16th
MAR
5 Ways to Use Social Media for Things You Are Already Doing
Posted by cgseo under Social Media, Web Marketing
5 Ways to Use Social Media for Things You Are Already Doing This content from: Duct Tape Marketing One of the biggest road blocks facing small businesses when addressing social media is the question of return on investment. With so little time devote to what’s crying out to be done, adding something else or something new like social media can feel like a real burden. Sometimes the only way to rationalize and prioritize something new is to understand the benefits in relation to everything else your doing and take a new view based on that understanding. So much of what’s written on social media amounts to lists of things you should do, get on twitter, blog, create a Facebook fan page, and not enough on why you might consider doing it. While all those tactics may indeed be wise, I would like suggest a number of ways to use those actions to do a better or more efficient job doing things you’re already (or should be) doing. Start to think in terms of doing more with less effort, not simply doing more. If I can let small business owners get a glimpse of social media through this lens, they might just decide to go a little deeper. Here are five ways to look at it. 1) Follow up with prospects I love using social media tools as a way to follow-up with prospects you might meet out there in the real world. So you go to a Chamber event and meet someone that has asked you to follow-up. Traditionally, you might send an email a week later or call them up and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on LinkedIn, asked to be connected and then shared an information rich article that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Chamber mixer. Then you offered to show them how to create a custom RSS feed to get tons of information about their industry and their competitors. Do you think that next meeting might get started a little quicker towards your objectives? I sure do. 2) Stay top of mind with customers Once someone becomes a customer it’s easy to ignore them, assuming they will call next time they need something or, worse yet, assuming they understand the full depth and breadth of your offerings and will chime in when they have other needs. Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and upsell them is a key ingredient to building marketing momentum and few businesses do it well. This is an area where a host of social media tools can excel. A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encouraging your customers to subscribe and comment can lead to further engagement. Recording video stories from customers and uploading them to YouTube to embed on your site can create great marketing content and remind your customer why they do business with you. Facebook Fan pages can be used as a way to implement a client community and offer education and networking opportunities online. 3) Keep up on your industry Keeping up with what’s happening in any industry is a task that is essential these days. With unparalleled access to information many clients can learn as much or more about the products and solutions offered by a company as those charged with suggesting those products and solutions. You better keep up or you risk becoming irrelevant. Of course I could extend this to keeping up with what your customers, competitors, and key industry journalists are doing as well. Here again, new monitoring services and tools steeped in social media and real time reporting make this an easier task. Subscribing to blogs written by industry leaders, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place. Setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches ( see more about how to do this ) or checking out paid monitoring services such as Radian6 or Trackur allows you to receive daily email reports on the important mentions of industry terms and people so you are up to the minute in the know. (Of course, once you do this you can teach your customers how to do it and make yourself even more valuable to them – no matter what you sell.) 4) Provide a better customer experience It’s probably impossible to provide too much customer service, too much of a great experience, but you can go nuts trying. Using the new breed of online tools you can plug some of the gaps you might have in providing customer service and, combined with your offline touches, create an experience that no competitor can match. While some might not lump this tool into social media, I certainly think any tool that allows you to collaborate with and serve your customers qualifies. Using an online project management tool such as Central Desktop allows you to create an entire customer education, orientation, and handbook kind of training experience one time and then roll it out to each new customer in a high tech client portal kind of way. This approach can easily set you apart from anyone else in your industry and provide the kind of experience that gets customers talking. 5) Network with potential partners Building a strong network of strategic marketing partners is probably the best defense against any kind of economic downturn. One of the surest ways to attract potential partners is to build relationships through networking. Of course you know that, but you might not be viewing this kind of networking as a social media function. If you identify a potential strategic partner, find out if they have a blog and start reading and commenting. Few things will get you noticed faster than smart, genuine blog comments. Once you establish this relationship it might make sense to offer a guest blog post. If your use a CRM tool (and you should) you’ve probably noticed that most are moving to add social media information to contact records, add your potential partners social media information and you will learn what’s important to them pretty quickly. If you know how to set up a blog already, offer to create a blog of network partners so each of you can write about your area of expertise and create some great local SEO for the group. So, you see, you don’t have to bite into the entire social media pie all at once. Find a tool, a technique, a tactic that makes your life easier today and provides more value for partners, prospects and customers and you’ll be on the path to getting some real ROI on your social media investment. What social media tactics have you discovered that allow you to do more of something you’re already doing? Related Posts: Small Businesses Will Simply Become More Naturally Social 7 Simple Truths of Social Media Marketing 5 Tips for Getting More From Your Blog 5 Ways to Share Content to Create Referrals Create a Journalist Listening Station Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others
