Are You Using the Right Social Networks for Your Marketing?
Social networking websites are an important strategy for any online marketing and promotion of your business.
Knowing which sites are growing and which are shrinking enables you to make decisions are to where to place your effort and budget.
There have been big changes to the social networking landscape over the past couple of years as can be seen in these charts.
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The big winner is Facebook, which has grown from 9.61% in June 2008 to commanding a huge 54.96% of social networking site visits. Facebook also recently announced that they have reached 500 million users. In New Zealand it is reported that there are over a million Facebook users, a staggering quarter of the population.
Facebook is a great tool from a marketing point of view. There are numerous ways in which to use it for marketing and promoting your local business and generating new leads.
Other notable mentions in the charts are YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace.
Of all the video sharing sites, YouTube has almost the entire market share. When it comes to social networking, YouTube primarily does this through the process of sharing videos, compared to Facebook where video is just one of many media options.
Twitter has come from nowhere to #4 on the list. Twitter did not go mainstream until 2009, 3 years after it was founded. Although it was in the news a lot in 2009 it has been less so in 2010. Twitter is still an important marketing strategy and often best used as a way of alerting people to other marketing such as blog, Facebook, and other content updates. One of the difficulties many people face is getting people from seeing you on Twitter to then visit your other online sites.
The biggest loser over the past couple of years is MySapce. Previously commanding over 40% of social networking visits, it has dropped from #1 to #3 and has shrunk to 11.54% of visits.
Last words: Social networking is an important marketing strategy. The sites that give you the most benefit change over time and knowing this helps maximise your marketing effort. Currently the big increases are in Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Although still an important site, MySpace the once big social network, has shrunk significantly over the last 2 years. If you are not already using social networking, start today.
The Buying Cycle
The answers to why people don’t buy now and how to have them buy from you in the future.
Isn’t it odd that when you present your offer to someone and they say no?
Well, not really. Assuming the whole Know, Like, and Trust thing is taken care of, then chances are it’s because they’re not in the buying part of the cycle just yet.
“But my offer is outstanding, they are my target market, everyone should say yes, it’s that good” I hear you say. Well, no.
As an example, let’s say you sell websites, if the prospect just got a shiny new website, then chances are slim that they will want to buy a replacement one the following day. At some point after that, maybe 2 or even 5 years later, they are going to think about a new website. Their current one is no longer up to date, it looks dated, or the business has changed direction.
Whatever the reason, unless you happen to by chance get in touch and pitch your website offering in the small window of opportunity, then it’s likely to go to the person that does.
Unless …
Unless of course you’re aware of the buying cycle and have kept yourself top of the prospects mind. By keeping you top of mind over the months or years leading up to when the prospect thinks it’s time to update the website, then you’re the one they are going to want involved.
What most sales reps usually do however is say, “oh you don’t want to buy, good bye then.” And that’s it; they don’t bother to do anything after that. The alternative is to keep in touch with the prospect, so when they do want to say yes, it’s you they come to.
So how do you keep the awareness of you over this time while you’re waiting for them to buy?
Here’s what to do to keep you top of mind:
- Add Value
- Educate
- Do it regularly
- Automate it
- Personalise it
Add value by giving freely of your ideas and suggestions and this doesn’t have to be solely related to your product or service.
Educate your prospects; help them understand the benefit of your product or service and the return on investment for them. Do with testimonials and other proof from customers.
Do it regularly, after 90 days your prospect has forgotten about you, probably sooner. Regularly get in touch to educate and add value.
Automate it; use email auto-responders to send out scheduled emails. Couple this with using your CRM or reminders in Outlook to follow up using other means such as by phone or direct mail.
Personalise it. Email auto-responders can merge data into the email, typically the prospects first name, don’t overdo it however. The emails or other “templated” materials you send out should be read by the prospect thinking you wrote this to them and only to them.
Last words. You have prospects that aren’t in buying mode just yet; however, will be at some point in the future. Rather than forget all about the prospect, nurture them until they are ready to buy. So keep them warm and to keep you on top of their mind, regularly add value and educate them, personalise the communication, and automate as much of it as possible. Automating it means it does actually get done, it’s repeatable, and other people can do some of it for you, so it frees up your time.
Selling by Email – Sales Dream or Nightmare
Done right, sending out a special offer to you previous customers is an excellent way of generating instant cash flow.
Let me give you an example I have just experienced.
One of my suppliers (in other words I’m their customer) emailed me with a special off I couldn’t refuse.
It’s been 18 months since I last purchased from them, and normally I’d need to make a purchase from them at least annually. Purchasing from them has been on my to do list, however, at a low priority.
So I was in ready to buy mode, and all I really needed was something to get me to take action.
The email they sent contained an irresistible offer. The offer included more product than I’d previously got and at a lower price than the previous time I’d purchased, plus a 15% discount on top of that.
And here’s where the trouble started and it all went pear shaped.
First off they made me jump through hoops on their website. Yes it was clever how their website processed my order, very cool looking etc. Trouble is, for me, one of the steps didn’t work and I was unable to get to the next step of the process.
