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Continue from previous work-cvs client introduction
Over the course of the semester, you have had the opportunity to explore your client’s strategic goals and create elements of a social media campaign. The purpose of this project is to synthesize through a complete social media strategy and campaign that you design for your client.
Your submission should be written, and 10-12 pages in length (TOTAL – this includes cover page, calendars, reference page). You may use any template you would like or you can create your own format for the project.
Directions
Use templates to develop a social media strategy/campaign plan for your client. Remember from our readings and course materials: campaign development should always follow strategy. You should begin by establishing a clear picture of your client’s overall strategic mission, and then create the context for the integration of social through a situational analysis.
Next, you will detail the results of social monitoring on behalf of your client. Establish the client’s communication objectives (which should support the client’s strategic plan) and identify the current target audience.
This foundation should lead logically and persuasively to your proposed use of social media as one component of the client’s communication plan. Detail the overall social approach, including channels and key messaging. Then, conclude with a specific campaign proposal. This campaign should include SMART objects, sample content, publication calendars, and metrics for assessing campaign outcomes.
Each of these topics has been covered during one or more weekly lessons this semester.
Thus, your submission should include the following:
Introduction to the client (history, mission, vision, brand identity, corporate goals)
Situation analysis (social/political/economic landscape, current publics, target audience)
Communication
objectives ( a minimum of two)
Your proposal should be submitted as a Word file or .pdf. It should be no more than 12 pages in length, and use design elements that would be appealing for your client. This means that your proposal should incorporate images, figures, tables, etc. when relevant and when those components can highlight/enhance your proposal message.
Your proposal font should be 12 point in size. Margins 1.5”. Generally, all text should be double-spaced (use 1.5 or single spacing only for style/emphasis).
Your proposal should be proofread and edited for style, grammar and clarity. All citations should be created in APA format, and this proposal should include a cover page, headers, page numbers, and a table of contents.
In sum, this is a professional communication plan proposal. What you submit should reflect the quality of work you would want to have if you submit the proposal to an actual representative of your client team.
Scoring
This assignment is worth 60 total points.
Additional informations
Rubric AreaWeight of RowUnacceptable (0 – 49%)Satisfactory (50 – 79%)Exemplary (80 – 100%)Introduction10%There is no introduction or the introduction does not craft a full picture of the client. Mission, vision, brand or corporate goals may be missing.The client’s mission, vision, brand and goals are summarized but require clarification or are not interpreted as part of the client’s overall strategic plan.The introduction effectively establishes a clear description of the client’s strategic plan including all key elements.Situation Analysis10%The situation analysis does not address the relevant situational features and/or discusses the situation without explaining the relevance for the client.The situation analysis offers a general assessment of all relevant components but does not show a strong sense of how this will guide the client’s communication plan.The situation analysis is thorough, complete, and effectively integrates all components to offering a compelling case for the direction of the client’s communications.Social Media Monitoring10%The monitoring report is incomplete and/or does not show an understanding of how monitoring translates to decisions for communications campaigns.Monitoring is evident, and there is some connection between the monitoring outcomes and the campaign proposal. The competitor analysis may not be complete or the connection between outcomes and plan is limited.All components of a monitoring initiative are evident and outcomes are clear and interpreted. Interpretation is clearly and thoughtfully connected to the campaign proposal.
Communication
& Campaign Objectives
10%Objectives are not included in sections 4 and/or 6 OR the plan does not show evidence of understanding the distinction between strategy and campaign objectives OR objectives are not written in a SMART format.Most objectives show evidence of understanding the distinction between strategy and campaign objectives and most are written in a SMART format.The objectives derive logically from the plan narrative. Appropriate objectives are selected for the strategy and campaign levels. Objectives show strong grasp of SMART format.Campaign Proposal20%The proposal is missing elements (channel, content, objectives) or fails to justify the proposal in a way that reflects understanding of course materials and/or the client. Elements that are included are poorly chosen/constructed.The elements of the proposal are included and justified, however the elements may be underdeveloped and/or the justification may not be strongly tied to the client or situational analysis.All proposal elements are creatively crafted and reflect a strong sense of virality and purpose. The justification for all elements is well grounded in the interpretation of the client, their situation, and their strategic goals.Calendar10%One or more calendar elements may not be included or the calendars do not reflect the time constraints. The calendar components are not tied to the campaign proposal and/or do not show an understanding of how timing impacts social campaigns.Both calendar elements are included within the correct time constraints. The calendar elements may not be clearly tied to the campaign proposal or do not show an understanding of timing relevant for the campaign.Both calendar elements are effectively designed within the specified time constraints to leverage the client’s strategic position and situation, and to maximize outcomes in the proposed social media campaign.Metrics10%Metrics are not included or are not connected to the campaign proposal objectives.Metrics are included but may be insufficient to measure the outcomes on the described objectives. Metrics may show some understanding of the relevance for interpreting the campaign.Metrics are included for all stated objectives. Metrics chosen are appropriate for the client and the campaign. Justification clearly explains the connection between campaign outcomes and overall strategy.Course concepts10%The overall plan document does not show a strong grasp of course concepts; the language used is not consistent with contemporary approaches to social media and/or is used inaccurately and/or without effect.The overall plan document shows a moderate grasp of course concepts; contemporary language is used effectively but inconsistently to make a substantial appeal for the value of the plan for the client.The overall plan document shows a strong grasp of the course concepts; contemporary language about social media is used both consistently and effectively to display expertise about the subject matter and to make a persuasive appeal about the value of the plan for the client.Presentation10%The overall plan document does not show evidence of attention to presentation; there are numerous spelling/editing errors, it is difficult to read either because of style or clarity, requirements (such as page numbers/limit) are not met.The overall plan document is presentable. There are minor errors that do not distract from understandability; style elements are limited and basic, but all written requirements are met.The overall plan document meets all the written requirements, is free from error, is edited for clarity and persuasive effect. Visual elements are well-designed and clearly chosen to illuminate the plan elements in a way that contributes to the plan’s message.
additional information:
This part is a bit longer info but I thought it’d be good to share it as a few of you have emailed asking me to explain the difference between the Communications Objectives and the Campaign Objectives. I’ve responded to those who’ve asked but in case it’s still unclear to you, here is how I’m explaining it (please reference the campaign report example on the Assignment):
Your communications objective is the umbrella (it can/should be broad); think of it like you’re a Communications Director of a company and you have a lot of communications tools at your disposal – special events, social media, advertising, etc. Your communications objective is the big picture objective – like help increase sales this year. Then you’d use all the communications tools in your toolbox to help achieve that goal, right? Let’s say you host a special event in which you have things for sale or you place an ad somewhere to help increase sales…that sort of thing. THINK BROAD HERE.
Your CAMPAIGN objectives should be specific to your CAMPAIGN and involve social or digital media (and these could be/probably should be from your Obj + Meas assignment).
Check out the example I included under the assignment tab and look on the bottom of page 6:
The communication objectives for this social media campaign proposal align with the intent to decrease Green Lush Design’s current online vulnerabilities and improve its consumer engagement and brand awareness <<< THIS is a communications objective and note how it's very broad (decrease Green Lush Design’s current online vulnerabilities and improve its consumer engagement and brand awareness)
Then, on page 7, the report states:
The following objectives will be implemented to improve the organization’s brand awareness, sales, and increase engagement:
Increase Green Lush Design’s brand awareness on Instagram by 50%, or an increase of 34 followers, utilizing Instagram Promotions with a daily budget of $5 for a 14-day duration starting November 30 and ending December 14, 2020.
Increase traffic to
greenlushdesign.com
for a weekly total of 34 unique visitors through Instagram-targeted ads on from November 30 to December 14, 2020.
Enhance the organization’s brand story by launching Green Lush Design’s Facebook page, promoting thoughtful content, and acquiring 100 followers by December 14, 2020.
Increase sales of Green Lush Design’s products by 50% and generate five new leads for indoor green wall design by December 14, 2020.
THESE FOUR OBJECTIVES are specific to the campaign and use social and digital media platforms/tools to meet them. Therefore, the campaign will be developed to meet these specific campaign objectives.
You can still accomplish the communications objectives in some other way (such as a special event, a marketing campaign, a giveaway, advertising, etc.) — but how WE do it as part of a social media campaign is what makes the campaign objectives different than the communications objective. The communications objective is the BIG PICTURE. The campaign objectives are specific to that campaign.
I hope that explanation is helpful as you review the drafts and provide feedback to your peer reviewees.
Questions? Comments? Let me know or post it on the Discussion Board so others and I can respond.
Praise for The Zen of Social Media Marketing
“The Zen of Social Media Marketing demystifies the wacky, yet immensely powerful new world of online
conversational marketing and serves as a great primer to understand where to allocate your time, money, and
energy. A great read for entrepreneurs, professionals, and small businesses.”
—JONATHAN FIELDS, Author of Career Renegade
“Building on a strong background of expert marketing advice, Shama has again produced a body of work that
is at once complete and practical. This is a book that you can read quickly when you’re frustrated by what
seems like endless contradictions of social media, and then reference again and again as you develop your
own sense of place on the social web. It is, after all, quite correctly titled The Zen of Social Media Marketing.
I highly recommend this book.”
—DAVE EVANS, Social Media Strategist, and Author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
“Shama breaks down the ‘why’ and ‘how’ with easy-to-understand examples that can get you on the right
track immediately . . . and ultimately grow your business.”
—JOE PULIZZI, Coauthor of Get Content. Get Customers, and Founder of Junta42
“Finally! A true authority on the subject of social media has broken through the utter noise of get-rich-quickwith-social-media hysteria. Shama takes the mystery and hype out of social media and gives readers a
practical step-by-step action plan to start, grow, measure, expand, and optimize their online presence. It is a
must-read for any marketing professional, C-level executive, or entrepreneur. Her conversational writing
style, numerous case studies, and ‘how-to’ guides with screen shots make learning and implementing almost
elementary. It will be required reading for all our clients.”
—JOE ABRAHAM, Founder and Managing Director at En Corpus Group, and Author of B.O.S.I.
Entrepreneurship
“Ready for a true social marketing awakening? If so, be sure and take Shama Kabani’s The Zen of Social
Media Marketing on your path to web enlightenment.”
—DEAN LINDSAY, Author of The Progress Challenge and Cracking the Networking CODE
“The Zen of Social Media Marketing is a comprehensive guide for maximizing the marketing opportunities
from online networks. Shama Kabani helps you make the most of your efforts in marketing through a
stronger knowledge of social media.”
