Small Business SMM

If you own a small business, it seems like everyone is trying to get you to use social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are pushing hard for small businesses to embrace social media marketing.

Digital marketing gurus are spending big money to try and get you to spend big money on their social media marketing services.

You’ve probably already dabbled with social media marketing. You might have a Facebook business page. But, in your gut, you also suspect that social media is a bit of a scam.

You’re wrong.

Social media marketing isn’t a bit of a scam. Social media marketing is a complete scam for most small and medium-sized businesses.

What Does Social Media Marketing Mean?

Social media marketing is built around the concept of creating free content to build an audience. This is a time-tested strategy. But, social media marketing breaks this otherwise effective approach.

First, when you build an audience on social media, you aren’t creating an asset for your business. You are creating an asset for the company who owns the platform. If the social media platform goes under next month, your audience goes down with it. Social media platforms can, and do, change policies on a whim. What’s free today is pay-to-play tomorrow. Facebook pulled the rug out from under businesses several years ago making it impossible to reach your fans without paying to boost your posts.

Second, social media isn’t a great vehicle for selling. Look at any think piece about how businesses should use social media, and you will find that you should do more than just share your own content. You should be seen as a trusted authority or source or entertainment. But, it’s hard to make money just by being social and leaving a good impression.

But, as a small business, you cannot effectively monetize any of those metrics.

Social media marketing won’t lead to more sales for your small business. It will suck up all of your available time and money, leaving your frustrated and ready to quit anything having to do with online marketing.

Social media marketing is about creating posts to try and drive likes, shares, comments, and follows. But, as a small business, you cannot effectively monetize any of those metrics.

Pay-per-click advertising on social media is an entirely different beast from social media marketing. Paid advertising can be effective, but paid or free content marketing on social media platforms is a horrible investment for small businesses.

How Big Consumer Brands use Social Media

Big brands like Arby’s, McDonald’s, Target, and Ford spend a lot of money on social media marketing. These are smart companies. Why would they invest in something that doesn’t work?

They don’t.

What big brands want and get out of social media is different from what you want and what you get as a small business.

One of the marketing strategies big businesses employ is investing in brand recognition. They want people to associate their brand with specific emotions, life stages, and decisions. Big consumer brands don’t care about generating sales from social media. They care about leaving an impression.

These brands can afford this strategy because of their size, the number of different markets they are in, and because they are mostly focused on consumers.

You’re Not a Big Brand

Your small or medium business is not a big brand. You don’t have the budget or timeline to slowly build a desire for your products and brand over several years. You can’t afford to invest in brand recognition because you will get squashed by the competition.

Your company isn’t a big brand. You shouldn’t waste money trying to use their marketing strategies.

You need to focus on marketing strategies and tactics that actually make a difference to your bottom line instead of focusing on metrics that flatter your ego.

Boost Profits by Making Sales Not by Leaving an Impression

How much is a like worth to your business? How about a share or a follow? Here are the results of some back of the envelope math:

Likes = $0

Followers= $0

Leaving a good impression doesn’t generate one penny of revenue. If you want to boost profits, you have to sell more stuff. That’s how small businesses stay in business. They sell enough goods or services to pay all their bills and generate a level of profit.

You don’t have VCs backing you. You aren’t going to cash out in an IPO. You are going to have to get your cash the old-fashioned way, selling stuff people need or want.

While this seems like common sense, most social media marketers forget this fact. Think about what would happen if you suddenly had 10,000 real Facebook fans tomorrow. How would that affect your business?

It wouldn’t

You would still have to try and sell to those followers. How are you going to reach them? You can write a bunch of posts, but you will have to pay to boost those posts to get more than 5% of your fans to see them.

If you make all of those posts sales posts, you’ll start losing fans.

You’re in a no-win situation with social media.

No matter how much time and money you spend on social media, you still have to do the work of making a sale.

Instead of wasting your time and money on social media marketing, you should invest in three different tactics instead:

1. Paid advertising on social media platforms

2. Long tail SEO

3. Direct response email marketing

The exact way you deploy these tactics will vary depending on the specifics of your business. Business to business companies have different sales funnels than consumer-focused companies.

But, these tactics will help you connect with people eager to buy from you, and not just people looking to fill their feed with interesting articles.

