Social Media Tips for 2016

Companies vary in their usage and understanding of social media.  Some are just starting out, while others have been leveraging several social media platforms to listen to what the market is saying about them, engaging with their customers and finding new ones through social media.  For B2B and B2C companies, think of social media as the new “barbershop” or “beauty parlor” of the next generation.  In other words, it is a place where you can update friends and family on what is going on in your life, as well as to hear what is going on in their lives.  Unlike your local gathering place, social media is a network of millions of people who talk to each other about everything and you have the opportunity to hear what they are saying.

Here are some social media tips you may want to try in 2016.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the best business networking platforms on social media.  This is the place where recruiters find new job applications, businesses grow their customer base by reaching out to prospects and customers, professionals meet other professionals in their field to share ideas and insight, and you can learn from people all over the world.  If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, create one.  If your company doesn’t have a presence on LinkedIn, create a profile for them.

Some professionals don’t understand why you should create a profile on LinkedIn when you already have a website.  LinkedIn enhances your company’s visibility in several ways. Often customers use LinkedIn to get an overview of the company and to find key contacts at that company to build relationships with.  LinkedIn also provides a personable side of your business. If you want to show the world that you value what customers have to say about you, you need to be on social media.  LinkedIn is the central location where new talent is looking for work and where leaders of companies and corporations go to network.

Facebook

Facebook was originally created for college students, but has expanded to every age and background all over the globe.  As Facebook continued to expand, parents and family members of all ages began using Facebook as a place to post family updates.  Why is this significant for business?  Facebook has 1.19 billion active users every month.  Putting it another way, that’s 1.19 BILLION potential new customers.

Facebook ads continue to grow in popularity as a way to drive traffic to your website.  Facebook Groups are clusters of like-minded individuals so you can target whatever groups of people that you want to.

Twitter

Twitter is an outstanding medium for broadcasting short, marketing messages about your products and services.  You can announce promotions, discounts, and new products while drawing attention to the interests and knowledge of your company.  The power of Twitter is listening to the conversations on social media and adding to the conversation.

The proper use of hashtags (i.e. #StarWarsTheForceAwakens) can get your announcements and messages in front of the right people at the right time.  You need to monitor what is trending and determine if it makes sense to join into those conversations.  You can also just put a # in front of a topic that makes sense for your product or service, like #businesstrends, #digitalmarketing or #marketingtools.

YouTube

If you have corporate or product videos, post them on YouTube.  YouTube has over one billion users, almost 1/3 of the number of people using the internet.  Videos are a great way of demonstrating your products, telling your story or showing your company’s DNA.  Like the other social media platforms, you can advertise on YouTube or through Google Adwords remarketing, allowing your ads to show up when people visit your site, then go to other Google network sites like YouTube.

Pinterest

Pintererst is a social media platform where you can “pin” photos and videos on other people’s or company’s boards.  Think of it as an electronic bulletin board.  Like LinkedIn and Facebook, there are groups of like-minded people that share their interests, recipes, photos in interesting places, etc.  If you find like-minded customers, Pinterest is an excellent place to start conversations and relationships and to increase search engine optimization for your website.

Instagram

Instagram is a photo-sharing social media platform that focuses on your personal experience to a particular brand.  It is a great place to build brand awareness.  Your Instagram page can connect to your Facebook business page to help solidify your brand.

Instagram allows you to show your customers the personal side of your business by sharing photos of your products, team and services.  Customers are more comfortable dealing with people they can relate to versus cold, aloof companies.  Small businesses can effectively use Instagram to show their personal side and hopefully relate more effectively to customers compared to big businesses.  Instagram can really help your customers visualize your company.

Making An Impact Using Social Media

 I like to think of Social Media as the next evolution of communication where you can connect with anyone all over the world.  How do you leverage social media to help grow your business?

1. Make sure that you have dedicated people in your organization who are knowledgeable about and skilled at social media. Business people that suggest that companies only need a part-time social media person don’t understand the power of social media. If you could listen to what your customers say about your company, products and services 24/7, wouldn’t you take advantage of that? Social media allows you to set your company apart from your competitors.
2. Determine which social media platform works best for your industry. There are many social media networks beyond the ones that I mentioned.  Do some research and find out where your customers and competitors are congregating.  Figure out which media platform will best reach your customers and bring in new customers.
3. Once you get your social media team in place and identify your networks, now it’s time to build a social media strategy and implement it. I’m a firm believer in synchronized marketing – getting all of your marketing efforts including social media working together in harmony.  For example, if you put a product on sale in a flier, make sure it is also on your website and be sure to communicate the sale through email, Google Adwords and social media advertising.  You can do “Facebook Only” contests that aren’t offered anywhere else but your Facebook landing page so you can then drive traffic to your website.
4. Once you get your social media marketing machine in motion, you can then train your entire staff to broadcast messages about your company, new products, and services on several social media platforms simultaneously. Be very careful that your staff is fully trained.  Social media is a very powerful tool – when you broadcast a message, it can easily be seen by millions of people.  Make sure the message that goes out is monitored and presents your company in a professional and positive light. Imagine that instead of a handful of people sending out targeted messages through social media, your entire company can expand your message exponentially through careful implementation.

