Mediaboss Marketing

More small and mid-sized businesses recognize the power of social media.

Research from GetApp revealed 56 percent of small business owners and managers say social media offers the best digital brand-building strategy. They believe its more effective than developing apps or investing in technologies like digital signage.

Although a small or mid-sized business can create social media accounts and post announcements relatively easily, reaching business objectives such as obtaining more customers and increasing sales and revenue is more difficult. Engaging with customers can be time-consuming and confirming the business value of social media efforts can be challenging.

Experts recommend these steps to help small and mid-sized businesses implement effective social media marketing.

Go where your customers are. Only large companies and brands have resources to remain active on most social media networks. Different platforms serve different needs and cater to different demographics. Instead of choosing networks arbitrarily, savvy businesses research platforms to determine where their targeted customers are active.

Provide value. Constantly promoting your business will bore and annoy customers. A mix of helpful advice and promotional news gain a following while publicizing your products. Experts typically recommend a maximum of 20 percent promotional material and 80 percent educational. Its acceptable to sometimes stray off topic to offer customers helpful information.

Always ask yourself: Is this content valuable to my clients or prospects? If the answer is no, dont waste your time or theirs, said Sarah Lane, marketing specialist at Impact Marketing.

Listen to customers. Monitoring social media for your businesses and products allows you to find negative remarks that require responses and resolve customer service issues. Monitoring can also uncover positive comments that businesses can share. Monitoring for industry terms identifies sales leads. As social media listening services become more advanced, theyve become a viable option for all but the smallest businesses.

For instance, law firms can acquire clients through social media listening by monitoring for their specialties, such as auto accident and suggest their services. Customers feel more comfortable with businesses that offer valuable information while avoiding an immediate hard sell.

Take some risks. Share advice in a fun and interesting way with humor and opinion. Share funny stories and quick facts people might find surprising. Education and information provided on social media is much more likely to be understood if its presented in an engaging way. But be careful. Its easy to offend.

Include images. These attract attention and increase engagement. Rather than being satisfied with generic stock images, seek high-quality ones that are relevant to your content or brand. You dont necessarily need a professional photographer if you can produce photos with good contrast, lighting and composition.

Support the community. Support your community by sharing others posts, answering questions and participating in discussions.

Sure your brand and logo are important but what really connects people to you are shared beliefs and ideas, said Ravi Shukle at Post Planner. Talking openly about what youre thinking and where you want to head will help unite your followers and grow a stronger, more passionate community.

Measure results. Its essential to establish goals that are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-based. Changes in web traffic, website conversions and other metrics can reveal the effectiveness of social media marketing and where to make adjustments.

Without the benefit of a marketing team creating a strategy complete with goals and measurement, small businesses have a harder time evaluating marketing efforts, writes Suzanne Delzio, director of Informed Web Content, for Social Media Examiner.

Dedicate adequate resources to the task. If youre not investing, at a minimum, the equivalent of 25 percent of a full-time employee daily to execute your social media marketing strategy, you likely will not get the results you need and expect, stressed John Beveridge, president and founder of Rapidan Inbound. Your social media manager should be measuring, communicating, posting, responding and analyzing your social media marketing every day.

Properly implemented, social media marketing can produce gains in sales, number of customers and lifetime value of customers. Its not easy; it takes effort and commitment. In time, local followers will grow and positive results will accumulate.

One last tip: Promote your social media accounts to your existing customers on cash register receipts, for instance, and in mailings.

William Comcowich is founder and acting CEO of Glean.info, a media monitoring and measurement service for public relations and marketing. Hes speaking at the Public Relation Society of Americas Hampton Roads Chapter lunch meeting May 17.

William Comcowich is founder and acting CEO of Glean.info, a media monitoring and measurement service for public relations and marketing. He's speaking at the Public Relation Society of America's Hampton Roads Chapter lunch meeting May 17.

Link:
Eight vital social media marketing tips for small and mid-sized businesses | Expert column - Virginian-Pilot

More brands are taking note of social marketing, and they want to put their brand on it. That is leading to a new trend: that of brands trademarking not only logos, but social media hashtags. Hotel brand Marriott, for example, has trademarked #lovetravels, and chocolates brands Hershey has trademarked #gofor2. One-third (33%) of global hashtag trademarks are made by US brands (since 2010)

"Even though overall organisations are registering more hashtag trademarks than ever before, there has been a slowdown in the rate of growth in the U.S. market, possibly due to the time and effort it takes for success," says Rob Davey, senior director, Global Services, CompuMark. "But what the overall rise in global applications does indicate is that brands are seeing the value in going through the proper trademarking process in all spheres, including social media, to make sure they are protecting themselves from possible infringement and mitigating the associated risks."

Other interesting findings from the research include:

Brazilian and Indian brands are right behind the US for hashtag trademark applications US trademarks are now 28% of the market, but US companies still trademark more hashtags Colombia-based RCN Television S.A. registered the most trademarks (54) in 2016 Education and Entertainment Services rank as the top trademark registration class

Trademarks for Class 9 - computer software, gaming, peripheral devices - fell to the 15th most applications for trademarks last year with only 101.

Tags: advertising, branded hashtags, CompuMark, social marketing, trademark hashtags

See more here:
Study: More brands #trademarking - BizReport

Although we are known as Social Stairway we do a lot more than just social media marketing. So, heres a few common misconceptions that you might keep in mind when looking for an online marketing agency that would be a good fit for your organization

Myth 1. Social Media Marketing Companies only work with Social Media:

Most GOOD social media marketing companies are shifting more and more to becoming full service inbound marketing agencies. The shift is mainly driven by the need to demonstrate clear ROI from social media efforts. And to get conversions from these efforts you typically must continue to track traffic when it LEAVES the social platform and heads to a business website.

