*This is a Guest Post by Greg Digneo*

When you ask someone with a successful social media presence how to build your own audience, the answer most often is, “Write a blog post, Tweet it to your following, and share it on Facebook and LinkedIn.”   But what if you do not have many followers on Twitter or Facebook Fans?

A few weeks ago, my company decided to start a process to answer the question:  “How can a business that does not have many hits on their website, has no followers on Twitter, and no Fans on Facebook, generate sales leads using inbound marketing in only 30 days?”

Here’s our story about how we’re building our own buzz in 30 days.

Create a Story

The web is a crowded space and you are in constant competition to earn your target audience’s attention.  We have come to realize that your competition does not just reside in your industry, but is everywhere.  Think about what you read – whether it pertains to your business or not.  What stories resonate with you the most?  It can be a blog post on how to grow your business, or news relating to your favorite football team, or the heartfelt story of a mother reunited with her child.  All content producers are competing for your time, and no matter how you spend it, you only have 24 hours a day.

Before writing a blog post, and before building your social media plan, you first need a story that will resonate with your ideal customer.  At Cloud Marketing Labs, we want to be known as the firm who can deliver sales leads in 30 days using Social Media.  We feel this is something our audience can wrap their hands around, and will help us stand out from some of our marketing firm competitors.

Focus

You cannot join every network and be successful at all of them in 30 days.  You need to focus all of your time and energy on 2 or 3 platforms.  We chose blogging, public relations, and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Blogging

After writing great content pertaining to your story, you need an audience to read it.  In order to grow our audience, we would share our most helpful posts with friends and customers by emailing them a link to the post and asking them to share it with their friends.

The key here is not to abuse your contacts.   Only send a few posts, otherwise, you risk becoming a bit of a spammer and annoying.    Even if you do not have a large following on Facebook, Twitter, etc., chances are someone who you are in regular contact with does, and will be happy to share helpful information with their network.

Public Relations

We found many blogs, such as Real Time Marketer, looking for guest posters and fresh content.  If your story is compelling and unique, chances are they will allow you to leverage their network and help you grow your audience and expand your reach.

By pitching our “Sales Leads in 30 Days Using Social Media” story to various blogs and friends, we have been able to set up a few guest posts over the course of these 30 days.  We get the benefit of expanded reach, and they get the benefit of new voices.

We are also going to submit a news release announcing a webinar where we will share this story with small and mid-sized business owners.  However, instead of emailing the news release to journalists, we are going to use the online distribution service PRWeb.  This will help with our search rankings and increase the visibility of our story as it gets picked up by various news aggregation sites.

Pay Per Click

Our final focus is on PPC advertising.  However, instead of using Adwords, we decided to use Facebook’s advertising platform.  There are two main reasons for this.  First, it is cheaper.  We are in a competitive space, and Adwords clicks would be well over $1.00 per click to get onto the first page.  Second, Facebook ads will help you develop your buyer persona.  You have visibility on things like age, gender, likes, and job titles that you are unable to see using Google Adwords.  This will help us target our ads more precisely, increasing the efficiency of our campaign.

So far so good, our straregy is currently working.  We’re offering a webinar where we will share this marketing plan in more details and our learning’s from it.

Below is a link you can click on to sign up.

Greg Digneo is founder of Cloud Marketing Labs, a marketing service that helps small and midsized businesses generate sales leads in 30 days using inbound marketing.  He is hosting the webinar “How to generate sales leads in 30 days using social media” and is co-author of the Cloud Marketing Labs blog.

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Is Your Social Media Marketing Working?

Social media marketing is apparently all about engagement, engagement, engagement.  Did you hear that you should be using social media for engagement with your customers or targeted customers.  Just get more engagement on your social networks, and your business dreams will come true.

Great, it’s about engagement…so what the hell does that mean?

I am certainly one to promote more interactions between your business and your audience. It’s vital.  But I try to distinguish myself in this cluttered space just a little bit by pealing back the onion and digging into the meaning behind the activities.

Engagement is worthless if you don’t know what kind of interactions lead to achieving your digital goals and objectives.

What does your WIN look like?

If you’re trying to get more sales, how much traffic leads to a trial of your product.  How many trials lead to a sale?  Which networks lead to the most traffic, why?

Creating engagement for the sake of interaction doesn’t achieve much more than more work.  Dig deeper to establish a list of interaction criteria that you are aiming for.  What types of engagement signal more interest in your business?

