Customer: How will you achieve this?

Marketing Agency 1: We’ll develop an engagement gradually by actively participating in social media conversation, publishing content, sharing and developing an all round presence to drive inbound traffic.

Marketing Agency 2: Don’t worry about it, we’re experts in SEO techniques, we’ll deliver 1000′s of links, guaranteed traffic and you will have quick results.

Customer: When can I see results? How much traffic can you generate at the end of the first month?

Marketing Agency 1: We may be able to generate a moderate few hundred to 1000 visitors through referral traffic in the first month but consistently build and later start seeing more traction from search traffic coming in from content that’s made an impact with users. 

Marketing Agency 2: We can get thousands of visitors in the first month, thousands of Twitter followers and thousands of Facebook fans…it all depends on your budget.

Customer: Obvious choice! Marketing Agency 2 knows what I want…you’re hired! 

Money can buy you traffic for your website, it can buy you quick marketing results and even the impression that you’re online marketing efforts are a success.What it can not by you is true online engagement.

When it comes to demand generation and online marketing instant results, quick traffic, rapid growth, small campaign cycles are words businesses and marketers like to hear. It’s all possible online just as it is offline, if you have advertising dollars to spend, attention can be bought. However, to keep that attention, you need to keep spending those ad dollars and when using these routes, one needs to remember:

Easy come….easy go.

Not that there is anything wrong with online advertising, banner exchanges, buying leads, traffic or fans but should that be the only strategy as part of the overall online marketing mix? The reality is, these quick result mediums are effective in getting attention but they work exactly as traditional push based advertising or marketing does.

There are no short cuts to the pull based or inbound marketing. It needs to be earned by offering something of value constantly but the results can be lasting. It doesn’t cost as much but it needs long term vision and commitment to grow an online marketing effort that draws traffic and customers towards you and getting people to talk about your business. It is the road less traveled, longer, more demanding but in the end….it leads to a better place.

Attention can be bought, trust needs to be earned and when you’re building a long term online presence that people can connect to, it’s working hard at building engagement and trust that will make all the difference.

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Plus etc are the the better known bigwigs of the social web and undoubtedly the first places that come to mind when you think about developing a marketing strategy online. Going purely by the volume of traffic they have, it seems obvious to spend more time and energy developing activity and outreach on the platforms that have the most traffic and give less priority to the ones that have comparatively less traffic. It seems like common sense that if you have target market of 20 million on Facebook, that’s where you should spend most of your online marketing focus and yet this isn’t always the case.

When it comes to online marketing and engaging people through different web channels there’s a lot more than quantity of traffic that comes into play. The same set of social sites and using the same outreach formula may not always work since every brand, business, target market and web user base has it’s own characteristics. Facebook may bring in 1000 fans and not a single conversion over 10 months. A small niche community site or online group on the other hand may bring in just 50 visitors in the same time frame resulting in 10 conversions. There’s marketing potential far beyond Facebook and the obvious social media super sites.

Just to be clear, we’re not saying don’t spend time on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and so on. We’re saying don’t restrict your outreach efforts to only these sites and look beyond the obvious choices because you never know what works best for your inbound marketing till you experiment.

Let me illustrate:

A new picturesque family getaway hill resort was looking to  increase their online visibility to drive more bookings and eventually to rely on inbound traffic and conversions to keep the occupancy charts filled. They managed to create a Facebook page and spread the word through family and friends touching 400 fans in their first 3 months however, there were only about 3 bookings that could be attributed to their activity on the Facebook page. Some weeks later, one of their customers submitted a review of the resort on TripAdvisor.com and resulted in someone else discovering the resort as a result of this review. From that instance, the resort decided to explicitly request their customers to add a review on TripAdvisor.com if they enjoyed their stay and customers did. The TripAdvisor reviews showed up well in Google search results for ‘places to stay’ related to the region and the bookings clearly saw an increase. Learning from the experience, the resort spent more time submitting their details to similar hotel directory sites, travel review communities and listings stepping up their activity on these sites and although the traffic increase was not huge, the conversion rate was growing and inbound bookings went up significantly as more people discovered the resort through their searches for staying options in the area.

