The most common marketing mistake startups make

I ’ve seen the same basic marketing mistake play out at some of the best software companies in the world: If your marketing team needs help from engineering to update their website (publish new posts, edit copy, upload images, etc.), then they have been set up to fail.

This mistake is most often made when executives of companies (often engineers themselves) are unfamiliar with the day-to-day job of the marketers, website designers and developers they employ. I know of software companies with hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of revenue on the line where marketers are simply unable to do their jobs and have to wait on engineering for days/weeks/months to make updates to their websites.

Launching new online campaigns can mean waiting for the engineering team of the company to de-prioritize working on product features to create time for marketing’s needs. It can become a large-scale organizational dysfunction.

This is insane (making the same predictable mistake over and over again) and it should stop. It’s 2016 — we should not still be having this debate.

In this post, I want to dive deep on how this problem gets created, why it can be ignored for so long and what marketers (and enlightened startup executives) can do to fix it.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

Let engineers code, and let marketers publish their content! Marketers who can’t control their content can’t do their job.If you delay too long and take this to the extreme, you end up with a marketing team of dozens of employees where they can’t update and control the content themselves. How would you like to work on an engineering team where in order to deploy code you had to wait in line in the copyediting queue to get marketing to approve the grammar and sentence construction of your code’s comments?

Enter content management

Simply put, content management software enables marketers to update the content of their websites themselves via a graphical interface. No coding, no pull requests, no code-review — no engineering intervention required. Content management works. Content management enables marketers to do their job.

Content management software has been around for more than 20 years but, strangely for such a large ($190 billion) industry, it has only recently matured. Drupal and WordPress between them now command 65 percent share of the market (going to 80 percent quickly). WordPress and Drupal have won the market primarily because the industry of professional website designers and developers have, by and large, standardized their work on the software. Increasingly over the last few years, if you are professional website developer you won’t get hired by marketers unless you use Drupal or WordPress.

Most marketers by now know how to use these tools and are comfortable using them (just ask them!). There is an increasingly robust vendor ecosystem (in which Pantheon competes) that specializes in operating — hosting, scaling, tuning, developing — WordPress and Drupal sites. But it is a specialized industry with its own tools and vendors, connected but separate from the wider software engineering industry. I’ve found many engineers at startups who are pulled into website projects but often are not up to speed on the content management industry, which contributes to this disconnect.

How website technology decisions at startups go down

Does this sound familiar?

• Pre-seed: The engineering and product design team for the company’s product own the website. It’s often flat XHTML/CSS hanging off product code base. Life is simple and engineers manage the content themselves. This works!
• Seed stage: You have your first marketer on staff. You try to teach them how to update the website. It’s pretty hacky, but it kind of works. You know you are bottlenecking them, but who has time to go implement a whole new website?
• Series A: You are now scaling up your marketing team. You have a marketing executive who keeps bringing up the website and how they can’t really update it themselves. They want WordPress. You suddenly remember how much a PITA that last WordPress site was that you had to manage, so you plead “I hear you, but I don’t think we can prioritize this right now.”
• Scaling: You now have a sophisticated marketing team built. Content marketers, writers, editors, designers, demand gen, the whole shebang. The marketing team has given up on owning the website. You’ll hear the odd grumbling now and then, but “it is what it is.” Your product team (designers and engineers) must be heavily involved in any new marketing campaign launch. Things seem to move much slower than they should, but the thought of re-building the website feels totally overwhelming to everyone involved. At this point, nobody wants to own it.
• Then: One night you are browsing a competitor’s or sister company’s website and you realize how much you hate your website. Your website may be well-designed, but it is incredibly thin on content. You know it doesn’t fairly reflect the quality and depth of your product and your company . You know demand-gen is suffering and you can see why —  the volume and quality of publishing on a proper website is incredible. You’re sitting in a (stunning) 1967 Camaro to drag race with a Tesla. Your website may look cool at first blush, but you are being left in the dust.

