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The Great Social Media Customer Service Race

January 22, 2013 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

Software Advice, a research advisory firm that offers software reviews and comparisons, recently conducted “The Great Social Customer Service Race” to evaluate how efficiently the nation’s top brands provide consumer support on Twitter. The objective was to identify what kinds of tweets received a response, and how quickly. This is a guest post by Ashley Verrill with Software Advice.

Social media communities have always been a place where conversations, networking and relationship building flourish; a place for engagement. Unfortunately for businesses, this can be difficult to scale. So many companies succumb to using the social media strictly for racking up fans and blasting promotions.

But times have changed. Customers now expect businesses to respond when they send messages, tweets or wall posts. It’s up to each business to take advantage of new technologies that help prioritize, route and address these messages efficiently.

Recently, I conducted an experiment to assess whether 14 of the nation’s top brands employ such technologies to achieve social media responsiveness. The test – dubbed The Great Social Customer Service Race – involved sending 280 tweets from four personal accounts, during a four-week period.

We analyzed the percent of total tweets each brand responded to, as well as the time it took them to write back when they did respond. We designed questions that tested specific listening technology features, as well as social response best practices.

Here’s a few lessons we learned from the race that you can use to improve your own social media response.

Listening Technology Should Catch @, no @ and #BrandName

One of the most striking results was the overwhelming lack of response for tweets that did not include the @ symbol and the company’s Twitter handle.

Even though the customer might not be specifically addressing the brand if they don’t use their handle, these messages sometimes present a chance to surprise and delight the customer. Think of it this way: you either capitalize on an opportunity to create a brand advocate, or you risk a negative message traveling further, faster in the wrong hands.

Consider this tweet that didn’t receive a response:

This left a bad impression on me and my followers. Not only that, but competitors could be listening for your brand and capitalize on negative messages about you. Consider this response to a tweet I sent about Bank of America.

Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize

For large companies, it’s impossible to expect that they respond to everything. But overall, these brands only replied to about 14 percent of the messages we sent. This is frighteningly low. To tackle this challenge, companies should utilize technology that identifies the most important messages and moves them to the front of the response queue.

This is done primarily through prioritization rules that can be customized and programmed into your listening technology. This should include priority triggers such as “thank you,” “angry,” “mad,” “switching,” “buying” and so on. Your team should also spend time finding other keywords that might be more specific to your industry or company.

McDonalds demonstrated during the race that its team was listening for thank you. This tweet received a response in just 13 minutes:

While these important interactions went unnoticed:

Responses Should Be Tracked

It’s critical your team have a process for tracking responses once they are prioritized and routed. At one point during the race, we received two responses to the same tweet, one day apart. The first response seemed robotic, and the second didn’t address the question.

A customer service ticketing-type application is one way to achieve this kind of tracking. When a message is received, it becomes a response ticket that is instantly prioritized and routed. Then once it receives a response, it’s removed from the response queue. This is also helpful if the responder that receives the message is busy. Many social listening technologies can instantly re-route the message if it isn’t touched after a certain amount of time.

Customer Clout Should Be Considered

A customer’s social activity level or purchase history might be another measure to consider when prioritizing your response. During the race, each of our four Twitter users tweeted the same brand name as many as seven times during the four-week experiment. One goal was to see if any of the brands would identify us as active socializers and improve their response time. Not one of the 14 brands did.

To do this:

1) Ensure your CRM software records every Twitter interaction with your brand in the corresponding customer’s profile. This allows the next responding agent to quickly see if that customer is a brand advocate or tweeted negatively in the past.

2) Program socially integrated ticketing software to increase response priority if a user emerges as an active socializer.

Really Listening

Customers social media response expectations will only continue to increase. Now is the time to get a handle on your engagement process with the right technology, used in the right way.

What do you think? How actively is your brand engaging, listening and responding? Share your comments and best practice advice below!

Does your business need help? Contact Grow Social Marketing today for a complimentary consultation and let’s get your brand leading the Social Customer Service Race!

Download Infographic: Grow Social Marketing-Social-Customer-Service-Race

Filed Under: CRM, Social Media, social networking

Using Social Media and Content Marketing for Product Launches

November 23, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

When launching a new product, one of the greatest challenges business owners face centers on marketing. As a Social Marketing Consultant, one of the primary questions I get asked from business owners is, “We have a great product, but how do we get people to buy it?”

