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With social selling, you’re no longer simply pushing information about products and services out to your audience. Instead, you’re discovering what they’re passionate about, which can lead naturally—organically—into a discussion of how you can solve a problem or improve their lives, and why your company is the right choice to help them,” Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara said recently, as I was researching technologies that enable this kind of social approach. Building a socialized selling strategy involves completing the following three basic stages: Research: This stage is all about identifying your ideal customer – also called your Buyer Persona – then finding out what their fears are when buying your product: Content: This stage is all about creating content that speaks to the buyer persona you identified in the first step. Distribution: This stage is about getting the word out about your content, then using the results to refine future content.
For the latest in our series of posts looking at how the world’s biggest brands use social I’ve turned the spotlight on Microsoft. Bill Gates’ empire still looms large over the global software market, though its fortunes are often overshadowed by Apple’s astonishing level of success. And much like Google, Microsoft also runs a few of its own social platforms – enterprise network Yammer and Pinterest clone Socl. So it’s interesting to see how Microsoft makes use of other social networks to promote its products and maintain its fortunes....
There is a growing market out there for content marketing. Not the old fashioned kind where magazine companies would create custom magazines for brands, marketers, and retailers. I am talking about the Internet version in which brands, marketers, retailers and other businesses create blogs, twitter accounts, facebook pages, and the like and then spend money filling those pages with content. Many brands have full time employees creating this content. Others use third parties and even freelancers to do it. In many ways I see this as the future of online marketing. Instead of paying tens of millions of dollars a year (or more) creating banner ads and paying to run them on pages filled with someone else's content, marketers can create their own web and mobile presences and use the most efficient form of advertising, pay per click advertising, to drive traffic to these pages and then engage in a conversation with their customers and potential customers. I like to think of this as moving the message from a banner to your brand and changing the engagement from a view to a conversation. It also helps that this approach works better on mobile where we are spending more and more of our time every day....
Ikea USA serves as a blueprint for social media content creation. There are some great ideas to steal from Ikea USA’s editorial calendar. If I were to reveal a hidden talent of mine, I’d say I’m good at assembling Ikea furniture. As most Swedes, I’ve grown up with flat packages and family quarrels around mounting manuals. I’m practically born with a hexagon key in my hand. Therefore, as a devoted brand advocate, I wanted to check out Ikea’s social media strategy; curious to know if it is as innovative as their products. Ikea Sweden is not on Twitter while Ikea USA tweets according to a clear content strategy....
Are you looking for cool blogging tools to enhance your business blog? The right mix of blogging plugins and widgets can make it easier to blog and also help you achieve your business goals. To help you keep up with the latest and greatest, we asked a group of blogging pros to share the favorite new tools they’ve recently discovered. Here are the latest blogging tools adopted by these social media pros....
Pheed, the new monetised social network, takes off. It combines aspects of Twitter, FB, Youtube, Instagram and SoundCloud. ... Already believed to be the social media event of the year, the team at the head of this new network hope to attract at least 10 million users worldwide. Pheed social networking is on the rise and many are beginning to wonder: will it prove to be competition for the two giants of social media, Facebook and Twitter? In support of this thought, the Pheed app is currently downloaded more than Twitter or Facebook from the Apple iStore. However, this statistic may appear inflated as many users have already Facebook and Twitter applications, and do not need to « redownload » it. Download figures of Pheed mean little therefore, but the buzz is growing, especially amongst youth who are seduced by the concept....
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Today is my first day as a marketing fellow at HubSpot. In my last job, I was the editor in chief of a technology news site called ReadWrite. Before that I was the technology editor at Newsweek, and before that I was a technology columnist at Forbes. I’ve spent my entire career in the media business, and now I’ve bailed out. In the end it was a pretty simple decision. I came to the realization that advertising is dying, and therefore any business that depends on advertising to pay the bills is a dead end. I also had grown less and less enchanted with the kind of work I was doing as a “mainstream” journalist. Media companies need a new way to make money -- one that doesn’t depend on advertising. But so far nobody has come up with anything. That wouldn’t be so bad, if at least they were aware of this problem. The truly scary thing to me is that publishers either aren’t aware of this, or won’t admit it....
There are several people asking the same question: “How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Work?” In today’s video, Arnie Kuenn answers the question in several ways... ...What’s it really going to take to get that payoff? Well, this slide here shows you that both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies with 100 to 200 pages will generate 2.5 times as many leads compared to those who have 50 pages or fewer. It gives you an idea of where you are with your website. If you’re far exceeding that, you have thousands of pages, well then you’re in a different league. But basically for small businesses, this is the target you want to have. Companies that blog more than 15 times per month, we used to tell our clients that they really need to be looking at trying to blog or post new content on their website 3 to 4 times a week. This pretty much right there, 15 times a month for some new content. If you do that, you’re looking at generating five times as much traffic to your website compared to people who aren’t blogging or aren’t generating any kind of new content at all. That’s significant. That’s five times as much traffic....
... The great majority of brands’ online budgets are going towards gunning for those Facebook likes – and, to be fair, businesses’ hands are tied in that space, thanks to Facebook’s increased advertising pressure based on wonky algorithms. But here’s the thing. The report also found that the resource consumers relied on most for shaping their opinions and making purchasing decisions was blogs. Consumers consider blogs to be trusted sources of information – more so than any social networking site, including Facebook....
A Coca-Cola executive threw cold water on social media buzz earlier this week when he told an advertising conference that the company doesn’t see a relationship between online buzz and the company’s short-term product sales. ... After the AdAge article created a lot of buzz this week (ironic, isn’t it?), Coke went out of its way today to emphasize that social media plays a “crucial role” in its online marketing, and has been driving in-store Coke sales. Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola’s Senior Vice President of Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities, wrote a response to the conversation on the company website: None of our plans are simply social, or TV, or mobile or experiential. On the contrary, it’s the combination of owned, earned, shared and paid media connections – with social playing a crucial role at the heart of our activations – that creates marketplace impact, consumer engagement, brand love and brand value. Reach, engagement, love and value are the markers of success we use for our campaigns. We measure these in a variety of ways, often with our media partners. In beta testing with Facebook, we’ve been able to track closed-loop sales from site exposure to in-store purchase with very promising initial results that are above norms for what we see with other media....
Blogs are more influential than social networks in shaping consumers’ opinions and purchase decisions, according to Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influence Report. Even so, brands seem to be investing more on other social channels, particularly Facebook, than on blogging. Below, additional findings from the 2013 Digital Influence Report, based on surveys conducted among 1,200 consumers, 150 top brand marketers, and 6,000 digital influencers. When making decisions about what to buy, consumers rank blogs as the third most influential digital resource (31.1%), behind retail sites (56%) and brand sites (34%)....
There are always situations where leasing works, but if you can buy the asset of content, and you know that (if done correctly) the asset will grow in value, why would you ever pass up that opportunity... If executed correctly, you can leverage (and re-leverage) that asset to continually communicate with customers and prospects. A great example of this is CMI’s 100 Content Marketing Examples eBook. That piece of “owned” content was made up of about 50 other pieces of “owned” content. For the most part, top-tier content marketing like this does not depreciate over time (it’s what publishing folks call “evergreen” content), unlike a car. Great content works more like buying a house or property — if it’s good, and can easily be found (location), it will go up in value....
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