Even if you are convinced that marketing needs content management, it’s not like you can just snap your fingers. Let’s get into the real horse-trading that happens when it comes to managing your company’s website. And let’s make sure marketing is properly armed because it’s not always fair pitting a marketer against your world-class engineers weighing in on a technology decision.

Top reasons engineers will use to try to explain why you don’t need content management software (and what to tell them)

We can’t run WordPress or Drupal because it’s insecure.

This is a very lazy excuse. While it’s true that you need to manage Drupal and WordPress security updates, that is true of all software for which engineers are responsible. It would be like a marketer saying “We can’t invest in PR because it may result in bad PR.” Technically true, but wrong nonetheless.

It may be true that the engineer may not want to take on the security burden themselves, which is fair, but there are a number of great options for outsourcing this responsibility.

My follow-up question for your security-minded engineering: Do we really want to run our public, Internet-accessible website on the same infrastructure as our product and user data? Breaking out your website from your product can improve security via security in depth.

Our website developers don’t want to use WordPress or Drupal.

This often happens if you are borrowing engineers from your product team to develop your website. Engineers who build products for a living are more familiar with tools for software engineers — React, Ruby on Rails — as opposed to the tools professional website developers use, such as WordPress and Drupal. This can be especially tricky if these developers are shared between product and marketing; it is hard to ask engineers to flip back and forth between two very different kinds of environments.

However, to be fair to marketing, you are making an implicit trade-off. You need to sit down and decide what’s more important: for your front-end engineers to use the tools they prefer or for your marketing team to be able to manage their content. That’s a decision that requires thoughtful weighing of trade-offs.

Long term, obviously, the real answer here is to get marketing their own resources for developing the website. The sooner the better, because it will become increasingly hard for the product teams to carve out time to help to market; they have their “real” jobs to do, of course.

This flat-file website technology I use to update my personal website is way better than Drupal and WordPress, so we should use it instead. I’ll teach you how to make a Pull Request, it’s easy!

This is pure hubris. Marketers, not your engineering team, are experts in evaluating marketing software. What would happen if your marketer went up to your CTO and told them “I went to this conference and saw a demo of this data-center management software from Oracle that is SUPER powerful? I am really concerned that we are missing the boat here.”

If an engineer ever tells your marketing executive they know how to evaluate marketing technology better, your marketer should smile politely and stay firm (and feel free to send them to this post).

WordPress and Drupal are overkill, our engineers are going to build you a custom CMS that will work way better.

This is beyond hubris. It’s really stupid. Anyone planning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (let alone millions) building a custom CMS is on a fool’s errand. I am not understating the risk. In extreme cases (e.g. at digital publishers) I have seen these decision derail companies.

What would you say if your CTO came to the conclusion that in order to build your product they needed to develop their own proprietary replacement for the Linux kernel?

WordPress and Drupal are huge, established open-source projects with thousands of contributors and ecosystems of hundreds of thousands of professional developers, marketing users, and vendors. In terms of successful open-source projects, they are right up there with the Linux kernel. They have leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars of open-source engineering effort. They are incredibly robust products.

Your engineering team may be talented, but they are not going to build a replacement for WordPress or Drupal overnight. They are going to build you a complicated, buggy website money pit that your marketing department will be married to indefinitely. For a marketer, this can be job-ender.

If your engineering team came to this conclusion, you need to push them hard — your company cannot afford this mistake.

We are too invested in our current website stack right now and there is no way we can prioritize rebuilding it right now.

This is a tough one as it’s a high-level and high-stakes prioritization decision for your company.

You first need to answer for your company, how important is our website? I would start this exercise by finding out what percent of your leads originate on your website. (For software companies this is often as high as 95 percent.)

You will then need to weigh the cost (time and money) of rebuilding your website against the opportunity cost of having a high-functioning website. To be fair, you will need to weigh in the project risk of the transition itself as these projects can be complicated.

