Finding Your Social Media Voice

February 22, 2011 Filed under: Social Media Marketing — Tags: Social Media Marketing —

I often talk with small business owners who want to jump on the Social Media bandwagon and establish their presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, or some combination of these. After all, everyone is doing it and who wants to be left behind? Many people adopt the “just try it” mindset, and create an account, start posting, build a following, …and then wonder where to go from there (the classic Fire, Aim, Ready approach). That’s fine if your goal for social media is just to be social. But if you’re intending to market your business through Social Media, you should take a more deliberate approach. I call it finding your voice. Here are some practical tips for how to get there.

Establish your goals. Are you looking to draw visitors to your website? Address customer concerns and feedback? Establish online thought leadership? Build a brand? While these are all valid goals, your answer should NOT be “all of the above”. Decide on one or 2 primary goals and put your full weight behind those. You’ll be more effective if you’re focused.

Identify your intended audience, and make a clear mental picture of who they are. If your audience is your customers, for example (that’s the case for my blog), keep a single person in mind and define them more expansively than just their interest in your product or service. What do they look like, what interests do they have? What do they care about? My favorite example is the Fiskateers blog, which targets scrapbookers. Sure, they use Fiskar scissors, but the voice of the blog understands that a scrapbooker is much more than just a user of scissors. By defining a clear persona as their target reader, Fiskar has built a successful following by catering to the specific needs of the scrapbooking persona.

(more…)

0 Comments

Facebook Updates Your Company Page

February 11, 2011 Filed under: Social Media Marketing — Tags: Facebook, Social Media Marketing —

Big changes are afoot at Facebook, which has just updated its Facebook Pages. This is good news for small business, as they appear to be making a clearer distinction between personal profiles and company/organization pages, and making Facebook Pages easier to work with, edit, and track, all of which help to support the needs of small businesses. Here’s a quick overview of their changes (and here’s Facebook’s overview of the changes):

Choose your identity. Since Facebook started as a person-to-person exchange, and only later added Facebook Pages for organizations, there has often been confusion between personal and company identities. Now they’ve made a clear distinction. You still need a personal account to setup a company page, but you can now operate as either the personal or company identity – and you can change between them within one account (see pink arrow). In the picture above, I have entered posts on my company page (Sound Web Solutions) as both Sound Web Solutions and as Cynthia Lavoie (see red arrows). And when I comment on other pages, I can do so as either identity, using the “use Facebook as…” chooser (pink arrow).

NOTE: To switch between identities, you’ll need to go into your company page Settings and uncheck the box next to “Always comment and post on your page as PAGE NAME even when using Facebook as YOUR NAME”.

Showcase photos. Photos have long been a favorite thing for Facebook users to share, but they’ve never been particularly prominent on the standard design of a company page. Now they are (see blue arrow). Take advantage and dress your page up with some personalized photos – of your employees, your place of business, or whatever.
Feature other pages. If you go into the “Edit Page” mode (purple arrow), you’ll see Featured Pages which allows you set the other pages that you like. Make sure to feature your friends’ pages, business partner pages and clients. You can also feature the human owners of other pages.
New Left Navigation. Facebook has moved the navigation tabs from the top to the left of the page (see gold arrow). To move the left navigation around, just click edit and then drag and drop. To add some variety and interest, you can add Notes, YouTube, Event and your blog to the default list of tabs Facebook provides.
Interact with other pages. You can see activity from the pages you like in your News feed. You can also highlight other Pages you are connected with as well as the people who are managing your Page.
Get notifications when fans interact with your page or posts.

It’s exciting, to be sure, and it’s bound to make Facebook an even more popular channel for small businesses to market themselves. However, let me add a note of warning. As these updates show, Facebook is known to change things around often, without warning. They also own all the content on your pages, and do not add significantly to the ranking or authority of your website. With that said, it’s hard to ignore the fact that they have more than 500 million active users. My suggestion: update your Facebook Page to these latest changes. If you don’t, Facebook will authomatically update you March 1^st anyway.

1 Comment

Top Ten Signs You’re Pulling – Not Pushing – Your Customers

December 8, 2010 Filed under: Content Marketing,Social Media Marketing —

You’re Not Still Push-Marketing, Are You?
Marketing is getting turned on its head these days, and if you’ve done traditional marketing for a long time, you may be struggling to make the switch from traditional ‘push’ to social media ‘pull’ marketing techniques. Today’s savvy marketers know that customers are turned off and tuned out from invasive push-marketing tactics, and they’re demanding more control over when and where they pay attention to branded content. The challenge of marketing is shifting away from traditional push strategies, recognizable in language such as:

Target your market
Advertise your product benefits
Convince your prospects to buy

…to a new set of pull strategies, with language such as:

Be available in the right places
Build connection and trust
Provide value before purchase

I’m not suggesting you abandon all push-marketing activities; most companies will probably find a mix of both works best. But don’t underestimate how much of a mindset-change the pull approach requires. Here are some tell-tale signs you’re successfully making the switch:

Your blog posts, tweets, and social media comments don’t all start with “I” or “we”.
Your customers are finding you more often than you are finding them.
You’re more excited to address your customers’ challenges than to talk about your product’s new features .
Your online persona has an individual personality & voice, rather than just a corporate brand image.
People are sharing your comments and content across social media channels because it’s valuable to them .
You feel more like a publisher than a marketer or sales person.
You worry less about building your prospect or email list, and more about building your editorial calendar.
You’re hyper-aware of your most valuable keyword terms, and you actively weave them into what you write for online consumption.
Your website is optimized to attract the audience you are targeting, and offers clear next steps for your qualified visitors to take.
You track and measure all online engagements so you can clearly refine the elements that pull visitors and leads to your site.

