marketsimplicity

Social Media as part of a Marketing System

By marketsimplicity on January 6, 2012

By Brad Tornberg

Now that we all understand the importance of business participation in Social Media the next obvious question becomes now that they know you how do you covert them to eventually become a customer?

A prospect who knows you somehow found you – a job well done! Now once they see your fresh content that adds value they will begin to like you and your message follow you or even give you permission to email them important information.

Once they begin to see your core differentiator (what makes you different form the competition) and follow your message and marketing cycle they will begin to see how you stand out as the expert and look to you for answers because they trust you. They read the testimonials and recommendations that position you as the expert who can solve their problem. This is why you need to continually educate your customers and position your business as the authority by offering valuable usable content.

The next step is for them to get a taste of what it’s like to do business with you. They want to try what you are offering before they buy your product or service. An offer of a free assessment, a free consultation or giving an opportunity to participate in a webinar, seminar or other venue where you educate them and provide valuable tips and information gives them a taste of things to come.

Social Media is a marketing tactic like many others including traditional methods (direct mail, networking, etc.) that helps generate leads. Once generated the lead needs to be nurtured and put into a systematic method for follow up and eventual conversion to a customer.

Social media like traditional media must continually put the message in front of the prospect so that when they are ready to buy you will be who they buy for. The key here is being in front just enough times to become the brand of choice but not too much that they feel overwhelmed and are being sold to. For social media to be successful you still need a “call to action”. It can be as simple as gaining a follower to an offer for a free whitepaper or webinar or even a drawing for a free Ipad.

Social media is one spoke tactic that should echo the message of what makes us different and why people buy from us and like us. Duct Tape Marketing Teaches to us to first build a marketing strategy and then build a marketing system. People need to know you, like you and trust you before they try what you have to offer, buy from you, repeat the cycle and refer you to others. Do you have a marketing strategy? Do you have a systematic approach to marketing? If not how’s the social media thing going?

Reflections on Penn State, the Eagles and Social Media

By marketsimplicity on November 14, 2011

The revelations over the last week concerning Penn State is a sad story that in one single event brought down one of the best known brands in our country – the squeaky clean brand called “Penn State”. Yes it’s still a great academic institution and yes they will survive this disaster because there are so many successful graduates in our business community that will see that it does get fixed but it points out a few things that are worth mentioning in terms of brand and social media.

I used to have a boss who always said – one atta boy equals one oh crap (I’m cleaning it up here folks) and boy did that hold true. It may be a big oh crap but none the less it is this one incident that has brought down the house of Paterno and forever scar his reputation. All those years of building good will is gone. All of the trust in the program and Joe as a coach is gone. A man spends a life time building something great and in an instant it is gone – makes you think doesn’t it?

Your brand is about your reputation. It has to remain pristine at all times. With the speed of information today and social media if you don’t protect your brand you’re doomed. There are a lot of things going back and forth about this on the social pages but it will live forever and making it even harder for the stigma to go away.

Your brand better live up to its expectations also. One bad mark and your competitors have dirt on you and can use it against you. If you say your product or service is great and exceeds all expectations it better! Look at the Philadelphia Eagles – billed as a “dream team” they thought just walking out on the field would be enough to guarantee victory. Someone forgot to tell them this is why they play the game. You may have the greatest individual players but this like a business is a team sport.

This team was branded as the “dream team” by one of their own players. It has been anything but a dream season for the Eagles and what makes it worse is by positioning themselves (or advertising themselves) as better than they really were they created the famous expectation-delivery gap causing criticism from everyone. The bottom line is they didn’t deliver on what they promised. What impact has this brought upon their “brand”? I would bet that merchandise and jersey sales are down. Fans and the media are calling for the head coaches’ job. It’s a mess.

Why? Because the impression that was given was that they are much better than they have been performing. Fans are using social media to abandon the ship. If the Eagles were “listening” to the social sites they would see a diminishing interest in their brand. You’ve work hard to build your brand so make sure you protect it! Remember people are listening…

Social CRM – The Tue Picture of What Your Customer Thinks

By marketsimplicity on October 31, 2011

Customer Relationship management Solutions tend to track transactional related information from your customers. It tells you what they purchased, what their interests are, what buying patterns they may have and a variety of other metrics that help you anticipate what and when the customer is interested in when it comes to your company and products.