Conclusion

In 2016, identify the social media platforms that make sense for your company.  Go where your customers and competitors are online.  Identify who in your company is responsible for social media, particularly in the marketing or corporate communications departments.  Make sure that you build a social media strategy leveraging other marketing platforms like print, web advertising, email marketing, Google Adwords, social media advertising and messaging.  Once you have tested your messaging and start building momentum, you can expand your social media messaging throughout the company under the careful direction of your marketing and corporate communications management team.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: Peter Ras via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

How Good Is Your Ecommerce Website?

I have designed, directed and built over 350 websites in my career.  I would like to share with you some of the key elements of ensuring a successful ecommerce website.  You can have the best website in the world, but there are a couple of key elements that need to be in place before you launch your website.

First, evaluate how good your customer service is.  You may be wondering “what does building a great ecommerce website have to do with customer service?”  Everything.  Many of the customers in the B2B industrial space use the web to search for products, but often use the phone to place the orders.  Whether the customer is placing the order online, through email or fax, or just making a phone call, the customer experience needs to be great.  Customers go to your website to learn about you and the products that you are selling.  The customer user interface for your website needs to be easy to use and functional.

Second, your customers need to find you.  With the introduction of the internet, the competitive landscape expanded significantly.  With smart phones, IPads, tablets and other web searching devices, access to the internet, the competitive landscape is even larger.  Your company must  be found through all of the internet noise.  Your ecommerce website needs to be search engine optimized. Customers tend to take the path of least resistance.  They can find whatever they want by going to Google, Bing or other search engines.  When they are searching for companies that sell the products you sell, you need to come up on top of the search results.  Make sure your site has search engine friendly URL strings, alt tags, meta tags and is loaded with keywords that show the search engines that you are a valuable resource for your customers for the products that you sell.  Also, leverage social media, online and print advertising.  The more your customers see you, the more likely they are to visit your site and purchase from you.

Third, along with SEO, a solid search engine marketing strategy is important.  Using Google Adwords, for example, to make sure your top products are showing up on page 1 of search results is very important.  When your site is optimized, you can show up on page 1 through organic search and PPC.  Now you are giving the customer a couple of views of you on the same page.

Fourth, your search and navigation on your site need to be easy to use and provide optimum results quickly.  Customers are busy and they don’t want to dig for the products they need.  They want to find what they are looking for fast so they can move on to other things.  If they can’t find what they are looking for quickly on your site, they will turn to your competitors.  I like to use the “3 clicks or less” rule.  If the customer takes more than three clicks to get what they are looking for, they will probably go elsewhere.  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  How would you find what you are looking for on your site?  Don’t assume that you know.  Ask your customers.  At one place where I worked, we totally rebuilt a brand new website based on customer feedback and the results were fantastic.

Fifth, make sure your product content is rich.  Search engines love rich content.  The more relevant the search is for the customers, the more money the search engine companies make through advertising and repeat customers.

Finally, make sure that your pricing strategy is competitive.  I have visited great websites that were easy to find products, but their prices were out of line.  You may find desperate customers who might pay the unreasonable price, but don’t expect them as repeat customers.  Do some pricing comparisons with your major competitors and negotiate with your suppliers to improve your margins.

Customers want easy to use sites, good user experience, fantastic customer service and competitive pricing.  With those core elements in place, you can drive traffic and increase sales by launching a synchronized marketing strategy using search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and print, online and email marketing.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Customer Segmentation – Leveraging Your Data For Success

In my post “Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold”, I talked about the importance of customer and product data hygiene and maintenance.  In this post, I would like to take you through the next steps with your clean customer database… customer segmentation. 

The first step in customer segmentation is to analyze your customer data.  Any marketer will tell you that you need to collect as much information about your customers as possible.  The more data you have, the more segmentation you can do.  One of the key things you look for are patterns – similarities and differences in the data that you collect.  Here are some things to look for.

• Geography
• Lead, prospect or customer
• Gender
• Age
• Method of entry to your company (email, print, banner ads, Adwords, social media, call center, fax, walk-in)
• Method that your customers purchase (phone, web, walk-in)
• Products purchased
• Frequency of purchases
• Products viewed but not purchased (You might detect a pricing or product content issue)

 The next step is to group and flag this information into your database.  You can create and name categories that your customers fall into.  For example, if you segment your database by “XYZ widget buyers”, then you can target market to that group only and upsell certain accessories to those customers.

