Taking a Professional Approach To Email Marketing

Marketing should be done by all companies, but not all do it effectively.  Running affordable email marketing campaigns are a great way to  promote your business. Keep reading to find out how you can send out effective  emails.

Sending  emails is a fast and personal way to keep in touch with your customers. Keep  your emails short to ensure you hang on to your reader’s attention. Few people  will care to read a lengthy, thousand-word wall of text about a single product  or service. Include links to your website. This way, your customers will be able  to get more information there.

Never send emails to consumers without gaining their permission first. People  don’t like spam, and spam is unsolicited email. Sending out unannounced email  messages can have a negative impact on your brand. Start off the right way, and  be certain that your efforts are going to people who agree to hear from you.

Your email subscribers are very likely to be reading your emails from a  mobile device such as a smartphone. These devices lack the resolution of high  end computers, so word count and careful use of graphics becomes very important.  Recognize the constraints of mobile devices and always be sure that your emails  can be easily read, regardless of such constraints.

Create your content for your customers, not just crafted to evade the spam  filters. If you write your messages properly and limit the sales talk, you’ll  escape the spam filters. If you solely focus on using methods that will pass a  spam filter, your messages will likely be boring and readers will quickly delete  them. Worse, they’ll unsubscribe from your mailing list.

During the opt-in process, ask for your customers’ names, or at least their  first names. By having the recipients name, you can customize a message that is  more personal in its tone. Your emails will be different from other emails and  your recipient will feel less anonymous.

Provide several different ways for people to opt-in to your emails on your  site, but do not exert pressure for them to do so. Assure your customers that  their information will never be compromised and that you are worthy of trust.  Make certain to also inform them how they will benefit from signing up with you.  An e-mail marketing plan that is successful depends on the ability to get  customer information.

Offer  your visitors a free learning course conducted via email. You’ll need to develop  a set amount of auto responders, breaking up the lesson into sections. Four to  six sections should be an appropriate amount. Make sure the content is both  informative and unique. Schedule the sections to be sent out one at a time every  24 hours. This can provide you with a host of benefits, such as enhancing your  website, gaining your customers’ confidence, developing your authority, and  building your email base.

Be sure that you provide people with a way to opt out of your email marketing  newsletters. Using an autoresponder service like Aweber means you can do very affordable email marketing (you can send out emails to a  large number of subscribers for just a couple of dollars). You can create  separate email lists for different products, services and/or websites, market to  specific lists or send emails to all your subscribers. Compartmentalizing your  lists this way is very important to keeping things organized.

You will be very successful at email marketing if you know how to go about it  correctly. You’ll be able to use this method to build your business, increase  your profits and reach customers you never would have otherwise. The more you  learn about email marketing, the more you will realize just how effective a  marketing technique it can be. Once you start using email to promote your  business, you will never turn back.

Tags:Email Lists,  Marketing Campaign,  Email Marketing

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Check out the Internet Marketing Help blog for more great articles like   http://webbizkb.com/email-marketing/taking-a-professional-approach-to-email-marketing/ which was syndicated here at 12:42 pm on April 5, 2013. ______________________________________________________________________

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How social business will transform B2B Sales & Marketing

                                                                  BigStockPhoto image by kentoh

 

B2B must evolve to meet clients’ changing needs

Client work for B2B and B2C organizations has me reviewing thousands of conversations in social venues every month, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that much of Sales and Marketing as we know them is significantly out of alignment with B2B clients. They are much smarter now and want a new style of relationship with their business partners (erstwhile “vendors,” “providers”). Social business is permeating client networks throughout the economy and changing client behavior and expectations.

This has created a rare opportunity for B2B sales and marketing people who understand and respond ahead of the market. Here I’ll do a deeper dive into how legacy Sales and Marketing functions will evolve, using social business as a lever.

Reexamining B2B Sales and Marketing

Marketing assumes it’s not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one client conversations. Sales assumes it must rely on one-on-one prospecting to drive value. Both assumptions are increasingly false.

Two examples of misalignment: One of Marketing’s underlying assumptions is that it is not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one client conversations, so marketing must achieve scale through secondary research (and remain isolated from the client). One of Sales’ key assumptions is that it must rely on primary one-on-one prospect/client/customer communications to drive value. Both of these are increasingly false, so I’ll drill down on them before offering practical recommendations for how Sales And Marketing can explore social business at a new level.

