One of the top reasons decision makers in B2B businesses put off social media marketing and spending on activity which can help create a web presence is “no instant ROI”. The logic: why pay someone to blog, publish content, share content, comment on others websites and spend time on social networks all day when it doesn’t instantly result in sales? It’s just an ongoing cost which can run for months without a directly proportional result in terms of sales that can be tied directly to this activity.

Most traditional business development decision makers would rather spend on advertising campaigns, email marketing campaigns, telemarketing or buying peoples attention rather than earning trust by building a relationship through social media which can be a much longer process. You wouldn’t be wrong to think social media and the content marketing approach is a slower path to converting attention to sales so it can be put off. However, it would be short-sighted.

You see, developing a content ecosystem and a social media presence is a long term investment much like brand building and not a short term marketing campaign spend like a telemarketing campaign.

So when you look at the term ROI on activities like blogging, sharing, content development and others related to developing an online presence, you need to look at it standing far back thinking what it can do for you several years down the line rather than looking at it up close like a 2 month advertising campaign where you count spend and conversions over this short period. Social media is a long term investment in creating brand pull around your business and that’s the perspective it needs to be seen in.

Real life case illustration

A couple of years ago  I was involved with the demand generation team for a B2B service. When it was launched, there were two major components to the customer acquisition process. An inbound marketing lead (just myself) and an outbound pre-sales team of 4 that would run email campaigns combined with outbound telemarketing campaigns to identify potential customers that supported a 5th sales manager that would actually close sales resulting in conversion when a hot lead has been identified by the pre-sales team.

Working of the Outbound Marketing Team

4 resources costing the company $3000 (made up figure) a month each at a total cost of $12,000 a month.

Together they generate approximately 120 phone calls each day reaching about 50  a day of which 2 warm leads would emerge. That’s about 10 warm leads a week of which about 1 would convert into a customer. This team of 4 would consistently deliver about 4 customers a month which was not bad considering this was a service where a single customer would be high value and contribute significant revenues.

The process was linear and the cost of sales constant. The only way to increase sales would be to increase costs.

Working of the Inbound Marketing Effort

1 resource costing the company $3000 (made up figure) a month total cost of $3,000 a month.

As a 1 person inbound marketing resource for a small business, I would spend my hours each day creating a compelling blog post, developing engaging content around the service like slideshare presentations, ebooks, PDFs etc. Promoting and sharing this content across social bookmarking sites, interacting with others on relevant communities across Linkedin groups, doing guest blog posts with industry thought leaders, building a following on Twitter, link building and developing awareness for the service and company.

The first two or three months there was very little traffic, a hand full of inbound leads mainly from decision makers stumbling across conversations and learning about the company. In the next three months we were reaching about 150 inbound visitors a day resulting in about just 10 form fills a month but converting into about 4-5 sales a month since the inbound leads were more qualified and came looking for what we offer. This was at par with the 4 person outbound team.

As the activity continued at the same pace, towards the end of the first year traffic grew steadily towards the website, form fills started to increase and inbound leads were continuing to show steady progress. Conversions were much better on these inbound leads since they came from visitors that had come across us online through our content or conversations, heard about us, reviewed and done most of their evaluation on the website with content provided there and then asked us to get in touch with them since they were interested.

By the end of the second year, the number of inbound leads from the website as a result of the social media and content marketing activity had far exceeded anything the 4 person sales team could come up with who were still at 4 sales a month.

The process took time and effort to yield anything. Once it did, however, it scaled and beyond a point, the returns far outweighed the costs.

Developing an online presence is not going to yield instant results but great brands were not built overnight. They were investments made with the vision that people will connect with them and when they finally did they paid off. Social media and online outreach is an investment. Invest early, reap the benefits long term!

Using Social Influencers To Get The Customers Attention

The morning started off at the Zomato.com office in Koregaon Park, Pune where the panelists converged and the got some time to connect with each other. Including some of Pune’s most active social media folks, the panelists were a great mix of individuals ensuring this was going to be a great session.