Social media allows you to integrate what the customers are saying as well as look at the transactional data to get a better picture of the customer (and prospect) overall. It means gathering all of the social data from all the social sites and then integrating them into your CRM solution. Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and other social sites provide relevant information that should and must reside within your CRM software solution to get this Omniscient view of your buyer.

By bringing together transactional data from your ERP and CRM systems with insights, opinions, comments and issues gathered from their participation on social sites you will gain a better and more complete understanding of your customer which can be used to better target your marketing, sales and customer service offerings.

The transactional perspective is good but metrics can fool you. Trends in the past don’t necessarily indicate a trend for the future. Listening to the noise around your products or services can be good and/or bad. If it’s good then you want to continue in that direction. If it is bad then it is easier to listen to the noise and make some quick short term adjustments to get your offering to peak interest or renew interest from those that had issues or problems with your offering.

In fact you can use the same social sites to communicate with your customers to let them know what changes are coming before they jump to a competitor or a different product offering. The bottom line here is it takes a lot longer to notice sales and marketing metrics (trends) then it does to hear the raising of social media voices (good or bad).

A good idea I recently came across is that many companies are using social media to push their prospects and customers to their own social media site. Here they control the dialog and most importantly own all of the data. By building out these communities they gain better traction and interaction with past, present and future customers. The warm and fuzzy feeling of “hey we listen” permeates loudly when a company makes the effort to setup its own “space” where people can collaborate, exchange ideas and most of all what every customer wants – to be heard! What do you think?

It’s all who you know – CRM and Social Marketing

By marketsimplicity on October 11, 2011

Perhaps you have noticed the trend towards Customer Relationship Management Solutions incorporating social media into their solution set. Microsoft recently announced that their next release of CRM will incorporate many of the popular social media sites being integrated into their solution. Act has already released and continues to enhance these same social accelerators. Salesforce has many new tools that allow you to monitor and collect information form social sites into their CRM solution.

The real question is why is this trend happening? Is it because of the current popularity of all of these sites or for a bigger and better reason? The answer is simple. The change is occurring in the core definition of social media and the how CRM uses social media to accelerate the velocity of the customer lifecycle and hence the transaction. Businesses are looking for that competitive edge that gets them in front of the client quicker with a better targeted solution at a time they are ready to buy. Listening allows you to identify the pain of the prospect and spot opportunities that are much more targeted and in line with their business goals.

Social Media is no longer just about telling a story or for marketing a business or idea. It’s about listening to what customers are saying about you and your business (and for that matter your service, product quality, the friendliness of your employees, etc.) It’s about spotting trends, collaborating with your customers and prospects to put out product and services that they need and want.

CRM and Social Media have a lot in common. They both help identify opportunities, listen for needs based on responses, feedback or even behaviors. They can identify trends, suggest ideas and add value to the customer or prospect and their overall experience. It gives you the ability to get a jump on your competitors before others do.

Social Listening is important to business success in today’s market. People want to know were experiences with your product or service good or bad? Are there others who preach your product or service? Do people who use your product or service have a platform or place where they can collaborate and from this you gain intelligence through these “conversations”?

The two terms are becoming one in the same and a new term is evolving – Social CRM. The Social media gives the business owner a tool they never really had available unless they called or spoke directly to their customer – the ability to filter through information and gain a clear insight into what customers or products are saying. Is the product to expensive? Are there too many problems? How is the customer service after the sale?

If you aren’t thinking about using any of the listening services (Google Alerts, Twitter, etc.) you are really missing out. It’s just the beginning of the universe for listening in CRM. It gives you the ability to get information before your competitors and after all, it’s who you know when it comes to getting new business.

What CRM is best for my business?

By marketsimplicity on September 24, 2011

I get many questions from clients and other consultants who specialize in marketing on what is the best CRM solution for a certain type of business. It always makes me wonder what people are thinking about when they go to find a software solution to help manage, nurture and convert leads to sales.