As head of marketing for several B2B firms with direct sales forces since the 1980s, I have worked with my fellow execs in Sales, Operations, Finance & IT to drive the top line. As a management consultant, I have advised clients in adopting numerous disruptive technologies that have confronted enterprise functions with change. These experiences lead me to believe that social business will transform B2B Sales And Marketing during the next 5-10 years. Moreover, organizations that begin the transformation process earlier will profit at the expense of laggards because social business will improve enterprises’ communications and collaborations with clients by an order of magnitude.

B2B Marketing usually refers to several practices that vary with the type of business, but the end game is to define/control message and produce leads that are worked by Sales:
•Defining the firm’s brand, strategy, value proposition and “message”; this includes managing how various brand elements are used (elevator pitches, logos, colors)
•Designing and running outbound “campaigns” via email marketing, snailmail
•Attracting/capturing inbound leads via rich media, SEO, SEM, thought leadership
•Conducting database management (CRM..)
•Producing “collateral” (websites, brochures, templates for use by Sales)
•Managing the firm’s participation in conferences and trade shows
•(often) Managing the firm’s channel and strategic alliances
•All of these practices are grounded in scaled group communications; i.e. Marketing communicates with researched demographics, not individuals because they usually have no relationships with individual prospects.

B2B Sales/Business Development is a contact sport that usually refers to a direct sales force, which is sometimes supported by indirect or inside sales:
•Identifying leads via face to face, telephone or email interactions with their individual professional networks; often salespeople are hired for their career-accumulated networks
•Working leads sourced from Marketing and their individual work according to a gated pipeline or funnel along which leads approach conversion
•Conducting (telephone) calling and email campaigns
•Getting and conducting meetings with prospects
•Working conferences and trade shows under Marketing’s direction
•Entertaining clients and prospects (golf, opera, sports, other events)
•Collaborating with channel partners’ representatives to exchange and work leads
•Closing deals and handing off to “delivery” teams (or, in the case of professional services, managing delivery)
•All of these practices are based on communications with individual prospects.

In summary, Marketing has served as the firm’s research and scalable communications arm while Sales has been responsible for doing the deals. Marketing’s value proposition has been researched intelligence, strategy and scaled communications. Salespeople would develop intelligence based on direct feedback with their own networks.

How B2B Sales and Marketing can evolve with social business

Marketing’s biggest mental roadblock is the habit of being isolated from the client/customer. “But I don’t touch the client, that’s Sales.” No, Marketing has to evolve its approach. Marketers that realign themselves will unleash value that they could only dream about before. Here are a few specific ideas to get your evolution thinking started:
•Marketing makes most decisions in isolation from real clients (research and focus groups are too artificial because they rarely focus on client-to-client interactions, which are an order of magnitude more enlightening). Marketing can start infusing marketing research with direct communication with prospects and clients.
•Conferences and trade shows can be fantastic opportunities to connect with differentiated prospects, but few firms even come close to realizing the ROI. The opportunity here is to reimagine events as connection opportunities that happen to have a geographical/time dimension to them. Marketing currently spends most of its attention on physical event logistics. What if they used the event as an excuse to involve prospects in discussions leading up to the event? Onsite, they capture the most relevant client/prospect conversations on video, which can enable other prospects to get engaged. They design programming that engages attendees and non-attendees in what happened “after” the event. But “the event” is no longer bounded by the physical event.
•Transform the channel by organizing online collaboration spaces that connect various channel partners in ways that are meaningful to them. Most parts of the channel have information that is useful to others, but it’s almost impossible to get someone on the phone. Email is very inefficient. And people need guidance for how to interact in transparent social venues.
•Here’s how many-to-many communications in social venues have different economics: Research has consistently showed that, in most online social venues, about 10% of participants are interacting while 90% are observing. And they can go back to it. Moreover, anyone interested in that topic can find it. Now. Email is a closed system that has no leverage in comparison. High-quality, relevant digital conversations are almost always superior to any “content” that any company can create because the prospect is involved. It’s more relevant, it’s more individualized.

Sales needs to come out of its shell. Many salespeople are actually shy in front of large audiences they don’t know personally (how many times does the sales team gab among themselves at the trade show booth?). So, it’s a stretch for many salespeople to converse with “strangers” in social venues. Many of them are afraid of writing (they’re talkers). Here are specific examples for Sales:
•Although many people have learned this, I’ll repeat just in case: In general, writing questions and responses in public is held to a fairly low standard grammar-wise. Most people aren’t going to attack you if your sentence structure is horrid. You can spell-check words. Get over this fear if you harbor it. (Rare exceptions apply.)
•Like Marketing, Sales need no longer accept assumptions about “market conditions,” or prospects’ needs. Find and interact with people in social venues who are talking about things your clients care about. Observe what they think, and ask them questions.
•Think about yourself compared to people in your firm and outside. What knowledge or interest do you have that you have related to the product/service that lets you add unique value? Experiment with search: create keyword combinations that find these conversations, and observe them for a while. Then jump in and add your perspective. Remember, these conversations are your thoughts immortalized. Even better, you can bookmark the best ones and share with prospects later. In the LinkedIn forum, the prospect will see you offering value-added information and guidance; when people thank you, your credibility goes way up. In forums, other prospects are setting the table for you to help them and gain huge, immortal visibility.