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5 Ways to Use Social Media for Things You Are Already Doing
15th
MAR
Use Your Neighbors and Partners to Build Your List
Posted by cgseo under Social Media
Use Your Neighbors and Partners to Build Your List This content from: Duct Tape Marketing From the WikiPedia: Referral marketing is a structured and systematic process that maximizes word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers and contacts to think and talk as much as possible about their supplier, their company, product and service and the value and benefit the supplier brings to them and people they know. So referral marketing is really all about relationships you foster with people, and how those people remember you when they talk to anyone that might need your products or services. If you’ve got a storefront or business that serves a certain location (even if you don’t, read on this applies to you as well), your number one goal is to get traffic to that location, right? And hopefully you’ve built good relationships with the business owners around you, or are willing to. So today, I’m going to talk about how your neighboring businesses can use their email list to refer business to you, and how you can do the same for them. Here is a great example of how 4 local businesses can collectively refer customers to each other : You have a retail business in a neighborhood where there are other retailers, service businesses or restaurants where people visit. In this case a restaurant called Nova Bar. The product or service that you sell has complementary (maybe even competitive) products offered by other businesses in the area. In this example this particular restaurant also included another restaurant in their email campaign. You can’t eat at the same restaurant every day, right? You’ve been collecting email addresses and communicating to your recipients on a regular basis. Here’s one way to make it happen: Step 1. Approach your neighboring businesses and tell them that you’ve got an idea that will collectively help all of you get more business. Step 2. Find out how many email addresses each business has. You’ll want them to be close to the same because if one is 10x bigger than the others everyone else will benefit from the big guy but they might not benefit in the same way. That said, if this does happen, maybe the businesses with smaller lists can make up for it by mailing a few more times. Step 3. Create separate email campaigns where the FROM LABEL is from each list owner. If you are doing the mailing to your list it should come FROM your business, if your neighbor is doing the mailing to her list it should come FROM her business. Step 4. Your message should include a paragraph explaining why you’re sending this email. For example: “The merchants of South Beach all got together and decided that you need to know about everything that’s going on. So opt-in to all of these lists and be the first to know. Try giving an incentive or coupon to any new people who signed up to each list to motivate them even more to join! Step 5. In this example you can see that there are links to each of the business’s opt-in forms. Avoid sending them directly to a home page unless the opt-in form is easy to spot. Make sure you also tell your recipients what new registrants can expect, like weekly specials or “email only” discounts. Also include an image or logo for each business. Other ideas for using email marketing as a referral tool: If you don’t want to use this as a “list building” tool and each local business just wants to give a great offer, go for it! Make sure you send them directly to a page where the offer is displayed prominently. If you’re business isn’t “locally oriented” but you have complementary business partners, you can still follow the same general steps. Partner up with them and send emails to your respective email lists about your partners, ask them to do the same. You can also use the page that you send people after they opt-in to your list, and include your partners/neighbors offers or links, and they can do the same for you. Bottom line: keep each other honest. Join each other’s lists and make sure all of you are participating. Agreeing to help businesses build their lists is going to help traffic to everyone’s business. And that’s what referral marketing is all about in the long run. Janine Popick is the CEO and co-founder of VerticalResponse (Inc. 5000 2006-2009). She also is VerticalResponse’s CEB ( Chief Executive Blogger ) and won the 2006 ClickZ Best Marketing Blog Award, the 2007 Stevie Award for Best Blog, a 2008 SIIA Codie Finalist for best blog and 2009 Stevie Finalist for Best Blog. Related Posts: Track Your Email Marketing Efforts with Swiftpage The right list is a big piece of the puzzle Email Marketing Still a Great Small Business Tool How to Boost Your Customer Referrals in 7 Simple Steps Vertical Response adds multi channel tool Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others
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Use Your Neighbors and Partners to Build Your List
12th
MAR
How to Boost Your Customer Referrals in 7 Simple Steps
Posted by cgseo under Social Media
