Think Basis It's Good For Business

Social media marketing is the next hot topic at every SEO related conference lately. Those of you that have been involved in marketing for a while might call it Viral Marketing with a twist.

Social media is the art and science of communicating with your customers on the grass roots level: being interwoven with their work and private lives in addition to the traditional relationship of client/vendor that is achieved through traditional advertising and marketing.

So what are the benefits of social media?

It really all boils down to top of mind awareness. Numerous studies have shown that the human mind can typically only spontaneously recall 4 things at a time on any give subject. Referred to as Working Memory, this ability to recall only 4 brands at any one time is crucial for referrals and word of mouth business growth. All brands strive to maintain one of these 4 spots in the clients mind. That’s where social media comes in to level the playing field for small businesses.

Play with the big boys

Being top of mind against huge brands and huge budgets is tough for small to medium sized businesses. But luckily, you don’t need much to compete with social trends. A keen imagination and small marketing budget is enough to get you going.

Put your best Facebook forward

Setting up a Facebook page for your business is free. If you understand your customers and their interests, you’re only limited by your imagination. Come up with the right idea and connect with your audience and there is little that even a huge brand can do to compete.

Some ideas could include:
• News and gossip
• Top 10 lists
• Humorous photos or illustrations
• Short videos
• Tips and information
• How-To articles and videos

Don’t expect to succeed off the start

Yes it is okay to fail. Even the experts don’t bat a thousand. The most important thing for your social media marketing campaign is to keep trying. Learn from your failures and your successes alike. Test, test, and then test again. The only way to truly find out what resonates is to keep posting and keep inventing new ideas. See what others are doing. Copy some aspects and then reinvent to succeed. Stamina is a huge part of any business strategy and you should plan to be in the game for the long haul. Don’t give up and don’t worry about falling down. Eventually you will discover the right formula for your niche and your business will be better off for it. Firsthand experience is the kind of invaluable knowledge that you can’t buy.

Know when to call in the big guns

Even the best viral marketing idea may not see the light of day if it’s not promoted properly. And I’m not talking about SEO. Some sites often need an article promoted by someone who is already established within the community. Think of it like a kick start for your campaign. If you feel that your ideas are sound but you just can’t get traction, consider hiring a social media marketing company to help troubleshoot your campaign and give it that initial boost that it needs. Once you go viral, it can be a lot easier to push further content to your audience by leveraging the following you build up. As long as your ideas stay fresh and you remember that your customers are your audience of course. Stay on message and give people a reason to pass your links around and you will reap the benefits of fanatical customer loyalty.

Leave the conversion rates to the bean counters

Social media marketing is not about conversions. The bulk of your web traffic will not spend a single dime on the day you run your campaign. Focusing on conversion rates misses the point of top of mind awareness and brand building. Your goal is to stay ahead of your competition and be there when your prospect needs to think up a brand to recommend or make a purchase from. As web marketers, it’s easy to become slaves to analytics and conversion rates while scoffing at brand development and social marketing. Don’t make that mistake. Brands like Nike, Apple and IBM cannot charge a premium because of their conversion rates. They charge a premium because of the emotive qualities of their brand and the ability to stay top of mind in their industry. Plan for a 12 month sustained effort and then evaluate your overall sales as a measure of success. Social media is not about the short run or quick success. It’s all about building a foundation for long-term growth.

Focus on your ability to entertain and communicate with your audience on personal level and your business will enjoy the long term benefits of brand development and dialogue through social media marketing.

Having previously discussed some of the different small business approaches to online marketing, I’ve had several discussions over the past couple weeks with different colleagues about what can be done by the small business owner who falls into the, “We need to be online…” category of thinking. These are the companies that recognize the importance of having a quality website, know they have a lot to learn, but don’t have any idea where to begin.

