3 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Leverage Social Media to Market New Products and Services

Thousands of new businesses are started in the U.S. every month. Budding entrepreneurs with minds full of ambition and great ideas turn their understanding of a common problem within a market into a new product or service solution.

Many new businesses score well with the solution they've created including the logistics of suppliers, manufacturing, and distribution to bring that product or service to market. However, one of the greatest challenges of starting a new business centers on marketing: "We have a great product, but how do we get people to buy it?"

Over the years I've had a chance to talk with many entrepreneurs with great ideas and great minds for engineering, creativity, and accounting. Many do not possess the same acumen for marketing in general, let alone specific areas like social networking.

At a coffee shop recently, I overheard a business consultant meeting with a woman who wanted to start a new business with a unique line of upscale tea. With a solid product and business plan, the only major questions were about things like a website, blog, and social media. Publicity, SEO, and product sampling were mingled with other marketing and advertising concepts as if they were all the same thing. I could understand why she was uncertain, being provided with so many options and considerations.

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

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

I'm a fan of keeping things simple to help people gain confidence in areas like social media marketing. With that KISS perspective in mind, here are three ways entrepreneurs can use social media to gain insight, grow awareness, and optimize their online marketing.

Social listening is an ongoing effort to assess online interest trends and for hits about a particular topic during a given moment in time. Our upscale tea entrepreneur could leverage a basic tool like Trackur, a mid-market tool like Google's Wildfire, or a more advanced tool like Radian6 to uncover conversations from real customers as they discuss their favorite teas, 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 the upscale tea.

Social media research and monitoring 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, or Followerwonk, our tea seller can find centers of influence in the upscale tea-drinking community.

Social content for marketing often starts with a blog where new business owners can talk about the story of their product and how it solves important problems in the marketplace. A blog can also serve as a communication channel with other blogs in the industry, the media, customers, and a community.

Our upscale tea entrepreneur could start a blog highlighting new teas and welcome conversations with customers and tea fans in general. The blog could serve as a living FAQ repository and as a hub to other social participation channels including Twitter, Facebook, 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? Findable and sharable content makes the social web go 'round.

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's different topics for blog posts, words used in tweets, or types of images shared on Pinterest. Google Analytics is an easy choice for entrepreneurs 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, entrepreneurs or 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.

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The 5 Most Important Elements of a Holiday Social Media Strategy

As social media marketers plan for their sixth holiday season, it's a great time to take stock of the current best practices for amplifying campaigns - and sales - because this year's formula for social marketing success is different.

It's different because both the social landscape (Facebook Timeline, Pinterest, Instagram) and social consumer behaviors (think mobile use and approach to product discovery) have evolved considerably in the last 12 months.

Before we get to the holidays, let me first give a little context.

As I've shared in past columns, we've seen an evolution in social media marketing. First, we were focused on community building and growing fan and follower counts. Marketers then built on that foundation by focusing on engaging fans with content and conversation. And today, we're riding the next wave, focusing on product promotion and quantifying returns from social.

While some early vendors made it easy and inexpensive to publish lightweight social "engagement apps" around things like contests, voting, and content publishing, many marketers have found that these low-cost tactics are also low value.

And, as with many new channels, especially one as complicated and dynamic as social and mobile, there is often wisdom in returning to marketing fundamentals. As a result, today's winning approach is analogous to the traditional marketing funnel of acquire, convert, retain - but as seen through a social media lens.

This movement isn't a wishful longing for days past, it's a call to focus on what works. And with a busy holiday season beginning to dawn on the horizon, there is no better time to focus on what works best today in social media marketing. So, without further ado, I present the five most important elements of a holiday social media marketing strategy:

1. Promotion: rich posts across social networks. Social channels are specializing. Customer attention is fragmenting and content streams are getting richer. Make sure you have a clear definition of who you want to reach and how to earn your way into their attention streams. Use the best of each network to drive reach and activation.
2. Engagement: experiences that drive amplification and consideration. Social customers want to explore and engage with your products; they want to have their voice heard by voting, commenting, curating, etc. Treat them like a VIP and enable them to create sharable content while they experience your products in a social context. 
   
   
   
3. Amplification: build momentum cross social networks. Social amplification comes primarily from users sharing content they either create or find valuable. Make it easy for participants to share through your identified key social channels. Make sure that your experiences leverage the strengths of each network when pushing to streams.
4. Conversion: collect valuable data and social purchase intent. Every social product experience should be designed to elicit a small number of key, valuable actions for the brand. This could be as simple as capturing an email address or generating a post, or it might even include a loyalty program sign-up or purchase.
5. Analysis: measure and optimize. Closing the loop through reporting is the only way to really understand attribution, quantify results, and ultimately, improve the performance of your social media efforts. Although it will continue to be tough to quantify the influence your marketing efforts have on offline sales, with expertise, proven strategies, and integrated tools, you can truly prove and improve the value you generate.