A children’s clothing and apparel brand setup an online store in an attempt to break out of it’s local operations and look global for customers. They spent significant resources working on on-site SEO and creating accounts on Twitter, Facebook as well as setting up a blog which they could use to showcase their style tips and advice. They soon learned this is a very crowded and competitive space online and got frustrated not being noticed and getting the attention they thought they would. Their break came from getting actively involved on family and kids fashion sites like mykidsfashion.com, stylecaster.com, cafemom.com and others. People seemed to respond better to photos of their kids wear and gradually the purchases started happening. They were finally connecting to the right audiences in the right places and developing an influence there.

There’s a wide web of places online beyond the popular choices to develop an influence and reach out to the right people online and sometimes all it takes is a little will and effort to experiment and find out what works best for you. It can be a long process but well worth it in the end when you find the right mix and focus efforts on the ones that yield results.

Social media as an effective marketing channel has been around for a while now and at times it seems the word has been thrown around so much that some businesses fail to really understand what it means before deciding they want to “use social media” to “increase traffic”, “increase sales” and demand “ROI”.

Among the Indian business fraternity, this divide in understanding how social media is used to build a presence or a brand is seems ever so prevalent after speaking to several business development executives in charge of using the social web in their marketing mix. There some Indian businesses that have used social media “brilliantly” to carve themselves a niche on the web using innovative and authentic ways to engage an audience. They’ve been able to make a connection with their target audiences by giving them something new, something useful, using blogging as a medium to communicate effectively engage their community.

These are often the companies who have said:

- We’d like to try something fresh, we need to communicate to our audience in a way that’s not direct selling or pushing people to buy from us but rather letting them know we’re here in this space and we’d like to connect with others who are interested too

- Let’s plan this right, take the time and invest in building a strong relationship with people online via quality content and engagement

- Of course we need ROI but we’re in it for the long haul and we want our online audiences to “like us” so we won’t jeopardize our brand, reputation or values as a business by crossing (invisible) boundaries that exist in the social web world.

These are the kind of companies you will see:

- Blogging with  a personality and a genuine voice

- Developing content that audiences will find useful

- Using Twitter not just on auto pilot to advertise a single link or two from their website but share, have conversations and open a communication channel with others there. You’ll notice their followers may grow more gradually but they have relationships with these followers and a genuine following.

- Using Facebook to build communities while understanding that peoples privacy and online space also needs to be respected

Lesson : – Everybody Loves Elmo As Well As Businesses That Understand And Respect The Social Web Environment

Then there are companies who see the social web as another marketing channel not very different from a large telemarketing or email list which needs to be pounded, messaging needs to be pushed out in front of people as possible and the objective is use all means to drive sales fast! These are businesses (And sadly a large number of so called SEO / Web Marketing / Social Media / Content Generation firms) that end up not using…but abusing the social web and effectively pollute it with a lot of the unwanted or spam content that you and I see and ignore out there.

These businesses have said:

- We need rapid link building to our website… we don’t care how you do it but we need to see 4000 links every month. Use auto commenters, leave multiple comments on anyone else’s sites,   publish hundreds of posts with links to our sites….we don’t care what the posts say as long as they have our keywords.

- Our objective is to go from 0 visitors to 100,000 visitors in the first month. We don’t care who they are or how they come to our site….just make it happen.

- If we spend $X for the first 2 weeks, we would like to see $X into 10 in sales by the end of these two weeks otherwise it means social media doesn’t work.

- We’ll create a Facebook account and Twitter account, link them to an auto sharing tool that lifts feeds from rss and then get someone to add 500 random followers everyday so they follow our advertising links and we get clicks that convert

- If you have a few hundred followers on Facebook and Linkedin, lets direct message each one with a bulk message and measure the results

- Create 20 profiles on each social bookmarking and networking site to promote our website.