Net net

Disruption always serves to elevate threats and opportunities. I hope you can see that “traditional” sales and marketing practices developed in an era in which B2B clients had relatively little opportunity to find information independently or to connect with other people with similar challenges. Social business has changed the game, and early movers have the opportunity to profit to the detriment of their competitors.

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Twitter Brings the Most Social Leads to B2B SMBs

2013-03-03  by Violeta-Loredana Pascal

Business to business small and medium companies obtain different results from the social networks they use, a new study presented by eMarketer shows. 600 US B2B SMB websites, which were included in an Optify analysis, revealed very interesting data.

54% of all social media-sourced site visits came from Facebook and 32% from Twitter, the study showed. However, when it comes to leads, Twitter performed best, with 82% of the social leads, while Facebook accounted for only 9% of the B2B SMB leads. LinkedIn, another important social media network, was responsible for 14% of site visits and 9% of the social leads.

Despite the encouraging general statistics, social B2B traffic accounted for only 1.9% of the total traffic. In fact, the study revealed that 80% of the visits were organic or direct. The percentage of the social leads from the total B2B SMB leads was 4.8% of all. This is not much, but it is relevant. Companies should not ditch their social media accounts too soon, as social media networks evolve all the time and more and more people and businesses start to use them.

Speaking numbers in regards to sources of leads for small and medium-sized B2B company websites, these showed that leads came directly (34%), organic (36.5), through referral (12.5%), paid search (10.5%), email (9%), social media (4%) and other 2.8%.

Different social media sites serve different purposes, therefore marketers have to know really well what results can they expect from various networks. Having a good knowledge of the deliverables each social media network can bring will help marketers choose the most suited channels of communication for their clients.

About Violeta-Loredana Pascal

Violeta-Loredana Pascal has over 10 years of experience in PR, marketing and communication, and has been running her own PR agency, PRwave INTERNATIONAL for 7 years. She is passionate about reading, blogging and traveling – see Travel – Moments in Time. Follow her on Twitter – @violetaloredana (Romanian and English) and @TravelMoments (English only}

 

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Ten marketing phrases you need to stop using now~ By David Petherick

It’s time for a little rant. Words are powerful, until they start to become abused, by being lazily thrown in parrot-like as part of loathsome marketingspeak and managementspeak. Here are the current Top Ten words and phrases that annoy the hell out of me.

1: Game-changing

Here’s how to change the game of cricket: replace the cricket ball with a shuttlecock. It certainly changes the game, but it doesn’t make it a better game, or one that’s going to be enjoyed by players or spectators. There are very few things that really change the game. It’s more realistic to focus on improving your game, or to realise you’re playing a different game.

2: Groundbreaking

In similar vein to game-changing, this has become a cliche, and is lazily and incorrectly used as a synonym for ‘new’. Are you digging the foundations for a grand new building that defies architectural precedent? Are you trying to suggest that digging a hole is something amazing? It’s not, so shut up.

3: Engagement

Did you give her a ring and ask her to marry you? Then it’s not engagement. This word is especially popular when talking about social media: “this offers the opportunity for engagement with customers”. It’s also combined very often with another choice phrase, so that you end up “driving engagement”.

4: Thinking outside the box

Dear God, I thought this was gone, but it’s still there, and keeps reappearing like a stubborn case of athlete’s foot. What, and where is, the box you are talking about? Use this phrase, and I’ll assume you are referring to the tiny little cardboard receptacle in which your feeble brain is rattling around. Forget the box.

5: Go viral

It’s not 2005 any more kids. So if you still think you can create content designed to “go viral” then I think it’s time for you to open an envelope containing your P45 or pink slip. This phrase was dead almost before it first started to be abused in Powerpoint and chocolate biscuit sessions.

6: Driving / Driver

“This is driving up engagement across social channels.” No it’s not. “This will act as the driver for this interaction” No it won’t. Do you think you’re like Fernando Alonso? Or are you a chauffeur? No, gracias.

