The Social Media Advantage. Holly Berkley

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СКАЧАТЬ directly push your business. Instead, contribute meaningful information that your target audience is seeking. Don’t be afraid to give it away for free. Encourage dialogue that helps position you as a knowledgeable person in your industry and as someone who cares about others’ thoughts, problems, concerns and opinions. Spend more of your time on social sites talking to people, building relationships, sharing resources that aren’t your own products or services than you spend promoting yourself and your company. Through this type of engagement and understanding of the audiences, you will be more likely to capture the right kind of attention, along with trust and loyalty.

      Once you are an accepted member of the group, test out new approaches and dialogues. Have fun with it. After all, social networking is still in its infancy as a field of interest and study. Best practices and tactics in the field are continuing to evolve. Many small businesses are benefiting from a combination of traditional and social marketing. While social media helps open doors to new leads, many small businesses have found that more traditional follow up tactics help them to actually close the deal. Read the side bar from TKO Graphix to learn how they used a combination of social networks and traditional sales to help them land a 2 million dollar project.

      Case Study

      Combining Social Media outreach with traditional sales strategies helps land $2 Million Dollar Sale from Flickr lead

      Company Overview

      TKO Graphix is a full-service graphics provider in Plainfield, Indiana, established in 1985. We design, manufacture, and install graphics for fleets, vehicles, retail, events, and trade shows. We also offer signage services nationally. Our customers include Target Stores, Celadon, HH Gregg, Interstate Distributing, and Knight Transportation, among others.

      Marketing Goals, History

      Our goal in using social media has been to better connect with our current customers, while finding new prospective customers and associates to work with. We also wish to maximize our web presence and engage our demographic through a more personalized experience.

      In 2009, we launched our social media presence, and have since established accounts on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google’s G+ and LinkedIn, along with our Brandwire Blog. As with all our networks, we expanded our Flickr presence daily by publishing new photographs of our work, searching for current customers and prospects (Flickr search), and searching via common keywords respective of our industry. New contacts were emailed a brief, personalized note to welcome them, which led to my (Josh Humble) connecting with a print broker in St. Louis, IL. I then introduced him to Glenn Burris, one of TKO’s national account representatives. Glenn drove to St. Louis, where they talked about how we could help each other. The broker was contacted by an ad agency that needed a large format graphics company with traveling installation crews. This led to TKO presenting to a large national company. After meeting with the national company for a second time, TKO provided a proposal and was awarded the contract.

      A Multi-Faceted Marketing Plan

      • Social Media: Publishing our portfolio to Flickr, while adhering to best practices for titles, description tags.

      • Social Networking: Proactively seeking prospects and engaging with target audience via the network.

      • Traditional Networking: Meeting face to face with prospectives.

      • Sales Presentation: Presenting in-person to the prospective customer.

      In the middle of a very challenging recession, 2009 was our best year yet, thanks to the power of social media and engaged marketing.

      We re-branded over 4,000 vehicles at 221 locations in North America for the national company. We also manufactured all decals and wraps, de-identified their vehicles, and installed new graphics, while creating an online fulfillment program for easy ordering.

      Understanding and using all traditional forms of applicable marketing, in conjunction with new media marketing, has been one of our biggest lessons learned. Social media works - however, we always need to be where our audience is.

      Considering our markets are composed of both traditional AND new media demographics, keeping a balance of mediums and tools used has been greatly beneficial.

       —Josh Humble

       Interaction Designer, Photographer, and Social Media Strategist for TKO Graphix

      www.tkographix.com

      Focus on relevant, quality messaging, not quantity, to attract your audience.

      When local plumber, Tim McKenna of McKenna Plumbing canceled his newspaper and Yellow Page ads to save money, he eventually turned to Twitter to drum up business. He quickly learned that a subtle, more conversational approach won out over direct, hard selling. Although his Twitter handle @itstheplumber, identifies his profession, his bio is friendly, sharing that he “loves tango, yoga, rowing, endurance sports.”

      “Forget about the number of followers,” said Mckenna, “It’s most important to connect with the people who do follow you.”

      McKenna learned this first hand when a follower with a plumbing issue reached out to him on Twitter. The follower’s kitchen sink lost water pressure and she was hoping to find a quick fix online. McKenna ended up resolving her issue via a phone call, however the expert advice resulted in a quality Twitter testimonial for everyone to see.

      In specialized fields or niche industries especially, quality trumps quantity every time. In other words, it’s better to have a few hundred Twitter users who subscribe to your tweets (“followers”) who are your core audience and care about what you have to say, than to have thousands of followers that will never notice you or become your online advocates by retweeting and responding to what you have to say. The same idea holds true with blogging*. Its best to have well-crafted, thought out blog posts that convey your brand messaging while providing insightful opinions and information than to post mindless chatter every day. It’s the quality posts that will get forwarded, linked to, picked up by various RSS feeds* and help your online presence grow.

      Figure 2.2: Building a focused social presence and crafting quality content will generate a targeted following that is more likely to engage and help share your messages.

      Understanding not only who your target audience is, but why they are engaged on a specific social network, is important. You want to understand what kind of information they are seeking in a particular social space and be able to provide that to them. For example, your Facebook friends* may want to see different types of information than those who subscribe to your blog. Through testing and tracking which types of posts and information gain the most feedback in the form of comments, likes* or shares*, you will be able to optimize each social communication channel to benefit each audience, and therefore get closer to reaching your specific business goals.

      A 2011 study by Razorfish found that among all social networks, friends, followers and fans cited “feeling valued” as the most important element of engaging with a company online. Therefore it isn’t just about providing your audience with the type of information they seek; “companies should worry less about building out numerous channels and touch points and more about ensuring each customer interaction communicates value,” Razorfish says.

      Ensuring value and quality posts is something СКАЧАТЬ