social media marketing strategy | inBlurbs Inbound Marketing Agency

February 1, 2012February 1, 2012

How to use Social Media for Customer Acquisition

Social media has become a significant part of serious marketers lead generation strategy.

Companies who engage in social media increase their reach massively. And there is no matter if they are B2C or B2B.

Social media is public communications channel where companies can get great unfiltered feedback.

Companies need to understand that social media is not for “pushing your messages out “.

To be successful and to reach a positive ROI with social media, companies need to communicate and to listen to their audience.

It is simply untrue when someone claims that his customers are not active in social media. They are active in B2C and B2B and they research online for products and services.

The only question is: What will they find when they research for products and services you also have to offer, will they find you or your competitor?

Studies prove that B2C and B2B profit likewise from social media engagement.

A study from Wildfire Interactive shows that social media helps grow brand awareness, increase sales and partnerships and helped to reduce marketing costs.

Engaging in dialogue with customers via social media has become an important part of successful companies.

Smart marketers measure the value of social media channels as well. They want to know which one has the best results for their business. One of the most popular channels is Facebook. About 44% of surveyed marketers say that “Facebook is valuable because they help with new customer recruitment”.

Moreover they have stated that Facebook fans have higher conversion rates and they make more frequent purchases.

How can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing?

• At first you can do this by increase of your revenue
• As a second way you can measure are “Likes”
• You can measure social media mentions of your brand

A great way is to add lead capture pages to your in social published articles and to track the traffic, leads, lead to customer rate and revenue per generated lead. So you get a good picture of your cost per lead and adjust activities to increase your profits.

Studies show that companies which relying on online lead generation are two times more profitable than those who do not. Those companies achieve an up to 62% lower cost per lead.

Infographic: Brand Messaging

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January 25, 2012January 25, 2012

B2B Decision Makers are Increasingly Researching in Social Media

In the beginning of the internet it was a source of information and today entertainment and shopping have accompanied this attitude. But research is still the main factor when it comes to web use.

Before social media people went mainly to search engines to research and to find products and services. Today in times of social media the products and services find them through discussions, content sharing and recommendations from friends and followers. And even on the road these information are accessible through mobile devices.

This evolution of information technology also arrived to the B2B companies.

The search volume on Facebook has overtaken Google. And there are not only consumers who research there. B2B is also using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social networks to research for products, services, industry related information and new business partners.

Nobody says that a product or service with a volume of hundreds of thousands of dollars has to be sold on Facebook. But the first contact can be made there and the further discussions and negotiations can be took offline to close the deal.

Social media is a great way to showcase a business and to offer a more personal insight view. A company has great opportunities to show personality to attract the right buyer persona and to get in touch with the right new future customer when this one is looking out for products and services.

All social media sites also have mobile apps; their reach also spreads wider and is working 24/7. Not only teenagers are surfing on social networks through their mobile devices. B2B decision makes do this as well and their number is increasing!

“Research from ad agency TricomB2B and University of Dayton School of Business Administration showed an even higher concentration of B2B influencers researching purchases on mobile devices.”

How can you and a B2B firm leverage this information above for your business?

1. Start a social media presence. Complete your profile there.
2. Research for industry related B2B groups and people. Become a member and invite those people to your network.
3. Listen to their discussions. If you have something valuable to contribute than do it, otherwise go on listening.
4. Start a corporate blog. Write about topics your B2B audience is interested in. Share your blog articles in social media and ask for feedback for your publication.
5. Build landing pages and offer exclusive and valuable content for download. So you generate laser target high quality industry related B2B leads.
6. Measure your activities.
7. Improve your activities and repeat.

What do you think? How are your experiences?

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November 17, 2011November 17, 2011

Inbound Marketing the Easy Solution to get endless Business Leads

To be visible on Facebook and LinkedIn increases your chances massively to get a steady stream of high quality business leads and revenue.

As this information is a fact, still not the most companies do embrace social media and the wide opportunities it offers to step into real-time two way communication.

Still there are companies which do not act in this medium.

Research data below shows this:

• On Facebook alone, 69% of small businesses reported receiving customer recommendations through the site (University of Maryland School of Business)
• 41% of people using LinkedIn for marketing have generated business from it (Hubspot)

But

• According to CreditDonkey, just 35% of small business owners have a Facebook page (CreditDonkey)
• 18% of small businesses are using LinkedIn (Crowdspring)

What does it mean for your business?