Finally, you need to answer: If we don’t rebuild our website now, then when will we?

Slowly, but surely rational business decision making will win the day.

 

 Source: http://tcrn.ch/1QWhGTW

7 Tools to Help Your Internet Marketing Efforts

The difference between a beginner Internet marketer and a proficient one is, on the one hand, in experience, and on the other hand, in the tools they use. And while experience can only be obtained through continuous work and study of the market, tools are what you can get right now. Here are some with which you should start.

1. Google Alerts

Good old Google Alerts may look unassuming, but it is still one of the best tools for tracing the mentions of your or your competitor’s brand name. RSS may not be as popular as it has been several years ago, but it is nonetheless a simple, reliable and completely free way of keeping track of developments in your industry, and with careful choice of keywords you can gain a lot of insights from this simple tool.

2. DA Checker

Whether you want to check the results of your latest advertising campaign or decide if this or that website is worth cooperating with, knowing the resource’s authority is always extremely helpful. Domain Authority Checker is exactly what it says on the tin – it determines the strength of a website’s presence in the Internet and, unlike many of its analogues, can be used completely free of charge.

3. Website Grader

Do you want to get a fast and reliable review of how strong the SEO of your website is? Then go no further, as Website Grader is one of the most popular and straightforward instruments available in this area of marketing.

4. Hootsuite

Social media may be a major power in modern marketing, and their importance seems to be on the rise. Unfortunately, managing all your social media accounts, updating them, reviewing what others are saying and so on tends to eat up inordinate amounts of your time that you could use for more productive purposes.Hootsuite is a free tool that allows you to comfortably manage all your social media accounts, speeds up the process of posting and lets you review everything from a single interface.

5. Phrase Builder

Phrase Builder may look a bit ugly, but it is truly indispensable when you need a plenty of related keyword ideas and don’t have time to think them up ‘manually’. You simply define certain input criteria, and the tool will generate the list of keywords and phrases.

6. UberSuggest

UberSuggest is one of the most popular tools used by PPC marketers, and for a good reason. In many respects, it is similar to other suggestion tools, but there are a few differences, such as foreign language support and a lot of small details that add up to better and more flexible functionality.

7. Five Second Test

It is often said that what a user sees within five seconds after visiting your site defines whether he is going to stay or leave.  Five Second Test allows you to check how much your website is attuned to this idea: it shows you what the visitor sees, what he is likely to miss and what he is likely to remember.

Using these tools won’t turn you into a pro in a blink of an eye, but it will certainly increase your effectiveness as an online marketer – and quickly!

Souce:http://bit.ly/23oGX5B

7 Myths About Social Selling That You Probably Believe

Here are the myths and the opposing ideas:

1. Social selling takes a lot of time.

Actually, you can get enough done to see results with just 30 minutes a day.

2. You have to know a lot about social media to do social selling right.

If you wait until you’re a master at social media, you may never get started. Basic skills and some common sense are all you need to do well. The whole social selling thing is far less technically challenging that it appears.

3. Social selling is all about the data.

In part, that’s true. But the data is useless without all your well-tested sales experience. You’re not anywhere near being obsolete.

4. Social selling can be automated.

Again, some parts can be automated – like content sharing, and some email marketing. But you must reach out to contacts with customized messages that show you’ve done some research on them. Nobody likes automated social media messages.

5. All content is shared via social media.

Email is a more active sharing channel than social is. There’s actually more sharing going on via “dark social” than on any social platform.

6. It’s okay to stick with cold calling.

Not if you want to be competitive.

7. Social selling means LinkedIn marketing.

Surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter outperform LinkedIn for some social sellers. It depends on your business and your particular social selling techniques.

Want all that in a nutshell? Here it is:

Don’t get spooked by social selling. You’ve already got all the essential skills you need to do it well. Learn a bit about the different messaging tactics and the etiquette of different platforms, and you’ll do fine.

