Wednesday, 17 October 2012

How to Exploit All The Possibilities of Social Media


Consumers have integrated social media in their everyday routine, whether it is for business or personal purposes, because of this, the social media landscape looks stable and there’s only room for newcomers with a unique angle such as Instagram and Pinterest. Consumers still like to connect with brands but just a few brands are actively monitored. Apart from receiving content, consumers also want to be involved in the management of these companies.

This means that marketers and social media managers should plot their strategy along two factors:
  • Reach: in social media, both a broad and a limited reach can be useful. It is possible to create value for your customers and the company simply by helping a single individual. Solving the problem of an unsatisfied customer is a good example of a small reach that offers great value. Then there’s also the possibility of reaching a wide audience. A fun campaign has the potential of reaching millions of consumers. Good content always appeals to a large group of people.
  • Structural collaboration: both one-off contacts and structural relationships are possible on social media. A fun campaign may result in a positive one-off interaction, which in itself is valuable for both parties. This single contact may even develop into a genuine conversation. Also, social media provide a platform for structural collaboration with a group of people (staff, customers, suppliers, shareholders…).

The important thing is that both dimensions should create value for consumer and company alike. A modern company makes the most of social media by cultivating all four aspects: a wide or limited reach and loose or structural relationships. The long-term goal is inspiring customer commitment. Combining a wide reach with structural collaboration is an excellent goal.

If you achieve that goal, your company will benefit from four key quadrants. At the heart of the concept is the conversation philosophy (listening and engaging in dialogue) that forms the basis for the strategy. 

These are the four key benefits of such an approach:
  • Customer experience: The favourite topic of conversation among consumers is the products and services companies have to offer. Solving the problems of individual people is by definition an action with a limited scope but it has a positive impact on that person’s conversation potential.
  • Conversation: Instead of communication the goal is to have a conversation. It’s all about listening, asking questions, facilitating conversations and taking an active part in them. Managing that conversation is the basic principle in this scheme.
  • Content: Give people something to talk about but do so in an authentic and positive manner that reflects the culture of your organisation. Do this well and you will reach a wide audience.
  • Collaboration: Involve the public in everything your company does. Invite them into your boardroom, make them an active part of your project teams and use their vision when making decisions. You can call upon a big group of people on a large open forum or you can connect with a small group of consumers in a closed community. Both these methods of involving the customer in corporate policy are meaningful and offer added value.



Social Media Marketing to Close More Deals


The reason is simply because the power of social media. Thanks to thought leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, the whole way that we perceive salespeople and marketing tactics, is changing at a rapid pace. Plus now we have a way to stay connected and engaged with our clients/prospects in a seemingly real way. It’s every salesperson’s goal to be the first person your past clients think of when they are ready to buy your product and services again.

Social is Visual
We are becoming more visually stimulated individuals. We want to look at content with infographics. We want to look at facebook posts with pictures. Every multimedia stimulation will interest us more. 

Is Email Effective?
Email is no longer considered one of the highest influential ways to market. The truth is, that the average email open rate is only 12% daily. Most of it gets directed automatically into the spam bin, and only 7% of direct-mailers actually show a positive ROI.
Even traditional media is becoming less and less influential, only 16% of all TV and Radio marketing campaigns yield a positive ROI. 

Steps to close more deals to social media marketing
Step 1: Listen to your audience.
How do you listen to your audience with out physically talking to them? The best way to listen to your audience, without having to pick up phone and have a conversation with them, or without having to really get to know them better is to stalk them online. Take a look at their Facebook page. Take a look at their Twitter, their LinkedIn page, find out the things that they’re saying. Look at what they interested in, read their posts, look at their pictures and familiarize yourself with their online character. 
This gives you instant ammo to start a conversation that they also want to have. With a little finesse, you will have them telling you what you need to hear in order to close the deal.

Step 2: Connect and engage with your audience.
We all know that it takes seven touches in order to influence an individual and for them to become familiar with you. We also know that people buy from people they know like and trust. With these things in mind the easiest, fastest, and most influential way to accomplish the seven touches you need, can be done easily via social media.
The first touch comes from the prospect seeing your post.
The second touch comes from when they like or comment on your post.
The third touch comes from you by tagging them in your response comment.
The fourth touch is a gimme, everyone likes to see their name written and hear it spoken.
The fifth is when almost all SM sites automatically send an email when you mention them.
The sixth and seventh are when you keep the conversation going by keeping the comments.

