What is a contact strategy? A contact strategy is a marketing program that sends appropriate messages to relevant groups of customers according to a strategic schedule.

Who needs a contact strategy? Any brand that is serious about using a particular channel to generate income.

Most brands that live or die through direct marketing understand the importance of a contact strategy. Brands that rely heavily on the postal channel tend to focus on building an effective contact strategy because of the high costs of paper, printing, and postage. Yet I’ve seen that many brands that use email and social media to reach their customers don’t focus much on creating a disciplined contact strategy. This is a huge mistake. It is the difference between a random shot gun approach and a scientifically engineered process. Which do you think will produce the results you want?

Having a direct response background, I look at social media as the latest generation direct marketing channel. I use social media’s predecessors–email and postal messaging–as models for designing a strategy. I’ll show you what I mean.

Learning from catalog brands

When I worked in the print catalog world, we focused heavily on RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) in determining who received a catalog when. In other words, the time of the customer’s last purchase, how often they purchased, and how much they spent drove our decisions on which customers we should invest marketing dollars on. These indicators were so reliable you would be willing to bet on them.

Email response indicators

In our email strategies for clients, we add another component to this model. We bring into the equation when the customer last opened or clicked on an email message. Although email is a low cost channel, you can do harm to your list and leave sales dollars on the table without this kind of approach.

Designing social media contact strategies

I like to think of Inner Architect as being a pioneer in developing contact strategies for the social media channel. Here are some things you should consider in creating a more disciplined approach to your social marketing program:

• Do you know which of your customers are on Facebook and/or Twitter?
• Do you know which customers like your brand or follow you?
• Are you keeping track of who is engaging with you and when?
• How often do you want to reach out and to whom?
• What can you establish for measurement?

This is exciting new territory! Please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can answer any questions.

In our conversations with potential clients,

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

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

“Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave” Holism-Wikipedia

In part 1 of our series “Becoming a Holistic Social Media Marketer” we will outline how to approach your marketing efforts with a top down, whole environment strategy. Although many people begin by integrating social networks into their marketing plans, they often ignore how the pieces relate and can be used together.

Holistic Social Media Strategy

The definition of the word holistic is a great example of how a social media marketer could begin to plan strategies: “relating to or concerned with wholes or with complete systems rather than with the analysis of, treatment of, or dissection into parts. . . ”

3 Holistic Social Media Steps

Before you begin to plan and execute your social media marketing efforts, you must understand the whole playing field. Without an understanding of the “big picture”, you cannot effectively break down the parts and extract relevant analysis:

1. Choosing Social Networks: which social network(s) will be utilized in your plan? The answer to this question comes from the goals being set by your organization.
   • Is this a marketing campaign designed to change public perception?
   • Is it focused on new sales growth? Retention?
   • Is it meant to drive networking and new partnerships?
2. Social “Big Picture”: how do the social networks you have chosen to utilize fit together and collaborate in a “whole” strategy?
   • Widgets: interconnecting your social networks, so people know where to find you, by providing a “portal” aka widget that with one click can take them to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profiles or pages
   • Synergy: connecting your blog messaging to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn by embedding links to articles-messages on each social network you are utilizing
   • Uniformity: consistent articles-messages delivered to each social network providing your audience with a clear perception of your company
3. Identification: identify the role(s) each social network will play in the marketing plan.
   • Facebook: can function as the relationship builder, CRM mechanism, and customer service spot for your company
   • Twitter: often takes on the role as the prospect-lead generation tool feeding your Facebook profile, page, or company blog
   • Blog: this is the ultimate publishing platform for your company’s messages. It is the best hub and centerpiece from which to launch
   • LinkedIn: this is your networking portal and due diligence mechanism. If people want to know key  individuals running a company this is where they will land. This is also a fantastic place to create real time update messaging as well as demonstrate and establish company expertise within a niche

Erick Qualman, author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business, is behind this eye-opening video that details how social media has changed the world. This kind of development reminds me of the music and cultural revolution of the 1960’s—a transformation that will likely have a long-term impact. Are you ready now to take social media seriously?

I think we all pretty much agree

1. Approach social media as you would a small child with much potential. Invest in its care and feeding and don’t expect it to support itself until it has a chance to grow up.
2. Shift the focus from the concept of influence to the idea of propensity. Look towards building connections with people who have proven to take the action you want rather than rely on their friends to influence them.
3. Invest in developing methods to identify and reach out to your target customers. Don’t allow your social networks to evolve on their own. Manage your networks from the perspective of building the most valuable list you can. Don’t skimp on the time to do some digging as that is where you will discover your gold.

Wine marketing is the number one challenge for wineries in today’s economy. The importance of social media for wine marketing can be directly related to the acronym “DTC.” Direct to consumer sales provide opportunities for  higher profit margins, increased special event sales, and to sell  important wine club memberships. Yet with all that is riding on direct to consumer sales and marketing, the awareness of the power of social media marketing as a sales channel remains underappreciated and underutilized.

Case in point, the Winebusiness.com “Direct to Consumer: 2009 Tasting Room Report.” Most interesting in this report are the “barriers” to maximizing DTC potential for all wineries. The reported challenges as well as  the opportunities to overcome the challenges may surprise you.

Direct to Consumer Challenges

1. Compliance and Shipping: (39 percent) believe issues of compliance and shipping “still outweigh all other barriers“
2. Lack of Resources: (17 percent)  people, time and money
3. Effective Technology and Systems: (13 percent)
4. Acquiring Customers: (13 percent) aka lead generation
5. Marketing Tools: (13 percent) believe a lack of DTC marketing tools like customer relationship marketing (CRM) and Web analytics

Direct to Consumer Opportunities

1. Tasting Room Software: according to the report there are many online systems available to greatly reduce the challenges of shipping and compliance
2. Lack of Resources: the three resources  are people, time, and money. The answers should include social media marketing training that enables key employees to become more efficient in their social media tasks. Another solution is to hire a social media marketing agency to run your marketing program
3. Effective Technology and Systems: technologies that could improve DTC sales would be a blog and a strategic social media marketing plan to engage with consumers on Facebook and Twitter. Placing laptops in the tasting rooms so consumers can directly fan your Facebook winery page or follow your Twitter account(s) creates a bridge from real world to online world.
4. “Acquiring Customers”: this challenge (lead generation) could be addressed with a DTC Twitter strategy in concert with a Facebook company page for customer relationship management
5. Marketing Tools: customer relationship management would be the role of a strategically implemented Facebook company page that engaged consumers and created “Call to Action” messaging.  Web analytic measurement tools could be implemented to measure each message delivered in specific channels including the blogosphere, Facebook, and Twitter for the messages relevance or effectiveness