  Source: http://bit.ly/1RQ6oHK

The 10 Most Destructive Lies Business Owners Tell Themselves

We talk to ourselves constantly. Okay, maybe not literally, but the psychological phenomenon of self-talk is real and it can have a major bearing on your life, moods and even your professional performance. Self-talk can manifest as reactions to certain events and situations. For example, you might think “that was a dumb mistake” or “this is going to be awesome,” and these thoughts generally have an effect on how you perceive the event in question. They can also manifest as assumptions, in the short-term or long-term, about different aspects of your life and business.

There’s no question that business owners lie to themselves, often knowingly, but some lies are innocuous. Others, like these 10, are destructive and should be avoided at all costs.

Lies Business Owners Tell

My Customers are Going to Love This

This lie stems from your own personal biases. You came up with the idea for your business (or product), so, of course, you’re going to love it! That doesn’t mean everyone else in your target audience is going to, and assuming that’s the case may set you up for failure. If you don’t have any objective data backing this statement, you’re lying to yourself.

Everything Will Work Out

It won’t. Not if you allow things to continue as they are. There’s this persistent myth that businesses succeed because they had a good idea and a good system. Then they just waited for everything else to fall in place. This isn’t true. Successful businesses have to experiment, tinker, and evolve constantly. You have to put in the effort if you want to succeed.

I Can Always Change This Later

This can be true, depending on the context, but it’s not a line of thinking you want to apply to many areas of your business. Assuming you’ll be able to change something later gives you a lower threshold for quality, meaning you’ll start off with a weaker strategy. And thanks to procrastination, you’ll probably end up never changing it anyway. Start strong if you want to finish strong.

I Don’t Have to Worry About This Yet

There are many reasons for procrastination, and some of them are actually pretty good. However, when you delay a task, the indefiniteness of “I’ll worry about that later” can set you up for a perpetual cycle of delay. Instead, if you don’t have time to do something, either schedule a concrete time to do it in the future or delegate it to someone else.

I Have to Do This Myself

Entrepreneurs love to get their hands dirty, and many take it as a point of pride. You might convince yourself that you’re the only one with the skill set or experience to handle a certain task, or that if you don’t do this yourself, you’ll lose control of your business. However, it’s unlikely that these things are true. Learn to let go, and trust your teammates to help you out.

I Don’t Have Time

Entrepreneurship is demanding. It takes a heavy investment of time and effort to see any progress, so many business owners end up putting off or ignoring other aspects of their life — like family, friends and leisure time. Trust me, you need to make time for these things, or you’ll regret it later.

I Just Have to Work Harder

Working harder isn’t always the best approach, just like hitting your head against a brick wall with more force isn’t going to help you tear it down. Instead, opt for smarter, more innovative solutions to your problems. Putting in more hours with a “brute force” style will leave you burned out and frustrated.

This Could Never Work

This lie often stems from preconceived notions about different strategies. You might hear an idea for the first time and immediately write it off as impractical or useless, or you might be presented with a strategy that didn’t work out well for you in the past and assume it could never work out. It’s important to be open to new ideas, especially since many strategies can be feasible as long as you use the right approach.

All I Need Is . . . . . 

Businesses are ridiculously complicated, and even to the most seasoned, successful entrepreneurs in the world, they’re somewhat unpredictable. There are too many variables for you to definitively boil down any problem to a single factor. If you give yourself this problem-solving tunnel vision, you could wind up ignoring the factors that are actually responsible for your predicament. Know that every problem is complex, and no one fix will solve everything.

No One Understands

Entrepreneurship can be painfully lonely. Because you’re working long hours, you’re in an isolated position, and you have to put on a “brave” face for your employees and clients, you might find yourself thinking that nobody understands the stresses you’re dealing with. This weighs heavily on the mind. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re alone. Connect with other entrepreneurs and open up about your experiences.

