Compiled by my colleague Kelly Craft (@krcraft) and the first in a series of four presentations on Integrated Marketing for the SMB community in Kitchener/Waterloo. Thanks to our partner Waterloo Regional Small Business Centre
8 ParticipantsEducational toys – directly to daycares and schools
Be prepared to discuss what the Narrative is – what does it mean to you
Why drive to the websiteDataInformation – assist them in their buyer’s journey what dtage they are atAuthority -
Provide a great example of a solid – use the story summary / executive summary
The better you understand the concepts illustrated in this guide, the better you’ll be able to craft a strategy.1. Understand what you want from participating in social media:Branding: building or maintaining an image or reputation.Direct Sales: selling a product or service directly to users.Indirect Sales: converting a user into a customer through the use of a conversion funnel.Research: finding out insights about your customers, your market, or your industry.Customer Service: helping users who are already customers.Collaboration: helping employees learn & communicate with each other (and your customers).2. Understand the issues & opportunities associated with each potential social media channel.3. Select channels, and set realistic benchmarks. Understanding how different networks grow, and what to listen for is key.4. Never stop testing, evaluating, and learning from the communities you participate. It’s better to participate in fewer channels effectively, than it is to try and participate everywhere the “fish” are.
Integrated marketing communication calls for recognizing all contact points (brand contact) where the customer may encounter the company and its brandsIntegrated marketing communication involves identifying the target audience and shaping a well-coordinated promotional program to obtain the desired audience responseThe promotion mix is the specific blend of advertising, public relations, personal selling, and direct-marketing tools that the company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships
Social media is Pervasive – It is absolutely everywhere. Whether or not you or your company are participating in social, you can bet members of your customer community are. Social Media brings an entire new dynamic to the term word of mouth. It is a space where we can engage with multiple key audiences at once. Yes, it allows us to mine for leads, but more importantly, it allows us to build communities and our relationships with partners, customers, teams, vendors, industry voices, and the public. Why do we want to build stronger relationships? Because building better relationships helps us better understand the needs and goals of all of our constituents: it gives customers a voice, allows partners to cross-promote products and services, can result in important feedback, and it results in a constant cycle of learning for all involved.Participating in Social media is more than having an account on websites like Facebook and Twitter. It is a communication shift between people, companies and brands and you will benefit by being a part of it. But before we dive into the big social sea, its helpful if we truly understand why we are doing it so we can align it with new or existing business objectives, then establish supporting processes and routines, and plans for measuring our successes in aligning our goals.
So, let’s explore further the internal, external and evolving content we’ve been using to help make this summit event a success.We shared the Social Summit event and registration page (external)We read and shared other speaker’s blogs about the event or in preparation for their sessions – James did this really well (external)We created our own blog with a brief write-up about the advantages of attending to learn, meet others and swap social business stories (internal)We listened, shared and reshared tweets and updates about the event in other channels WITH news about the event (evolving)Let’s have a look at some of the evolving content that surfaced from the events content.
As I said earlier, evolving content is often most readily found on social channels where trends can surface in seconds. We can see a variety of evolving content that surfaced after ourselves and the Knowledge is Power team shared the content. The evolving content includes others sharing with their communities, comments highlighting the value of attending and people networking and letting others know they are attending. Uncovering evolving pieces of content AND integrating them with your internal and external sources is a successful content strategy that we have seen contribute to building strong communities and connections.
The story here is that successful social folks create content, share other content, and integrate all sorts of content in different configurations to support both their own, and the goals of the event organizers.That’s exactly what we hope you learn to do as you delve into social. It’s all about shared goals and purposes. Building your business, building communities, and helping others build theirs effectively, too.What really made this work so well? The content map is a big part of that.
AptiDraft has very respectable positioning in Google rankings. Whatever they are already doing with keywords and adwords is working. Those same keywords should be judiciously laced into both newly created content, and in some of their social update posts. Chances are, some of those same successful keywords will also be relevant hashtags on social channels.And since there are so many non-profits in the room, we’d like to pause here to mention that if you are a non-profit, you may be able to apply for a grab to obtain free google ad-words. If you are interested, see Gord later and he can tell you a bit more about.
While there are unique requirements and goals for every business, ALL businesses share one commonality: Large or small, every organizations has events. They might not call them events, but that is what they are.All orgs have events, whether planned or unplannedEvents can be internal, external, or a combination of bothEvents may include any combination of: customers, partners, supply chain, vendors, employees, VARs, competitors, influencers, public, media, industry interests2. ALL events can minimally be broken down into before, during and after phasesALWAYS CHECK YOUR BASELINE AND BENCHMARKS BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER EVERY EVENT.
While there are unique requirements and goals for every business, ALL businesses share one commonality: Large or small, every organizations has events. They might not call them events, but that is what they are.All orgs have events, whether planned or unplannedEvents can be internal, external, or a combination of bothEvents may include any combination of: customers, partners, supply chain, vendors, employees, VARs, competitors, influencers, public, media, industry interests2. ALL events can minimally be broken down into before, during and after phasesWith that basic shift in perspective, business users can now begin to ask relevant, intelligent questions to determine where listening, engagement, response, community building, follow-ups and sentiment might fit into their business processes and KPI’s at each phase. Using the event method, you have: two kinds of listening/data mining/analysis - confirmation (searching for knowns) and discovery - searching for unknowns using layered data that builds over timeand two kinds of responses - real-time recovery/action and longer term strategies/initiatives generation
Despite the advances in integrating social media into business communications, the majority of companies we’ve spoken or worked with don’t have any sort of standard frameworkin place to measure it’s value. This is true of not only companies that are beginning to engage, but many of the companies who have been present in social channels for several years.Orgs large and small need a framework to help them understand their:Activities:Listening – collecting data, experience and sentimentAnalyzing – identifying and extracting target data setsAct – engage -> content developed. Listen, report, tweak content, engage. Repeat in an ongoing tracking cycle. customer needs, collect data, identify and extract
Laurie “theme really is provide value” (LIKE) Everyone here today is part of a small or medium business. Your company goals are to acquire more business. In the social sphere, that means more followers, more conversations, more relationships. Some of these relationships lead to business and some do not but regardless of the outcome, we should award these people for their effort and engagement. We want to reward them so they are interested in continuing to build their relationship with us. Insert definition of reward??? So using Podio, let’s look at how we can bring this full circle.
Notes:As a thank you to all who have attended our sessions today, we’d like to offer each of you a mini-audit of any one social profile/channel you are currently using. We will provide you with a short review including: •Three suggestions for improving presence on the channel.•Three suggestions for additional content sources for their field or industry.•An overall recommendation for strategic improvement. There will be a button at the bottom right of our home page that links to it and the promo code is DDGSMS25 and is needed for submission. Please look for it at the end of today. If you have any trouble finding it please send us an email or a tweet!