How to Boost Your Customer Referrals in 7 Simple Steps This content from: Duct Tape Marketing This post is a special Make a Referral Week guest post featuring education on the subject of referrals and word of mouth marketing and making 1000 referrals to 1000 small businesses – check it out at Make a Referral Week 2010 Customer referrals really rock as a cost-effective way to gain new business and regain old customers. But how do you generate more referrals…higher quality referrals? And how can you squeeze more mileage out of the referrals that you’ve got? The folks who run my fitness club are masters at referral marketing. They’re constantly running a promotion for referring new members with discounts, free training or free stuff. Whether I’m walking in the door, opening my mail or looking online, I’m barraged with signs, banners, stickers and mailers encouraging referrals with free passes, discounts, goodies and even cash. We all know the magic of referrals, which offer instant credibility. So why don’t more small business owners use referrals effectively? Mainly because it’s harder than it looks. For one thing, referrals come in different forms and flavors. If someone merely provides you a name and email address, that’s low-grade referral. But if a customer actively talks up your product or service, sets up a meeting or brings the prospect in the door, that’s a Grade A referral. At www.business.com we see big companies taking customer referrals very seriously. Many have turned it into a science of modeling, calculating and tracking a Net Promoter Score (NPS). At its most basic, the NPS attempts to measure how likely it is that a customer would recommend a business, product or service to a friend or colleague. “Promoters” are your most loyally enthusiastic customers – the regulars who also refer others to help fuel your business growth. “Passives” are happy, but not enthusiastic and are easily attracted to a better deal elsewhere. “Detractors” are unhappy customers who can hurt your sales with negative word-of-mouth. The NPS is determined by taking the percentage of customers who are promoters and subtracting the percentage who are detractors. An equal amount of each gets you an NPS of zero. Here are seven steps to getting more and better referrals, and raising your net promoter score: Step 1 – Create a referral-generation plan: Referrals are not automatic. Some “just happen,” but most occur because you do something to trigger it. Some business owners assume that a great product or terrific customer service will generate referrals by default. Not so. You have to learn to ask, and make sure employees are on board as well. Most customers are open to being asked for referrals. Some even appreciate the opportunity to tell friends, family and associates about something good they’ve discovered. Referral tip: The worst time to ask for a referral is at the cash register or when you present a bill. Look for opportunities earlier or later in the process when customers are more receptive. Step 2 – Provide support: Don’t ask customers to recommend you to others without offering them some backup. It can be as simple as a supply of your business cards, or a link to a special page on your website. Or it could be a brochure, your latest newsletter or some other type of printed material that describes what you do and can reinforce the referral. Step 3 – Offer incentives: But incentives can be tricky. The type of incentive you offer must fit with the kind of business you run. It could be a discount, service credits, an upgrade, a free item or some other trigger that will entice clients to provide referrals. Don’t be afraid to test offers to find out what works best. Communicate details of your referral program to your best customers through whatever means you have available, including a blog, newsletter, email or customer mailings. And be sure to thank customers when they make referrals. Step 4 – Ask for the right information: Getting a name and number isn’t really a referral at all. It’s just a lead. Use a referral form, checklist or web-based system to capture details that will make the referral more valuable. The best referrals are where a customer actually facilitates a meeting, visit or purchase by the referred person, in person, by email or otherwise. This makes the customer an active agent on your behalf. Step 5 – Target your most influential customers: Seek referrals first from your most influential customers, especially if your resources are limited. These might not actually be your best customers, but they are the people whose opinions would carry the most weight with others in your industry, community or customer base. By targeting these customers, you have a highly focused effort with a good chance to generate the highest quality referrals. Step 6 – Target related businesses: The health care profession is one of the most adept at fostering referrals between complementary disciplines – specialists, imaging services, physical therapists, medical equipment suppliers and others. Consider the same strategy yourself. Contact businesses that provide complementary services to your own and ask for referrals. Step 7 – Build your relationships: This takes time, but it’s critical because many of your most influential customers won’t provide referrals until you gain their complete trust. You’ll want to treat each customer contact as if it’s critical to your next referral. Through each sales, marketing or customer service “touch” you are building a foundation of trust that that will one day lead to a valuable referral. Daniel Kehrer is Editor and Director of Content Development for Business.com , the world’s leading B2B search engine and knowledge site, and writes the What Works for Business blog on Business.com Related Posts: Design and Operate a Referral System Cultivate a Culture For Referrals Getting Referrals is only 1/2 of the game Educate Your Referral Sources The Ultimate Referral System in 7 Steps Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others