Paid Advertising on Social Media Channels is Different

The real social media gold for small and medium businesses is in paid advertising. Writing and boosts is a slow, expensive, and inefficient way to attract paying customers.

Paid advertising cuts right to the heart of the matter. You get to ask your ideal customer directly to do something. It might just be to click on a link, but, it gets them off of social media and onto your website where you control the terms of engagement.

The biggest advantage of social media advertising is you can micro-target. You want to appeal to a very narrow set of people. When you use micro-targeting, it’s easy to talk directly to their needs. The customer can feel that you speak their language. They are excited to see how you can deliver the one thing they most want or need.

Paid advertising should be used to send customers to a specific landing page, and not just your website. You want to send them to a place where they can buy a specific product or service, or you want to send them to a landing page where you can capture their email address in return for something of value.

Advertising leads to direct sales, or it allows you to build a list of contacts that you can continue to market to, through methods you control like physical mail or email.

Paid social media advertising is one of the best ways to rapidly drive sales. Most businesses can see significant results in spending as little as $5 a day in social media advertising. But, you will have to invest time and money into testing ads and audiences. Paid advertising isn’t a silver bullet, but unlike social media marketing, it does deliver real results and generates a measurable return on investment.

Using Long tail SEO

Paid advertising is excellent for driving traffic and generating fast sales in the short term. But, if you want to build your business for the long term, you need other tools.

Long-tail SEO can provide you with small, steady profits that gradually increase the longer you are in business.

The goal with long-tail SEO is that you are driving organic traffic from search engines to your product or service pages. People who are looking to buy what you’re selling will find you. Long-tail SEO isn’t sexy like social media marketing. It takes hard work and a lot of patience. But, it delivers.

Long-tail SEO is about creating thousands of sales pages on your website that each generates a little bit of money each month.

Advantages of Direct Response Email Marketing

Email marketing is the most cost-effective form of digital marketing. It costs almost nothing to send an email campaign. When done right, you can generate thousands or tens of thousands of dollars just by sending out an optimized sales sequence to your list.

But, for this tactic to work, you have to build a high-quality list of prospects and customers, and you need to master direct response marketing.

Direct response marketing means that you ask your prospect to take a specific, measurable action. It might be buying something. It might be signing up for a free webinar.

The goal is to persuade your prospect to take one action that brings them closer to making a purchase.

Direct response marketing is a multi-billion-dollar subspecialty of marketing. It works.

When you combine paid advertising, long-tail SEO, and direct response email marketing you turn your small or medium business into a selling powerhouse.

None of these steps are easy. But, they are all simple. You will see results with each one, even before you have mastered the tactic. Each of these tactics makes it easy for you to measure your results. You can easily calculate your return on investment.

This is critical because you need good data to run effective experiments.

You only have so much time as the owner of a business. Don’t waste a second of it on social media marketing.

Instead, focus on marketing that gets results you can measure. Focus on tactics that put money in your pocket through sales instead of tactics that give you a dopamine hit from likes and shares.

You can’t pay bills with dopamine.

Improve your English

It seems that there are many aspirants for English learning courses across the world. In non-English speaking countries, proficiency in English is considered as a dignity and qualification for higher positions. So, there are so many advertising initiatives for this kind of institutions which aim to teach English.

We have seen how an Indian institution ad featured people who literally beat around the bush, and bring the horse to the well. Now, this advertising campaign from Language studies worldwide(www.smallworld.ch) , though not so subtle way, aims to convey the message mixing the copy and art-direction.

The campaign, developed by Wirz/BBDO, fairly succeeds to make an appeal among the target audience.

CREDITS

Advertising Agency: Wirz/BBDO, Switzerland

Creative Director: Thomas Kurzmeyer

Art Directors: Kim Sokola, Rahel Boesinger

Copywriter: Thomas Kurzmeyer

Illustrator: Kim Sokola

Via: Pixel pasta

Facebook + cute dogs + coffee = BIG Change

Here's a cute story about how Facebook (and more importantly, a retailer's fans) made a difference for a small business. Coffee Labs, a dog friendly emporium in Tarrytown, NY got into trouble with their local health department for being dog friendly.

The business created a fan page for local dog owners to declare their love for the shop. Facebook + cute dogs + coffee = local tv magic. Naturally, this gets picked up by the local news, and before you know it, a local attorney gets involved and writes a waiver for the coffee shop.

