eSpire Marketing

IMG_0002.JPGTrust and transparency are the key to raising your revenue. I don’t know about the rest of you but I have certainly noticed a huge number of websites, applications, and blogs integrating facebook connect to their sites. Why is that? Well it’s simple really, everyone is finally cayltching on that social media is here to stay.
Whether your marketing department wants to believe it or not it is here to stay and if you don’t embrace it soon you’ll find yourself on the outskirts of your industry and fast. This economy has made it increasingly more difficult to sell things to people because most people, including myself, are buying simply out of neccesity and less and less based on want. On top of that people are researching more and more the products they do decide to buy before they make the final purhase. They need to trust the product and the company they buy it from.
This is always the analogy I use when I’m explaining myself to others; Think of it like this, are you more likely to buy the product that you saw on a billboard on the drive home, or the product that one of your friends can give you a review of and recommend? For me the obvious answer is to buy the product my friend recommends.
Social Media gives your business the opportunity to create that brand and product trust (as well as consumer recommendation) that is so vital to your business’s success. That is why we are all seeing the influx of Facebook and Twitter integration everywhere on the web. It gives your company the power to control (or at least influence) the conversation around your brand and your products and in turn transparency, trust, and inthe end sales.

I’ll leave you with this. My top 3 best practices for creating brand loyalty and trust with social media and that equals sales for you.

1. Ask the consumer – So you want to add a new product to your website? Go to your Twitter or Facebook page and ask your followers which one they like best. They’ll appreciate the fact that you want their opinion and they’ll feel as if they have some ownership in the decisions for your company.
2. Follow your brand mentions- Watching to see who is talking about you and what they are saying is important. That way if a customer has a complaint to make, you can deal with it out in the open and take care of them. That visibility and transparency will create brand loyalty and trust down the road.
3. Give away free stuff – The best way to win people over is to give them something for little or no return on their part. I realize from an ROI standpoint that might be hard to do but they’ll tell their friends and that word of mouth marketing is what you really should strive for.

It’s not hard really. You just have to put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. Wake up people, welcome to the new economy. The consumer driven economy.

So you just set up a Facebook page for your company, now what? Just because you set it up doesn’t mean that anyone knows (or cares) that you are on Facebook. You need to promote your social media campaigns just as you would promote a new product for sale. Generally when you’re promoting a new product, to get it off to the right foot, you probably give them a bit of extra incentive at first to come and try it out right? Well your social media campaigns should be no different.

Step 1:
The first thing you’ll want to do is post some cool content on your page. If you invite anyone to be a fan of a page that doesn’t have anything posted, you’ll hardly get any fans at all. You need to give the people who visit your page something to look at. Whether that is video content, blog posts, or pictures it doesn’t matter. Make your page look interesting before you tell anyone that you even have a page at all.

Step 2:
The next thing that everyone needs in order to have a successful social media campaign is friends right? Well then your first step is going to have to be to acquire friends. The obvious first step is to ask your friends and family to become a fan of your Facebook Page. You will get a decent amount of people to become a fan of your page just because they know you. It will help to make your account look a bit more established before you announce it to the rest of the online world.

Step 3:
Now that you’ve got your feet wet it’s time to officially announce your new Facebook Page to the rest of the world. Your next step should be to write a blog article telling all of your fans that you have set up a New Facebook Page. This step is more for the search engines than anything else. It will also act as a reference page for the next step in this process.

Step 4:
Gather a list of people to email and announce the launch of your new Social media page. You may already have gathered an email list from your customers. Email them and let them know, but give them some incentive as to why they should become a fan of your new page. Maybe offer a lucrative discount to all the fans of your pages. It works trust me. I’ve seen it done with a lot of success on numerous occasions. Then, add the people who actually opened the email to a separate email list. These will be the people you will continually email about your new facebook or twitter page.

Step 5:
Once the initial momentum has stopped from the first email, create a contest of sorts, and make the prize opportunity something very nice. One of the best things to do is a “Become a fan for free stuff.” For instance, if you want to make it your initial goal to reach 1000 fans on Facebook, give prizes out to your fans for helping you get there. Customized Girl does a great job with this idea in that contest.

Step 6:
Keep things interesting. You want to continue to keep momentum rolling. Try different promos, contest, and just fun ideas with your new fans on these pages. You want to keep giving them a reason to come back to your page and continue to give them reasons to interact with you. That is how you create online social media buzz.

A lot of smaller businesses might find the amount of time and effort needed to be spent with these people creating new ideas, contest, and promotions to keep their fans coming back for more. I promise you, that the lifetime value of these people is going to FAR exceed the amount of money you spend keeping them entertained. Keep it fun, keep it fresh, keep it real.