Introducing the panelists:

 Top row from left to right:

Sonali Brahma : Independent Strategist and Creative Consultant

Saurabh Sengupta : Business Head, Zomato

Radha Giri : CEO of Midas Touch Consultants

Dr. Parag Dixit : Co-Founder of Sheepstop.com

Neil Sequeira : Founder of BuzzFactory.net (that would be me)

Swati Maheshwari : Co-founder of Rustic Art (Moderator for the discussion)

Bottom row from left to right:

Shikha Pakhide: Co-founder of Social Media Club Pune Chapter (Organizer for this event)

Yash Sharma : Founder of Change Republic

Sandeep Saxena : Founder and CEO, Acton Biotech

Prasant Naidu : Co-Founder of Lighthouse Insights

Arun Prabhudesai : Founder of Trak.in

Social influencer’s are to the social media realm what celebrities and brand ambassadors or brand influencers are to the offline marketing world. They hold the attention and have the trust of their audiences whether through their blog, Twitter accounts or social networks and a single mention by them could help or ruin the reputation of a product, business or brand. As the panel discussion got underway, there were some terrific examples, experiences shared, points made, opinions brought to light and tonnes of great insights around the subject of using social media influencers and the use of social media for marketing in general. The overall learnings from  this fruitful discussion may just be to vast to review or list out in a single post but here are just some of the points the panel generally agreed on and made during the discussion which would be good takeaways to remember and chew on:

Takeaways

1) Using social influencers can be effective in promoting a business or brand however, social influencers have built their audience and reputations the hard way and won’t necessarily use their power/influence to promote or mention something pushed to them.

2) If you ask a social influencer to promote or review something, expect they won’t necessarily say only good things about you. Many won’t like being pushed to review or promote your product or brand especially if they don’t really know you. Others may agree to have a look at it but they won’t compromise their honest criticism or feedback .

3) There are indirect ways to catch the attention of a social influencer, get to know them or get on their radar. They’re more likely to mention you or your brand once they’ve gotten to know you and genuinely like the product or the brand on their own without being pushed into promoting it.

4) Brand evangelism and influencers can really impact your sales but you can gather brand evangelists only if your product/service is great or worth talking about. There are lot of little creative things you can do to make your product or service better and give people something worth talking about. If you do, they will do your promotion for you. A crappy product or service can not be pushed through social media channels even if you pay people to talk about it.

5) If you’re using social media and want others to talk about your brand in a positive light, be ready for negative feedback and reactions too. Don’t block people from being able to express negative sentiments instead, address every unhappy customer or user and try and turn that negative into a positive. A single negative that is turned to a positive on social media channels is worth more than a hundred positive comments because it shows people that you care!

6) You can’t just leave anyone in charge of your social media especially if they don’t have a clue about what they’re doing or they are not empowered to respond and act. For example, a company CEO doesn’t let some random employee reply using his email id, so why should he do that with his social media accounts. Cases when a CEO, business owner or an empowered representative of the company immediately responds to a comment, tweet, update or conversation and takes swift action showing the company is listening creates immense respect for that brand or company.

7)You have the technology, the audience and tools to take a conscious decision to become a social influencer within your field. It’s a process which needs constant interaction, activity, passion and dedication along with a systematic effort but any one of us can gradually become an influencer today if you invest the time and effort to doing so and you earn the respect of online users.

One needs to bring in personality into their social media presence since no one wants to interact with robots or even worse, humans posting like robots!

9)You need to identify how your social media interactions are working for you. In some cases, it may not be about bringing in more traffic or new customers, it could be to retain existing traffic and keep people coming back.

10)Identifying who the best social influencers are for your business is important and can vary a lot depending on what kind of business you are. For a small services business for example, it’s all about word of mouth and your existing customers can be your most powerful influencers if they talk about you to their peers. For some companies, their employees can be their best evangelists while others a highly passionate and influential customer can become your best evangelist.

11)Money is rarely an effective compensation for most social influencers and directly telling them to promote your product or write a good review will probably backfire. If you wish to leverage social influencers, the approach has to be much more inviting, creative, giving them an opportunity to voice their own opinion on something whether good or bad. It’s about creating an experience for them to talk about and giving them the freedom to do it their way on their terms.