—PENELOPE TRUNK, Founder of the Social Network Brazen Careerist
“Shama is hands-down the industry leader in social media marketing and creating buzz. She has a rare
combination of social media savvy and law-of-attraction mastery that businesses clamor to find. It’s easy to
see why she’s called the ‘Shaman of social media.’ She will transform your marketing and increase your
sales. Listen to everything this luminary says.”
—SHAWNE DUPERON, Five-Time EMMY® Award Winner, ShawneTV
“The Zen of Social Media Marketing is for anyone that has ever felt overwhelmed by all of the online options
available now for networking, socializing, and just plain being online in general! Shama breaks it down so
that even the most social media–phobes will be breathing sighs of relief at how simple she makes it all
sound! Get this book today and be on your way to a stress-free online experience that you will groove and
align with, thrive, and enjoy.”
—SALLY SHIELDS, Author of The DIL Rules
Copyright © 2016 by Shama Hyder
Previous edition copyright © 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Acknowledgments
Foreword by CHRIS BROGAN
Introduction
Online Marketing Basics
Websites and Content Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The Art and Science of Driving
Traffic to Your Website
Social Media Marketing: What You Need to Know Before You Start
Identity Before Community: Why Most Companies Fail at Social Media
Marketing
Facebook: King of the Social Media Jungle
Twitter: Conversation, Engagement, and Sharing
LinkedIn: The Social Media Platform for Professionals
The Many Flavors of Social Media
Social Advertising: Facebook Ads, Sponsored Tweets, and More
Video: A Powerful Social Medium
Crafting a Social Media Policy for Your Organization
A Final Word on Social Media: Tools for Attracting Even More Business
Burning Questions and Answers: Taking Questions and Dishing Out
Answers and Advice
Social Media Marketing Case Studies: Highlighting Real-World Best
Practices
Discussion Questions: A Guide to Sparking Engagement on the Topic of
Social Media
Index
About the Author
Acknowledgments
This book has been a group effort. I couldn’t have done it without the entire team
at The Marketing Zen Group, and special thanks goes out to Angela von WeberHahnsberg and David Kirkpatrick.
This book is just as much theirs as it is mine.
To our clients at The Marketing Zen Group: Thank you for allowing us to be
your digital Sherpas. Thank you for your trust, your respect, and your belief in us.
And THANK YOU, DEAR READER! You have shown this book enough
love to make it to a 4th edition. I hope you find this edition, too, worthy of your
time and attention.
Foreword
Shama Hyder starts off her book with a scene from The Matrix. I know the scene
well. It’s a little bit of philosophy thrown into Hollywood and made simple to
consume. Shama’s right for giving us this gem; The Matrix seems to have
motivated a lot of us to think differently about how we live online, and how
business works.
I know. I wrote about The Matrix a few different times in Trust Agents. We
could have just written, “To be a trust agent is to know how to be Neo,” and it
would’ve been a shorter book.
There is a Zen to social media. There is a way. Shama’s right about that. And
her way—her thoughts, her experiments, her recommendations in this book—is
one that can get a lot of people closer to the prize than anything they might intuit
and do on their own.
Business rules are different now. Don’t believe me? How are the banks in the
United States doing? How are the three big carmakers? How are small businesses
doing? You want to keep marketing the way companies have been for the last
fifty years? Not a good idea, I’m afraid.
We’re writing new code, and Shama knows it.
There’s human code out there all about how human you can be, how you can
connect with people, and what that means for business. I’m flying all over the
planet right now writing new versions of this code for companies, showing them
how to be human. The goal is simple: explain to people that, while face-to-face is
just as important as it ever was, now we’ve got all kinds of new tools that let us
tighten bonds in between those in-person moments.
These tools leave a wake of data behind them. Follow these invisible trails of
data and you can smell new customers, new opportunities. New networks don’t
form inside your inbox. New phone numbers don’t start following you (frankly,
that’s probably a good thing). Social media provides the links and connections
that allow these networks to form. I’ve taken to calling Twitter the Serendipity
Engine, because that’s what it harnesses: serendipity. And you, too, can harness it
for your business.
Shama has a way of teaching this new code—her business-savvy Zen
approach—that fits the business you’re in, the person you are, and the results you
want. I might do a few things differently, but we all might. (After all, if you see
Buddha on the road, kill him. Isn’t that the quote?) And you need to consider
what parts of her approach you’ll benefit most from implementing. But ignoring
her isn’t a good move.
Get into The Zen of Social Media Marketing. Keep a notepad file handy. Write
down notes. Seek out everything that makes sense for you. Start setting up some
next moves based on what you learn. Shama will show you.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the white rabbit.
—Chris Brogan,
coauthor of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller Trust Agents
Introduction
Why Write This?
When the first edition of The Zen of Social Media Marketing came out in April
2010, I was truly humbled by the amazing response we received. Readers from
every walk of life and every corner of the world sent me their stories, their
challenges, and their questions. Two years later, I knew the vast world of social
media had changed enough to require an updated guide. Although the principles
of online marketing and social media remain unchanged, new platforms,
opportunities, and tools have emerged that make marketing online more efficient
and easier than ever.
Social media is now an integral part of everyday life. Yet many continue to
struggle with it.
A while back, I realized the main reason people are struggling with social
media marketing: They are going against the natural order of things! The
traditional marketing rules cannot be applied to social media because social
media is not a marketer’s platform. It belongs to consumers.
For the longest time, marketing consisted of putting out a message about a
business or product that was controlled strictly by the business itself. Think about
a square peg. The square peg represents the traditional marketing message. Now,
imagine square holes. Each hole is a traditional marketing medium—print, radio,
and television. The square peg fits the square hole perfectly.
However, here comes social media: multiple online mediums all controlled by
the people participating within them—people who are busy having conversations,
sharing resources, and forming their own communities. Social media is full of
constant activity controlled by no one individual in particular. Unlike radio,
television, and print, it isn’t passive—users don’t just receive content; they create
it, too. Social media is a circular hole. Yet most marketers are still using a square
peg. They are working against the grain. And they’re finding themselves
thoroughly stumped and no better off than they were when they started on their
journey.
I wanted something I could hand to these frustrated folks, something that
could help social media make sense to them. I wanted something that would
finally help marketers (and make no mistake—we are all marketers)
understand how to utilize social media marketing concepts in a practical and
efficient manner. I wanted to help them find the circular peg to fit the
circular hole.
I wanted to show them the Zen of social media marketing. Once you truly
understand how social media functions, marketing using social media channels
becomes effortless.
The Zen of What?
Yes, I know. Spending hours on social media sites only to be disappointed by a
zero return on your investment doesn’t put you in a Zen-like state. But that
happens only if you are doing it wrong! If you go with the flow, you can rake in
the profits and have fun. Imagine that!
The Zen of Social Media Marketing is about understanding the mind-set
of people who are using social media and then using it to your advantage.
Do you remember the famous scene from The Matrix where Neo bends the
spoon? It went like this:
SPOON BOY: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead . . .
only try to realize the truth.
NEO: What truth?
SPOON BOY: There is no spoon.
NEO: There is no spoon?
SPOON BOY: Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends; it is only
yourself.
Social media is like that spoon. If you try to bend it, it won’t bend. If, instead,
you bend—if you alter your own attitude and how you market—you win. Have
you ever wondered how some people rack up friends and followers, cultivate
fans, and just seem to be everywhere at once? These people are true Zen
marketers. They may not even realize they’re doing anything special; they just go
with the flow. They make it look effortless because so much of it is effortless.
Now, if you are thinking this book is just going to tell you to breathe deeply
and use the force, think again. Like every good Zen master, you need some tools
in your arsenal. In the following pages, I will share with you all the tools and
techniques you need to become the ideal social media marketer—the guy or gal
people want to be friends with and whose business gets talked about constantly.
A Personal Story
I launched my online marketing firm, The Marketing Zen Group, right out of
graduate school, on my own, with no resources. Today, we have a full-time team
of thirty and a global clientele. And 100 percent of our clients came to us from
our online marketing efforts, specifically our social media marketing efforts.
Today, we are recognized as one of the leading digital marketing companies in the
world.
I continued to hire the best people to help grow our team until we became a
truly full-service web agency. Whatever our clients needed online, we could
provide. Soon, the business fueled its own growth. Word spread quickly; that’s
the nature of online marketing! I started receiving invitations to speak at top
industry conferences, earned interviews with television media, and we had to start
turning away more clients than we were taking on. As the business grew, so did
my personal brand. I am humbled by and grateful for our growth.
My company is living proof that, when done right, social media marketing
works for businesses. And it works, albeit slightly differently, for businesses of all
sizes and types. I know this because we have worked with clients at all stages—
from start-ups to Fortune 500s—to leverage social media. It is my sincerest
intention to share with you the same wisdom that helped our company and
our clients’ companies grow. Throughout this book, you will find the stories of
businesses from a variety of industries that are successfully marketing through
social platforms. If they can do it, so can you!
Who Is This Guide a Perfect Fit For?
If you are responsible for marketing in any shape or form, this guide is written for
you. Perhaps you are a small-business owner responsible for attracting your own
customers or clientele, or the CEO of an Inc. 5000 company that wants to solidify
its online reputation. Or perhaps you’re a CMO looking to constantly generate
inbound leads. Maybe you want to get the word out about your nonprofit. It
doesn’t matter; the principles are all the same. This book will show you exactly
how to leverage social media to accomplish your goals.
What does matter is that you are
• committed
to
marketing
or
promoting
your
service/product/blog/organization in an ethical and unassuming manner;
• willing to listen, communicate, and share (the building blocks of social
media marketing); and
• okay with doing things the easy way and don’t insist on going against the
grain.
Social media marketing does not have to be a struggle.
Who Is This Guide Not a Good Fit For?
This guide is not for those who want to become overnight millionaires, internet
marketers looking to turn a quick buck, or those looking to grow their Facebook
friend count so they can spam those friends. Sorry to disappoint you! The
strategies and techniques I lay out in this book are for legitimate businesses that
will apply them with consistency and commitment—two necessary elements for
social media success.
