4 content strategies for micromarketing
A friend used to joke that he was going to sell his old jeans on eBay for $1 million. Of course, everyone poo-pooed his idea. He always responded by saying, “Hey, I only have to sell one pair!” That’s the beauty of micromarketing – you can get the margin you need. The difficulty is finding the people who are willing to pay your price. Fortunately, there is a perfect storm of marketing tools and content delivery systems at everyone’s disposal today that makes it possible to connect with the groups of buyers most receptive to your offer. Write a book There’s no reason that everyone serious about building their business shouldn’t have a book published. It can be an e-book or – with various instant printing services available – a traditional book that you either give away or sell (or both). Nothing establishes your authority more than a published book. The important tactic here is to focus your topic narrowly enough to make you the expert. I remember hearing about a woman who wrote on the topic of successfully selling from those mall aisle kiosks. It was never going to be a New York Times bestseller, but even if only a few hundred people ever got their hands on the book, it would boost her consulting business tremendously. Hold a webinar You don’t need 1,000 registrants to have a successful webinar. If your product or service is valuable, and a handful of sales results from the webinar, it will prove its worth. There are many services that provide the infrastructure for webinars today. Also, businesses can leverage free video services such as Facebook Live and Google’s video Hangouts to hold more informal webinars, or online conferences. If you use a standard webinar provider, it will also help you build your list of leads so you can continue to market to them. Host an event Holding an actual “in-person” event is an excellent way to establish yourself and it provides a good environment for micromarketing. While a webinar is great for getting far-flung people together, a local event is even better if you are marketing to people in your general area. These don’t have to be big events, but they need to be well planned and executed, and offer real value to participants. If people aren’t going to be wowed by your event, don’t bother – you’ll be doing more harm than good. In some cases, hosting a general “mixer” or series of mixers can serve this purpose, at least in part. The invitees can simply be nearby businesses or professionals you want to make contact with who share the same general interests. Create online content If you publish a blog on your website and then promote it via your social media channels, it’s like a shotgun blast. However, there are ways to more narrowly target your audience. Advertising on the various social media platforms gives you the power to better define those who see your ads. Facebook “dark posts” can be used this way. These are paid posts crafted for specific audiences – they are not seen by your general group of Facebook followers. This gives you more ability to create posts or articles to meet the needs of smaller, micro markets. Creating content specifically geared for micromarketing can be...
read moreWhy likeable social media is crucial to your success and what to do about it
Quick question: What do you feel when you see those “sponsored” posts in your Facebook news feed? Granted, some may interest you, but aren’t most of them a bit of a turnoff? Further, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that most of us don’t really like them. The likeability factor is central to business success and that may be nowhere more important than in your social media marketing. (After all, we even count our “likes”!) Without likeable social media posts, your marketing is dead in the water. In fact, maintaining a likeable social media presence is probably even more important than posting über-informative items…although the two are not mutually exclusive. Let’s look at factors that can contribute to giving you a likeable social media presence. Personality The various social media platforms are today’s town square or the local mall; they are the places where people hang out to catch up with one another. The personality you project is an important component of this. You probably know some major social media influencers who are immediately associated with a certain personality. For most of us, we don’t want to swing too far one way or another in terms of the personalities we project on the social media. We don’t want to as combative as Donald Trump or as wacky as Ricky Gervais. (Okay, if I could be as funny as Gervais’ on Twitter, I’d go with it.) Perhaps the most important concept here is to give people a glimpse into your personality. This can often be accomplished by peppering your social media marketing with insights into your personal life. For example, I’ve found that posts of me and my lovable canine companion always get a favorable reaction. Insights The information you share on the social media says a lot about who you are. You can’t create a likeable social media presence with ho-hum posts. Going back to how social media is where people hang out, isn’t it true that we generally like to hang out with people we respect or look up to? This often includes individuals who are a bit “further along” their professional paths than we are, or who know more about something we’re interested in. Your social media will be more likeable when it delivers insights that aren’t available everywhere. I can’t tell you how many times each week I get pitched guest articles that cover the same ground hundreds of other writers have covered. Create and find unique content to share. Aesthetics Can we talk? Don’t we all appreciate people and things that are “easy on the eyes”? We are born with an innate sense of aesthetics. We find beautiful people, beautiful cars, beautiful paintings, beautiful vistas, and even beautiful food more to our liking. Frankly, I think this is one of the reasons Pinterest got off to such a fast start. Users filled it with beautiful graphics. Give serious thought to the visual appeal of your social media posts. Make them look good. Create visuals that are engaging. Language Similar to the visual appeal required in your social media posts, always be careful to use good grammar and spelling. You may be allowed the occasional online acronym, lol, but don’t overdo it! And we all know what happens when you mix...