- Post 30 Facebook updates on the page daily so all that a follower sees in their feed is us….doesn’t matter if it’s useful for them or not.

- Have all our content and links to the site replicated on all social sites like Squidoo, Article marketing tools, article distribution sites, Blogger and every other site.

- Join forums and we’ll post several great reviews of our own business under fake names

It’s these businesses and companies that claim these are genuine social media marketing tactics that are responsible for automated junk comments, tonnes of irrelevant articles and posts, spam email campaigns, spam messages in your Facebook, Linkedin and social accounts, shares that annoy you in your content sharing accounts, un related ping backs and links to your blog and sites, spam discussions in your forums or discussion groups and all that’s polluting the otherwise awesome social web environment.

It’s possible that with the sheer number of people these campaigns are pushed at that it could result in some short term benefits. However, do you really develop a positive vibe about a business that does this to you and ruins your social web experience? Would you really want to buy from or connect with them?

Nobody Likes Darth Vader Or Businesses That Pollute And Disrespect The Social Web For Profit

There’s a fine line between using and abusing social media. Each business needs to respect that the social web world exists on it’s own terms and to fit in, you need to be a part of that experience and contribute something constructive to peoples experience while respecting that they get to choose whether they want to engage with you or not. One needs to understand how to build a presence there gradually developing your influence and not try and get there with brute force like the offline marketing and advertising world.

The social web is not kind to those who use “corporate might” and “hard selling”. Take the time to understand what people want, what they don’t mind, how they interact in this online environment and  you’ll make a place for yourself there that will be yours for a long time to come.

Content and social media marketing is serious work! Execution is what lies at the very core of a successful online marketing initiative and while most SEO and online marketing tools will tell you what to do in order to get your Google ranking up and drive more  inbound traffic, how to create more online buzz, we actually focus on executing on what should be done.

At BuzzFactory, as we move ahead into our second year with more clients on board, more content to develop, more sites to manage and more online buzz to create there’s just so much going on at any given time we decided it was time for us to spruce up our online workplace. We needed a place which incorporates our core processes and ensured they remain as efficient and transparent as possible so that execution on every account remains as strong as ever.

After all, it’s the execution of our customer social media and content marketing strategies that we focus on.  The result…. was a new back end Virtual Office dubbed The Factory!

The Factory offers the perfect online work environment for everyone here at BuzzFactory while strengthening the workflow and processes which are so critical to what we do here.  For now, The Factory is open only to employees and functions as an intranet software for internal use but we do plan to roll out a future version which will include customers so they can monitor projects, get live updates and interact with the team in real-time.

Here is a small sneak peak into the back end software “The Factory” in the form of screen shots:

The screen from which freshly published content gets submitted to the next stage where it gets broadcast and gets promoted through social bookmarking sites, social networks, communities and more. (Please don’t mind the pink mist…it’s a bid to maintain some confidentiality)

A glimpse of one of the internal sections of “The Factory” which doubles as our online office or workplace. This one is a screen of the Projects section where individual accounts are managed, to-do lists are created, tasks are tracked and files are uploaded to streamline execution. (Please excuse the pink mist…again…it’s a necessary evil)

We’re pretty stoked about the new platform. We see it as the right kind of software platform to give an already strong team and strong process an additional boost and help scale without making a dent to efficiency.

I’ve been frequently asked the question “why invest in social media and content marketing?” .

The question often asked to substantiate whether there is any clear ROI in engaging in creating compelling new content and distributing it through social media channels. Somehow, it often takes time for executives more comfortable with traditional marketing tactics to come to reason with why they should consider content and social media core to their marketing online. The prospect of how all the content you generate and all the relationships you build with people online through your blog, social networks, podcasts, articles, slideshare presentations work together to create an online “pull” which will drive your inbound marketing sounds good but it’s not a pack of “instant noodles”. It’s perhaps something PR professionals will appreciate more than marketers since they can relate to how personality, image and brand can be built through strategic communication over a period of time.

