What's Your Social Media Game Plan

Every sporting team has a game plan, a series of scripted actions that hopefully will lead to the outcome they desire, a win.  For a football team, it’s inside handoff, a safety blitz or a post pattern.  In basketball, it may be a pick and roll or a triangle and two defense. Baseball players practice, the suicide squeeze while pitchers and catchers go over the pitch sequence for each batter.

The goal of having a game plan is to have a successful outcome, winning the game. And of course it doesn’t always happen, because the opponents have their own game plan. So it comes down to who can execute their game plan the best.

Isn’t the same true for your business? You have a desired outcome, either making more money, selling more products or providing a better service. So shouldn’t you have a game plan?

But the question is where to start? The first step in the process should be defining what outcome you want. Making a ton of money isn’t an outcome, it’s a fairytale. So the first step should be defining the goals for your business. Beginning by setting SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. There are many resources that discuss SMART goals and how to set them, so I won’t cover that here, other than to say, it is critical to know where you’re going and be able to measure your progress along the way.

So now that you have your goals set and know what outcome you want, its time to design the plays to make those happen. The first step is defining who is your target market. The second step then, becomes how do you reach your target market.

That’s where social media comes into play. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin have very broad demographics. Facebook currently has over 400 million people with the fastest growing segment being over 35 and female. In fact, Facebook is now the number two most trafficked site on the web. In March of 2010 during a one-week time period, Facebook actually got more traffic than Google.

If your business targets professionals with 100,000+ income, LinkedIn might be your best choice. While not as social a community, the LinkedIn users are categorized by their business and professions. So if you want to target marketing officers in the healthcare industry, for example, you can do that.

The incredible power social media offers to create a buzz in the marketplace is really at the heart of its strength and popularity. You can spend thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, in advertising, and only hope your message reaches your targeted customers. But with social media, you can target those customers, where they’re spending a lot of time with very little cost.

I’ve always said, if I could sell word-of-mouth advertising, I would be sitting on a beach somewhere with a cell phone saying “send me a check for $100,000, and I will deliver the customers to you”. But now, that’s not far from the truth (at least the part about word-of-mouth advertising.) Social media has elevated referral marketing or word of mouth advertising to a viral state. Now, we don’t have to be on the phone or at a party talking to a friend to recommend a business. We do that on our social media sites. And while we only talk to a handful of people on the phone or, at that party, our entire circle of friends will see a recommendation posted on our wall.

So unless your business game plan includes a social media plan, you’re more like the sandlot sports team drawing plays in the dirt. You might occasionally get lucky and throw a touchdown. But if you come up against a team (business) with a well practiced game plan, success will not likely be in your future.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com have over 10 years experience in website design, search engine optimization and social media marketing. With over 30 years in business and consulting, we understand your business needs and partner with you to grow your business.

Tags: facebook, linkedin, social media, twitter, youtube

For the last 5 or more years, I couldn’t pick up a newsletter or ezine without finding an article about search engine optimization.  That is, until now.

Ten years ago, we focused on adding meta tags to our websites to get them ranked.   Five years ago, it was about linking strategies.  Then content became king.  And with each change, SEO specialists like myself adapted.  So how to you drive traffic to your site today?

The evolution of search today has taken on a real time emphasis.  Looking for the news? Today the news finds you.   Of course, you want the latest information on whatever you are searching for.  Nothing is more frustrating than going to a website and finding information from 2006.  Even if it’s still pertinent, chances are you will go on to a more current site.

Real search or live search focuses on delivering the most recent information.  And that information is frequently not from a website.  The most recent information is more likely a blog post or even a Twitter tweet.  Yes, I said a Twitter tweet.  Here’s a good example:

A Google search for “Iceland Volcano” resulted in a section for Latest News – that contains a live feed changing every few seconds.  The listing below shows results from just minutes before.

Twitter Results in Google

Directly below the Latest News is a section for Video results that displays YouTube videos of the Iceland Volcano.  What every happened to the Google we all knew that took 90 days to get your site found?

Video Results - YouTube

So should you abandon your website for a blog, Twitter account and YouTube channel?  Not yet.  I look at the social media like a big funnel.  Twitter, Facebook and YouTube should be funneling people to your blog and your blog should be funneling people to your website, where browsers can find out details about you and your business and hopefully take action (but that’s another topic).

Another reason you can’t abandon search engine optimization (SEO) and your website is the permanency of social media.  You might be ranking well with your current article, post, tweet or video, but as more recent media are found, yours will either drop in ranking or disappear all together.  So you website is the anchor. A well designed, search engine optimized website should remain fairly stable (even in competitive keywords.)  For example, search for “Tucson Interior Design” in Google.  Of the top 4 results, 3 of the sites are ones that were optimized by 800biz.com several years ago.  With little or no changes, these sites have maintained their top ranking consistently.

