St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing

Great article written by Lorrie Thomas – Web Marketing Therapy

Had to pass it on to all of you, she’s right on target!!

Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Social media platforms build buzz, boost business and serve small businesses as low-cost/no-cost marketing tools. Small business owners need to understand how these tools strategically serve and support small business first so they best implement social media strategies to sell products and/or services.

How Social Media Serves and Supports Small Business

Social Media, simply put, serves users and organizations in marketing in three ways:

1. Communication

Marketing is all about building relationships — relationships start with communication. New web tools like blogging, micro-blogging (Twitter), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning), podcasting (BlogTalkRadio), video distribution (YouTube), event coordination tools (Meetup), wikis (Wikipedia) photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket), and product review sites (epinions.com) allow small businesses to communicate, educate and share information directly with their current and prospective customers.

Content in the form of blog posts, audio, video, comparison/review sites, tweets and social network messages help share information in a less-formal way that builds the know, like and trust factors that influence decision making. Content is no longer just text. Small businesses can use audio or visual content for a “show me” and “tell me” to make communications a pack more interactive punch.

Social media’s direct communication distinction serves and supports small business as it brings the people you want to attract directly to you and makes direct communication possible. Social Media makes communication a conversation so small business owners can share, receive feedback and connect on equal ground with their target markets.

2. Collaboration

When small businesses empower their target consumers, they feel powerful. When your target market feels powerful, it trusts you, buys from you, and stays with you. Social media collaboration transforms consumers into prosumers. In an era of social media prosumers, it’s people (not companies) who make, shape, or break purchase patterns.

Small businesses can ignite collaboration for marketing by creating their own communities and/or joining communities. By doing so, they can listen and connect to their target customers and build a free forum to bring their market together. Collaboration = Marketing Acceleration.

Social media collaboration tools like review sites, video sharing sites, blogs, wikis and more allow users to self-serve, collaborate, and potentially serve as an endorser for your small business. Social media works as a marketing tool because people are more likely to trust peers rather than companies.

The power of mass collaboration serves and supports small business owners in a distinct way. Tapping/creating valuable collaborative options can bring people together to share ideas, exchange information, and help each other — and support relationship growth. Removing the “company/client” disconnect can break down elitism and boost marketing mind power.

3. Entertainment

The most important reason that social media works as a marketing tool is simple — because it’s fun. People want to go where they feel they belong, have a voice, are listened to, and enjoy themselves. Small business owners need to be where their target markets are — and these days, the masses are on Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Linkedin, Photobucket, YouTube and more because it has entertainment value.

Remember the Will It Blend? campaigns by Blendtec? They were a perfect example of social media marketing in brilliant action. Videos were relevant as they showed the product, were entertaining (they blended an iPhone!), and they were viral! People could easily share the fun with friends due to the ease of social media sharing widgets.

You can’t put a dollar amount on free promotion. The way social media stores data as an “Interactive Rolodex” also has an entertainment factor. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are becoming the “new databases” because they are fast, easy, and fun. People are more likely to update their Facebook and LinkedIn information than a sterile address book because it is fun.

Small business owners use social media’s entertainment factor to build their online database of contacts and connections, be visible to prospective customers, and get the word out in creative ways like YouTube videos, blog posts, images, podcasts to make people smile and spread the word.

How Social Media Helps Small Businesses Sell

Social Media Marketing helps most small businesses boost sales indirectly by increasing relationships. Understanding that social media marketing serves users for communication, collaboration, and entertainment is the first step to considering how to strategically implement the multitude of social media marketing tools and choose the ones that work best for your unique organization.

The key thing that small businesses need to remember when using social media to help sell is that efforts must have value. There has to be value to your content, community, and execution to get people to engage with you or your organization. Social media doesn’t sell things — people sell things. Engaging in social media marketing starts the relationship-building process. Start small and snowball. Social media takes understanding, passion, effort, and commitment to make it work. Give your small business an authentic voice with social media and commit to providing value and you will be off to a smart start.

