Establishing Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

You must leverage social media if you want to successfully market your business. You will reach a huge amount of customers and prospects worldwide in just a few minutes.

If you are a newbie to social media management, this new way of marketing can be overwhelming.

With the advent of social media, many new communications and content marketing channels are available. Social media creates a new environment for customer conversations. And, just about the time you get comfortable with using a few, another new social media community pops up.

Where do you start and what social networks do you focus on? Many choices are available. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube are the most visited social media sites.

Using social media on a regular basis will help you gain valuable customers that are in the know, and like and trust your business. With social media, you let people know what’s going on with your business. This contact and interaction will help your company build relationships; make friends with customers and prospects. With social media, many ways are available to profile and highlight your company.

You should frequently post informative content that lets prospects get to know your company, its expertise, brand messages and offerings. By reaching out and having interaction with your social networks, you are able to touch base with hundreds of people each day.

Social media is particularly critical to reputation management, brand messaging and reaching customers. How you interact with others through social media will have a big impact on how others view your company, its products and services, and maintaining your brand identity.

The information that you put online should enhance the reputation and expertise of your company, and support your brand. You need to make sure that everything you write and put as your content elevates and guards your company reputation, including how your company looks and acts, what it says and how it says it.

Social media pages are designed for content postings that build relationships though content interaction. It is important to make sure that you balance how much marketing you do. Your social contacts will become very tired of your company, if day in and day out you do are making a hard sales pitch.

Your social media content is King. Once you commit to be social online, you must keep your content fresh and valuable to your followers and fans. Informative content will help your company stand out from your competitors online.

You need to use good content marketing with your social media efforts. Informational content generates trust. It provides prospective buyers with the information needed to nurture their interest and push them through the sales cycle. You can even figure out what they are interested in simply by looking at what content they interact with online.

When you first do your social media planning, a huge challenge is to find out what social media venues that your customers are using. After doing your research to find them, you need to analyze and find out what type of content your customers’ are interested in. Knowing their areas of interest will enable your company to become a resource in your product or service arena. You also need to think about how your company can create continuous beneficial and informative content. The key to retaining loyal customers and attracting new buyers is telling valuable, relevant and compelling stories.

You need an ongoing social media strategy and plan to make sure you will reach your goals on an ongoing basis. Social media marketing is only one part of an Internet marketing plan, but it is a very important part. Social media activities are an essential element to capture business online.

Consistent Branding Means Survival

To ensure the future growth and profitability of your company, you must use a brand management strategy to continually build, strengthen and revitalize your brand. Building and maintaining a valuable brand isn’t easy.

Brand positioning is a process, not an event. Your brand blueprint (vision, areas of focus and touch points) and your brand voice (main messages, approach to language, type, color and imagery) come from ongoing emotional connections made with your customers every day.

You must focus on the emotional aspects of your brand – the proposition, making a quick and intuitive emotional connection with your customers that creates awareness, has influence, and elicits their buy-in and loyalty.

Exceptional brand performance is no accident. Implementing a strong, actionable brand plan is crucial to achieving standout market performance. You can’t simply rely on the functional differences of your products or services. Customers have too many choices. Differentiating and communicating your brand’s unique value to the marketplace is essential. You need to craft messages that stir up specific words or emotions when someone hears or sees your company’s name, products or services.

Your brand serves as a powerful motivation tool to all your stakeholders such as employees, investors and customers. Companies are constantly looking for ways to grow their brand image, using new ideas and initiatives in the market. Many are creating innovative ways for building their brand and pushing boundaries to influence customer buying behavior, getting their messages across clearly and effectively. Branding today must include social media across multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more social communities.

Customer loyalty, commitment and collaboration are the key to business success in today’s competitive environment. Brand strategies need to be relevant, have a differentiated offer and reflect values that are credible and believable. This is only achievable by ensuring consistency in product and service quality with your brand promise.

