Five Sucessful Social Marketing Tips

The effects of social media on marketing and branding have caught many CMOs off guard. Just five years ago, it was conventional wisdom that social media would quickly peak and fade in importance. Then two years ago, CMOs found themselves scrambling to launch Facebook fan pages and Twitter streams, trying to catch up with consumers who appeared to be migrating in droves to social networks and smartphones.

While the 30-second TV spot has held its own, the evolution of social media marches on. It continues to grow, and is entering its third stage of evolution. It is now becoming the focal point for consumers and citizens to form strong links and communities centered around shared values and common goals to persuade corporations to participate in building a better world. A few brands have caught on with cause-conscious marketing initiatives like the Pepsi Refresh Project, Starbucks' Shared Planet, Walmart's Sustainability Index, Nike's Livestrong partnership, and Procter & Gamble's "Clean Water Blogivation" effort, to name but a few.

Social media represents a significant and permanent change that CMOs must embrace. Disingenuous efforts to fast track your social-media footprint simply by stockpiling "fans" will not only prove ineffective but will backfire. Savvy social-media customers know when there is no authentic commitment to engage with them.

The key today is CMOs must shift their strategies from trumpeting their brand as the "celebrity" (with all attention directed inward on themselves) to being the chief celebrant of their customers' community. This shift entails rethinking many fundamental elements of your marketing strategy. Here is a step-by-step strategy for brands to build customer engagement by leveraging the evolving tools of social media.

1. Define Your Core Values. Rethink how you want to define (or redefine) your brand. What are its core values? Its purpose? The answers should not be framed in terms of admirable but empty promises, but authentically humanistic values that are constructive and shareable within your brand community.

2. Get Leadership Buy-in. As CMO, you need to facilitate the adoption of these values throughout the company. It starts with getting buy-in from your CEO, and must extend down through the leadership and management ranks. You cannot let the inertia of the hierarchical organization become a stumbling block.

3. Align Employees Around the Values and Purpose. Your employee base is your first line of loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising for the brand, so you need to ensure that your brand's support for social cause resonates with them. A powerful way to do this is to invite the CEO to craft a video message or contribute to a blog especially for employees. Also, promote employee volunteer activities and celebrate the good works they do on their own time within the company culture.

4. Celebrate Your Customers, Not Your Brand. This step is one of the hardest for CMOs who have built their success on traditional broadcast thinking. It involves transitioning from a push to a pull strategy, from "me first" to "we first" thinking. One of the key shifts here is to share the brand's storytelling with your customers. You must invite them to co-author the stories your brand is telling and allow them to be partners in the distribution of content about your brand. The guiding principles of a pull strategy are as follows:

    Recognize that your story is now your community's story.
    Lead with listening rather than talking about your own brand.
    Start treating customers as living, breathing people with concerns about the world.
    Invest time and energy in building relationships as well as making profits.
    Expand from a sales focus into a service mentality.
    Become a day trader in social emotion by constantly monitoring your brand's reputation.

5. Focus customer service on engagement. Be mindful of the social footprint of your customers and see them as partners in disseminating your values rather than as purchasers of your products.

Taking these steps may feel uncomfortable at first, as they probably go against the grain of existing business models, profit centers and incentive schemes. But they are reflective of the new marketplace of customers that gravitate to social media at every chance they can to talk about their brand choices. Your goal is to authentically inspire your customers to become emotionally invested in the company's success not only because they love your brand but because they respect your values and purpose.

Article Source: http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/tips-social-media-marketing/227857/

Tips For Small Business Networking and Marketing

Why should you care? Small business drives the economy: they hire employees (two out of every three people hired are by a small business), they purchase goods and really care about growing their business. These entities are very special, but finding them requires a very tailored approach.

The ‘one size fits all’ method doesn’t work when it comes to connecting with small business owners.

Areas on which to focus that help small business owners notice you have to do with:

1) How your service helps the business owner stand out, in other words promotion.

2) How your service helps the business owner find new customers

As you think about how to apply this message to these business owners, don’t use generic “large company” titles such as “marketing director” or “purchasing agent.” Employees of small businesses wear many hats and have many generalists working at them – everyone needing to pitch in to cover the tasks at hand in order to grow their business.

Speak to how your product or service will help them “be found” or drive more revenue – near and dear to all of us, but especially to the small business person.

Understanding that 50 percent of small businesses with less than five employees don’t have a website, you have to think about how to best reach these business owners as well. While they may not have a website, they do subscribe to industry trade journals, meet with peers and use online services to stay competitive. Even though they might not be on the bleeding edge of technology adoption, as they are busy running their company, small businesses definitely look to find new ways of reaching customers.

Introducing your products and services through targeted ad placement is one approach for connecting with this group, another is providing useful information that helps a small business owner stay competitive. Become a champion of this group – provide resources and participate in the conversation where small business owners are.