7: Unique

A cliche again, and the worst type, because usually, this now means the opposite. “A unique opportunity” is best translated as “the same opportunity again, perhaps in a thin disguise”. Avoid.

8: Impact

This is an incredibly flexible little word, and is used as a verb and a noun. “This will impact impressions favourably.” And “This had a significant impact”. It’s such a nice satisfying sounding word, but it’s simply abused too often. Impact describes a collision, or the effect of one thing on another. Use affect or effect, and people will stop tuning out, because they might just understand what the hell you’re rabbiting on about. This word has become jargon.

9: Front-of-mind

The human brain does not work like a conveyor belt, and even brain surgeons admit they know only a small fraction of what there is to learn about the workings of the human brain, so this phrase is entirely ridiculous. Quite aside from anything else, assuming that people have even more than a passing interest in your products or services is highly delusional.

10: Implementation

Just shut up. This means ‘doing stuff’ or putting something into effect. “The key stage will be in effectively implementing this strategy.” Ugh. I often hear the gleeful substitution of ‘execution’ for this word, which is just as feeble-minded. “We need to execute on this plan”. Nah. You need to fire the next person who uses that phrase.

11: What about you?

What words or phrases do you have to add to this list? I look forward to hearing your gems…

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4 Great Content Marketing Examples~By Andrew Schulkind

Looking for inspiration? Here are a handful of very different content marketing examples worth examining. We’ve covered a lot of ground in this column over the past few months, from the importance of relationships to evaluating appropriate channels to measuring your content marketing’s effectiveness. In some of those columns, we’ve looked at examples of great content marketing, but I thought it would be helpful to gather a small collection of samples for inspiration. Here’s are 4 of my favorites. These aren’t necessarily the “greatest of all time,” to borrow a phrase from Muhammad Ali; I’ve chosen them because they represent different ways to be memorable and because I hope they’ll inspire great ideas for you to use in your own content marketing.

Get People Involved
I just read this week that Hasbro has launched a campaign asking people to save their favorite Monopoly piece. Between now and February 5, 2013 you are invited to vote for the token you most want Monopoly keep. Voting takes place on the Monopoly Facebook page. As the article says, the least voted-for token “goes directly – and permanently – to jail.”

Talk about great content marketing. The campaign itself creates excitement, gets fans involved and rekindles nostalgia for the game in people who probably haven’t thought about Monopoly in a decade or more.

Even better, they’ve taken steps to capitalize on the excitement, releasing a limited edition of the game that includes all the current pieces and all the new candidates to replace the losing piece. You get a vote to save your favorite piece and a vote for your favorite candidate to replace the losing piece from five possibilities: toy robot, helicopter, cat, guitar or diamond ring.

(By the way, I came across this on Flipboard – a great tool for any content marketer or news junkie – and have to admit that this is the first time I’ve read an article in USAToday while sitting anywhere but a hotel coffee shop.)

Hasbro’s approach is worth looking to for inspiration if you’re a B2C brand with an emotional connection to your audience. (Even if that connection is somewhat dormant.) The social media aspect is worth examining for B2B audiences, too, though Facebook is probably not the channel for most B2B marketers.

Make ‘Em Laugh
I doubt there’s ever been a better way to waste time than the internet. But that doesn’t mean humor is always going to make for effective marketing. Beneath the yuks, there has to be a strong message if humor is going to further your content marketing goals. One fantastic example, and a real granddaddy of content marketing greatness, is the Blendtec video series, “Will It Blend?”

It’s not just enormously enjoyable to watch a “scientist” destroy cell phones, iPads, or Justin Bieber CDs. It also makes it plainly obvious that the Blendtec is one powerful blender. Will this work for you? Well, video is tough to beat as a delivery mechanism. People love watching video, and the search engines reward it in SEO terms.

The bigger question, though, is can you compete? No one cares whether your budget is a fraction of Blendtec’s – they just want to be entertained. If you don’t have the creativity or skills in-house and can’t afford to hire pros who do, you don’t really stand a chance. Dollar Shave Club is another firm with great a video. But unless you have a CEO who is really comfortable on camera, don’t try this at home.

Perfect Timing
Is there any better time for a welcome distraction than when you kid has scraped her knee? Band-Aids to the rescue.
1.Apply Muppets Band-Aid to the scraped knee.
2.Fire up the app on your smartphone
3.Sigh in relief as the video plays and the crying stops

Here again we have video, but we also have a really wonderful tie between a product that doesn’t generally grab many people emotionally and a product that does.

