This slide show is geared to women entrepreneurs, start ups, marketing directors at non profits and small business. It talks about the basics, why things have changed and how to focus efforts once you have your goals and target markets defined for your business. Social media overview, online reputation management and reviews and the importance of mobile marketing are covered. This is an overview.
33. Social Media
• LinkedIn for B2B and professionals
• Facebook for non-profits, retail, photographers
• Pinterest for fashion, crafts & visual businesses
• Houzz for interior designers, remodel contractors
• Foursquare for retail businesses
• Twitter has SHORT shelf life. Reporters, non profits,
famous people
• You Tube for everyone!
43. Stalk Us Online at
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@impressionM
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44. Easy to Get eNews
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Editor's Notes
At Impression Marketing, our focus is internet marketing which starts with a strong brand image and a focus on your websites as the flagship of your marketing efforts.
Marketing is at a crossroads and experiencing a dramatic shift. There are a number of factors driving this change
First, technology has inspired many changes. Just 5 years ago there was no such thing as an ipad and now it’s an integral part of our digital lives. Everything is smaller, faster, more useful, more portable.
The hardware to access the internet and to communicate has changed. There are multiple devices on which to reach consumers with still more coming out all the time. Many times consumers are watching TV and looking up things on an ipad or mobile phone.
As a result of the economy downturn of 2008 and technology advances, the way people shop has changed. Upper class has started shopping like the middle class. People are doing more comparison shopping and checking reviews. Retail vendors and businesses are more accountable than ever.
With a change in buying behavior, you also have a change in the sales funnel. In some cases, it’s a longer sales funnel and one in which the marketing part is extended and the role of sales may have shortened. How many of you have had a customer bring in some kind of print out or picture on their cell phone and told you they want what’s the picture?
Many things which used to work in marketing no longer do or rather that which you are doing no longer brings in the ROI it once did.
The internet and social media has made marketing more labor intensive. It never sleeps. So while people have the idea that it’s less expensive, it’s not when you consider the hours it takes to market content, coordinate and monitor the social channels
What’s more, juggling, coordinating and orchestrating all the different media or vendors has become overwhelming. And even if you have help in the form of multiple vendors, that’s multiple vendors that are not talking to each other. Hard to send an integrated message if everyone is socked away in silos. So it’s best to limit your outside vendors, working instead with firms that manage most of them for you.
The new marketing plan is not neat and tidy. It’s not linear. So how do you even begin building and executing a chaotic marketing map like this?
Not like that. So you may feel thoroughly confused and overwhelmed, so we’re going to start to break some of this down and focus on what’s the most important for marketing YOUR business.
First, let’s start with the basics. Define your business goals. Think about 6 months out. For example, what do you want your website to do for your business? Preferably not sit there collecting server dust. You want it to engage and inspire a target market to call, donate, send a form, fill something out etc. I do have a “one page marketing plan” I can share with you after this workshop that will help you define these goals.
Define a budget. Marketing budgets have declined from 11% in August 2012 to 7.8% in August 2013. So you’re faced with having to do more with less. Anywhere from 25-75% of this could be spent online. So choose 7-15% of your budget for marketing your business.
One of the most important things you’ll do is to create target audience profiles. Defining your market is very important and you should have some ideas who they are. I also have another document that will help you to clearly define your markets. This upfront work will pay off for you and keep you more focused on where it is you want to go.
Using the goals and the profiles of your target market, you can then start to test messages with Linkedin ads, Facebook ads or boosted posts. Pay per click ads are a great testing tool for messages but I wouldn’t advise doing pay per click as a novice. Basically, you want to see what your audience clicks on and with which messages they engage.
For this plumbing company, we went with some humor and one of the top reasons people call a plumber which is a clogged toilet. The typical target market is families and this message can be reflected on Facebook, outdoor, email, on the website. This billboard has been extremely popular for over a year and a half now.
For Colon & Rectal Specialists, who want more people to have a colonoscopy to reduce their risk of developing colon cancer, we addressed the fear of the event. And we branded the colonoscopy as the “kinder colonoscopy” which is a concept we tested in Google pay per click ads over the course of 30 days. This message is reflected over multi media channels.
So questions so far? Any idea of what call to action you might add to your website to help you reach your goals?
Email is one of the most ignored and misused marketing tools. It’s inexpensive and an ideal way to stay in front of your customers even if they never open your email because they at least see your name in their email inbox. Keep your emails simple. Keep them short. And keep them focused on offering your customers and clients value. Do not use syndicated content. It’s generic and people know it.