Those are just some of the takeaways from this session which could prove invaluable to anyone planning on identifying and engaging social media influencers to evangelize their brands or businesses. All in all, a Saturday morning well spent with some interesting discussions, valuable takeaways and … scrumptious pizzas to top it off!

Social media is a powerful medium for brands and marketing. No doubt about it. Businesses spend a significant portion of their budgets marketing and it’s not uncommon to have budgets of millions of dollars kept aside for advertising, buying media space, filming commercials, putting up events and other channels. When it comes to budgeting or investing in online marketing (online advertising not withstanding) or social media media marketing a common response is :

But isn’t that free?

Or at least, social media marketing is associated with low cost options for marketing….which it is. The truth is, you can market a brand or business online for virtually nothing. All you need is a laptop, internet and understanding of social media and how they can be leveraged to drive traffic and awareness for you. Most sites that are commonly used will give you free sign ups. You can setup a blog on Blogger or WordPress.com for nothing. Create a Facebook page, a Twitter account, submit pages to directories, work on your search marketing all without having to pull out a credit card or spend money. Social media is free. So what are we social media marketing agencies really charging for?

Time!

Let’s rewind a bit and look at how you would go about starting to create some online presence assuming we just launched a new website. Creating a blog can be done for free if you choose to. Writing a first post will cost you about 2 hours assuming you need to do some research, editing, include some of your keywords and really put together something people would share. That post is not going to get noticed without promoting it so that will cost a couple of hours too. Submitting it to several top bookmarking sites, communities, social networks, groups and so on so that it may get at least a few clicks from there. Doing this once will achieve nothing! It needs to be done daily or consistently. How many hours is that?

Every one of those accounts whether on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, StumbleUpon, Digg, Tumblr etc are edge-less swords until you’ve built a social influence on each one of these networks. Creating a social influence on a single social site takes hours a week and even years of activity and working at it. If you have a new Twitter account and spend a few weeks having built a following of 30 people and share your website, chances are 0-1 person may just click on it. Being in a position where you build a larger following, know people within your network build an influence on Twitter which guarantees a few hundred or thousand people will hear what you say can take take hundreds of hours of dedicated activity on Twitter. Likewise, developing a following and influence on other accounts and communities cost hundreds of hours in time. This doesn’t include the time invested in conversations, networking, replying, commenting and several other activities which are an integral part of creating an online engagement.

Social media as a channel is low cost. It may not need a lot of investment in terms of money but it needs more investment in time than perhaps any (or most) other marketing activity and time is a valuable commodity.  

It could be your time, your employees time, the time put in a by an online marketing manager, a dedicated social media team or that of a social media agency. One way or another, to build a really great online presence and social media engagement you need to invest a lot of time and effort no matter who is putting it in. So is it really low cost or free?

Some say social media and online marketing agencies like us sell expertise but I believe there is little barrier to learning what we know and a wealth of information shared on the subject if you have the time to learn it all. I like to think what we’re really charging for is our time because we spend a lot of it doing what we do. The value proposition to those that engage the support of a social media agency? :- Save your time, buy ours instead because you’ll need all the time you can get to make social media marketing really work for you and when it does, you’ll know it was worth every minute.

A financial company had this big event planned which would bring down some heavy weight global investors as well as some key government leaders two months away. They planned to market this event in a big way to attract more attendees from the private sector and decided to use an integrated multi-pronged plan with email campaigns, a single newspaper advertisement, call in known press contacts for some offline PR and wait for it….social media marketing!

Now this could have been a great strategy to reach out and spread the word about the event inviting people to come attend but the catch was they didn’t have a social media presence or online engagement they could tap into so they decided to engage a social media and online marketing company that could help them create a web presence for them since they would be busy with preparations for the event. Now deciding to create a social media and web presence for your company IS a great idea. What was wrong with this particular case is the plan was to spend exactly 2 months engaging on social media, setting up a blog, a Facebook account, connecting with groups on Linkedin, Twitter…..and then STOP until much later in the year when another similar event was planned.