The take-away here: seek out connections like this – whether for content marketing or for your philanthropic giving – and you’ll be more likely to rise above the noise. The use of really cool tech toys, like the augmented reality used here, can also help spread the message.

Remain Relevant
If you’ve spent any time thinking about content marketing, you’ve probably heard of The Furrow from John Deere. Frequently cited as the original content marketing vehicle, it’s a publication that John Deere has made available to customers since before the turn of the century. (The turn from the 19th to the 20th …)

It’s a great example of sticking to your knitting – knowing your audience, knowing their interests, and recognizing how addressing their needs provides you with the opportunity to present your products without a hard sell. Yes, The Furrow is available online now, but it has stuck to its formula of serving an audience it knows well with information Deere knows they want.

The lesson here is to not dive into what’s hot just because it’s hot – choosing a channel should be one of the last decisions you make. First you have to you determine who you’re trying to reach, what they’re interested in, and how you can fill a need for them. A channel or channels should present itself pretty naturally once you’ve answered those questions.

I’d love to hear your favorite content marketing examples – and why they work for you.

 

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Does your Internet marketing training make you feel dumb? ~By Mike Moran

I  have been hearing from a lot of people on my post from Wednesday on new ways to train your team in digital marketing. I’ve gotten great feedback, but there was one comment that struck a nerve, when someone asked if anything about marketing and sales is the same as it was back before the InterWebs. I understand why people ask that question and I feel compelled to give an answer that is not the normal one for a digital marketing trainer. Most things are not any different than they were before. Most of what you knew then is still true. Marketing is still marketing.

I know, I know. Heretic! Blasphemer! I know that I am supposed to be this brandy-new social media guy who can introduce you to the brave new world. I mean, the more new and the scarier it is, the more you need the training, right? If I can scare you until you wet yourself then you’ll just have to hire me. At least that is how the thinking seems to go.

There are a couple of problems with that approach. One is that it isn’t exactly true. The other is that it isn’t very helpful to someone trying to adapt to all the changes.

You see, the dirty little secret of Internet marketing trainers is that Internet marketing is way more about marketing than about the Internet. I’ll prove it to you. If I gave you a choice for your next digital marketing czar–you can pick either an expert on the Internet or an expert on marketing, who do you want? As an ex-IT guy, I mean this kindly, but DON’T TAKE THE TECHNOLOGY GEEK.

Internet marketing isn’t about the Internet any more than radio advertising needs someone who understands the gigahertz of the FM band. Or the intricacies of audio recording. I’m not saying that such knowledge is useless–what I know about how search engines work clearly helps me in search marketing–but it is less important than understanding why customers search and what they are looking for.

And marketers already know a lot of what they need, if people would only explain it better. For example, search keywords are market segments. Yes, I know that the traditional marketer might not see that right away, but when I spend some time explaining it, then suddenly they know a dozen things they can do–they can see which keywords have the most loyal customers or the highest conversion rate or the highest order size. The reason they can quickly do that is because they already know how to compare market segments, so once they know what keywords are, then they can apply what they already know.

I’ve trained direct marketers in digital marketing in about three days. These people walk into class thinking they are dinosaurs and walk out ready to run rings around people who might be really good at Facebook but they don’t really understand how to measure response to a marketing message and what to do about it.

Sales people tell me they don’t know how to use social media to sell. Then I show them that every time their customer asks a question, they have a blog post. They can communicate with customers on LinkedIn every day without being annoying. And they get it.

I hope there isn’t anyone out there feeling defeated and old because they just don’t get this Internet stuff. I’m telling you that if you know marketing that you can know Internet marketing. You just need it explained based on what you know already, instead of being the brave new world. It ain’t.

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Too busy with clients to post to my blog ~ By Mike Moran.

Most of you know that I do career coaching, mostly for technical and marketing executives. I had an interesting conversation recently during one such coaching session, when my client expressed a deep need to publicize her expertise but lamented her inability to maintain her blog. She gave me an entirely believable and reasonable reason for her lack of recent posts: “I am too busy with my clients to post.”But while believable and reasonable, my client wasn’t thinking clearly about her choices. First off, nobody actually has any more time than anyone else. We each get 24 hours in the day and we all get to choose how to use them. So, if a blog post is really more important in the long run than spending an extra hour on client work, you should be able to make that happen.

But, as a consultant myself, I totally understand the calculation that billable time is almost always more important than non-billable time, so I can sympathize with always prioritizing client work over blogging. What my client needed was a way to blog more efficiently.

