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Getting started with social media: where to begin?

February 9th, 2010

There is no doubt that social media is having a huge impact on the way we communicate. Now that Facebook is cited to be the 3^rd largest country in the world, having more registered users than the population of USA, and social networking has become the number one activity on the web, taking the place of … well, you know what was number one before, don’t you? (don’t dare type the word and get shown up in the wrong kind of keyword searches!!), it looks like that social media is not a fad.

Social media is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

So rather than bury your head in the sand and try to pretend it will all go away, at some point you will have to acknowledge these new ways of communicating with potential clients.

But where to begin?

Just because social media is technology based, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by it. But social media is just like any other type of marketing tool in that it needs proper planning, objectives set and a timeline planned out to make sure it is an effective use of your resources.

And like any other marketing tool, the place to start with social media is with your clients.

Too many business owners get sucked in to “all that glitters” and before you know it, they are tweeting, facebooking and blogging all hours of the day.

But how many of you have considered your clients first?

You wouldn’t dream of placing a £5K advert in the Sunday Times without thorough market research to gauge the return on your investment.

You wouldn’t dream of getting in to your car and driving 500 miles to see a potential client without having a phone conversation with them first to understand what it was they were looking for.

And yet, there are business owners all over the world who are jumping on the social media bandwagon – without taking the time to consider how their target clients use it.

It actually doesn’t matter what you like or dislike about the different social media tools, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. What matters is how your target clients are beginning to use social media and what they like and don’t like about them.

So before you tweet, poke or blog – STOP! Take the time to understand how your target clients use various social media tools. Once you’ve done that, your investment in integrating social media in to your marketing strategy will be spent more wisely.

What thoughts do you have about getting started with social media? It would be great to read your comments

Posted in Marketing Small Business | 1 Comment »

Is it Time to Ditch Traditional Marketing?

January 28th, 2010

The past few years have created very exciting marketing opportunities for small business owners. The ability to get yourself known, both locally and internationally, has been made easier and cheaper than ever before.

The explosion of social media has allowed you to upload videos, publish articles and reach out to potentially thousands of new clients – every day. And without having to shell out thousands of pounds to do it.

But does that mean traditional marketing, such as printed brochures, face-to-face networking and advertising are things of the past?

Can’t we just ditch all that expensive stuff and put all our energies in to these new, web-tech tools?

It’s tempting isn’t it?

But be tempted and you’ll probably find yourself left with a very quiet business pipeline.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Social media and online marketing techniques can be incredibly effective. I use tools such as facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn because of they do generate great results for me and my business.

But use them in isolation? Absolutely not!

Behind my very visible online presence lies speaking schedules, regular face-to-face networking, newsletters as well as postcard campaigns and word of mouth referrals to name but a few other marketing activities I embrace.

Let me give you a great example of a recent campaign that has taken place over the past couple of months. Google released its own internet browser, Chrome. And if there is one company that is synonymous with the internet, it is Google.

Google is dominant in the world of online advertising and it has become a verb, just the way the brand Hoover did all those decades ago.

And yet, when Google launched its new internet browser, did it rely only on the internet?

Absolutely not!

They took out full page spreads in national papers. They were on billboards up and down the country. They had posters in and around the underground in London.

They had a full scale, offline advertising campaign going. And all to spread the word of an internet based product, that could only be used on the internet.

So, it’s not a case of choosing between using social media and traditional methods. It’s about integrating the two worlds together and making sure your offline world is backing up what you are doing online, and vice versa.

How do you do this? Here are a few simple suggestions to get started with (and none of which involved a national advertising campaign, you’d be relieved to know!)

Have your online profiles on your business card, along with your phone number and business address – give people the option of how they want to get in touch with you.
Arrange to have a coffee meeting with a new contact you “meet” on LinkedIn – get to really know your online network.
Have your phone number listed on your website, blog and social networking profiles – make it easy for people to speak to you, rather than be forced to message you electronically all the time.
Pick up the phone to someone rather than send them a message online – it’s amazing how these conversations can go!
Follow up the people you’ve met at a networking event and search for them on LinkedIn – get connected online with the people you meet offline.
Use postcards to promote your facebook page or LinkedIn group to encourage more people to visit and sign up – don’t just rely on those automatic email invitations that seemed to get ignored most of the time.

These are just a few ideas to get you going and very few of them need any cash to follow them through. So, don’t get caught up with the sparkles and glitz of social media and ignore your offline strategies.

The more you can integrate your social media marketing with your traditional marketing, the more effective it will be.

Posted in Featured Articles, Marketing Small Business, Social Media, Website & SEO Tips | 3 Comments »

Social Media: What’s the worst thing you can do?

