Digital marketing has evolved rapidly and social media, mobile devices, and the way customers shop, have turned traditional marketing on its head and brought in new best practices.
This wouldn’t be a problem if marketers were prepared for these changes, but many are not. Over 75% of marketers do not believe their departments are modern or nimble. If you and your company aren’t up to date on what the newest generation of buyers (Generation Z – born 1996 – 2010) wants from their online experience, it may be time to modernize and update your marketing skills.
Many of the members of Generation Z aren’t yet able to make their own purchases, but they account for 22% of the US population. They have a big influence (up to $333 billion) in household spending. Younger consumers are digital natives, and it’s crucial to meet them on their own preferred platforms and devices.
Marketing in 2018 has to combine multi-channel approaches with big data, SEO, and exciting new mediums for content. Content marketing has become a long-term must for everything from branding to loyalty. The catch? Young readers need a hook, and they like a variety of written and visual mediums. Beautiful designs, videos, interactive content—marketers have the challenge of creating fresh content that has a consistent voice and message at all times.
The modern marketer needs a wide range of skills, particularly in a smaller company. Strong writing and social media skills, the ability to shift between long and short-form content, design, analytics and more. As if the creative aspects of marketing weren’t enough, marketers also need to have strong operational skills. Being able to keep on budget, keep the goals of the department aligned with the company goals, and measuring relevant metrics and ROI are all key for ensuring that digital marketing has a long-term eye toward profits. It’s all about the numbers, especially as companies move toward lean initiatives.
Recently I discovered an expert, Don Crowther, whose specialty is social media and how to make money for your business by using social media marketing.
Two Types of Social Media
First he explained about two types of social media:
Social media that makes you money
Social media that only makes you friends
He continued explaining some of the social media statistics, as well as the different types of social media users and how to attract them.
Keeping a clear division between the social media you use just for friendships and what you do to build business relationships to make money is absolutely critical.
Making money from social media requires a much more strategic approach which he explains very well in his videos. This goes way beyond just setting up a business page in Facebook. This is about what type of content to produce and where to put it. He also covers when and how to ask for money, when and how to give content and when and how to be personal.
Your social media efforts need to add value. Your social media engagement must portray you as an expert in your business and a trusted source of information.
The big lesson I received from watching the video was that the quality of your posts on social media platforms directly relates to the quality of your audience and that will create a following of people more likely to buy from you.
For a powerful social media tool that provides guidelines to identifying your social media marketinggoals and objectives, shares tactics for sharing content on top social media tools, strategies for monitoring and measuring and time estimates, download the free social media strategy template!
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In order to get faster results from an investment in Social Media Marketing you need to measure your Social Networking efforts in terms of Return On Investment (ROI).
Five proven ways to increase your ROI are:
Have a Business Strategy to increase exposure in support of your products and services and to create new business.
Establish presence in your marketplace and reinforce your credibility.
Expand your reach and create buzz for events you’re hosting.
Nurture relationships and create strategic partnerships.
Properly maintain your presence and be an industry leader.
What ROI categories do you use?
Once you have a Social Media Marketing strategy in place in support of your Business Strategy, the following ROI categories can be used to measure return on investment to create branded online community:
Customer Communities:
Increase in customer acquisition
Increase in customer retention
Reduction in customer service costs
Increase in page rank and general site traffic due to additional content on a community
Improved product and service allocation based on real time customer feedback and customer driven innovation
Internal Communities (Employees):
Increase in productivity due to
General knowledge sharing
Identification of subject matter experts to shorten ramp up
Virtual team environments for distributed teams
Increase in employee retention. People like meeting other employees, face to face and virtually. This produces a more enriching work environment.
Decreased hiring costs. It’s easier to hire from within. Finding good candidates through internal social networks can provide even more information (both profile based and content creation based) about internal candidates.
This is an extract from my free Social Media Marketing Report.
If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.
Using Social Media for social networking is an effective marketing tool that became very popular in recent years. It compliments traditional media tools for marketing and should not be seen as the only way to market online businesses or the best answer to grow any business as this is not the Golden Compass to solve all your marketing challenges. But it certainly could be if used correctly.
Marketing through Social Networking is a long term activity where you are building your presence, your reputation and your credibility over time. Use Social Networking sites to listen online to what people are saying about your company, about your products, about your brand. One can refer here to a case study of Vodafone in Europe who has a team monitoring conversation in Social Media about Vodafone. To them it is all about customer retention.
Let’s look at the benefits to Entrepreneurs, Business Owners/Executives and Service Professionals of using Social Media as a marketing tool.