The next step is to segment your customer database.  Be careful here.  You don’t necessarily want to pigeon-hole customers into one group.  You will find customers overlap into multiple categories.  Make sure that you don’t hit the same customers that fall in different groups at the same time.  Verify that the simultaneous marketing campaigns you are launching include different customers.  Over-marketing is easy to do if you aren’t careful.

Once you have flagged your database with the appropriate segments, do some A/B testing of your marketing campaigns.  See what works for those segments and what does not.

Measure everything you do and make adjustments to continuously improve your campaigns.  Implement the programs that work and stop the ones that don’t.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

What is the best way to market a new catalog?

There are several different ways to reach out and touch prospects and customers.  If you offer a variety of different products, you most likely have a printed catalog.  You many also offer a catalog flipper on your website.  But how do you let your customers and prospects know that your new catalog is available?

You could send postcards that are inexpensive, but unless you have a reliable, accurate database, that could be a waste of money.  An old fashioned letter via snail mail is another option.  Slim catalogs are an inexpensive way to get more information to a customer or prospect versus just a letter, but we’re back to the reliable, accurate database again.

Some marketers would deploy an email marketing campaign.  It’s significantly cheaper than print.  You can leverage your customer database with an email database you can purchase.  It has been my experience that purchasing email databases is unreliable.  How many different email addresses do you have and use?  People change email addresses all of the time.  In addition, not everyone likes or reads marketing or new catalog announcement emails, especially if they are getting bombarded by spam emails on a regular basis.

Pay-per-click, SEM/SEO and banner advertising are still viable options, but you need to be careful.  PPC can be great, but you can blow a ton of cash from your budget faster than you can say “Google Adwords”.  SEO/SEM works very well if your website is optimized.  The key is getting into the heads of your customers and prospects.  How are they searching for and finding your company on the internet?  If you know and understand that, you can build a very effective SEO/SEM strategy.

And what about using social media to get the word out?  Whether your company caters to B2B or B2C, social media is an excellent channel to tell the world about your new catalog.

Which channel is right for your business?

I have done a significant amount of work in the industrial supply market which was primarily B2B although we expanded more into the B2C space when we opened a store on Amazon.  Over the years, we have seen a migration to digital technology, but print isn’t dead by any means.  Email marketing has become an effective, inexpensive option.  Social media which was born in the B2C market is migrating to B2B.

One thing I have learned over my 20+ years of marketing is that you need to use multiple channels to touch the right prospects and customers.   Everyone has different preferences.  Some like to order online through a website, social media or an app, others use printed catalogs and 800-numbers, and others still use fax or email.  I recommend doing analysis on your customer and prospect ordering methods.  Give the customer the option to review and order your products however they want to.  With all of the digital browsing and ordering tools like smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, and the speed in which new product information is delivered, you need to be ready to receive orders whatever what way your customers want to order.  Do B2B companies, for example, have to have a mobile version of your website?  Ask your customers.  If that’s their preferred method of searching and ordering products, then you had better build it.  If customers prefer that method, your competitors may have already figured that out.

As a firm believer in synchronized marketing, if you have a new catalog that you want to present to the marketplace, you need to use every marketing channel you can afford and more importantly, the ones which your customers and prospects prefer, and get the word out in one concise, synchronized branding message.

Building an effective synchronized marketing strategy

Synchronized marketing incorporates all of the elements of your marketing strategy including print, online, email, social, PR, trade shows, sales, and customer service and allows them to work together and feed off of each other.  Integrated marketing ties together a few elements, but synchronized marketing ties everything together.  Why does an orchestra make beautiful music?  How can your favorite football team score on an unbelievable play?  The answer to both questions is they work together as a team with perfect synchronization.  Everyone knows what their role is and they know what the goal is of the team.  Let me give you a real-life example of how it can work.

When I started working at a company, prior management didn’t believe in advertising or marketing.  We were dealing with a 60+ year old company that everyone thought was out of business, two black and white catalogs and a web site that had a whopping 15 indexed pages on Google.  The prior management thought that if they dropped a black and white catalog when all of their competitors had color catalogs that the phone would ring off the hook. It didn’t.

After I arrived, the first thing we did was to eliminate black and white catalogs and had one color-coded catalog annually.  We also rebuilt the website using that same color-coding on a platform that Google liked and indexed easily.  All of our marketing and promotional materials used the same color-coding.  Our call center, direct and inside sales reps were also trained to help guide customers on the phone through the catalog based on the color-coding.  The goal is to make it as easy as possible for customers to find and purchase our products.  We even created a custom trade show booth with color-coded back-lit shelves displaying representative products for each section on their respective shelves.  We also leveraged social media through contests that drove traffic back to our new and improved website.  We re-introduced the company to the marketplace through print and online advertising as the best kept secret around. It worked.

