Social is Sexy

Why is it so important to use social media in business?

People like to share interesting and new information to other people, it’s that simple. It has been going on for thousands of years and is only getting easier! Social media is what connects a business on a personal level to their audience, and allows them to interact or share the business on a personal level. Breaking down the barrier of the individual and your business is the beginning of an exponentially growing number of customer relationships.

Businesses today have mainly been utilizing Facebook to create their businesses social media presence. Facebook is probably the easiest way for a business to begin breaking down the barrier between the customer and the business and create that relationship. Your businesses goal is to create the relationship where the customer can continue to stay in contact with your business on a casual basis. Moz states some of the “Do’s” and “Don’ts” of the unwritten Facebook “rules”.

1. Don’t Spam

– Nobody likes to see advertising on Facebook so don’t do it. They’re there to enjoy their time and see interesting posts!

2. Respond

– Timely responses to comments or statements will create a more personal relationship with your business and the customer.

3. Say no to cluster updates

– You can make status updates and posts, but keep it to a safe number. Don’t flood your customers page with updates or they may become overwhelmed.

4. Highlight important posts

– If your company has important posts e.g. acquisitions, sales or feature in news articles, you are able to highlight them on your timeline.

These are just a few of some unwritten “do’s” and “donts” that will help your business successfully create their online relationships.

Twitter, Pinterest and blogging have also gained recent popularity as far at the online social media presence for companies. All of which, share a majority of the same rules. One example of a company that had an online social media presence was that of Applebees and an unfortunate incident that resulted from their poor social media knowledge. Overturning Tables posted a very all made article about how this social media disaster transpired.

Social Media is constantly changing and is very difficult to effectively and continuously be up kept for your business. Do to the unlimited potential, the long term benefits however, will be far greater than any sort of advertisement you can put out!

Stay social people!

The Big Three

Throughout history, we’ve seen many things become successful in groups of three. We’ve seen trios such as the Three Stooges, Peter Paul & Mary, the Three Amigos and the Three Wise Men to name a few. We can even talk about the David Ortiz 3-run home run in the 8th inning to beat the Texas Rangers last Wednesday!

My point being, that as you have seen throughout the last couple of posts, there’s a lot more to marketing than just getting your name out there. Inbound Marketing is made up of multiple facets and strategies that create this new marketing mix. The big idea for today’s post is Content Marketing and it’s three main components. Content Marketing is a marketing strategy so important to Inbound Marketing that in a few years, it will be spoken about as one of our successful trios!

 

---

 

Content Marketing in a Nutshell

As described in an article The Business Case for Agile Content Marketing by SCRIBD, content marketing is made up of three components, each of equal importance.

Content + Social + Search = Content Marketing

 

Content Marketing is the reason for a customer to choose you over another product whenever there is any doubt.

• Content

– The aim for your content should be to have valuable information that your intended audience would pay to have. You want to answer all questions, alleviate all fears or doubt and most of all, inspire them to support the new idea you have for them.

– This content will then transform into shared information through social media

• Social

– When your content is being shared through social media, it does two main things for you. First, it creates quality advertising to friends/followers via Facebook, twitter, Pinterest etc.. by whoever is sharing the information.

– Second, social sharing signals Google that your content is quality and will ultimately improve your “searchability”.

• Search

– You can have the best website/product out there, but if you aren’t searchable, then nobody will ever know about it. The first two components of Content Marketing will create the third.

– The key is to tweak your information just enough towards your audience that you are targeting so that they will be the first to easily come across your information.

The key to Content marketing is to not “sell” your product. People simply want to be information of quality useful information. You are teaching first instead of pitching. Content has a powerful effect of persuading and overcoming objections without even an attempt to sell. These days people want to learn before they buy, be educated instead of pitched.

Here is an ebook from the Content Marketing Institute giving 100 examples of businesses that have created and spread the word of their products/businesses using many creative methods! For example, The Waffle Shop located in Pittsburgh is just a small ordinary Waffle shop that has created an effective Inbound Marketing strategy by using Content Marketing via a live-streaming talk show. This has allowed their create buzz around the city and turn that talk into profit. Other businesses have found success through computer games, magazines and iPhone apps.

 

SEO 2014: The Rise of Your Business

 

In 2000 years it will be you and your business they’ll be making movies about. Movie producers will be glorifying all of the headaches and late nights you battled through, in order for you to rise your business to the top!

Although we may not have the chiseled physique or excellent combat skills like our Spartan warrior here, I guarantee you one thing. He wouldn’t last one day in business without literally beating out the competition. So to “beat” our competition today, one of the biggest strategies of Inbound Marketing is improvement of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

---

What is SEO and how can I effectively use it?

SEO is the process of using “Relevance” and “Importance” of your webpages to make it more searchable. Every business with a website is technically “searchable” on the internet. However, the main idea of Inbound Marketing and the SEO strategy is for an everyday internet user to “accidentally” or intentionally come across your website! It’s making your business pop up first on the list when a similar keyword or topic is searched. According to “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO”, Googlers recommend the following to get better rankings for their search engines:

It will take some time, but once you grasp what the average searcher of your target market is looking for, you can more effectively reach them. Some businesses are able to hire a company to improve their Inbound Marketing. Companies like Iterate Marketing have capitalized on perfecting SEO techniques in order to effectively help small businesses become searchable. They strive to turn your ideas, concepts and thoughts into keywords. They’ll help you get your business to pop up to the top of the search bar and be as noticeable (in a good way) as Xerxes in a Wall Street elevator!

As discussed above, relevance will come from similar content or ideas being search but importance will come from popularity. You will need a strong mix of the two in order to effectively improve SEO. You can have the prettiest website or blog on the internet but it’s content will remain more or less invisible to search engines unless you promote it. With your promotion it will slowly generate more popularity if it is quality work and with popularity it will transform into the search engine term of “importance.”

