B Squared Marketing Shares Its Wisdom While Making It Short and

Advertising Tip of the Week: Want to drive more traffic? Consider condensing a 3 to 4 month advertising budget to just 6 weeks and build a promotion around it.

I might be getting carried away. But, I loved this very brief bit of marketing advice when it showed up on my iPhone this afternoon.  I think it proves how brevity can be the soul of content marketing brilliance in a social media milieu.

B Squared is an established SW Florida Advertising that does great work and has won a ton of awards. I knew that, but I hadn’t thought of them for ages until I saw their Facebook post this afternoon.  I was so struck that I had to write something right now.

Six Reasons Why This Makes for Fabulous Content Marketing

1. It is short. Just 24 words and less than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter if you exclude ‘advertising tip the week.’ In fact, it would make a terrific tweet.
2. It is authentic. Clearly, B Squared is offering solid advice without a sneaky ulterior motive. It’s a device you could even act on yourself without outside help.
3. It is creative. They are suggesting something outside the box that might generate fast and measurable results.
4. It is repeatable. Because their advice is so short and so easy to understand, business owners and professionals are likely to share the information and to give credit to B Squared. (Well, it sure worked for me.)
5. It is unique. Although other advertising professionals might have thought of this, I have never seen it suggested before. And, it hints to me that this company might have a lot of other unique ideas worth learning about.
6. It is action-oriented. As a small business advertiser, it would certainly inspire me to take action either on my own–or, best of all, to contact B Squared to talk to them about how they might be able to help me market more effectively.

Not only is this a great example of content marketing, but B Squared also makes great use of Facebook where you can easily share this information inside Facebook or beyond.

My only advice: Shorten these distinct words of wisdom down to 140 characters so that you can tweet them after which they will be pulled into Facebook automatically.

Written by Newt Barrett Visit the original post at this link.

Welcome to the new world of social influence marketing. The old ways of conducting market research is becoming extinct while companies across the globe are creating opportunities to hear directly from their clients and consumers on what they want and how they feel. Surveys for market research can now be carried out via a few clicks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and through a business blog.

By using a Facebook business page, a company can post information in the form of a poll or survey and allow their “fans” to give instant feedback. Companies are gaining insight on:

• Consumers’ attitudes toward particular products
• Consumers emotions about the company
• Insight into how consumers using their products
• What their clients’ needs are
• What other services they would like to see in the market place, just to name a few.

It’s faster than waiting for a hard copy market study to come back, as reliable and as fast as real time allows. It’s the new “secret shopper” but with loads more information – and none of it is secret.

Think of the possibilities: You develop a product or a service and you want to gauge consumer response quickly. Sending people out to stores to interview customers will take too long and is costly, why not post the question on your Facebook page and ask your fan base to participate in the conversation?

Old forms of advertising, via print media, won’t work either; many consumers don’t have the time to sit down, fill out a questionnaire and send it back in, yet they will take the time while they are on their favorite social site to answer a few questions. You want quick results so you can tweak the product according to customer response, now it’s possible; get it in real time by utilizing the place consumers spend a good amount of their time.

Utilizing the power of Twitter and Facebook will garner you results in seconds.

• Post 140 words and find out what people think of you, your business, your products and your services in the time it takes to hit the “enter” key.
• It’s a survey, a focus group analysis times ten – market research on steroids.
• It’s everything you need to know from the people who support your business and the speedy turnaround of information allows you to make adjustments swiftly.
• That means quicker profits.

It’s a turbulent world – make social media your new constant. It’s reliable and has more muscle than any old form of marketing could ever possibly hold. It is, in effect, your new best business partner.

In 2010 this complex, highly functional network takes on a much different personality. It is no longer merely billions of bytes of information zooming among computers worldwide but a smaller interpersonal network that provides an information resource in a large sphere among groups and in a smaller setting, among companies and employees.

Just as Twitter and Facebook have been used as social media marketing tools to connect ideas and information among large disconnected and fragmented groups of people, they can also be used to supply information among smaller, interrelated communities. In fact, today, executives use Twitter and Facebook to not only convey a message to consumers but to talk to their own employees. Twitter is the means through which CEO’s communicate and let people in their organization know what’s happening on a daily basis. Internal blogging is used as a two-way communication channel with employees to converse about events taking place the company, it is also a great tool to hear what employees are saying to each other and what could make them more productive.

This means of communication surpasses the internal newsletter as the new information source. It is faster, quicker and in real time – a fresh and immediate e-letter. Where you’d once wait weeks to have such information on your desk, today you wait minutes – seconds – which makes the e-letter’s contents much more relevant to a company’s operations. Employees want to know what’s happening in the company now and this instant supply of information can help in decision making and planning timely strategies. Social media marketing is not only the link that supports the connections among consumers and companies but the support that grounds and supplies news among people who work within the company.

