DMNews.com and ReadWriteWeb both published articles about the subject that you may want to read in conjunction with this post.

You may wonder why I feel it necessary to expand on the all the information already in circulation by writing yet another article on the subject.  In contrast to most of these,  my article is directed to the small and medium sized businesses that are looking for some practical ‘to do’s’ rather than an intellectual commentary.  Particularly businesses that cater to other businesses or have a product or service that’s not immediately perceived as ‘exciting’.  These businesses often flounder when it comes to exploiting social media because they perceive it as being either ‘too gimmicky’ or too consumer orientated.

Most marketing experts are agreed that use of social media has a positive effect on client loyalty.  If you’re just starting out in this territory, you may have some doubts about this.  I don’t blame you.  It’s simple and yet not easy to actually implement.  The logic is irrefutable, yet it requires considerable faith to go through the process required to actually begin reaping the rewards you’ve been hearing about.

I’ve covered the logic behind social media in other articles on this blog, so I’ll simply gloss over the fact that social media is the perfect tool for businesses with limited budgets.  Let’s just leave it at ‘you can’t get better than free’ in terms of publicity.

The key to getting good results is knowing how to use it effectively.

The basis of an effective social media strategy is to use your venue, or combination of venues, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on, to gather a community sharing a common interest to which your product or service contributes and to position yourself as a trusted friend in this community.

Your community may be large or it may be small.  What really matters is that it comprises people who are likely candidates for your product or service and that they are active.  Make it easy for these people to interact with you:  if you set up a blog, you want to have an RSS feed that people can subscribe to in order to keep them up to date with your latest posts.  You want to encourage interaction by means of attracting comments and providing information that will keep your audience engaged.  You also want to have a feed attached to the blog that disseminates the posts to your Facebook page and Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.  In this way, you can cover several venues with minimal time and effort.

Setting this up is just the beginning.  What you’re really aiming at is actually connecting with people who may buy your product and service.  You have the venues, now you need the traffic.  Mechanics of generating traffic is a huge subject. I will deal with this in more detail in upcoming articles.   In this article, I’m going to concentrate on things you can easily implement to engage your audience and which will help you be found by qualified prospective customers once you implement a traffic strategy.

One of the primary things you can do to create a lively and effective social media strategy is to offer your audience, who you want to convert to ‘friends’,  something they perceive as having a high value.  This would be something that they want and will use.  The easiest thing to offer is information.  Information can be created, offered and downloaded with minimal technical expertise or cost and can be made available in unlimited quantities for an unlimited period of time.

With the rapid changes in society and in technology, people are always looking for useful  ‘how to’ information. By offering the information they want, you are able to attract people who are potential customers.  Giving them value before they buy gives them an opportunity to experience your expertise and builds credibility.   They then see you as a trusted mentor rather than as a vendor.  This immediately raises your relationship status with them and heightens the purchase potential.  People prefer to buy from people they know and trust.

You don’t need to confine your offerings to your own work.  By offering other experts in the field an opportunity to share information on your venues. you not only benefit from their credibility and follower base, but you also create an additional level of activity on your social media site.

Another effective way to generate interest in your venues is to hold competitions which require readers to participate by commenting on posts on your blog. It’s an easy, practical and effective way of encouraging activity and fostering ongoing relationships.  Readers post their comments and come back over the course of the competition to check what other people are saying.  Publishing winners as soon as the competition is over enhances your credibility with all participants and ensures that next time you hold a competition, you’ll have a ready made audience willing to participate.

If you begin working this very basic social media strategy,  you’ll find that although results may take a little while to become apparent, once they do begin, they will continue – provided that you are diligent about posting regularly and offering what your target audience wants.

Whether your business is an industrial, commercial or even scientific, this strategy will work for you.  After all, if you have any market demand at all, there will definitely be information you can share with your target audience that’s of value to them and ultimately positions you as the expert of choice.  A quick search of the groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter will allay any doubts you have about whether your audience is engaged in social media or not.

If you’re in an information based business, you can offer useful giveaways without endangering the actual information products you are selling.  It can be a little tricky, but still, very effective.  After all, if you’re offering a great quality and quantity of very useful information for nothing, your audience will automatically assume that what you have for sale must be of an even higher caliber and well worth the investment.

The key is to understand both your product  and your audience. The most successful social media strategies revolve around a balanced offering of high value giveaways, great information and a subtle entertainment factor.  Your audience is more likely to return on an ongoing basis and purchase from you if they find interacting with you to be a pleasant experience.

In upcoming articles I’ll discuss details on  how best to get in front of a targeted audience and drive traffic to your social media venues.

In the meantime, if you’d like to discuss how you might implement a practical and inexpensive social media strategy for your business, either leave a comment or email me.  If you’d like to share your social media strategies or experiences, please post a comment below.

When I first came to North America, I was frustrated and amused by how much time business people spent in meetings. I used to joke that people had meetings to plan meetings.  Committees for every purpose – but all they ever seemed to achieve was a staggering number of hours spent in meetings.

At the beginning of my marketing career I viewed Focus Groups in the same light.  However, I later came to realize that if handled correctly, a Focus Group can be an extremely valuable tool.

