What a high-school reunion can teach about social-media marketing

A colleague attended her HS reunion recently.  She described a vignette that sums up what not to do when utilizing social media in your marketing efforts.  She was set upon by a classmate who, in the span of about 90 seconds of monologue, made sure she, and anyone else within earshot, knew that (a) he was a Harvard MBA, (b) started his career at a high-horsepower consulting firm, (c) went on to a still higher-horsepower corporate job, and (d) had a daughter now enrolled at an exclusive prep school.  Oh, and the family had just returned from a month at their beach estate on Maui.  Before my colleague could say much of anything in response, the guy was excusing himself to go and refresh his beverage.  And regale someone else he’d recognized somewhere in mid-monologue.

The social media parallel begins and ends with the all-about-me monologue, of course.  You want to engage people. Therefore, you want to foster dialogue.  Find out what interests them and then address it as interestingly as you can.   Drop the self-promotion already.  You can then stand apart and distinct from the monologists who infest the social-media sphere today.  What are you doing to be more engaging than your competitors?  What is your market teaching you?  Where else are you learning new strategies and tactics?

 

 

Corporate blogs generate customers cheaper

When it comes to blogging, frequency matters.

Findings released earlier this year by HubSpot bear repeating, not to mention serious management consideration at companies of any size in any industry. Right now. Nearly 800 companies, representing B2B and B2C, were studied. Among the findings: the more you blog, the better your chances of attracting more of the traffic you want.

Brands whose management has taken this seriously, e.g., CEOs who post quality content on a weekly basis, draw the most high-quality leads. Not only that, the leads drawn were less expensive to generate than those coming via other means. To the tune of 52%.  To say that this is significant is an understatement.  Cheaper generation of quality leads drives down the costs of sales.  It’s that simple. Another nugget: Practically all those companies who post multiple times a day acquired customers directly via the posts.   Even if you can’t post every day, it’s worth noting that even a weekly post generated customers.   Turns out that the most popular frequency is once a week.  Still, more is better.

What makes a value proposition compelling is same as it ever was in marketing.  Web or no Web.

We still live in a multi-channel world.  Now there is empirical data showing that most word-of-mouth marketing happens off-line, not online.  Check out the findings of the Keller Fay Group, which said that 90% of the of the conversations people have about products, companies and brands do not occur on the Web.

This should be a wake up call for marketers obsessed with social media.  It suprises no one who has understood that a toolbox is not a strategy and that marketing techniques and tactics have always been in a state of evolution.  Look at it this way: Autodesk tools changed the way architects practice.  But the principles of architecture, structural engineering, materials science and mathematics are the same for the construction of the new Bay Bridge as they were for the Egyptian pyramids.  The way we reach out to markets today are a far cry from yesteryear, but the things that make a product’s value proposition relevant and compelling to a buyer are the same as they ever were.  The same in the age of Zuckerberg as they were in the time of Gutenberg, and long before that.  Knowledge of your customers trumps knowledge of whatever tool you happen to use to reach them.  Indeed, the former will always determine the latter.

The questions every company should ask itself about social-media marketing.

The way you are already marketing on the social Web probably deserves a closer look.

With apologies to JFK and deep gratitude to Jay Baer, here’s a list of questions that a lot of companies should be asking — and not asking — themselves about social-media marketing.  Specifically, how it applies to them, their customers and their brands:

1.  Ask not what the hot new trend is in social media, ask how you can
optimize and improve the social-media programs you already have in place.

2.  Ask not the best way to get the most possible Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers, ask how you can encourage existing customers to truly engage with you online.

3.  Ask not how you can make a viral video that gets thousands of views, ask how you can
optimize a video so that your prospects can quickly find it in a search.

4.  Ask not how much money you should transfer from the email budget to social media, ask how you can best integrate email and social media so that the whole exceeds the sum of the parts.

5.  Ask not how you can convince the CEO that you know your stuff when it comes to social technology, ask how you can create content in multiple forms and locations that demonstrates your expertise.

6. Ask not for the budget to hire a social-media expert, ask how you can distribute social-media knowledge across the entire company — including continuous training and knowledge sharing.

7.  Ask not how you can create a super-viral campaign, ask how you can
develop a sustainable, perpetual strategy that turns your customers into your most vocal cheerleaders — your auxiliary salesforce.

8. Ask not how to find the most influential bloggers and get them to write about you, ask how to find existing customers who are passionate about your products — and turn them into active evangelists.