Social media can not be compared directly to television advertising or other offline media. It doesn’t work on the principle of flash a message to a known sized audience and pay accordingly (Online advertising does that but not social media engagement). It’s about constant interaction, communication and building that community / audience and that’s not a quick ‘put together’ and sell ….it’s build and nurture over a long time. Blog audiences are not built in a month or two, neither are Facebook groups or social influence on other sites. Not to say they can’t be done with a large budget and paid online advertising but you get what you pay for and to grow a social presence online organically and build lasting relationships with people online, that’s not a viable strategy.

Think of it as a conversation (which is exactly what it is). When you stop activity, stop publishing, stop updating, stop answering, replying or communicating online…..that is the end of the conversation. The other’s in the room with you have little option but to leave the room or move on. You can’t build a relationship based on a single conversation in any social situation online or not. Stronger relationships are built when you keep in touch, keep communicating and stay in contact. Social media and online presence is great for marketing – but it can’t be a seasonal strategy which can be turned on an off.

This company is not alone in their resolve to use social media and invest in online activity for a few days of the year only when it’s strategically needed for their marketing. There are sporting clubs and franchises that engage a million strong fan base for a few months of the year when the season is on and then cut off all activity when its done. Sure season is when the interest peaks and the sponsorship revenues come pouring in for the teams and clubs but what about the fans? Do they stop being fans once the season is over? Do they stop reading about their favorite players or not want to hear what is happening off the field through the year till the next season? There are businesses from every field occasionally dabbling in social media and then letting the activity slide like it’s a seasonal campaign but there’s no such thing when it comes to social media.

There’s always advertising to turn to for instant demand generation but inbound marketing and social media marketing is not about that and doesn’t fit there as a solution to short term demand increases. It’s about relationships and like any dating guru (or social media influencer) will tell you…you need to invest time and effort in any relationship and work at it constantly to strengthen it.

This is easily the weirdest post to have graced this blog all in the name of social media marketing. The Dot was created as part of a social media experiment to observe how people share on social networks. We always say content needs to be share worthy to make waves on the social web. With “The Dot” we intend to learn something around just what constitutes “share worthy”.

Remember: If you see the dot and you like the dot, please share the dot!

“If you don’t have an iPhone…then you don’t have an iPhone”

As a marketing enthusiast I love the message. It’s smart, it’s catchy and makes you question…why don’t I have an iPhone? As a television viewer, I can’t stand this line anymore because I’m compelled to watch it every five minutes over and over again while catching my favorite shows on TV. Today it’s the iPhone advertisement but a week from now it will be some other advertisement, message or brand that will fight for attention and eventually haunt me to the point I would actually have a negative attitude towards the brand.

Similarly in the social web space, there is such a thing as overdoing it…..only perhaps you will have to change shoes to perceive this fact.

Let me explain with a common example of a regular day on Facebook….

Put on your marketing shoes as someone who is promoting their brand online :-

- 10:30 am You discover a really great blog post related to your business or industry

- 10:32 am You post it as an update on your company’s Facebook page and share it with everyone within the group

- 10:38 am You share another find on Facebook using your company’s page

- 10:40 am You add a status update to your company page about a new product that will be on offer soon

- 10:50 am You upload some photos from yesterday’s event to the page’s photo album

Put on your regular everyday Facebook user shoes who’s logged in to connect with friends and family. Rewind to 10:30 am:-

- 10:30 am You log in to Facebook and look at your news feed. A friend of yours has a birthday today. There are some new photos your sister uploaded of their recent vacation.  So you wish your friend, check out the new photos.

- 10:32 am You go back to your feed and see this blog post shared by a company whose page you “liked”. So you check out the blog post, click the line button and maybe even leave a comment.

- 10: 38 am There is another share from this company in your feed less than 5 minutes after the first one. You ignore it.

-10:40 am Now there is a third item from the same company saying they have a new product.

-10:50 am There is another item in your feed from the same company with some photos but your feed page is starting to look like their company page and their posts are dominating all the space in your Facebook feed pushing your friends and family out.

-10:55 am This is getting annoying…so you blog their updates or leave the page.

There is something like too much! Perhaps not as a business, but definitely as a consumer or user of the social web. It’s the same annoying feeling you get when someone on Twitter posts every 20 seconds especially when they are just links and not personal messages. It’s the same for automated social accounts which keep posting like bots, when you get an automated comment on your blog every single day from the same company trying to promote their link but don’t really have anything real to say about your post. It’s the same when someone keeps posting the very same link to your Linked twice a day in group drowning out all the good discussions and shares.