Yes, ReTweets on Twitter are important.  It means your network is actually reading your Tweets.  But do those RT’s lead to an increase in traffic?  Do those who ReTweet you on Twitter ever ReTweet anything else?  Are you even measuring for that?

Understand the digital steps and actions it takes for you to be successful…then focus on getting more of them.  The techniques and actions will be different for everyone because all of our goals are different.  But if you don’t understand what your WIN looks like, you’ll never know if any of your activities are really doing anything.

I’m happy to help your business peal back and dig deep to set your WINS up, shoot me an email to scott@realtimemarketer.com and we can dive in.

Happy digging.

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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Exciting news, I am a new contributor for the Gen-Y PR blog…LAF!  (http://laurenafernandez.com/blog).  I’ll be writing at least 2 posts per month on the PR blog.

My first post went live last week and I was extremely happy with the results.  51 ReTweets as of right now!  My posts there will tend to be a little light hearted and fun, but still full of good content. Make sure you check it out.

Here’s my first post:

Jump Out Of Your Social Media Clique

Here are the reasons I offer…

1. New Projects

2. New Paradigms

3. New Tools & Technologies

4. New Events = New Faces

5. New Audience

Read the full post HERE

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Where is Your Social Media Strategy Taking You?

Yes, your social media strategy sucks.

That seems a little harsh…True.  But here at the RTM there is no dilly dally.  Denying the truth doesn’t make it better.  But just pointing out flaws doesn’t make you better…and I want you to succeed.

So, how do we fix it?

Tie Your Social Media Strategy to REAL Business Goals

I’m not sure why you’ve decided to pawn off social media to the college intern but stop.  Yes, I know they’re on Facebook but that doesn’t mean they understand how Facebook ties to business goals.  If you’re a clothing brand, you wouldn’t hand over sales or marketing to the intern because they own a shirt.

Social media is an extension of marketing.  Do not treat it differently.  You have a business plan, a marketing plan, sales plans…you need a social media strategy and plan.  If you’re serious about social media, give it the respect it deserves to drive real results.

Tie your strategy to real business goals.  Social media, although technically pretty inexpensive…takes a tremendous amount of time.  If you’re going to spending that much time on a project or tasks…it better drive some real business results.  Know what those are.

Get Specific Goals…Kill Fluff!

Creating “Brand Awareness” is a half-ass goal that doesn’t mean anything.  If your only goal is brand awareness, then as soon as someone becomes a follower on Twitter…you’re done.  Right?  Well, one person now knows about you…technically that’s awareness.

Probably not the final result you had in mind.

Dig down deep and dive into specifics.  If you want to increase sales via social media…by how much?  If you want to increase brand awareness, how much web-traffic do you want?  Define exactly what you want.  Kill fluff, it’s the arch nemesis of specific goals.

Commit To The Strategy

You need to be committed to your social media strategy.  You wouldn’t abandon your sales strategy after a month.  Be committed to really diving into social media.  If your strategy is researched well, it will work.  If you’re not going to be committed, stop now.  You’re guaranteed to fail.

Revolve Around Engagement

To maximize social media, you need to engage.  A push only strategy does not work.  People are bombarded enough on television, radio, print, billboards, and everywhere in between.  If you’re just sending out more ads over social networks, your response is going to be small.  Engage with your audience.  Create and respond to dialogue.  Spark opinions.  Get involved.

Assign A Time Aspect

You need a time table attached to your social media strategy.  You can always adjust over time, but you need an End in Mind.  Are you assigning monthly goals?  Quarterly goals?  If you have no time table attached then technically you can never fail…because the game is never over.  You never have a bar to judge if you’re winning or losing so you can adjust and fix areas that need it.

Allow For Flexible Execution

Your strategy should be solid, but the tools and networks you use needs to be flexible.  The “Why” is always more important than the “How”.  The “How” will change over time.  New tools will come out. Find out what is working best and attack that.  Drop what’s not returning high value.

Know What A Win Looks Like

How do you know if you’re succeeding in your social media strategy if you don’t know what a “win” is.  Is is sale?  Is it a ReTweet?  Is it more social mentions?  Figure out what your wins are, then you can focus on getting more of them.

Create Value

Your strategy needs to create value for your audience.  Everything you do should be with the customers or targets in mind.  Does this blog post create value to my readers (You don’t need to answer that question about this post, I already know it’s amazing).  Does my Twitter account distribute valuable content?  Does my Facebook Page spark valuable engagement.  Always be thinking value.

So even if your social media strategy doesn’t completely suck…incorporate these aspects to take your game to the level it and you deserve.