What You Will Learn
Where social media marketing fits in the bigger scheme of things
How to make your website or blog the hub of your online marketing efforts
How to use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for online marketing in an
ethical manner
How to drive traffic to your sites
How to navigate the constantly growing world of social media platforms
How to leverage social advertising
How to build credibility and establish expertise
How to generate leads
How to build your own community of fans
How to build your e-zine/newsletter list
How to measure your social media marketing efforts
How to pitch bloggers and engage in Digital PR
How to pitch and create strategic joint venture relationships using social
media
How to leverage your past success to gain future customers and clients
How to get speaking engagements
What you must have before you start social media marketing
The #1 reason people fail at social media marketing and how to avoid that
mistake
Case Studies and Profiles
In addition to the case studies peppered throughout the book, you will find a
group of profiles at the end. These profiles present real people and businesses
using social media marketing to achieve their goals. They aren’t all marketers by
profession but are marketing and promoting their causes successfully nonetheless.
Here’s to you—a future Zen master of social media marketing! Let the
journey begin.
1
Online Marketing Basics
“Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence
of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.”
Jim Rohn
BEFORE WE LOOK AT ONLINE MARKETING, let’s look at traditional or
offline marketing. This will help set the foundation for marketing on the internet.
Before the advent of the internet, there were predominantly three main ways to
market. These traditional marketing avenues were print, TV, and radio. Print
included newspapers, magazines, Yellow Pages, posters, billboards, and even
direct mail. Radio and TV included commercials and spots or segments.
Traditional marketing worked very well for many years for three main reasons.
REASON 1: Marketing was a one-way street. Companies talked at the
consumers, and this was expected because there really was no viable way for
customers to talk back. Sure, word of mouth existed. However, you would
realistically only tell Joe, Sally, and maybe Mary (if she was in town) before
moving on. Moreover, it took a long time for word to get around. So, basically,
if the nice-looking lady on television said the laundry detergent was amazing,
we believed it. Today, we can go on a company’s Facebook page, find them on
Twitter, or even comment on their blog. Customers can—and are—talking
back!
REASON 2: We were all the same, more or less. Let’s face it! We wore the
same clothes, had the same habits, and enjoyed the same activities. It was
easier for marketers to target buyers because they knew exactly who and where
they were. Targeting a woman in her thirties? She was most likely a married
mother of two and a stay-at-home mom. She put her family first and most
likely went to church on Sundays. Try targeting a woman in her thirties today.
She may be a stay-at-home mom to two kids and go to church on Sundays. But
she may just as likely be a single woman focused on her career who enjoys
hiking on the weekends. Today, you need a multipronged approach. You can’t
reach a demographic through one channel. You have to reach people through
the channel of their choice.
REASON 3: We were less tired—and a little less jaded. At first, we believed
the man on television when he said that his product could eliminate any stain.
We believed it when the woman who reminded us of Grandma said the cookies
tasted freshly baked. We believed it all—for a while. We were so transfixed by
the well-written copy in the magazine or the flashy ad on TV. Today, we are a
lot savvier. We check reviews, leave comments, and demand trial versions.
Does this mean traditional marketing is over? Not at all. It has, however,
evolved. The internet has woven its way through every form of traditional
marketing. When was the last time you got a piece of direct mail that didn’t have
a website address for you to visit? Every morning I listen to NPR (National
Public Radio), and every morning the broadcasters invite me to tweet them my
questions or fan their Facebook page.
What is online marketing? Online marketing is the art and science (dare I
say the Zen?) of leveraging the internet to get your message across so that you
can move people to take action. Whether that action is donating their time to your
cause or buying your product or service, the goal of marketing has always been
the same—to get people to take action. The tools just keep changing.
If online marketing is the act of leveraging the internet in general to get your
message across, social media marketing is the act of leveraging specifically social
media platforms (places where people connect and communicate) to promote a
product or a service to increase sales.
The social media movement has provided the business owner powerful tools for reaching thousands
of prospects and clients at the click of a mouse. However, without a strong business strategy and
knowledge of online marketing, these tools are often used in vain. Success in this new media requires
you to lead with a strong business mind-set.
To that end, ask yourself:
• What exactly am I trying to accomplish with social media and why?
• What are my readers’ most pressing challenges, and how can I help them overcome these?
• What are the most effective delivery tools for my messages?
• How can I build enduring relationships and turn strangers into lifetime customers?
Mitch Meyerson,
author of Mastering Online Marketing and eight other books (www.MitchMeyerson.com)
First I want to share with you a simple framework for marketing online. This
framework is necessary because social media marketing is not a stand-alone
process or an outcome. So, before we delve into the specifics, we have to take in
the big picture.
Successful online marketing can be broken down into three distinct
components. I like to use the acronym ACT to describe the process.
The ACT Methodology
A is for Attract. To attract means to get attention or stand out. Practically,
this means attracting traffic to your website—your main online marketing tool.
C is for Convert. Conversion happens when you turn a stranger into a
consumer or customer. And there is a difference between the two! A consumer
may take in your information or even sample your product, but he or she may not
always buy. That’s okay! Over time, that consumer may become a customer. The
more expensive a purchase is, the longer it may take. This means that you
constantly have to work to convert people into consumers and customers.
T is for Transform. You transform when you turn past and present successes
into magnetic forces of attraction.
Let’s use Sue as an example. Sue sells quilts on the internet. So do hundreds
of other people. How can Sue bring people to her website? If she has a Facebook
page, she could create an album of her quilts. Jane, a Facebook friend of Sue’s,
looks at the pictures and instantly thinks of getting one for her granddaughter. She
sees that Sue has placed a link to her website right below the pictures, so she
clicks over to her site. Sue has successfully ATTRACTED Jane to her website.
With social media, you are the publisher! The sooner you realize you are a publisher, the more
successful your business will be. Wouldn’t it be great if people relied on you and your business to
help them in their careers and personal lives? It’s possible, but you have to start thinking differently
about the way you market. Publishing valuable, relevant, and compelling information targeted to your
customers and prospects is the answer. What’s your expertise? How does that expertise relate to your
customers’ pain points? Then create the story and reach people where they are—through email,
ebooks, blogs, social media, and more. Then watch the magic happen: you become the authority for
that niche. You are the expert, and you may never have to actively sell again!
Joe Pulizzi,
coauthor of Get Content. Get Customers
Once Jane visits Sue’s website, she takes a closer look at the quilts. She finds
one that she thinks her granddaughter would just love as a holiday gift. She makes
a note to herself that she will make sure to come back closer to Christmas. Now,
what are the chances that Jane will actually be back? Very slim. Luckily, Sue has
a newsletter sign-up box on her home page. She offers Jane some tips on quilt
making in exchange for her email address. Jane gladly gives it; she is
CONVERTED from a stranger to a consumer. Now, Sue can email Jane whenever
she has something exciting to share—a new shipment, some more tips, or even
news of a sale. Come Christmas, Jane receives an email from Sue reminding her
to get her Christmas shopping done—and Jane buys. She is CONVERTED from a
consumer into a customer.
Jane loves the quilt she receives from Sue! It even has a nice note. Jane’s
granddaughter loves the quilt just as much. In fact, she drags it around the house.
It has become her favorite blankie. Jane just has to take a picture and send it to
Sue. Sue takes this picture and shares it on her company blog. She
TRANSFORMS the success with a customer into an attraction tool. She explains
how each quilt leads to long-lasting memories and how happy it makes her to see
her customers happy. Enter Don. Don has been thinking about purchasing a quilt
for his own daughter but wasn’t sure if she would really enjoy it. He just stumbled
across Sue’s blog after his wife forwarded him an article in which Sue was
featured. Seeing Jane’s granddaughter’s smiling image with the quilt makes Don
smile. He thinks, “If that little girl loves it so much, perhaps mine will, too.” He
also notes how much Sue seems to care about her customers. He buys a quilt
instantly.
AHA! Zen Moment
In this book I’ll be using the words “customer” and “client” interchangeably to
refer to both, because there isn’t much difference between them when it comes to
using social media marketing techniques: you can ATTRACT, CONVERT, and
TRANSFORM both with the same methods!
Through the ACT process, Sue ensures that she will never be short of
customers. It is a simple yet effective process.
Start thinking about all your online marketing tactics as falling into at least
one of these categories. Whenever you think about marketing, ask yourself this
question: Am I using this technique to Attract, Convert, or Transform? Keep in
mind that there are plenty of instances in which an online marketing tactic can
perform multiple functions. We will cover these instances later.
Attract
Nowhere is social media marketing more successful and useful than in the
“attracting” phase of online marketing. During the attraction phase, you are trying
to drive traffic to your site and stand out from the masses.
We will look at the how of driving traffic later in the book. For now, let’s
focus briefly on what you need in order to make your product or service attractive
online.
This may seem like a detour from social media marketing, but it is in fact the
framework you absolutely must have to attract people to your product or service.
What do you need to attract prospects online? A great BOD!
• Brand: If your brand could be summed up in one word, what would it be? I
will use my company, The Marketing Zen Group, as an example. Our clients use
many words to describe us, but at the end of the day, the best phrase is “full
service.” We constantly aim to provide anything our clients may need relating to
digital marketing and PR.
• Outcome: What’s the outcome you help clients achieve? Not the process
you use but the final result. Sum it up in one line: Our company helps businesses
grow by leveraging the internet. Simple. We may create websites and conduct
social media trainings and so on, but those are all part of the process. We do those
things to accomplish a goal. That goal is to help our clients make more money.
That goal is our outcome.
• Differentiator: What makes you inherently different from your
competitors? The online marketing field is a competitive one. However, most
marketing companies only offer one piece of the puzzle. They may offer graphic
design, or optimize websites, or focus on simply consulting. There isn’t anything
wrong with this approach, but this is where our company, The Marketing Zen
Group, decided to stand out. We recognized that many clients out there didn’t
have the time or in-house resources to handle their web marketing. Moreover,
they didn’t want to hire and manage multiple companies and consultants. So, we
offered to literally take over web marketing for our clients. In essence, we offered
to become their online marketing department and drive inbound leads. It has been
an amazing differentiator for us! So, your differentiator, in other words, is simply
what makes you stand out.
I can’t stress enough how important these principles—these basic building
blocks—are to online marketing and social media marketing in particular. There
is no lack of information and noise out there. As consumers, we are constantly
inundated with data. It is a continual grand bazaar. If you don’t have the right
elements, you can’t stand out from the noise. If you don’t stand out, you can’t
attract people to do business.
The branding principle “everything communicates” has only been magnified by the rise of social
media.
To be effective in this space, you have to be clear about what you want to be known for—what
your brand stands for. And then, you have to be vigilant about building an integrated marketing
presence that supports your identity consistently. Due in part to the blurring of personal and
professional identities online, you can “leak” messages that are incongruent with your brand.