So, I started by asking her a question about how much time blogging takes: “Which takes more time, the actual writing or the process of coming up with the idea?” She thought a minute, concluding that coming up with the idea was the tough part. She said she could write post in 30 minutes or less once she had a solid idea, but she had writer’s block when she had to write a post with no idea.

What she needed was a new process for coming up with ideas. So, I gave her one suggestion for a new process, that she write down every good question a client asks her. Answering each question is a potential blog post. In fact, when she is spending the most time with clients is when she should be surrounded with ideas for posts. The problem isn’t the lack of ideas, but rather that she hasn’t organized herself to write down those ideas when they are most plentiful.

Once you have a system for capturing ideas, the blog posts are far easier to do. It usually isn’t lack of time that prevents blogging, but our understandable avoidance of that excruciating pain of trying to come up with an idea from nothing. Most people don’t generate ideas on demand, while they sit and contemplate.

If you’ve been struggling to maintain your blog, perhaps this system might work for you. It works for me. That’s how I got this post. I wrote down my client’s question when she asked it, weeks ago. Then today, when I needed to write, I went through my list of ideas and this one seemed the one I could knock out most comfortably.

 

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Five Digital Media Marketing Lessons in Sandy’s Eye~ By Diane Thieke

I have a stock answer whenever I’m asked why I’m good at PR: “It’s all about the relationships.” In PR, your success or failure is 90% driven by the types of relationships that you have with the media. Cultivating those relationships takes up a fair amount of your time and represents one of the greatest intangibles, which is what makes PR so hard to quantify. Digital media marketing, especially the social side, is not much different. It’s all about the relationships – with your customers.

 

Over the last several days, digital media has been playing a big role in keeping large parts of New Jersey and New York informed about Hurricane Sandy, power outages and the status of friends, family, and vacation homes. The digital communications efforts of utility companies and state and local governments have played a critical role in keeping communities apprised. Not surprisingly, some organizations did this really, really well; while others, not so much. Here are some lessons from the storm and its aftermath.

Lesson #1: Even when the power is out, people can still use digital media on smartphones.

I don’t know of anyone who went without a battery charge for more than a night during this crisis.  Interestingly, even the folks I know who rarely use social media were relying heavily on Facebook and Twitter for updates. This included tracking the status of family and friends, finding temporary refuge, identifying closed roads, locating open gas stations, getting information on where to donate, and keeping tabs on when their neighborhood would come back onto the power grid.

Lesson #2: Happy customers are informed customers.

One Facebook friend said it best (full disclosure, she works for a major media organization): Someone actually said “no information is better than misinformation.” Really? If information from trusted sources is handily available, it actually cuts down on misinformation and rumors. Just saying. Or, as I like to say in another stock phrase, I abhor a vacuum.

Public Service Gas & Electric (PSE&G), which has 2.2 million customers in New Jersey, had as many as 1.7 million without power after the storm. During the day, the company is answering questions and providing updates via Twitter, and every evening it is sending an email update to all customers. It’s also using its Web site to keep residents up-to-date on the status of power in each community. A PDF document shows the number and percentage of homes in each community that are without power, along with estimates of when it will be restored.

Such detail and attention to communication – as well as swift progress in getting homes back on the grid – has kept PSE&G criticism at bay.

Lesson #3: Use every available digital communications vehicle.

Thousands of people are displaced in New Jersey, and many towns either destroyed or still without power. With a presidential election on the horizon, state and local governments scrambled to accommodate all voters by setting up additional options for voting, as well as alternate polling locations. In the “best use of mobile technology” category, the state established an SMS system for those who lost homes – and therefore sample ballots. Finding your polling place was as easy as sending a text message with your address to 877877. Immediately, you’d get a response that told you where you should go to vote.

Lesson #4: Say it in your update – don’t make people click away.

My local township has a Facebook page, but rather than use it as a way to build conversation, it simply posts announcements. Unfortunately, it posts only the link to the announcement. The effect is disconcerting. “Alert. {link url}” is not helpful communication. Since it doesn’t tell me what the news is, I’m forced to click away. If I’ve got a slow or slippery connection – as was the case during the hurricane and after – I may not be able to link through at all. That’s trouble if the message is about contaminated and undrinkable water. Always provide the news in the post or update itself. Links should be additive – not the whole message.

Lesson # 5: Have a conversation, build a better relationship.

Newark mayor Cory Booker is known nationally for his Twitter engagement and boots-on-the-ground response to questions on his feed. But I’ve been particularly impressed by the Facebook page of the West Windsor Police Department. They’ve routinely posted updates throughout the crisis, answered questions, and followed up on every problem or inquiry. Their residents got the information they needed quickly and efficiently. What’s more, there is true dialogue on the page, with the department responding to individual comments. And judging from the number of “thank yous” and “great jobs,” they’ve been very successful in building a strong relationship with their community.