Don’t feel ashamed if you lie to yourself. In fact, if you don’t, you’re in the minority. Some lies are important to reframe your expectations, help you think more positively and direct your line of thought to something more productive. However, don’t let yourself get caught in a trap of unproductive self-deception. Keep your thoughts and assumptions in check by remaining as objective as possible in your business.

  Source: http://bit.ly/1XY9dVM

5 marketing quotes of the week

What Your Favorite Social Media Network Says About You

“You are what you eat,” or so the old saying goes, but I’m pretty sure it’s high time we update that adage to “You are what you tweet.” Whether you want to admit it or not, the things you get up to online say a ton about who you really are as a person. Read on to find out what your favorite social media network says about you:

Instagram

If you had to describe yourself in three words, you’d say: “Foodie. Adventurer. Storyteller.” You can’t remember the last time you ate a meal without organizing the items on your plate in a particular way. Your fantasize about quitting your office job, taking a cab to the airport, and never looking back. You know a lot about angles and lighting and teeth-whitening products. Your most overused saying is, “We should totally get together soon! I’ll text you!” You dream in shades of Perpetua.

Facebook

You’ve got friends in low places, high places, and downright bizarre places… And you always know where they are at any given moment because they’ve all “checked in” on Facebook. Duh. You believe that everyone has the right to hear your opinion. Your 2016 New Year’s resolution was to stop getting so invested in other people’s problems. You haven’t had much success keeping that resolution, unfortunately.

Snapchat

In your world, the weekend starts on Thursday night. You can’t remember the last time you turned down an invitation of any kind—you is an “up for anything” kind of person. You’re maybe a wee bit “much” for most people’s tastes, but you couldn’t care less, to be honest. You would describe your personal style as “Miley Cyrus meets Instagram model meets Blossom.”

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is your favorite social media network because it’s the only one you participate in. You simply can’t fathom why anyone would be so foolish as to have any part of their personal lives on the Internet for public consumption. Don’t they know that employers have Google, too?

Twitter

No one would ever accuse you of beating around the bush. You’re a straight shooter, and you like to keep things short and sweet. You aren’t afraid to call people out on their bullshit. There’s nothing you love more than a rousing debate, and you are well-versed in the world of Internet acronyms. You always have a dozen projects on the go, but you can’t seem to follow through with any of them. Your current undertaking? Writing a screenplay about a woman who stumbles upon a political cover up in action and live-tweets the entire thing.

 Source : http://bit.ly/1LmeWnj

Free Marketing tips.

10 Ways to Kickstart Your Business Idea in 2016

It’s never been a better time to start a business. Access to online environments and innovations such as smart devices and cloud technology mean that many entrepreneurs can set up on a shoestring and get things going without needing excessive start-up budgets. Add into the mix the wide availability of cloud-funding platforms and cheap marketing through social media and it’s easy to see the many opportunities that people don’t want to miss out on.

Here are just some ways to get your business idea off the ground if you have the entrepreneurial spirit this year.

1. Find the Right Support

You may have all the personal and physical tools in place, but you’re nowhere without friends. There’s no better time to start networking, building business associate relationships, and getting sound advice from people in your local area and online. The great news for startups is there’s plenty of guidance from other entrepreneurs who are happy to help out for free.

Take the opportunity to make solid, long-term contacts and research all areas of running a business. A good place to start is the Government’s own business portal.

2. Organize Your Funds

While it can be cheap to set up a business nowadays, especially if you have the right idea, it’s a good thing to check what you can currently bring to the table. This should include any debts you have, which may need to be addressed first, and the amount of collateral you can use, if needed, to apply for a loan. If you are finding it difficult to make ends meet, you may well have more problems down the line when you start your business.

3. Come Up with the Right Idea

What may seem like a good idea over a couple of drinks in the local bar might not seem so bright in the cold light of day. Coming up with a good idea is imperative if you want to have any chance of success.