Frustrated offenders might say, “I didn’t want that to communicate!” But it’s not our choice; the
experience of the target audience determines our identity, and they decide what to include as an
element of our brand.
From its essence to its look and feel, business model, affiliations, and so on, it has never been
more important to thoroughly plan your brand.
Samantha Hartley,
Enlightened Marketing (www.EnlightenedMarketing.com)
The #1 reason people fail at social media marketing is that they don’t
have a solid foundation. They don’t have a brand, they don’t understand the
outcome they provide, and they have absolutely no way of differentiating
themselves from the competition.
Social media is the ultimate amplifier. If you have a good product or
service, it will be amplified until it is perceived as great. If you have a shoddy
product to begin with, that will also be amplified. Think about when you speak
to your friends. Do you tell them that a restaurant you liked was good or do you
say it was amazing? Inside each of us is a storyteller. We like to amplify. Social
platforms and the internet in general allow us to do that. They are a megaphone
for your message. The people who consistently do well using social media are the
ones who were already doing well to begin with. The medium simply amplified
their success.
Convert
So, what happens after you attract clients or customers? If they are an ideal fit,
they convert. I say if they are an ideal fit because not everyone you attract will be.
In our story earlier, Sue attracted Jane, who was an ideal fit. She was looking for
quilts to buy. Let’s say Sue also attracts Edgar to visit her site because he likes the
pictures of the quilts on her Facebook profile. However, he doesn’t have any use
for a quilt; he just thinks they are pretty. He may never buy. And that’s okay. You
want to convert the Janes out there, not the Edgars.
As I mentioned previously, conversion can happen in one of two ways: (1) a
stranger turns into a consumer, or (2) a stranger turns into a client or customer.
People become consumers when they subscribe to your blog, get on your
newsletter list, or merely like your Facebook page (more on this later). They are
consuming your information. At this point, they have converted. They are no
longer strangers.
Why is this important? Even if they aren’t paying for the content they’re
consuming, they are still being exposed to your company and your brand. There is
an old marketing adage that says a person must come into contact with your brand
seven times before he or she will make a purchase. Seven times!
Think about the last time you went grocery shopping at a big chain store.
Chances are that there was some table setup that allowed you to sample a product
—whether it was a new juice or old-fashioned jam. Studies show that when
people sample, they are more likely to buy! This same “sample table” concept
also works online. Offering people a sample of your work—whether through
written content, pictures, or videos—can also lead them to buy from you.
Ideally, the formula works like this:
Consumption of Valuable Content + Time = Client
Time is a variable. Some people may buy right after sampling your product or
service. Others may need much longer. Some of our clients received our
newsletter for over a year before they decided to become clients. And not
everyone should turn into a client. You only want those who are a perfect fit. The
more qualified the buyer, the fewer the returns.
Consumers and business buyers want to make up their own minds about what they need without
interference from noisy marketers. In fact, by the time they are ready to talk to you, they will be
armed with information about your company, its people, and its products.
Benefit from this new buyer behavior by engaging with them as they search for answers. Deliver
content that is relevant and compelling in their search for solutions. You can do this before they ever
call you or walk through your front door.
You become the expert your future buyers can count on. Your content engenders a trusted
relationship that makes it easy to buy from you. That’s what content marketing is all about.
Newt Barrett,
coauthor of Get Content. Get Customers
How Does Social Media Marketing Fit When It Comes to
Conversion?
Let’s be completely honest about what social media rarely does—lead to instant
clients. For example, if you are looking to put up your LinkedIn profile and
immediately get swamped by client requests, you may be disappointed. I won’t
say that social media marketing doesn’t ever lead directly to clients because it
does happen, but this should not be your goal. If you want to gain clients quickly,
there are better ways of achieving it.
What social media is great at is turning strangers into consumers. It’s the
perfect channel for allowing people to get a taste of your product or service—it’s
sampling made easy.
AHA! Zen Moment
Social media marketing works best as a tool for attracting traffic and attention. It
doesn’t work as well for converting strangers into clients. It’s better suited to
converting strangers into consumers (i.e., blog readers or newsletter subscribers),
if simply because “free” is an easy sell. Free works! And over time, it can and
will lead to business.
What’s the Best Conversion Tool?
Your website! There is no getting around this one. You shouldn’t be engaging in
social media marketing if you don’t have a website first. Every time I speak on the
subject of social media marketing, someone inevitably asks me, “Can’t I
substitute a social media profile (say, on Facebook or LinkedIn) in lieu of a
website?” The answer is always no.
Why should you have your own website and not depend on social media
profiles?
• You own your website. You don’t own your social media profiles. Your
profile (and your hard-earned contact list) is owned by the social media site
itself. If it goes “poof” tomorrow, then so does your online presence.
• Social media profiles are limiting. You can convey only so much
information on your profile. Although it may (and should) intrigue
someone, it isn’t enough to make a sale. Remember, social media is not a
selling tool! It is an attracting tool.
Transform
Once you have mastered the art of attracting and converting, you must transform
your successes into attraction magnets. This brings the entire online marketing
process full circle.
People, especially strangers, crave social proof. Social proof is the theory that
we are more likely to do something when we see others doing it. This applies
even more when the others in question are similar to us. We often decide what to
do (including whether to buy) based on what others are doing. This isn’t the only
factor in our decision making, but it is a major one.
Social media is built on social proof. Because of this, social media is a great
way to transform past successes into new attention for your company.
There are two parts to transforming:
1. You have to do a good job. If your service or product just doesn’t deliver,
you are out of luck. You can’t transform a bad experience into an attraction
tool. Let’s say you sell a blender and it breaks. The customer tries to return
it, but your overworked employee says you just don’t take returns. Sorry.
And good day! This is not an experience you want amplified. On the other
hand, if you do a great job, it makes for the perfect story. One of our
clients is K9Cuisine.com. They sell premium dog food online. Nothing too
glamorous, but their customer service is amazing. They go above and
beyond just delivering an order. If a client orders regular shipping, they
upgrade it for no extra charge. If a customer says his dog didn’t like a
specific brand, they swap it out and help him find something that his dog
will like. They’re more than just a dog food seller; they become trusted
dog nutrition advisors who care about your four-legged friend.
2. You have to use your success to attract more success. This goes beyond
just regular testimonials. This involves telling your customers’ story—the
story of what they achieved through your service or product. When
K9Cuisine.com receives an email thanking them for helping Jack, the
loved golden retriever, start eating again after a long illness, they ask the
customer if they can share their story with others. The story then makes its
way onto their Facebook page and into their tweets. Soon, lots of people
know about how K9Cuisine.com helped Jack. Next time they think about
Fido needing dog food, they will think about K9Cuisine.com. If they have
a great experience, they may tell their friends. The cycle continues.
Traditional marketers didn’t worry about who controlled the message. Online marketers today engage
an empowered customer. For this reason I ask my clients to keep two principles in mind at all times:
1. Make it easy to buy. This involves telling the right story, exposing the real benefits, and
making your shopping cart a one-click affair. It helps keep you focused when you are creating
your online presence and figuring out how you will construct your marketing message.
2. Pick tactics last. This ensures that you won’t get distracted by the latest shiny object fad before
you have your essentials in place. Once you do, you can focus on picking the right tactics to
really hear your customers.
Stephanie Diamond,
author of Web Marketing for Small Businesses
What Does Social Media Marketing Have to Do with This Step?
Everything! Whereas social media may not be ideal for converting strangers into
clients, it’s an excellent platform for sharing stories. Stories establish your
expertise, attract fresh consumers, and even help convert faster.
The following are possible tools for transformation:
• Testimonials from customers and clients
• Case studies that showcase how a customer found a solution to his or her
problem (ideally the solution is your service or product)
• Video interviews with clients
• Audio interviews with customers
• Pictures of smiling clients with your products
AHA! Zen Moment
Social media platforms are a great way to showcase past and present success
stories. By letting the customers speak for themselves, you can leverage social
proof to attract more prospects.
Overview of Online Marketing Tactics and How They
ACT (Attract, Convert, Transform)
The following table presents several online marketing methods and how well they
accomplish each step of the ACT process. (Note: Search engine optimization
[SEO] involves increasing the traffic to a website from search engines by causing
the website to appear higher in a list of search results. SEO is discussed in more
detail in Chapter 2.)
One-Minute Online Marketing Secret
Have you ever heard of putting strategy before tactics? A strategy is an overall
plan. It is the big picture: what needs to be accomplished and why. Tactics, in
contrast, address the when, where, and how. Tactics are the way you implement
your strategy.
Strategy should always come before tactics. However, most people doing
business online go about this backwards. I call this the “shiny toy syndrome.”
They see the next cool networking site and join, or someone tells them they have
to have a blog, so they start one only to abandon it after a month. I see people
constantly chasing the next cool thing online without really knowing specifically
what they want to accomplish. They may think, “I want to make money,” but
don’t go further than that. And most importantly, because they don’t know what
they want to accomplish, they don’t know how to measure the success of their
tactics.
The net comprises a gazillion splinters, most of which are businesses trying to claim their spot. So
social media doesn’t amount to a hill of beans unless what you’re promoting stands out in that
crowded marketplace. Differentiation is key, and that is why nothing can get along in the land of
social media marketing without a clearly defined, unique, “hooky” offer. This is actually the most
important part of branding—not the clever name or snappy tagline, as most think. In fact, when I
brand folks, the brand is added last and naturally tumbles out of the “hooky” offer. My intention in
branding folks is always to extract what is truly unique, quirky, interesting, and relevant about them
and their businesses and then roll that into the offer and consequently the brand. What’s hooky about
you?
Suzanne Falter-Barns,
Get Known Now (www.GetKnownNow.com)
Are you trying to attract? Convert? Transform? Once you decide what your
goal is, look at the preceding table to find a tactic that will help you achieve it.
Then you’ll also know how to measure your success. For example, if you know
that the ad you are going to put on Google is meant to attract, then you will
measure the number of visitors to your site to gauge how successful your
investment was. You won’t waste your time being frustrated that it didn’t lead to
more direct sales. If you were using a tactic to convert, you would check the
number of people who subscribed to your newsletter. (Hint: These subscribers
would be considered consumers! Remember: Consumption of Valuable Content +
Time = Client.)
Now that you have a solid understanding of how social media fits into the
bigger scheme of things, let’s take a quick look at how to make the most of your
ultimate conversion tool—your website!