Your branding identity strategy will be more successful if you closely target your market. Focus on getting your company name and your products or services in front of your current customers and best potential customers. An effective brand marketing strategy creates the kind of loyalty that leaves customers indifferent to the advertising and marketing factors of your competitors.

Branding is the intangible part of your business. A brand, unlike your product or service offerings, is a collection of ideas, feelings, word associations and visuals that represent your value proposition. Customers choose one particular brand over another because of its intrinsic value. Your brand serves as the link between your product’s promise and the customer’s desire.

Branding is a way to differentiate your company, product or service from competitors. It means having a personality that is unique and appeals to customers. This would include your brand name, graphic representation, tagline, key descriptive phases and brand story.

Well-focused and consistent attention to brand identity marketing will create a favorable, memorable position of your products or services in the minds of your prospects and customers. You must brand consistently to compete and become a factor in the industry sector in which your company participates.

A powerful brand identity and active brand strategy can prevent poor market awareness, insufficient product or service recognition, weak customer retention, lack of loyalty, inadequate lead generation flow, longer-than-expected selling cycles and low product valuation.

Whether you are a new or established business, one looking to refresh or solidify your brand, your company’s brand identity is crucial to your company’s success. A strong brand communicates to your customers a promise and expresses your unique value through words and images.

Developing your brand doesn’t happen overnight. Consistent communications that differentiate your company are imperative to the success and life of your brand.

In today’s fast-paced, multimedia world, it is more important than ever to promote recognition of your company, and its product or service by stressing the quality and the unique value of your brand.

Public Relations = Good Business

Public relations (PR) is a cost-efficient and effective way to find new customers and build a quality reputation. Awareness and a good image are what can set your company apart from your competitors.

PR is a carefully planned, sustained effort to establish your identity, maintain credibility and promote communication between your organization and its public. It’s a way to keep your name and good deeds in front of the public. It should be part of your overall branding strategy for your business to build brand awareness.

PR is one tool to be used to achieve a communications objective. Advertising strategies are another. In advertising, you’re paying to control the message that you want delivered. Public relations means getting stories written or broadcast about your company on and offline in the local press, business media, trade publications, radio, television and other media outlets depending on the audience you want to reach. PR is an information message about your company.

The public can be very cynical. They have lots of advertising messages thrown at them on a daily basis. But, when people read articles, hear or see something about your company in the news, they’re going to take you more seriously than they do from your ads.

When someone makes a claim, you typically say, “How do you know?” The reply you most commonly hear is, “I read it in the newspaper; I heard it on the radio; I saw it on the Internet.” Not, “I saw it in an ad.” Using the media to deliver a message is a type of endorsement that is impossible to achieve through any type of advertisement. With its message of integrity, quality and extraordinary service, it has the power to persuade.

Writing and placing good and informative content – user case studies, company profiles, product and market overviews, section briefs – in publications or getting one of your executives interviewed by a local or national reporter have a much longer shelf life and greater pass-through value than ads. This becomes especially true if you get permission to reprint from the magazine publisher or rebroadcast your television or radio appearance, which allows you to circulate them further to your employees, customers and others. Also, you can then put the material on your Website or in your next e-newsletter.

No company can expect much return from the marketplace if not enough prospective customers know what it does and how it operates. Some argue that attempts to create greater recognition, or to sculpt public impressions, are in some way unnatural. These skeptics feel that if their company is doing a good job, the public will “beat a path” to their door.

Waiting to be discovered can take a financial toll on your company. Your company competes with thousands of others. Oftentimes, the main difference between you and your competitors is whether your communications or marketing program are established by default, or as a result of careful planning.

Many of your competitors already are actively doing public relations, media relations, community relations, employee relations and marketing communications. You’ll never stand far unless you also proactively seek attention. It’s an extremely crowded market in the online and offline space.

Getting attention takes an ongoing, dedicated effort. You need to have an ongoing plan to communicate ideas and messages to the public, creating marketing support for services and products, and developing and nurturing media relations. You focus on your key brand messages. Until you clearly differentiate the appeals of your company – its products and services – you cannot market your company effectively.

