social media and resources

In our conversations with potential clients, the most frequent goal we hear is the desire to monetize social media. To this end, we at Inner Architect have begun to take a unique approach that enables email to monetize social media.

Think about it this way. Your goal with social media is to build relationships that positively influence customers’ lifetime purchasing with your brand. Rather than look to social media to make the sale, leverage your social media relationships to influence sales in email, postal or telesales efforts. By doing so, you:

• Personalize the outreach
• Strengthen the relationship
• Increase the potential to make a sale

Let’s face it. Facebook and Twitter have changed our culture. Customers who engage with your brand on Facebook or Twitter want to be recognized. If you are not sending those customers personalized messages that acknowledge your Facebook or Twitter relationship, you miss the opportunity to leverage the social relationship. You defeat the whole purpose of social media by sending messages that are not personalized.

We are recommending strategies that segment customers into targeted groups that enable you to send relevant messages. This level of  segmentation also helps you to capitalize on opportunities to outreach when purchasing history indicates a likeliness to buy.

Want to learn more? We’d love to hear from you.

Let’s face it. While social media is the trendy new marketing kid on the block, email remains the channel that most companies rely upon to execute their direct marketing programs. Why?

• Email is easy and inexpensive.
• Social media is new and time-consuming.

Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that since email is cheap, there’s no harm in blasting the whole database with the same message. Yet this strategy produces an unhealthy syndrome called list fatigue. Without a strategy for sending the most relevant messages to the most targeted customers, your emails can begin to be perceived as irrelevant and your customers stop opening them. If your customers shut down your only touch point, you lose your ability to communicate with them and increase the likelihood of losing them. Not good.

This is where social media can play the hero. Social networks give you another channel in which to get your customer’s attention. By making the effort to maintain social network contact information on your database, consider the power of what you can do:

• Best customers: Show them that you care by acknowledging them in a social relationship.
• New customers: Get the relationship off to the most promising start by welcoming them to a social relationship.
• Lapsed customers: Seize the opportunity to re-engage those who are no longer responding to your emails.

Are you thinking this sounds too time-consuming and something you can’t afford? Think about it this way. Back in the day direct marketers spent tons of money on four-color printing on high quality paper. But they didn’t mail these expensive pieces to everyone. They only invested in the people they predicted were most likely to buy or those they sorely did not want to lose.

This is the kind of science that now needs to be applied to social media marketing. How prepared are you?

Do you understand how to manage your social media marketing program? Most companies and entrepreneurs simply “show up” establishing a Twitter account, Facebook page, or blog without a plan. The idea that being there takes precedence over strategically leveraging each social network.

By understanding how to manage your social media marketing, your efforts will  evolve from a casual, random, unmeasured effort to a strategic, analytical and consistently refined program. By not planning your social media marketing and without ongoing monthly management, your marketing efforts will fail with very poor to ineffective results

8 Tasks For Managing Your Social Media Marketing

1. Content Strategy: you must develop a message content strategy that supports your business goals
2. Contact Strategy: you must develop a contact strategy and schedule
3. Delivery: you should deliver messages according to schedule
4. Analyzation: you should analyze the results of your messages
5. Adjustments: you should refine your strategy and schedule based on results
6. Recognize People: you must acknowledge new connections on the various social networks
7. Conversations: you must engage with connections on the social networks
8. Search: you must research opportunities to reach out to new individuals that align with your product by utilizing the internal search engines within each social network you are marketing within

What If You Can Not Do This?

If you or your company does not have the time, manpower, or expertise to manage an ongoing social media marketing program, you should consider hiring a consulting firm to take on this vital function. Inner Architect manages the Facebook page(s) and Twitter account(s) for major companies, like Whitehall Lane winery, in order to provide the following benefits:

• Lead Generation
• Prospecting
• Sales
• Research
• Broadcasting
• Announcements
• Customer Relationship Management
• Customer Service
• Reputation Management
• SEO

Ship Naming Wiki

If you have adopted a social media plan are you on the right track? How do you know if you are taking the right steps? In order to understand the position you are in today, it is important to answer five questions.

5 Questions About Your Social Media Plan

• Have you adopted the right tools to effectively leverage social media as a marketing channel?
• Are you participating in the social networks that best reach your target audience?
• Do you know what to say in your messages?
• Do you have an effective contact strategy?
• Can you measure your efforts?

5 Components of Social Media Diagnostic

• Social media overview: Analytical review of your social media presence
• Profile analysis: Reports how well your profile is strategically positioned to maximize and attract opportunities
• Diagnostic overview: Review to insure all your social media sites include your links, links are interconnected, and all your sites are pointing links to and from one another
• Marketing analysis: Insuring that you understand how to send your blog article links, leave links in comment sections of blogs, and how to move your value message forward in a strategically targeted method
• Traffic analysis: Insure your sites are open to traffic, check availability of widgets and their usage, and analyze your networking efforts within each social media site

Results

If your company can not answer any or a majority of these questions then it is time for a social media marketing diagnostic. Before you begin investing time-money-manpower-effort into this vital strategy get more information on how to get started.

Multilevel Marketers, affiliate marketers, spamming business owners, scam artists, hard sell sales people, and a myriad of other “dark forces” are lurking on Twitter with the idea of selling you something no matter how you feel about being sold.

In order to avoid, and avoiding this at all costs strikes to the very heart of your credibility, the perception of being one of these “dark forces” avoid the following mistakes when establishing your Twitter presence.

5 Tips To Avoiding Being Perceived As A Spammer On Twitter

• Follow to Follower Ratio: Do not begin your account on Twitter by following hundreds of people-companies or you will be perceived as a MLM, affiliate marketing spammer. This condition is called “Being upside down”
• Follow Recipricols: Begin by following companies or people who almost automatically will follow you in return. Ex- GuyKawasaki usually follows everyone, Pat Kitano, or me deansguide
• Build Slowly: Monitor your “ratios” for the first 100- try to keep it at a 1-1 ratio of followers to those you follow
• Sales Messaging: Do not simply run tweets filled with sales pitches for you or your services. This is the fastest way to lose an audience
• Messaging Content: Just like on a blog, concentrate on tweeting about your region, city, town, community, neighborhood, politics, schools, events, restaurants, construction and any hyper local news that will make you the go-to source for your area