2
Websites and Content Marketing
“When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is
called the Worldwide Web . . . Now even my cat has its own page.”
Bill Clinton
YOUR WEBSITE IS A WINDOW into your company. If eyes are the window to
a person’s soul, a website is the window to a company’s soul. Okay, okay, so now
you know why I am sticking to writing nonfiction. My point is your website is
crucial.
Social media, blogging, search engine optimization, and email marketing are powerful ways of
developing online leads for most business. However, it’s your company’s website where your prospect
makes a buying decision and the sale actually takes place. Each webpage needs to provide prospects
with a compelling reason to do business with you, including calls to action that gently direct them
down the sales funnel, getting them to “buy now” or contact you. While an unprofessional website
will derail the best web marketing campaign, a well-designed site is a powerful conversion tool that
will continually deliver high-quality leads.
Rich Brooks,
president of flyte new media (www.flyte.biz)
The following are three reasons you must have a website.
REASON 1: It’s expected! Can you imagine a business that doesn’t have a
phone number? No telephone? How 1800s! No website? How 1990s!
As social media grows and companies break new ground, even a website
may not be enough. What starts out as “all the cool companies are doing it”
soon turns into standard practice. I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s consumers
get frustrated because they don’t find the company they are trying to reach on
Twitter. As communication channels increase, so does our level of expectation.
REASON 2: It’s efficient. A website can multiply the number of people your
business can influence exponentially.
Let’s say you sell art supplies at a beautiful store. How many customers can
you serve at one time? Two? Three? Maybe you are really good and you can
serve four at a time. How many people can visit your website at once?
Hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. They can see your
products, make purchases, and share you with friends—simultaneously.
Our website contains everything a prospect might want to know about us. It
includes case studies, articles, bios of team members, and even videos! And all
of that is available 24/7, whenever our potential clients might need it.
REASON 3: It converts! Perhaps the biggest reason to have a website is that it
takes care of the “C” in our ACT blueprint. A website can convert visitors that
you attract (using social media) into consumers and customers. You can attract
all the people you want on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But if they don’t
convert, what’s the point?
Why Your Website Can’t Just Be Good——It Has to
Be Great!
Your website is the online equivalent of your office—the place people go when
they want to do business with you. It’s not enough to have just any website.
People expect that your website will match their perception of your business.
Let’s say you meet a guy at a party, and he is dressed to the nines. He tells you
that he helps business owners triple their income. You also hear from someone
else that he is a successful business consultant. You chat with him for a few
minutes, and you are impressed! This guy looks like the epitome of success.
Then, he pulls out a business card (also fancy) and invites you to his office. You
think, “My business could always use more help. It couldn’t hurt to visit with this
guy.” So you go to his office.
Except his office is hard to find. You drive around for thirty minutes in circles
before you locate the building, and when you finally find it, it’s more like a
broken-down warehouse. You park your car, double-check the locks, and slowly
make your way in. The office is decrepit. It is a congested little room with papers
strewn all around, and to top it off, it smells like cat litter.
Will you still do business with the guy? You might. But you may also see a
major disconnect in his public persona and his actual business. If your website
isn’t up to par—easily findable and professional—this is the same disconnect
people are likely to feel about you.
Our web is not the web of the 1990s. Remember when people actually “surfed
the internet”? It was common and many times it was listed as a hobby. “I like to
read, take long walks on the beach, and surf the internet.” Surfing is over. It was
easy back then because there were fewer websites. Today, there are trillions of
websites, and people have a lot less patience for bad ones. Think about it. How
long do you look at a website you are unsure about before you hit the back
button? According to Canadian researchers, web users form first impressions of
webpages in as little as fifty milliseconds (one-twentieth of a second). In the blink
of an eye, we decide if we will keep looking or go back. This is why good enough
isn’t good enough anymore. You have to have a great website.
Another key consideration is ensuring your website is mobile-friendly. One
reason to do so is that, if your website isn’t, it will take a major search engine
optimization hit, but the main reason is that more and more people are using
mobile devices for everything from casual searches to serious research to making
purchases.
You’ve probably experienced the frustration of visiting a non-mobile-friendly
website on a smartphone and had to expand a page just to be able to read it, or
tried to click a button designed to be clicked with a fine-point mouse rather than
tapped with a relatively “fat” finger.
Optimization can be done by building separate websites for desktop and
mobile visitors, but a better approach is to design your site using responsive
design, or other similar background technology, which adjusts how your site is
presented based on the size of the device being used. This means desktop visitors,
mobile tablet visitors, and smartphone visitors will all have an optimal user
experience. (This same optimization should also be done for your marketing
emails.)
Website 911–EMS
To be great, your website must do three things simultaneously. It must Educate,
Market, and Sell (EMS). Whenever I hear that someone’s website isn’t doing
what it needs to, I always find it lacking in one of these three areas. And EMS is
essential when it comes to conversion.
Imagine that all the visitors to your website are dots on a scale from 1 to 10.
At 10, a visitor becomes a client or customer—the ultimate goal. Now, imagine a
whole bunch of dots scattered on that scale. Some are at 1, some are at 5, and
some are at 9.
The people at 1 are just being introduced to your brand. They just heard about
you and have landed on your website for the first time. They need to be educated
about how you work before they will buy. (Note: The bigger a sale, the longer the
education process may need to be. You don’t think too hard before spending $20
on a book, but you may need more time when you’re buying a $20,000 car.)
The people at 5 already know you. They may even trust you. They just need
to be nurtured for a while longer. They may need more education, or they may
need more marketing—or they may just be waiting for the right time. If you are
there when the time is right, the 5s are likely to buy. Let’s say you sell Halloween
costumes. I may not buy until Halloween comes around, unless another event
comes along for which I need a costume. But when I do feel the need, it’s
important that you are already positioned as a solution.
The 9s may be ready to buy but just need the right incentive. Perhaps a final
reminder? A last question answered? A discount? Whatever it is, your website
needs to provide it to make the sale.
My goal here is to show you that everyone who visits your website will be at
a different point on that imaginary scale. Your website—through Educating,
Marketing, and Selling—has to move all the visitors who are an ideal fit to 10.
Let’s take a look at which elements allow a website to serve as the ultimate
marketing tool.
Seven Elements of a Great Website
A great website has impeccable design, structure, content, optimization, and
maintenance. It also ideally includes a lead capture mechanism and social media
integration.
DESIGN: Looks matter—so much so that scientists have a term for the way
looks affect us: the halo effect. The halo effect occurs when we think
something looks good on the surface and so we broaden the scope of that
positive judgment to include characteristics other than outward appearance. If
someone is good-looking, we infer that he or she must also have a good
disposition. The same concept applies to websites. If a website looks good, we
assume that the company behind it must also do good work. First impressions
count. Especially online, where a visitor doesn’t have much to go by except
your website.
LEAD CAPTURE MECHANISM WITH FREE GIVEAWAY: The area on
your website where visitors can input their name and email address is called a
“lead capture mechanism.” The majority of visitors to your website will not
purchase right away. It’s your job to make sure you give them options that
allow you to stay in touch with them. Email marketing is a great way to stay in
touch with website visitors and prospects. But when was the last time you were
eager to give out your email address? Chances are, your visitors won’t be either
—unless you provide them with an incentive. A white paper, a recorded
webinar, or a free report of some type is usually a good choice.
STRUCTURE: Ever visited a website and found yourself struggling to find a
page . . . or even to get back to the home page? Too many choices boggle the
mind. And when our mind is boggled, it is easier to say no than yes. The way
you structure your website navigation is crucial. The structure must guide
visitors through your website and handhold them (virtually) into taking action.
And it must do this for visitors at every level—those who may be ready to buy
now and those who are first-time visitors.
Don’t forget about the structure of your mobile website as well. If you are
using responsive design, you want to make sure you understand how that
technology is presenting your site on differently sized devices and different
operating systems. Your website’s structure will necessarily need to be
simplified for mobile, but just like the main version of the site, it must be able
to guide visitors in a logical fashion.
CONTENT: Content is king. It is the heart of every good website and serves
multiple purposes. The first purpose is to educate prospects and build expertise.
This is why blogs are so heralded. A well-written blog can help you stand out
from the competition and educate your prospects. (I talk more about blogs later
in the chapter.)
You can provide content in several forms: written (blogs and articles),
audio (podcasts), and visual (video). Want to really kick it up a notch? Provide
content in all three forms. This is not overkill; it’s about appealing to the
various learning preferences of a potential visitor. In this day and age, choices
rule. Give your visitors a choice, and they are much more likely to choose you.
Good content builds trust and credibility with your network. It shows you
are keeping up with the latest and greatest trends and information in your
industry. It shows you care by sharing resources and tips with your visitors, and
it helps you be seen as an expert in your field—the go-to person for all things.
The more information you can share, the better. Again, this content should be
syndicated throughout your social networks, helping make you a trusted
resource.
Content becomes especially important if you are in the professional
services industry or any business-to-business field in which expertise plays a
key role. Content is also the lifeblood of search engines. Think about it: search
engines are looking to serve their customers with good search results. They
constantly have to separate the wheat from the chaff. They have to differentiate
spam sites (websites set up specifically for the purpose of spamming people—
think Viagra emails) from real, wholesome websites (like yours!). One of the
ways they do this is by looking for content. The more fresh content you provide
to search engines like Google to deliver to their customers, the more the search
engines reward you.
SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION: Be sure to make it easy for your visitors to
connect with you on the social media networks through your website. Why?
Remember, turning strangers into consumers is part of the conversion process.
People like to consume information in different formats. One person may
prefer to keep in touch with your company on Facebook, although someone
else may prefer Twitter, and yet others prefer email marketing. That’s why it’s
important to give website visitors multiple ways to stay in touch.
You also want to make it easy for visitors to share the information with
their networks. Having a Facebook “Like” button and a Twitter button on each
page of your site for visitors to share information on your website quickly with
others is a great way to spread your information as well.
OPTIMIZATION: Optimization has two meanings here. One, your website has
to be optimized internally. A website may look beautiful from the outside, but
if the inside is poorly built, chances are it will start to show. For example, if it
isn’t coded correctly, it can look odd in certain browsers even though it looks
fine in others. The World Wide Web Consortium has a tool that allows you to
make sure your website is well coded. The tool can be found at
jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator. You just put in your website address, and it will
tell you what, if anything, needs to be repaired. The second type of
optimization relates to search engines and making sure that search engines can
“read” your website. This is called search engine optimization, and it is
discussed in detail later in the book.