That's it! Five easy elements that every - yes, every - holiday social strategy must include. Keep this formula in mind as you plan your holiday campaigns and get ready for the most exciting social marketing season yet.

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Your Social Media Marketing Plan in 5 Easy Steps

Many marketers launch their social media programs because they feel they need to and then scramble to understand both how they will make these work and how they will be managed. Most of them do this with no goal in mind and worse, no understanding of how social media marketing (SMM) works.

Many believe that social is the answer to customer acquisition and are short-sided in defining realistic results. Unfortunately this all results in lost time, lost customers, lost market share, and lost profitability.

Stop chasing your tail in social. Start your SMM planning right by following these five easy steps.

SMM Step 1: Create Your Executive Overview Business Plan

Spell out your business in a one-pager to realize why you need social:

• Your Business Mission and History
• Your Business or Revenue Model
• Descriptions of your Products & Services
• Details of Your Target Audience
• Review of Your Current Marketing Efforts

SMM Step 2: Define Your Specific Social Media Goals

It is impossible to reach and attain a goal without defining exact specifics. Too many business owners let social metrics define their goals, such as “More Twitter Followers”, “More Fans on Facebook”, “More YouTube Views.”

As marketers, we all know that it is really about engagement that counts. But, what engagement are we talking about? Positive engagement? Volume of commenting on a controversial piece of content?

You need to go a step beyond to define specific, actionable, and (most importantly) reasonable SMM goals. Here are some specific SMM goals you might use after completing your business review:

• Validate a new product or service using social as a research platform.
• Develop buzz and interest around a new product.
• Engage users in social to generate relevant and targeted traffic to your site.
• Gain market share by leading customer/client service through social.
• Generate registrations to branded events through social.

SMM Step 3: Find Your SMM Voice

One of the keys to ensuring your success in social is to create and implement a voice that resonates with your specific target audience. For each audience type, break down and research age, income, location, and reasons for possibly buying your products/services.

SMM Step 4: Choosing Your Social Tools Appropriately

Choosing your social tools appropriately is an essential piece of your online communications plan, so choose wisely. Let’s do a short review of the leading social sites to assist you in your selection:

• Facebook:More than 955 million users. Majority between 18-25; 60 percent female. Best opportunity for community building with customers.
• Twitter:More than 555 million users. Majority between 26-34; 57 percent female. Best tool for interacting in real-time.
• Google Plus+:More than 170 million users. Majority between 26-34; 63 percent male. Platform for driving visibility around a brand.
• LinkedIn:More than 150 million users. Majority between 26-34, directly followed by 35-44. The number one B2B social networking tool.
• Pinterest: More than 12 Million Users. Majority between 26-44; 68 percent female. A viral platform for sharing stories via pictures.

SMM Step 5: Plan & Execute Content & Delivery

Now to the hard part – finding, creating, and delivering engaging social media content. Social media execution can be daunting, but with a proper plan it is doable and can drive real (marketing) results.

What you need to define:

• Your frequency of content delivery & response to social engagement.
• Your types and specific topics for content creation.
• Ways to increase audience engagement.
• Events that can drive social.
• Your social success metrics (number of followers, number of fans, volume of traffic back to site, number of retweets, etc.).

Summary

Social media marketing can be an excellent vehicle for developing online brand awareness, customer engagement, and audience growth. This requires a solid, measurable plan and a commitment to developing consistent and valuable content. In addition, it’s crucial for you to have a clear understanding of why social can be useful for reaching your business goals.

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5 Reasons SEM Agencies Should Do Social and SEO

I'll admit it; I was wrong when I thought that social media was a stretch for SEM and SEO agencies and that a separate set of agencies would be required to fully tap the social media marketing opportunity for advertisers and marketers. And I was wrong when I assumed that marketers for whom PPC search was critically important would turn to boutique specialist agencies that excelled in PPC search either exclusively or primarily, not one-stop shops. After reevaluating both my decision-making process over the last decade with regard to focus, and by talking with clients, prospects, and fellow folks in the industry, I've become convinced that the benefits of a unified approach to search and social marketing handled through a team with high levels of communication with each other is superior to a fragmented approach.