This makes social media the new media for corporations worldwide – an informational superhighway informs employees which, in turn, brings results at the speed of light.

Google “twitter oil spill” and up comes a TechCrunch article, “Central Command Turns to Twitter to Solve the Gulf Oil Spill” (followed by the words “Uh Oh,” relating to the fact that BP is looking for people with tech expertise via social media for ideas to stop the spill).

The article explains how a group of a dozen or so organizations including BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA have set up Deepwater Horizon Response to manage response operations. “In addition to a Web site for this effort,” the article notes, “there’s a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account and a YouTube account.” All of these combined efforts are giving people worldwide a ton of information about the spill. The Twitter page alone has 7,843 followers.

How does this relate to your business? Realizing that the chance is nill that you’ll have to pull a PR/social media blitz the scope of BP’s within the lifetime of your business, the incident nevertheless highlights the power of the Internet and social media to get information out to large groups of people. You can, in essence, move mountains, whether you need to inform about a disruption in your business, a problem you’ve encountered with a product or service or another notable breach that affects you and your customers.

Say something does happen to your company that demands a bit of finesse; what if a figurative “oil spill” occurred and you suddenly found that you had to rely on social media marketing to clean up the mess?

Your company and what it stands for are emblazoned into a brand name; if your brand becomes tarnished there’s no better way to blunt the PR damage than through a social media marketing campaign. Use these Internet tools to explain, to inform and to mitigate, if not on a global basis, then on a local level. Customers are customers, whether they span the globe or take out their garbage on the next street.

Social media is fast becoming synonymous with information resource. Used effectively it can help you pave the way to better relations with customers.

Funny, that hyphenated word used to carry a whole different meaning, as in people who engaged in behavior that was outside the norm. Shunning social media doesn’t place you outside the boundaries of generally accepted behavior but it does place you outside in the cold and away from an effective form of business marketing.

Embracing social media marketing is like giving your business a facelift. Dropping fifty pounds and buying a new wardrobe. Painting the living room. It’s all the same – it gives you a new perspective and once that’s understood, the sky’s the limit when it comes to how far you can take your marketing plan.

Changing from an old to new mindset is not always easy. In the 1920s the automobile blew past the horse and buggy; in the 1950s, TV edged out radio and in the 1990s the Internet flexed its muscle and overpowered everything and with each rumble of thunder there came a resistance that consistently sought to harken back to the “good old days.”

But by the early 2000s, the old method of advertising and marketing became the leisure suit of the industry – a hackneyed and tired piece of clothing best left to old disco movies.

So in establishing the new you and, in essence, establishing a new format for your marketing campaign and embracing social media, you might find that you’re having trouble adapting to a new world order. You might, in effect, find that you’re anti-social. If you do keep these points in mind:

1. It’s not as painful as you might think. Social media marketing is a few clicks into a world of interconnected relationships that can bring power and prestige to your business.
2. Social media marketing, via Facebook and Twitter, enables you to target your audience. Thus, you can bring additional leverage to your business, something that old forms of advertising and marketing could never deliver.
3. Marketing via the internet allows you to connect daily, hourly, minute by minute, in real time with consumers. An instantaneous flow of possibilities is at your fingertips.

So throw off the old tweeds and loafers and get a new look via social media marketing. Wear it well and see how your business grows.

• Develop a planned strategy: three- six or 12-month. Know what blog topics you’ll be posting on what dates. By doing this you’re letting your subscribers know when to expect your next blog post and they’ll anticipate it on the same date every time. If your postings are all over the map – different times, different days every month or every other month – you might not get the feedback you want. You might not get any feedback.
• Don’t be aimless. In other words, don’t rattle on about the weather if you really want to discuss information on what your business offers consumers during a particular season. Likewise, don’t rant on a particular issue that’s bothering you. People drawn to your blog site don’t want your opinion; they want information on a solution.
• Entertain. While the name of the game is to supply information, at the same time, have some fun with it. Even the driest of subject matters can be presented in a format that’s enjoyable to read.
• Learn the art of creating the perfect subject line. If you’re introducing a new blog topic via mass email, make the subject line intriguing enough so that people will want to click through. Use action words and present tense to give a sense of urgency.
• Be engaged on social media network sites. Use Twitter and Facebook not just as a place to dump information on your business. Interact with people; share information and be interested in what they’re telling you. That sort of give and take helps to build a network and a following.

Social media marketing is, indeed, a multi-level strategy to engage, to capture interest and to build continuing relationships. Doing it correctly can make you and your business stand out in the crowd.

Why is this beneficial to a business? It is beneficial because it gives organizations the tools and resources to build the image of what they see their company as of today, and what they see their company as in the future.

Several tools used within Social Media that will help a company build their image include:

• The physical image of a companies brand like logos, pictures, and videos are tools used several times a day on social media sites to help build a companies image.  Unlike a website which is usually static everyday, Social Media sites such as twitter and facebook are updated several times a day driving a company image into the minds of their audience.

