Shelby Clark
MBus(Adv) Marketing and International Business

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A common misconception is that Social Media Marketing is about selling your product on Social Media. That is not completely wrong but there is much more to it. With the rise of the internet consumers now have the ability to voice opinions, research information and seek out alternatives so simply putting a product in front of them and asking them to buy it is not going to cut it. Social Media marketing now is all about creating a conversation. You need to imagine Social Media Marketing like dating – you can’t just walk up to someone and say “Hi, your cute marry me?” so with Social media marketing you can’t go “Hi this is my product buy it”. You want to chat first, get to know each other, weigh up the pros and cons and then they can decide if they want to take that next step to get married or in this case buy your product. So the main goal on Facebook for example is to get customers to use Messenger to ask questions and interact with you. From there you can then introduce the sale. The main platforms you want to be focusing on will depend on the market you are dealing with. Facebook is a good all-rounder with audiences stretching both genders and most age categories plus its used globally. Instagram is for a younger target market but requires creative imagery as opposed to text to get your point across. If your focus is more B2B streams then you may be looking at creating connections on LinkedIn.

Shelby Clark
MBus(Adv) Marketing and International Business

The post Social Media appeared first on Marketing Makeovers.

www.tshopbiz.com.au

My quick view of this process which has taken months is that a brand must reflect everything a company does or says at every customer access point. If for example your advertising on TV is a customer service strategy and yet when customers come into stores and find a lack of staff and they are not knowledgeable on the products and services you instantly have lost some integrity.

In choosing and launching a brand my strategy is to always first seek to understand then be understood. As a marketer and/or a consultant go out and spend time in the various customer touch point, get a feel for what is happening, gain an understanding of the culture. Spend time with the management team in all divisions and understand the strategy of the company and where it is heading.

Once you understand where the company is currently positioned design a branding that reflects and reinforces that position so there is no integrity loss at initial launch. Then by understand what is the company’s desired direction is you can have the brand with flexible elements to travel on the same journey.

In TshopBiz the name reflects the business is made up of Telstra Licensed Shop – it’s a Telstra Licensed Shop Business. The star reflects the various colours related to individual locations and represents the coming together of each location to build a ‘group’ of companies. Each colour within in the star can be changed are the star pivots so if the business continues to grow by changing colours we can have the same logo for multiple locations. The description of the company, the vision and values were derived and agreed at server senior management workshops and are ‘lived’ every day by staff and built into their annual reviews. With TShopBiz you get what you see.

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To be a good marketer you have to be a good at sucking up. Your favourite saying should be, “what’s in it for them”. If you want to implement a company wide campaign that does not die on the sales floor you had better spend the time explaining what your wanting to achieve and getting the sales people’s buy in before launching. I have seen a marketing campaign with a launch date the same as the national sales conference when the sales people were all away and I’ve seen a marketing campaign generating new installations at a time when the technicians have their heaviest annual work load. To make a customer promise in advertising and have the customers find long waiting lists means a loss of brand integrity not to mention as possible social media backlash.

A good marketer also understands external suppliers are an integril part of the team. Not only do suppliers add value in the campaign execution process if your having conversations with them rather than just simply directing them but they are also a great source of new ideas an innovation as they often discuss what other businesses may be doing. I judge my suppliers on making targets, reducing costs and hitting deadlines but more importantly I judge them on the depth of relationship. If something stuffs up do they have their shoulder to the wheel also and are they always looking for ways to improve their delivery and deliver innovative ideas.

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I’m often asked this and having just spent 2 days at a local business expo talking to small businesses it still seems a baffling question to most.

(1) What is it – it’s a fancy new term for, information shared by word of mouth. Before mobile phones and the Internet we used to talk over the fence to our neighbors or go off to kids sport and spend some time talking to the other parents.  “what are you doing this weekend” we would say. “I’m getting some plumbing done in the bathroom” they would reply. “Oh do you know a good plumber?” we would ask.  There it is, Social Media in action.  Now we have mobile phones and Internet and applications on them that allow groups of people to find and talk to each other.  It’s just word of mouth using a different medium where people discuss, recommend or voice their dislike of certain things.

(2) Should I have it? Yes – but like a good wine – in moderation. We want people talking about our business and recommending us to others and the more people are doing that the more likely we will make more sales. Social media (promoting word of mouth) has to be part of your overall marketing plan and the amount of time spent doing it must be in portion to the time you spend on other promotional activity and what the return is from that.  Here is an example: one of my clients is a retail franchise, they want people walking through their doors and their franchise agreement does not allow them to have their own retail web site. There are 21,000 households in their store footprint and currently they have 198 “likes” on social media.  Spending time on social media talking to the 198 is talking to less than 1% of the local community so as a rule of thumb 1% of their marketing time should also be spent on Social Media or 24 minutes a week. To spend time on social media when you could be dropping a brochure in every household’s letter box is just silly.  Yes, I hear the screams about spending time where the greatest potential is but I also hear the boss saying – show me the money.

(3) Will I make money? Maybe  - Just Google – Pepsi & social media disaster, you will see even the big boys make mistakes and loose money.  Social media can be an efficient cost reduction mechanism as well as a revenue generator but also like Pepsi you can loose money, market share and direction if you get it wrong or do it while forsaking other marketing activities. (a) If you simply posted tips and tricks how to use your products and asked customers to follow you for that reason you may reduce incoming service calls and save money. (b) If your prepared to spend the time posting at least 3 items a week, reviewing results, building links to your web site which will also need the same updates, replying to customer comments both good and critical and you have the patience to build a following then you will make money.  If your social marketing is not integrated with your overall marketing plan, if you over resource it or start without an understanding of it then invariably – you will fail.

