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Posts Tagged / Tips

  • Jun 03 / 2013
  • 0
Articles, Social Media

Make Money Using Social Media, Part III

catsandsmHappy Monday, readers! Welcome to part III of Make Money Using Social Media. Our last two posts explained why and how social media got so big, and why it’s important for you to develop a social media strategy. Here are a few ways to stay on the ball with your social media plan:

 

 

 

 

 

22% of Salespeople Don’t Want to Make Money

 

 

 

…continued…

 

 

 

What Sales Reps Could Be Doing TODAY to Leverage Social Media

 

 

So how exactly does a salesperson get involved in an effective social media strategy? The first steps are knowing which messages to search for, who the most important people to look for are, and how to best respond to individual messages. Here’s how you (or that friend of yours in the 22%) could get started immediately with being a social seller.

 

 

Monitor Your Company and Industry Keywords

 

Regularly monitoring mentions of target keywords (often the same ones Marketing uses to optimize their content) and mentions of your company on social media platforms like Twitter can help to identify those leads who are looking for a service like yours. You might even find leads making direct comparisons between you and your competitors. This is the perfect opportunity to lend a helpful hand and reach out to those people who are asking sales-centric questions.

 

 

Monitor Your Leads

 

Even salespeople who are already on social media often find it difficult to uncover messages from those leads who matter the most. This problem can be solved by monitoring specific lists of social media messages only from your leads, in order to gain perspective on their challenges and needs from your business.

 

 

You can create manual lists of people to monitor in Twitter, allowing you to see only messages that are coming from specific people — like, say, a specific sales rep’s leads. Here at HubSpot, we use the brand new Social Inbox to do this. Social Inbox is integrated into the same contacts database a marketer uses to send emails, so we’re able to monitor specific lists, like a sales rep’s specific leads from a CRM like Salesforce. From there, sales reps can monitor everything their leads are tweeting, or filter it further to only deliver streams of messages containing mentions of your company, relevant keywords in your industry, or just about any other custom search term that you care about.

 

 

Gather Social Context

 

Social media can be a great place to gather valuable lead intelligence that fuels your more high-touch sales efforts, like phone calls or in-person meetings. For example, one IT consulting company, NSK Inc., uses social media to streamline their in-person networking events. They host various in-person events in the industry, and invite people to register for free to attend and learn about new technologies in cloud computing and other relevant topics. Before the event, sales reps are able to pull a list of their leads who are attending, and easily view a history of their interactions with the company, a picture of them sourced from Twitter, and a stream of only their tweets. When sales reps have this valuable information ahead of time, they can streamline their conversations to the aspects of their offerings that each person cares about, instead of showing off every feature or capability.

 

 

Engage in a Conversation

 

Though some behaviors have changed with the adoption of new technologies, one thing hasn’t changed: we all still like to be treated like humans. The philosophy of inbound aims to take Marketing and Sales back to square one, and put the person (in this case, a prospect or lead) back at the center of your strategy. That means engaging in helpful conversations, not in sales pitches. That means addressing the specific needs of each individual person, not blasting the same all-encompassing tweet or response. Here are a few tips for better, more personalized social engagement:

 

1) Answer the Prospect, Not the Competition

 

 

If a prospect sends a message out to the Twittersphere asking for experiences with your company versus your competitor, you should, obviously, do what you can to answer their question. You should not send them a message about how much your competition sucks (even if they do). Instead, you could send them a link to a case study or testimonial from an existing customer. If your email marketing client and web analytics are integrated into your social media monitoring tool, you could look into your contact’s past history with your company to better identify what their biggest challenges and interests are, and target your message toward them accordingly.

 

 

2) Develop a Personal Relationship

 

The real secret to social media is simple: be a person. People don’t want to do business with automated social media bots. Social media is an amazing opportunity to break down the faceless front of a company or brand and establish yourself as an actual person at the other end of the screen. This is the kind of rapport sales folks aim to achieve at the beginning of every phone call. Similarly, rapport can be established over social media, all the while having rich lead intelligence on hand to better understand and effectively address your potential customers’ pain points.

 

 

3) Don’t Be Afraid of What You Don’t Know

 

Maybe your leads are asking you questions you don’t have the answers to, whether they be technical or in the domain of another department. The best part about social media is that simply by answering your prospects’ calls, you’re already establishing great brand equity. If someone gives you a tough question, it’s better to tell a prospect that you’ll find them an answer and dig into it deeper with the people in your company that have the answers. Often, people can shy away from this level of uncertainty, but the openness of social media has invited a sense of transparency that, while uncomfortable at first, is preferred (and often demanded) by consumers.