read more10 sure-winner blog post ideas
Question: What’s the best strategy when you have writer’s block and just can’t think of blog topics to write on or create a video about? Answer: Read an article like 10 sure-winner blog post ideas. And this hopefully clever introduction brings us to our first idea: Questions and Answers. The Q&A format, if you do it right, has two excellent things going for it: it’s easy to read and it encourages short responses. You can address commonly asked questions or dig down into your brain cells for important questions you believe should be asked and answered. Interviews of employees, customers, and industry experts. Interviews have been the meat and potatoes of popular magazines since publishing began. Finding employees and customers should be easy. To snag industry experts, make connections at trade shows and similar events. Go out on a limb – make predictions. If interviews are the meat and potatoes of print media, hire wire acts are what keep people coming back to the circus. Make some radical predictions about your industry or evolution of your products or services. Be bold! Reviews and comparisons. Review the best books/blogs related to your product or service. You probably follow these more closely than your customers or clients, so take some time to clue them in. Start with number one and keep going. Anytime you can squeeze a topic into a list, you’re doing your blog a big favor – just ask the editors of Cosmopolitan or People Magazine. Legal matters. Okay, this may not always be compelling reading, but sometimes covering legal matters that your customers or clients may not know or understand is an important service to provide. Tip: Start with an example of how someone ran afoul of a law or regulation to pull in your readers – keep the writing personal – don’t let it read like the opinion of the 12th Circuit Court. Team introductions. Developing pseudo-personal relationships with the people we do business with today is important. If you have a clog dancer, storage unit auction addict, or expert in Thai cooking on your team, let people know. Of course, also include the training and life/professional experiences that qualifies people for the positions they hold. Hall of Fame, Hall of Shame. What are the best and worst things that have happened in your industry? Your company? How you spent your summer vacation. This echoes the team introductions mentioned above. Every so often take time to briefly discuss things happening in your life. Let these roll over into your social media marketing as well. I’m always surprised and encouraged by the response I get when I share some of the little things in life that pop up in my journey. Thought leaders you suggest people follow. Just as you should occasionally review books and other materials, do the same thing for thought leaders. Let your customers and clients know who they should be listening to and watching for. This will also help you establish relationships with important industry voices and even drive traffic to your website; include links to these professionals and let them know that you have mentioned them…and would appreciate a social media mention. With a little minimal effort, you’ll be able to squeeze a lot of content out of these ideas. What approaches have...