It should always start at defining the needs of the business first. Are they small or large in size? Can they support taking care and managing the “technical” side of a CRM solution or is a hosted solution off premise a better alternative? Sometimes the answer to this helps reduce the choices right from the start. Most companies today recognize they need to have both solutions so in that case which works best if both options will work?

Typically, the answer may lie in two areas – number of users and cost per user. At some point if I say have 10 users at $35 per month that cost will exceed the cost of having the solution on site that you pay for once. Don’t forget to add on the upgrade and maintenance charges and the ongoing cost of either doing it yourself or having the vendor who sold it to you come back and bill for more. Either way it’s important to sit down and do the math. Sometimes the up-front cost can’t be met and there is no choice. Other times the spend on a monthly basis won’t work but a loan to purchase it outright may. Sometimes it’s based on the “hassle Factor” or having to maintain or support it yourself.

Either way you still have to take care of and nurture the data in the solution. If not the money is wasted. Most clients don’t take the time to define who owns the solution? Who is responsible for defining and managing how the data goes in and what is done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. How is the data going to be used and are we collecting the information we need to be able to effectively use it? The hard part starts after the purchase. No solution will take care of itself. You can automate the steps and tracks that a new lead or contact should follow but who will setup that path?

Oh so what is the best solution for your type of business? The answer is one that allows you to customize the system so that it meets the needs of your business and can be managed by the current staff you have in place. Most of those give you some capability to modify the fields, screens, views, reports with information specific to your business. If I am a dentist I want to know the date of the last checkup. If I own a salon I want to know what products my customer likes and uses. Information and the way you track it is unique to you and in most cases the reason you want to use a CRM system to help you have better customer interactions resulting in more sales from that customer or prospect.

Time to Plan and Get Ready for the Fall!

By marketsimplicity on August 22, 2011

I always look at the summer in two ways. First it’s extremely important as a business owner to take down time and relax. Mental freshness is sometimes the biggest roadblock for business innovation. Sometimes rest can be regenerative in terms of your creativity skills thus the benefits of taking a break.

The second benefit of the summer is it gives you a chance to refocus on the last three business development months. I say three months because unless you are well into the sales cycle or get lucky enough to find those people who realize it’s use it or lose it in terms of budget, you only really have thru Thanksgiving in terms of getting buyers attention. Holidays work well for B-to-C but here we are specifically referring to the B-To-B market.

Many business owners and decision makers also look at the last part of the year the same way so if they are going to reach their milestones they need to get moving and in terms of your product or service so the timing is good to get their attention.

Planning what you’re going to do is the best place to start. How much do you have to spend to get what result? That is the place to start. Focus on the activities that will generate the revenue you need to reach your goal in the shortest time. In my case it was going back to basics in terms of traditional marketing methods such as Trade Shows and Direct Mail.

With that being said do not forget the marketing system or machine that you are hopefully trying to build (If not you should get In touch with me so I can show you how!). The system should have a clear strategy as well as s tactics necessary to achieve the strategy. The system always needs to be fed. Social media and other passive methods tend to collect the feeder you need to produce the desired result of a buyer so don’t neglect them.

In my case the long term continues to get fed by more Belly to Belly in person contact such as Speaking Engagements and Networking. A grass roots campaign of getting out and talking to the people adds this other leg to my campaign without any pressure. It’s strictly getting out to people, exchanging business cards, educating them and hoping that when they need you (and of course you have to stay in front of them for this to happen) they immediately think of you as the one to go to in their mind. They know you, they like you and they have been looking for a reason to do business with you. They trust you because they read your blogs and hear you speak. They visit your web site and find its content useful and timely. Occasionally you tweet something useful for them to go look at or research. You add value to the relationship.

I feel strongly about the Duct Tape Marketing approach that people need to Know, Like and Trust you before they Try, Buy and Repeat from you. So how to you get them to know. Like and trust you? My planning usually happens during a quiet time on a lazy summer Sunday or Thursday evening at a Coffee Shop. Either way you need to find your time, find your place and plan your fall campaign season now!