So what can you quickly do to connect to the SMB audience? I’d suggest participating in these sites where small businesses are actively present:

1.) Manta (www.manta.com)- allows for specialized/targeted advertising to small businesses and decision makers by revenue, employee size, industry, etc...

2.) LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) – allows for finding business professionals by industry

3.) Present.ly (www.presently.com) – allows individuals within a company to post short, frequent updates that are tracked or "followed" by others. Unlike Twitter, it provides a secure and private way to share updates among members of a company, without them being visible to the general public

3.) TalkBizNow (www.talkbiznow.com) – allows networking while visualizing the small-world phenomenon by displaying how each member is connected to any other member.

For more information on marketing your business, please give Montari Brooklyn Marketing and Advertising Agency a call at 1-855-We-Sale-U or visit us on the website at www.MontariBrooklyn.com.

Google Adds Their Own "Like Button" In Regards to Social Search

Google is adding its take on the "like" button -- which it is calling the "plus-one" -- in its latest bid to make search more social, as well as combat the growing dominance of Facebook.

Google's plus-one icon

Starting this afternoon, Google will allow users to vote plus-one on search results they find useful, and to share that preference with their connections in Gchat, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz and, soon, Twitter. Users will see both the total number of plus-one votes, as well as the names and photos of their contacts who have stated a preference.

It's the most aggressive foray into social search to date and the first time Google has added a direct social signal into search results. Over time, Google will integrate the plus-one into the search algorithm itself so human votes will have an impact search ranking.
"When someone recommends something, that's a pretty good indicator of quality," said Matt Cutts, Google's principle engineer for search. "We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings."
Google is also adding the ability to vote plus-one on search ads. Internal tests have shown that plus-one votes increase clicks; Google won't charge for the functionality, but expects better ads to return more plus-ones and, in turn, more clicks. Higher click-through rates can improve quality scores, meaning marketers with better ads could pay less for a given keyword or position.

"We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones," said ads group product manager Christian Oestlien. "Our belief is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations."
The changes are some of the biggest to the visual architecture of search, the classic list of blue links, as well as its functional underpinnings. Plus-one buttons and social connections are going to join a search-results page getting more and more complicated with both real-time and local-search results, in addition to search ads that have also added functionality.

Traditionally, inbound links have been the strongest indicator of relevance and component of page rank. Last year, Google added Twitter results to also surface results that are more recent. Adding the plus-one will add another social component.

"Injecting a social layer into the algorithmic search is key to relevance," said Dave Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier. "Do a search on 'DVD player' today now you will see 35,000 results in less than 3 milliseconds. It's meaningless, but if you can sort through those by people who have given a social signal and those rise to the top, I think that can only enhance the user experience."

But the biggest move here may not be about search at all, but about taking another swing at the social networking business -- and at Facebook itself. The first time users clicks on a plus-one button, they will be prompted to create a Google profile, as well as be given the opportunity to adjust privacy settings.

Microsoft's Bing integrated Facebook "likes" into search results late last year but not into its actual algorithm, meaning a "like" has no affect on search rankings. Google has no immediate plans to add Facebook connections to the system, partly because they don't have the right to do so. "It would depend on whether that data were available," Mr. Cutts said.

"Its important for Google to bring in social influence into search results to prevent the social web from becoming a parallel universe," said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, a unit of Dentsu. "I do think they need to have the Facebook 'likes' in there because you're going to have two webs, the social web and the open web."
In addition, Google will allow publishers to add the plus-one button, so users can vote on content outside of search, and ultimately improve the ranking of that content in organic search results. Google has by far the largest publisher network, including websites that use DoubleClick for ad serving or Google's ad exchange, so penetration of the plus-one will be immediate and comprehensive.

The question is whether Google can keep bad actors from gaming the plus-one system for fun or for profit. Google, to its credit, has a lot of experience filtering out attempts to game its algorithms. "The worst case is you just ignore them," Mr. Cutts said, adding that more complexity makes that more difficult. "If you give somebody five signals -- and give them five more -- it can actually get harder for spammers."

Article Source: http://adage.com/article/digital/google-adds-button-foray-social-search/149645/

Intergrating Email Marketing with Social Media

When was the last time you created an email campaign? Have you taken the time to evaluate to evaluate your email marketing campaign? Consider these questions and begin to take control of you prospective leads today. Don’t settle for a load of boring letters, that your potential clients do not want to read. Instead, use this opportunity to build a solid relationship, which will bring in more clients and increase your revenue. Assuming you have a social network, invite your subscribers to your social network, and provide links and promotions in regards to your service.

With the rise of social media networking websites you’d want to create a marketing campaign that is connected to your email. You can increase your client/fan base by allowing your information to be shared and promoted across other sites.  When you integrate social media with your emails, you create an effective campaign that can reach millions. Always include something unique, valuable, and useful to your target audience.

If you would like more ideas on how to use email and marketing, please contact us today at 312-204-7251 for a free consultation. In addition, we will tell you how you can receive free leads.