read moreThis week in small business: Best and worst industries and a good reason to catch some more shut eye
This weeks’ collection of curated content includes a “fastest-growing” list along with a compilation of the 10 worst performing industry sectors. Use that info as best you can. And if you need an excuse to snag some more snooze time, we have that too. Leadership, management, and productivity Rose Leadem created an infographic that depicts unusual team-building methods of some famous bosses…they sound pretty fun to us. Holly Grogan, chief people officer at Tribridge, is the subject of this edition of Laura Emily Dunn’s Women in Business Q&A. This seems too good to be true (but I’m hoping it’s not!): Dawne Davis says we can boost our brain productivity by 13 percent with another 36 minutes of sleep. (Excuse me while I put this to the test …) Always on the lookout for good online tools and resources, we appreciated this article by Karen Repoli. Marketing and sales Ouch! See how many of the 16 dumbest content market mistakes – as listed by David Spark – you’re guilty of. It’s a topic that we keep coming around to: video marketing. In this piece, Nicki Howell calls it the savvy strategy for 2017. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Thinking about pulling the plug on your startup? Maybe you should bring in a re-founder first, says George Deeb. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to focus on, especially for rookie entrepreneurs. Kc Agu suggests five metrics. Want to kick the tires before you jump on the bandwagon? Check out Susan Adam’s collection of the fastest-growing women-owned businesses for 2017. And while we’re on the topic of women entrepreneurs, Nada Al Rifai profiles Dunia Othman on what it’s like working as a female entrepreneur in a male-dominated world, and operating in the Arab Middle East, Othman knows of what she speaks. We’ve talked about the “fastest growing,” now how about the other side of the coin? For that info, check out Mary Ellen Blery’s article where shares Sagesworks’ stats on the 10 worst performing U.S. industries by sales. Ali Ash looks at the art of disruption in both entrepreneurship and in life. You’ll find lots of good observations on tech startups in Daniel Senyard’s “Fake it Til You (Have To) Make it: Get Your Hands Dirty Early on to Prove Product/Market Fit.” Politics, government, and the economy By all accounts, productivity growth has been less than stellar. Charles Hughes says that high-tech growth is the key to solving the productivity...
read more6 Ways to use social media in your small business…and marketing is only one of them!
Last time I checked you can’t beat free and that alone should be enough motivation for you to leverage social media as much as possible. Here are the six best ways to use social media in your business: Marketing Customer service Talent recruiting and hiring Selling Company communications Market and product research Social media marketing Social media marketing gets the most attention. I’ve never counted, but dozens of good online articles on social media marketing are published every month. Marketing continues to be one of the best ways to use social media in your small business because you can establish a presence that rivals much bigger businesses – if you have a good strategy, consistently apply yourself or have a talented team member you can rely on. Social media customer service If you have a business Facebook page, you may have accidently backed into social media customer service when your first customer posted a complaint on your page. Ouch! Twitter is extremely well suited for social media customer service. However, take it further than merely using it as a communication channel for customers to air their gripes. Be proactive and use it as a tool to enhance the customer experience. I can’t help but think that if United Airlines had been able to communicate better with its passengers not long ago, they could have avoided the video of a passenger being dragged down the narrow aisle on that jet like a human beverage cart. Social media recruiting and hiring LinkedIn is still an excellent resource for finding talent and vetting prospective hires. However, I need to point out that premium subscriptions have gone up in price and without a premium subscription, your ability to communicate with professionals outside of your contacts is very limited. Lots of professionals will temporarily upgrade to a high-level account when they are looking to hire or putting themselves out on the job market. LinkedIn has been putting even more emphasis on providing good hiring tools since Microsoft bought it. Social media selling Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram have all made plays with “buy buttons” or other forms of e-commerce. These aren’t free, but for some merchants and small artisanal manufacturers, they are worth exploring. If you can build a legion of enthusiastic buyers on your Facebook store, it can be a big stepping stone to far greater things. Sarah Kessler does a nice job profiling three Facebook store successes in this Mashable piece. If you use Shopify, check out Satish Kanwar’s article about the launch of the “buyable pin” partnership between Shopify and Pinterest. Social media company communication Social media is proving to be one of the best ways to communicate with your team members. Messaging-apps-on-steroids like Slack and HipChat are solid productivity boosters for some small businesses. Twitter can also provide a good channel for disseminating information broadly. If you have a lot of Facebook users working for you, Workplace By Facebook could be a good solution – hey, your employees are in the “neighborhood” anyway, why not be able to say “hi”… and a lot more. Social media market and product research Everything people say about products and services – whether good or bad – gets expressed on social media. Further, it’s probably the best barometer for trends. Social listening and following topics on...
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