Step 3: Question the confession
A true closer is waiting for the prospect to talk about the bad. Many times we are on sales calls and listening but to only the good things. People want to know about the good things, but they always thinking whats the bad thing as well. If things were good, you would not be talking. You poke around and ask the hard questions. The ones that make them uncomfortable and realize they need improvement. Then once they tell you what that pain is, you tell them you can make that pain go away. Easy, simple and a lot less words and energy.






Unlock The Marketing Power


To perceive successful marketing that used digital marketing and consumer trends at the present time is not an easy achievement. There are some ways, which will help us to solve the marketing problems, and these have been tested for many times. There are 3 popular Internet marketing methods that help the business to be successful when promoting their products through Internet to uplift the online existence.

Facebook Marketing Phenomenon
There are several ways to make promotion for their brand recognition, increase sales and online traffic. The most popular way is by using Facebook, which enable people to see the differences of marketing services. In Facebook page, we can use fan page as to promote with the goods or services. From this page, people can ‘like’, follow and comment in it. Usually, it can build a strong relationship with the customer, as they will know more about the business. In fan page, the business should put their details as an example of their full details, webpage (if they have any), notes and photos and educate and inform potential customers. By putting business information in Facebook it helps to spread easily to all people which nowadays most of us use Facebook. However, to get a good attention from the reader, they should put interesting, unique and relevant information about their brands.

Effective Marketing through Email
Another way to operate an effective marketing is by email. Email is simpler way than Facebook because it is only sending a necessary message via email to others people. It sounds simple because we think it is only sending message. However, it is not that easy for logistic of email marketing which is more complex than we think. It is because of the spam filters, massive recipient list and complex digital content. There are some techniques which can makes more interesting to improve the consumer experience through important notifications, thank you messages and exciting announcements. Nevertheless, email-marketing objectives is to look at the return on investment (ROI) compare to non-digital advertisements as an example billboards.

Even though email marketing is the most effective way to marketing techniques, there are some disadvantages. Firstly it may fall under jurisdiction of local and international spamming laws when they have an increase in marketing globalization. Secondly, it is usually have problems of transcription errors, out of date email and false addresses that leads to undelivered rate. These kinds of problems, business should be aware and know about it. Last but not least; sometimes email that sends will be blocked by the spam filters which it will overlapping with other disadvantages. To solve this kind of problem, business can contact the host server.

Power of Blogging
The last key to the big 3 is about blogging. Most of the business now uses blog to promote their products and services. This is because blog is easier and flexible to the marketing weapon for the business. The advantage of using blog is that blog can link to the marketing solution and other marketing solution, which have potential to get the customers back to the business, and these provide the point of sale. However, when we have blog, we need to maintain it and put a lot of work there. We cannot just make it once and leave it for several months. We need to provide the latest and up to date content about the products or services. Aside from that the business should also use an attractive design and not complicated features. Blog itself can be linked to other social media but it will be back to the business website and blog. This allows the viewers to share information and increase in size of the business. Nonetheless, business should look to the best marketing solutions for their business. These three solutions can helps with their marketing methods if they need it.


Thursday, 11 October 2012

Social Media ROI Europe


What matters to Marketers in Europe? One of the matters that happened in Europe is that most of the business is concerning on Return On Investment (ROI) in social media marketing. The ROI in Europe become more crucial as the revenue that got in the business cannot be join directly to the intangible benefits. Marketers seem think that social media is cool but they sometimes don’t think about the ROI. It is easy to set up the objectives of the marketers but they need to consider about the ‘likes’ linking to the sales where it is hard and completely a challenge for most of the marketers.  

There are some issues measuring the ROI of social media. There are issues when deciding the problematic issues, as there is lot of different opinions from others to set which track is the right one for the marketers. As an example is based on the European survey about social media marketing practices, Neolane said the ROI have a forceful target which makes most of the marketers (69%) think that it’s challenge for them. While the rest of the marketers is measure intangibles such as brand awareness, buzz and web traffic.

However, consumer response and rates of fan growth doesn’t mean that it is not important. This is because the process of allure the consumer with the brand will lead up to the sales through some of the arrangement. Each customer journey is individuals.

There is an interesting finding that is unpredicted where the ROI social media in Europe assume that they have a falsehood of the digital marketing opportunities. This would not be good for marketers in Europe as social media is really important where they can personalized users opinion and testing the primary issue with the marketers.