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.

If you don’t understand how social media marketing fits into your current marketing plan, and how it changes the way you might traditionally look at Return on Investment, here’s an article that I think explains it precisely. I proper social media marketing plan is not an option moving forward. Those who survive an economic turn down are those who plan effectively and for the long haul….and that means starting TODAY (ok yesterday, but it’s not too late)
Valerie
PS Register for the Power Marketing Conference for Elder Care Entrepreneurs and Senior Service Providers at http://www.powermarketingconference.com

Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media

February 20th, 2009 | by Tom Smith
Original Post at: http://mashable.com/2009/02/20/big-brands-social-media/

Tom Smith is the founder of Trendstream, a research consultancy that specialises in providing research and consultancy on social media, web and mobile. He formerly worked as Head of Consumer Futures at Universal McCann.

Social media continues to grow globally in terms of adoption, usage, interest and impact in a massive way. It’s undeniably changing the way that content and information work particularly in terms of the publishing of consumer opinion. This has transformed the way that consumers relate to brands and the way that brands should operate, driving direct interaction, transparency and a more consultative approach.

However, we still operate in a system defined by the old media world and consequently big brand involvement is still in the main tentative and sporadic. From my experience of trying to get big brands to embrace the social revolution, there are a number of reasons why they have yet to embrace the real opportunities that involvement can deliver:

1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel: It is of course so much more; it is a completely different approach to interacting with consumers and customers. Of course, you can advertise in a social media environment, but the true return on investment comes from developing communities, creating content to be shared, and talking and listening directly with consumers.

2. It does not fit into current structures: True social media falls somewhere between marketing, PR, communications, content production and web development. No one is quite sure whose responsibility it is and who should ultimately deliver their organisation’s social media strategy.

3. Communities and content are global: Users of social media connect, consume, and share content globally with little care for international borders. Marketing and PR departments and objectives are set up nationally or regionally. Very few organisations have a truly international structure and perspective.

4. Social media needs a long term approach: To build community, distribute content, or get people actively involved in an application takes time. Marketing and PR work on short time frames and are wedded to sets of individual campaigns or short term objectives. Social media is not a campaign, it’s a permanent approach.

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I received this email today, and I did click through- well worth my time. So much so, that I thought it was worth sharing this with all of you!

Download it and read when you have time. Remember, it’s about forming relationships and establishing authority, credibility, and trust.

http://img.en25.com/Web/Eloqua/eloqua_eBook_chapter4_v4-1.pdf

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The Internet has fundamentally altered buyer behavior – the way prospects identify, understand, evaluate, and buy products – forever.

Download this complimentary chapter: The Profile of the New Buyer
Marketers must accept this buyer behavior evolution and learn how best to interact with resourceful prospects that gather information and reviews via search engines, social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), and blogs.

Download this complimentary chapter and learn how to:

• Successfully interact with and influence this new breed of buyers
• Read prospects’ digital body language
• Cost-effectively nurture relationships with “not-ready-to-buy” leads
• Download your complimentary chapter from Steven Woods’ New eBook: Digital Body Language!

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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Found this post over the weekend and thought it would interest most of you.  Remember, the more you practice social media marketing and transparency, the more POSITIVE results you will see…..

This full story is originally posted at: http://www.newcommreview.com/?p=1207

As social media usage becomes more ubiquitous, affluent consumers are using social media channels to share their personal customer service experiences and learn about others’ care experiences when making purchase decisions. This is among the initial findings of a new Society for New Communications Research study, Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media, which will be presented at the SNCR’s New Communications Forum in Sonoma County, Calif. later this week.

More than 300 consumers who are active Internet users participated in a survey focusing on how customer care influences brand reputation given the widespread adoption of social media. Top findings include:

• 59.1% of respondents use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience
• 72.2% of respondents research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
• 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company
• 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online
• 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care in their decision to do business with a company at least sometimes
• 81% believe that blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously
• Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research, according to respondents. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce (39%), YouTube (27%) and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%)