Today I got the opportunity to attend the Columbus Chamber Event “Getting Results with Social Media” and I must say it was truly a priviledge. The event consisted of a series of case studies that various businesses had used and seen success with. This was my first Columbus Chamber event and I must say it was quite an experience.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I got to the conference but I was definitely looking forward to learning something new. I think more important to me was to get a chance to really see where Columbus stands in terms of the Internet Marketing Industry. I must say that I was extremely impressed and inspired. We have a lot of great minds in this city and that is something that I am extremely proud of and all of you should be as well. Check out what everyone was saying about it on twitter #cmhsome.

I am not going to go over each case study piece by piece but I would like to take my top social media best practices that I pulled from the conference.

Social Media Best Practices

1. Research Your Target Audience – The best way to reach your target audience is to meet them where they are. That may be Facebook or Twitter or a forum of some sort. Engage your target audience where they are and find a way to connect with them.
2. Create an Event – The case study about Capital University is what inspired this one. They used social Media to re-brand themselves. They also went to their target audience. Enrollment counselors friend requested students who had applied and been accepted, continued to create fun events around their major dates, and enrollment exceeded expectations.
3. BE REAL – This is an important one. In order to truly engage with the social media communities you have to be engaged with them. If someone tries to ask you a question about your business or service answer them in a timely manner. It makes the conversation seem more real and gives the user more incentive to continue to interact with you.
4. Be consistent – This sort of goes along with the last best practice. Consistency does help you seem more real and give the user more incentive to interact. But more than that posting on the same days can give your following a schedule of sorts. Just like TV, if they know when you’re on (posting), you will get a much more consistent following encouraging them even more to interact with you.
5. Creativity is King – Look, Social Media isn’t a science, it’s a lot of trial and error, but as Paul would say, it’s all about swinging the bat. So think outside of the box, try some fun and crazy ideas, think creatively and you will come up with some great ideas that people will love.
6. Keep Learning – We all know that the internet changes pretty regularly. What did work, doesn’t anymore so you need to continue to read, learn, and try new things. Knowledge is the key to everything in life and Internet Marketing and Social Media are no different.

I’ll keep an eye out for some of the video footage from this conference and make sure to post it for everyone. I’d advise you to just take a look at these case studies and hopefully you can come out with some cool ideas for how to implement social media into your business.

There are two separate business models for successful business growth online. If you are looking to drive sales through your twitter account Twitter can be great for that. If you are looking to just get your name more well known Twitter is still a great place for you to get started. This article is dedicated to teaching all of you how to get the Twitter sale conversion success that we all crave.

Everyone is on Twitter now, from Shaq, to your Congressional leaders, to big branded businesses. For those of us that aren’t quite that established in the public eye I’m here to tell you that Twitter is for you and I as well. Even with all of the big fish in the pond there is still plenty of room for the rest of us to help grow and establish a brand and a business through Twitter.

Now I better put a disclaimer in here. For those of you who are looking to maintain the conversion rates you normally see from your online sales avenues, you are not likely going to see those same types of numbers while selling through Twitter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make money. Dell made over $1 Million last year on Twitter, but that is only $1 Million from their hundreds of millions of dollars in sales they did last year.

If you are looking to strictly drive sales through Twitter I suggest using the <a href=”http://twitter.com/delloutlet”>Dell Outlet</a> model for Twitter. While still staying in communication with the customers who choose to contact them via Twitter the main focus of their Twitter account is to post the latest and best deals that they have to offer on their website. Take a look at this screen shot from their Twitter page.

The tweet that are in the Yellow are the sales that Dell is currently running on their outlet site. The examples in the orange are examples of how Dell communicates with their customers via Twitter when they aren’t posting a sale. Notice how even when simply communicating with the customer their communication is still sales driven. Instead of having a normal twitter conversation you might typically see on Twitter they are straight to the point and always sales driven.

Now Dell has a superior advantage to almost everyone else who is trying to sell on Twitter, they are already a well established brand, all they have to do is tell people that they have a Twitter account and they have 450,000 followers. You can still have relatively similar success to Dell by using this model but you will also want to couple that with a bit more conversative involvement on Twitter in order to grow your Twitter follower base. Perhaps try setting up another Twitter account to build brand awareness and drive your traffic from that account to your sales based Twitter account in order to try and pin point those followers who want to buy instead of just have a conversation.

There are other sales avenues you can try through Twitter as well such as magpie and other sales avenues. I will get to those avenues in a later post perhaps. I wanted to show people the best way to drive sales directly through their company’s own Twitter accounts. Twitter is great for a lot of things and it can be used to increase your sales I suggest just giving it a try.