Product Marketing Launch

With a solid product and business plan, content marketing should be your primary focus. Start by telling the story. Your website, blog, and social media communities are the places to fuel and funnel that content through.

When considering how to communicate to a market about a new product or service, there are several important questions that social media can help solve for a business owner:

Who is talking about the problem your product solves?
Where are they talking about it and what language are they using?
Who are the influencers actively able to affect product awareness and product use?

To help answer those key questions, here are four ways business owners can use social media to gain insight, grow awareness, and optimize their online marketing:

Listen for Insight – Social media monitoring is an ongoing effort to assess online interest trends and for hits about a particular topic during a given moment in time. Leverage social listening tools like Hootsuite or Trackur, or more robust platforms like Radian6 or Hubspot, to uncover conversations from real customers as they discuss their favorite products, where to find them, what they like, and what they don’t like. Social listening can help uncover other key insights that could fuel social media outreach, content, and engagement to drive relevant awareness of your product.
Social media research and listening are also useful for identifying topically relevant influencers. In any given online community, there are people who make recommendations that others really listen to and act on. In combination with community participation, the social listening tools above, and influence tracking services like Klout, Kred, Traackr or Followerwonk, you can find centers of influence in your target audience communities.
Awesome Content is the (Search) Engine of Marketing – Social content for marketing should start with your blog. You can talk about the story of your product and how it solves important problems in the marketplace. Your blog can also serve as a communication channel with other blogs in the industry, the media, customers, and communities; online and locally.

If your company doesn’t have a blog, start one! Start blogging by writing about your new product and highlighting the product innovation, key features and most importantly, the problems it solves. Gather customer testimonials and welcome conversations with customers and product fans in general. The blog could serve as a living FAQ repository and as a hub to other social participation channels including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Blogs are also excellent marketing resources to attract new customers actively looking for products and services through search. What better time to be easy to find than when customers are actively looking? Fresh, findable, sharable and relevant content makes the social web social. We all know word of mouth advertising is not only the best form of advertising, it’s free!

4. Monitor, Measure and Refine – Social media analytics and optimization is a growing trend for successful businesses, and taps into marketing performance data and web analytics to reveal insights into the success of specific messages, media, and offers. Those data-driven insights can provide direction for optimizing social media marketing efforts for better performance, whether it is different topics for blog posts, words used in tweets, or types of images shared on Pinterest. Google Analytics is a must have for business owners because of the free cost and robust features, including some social media-tracking integration.

The sheer volume of information created and promoted on the social web can be overwhelming. With the right questions and tools, business marketers with companies of any size can leverage that data and the connections between people the information represents to better understand the digital marketplace, the voice of the customers, who can influence sales, and insights to optimize marketing performance.

If you’re a business owner, how have you leveraged social media to launch a new product or service? What was some of the best (and worst) advice you received?

Filed Under: Business, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media, Website

How to Use Social Media Monitoring to Keep Tabs on Your Competition

October 21, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

By now, most savvy companies have launched blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, mindful that actively engaging online audiences is essential to the survival of any business. But social media offers a major benefit that is too often ignored: the ability to monitor the online space to glean information about your customers, your competition, and even your own company. Effectively using social media monitoring, the information you gain from listening will be just what you need to keep abreast of conversations in real time.

Twitter, for example, allows businesses to quickly detect a problem with a service or product before that problem turns into a full-blown crisis. But social media monitoring is not limited to keeping a lookout for sudden online developments. It also involves tracking data that are both quantifiable (the number of times your information is shared or retweeted) and qualitative (the tone of the conversation surrounding your brand).

Here are My Top 5 Reasons Why Social Media Monitoring Must be a Key Part of Your Marketing Strategy:

1. Develop insight into how your brand is perceived.

No matter how you feel about your company, the perception that the market has of it — the only perception that matters — may well be different. Social media monitoring can help you to gain some real perspective on how others see your company and how passionate they are (or are not) about your service or product. It is a great way to take the pulse of your audience and identify your brand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

2. Scout Your Competition.

Companies sometimes divulge information on their social networking pages that provide insights into their priorities. The information may be as simple as your competitor’s online fans and followers. But sometimes the information can be more telling than that — like photos and names of your rival’s investors on, say, a Facebook page. By monitoring the social media space, you can learn as much about your competitors’ weakness as you can about their strengths.

