How to use social media to advertise your business has always been a game of catch-up. Inventors, investors and programmers are constantly busy with building new sites, creating new applications that will change or improve the way we connect with each other and our viewing habits.
TechCrunch, a company that started as a blog in 2005 and has evolved to be one of the biggest and more innovative companies, holds a yearly conference where they choose 25 new startups from over 1000 applications to present their ideas to the conference and through it to the world.
At the last conference in San Francisco, in September 2010, TechCrunch chose to show a few companies that might have an impact on how you advertise your small business through the web. Here are some to watch for:
Badgeville – Aims to help increase audience engagement and loyalty by providing an easy way for web publishers, media sites and brands to increase engagement with their customers. It also enables measuring and optimization of users engagement.
Gifi – Combines Venmo and FourSquare into a location based game involving real money. Recommending a restaurant or a dish becomes a social game. Users can hide money for their friends to be unlocked when they order the dish they recommended for example. It provides business owners with a simple way to deliver rewards for valued or frequent customers. Every time a customer is rewarded, the business gets exposure through the social media sites of their customer’s friends. The company received $1.2 million in seed money this year.
Gripe – A location based free mobile app. It allows the users to send complaints or cheers about a business they frequented. The remarks are sent to the business as well and they can react, while spreading the words through friends and followers. By resolving complaints, businesses can turn detractors into promoters spreading positive word-of-mouth to everyone on their social media network.
Sumazi – was awarded by TechCrunch as the startup “most likely to change the world”. By intelligently connecting people to other people they don’t know but should, they leverage the personal and extended networks to discover, recommend and introduce customers to other people and opportunities at the right time.
Tello – another startup which aims to help companies improve customer service by providing real time reactions to their customer’s experience. It is a mobile and social application. Businesses of all sizes can improve service and engage customers in conversation, resolving issue and monitor employee ratings.
Which of these will flourish remains to be seen. Watch for them and subscribe when they become operational.
Digital & Internet Marketing
So You Want to Start a Business Blog….
A paradigm shift (shift in habits) has been happening in the last year as far as blogging is concerned. It was not surprising to find that according to a research done by Hubspot, blogs are the most critical platform for businesses, more than social media.
75% of the respondents said they consider blogs ‘useful’ and 31% said it is ‘critical’ to their business.
According to the survey businesses with corporate blog generate more leads than businesses which don’t have one. And it is true not only for business to customer relations but also for business to business.
As long as you post quality content which addresses your specific target audience, business leads are almost guaranteed.
The quality of the content, posting frequency and having an interesting and easy to read design, have to be consistent to ensure effectiveness.
Before you embark on a blogging adventure you have to ask yourself several questions:
– What are your strategies? Experts have found 4 different kinds of blogs that are used for businesses advantage:
Building brand awareness through leadership. It requires businesses to share their thoughts and opinions regarding their industry. The aim is to be a trusted source, to be considered an expert in the field and come up with blogs about new developments, opinions about old ones and guidelines. (For example: http://edelmandigital.com/page/1/)
Another kind of blog deals with the corporate culture – helping others understand the company and what motivates it. (http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos)
Connecting with leaders – is another kind of blog written by the CEO or another head of company. It helps connect the leaders of the company with its employees and the customers. It creates familiarity that has disappeared from the corporate culture as companies grow bigger. (http://www.blogs.marriott.com/)
Branding – a blog that establishes a brand image. (http://www.openforum.com/)
The content must reflect the reason for the blog.
– Set Goals – Think what you want to achieve with the blog and how are you going to be able to see if you accomplished that goal.
– Management – Someone in the company has to be responsible for the blog. If you don’t have an IT to build the blog for you, you can go to hosted blogging services such as WordPress. That is for the look of the blog and the ability to upload it quickly, but managing the content is another issue. Have an “editor” designated to working on the blog and generating and evaluating the information that comes in. Have more than one person post blogs especially if you want to publish on a daily basis.
– Post interesting blogs. Make them easy to read and informative. You’d want people to spread the word through Tweets and the readers own social networks.
Google Places – a New Kind of Search
In an attempt to improve, evolve and keep its prominence as the leading search engine, Google has launched, last September, a new service called Goggle Places, an improvement on Goggle’s Business Center.
Millions of people search Google every day, and the wealth of information is staggering. To minimize frustration and provide a better service that can be monetized, Google Places will now help you find places in the real world and display them with a tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.
With a listing of 50 million places around the world Google helps people find a localized place; from restaurants and hotels to car repair shops and dry cleaners. According to Google, local search amount to 20% of all searches being done.