To convince many other marketing professionals, we may need something a little closer to home to help understand the need to have an active social media and content marketing strategy in play. Something more comparable like “Lead Nurturing”. Lead nurturing doesn’t result in instant conversions. It is however, a highly effective marketing strategy and we marketers love it!

It keeps a constant engagement with prospective customers in the form of emails, newsletters, updates and other content which could be of value to them. It keeps “you as an organization or business” fresh in their minds since they are reminded of you with each “contact” and when they are ready to “buy” or “act” they know who to go to.

Social content marketing works much the same way. It’s perhaps even less intrusive that typical lead nurturing which in itself is pull based. Here’s an example:

The other day someone asked me if I knew a good web design firm in the APAC region. I thought about for a good 3 seconds and said ” try getting in touch with Brightlabs!”.

Now I’ve never used Brightlabs personally for any web design or development work. I do however read their blog posts quite often, see updates from them on Twitter, read their articles which show on my Linkedin feed. Since I ended up following them on Facebook, I also often come across a wall update or hear about what they are up to on my Facebook account feed. Simply through all the outreach and content they publish, they come off as a firm that really knows what they are doing. In my view, they come across as real professionals who have an eye for detail and passion in the sites they design and build. I feel like I know them well through their online communication. Whenever I’m online on any of my social sites such as Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter, I see them there. So when a requirement came up, the first thing that came to my head when I head web design was “Brightlabs“.

Your content and interaction with people on social networks does what you would expect from lead nurturing campaigns.

- Touch base with them frequently

-Provide them information and content which is valuable

-Don’t sell (at least not directly through your content)

-Be everywhere, social networks, search engines, blogs

-Build relationships through what you publish and what you say online

-Become known for what you do

When the time is right and they have a requirement, they will come to you. Going back to the question “Why invest in social media and content marketing?”. The same reason you would invest in lead nurturing program. To keep your prospective customers in the loop so that when they  have a requirement, they know you are there.

The problem is many people who are charged with the task of turning their website into a successful marketing channel take these two metrics and set them as their primary objectives losing sight of the big picture. Back links, increasing your page rank, maximizing page-views, reducing bounce rates although considered metrics for successful websites should actually be secondary outcomes which result from going after a primary goal which is far more important “creating a high quality engagement with your online audience“. If you do this, the rest will follow and you’ll end up having more than just a website with impressive traffic figures but doesn’t do wonders as far as your key objectives go. You’ll have a long term online asset which works for you.

Here is what we’re talking about:

Super Holiday Hotels sets up a brand new website for their new property in Male, Maldives. They decide they want some aggressive traffic building activity for their new site with tonnes of unique visitors and back links from the top travel websites with high page ranks to increase their own page rank. They set out to hire a few freelance article writers who can deliver bulk posts 500 words in length at a steal, hire more freelance guys who do link submissions to directories and promise 250 plus back links to your website in a month and another set of guys who will comment on other blogs (some of whom will use bots) and pay them for every 100 comments posted. In 8 months the Super Holiday Hotels has 35,000 unique visitors a month! A success! Oh… and they also get an average of 3 visitors who fill in their online reservation form and book rooms with them each month.

The Beachfront Hotel sets up a brand new website for their new property in Male, Maldives. They decide they want to turn their website into a source of inbound reservations and bookings for the long term so that most of their sales will come through the website. They know the way to do this is build a reputation online, reflect their own hospitable personality and love for their island nation online through their social media channels and create relationships with online travelers so that some day they may arrive at the property as guests. They engage BuzzFactory.net! (…just kidding) They create an resource for people traveling to the Maldives irrespective of where they plan to stay. They deliver great content which carries their personality as a business while also ensuring what they publish is information that readers can rely on and help them on their travels there. They work steadily at building a publication which is invaluable to anyone who plans to visit Male, creates a community of those interested in the island around their site, creating communities on Facebook, Twitter while answering questions for those communities keeping them updates on what happens on the island and the property. In 8 months The Beachfront Hotel has reached 10,000 visitors a month. Disappointment? Not really… they will eventually get to 35,000 in a few months time and keep climbing. More importantly, with just 10,000 visitors a month, they have averaged 20 bookings and reservations a month through their website which accounts for 50% of their occupancy each month. It’s working!

