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How Can Social Media Benefit My Business? What are the benefits to business? Jumping into social media in a public fashion expands your audience. Let’s talk about what those benefits might include: More sales, leads, or donors, better relationships with current customers, a better reputation with your audience and industry, as well as new relationships with consumers, distributors, and press. Social media offer ways to see comments made about your competitors. You can react to those and manage queries made about products and services in either a private or a public fashion. So you may have heard a lot of noise about social media. But you don’t know what it can do for your business or non-profit yet. I’ll give you a few real statistics and then some examples to demonstrate results and the effectiveness of these activities. Who are some of the businesses? What kind of results have they seen? Social media campaigns increased revenues by 18%, according to a study of the top 100 brands by to Wetpaint/Altimeter[1]. Granted, the 18% increases came from “mavens,” or basically, people who really used the various means. The moral of the story is that you present yourself in a variety of places and opportunities and maintain that presence to get results, whether you are looking to serve customers or to find new ones. Comcast, Zappos, Whole Foods, and Dell are just a few of the brands who have experienced growth and have responded to that success with additional support resources for these efforts. Where are these brands participating in social media? 56.8% of the top 500 etailers have Facebook Fan Pages according to Internet Retailer. 41.4% have YouTube channels, and 20.4% have Twitter pages. 30.5% said they expect social media to outperform paid search. Increased growth has piqued increased business interest. There must be something to this. How are companies and non-profits conducting these social media campaigns? Lets describe a variety of ways to get reaction to your message. First of all social media is not like any other sales pitch you have ever done. There is etiquette involved and it’s called soft-selling. The big return is that your audience will give you a warm response. You must earn the privilege to present your message. Your reward will be an audience that will know you better and trust you more. Sound good? How has social media helped other businesses? Here are some of the ways it can work: 1) Participating in discussions about your industry. Someone in a professional group asks how much it should cost to make a TV commercial. We can strike up a conversation with a reply that is either public or private or give a broad-ranged public answer. Not only can group members see the public answer, but also those searching the Internet. The audience, hopefully, will value this answer as that of an expert and has the chance to follow and reach out to make contact. This is one of many crumbs in a trail that remain out in the Social Sphere of Influence into infinity. This may turn into business today and/or some day in the future when conversations about TV commercials are searched on in the future. 2) Social networks can be seen as additional websites. You put up your message and it speaks to that audience. Each audience may well be different demographically and psychographically. You can speak to some very niche groups. Facebook is the #3 ranked website. Your Facebook Fan Page alone offers you access to not only great traffic, but to lifting the visibility of your current presence. Now add to that the potential of 3, 10, 25, 50 or 100 additional presences. 3) Expand your affiliate program. A leading affiliate manager believes social media helps their clients very successfully with lead-generation offers in areas of education, autofinance, fashion design, culinary and dating. Another affiliate manager uses social media for concert, sports and theater ticket sales as long as they follow guidelines for spam and violence. The cost for media can be nothing except the time to write and submit promotional messages for the return on sales. Follow our blog for further case studies and industry articles on social media results across categories such as in customer retention, real estate, non-profits, recruitment and more. [1] Engagementdb.com |
Social Media Dynamics - A Wealth of Experience What makes SMD different from others? Our industry experience includes working with a variety of clients across a multitude of industries through marketing, advertising, sales and research. SMD has expertise in traditional, direct response and online marketing and media. Our technical knowledge that goes back to the first IBM PC to early development of web site design and implementation (1997) to online advertising campaigns (1999) to Social Media Marketing. Research backgrounds in marketing and media. Not just numbers either: psychographics, socio-economics and geo-demographics and qualitative.
SMD’s team has
worked together for years to meet client objectives. We have
been teachers and trainers in our industries. We listen: One size does not fit all. That is why we start by listening and gathering information about your industry. We want to know all about your business – where and why you started and where you want to go. What are your immediate and longer range goals? We will discuss related business fields to explore new possibilities. What other marketing activities are you currently doing? What social participation are you doing now: trade shows and associations, speaking engagements, sponsorship and beyond. We assess: We make an assessment of where you, your competitors and your industry are today. We move forward when we have the current picture of what is going on right now, By understanding where your industry is heading, who are the key players and what major developments are on the horizon, we can begin the next three phases. We chart: Our exclusive social media matrix is used to plot your social media map. Using data and intelligence gathered through a variety of sources and through comprehensive research, we incorporate ranking systems into a multi-dimension matrix to guide us through the next phase. How does SMD move clients into the SocialSphere? We do careful homework to learn your product/service/goals and research your current social footprint and that of your competition. After analysis, we recommend the topics and formats of messages and locations. We then build out creative placements and promote them to increase your Social Sphere of connections. Each message reaction is returned with engagement to gain trust and interest, focusing on the goals we want to achieve. We provide reporting and evaluation, then we map out the next steps. We create a dynamic and fluid marketing plan integrating the appropriate social networking channels to promote your company using a consistent message. The starting point is to review your current resources and set of short and long-term goals. Take stock of how much time you can devote to the approval process and ongoing brainstorming. We start discussions to build a strategy of which social projects are important and applicable. Then we plan the timeline to build, develop, write, design and launch each. We present the timeline for review and make any changes. We execute and manage the campaign with reporting of results. We establish a review process of consumer responses and reporting techniques, format and frequency. We continue to provide ongoing discussions re: next steps, approvals, reporting and continued review. Our services include the maintenance of the work we do for you with backup and cleanup as well as monitoring of posts. We adjust and adapt as we look forward as social media evolve and greater opportunities present themselves. With each success, we can move on to explore options. We continue to evaluate and present each for review. Being early to this new and expanding horizon, we can only expect ever-increasing options. We report on the activity generated by the various channels and efforts. Again not just numbers of followers, fans, connections but of the quality and opportunities available to convert online traffic to lead, donors and sales potential. We listen again this time to your followers, fans and connections. What are they saying about you, your industry and your competitors. We start again: we access, we chart, we create, executive, we adjust and adapt and we report based on a continuing flow of new information, technology changes and social media growth.
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