Everyone was on the same page.  The catalog, website, social media, online and print advertising, Google Adwords, SEO, promotional materials and the trade show booth all working together to reinforce the brand.  The first trade show I attended before we built the color-coding booth, customers would say things like “I thought you guys went out of business.”  After we launched our synchronized advertising and marketing campaign, the next trade show we attended, we were hearing comments from customers like “I saw your ad in XYZ magazine and had to come see what you are doing.  I have been seeing your ads everywhere.”  Those comments were music to my ears.

How to Make Remarketing Work

 

Before beginning any remarketing campaign, there are a couple of things that need to be in place.  Make sure that your website is optimized and easy to use.  Nothing is worse than having a great remarketing campaign where customers or potential customers click on links to your site and they can’t find what they are looking for.  All of your work to get them to your site just went up in smoke.  If customers and prospects can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will go to a site where they can.  There goes a lost opportunity.

I recently visited a website that has nice flash animation, but the designers sacrificed functionality for glitz.  It was cool, but after clicking around the site for 5 minutes, I still didn’t know what the company did or what products and services they sold.  It was too much work for me to dig on their site for information about them.  A well-designed website makes it very clear what they are selling or offering as soon as you land on the home page.  In the age of split-second decision making, you have to capture their attention immediately. If the site is designed well, it also needs to be optimized so Google searches can bring up your site as a search result.

Rule 1: Make sure your website clearly defines who you are, what you sell and make it as easy as possible for your customers and prospects to use your site.

Now that your site is in good working order and optimized for Google indexing, now you need to drive traffic to your site.  There are a variety of ways to drive traffic to your site.

1. Email marketing with promotions 

2. Banner ads on other high traffic sites

3. Free white paper downloads

4. Social media contests

5. Press releases

6. Print promotions that tie-in to your website

7. Free enewsletters

8. Good SEO with targeted keywords for organic search results

9. Well designed Google Adwords campaigns

And the list goes on.

Rule 2: Make sure your website is optimized for Google search including proper tagging of pages, links going to the correct location (no broken links), solid meta-data, good, rich content, and URL rewrites so the URL matches what’s found on any given page.

Now that you have a functional, easy-to-use site that is optimized and you are driving traffic to it, now you can deploy remarketing programs.  You need to determine what products you want to remarket on your website.  If you sell blue widgets and want to “follow” visitors on your site with your remarketing ad, then you need to design a compelling ad that will get the customer to return to your site. 

Rule 3: Make your remarketing ads are compelling with a clear call to action.

Remember, remarketing is only effective with a clean, well-designed and optimized site that has solid traffic going to it and ads that have a clear call to action.

Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold

You can have the best marketing plan with powerful social media, outstanding print and online advertising, great press releases, a speedy ecommerce website, but if your customer and product data isn’t clean, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t know who is visiting your site or placing orders, it’s difficult to market to them. Think of customer data as your pot of gold…your treasure. Without your customers, you have nothing.

I have worked at several organizations and even our own customer data was outdated in large corporate databases like D&B. We were doing some data hygiene and I asked my colleagues to look up our own company information on D&B. The President listed hadn’t been President in several years. Every one of the executives listed weren’t even employed there anymore. Unless you keep customer data up-to-date, contact information and addresses might be wrong. I have worked at organizations that have undergone corporate acquisitions, moved physical locations, had subsidiaries bought and sold. I have yet to find any organization that is totally accurate on their company databases.

As marketers, it is our responsibility to keep our customer databases clean. It is extremely important to have the correct company name, address, city, state, zip, contact information, phone numbers, fax numbers and if possible email addresses. I worked for a company that had very poor data cleansing practices. When asked to de-dupe a 600K record database for a mailing, over half of the addresses were either duplicates or undeliverable. Keeping customer data clean is a ton of work, but it’s a necessary evil.

The same holds true for product data. If a Customer goes to your website, but can’t find what he or she is looking for because the keywords and product descriptions are weak, they won’t waste their time and they will leave…often never returning.  The cleaner your product data is on your website and in your catalogs the better. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Try to find a specific product on your website using a keyword that a customer would use. This is a trap that many marketers fall into. Just because a marketer or a manufacturer calls a product a certain keyword, that doesn’t mean that’s what the customer calls it. Kentucky Fried Chicken had tried to market themselves as that for years, but their customers kept calling them “KFC”. I was working with KFC during this transition time. Instead of trying to change customers’ behavior, KFC smartly changed their advertising approach. Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC. Packaging, signage and advertising all adjusted to what the customer wanted. Learning how the customer finds your products and what they call them is critical. If you can’t find your products easily, neither can your customers or Google for that matter.

It has been my experience that having a team dedicated to keeping your customer and product data clean and accurate is critical to future success. It’s an investment well worth the money and time.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile and my website.