What was my response after a reevaluation of the landscape that suggested a significant strategy change? I bought an agency that put me back into the one-stop shop business. But let's look at you and your strategies and how you should approach the tasks of resource and budget allocations across paid and organic search as well as social media.

Much of my earlier decision process supporting the boutique model was based on the behavior of IT departments at enterprise clients and the way mid-size marketers decided who should "own" the website (generally IT). IT departments 10 or 15 years ago were far more likely to have resisted the necessary changes to a content management system (CMS) or e-commerce site based on SEO recommendations.

However, in the last 10 years (when I made the decision to double-down on PPC search and make SEO more of a hobby), many IT teams finally learned that SEO is a necessary part of having an online presence. From 1996 through 2002, my recollection is that when we put together SEO priority lists and itemized the SEO initiatives that would be required in order for clients to reach their potential in the vast majority of instances, months would pass and progress of SEO would be slowed due to IT teams dragging their feet. That still happens to some extent, but far less frequently. In addition, Google and Bing rely more heavily on external ranking factors to break a tie between two sites, both of whom have great, relevant content.

That brings us to social media. It turns out that the evolution of social media advertising and earned social media (as some people call it) has several factors that make the expertise of the SEM and SEO agency and team relevant to social media. Regardless of whether or not the search engines are using social media signals in their ranking formulas (many people believe that it's already happening, if not imminent), earned social media is clearly a catalyst for coverage in the blogs and press, much of which includes links and citations. There's the SEO to social media link.

So, the first reason a holistic digital marketing agency with strong competence in SEM should be running social and SEO is:

1. Social media supports SEO. You need good social activity to maintain buzz and get links.
2. The lines between earned media social and paid media social are blurring. Facebook's Sponsored Stories ads work best when the brand has interesting things to say and is well-known within the social media ecosystem. So, paid social media advertising is more efficient when the social media strategy and tactics are coordinated with teams that are in regular communications.
3. Attribution. I barely need to say more. Brands that also invest in early buy funnel (that outdated yet very useful concept) marketing communications get more mileage out of social media and SEM campaigns even with last-click attribution. When digital "marcom" is handled either by a single team with access to all the data on paid and earned media social and search (including SEO), or information is shared freely, the results are better. Access to the full spectrum of marketing data allows for both experimentation and modeling, taking us one step closer to a marketing mix model (including earned social and SEO).
4. Targeting and audiences. SEM folks understand targeting and the various forms that targeting can take (beyond the keyword). An SEM team understands and can appreciate the differences between search and social media audience targeting and how best to combine targeting options.
5. Convenience. This seems like a trivial reason, but I've heard it far too many times from client-side marketing departments not to mention it. When a client-side marketer has only eight to 15 hours a day to work every repeated conversation about campaigns and their effectiveness, it slows that marketer down from taking on meaningful projects.

So, after having been a stubborn believer in the "boutique agencies rock" as the only solution for 10 years, I've decided that if a marketer can find an agency that is great at the most important channel and competent in the other important supporting areas of online marketing, then indeed the one-stop shop can be the right decision. Agencies that are great in a couple of areas often end up acting as general contractors themselves, farming out the tactical work to freelancers or other agencies. The client gets a single point of contact and responsibility. The alternative of hiring best-in-class boutiques and project managing those is clearly an option, but requires a commitment from the marketer to staff the internal teams appropriately.

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Social Media Seasonality

Marketers have become quite adept at managing and messaging consumers according to a calendar that matches brand needs. In general, marketers work to maximize their efficiency by staying top-of-mind with consumers along the product lifecycle, but particularly when sales or other desirable events are most likely to occur. Brands control the timing of ad campaigns, content launches, new product introductions, and other budgetary expenditures, like sampling, to fall mostly in this productive window, but they now have a new challenge in timing social interactions. How do you plan a calendar of social interactions when the brand cycle is off or down but consumers aren't?

This may not impact every marketer, but many products and services have seasonal cycles that drive their planning and spending. If you are a ski resort or an allergy brand, for example, then your product or service may be out of sight, out of mind for a portion of the year. But the connections you make in social can't be dropped when convenient for the brand and then picked up again without paying a price. You can cycle with the seasons in social interactions; you just can't drop off completely. There are some things you can focus on to help smooth out your year and maintain the connections, buzz, and engagement that you worked so hard to earn.