When you are active now:

— Increase your activity and do more. Optimize what you are doing right now and measure to learn more about the things who work and the one who does not.

When you are still not active:

— When you start now you can position yourself the smart way and secure your share.
— Come from the sideline and take action before you get left behind and have to start an expensive uphill battle.

Companies which engage in social media show presence and get tremendous opportunities to get in touch with their audience. This also leads to an increase of credibility and unfiltered feedback of the audience and this can lead to an improvement of products and services.

The value of effective social media engagement in a context of a well executes inbound marketing strategy can be measured and results in an increase of brand value and growing revenue.

There is a wide list of big and small companies which have increased their success by utilizing social media. Companies like IBM, Dell, Coca Cola, SteelMaster Buildings LLC, The Equine Practice, Inc, Idea Paint, Neenah Paper Inc. and Duncan Aviation Inc. only to name some of them. And you can become one of these success stories too.

Infographic: The Future of Marketing

—What do you think? Let me kow your thoughts and comment below.

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November 2, 2011November 2, 2011

IBM Study reveals that social media is the Marketing Priority worldwide

A recent IBM study shows that 82% of CMOs worldwide are planning increase their technology investment in social media within the next three to five years.

These are interesting data. As social media evolves and more businesses jumping o this bandwagon it looks for me that three to five years are not an appropriate time frame to step into conversation with existing and future customers.

The more companies engage in social media two way communications the thinner the air becomes for those who start later. Those who come late will experience a massive uphill battle to gain positions which their competitors already have secured.

Companies which like to position their business to gain a competitive advantage need to act now, and not to wait three to five years.

Moreover companies who decide to take action within the next five years will be under risk to vanish from the customer radar and sink.

As social media is evolving at a very quick pace businesses also need to evolve to stay on track.

Content creation is the key to get found on the web. Your audience is researching o the web fist. If your audience can’t find you when they research for products or services which you also have to offer than you will lose potential business.

The three big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are indexing content form social media. So if you are in social media your chances increase to get found on the web.

What can you do to position your business today?

If you want to do business in the next five years and beyond you should take the opportunity to jump into social media as a valuable communication channel.

A. Register the most important social media networks for your brand as they are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare and any other sites or forums where your target audience is around.

B. Complete and customize your profiles there to have a social media branding to get recognized by your audience.

C. Listen to the social media conversation and contribute if you feel you have something valuable and helpful to say.

D. Start a corporate blog where you write about topics which your audience is interested in. Share your articles in your social media channels and ask your audience about their opinion.

E. Train you staff to become your brand ambassadors on the web and I social media and give them the freedom to decide how to communicate by establishing clear social media policy.

F. Measure your doings and check out what is working and what is not working. The things which work for your business you should intensify and the thing which do not work the way you have expected you should cut back.

G. Set realistic goals! Be realistic with your social media engagement. Rome wasn’t built in a day as well. Be patient as any strategy needs time to breathe to show up results and social media marketing a blogging are no exceptions.

Infographic: The ROI of Social Media

–How about you? What are your experiences with sociel media? I am looking forward to your comment below.

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July 25, 2011October 7, 2011

USA Today reports: Social Media Future is NOW don’t get left behind

USA Today reported in the article “Social media finds place in classroom” that New Milford (N.J.) High School is encouraging social media Facebook, Twitter and YouTube use for educational purposes in his classrooms to communicate with students and parents. Furthermore the teachers encourage students to communicate with their cell phones mobile learning devices.

What does this mean for businesses today and in the future?

There is a generation coming which is mostly communicating over social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They are savvy with blogs, mobile devices and video. This generation is growing up with these tools and businesses who want to stay visible to those potential customers and job candidates need to be there where they are and communicate on those platforms and devices to reach them.

Businesses should rethink their social media mind set and allow the use of these tools on their workplaces for business purposes. Otherwise the chances are good that they lose relation to their target audience and their associates.

