Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Strategy’
Social Media Marketing – Easy and Inexpensive Publicity For Small Non-Profits
If you run a small non-profit agency, you owe it to yourself to learn more about social media marketing. Social media marketing is an effective and easy way to promote and publicize your organization for little or no cost.
Social media marketing takes advantage of the social aspects of the Internet. How? Before we begin that discussion, let’s first start with an overview of the objectives of online marketing in general.
Online marketing has one main goal – attract visitors to your Website. To draw traffic, most organizations focus on improving their ranking on search engines like Google. There are many ways to boost your ranking, with paid listings, search engine optimization, and link building being the main ones:
Paid listings offer fast results but are prohibitively expensive for small non-profits. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves making your site really relevant to the keywords that pertain to your organization’s mission. It has no direct costs, but you may need to pay for the services of a search engine marketing firm to get decent results. TIP: The critical aspects of SEO are keyword research and large quantities of Website content, which makes it an important part of your marketing strategy whether you choose to use social media or not. A Google search on SEO techniques can help you learn how to optimize your site. Link building is a strategy to increase the number of links pointing to your site. The greater the number of links, the more popular and relevant your site is considered to be, and the greater the chance of a high search engine ranking.
Social media marketing is based on participation in various online communities/meeting places, like blogs, article databases, and social bookmarking and news sites. Each time you participate, you can create a link to your site. You can use blog entries and articles to fill out the content on your site, making it even more relevant in the eyes of the search engines. And you can do all of this for next to nothing, especially if you know some Net-savvy volunteers with a flair for writing.
Here is a quick overview of the main tools used for social media marketing:
Blogs. Each blog posting has a unique URL, or Web page address. This means that if the blog is hosted directly on your site, every blog post will create a new page on your site, giving search engines more to work with when assessing your site’s relevance. To host your own blog you need a domain name, which has a monthly cost. If you host your blog elsewhere, like blogger.com, there is no charge, and you can still take advantage of link building opportunities by pointing to your own site in your posts or adding your posts to social bookmarking and news sites.
Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites allow users to share their favourite Websites with others over the Internet. More bookmarks to a site mean more potential links. In the context of marketing, social bookmarking sites allow your organization to post every blog entry, new Web page and article you write, and create a link to your site for each one. Companies like addthis.com offer buttons for your site that allow visitors to bookmark your site with the click of a single button.
Social News. Social news sites are similar in concept to social bookmarking sites. With a free membership you can start submitting your articles and blog posts to news sites. These sites have a lot of traffic and can lead many users to your Website. Check out services like Digg and Reddit for more information.
Social Networking. Most non-profits and many businesses have a page on MySpace or Facebook. These heavily visited sites give you lots of opportunity to network online with supporters and volunteers, building your “brand” and inspiring people who like what you do to visit your site.
Article Writing. Articles are not a social medium per se, but I like to include them in discussions of social media marketing anyway. Article databases, like EzineArticles.com, give you a forum for posting detailed articles (as opposed to short blog posts) that relate to your organization. Articles allow links, so you can easily connect readers to your site. You can also post your articles on your own Website to increase the content there.
Although social media marketing takes time, it is well worth the effort. If you haven’t considered it before, I advise you to do so now. There is ample research available on the Web about social media marketing. Do some reading, then gather a committee of staff, board members and volunteers to plan a strategy that will allow you to reap the benefits of this no-cost marketing opportunity.
Country Wine
Social Media Marketing For Small Business
Move to Trash
Where does social media – networking sites, forums, blogs, wikis and the like, fit with your overall marketing strategy? Social media does not replace all of your other marketing – it just changes the mix.
When I look at a company’s marketing I categorise it into two main areas – Online and Offline. I then break these down into further categories.
Online:
o Website & Search engine strategies
o Customer strategies
o List building strategies
o Sales strategies
o Social Media
Offline:
o Hands-off strategies (where you communicate with your customers indirectly) such as advertising, marketing collateral, direct mail, sponsorship, press releases
o Hands-on strategies (where you communicate face to face with customers) such as trade shows, seminars, events, client nurturing
o Shared strategies (where you work with others to jointly grow your businesses) such as networking, alliances, joint ventures, referrals
When a business is looking at marketing, they need to look at the right blend of these strategies to meet their specific goals.
Social media is just one part of the blend – but there are many reasons I love the Social Media for small business.
For starters the big one – it’s almost totally free! The only cost with much of the social media strategies is time if you do it yourself.
You can target your social media strategy so it also achieves the side targets of all of your other online strategies – more loyal customers, bigger list, better sales, and increased search engine presence.
The downside is it can be tricky to learn what to do; many of your peers and colleagues look at you as if you have suddenly grown two heads when you talk about it (so peer support can be quite low); and if not done correctly it can suck up hours of time without much result.
Off-line strategies are more traditional and have been proven to work over the years. The downside is they are often quite costly and in many cases you don’t get the results you were hoping for.
I know of people who have paid $3000+ for a tradeshow booth plus fit-out and printing costs, as well as wages and time and ended up with very little result.
With all marketing strategies – both online and off line, you need to calculate return on investment. You want to see how much the strategy costs to acquire a new customer.
So in the case of the tradeshow – let’s assume they spent all up $5000 on the show and acquired 10 new customers – the cost to acquire each new customer was $500. You need each customer to spend more than $500 with you over the life of their history with you in order to generate a return on investment.
I recommend businesses run the stats ruler over their networking activities in particular. Add in the membership fees, annual fees, meal fees, lost earning time (if appropriate) and then calculate how much new business you have generated from that process.
This is very confronting for many people – they may enjoy their networking but when they run the financial ruler over it they find they are paying out much more than they are getting back in financial return.
Of course not everything is about money – if you are getting your personal needs for connection and being part of something bigger met, then your investment in networking is a worthwhile one for you personally. Just be clear it is not really a business strategy but a personal strategy and you will go into your next session with a slightly different outlook and will gain more from it as a result.
So back to where social media fits with your marketing strategy. Well it all depends on what you want to achieve, the demographics of your market, the amount you have to spend and the time you have available. In my experience it is something worth adding to your marketing blend.