MAINTENANCE: The website of today in many ways is a living, breathing
thing. In the past, you could create a website and sit back. Today, you can’t.
Passively keeping a website is almost akin to opening a store, stocking the
shelves, and then doing nothing. You don’t have to re-create the store every day
or even every year, but you do need to tag products, move items around,
change displays, and so on. Your website is the same way. Once you have the
design and structure in place, you don’t have to keep changing it. However, you
do need to maintain it by adding content.
AHA! Zen Moment
Blogging can be a great attracting and converting tool! People can find your posts
attractive and subscribe to your blog, becoming instant consumers. Over time,
they can be converted into customers.
A blog is an instantly and easily updatable website. A blog is the hub of your social media strategy,
enabling you to grow your online presence as social media trends change and evolve.
Andy Wibbels,
author of BlogWild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging
Content Marketing
If you do any marketing industry reading, you’ve heard (and might be tired of)
the phrase “content marketing.” There’s a reason content marketing has become
such a marketing mantra; as I pointed out in the last section, content is king. If
your website is the engine driving your marketing strategy, content is the fuel that
makes that engine run—it’s the core resource for your social media and email
campaigns.
Content comes in many forms:
• Blog posts
• White papers
• E-books
• Photographs
• Infographics
• Videos
• Webinar replays
• Slideshows (such as webinar slidedecks)
• Animated GIFs
• Podcasts
• Customer reviews and testimonials
• And more!
Creative output of an almost limitless range of media can, and should, be part
of your content marketing strategy; however, special attention should be paid to
one of the most effective types of content—the blog.
The Million-Dollar Question: Do I Need a Blog?
You don’t need a blog, but you do need fresh content on an ongoing basis. The
best place to put this content is in a blog. Can you choose just to post this
information on a webpage? Yes, but it isn’t nearly as efficient because readers
can’t subscribe, and you can’t keep up with your consumers to turn them into
clients.
Blogsites
You can add a blog to an existing website, but you can also build a website
around a blog. I am a huge fan of hybrid websites, or blogsites, where the entire
website is built on a blogging platform. There are many blog publishing platforms
out there, but the one we use most often is WordPress. It is the most robust
platform, and many business websites are now using it as a content management
system (CMS). A CMS allows you to manage your entire website like you would
a blog. You get an admin console from which you can edit your site, allowing you
to maintain your website and make regular changes without much technical
knowledge. If you don’t have a technical background or a webmaster who can
make your updates, you should consider getting a content management system.
Now, let’s say you have an excellent website in place with lots of wonderful
fresh content. How do you drive traffic to it? Keep reading . . .
I started my blog four years ago and always had it separate from my business website. Right before
my book launched this year, I decided to move to an integrated “blogsite” platform on WordPress for
the following reasons:
• Effort and resources: It was taking too much time to update both a blog and website with
relevant information. And without changing information on the website, why would people
come back after an initial visit? By having an integrated site, people come back over and over to
read new content.
• SEO: I realized that I was not being efficient by driving people to two sites. It became
confusing to know which link to provide when sharing my bio, and I was diluting the SEO for
both sites. Now every road leads to one site, which has increased traffic and Google ranking.
• Client conversion: I had many people visit my blog who loved my posts but who did not have
a complete picture of what I did professionally. Many did not click the link in my “About”
section to my main website to find out about my products and services. Since converting to one
site, I have had a twofold increase in individual coaching clients, as well as strong sales in my
live workshops and membership site.
Pamela Slim,
author of Escape from Cubicle Nation
Tips for an “Optimal” Blog
There is a strategy to blogging. Here are a few guidelines to follow when creating
blog posts to get the biggest bang for your buck:
• Ideally, you should blog at least two times per week, especially when
starting out.
• Each blog post should be a bare minimum of 500 words, but the longer, the
better. Posts of 2000 to 5000 words are the most effective.
• Be sure to use keywords in your blog. For example, if you’re a
manufacturer of baked goods, you want to write posts that are relevant to
baking—how to bake a cake, best desserts, and so forth. (You will learn
more about keywords in the following chapter covering SEO.)
WordPress is the ultimate publishing platform because it’s easy to use, it’s not overly complicated,
and it’s infinitely flexible. Sure, it’s great for blogs, and that is its forte, but it’s also great for non-blog
websites and even ecommerce sites. Because of plug-ins and themes (especially Headway, which
includes visual blog design tools), WordPress can be extended into anything you can imagine.
Creating and publishing content in WordPress really is about as easy as writing an email, only instead
of clicking “Send,” you click “Publish.” That’s such a satisfying button to click on, too, because
whenever you do it, you know that hundreds or even thousands of people are going to read what you
wrote.
Michael Martine,
Remarkablogger (remarkablogger.com)
• Interlink when appropriate. When you have a keyword or phrase in your
blog, link it back to the page on your site that talks about that particular
product or service. For instance, if you are blogging about tips for ordering
a wedding cake, link the words “wedding cake” with the page on your site
that talks about wedding cakes. This is a great tip for aiding in your organic
search rankings.
• Use a picture in every blog post. You’ll be syndicating your blog posts into
your different social networks, and when the blog posts feed into Facebook,
as an example, the picture will show up. People are much more likely to
read a blog post with a captivating picture than one without a picture. Don’t
have a relevant image of your own? You can get royalty-free images on
flickr.com (just be sure to search within the box for Creative Commons for
images available “for commercial use”).
• If using WordPress, be sure to add tags—keywords or phrases for subjects
you discussed in your blog. Again, this is a great search engine optimization
tool.
Solid content is really at the heart of any good online marketing campaign,
and these guidelines can help you optimize your blog content to the fullest!
3
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The Art and Science of Driving Traffic to
Your Website
“It is not the job of search engine optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of
the SEO to genetically reengineer the Web site so that it becomes an eagle.”
Bruce Clay,
Bruce Clay, Inc.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, also known as SEO, is the process of
improving the position and visibility of a website on search engines such as
Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. The most important reason to get higher rankings is
that you will get more targeted leads and conversions, which in turn means you
will get more people knocking on your door to buy your products.
The most beautiful thing about search engine marketing is how targeted it is.
Traditional marketing is like a funnel, with a wide top and a small bottom. The
top is the whole audience that sees your marketing effort (say, a commercial on
TV or radio, or an ad in a magazine or newspaper), and the bottom is the people
who might actually be interested in your product or service—the people you
actually want to reach. Search engine marketing targets the bottom of the funnel.
You don’t get a large general audience. You get the audience who is searching for
exactly what you’re selling. Google will never show a user something that is not
relevant to his or her search query. Google and other major search engines will
never list your website high on their results page otherwise. The key to getting
high search engine ranking for the audience you want is relevancy. Your site must
appear relevant to a specific search query.
Google, as well as other search engines, uses more than 200 factors in their
search engine algorithm to rank webpages. In order for your site to appear at the
top of the search engines for specific search queries, you must follow strategic
step-by-step guidelines to ensure that your site is search engine–friendly and fully
optimized for search engines. In this chapter, you will learn how to optimize the
pages on your site to get search engines to rank your site as the most relevant in
the search query or queries your target audience is using, which will lead more
business to your website.
You might have heard the saying around SEO blogs and discussion boards
that “Content is King,” which is true. But optimizing that content is how to ensure
your site performs better than your competitors’.
Let’s begin our search engine optimization process and discover how you can
dominate the Search Engine Results Page with the most competitive keywords for
your company.
Keyword Research
One of the most vital steps to take in starting your search engine optimization
process is to identify your target audience, and the keywords those potential
customers and visitors use in search engines. If you know what your customers
are searching for, you will be able to build your site and marketing campaign
specifically around those customers and their inquiries.
There are many legitimate keyword tools out there, but for this example we’ll
use the Google Keyword Planner, which provides you with keywords users are
searching for on Google.com, to identify our target audience and build our
keyword research from the ground up.
To use this tool, you’ll need to register for a free Googe Ad-Words account at
https://adwords.google.com/. Once you’re signed up, click on “Keyword Planner”
under Tools.
It looks like this:
Click on “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category” to
launch.
Let’s say we’re building a site for a company that specializes in fundraising.
Type “Fundraising” into the “Your product or service” box and click “Get ideas.”
Once your results load, click on the “Keyword Ideas” tab to display the list of
relevant keywords.
Begin your keyword research by searching for broad keywords. As you
continue, drill down to more specific keywords within your industry. This will
help you reach a more specific target audience. For example, type in “raise money
for” under “Keywords to include” on the left.
You will get the following results:
Notice that there are quite a few searches for keywords such as “how to raise
money for a cause,” “ways to raise money for charity,” and “how to raise money
for charity.” These are all great keywords that you can use to expand your site’s
content and pages.
Google allows you to download each list of keywords you generate with your
searches to a separate file. This is a great process to help you stay organized.
When you finish a keyword search session, click on “Download.”
Then export the list as an “Excel CSV” file.
Organize your Excel file by grouping your keywords into categories. Every
category will contain a set of keywords associated with it. For example:
The Fundraising category will have keywords such as fundraising, fundraising
ideas, and school fundraising ideas. The Fundraiser category will contain the
keywords associated with it: fundraiser, fundraiser ideas, school fundraiser ideas,
and similar phrases.
Note: You should export all the CSVs and then combine them into one
document yourself. This will ensure that you have all your keywords in one spot.
This keyword identification process will assist you throughout the duration of
your search engine marketing campaign, as you create new content or edit your
existing content to include these keywords.
More Keyword Research
Keyword research is an ongoing process. You can always find and identify other
keywords potential customers are searching for as your business grows and
develops. In particular, there are two easy-to-use tools that can help you keep
your keyword list up-to-date.
Google’s keyword suggestion function is a great way to identify additional
keywords you may have missed. In the following example, we are trying to find
additional keywords Google suggests to its users (which are based on what others
are currently searching for) when typing “how to raise money” into the search
box:
Google suggests that the phrases “how to raise money fast” and “how to raise
money for a cause” would be very useful keywords to use in optimizing specific
pages on your site tailored to different audiences.
Google’s “Searches related to” feature is another tool to identify additional
keywords. Go to Google.com and type in “Fundraising ideas.” Scroll down the
page to the very bottom, and you will see:
These keywords are more useful additions to your list and can help you with
further keyword research using Google’s keyword suggestion function. Hang on
to this keyword list, because it provides you with greater insight into the minds of
your consumers. You can also use your keywords for topic ideas when working
on blog posts or content for your website.