If Google thinks the query is about a place, it automatically chooses the Place search, rather than a general web search. It shows a new kind of search result that replaces a list of links with a list of mini-pages for the businesses in the area, with a map, an address and phone number. The mini-profile also contains a photo of the establishment and snippet from a typical review.
It already lists non-business places such as museums, parks and schools in 50 million locations.
As for the merchants, it opens up a new advertising venue. For $25 a month, local businesses can buy “tags” which will make their listing appear in Google Places more prominently.
Businesses are able to add pictures, and add real-time updates. They can define the area they operate in, schedule a photo shoot for a better picture and will be able, very soon, to add coupons and special promotions to be displayed on the search result.
Customers can print out custom QR codes which are readable by cell phones with cameras and QR readers that will pop up in a mobile version of their Google Place page.
It’s a win-win situation, Google says. Google is helping people make more informed decisions about where to go, in a shorter amount of time. Local businesses can receive bigger, better and quicker exposure with a relatively small price tag.
Social Brand Visibility: Identi.ca
Twitter or Identi.ca?
Micro-blogging has become a big thing when it comes to promoting your sites, network or keep in touch with your friends.
But which host do you prefer?
Identi.ca is a microblogging service where users post short (140 character) messages which are broadcast to their friends using the Web, RSS, or instant messages. While similar than Twitter in both concept and operation, Identi.ca provides many features not currently implemented by Twitter, including XMPP support and personal tag clouds.
Identi.ca allows free export and exchange of personal and friend’s data based on the FOAF standard; therefore, notices can be fed into a Twitter account or other service.
Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Their goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users’ autonomy. You deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence, they say. The service reached 1 million postings on November 4, 2008.
Users say it trumps Twitter by leaps and bounds in terms of features. But with these features comes an uncharted territory, much of which is sometimes getting abused.
Identi.ca is as close to Twitter as you can get. Instead of Tweets they call their massages ‘dents’. In fact it’s almost identical to Twitter….”almost” because Identi.ca was built with OpenMicroblogging in mind. This means that it is built on an open platform that can be shared with anyone who wants to host their own federated version of the software. So unlike Twitter, which hopes to monetize the service in order to turn a profit, you can host a Laconi.ca server, sharing ‘dents’ with any identi.ca accounts as well as with anyone else running the same software. This means no more down-time.
Twitter is close, and more popular, but identi.ca is robust, more reliable, and simply an ALTERNATIVE and a CHOICE.
How to Market Your Business like the Big Boys
Sometimes looking at a big company and their marketing strategy can teach us a lot about marketing our small business.
Apple Co. is no doubt a big company. They are known for their innovation and ‘cool’ gadgets. Every launch of a new product involves a presentation by Steve Jobs. Their products are sold in the millions in the first few days (iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million in 3 days) because they create such an anticipation and smart marketing campaign. What do they do that makes them so successful?
Looking at their last few launches a pattern emerges. Not only does Steve Jobs do all the presentations, not only he wears the same clothes no matter what weight he’s in, there are some things we can all learn from the big boys, with their cool innovations, the advertising budget and the PR firm. We can do it too, on a smaller scale.
When Steve Jobs does his presentation he is concise, to the point and entertaining. He does not concentrate on the technical aspect of the new product. He doesn’t talk shop – how fast it is, how the components became smaller. What he does talks about is what their new product will do for you, the customer. How will it improve the way you communicate or do business. If a customer wants to know the specifications of their new gadget he can go to their web site and get that information. Steve jobs is talking to the average customer to show him how cool is the new product and how fun it is to use.
When thinking about marketing and advertising, think about your customers first – how will they benefit from it, what needs your product comes to satisfy.
- Create a buzz. That is what Apple does best. Months before the product launch they drop a few words here and there. Obviously not every company is as highly regarded as Apple, and not every launch is a topic of conversation on the big news networks. Creating a buzz before the launch is very important. Every company that is serious about their marketing can do it through websites, social media and bookmarking sites. Don’t wait until the product is completely finished. When you create a buzz you can get feedback about what people want and think your product will be. Monitor those conversations, see what customers really want.
- Create a product customers will be happy to show off. When you look at Apple’s products, not only the components are important the packaging is important as well. It is always slick and new (think iPhone, iPad, iPod.) Apple always innovates, jumps ahead in leaps and bounds, not only evolves from model to model. What can you do to your product to make it as sleek as possible, something others will be proud to share? How do you show it on your website?
- Get expert advice and recommendations ahead of time. Show your product to the titans of your niche and have them write a few words about it. Put it on your website and tweet about it.
- Take pre-orders. This is a must and a base to build on. Even if you are not sure yet about the final price, you can create a following you can e mail to and update on pricing and new features. A business woman I know created a buzz by tweeting about her product when it was still in the building stage. She got 150 preorders just in the first few days. The product is not finished yet.