For companies like this there are several major challenges standing in their way:

1) Time

Most small business owners are very motivated entrepreneurs that shoulder a massive amount of responsibility across almost all facets of their company. As a result, finding the necessary time to educate themselves about a topic which is almost entirely foreign to them is sometimes just too daunting to warrant starting in the first place.

2) Budget

Unlike most medium and larger businesses, there is typically no budget set aside specifically for Internet marketing, or even for building a website, and a lot of times since the money is going to be coming directly out of the owner’s pocket they will do whatever they can to find the best deal. Sometimes sacrificing quality or deciding to table a project they know they should probably complete.

3) Desire to Succeed

Because they are so invested in the success of their business, their passion for what they’re good at can combine with their ignorance to all things online and create a perfect storm of susceptibility to people who don’t have their best interests at heart.

But, what are the mom and pop retailers with an @aol.com email address and a fear of technology supposed to do? Shouldn’t there be somewhere they can turn for unbiased advice?

A Step in the Right Direction

In an article a few days ago, David Mihm discussed the need for more local outreach, and suggested it would be, “to our benefit as an industry to increase awareness of the opportunities in Local Search among our own communities.”

It is this philosophy that no doubt played a large role in both David, and Pat Sexton, creating a resource specifically geared toward helping small business owners learn more about how their businesses are listed online. Officially launching on January 20th, Getlisted.org offers a great starting point for the business owner with a tight budget and a minimal amount of time.

As one of my colleagues put it:

“Local search is one of the easiest ways to get your business noticed. You can often get top rankings in map listings which drive valuable and tangible returns. For someone who usually has to wear many hats throughout a very busy day, the service makes local search a virtual no-brainer.”

Undoubtedly this resource offers a tremendous amount of value to small business owners, but the biggest question is whether the people who need it most are going to have a way to find out about it.

Becoming a Voice in the Community

GetListed.org has already made its way across the SEO landscape, but the most important part is going to be the next step; making its way to local businesses that might be completely unaware they even need to claim their listing in the first place.

My feeling is that as a knowledgeable internet marketer, the best thing a person can do is try to share basic information with as many people in the community as possible. There’s plenty of business out there, and if you know what you’re doing then there will always be people who need your expertise. However, by building a reputation as someone who’s active in the local business community–and even willing to occasionally offer help with no ulterior motive–the rewards are going to be far greater than if you sit around waiting for someone to email you with a proposal request.

I’m challenging myself and others to find a way to reach out to at least a few of the small businesses right in their backyard that need help with some of the basics. This isn’t about doing a pro-bono redesign of someone’s site or giving away countless hours of your time, it’s about taking an hour or two a month to connect with people who have a strong desire to succeed and will be legitimately grateful for your help.

At the absolute worst you’re going to be giving up a couple hours of your time, and at best you’ll be making a lasting impact on someone’s business and building meaningful relationships within your community. Not exactly a bad scenario.

There are a number of things businesses do that aren’t in the best interest of the consumer. A lot of them are unavoidable offshoots of wanting to maximize profit, but some of them can be shortsighted, lazy, or even dangerous. While I’d never say some of these practices can’t be extremely successful, I would certainly argue there’s a good chance you’re sacrificing long term equity for immediate gain.

1) Trying to Prey on Fear

Plenty of companies thrive on using a consumer’s fear of missing out on the product they’re after by using a manufactured scarcity to push people over the buying threshold. Suddenly the car that’s been sitting on the lot for six months has “several other potential buyers” as soon as you express some interest. Similarly, Gamestop insists you pre-order your games despite the fact that they’ll have dozens of additional copies laying around the store, and has even gone as far as refusing to sell these extras to customers in an effort to instill the value of pre-ordering.

While this strategy might be successful in the short term, it commoditizes the sale and reduces or eliminates customer loyalty. By manufacturing scarcity you encourage your customers to snatch up the product they want as soon as they find it, and it’s likely your competitors will be the beneficiaries.