Summary  – Seek first to understand, do your research, make a plan, look at how you will measure it and the possible returns then look at the cost trade off of not doing something else. Do not fall for the “oh every one is doing it”. Word of mouth is important to your business and there are several ways to fuel it, social media is just one of them.

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Think not what you need for yourself but what they need and how you can help achieve their goals then they might support you. A proposal should never be submitted without some research conducted into the business you are asking support from and a proposal should never be ‘you can have any color as long as it’s black”.

Customize your proposal – At the very least go to the businesses web site and have a look around, look at the latest press releases, look for social responsibility pages, look for recent new office openings, you might even find an annual report with some handy information about their goals and outlook. Also have a look at the ‘about us’ pages, find the management team and look at their interests and history.

Some examples:

People reached – let’s say you’re a sporting team like a local netball competition. There are 14 courts and teams play all Saturday. Let’s also say there is one game per hour and an average of 10 players per team over the 8 hours. So your proposal could reasonably include reaching each weekend 2,240 teenage females, or around 4,480 parents in a captive audience for around 1 hour each. You could then offer a sponsorship that includes access via email and a retail stand at the ground.

Professional services – let’s say you’re a triathlon club and you have the obvious equipment suppliers but need more. Think about businesses that have lots of staff and a good work culture of involvement. Go to all the triathlon competition and fun run sites and look through the corporate team results. Those businesses may well want the services of a head coach to come in and run team building exercises or they may want people to come in and talk about nutrition and health. If their staff participates in some events maybe offer one free membership to use as a staff incentive.

Staff involvement – many organizations now give staff some days a year off normal duties so they can work in a charity or a sponsor’s business. You may find this in the ‘careers’ section or ‘social responsibilities’ parts of their web site. Your proposal would need to contain what staff would do for a day – cuddle baby wildlife or serve food to the homeless.

Social responsibility – It works on a large scale as well. A well know mining company has a history of supporting indigenous groups and there are several press releases on their website. There has been a goal set to employee 50 of this group by 2015 across the business and including suppliers. How many of the group do you have employed and/or what support have you given without it you won’t be considered over others.

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Country people are hard working, spend long hours out of the house, are loyal, don’t like change, help each other, face to face communication preferred and the ‘clincher’ – like to do business with people who support their community.

Being from the country I thought I knew it all when marketing products back to rural communities but my very first campaign as a young marketer quickly showed me the complexities of the challenge and the skills needed. In short, I was selling long range cordless phones to farmers and as a creative had a picture of a farmer talking on one of the phones while sitting on his tractor in a cane field. I had more complaints than sales simply because the tractor didn’t have roll bars and that was against safety regulations for farmers. The roll bars had been removed in the photo shoot to get a clearer photo of the farmer using the phone.

The point is that rural people will see through fake attempts to appear ‘rural’ or to ‘understand’ their situations. Sending creative executions with lots of green grass and blue sky may look great in the office but is a stab in the heart to a rural community that has been in drought for 7 years.

Some good ideas are to research each community, rural communities more often than not have a community group that knits the community together, rural fire fighters, Country women’s Association, Lions club or a local football team. It is a goo tactic to become a support of this network and if possible show a face at some events. Reciprocal selling arrangements, dealerships and sponsorships for units sold are all ways to create a profitable connection. Once a bridgehead has been established and the community leaders know what you business is about then roll in the campaigns – but research the creative execution first.

Sounds simple – no it’s not and that’s the mistake I most often see. You must treat rural communities with respect and acknowledge there is a specific set of skills needed to be successful.

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My local take away coffee shop owner asked how he might find some new customers given there was a new café opening up in the street and he expected to loose some existing customers to them.

I suggested as a start he get a handful of his loyalty cards, tick the first 9 boxes leaving the next coffee being the FREE one and take them to the Thai Restaurant on the corner of the street.

The Thai restaurant only opens for dinner and the coffee takeaway only opens until lunchtime so they don’t compete but they do share the same types of customers – local people with finances to eat and drink out. I suggested the restaurant staff could ask their regular customers if they knew of the coffee shop and if not then give them FREE coffee as a reward for the regular patronage. The restaurant staff should write the customer’s name on the card and put their restaurant logo next to it. This way the coffee shop owner can measure the success rate when the cards are presented. With a real cost of around $1.20 to produce a cup of coffee it is a relative cost effective acquisition strategy and importantly easy to measure the ROI is the second row on the loyalty card starts to fill.

So cognizant of privacy laws and collection statements, how is that different to a Corporate washing their customer data with another and making improved offers to their customers? It might not be called ‘big data’ when 2 small businesses work together but it is big for them and common sense in a street where there are only 6 other businesses.

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The use of customer data is a cross business effort. Sales often know what to look for as they see behavioural changes in customers every day, IT know where the data is stored and which snippets to extract, Marketing formulate the offers, Finance measure it, Legal approve it and so on.

Too often we see in businesses groups working so hard they don’t see the cross business opportunities. Sales want to sell more stuff today, Marketing want to make more long-term margin for tomorrow, Customer Service want to stick to their cost efficiency program and so on.

Getting people to take the time to look across the business and view data flows as opportunities for open discussion and innovation is often a paradigm shift best explored by a consultant with a fresh set of eyes.

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But the CEOs, CFOs, Sales, Customer Service and pretty much the rest of the business just want to know how many sales were actually made. They just want to see the money.

Marketers too often are the victims of their own lingo when claiming potential outcomes. For a business to understand the true value of the marketing effort a marketer needs to follow a simple process in their plans – how much was I given to start with, what did I do with it, how much did I give back in actual dollars in the bank.

Only when the Finance team can audit that process and see the direct reward for effort, can marketing claim to be ROI focused.

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