Do you feel like your business isn’t meeting your goals for social media marketing? Perhaps you’re overlooking a few things that could boost your viral opportunities and overall exposure. That’s the point of a recent post by Heather Smith on PR Daily.
“Social media (participation) is the most popular online activity, so it makes perfect sense for businesses to want to tap into social media marketing to increase sales,” she writes. Simply opening an account or sending out some posts or tweets is not enough to make social media platforms a viable and profitable part of your marketing strategy. By avoiding some missteps, businesses have the ability to increase their return on investment (ROI) for social media marketing and create more awareness and leads from social media accounts.”
Testimonials are the lifeblood of referral marketing. Many customers and clients are happy to give them when you do a great job or provide outstanding service on a project or over the long term. Sadly, few companies then put them in the right places to capitalize on them.
Building a good testimonial requires more than just doing good work. A blog post by Cairril Mills, owner of a design and marketing firm in Bloomington, IN, goes beyond the obvious. She advises approaching the clients who are like those you really want to work with and make sure they have a compelling story to tell. Then, interview people most likely to impress the prospects you want to impress. Get them to describe the problem or need they had, how your business helped them solve that problem or fill that need and the benefits gained from their relationship with you.
Here’s a competitive intelligence tool that’s credible and free.
Google Alerts can help you stay up to date on developments in your business by tracking industry news and trends and your competitors’ activities automatically. And this information has a wide variety of uses beyond tracking your competitors, such as gathering material for email marketing and social media campaigns.
We always think of Google searches as a way for customers and prospects to find out about us. As one of the world’s largest aggregators of information, Google is well-positioned to pull in news articles, blog posts, even website changes and anything else that hits the Internet. Google Alerts is a free service, all of it delivered to your email box whenever and as often as you want. Google Alerts recently launched a redesign of its format for better aesthetics and management.
There’s trouble in the General Mills community – even as the company had a weekend change of heart. As reported in many, many media outlets late last week, downloading a 50-cent coupon for a box of cereal may have precluded a consumer from suing the food-product giant – which sells a lot more than Cheerios and Fruit Loops.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul (MN) Business Journal, a sister publication of the Atlanta Business Chronicle, reported the company abandoned a controversial new privacy policy that sought to bar consumers from suing the company if they engaged with General Mills online. The reversal came after their new rules sparked a backlash on social media.
Facebook has been making technology news over the past few weeks with Virtual Reality (VR) which could have many exciting applications for marketing. Today, it’s another reason to assess your use social media because you it takes time to create an impact via Social.
Facebook has developed a new capability, called Deep Face, and is reportedly acquiring Oculus VR, a virtual reality company. Deep Face is both fascinating and fearful at the same time.
As reported in a blog by marketing executive Chad Pollitt, news coverage, termed “earned media,” is 80% more effective than branded content, or owned media, at the consideration and affinity stages of the purchase process. At the familiarity stage, which is closer to the actual purchase, news coverage is 38% more effective.
The study presented 900 consumers with three different types of content: expert content from credible sources (earned media), branded content (owned media), and user-generated content (such as reviews on Amazon).
For Company Pages, LinkedIn is removing the Products & Services tab, on April 14. If you have a Company Page and use that tab to tell followers about your offerings, you’ll need to move that info to your Company Update or Showcase Pages, which some companies are already doing.
If you don’t have a Company Page, or never used the Products & Services tab, don’t blow off this blog post. Instead, look at how much information is being shared in LinkedIn groups and how often your biz dev folks’ profiles are being viewed each month.
If one thing hasn’t changed in the last 10 years, it’s that you constantly need to innovate and change to compete.
Lew Platt, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, said in a speech 10 years ago: “You must anticipate that whatever made you successful in the past won’t in the future.” He made the statement in a speech that Industry Week characterized as “a bit of sage advice for guiding an organization in a time of rapid and turbulent change.”
If you go back and read the article, well, you’ll find that 10 years later, much remains unchanged about innovation, entrepreneurialism and change.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing has established itself as one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways for small businesses to get out the word about their products and services. In today’s highly connected world, a good word-of-mouth strategy combines a number of techniques that are all designed to develop pathways that lead back to you.
Back when the Internet was coming into its own, word-of-mouth marketing was mostly a function of networking groups, some of which functioned – and still do – as lead-generation groups.
When changing your company’s name, updating your website just means replacing an old logo and name with the new, right? While updating aesthetics is one part of rebranding a website, website mechanics and search engine optimization strategies must change, as well. Provider of commercial security solutions for more than ten…