1 Comment

6 Metrics For Measuring SEO Success

November 18, 2010 Filed under: SEO,Social Media Marketing,Web Analytics — Tags: SEO metrics, web analytics —

Search Engine Optimization is a long-term investment. Unlike PPC advertising, which can produce results immediately and generate qualified leads within days, SEO often takes months before it moves your website into the desired top search rankings. So, how do you know if you’re on the right track in the meantime? What metrics can you use along the way to determine what’s working, to keep you moving in the right direction, and to course correct as needed? And how can you tie these into your bigger-picture online marketing analytics, to help you make better marketing and budgeting decisions?

Here are the 6 most important measures that will tell you how well you’re doing in the Organic Search Ranking game. These are the tools of the SEO trade, and any SEO consultant should have them at their fingertips. Before you embark on measuring, however, make sure you know what goals you’re trying to reach, and set yourself up to measure the things that will have the greatest impact on your long-term success.

Ranking Reports

Since the main objective of SEO is to improve your website’s search ranking for valuable keywords, the most obvious metric is your ranking. At the simplest level, you can easily track this by typing your keyword into Google each week and watching where your website appears in the list of results – if you’re doing the right things in SEO, you’ll see it inch up over time. If you’re tracking multiple keywords, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to track the top search queries people are using to find your site, and the average position each one achieves in rankings. If you’re looking for broader and deeper metrics, consider some of the more sophisticated ranking tools that measure your all keywords on all search engines, and track progress over time. We use and really like Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon – it’s easy to set up, easy to use, and has a simple, intuitive interface that shows progress for all your keywords over any time segments – but there are many others as well. (more…)

1 Comment

How to Manage Your Search Marketing Agency: No More “Go Do It Please”

October 27, 2010 Filed under: Content Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media Marketing — Tags: content marketing, Search Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing —

There’s no doubt about it – marketing as a profession is undergoing massive changes, right now, in real-time. When you’re in the midst of change, it’s hard enough to shift your perceptions, and even harder to alter long-established practices. But in marketing as in anything else, if you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need to acknowledge that things aren’t what they used to be, and then be willing to reset your expectations as well as your plans.

I’ve been a marketing professional for over 20 years, and for the first 17-18 years, the practice of marketing didn’t change much. Companies determined their product (or service) strategy, created marketing materials, attended conferences, hired ad agencies to run ad campaigns and PR agencies to pitch stories to the press. (Gross generalization, I admit, but roughly true). When you hired an agency, you expected the ‘creative types’ to go off, think creatively, and come back with some cool-looking ads or some punchy story ideas to pitch to journalists. The implicit expectation: “just go do it for me, please.”

The new world of search marketing and social media is much different. If your job is to market your company’s products, you can’t expect an agency to just “go do it” for you. Why not? There are 3 main reasons, as I see it:

Content Freshness. Your online image is only as fresh as your content. While an outside marketing agency may know lots about your company or product, they’re just not as close as you are to what’s new and interesting about it. You’ll need to keep the content coming, and keep the news fresh. An outside agency can, however, be a terrific brainstorming partner, content management advisor, ghost writer, editor, content optimizer, writing coach, and even blog “personal trainer” (ask me about this if you don’t know what I mean). Online marketing is fast evolving into content marketing, and an agency can be a valuable partner in helping your company to make this transition.

The Personal Touch. Social media is all about connecting directly with your customers and prospects, and an authentic voice is critical to establishing trust. It’s therefore a good idea to develop your own company “voice” and to build a credible presence on social media. An outside agency can be a key partner in helping you set goals for your social media strategy, understand the different social media channels and which are best suited to your goals and audience, and coach you on how to get started. They can also help you tie your social media strategy to a larger Content Marketing strategy, and measure your effectiveness across the board.

Quick Response. It’s likely your company is being talked about online. Whether it’s online customer reviews, social media discussions, or blog comments, your company name – and hence your online reputation – is out there. If you want a chance to respond, shape your image, or even just track what’s being said, you’ll need to tune in to this chatter. A company representative is once again your best online voice, although a marketing agency can track and measure what’s being said and point you to the trouble spots that need your immediate attention.

Success for a marketer in the current online environment starts with engagement. Engagement is becoming an over-used word, but it’s an apt one nonetheless. If you don’t engage with your customers, you’ll lose their online attention; and for a growing number of consumers, online is where their attention is increasingly focused.

Does this mean you shouldn’t hire a marketing agency? No, that’s certainly not what I’m suggesting (disclosure: I AM a marketing agency). And you should still expect creative ideas, solid strategic thinking, and excellence in execution, as good marketing agencies have always provided. But I am suggesting you alter your “just do it for me” expectation. To help you succeed, an Internet Marketing agency needs your deep involvement. While there are agencies who’ll encourage you to outsource everything to them, a more effective approach is a partnership.

If you want to portray an authentic online presence, you’ll need to develop your own unique voice in social media, generate unique content on a frequent basis, and respond in a timely manner to your online fans and reviewers. These are big tasks, and an online marketing agency can help – as coach, editor, organizer, strategizer, ghost writer, metrics tracker and analyst, and more. But they can’t “just go do it” without you.

1 Comment

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »