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Integrated Marketing

Social Media Marketing is an Investment, Not a “Free” Marketing Channel

Written May 14th, 2012 by Liana Li Evans

Free Marketing Tools Are Great! Who Doesn’t Love “Free”?

Social Media is a free marketing tool, isn’t it? In the very basic sense of examining it, yes “social media” can be seen as a free marketing tool because there’s very little to no outlay of monetary funds. Participating in social media, if you are a community member, 9 times out of 10, is at no cost to you from the perspective of joining and engaging. The only time these social media communities charge a fee is if you are upgrading to some sort of premium or pro account. Think about Flickr in this case, if you don’t want to be limited on your daily uploads or want the analytics, you have to upgrade to the professional account.

From the community participant’s end, this is wonderful! I get to share and connect with people who have the same interests as me without having to pay a fee, who doesn’t like that concept? That’s why social media communities have been around long before the term “social media” had ever been coined.

Companies stepping into the idea of marketing in these social media communities with the mistaken idea that marketing within social media communities is “free” are a lot of times sadly mistaken at the end of their campaign’s run. They find it’s failed, or rather they are under the impression that their marketing attempt failed and they also find there’s a lot more involved than they ever realized. At the end of the day it isn’t free. There’s a whole lot of investment that needs to go on in both resources and technology.

It really makes me curious why companies think they can just put up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page and think “this is going to work” immediately. A “Field of Dreams” Social Media is not, unfortunately if you build it, most likely they won’t come. Companies spend millions developing new logos, planning public relations (PR) Events, doing keyword research for SEO and PPC, why should the concepts around social media marketing be any different? The “free” barrier to entry is a huge misnomer and misleads a lot of marketing departments down the wrong path.

So what should a company plan to invest in when looking at a social media strategy? Well that really depends a lot on what the company hopes to establish in the medium. Is it increased buzz or brand lift? How about increased sales or traffic to the site? Could you want people to sign up for your email list, blog RSS or coupon distribution? Become part of your own community? Different goals require different strategies in social media, and they all require different levels and types of resource investment.

Here’s a quick list to keep in mind of what you’ll be investing in when you decide that social media is the next medium your company should become actively involved in.

Investing in Understanding: “Where Are We Now” in the Whole Social Media Sphere

Do people even know who you are? Is there any buzz about you? Do they know the products you sell or the services you offer?
Invest in Finding Your Audience

Where are the conversations happening? Who’s doing the talking about you?
Invest in the Approach

How do I interact with the social media communities that are talking about me, my industry, products or services? How do I add value to their lives and not just be another “noise channel”
Goals & Measurement Need Investment

Free tools verses Paid Tools? Free buzz monitoring tools give you limited data, can your strategy work with that limited data, or do you need more robust information? What about your analytics, are the free tools going to give you enough information to connect the dots of traffic to buzz & engagement to conversions? Have you even taken the time to plan what goals will make you successful?
Employees are as Social Media Investment in their own right

You pay your employees a salary or an hourly wage to preform tasks for you. If one of their tasks has to do with social media, that’s definitely an investment that isn’t free by any means. However, it isn’t just their time engaging you should be planning for, it’s their time researching, setting goals, training, developing and ultimately fortifying relationships with your audience that you really need to plan for investing in.

With investment in research, strategy and measurement companies can see return, or at least if there isn’t a return they can figure out why. The investment of time and resources from the onset is likely the biggest factor of whether a company is going to succeed or fail. Don’t you want the money and time you’ve invested to grow your social media strategy into a success rather than just having spaghetti being thrown at the wall?

Scrabble Letters Photo Credit: Flickr User WonderWebby

Tree & Coins Photo Credit: Flickr User Pfala

Are You Flexible Enough To Do Social Media Marketing?

Written May 11th, 2012 by Liana Li Evans

Next to taxes and death, change is the only thing in this world that is certain. As the tides of the internet push and pull and the whims of social media community members ebb and flow, so does the popularity, web site traffic, interest and buzz around tools, applications and sites in social media. Even with all your research, six months down the line, the social media marketing tactic that you identified as part of your strategy could be in serious decline and not performing.

On the other hand, the marketing tactic could be even more of a success than you imagined. The question then comes to any company – “Are You Flexible Enough in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy to Change & Adapt to Those Conditions?”

Can You Plan to Be Nimble and Integrate Your Marketing Strategies?

Some companies have internal politics that make it nearly impossible to be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changes that happen in social media. There are budget constraints, signatures that need to be obtained or a bunch of other hoops that a social media marketing team must go through in order to change parts of their strategies on the fly. This is where mid-sized to small-sized businesses have an advantage to super big corporations, a lot of times it’s a quick phone call or email to get that change done, not a check list of permissions that need to be obtained.

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Are You Integrating Email with Your Social Media Strategies?

Written April 13th, 2012 by Liana Li Evans

* This is a partial reprint of Li’s ClickZ column on Integrated Marketing

Mark Twain's Letter

Mark Twain once wrote in a letter in 1897, “…the report of my death was an exaggeration.” This too can be said of email with so many experts proclaiming its demise. The reality is, email marketing isn’t dying just yet, but it is changing. It’s becoming more efficient, especially when integrated with your other marketing channels. The trick to being successful at it in today’s socially-engaged world is that the marketer has to understand their audience, not just a demographic.

With the growth of social media, experts were proclaiming that surely this was the channel that would kill off email. That couldn’t be further from the truth. People still subscribe to email lists because they want to get that information right to their desktop; they don’t want to have to go out and search a social community or go to a search engine to find the information that they are interested in. There’s a convenience factor to email that a large segment of the general population still finds attractive.

Unfortunately for the user, there’s no way to communicate back with an email in a way that appeals to social channels, and most emails come from a generic email address that a human doesn’t man. This is where integration comes into play. Remember with your email list you already have a captive audience that is interested in your message; make sure that you give them every opportunity that’s available to become engaged with you. This means using a more enhanced means of email marketing than the old-style “list serve” system.

Email Marketing Has Become “Socialized”

No longer is email marketing about a plain text email being sent out, which is why the rise of very affordable email services like MailChimp, Blue Sky Factory, and Constant Contact has taken place. These types of services offer an array of “social add-ons” where you can make sure your email marketing message can be engaged with on your available social channels. They also make it easy for any small business owner to launch a socially-engaged email campaign.

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Small Business & Integrated Marketing Tips

Written April 11th, 2012 by Liana Li Evans

* This is a partial reprint of Li’s ClickZ column on Integrated Marketing

Helping Small Business with Integrated Marketing

Small business owners are probably some of the hardest-working people I know. Constantly pressed for time, juggling and balancing priorities, trying to figure out which strategies to implement to get them closer to success – it’s hard to find time to breathe. Add that in with the hundred other day-to-day responsibilities, figuring out how to implement all of the online marketing strategies out there can be quite overwhelming. That’s why we’re launching this series that’s dedicated to the small business to help you understand how to begin and implement different online marketing channels in the most time- and resource-efficient ways.

Rather than start off with a particular channel of online marketing and discussing how to integrate it into what you have already implemented, I feel it’s best to start everyone at the beginning. Launching into a marketing channel just because your competition is doing it or you read an article about it on CNN, doesn’t mean that it’s the best path for you. So how does a company get to know what’s best for them? Audience Research.

Yes, it might slow you down in launching your strategy, but at the end of the day you’re going to be very glad that you invested the time to understand how to carefully and successfully implement your marketing strategies in the channels where you are going to get the “most bang for your buck.” There are several ways you can go about your research, and as a small business you won’t need all the bells and whistles that the enterprise-level tools offer. You just need the time and effort to understand the research to use it to your advantage.

Inexpensive but Great Listening Tools

Google Alerts. Google Alerts, if used and fine-tuned around the terms that matter most to your business, can be a great source of understanding multiple channels at once, not just social media. Google Alerts can give you an idea of what’s up-and-coming in the search results, pay per click, as well as social media. The caveat here is to fine-tune your search queries, and make sure you include negatives with your searches so that you get the most relevant results.

Twitter Search. You may or may not find that Twitter is the channel for you to be active in. For some businesses, the audience you seek just isn’t in Twitter. However, Twitter is still a great place to figure out the “pulse” of a topic whether it’s trending or one that’s evergreen. A lot of time utilizing Twitter can lead you to other more powerful and relevant social communities that you might not have been aware of.

Trackur. When you combine Google Alerts and Twitter Search with social media “listening tools” such as Trackur, you can truly get a great understanding of where you should be focusing your efforts. Trackur is great because it’s very easy to understand and utilize in a time-efficient manner for any small business owner who’s pressed for time. Looking at the results daily for about 15 minutes can help you keep an eye on changing trends and where the most relevant conversations are taking place and ensure your strategies are still in line with where the action is happening.

…. Read more of this article at ClickZ

Making the Connection: How Duracell Misses the Mark with Daughtry Facebok Campaign

Written December 7th, 2011 by Liana Li Evans

In marketing it’s all about making connections. Products and services to messages, facts to value propositions, companies to potential customers these connections are all vital to having you marketing strategies succeed . Marketers generally assume that the messages they devise will be easily understood by customers and that they will be able to make the connection of why what we are presenting to them should matter to them. That assumption, without data to back it up, can sometimes be the death of any a marketing plan, no matter how easy you assume that the leap is to make the connection, especially if egos are involved.

Failure to make the connection can also happen when not all of the parties involved are on the same page. This happens a lot when marketing departments are ‘siloing’ their efforts. In other words, the PR (pubic relations) department has no clue what the online marketing department is doing and vice versa and they are running separate campaigns in similar venues and the messages are confusing between each channel. In these situations not only is it confusing for the customer, its damn near impossible for them to make a leap in these messages to make the connections, let alone trust that the company itself understands its own messaging.
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Social Media Marketing & The Fallacy of Going Viral

Written August 26th, 2011 by Liana Li Evans

Last week I was a speaker at SES San Francisco on the audience choice “Like Me” panel. The panel discussed the intricacies of viral marketing and the fallacies around it. Viral Marketing is not really something that is cookie cutter in nature. Most of the time the nature of a video, game or even fanpage or twitter account that has “gone viral” is completely by accident.

Instead creating a social media strategy through audience analysis and figuring out how to become not only a valuable asset to your audience, but solving some sort of problem or issue for them is the better target to hit rather than that ever illusive “Viral” moniker. Viral is short lived and usually not the quality audience you are working to engage with. Becoming an asset to your audience not only creates a loyal following but a highly engaged community as well.

So with that in mind, we wanted to share our deck from the session at SES San Francisco.

What is Foursquare: A Business Guide to Location Based Marketing

Written August 23rd, 2011 by Liana Li Evans

Lately the team here at Da Li Social Integrated Marketing has been getting a lot of questions about “What is Foursquare?” We’ve been compiling a lot of posts about Foursquare and other location based marketing / geo-social networking site and communities and highlighting how businesses of just about any size can take advantage of these communities to help market their businesses.

These communities, especially Foursquare, offer unique opportunities to engage your most loyal customers and also at the same time, bring new foot traffic into your business. That being said, we know that trying to get a handle on just what all is involved with marketing on Foursquare can be a time consuming task. The information isn’t all housed in one simple area for marketers and businesses to easily read and understand what they need to do. That’s why we created our latest eBook about Foursquare.