Social Media Training Series: Marketing & Sales; Customer Service; Leveraging Social Communities; Tracking and Analyzing

Social Media Training Series

Presented by Genia Stevens, MBA Social Media Trainer – Marketing Strategist

www.GeniaStevens.com 608.466.7612 (office) 608.466.5230 (mobile) [email protected]

Helping your company keep pace with the latest marketing trends.


Session 1:

Social Media Marketing and Sales

Discussion Points:

1. Defining your target market 2. Defining business goals 3. Which social media property

will work best for your company?

4. Avoiding common pitfalls 5. Best practices for small and

medium-sized companies

Define Your Target Market • Analyze your current customers a. what social networks do they use? b. what type of content do they share? c. track interests, behaviors, characteristics to build a customer profile •Research your competitors a. who are their customers? b. how are they engaged? c. where are they engaged? d. is their customer profile different from yours? e. what do they do better than you? f. what do you do better than them?

•Test your communication tone

Define Business Goals • What is the goal you are trying to accomplish?

a. clearly define your organization’s goal(s) b. make sure you have buy-in from upper-management c. make it clear how you plan to use social media to help accomplish this goal •What is the timeframe for accomplishing this goal? a. establish realistic timeframes b. set checkpoints

•Is this goal aligned with your organization’s strategic plan?

Which Social Media Properties Work Best? Top Four Social Networks:

1. Facebook (B2C) 2. Twitter (B2C) 3. Pinterest (?)* 4. LinkedIn (B2B)

LinkedIn Boardroom

Facebook: Water cooler

Twitter: Cocktail Hour

Pinterest New Kid

Google+ LinkedIn Wannabe

* So far, it appears Pinterest will head in the B2C direction.

Pitfalls to Watch Out For • Forgetting about your website - don’t forget to keep your website up-to-date •Giving away the farm - if you’re using giveaways to grow your community, don’t get giveaway happy – your fans will begin to expect freebies all the time •Remain consistent and promote frequently - if your primary goal for the first 6 months is to raise brand awareness, stick to that and set secondary goals aside

Pitfalls to Watch Out For •Getting started with social media marketing without a strategy - write one! remember: you want specific, measurable and attainable goals •Over-sharing - sharing information is great, but if you’re a business owner, you can’t afford to share too much •Data paralysis - data should help drive decisions, but don’t let it get in the way of creative ideas •Lack of personalization - use a real person – embrace personal brands

Best Practices for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses • Add social media training to your sales

training program

a. social networks are a great place to build and maintain relationships b. sales professionals can successfully use social networks as a lead generation tool c. social networks can be used to drive traffic directly to a company’s website where products are sold

Your market is already online – your sales team should be there participating, observing and engaging.

Best Practices for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses • Add social media training to your sales

training program

d. more and more buyers initiate sales via information found on the internet e. people, especially women, prefer to buy from people they trust – social networks build that trust f. the most successful sellers are those

who changed their business development activities from prospecting to networking

Best Practices for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses • Add social media training to your customer

service training program

a. your social networks should be an extension of your customer service department b. assign a person or team to monitor your brand mentions across multiple social network platforms c. make sure your social CSR has been trained to deal with online behaviors

Your customers are already talking about your brand on social networks – you should be a part of that conversation.


Session 2:

Social Media Sales and Service with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Discussion Points: 1. How to build your company

profile on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

2. Turning followers and fans into customer advocates

3. Designing a successful marketing campaign for sales and service across multiple social networking platforms

4. Time effective use of social media communications with simple push-button automation

Building Your Company Profile on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn • Know each network’s personality type - LinkedIn: boardroom - Facebook: water cooler - Twitter: cocktail hour • Complete your profile accurately - Name, company information, web address, phone, snail mail, etc. • Give your profile a personal touch

•Keep your branding consistent - Mission statement, elevator speech, colors, picture and biographical information should remain the same across multiple platforms

Turning Followers and Fans Into Customer Advocates Engage: •Post updates on your social networks that get your community engaged with your brand

•Post updates that help you build a relationship with your community •Respond to your community members - don’t leave them hanging

Turning Followers and Fans Into Customer Advocates Engage:

•Engaged community members trust your brand

•Engaged community members become viral marketers

•Engaged community members who are excited about your brand become word-of-mouth marketers

•Engaged community members become your customer advocates

Turning Followers and Fans Into Customer Advocates Nurture Your Relationship:

•Once you’ve gained your community’s loyalty and trust, don’t abandon them •Don’t abuse the trust and respect you’ve earned

•Use your social network community as part of your customer service department

•Always respond to criticism (remain calm and professional)

•Have fun

Designing a successful marketing campaign for sales and service across multiple social networking platforms

To Develop a Successful Marketing

Campaign, You Want to Answer these Questions: •Who’s your target market? •Who are you? •What are you trying to accomplish? •Who will create, implement and manage your campaign? •What tools will you use? •Where will your content come from? •What milestones will you establish? •How will you measure your progress? •How will you manage your brand’s reputation?