Generate exposure for your business
Help rise in search engine rankings and increase traffic
Reduce overall marketing expenses
Build new business partnerships
Bring in new qualified leads with increased subscribers from opt-in list
Help close new business
Taking into consideration that Social Media sites influence purchase decisions and change minds regarding purchasing products, these sites can be used to do product research and do consumer reviews. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool as consumers trust their friend’s recommendations more than any other form of advertising.
Social Media Marketing takes place through various Social Media platforms when they are used as a marketing tool to market a company’s products and services. Social Media tools can be divided into different categories, each category serving its own purpose.
The above diagram depicts some of the key Social Platforms in use today. Many of the platforms can be targeted as marketing tools to increase exposure to your business and grow your business through more sales and strategic partnerships. Let’s look at each key platform in more detail. For the purposes of this article only one example of each type will be discussed.
1) Blogs
From term “weblog” is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. At beginning of 2008 blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs and this number is growing at a rapid pace.
Currently there are 12,9 million active blogs with more than 5 billion readers.
2) Micro-blogging: Twitter
Micro-Blogging is a Social Media tool that answers to 1 question:
“What Are You Doing?”
Answers question in short sentences of 140 characters or less.
Most users on Twitter are already on Facebook .
Twitter is one of the fastest growing Social Media platforms.
It is referred to as ‘Instant messaging on steroids’.
Demographics shows that it is used by politicians, celebrities, news anchors and individuals.
Total visits in May 2009 were 134 million ; with 32 million unique visitors in April 2009.
The Twitter platform is used by 94% of marketers.
3) Really Simple Syndication: RSS
RSS “feeds” allow people to subscribe to the various websites, blogs or sections of websites that are of interest to them.
4) Social Networking: Facebook
Facebook is a well-known Social Media platform to create, participate in groups, share photos, videos, audios online.
It has an Alexa ranking of 5 (fifth most trafficked website in the world).
Currently 300 million active members, growing with 250 000 new members per day and predicted to be 500 million by 2011.
Demographics: fastest growing age group is 30-35. Women aged 55 is also a big growth area
Facebook presents huge opportunities to set up a group discussing areas of interest relating to your business.
5) Niche Networks: LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a Professional Networking Social Media platform and the largest network of its kind. Currently, it is used by more than 50 million professionals to exchange information, ideas, opportunities and business networking.
6) Chatrooms
Build your own network of contacts who share your interests.
7) Message Boards: Forums
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site were any topic of interest is posted and discussed.
8) Podcasts
A podcast is a series of digital computer files, usually either digital audio or video, that is released periodically and made available for download by means of web syndication.
9) Video sharing: You Tube
YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. You Tube is a video sharing Social Media platform that currently has 75 million videos and 150 000 more videos are added per day. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email. In 2006 YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. Video marketing is used significantly more by men than women.
Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages.
If you enjoyed this summary of social media marketing tools for business, go read my free Social Media Marketing Report which contains more useful information about your most pressing questions about social media as a marketing tool.
The rapid emergence of social networking over the past five years is nothing short of a phenomenon. Social networking and blogs are now more popular than e-mail. “Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience.” According to John Burbank, Nielsen Online’s CEO.
Social Media is part of Web 2.0. With Web 2.0 the potential exists to create an interactive, dynamic environment where individuals, consumers and business collaborate, communicate and share. It is viral by nature.
A growing number of news publishers have adapted their strategies from simply having websites to participating in social media through active use of sites like Twitter to drive awareness and conversation around their brands and offerings. CNN and the New York Times have some of the largest following on Twitter. Source: Nielsen Report
According to Michael Stelzner who published the Social Media Marketing Industry Report, the people most likely to use Social Media Marketing, are aged between 30 and 39 years. Certainly, for people new to Social Media, there are many questions that come to mind. These questions are asked by Entrepreneurs, Business Owners/Executives of any size company and Service Professionals.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing can be defined as an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. It’s the online conversation among customers, investors, employees, fans and critics. The power is shifting from corporations to individuals and communities.
This is the new model that is part of Web 2.0 where people use the Web’s potential for creating an interactive, dynamic environment where individuals, consumers and businesses can collaborate and communicate in new and simpler ways.
The Social Media model enables a number of things:
informing
persuading
involving
demonstrating
reminding
Above all, Social Media Marketing is free! All it takes, is a time commitment and using Social Media tools according to a predefined strategy. In this day and age it makes sense to use Social Media to promote your business.
To find answers on the 10 most asked questions, read this special report to understand how marketers are using Social Media to grow and promote their businesses.
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Digital marketing has evolved rapidly and social media, mobile devices, and the way customers shop, have turned traditional marketing on its head and brought in new best practices.
