To Blog or Not To Blog

Narrative building, relationship building, experience demonstrating...if used correctly and consistently, a blog can be a very powerful tool for connecting with your customers. I recently read an article on Digital Brand Marketing’s blog entitled, “Do You Need a Blog? The Personal Branding Perspective,” and they explain perfectly about how powerful a blog can be, “Have you seen Amy Adams and Meryl Streep in the movie Julie & Julia?  The film demonstrates the power of blogging, and how it can impact an individual’s life or business.  I won’t give away the plot, but the main character played by Amy Adams follows her cooking passion and writes about her struggles and successes.  Her creativity, writing ability, emotion and content slowly began to resonate and attract a following, media attention and much more.”

Following are some reasons that you should blog:

1. SEO - the more you post blog articles with relevant keywords, the better search engine results your page will get.
2. Social Media Marketing - by posting blog posts to your website and linking them to social media pages, you will build excitement and more traffic to both your website and blog.
3. Generating Leads and Sales - a blog is an open platform that gives everyone on the web access to learn more about the products and services that your company or organization offers.
4. Lowering Costs - instead of buying expensive advertising space, you can utilize your blog to describe your products and services.
5. Receiving Feedback - blogs are an open dialogue, your followers can leave comments in response to your blog posts.

You should not start a blog if:

1. You will not be consistent about posting to your blog.
2. You do not have someone in your company that will be dedicated and take ownership of the blog.

Consistency and timeliness are the two necessities you must have if you plan to start a blog. So go on, start creating a narrative for your brand. Remember to use the editorial calendar that I included in a previous post to schedule timely, informational, interesting and fun blog posts. If your company has a blog, I’d love to read it, so please email me a link to it: melissa@bigredprinting.net. Check out our blog at: http://bigredprintingspotlight.blogspot.com/

Source: www.impactbnd.com, “Top 10 Reasons Every Small Business Should Be Blogging.”

Is Your Direct Mail Social?

Why integrating your marketing efforts should be one of your top priorities. 

Did you know that research still shows that 60% of consumers prefer receiving physical marketing materials, such as direct mail postcards, versus emails. In fact, some of the most recognizable brands, such as Google, spend millions of dollars from their marketing budgets on the printing and mailing of direct mail pieces. Why? Just as I mentioned before, some audiences are more responsive to physical mail and therefore it is important to integrate your marketing efforts.

Integrating your marketing efforts means that if your company has gone social, it will be important for you to incorporate your social media into your traditional media campaigns. See DIAGRAM 1 for a comparison between types of traditional vs. new media. I’ve said it a million times and I will keep saying it, just because you build it, doesn’t mean that people are going to visit your social profiles. 

DIAGRAM 1

Ways You Can Integrate Social Media into Traditional Media Outlets

Add your social profile names and logos to your traditional media items

• Be SPECIFIC - put the direct URL to the page. (i.e. facebook.com/bigredprinting)
• Add a social component to your traditional media (make your offer social!)
• Offer a discount, offer a discount for sharing the discount on social media, offer a free whitepaper for liking your page
• Post your offline campaigns to your social profiles
• Create events to entice recipients to join you online

It is important to remember that as you plan your direct mail campaigns, you should simultaneously be also planning your email messages, Facebook status updates, blog posts and tweets so that they all complement each other. 

Sources: socialmediab2b.com, yellowbook360.com

Tweet, Retweet...What’s all the Chirping About.

Twitter 101 exclaims, “Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turing to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.”

Twitter will prove to be a valuable social network to most companies, you just have to give it a chance. Twitter is a platform where you can quickly connect with your customers.  For example, some of the marketing implications for businesses to use Twitter include the following: Improve Customer Service, Hold Inexpensive Focus Groups, Follow Customers, Manage Customer Expectations , Recruit Employees, and Perform Inexpensive Market Research.

Once you are on Twitter, it soon comes time for you to prove to your boss that your use of Twitter has been successful. Similar to Facebook likes, you can’t judge a Twitter account by the number of followers it has. If you have 75 followers that you are engaging and interacting with on a regular basis, you are in a better position than a company that has thousands of followers but doesn’t pay attention to anything they have to say. 

If your followers aren’t the most important metric for you to measure your Twitter success, then how should you be measuring your Twitter influence? Following are a few of the many available websites that you should explore, they will help you uncover just how influential you are on Twitter.

Klout—Klout.com (understand and leverage your Twitter influence)

PeerIndex—PeerIndex.com (a snapshot of what you talk about on Twitter)

Tweriod – http://www.tweriod.com/ (best times to tweet to reach your audience)

Bit.ly –https://bitly.com/ (track your links, see who is reading them)

Tweet Stats — http://tweetstats.com/ (graph your Twitter Stats)

Twitalyzer—http://www.twitalyzer.com/ (in depth information on your followers)

Retweetrank—http://www.retweetrank.com/ (see how many retweets you get)

Twentyfeet­­— https://www.twentyfeet.com/ (all your online stats in one place!)

Tweetlevel— http://tweetlevel.edelman.com/ (Twitter measurement tool)

Happy Tweeting!

An Editorial Calendar Will Save Your Sanity!

Social media tasks, marketing tasks—an editorial calendar will save your sanity. Do you sit down at the beginning of each month and lay out your plan for your social media and marketing efforts? If not, I would HIGHLY recommend that you start. You will be organized and your social media and marketing will be streamlined. Below is a sample Social Media Editorial Calendar.  You can adapt this to your needs—marketing or social media. An excel spreadsheet would be a great tool to utilize when creating your calendar.

Here, There and Everywhere...Where in the Social World Should You Be?

There are so many different social media platforms out there, that I thought I would summarize and suggest a few of my favorites. See the table below to see where in the social world you might fit in!

Facebook Interests - The Latest Change to Facebook

If you are familiar with Twitter, then chances are you are familiar with making lists to categorize people that you follow. Good news...if you are also an avid Facebook user, Facebook will be rolling out a similar feature entitled, "Interests." You can now organize all of the pages and people that you follow on Facebook.

Below is a glimpse at how the new Interests section on your Facebook profile will appear. (It will show up in your sidebar on the lefthand side of your profile). You can either create your own Interests lists or you can subscribe to lists that other users have created and made public.

Below is a screenshot of what will appear if you click on the word interests (in the screen shot above). Here you can organize, edit and delete your interests categories.

Do you want to learn more? Rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought instead I would share this great article from Digital Brand Marketing, which give an in-depth description about the new Interests capabilities on Facebook! Enjoy. http://digitalbrandmarketing.com/2012/03/16/what-interests-you-facebooks-new-interest-lists/

Recommended Resource - Digital Brand Marketing

Digital Brand Marketing - www.digitalbrandmarketing.com

This is a new blog that we just discovered (Thanks to Social Media Examiners list of Finalists for the Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2012.) Digital Brand Marketing’s blog “serves as a continuing education tool in the ‘Read, Write & Share’ philosophy covering subject matter in digital branding, marketing, business and more.”

Some subjects they’ve covered on their blog, in the past month, are;

1. The Recipe for a Social Media Enhanced Resume

2. The Price of Social Media. It’s Not Free.

3. The Buzz About Pinterest

In addition, If you are so inspired, Digital Brand Marketing allows readers to submit their own articles for publication on their blog as long as they fit topics related to digital media, brand and/or marketing.

Visit their website to sign up to receive their daily blog post right to your email inbox. I look forward to receiving my daily email from Digital Brand Marketing and I know you will too!