Social Media for SMBs: 4 Best Practices #SMBs #BestPractices

Team Position² — Wed, 11 May 2011 08:50:49 +0000

SMBs: Anything But Small

Small and midsize business owners today understand that including social media in their marketing efforts is essential for success. The last four years have witnessed SMBs using social media and online monitoring tools to add value to their businesses. The reasons for making their presence felt on social media platforms may vary from company to company; while some may use to it to gain new customers, others simply want their brand to be noticed. The spring 2011 edition of the American Express OPEN “Small Business Monitor” reports that:

Over 35% of small businesses in the US are using social networking in their marketing efforts; this is a 15% increase when compared to fall 2009.
Nearly 12% of the respondents have been using blogs as a social tactic, almost twice more than in fall 2009.

As we progress into 2011, statistics show that more SMBs are refocusing their marketing investments to design campaigns that have influence on the social web. Social media is expected to be one among the top five budget areas that small businesses are likely to increase their marketing spend in 2011. Supporting this is the study conducted by GrowBiz Media and Zoomerang, where 751 US businesses were surveyed. Findings show that:

50% of the small companies will either increase or keep steady their social media budget for 2011.
Of these, 13% are planning to increase their social media budget, surpassed only by e-mail marketing, direct marketing and website upgrades.

Getting the Most out of Social Media: 4 Best Practices

It is good to have a plan if you are serious about getting the most out of social media. Here are 4 best practices to be followed in order to get maximum benefits from your social media efforts:

Engaging with Customers:

Setting up a blog, fan page or a Twitter account is easy; this does not involve expensive software or media buys. However, despite the low-price tag, there is a different type of investment involved. It’s called ‘connecting with customers’. According to Brian Solis, in 2010:

Nearly 73% SMBs said one of the biggest reasons for using social media is to attract new customers.
Of these, 61% achieved success.
46% said that staying engaged with current customers in a meaningful way was an important part of their social media plan.

Marsha Collier, author of The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide, recommends US-based United Linen as an example of an SMB that successfully serves its customers via social media.

Listening to conversations, creating interesting content for prospective customers and responding in real-time involves time, energy and effort. While this holds true for all companies irrespective of their size, for smaller businesses it boils down to picking one or two communities that are important in your market. Once this is done, it’s all about focusing your efforts on growing these communities.

Getting Exposure:

The September 2010 edition of the American Express OPEN survey found that the primary reason for using social media by SMBs was to increase the exposure of their business. When compared to September 2010, 44% of the companies in spring 2011 were using social media to help their businesses, a 39% increase; and they were focusing on the top social networking sites for those efforts. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others have been doing a good job of providing additional marketing exposure for these companies.

Most small and mid-sized marketing companies agree that social media helps them make their presence felt in an increasingly noisy market place. In fact, ‘getting exposure’ tops the list of social media benefits for small business owners at 88%.

To determine how well your company is doing in terms of building brand awareness, you can:

Monitor the social media platforms that generated the most buzz.
Gauge the overall sentiment of the conversations specific to your brand(s).
Take a baseline count of your Twitter followers, Facebook fans etc, and monitor this over a time period to see how they grow.
Monitor the number of people who retweet your conversations or revisit your site.
Find out who the key influencers are for your brand(s).
Track awareness by measuring how many mentions your company gets in a day, week or month.
Keep a tab on how many people sign up for email newsletters, subscribe to your blogs etc.

Building brand awareness through social media ultimately results in increased traffic to your site. This, in turn, will help increase sales and generate leads.

Using the Right Social Media Tools:

When it comes to social media marketing, having a clear understanding of your company’s business objectives is vital. Your social media tool kit will depend on a) what kind of a company you are and b) what do you wish to achieve.

For instance:

A B2B company is better off using LinkedIn as this is a business oriented social network for professionals.
If you are a consumer-facing company, we suggest using Twitter or Facebook.
Similarly, if your company aims to attract new customers, then Facebook could prove to be useful (as indicated by the eMarketer report).
Yelp can make an impact for local businesses with a storefront. Companies using Yelp can create listings with all the necessary information that the consumer needs to find you.

The top four tools that most SMBs have in their social media tool kit include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs. A study conducted by Social Media Examiner in 2011 shows that:

Facebook use has surpassed Twitter this year.
81% of the marketers are no longer using MySpace.
Compared to large organizations (68%), small business owners are more likely to use LinkedIn in 2011(61%).

Monitor Everything:

The number of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page or how many Twitter followers your brand boasts does not always indicate success levels. To measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and useful information about website traffic, you need to use the right social media monitoring tools.

In addition to monitoring, deciding a strategy on how you will engage in conversations is important. Engaging in conversations everywhere can prove to be time-consuming and difficult. Your social media monitoring tools can help:

Separate the noise from the relevant conversations.
Identify the ‘high influencers’ (based on popularity, number of conversations etc).
Help you understand where you traffic is coming from ( Twitter, blogs etc).
Obtain the right demographic break-up (in terms of gender, age and so on).

Engaging in social media monitoring does not mean always mean doing it all by yourself. We suggest seeking the help of a social media specialist. Qualified social media experts can work closely with SMBs, helping them balance the management of community relationships and seeking assistance for managing prospect and customer engagement.

Conclusion

Social media used to be treated as an add-on in a company’s marketing plans. Over the last 3-4 years, this picture has considerably changed, especially for small and mid-size businesses. SMBs now know that feeding their customers’ social media appetite leads to dividends. Social media has become as much a part of a company’s marketing plans, as traditional marketing tactics have been so far.

In 2010 and 2011, SMBs largely adopted social media to get their brands noticed in the digital space, followed by the need to attract new customers. It will be interesting to see if these will continue to be among the top parameters for small companies to include social media as part of their marketing plans. With SMBs increasingly using blogs, it will also be worth noting if blogs will oust the big three (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) as a primary social media tool in the future.

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Conversion Optimization to Improve Conversions

Team Position² — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:18:13 +0000

Ever wondered why you do not get enough leads even when your website generates a lot of traffic. You would have noticed that your website maybe ranking well for the most competitive terms but it still fails to generate quality traffic. If you happen to notice that your website is still failing to get the leads, then you may have to consider conversion optimization and also analyze what kind of keywords are driving traffic to your website. This may also be a good time to look at your SEO landing pages, to identify if the page convinces the web visitor to take an action on the page.

Improving conversions on your website can involve following steps

Identify pages having highest bounce rates to make improvements
Ensure that your call to action content is clear and prominent
Ensure that the sign-up or registration process is streamlined
Display fewer ads
Identify and optimize top converting keywords
Keep your purchase funnels short
Have a clean design layout for your page

Ensure that you audit your website against these parameters to improve the stickiness of your SEO landing pages and to improve the overall conversion rates for your website.

Contributed by Zuheb SM