January 26th, 2010

There’s lots of bad things you can do on social media, isn’t there?

You can sell to everyone all the time and create noise that no-one listens to. You can automate your updates to the point that people wonder if you really a bot, rather than a human being.

You can get obsessed by numbers and spend your whole week focusing on getting more and more followers, irrespective of whether they are porn stars, get-rich-quick-system-sellers or C-list celebs.

You can even kid yourself that because you spent the whole morning replying to tweets and retweeting other people’s tweets that you are actually contributing to the profitability of your business.

But what is the worst thing you can do?

It’s getting started and quitting before you achieve anything.

Most small business owners throw themselves in social media tools, such as facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, create a profile, start updating their status and then after a few weeks, let it all peter out and give up.

It can actually be more damaging to your brand and business to have a twitter account lying dormant or a LinkedIn profile with a half-done profile than having nothing at all.

Sites like LinkedIn and Twitter are indexed so quickly by search engines that your online profiles can appear very quickly in the search results. Go on, try it now – google your own name and see how many of your half-done social networking profiles appear.

And that’s what your potential clients will see too.

By all means, you need to have a play with many of these online tools before deciding how best to use them in your business – there’s a lot to get your head round, isn’t it?

But, start your social media marketing with purpose. Have a strategy, know what you want to get out of using these tools and work out how you are going to incorporate them into the rest of your marketing.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so don’t start until you are ready to achieve.

Posted in Blogging, Marketing Small Business, Social Media | 7 Comments »

How does the style of your writing need to differ between your blog, your brochure and your website?

January 21st, 2010

Most business owners find it incredibly difficult to put down in words why they are so great to work with. Writing can be one of the most challenging skills to learn and master and it’s certainly not high on the list when you first start out.

All the focus in the first few months is around financing, cash flows, business planning and marketing strategy. But one of the most beneficial skills to have as a business owner is often the written word.

Contracting writing out to copywriters can be expensive and often time-consuming. So when small business owners decide to get on with the writing themselves, without thinking about how to write effectively, they are can be costing themselves dearly.

And writing copy for your brochure, your website and your blog all need different styles and approaches.

Let’s take them one by one.

Writing for your brochure. Your brochure and leaflets are going to be printed so design and layout can be just as important considerations as the words you write. Your headline needs to be eye-catching and stop readers in their tracks. This is the time to be selling, to be focusing on what problem the potential client has and how you can make it all better.

Your style has to be strong, punchy and to the point as you’ve usually got limited space. But you’ve also got to get all the facts in to enable your potential client to make a decision.

Writing for your website. Again, this is the time to be selling. But just because you may have unlimited space and pages, doesn’t mean you can ramble on aimlessly.

Strong headlines are essential. Use questions to stop your online visitor in their tracks quickly (you’ve got less than a second to make an impact!) And sharp, clear benefit-driven copy to outline how it is you may be the answer to your potential client’s problems.

People read differently on a screen than they do from print so use short sentences, 2 to 3 word paragraphs and bullet points where appropriate.

Writing for your blog. Whilst your brochure and website is there to sell your business, your blog is there is to build relationships. It is here you need to stop selling and focus on giving value, content and useful information.

Your blog is place to showcase your expertise, to share tips and ideas with your readers and build up a useful resource for potential clients to come back to again and again.

Your blog is one of the doorways to your business so welcome your readers and invite them to check out what is inside, linking relevant pages to your website where the selling can take place. If you try to sell hard at the doorstep, your potential client won’t think about crossing the threshold.

So when thinking about writing, consider the different platforms for your writing. Know when to sell and when to give value. And a blog is place where you will sell more but selling less!

What have you done differently in your brochure, website and blog copy writing?

Posted in Blogging, Marketing Small Business, Website & SEO Tips | 2 Comments »

7 Ways to Build your Blog Following

January 19th, 2010

A blog can be a great marketing tool for a small business. It allows you, the business owner, to showcase your expertise, share ideas and tips on what you help your clients with and give potential clients a real flavour of what you are all about.

A blog can be your online personality, giving some umph and meaning to an otherwise static and boring online brochure.

But for a blog to make real impact on potential clients, it helps to have some life in it. It helps to have more than just you contribute content.

And this is where your blog following comes in. Have people following you, reading your content on a regular basis, stopping by and commenting from time to time – all of this helps give it some credence.

After all, people tend to purchase via recommendations and if others are seen to be contributing and commenting to your blog, it gives the right impression to a new visitor.

But how do you build your blog following? Here are 7 ways.

