Marketing in Real Life

If you have a strategy, a plan, and goals you're doing social media marketing. If not, you're just posting stuff.  Strategy = what do you want people to think or do do differently by interacting with your social posts? How do they connect to your brand? How far afield do you want to go from what you actually "do"? Plan = How many times a day or week are you going to post? Who is going to do it? Where does the content come from? How much of it will be yours v. sharing other people's content?  Goals = How will you know if it's working? What do you expect for audience growth on a weekly or monthly basis? How does that translate into business success for you? If you can't answer all of those questions, you're not really doing social media marketing. But don't get discouraged, posting is way better than nothing and a great step towards becoming a social media marketer!

I grew up in Boston in the 80's as a diehard Redsox, Bruins, and Patriots fan.  I yearned for victory because I knew they should be winning.  Close call after close call but our teams never quite got there.  Obviously that all changed with the Pats in 2001, the Sox in 2004, and bruins in 2011.  And those changes in championship stature helped confirm what I had always believed - that if your team worked hard enough and worked with both brains and brawn - anyone could win. This belief is something I've always stood by in my professional life as well.  When I worked for a 5 million dollar research agency, I knew that we could grow enough to become a top 50 firm.  When Constant Contact set out to build a social media tool I knew we could get huge numbers of smb's to use it.  And when I set out to find a job at an awesome early stage startup, I knew I could make it happen . But I guess I never really expected my small liberal arts college to tak...

Where I am seeing more and more trouble is the translation of that kind of internal thinking into the customer/user experience.  Especially on products that are not labeled as Alphas or Betas, but that are being sold  or promoted  as fully functional.   (If you’re piecing it together with duct tape behind the scenes, so be it, you can come back for tech debt later.) “Lean Startup isn't about being cheap [but is about] being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.” Simply put, your customers should never know that you’ve but an MVP in market.    That means paying attention to all of the details that create a great customer experience and not skimping on the work. Your marketing website:  Make it look good – I mean, really good.  You want people to know what they are signing up for and how it can help them without having to do a ton of work to find the answers. Your collateral:  Don’t just .pdf an internal w...

I’ve been selling a lot lately…  not software or services but things like getting in the car, going to bed, or eating a vegetable.  Clearly I have a two year old. And in thinking about what works three universally applicable lessons have come to the top: Think about your audience:  Tell people why it’s good for them, not why it’s good for you… they don’t care. Speak clearly: There’s no faster way to have a bad interaction than by not being clear about what you are offering and what is expected in return. Once the deal is done, stop talking:   There is no faster way to derail a decision than by introducing another option, take the victory and move on. Are you making things harder by being unclear?

Throughout my career I have never really had anyone telling me exactly what to do, so I have paved my own way and set goals that I thought were important. And at times I have valued my work more than others for one reason: I was never told what I should try to achieve and never forced an answer to the question. As a brash young marketer I always felt like I knew the best way and it didn’t matter what anyone else thought. But now I know that I needed to fight for more clear direction from my managers… and with direction I would have been happier and more effective. Simply put, good management provides direction that creates: - Alignment between your activities and the company’s goals - Agreed upon, clear check in points to measure success and determine if you are on the right path - Clear value of your work to the organization if/when you want to be promoted or need other people’s time - Room to breathe and be creative within a larger framework for success; and - A sense ...

Facebook takes a lot of heat in the blogosphere but they have made on the fly page management much easier in the last few weeks and should be applauded for it. With the ability to schedule posts and see/respond to comments quickly from their new mobile Pages app they've made the life of an admin who is not paid to be a community manager much easier. Here's how I'd do it spending just twenty minutes a week on the computer: 1) Set up a like-gated exclusive offer using a tool like Constant Contact's Social Campaigns ; 2) Schedule a series of related promotional posts for the week (3-5 should do it); 3) Keep an eye on any comments using the pages app and respond on the fly (turn your notifications on!); 4) At the end of the week log on to Facebook and/or Constant Contact, see your results using campaign stats and facebook insights, and build your next week of activity That's it!

As someone who talks and writes and thinks about social media a lot nothing makes my blood boil quite like people saying that Facebook doesn't work for B2Bs. I know people talk about Linkedin being better but I really haven't seen it myself (send me any successes if you have them - I'm willing to be convinced). The thing is that social media is blurring the lines between personal and professional and people buy from people regardless of the industry. So unless your are selling on price alone you can use Facebook to showcas your expertise, capture leads, and give people a sense of what it's like to business with you. Sure, lots of B2Bs struggle with Facebook, but that is because they aren't doing it well. And that's user error, not platform failure.