This is DAY 26 of my “28 Day Blogging Challenge“

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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Are You Only Writing For The Search Engines?

Read anything about blogging advice and SEO is bound to enter an early chapter.  I say throw out any thoughts of writing for SEO traffic.  Your readers are your top priorities, not Google.

Drop the SEO mindset…at least at first.

Yes, organic traffic is great.  I track mine on a daily basis about what is drawing in new readers and what’s not.  But I DO NOT let SEO control my posts.  I admit, my traffic from search engines is small, very small.  Right now I only have about 8% of this blog’s traffic coming from Google and other search engines.  Any blogging expert evaluating that stat would say that this blog is a miserable failure.  But it’s obviously not or you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

You most likely came across this post because you are one of the 761 readers who subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter, or saw someone who did that passed it to their networks.

I write for my readers…not Google

Yes, I have no doubt my traffic could be higher if I wrote topics for SEO.  But I’d rather have an engaged community of readers that are loyal, active, and interested in my content post after post.

When you’re thinking about a post only in terms of SEO, you’re putting content on the back burner.  Don’t.  When you’re starting out your blog you need to be focused on content.  Build up a base of readers by having interesting and engageing topics.

The trouble with the SEO mindset is that the topics you write about aren’t based on your readers interest.  Your posts are based on what you think will get the most traffic from Google.  Your creativity is at the mercy of the search engine.  How boring is that!

I’m not the guy that’s trying to teach you how to make $10 a month from your blog.

I am the guy who will do everything he can to offer suggestions and information to build a brand…a real brand.  Something that conjures up real emotions when your targeted prospects think of it.  If that’s what you want, write content with your readers in mind.

Focus on building a community of readers that will come back to your blog time and time again because you’re a trusted source of information.  You should optimize each post to the best you can, just make sure that this mindset doesn’t invade your creative thinking.  There are still certain techniques you can use or WordPress plugins that optimize your posts that I use.  But I’m not writing post topics because they got 2400 searches each month.

Build your base of loyal traffic first.  Write such fantastic content that your base spreads the word for you to gain even more traffic.

Communities and social media empires are built from loyal relationships…not from search engines.

This is DAY 22 of my “28 Day Blogging Challenge“

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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How would you answer if a customer asks you…”Why should I be a fan of your Facebook page?”

It’s a reasonable question.  After all, you’re asking them to take the time and energy to join your brand’s page.  It’s perfectly natural for someone to ask “why”.  So do you have a specific and precise answer?  Is it compelling?

Why not?

I have no doubt about your persistence and drive to ask customers or potential customers to become a Fan of your Facebook Page.  Hopefully you’re even having some luck getting them to sign up.  But if your page isn’t creating value and engagement, what reason do they ever have to come back.

Acquiring fans is not the challenge for your brand’s Facebook Page anymore, it’s the starting point.  Because Facebook changed up the News Feed and replaced it with an algorithm, it’s all about engagement, engagement, engagement.   The challenge of a Facebook Page is to create a compelling reason for your fans to continually engage with the Page and take actions.

Engagement is the key to Facebook success for your social media marketing.  Without it, none of your fans, or at least very few of them will even see your updates.

You need to be able to complete these sentences:

My Facebook Page adds value to my customers because…

My Facebook Page adds value to potential customers because…

I am activitely engageing my fans by…

I am creating fan engagement each week by…

Write these answers out.  Analyze what you have written down.  Show them to some trusted business partners and ask for their opinions.

Having trouble with ideas about creating value?  Why not go directly to the source and ask your fans.  Your next post should be something about what are they wanting or expecting from your Page.  How can you increase their interest in this page?

Most marketers create a Facebook Page and expect to see some sort of results without ever really thinking about why anyone would actually want to be a Fan.  Get a leg up on rival pages by critically thinking this through.

All of your fans will appreciate this process and after all, isn’t that the point.

This is DAY 21 of my “28 Day Blogging Challenge“

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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Your Customers Are Telling You Something Right Now

The real time web has gotten quite a bit of buzz, but are you actually using the available tools?  There are several areas where you can apply using real-time data to affect your business and your social media marketing.  Use the real time web to gather specific data.  Don’t let the amount of data at your finger tips paralyze your decision making ability or your social media marketing strategy. Have a predetermined list of information you are looking for.  Use these suggestions to boost your business.

Find Targeted Prospects

Do a quick search of Twitter and type in a few keywords that signal a potential interested customer.  If there are a few tweets where it looks like you can jump into a conversation, go for it.  Otherwise just follow the folks who are chatting and perhaps there will be a need down the road.  Even if they don’t buy right away, you’re now following targets you know have an interest in what you do.