This includes researching how others are running businesses in a similar industry or niche. It also means being honest with yourself.

For a very successful business, the question of scalability is always an issue. In other words, when you come to grow, how easy and cheap is it going to be to carry that out? If you run a restaurant business, that might involve giving out franchises or spending money on new premises.

4. Plan the Business

This is the crucial stage of any startup and the step that many entrepreneurs get wrong. It involves setting out clear stages and strategies, from getting financed, setting up websites, marketing, brand development, and deciding whether you need to have staff employed and where you are going to find them. As far as staff are concerned, there are plenty of options to hire freelancers who can do the initial jobs for you, though you may have to do some hard searching to find the right ones.

You also need to plan for a long-term future and not just look at the immediate setup of your business. There may be a lot to do but it’s important that you have your direction set for some time to come. Your plan should include how you are going to build capital and secure your business future.

You’ll need a strong business plan, especially if you are going to be heading to the bank for a loan or looking at crowdfunding. Check out this article from Start Up Donut for some sound advice.

5. Check Yourself Online

If you have been working for a number of years, no doubt you have a persona online and you need to have a quick search to make sure it doesn’t have any negatives associated with it. Another thing to check, if you don’t want egg on your face, is the name of your new company and whether someone else has got there before you.

6. Register Your Business

One thing you are going to need to do is register your business. This used to be a complicated process, but with online sites such as www.companyformations247.co.uk, everything is reduced to simplicity and you can register everything within 3 hours. You need to do this in the UK if you have a limited company, and it includes registering with Companies House as well as designating directorial roles within your business.

7. Raise Money

Getting the finances together for a business idea is much more viable nowadays. You can use your home or other properties as collateral for a bank loan or choose to sell property and self-fund. Increasingly, many entrepreneurs are turning to crowdfunding to get their business ideas off the ground. If you have good presentation skills and a solid business plan, and can communicate how strong your idea is, then this a great way to get capital. You generally pitch your idea online and people from all over the world can help fund it in exchange for something you offer, for instance a free product or share of the company.

8. Develop Your Brand Online

If you are going to run a business nowadays, you need to develop your online brand and that means marketing. You should have looked into this in detail in the planning stage of your business idea, as it’s the key to success or failure.

You need to build brand awareness, find a following, engage with customers, and use all the free and paid resources out there that help make your business thrive. This may include doing a lot of it yourself at first, but you can also engage with online marketing companies to help you choose the right options.

9. Test, Evaluate, Tweak, Test

While you had strong ideas for how your business would begin to develop, the chances are that things will not go completely according to plan. Even the most experienced entrepreneurs encounter hitches along the way. This is where you need to put in more hard yards. It’s a question of testing everything, evaluating it, tweaking, and then testing again to guide you in the right direction.

10. Plan for Growth

Once your business is up and running and you are satisfied with its progress, it’s time to take a look at that plan again and check whether you under or overestimated growth in the future. Now that you have a bit more experience in the real world, there will no doubt be new ideas that have to be incorporated to guarantee more success. You might need to think about getting other experts on board, or you could be looking to expand into profitable new markets.

There’s no doubt that running a new business requires a lot of good thought, strong planning, and putting in the effort, not to mention often working long hours. With some 50% of startups failing within the first five years, it may seem that you are swimming against the tide in the effort to succeed. If you have done the planning, come up with a great plan, and have the enthusiasm and energy to carry it forward, you stand a better chance of success than other ventures.

 Source : http://bit.ly/24EgCyv

7 Tips to Create a Simple and Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media and marketing are two terms that are increasingly viewed as one and the same. In truth, while there is a certain segment of the user community that maintains their social media profiles purely for social reasons, an increasing majority of users also see social media as useful advertising tool. If you are in the latter category, you can use these tips to craft a simple and effective social media marketing strategy for your business. Best of all, you will pay nothing (or next to nothing) for creating a very effective advertising strategy!