• Brand image can also be developed through words.  Status updates, blogs and tweets to name a few are ways a company can develop their brand image. Through stories and descriptions their audience will have a grand picture of what their product is and how it  benefits them.

• Communication will also help develop a company’s brand image.  The unique benefit of Social Media compared to other internet marketing tools is that it directly speaks to the audience and encourages feedback.  Through this feed back an organization can measure if their brand image is being conveyed correctly and what type of steps can be taken to ensure a strong brand image.

The combination of images, words and communication that Social Media Marketing has to offer is genius, it gives all the right ingredients an organization needs to build and maintain their online image.  Used correctly, Social Media can ensure a company’s brand image goals will be successful goals.

The results of Social Media Marketing differ drastically from the results of traditional marketing efforts like television or direct mail for two main reasons:

Consumers today are not the same consumers of yesterday.  Today, consumer are watching television, updating their Facebook, texting on their cell and eating dinner, simultaneously.  Until something strikes their curiosity, they have the ability to not fully focus on any one particular task.

Consumers today have built infiltration systems and are less likely to respond to one particular advertisement.  Advertisements are on billboards, web pages, products, text messages, commercials, blogs, and social media sites.  With so much information surrounding each consumer it is only reasonable for the human brain to cope by filtering all this information. Statistics show that consumers are more likely to trust a friend’s opinion or advice over that of an advertisement. This goes to show you that consumers are more interested in what their friends have to say and social networking is one of the places they interact with friends. Therefore, if their friends are commenting on a companies page or product on social media sites, their friends will see and  are more likely to respond.

So where does this leave Social Media Marketing?  It leaves social media sites to do what it does best, socialize.  By having hands on contact with consumers companies are not only letting them into their world, but they are also in theirs.  Consumers are laying their cards on the table and all you have to do is play.  Think outside the box when it comes to social media, think beyond banner advertisements and mass emails but open yourself up to the concept of the opportunity to capture the attention of the world by opening the lines of communication.

Hunting can be compared to traditional marketing, while farming is much like social media marketing.  In traditional marketing take for instance telemarketing, within a matter of a few minutes you can tell if the client on the other end of the phone is interested in the products or services that are being pitched. Within a few moments after that, it is quite easy to know whether the deal is sealed not. Traditional marketing more often than not provides almost instant gratification. Social media marketing is much different, like farming or face to face networking; social media marketing requires time and consistency.

When utilizing social networks as a tool to promote a business it is important to treat the interaction on the platforms like you would if you were farming.

• First develop or plant a relationship with the network that is built.
• Secondly water those relationships consistently.
• Thirdly monitor their growth, to see if anything needs to be changed in the strategy

Then with patience and perseverance like farming, you will see the results of the harvesting. Eventually the crops will grow and business will begin to flourish because of the time that was spent with your network.

The purpose of this analogy is to show that the time frame to measure the success of a social media campaign is not set in stone, nor is it immediate.  The goal is to plant and water a seed for a lasting relationship with the network you build over time, which will create the opportunity for a successful partnership, if the time spent with that network is meaningful.  A successful partnership is the end result of participating in the conversation happening on social networks. Forming a relationship with your targeted network of decision maker’s, results in increased profits over time.

Every effort put into a social network profile whether it is interesting status updates, helpful information and insights, news and information on your industry, or feedback and interaction about your service will help your organization grow into the business you envisioned.  Social media marketing can help a business grow to the next level while creating the opportunity for more quality business relationships.

Step 1: Let them know you’re alive!

Once you have added all of your contacts and networked with new friends, what is the next step?  Provide your readers with tangible information. Making your status updates relatable and writing about relevant topics and interesting one-liners, will help to gain more followers on a consistent basis. This is the key to making social media work for business. While your topics should relate to the industry with which you operate, they should also appeal to the audience you are looking to communicate to.  The object of a status updates is to grab a “friend’s” attention immediately and provoke thought and participation.

Step 2: Ask Questions.

One of the best ways to open up a two way conversation is to immediately involve your audience.  Facebook allows the ability for a business page to start discussion topics. These topics can be related to a product within a company for example if your company is a dental office ask users how they feel about going to the dentist, ask them on ways to improve their visit and invite topics that consumers love to debate and talk about.

Step 3: Lead by example!

A sure way to engage readers in the content you post to your social media sites is to participate in your network’s topics.  Post a simple “like” on a friend’s status update, or contribute in a discussion topic on someone else’s page. The more you participate in the conversation on other’s pages, the more traffic you will drive back to your page.

Our experience shows that an active social media profile includes communication both from the profile owner, the end user and the network in which they are involved.  Networking with your network is the best way to make a social media marketing campaign work. Social media can be applied to any type of industry as long as there are clear goals, a clear strategy and consistent communication.