Tweet your articles – set up your RSS feed to automatically tweet your blog posts and it is instantly tweeted once published for your followers to see. As twitter users are already used to publishing content online with their tweets, they tend to have less reservations for stopping by and leaving a comment.
Tweet your comments – when you get a great comment, tweet about it. If there is one thing that people like more than a great blog article, is someone leaving a great comment. Some of the best blog articles I have read in recent months have had comments that have been more interesting than the articles.
Make your blog subscription easy – don’t hide your RSS feed button away. Make it prominent and usually the best place is top right corner. The more people who subscribe, the more likely you are to have people stop by and comment, as well as share your articles to their network.
Offer email subscription too – not everyone who visits your blog will know how to subscribe to their RSS feed so don’t assume they know how to come back and read your blog. Most people know how to subscribe via email, so give them the option of receiving updates via email. Feedburner is a great system for this.
Link your blog in with your email newsletter – invite your email subscribers to come read your latest blog articles and, again, specifically ask for their comments. If your readers aren’t used to commenting on blogs you may need to lay out some guidelines – make them feel safer about leaving a comment for the world to see.
Email your articles to specific people – if you have a good offline relationship with your network, take the time to email specific articles to specific people and invite comments. By valuing their opinion, they will more likely make the time to drop by and leave them on your blog.
Thank your followers – take the time to thank everyone who visits and leaves a comment. You can, as the blog administrator, see someone’s email address so drop them a line and tell them how much you value their thoughts. They will appreciate it and come back again. And probably tell their friends to come too!

Building your blog following takes time, but it is time worth taking!

What do you think? Have you got another way of building a blog following?

Posted in Marketing Small Business | 3 Comments »

Auto-unfollowing on Twitter: Is it right?

January 15th, 2010

SocialToo, a useful management tool for your social media accounts, has just announced on its blog that Twitter has requested they take away the auto-unfollowing feature.

Up until now, SocialToo subscribers could set their Twitter account to automatically unfollow people when they unfollowed you. Sounds like an efficient way of managing an account, doesn’t it?

On the SocialToo blog they say they added this feature because “when I auto-follow, some times later on those people unfollow you again”. The point being that as Twitter has set out a ratio to ensure you are only follow people in proportion to the number of people who follow you back, it allows you, the Twitter user, to keep adding more followers who keep following you, and dump the ones who don’t.

Doesn’t that mean that you are only in Twitter for the follower numbers?

My take on follower numbers is that they are nothing more than Emporer’s Clothing if you are using Twitter to help promote your brand online.

Yes, the number of followers is a useful indicator of how “popular” you may be and give you one measurement of how “popular” you may become over time, but just because someone follows you, doesn’t mean that they read or act on your tweets.

Tools like auto-unfollow are incredibly useful for those of you who just want to focus on numbers but for most of you reading this, I assume you like to use Twitter like I do – follow people who interest you, engage with you and you learn from. And not follow people just because they are following you or you want them to follow you back.

Noise is not helpful in your day-to-day lives. But conversation and engagement is.

Which is why I think it is very interesting that Twitter itself has taken a stand against auto-unfollows and asked third party applications, like SocialToo, to remove it.

What do you think?

Posted in Cool Tools, Gadgets & Widgets, Social Media | 8 Comments »

6 Things You Need to Know About Writing Website Copy

January 14th, 2010

Biggest website mistake? It’s when business owners spend all their time and energy on making sure the look and feel is right and then try to bash out some copy quickly so that they can make their website go live.

Absolutely, first impressions do count. A picture is worth a thousand words and finding a website designer who understands how some colours have better impact online than others will undoubtedly help the success of your website.

But if you spend no more than a few hours writing up 5 pages of website copy, then all your lovely images, beautiful branding and snazzy colours will be wasted.

If the words don’t back up your branding and speak your clients’ language, your potential clients will be clicking the back button as quickly as they can blink.

Last year I published an article on my blog asking the question “Do Long Sales Letters Work?” And it certainly evoked many comments and thoughts from readers. But putting the long sales letter formula aside for the moment, there are some essential copy writing points to follow if you want your potential clients to take the next step with you via your website.

1. It’s never about you but always about your clients. Avoid the trap of writing about yourself and your business because ultimately your potential clients will only care about what’s in it for them.

So what if you are the market leaders in your region – what does that mean to your client? So what if you have worked with all the big names – how does that benefit your client? Don’t list the reasons why you are so great. Focus on the benefits to your clients.

2. Stop writing “we” and start writing “you”. Print out your home page copy and highlight every “we”, “our” and reference to your business name. Then highlight every “you” in a different colour. There should be 5 times as many “you”s as there are “we”s – but you’ll probably find the opposite!