Then began my hunt for a phone number, eventually I found an 0800 number answered by an offshore call centre. Let’s just say they were less than helpful. I asked for the local office number, while they put me on hold to look for it, I found it on a local business directory, just as well, because they didn’t have it.
Like I said, the offer was irresistible, so I phoned the local office. I spoke with the person whose name was on the email, they said they would help. I emailed them the issue I’d had so they could get a support person to help me.
Meanwhile I find another way of getting around the issues of their website ordering process.
Looking good, I’m about to complete the order, and more confusion sets in.
The email mentions a 15% discount, and the order page requires a promo code to get said discount. I don’t have this code yet.
You see, there are two links in the email. One to go buy the product, which I had clicked on. And another to register your interest in purchasing and request the promo code.
This promo code would arrive next week, and be valid for 10 days starting the week after that. Confusing, yes.
So I’m hot to buy right now. Instead they want me to request a promo code that I’ll get in a weeks’ time, that I can use the week after that. You can just hear the response rate taking a massive dive.
It all started of with an irresistible offer that got me to take action and want to buy right now.
This could have been a huge money earner for them. However, with this amount of confusion, sales will likely be minimal. They made it too hard to buy. This type of customer experience does a lot more harm than good, and the unfortunate thing is that it happens day in day out at businesses all over town.
What not to do:
- Include a lame offer like 5% off
- Confuse with multiple actions
- Make it hard to buy, if someone wants to buy now, let them, don’t make them wait (and lose interest)
- Make it hard to get help
What to do:
- Include a single irresistible offer in your email to get people to take action, great for reactivating people that haven’t purchased in a while and have forgotten about you
- Make the action you want the reader to take obvious
- Minimise the number of clicks they have to do to make a purchase
- Add value and bonuses that have high perceived value to the customer, yet cost you little, such as extended warranties or gifts from complementary companies
- Provide a phone number answered by a real person (not a machine) in case people have problems buying
- Detail what the customer can expect after completing the purchase, timeframe of getting the product etc (under promise and over deliver here)
Last words – sending out an offer to your customers by email is an excellent way to get instant sales, making an irresistible offer will massively increase your sales, making it hard to buy will drop sales through the floor and massively reduce the likelihood that they will ever do business with you in the future.
Test, Track, and Tweak Your Marketing
The other day a colleague mentioned that a big company had got onto the idea of testing and tracking their marketing. Excellent I said.
Trouble is they had taken the concept to the extreme and were only doing marketing that they could track.
The idea of testing, tracking and tweaking your marketing is so you can made marketing decisions based on the numbers, not some gut feel or one what looks nice. First up you run your marketing campaign (in other words you test it). Then you track the response you get from it such as how many leads a week it generates. As you come up with ways to improve it, you make a tweak (in other words a small change) and get this out in the market place (that is, test it). Then guess what? Yes, we track how it does. Compare this to the previous one, essentially keep what works best and cull what doesn’t.
Let’s get back to the story. So as not to identify who the company is, we’ll say they sell widgets. These aren’t the cheapest, nor the best quality, however, the deliver what they say they do and have been growing their sales over the last few years.
Enter a new manager, with the mantra of only doing marketing that can be tested and tracked.
Exit Sales. Yes, sales are now down 25% over the last 6 months. Agreed the current market has not been the most hospitable for widgets, and the company does have some seriously big competitors.
Really though, the big change was not the economy, it was the change in marketing. Basically what they did was slash and burn any marketing they deemed un-trackable. I know, crazy.
So now, yes they can track the marketing. Trouble is, sales have plummeted.
Here’s the kicker. Can you imagine what the new marketing plan they have put in place it all about? Grow it back to least what it was doing and some, I hear you say. No. No, their grand plan is to stabilise the plummeting and stop it dropping any more; I shake my head in disbelief.
Here’s what would have been a saner, safer, and in the end, more profitable approach:
- Put tracking in place where possible.
- DO NOT stop any existing marketing at this point (regardless of whether it’s being tracked or not).
- Think. There’s always ways of tracking where your sales are coming from.
- Put these new tracking ideas into place.
- Tweak and split test existing marketing.
- Do more of what works best.
- Rinse and repeat.
- Cull stuff that gives low Return on Investment on time and or money – after you have proof.
The big mistake this company, and in particular, this new manager made, was killing off marketing because they believed they could not track its performance.
Once I heard what it was they killed off, it was immediately obvious how with a little tweak they could track the results. The sad thing about the campaign they killed was it was to a highly targeted, captive, and motivated audience.
Hey, I don’t know the exact numbers (though, nor do they), however, from thinking about the campaign and medium they were using, I am sure it would have been an excellent source of leads.
So if someone suggests you kill off your marketing that you can’t track, run, don’t walk, run, they are a danger to your business.
Imagine if someone said to you that you should stop your Yellow Pages book advertising and you haven’t been tracking the results it generates. If you kill that off, it’s a year before you can get back in, what if you get leads every month from it, yet don’t know because you don’t track it? Before you make a decision like that, you’ve got to know the numbers, and then make an informed decision based on those numbers.
Last words – don’t kill off marketing you have in place without the numbers to back up your decision.