media platforms to use, who will create the content, and who will be the public face of your content. Presumably you’ve done your homework to find the audience you want to reach, and you’re committed to producing the content that will reach them. You’ll need to experiment to find the right mix of content and platforms to reach your desired audience. You may find that some content is more effective than others in expanding your brand. You’ll need to take some risk and measure results along the way to determine the effectiveness of expanding your brand through social media.

Let Your Content Go
The reality is that most businesses have more content than we know what to do with. We have white papers, news releases, websites, newsletters, and countless internal documents, not to mention the brilliant but often undeveloped content residing in between our ears. The power of social media marketing lies in letting it all go. Share your content with the world. So if you have good content for your community, share it, promote it, but most of all, just let it go.

Ready, Aim, Fire
Do your homework. Set your goals. Set your content strategy. Assemble the team. Cut non-performing activities to make room for a social media strategy. Then, get started. You’ll make some mistakes. But, with good planning you’ll make fewer and less costly mistakes and you’ll accelerate your results.

I’ll write a blog post soon about how to measure social media marketing results…

Help Me Select Social Media Marketing Book Cover Design

My new social media marketing book is coming out this summer. And, I need your help selecting the book cover design.

The book title is Marketing 2.0: Bridging the Gap between Seller and Buyer through Social Media Marketing. The book is written for small and medium size businesses. It is a how-to book for marketers who have not yet fully developed their social media marketing strategy. The book provides guidelines for developing your strategy and real world case study examples from other SMBs for inspiration.

You’ll hear more about the book soon. For now, I want you to help me select the book cover design. Below are two slightly different versions of the book design. Please use the comments section below to give me your opinion on which one I should select.

I look forward to your input. Thanks!

Rick Short is Long on Social Media Marketing Success

This podcast interview is with Rick Short, Marketing Communications Director at Indium Corp. The interview is an excerpt from my forthcoming social media marketing book and covers the history and success of Indium’s social media marketing strategy.

Indium is a 75 year old manufacturer of electronics assembly materials. Rick has been there 25 years and has seen many evolutions in marketing during this time at Indium.

Rick started at Indium as a tech support specialist. He quickly learned that their customer is extremely educated, passionate and concerned with details. Indium’s experience with social media is about four years old. He emphasizes that social media allows us to be social with people. Indium’s culture has always been about helping people understand how to use their products in relevant ways.

Rick needed to help people at Indium understand that the tools in social media are available….No blog communication was strategy needed. This would violate social culture…Rather, they implemented a social media policy. But, they needed to convince the CEO that social media is real in B2B. To do that, Rick used this simple logic.

People talk on the phone…People email customers…People send faxes..People speak at conferences…People write in magazines…And, there are no formal policies for these methods of communication.

But blogging can live forever! Yes, but, so can the other media…It’s not a reason to inhibit the use of blogging.

Blogging is the most prevalent social media platform at Indium. The ultimate goal is to produce face to face contacts and relationships. Blogging is a version of communication that is close to face to face. It advances close contact. You can include video, photos, invite comments, post emails and phone numbers to invite customers to engage in conversations offline.

Indium now has 10 blogs with 15 people hosting them. The blogs are comprised of specific market segments to address the needs of these market segments. The bloggers write about the nuances of each market segment.

Rick has a very creative way of motivating engineers to blog. He provides inspiration them inspiration. The effectiveness of blogging has proved itself at Indium over the last four years. Blogging has actually replaced some tasks that are no longer good use of time or effective.  As results have become self evident the time management and the way you structure staff has also evolved.

At the annual attendance of the biggest trade show of the year in North America, Indium’s content was the primary focus. The content is asset which drives sales opportunities. Indium no longer spends a lot of money with big trade show booths. They actually cut trade show spending by 75%. Instead they sent more people to the technical sessions to engage in human conversations. Although trade show attendance was down 30% Indium generated as many leads as in years past!

Rick’s mantra: Rick receives content and hands off contacts. The sales team builds the relationships that produces sales.

Measuring Results
Rick measures traffic, and other traditional web metrics. But the primary metric is how many contacts (leads) he produces for the sales department.

Rick’s advice to executives who have not yet implemented a social media marketing strategy.

• Don’t rush to do it just because others have told you to do it. Your heart must be in it!
• It’s ok to make some mistakes. Fail forward.
• Begin at the end. What does your situation look like two years from now? Write it down.
• Build confidence through education, support, relationships. Cultivate skills.
• Refresh frequently. Challenge status quo. Are there newer/better tools?
• Measure results.
• Be very trasnparent. You’ll get a lot of help and support from others.
• Be committed. Start small by listening and commit resources to taking some action.

Indium also creates videos, both educational and humorous videos. They get tons of positive feedback for poking fun at themselves. Rick say’s “people feel respected when we poke fun at ourselves.”

Indium Corp’s successes using social media are an inspiration to any business who thinks that social media marketing is only for big brands or only for B2C brands. If a 75 year old electronics assembly manufacturer with a very technical customer can have success with social media, chances are you can too.

If you haven’t listened to the podcast interview for the full story, click the play button above. Enjoy.

Bernie Borges
@berniebay

Marketing 2.0 Presented at Chamber Event

I was invited to speak at the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, which is the largest chamber in the Tampa Bay region where I live. The event was well attended with close to 100 people representing mostly small and midsized businesses and non-profits.

I tested out my new slides which summarize my forthcoming book entitled Marketing 2.0. Judging by the questions, comments and the active note taking in the audience, I’d say my presentation was well received.