- Make a big deal out of your launch – as big as your budget allows. If not a presentation in a big ball room, you can create a launch on the web. Make sure your speech is short and entertaining. Leave the technology to the experts.
The bottom line – when you are about to launch a new product, plan the launch months before the actual date. Think what information you want to release and when, think how you can maximize your exposure and don’t hesitate to turn to experts in the field to help you plan it correctly.
The Niche You Need To Target To Promote Your Small Business
You have your products ready, and your services are in place. Your brand image is ready and your marketing collateral is all written, designed and printed out. You now need to target your preferred demographic, your target audience and the niche your small business will occupy.
Nearly every product or service is aimed at a specific demographic group that will be interested buy it. As a small business, you need to do some market research to determine your sales demographics and establish a target audience.
If your product is something that a wide range of customers will use, you will need to create various marketing campaigns to reach different segments of this broad market, maximizing visibility. Then there are products and services which have a fairly specific target audience which need to be zeroed in using a more specific manner. This is called niche marketing and if done properly, can be very beneficial and cost-effective.
How do you determine your market niche? Ask yourself the following questions:
- What should be the age of your potential customer?
- Who would be more interested in your product, a man or a woman?
- If your product is pricey, what income level should your potential customers belong to, preferably?
- If your product requires it to be used in a certain way, what is the education level of your potential customers?
- Is your product something that will be used by a family or an individual?
- What will your customers appreciate the most about your product? Its price, easy availability, or ease of use? What do they like or dislike about the product or service in general?
- Where does your audience research for products? Do they use the Internet, newspapers, books, or television?
Based on the results of your marketing research, you should be able to determine the focus of your advertising and marketing efforts. If you happen to find that your potential clients spend are frequent users of the internet, likely that your best marketing lever would be a Web page or an e-newsletter. Again, if you find that your potential customers are interested in listening to talk radio, you would do well to develop promotional strategies that revolve around radios.
Your audience might change too, depending on various factors. It’s always important to keep on top of who your target audience is. Do this, and you will maintain a steady flow and easy returns.
Promoting a Small Business Without Breaking The Bank
How do you promote your small business while staying afloat? All you need is a little ingenuity!
The classic promotions options are print, television media and direct campaign. You might think that all these options will cost money, and that you need a large budget to get your message across. Without spending an incredible amount of money, you can attract customers, and have ready to use custom recorded video content for future use, as follows:
- Cut costs by using your own employees in place of models for print and television Ads. It’s more believable and you stand a better chance of being noticed and remembered.
- Obtain a database of email address and send your company’s information with links to your site via emails for direct campaign.
- Put up your promotional videos on your website, with additional content and offers that people can read and watch. Always make sure that your website loads fast, and don’t use too many graphics and heavy content that might slow down the experience for your customers.
- Spend a little to ensure more traffic to your website. With more traffic you can usually expect more sales.
- Use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to advertise your products and services. Even though too many companies are doing this nowadays, you can still garner eyeballs if you package your company’s identity realistically.
What you need to do is to combine guerrilla marketing with traditional advertising strategies to gain exposure and get paying customers by letting the current technology work for you instead of against you. Create interesting and entertaining under 3 minute videos and post them on your site; while you’re at it, you may as well upload them on video sites such as YouTube. Most video sites are free; by posting your videos online, you can create exposure for your company. Make sure that your video titles contain keywords that are commonly searched by people.
Focus on your demographic; who do you want to target? If you know this already, well and good. If not, consult a good advertising agency to help you define your correct demographic. When you’re on a budget, focusing on your exact target audience will get you more paying customers.
Optimize on television broadcasting by purchasing media time in any locality on any cable network. By doing this, you can run a local cable television advertising campaign in many different cities at the same time. For example, if you know that most of your customers live in large cities, focus only on them. By doing this you can bring down your advertising budget. A national television campaign is way more expensive than a cable TV campaign, and is not as effective either.
How to get Your Small Business on the Virtual Map
The world is divided into two equally powerful entities today; one is the real world that we live in, and the other is the virtual world, or the world of the internet. Getting your business known and noticed in the virtual world can boost your brand identity recognition and your sales to unforeseen heights, depending on your marketing strategies. So how to put your small business on the virtual map?
The first thing to do is to set up your professional corporate website and incorporating e-commerce to increase the value of your business. However, this alone will not result in an implicit increase in the enterprise value of your business.
What you will need to do is leverage the Internet to increase your sales and profitability, thereby increasing the value of your business. With over a 1000 million people online in the world today, and trillions of dollars transacted over the internet, you can sense the presence of a staggering opportunity.