As part of Inbound Marketing and making your company attract prospects, you will need to incorporate Search Engine Optimization to increase the “searchability” of your company and ultimately increase website traffic. This is done through the quality and “Relevance” of the content on your site, as well as promotion and “importance” of your company. It’s a difficult process to get going, but in the end, they’ll still make a movie about it!

 

 

Inbound Marketing is the new “pickup line”

Inbound Marketing

We’ve all seen the movies where there is a woman in the bar that every guy is head-over-heels for however, nobody stands a chance with her. No guy handsome or ugly, rich or poor is able to get more than her cold shoulder. This is what todays advertisements are like for the average person. On a daily basis, we are exposed to hundreds of advertisements that we automatically shrug off as if they were persistent bar creeps. So what’s the secret to actually getting through to a potential customer and not simply getting the cold shoulder? The secret is not by being very handsome or well dressed. Or the fact that you have a product that is actually useful. The secret is about having Inbound Marketing!

Inbound Marketing is the personalization of marketing a product, to a specific individual. This being compared to aiming for a wider audience. The goal is to make sure that the customer’s experience was as good, if not better than the actual product! You want to COMPLETELY SATISFY the customer, not just give them what they want. Completely satisfying the customer will then create the urge for the customer to talk highly of your product or company to others. Which ultimately makes that satisfied customer your most valuable and effective advertisement!

“People don’t remember the pitch, they remember the experience.”

When you have the right approach to something, it doesn’t matter what you look like or what product you are selling as long as the experience was positive and memorable! For smaller companies, this is crucial to their success and growth . Here’s an example of Budweiser successfully creating a good experience to a large audience.

Experience

According to Marketing platform Hubspot.com, there are 4 steps in the Inbound Marketing strategy

 

Obviously you need to create awareness in order to attract a potential customer. In todays technology driven world, the best ways to do that are through

• Blogs
• Social Networking
• Search Engine Optimization

When a visitor enjoys what they see and they have had a solid experience with the website or store, there’s a good chance they may want to buy the product. The end goal is to make the entire experience from stumbling upon this unfamiliar website or store all the way to buying the product, the easiest and most enjoyable time possible. This will then create the customer promoting step!

Hubspot.com has also created a couple new products to specifically help a businesses successfully execute the steps of Inbound Methodology. They have created a Content Optimization System that modifies your businesses website not only to the specific customer that is on your site, but by the device they are using as well! This personalizes the site and creates different experiences for the complete stranger, the potential lead and the returning customer. This customized focus on the customer will in turn create a more enjoyable experience on the webpage.

Another example of website customization is simply to continue updating the website with the newest information. My good friend Peter Rallis runs RallisReview.com a website that is so sexy, you’re palms will start sweating just thinking about it! It’s not a site that is selling any products, it’s a site that is essentially selling the “easy access” of all of the newest movie news and trailers. The viewers go to this website for the enjoyable experience of having all this information in a continuously updated website. The website promotes itself through satisfied viewers like myself!

Next time you’re looking to pickup a prospect, just use Inbound Marketing!

Stay social amigos!

Spring Blog Intro

My name is Anthony Carter, but for now you can call me “El Tony” (Far right in the picture below). I am a proud dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico and will take my nickname El Tony with me for the rest of my life! I am a 23 year old senior at Western Washington University in the beautiful town of Bellingham, Washington. I live for my family and friends and love meeting new people. I am an outgoing and fun person to be around and I’m always ready for a good time. I truly love football and have been a Seattle Seahawks fan ever since I can remember! I literally plan my fall quarter classes with consideration of the NFL season… Since day 1 of college, I have learned the rollercoaster ups and downs that is balancing school, work and a social life.  Here at WWU, I am majoring in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing. I am hoping to find a place of work that I enjoy going to everyday, allows me to grow as a person/employee as well as a place that allows me to help others around me. I currently work in the Financial Aid Office at WWU and feel very blessed to be a part of such a great group of people in an office that teaches you many skills that will be used for the rest of my life. Working there has giving me the utmost hope that there are great places to work, and you do not have to dread going to work everyday. Adding this blog to my plate will hopefully allow me to update my family, friends coworkers and bloggers with some of my life adventures as well as talk about current business and marketing topics! I am currently taking Marketing Digital Design to further develop my skills in the ever growing professional digital and social media world. I’m also giving a try out to my first blog.. So without further ado, let’s get to today’s topic!

 

What are we learning in school?

Is what we learn in school really going to be applied and help us in our future workplace? While conceptual marketing knowledge has a rather long life cycle, technical or vocational skills change very rapidly. This makes it difficult for business programs at universities around the U.S. to constantly update their marketing curriculum in order for it to actually be useful for students when applying for jobs. In the article, “Knowledge and Skill Requirements for Marketing Jobs of the 21 Century”, it refers to studies that have shown entry level positions relating to Business Administration or more specifically marketing, require more technical skills than the senior level positions. The senior level positions were shown to require more conceptually based knowledge which will ultimately be what students mostly learned in their college classes.

Business programs in universities around the U.S. have begun to create more involved classes using modern programs in order to prepare young professionals to what they will eventually see in related fields of work.

As far as technical skills are emerging in todays modern social world. The ability for students to effectively and professionally convey a businesses message requires much skill as a person and an modern day influencer. This is a growing trait that many business are now considering essential for many high paying positions. These social media influencers are the future of advertising for companies. What people these days don’t realize is that the social media usage that they have on a daily basis is actually a trait that many companies are now looking for in young professionals.

Stay social amigos!