Archive for July, 2009
Elymedia is starting to work on social-media strategies to create buzz for more local companies, brands, and venues. It’s quite gratifying to plug into the local community and make a difference — not just for the client, but to share great info within the community. Brand recognition is high, and loyalty strong. It’s a good thing. Below are 7 quick tips that might help small businesses, local retailers, and restaurants and those crafty and creative food-carts:
Want more detail or help on how to build a plan, using some or all of the above? We would love to help. Social media has taught us that it starts with the customer — engaging, listening, sharing. Done well, all marketing should start with the customer — their needs, wants, and priorities the driving force for all marketing efforts. Thorough exploration and knowledge of the customer base is where we start when working with a new client. If there isn’t solid, current information about the customer, we will propose one or all of the following techniques: - Utilize outside services to gain intelligence about the current customer base. We will source database overlays to find additional key pieces of information about each customer. For B2B companies, that might mean title, size of company, functions, installed hardware and so on. For consumer companies, having demographic profiling done will flesh out their understanding of thir customers. Hard empirical data may conflict with what a company thinks is the definition of their customer — and it’s important to get a reality check as early as possible. - Survey the customer base — we enlist one of several excellent telemarketing groups whose specialty is finding decisionmakers and probing (with a well-crafted script) for additional information about each company or contact. Or we will use an online survey tool that can go directly to the customers, and ask for their input. - Talk to your sales force or customer service people who are face-to-face (or ear-to-ear?) on a daily basis to get “behind the numbers” to find out more or corroborate what you’ve learned from the analyses. If you have multiple types of customer, careful attention must be paid to defining each one. These customer segments may be per product line (do they only have Mac hardware and software on site?); types or frequency of interaction (do they only buy sale items, or plus sizes?). Segment your customer base and marketing activities accordingly. You can’t use social media intelligently or strategically unless you know who you are addressing. Then provide prospects with resources, information, tips, ideas, and links back to landing-pages in your website that are in line with their needs.
E-mail is enjoying a resurgence in these difficult times. Many bloggers are adding email to their mix of content distribution, and many companies are rediscovering the importance of an ongoing email strategy to enhance their brand, re-connect with customers, and drive leads or sales. Whether you are using email to prospect for new leads or customers, or as a vehicle to communicate with (and gain incremental revenue from) your current customer base, it would be wise to be sure they are as productive as possible. Here are a few tricks of the trade: • Prospecting • - Be sure you are using outside email lists that are reputable — opted-in, double opted-in. If the price for a list seems too good to be true, it is…. Don’t use it. - Clearly identify your target — the sweet spot may not be achievable in the data world but start the search there, and then tweak “selects” based on availability. - Explore pricing models — can you find CPC or CPL deals? More and more email list providers are willing to move to a CPL basis. • Creative • - Use a strong subject line — short and addressing a “pain point” will get the best open rates. - Put a personal note above your banner or header to get recipients reading immediately — either in their mail-reader preview pane or when they open the e-mail. - Personalize the message (IF your email database is reliable enough and you’re sure that most records have a first or first-and-last name) - Include a sidebar. Highlight your call to action there with a photo, headline, caption, and action button. - Pace your copy. Opening paragraph should be the most engaging, but short, 2 or 3 lines at most. The rest of the paragraphs should be no more than three sentences each. Intersperse longer paragraphs with short, snappy one-sentence paragraphs for emphasis. Use bold type and underlining (for links) to guide the eye to your most important points. Use bullets to break up the copy and move the reader along. Every third paragraph should have an action link to your desired call to action. Most click-thrus happen at the very end of the copy, Be sure you end with a link AND include a “P.S.” — that old standard from Direct Marketing 101. • Landing Page • - Whole books are written about landing pages, but at the very least include a very strong call to action — hopefully only one. - Keep it clean and crisp. The creative design should have the same look and feel (and company logo etc) as the email so the reader doesn’t think they have gone to a different website or offer. • Video? • - If it’s in the body of the email itself, it may have delivery problems, or be blocked as potential spam attachment. If the video is on the landing page, it will probably get good viewership — but will it distract from the main call to action? Put some brief text and a call-to-action link above the video, or maybe the video can include a constantly visible and even clickable Web-address URL. • Got Strategy? • - If you are using email to contact your customer base, it’s best to have a schedule and stick to it. - Decide on an email frequency — once a week, or once a month may be fine for some companies, too frequent or not enough for others. If you have a large enough mail-list file to test and measure response rates for different frequencies, do so. The last thing you want to do is irritate your own customer. They should perceive your emails as value-added, not intrusive. - Segment your own email database if it makes sense. For leads, use different offers depending upon how far down the sales funnel the prospect is. For current clients, segment by product category, for example. - Think BIG. A large-scale email campaign may not always be as efficient per dollar as a timid campaign, but well-crafted email can quickly build up your in-house customer list for further testing or offers. It’s an investment. - Tracking is critical. Be sure you can measure open rates, click-thru rates, and conversions at least for each blast. And maintain historical reports over time to see both successes and weaknesses in your campaigns. Need help? Want the best list broker? Thought you’d never ask. Call us.
I keep searching for new/more/different methods of measuring activity in Web social media. I just starting using Bit.ly to shorten all of the links that I include in posts that don’t feed back to Elymedia so I can track results.
Twitter itself now uses bit.ly and it has taken a lead in the url shortening market over Tinyrul and others. It’s still a bit wonky — some stats are inaccurate, but their blog clearly states that they are hammering out bugs. The analytics are the fun part — if you put a simple “+” on the end of any bit.ly link, you will see, in real time, the pace at which that link is getting shared and clicked on as it moves around social-media networks. Bit.ly has growth plans and will provide more features rapidly. Techcrunch did a great post on the future plans for the company and details the sophistication and intelligence it will bring to the user regarding overall use of links, their popularity, and distribution. For now, I’m just happy to watch how much traction my links are getting and knowing that people are enjoying my content. Good stuff. This past week, two ethics issues caught my attention in the media. The Washington Post apologized to the paper’s readers for their plans to organize sponsored “salons” that would be attended by Washington-DC lobbyists, governent officials, and the paper’s own journalists. In short — anyone who might be influential in our nation’s capitol. The sponsorships, with fees ranging from $25,000 for one session to $250,000 for an entire series, seemed to imply that attendees would get paid access to these elite movers and shakers. The controversy erupted last Thursday after the website Politico.com disclosed the contents of a promotional brochure from the Post that solicited corporate sponsorships for the dinners, with fees ranging from $25,000 for one session to $250,000 for an entire series. Writing on his blog last week, the paper’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander called the disclosure “pretty close to a public relations disaster.” The first salon dinner, focusing on health care, was scheduled for July 21. The Post publisher Katharine Weymouth stated that it was all a misunderstanding but has called for an external review. The Post has said a marketing employee, Charles Pelton, sent out the brochure without vetting from either Ms. Weymouth or Marcus Brauchli, the paper’s executive editor. The brochure suggested that a single corporation could sponsor the dinners. Ms. Weymouth, in her letter to readers, said the brochure “was not approved by me or newsroom editors, and it did not reflect what we had in mind.” If a paper as revered as the Washington Post can behave with dubious ethics, what’s a reader to think? And where do readers go these days for credible, unbiased news and reporting? Who do you read/listen/watch for accurate reporting? Where does Social Media fit in? Do you still read “treeware” (print newspapers and magazines)? Have you given up on CBS, ABC, NBC, even PBS TV news? Do you sip a blend of Internet news-blogs and user-generated videos and completely ignore TV? Do we trust any major news organizations any longer? |