I was recently in the market for a new bike, and as such, completely expected a certain amount of “used car type sales tactics” that would eventually culminate in someone asking me, “What can I do to get you on this bike today?” Shockingly, I was met with the total opposite, and the sales force practically bent over backwards to prevent me from making a hasty decision. They made some recommendations, helped me narrow it down to two, and then said they’d hold both of them for me so I could come back when it was sunny out and take them both on a “proper ride.” No pressure, no mention of possibly selling the bike I wanted while I was mulling over my decision. The end result is I now have a stronger allegiance to that particular retailer than I probably should…and a sweet new bike.

2) The Perpetual “Ending Soon” Sale

Every city seems to have a furniture store that has been going out of business for the past three years. The commercial shouts about how you better “hurry in this weekend, because everything must go!” The logic is sound enough. Everyone loves a good deal, so if you make people think you’re having an incredible sale for a “limited time only” they will come running. The only problem is, after two-plus-years of the same ploy the sale means absolutely nothing. Not only that, it has now devalued everything in the store to the point where if it’s not on sale, there is no reason anyone would want to buy it.

Allposters.com is a prime example of the perpetual sale. Here’s the last six months worth of sales offers I’ve received:

While the constant barrage of emails have (arguably) kept them “top of mind,” the offers are pretty meaningless and eventually just turn into noise.

Contrast this with Active.com’s considerably more intermittent–and product specific–offers that still maintain some “top of mind” value but don’t give me the expectation that anything I purchase through them should always be at a discounted price.

Granted, the immediate response to any individual offer will probably be less for the second example. However, the long term results will be more items sold at full retail and higher conversions during times when there is no sale being offered.

3) Arbitrary Product Release Dates

Small tech companies seem to be the biggest offender of this particular consumer letdown. Although premiering your latest product at a conference or having a usable demo ready for a board meeting is good in theory, it’s still useful to remember there’s a lot of truth in the whole “one chance at a first impression” philosophy. Ask cuil. Although balancing the strains of needing to drive profits with the need to deliver a quality product is always going to be a challenge, it’s hard to recover from an underwhelming product launch or an application that was hurried into production and doesn’t deliver on the vision you promised.

At a previous company I witnessed firsthand an incredibly disappointing product launch resulting from decisions to start selling something that simply wasn’t ready for consumers. Without going into too much detail, I will say the decision to rush to market had a lot to do with VC funding and a desire to show dramatic revenue growth over the previous year. However, after watching the product devolve from its original scope into a neutered version that could “be ready by January,” it became abundantly clear that none of this was for the benefit of customers.

The end result of this major product launch was an underwhelming amount of sales, a continued retooling of the product that resulting in halting all sales efforts for a one month period, and a number of dissatisfied customers that had been sold a product failing to live up to its initial value proposition.

Obviously it’s ridiculous to think you can keep moving something back indefinitely while you fine tune it to perfection (unless you’re Blizzard). However, if you’re honest about the reasons for your “drop-dead” release date, it might just be better to cope with some internal disappointment upfront to avoid a public disappointment when you launch.

4) Strict Adherence to “Corporate Policy”

While having policies and best practices in place is always a sound idea, failing to allow for some old-fashioned common sense and good judgment can be a huge mistake. Sure, it can be easier to hide behind a generic policy, but when it’s taken too far you’re left with instances like Jo-Ann Fabrics’ refusal to let a customer use the bathroom, or Bed Bath and Beyond not letting a customer use a phone to dial 9-1-1.

This seems like a head smackingly obvious statement, but by filling your organization with quality employees who are empowered to sidestep “company policy” when all common sense and human decency is telling them to do so, you’re sending a much stronger signal to your customers.

Like I said earlier, there are plenty of successful businesses that do some (or all) of these things, and I’m not saying these can’t be profitable (the first three at least). However, as a long-term strategy, and in an increasingly competitive environment, taking a step back every once in a while and making sure your customers’ best interests are aligned with your own isn’t a bad way to do business.