Who’s Your Target Market?

•Determine your target market •What social networks do they use? •How will you locate them on the various social networks? •How will you approach them? •When will you approach them?


Who are you?

•What does your organization/company do? •How does it benefit your target market?


Who Will Create, Implement and

Manage Your Campaign? •Senior level marketing staff (create) •Mid level marketing staff (implement) •Entry level marketing staff (manage ongoing tasks) •Interns (manage ongoing tasks) •Outsourced 3rd party (create, implement or manage ongoing tasks) •Knowledgeable •Passionate about building and maintaining relationships


What Tools Will You Use?

•Blogs •Your web site •Video sharing web sites •Social networking web sites •Social media press releases •Webinars •White papers


Where Will Your Content Come

From? •Articles •Blog posts •Videos •Press releases •News from trusted and reliable resources •E-Newsletters you subscribe to •Pictures •Giveaways •Surveys (quantitative and qualitative) •Share your connections’ content


What Milestones Will You

Establish? •Establish timeframes for accomplishing major goals (3 months, 6 months) •Time milestones with product/site launches •Establish weekly and monthly tasks


How Will You Measure Your

Progress? •Use Bit.ly (or similar URL shortener) •Track how often your content is shared •Monitor level of engagement •Install Google Analytics •Utilize Facebook fan page insights •Track community growth •Track sales related to social media activity •Track leads obtained using social media activity


How Will You Manage Your Brand’s

Reputation? Assign a person or team to do the following: •Stay alert on the various social networks •Subscribe to Google alerts •Monitor brand mentions on all social networks •Put out fires quickly •Respond to questions/comments about your company/product


Brands that take the time to write a

solid social media strategy: 1. Develop great relationships with their social

community 2. Avoid common pitfalls that damage their brand 3. Create great content that get their community

engaged and keep them engaged 4. Turn their community members into customer

advocates who sell their product or service to their friends, family and colleagues

5. Increase their revenue and growth by 60% (versus 8% for businesses that don’t use social media - Marketo Report, 2010)

Time effective use of social media communication with simple push-button automation

Push-Button Social Media

Scheduling & Management Tools

- SocialOomph.com -HootSuite.com

-Roost.com

- CoTweet


Session 3:

Leveraging Social Media Communities for Your Business – Build Your Brand and Win New Customers Online

Discussion Points: 1. The most effective way to

communicate online 2. Psychological and social aspects of

building your brand online 3. Brand management action plans

and monitoring tools – listening to the voice of your customer

4. Gathering competitive intelligence and relevant metrics

5. Crisis communication – how to quickly remedy a bad situation

6. Building customer advocates

Communicating Effectively Online • Communicate With (Do Not Talk AT) Your Community -Utilize content that encourages a discussion - Ask questions - Ask for feedback from your community - Respond to feedback professionally (remain friendly and relaxed) - Be personable •Test your communication tone

Psychological and social aspects of building your brand online

Unless you are using video marketing in your social media campaign, you are losing 55% of your organization’s capabilities to get people to like your content, since body language is absent.

-------------------------------------------------- The 7%-38%-55% Rule (Dr. Albert Mehrabian in the 1960′s)

We accept and absorb meaning of words at these intervals:

7% from words 38% from tone of voice 55% from body language.


Successful Video Marketing • Keep your videos short, less than 2 minutes in length

• Your videos should inform or entertain – if not, DO NOT post them

•Prepare a video marketing strategy

•Prepare a video content schedule

•Keep search engine optimization in mind when preparing your video marketing strategy


1. Altruists

2. Careerists

3. Hipsters

4. Boomerangs

5. Connectors

6. Selectives

There are 6 Social Media User Personalities:


Altruists: Social media users who share helpful information through being thoughtful and connected

Careerists: Social media users who share things related to business and are interested in exchanging ideas on how to solve problems in the work field

Hipsters: Social media users who believe that sharing is a part of them

Boomerangs: Social media users who post to get a reaction

Connectors: Social media users who are always passing deals and opportunities to their friends

Selectives: Social media users who only share things with someone specific. If it isn’t relevant to them there is no point in sending it


The biggest mistake brands make

when using social media to promote their product or service is: Making it all about themselves. Remember the 6 social media personalities and, as often as possible, feed into all of them.

Brand management action plans and monitoring tools – listening to the voice of the customer

•Who will develop your brand management action plan?

•Goals? -Aligned with organization’s strategic goals?