As an early snowstorm approaches I have been catching up on some long lost emails and articles from the past few months in hopes of reaching the holy grail of inbox zero (down to 35 right now!) One of the articles that jumped out from the pile talked about a recent study from Cone, a marketing agency out of Boston. The article talks about recently released survey data that says 80% of people have changed a purchase decision due to a bad review they saw, especially on social media. And I believe it. The skeptics will say that not many people ask for recommendations on social media sites, so how big can the impact be? But those people misunderstand how social word of mouth works. Those of us who spend a lot of time (probably too much) on social networking sites are constantly being influenced by others and their experiences in an informal way. We know when our friends have an amazing meal or an amazingly bad one. Or which airlines are keeping us stranded at every turn. Or wh...

As an early snowstorm approaches I have been catching up on some long lost emails and articles from the past few months in hopes of reaching the holy grail of inbox zero (down to 35 right now!) One of the articles that jumped out from the pile talked about a recent study from Cone, a marketing agency out of Boston. The article talks about recently released survey data that says 80% of people have changed a purchase decision due to a bad review they saw, especially on social media. And I believe it. The skeptics will say that not many people ask for recommendations on social media sites, so how big can the impact be? But those people misunderstand how social word of mouth works. Those of us who spend a lot of time (probably too much) on social networking sites are constantly being influenced by others and their experiences in an informal way. We know when our friends have an amazing meal or an amazingly bad one. Or which airlines are keeping us stranded at every turn. Or which re...

There is a lot you can learn about your Facebook Fans by keeping a close eye on what content they engage with and tracking Facebook insights, but some things you just need to ask. While you don't want to over survey your fans, here are three things you should know as you build out your strategy. 1. Are your fans already customers? To best serve your audience, you need to know if you fans are already on board, considering a purchase, or just enjoying your content with no intention of buying (not necessarily a bad thing by the way!) 2. Why did they become your fans? Did people click the "like" button for a specific offer? On a whim? Or because they really want to engage with you? Knowing what got them to act in the first place can help you grow your network and provide the right content. 3. What do they expect? While you can learn a lot from Facebook insights about what works, it never hurts to ask. How often do they want you to post and about what? If you give your ...

We've been interviewing lots of people at my job lately and I often wonder if we all over think the process. We look for specific skills. We scour resumes for companies we admire. We ask thoughtful questions and hope for great responses. But are we really using the right measuring sticks? I'm not so sure. We all spend so much time with our co-workers - more than with our families - and yet we often use impersonal methods for evaluating job candidates. The truth is that you know pretty quickly if someone is close to right. If the conversation is easy, enthusiastic, and enjoyable and they have a background close to what you need the details can always be taught. I mean, how many skills truly transfer directly from one company to another? So, my advice is to not think so hard. You know when a candidate is right. And that may mean placing more value on the personal connection than the resume.

I read and write a lot about content marketing. In my opinion the beauty of content marketing is that you are empowering your customers and prospects to be successful before they even realize it. One tip after another you dish out small pieces of information that people can act on and before they know it they are already having success and bought into your philosophy (and often your products and services.) This process reminds me of when we were training our puppy (now a happy middle aged dog) to go up the stairs at our condo. He obviously had the ability to go up on his own but lacked the confidence to do it on his own. So we started by placing a piece of ham (he's a pug so food rules the day) on the second step, which he forced himself to go get. Next time out we put ham on the second and fourth steps. Based on his prior success he was willing to go a bit further and grabbed the second piece. Two more training sessions and he was at the top of the steps happily eating ham and t...

Over the last week or so, there has been a ton of chatter in the online marketing world about Google+, a new social network from Google. The user experience is similar to that of Facebook (a news feed based on status updates and shared content, recommended friends, etc.), but the idea here is to make it easier to share content with specific sets of people (called Circles) instead of just publishing content on your wall for everyone to see. It's definitely a cool concept, even if it doesn't gain real traction (like some of Google's previous attempts to be social). Right now Google+ does not allow businesses to sign up for a page, although they have said they will be bringing a business-friendly version to market later this year. While many business pages have actually been shut down, Ford was one of the first corporations to have a page launch legally earlier this week. So ... as a small business, should you care about Google+? In short, not right now. Google has been ama...

This year was my first visit to SXSW Interactive, the annual tech and social media geek convention (wait, is it marketed differently than this?) in Austin, Texas that overlaps with an amazing film and equally amazing festival. I have been to a lot of conferences in the past ten years, but this one was definitely less about the presentation content (although some of that was good too) and more about the people you meet and the conversations you have. Part of team’s mission at “South By,” as it’s known among the SXSW veterans, was to interview interesting people on the state of social media marketing and email marketing for small businesses. We got lots of great interviews, but here are 4 of my favorites. Enjoy!  (I have more content related summaries on social media marketing and monitoring for small businesses that you can check out on the Constant Contact Blog here , here , and here .)