Quality! Quality! Quality!

Quality of your objectives and plan + Quality of your execution = Quality of your results

The Beachfront Hotel was not blinded by the numbers of back links and unique visitors. The visitors to their website were not a flow of traffic from some irrelevant high traffic website as a result of clever traffic building schemes, they were people searching for travel information in Male and found a reliable online personality by the name of The Beachfront Hotel which offered it. They interacted with them on Facebook, decided to explore the website a bit further and made a decision to stay there during their visit. In the long run…chances are…other high ranking travel websites will see The Beachfront Hotels online publication as a great resource for that destination and link them anyway.

Traffic and back links are a by-product of having a really great website which others consider a “great resource” or “important website” with your domain. With the right direction, right objectives and metrics to measure your online marketing success by, you’ll be on your way to building a really great web asset.

In an early stage business the situation is very different. There isn’t a steady base of customers you can already rely on and the challenge isn’t really growing it, the challenge is to create that customer base. Social media marketing or online marketing is really about engaging people through conversation, content and building a brand through which audiences will start recognizing you through and eventually, approaching you. It’s inbound and pull based but it’s not instant and needs time to develop. Time is something in short supply in the early stages and closing customers is a priority. This should mean…. focusing completely on sales will help you go after targeted set of prospects and close customers slow and steady to build the revenue stream. However, there is a conflict in this strategy.

Given a hypothetical situation where you employee a 3 person sales team using email and telephone campaigns to pursue and close new customers, the progress over a few months is likely to appear like the blue line above. There will be a more or less steady line with some good months, some bad ones but the only way to increase sales in future is to increase the size of the sales team and invest more into sales. Great way to start business development but no long term benefits for growth.

It’s like hunting for your food. The more you need, the more hunters you need and it’s not a sustainable strategy.

Given the same situation where you employ a team of 3 for social media marketing and outreach, you are likely to see something similar to the red line. You may not see much progress over the first few months but as the ecosystem of content and buzz around your business grows, you’ll find an increasing flow of prospects towards your site which with time can be closed as customers. The process starts slow but consistently grows with the same amount of work put in every month. This means, though in the short run it may seem slow, in the long run you can grow your customer base without increasing your investment in the process. Not a great start but great future benefits perfect for high growth.

It’s like farming for your food. You cultivate a customer base by sowing content. It’s highly sustainable in the long run. As the content and buzz around your business increases each month, so does your business development.

Ideally you need both. Some amount of direct sales to kick start the customer base since you can’t completely rely on social media marketing to reap immediate results. At the same time, you need to start your social media and content marketing campaigns as early as possible so that in the later stages you don’t find yourself in a situation where your business development growth has just flat-lined because you were not thinking long term.

Our advice is start cultivating your social content farm as early as you possibly can. It’s sustainable, will grow and provide you more in time through a steady process than the hunting strategy which is effective but will make you work just as hard for every customer you intend to close and eventually, won’t work towards scaling your business. Hope that helps!

Happy Birthday BuzzFactory

When I started thinking about venturing out into a start-up all my previous experience in online marketing thought me  “Great Original Content” is going to be at the very core of every businesses web marketing strategies. It’s the fuel which drives search marketing, SEO, inbound marketing, social media marketing, online marketing campaigns, e-mail marketing campaigns and just about every outreach component which can drive more visibility online around one’s business. Original content which can engage people on the web is an ongoing everyday requirement without which a business doesn’t have much to work with and few busy professionals can commit to creating such content as frequently and consistently as required for online initiatives to work for them. However, with a bit of support, a defined daily plan and a dedicated team to execute on it there is little that can’t be achieved.

With each of our customers since 15th of May last year we’ve learned from them, absorbed their passion for their business areas and supported their content marketing and social media marketing initiatives. We’ve constantly experimented, innovated, learned and evolved as a business and for just one year, BuzzFactory has grown tremendously in terms of capabilities.