Having a well-developed public relations campaign gives you several advantages. For starters, when stories are done on your industry, the media will have a spokesperson within your company to contact. This way, your company, and its executives, will be mentioned prominently in such articles, positioning them as leaders in the field. Most importantly, though, it will convey information to the most important audience of all: your potential customers.

So, what is news? Anything that is of potential interest to the people in your community. People make news. Employee promotions and awards make news. Events make news – business openings, special promotions, anniversary celebrations, participation in or sponsorship of a community event. Innovations are news – a new product or service.

In addition, you should be using social media. It’s an attractive public relations method for interacting with the general public, customers and community at large.

The more customers read, see or hear about your company’s accomplishments, the more they know about you, and the more they want to know about you. Your commitment to a sound, ongoing PR program makes a big difference if you want to capture solid awareness of your company. Why are you waiting?

What makes a good logo?

A logo can be one of the most important marketing pieces a company has because it is the foundation of your marketing or branded look. Therefore, a good logo should be a unique and timeless representation of your company, defining your services in a memorable way, and work well across a multitude of mediums. Whether your logo is on a billboard, a TV screen, the Internet or whatever, you may only have a split second to get your message across and still make an impact.

So with a sea of images and brands out there, what makes a good logo? It starts with a creative concept.

Keep it simple.
If your logo is too detailed or complex, your message may be lost in that split second of first impressions. Some of the most successful, classic and timeless logos of our time have been as simple as a piece of fruit with a bite out of it for a computer company, a simple swoosh for a famous shoe brand, and some golden arches for a now worldwide fast-food chain. Get the picture?

But just because it is simple doesn’t mean it is easy. Creating a simple and unique logo can be a challenge. A successful logo could start with a clever treatment of shape and / or text reflecting your service or product. It could be a color or symbol treatment to enhance the image or mood you want to portray; but whatever you do, do it as simply as possible.

Keep it versatile.
With the latest programs out there making drop shadows and special effects so easy to produce, be careful when it comes to applying them to logos.

A logo must be able to work whether it is on a printed piece, the Internet, a billboard, or even a t-shirt. It needs to work on any number of different backgrounds and textures as well. Keep in mind that the latest in special effects may look good and produce well on the Internet, but may also get lost when reduced in print to the size of a pencil! To test your logo, it should be able to maintain its integrity in black only, in just two colors for budget-minded projects, work on both dark and light backgrounds or in white, and be scalable in all sizes. Vector art is the format of choice for logo creation, rather than a logo created in raster art (such as Photoshop^®) because it will not scale larger without some degradation.

Your logo should be your brand.
Keep your logo appropriate for your image and for your audience. Make sure your logo is not misrepresenting you with any hidden images or shapes. Review even the negative spaces (and subliminal possibilities) of your shape to prevent any unwanted interpretations. What one person sees, another may see something entirely different! So test, test, test on a variety of recipients.

Use color to your advantage, as color can enhance a feeling or mood. The colors you use along with your branded image can spur reactions anywhere from warm and friendly, to scientific or high-tech, or just plain fun with your clever use of color and shapes.

Finally, pay attention to the details.
It is important to check your logo’s accuracy should it be enlarged to a very large size such as a billboard, as a reproduction at this scale will show any flaws dramatically. A good logo needs to be finished and produced using clean, smooth lines and the utmost in precision.

Why should you care about Website usability?

Because your potential customers may leave if you don’t.

A great Website starts with great content. However, even the best content may not attract or keep your customers’ interest if your Website lacks usability.

According to the W3C, the worldwide organization that writes Website standards, “usability is about designing products to be effective, efficient, and satisfying.”

For Websites, usability improves the user experience – making information easier to find and understand, resulting in more leads and / or sales.

Why should you care? In a nutshell, because people will leave your Website if is difficult to use. If it doesn’t answer their questions, they’ll leave. If your products are difficult to find, they won’t buy them. And, if your phone number is not prominent, they won’t call.