For every sentence that has a “we” or a “our” in it, re-write it and change the reference to a “you” and you’ll be on the right track to having copy that engages with your potential client, rather than turns them off.

3. Speak your client’s language – not your own. It’s easy to use industry standard pre-fixes and jargon in website copy. After all, you probably use these words every day when you talk to colleagues or suppliers. But your clients probably don’t! Use words they wouldn’t understand and you’ll end up alienating them at worst or coming across too corporate at best.

4. Correct grammar of course, but don’t be afraid of writing colloquially. If your potential clients use informal language, then embrace it. If they use slang, embrace it too.

Over the years, I have had the odd email from a subscriber pointing out my occasional spelling mistakes and bad grammar. But for most of you, the feedback has been that you’ve enjoyed my natural “speaking” style – I write how I talk. If it works for your potential clients, then use it!

5. Use short paragraphs, bullet points and selective bolding. Reading from a screen is different from reading the printed page. People tend to scan and often don’t read word for word.

Make it easier for your online visitor to digest your words by using one to three sentence paragraphs. Break it up with bullet points where appropriate. And use the bold selectively (too much & it defeats the object!).

6. To create action you need to demonstrate pain. Your potential client will only contact you if they find themselves in enough pain. Whether that’s confusion and lose of direction or losing profitability and sales – if there’s no pain, why would they spend money with you to solve a problem they don’t have?

To identify a reason to contact you, they need to identify with the problems you highlight in your website copy. So don’t just write warm, fuzzy words all of the time. You need to hit them between the eyes to create enough reason for them to send you an email or pick up the phone to you.

Writing website copy that sells is not easy. But it is skill that can be developed over time with lots of practice and lots of learning.

Keep going back to your website copy once a month and review what you have written. Read up about copy writing and get in to the habit of writing on a regular basis. It is really worth the time and energy because to have a website that sells your business to potential clients is a business resource worth having – guaranteed!

Got a comment to add?

What tips and suggestions have you got? Or perhaps you have a question you want answering? Leave your comments below

Posted in Featured Articles, Marketing Small Business, Website & SEO Tips | 11 Comments »

What’s that gathering dust on your desk?

January 8th, 2010

In this online world that we all seem to live in, it is easy to focus all your efforts on one or more of the new social media tools at the start of this new year.

Yup, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are being used more and more by small businesses. But did you know that there is a quicker way to get in touch with people?

I know it’s rather old fashioned and it hardly gets a mention nowadays, but the telephone is really a wonderful device!

At the start of a New Year, you have a great excuse to pick up the phone and call a few past clients and customers. Wish them a Happy New Year and find out how the past few months have been for them.

You may want to find out if they are still on target with the plans you helped set out for them. It could that you ask for feedback on the last product they purchased from you.

However the phone call goes, there is a very good chance that a couple of those calls may lead to a re-booking or a re-order.

Go on – you know you remember how to use it. Just pick up that handset thingy, press the numbers and when the ringing sound stops, the person will be there on the other end.

It’s quite magical you know And not a tweet or poke in sight!

Posted in Marketing Live Events, Marketing Small Business, Selling You & Your Business | 1 Comment »

Copyrighting articles is bad for your business!

December 17th, 2009

I was out walking the other morning in the bitter cold but beautiful sunshine and I read the notice that The National Trust have at the Devil’s Punchbowl.

“The National Trust welcomes responsible dog owners”

Isn’t this better than a typical local council “Dogs Must Be Kept on the Lead AT ALL TIMES”?

Something that I learnt very early on was to make sure I always put out the welcome mats as opposed to the “You are NOT allowed” signs. And a great example of this is the good, old copyright statement that you often see on articles and newsletters.

“Nothing is to be copied, reproduced or photocopied without the author’s express permission”.

Mmmm – well I don’t know about you but I would love it if more people copied, reproduced and photocopied my information. The more people who could read my articles and have access to the information that I share with my newsletter subscribers and blog readers the better.

My attitude is “Please feel free to reproduce anything that you find on this blog – all I ask is that you credit the article to my name and list my website address.”

So check your copyright statement at the bottom of your articles– do you have a welcome mat or a “Keep Out” notice?

Got a comment you would like to make? Add your thoughts, ideas or questions below.

Posted in Marketing Small Business | 2 Comments »

Getting started with social media: where to begin?

How does the style of your writing need to differ between your blog, your brochure and your website?

7 Ways to Build your Blog Following

6 Things You Need to Know About Writing Website Copy

Got a comment to add?

What’s that gathering dust on your desk?

Copyrighting articles is bad for your business!

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