3. Improve Customer Service.

Social media monitoring provides another platform for you to have a direct one-on-one exchange with the customer. That kind of responsiveness is not only a way to earn brand loyalty. It also gives you an opportunity to turn satisfied customers into brand ambassadors. A study conducted by Maritz Research shows that customers who received responses after tweeting about a company improved their perception of that company 83 percent of the time.

4. Achieve a Competitive Advantage.

Any avid social media user can tell you that online audiences are enthusiastic critics of everything, from service at a restaurant to the usefulness of a new product. This kind of constant appraisal and feedback can be valuable to business owners trying to assess the strengths of their own company or industry. Indeed, the conversations occurring online could shine a light on potential voids your company might be able to fill, thus providing a competitive advantage.

5. Manage Your Online Reputation.

Social media monitoring enables businesses to manage their online reputation in real time. That is important because social media can serve as a kind of echo chamber for consumer opinion, both good and bad. It is essential that you react quickly to any opinion that undercuts or distorts your brand before that opinion spreads suddenly.

So how do you do it? The good news is, if you are utilizing Marketing Automation software (such as Hootsuite Pro, Hubspot or Radian6, the monitoring tool is built in. If not, there are a host of free tools available.

Here are Four of My Favorite Free Social Media Monitoring Tools:

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on what’s being said on your business, a competitor or industry.

Social Mention

Same as Google Alerts, but for social media communities.

WhosTalkin.com

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Their goal is to deliver the most and current conversations happening in the world of social media. This tool covers 60 social media gateways.

BoardReader

Not all forums and message boards are indexed by Google. BoardReader is a community search engine that crawls forums, blog posts, images and micro blogs. It’ll also let you know when a new forum starts specifically to discuss your brand or organization. It purports to crawl 50,000 online communities!

These days, many of the free monitoring tools have either gone by the wayside (defunct), been acquired by bigger companies, or have developed into rich, integrated platforms and are no longer free. To that point, the bottom line, your brands’ reputation is important, knowing what your competitors are doing is important and knowing what’s being said about both are critical. Being at the forefront of those conversations is the key to taking responsive action.

What tools are you using to manage your online reputation? Leave your comments below. We’d love to hear them!

Filed Under: Business, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media

Using Digital Data to Create Customer Profiles and Optimize the Customer Experience

August 14, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

A friend mentioned the other day that she had recently made a furniture purchase online with a large retailer, and the next week she received an email from the same retailer promoting the product for $300 less than what she’d paid for it. She then called their customer service department and asked for the discount. The retailer complied (which made her happy), but it made us wonder: what if she never knew about the discount? How many other customers have had that same experience after the purchase? What did her actions cost the company, beyond rebating $300?

This is a common scenario for countless brands because they do not have a 360° view of their customers across all digital channels, and therefore, are lacking an understanding of their customers’ behaviors. If the retailer was able to identify who my friend was across all channels and recognize that she had already made the furniture purchase, wouldn’t it have made more sense to send her an offer for something else, which would complement her furniture purchase? Or, at the very least, not market to her a discounted price on the item she’d just purchased? What if that retailer was able to connect her purchase to their customer database and make the distinction before the email went out? An email thanking her for her purchase along with products that would complement her initial purchase would have made much more sense; and she would have appreciated the follow up and understanding of her needs.

Brands today face unprecedented challenges when it comes to creating and maintaining a holistic view of their customers across their marketing ecosystem. It seems that customer interaction points, particularly in the digital channel world, continue to multiply on a daily basis: email, social, mobile and more. Add in the pressure of today’s empowered customers expecting highly relevant and seamless communications when and where they want them, and the business goals of increasing the lifetime value of each customer, and it equates to an increasingly difficult environment in which brands must operate. Finding, consolidating and analyzing data to achieve optimal customer interaction has never been further from us — and yet has never been so close. With a plethora of tools available, brands can reach their customers through emails, mobile devices, online profiles, loyalty programs, social media network profiles and more. What hasn’t been readily available is the ability to link these digital profiles together, reducing duplication in marketing databases, giving marketers a clear understanding of active and inactive customers, plus who is buying from them, where they are shopping and how they want to be interacted with.

The ability to aggregate and compile and integrate this kind of customer information to create customer identity profiles can be a profoundly difficult challenge. This isn’t about appending data; it’s about using the data a company already has, housed in multiple databases, and linking it all together through sophisticated matching algorithms that leverage a rich repository of referential data.