To accurately follow these leads and conversions, an agency will need to help your business integrate email and sales for following up. You will also need a well-developed content marketing strategy as this is often why people leave the social network and head to your website in the first place.

Go here to see the original:
5 common misconceptions about social media marketing companies - CUinsight.com (press release)

May 15, 2017

Always positive about his business's mission, Sprinklr founder and CEO Ragy Thomas was still highly charged from the billion dollar unicorn's "coming out party" when I caught up with him Friday.

Just about a month prior to our conversation, Sprinklr had officially its expansion from social media management to customer experience management with the launch of the Experience Cloud. But Thomas told me: "This is who we were from day one." The difficulty lay in asking prospective clients to bet on Sprinklr as a comprehensive digital transition partner without first building credibility. Those first seven and a half years, Thomas says, "were painful," and he's truly delighted that Sprinklr can no longer be considered yet another of those "ankle biting single point solutions."

To be fair, Thomas laid a trail of clues for us. For example, when I interviewed him in June 2016, I asked him if Sprinklr was edging closer to being a broad customer experience management suite, he told me:

It would be very hard to deny what you just said. I don't think it's a secret that we're by far the most ambitious company to come out of this last generation of companies in the enterprise space: And you can quote me on that.

Sprinklr is not alone, of course, in asserting that brands are being replaced by experiences. "The brand is what people experience," Thomas says, "and social is the foundation of customer experience." The move is from one way interactions to bi-directional conversations, and the ability to manage this conversation across dozens of channels is now key to business success. How does it feel to have joined the experience chorus, alongside Salesforce, Adobe, Marketo, and all the rest?

"I have no time to think about the other guys," said Thomas. "The sun is shining, we love them all." But, he added: "We're on a mission. Every company on earth needs what we're building. The fun is only beginning."

The Sprinklr experience cloud (needed by "every company," but Thomas will admit built for the enterprise) includes cloud-based platforms for social, marketing, advertising (although not yet including execution beyond social channels), research, care, and commerce.

Spare a thought too for the woman with probably the most difficult job in content marketing today, Dana Brooks Reinglass. She's the first person to be hired for the Chief Storyteller position at United Airlines. After a career with Oprah, she seems to have developed a thick skin. "Thanks for not booing me," she said, taking the #ThinkContent stage.

Monday Stack logo by Hilary Allison

See the rest here:
The Monday Stack: Every Company on Earth Needs Sprinklr - DMN

May 13, 2017 at 8:06 pm | Print View

Having a sense of humor can help your brand standout exponentially. Nothing delivers connection and meaning faster than making someone laugh.

As comedian Louis CK notes, The goal of comedy is to just laugh, which is a really high-hearted thing, (about) visceral connection and reaction.

In addition to comedy, C.K. knows a thing or two about branding and marketing. Advertising Age ranked him at the top of their Digital A-List in 2012 for rethinking how artists interact with their fans. A recent Nielsen study found that 47 percent of global respondents said that humorous ads resonated the most.

Why Humor Helps

For scrappy businesses, Humor can help you stand out in a crowded world, says Tim Washer, creative director at Cisco. In this role, Washer produces hilarious videos for the B2B software brand including a popular ad introducing a new server as the ideal Valentines Day gift. (Nothing says I love you like six times the mobile backhaul capacity.)

In rolling out their new mail-order service, Dollar Shave Club needed to cut through the clutter of the billion-dollar razor industry. They did so with a hilarious 90-second video that offers a mix of on-target product benefits conveyed in a distinct brand voice.

Forty-eight hours after the videos debut on YouTube, Dollar Shave Club was laughing all the way to the bank with 12,000 people signed up for their service.

Theres no limit to who can use humor. You arent bound by size, industry, budget or any other constraint. So how do you get started?

Start with the Right People

BarkBox has a lot of fun with their marketing. For an example, check out their posts on #HumpDay which takes on new meaning when your business is dog products. So how do they do it?

I dont find myself to be the funniest person in the room. But because of that, Ive only hired people on my team who are genuinely funny, says Stacie Grissom, Bark & Cos editor-in-chief. Humor is something that needs to come naturally. And if it doesnt come naturally to you find someone to help you out.

Create a role like Cisco did or simply hire for humor. Bottom line surround yourself with the right people.

How to Tell Funny (Brand) Stories

Most comedy tells stories. As such, many of those same story elements are critical in telling a funny story for your brand.

l Plot Kurt Vonnegut famously called them story shapes but ultimately there are only a few different common plots out there. What kind of story are you trying to tell?

l Character Your main character shouldnt be your brand it should be about your audience.

l Conflict Most comedy comes from pain. In many cases your customers are in pain and you can help them. Humor allows you to explore this by casting pain in a comedic light.

We werent laughing at the Wheres the beef? lady in the Wendys ads. We were laughing with her at the sad state of the fast-food hamburger.

l Voice Humor has to fit your brand voice. For years, Charmin embraced a family friendly voice in talking about bathroom business. Thats why they regularly use scatological puns and the hashtag #tweetfromtheseat to weigh in on current events and pop culture but still in a G-rated context.

I dont think theres any brand that shouldnt be funny, says Eric Munn of Onion Labs, the content services division of the venerable comedy brand, The Onion, which works with brands such as Audi, Bacardi, and Overstock to create engaging and humorous content on their platforms.

Surround yourself with funny people and use the tools of storytelling archetypes, characters, conflict and voice to find a way of embracing humor that fits for your brand. Go forth and be funny!

l Nick Westergaard is founder of Brand Driven Digital; nick@westergaard.com; @NickWestergaard

We make it easy to stay connected:

See the original post:
Social Media: How to use humor in your marketing - The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines