Where Social Media Marketing Fits In Your 2012 Budget?

Regardless of what marketers say about social media, the rubber hits the road at budget time when they have to put their money where their mouth is. For B2B marketers, social media marketing ranks seventh in terms of budget importance trailing old-fashioned postal direct mail according to 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report conducted by Marketing Sherpa and sponsored by Marketo.

 

Where is social media in your B2B marketing budget?

Before you write off social media as a consumer-only marketing strategy, here are 3 reasons many B2B marketers overlook the importance of social media in their 2012 budgets.

• 1.    Weak U.S. economy drives use of tried and true marketing strategies. The continued frail U.S. economy has made marketers reticent to use more experimental formats. It’s safer and easier to use the marketing strategies that worked best historically and provide an indicator of performance potential.  As a result, there’s less perceived risk.

• 2.    Marketers overlook the cost of social media. If social media has no cost, then there’s no reason to include it in your budget. Of course, this is a fallacy because social media marketing requires brand monitoring to track the conversation, content marketing to feed social media engagement, and headcount to participate on social media platforms.

• 3.    Social media has weak or limited metrics. Across the board, marketers are challenged when it comes to measuring hard results from social media in terms of lead generation and sales. Last year, research from SmartBrief for Social Media and Summus Limited found that only one third of firms tracked social media marketing ROIafter three years. Exacerbating this problem is the fact that some marketers don’t include a clear call-to-action and unique tracking code within social.

If you’re a B2B who does NOT overlook social media, but has yet to effectively incorporate social into your marketing strategy, here are 5 suggestions to get you started with social leveraging existing marketing strategies. If implemented effectively, your social media marketing can enhance other areas of your marketing budget.

• 1.    Use social media to support your search optimization efforts (SEO). To this end, create a blog and integrate it with your website. Where appropriate, link to products on your website. When done well, these two marketing strategies support each other. Incorporate improved organic search rankings into your tracking metrics.

• 2.    Create relevant content marketing. When implementing a social media marketing strategy, develop appropriate content. To ensure that you have sufficient content, plan your editorial calendar to include both unique and repurposed content with a new twist within social channels. Understand that using the same boring product information everywhere won’t cut it!

• 3.    Incorporate contextually relevant call-to-action and related unique tracking codes. The bottom line is that it’s difficult to make a case for social media if you can’t show business results. To this end, it’s important to develop metrics that relate back to your business objectives at the point when you’re developing your overall marketing plans. Otherwise, you’ll have to make do with whatever you’re able to collect after the fact and the challenge is that social media can have an impact on soft issues that are outside of your regular tracking.

• 4.    Add social sharing to your content. Cost-effectively extend the reach of your marketing by including social sharing buttons and related calls-to-action on your content. Use the dominant formats, namely Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and StumbleUpon. The aim is to increase your reach via earned impressions.

• 5.    Support your social media marketing efforts with internal or owned media.Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It requires marketing to drive readers and engagement. To this end, leverage your internal media, namely your website, emailings, business cards and email signature files to promote your social media executions. While a special targeted marketing promotion isn’t needed, it does need to be marketed.

Social media should have a place in your B2B marketing plans and budget. While you may want to believe that social media is free, it requires support both human and financial as well as senior management buy-in. Further, social media marketing must be integrated into your overall strategy to maximize its effectiveness and ensure that it’s cross-promoted and tracked appropriately.

Where is social media marketing fit into your plans for 2012?

Author: Maria Pergolino

 

 

The Definition of Social Business?

Per request of the Author. We removed the imported shared text blog and added the direct link for your con’t reading for the story. You may read it here - http://www.pammarketingnut.com/2012/01/the-definition-of-social-business

Native Apps vs. Web Apps, or How About a Hybrid?

Everyone agrees that apps are great marketing tools for engaging consumers. Now the debate is whether to develop native or web apps. Which is better? Well, it depends.

What Are Native Apps, Web Apps, and Hybrid Apps?

Native apps are apps that are explicitly developed and stored on a device. Native apps require installation.

Web apps are written entirely with web technologies and the code is executed by the browser; installation is optional.

Hybrid apps are native apps with embedded HTML. They have most of the benefits of native apps. The web portions can be packed with the app or downloaded from the web.

Factor 1: How Will the Consumer Use the App?

If the app uses features of the device (microphone, speaker, camera, vibration, GPS, etc.), a native app is more appropriate. If the app relies on the Internet for content (i.e., a catalog of products), a web app is more appropriate. This chart demonstrates applications by Internet task – shopping and search apps being heavy browser users are more likely to be web apps while connecting and navigating apps use features of the device and are more likely to be native apps.

Factor 2: How Fast and How User Friendly Do You Want the App?

Since a native app is explicitly downloaded and stored on the device, generally the user experience is better. The user interface can be cleaner without multiple frames. As Matt Legend Gemmell said when speaking about native apps in his article “Apps vs the Web,” “…humans are designed to focus the majority of our attention on a single task at a time. Interfaces which permit and even encourage this separation of concerns reduce our stress level, and facilitate concentration.” Native apps tend to have better graphics and a smooth user experience due to the interface with the device.

Factor 3: How Will the App Be Distributed?

Native apps can be distributed for free through app stores using their payment system. However, a negative is the loss of control through the approval process, monetization, and promotion of the app. Web apps generally have less visibility and are usually marketed using search engines or on branded websites directly to the consumer.

Factor 4: What Do You Want to Spend?

Native apps are more expensive to develop, as they need to be developed for each specific operating system – iOS, Android (multiple devices), Windows, etc. Many web apps can be developed by in-house developers using existing skills. Therefore, native apps can also take longer to develop. Maintaining apps on multiple operating systems is also expensive and time consuming.

Of course, you can always use the hybrid model, which can combine the best of both worlds. Hybrid applications are increasingly rising in popularity as operating systems become more fragmented.

Usage, user experience, control, distribution, and cost all come into play when developing an app; and then there is how to design the app itself so that it is engaging and retains the user to defray distribution costs.

Author: Rob Weber

Need a Social Media Strategy? Start with These Three-Pronged Approaches

Most nonprofits understand the potential power of social media to connect with both old and new supporters, advocates, and clients. But few nonprofits can articulate the strategy behind the time they spend on blogging, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

All good communications strategies start with a goal: What are you trying to accomplish via your communications? More specifically with social media, what do you want the reaction to be when someone reads your blog, or Facebook status update, or tweet?

I think the answer boils down to three basic choices for nonprofits. You want people to DO something, to THINK something, or to FEEL something.

DO Something. Your words are calling them to some kind of action. Donate, volunteer, call your legislator, register, andtell a friend are all common examples of nonprofits asking supporters to do something.

THINK Something. Your words are sharing something helpful or educational. You share a link to a news article or to a free download. You share an interesting fact or story. You offer some how-to instructions or tips. By sharing these updates, you hope readers will think about what you have presented.

FEEL Something. Your words show the human side of your organization and prove that there really are passionate people behind the 501(c)(whatever you are). You are building rapport by sharing content that makes your supporters laugh, cry, smile, feel included, or swell with pride. Never discount the value of building that human rapport. As Dr. Maya Angelou says, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Strive for a mix of these three outcomes as your write for social media.

Now, let’s look beyond the specific updates and think a little more broadly about how you want your organization to be perceived within your social media communities. Social media success is most often defined by what we call “engagement,” and we only get engaged to people whom we genuinely enjoy being around. So how can your social media strategy help you move down that path from being introduced to “just friends” to getting engaged and, you hope, into a life-long relationship with your supporters?

I have another three-pronged approach that I call the Three G’s: Be Genuine, Generous, and Grateful.

Be GENUINE. Let your organizational personality shine through, and build up that rapport that makes people love your cause. Let us know how you feel about what’s happening in the world. Express some opinions, instead of just sharing facts. Take us backstage and let us see what’s really going on.

Be GENEROUS. It’s all about being a helpful human. Think of communicating as gift giving—are you a good gift giver who thinks about the people on the receiving end and what they want or need? Or are you a bad gift giver, thinking about your own needs and treating communications as just another chore on your to-do list? Listen carefully and constantly to your supporters, and then respond in kind. Empower them with helpful information and resources, even if those materials have been created by other “competing” nonprofits (it makes you look really smart, confident, and in the know).

Be GRATEFUL. Being grateful is what you do in response to generosity from others. You can say, “Thank You,” directly or you can do what I call “blowing kisses” throughout the day. Share a link to someone else, retweet them, or otherwise pass on information from others who have been kind to you, as a way of saying thanks. Tell stories not just about you and your clients but about your fans and followers, too. Show them how much they really mean to you.

Every nonprofit is a little different, and your social media strategies should be, too. But any strategy with these three-pronged approaches at its core is bound to be a success.

Author: Kivi Leroux Miller

When to remove email addresses…

We have developed a simple strategy to help you decide if, and when, to remove an email address from your opt-in list.

I recommend these 4 steps to establish which addresses are truly inactive, and which fall into the unemotionally subscribed group.

• Step 1 Start a reactivation campaign. Try to re-engage anyone who hasn’t opened an email for more than 6, or even 12 months.
• Step 2 Separate your lists. Anyone who still hasn’t opened an email after the reactivation campaign should be placed on a separate list to your active recipients.
• Step 3 Send the same email to each list and focus on activity. The active list will now show a truer representation of engagement and your results will not be dragged down by the dead email list. After every mailing (or month), move anyone who becomes active again to your active list, and anyone on the active list that now qualifies as inactive by your definition to the inactive list. You can now clearly identify how much revenue is generated by emailing the dead addresses versus how much it is costing you.
• Step 4 Analyze over time before deleting anyone. Within 6 to 12 months you’ll have a much better sense of how long you should continue to email an unresponsive email address before removing it from the list. We have generally found it to be the point at which almost every person who opens an email for the first time in a while goes on to unsubscribe.

So that’s the way we see it. What’s your view?

By Guest Expert.

Inactive subscribers are still valuable to your brand…

Inactive subscribers are still engaged

Inactive subscribers are still valuable to your brand and can generate a significant amount of revenue.

It makes perfect sense to stop emailing someone you know would never buy your products again or who actively dislikes receiving your emails. But long-term inactivity isn’t a good indicator of whether someone falls into that category. There are 5 reasons why your subscribers may be – or appear to be – inactive:

1. They want your email, but haven’t needed your product for a while.
2. You’re receiving false negatives – your email is optimized to be read with image blocking on, so some subscribers could be opening it without you knowing.
3. The subscriber doesn’t want your email, but doesn’t care enough to unsubscribe.
4. Email address churn – the subscriber no longer uses or rarely checks that email address.
5. They don’t see your email because it goes into the junk folder.

By far the largest group is the first one – we call these people the unemotionally subscribed. They will happily ignore your emails until they’re ready to buy, because it’s easier than unsubscribing and having to remember your URL or Google you later.

We’ve gathered plenty of evidence on this group and demonstrated that while they might not read an email, they’re still a very important customer base. For example:

• One of our clients generated $120,000 from subscribers who had not opened or clicked on the previous 25 to 40 emails.
• Another saw 14% of revenue generated by subscribers who did not open or click a single email.

Common marketing advice would have been to delete those subscribers after a year’s inactivity. But by retaining unemotionally subscribed addresses, the client brought in a significant amount of additional revenue.

by DAVE CHAFFEY

Mobile Retail Websites – Upgrade your Storefront today..

Consumers Increasingly Turn to Mobile Retail Websites As They Shop to Find Products, Special Offers and Competitive Prices

Mobile retail websites have emerged as an indispensible in-store tool for consumers as they shop, according to a new survey conducted by Hipcricket, an Augme Technologies, Inc. company (OTCBB: AUGT). The fourth annual Hipcricket Mobile Marketing Survey revealed that consumers”particularly smartphone owners”are turning to mobile retail sites as a critical tool for locating the products they want, searching for coupons and special discounts, and comparing prices at competitors’ stores.

Sixty-three percent of smartphone users have visited a retailer’s website from their mobile device”up from 53 percent in 2010”and 41 percent have done so while in the retail store. Of interest, 50 percent have checked a competitor’s mobile website while in another store.

While mobile retail sites have historically served as “brochures,” lightweight versions of retailers’ full websites that provide limited information such as store locations, directions and hours, today’s mobile-specific retail sites are now providing more significant benefits to consumers as they move along their path-to-purchase.

The survey found that smartphone owners are visiting mobile retail sites to:

Research prices (46 percent);
Search for coupons and offers (36 percent);
Research products (28 percent); and
Purchase products (13 percent)

In general, consumers are finding more value in the mobile Web. Seventy percent of all smartphone users regularly use their phone to access the mobile Web, second only to SMS/texting among media usage on mobile devices.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Goes Mobile [VIDEO]

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Goes Mobile [VIDEO].

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is getting a technology update for its 85th year by way of an official mobile app. The Parade app will be available on both iOS and Android ahead of next Thursday’s event, and feature a route map, NYC tips, a wifi hotspot finder and a way to track specific participants in the parade.

You can see some of the app’s features in the video above. Macy’s says that all of the features will also be available on the Parade website. Will you be tuning into the parade this year? Let us know in the comments.