I spoke on how the old way of marketing (1.0) comprised of shouting at customers is dead. I referenced this video comically showing the divorce between advertiser and consumer.  I pointed out that buyers have filters that allow us to prevent old-style marketing from reaching us.

I highlighted how marketers must focus on two fundamental pillars in a marketing 2.0 strategy:

• producing great content
• building relationships on the social web

I discussed the types of content to produce ranging from websites, blogs, newsletters, e-books, white papers, articles, press releases, videos, photos. I didn’t mention (but should have) wikis and podcasts.

I stressed the importance of engaging with like minded communities to build relationships with people and to build trust.

I spoke of how buyers now buy differently. I explained that when I buy I turn to two places: 1) my friends (my network) and 2) the web. When researching on the web I ask for opinions from other people whom I’ve never met. But, I can read the profile and experience of people who make recommendations to determine their qualifications (trustworthiness) for recommendations.

I can also make valuable connections, some of which can turn into measurable results. I spoke of how to measure results using tools and Internet marketing software as well as also measuring the outcome of new relationships.

I was not surprised to learn that most people in the audience used LinkedIn. About half the audience used Facebook. But, only three people actively use Twitter and only a few more maintained active blogs.

I got the strong impression that most of the attendees were fairly new to social media marketing. Some indicated they previously had very little exposure to it.

I didn’t hear any major objections to a marketing 2.0, social media marketing strategy, which I characterized as a paradigm shift.

Rather, I believe I heard a willingness to experiment and explore the business benefits of producing and sharing content on the social web and building relationships which can produce positive benefits to their business.

You can view my entire Marketing 2.0 presentation on Slideshare.

Cheers,

Bernie Borges
@berniebay

Web Marketing and Baseball: What They Have in Common

I am a huge baseball fan which is mostly a night time past time. My day job is running a web marketing agency delivering SEO services and social media marketing strategies. Last night I realized that baseball has a lot in common with web marketing. Here’s how.

My team, the Tampa Bay Rays, was leading yesterday in the ALCS 3 games to 1. In the fifth game they took a 7 – 0 lead through six innings. By all accounts, it was looking pretty good for them to clinch the ALCS title and celebrate their first ever World Series birth.

But, just like the unpredictability of web marketing results, the Boston Red Sox came back with an impressive vengeance and won the game in dramatic style, spoiling the Rays’ chance to celebrate.

When we implement SEO services and social media strategies for our clients I like to say that “every day is a new day.” Whatever search engine rankings you had yesterday may or may not be the same today. Whatever influence your content had yesterday in the social mediasphere may or may not be the same today.

The web is dynamic and constantly moving. And, that is a double edge sword for marketers. The constant movement is incentive for marketers to keep producing positive results through ongoing relationship building and good content that gets indexed by search engines. The flip side is that if you “take your eye of the ball” for one day, the results can change negatively.

This baseball cliche has multiple meanings. To achieve sustainable web marketing results, marketers need to “keep their eye on the ball” by:
- constantly producing good content
- continually building relationships (offline and online)
- consistently listening to the conversations taking place in and around their target communities
- working to engage their community with sincerity and in a human voice

So, let’s tie this back to baseball. My Tampa Bay Rays didn’t expect the Red Sox to come back hard like they did when they had a 7 – 0 lead. They took their eye off the ball. And, they lost this game, but not the entire series. As of this writing, they are still leading 3 – 2 in the series. So, they can still get to the World Series.

Marketers lose small battles from time to time in the context of ongoing marketing plans. Keep your eye on the ball by following the best practices described above to minimize the small battles you may lose. You don’t want to lose the war.

Okay, so the ALCS is not a war. But, when you play the Red Sox for a major league championship, it can feel like a war.

Your thoughts on either the ALCS or these marketing best practices?

Bernie

Impact of Economy on SEO Services

On the date of this writing, the world is in a financial crisis unlike anything we’ve seen since the great depression (years before my birth).  Yet, I’ve noticed a very interesting trend in our business.  Lately, there is increased demand for our SEO services. 

I noticed the trend about a month ago when more inquiries and referrals started coming our way for SEO services.  So, I started asking prospective new clients what they are doing right now in the face of this economy?  The answer I’m hearing consistently doesn’t surprise me.

Most businesses across all industries are cutting expenses.  Some industries are affected more than others impacting the severity of their cutbacks.  Most marketing managers are being forced to cut marketing expenses. 

So, why are we seeing increased demand for SEO services?  Because marketers are cutting back other more traditional forms of marketing and relying more on the web to “find and convert” new sales opportunities.

Marketers are relying more on inbound marketing strategies through the web and it starts with search engine optimization (SE0) recognizing that when someone has found them on the web and contacted them, they are a potentially serious buyer.  In this economy, most sellers want to avoid wasting time with tire kickers and only spend time with serious buyers and the web is the most efficient medium to source out serious buyers.

While this is good news for internet marketing services companies like us, there is one word of caution I share with new clients.  I advise all client not to put all their eggs in the Google basket.

I inform all our clients that our web analytics prove that the top five referring sources of traffic to Find and Convert’s website include Google as well as other social media sites such as StumbleUpon, Twitter, Junta42 and Sphinn.

I advise all our clients to build a rock solid foundation in their SEO plan, and build out a social media marketing strategy on top of it for best long term results.  I’ve always believed we should “fish where the fish are,” and Google is not the only pond that has fish.  Focusing an entire internet marketing strategy just on Google would seriously overlook “other ponds of fish.”

Your thoughts?

Bernie Borges