To make an integrated marketing strategy work, you need to be able to:

1. Validate contact data in real time, as it is entered online, in-store and over the phone

2. Create linkage of disparate identities and data sets, using merely a single piece of personally identifiable information for any customer

3. Enhance your data with a 360-degree view of your customers

4. Cleanse your data to remove duplicates or inaccurate information

5. Profile your best customers and understand how they want to be reached: mobile, email, catalog, social and more

6. Identify more customers like your best customers

Organizations can build this infrastructure in-house, however the process necessitates an investment in technology and resources. In addition, the ability to resolve identities is limited to the pieces of information that can be collected by the organization. One solution is to work with experienced Digital Strategists such as Grow Social Marketing. We partner with your company to resolve your customer and prospect identities across mediums in accordance with your budget. By doing so, your brand can create consistent and coordinated messaging strategies, understand the optimal path to purchase activities, maximize return on marketing investment and create “wow” experiences for customers. And those are the experiences which get amplified through word-of-mouth (WOM. That, my friends, is the best form of advertising to have in building your brand and reputation.

Filed Under: Customer Profiling, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing

The ROI of Social Media

June 25, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

As a Social Media Consultant, how to determine the ROI of Social Media is the #1 question that I get asked, from large, industry leading companies to small companies. As a matter of fact, how to determine the ROI of social media is a topic of debate and contention, amongst business owners and marketers alike. When asked this question, my answer is a resounding YES. You can determine the ROI of your companies’ social media marketing efforts and here is how:

Invest in a Social Media Management Platform. Assuming your brand is set up in some or all of the top social media communities such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr, you need to be measuring, monitoring and calculating your marketing efforts. This is the first step in understanding and determining the ROI of social. However, you need to take it a step further and understand how to analyze, interpret and report on data to senior management at your company. Data doesn’t lie and with Senior Management at any company, being able to understand and interpret data while presenting will gain buy-in to your efforts. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.
Social Media Management Software Varies Widely in Price. For big brands, my favorites are Hubspot, Radian6 and Webtrends. These platforms are costly, so it only makes sense if your brand has a significant social media presence, CRM system and budget to support. One of the key reasons why I love these platforms is the integration with your CRM platform. On the lower end of price, I recommend Hootsuite. Hootsuite is awesome! I recommend signing up for the Pro plan instead of the free plan, which is $9.95/month and includes advanced analytics, apps and more social communities. Investing in the right Social Media Management platform for your company is critical to understanding the ROI of Social Media.
Understand How to Set-up, Analyze and Communicate Data with Google Analytics. Google Analytics has overhauled their platform, integrating social monitoring into the mix. Here is an example, let’s say you are conducting a Facebook Advertising campaign and you decide to do an A/B split. You set-up and run an advertising campaign with half of your budget to increase your Facebook “likes” and the other half to a landing page that you’ve set up on your website, specifically for this campaign. Within your Google Analytics you can set up the Facebook campaign so you can measure and determine the ROI of the Like campaign vs. your websites’ landing page campaign, as well as the lifecycle of site visitors after they leave your landing page and the time spent on your website.
Utilize your Social Media Insights and Reporting analytics. For the above example, Facebook has improved their Page Insights tool, to provide you with a deep understanding of the demographics that make up your target audience, fan base, “reach” and other statistics.
Set-up and Implement KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and Benchmarks. These should be set-up at the beginning of your campaigns, so you can analyze the before, during and after of your social media efforts. KPIs should clearly link to the strategic objectives of your overall marketing strategy and therefore help monitor the campaign execution. Think of benchmarks as incremental goals that you aim to meet during your marketing campaigns. A benchmark example can be increasing your fan base by 10% or increasing your email newsletter signups by 15%, over a specific time period. If you don’t set up KPIs and benchmarks at the beginning of your social marketing efforts, you won’t be able to measure and support the time that you are spending in the social media stratosphere to your manager. Time is part of the ROI equation.
Engaging Your Customers Across Multiple platforms Infuses Your Brand and Products into Your Potential Customer’s Life on a Regular Basis. Regularity leads to familiarity and therefore, comfort with a brand, product, or idea. Managed properly, this will drive lead generation, conversions, sales and ROI. A comprehensive strategy with a clear purpose will do just that. Moreover, by using the same branding message across multiple channels, you can create a more interactive experience for the consumer.
Funnel Everything Said About your Brand Into One Message Directed at the Appropriate Audience Demographic for Your Company. Depending on your style of campaign, you might not have the diversity in customers you were going for originally with a campaign spread across multiple advertising mediums, but your ROI will be greater, and your business will grow more efficiently into additional markets. And after all, isn’t growing your business what it is all about?
Using the Above Techniques as well as the standard ROI equation calculation, you will be able to understand, interpret and communicate the ROI of your social marketing efforts.

