One of the more raging debates and discourse you’ll hear in marketing and business circles is the value, the return on investment of social media. While there is no doubt that social media is a trend, but rather a distinct movement towards active consumerism, measuring the value to a company’s bottom line is much more complex. This week, the good folks over at MDG Advertising created a compelling and easy data visualization focused on the ROI of social media.

Infographic by MDG Advertising

This month, you’ve made it far. If you’ve followed our 5-step series, you’ve already: defined your value, defined your audiences, created key messages and created a basic action plan. You’ve got one more step, so read on.

This last step is surely forgotten, after all you’re tired, busy and behind on lots of other things on your to-do list. But here’s the reason you WANT this step. If you don’t measure, you never really know how well or how poorly something is working.

In marketing, you want some form of measurement for every action you take. For example, did the radio ad at 10am work better or was the drive-time 5:30pm ad sending you more calls. Did you notice a rise in web traffic after you sent that email? Are you getting a better open rate of emails when you send on Tuesdays or Fridays? Now there are whole books and plenty of resources on how to measure. But guess what – you can measure it. Anyone can install Google Analytics on their website, it’s a free tool and does a very good job of telling you about web traffic (if that’s important to you). Even if you’re simply tracking one thing, measure it to your bottom line.

 And to quote someone smarter than me, “If it’s not working, fail fast, learn the lesson, and move on.”  I’ll add, and if it’s working keep at it.

As a final thought from this series: when in doubt repeat this slowly: focus on the why, what and who, before you ever get to the how.

Guess what? You know more than you think, it’s just that there is so much you can do, it may seem overwhelming. So let’s start with a few basic questions and get you to an action plan you can use.

First up, timing. Is your business seasonal or cyclical? If so, ramp up marketing efforts when it makes sense. No one advertises Christmas in March for a reason. But think of timing, when does it make the most sense to try to reach your customers.  Here’s a good example of how not to plan timing – think of your college reaching out for a few dollars from you as an alum – now, you like them, you want to give, you know the value. But they call on a Sunday night at 6:30pm… wrong time and they lose you.  Think about timing.

Next up, direct or indirect. Now you have two main options when taking action, you can reach people directly or indirectly. Think of it this way, do you want to ask them directly for their business or are they unavailable for direct access?  If it’s a more direct approach, what does your target audience respond best to and when? What are 3 tactics you think can directly reach your audience and influence their purchase or sale?  Is it radio ads? Twitter? Facebook? An online ad? An event sponsorship? A tradeshow? Email marketing? Of the 3 tactics you selected are you able to implement them well? If you can only send one tweet, don’t expect a run at your store. If you want radio but can’t afford to create a radio ad, well then you’ll need to find another tactic.  But what if your customer isn’t available directly to you? Or what if you want to surround your customer with your brand?  Indirect actions allow you to reach influencers that can help persuade your customers to take action. A good analogy? Direct is like you telling someone how great you are and asking them on a date. Indirect is getting all your friends to talk to them about how great you are and then they want you to ask for a date.

No matter what action you take, it’s called your “marketing mix” which is just our industry speak for the different ways you market to your target audiences.

To help you with this step, grab a piece of paper and a pen, you know old-school style. Now make divide it in thirds and write 30-days, 60-days, 90-days in each section. Now list what you CAN do realistically in the next 90 days.

This week, we’re on step three of modern marketing. It’s our short series on the basics of marketing that can help any business or brand assure they’re on track instead of following shiny new objects in the marketing world.  This week?  We’re on to defining key messages, the very core things you want people to know about you, your product or your service.

Your goal here is message transference: what would you want a happy customer to say when people say, well, “who/what’s that?” Now a lot of folks fail at this point because they A) want to convey too much b) use technical language or jargon and 3) they write them as long as the Gettysburg Address. So think of it this way, if one of your customers shared what you do and what the value is, how might they say it?  Or what would you put on the back of your business card? Think short sentences that convey a single point. E.g Let There Be Light, Just Do It, Quality is Job 1.  Now these aren’t all supposed to be taglines, but many of them could be.  But for you, focus on simple, short and action-verb centered on benefits. 

And here’s why simple matters, the goal is message transference. You want your customers to start to use the messages you develop to talk about your business.  And if you can’t remember them, all bets are on that your audience won’t either.

This week, we’re offering the second step out of five steps to modern marketing.  Last week we covered defining your value, and this week, we’re moving on to defining your audience.

Hint: it’s not everybody.

Even if everybody would buy it, you can’t market to everyone. Trust me, you don’t have a budget big enough and there is no way to be effective at marketing to every single person on the planet. Or even every person in your community.

So start by asking who would be your best customers, the first people in the door. Or if you’ve already started, ask who your happiest customers are. You know more than you think – list out their age, education, geographic location, do they have kids, drive a car or take public transport, do most of them own houses, do most live within a radius of your store, or do most of your customers come from one industry.  List out as many common characteristics as you can. If you want to reinforce this, send out a survey to your happiest or most frequent customers.