Start by building your list. A hello bar is easy to install and one way to get that list started. The forms that appear when you go to a site and darken the rest of the page? Hate them. You know what? They have 50% opt in. Fifty percent. The marketer in me has to love that statistic. What other ways could you use to easily build your list?
Make your emails consistent and branded. Don’t change backgrounds as it fractures your brand. In this example, the practice wanted to build their cosmetic cases. We used the email to engage and they clicked through online to the blog for more information on recovery time and results to expect.
What would be the goal you’d want to reach with email marketing? What kind of content would be in your email to reach that goal?
Get online reviews. 71% of online shoppers read a review before making that purchase. How do you get them? And what are your online reviews saying about your business? Do the research first. Act as a customer and search your business online to see what others are saying.
How do you get them? You ask for them! You are 95% more likely to get positive reviews if you ASK for them. If you don’t ask for reviews, you’ll get the disgruntled visitor reviews only. What you want is to get enough reviews that the occasional bad review doesn’t kill you. And pay attention to the less than stellar ones as well. It may be that they are telling you something you need to change.
Step one. Claim a page. That means if you have a listing on Yelp, for example, go fill in all the relevant information. Same with Google +. Fill in the info and make the page look “claimed”. Since Google+ is owned by Google, I would suggest you have a Google+ page with reviews so you show up better in Google search results.
Here’s an example of a claimed Google+ page for Robinson’s Plumbing. Clearly you can see their phone number and the billboard message is carried over to the Google+ page.
Step 2. Buy an easy to remember url and redirect it to the Google+ or whatever page you designated to take reviews. Make sure the url goes to the exact location they need to go to insert the review. So test the link and make sure to do so when you are logged out of the page. You can make a list, buy the one you want that is most memorable at GoDaddy if it’s available. Then call GoDaddy and ask them to walk you through redirecting it.
Step Three. Print some cards. These are fancy and you can go fancy. Or you can print two on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. Go to office max and have them print them on business cards for a nominal price. Order some from Vista print. However you want to do it, make sure they have something to remind them. You will probably get only 1 out of 10 or 20 to give you an online review. But over time, this will add up and will super boost your SEO and site visitation as well as your online reputation.
None of this will work if you don’t hand any out. Or have your employees or technicians hand them out. This is the follow through!
Here is the result of getting online reviews on Google+. Google gives you a little ad for your business. Free. No charge. Pretty nice, right? With 85% of the population using Google, a free ad is a pretty big perk for getting reviews.
If you don’t want to do all that work. sign up with customer lobby. Great bargain. This protects your online reputation. Should you have a disgruntled customer, it would get buried by all the other reviews you have out there. They do a really good job of calling and/or emailing to get your reviews posted.
Who in this room thinks they might benefit from positive online reviews? Do you know what’s being said about you online?
This is an quick overview of which social media works for what kinds of businesses. The most words you’ll ever see on a slide from me!
I say You Tube is for everyone because it is 50 times more likely you’ll end up on page one for a search term because you did a video on it.
Instagram will post to facebook and twitter as well as Foursquare, flickr and tumblr. You can also automate social media, using tools and even have your blog posts go automatically to facebook and twitter. But be careful not to over-automate as it doesn’t look good. It’s about engagement, not posting like a mad man on espresso. Two tools for managing multiple social media are Hootsuite and Buffering.
Choose 1. Or choose 2. But not all. You can own your page on each of them, but concentrate your efforts on a select few that reach your audience. Spreading yourself thin won’t get good results.
Which social media do you think would be good for your business?
Keep in mind, your audience is mobile. Is your website? If not, you could be losing customers and worse yet, Google will start to penalize you if your site is not mobile friendly or mobile responsive. If you are a start up, find a developer that will do a home page and contact page for you that is mobile responsive. This will keep things low cost until you get things off the ground.
57% use their mobile phones to search daily. 94% have searched for local businesses on their phone. NINETY percent take action from a search meaning they call, visit or purchase. That is a staggering statistic. And you have to ask yourself if you can afford to ignore mobile?
So your audience is mobile. Is your website? The focus for 2014, just like 2013, is mobile. For some socioeconomic groups, a smartphone is their ONLY access to the internet. For younger markets, their devices are as much a part of their personal identity as their underwear.
So if your ultimate goal is to have everything work together, how do you get started? First, identify any acute needs. For example, if you have bad reviews, you need to make changes in your business and/or getting more reviews first. Then start with one piece of a Chaotic Marketing Map and build from there. Make sure that any message you put out there is reflected on your social media and your website. The message is to start with the acute need and slowly work your way through your plan, adjusting it along the way. If it’s too much, cut it out and focus on the things you can get done.
And here we’ve reached the end that’s not really the end since marketing has no ending but is an never ending loop around the universe
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