If we seem overly positive about the future and what the next year has in store it would have to be attributed to our experience working with our existing customers each of whom we’ve become a part of over time. We are extremely grateful to the amazing early customers we have (ones listed on our site and ones who are not) who have been incredibly supportive, referred BuzzFactory.net to others and  carried us through the first year. It’s been a joy working with each one.

Keeping in with the spirit of turning over the year, the existing site, gets a cosmetic makeover and takes on a new look as it’s re-launched.  Cheers to turning one and here’s to many more!

being silent leads to being forgotten

If you picture a kid in a bus who is constantly talking about something and barely silent for a moment, you may not really be interested in what he is going on about but the chances are you are going to notice him and tune into what he is talking about. Chances are, others in the bus have also taken notice. It’s a lot like this with online channels starting with your blog. If you keep a constant conversation going online through your blog, Twitter, social networking and bookmarking sites, it will draw some listeners and create some interest. A part of that interest may drive readers to contact you and explore further. It generates a active interest in what you are talking about and creates opportunities. However, when the conversation stops, the blog posts dry out, the Twitter accounts turn silent and there is no dialog online, the activity around your site also tends to diminish (with the exception of search traffic coming through content that has been well indexed and show up in search results which has long lasting effects). If that online silence is prolonged, you’re likely to be forgotten.

constant activity is key

Most of those we work with are looking for our blogging and social media marketing support not because they don’t know how to do it themselves. It’s because they do know how it works and they know how important it is to be able to post and stay active very regularly and that is something their time schedules don’t permit.  They know there is a direct relation between the ability to consistently publish fresh content having active social channels and the ability to generate interest, conversations around their business and new customers.

keep a continuous online conversation going starting with your blog

For now, it’s time for me to break that silence on this blog with this post and other ones to follow. Then get back to being active on Twitter and other social sites to let everyone know I’m back and stiring a buzz. Perhaps I’m not very talkative in person but when it comes online marketing I know for sure, too much silence is not good for business.

Along with blog related activity and articles we often work with our customers to create very short Slideshare presentations which carry a single or very focused message about their products or offerings. We’ve found that these are simply great ways to reach out to customers and drive even a single valuable aspect or benefit of the offering across just a handful of slides and conveying a short crisp message. Traditionally, one would expect a slide presentation to be a comprehensive demo with detailed text and images which walk through a product but we tend to prefer using a combination fewer words and expressive images to just drive enough interest in a minutes time to  generate some curiosity about the product or business and explore some more.

For example… here is one on the importance of content in the online marketing space which we created to embed on the front page of our website to explain to users what the essence of what we do is all about.

Here are some reasons why we think Slideshare presentations are a great addition to your online content and help you reach out to more customers:

• They are on-demand viewing: users can access them and go through them when they have the time and need not set aside time from their schedule to go through them. More and more people actually take the time to go through presentations (as long as they are fresh and interesting) which means they are likely to get noticed.
• They are very sharable: This is perhaps the best reason to try out Slideshare presentations. Whether internally among the Slideshare community which alone has a large user base or on sites like Linkedin and other social networks, they can easily be shared on large communities and get noticed by people within your vertical or industry. Also since they are easy to embed in blogs as I’ve done above, there is a good chance people will help syndicate your slide show on their own blogs and sites.
• They show up well in search results: which is exactly what you want from any content you publish and Slideshare presentations don’t disappoint here. If they are well titled and tagged, they make for great search able and useful content for users who are searching for more information around your space.
• They are engaging & educational: which simply means they are perfect for demonstrating something in an interactive way and you can easily incorporate links to live examples, other web pages with more detail and use them to do what you would during a live presentation in the given time frame.

So if you are experimenting with different types of content to reach out to users try adding Slideshare presentations to your mix. You may just grow to like this versatile medium of content marketing just as much as we do.

If you have links of Slideshare presentations that you’ve done share them with us and post a link to them in the comments section. We would love see them.