From a business perspective it’s understandable why so many will insist more is better when it comes to frequency of posting, updating and getting their brand and message in front of people as often as they can through any site. We need a return on investment right?

Is overdoing it really going to give you that return? Or will it turn people away from your brand?

Consistency, frequency and being ever present in front of your consumers is undoubtedly important. So how much is too much?

Content plays an important role in social marketing and is often to keeping the conversation and buzz going around your business.  You need to have content that you can share with the online community. The real challenge is how you generate that daily content and keep it interesting for your customers.  One great way to tackle this is starting with a very active blog. By very active, we mean one that has engaging posts, insights, reviews, articles or observations as often as possible. Useful articles and posts around your business can be very versatile and need not be restricted to the blog. Once posted, the same post or article can be Tweeted, shared on groups like Linkedin, MySpace and Facebook, posted to discussion forums or communities, converted to a down-loadable document for the website and even sent out in an email newsletter. Discussions naturally follow around these posts whether in the form of comments people leave on the blog or social sites like Mixx & Reddit, re-tweets and replies on Twitter, passed around on social networking sites and really fuel the wider online conversation around your business and help it gather momentum.

We recently developed an niche vertical based online magazine for a customer of ours to provide not just their customers but virtually the industry with fresh articles published daily with interesting content within the space. Other than the stand alone community of readers within the industry which quickly developed around the online publication the company saw this as a great opportunity to tie the blog / online magazine content to jump start their other online marketing initiatives. This included posting regularly on a large community site for the industry, posting articles and starting conversations around them on their Facebook community, Myspace and drawing more followers on Twitter. On all these groups and communities they have people who enjoy reading through, sharing and commenting on the articles which are interesting or offer some valuable insights to them. As a result, the members on all these communities have increased activity and helps the business build stronger communities and better relationships with their customers.

The common ground for all social media marketing channels and social marketing is your content. Invest in regular content and the process of having a constant conversation with your customers online will just become a whole lot easier.

Every business is working towards a strong online marketing plan to help drive customers towards their websites rather than going after customers. Different strategies work for different businesses and whether it’s paid online advertising, search engine optimization, inbound lead generation programs or social media marketing, the main goal is the same: To get in front of customers with a message. Experimenting with all these various online marketing techniques over some time will help determine the winning mix of just how much of each one needs to get their customers coming in however among all these variables is one fact that can’t easily be disputed: Content plays an important role in the online marketing process.

The rules for the race to get the top spot in search engine results for the best target keywords has changed. The game has become more competitive. A lot more competitive. How many businesses would rest once their website shows up in the number one spot or the among the first page results of a Google search? Few. The race is no longer to get to the first page or claim that top spot. The aim is to dominate the results on the first page or even the first few pages of search results. After all, how long can your website hold that podium position before someone else comes along and pushes you down? This is why SEO or one aspect alone can’t drive online success. Once you’re at the top, you need to fight to stay there and you need to fight daily.

This is where content comes in. Fresh content is generally given priority over older content so need to produce fresh content as often as possible is key to staying among the results for a targeted set of keywords. Little wonder how blogging has turned into such a powerful marketing tool in any social media marketing plan. Depending on how often the blog is updated, the process helps update the content consistently and search engines pick up on this, marking it as a valuable source of information. Turning out daily content around a strategic topic area while including certain keywords (without going out of context just for the sake of keywords) will gradually work towards a website ranking higher for those keywords. More importantly, the more useful content you can get out there and promote through sharing and social media, the wider a net you can cast so more visitors are likely to be directed towards your site.

1. Develop content around your business whether its blog posts, videos, presentations, pdf documents, white papers, articles etc
2. Do it daily if possible or as often as you can. The more frequent you can publish new content, the better.
3. Promote each piece of content as much as possible. Share it, bookmark it, list it on directories and sites, tweet it and get it out there
4. Dominate the search results for that topic

Consistency is the key. If you can generate content consistently, you can become more visible.