Those are my five lessons–you might have more and I would love to hear them below–but suffice it to say that we are all learning lessons every time a real-world crisis shows off how much we rely on social media and other digital channels.

 

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• 

Diane S. Thieke is the founder of Simply Talk Media, a PR, marketing, and social media consultancy. With more than 25 years in digital media, she works with clients to develop their digital communications strategies and stay ahead of the changes in both social and traditional media.

• Previously, Diane led public relations and marketing teams at Dow Jones & Co. She began her career as an editor at Dow Jones’s first online service (now called Factiva), before becoming its first competitive intelligence manager. An early adopter and tech enthusiast, she launched Factiva’s first online community and its first blogging policy.

  She holds a B.A. in journalism and English writing from Rider University, and a M.S. in Communications Management from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.  Diane lives in New Jersey with her husband, two sons, and three ruling kittens. Even in her spare time, Diane is glued to her electronic devices, being social and devouring news and trends happening in the world, in technology. She blogs at Simply Talk Media and tweets at @thiekeds.

 

5 Things You Must Do Every Day to Build Your Business~By Joshua Black

If you are an entrepreneur there are a few critical tasks that you need to turn into a daily habit in order for your business to keep moving in a positive direction and to make you money. Read on to find out those key items and how you can add them to your daily routine.

Entrepreneurs have to wear many hats when a business is just starting. Many things need to be delegated to others in order for the business to run smoothly and there are a few things that you must do yourself. If you can create a habit of performing these 5 things every day, some for just a few minutes, then you will see your business grow right alongside your dreams:

1. Plan for the future a few minutes each day. Assume that your product has stopped selling all of a sudden. What direction will you take your company next? What new income stream can you add? This is a time for day dreaming and recording notes in preparation for the future. You don’t necessarily have to take action on these items, but you need to think about them daily in order to bring out the golden ideas.

2. Work on your marketing in some aspect every day to get new customers. If your prospective customers don’t know about you they won’t buy from you. Work on getting your message out every day even if it is just for a few minutes.

3. Work on closing a sale every single day. whether you are doing this on-line, on the phone, through the mail, or face-to-face you need to be selling every day. Without the close of a sale there is no business. This is not something that you can delegate all the way. even if you have a sales force you need to be out there looking for deals.

4. Develop or strengthen your business network. You need to join or create a business network where you can help others and they can help you back. This is a great place to get free customers through referrals and an excellent mentoring opportunity using the mastermind principle.

5. Contact your current customers. Don’t ever forget about the people that have already purchased from you. These are your best customers. They already like what you have to sell and they don’t cost anything to acquire. Contact your current customers frequently, even if you are just saying hello. They need to know what you have to offer and they need to know you are still breathing. They won’t seek you out. You must go to them.

 

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About the Author: Joshua Black is an on-line infopreneur, marketing consultant, small business owner and copywriter dedicated to helping the bootstrapping small business owner succeed. Visit his flagship resource site for entrepreneurs at http://www.UnderdogMillionaire.com for the free Underdog Millionaire Wealth Pack: including 5 FREE e-books and daily wealth building tips for the bootstrapping small business owner- in the areas of sales, marketing, motivation, product creation and more.

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Think you’ve got the next Great iPhone App idea?

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We can show you how to get it made without any programming experience at all.
Discover How To Create Iphone Apps Easily With No Programming Experienced Required. Learn From Some Of The Top Iphone App Developers To Get Your App Created Now.

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Think you’ve got the next Great iPhone App idea?

Think you’ve got the next Great iPhone App idea?

 We can show you how to get it made without any programming experience at all.
Discover How To Create Iphone Apps Easily With No Programming Experienced Required. Learn From Some Of The Top Iphone App Developers To Get Your App Created Now.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

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5 Ways Small Businesses Can Make the Most Out of Social Media

by Jennifer Gregory on June 29th, 2012

 Most large corporations have positions dedicated solely to managing the company’s social media outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Pinterest. But as a small business owner, social media responsibilities most likely land on your desk or another employee’s desk in addition to many other responsibilities. With the ability of social media to increase your customer loyalty, revenue and brand recognition, it is important that it doesn’t get pushed to the bottom of your to-do list.