 

Pretty low-hanging fruit, right? Feel like these are some changes you or someone you love in Sales could make today? (Hint: you totally can!) I believe in you, Sales. Become part of the 78%!

 

 

 

Thanks for sticking with us for this series! Hope ya’ll have a wonderful Monday. Contact us if you need a social media strategy, today!

  • May 24 / 2013
  • 0
Analytics, Articles

Tips for Online Marketing Analysis, Part II

funny-tip-jar2Hello there! Welcome to Part II of Tips for Online Marketing Analysis! Wednesday we gave the first  few tips of online market analysis. Keep reading for the rest!

 

Tips for Online Marketing Analysis

 

…continued…

 

 

Modifying your keywords

After you have analyzed a decent amount of data, you can then begin to modify your keywords. Identify the keywords that are not converting well (those browsers are not initially searching for).

This will save you time in attempting to optimize words that are not making you money, and will augment your overall sales by identifying words that are worth your efforts.

 

 

How long are they on the site?

Online marketing is also concerned with how long a user stays on a site. If a high number of users leave your site within the first minute, then you know you must work on the look and feel of your site.

If users are staying but are not making conversions, then you know you must improve your ad copy or conversion forms.

 

 

Catalog conversions

As previously stated, online marketing employs both search engine optimization and pay per click activities. It is important to track times and region of origin of conversions more so for PPC purposes than SEO.

For instance, if you know most of your conversions take place during the work week as in the business-to-business industry, then it would be beneficial to lower the amount spent on PPC during the weekend hours.

In addition, you may see trends according to season. You could then alter your PPC or SEO practices depending on the traffic particular to that season.

 

 

Where are they coming from?

It is easy to know what pages are leading the browser to your site in regards to a pay per click campaign. It is much more difficult to determine this outcome when it comes to search engine optimization.

The search engines will place your pages in the results depending on a browsers search query; so, for SEO purposes, it is very important to know what page inspired the browser to enter the site. If they are landing on the page and leaving quickly thereafter, you know you must improve the copy and design of that particular page. In addition, if certain pages are never leading browsers to your site, then you know it is in need of some intense optimization.

 

 

Thanks for sticking with us! Hopefully you enjoyed our May series on Inbound Marketing. Contact us if this sounds like the kind of stuff your business could use (which it totally could…just saying…)

  • May 22 / 2013
  • 0
Analytics, Articles

Tips for Online Marketing Analysis, Part I

tips-graphicGreetings readers! Our last post introduced what online marketing analysis was and explained some of the basics and the tools you can use. For the rest of this week we are going to have a 2 part “tip” session. Trust us here at NSquared, you don’t want to miss these tips.

 

 

 

“Tips for Online Marketing Analysis

 

 

How well are you analyzing your Web site’s efforts? Analysis is important in order to gauge current efforts and to modify for future success. Read the following article for suggestions in measuring search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns.

 

How much work do you devote towards your Web site? Online marketing is a continuous process. It is not enough to build the site, create content, and hope for conversions; but, you must also analyze your data.

 

 

What are you doing to garner more conversions? You have to study your current conversions to incur more of them. It is necessary to analyze your site’s data. Online marketing is contingent on analysis.

 

 

The following article is structured to help you get a better sense of structuring your methods of analysis. Consider the following information.

 

Know what it is and what it is not

Online marketing is associated with search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. These two methods are not mutually exclusive, yet are not one in the same. It is important for an online marketer to make a distinction between the two.

Workers heading the PPC campaigns are interested in analyzing keywords, behaviors of visitors coming from affiliate sites, search engines hosting their ads, etc. Those interested in SEO attempt to leverage organic rankings. These workers are concerned primarily with content, building links, and other methods associated with achieving high, organic rankings on search engines.

 

 

Look for as much as possible

As aforementioned, a worker analyzing pay per click is interested in visitor behavior. What behaviors should you track? You need to track as many behaviors as possible. Look at the search engine, the particular campaign, the ad, keywords searched, how long visitors were on the page, if a visitor is a unique or returning browser, etc. Collecting all this information will make it much easier to make decisions later.

 

 

Make it more specific

Online marketing is interested in general and specific behaviors of browsers. It is just as important to track individual users as it is to track the general behaviors listed above.

Use cookies or other means to trail the activity of individual browsers on your site. This will be easier to do with your own site rather than an affiliate site.”

 

…to be continued…

 

 

 

Stay tuned for Tips for Online Marketing Analysis, Part II. Give us an email or holler if you’re interested in inbound marketing for your business. We’ll make it happen, seriously…

 

 

 

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