I often hear people who are into social media talk about how their friends or colleagues or competitors are “doing social wrong.” But unless you are running scams or spamming, is there really a “wrong way” to do social? Certainly there are more and less effective ways to achieve your business goals using social media and there are lots of great tools and resources out there to help you get on your way, but saying someone is doing it wrong implies that everyone has the same goals and that there is only one way to be successful in attaining them. For example, here are three completely valid business objectives that require very different social techniques to achieve them. (Note: I haven’t included “building a large following” as a business goal. In my opinion it’s not, it is merely a means to an end.”) Drive increased foot traffic from existing customers [Activate your Network]: For many businesses, especially small businesses, driving increased foot traffic from the people who alread...

As a blogger, I feel like I have no choice but to write a predictions post for 2011.  Or at least what I hope will happen in 2011! So here are three things I see sitting right here, waiting to happen. 1) Data integration reaches a tipping point:  whether it's the combination of internal and external behavioral data, social media and primary research data, or even just sales and marketing data, it is time for departments to break down the walls and share what they know and work together to make smart decisions based on that data. 2) Real time will become more real. As with the DVR and the touch screen before it, much of the talk about real time data access was years ahead of the reality.  Pushed in part by the real time nature of social media and it's explosion, but also by the true integration between marketing, sales, and support systems, real time is becoming a reality at more and more companies.  And your internal and external customers are beginning to e...

In my last blog post about sellers and buyers making the process easier , I really wanted to include a story about a recent sales call – or series of calls rather that I received as a case in what not to do if you want to successfully cold call a business prospect (name and company changed to protect the guilty). I am paraphrasing, but it went a little like this. Voicemail 1: “Hi Josh, my name is George and I am calling from awesomeweb, a local design firm specializing in thought leadership based websites and I would like to talk to you about your website and how we might be able to help you increase your search engine power.” One week later: Voicemail 2: “Hi Josh, this is George calling from awesomeweb again. I left you a message last week and was hoping to talk to you about how we might be able to help with your web design needs.” One week later: Voicemail 3: “Hey Josh. George from awesomeweb. Give me a call.” George started off well enough, but made a criminal mis...

As a regular buyer of business technology and services I am continually shocked at some of the mistakes made by people trying to sell to me. And while I understand how many of the mistakes happen having done the job and read numerous selling books and white papers on the topic, many of those people I encounter would be far more successful if they made a few minor changes by thinking from the buyer perspective. The truth is that anyone who sells any product or service should spend some time on the buying side and anyone who buys should take a turn selling. Or as I always say to anyone who likes to eat out at restaurants, spend some time waiting tables and you'll quickly learn how to get better service and appreciate the value of the slight over tip. Sticking with the dining out metaphor, here are three tips to make buying and selling easier for everyone: 1. Create a comfortable environment: Remember that your job is not to “sell me something,” it is to help the buyer buy. Th...

In today’s edition of eMarketer there is an article stating that most business to business referrals from social sites are uninterested in products and services. The article, however, goes on to state that visitors from Facebook were most likely to check out a company’s “about” page or blog posts. As a B2B services marketer those are exactly the desired effects of social media that feed our sales process. While it would be great if potential clients saw something we posted on Twitter , LinkedIn , or Facebook and rushed to buy a project from my firm, the reality is that our sales process is not short or direct. Our value proposition is made up of the smarts, personalities, and creativity of our people and our sales cycle can take months (and occasionally years.) Barring the rare immediate project opportunity, our goal is to drive prospects to the elements of our site that let us different ourselves – the blog, the about us, the leadership team, etc. and encourage prospects to contact ...

My last post was about how we conducted internally feedback and a few people asked if they could see the actual questionnaire. As I said, it is far from perfect, but it got us moving in the right direction! What is your role in the company? - Executive - Project manager -Research associate -Admin/Finance/IT -Senior consultant/director -Business development -Other 0-10 agree/disagree scale: On the whole, the marketing team is doing its part to help its CMB internal customers to meet/exceed their goals Why do you rate the marketing team that way? (open end) 0-10 agree/disagree scale: The marketing team follows through on requests quickly and thoroughly Why do you rate the marketing team that way? (open end) 0-10 agree/disagree scale: The marketing team delivers work of the highest quality Why do you rate the marketing team that way? (open end) Overall, has the marketing team improved from 2008 to 2009? Yes/No/don’t know Where do you see room for improvement? (open end) What do you think...