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How to Boost Your Customer Referrals in 7 Simple Steps
11th
MAR
How To Use Surprise To Generate Word Of Mouth
Posted by cgseo under Social Media
Share How To Use Surprise To Generate Word Of Mouth This content from: Duct Tape Marketing This post is a special Make a Referral Week guest post featuring education on the subject of referrals and word of mouth marketing and making 1000 referrals to 1000 small businesses – check it out at Make a Referral Week 2010 Your customers live their life in a routine. I mean, we all do. We wake up at the same time; start our day off completing the same rituals; and then take the same route to work, switching on autopilot as soon as we get there. We’re creatures of habit. Our job as marketers is to both use and break these habits, replacing bad ones (not being our customer) with good ones (being our customer). But to do that, we first have to get their attention. We have to find a way to wake our customers from their zombie slumber and make them see us. We have to disrupt their routine. And that’s where surprise marketing comes in. Surprise breeds word of mouth by attacking the “been there, done that” mentality of customers and shattering it with something designed to cause a reaction. Because, the only thing to give the person who has everything is something they’ve never seen or thought of before. How Surprise Breeds Worth Of Mouth It’s said a lot that if you want people to talk about your business that you need to give them something to talk about. Well, that’s pretty much what surprise marketing does. It breaks up your customer’s every day and it gives them something new – tangible or not – to remember and hold on to. It ties you to an experience . As a small business owner, surprise marketing is perfectly suited for your business because it requires that you really know the people that you’re targeting. No one knows their audience as well as someone who lives in it every day. And once you know what they’re expecting, it’s your job to give them what they’re not. Oprah utilized surprise marketing when she gave away 276 Pontiac G6s and offered Pontiac “immediate recognition as the feel-good automaker”. But in the real world (as opposed to Oprah-vision), surprise marketing doesn’t have to mean big dollars. It means creativity. Surprise marketing works by giving someone something they needed at a time they weren’t expecting it. It’s chilled milk and cookies after a long day at Disney. It’s a person hiding in the Coke machine to hand deliver you and your friends a soda. It’s the bottle of water you’re handed by the hotel when you come back from a run. It’s about creating experiences that people are going to want to share with their friends. How To Surprise Your Customers You surprise customers when you create something that is both personal and valuable to them. Decide what feeling you’re trying to inspire (awe, joy, excitement, disbelief, horror, etc) and then get creative about how you can deliver that. And when you’re doing it, think small. Don’t go for the elaborate plan. Go as small as you can with it, because it’s the little things done better than someone would ever expect that create the biggest buzz. That’s how you get people talking about you and inspire someone to make that referral – you tie an emotional response to what you’re doing. How can a small business owner incorporate surprise marketing to inspire referrals from customers? Show Up Where They Don’t Expert: When you drove to work today, there were certain things you expected to encounter– traffic, the usual landmarks, your same parking spot. You weren’t expecting to see, say, a 27-foot-long hot dog parked outside your building. And if you did, it would take a pack of wild dogs to stop you from talking about it. . And that’s exactly why Oscar Mayer created the Wienermobile and why they park it in random cities across the country. Because while you may have heard about it, you’d never expect it to show up in your hometown. And when it does, you talk about it. Go Further Than You Have To: Go that extra step to create a WOW moment. Zappos does this by offering surprise overnight shipping so that customers unexpectedly receive their order just hours after they placed it. It creates an experience of “awe” when exactly what they wanted shows up when they weren’t expected it. Virgin America created its own WOW moment, rescuing 15 Chihuahuas from California. They did more than was required or expected and people talked. Give Them Something Different: Lots of businesses offer free gifts along with a purchase. It’s the coupon slipped into the bag at the register, the free makeup brush someone gets with their purchase, a trial of a new scent, etc. What about giving them something they wouldn’t expect you to? Like chocolate-covered grasshoppers , perhaps. You don’t have to get pricey to surprise someone, you just have to deliver something they weren’t expecting. Listen When They Think You’re Not: A young woman was sitting in a P.F. Chang twittering about how much she loves P.F.Chang’s chicken lettuce wraps – a pretty normal occurrence in today’s social media-heavy world, right? What she didn’t know was that an employee in the P.F. Chang’s Corporate Office saw the tweet, figured out what restaurant the customer was at and tracked her down to her specific table with the help of onsite staff. P.F. Chang’s then purchased the woman’s dinner for her and bought her dessert to say “thanks for visiting”. The Twitterer was shocked that the restaurant was listening so closely to customers and the story is now legend . Pretty cool, and not that difficult to pull off. Make The Little Things, Big Things: Disneyworld left milk and cookies in Scott Stratten’s hotel room when he was there with his son so they could have a snack to enjoy together. The Westin Long Beach hands out water bottles to guests who walk into the hotel after a run. By getting those tiny, personal gestures correct you set up those moments that your customers will take home and want to brag about later. You create an experience and a memory by making the little things big things in your organization. Obviously there are many other ways to surprise and capture the attention of your audience, but those will help get you started. Perhaps it’s the child in me, but I love using surprise marketing as a way to spread word of mouth and bring in referrals. It challenges you to look inward to change the course of someone’s day in a way that they’ll remember and positively associate with your brand. Not every profession is in the habit of creating memories. It’s the power of the unexpected and it doesn’t get much better than that. Lisa Barone is Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media , Inc., an Internet marketing company that specializes in providing clients with online reputation management, social media services and other Internet services. When she’s not blogging daily over at the Outspoken Media blog , you can find her guestposting on popular blogs like Search Engine Land, BlogWorldExpo, Sugarrae and a host of others. Related Posts: Surprise Your Clients Once In A While What's Your Blue Light Special? 5 Ways to Get Your Customers Talking Creativity is a wonderful motivator 17 Terrific Tactics to Inspire Customer Love (and Get New Business) Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others
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How To Use Surprise To Generate Word Of Mouth
9th
MAR
17 Terrific Tactics to Inspire Customer Love (and Get New Business)
Posted by cgseo under Social Media
17 Terrific Tactics to Inspire Customer Love (and Get New Business) This content from: Duct Tape Marketing This post is a special Make a Referral Week guest post featuring education on the subject of referrals and word of mouth marketing and making 1000 referrals to 1000 small businesses – check it out at Make a Referral Week 2010 There are two fundamental approaches to generate more business: The first is to focus on making your existing customers insanely happy, so that they want to tell others about how much they love you; the second is to simply be a resource, or be helpful, to those who aren’t customers yet. Specifically, here are 17 tactics: 1. Have a goal . Set a clear goal with a specific timeline – for example, you want an x increase in referrals over the next six months. You know that old adage about how you can’t get there if you don’t know where you’re going? It’s true. 2. Monitor the web and primary social channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) for people talking about you or your company . Say thank you (if they are saying nice things). Reach out and ask how you can help (if they aren’t). 3. And if they aren’t, BTW: Apologize for mistakes and solve problems fast. Speed is your ally. 4. Monitor the web and social channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) for specific keywords relevant to your business. Be approachable, conversational, and helpful there. Engage, don’t sell. 5. Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your expertise or industry, and build conversations with relevant individuals . Chime in when you have something to contribute, and be helpful with your advice, suggestions, opinions. Again: It’s about engaging, not selling. (This bears repeating.) 6. Create a blog with content that helps your customers with a problem, or gives advice on a difficult situation, or walks them through a hard decision, or just takes the customer’s point of view, generally. Be a resource, and don’t simply toot your own horn. 7. When someone comments on your blog, respond . Talk back. Thank them for participating with a follow-up email. This is a dead-simple thing, and something a lot of people don’t do. 8. Read other relevant blogs in your industry , or by your customers, or would-be clients. Comment there, too. How? I almost want to repeat that bit about engaging-not-selling again, but I know you get it. 9. Put something on your front door (if you have one) that reminds people to tell their friends about you. (This is an idea from my friend Andy Sernovitz . 10. Put a “tell-a-friend” form on every page of your website . (Another idea from Andy .) 11. Put a special offer in easily forward-able mail . 12. Add a small gift and a word of mouth tool to every package you sell . Do something unexpected. (Andy once sent me a few packets of Bacon Salt with a copy of his new book, for example, which inspired me to blog and tweet about it . 13. Create a mechanism to keep in touch with existing customers or clients , even if they aren’t in buying mode. Perhaps you publish and “insider’s” newsletter, guest-blog on their blogs, or pick up the telephone and call every once in a while, just to say hello. 14. Be generous in your business practices . Go the extra mile. Offer extra service or follow-up support as a routine way of doing business. 15. Be generous with your own referrals . 16. Say thank you . Someone refers new business to you? Send them a note. An especially nice touch in this digital age is a handwritten card. The kind that arrives in the mail. 17. Be nice . Does this sound lame? It’s not. People refer people who treat them well, are approachable, and likeable. Be that person. Your turn. How else do you generate referrals, or inspire positive word-of-mouth? Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs , the world’s largest community of marketers. Follow her on Twitter at @marketingprofs Related Posts: Making Referrals As a Job Creation Engine Author of Word of Mouth Marketing Visits Referral Week 5 Ways to Share Content to Create Referrals Have You Made Your Referral? Get Closer to Your Customers Now Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others
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17 Terrific Tactics to Inspire Customer Love (and Get New Business)
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