You’ve heard it before: Individuals using social media to hold people and organizations to a higher level of accountability and transparency for perceived injustices—leveraging their network and the power of an engaged community to bring about change.

An airline passenger with a smart phone Tweets about the fact that he’s been stuck on a tarmac for four hours with little access to food, water and bathrooms.  We’ve heard about companies monitoring Tweets 24/7, and seen how a Tweet in some cases will get you a faster customer service response than calling or even e-mailing—a real-time response for a real-time communication channel. A well-known restaurant chain is shamed by an employee who posts an inappropriate video to You Tube from one of its franchise locations, and a cable company is held accountable when its cable-repair guy falls asleep on a couch in the middle of a customer’s living room and the video goes viral on You Tube.

So it wasn’t much of a stretch to learn that my local coffee shop turned to social media—and the power of an engaged community—when the local Board of Health enforced a customer complaint about the establishment’s policy of allowing leashed dogs inside the shop with their owners. Coffee Labs—a play on coffee-colored labrador retrievers and the kind of laboratory it is for roasting coffee—has always been a dog-friendly place. Customers like me enjoy the friendly atmosphere and wonderful full-bodied coffee. The presence of an occasional dog is a pleasant diversion, and responsible people acting responsibly with their leashed dogs has always been the norm. A sign on the front window clearly indicates that “dogs are allowed” (Snoopy would be proud), and potential patrons bothered by this policy are always welcome to  take their business elsewhere.

Here’s what happened:

1. Someone complains to the local Board of Health about bringing dogs into Coffee Labs.
2. The shop owners build a fan page on Facebook called  I want to go back to Coffee Labs Roasters, WOOF!!!!! and let their network know about it.
3. The network of loyal customers (455 people as of this writing) is understandably outraged and shows their support.
4. The local television news—as is the custom with media these days—discovers a story breaking on social media (Facebook) and picks it up for coverage on the evening news.
5. A local attorney learns of the shop’s plight and volunteers to write a possible waiver to allow dogs back in the shop.

Bravo—the power of an engaged community using social media to fight injustice at the grass-roots level. Just a local coffee shop in the suburbs of New York City who wants to run their business as they see fit, not injustice on some grand scale.

But still…think of the possibilities.

The response came in a matter of days; the network came together voluntarily and participated enthusiastically and vigorously—no one is paying them and no one is paying the local attorney. It’s the power of an engaged community using social media to lock arms.

Royal Mail:::Delivering business expertise

Royal Mail was a company dangerously close to becoming unnecessary. Liberalisation of the monopoly markets meant it had new competitors able to provide customers discounts that it was barred from offering, whilst email and online activity had become the far more popular means of written communication than posting a letter.

However, another significant aspect of Royal Mail business is the assistance it gives to SME owners (Small Medium Enterprise), helping them to grow their companies. Although SME owners are the most receptive target audience to growth messages, as they have a personal commitment to their business, they are also the most difficult to engage with for that very same reason.

To generate publicity, Royal Mail ran an extensive TV ad campaign designed to shift attitudes about what its brand stood for. The TV ads directed people to royalmail.com where they could answer questions and generate a bespoke growth print, including case studies and product recommendations. To further promote the service, Royal Mail integrated its brand with MSN Office space, distributing content through special reports and channels within Growth Business and Fresh Business Thinking.

It also sponsored The Sunday Times’ Fast Track – an annual league table of the UK’s Fastest Growing Private Companies – and their Best Customer Service category. In addition, Royal Mail created a ‘Helping Hands’ channel within The Guardian online, a bespoke area containing case studies and commissioned content in the form of Q&As with business luminaries.

Overall, appeal for the Royal Mail brand has grown from 38% to 55%. SME owners claiming that Royal Mail is ‘providing new information’ grew from 20-47%, ‘better than other suppliers’ from 26-37% and ‘can help businesses grow’ 36-41%. There have been 216,000 visits to the website and, just 5 months into an 18 month campaign, revenue in the sales pipeline is already in excess of the media investment to date.

BRAND: Royal Mail

BRAND OWNER: Royal Mail

CATEGORY: Corporate

REGION: UK

DATE: 2008

AMEDIA CHANNEL

SMB Retailers Need to Embrace Digital Marketing

January 21st, 2009
It was pretty much the worst case scenario realized for retailers last month. Retail sales declined 2.7 percent in the all-important month of December, drawing to a close the worst holiday season since 1969.
With consumer confidence still at record lows, how can a typical retailer hope to survive such dire circumstances? While there are no easy answers to address this multitude of problems, it’s time for retailers, especially those in the SMB space, to embrace digital marketing to help survive and possibly even thrive in the current economic conditions.

Digital marketing should be top of mind for anyone in the SMB sector, and this is especially true for retailers, both online and “brick and mortar.” Here are a few reasons why:It’s Affordable-

Unlike other more traditional marketing channels, digital vehicles like email and SMS should be within the budget of even the smallest of retailers.It’s Trackable-Lower revenues and disappointing sales mean it’s time to re-focus on maximizing ROI, and digital marketing in its very nature is designed to be trackable. Whether you just want to see how many people respond to a specific offer, or you need more sophisticated conversion tracking, you can monitor, in real time, the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.
It’s Attainable-Gone are the days where only larger companies could effective deploy and manage digital marketing strategies. This is especially true for mobile marketing, in which SMB retailers can use applications like our mobileStorm SMS platform to quickly and easily launch highly effective campaigns, such as mobile coupons.It’s Adaptable–Being stuck with an ineffective marketing campaign can be a serious blow to a retailer, both in terms of lost revenue or even your reputation. Changing course in the traditional media outlets can be cost both time and money.
In the digital realm, however, such corrections can be done with minimal effort and expense.It’s Personable–Most forms of mass communication are geared towards the mass market, meaning that the same message is applied across a wide section of potential consumers. Digital marketing allows you to take an inverse approach, giving you the flexibility to customize your offer to a much smaller (and arguably more effective) niche audience.
It’s Inevitable–Whether or you are currently engaged in digital marketing, the fact is that eventually you’ll have no choice but to use it.

Improve Your Email Marketing Through Segmentation

Published on March 24, 2009

Not all customers are alike, and what appeals to one may not interest another. Therefore, it is important that you connect the message you are sending to your customers' differing interests.
Email messages that are segmented, targeted, and relevant to the recipient are much more likely to be opened and acted upon.

Every small business can segment its customer base at some basic level. The following are some examples:

A sporting goods store emails information to its customers who have purchased bikes to inform them of new arrivals, while sending an "end of the ski season" blowout special to customers who have purchased ski equipment.

A garden center sends out a "Planting for Spring" promotion to gardening customers and a "Flowers for all Occasions" promotion to cut-flower and bouquet buyers.

A landscaping company sends out a promotion to past customers about keeping up their landscaping activities as well as its new services, while sending out a different appeal to prospects and builders.

A pub/restaurant sends out an email about an upcoming food pairing/tasting event to wine enthusiasts and an email about seasonal brews and pitcher specials for beer lovers.

Otherwise, the wine lover might get turned off by the beer promotion, and vice versa... but tap the right customer's passion and need at the right time—with a targeted subject line and content—and you're much more likely to create a sale.

Segmentation—Getting Started
Creating different email messages for different groups is a bit more work, but it's worth the extra effort when an email message hits your customer's sweet spot.

Your general e-newsletter may appeal to most customers, but mailings that reach out to your audience segments can build even deeper relationships, and drive more sales.
Consider these simple tips to be more successful with your segmentation:

1. Start with the first touch point
The best time to collect information for segmenting purposes is right when your prospect or customer joins your email list. You can easily create segmented lists by offering options with checkboxes on your sign-up form.
2. Ask for personal information
Ask for information such as location and personal preference to determine what's relevant to the person signing up. For example, a retailer might ask whether someone prefers to shop online or in the store. That way, the retailer can create two separate lists and send email coupons that contain an online promotion to one list and an in-store promotion to the other list.
3. Use online surveys
In your email newsletters, include a link to a short survey and ask for noncritical information that helps you add your people to the appropriate segmented lists. Once you have the survey results, you can create new lists or add to existing ones based on how respondents answered questions.
4. Use tracking reports
If you are using a professional email service that provides campaign-tracking reports, let the links that people click on help you understand them better. Your tracking reports make it easy for you to add anyone who clicks on a link to an existing list or a new list.
* * *
Remember that there is a real person on the other end of each email address. Every time you create an email, ask yourself whether your email content is addressing the specific needs of your audience, or whether you're only addressing the needs of your business. Segmenting your list will set you up to do both effectively.