Now you may get different groups, different audiences, what then?  Rank them by primary and secondary audiences.  Your primary audience is the group who are most likely to buy or the most likely to create a long-term relationship with you. The secondary audience will still buy your product or service, they’re just a smaller group or need more efforts to make a purchase.  Remember, you have to rank your resources to ensure you get the most for your marketing dollars – spend wisely with the audience most likely to buy.

After you get your audiences more clearly defined, take time now to create a customer map on paper – answer where does this group mainly work, play, pray, shop, socialize, and surf online? (Not sure, send a survey to your customers and ask). You’ll need this info for step 4, but it’s a good idea to map it out while you’re thinking of your customers now.

Here’s the deal: you want results for both your brand and your bottom line, but you’re stuck with where to get started. Since I work with a lot of emerging companies or new brand efforts, I get this question a lot. How do we get started?  This month, we’re going to bring you 5 easy steps to the basics of modern marketing. Each step is designed to help you bring focus, clarity, direction and action to your marketing efforts.

And while we’re in the modern world and things move at the speed of lightening, be sure to work each step. If you skip one, we’ll let’s just say we’ll be bringing our wellies and helping you get unstuck.

Let’s get started.

Define your value

Seems simple right, but few companies every get to what the value is for their product or service. Start by defining what you do and focus on benefits to your customers. Keep it positive, non-technical and most importantly, convey one single thought. Next, ask how are you unique, what distinguishes you from another company? Answer the “why” – why would people buy your product or service and answer the “what” – what do I get for my money.

If you’re not sure about this, ask your customers – what do they get from your products or services? Sometimes we find our best answers by listening to our customers.

Inspired by Mashable’s 100 Upcoming Social Media and Technology Conferences list, we cracked open our planners and decided where we could invest our time in learning this fall. We decided on a few national conferences, opted for a few marketing, technology, and PR meetings, but when we got to the topic of social media, we were nearly crushed with the options. While we’d like to go to BlogWorld and APPNation, we needed to consider just how much time we could spend out of the office and our carbon footprint (Jenny’s traveling to speak in Houston at IS Conference and in San Diego at LavaCon). To save on time, we considered only social media conferences and events in Atlanta. To our surprise, we found a dozen* (this post started as 12, but with your input, it’s now at 17) social media conferences and meetings in Atlanta happening before the calendar flips to the new year. What’d we find? Take a look:

 While we’re narrowing down our options, reviewing speakers, and the value we’d get for our time out of the office, tell us how you decide on what conferences to attend? If you are coming to any of these conferences or headed to Atlanta for the first time, let’s be social and connect while you’re here. (Know about a conference we missed? Send us an email and let us know.)

*Thanks to Scott Lockhart (@scott_regator) for sending us the info on Mashable’s Atlanta event on Sept. 30; to Lane Bailey for sending us info about REBarCamp on Oct. 1; to Brandy Nagel (@benang) for the info on TedxPeachtree; to Stephen Boyd for sharing more about the digital/social media track at the IABC conference.

 We knew this town was busy.

With the fast pace of sports – an industry with ever-changing leaders, teams, athletes, seasons, sponsors, opportunities – it’s no wonder that keeping up with the rapid pace of social media can be a challenge. This week, the Atlanta chapter of Women in Sports and Events, invited me to present a social media primer for sports and event professionals.  Having worked in the several areas of sports, I jumped at the chance.
Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve heard about Twitter right? You join about 87% of Americans who’ve heard of it, but maybe you’re part of the 93% who haven’t ventured to try it for personal or for business.  While there are lots of case studies to show innovate ways to use Twitter and proof it leads to sales, you just don’t know how to start or if you should.  You’re not alone.

We frequently present on Twitter for business. It’s so important to help people get started, especially businesses, that Twitter posts a Twitter for Business Guide on its homepage.  But before you get there, let us help you with the first steps. 

This presentation was given at Atlanta’s Freelancer’s Forum last week.  While a lot of learning happened off the screen, these are the basic steps to get start in and understand more about the world’s most popular short-message platform.

Let us know if it helped you!

If you haven’t experience the phenomenon of Twitter chats, you’re missing out on excellent crowdsourced learning and sharing.  There are nearly 80 chats happening each week in topics ranging from agriculture to web journalists. We’ve put together a list of Twitter chats relating to our worlds – marketing, PR, social media, and business – all noted with their days and times.* While we’d love to list things like DesignChat (Wednesday, 8pm CT), we’re trying to stay focused and not list every chat we’d like to follow. 

 If you’re running your own business, or just trying to learn more about marketing/social media/pr you can follow the conversations, pose questions and participate. You can learn a lot to apply to your business.

Oh, and if you miss a chat at the time listed, you can also search by its hashtag for past conversations; many chat hosts will post summaries on their own blogs.

Feel free to share what chats you find worthwhile. If you just can’t get enough, you can find a full list of chats, by checking here.

*Times for chats are based on US time zones: ET is Eastern Time; CT is Central Time; PT is Pacific Time.