So for now, SEO is still alive and kicking.  But today, you there are more pieces of the online marketing puzzle to put together.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Tags: 800biz, blog, live search, real time search, search engine optimization, SEO, twitter, video, website design, youtube

One of the biggest road blocks facing small businesses when addressing social media is the question of return on investment. With so little time devote to what’s crying out to be done, adding something else or something new like social media can feel like a real burden. Sometimes the only way to rationalize and prioritize something new is to understand the benefits in relation to everything else your doing and take a new view based on that understanding.

So much of what’s written on social media amounts to lists of things you should do, get on twitter, blog, create a Facebook fan page, and not enough on why you might consider doing it. While all those tactics may indeed be wise, I would like suggest a number of ways to use those actions to do a better or more efficient job doing things you’re already (or should be) doing.

Start to think in terms of doing more with less effort, not simply doing more. If I can let small business owners get a glimpse of social media through this lens, they might just decide to go a little deeper. Here are five ways to look at it.

1) Follow up with prospects

I love using social media tools as a way to follow-up with prospects you might meet out there in the real world. So you go to a Chamber event and meet someone that has asked you to follow-up. Traditionally, you might send an email a week later or call them up and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on LinkedIn, asked to be connected and then shared an information rich article that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Chamber mixer. Then you offered to show them how to create a custom RSS feed to get tons of information about their industry and their competitors. Do you think that next meeting might get started a little quicker towards your objectives? I sure do.

2) Stay top of mind with customers

Once someone becomes a customer it’s easy to ignore them, assuming they will call next time they need something or, worse yet, assuming they understand the full depth and breadth of your offerings and will chime in when they have other needs. Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and upsell them is a key ingredient to building marketing momentum and few businesses do it well.

This is an area where a host of social media tools can excel. A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encouraging your customers to subscribe and comment can lead to further engagement. Recording video stories from customers and uploading them to YouTube to embed on your site can create great marketing content and remind your customer why they do business with you. Facebook Fan pages can be used as a way to implement a client community and offer education and networking opportunities online.

3) Keep up on your industry

Keeping up with what’s happening in any industry is a task that is essential these days. With unparalleled access to information many clients can learn as much or more about the products and solutions offered by a company as those charged with suggesting those products and solutions. You better keep up or you risk becoming irrelevant. Of course I could extend this to keeping up with what your customers, competitors, and key industry journalists are doing as well.

Here again, new monitoring services and tools steeped in social media and real time reporting make this an easier task. Subscribing to blogs written by industry leaders, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place. Setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches (see more about how to do this) or checking out paid monitoring services such as Radian6 or Trackur allows you to receive daily email reports on the important mentions of industry terms and people so you are up to the minute in the know. (Of course, once you do this you can teach your customers how to do it and make yourself even more valuable to them – no matter what you sell.)

4) Provide a better customer experience

It’s probably impossible to provide too much customer service, too much of a great experience, but you can go nuts trying.

Using the new breed of online tools you can plug some of the gaps you might have in providing customer service and, combined with your offline touches, create an experience that no competitor can match.

While some might not lump this tool into social media, I certainly think any tool that allows you to collaborate with and serve your customers qualifies. Using an online project management tool such as Central Desktop allows you to create an entire customer education, orientation, and handbook kind of training experience one time and then roll it out to each new customer in a high tech client portal kind of way. This approach can easily set you apart from anyone else in your industry and provide the kind of experience that gets customers talking.

5) Network with potential partners

Building a strong network of strategic marketing partners is probably the best defense against any kind of economic downturn. One of the surest ways to attract potential partners is to build relationships through networking. Of course you know that, but you might not be viewing this kind of networking as a social media function.

If you identify a potential strategic partner, find out if they have a blog and start reading and commenting. Few things will get you noticed faster than smart, genuine blog comments. Once you establish this relationship it might make sense to offer a guest blog post. If your use a CRM tool (and you should) you’ve probably noticed that most are moving to add social media information to contact records, add your potential partners social media information and you will learn what’s important to them pretty quickly.

If you know how to set up a blog already, offer to create a blog of network partners so each of you can write about your area of expertise and create some great local SEO for the group.

So, you see, you don’t have to bite into the entire social media pie all at once. Find a tool, a technique, a tactic that makes your life easier today and provides more value for partners, prospects and customers and you’ll be on the path to getting some real ROI on your social media investment.

What social media tactics have you discovered that allow you to do more of something you’re already doing?

Article by John Jantsch on 03/16/2010 – Reprinted from Duct Tape Marketing

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Tags: blog, facebook, linkedin, search engine optimization, social media, Social Media Marketing, twitter, youtube