Some facts from recent studies for your business to consider before your think of prohibiting the use in your company:

• 79% of adults are using the internet.
• People are about three hours on social media from their mobile devices, compared with one hour from their PC.
• 78% of buyers are researching products and services online before they buy.
• About one third of consumers are online for three hours or more daily.
• People spent three times more time on social media and blogs then on email!
• Companies who blog get 55% more visitors to their websites!
• 57% of companies who blog have acquired new customers through their blog.
• 67% of the B2C and 41% of the B2B companies reported that they got new customers through Facebook.
• 42% of companies reported to customers through Twitter.

Companies like Coca Cola, Dell, Zappos and thousands of small business show every day how to utilize social media to stay in touch with their customers.

Sociel media is no fad. Companies report success stories and provable profit of social media every day.

Those companies who utilize social media are more successful on average than companies who do not. Companies like Groupon, who depend very strong on social media for their coupon business and Zappos actually evolved with social media. Dell was one of the first Top Companies which reported a profit from their Twitter marketing!

For Companies listed on the stock exchange this can also reflect in a better share price. There are studies who show a correlation between the capability of communicate in social media and the share price.

To prohibit the use of social media on workplaces means prohibit to communicate where 700 million people are communication on Facebook and on Twitter (100 million+) makes the same sense as to prohibit the use of the telephone in the office.

Businesses should carefully study this evolution of communication and take their part to not get left behind and vanish in the dust of all naysayers!

Businesses should embrace social media and allow use on workplace. Your associates use social media on their workplaces from their mobile devices anyway.

Marketing Takeaway Tip: Start to engage with your audience on Facebook and Twitter. Show your associates that you trust them and figure out how to be on social media to profit from it. Integrate your associates to formulate a strategy ask them for advice to profit together from social media.

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July 16, 2011March 24, 2014

Make the Most of Social Media Marketing

There is no doubt about it; social media is here to stay. While the thought of venturing in into the realm of social media can be intimidating, the thing to remember is to start small, start with a purpose, and work to grow your social media marketing strategy over time.

The Facts

The trajectory of social networking continues to rise and gain momentum.

In fact, in 2010, 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users visited a social networking site each month and in 2010 social networking sites accounted for 12 percent of all time spent online, with an average Internet user spending more than 4.5 hours on these sites each month.

Social networking has become ingrained in our lives and is quickly becoming the preferred form of communication for countless individuals.

Facebook, the social networking behemoth, accounted for 10 percent of U.S. page views in 2010, and three out of every ten Internet sessions included a visit to this site.

(2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review: A Recap of the Year in Digital Media)

Why Use Social Media?

Aside from the fact that these sites are widely popular, they do provide numerous benefits to companies and organizations that are willing to invest in this type of marketing strategy.

These sites can assist in recruiting new employees, helping to establish trust with customers, working to build positive word of mouth buzz and establishing your company as an authority in your field of business. They can also assist with garnering research on your customers and testing out new product ideas.

Internally, they can also increase employee communication and feedback, assist with business process improvements and work to streamline project management efforts.

Where to Begin

As stated earlier, start small, but start smart.

Determine which sites to target

Figure out which sites your current and potential clients are visiting and focus on utilizing those for your social media efforts. Also assess what your competition is doing and don’t be afraid to review the efforts of large, successful companies. You can often glean tips and tricks to utilize on a smaller scale.

Establish goals and set metrics

Are you trying to raise brand awareness, sell more products, build relationships, position yourself as a thought leader, or all of the above? It is extremely important to evaluate how successful your strategy is. Measure how much your social media sites are being utilized and survey customers about their knowledge of them.

Align your tone and messaging

Since your vehicle for communication is changing, you also have to consider how you should change the tone of your messaging. Social media is much more casual than traditional marketing and it is also much more indirect.

Become a thought leader

Individuals see right through a campaign that is all about you and your business, instead, focus on sharing how your products and services can make the lives of your customers better and easier.

Don’t be afraid to share information that isn’t specifically about your company. Sharing valuable information establishes trust with your customer base; it shows them that you care about their success.

Make the time commitment and be timely

Social media is about starting and maintaining a conversation. You need to be active in order for social media to benefit your business. Set aside time each day to review what people are saying and to partake in the conversation.

Integrate your social media strategies with each other and with your traditional marketing plans

Ensure your messaging and branding remains consist. The last thing you want to do is jeopardize, weaken or dilute your brand.