When you put yourself on the virtual map, you are in effect completely eliminating geographic barriers. With one step, you reach a wider, more diverse audience. A properly marketed Web site can be a very effective means of reaching new and existing customers and expanding your geographic presence. Here are a few tips:
- Get a smart, professionally designed website designed for your company.
- Place your logo prominently on all pages.
- Place brief but informative and useful brochure ware of your company so that your potential customers, vendors and partners get an idea of who you are.
- Use search engine optimization tools to ensure that your Web site appears at the top of search lists when someone looks for a product or service similar to what you offer.
- Make sure your site prompts visitors to input comments and feedback. This way, you can capture the information of existing and potential customers to support the efforts of your sales team.
- Ensure that your website allows a safe and secure online purchasing experience. Use the best payment gateways and incorporate every possible security signatures that you can afford. When you allow customers to purchase your products or services online, you can more than quadruple your sales output.
By allowing people to shop online at your Web site, you can reduce your sales staff and other overheads. Imagine what this can do to your business’s bottom-line. Putting up your brochure content on your site can eliminate the need to print expensive brochures and other collateral materials.
Retain your customers and build customer loyalty by offering customer contact and support online. When your customers’ requests are attended to via real time chat, or email follow up, there’s greater satisfaction and trust in your company.
Social Brand Visibility: Mixx
Mixx is a user-driven social media site that combines social networking and bookmarking with web content, blogging and personalization tools.
There is so much information of the web these days that we don’t have the time to find the good stuff that interests us or is important to our business. Who knows better than you what informs you, what makes you think, what makes you laugh?
With Mixx you can be in charge. Using YourMixx you can tailor the content categories, specific users and groups and see the top-rated content as chosen by you and people who share your passions. It is like whipping up your own version of the web. Just tell the site how you like it and they’ll deliver the best the web has to offer—whenever you want it. You can create a personalized blend of web content that includes text-based articles, images and videos, using either free-form or pre-determined meta tags to define items by subject matter or geography.
The content on Mixx comes from various online sources. Mixx is in partnerships with a growing list of online publishing outlets that include CNN.com, USA Today, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The Weather Channel.
Mixx users can also follow other users with whom they share common interests, as well as create, join and invite other Mixx users to private groups to further share and discuss relevant items among peers.
There are a few methods you can use Mixx: –
Mixx Channels – Publishers of content must fight to be noticed. Mixx Channels enable companies to gather topical chatter and shared stories, photos, and videos into one place, an experience that cuts through the noise and delivers relevant content and information.
Mixx Sitebox – Promotes increased engagement and recirculation. It allows users to get a box of their favorite news channel and see what others have chosen and how much interested the news bit has generated.
Mixx Sifter – The Mixx community gives direct feedback on advertising. The better ads will get impressions – not based on how much is paid, but on how positive the feedback is from users.
An advertiser uploads five different ads, in virtually any format. Mixx then invites its frequent users to review those ads, rate them and provide direct private feedback. The most popular ad is then run on the site. Mixx is highlighting the value of direct feedback to advertisers.
Social Bookmarking Sites – Blinklist
Using the big search engines; Google, Yahoo, and Bing has become a way of life for us. Google became a verb in the English language. The problem with the search engines is the amount of information they present. If you want something specific it is sometimes like searching for a needle in a hay stack.
The main reason, apart from the wealth of information, is the indexing system which is done by machines. What will happen if all those pages were vetted by humans, not machines?
Social Bookmarking provides that vetting.
Social bookmarking sites allow the users to choose the website they like, bookmark them, tag them, categorize them and share them with others. Other users can pass them on to their groups of friends, and the word spreads. It is a way for like-minded users to rank and store websites, articles, blogs and videos.
Blinklist is one of those sites that proved to be very affective.
With an extremely simple and free registration, Blinklist installs a button on your toolbar. In a few quick steps you export all your existing bookmarks to their site.
You have entered a world of human interaction. You can see what others have bookmarked, you can check what is the most bookmarked page in a certain topic, you can see what your friends found interesting and you can rate their finds.
And by going to their site, you can access your bookmarks from any computer. That is a great feature when you want to show your friends, your coworkers or your boss something interesting you have found.
Blinklist enables you to save a copy of the web page on your computer. If the website disappears or is blocked you still have a copy. You can bookmark articles you are interested in reading later, a copy is saved on your computer and you can read it even when you are offline.
Social Bookmarking has become a great way to increase the visibility of your website, articles, blogs or product and is increasingly incorporated in an effective marketing campaign. It provides an instant statistics tool that enables you to measure, assess and learn what is working and what does not.
To use social bookmarking to your advantage you need to know which sites cater to your target audience, especially if you are dealing with affiliate marketing programs, or specific blogs. Birds of feather flock together, they say, and so do internet users.