Here are five tips for maximizing your presence on social media:

Pick the Right Media for the Message

Different social media applications are best used for different messages and goals. Think about the different messages you want to share with potential customers and then decide the best place for that based on the type of interactions on that media. By having a strategy, you will maximize your time spent and also increase the effectiveness of what you are sharing.

Raindrop Roofing in Portland, Ore. has seen a significant increase in leads due to their focused social media marketing efforts. “Twitter is our daily touchpoint for generating conversation, Facebook is who we are in pictures and LinkedIn, in terms of social networking, is our business networking anchor,” said Jenni Green Miller, social media/marketing director. They also use Angie’s List and Yelp to interact with potential customers.

 

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The Thorny Question of Marketing Attribution: Does It Apply to B2B?

By Ruth Stevens

Have you noticed how marketers are focusing on attribution these days? Which media channel is really driving the sale, they ask. What touch sequence is most productive? Where should we assign credit? There is much confusion and gnashing of teeth on this subject, but I say that in B2B, these are the junior questions, and just a building block to the bigger issues. Sure, we business marketers want to know where to invest our precious dollars. But what we really want to know is: 1) How do my prospects buy, and how can I make their journey easier, faster, and more likely to result in a sale for my company? 2) What’s the ROI on the sale, meaning how much sales and marketing investment do I need to close the piece of business?

I’ve been looking into this attribution discussion recently, and find it pretty frustrating. In the purely digital marketing world, marketing attribution analysis actually makes a lot of sense, and the various methods that are being talked about are worth looking at. To summarize, they boil down to 4 general techniques:

First touch, last touch.

This means all credit for the sale (or whatever is the desired outcome, like becoming a qualified lead) goes to the media channel that acquired the prospect (the first touch) OR the channel immediately before the outcome (the last touch). While many consumer marketers find last touch to make sense for attribution, in B2B, it’s more likely that marketers will be keeping close track of the first touch, since that is so useful for analyzing cold prospecting investment decisions.

Weighting.

All recorded touches are given some credit, and weighted equally, or according to some reasonable factor, like where they lie in the path to the sale. In B2B, this method becomes problematic very quickly, since the sales cycle is so complex, involving a long series of touches, to multiple contacts in a target account, through multiple channels, many of them offline, and difficult to capture in a database.

Modeling.

Statistical analysis of purchase patterns against touch sequences provides insight into the relative impact of each media channel, which can then be used for more reliable weighting. According to a

2010 Lenskold Group study, only 3% of business marketers are modeling for attribution. And even if they do, models tend to provide guidance only at a fairly high level, which doesn’t much help with granular touch-sequence decision-making.

Test and control.

Hands down, the most reliable method of sorting out the impact of an isolated single variable. But well nigh impossible to execute across a multi-channel, multi-touch relationship.

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Neuromarketing: The Future of Advertising

Marketing Conversation

Neuromarketing: The Future of Advertising by speters

Marketing evolves over time to the will of the people. This is a very important fact for business owners and other entrepreneurs to remember and follow accordingly. As times change, people change, and because advertising and marketing rely on the response of the people, they need to change as well.

In recent years we have seen the use of strategic ad placement, as well as social media marketing techniques. These strategies work very efficiently and sometimes effortlessly; however, success can be pushed even further by getting it all down to a science. What does that mean? Marketing to the masses using neurological means of advertising.

Some of you may think this already sounds confusing and complicated, but thankfully, it isn’t. Neurological marketing strategies are in fact very simple and easy to effectively incorporate in your business. In order to equip them into your business plans, you’ll need to understand basic examples of neurological marketing strategies.

When designing psychological based methods of advertisement, entrepreneurs should always be thinking of

basic human needs. Basic human needs are what drive consumers to make choices about certain products and purchases; thus, if a consumer ultimately feels that their needs are not being supported, they will choose to not purchase a product. Bartering with consumers and proving to them that you understand their desires and needs can help resolve their decision in your benefit.

With our current generation, there are multiple needs you can strike a chord with in order to be innovative and successful. In fact, these methods of neurological marketing are simple and have been used for years, but the way we use them is what has changed. The following are 3 basic marketing needs used by business savvy entrepreneurs that had their production booming in a short amount of time.

The first basic need we’ll cover is sex. For example, in 2002, cosmetic dentistry business owner Helaine Smith was finding trouble with her advertisement plan. She began to brainstorm other abstract ways in which to bring interest to her business. She considered the human need for sex, and published an electronic book titled Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex, documenting how good oral hygiene assists sex in being a much more pleasant experience.

Since the publishing of the book, her Helaine’s annual revenue for her business has tripled to one million dollars. This is due to readers finding information linking the book to Helaine’s original business.

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