Track Industry Trends

Use real time search engines like Sency, Icerocket, and One Riot to look at what the most popular infomation and links that are being shared about your industry, company, or products.  This can instantly offer advice about what your next blog post should be about, what customers are chatting about, and what customers are looking for.  It’s a good way to stay on top of competitors and get a feel for your industry.

Provide Customer Service

There are a good number of topics people chat about out on the web.  Naturally one of those is complaints.  Use monitoring tools available to scan the real time web for any of your current customers having problems and take care of them.  Comcast and their Comcast Cares Unit is probably the most well known company who uses Twitter for customer service purposes.  But I’ve been approached several times when tweeting about particular products.  Diffuse angry customers early.  You don’t know want folks online going nuts over your product without any response from you.

Online Campaign Tracking

I use Clicky every day to track my website analytics.  I use Clicky rather than Google Analytics because Clicky is in real time.  By keeping track of what links are drawing in the most traffic and what time of day, I know when and where to get the best ROI for links I share on the web.  This takes much of the social media marketing guessing game out of the equation.  You can use the service for free and I highly recommend it.

Instant Feedback

Maybe you have an idea for an event or a new product.  Why not bounce some ideas off of your networks and get the pulse before you go into dedicating a lot of time and money.  These obviously aren’t scientific surveys, but if this project is small you can get a feel if you start moving forward.

Information can often determine the difference between success and failure.  Utilize the real time web to give yourself a winning advantage.  I’d rather know things that are going on as the happen than after the fact.  Become a true Real Time Marketer by being smart and utilizing all of the tools in your belt.

This is DAY 18 of my “28 Day Blogging Challenge“

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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Is Your Social Media Strategy On Track?

Before initiating any social media marketing campaign, you need to really focus on a specific strategy.  Without a specific goal and execution path to success, your social media marketing campaign will not run on all cylinders.  Instead you may be moving…but you have no idea what direction.

Before you complete your strategy, make sure you answer these questions

Where Are Your Fish?

You need to know where your customers are most active.  It’s not feasible or smart for your brand to be everywhere.  Do your homework and figure out exactly what social networks your customers are active.  Fish where the fish are to maximize your return on your social media investment.

Why is This Valuable to Your Customers?

Before your brand gets social media activities underway, you need to answer what value this social media marketing is providing.  If you can’t answer without hesitation why your customers or potential customers will find your social media profiles valuable, you aren’t ready to create them.

Without value, you have no engagement.

Does This Create Engagement?

Aside from value, you’ll need to have a set of activities created specifically focused on creating engagement.  If your networks aren’t actively engaging in your activities, you’re posting worthless information that will result in zero benefits to you or your customers.  Make sure you have a path to active engagement.

Without engagement, is without success.

What Do You Want To Accomplish?

You need to have a reason for every activity you do.  Why do you have a Twitter profile? Why are you creating a Facebook page?  Every social media activity needs to be actively reaching a goal.  Know what yours are.

Why Will This Reach Your Goal?

Assuming you’ve already answered what your social media goals are, now you need to answer why your activities will reach them.  If you can’t answer why your social media activities will lead to your specific goal, then you need to drill down further or look at other social media options.

Not every network will lead to your goals, figure out what will give you the best opportunity for success.

How Long Will It Take?

What are your time-lines for your success?  Do you have one?  Most social media strategies either leave this part out, or are unrealistic.  Establish time frames so you can track whether or not you are likely to reach success.  Evaluate how your doing, adjust your timeline over time.

Do You Have Management Buy In?

Does upper management buy in to social media?  This is important because if they don’t…you’re almost guaranteed to fail.  Without the acceptance by management your legs will be cut right from under you.  Unrealistic goals will be wanted in an unrealistic time frame.  Once these goals which are already unrealistic aren’t met, you’ll be directed to engage in other activities.  Make sure they support what you’re doing and if they don’t, use your energy for persuasion.

How Are You Measuring Success?

So you’ve established goals, how are you measuring success?  If you’re purely tracking filling an event or sales that’s pretty straight forward.  But if a goal is something like “Brand Awareness”, you need some specific indicators to track how you’re doing.

How Are You Tracking Execution?

Along with tracking overall social media goals, you need to have a system set up to track activity.  You need to have a set of leading indicators set up and monitored.  Otherwise you’re basically driving blind.  You know that you’re moving but have no idea where on the map you are.  Track how your activities are driving the overall goal and adjust if needed.