Technical Issues with Your Site
Site architecture is your approach to the design and planning of your site. Google,
as well as other major search engines like Yahoo! and Bing, pay close attention to
how your site is built in order to determine if the site is “good enough” to be
listed at the top of the search engine’s pages. Everything from your site’s
navigation menu to hidden files and broken links and more can affect your site’s
rankings. If your website is not coded correctly, your site’s architecture can
actually get your website ranked behind your competitors’. It’s very important to
check certain elements in order to ensure your site is search engine–friendly and
ready to be easily “crawled” (reviewed for results page inclusion) by the search
engines.
• Google Webmaster Central: This tool ensures that your site is search
engine–friendly. It will identify various issues, such as broken links,
malware, crawling issues, and other problems, as well as providing data on
search engine indexing and search traffic. If you sign up for this tool,
Google will also send you messages if it finds issues with your current site.
To create an account, visit www.google.com/webmasters.
• Sitemap.xml: A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages that you want the
search engines to crawl; it’s like a glossary for Google. Generate a
sitemap.xml and upload it to the root directory of your server. Then submit
it to Google Webmaster Central.
• Site speed: Ensure that your site loads quickly. There are many free tools
that can be found online to test loading time. Use them to compare your site
to the top sites on the first page of Google. If your site loads slower than
your competitors’, ask your website developer or programmer to take steps
to improve your speed: clean the code your site was written in, reference
java script codes, and reduce the size of large images, just to name a few
examples. You can also have your programmer check various advanced
server issues. However, sharing a server with other websites or webhosts
can sometimes cause problems that you might not necessarily be aware of
but which slow down your site.
• Google Analytics: This tool tracks how visitors are getting to your site and
generates advanced traffic reports. To create an account, visit
http://www.google.com/analytics.
• 404 page error: A 404 page is a custom error page that appears whenever a
visitor accidentally arrives on a page of your site that no longer exists or, in
some cases, never existed. For example, let’s say a visitor was trying to get
to your services page, and misspelled the exact URL. A 404 page should
come up to help them. This makes for a better user experience, which
search engines value. Also, search engines like knowing which pages exist
and which don’t. Your 404 page should be customized to contain a message
to the user telling him or her that the page was not found, plus a call to
action to continue browsing your site, such as alternative pages to visit.
• 301
Redirect:
Google
treats
http://Domain-Name.com
and
http://www.Domain-Name.com as two different sites. This means your
website’s SEO is penalized. To avoid this, create a 301 redirect from
Domain-Name.com to www.Domain-Name.com. If you currently have an
.htaccess file on the root, simply add the following code to it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^Domain-Name.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.Domain-Name.com/$1 [L,R=301]
(Just make sure your website does in fact redirect to the www.DomainName.com after updating the .htaccess page.)
• 301 Permanent Redirect: If you are redeveloping a website, your pages
may end up with new URLs. A 301 permanent redirect ensures the search
engines know that your old pages have moved to a new location. If you
don’t do this, your site may lose the SEO value that your old pages acquired
over the years.
• Robots.txt: Your site may include data you do not want to be searchable.
To ensure that search engines do not crawl and index sensitive information,
use a robots.txt file, which tells search engines not to crawl specific areas of
your website. You can add the robots.txt file to the Google Webmaster tool.
• Broken Links: Search engines don’t like when sites link to pages that have
been deleted or moved. Ensure that there are no links like this on your site
by checking Google Webmaster Central.
• URL naming: Use your keywords to create pages dedicated to their target
audience. Taking our example for the Fundraising site, you will need to
name and create pages using these keywords. For example, if we have a
page about fundraising ideas for schools, name your page schoolfundraising-ideas.html. Remember that search engines are looking for
keywords, content, and relevancy to any given unique search query.
• Image naming: Naming images is basically the same as URL naming. You
want to name your images using the same technique. For example, if you
have a page about fundraising for schools, create an image with a fun
illustration of kids in school and name your file fundraiser-ideas-forschool.jpg.
On-Page Factors
On-page SEO factors are a crucial part to your site’s overall SEO success; they
are still an integral part of the algorithm Google and other search engines use to
rank your page. On-page elements refer to the HTML tags within a site’s coding
—HTML is a coding language used to write webpages—and they can be tweaked
to make your website more appealing to search engines.
Though other elements like sitemaps and redirects are important, it’s best to
concentrate on some of the major on-page factors in order to ensure that your
webpages are optimized and can rank higher with search engines.
Title: The tag defines the title of the page or document online—the
way search engines reference your page on their search engine result pages. It’s
also a great opportunity to provide search engines with information about the
page you are trying to optimize.
For example, go to Google.com and type in the following keywords:
fundraising ideas. You will see the following results:
Here’s the Title tag of the first result:
Do-It-Yourself Fundraising Ideas – DIY Fundraiser
As you can see, the title contains its site’s most relevant and important
keywords: Fundraising Ideas and DIY Fundraiser. These sites are optimized for
the search phrase “Fundraising ideas” because the keywords appear in the title,
among other factors.
Each page of your site should have a unique title that uses three to five
keyword phrases and is less than sixty-five characters long. Any characters
following the sixtieth one will be ignored. You should avoid “stop words”
between important keywords such as and, or, with, for. You have limited space to
write a title and you want to use as many of your main keywords as possible.
Dashes are one good way to separate keywords, but do not overuse them. This
can be viewed as keyword stuffing (a big no-no) by the search engines. You can
use commas, pipe bars, and sentences that make sense to humans, too.
Meta description: The description tag describes, in a couple of sentences,
what a page is about. For example:
The HTML code that generated that second result:
When writing a meta description, ensure it is no more than 150 characters in
length. Write a unique meta description for each page and the main keywords you
are optimizing your page for.
Headings: Search engines use heading tags to tell them of the relative
importance of text on a webpage. Your webpage readings should include the most
relevant keyword phrases and be wrapped in heading tags, like this:
Most relevant keywords
Second most relevant keyword phrases
Third most relevant keyword phrases
The best way to optimize the headings on your page is by assigning a heading
tag for various relevant paragraphs within your content. The most important tag is
the and is used at the top of the page.
Fundraising Ideas
The rest of the heading tags can be used for specific short phrases describing
the previous tag and the content associated. For example:
Easy Fundraising Ideas
Follow up with a heading further down the page that drills down further,
such as:
How Do I Start My Own Fundraiser?
Keep in mind that your headings must always describe the paragraph or
paragraphs that follow it.
Bold, italic, underline, bullet points: Search engines also pay attention to
the tags for bold , italic , underline , and bullet points. Use these
features to highlight search terms, but be sure to do so tastefully.
Internal linking: One of the best-kept secrets to advanced optimization is
internal linking between pages. Internal linking between pages helps Google as
well as other search engines understand the relevancy of keywords or keyword
phrases to your page content by using what’s called “anchor text”—the text that
visitors click on to go to another page. For example, let’s say you have a page that
talks about fundraising for elementary schools. This text can be linked to another
relevant page on your website that describes fundraising ideas for kids in school
like this:
This is a great way to connect relevant content within a website and target
additional keyword phrases.
You may want to use descriptive phrases to link between pages. For example:
the easiest way to raise money for school would be a great anchor text link to a
page that talks about raising money for schools.
Internal linking is also a great way to introduce pages deep within your site
(that is, pages that would otherwise take four or more clicks to reach from the
home page), so that search engines can crawl and index them.
Image ALT tag: Sometimes, search engines are specifically looking for
images, so optimizing your images for these searches can help you reach new
customers via image channels like Google Images and Bing Images. The best way
to optimize an image is by describing the picture in a few words (focusing on
your main keywords, of course). For example, let’s say we have an image
showing Boy Scouts collecting money for their fundraiser. This would be a good
picture to optimize for “boy scouts fundraising ideas.” The HTML code will look
like this:
On-page factors are a great way to tell the search engines what your site is
about but stay true to your target audience; optimize your pages with the most
relevant keywords related to the content of the page. Do not optimize your page
for apples when you’re talking about oranges.
Link Building
Link building—the process of getting links back to your site placed on other sites
in order to increase your site’s rank with search engines—is one of the most
misunderstood areas of Search Engine Optimization. Let’s start by defining what
“backlinks” are.
Backlinks are links that point to a website. Let’s say a webpage includes the
text “RecipesABC has the best chocolate cake recipes in the world” and the
words “chocolate cake recipes” link back to www.RecipesABC.com (not an
actual site).
What does that mean to search engines?
By providing a link back to RecipesABC.com with the anchor text “chocolate
cake recipes,” we are telling search engines that RecipesABC.com is relevant to
“chocolate cake recipes.” The search engines register this as a vote for
RecipesABC.com’s web popularity, which affects its rank among other relevant
sites with the same anchor text “chocolate cake recipes.” The more votes to your
site, the better rankings your website will achieve when users search “chocolate
cake recipes.”
Here are a few important factors to remember about link building:
Relevancy: Always seek backlinks from relevant websites. If you have a
website that sells a dessert recipe book, make sure to seek links from websites
that are relevant to your topic, i.e., other recipe websites, book stores, chef’s
blogs, home cooking, bakeries nearby, and so on. Their “votes” will mean more to
search engines on the subjects you’re targeting.
You can use www.dmoz.org to find more topics relevant to the theme of your
site.
Website authority: One of the most important things to remember about link
building is that not all links are created equal. In the eyes of search engines, a link
pointing to your website from the New York Times is a lot more authoritative than
a link from a website that was created yesterday.
You can use http://who.is to discover who owns a website and when it was
created, among other relevant details.
Note: Beware of link farms! A link farm is a website set up with the sole
purpose of increasing incoming links for other websites. These sites are usually
made up of long lists of unrelated links and are considered a form of spam.
User experience: Google, as well as other search engines, are looking for
websites that provide the best user experience. If users can’t find what they are
looking for, search engines will consider the site less trustworthy. If you see a site
that is not so user-friendly, skip your link-building efforts there and focus instead
on sites that provide a friendlier user experience.
There are many ways to build links back to your site. Here are a few ideas:
• Reach out to relevant blog owners and pitch an interesting story.
• Share your website content on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, and via
quality social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
• Add sharing options on your website to make it easier for other people to
share your stories via social bookmarking sites, social media sites, and
email.
• Participate in group discussions and forums related to your industry.