Social Media Has Captured the World by Storm. Social Media Marketing can be incredibly effective if properly managed; even more so than traditional marketing efforts. However, it takes time, a thoughtful strategy and plan.

Don’t Worry About Being Behind the Curve in Understanding the Massive Value of Social Media. According to a recent post by Inc.com, mid-sized businesses are suffering in the social media gap. I.e., they are not integrating social media into their marketing strategies, nor do they have a well-thought out plan for how to engage, drive lead generation and sales through the social media stratosphere. The various data this article discusses indicates that you and your company have about a three-year window to get ahead of your rivals in social media.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s get your business started! Contact Grow Social Marketing today.

Filed Under: Business

How and Why Your Professional Association Should Use Social Media

April 23, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

Why is it that with the majority of Professional Associations, it seems as if the clocks in the room have been turned back eight years since before the advent of social media? Although there are always some savvy users of social media, the Associations themselves are usually using the same antiquated medium to promote themselves, both internally and externally: a pre-historic website and email newsletter blasts.

Yet these organizations exist to support, educate and provide resources for professionals in a particular industry or profession.

I always say that social media is about the convergence of information and communication. Isn’t this the mission of every Professional Association: to inform their members and communicate regularly to increase the networking (and business) opportunities for their members? Then why don’t more Professional Associations embrace and strategically leverage all that social media has to offer, and in doing so also help increase Association membership while retaining existing members?

The answer to this is that, based on my own experience, most Associations are either:

Managed by their own business or
Outsource their marketing and other management affairs to companies or firms that
do not understand social media themselves.

For a primer on some easy ways that Professional Associations can maximize their social presence, here’s a list of six checklist items for your Association to confirm your current state in social media:

1. Create and Encourage Engagement in a Robust LinkedIn Group.

With a closed LinkedIn Group that is moderated and only open to Association members, you can achieve what you do at your in-person events, 24/7 online and without local boundaries. Many Associations have LinkedIn Groups but haven’t really encouraged engagement inside them. It is the perfect place to share information, generate discussions, and even share job openings that your company might have. If there is any social media website made for Associations, it is undoubtedly LinkedIn. Take advantage of it and leverage it as an important supplement for everything that your Association does at your in-person events.

There are so many ways your Association can create a thriving, active LinkedIn Group. You can start discussions and promote your events – before, during and after in real time! I belong to several LinkedIn Groups however, I participate in less than five Groups.

A few reasons why:

The best LinkedIn Group rules are stated up front. For example, after recently joining a LinkedIn Group, I received a welcome email containing the Group rules:

“We encourage all members of the Cleveland Professionals LinkedIn Group to make the most of this Group. Post your thoughts, discussion, questions and the like which pertain to business development and networking.
“Posts that serve only to sell one’s services/products are not acceptable. Posts looking for jobs are not acceptable. Posts announcing job openings are not acceptable. Postings such as these will be delete and the poster may be blocked from the Group.”
“We apologize for this hard-line stance, but we strive to keep this Group as pure as possible, focusing on business development and networking.”

2. The Group discussions are really interesting! Participating in Group discussions is a great way to network and meet like minded people within the Group. The Group moderators and members should pose discussions that are focused on all topics relative to the Group; encourage thought leadership and the sharing of ideas amongst the Group members.
3. The topics can be broad in nature, but always have the core focus of the Group in mind.

For example, a recent Group discussion from one of my favorite LinkedIn Groups, Search Engine Land, posed a great discussion relative to any Sales Employee: Should Sales Folks Use LinkedIn or Facebook Account or a Corporate Login? The topic is relative to the core nature of the Group, and poses a question that Group members in a sales position must contend with in today’s digital marketplace. This encourages an active discussion.
Good LinkedIn Groups ban “spammy” discussions. i.e . Group members starting a discussion related to promoting a blog post they wrote, their company, products or services.

These same principles can be applied to any online business community, such as COSE, and through their online portal such as COSE Mindspring.com.

Another route would be to build your online community as part of an ecommerce “member only” marketplace your Association has created.

Southwest Airlines is a great example of having a robust online travel community. There are numerous conversations taking place in real time, giving members the opportunity of voice and the sharing of experiences.