Adjust cadence and goals. Recognize that consumers might not be in the mood or mindset for you right now, and adjust both the cadence and content of your interactions. Fewer contacts might be more appropriate and productive just now. Above all, adjust your goals and expectations. While during your "season" you are rightly focused on conversion goals and measuring your CPAs while optimizing intently; during your customers' off-season you might have softer goals like delivering reminder messaging or gaining additional levels of opt-ins, gathering insights, testimonials, or even testing new messaging, new products, or new branding elements within the relatively safe environment of your own communities.

Leverage brand extensions. Does your ski resort become a mountain bike resort in spring and summer? Keep in mind what you are best known for and what motivated the interactions in social to-date. Hopefully you have some knowledge base and a database that segments your community members by origin or interest.

Use content tie-ins. What other brand associations can lead to content generation during the downcycle? Charity tie-ins are a great way to extend the brand story in off-season months but there may also be other stories that your audience may find of interest. If you have a likable real or animated spokesperson, perhaps they can be fleshed out with a variety of stories and events that bridge the gap months.

Look for audience-relevant content. Aside from direct product or brand content, a seasonal brand should be very aware of what other types of content their social media audience responds to or wants. Your research may peg your audience as ripe for environmental or celebrity news or a year-round fitness angle. Feed them content that they'd consider relevant, that reflects positively on the brand, and that keeps you top-of-mind.

Segment audiences by season. Not every season occurs simultaneously or is tied to weather. Use geographic segmentation to hit the seasons as they occur in various parts of the country. If you can market internationally, look for markets around the globe that are in season. Holiday seasons vary by the holidays particular audiences celebrate.

Warm up your audience pre-season. Make good use of the period in advance of your season to warm up your audience and get them thinking about your product or service. Engage them with quality content so that your primary touch points aren't always sales messaging.

Tempt your audiences even in the off-season. Don't disregard the aspirational value of off-season images and messages. People who are avid skiers are probably motivated by gorgeous ski photography no matter the season. For long-lead-time purchases you aren't truly off-season and can use discounting and promotions to keep users in the loop and thinking about your brand. This is a great time for less frequent but longer-form storytelling. Solicit customer testimonials or do case studies and highlight a few with some images.

Differentiate and prioritize. Don't treat all communities the same way. If your most active, productive, and engaged audiences tend to congregate in one place, then prioritize limited resources in that direction.

Use the off-season to gather content. Use your downtime to prep for uptime. If your offering is visually appealing then use your downtime to build up a stunning visual library that you can then selectively leverage on Pinterest or other properties when the timing is right. Or use your time to establish connections with the right bloggers and organize events that can kick off at more optimal times.

The biggest mistake you can make with a seasonal business in social media is to assume that seasonal high months are the only ones you need to plan for and to ignore all of the adjacent opportunities for good interactions and good content. How have you leveraged a seasonal business in the off-season in social media?

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7 Social Media Tactics Your 2013 Budget Needs to Succeed [Research]

The end of summer signals budget season for many businesses. As social media matures, it's no longer a test outside of your budget. Adding to this pressure, social media conversion rates are low relative to other marketing strategies. Therefore you must coordinate and integrate social media marketing into your overall marketing plans to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

To get your 2013 marketing plans on track to increase revenues, here are seven social media tactics based on solid research that you need now. (BTW, use these charts to persuade your management team!)

1. Leverage the power of social connections. Consumers are more likely to respond to recommendations from their friends than social media ads. The recommendation has the unstated endorsement.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Actionable marketing tip: Encourage customers to share your information on social media venues. Additionally, use social media advertising to target your audience and to send them to your page rather than off of the social media site.
2. Think beyond Facebook for social media. While Facebook is too large to ignore as a marketing platform, it's not as effective as other social media options for converting to sales. Specifically, researchby Shop.org, comScore, and The Partnering Group found that 70 percent of consumers click through on a retail blog to the firm's website and 68 percent of consumers use YouTube to browse and research products. Further, consumers follow more brands on social media platforms other than Facebook.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Actionable marketing tip: Build owned media in the form of a blog and video. Then distribute this content on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to social sharing.
3. Be device indifferent to maximize reach. Performics and ROI Research found that consumers use a variety of connected devices to access social media. Interestingly, they didn't include televisions. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Actionable marketing tip: At a minimum, have a mobile strategy to ensure that consumers can access your site from your social media location regardless of whether they're using a computer, smartphone, or tablet.
4. Show your emotional side to increase virality. Wharton professors Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman in an article entitled, "What Makes Online Content Viral?" from the Journal of Marketing Research found that positive, emotional, and/or surprising, useful information increases social transmission. Actionable marketing tip: Create remarkable content to enhance the chances for engagement and social sharing.
5. Skip promotional-speak to build customer trust. Face it, your customers are savvy and can smell an ad a mile away. Even worse, they don't trust your ads. They trust and seek content in a variety of formats.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Actionable marketing tip: Develop useful content shoppers seek before they purchase. Answer their questions, show them how to use your products, and provide customer reviews.
   