Social media strategy is a long and tedious task.  But without the proper strategy and roadmap you’re making success as hard as possible.  You would never engage in any other part of your business without a plan, don’t neglect social media marketing.

Use these questions to test how strong your strategy is.

This is DAY 16 of my “28 Day Blogging Challenge“

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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Are You Showing Off All Of Your Feathers?

The social media marketing scene is completely saturated with companies that most likely do and sell the same things as your business.  Fortunately for you, most of them do not do it well.

While creating your social media marketing strategy, in addition to goals, you’re going to create execution tactics and procedures to achieve these goals.  One of the areas that should be on the top of your mind is “How Do We Become Memorable”.  Like most marketing, within the social media realm you’re biggest competition is not with companies selling similar products.

Your biggest social media competitor is people’s attention

What is going to make you memorable?  Why would someone choose to engage with your brand?  There are several areas to concentrate on that will boost user engagement, but I think one the most overlooked yet highly important is Personality.

Here are 5 quick tips to start inserting some personality into your social media marketing. (If you’re not convinced brand personality is for you, read THIS)

Use Pictures

Bring your social media posts to life by using pictures.  Let your  fans and network see a little behind the curtain of your world.  If you have any unique office decorations show them off.  At an activity or event, take a pic.  Use pictures to allow a behind the scenes look at what your company does.  (My favorite service for Twitter is Twitpic)

Have Opinions

This is going to cause most higher ups at big offices a massive panic attack, but the fact is that real people have opinions.  Real people have dislikes and favorites, some things drive them crazy, some songs make there work day go faster.  You’re a human being, not a robot.  Have opinions.

Obviously you need to be conscious about what you’re projecting to the universe, but this doesn’t mean you need to be walled up behind a boring ball of plain Jane posts.

Personal brands can get away with a lot more flexibility than big corporate brands, but being part of a large corporation is not an excuse to not showcase and share opinions.  If you never say anything of substance, why will anyone care?  I can disagree with someone’s opinion and still support their product.  If I see a brand out there and sharing their real experiences I’m much more likely to follow that brand and engage.

Use Video

There is no better way to show off your personality than using video. Video is a medium that offers an opportunity to bring to life what print cannot, you.  Video offers a chance to be a moving breathing person.  You audience isn’t reading your words, they’re seeing you.  After watching a few video posts, if done correctly, your audience can really feel a sense that they know you.  (I really need to take my own advice, I plan on rolling out some video posts soon).

Engage

I recently had a conversation with a Chicago sports radio personality and blogger about getting more exposure for himself.  In our discussion we researched a few Facebook Pages that would fit his demographic, one of these pages was the Chicago White Sox.  They have about 200,000 fans, and a large amount of fan posts and comments.  Unfortunately, there is no engagement from the actual team…none.  The administrators post and walk away.  Sports fans are loyal.  They’re not likely to leave their favorite team because of lack of Facebook engagement, but the team might have better opportunities to sell merchandise and fill events if they were.

St. Louis has the 3rd biggest Mardi Gras in the world.  The official Facebook page for this event has 7,000 fans.  Again, you’ll see lots of fan engagement with little to NO interaction from the page administration.  I’m willing to bet more than 7,000 people showed up to the more than 30 events that were hosted.  If the page had more interaction perhaps the smaller events would have had better attendance.

As much as I scream about social media Engagement, Engagement, Engagement…it’s still not the rule but unfortunately the exception.  You should feel lucky and honored someone out there actually likes your brand enough to take the time to leave a comment or ask a question.  The least you can do is thank your fans and answer their questions letting them know they’re appreciated.

Think Outside The Box

Get creative!  Or if your creative juices aren’t flowing, then just look and see what others outside your industry are doing that you love, and apply it to your business.  Some successful examples are…

Mascots – Not every brand can get away with an alter ego but Chicago’s Berry Chill does a great job with Yogi Jones.  The lovable character tweets daily and thanks his fans when Berry Chill is mentioned on Twitter.

Contests / Events – Groupon is creating a contest called Live Off Groupon that will give away $100,000 to one person that can live an entire year off of their coupons and not spend a dime.  (don’t bother applying, I’m already going to win it! )  What better way to show off their service than have a fan live there whole life for one year on it.

The battle for attention is going to be your biggest competition when executing your social media marketing strategy.  Succeed by creating some brand personality in your social media marketing.

This is DAY 15 of my “28 Day Blogging Challenge“

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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