2. Sharing Your Information with the World through Blogging

Sharing information encourages current members to keep informed as well as helps introduce your Association to potential new members through the power of your content. Instead of taking a walled garden approach to protecting your content to only be accessible to members, strategically summarize your internal information for the outside world to showcase your leadership within your industry and encourage others to join. Blogging has the additional benefit of aiding your professional Association’s website to ensure greater search engine optimization (SEO) benefits as well.

3. Social Media Promotion of Your Association Events

Obviously, social as a promotional channel is well known by most Associations. But how many Associations actually go through the hassle of not only creating a LinkedIn Event and even a Facebook Event for each meeting they have; but also encouraging members to RSVP through these social media channels to help spread the word about the event? The viral nature of social media will only work for the benefit of your promotion if you get your members to spend a few seconds to actually RSVP in social media to help spread the word to their networks. For that reason, point #5 below regarding social media education is equally important.

4. Social Media Promotion During Your Association Events

Anyone who has gone to any professional event is probably familiar with the notion that there are always one or two people in the audience who are updating their Twitter followers through tweeting out quotes and other information shared at the event. Why aren’t more professional Associations proactively doing this? By sharing quotes, information, photos and even video from your events, it will go a long way to help promote your Association – and inform those members who couldn’t make it to the event. Even if you don’t use Twitter, you can do this from your social presence on other platforms.

5. Teach Your Association Members Social Media

Social is a tool that is beginning to permeate every discipline within an organization and transcend every industry that exists. Most Association members are asking their leadership for more information about social media because they need it for their own workplace. More importantly, teaching your members about social media will not only ensure that your Association members will become better equipped to handle social media-related issues at their own company, but it will also make them more willing participants in everything your Association does with regards to social media. It is the “secret sauce” that will ensure positive ROI in your social efforts – and a more satisfied and engaged community of Association members.

6. Rebrand Your Presence from an Analog, Static one to a Digital, Social One

Just as adopting social will undoubtedly change the culture of companies as they slowly evolve into a “social brand,” the same will happen to your professional Association. The information sharing and communication that occurs will become much more dynamic and social; and it will be evident in a very short time that your own branding on your digital properties needs to be revised to better reflect this. Becoming a digital and truly social professional Association will require you to look and potentially revise many visual elements that are associated with your Association, including your website; as well as prompt you to include more social elements into your digital presence in a creative way to help further foster dialogue and community engagement.

What do you think? What are your thoughts and tips on building and maintaining a thriving LinkedIn Group? I’d love to hear them below.

Filed Under: Business, Networking, Social Media, social networking

Advice From the Experts: Six Tips for Social Media Marketing Success

March 19, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

Even the best B2B marketers and business owners can use a little advice—and new ideas—every now and then. With that in mind, we are sharing six secrets to social media marketing success:

Start with the Right Strategy
Align with the goals of your department. That’s a good starting place. In most cases your department strategy should also align to a larger corporate strategy. We don’t want a communication strategy that is at odds with our service strategy.
Know Your Objectives
Tie your social media activities to existing objectives, such as increasing online sales, driving web traffic or boosting attendance at your next webinar or offline event. Set a reasonable target, see what happens and use it as a benchmark for future campaigns.
Deliver Relevant Content
Deliver the right content, at the right time, in the right channel to the right customer (or partner). Relevant content happens as a result of listening, thought leadership, Google insights, and community sentiment.
Develop Meaningful Relationships
Use social media as a platform for developing relationships. Show your thought leadership by answering questions on LinkedIn and Quora—it could lead to new contacts and leads.
Integrate into Your Marketing Mix
Don’t leave opportunities on the table; explore how you can extend your marketing effort by integrating social elements into your PR, events and customer support activities.
Measure What Matters
Distill social media measurement down to core metrics that your company is already measuring that have history behind them. When you show what social media is or isn’t delivering there is a conversation that can take place.

Want more advice like this? Grow Social Marketing offers social media training sessions at your office, via Skype, online or phone. Our expert presenters will provide your business with everything needed to get your brand vested in social media. New ideas that you can implement immediately to improve your social communications—and bottom line results.

Contact Us today and let’s get started!

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media, social networking

Healthcare Industry Interacts With Their Audiences Through Social Media

February 19, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

The Healthcare industry has embraced social media. From using Twitter to broadcast live surgical procedures to live chats with doctors and patients on Facebook, healthcare providers and consumers are connecting in a way never available before the advent of social media. More than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media.