Lorrie Thomas, MA is a Marketing Therapist that helps small businesses get BIG with web marketing. Her team of “wild web women” at Web Marketing Therapy empower professionals with healthy doses of marketing advice to gain maximum wealth from the web. Lorrie speaks nationally and teaches Web Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Marketing courses at UCSB and Berkeley Extension.

Hi all,
Hope everyone is having a great summer! We are continuing to add new accounts and enhancements to our program.
Some of you who are new to the program will note that your blogs are set up on our own servers now.
That gives us more control over content, rights, and information, and SEO options.
We will be sending out new URLs and usernames and passwords to those of you who were moved over.

A few reminders:
1. If you haven’t downloaded the community presentations, please do so at any time!

2. If you would like to watch the Do-It-Yourself Video Course, you are welcome to do that.
There are 15 short videos that walk you through a lot of what we do. Some of the info has changed over time,
but you will get the drift.

We will be having our usual private monthly webinar soon. Watch your email for instructions.
Also, be sure to register for our conference this fall- we will absolutely sell out before August 1.
Very few seats left! Register ASAP!!!

www.PowerMarketingConference.com

Thank you from all of us!
Valerie and Staff

Interesting Facts:

70% to 80% of consumers’ clicks still happen within natural search results. (iCrossing). Search spending totaled more than $13.5-billion in 08, 88% of that spent on paid search/pay per click advertising. (SEMPO, Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization).

So, even though, 70%+ of traffic comes from organic search, business is only devoting 12% of its resources to that, 88% to pay-per-click. YOU can be smarter!

Knowing how to attract your ideal customers from their own active search activity gives you enormous advantage!

If you want all of your social media marketing and natural search engine results Done-For-You, be sure to contact us to set up a time for conference call and by all means visit http://www.LTCSocialMark.com  right now!

The site does say that we are sold out- but we will take new clients by private referral or interview on a case by case basis. We’re ready to get started, are you next?

Senior services and the elder care market are our specialty, our niche, and our expertise!

http://www.LTCSocialMark.com

Valerie

In this installment I will discuss a few ideas about Internet marketing.

By Tom Day                www.longtermcarelink.com

I am by no means the expert on Internet marketing, but I am using it successfully. The National Care Planning Council has achieved our growth primarily through using the Internet. As far as I can remember, we have never spent a dime on hiring salespeople or using traditional media advertising strategies. Our primary website — www.longtermcarelink.net — receives about 800,000 hits a month from roughly 60,000 visitors a month — almost all from search engine searches. We currently have a Google page rank of 6. We are ranked by Alexa at around 500,000. People find us through approximately 16,000 keyword searches a month. At least 15 of these keyword searches are common public search engine inputs for long-term care issues and bring up our site in the top three returns on a Google search.

In September, we will have a brand-new version of www.longtermcarelink.net and expect this will increase our traffic and our business by 20% to 30%. We are already in the process of redesigning our state council websites and this has brought increased traffic as well.

Our other 20 websites are also popular for certain keyword search strings and come up in at least the top five searches on Google for these categories. In addition, we maintain another 83 websites for our veterans benefits consultants. We are adding 6 or 7 new websites a month. A year from now, we will have well over 180 websites generating leads for our members.

Our websites are designed to produce requests for help from the public. The number of these requests has doubled or tripled every year. As an example, the search category that attracts the public to our primary website on the aid and attendance benefit is currently producing about 10 to 20 requests a day for all of our veterans aid and attendance consultants. The volume of these requests has quadrupled over the past two years since we started offering this service.

I’m sure many of you are well-versed in strategies using the Internet to attract new business. I will share with you a summary of some of my observations on Internet marketing.