   
   
6. Socialize inside the square with photos. Photographs are audience magnets. Images attract attention and pull your audience in.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Actionable marketing tip: Create an integrated content strategy around photographs using Facebook,Pinterest, and/or Instagram.
7. Continue customer relationships initiated on social media with email. The reality is that social media has low conversion rates relative to email, according to Monetate. Going from social media engagement to "Buy Now" isn't effective.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Actionable marketing tip: Build an email house file to continue the dialogue with prospects and then convert them.

To improve your marketing results from your social media strategies, start by acknowledging that consumers are active on social media venues to socialize. Then leverage the power of social media to engage with prospects, customers, and the public to build trust and continue your relationships on email and other owned media where you can convert them to sales.

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How to create friendly mobile landing pages

Over the last year, much attention has been paid to, and in fact a cottage industry has grown up around, optimizing landing pages for mobile devices. But too often landing pages are not optimized for mobile users, generating frustration and anger rather than conversions.

According to Walker Sands, 12.6% of total website traffic was driven via mobile devices in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 102% from the year before. As consumers increasingly turn to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets for product research, web browsing, and on-the-go shopping, it’s key for online brands to rely on landing pages that are not only optimized for mobile devices, but demonstrate relevance to the user as well. 

The Mobile Lens 

When consumers search using their mobile phones they typically have a clear purpose in mind. The first step for marketers to better engage with mobile users is to understand exactly who is searching from their mobile devices, and what they’re searching for.

If a user is searching from inside a brick-and-mortar store, they may be staring at one price and wondering if they can get it for less online. To counter this, highlight on the mobile landing page your guarantee to beat any competitor’s price. If you don’t have a price advantage, make sure users know what unique advantages you do offer. Maybe it’s your return policy, your shipping speed, or your expert knowledge. Tell them up front before they click away and never come back.

We've all heard the expression "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." Well, the mobile web is "what happens while your visitors are doing something else" - i.e. watching TV, waiting for a bus, or just killing time. Your job is to figure out if they are a committed shopper, and if not, how to turn them into one. 

While we’ve been rightly focused on delivering a usable mobile experience, not enough emphasis has been placed on what is useful for consumers. In addition to optimizing for the smaller screen, it is most important to deliver a more relevant experience that keeps consumers engaged and interested when interacting with your brand from their mobile devices.

New vs. Returning Visitors

Often customers have questions before they buy. What is the shipping and return policy? What kind of payments are accepted? Do I have to pay sales tax? All that information takes up prime real estate on the already-small screen of a mobile device.

That’s why it’s key for online brands to know whether or not a visitor is already familiar with your brand. If it’s someone’s first time on your site, for example, it’s best to highlight your value proposition front and center. If they’re a repeat visitor, on the other hand, you may consider devoting this precious real-estate to information more important to someone already familiar with your brand.

Headlines Matter

With limited real estate on mobile devices, you have to get to the point fast. You are also challenged with reaching someone who is probably only giving you a small slice of their attention. They may be in a store, on a train, or talking to someone else.  Unlike a laptop, where you typically have the consumer’s full attention, on the mobile web you almost certainly don’t.

An easy first step toward effectively engaging with mobile users is to make sure your landing pages use large enough fonts and present a clear call to action. More importantly, you must be very concise with your headline copy and get people hooked right away because you only have a small window of opportunity to grab their attention. Use urgency and emotion rather than flowery details because it’s easy for someone to lose concentration when Draw Something or Facebook is just a tap away.

Test, Test, and Test

The reality is that landing page optimization for mobile is constantly evolving, and nobody has definitive answers. On the technology side there are a set of best practices that should always be followed:

• Develop in HTML5 since Apple devices, which represent a large part of the market, don’t use Flash

• Don’t weigh your pages down with heavy graphics that make them take a long time to load

• Don’t use hover features, which will not render properly (or at all)

However, from a marketing perspective, there are no absolute hard and fast rules. That’s why brands need to be disciplined and test what works for them. Try shorter headlines. Try simpler copy. Try lighter graphics.

Figure out what works best for your brand and what helps you reach this lucrative—and fast growing —segment of the market. And when you do identify what keeps mobile users engaged: Keep doing it.

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