The proof is in the numbers. PwC’s Health Research Institute commissioned an online survey of 1,000 US adults in fall 2011. The results were released in their study of Health Care Trends for 2012. One key finding is that Social Media plays a bigger role in consumer healthcare decisions. Nearly half of survey respondents (50%), including half of people under the age of 35, have used social media channels for healthcare purposes, such as connecting with health organizations and other people with shared health interests or for research purposes.

Social media outlets used:

Facebook: 18%
YouTube: 12%
Blogs: 9%
Google Plus: 8%
Twitter: 6%

According to Manhattan Research, 51% of online U.S. adults use pharma-sponsored digital resources, such as condition and treatment information, disease management tools, doctor discussion guides, or mobile apps or websites. Additionally, these resources are strong drivers of action – 43 percent of consumers using pharma-sponsored digital resources have discussed prescription drugs with a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist as a result.

Although it’s easy to identify demand, healthcare marketers may be slow to understand how they can integrate social media into their marketing mix. Social media is only a small portion of the online strategies and tactics being employed across healthcare marketing. In fact, those marketing departments that do not incorporate it into their planning processes are falling short. It has been proven that an integrated approach–one that incorporates both online and off-line– is most effective in reaching Healthcare Practitioner audiences, especially when it comes to product launch and commercialization.

I will say, that critical to social media, is making sure that content is king. Correct, clear, poignant messaging and positioning, accurate depictions, full substantiation, and disclosure, and keeping information fairly balanced are all important aspects to avoid liability concerns and meet FDA guidelines.

The growing numbers of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare companies connecting with their audiences online are clear indicators that they’ve embraced social media. So much so, that Jonathan Richmond, author of Dose of Digital blog, created the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Social Media Wiki. This wiki is meant to house every Social Media project that has been created by pharmaceutical or healthcare companies in general. It’s a great resource of online communities for consumers.

Kristen Davis, PR and Communications Specialist for EMH Healthcare in Ohio, utilizes Facebook and Twitter as social media outlets. Kristen says their social media strategy incorporates the 70/20/10 rule: “70% is value added content; useful, unbiased information from credible sources. 20% is interaction and engagement driven, and 10% is EMH promotional content that supports hospital initiatives and local news stories and events.” EMH Healthcare has three Facebook pages: The main EMH Facebook Page, the EMH Healthcare HR Department Facebook Page for talent acquisition and recruiting and the EMH Center for Health and Fitness Page, the medically-based fitness center where degreed and certified fitness specialists are available to work with members and can tailor a workout to any fitness level. Like many social media marketers, EMH is aiming to be ahead of the curve in social media trends. For example, the ongoing Facebook algorithm changes, which Kristen says will impact their posting marketing tactics. To increase fan engagement, EMH will be introducing video clips in 2012; from doctors to diabetes educators on how to control blood sugar, the objective is to provide real time information.

The benefits of integrating social media into healthcare marketing efforts are priceless – from improving patient care to gaining media coverage to attracting new patients and staff. If your healthcare organization hasn’t already taken advantage of social networking channels, now is the time. As consumer driven healthcare becomes more prevalent, we’re going to see even more ways that healthcare organizations can utilize social media to engage and interact with their patients. I like to say, it’s all in the mix.

Is your healthcare entity currently engaging in social media? Why or why not? Tell us in the comments!

Filed Under: Healthcare, Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: healthcare, internet marketing, social marketing, social media

Pay-per-Click Advertising vs. Social Media Marketing

February 3, 2012 by Jennifer Davis Leave a Comment

Recently, many of my connections have asked me what the difference between the two is, or are they one and the same. Yes, there is a profound difference and here is why:

Pay-per-Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising method used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. PPC “display” advertisements are shown on web sites or search engine results with related content that have agreed to show ads. These are the ads that appear at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs. PPC Ads are the opposite of organic (unpaid) search engine results.

The best ways to get started in paid advertising are through Google Adwords, Facebook Advertising and LinkedIn Ads.

What’s the difference? With Google and other search engines, you choose words and search phrases that people will be searching for. With Facebook and LinkedIn, you choose what type of people, their likes and interests that you will send your ad to using keywords.