In Conclusion

Take a deep breath and jump right in because you have to start somewhere. As long as your content is valuable, you will see that people are interested in what you have to say.

Author Profile

Keith Barrett is a leading search engine optimization expert, with specific interest in social media marketing. His company, Search South, offers small business SEO services, as well as a wider range of approaches for businesses of all sizes.

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March 17, 2011October 8, 2011

9 Ways to measure your social media ROI the smart way

Social media can be a great source of traffic and leads.

More and more businesses start the conversation in social media and many of them ask for the ROI.

As social media needs investment of time and money like any other communication channel, it needs to prove results!

Metrics are a great way to prove results.

Traffic

The amount of target traffic is important. The more qualified visitors you have the more leads you generate. Build as many traffic as you can.

Participant

The more people participate in your online activities the better. This shows that you have authority and can motivate your target group.

Visibility

When you publish content look out how many people read or downloads your published content. Most services offer stats. Here you can get metrics about the success of your content.

Leads

Leads are a result of qualified traffic and good landing pages with compelling call to action. Like traffic, the more the better. But your lead count depends to your traffic! Build as many landing pages as you can.

Reach

The more you engage in social media like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and some other the more you can expand your reach. For example, each Facebook user has about 130 friends and their friends have also about 130 friends each, and so.

Search Engines

Under which keywords can you be found in the search engines. And how often are you found through this keywords from you target audience?

Buzz

The more people you mention, your business and your brand the better. So more people become aware of you and visit your social profiles and your website.

Customer Satisfaction

Service and support are the secret weapons of marketing. Satisfied customers use to talk and unsatisfied talk as well. Keep your clients satisfied and you will gain more business.

Your revenue

The most important metric! Has your revenue increased? If yes, which channel was the most profitable one?

These are some simple ideas for you to measure your activities and to show ROI.

How do you measure your sociel media results and what are your experiences?

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February 28, 2011October 8, 2011

How to show short term social media ROI to your boss?

To show a short term ROI out from social media is important to keep the activities motivated and long lasting. In the long term social media brings massive branding power as well.

How to show short term social media ROI?

You need to set up a strategy, which includes a whole set of tasks to get ROI out of social media and other online activities if you want to succeed!

Inbound marketing offers this kind of strategy to help you succeed with your revenue goals.

Inbound marketing positions you to execute a holistic marketing strategy and measure the results the smart way.

Inbound marketing gets you found and gets you leads!

To make your inbound marketing the right way and become able to measure your results you need to do a documentation of your doings and results.

Brain vs. Budget = Inbound Marketing

Track your month to month results (friends and followers growth) and then divide these numbers through your invested hours, your hourly working rate. You can also drill down to the price per friend and follower.

With this you get a good picture of how much it cost (time = money) to be active and to get followers and friends in each network.

To measure your profits made through social media activities you should setup different landing pages which for example lead friends from facebook to a FB related landing – lead capture page and followers from Twitter to a TW landing page – lead capture page.

Through a lead nurturing process you can track each channel separately and calculate your previous efforts invested (hours/ time = dollars) to your sales results from the said channels.

Your social media traffic has a great value. To calculate the value $$$ of the generated social media traffic which hits your landing pages, you could research the Google AdWords Keywords pricing.

You will discover that your social media landing page traffic, made through PPC, would cost you a ton of cash.With social media it does not.

This additional ROI factor, which also lowers the cost per lead through social media activities, can also be taken into account when presenting your short term social media ROI to your boss.

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February 25, 2011October 8, 2011

The Fortune 100 Companies love social media

During the past years social media has reached more and more big companies.

Companies as Coca Cola, SAP, IBM and many more are successfully active in social media.

For those companies social media has become an important communication channel to get valuable information about trends, customer satisfaction, to learn more about the market demand and address their products and services successfully straight direct to their audience.

For those companies who still did not embrace social media ahard uphill battle has begun!

Still there are misunderstandings and zero strategies when companies try to make use of social media as a communication channel.

Mostly traditional PR thinking collides with the new art of social media marketing.

Burson-Marsteller 2011 Global Social Media Check-up

To get value out of social media activities companies need to have a strategy, resources, budget and to forget the old school PR thinking! It simply does not work anymore in social media. Moreover it can damage a brand seriously.