Tip #1: Choose Your Social Media Platforms With Care

Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter regularly cull and deactivate accounts that have not been used within a period of time. This is done to keep their content relevant and fresh and also to keep their use statistics accurate. In the same way, you should choose which social media platforms you engage with carefully. Your business will not be helped – and may be harmed – by keeping a social media account open that you do not actually use.

If you have limited time to spend on social media, choose just one or a few platforms to engage with. Facebook and Twitter still command the largest user databases, but Instagram, Pinterest and other image-oriented platforms are rapidly gaining ground. The key is to choose the very best social media platforms for your products and services.

Tip #2: Seek to Create a Lively Online Community

Rather than viewing your followers and fans as wallets, you will have greater success in social media marketing when viewing them as your community. Interacting with them on a personal as well as professional level (where appropriate) can do more to increase brand awareness and loyalty than any number of special offers and discounts – although those are very helpful too!

Here, the more you can do to make your content humorous, memorable, relevant and timely, the more success you will have in building an online audience that sticks to you like glue. Also, do your best to promote your fans’ content as well – retweeting, re-posting, liking and connecting with them about what matters to them most.

Tip #3: Share Happy Customer Stories

You can use your social media platforms to share customer testimonials. Many customers would be just delighted to see their face and name and a short quote online! You could provide a form on your website and regular reminders over email and on your social media platforms for how to submit a testimonial that might get featured.

Tip #4: Use the Inexpensive and Effective Social Media Advertising Options

Google Adwords, Facebook ads and other inexpensive, highly targeted advertising programs are tailor-made for even those with the most limited advertising and marketing budgets. So long as you know who you are trying to reach and where they are (in terms of location as well as which social media platforms they prefer) you can use these programs to your benefit. You can target very specifically to demographics including age, gender, area of the country, interests, status and more.

Tip #5: Connect with Other Influencers on Your Chosen Social Media Platforms

If you notice that such-and-so has a huge following, this indicates a person of influence within your social media sphere. Not only can you friend or fan these folks, but you can actively seek them out and begin to build a relationship with them. One great way to bring yourself to their attention is to continually re-post or re-tweet their content.

Another great way to build a relationship is to extend an offer to cross-promote – you promote their brand to your audience and they promote your brand to their audience. You may also want to host a Google Hangout or Twitter Chat together to bring your audiences together and expand your reach jointly. The more you befriend other industry influencers the faster your own audience grows.

 

Tip #6: Steer Clear of Self-Promotion

This definitely seems counter-intuitive at first – after all, isn’t promotion the whole reason you are spending all this time on social media in the first place? Yes and no. You do want to be able to promote what you have to offer, but you want to do it in such a way that your community online doesn’t quite realize they have been promoted to until they are already purchasing what you offer.

In all of this, it is vital to understand that you are your own best representative for your brand. Social media marketing is all about relationships. It is not about products and services. People buy from people, not companies, so your community will be buying from you, not from your company or your brand. The more people get to know you and what you stand for, the more they learn about your company and what it stands for as well.

Tip #7: Position Yourself as a Reliable Source for Breaking News

Sharing current content, trending content, newsworthy content, will mark you as a vital news source as well as a place to buy products or services. This will keep your community tuned in to your social media profiles for other reasons than just because they need a product or service your company offers.

Did NASA discover another planet? Post about that! Did you just donate to help disaster relief victims? Retweet the donation link. Did your cute dog (or any cute dog) just win a noteworthy competition? For sure share that! Keep on top of the current news and events feeds and you may soon find you are being shared and re-posted and re-tweeted as well, with the effect of improving your brand awareness by default.

Conclusion

Armed with these seven simple tips, you can take your company’s social media presence from bland and boring to vibrant and engaging, increasing customer loyalty, sales and brand awareness without doing anything more than just being yourself!

Source : http://bit.ly/1SfSAEd