It’s important to make clear that paid search advertising is not a replacement for anything, but should instead be used to complement other marketing strategies. It takes a lot of time and effort, resources and ongoing management, and it’s something you really need to invest in. Many companies and small businesses especially — look at paid search as a replacement for the yellow page ads that they used to run or the classified ads that they’re doing. Or, they think that if they just pay to be on a search engine, they don’t have to invest time and resources in search engine optimization to rank higher organically.

How Paid Search Can Help Grow Your Business:

PPC is a great option if your business is not ranking well in the search engines with organic search alone. PPC can support your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy by helping your brand show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for the most competitive searches. Notice that we say “show up” rather than “rank” because there is nothing PPC can do to directly increase your organic rankings. However, PPC can be used to make sure that you have some kind of representation on page one while your SEO strategy catches up.
TIP: A solid SEO strategy is an ongoing process over a 6-12 month time period. If an agency tells you otherwise, look elsewhere for assistance.
PPC is an extremely powerful tool and a valuable asset for enhancing your company’s online presence. Studies show that the average customer needs to see your company products or service 6-7 times before they make a buying decision. Having your PPC ad on the front page of SERPs is powerful, as a supplement to your social media and SEO strategy.
Conducting PPC campaigns through search engines, Facebook and LinkedIn is a powerful way to generate a constant flow of traffic (lead generation) to your website. These are highly qualified and targeted audiences who are searching for your product/service or, in the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, have “likes, interests and qualities” that align with your company’s brand, products/service.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media marketing programs center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A company communication spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it appears to come from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself. This form of marketing is driven by word-of-mouth, meaning it results in earned media rather than paid media. Earned media is in essence an endorsement of your brand as statistics prove that people are more likely to trust a brand and subsequently make a purchase from a brand that their friends and family, or community has endorsed. They become your brand evangelists.

How Social Media Marketing Can Help Grow Your Business

Over 75% of consumers use social media in some format to learn about products and services.
Increased communication for businesses fosters brand awareness and can also act as an improved customer service channel. Your business now has the opportunity to respond in real time, without the customer having to call and navigate your company “phone tree”, go to your website’s FAQ’s or whatever method they are using to communicate with you.
Social media serves as an inexpensive platform for all businesses to implement marketing campaigns; marketing campaigns that are measurable and quantifiable and offer a much shorter timeframe to quantify your Return on Investment (ROI).

All great reasons for why we are so passionate for social media and internet marketing!

With that said, many of the so-called social media rules are not new, groundbreaking or even shocking. They are based on the fundamentals of communication and interaction. So whether you are using online media for personal or business reasons, treat others as you would like to be treated.

Getting started in social media marketing isn’t as daunting as it may seem at first. There are a few simple things you can do to make a splash in the online community.

Start and Maintain a Blog

It’s a proven statistic that blogging increases website traffic by at least 50%. This alone is why your business needs to start blogging now.

However, before you dust off your writer’s hat, it’s important to know that an effective blog requires a sound blogging strategy, time commitment and resource commitment. Once you start a blog, you must be committed to maintaining it forever; just like everything indexed on the internet lives online forever.

Once you set up your blog, it’s time to start creating content. Content can be anything, but it should obviously be relevant to your target audience.

How Blogging Can Help Grow Your Business

Keep in mind that you are not selling your products and/or services. You are committing to putting out really great content that others will want to share, thereby creating word-of-mouth advertising!
Encourage your readers to interact through questions, comments or feedback. If they leave a comment, be sure to respond to them.
Again, the huge spike in website traffic…so what are you waiting for?
Keep blogging consistently (at least once a week) and keep it real, and your readers will keep coming back.

Create your Business Profile on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Each of these online communities will get your brand more exposure and allow you to communicate with prospects and customers in real time. There are hundreds of online communities; what is key is to start small and be committed to being active and engaging in those communities.

Think of Social Media as being at a dinner party – conversations should develop, expand, educate and entertain. Keep these in mind when participating in social media. The more you participate, the more you establish yourself as a trusted expert and friend. If you do it right, it will equate to brand evangelists, lead generation and ultimately, sales.

Social media marketing requires ongoing time, resources, commitment and patience. A sound social media strategy and plan equates to 5-10 hours a week. If this is not feasible to maintain for your business, consider hiring Grow Social Marketing for help in the marketing strategy, plan and ongoing management of your social media and digital advertising efforts.

What other methods are you using to market your company online? We’d love to hear your comments, tips and suggestions below!

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: brand, business, Facebook, Google Adwords, LinkedIn, PPC, social media, Twitter

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