• Participate in Q&A sites, like Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, and Quora.
• Contribute to relevant blogs by posting comments on their stories.
• Connect with others whose sites share the same theme or niche as your
website and offer them a reason to link back to you.
• Run a promotion or contest on your website. Design a badge and provide
the HTML code so your visitors can link back to your website simply by
copying and pasting a badge.
• Submit your website to relevant quality directories. Some helpful search
terms to consider when looking for relevant directories include:
{keywords} + “add url”
{keywords} + “submit url”
{keywords} + “directory”
• Write press releases about your company and submit them to PRWeb.com
and other PR sites.
• Write unique articles related to your industry and distribute them to e-zine
articles sites, as well as to social media platforms such as squidoo.com and
blogger.com.
• Submit your business information to relevant sites like Google Places, Bing
Business Portal, Facebook Places, Yelp, Insider Pages, Yellow Pages, and
others.
Remember, when asking others to link to you, always request that the link use
specific anchor text keywords. This will get your website higher on the search
engine results pages for the specific keywords you’ve been targeting.
Also, always stay relevant by posting only insightful articles and comments
on other websites, not spam.
SEO, simplified, consists of this: (1) a well-built website, (2) lots of relevant
and timely content, and (3) links back from other credible websites. Don’t let the
technical aspects overwhelm you too much. Of all web marketing activities, SEO
is the most outsourced of them all; the goal for this chapter was just to give you
an educated overview. Now, let’s move on to social media!
4
Social Media Marketing
What You Need to Know Before You Start
“Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business
through social media channels, and it is a powerful strategy that will get you
links, attention, and massive amounts of traffic.”
Maki,
Dosh Dosh
The Nature of the Fun-Loving Beast
Now that you have a solid understanding of online marketing, we can move on to
social media marketing. Let’s break down the phrase “social media marketing.”
• Marketing: Promoting a product or a service to increase sales
• Social media: Online platforms where people connect and communicate
Some examples of online platforms are blogs; social networking sites such as
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram; and video sites such as YouTube.
Most marketers abuse social media platforms. They use them to push their
message on people and try to dominate the market. Remember our discussion
about the mistake of going against the grain? This is a great example. Marketers
who abuse social media usually do so because they are used to using traditional
marketing methods like television. You can’t talk back to the TV. (Well, you can,
but it doesn’t get you very far.) With social media, talking back is the whole
point; it’s a conversation, not a monologue.
What Social Media Is All About
I chose to explore the social web as a business framework after reading Tim Berners-Lee’s talk
honoring Vannevar Bush at MIT in 1995, excerpted in part here:
I [have] a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive
sea of shared knowledge [and that] by working on this knowledge together we can come to
better understandings.
This crystallized for me what social media is all about, conveying the importance of participating
with rather than attempting to impress upon your customers. The social web is a place where people
gather and share to improve their condition. As marketers, it is our obligation to respect this
fundamental premise. It is our gain when we do and our loss when we don’t.
Dave Evans,
author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
Chapter 1 discusses how traditional marketing has evolved over the years.
Now let’s take a look at a table of descriptive words and phrases that compares
traditional marketing and online marketing—specifically, social media marketing.
Traditional Marketing
Online Marketing/Social Media Marketing
Dominate the market
Create a community within the market
Shout out loud
Listen, and then whisper
Me, me, me
Us, us, us
Push the product or service
Pull in people with your message/story
Advertising
Word of mouth
Control
Allow
Pursue “leads”
Nurture relationships
Why Social Media Marketing? Why Bother?
According to multiple surveys and studies, between 49 and 90 percent of web
users have made a purchase based on recommendations they received
through a social media site—an impressive percentage even at the low end.
Roughly 40 percent of small businesses have a Facebook page, and many fewer
use other social media platforms (a little over 10 percent use Twitter). Marketers
are missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with potential customers. Social
media marketing is a good idea for the following three reasons.
1. Social media sites are where the people are. Let’s say there was an expo
happening with 1.55 billion attendees, and I offered you a free booth.
Would you take it? I sure hope you would. That’s how many people are
using Facebook. If Facebook were a country, it would be the most
populous nation on Earth. And it costs nothing to join.
2. Trust in advertising continues to erode. Let’s face it. We trust our friends
more than we trust what the nice folks on TV tell us. You can either be that
friend or you can be the voice on TV that gets ignored. The call is yours.
But you can’t fake it. Because of the transparent nature of social media,
you can’t really hide who you are for long. Let’s say a company pretends
that they value their customers more than anything. Then they turn around
and treat a customer badly. That customer has a voice. Chances are she has
a Facebook profile or Twitter account. Even if she doesn’t, she may tell a
friend who does.
3. People are already talking about you. That last example tells us
something else, too: people are already talking about your products, your
service, and your company. It’s inevitable. Social communities are
breeding grounds for interaction. The only choice you have is whether you
join the conversation. Every individual who interacts with your company
has the potential to become a champion or a critic. You get to determine
which one they become.
Two of the most powerful benefits of social media for small business are access and prominence. Tap
your blog to demonstrate thought leadership (aka prominence) in your niche, and then leverage
Twitter and Facebook to expand the conversation, facilitate evangelism, and grow your “following.”
As an example, Twitter lets you find highly relevant conversations with prospective clients, vendors,
mentors, and colleagues in real time; join in, demonstrate value, and then, if appropriate, offer
solutions to any problems being discussed. Do this on a regular basis and you’ll grow a sizable tribe
primed for your products and services.
Jonathan Fields,
author of Career Renegade
Social Media Marketing Tenets
Before we delve into the nitty-gritty of specific social media platforms and how to
make the most of them, let’s look at the tenets of social media marketing. These
principles do not change, regardless of the technology in question.
• Respect other people online. Whether you’re using email or instant
messaging (IM) or social media: (1) don’t spam people, (2) don’t blindly
add people to your email list, and (3) respect people’s “virtual space.”
Basically, follow the Golden Rule; if it would annoy you, it will doubly
annoy another. The same common rules of etiquette that apply offline apply
online, too. Would you ever run up to someone, hand him your business
card, and run away? I hope not. Yet people often do the online equivalent:
post their website link—their virtual business card—blindly on people’s
online spaces.
• Efforts to control or manipulate will backfire. Did you hear the story of
how the CEO of a top grocery chain got busted for pretending to be a
customer and praising the company in forums? It was quite a scandal. Once
his identity was made public, it was all over. It’s next to impossible to
manipulate people online without getting caught. And because there are so
many better ways to go about influencing people positively, there is no need
to control the conversation.
• Don’t chase everything new under the sun. This is a common mistake
many people make when first starting out. Remember “shiny toy
syndrome”? Resist the temptation to grab at everything. Do your research,
pick one or two methods, and work at them consistently. This is the reason I
am not covering every social media channel that’s out there in this book.
I’ve chosen instead to focus on the ones that I believe provide the highest
return on investment.
• Traffic is nice but should not be the only goal of social media
marketing. Some people out there look at social media marketing only as a
means of attracting traffic to their websites. Although traffic is a great goal
and easily measurable (it falls under Attract), it should not be your only
goal. Remember, you can and should use social media to transform as well.
It is a great way to share your stories, listen to feedback, and cultivate
relationships with potential customers and future partners and vendors.
• It’s a good idea to use your real name. Nine out of ten times, it’s best to
use your real name—even if you represent a company. Why? People don’t
want to be friends with McDonald’s or Dell. They want to connect with
others like them. We cover later when it is advisable to use your business
name.
• You have to be proactive. This is not the same as being pushy. I hear the
following a lot: “I am on Facebook and LinkedIn, but it doesn’t seem to do
much.” My response is usually: “What exactly did you expect ‘it’ to do?”
It’s like saying you went to a networking event that didn’t do anything for
you. The real question here is what did you do at the networking event? Did
you reach out to two people and have a conversation? Social media is only
what you make of it.
Social Media Marketing Checklist
The following is a list of what you must have in place (or be in the process of
putting in place) before you start with social media marketing. Remember—social
media marketing is only part of the bigger picture.
A good BOD: You must have a keen understanding of your brand,
outcome, and differentiator.
A website: Remember EMS. Your website must educate, market, and sell!
Content: Ideally, your website will include a blog, because a blog makes it
easy to update your site regularly with fresh content, but however you
update, just make sure you do. Fresh content increases the likelihood
visitors will stick around and turn into consumers.
An email capture mechanism: Don’t send people to your website unless
you have a way to follow up with them. Ideally, this means collecting their
email addresses so you can send them relevant content in the form of a
newsletter or bulletin in the future.
Have all four? You’re ready to rock and roll!
Visibility + Credibility = Real Social Media Success
By using social media to position yourself as an expert in your field, you’ll stand out from
competitors, generate buzz, and increase your value. To do this, you must market yourself as a highly
visible, ideally matched source of information for your audience.
Always focus on providing valuable content, boosting your credibility, and building trust. When
done correctly, you’ll turn followers into loyal fans who practically do your marketing for you.
Value, credibility, and trust. Add those three things to a high level of visibility and you have the
social media recipe for success.
Nancy Marmolejo,
Viva Visibility (www.VivaVisibilityBlog.com)
Which Technologies and Networks Do I Use?
Although there are thousands of social networking sites and technologies out
there, in this book, I will be focusing only on the “big three” (though a later
chapter addresses other valuable platforms, including Instagram, which may soon
join the big three, and Pinterest, a platform for marketers looking to reach a
female demographic):
• Facebook (www.facebook.com)
• Twitter (www.twitter.com)
• LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)
I also cover certain technologies that complement social media marketing,
including online video.
There’s really only one way “social” and “marketing” can coexist happily. And that’s if you take off
your marketing hat when thinking about social media marketing and, instead, think like an average
user of social media.
Allow yourself to become engrossed in the user experience on social media sites. Watch for things
like how the particular “culture” of each site is constructed and maintained. Watch for things people
say and do that would lead nicely into relationship building, which leads to new clients, branding, or
product sales.
Since it is impossible to completely forget that you are a marketer, you will still pick up on great
ways to increase business through social media, but you must think like a user first and a marketer
second.
Social media users are there for anything but advertisements and pushy marketing. But make no
mistake about the fact that marketing is being done successfully on these sites. It’s called social
marketing for a reason, and it’s a very different thing that you can only see when you have your user
goggles on.
Once you understand the main purpose of any social site, you can do a lot to increase your traffic
and grow your business with social media in ways that don’t turn off users but that engage, i…