To be successful in social media, you need to see social media as an important part of a holistic marketing strategy where every gear fits into each other like a Swiss watch.

As social media is one important part but not the only part of your marketing you need to have a holistic inbound marketing strategy. There is some more to be done to get value out of your social media marketing activities as well.

From the initial and important part of to get found online through search engines, social media, corporate blog, guest blogging -commenting, eBooks, whitepapers and some more; To the lead capture, lead nurturing, lead conversion and measurement, the inbound marketing strategy covers it all.

Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers.

With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.

Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.

Inbound marketing can help you to:

A. Save up to 60% of your marketing budget.
B. Stand out of your competition.
C. Generate a massive amount of leads.
D. Get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates.
E. Increase your customers and sales.

As your primarily goal is to get found, you need to gain reach. You need to expand your channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Search engines, YouTube, Corporate Blog, Blog directories, industry related forums and some more niche social networks.

You need to become a trusted and valuable source for your audience. This helps your business a lot and open doors where walls have been before.

You need to communicate authentic and honestly with your audience and expand your network step by step organically.

As you are active in social media, you can add press releases and sales activities to your social media tasks as well.

Listen carefully! Conversation about your brand is happen in social media for sure. The questions are, do you know about it and how do you respond to it?

Monitor social media to know when your brand is mentioned. Respond in a professional manor and take negative comments as chance to showcase your point of view!

The way you respond shows the level how much you care about your audience opinion!

And also this gives you an outlook about your future chances to survive in this competitive social media world.

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January 28, 2010October 28, 2011

Google Opens Social Search To Find YOUR Business

Google has begun experimenting with Social Search. And has open up in beta for all Google users. Google Social Search will surface search results from social streams like bookmarks, blog posts, photos, video and social networks. This is a very big step.

Before a couple of month Google, Bing and Yahoo announced to include search results from social media. These steps from Google, Bing and Yahoo can help you to get better discovered online. Because of social media marketing strategy this Google Social Search and the inclusion in the search results of Bing and Yahoo can become a booster which additionally spread your content online and helps you to become more and more visible in front of your buyer persona!

More and more businesses have understood that it is important to engage in social media or they will be left behind of their customers. If you are out of sight of your customers you practically do not exist for them and they forget you and you can loose business. Moreover more and more people have friend networks for example on Facebook and these connections can benefit you if you are only on their radar.

If you are within these connections, to spread your message to your potential and future clients is a breeze and you possible reach more and more people with the power of networking, recommendation and word of mouth.

For your business you can do these steps today to ensure Google, Bing and Yahoo will include your messages and your content you spread through, your blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Step 1. Produce valuable and remarkable content and post it to your blog. Think about what your customer benefits. Don’t try to sell! Inform, teach and be helpful. When your potential clients recognize you as a valuable source and as an expert in your field they will trust you and buy from you!

Step 2. Spread your content to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn How to do this with LinkedIn? LinkedIn offers an ‘Associate Your Blog’ feature, where you can associate your self hosted WordPress blog. Each update of your blog will automatically be visible on LinkedIn also. If you use a self hosted WordPress blog, than simply associate it with LinkedIn.

How to spread your content to Twitter? With this WordPress Plugin ‘Twitter Tools’ you can update your Twitter account hands free every time you post a blog! You simply go to your WordPress Plugin section and search for ‘Twitter Tools from Author: alexkingorg. Crowdfavorite’ and install and activate it. Now go to Setting and insert you Twitter name and password and you are done! Now every published blog post will be automatically delivered to your twitter account. [If you have no self hosted WordPress blog, or even you have no blog, than you should consider implementing one for your business. You can go to WordPress.org and download it for free. The installation takes up to five minutes.]

To deliver your posts to Facebook is easy as well! You login into Facebook select to associate your Twitter account with your Facebook profile [You later do the same for your Facebook Fan Page] and also here will appear your new blog content.

This solution set above is free to use, you only need to do it. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are free, WordPress and the offered Plugins’ are also free.

These three and very easy steps from above need about one hour to make them work. Thereafter this system works for you night and day 24/7 and can bring you additional exposure, additional prospects and clients, as long as you produce quality, helpful and remarkable content.

Do you have any tips for how to use Opens Social Search? What are they and how do you use Opens Social Searchfor your Business?