Social Media – It’s Your Business

Posted on October 5, 2011 by concentreblog

Effective marketing campaigns these days must include social media. Your competitors are gaining a competitive advantage over you if you aren’t embracing social media methods of connecting with your customers. It’s where your customers are.

Social media is an octopus. It invades everything on the Internet and will create a huge mess if you don’t take it seriously. Those tools are fast becoming the single most important way to attract new business customers and sustain old ones.

Actually, social media marketing tools bring us within reach of the ultimate marketer’s dream: reaching the right audience with the right offer at exactly the right time. They reveal who is using your social media content, what they are doing with it and what they want. Social media tools allow you to focus on smaller, more meaningful targets instead of a broad, undefined audience. You gain open collaboration, constructive conversations with your customers. Customers now have the ability to talk to brands: directly interacting with them online socially.

Lots of people – your prospects and customers – are using Facebook™, Twitter™, YouTube™ and others. You can’t afford NOT to participate. People talk to each other using these channels. They talk about what they do, what they like, what they buy. Customers trust their online friends’ recommendations almost as much as they trust their real-life friends’ advice. You can’t buy better advertising for any amount of money.

When customers want to gather information about a product or service, they Google™. Utilizing social media will help your company’s product or service appear near the top of their search results.

Using social media also gives you an advantage of being able to monitor the buzz about your business. A dissatisfied customer can easily tell their online network almost immediately. If you use social media and monitor your reputation, you’ll be alerted to such a complaint and be able to respond quickly to address the issue before it gets out of hand. This is an important and powerful tool.

Before you start, don’t forget to develop a solid social media strategy, stick to it and engage your followers. If you do, you are well on your way to becoming an online collaborator and influencer.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started. Start with one of these. Then, as you get more comfortable in the social media space, expand out to another.

Facebook: Engage your followers with a Fan Page. Keep them aware of new products or features, weekly specials, events, promotions, contests and place content that will drive traffic to your Website or blog.
Twitter: Follow your followers and those tweeting about what interests you and your business.
Blog: Start blogging and add content frequently based on what your customers are looking for. Post informative content and your customers will more likely to give you repeat business.
YouTube Channel: Do you ever wish you had a YouTube video that went viral? I can’t assure you that yours will, but I can guarantee it won’t if you never post a video.
Linking Tools: I use Hootsuite.com, but there are many others. You can use them on your computer or cellphone, schedule tweets, reply to tweets, track trends, keywords and see who is talking about your business. You can easily integrate your text message or “ping” to broadcast to all of your social media networks when you choose.

By using these five tools, you will be well on your way to gaining valuable mind share with your customers.

Social media is not an end in itself. It is not the silver bullet for business success. Yet, it is a hugely important tool to include in your marketing strategy. The days of simply ‘broadcasting’ your product, your service, your image, are gone.

Your image is what the customers say it is. To be successful, a business needs to be engaged in open collaboration online with customers via social media.

The Internet’s Impact on Your Marketing

Posted on September 30, 2011 by concentreblog

To succeed in today’s fast-paced business environment, you need to aggressively transform your marketing, communications and advertising plan. You need to focus taking risks with new directions on the Internet.

If you leverage and refresh your existing strategies, the possibilities are endless to gain competitive advantage. You should incorporate new media and techniques on the Web. To be successful, your online promotional plan must be closely woven with all your marketing activities.

With great strategy, planning and focus, you will achieve the reach you want with your marketing and advertising budget. The greatest challenge is choosing the strategies that are right for your business and to integrate them with your marketing and advertising initiatives.

It’s important to think strategically about your marketing choices in order to maximize the success of your program and to select the right tactics.

What are your goals? Enhance brand awareness, improve online visibility, boost traffic to your Website, increase online sales or boost offline sales? If your main goal is to build brand awareness on the Web, focus on activities that encourage public discussion about your company, such as thought leadership activities (white papers, articles, case studies, and best practices research), public relations and social networking activities. If your key objective is to drive online sales leads, then do more direct-response activities such as e-mail marketing and paid search advertising.

The Internet has changed the dynamics of the business world. Customers are going to the Internet to start their purchasing process. In order to stay competitive, businesses need to embrace and use inbound marketing techniques to get found online.

Who are your target customers? You need to find out where your audience hangs out on the Internet. Then use those social media platforms to publish your information and collaborate with your customers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others.

Using only traditional outbound marketing techniques such as trade shows and print advertising is less effective nowadays, because people are better at blocking out interruption-based or pushed messages. The Internet presents quick and easy ways for customers to learn and shop to pull information when and where they want it. Instead of flying across the country, a prospect needs only to go to the Internet and research products and services.

Another important consideration for your marketing strategy is whether your company is in the business-to-business or business-to-consumer niche. What type of industry are you in? How is your market structured? All of these will affect your approach to marketing. It’s important to tailor your tactics and approach to your business environment and where your customers can be found on the Internet.

The structure of your market and industry will influence your selection of tactics. If your market is saturated, pursue innovative approaches to stand out from your competition, such as a thought-provoking video. Your video must have a news hook.

If you are in an emerging field, invest resources into educating the public through articles and white papers online.

If your product or service is very complex or difficult to understand, use tactics that enable you to conduct discussions with your audience through forums, chats, blogs and social media platforms such as FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The Power of Public Relations Versus Advertising

Posted on September 13, 2011 by concentreblog

Good public relations is a carefully planned, sustained effort to establish your company identity, maintain credibility and promote communications between your company and its public. It means getting the word about your company to the media so that they, in turn, will keep your name and good deeds in front of their audience—your potential customers.

Many PR professionals don’t like to say that PR is marketing. But, it is one of the most effective ways to successfully market your company’s information.

You can make PR pay off for you if you tailor (market) your messages directly to your customer’s current situations. This will help create trust between your company
and its stakeholders.

PR means getting stories written or broadcast about your company in the local press, business media, trade publications, radio, television and other media outlets depending on the audience you want to reach. PR is an information message about your company.

The public can be cynical. They have lots of advertising messages directed to them on a daily basis. But, when people read media articles, hear or see something about your company in the press, they’re going to take them more seriously than they do ads, especially, if you get a third party – a customer or expert of some kind – to comment positively in an article about your company. That lends you enormous credibility, it’s good content that’s not coming from you.

Editorial contributions have a much longer shelf life and greater pass-through value than ads. This becomes especially true if you order reprints from a publisher or a DVD of your television or radio appearance and circulate them further to your employees, customers and others, and put them on your Website.

PR placements build relationships between companies and publishers, and editors covering specific markets, thus opening the door for your continued contribution as an information resource when they need an opinion or quote for an article.

A strategic approach to PR will build recognition for your company. A few ways to do this is to: employ different methods and channels of communication to achieve the most effective structuring and delivery of your company message; showcase executives as experts in your industry by using newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the Web as a very visible way to build consistent, broad scale recognition of executives as an authoritative source of information, which would consequently lead to a higher profile and elevate their role within the industry; and position executives as key industry spokespeople for the purpose of increasing visibility, and through that expertise educate the public about the vital role of your company within its industry.

PR is much more than just press releases. It’s about branding, internal and external communications, media relations, story development, writing and much more.

And, don’t forget to spread your news much further using social media venues such as Facebook, Twitter and your Blog.