•Keeping brand image consistent through content development

•Developing a social media ‘voice’ for the organization that doesn’t degrade the brand

•Successful communication with social community

•Listening and responding to the voice of the customer

Brand management action plans and monitoring tools – listening to the voice of the customer

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Monitor your brand, industry and competition across multiple social networks

Discover targeted users on multiple social networks

Respond to all your community members with the click of a button

Measure your social media efforts with detailed reporting

•SproutSocial •Social360 •Shoutlet

•Hootsuite •Klout

Social Media Monitoring Tools:

How to gather competitive intelligence and relevant metrics

Social media monitoring tools

provide the easiest way to gather the marketing intelligence and metrics needed to leverage your social media community. These tools measure:

• Level of engagement with content • Community growth • Ideal prospects with keyword, profile and geo search • Monitors your competition’s mentions and their community’s level of engagement •Provides comprehensive reporting and analysis

Crisis communication – How to quickly remedy a bad situation

• Fans will pay close attention to how you

respond to complaints from others

• People who are not fans will also monitor how you respond to complaints

•Remain calm and professional at all times

•Never ignore criticism

•Always address fans by name

•Take a bad situation offline quickly

Crisis communication – How to quickly remedy a bad situation

Here’s a sample response to a fan posting a

complaint on a company’s fan page wall:

If a fan posts a complaint similar to the following:

I just left your store. I bought a blouse and a button

was missing. When I complained to the sales girl,

she was very rude.

Possible response: Hi Diane. We’re sorry you had

a bad experience at our store. Please call me direct

at 555.222.1212, or you can email me at

[email protected]. We appreciate an

opportunity to fix this. - John

In this example, John apologized immediately,

addressed Diane by name, provided a phone number

and an email address and attempted to move this

conversation offline right away.

Building Customer Advocates

-Providing great customer service builds customer advocates

-Responding quickly and politely in a crisis situation builds customer advocates

-Having a brand management action plan in place and implementing it successfully builds customer advocates

-Relating to your social community on a level that makes them comfortable builds customer advocates


Session 4: Measuring and Managing Your Social Media Program

Discussion Points: 1. Overview of tools for

measuring and managing your social media strategy

2. 10 key metrics of social media

3. How to develop your target metrics

4. Metrics for evaluating your competitor’s performance

Overview of Tools for Measuring and Managing Your Social Media Strategy Social media management and measuring tools:

• track your social media efforts in real-time • allow you to stay on top of the latest Tweets and other social network updates • help manage social media workflow • perform tasks that even the social network itself can’t do (example schedule updates in advance)

Overview of Tools for Measuring and Managing Your Social Media Strategy Social Mention (free) – real time search engine that monitors over 100 social media properties. It’s like Google Alerts on steroids. Klout (free) – the de facto tool for measuring social media influence Google Alerts (free) – set up email alerts for your company name, product, and competition

http://www.klout.com/

http://www.google.com/alerts

Google Analytics (free) – the most popular web analytics software, used by 53% of all websites. You can configure Google Analytics to measure social web traffic.

CoTweet (free) – social media management and monitoring dashboard acquired by Twitter

HootSuite (free) – similar to CoTweet but has a slick iPad app that makes it easy to manage Facebook and Twitter

Overview of Tools for Measuring and Managing Your Social Media Strategy

http://www.cotweet.com/

Radian6 (paid) – acquired by the popular CRM company Salesforce.com earlier this year for $326 million

Marketwire (paid) – a PR distribution service with built-in social media monitoring

Facebook Analytics/Insights (free) - a comprehensive analytics suite for pages that allows you to get a full insight into your fans and how they’re interacting on the page.

Overview of Tools for Measuring and Managing Your Social Media Strategy

http://www.marketwire.com/communication_solutions/social_media_monitoring

How to Develop Your Target Metrics

First: establish your organization’s objective(s)

Second: establish the standard (metric)

you will use to evaluate your level of success in reaching this objective

Third: Determine the tool (refer to the

social media tools mentioned) you will use to measure this metric

Social media marketing objectives need to be aligned with corresponding metrics.

KEY OBJECTIVES M

ETRIC

S

10 Key Metrics of Social Media

1. Reach of fans, followers, subscribers 2. Conversion rate (registrations, purchases) 3. Leads generated 4. Inbound links 5. Sales generated 6. Value of fans, followers, subscribers 7. Brand sentiment 8. Social bookmarks 9. Strength or share of conversation 10. Customer service/support savings

Tracking social media data collected through measurement tools will help you gather the marketing intelligence you need to measure your level of success.

Metrics for Evaluating Your Competitor’s Performance

Use Social Media Measuring and Monitoring Tools to Track Your Competitors:

1. Reach of fans, followers, subscribers 2. Inbound links 3. Value of fans, followers, subscribers 4. Brand sentiment 5. Social bookmarks 6. Strength or share of conversation 7. Customer service/support savings


Presented by Genia Stevens, MBA Social Media Trainer – Marketing Strategist

www.GeniaStevens.com 608.466.7612 (office) 608.466.5230 (mobile) [email protected]

Helping your company keep pace with the latest marketing trends.

Documents

Social Media Training Series: Marketing & Sales; Customer Service; Leveraging Social Communities; Tracking and Analyzing