Thanksgiving is behind us as well as Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, three of the major shopping days of the year. I hope these events were successful for your business. Now is no time to rest and coast through the last month of the year when it comes to finishing out your holiday season marketing. By making email and online marketing as part of your marketing campaign, you can easily create new and easy ways to market your business.
Here are 12 ideas to make these last weeks a success.
Twitter is such an under used and unappreciated “social network” for business use. In fact, in a survey conducted by Pew Research, only 19 percent of online adults use Twitter verses 71 percent using Facebook. With that said, those businesses not incorporating Twitter with running a major event are missing the mark on attendee involvement before, during and long after the event.
I am going to go a bit off course this month and not focus on just social networks. Why you ask? Well, I'm preparing for my classes at RACC and always read new ebooks and books on marketing to share the latest and greatest. I find myself totally engulfed in a book written by David Meerman Scott called The New Rules of Marketing & PR.
When I ask the question in my classes, “How many businesses in attendance have a Google+ page,” very few hands go up. The answer is that only two out of 10 businesses who have a presence on the internet have claimed their Google+ business page. Yet, Google has created a business page for you to easily claim. Assuming you haven't claimed your page, the question is, “should you?” The answer is, “absolutely!”
When I meet with business owners to discuss their involvement in social networks, I seldom find them using Twitter. Twitter, with its hashtags, retweets, and mentions, doesn’t make sense to them. Well, first of all, Twitter is not really a social network but instead a feed of microblogs. Microblogs are short messages and, in this case, 140 character messages.
There's more than one way for your business to be found through search engines. Businesses who are active on social networks are finding that Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn are showing up as part of their search and sometimes before their website. When social networks are optimized, it is called Social Media Optimization (SMO).
When teaching a class about Social Media Mastery, I find it interesting to see the level of knowledge and involvement when it comes to using social networks as a marketing and sales tool for business. It goes the gammit, from total lack of involvement, to over the top, in your face. To find a balance for social network involvement, is to understand the rules of Social Media Mastery.
We have had the opportunity to work with a team of people who wrote a book called The Art Of The Nudge. Their leadership communication framework, TATN, is used in a variety of ways to help inspire business executives and their business associates to actions that deliver results in a variety of ways. While working with them, I have seen a difference in my own business by making small changes or better described as nudges.
When Paul Fair, with Paul Fair Associates LLC, met with me the first time, he had an adequate website but it wasn’t producing the traffic he was looking to reach. He also had an email engagement in place but was lacking in the engagement part of it. His social media presence was nonexistent.
With out a doubt, every time I teach a class, there is always someone in the class who asks me, “What is a hashtag?” I then explain what it is and does to fine tune searches for your specific event, product, phrase, or business. Let's look at how it works.
We’ve all visited eCommerce sites. But what are scommerce sites? Believe it or not, some of the largest scommerce sites are Amazon and Groupon. Now, all sizes of companies can sell through these means, but if you've ever worked with them you know there is a very small margin of profitability.
What if a business wants to take their own ecommerce site and control their own scommerce on the Internet, and not lose a piece of their profit margin to the goliaths like Amazon and Groupon?
We have a client who has been on YouTube for more than two years with a YouTube channel complete with playlists. Along with his monthly market updates, he uses it to share news about other local businesses.
The interest to visiting his channel has been, well, pathetic. Oh, we've received views by sharing links from Facebook to YouTube, but certainly not what we hope to have.
Most people would think a person who teaches Social Media Mastery and provides businesses with daily posting to their business page would be on social networks all day. That is not the case at all. If all my clients were located in other states, yes, then you would find me online for hours at a time but that, too, is not the case.
Having experienced a cold harsh winter like we just experienced, I welcome spring and the opportunity to work in my garden and dig in the dirt. I find it amazing to think what you can yield from one, single seed. With the proper planning, planting, watering, and harvesting, one seedling from a green bean can provide a meal, maybe two, for a family of four. Plant a whole row of seeds and you'll be canning and freezing beans to eat well into 2016.
If video is the wave of the future on Social Networks, how do you go about creating a quality video with your smartphone? Well, first and foremost, there is no replacement to working with a professional videographer to create a quality profile for your company. Yet, there will be those times when you are in a setting where you need to react in the moment and want to take advantage of the opportunity to create a brief video to upload on YouTube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook.
As I was preparing for this month's column, I thought it would be a great idea to share what is being said by other Social Media Experts throughout the cybersphere.
When teaching Social Media Mastery to my classes, I have a few rules I share with them that have been my practice in building and maintaining LinkedIn. It's also important to note, if your clients are businesses and not consumers, you want to concentrate on LinkedIn as your social network of choice. With that said, these are four rules to build and manage a successful LinkedIn network.