Regardless of whether you’re selling a product or a service, making your site usable is a key element in ensuring you have satisfied prospects and customers.

How can you make your Website more usable?

Design with consistency – A consistent header throughout your site, with prominent logo, company name, phone number, and contact link will make it easy for your prospective customers to understand who you are and how to contact you. In addition, a common main navigation, three clicks or less deep, will make all the pages of your site easy to find.

Be simple and skimmable – Web users skim pages when looking for information, products and services. Given that you have very few seconds to capture a user’s attention, it is essential that users are able to skim your pages for important information, and that the information is presented in simple and direct language. Keep industry jargon to a minimum and write in easy-to-understand sentences so that everyone, regardless of educational level, can understand your meaning. Break up long pages with headings and subheadings and pull out important information into easy-to-read bullet points.

Proofread for errors and meaning – A site riddled with misspelled words and grammatical errors is difficult to read and understand. Proofreading is an essential last step when writing. It gives you the opportunity to find not only your errors, but also to ensure that your text is conveying the meaning you have intended.

Put your important content first – Studies show that Web users view pages starting from the top left to top right, then the middle followed by the left side and finally the bottom. This may seem obvious to point out, but put your most important information in the most viewed areas of the page. That way, people who are skimming pages will see your most important information first, before possibly losing interest.

White space is a good thing – White space, or negative space, is the space between elements. Oftentimes people mistake white space as ‘empty,’ or space that needs to be filled up. However, white space fills a very important role – it allows the eye to distinguish between items and dramatically affects readability. It helps items stand out and separates them from other elements. Ultimately, white space can help improve readability while the lack of white space can destroy the readability of your Web page. If you have a lot of content, be sure to increase the amount of white space to make it easier to read.

Use proper HTML tags – The use of proper HTML tags, or semantic coding, is very important to usability for the visually impaired. Visually impaired people often rely on screen readers to read pages back to them. These types of programs cannot interpret pages well unless they are clearly explained in the HTML code.

Even if you do not know any HTML, it is possible to ensure that your Web pages are using the proper HTML tags. Modern content management systems will use the proper HTML tags if you make the right choices when designing your pages. Use the following as a guide:

• The headline of your page should always be ‘heading 1’
• Subheads should be ‘heading 2’ through ‘heading 6’ in order of importance
• The bold button should be used to highlight important words within the body of your article (not article headings or subheads)
• The italic button should be used for text that needs emphasis, like the names of publications
• Use the blockquote button instead of multiple spaces to indent text
• Use the enter key to begin a new paragraph and shift-enter to add a soft return, or line break
• Only use underlines to denote hyperlinks – most content management systems will do this for you automatically

Test your pages – Always, always test your pages in multiple browsers to ensure your page layouts look as intended. Each browser has its own unique quirks and what looks good in one may look completely unreadable in another. We recommend testing in Internet Explorer 7, 8, and 9, FireFox, Chrome, and Safari.

Likeability – All things being equal, users will follow up with, and purchase from, the site they ‘like’ the best. This is where the importance of branding comes into play… but, that is another article.

How to ensure / insure / assure you chose / choose the right word!

Some words are easy to confuse. At some point, you may find yourself wondering if you are choosing the correct word in your writing or correspondence. Making the wrong word choice can totally change the meaning of a sentence and confuse your audience.

Although many examples exist, I’ve put together a list of words that are easily and oftentimes used incorrectly; along with some tips on their usage that I hope you will find useful.

a lot, (alot – incorrect)
The phrase a lot always consists of two words (meaning a considerable quantity). Do not spell this phase as one word (alot).

affect, effect
Affect is always a verb meaning “to influence.” Effect can be a verb meaning “to make happen,” but it is most often a noun. The noun effect means “the result.”

beside, besides
I sat beside (next to) the stream.
Besides (in addition), we need your support.

can, may
Can means “able to” while may means “permitted to.”