Using a Website to Establish Your Credibility

When someone contacts me about our services, I go to that person’s website. If I don’t get a URL or recognize a domain from their email, I will do a Google search until I find a website. If there is no website, I will go to the specific search links that reference that particular person to learn as much about that person as I can. Sometimes, a website will give me an idea of who people are and what they do and give me some confidence in their services. I would like to think I’m not alone in this behavior. I believe more and more that the public is doing this or will be doing more such person-specific Internet searches in the future.

I realize that social networking websites can serve a similar purpose. Quite frankly, I am older — a baby boomer — and I don’t feel comfortable registering for a social network site to find out about someone. Somehow I think this more of an activity for people in their 30s or younger. These people are not our target market. It is either the older folks or their children who are in their late 40s or in their 50s. My personal opinion is having a website is more effective than using social networking sites to tell people about you.

I believe there is a trend for the public to rely on Web searches for an unknown individual to check that person out and to try and get an indication of that person’s credibility. I know this isn’t fair and might not even be true, but I often judge a person’s ability by the design of that person’s website. A crummy looking website gives me a negative feeling about that person’s abilities. If I have this feeling about websites, then perhaps others may as well. I might not be alone in the way I relate people to their websites. Here are some of the things I look for when I land on a website. I could write pages on each one of these items. There is simply not enough room to do this here.

· professional and pleasing design

· intuitive and easy navigation of the site

· generous content on a number of pages

· clear message of the services provided

· good biography of the people offering the services

· compelling sales message why I should use the services

· third-party endorsement by being a member of one or more recognized organizations

Using a Website to Establish an Identity and a Presence in the Community

It seems that everyone in business has a website. Those who don’t have a website are likely at a disadvantage to those who do. I think it is getting to the point that the public expects any organization offering services to the community should have a website or that person or company might not be considered to have an identity or a presence in the community. The lack of a website may result in losing some new business that would have been created had there been a website.

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Elder Care Entrepreneurs and Senior Service Marketers,

The  article below talks about nurturing leads from a B to B perspective, but all of us can learn a lot here. The same rules apply (with a little less techincal jargon) when marketing B to C (business to consumer, um that’s what YOU do). You have to nurture both new and old leads to make  a difference in your bottom line.

Having a very well put together email automation system (and you can get a great one here for $17.00 bucks per month) is essential. It’s called an autoresponder. Set up the emails and e-newsletters now, nurture your leads for life. Increase your business.

There’s more to “nurturing a lead” of course than just email autoresponders, but let’s take it in baby steps- get this one set up, and we move on from there.

Here’s the article below originally found at: http://www.demandgenreport.com/home/archives/feature-articles/229-climate-heightens-need-for-nurturing-to-match-the-new-btob-buying-processes.html

Considering the current business climate, it is hard to fathom that less than 10% of marketers are capitalizing on one of their biggest opportunities to drive new business, but that is the unfortunate reality. We conducted a survey of marketing executives back in December of 2008 and found that only 8% of respondents currently had automated lead nurturing strategies and processes in place.

While it can be argued that the small percentage of organizations using lead nurturing is consistent with the low adoption rate of marketing automation systems, another stat which was even more eye-opening was that only 15% of respondents planned to deploy or expand their automated lead nurturing efforts in 2009. This represents a huge missed opportunity for  organizations as lead nurturing has really become a required part of the selling process in today’s business landscape.

The notion that any prospect that clicks through an email campaign or downloads a white paper is ready for immediate sales follow-up is out of date. For those companies still practicing this uninformed, unresponsive type of outreach, they are hindering their revenue generation and also making a bad first impression on prospects.

Sophisticated  organizations have realized that the buying process has changed dramatically over the past five years.  Instances where a single executive will respond to a campaign and then own the vendor selection process all the way through the buying cycle are extremely rare. It is now more common that there are several different areas of an organization involved in the buying cycle—from finance to IT to operations as so on—and smart marketers will have touch points and content that speak to all of their pain points and concerns.

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