capital, capitol
Capital can be either a noun or an adjective. The noun capital refers to a city or to money. The adjective capital means “major or important.” Capitol is used only when talking about a building.

chose, choose
Chose (choz) is the past tense of the verb choose (chooz).
Example: “I chose the red one. Now it is your turn to choose.”

complement, compliment
Complement means to “complete or go with.” Compliment is an expression of admiration or praise.

ensure, insure, assure
Ensure means “to make certain.” Insure means “to protect against loss.” Assure means “to give someone confidence.”

it’s, its
It’s is the contraction of it is. Its is the possessive form of it, and has no apostrophe.
TIP: If you can replace it is in a sentence, you know the correct use is it’s.

palette, pallet
A palette is a particular range, quality, or use of color.
A pallet is a portable platform for storing materials as in a warehouse.

stationary, stationery
Stationary means “not movable.” Stationery is the paper and envelopes used to write letters.

to, too
To means “in the direction of.” Too means “also” as well as “excessively.”

toward, towards
Toward is more common, but both forms are correct.

used to (use to – incorrect)
Be sure to spell used with a “d.”
Example: We used to use that program. (Not: We use to use . . .)

who, whom
Who is used as a subject in a sentence; whom is used as the object.
Use who whenever he, she, they, I, or we could be substituted in the who clause. Example: Who booked the conference? (He booked the conference.)
Use whom whenever him, her, them, me, or us could be substituted as the object of the verb. Example: Whom did you see today? (You did see her today.)

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Better yet, make your own list of words that you find confusing; look up their usage and spelling, and keep your notes handy for reference. Soon you will remember the correct usage and improve your writing skills!

The Skinny on… Why use a creative consultant?

Many companies use an outside consultant, instead of hiring an additional employee or assigning in-house staff, to carry out their communications, marketing or graphic design needs.

In the business world, image really is everything. If you don’t promote a unique and professional image, then it is highly unlikely that you’ll fully meet your sales and marketing goals. It doesn’t matter how good your products or services are.

Agencies are able to devote full attention to your company’s opportunities and needs with an impartial and unbiased view. When you work with an outside creative firm, you aren’t just employing one person; you’re hiring a whole department—one that produces tangible, dollars-and-cents results. Staffed by experts in many areas of the communications and creative, rounds out your team. Each professional is highly trained and experienced in marketing. Because of this, they are experts at knowing what works and what doesn’t when creating a professional image that properly reflects your company.

If you don’t have public relations, advertising, graphic design or social networking experience yourself, then it can be difficult to determine what will actually work for your company. Creative agencies are experienced in planning and developing positioning statements and brand visuals day in and day out.

If you are thinking about promoting your company through public relations, the media depend on contacts that they trust to bring them a real news story. They trust agency personnel that they have been working with for the long term. PR professionals are skilled at communicating each client’s unique strengths in an interesting, innovative way.

Public relations is more than press releases. Effective publicity is choosing the correct placement of your news whether it is in print, broadcast or on the Internet. It’s getting your name out into the marketplace, getting that exact placement in the specific newspaper or trade publication.

A brand-marketing agency will help you differentiate your brand, generate new sales opportunities and increase your visibility through traditional and online marketing efforts. Using sound communications and marketing strategies will increase the support and awareness of your company.

Using a consultant leaves you to what you do best on a daily basis for your company. An agency’s full-time business is communicating ideas and messages to the public, and garnering marketing support for your product and / or service.

Your commitment to working with an agency to develop a sound communications or marketing program does make a difference. The payoff for your company can be tremendous.

It’s a Wrap

Concentre Communications, Inc. –

Named one of the top 20 Women-Owned Businesses in the 2012 Book of Lists from InBusiness.

Received recertification of eligibility for a five-year period as a Women-Owned WDBE for federally-funded projects performing a commercially-useful function in advertising, graphic design, strategic planning and marketing, and public relations.

Accepted and remains in force ®

by the USPTO for another 10-year period.

Need More Help?
For more expert help, visit our website: www.concentre.us frequently.