Seeing a change in your traffic or sales patterns?  Seeing demand for a certain product or service drop? You can wrack your brains until you’re exhausted looking for the reason.  Why waste your time and energy?  Simply get a Focus Group together and ask them a few well targeted questions.

By tapping into your actual target market and customer base, you will quickly discover their changing perceptions, needs and desires.  As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, even experienced marketers do not know better than the market.  It’s always best to get a reality check sooner rather than later.

How do you organize and run a Focus Group?

• identify 10 – 15 candidates from within the top 20% of your customer base (you can do exactly the same using candidates from your perfect target market base who are not yet customers.  This group should be surveyed separately.)
• identify between 5 and 10 crucial things you need to know – for example: What do you think of the current inventory?  How are you finding pricing? What would you like us to do for you?
• have an independent third party conduct the session, posing one question at a time and recording the answers.

The answers may be all over the map, but you should see some trends emerging.  By asking open-ended questions, you will get people in the group talking.  When people talk without too much interference,  they will eventually open up and you’ll glean all kinds of interesting information about your business and the market perceptions.  Not to mention valuable information about your competitors.

The key is to really analyze the results and formulate your response.  Simply being aware of the perceptions is not enough.  To increase profitability, you have to go where the market is headed and be there, ready to provide what they want when they arrive.

Too few and you might walk away from a sale when you’re 95% of the way to a successful close – too many and you may risk alienating your prospect to such an extent that they will resist any future efforts.

However, in my experience, the vast majority of people err on the side of too few contacts.  Many clients are shocked when we have our first meeting and I tell them that the best statistical estimates are between 10 and 12 contacts before a prospect becomes interested.

In the 80′s the statistics were around 8.5 contacts.  In the 90′s, between 8.5 and 10.  Given the vast proliferation of email marketing over the past 5 or 6 years, I’d say 10 to 12 contacts is a fairly conservative estimate.

Having said that, it also depends on what you are selling as well as the price point relative to the market.

Business to business sales and higher price point sales generally take longer and require more communication than an impulse driven. low price point consumer product.

It stands to reason that with the amount of information we’re all bombarded with, one of the key criteria in how many contacts we’d need to become interested in buying something, is our desire and need for that item at the particular time that we’re approached.

It may take multiple approaches using a progressive ‘educational’ approach, giving the reader more reasons to take action each time. To achieve the optimum number of contacts, we have to realise that the number really depends on where the prospect happens to be in the interest cycle.

If they’ve already pretty much decided to buy, then your first contact may well be the one that tips them in favor of your offering as opposed to your competitors’. If they’ve just begun researching the subject, you will need further contacts to provide the information they’re looking for and to position your product as the ideal choice.  If they’ve never thought of purchasing this particular item, it will take even more contacts over a longer period of time – and a great deal of consistency on your part to maintain contact in the face of seeming disinterest.

So, how do you cover all your bases and ensure that no matter where your prospect is, that you provide as much, as frequently as necessary without becoming a pest?

The easiest way is to predetermine a theme that can be broken up into about 10 or 12 segments.

• Take each segment and create an informative email of perhaps 6 to 8 paragraphs each focusing on a single main point.
• Take all your information and create an e-book or report in a long and a short version which can also be offered at various points during the communication.
• Adding direct mail to your email communication in the form of letters, packages or even postcards can increase your impact significantly.  Of course, these will cost more than emailing, but depending upon the item you’re selling, the extra cost may easily be justified by the increase in response that ‘mixing’ media can bring.
• Combining direct mail and email adds to the perceived value and importance of your communication and also helps prevent email ‘overload’.
• Adding follow up phone calls provides another dimension and can be super effective – provided you are offering something of value and your call does not resemble the standard telemarketing approach in any way.

If so, here’s an opportunity to get some free advice and a free copy of my new book that lays out viable, proven strategies to deal with thorny writing and marketing issues.

Send me your question and here’s what I’ll do:

1. send you an answer within one week – FREE
2. include the best questions in my new book – giving you the credit for the question
3. send you a copy of the book once it’s complete – FREE

Initially, I’ll be selling this book in electronic form, but if you help me by sending me your question, you’ll get a copy absolutely free.  So, I invite you to help me and help yourself at the same time.  Let me summarise:

1. send me your question – get the answer free - remember, my clients pay me to do this, so this is a valuable opportunity
2. get a free copy of my book - this will include the best, thorniest, most challenging marketing / writing issues that face business professionals today.

This book is intended to be used as a handy resource with timely advice, solutions and ideas that you’ll find useful not only for those ‘unusually’ challenging issues, but for those everyday issues that require a fresh, innovative approach in order to gain an edge over the competition.

Post your questions in the post /reply box below, or email them to me at jackie@jackiecooperwriter.com.

In addition, please take this very quick poll:

“What is your biggest challenge in marketing”

(please click on the link above to access the poll)

Thank you!

I recently received this question from John from Arkansas:

Question: What’s better: short or long copy
Answer: Great question John.  It’s one I continually get from my clients and there’s a raging debate about this amongst marketers and advertisers.

It’s a debate that’s been going on for absolutely years.  The short answer is that it depends on what the purpose of the piece is, who’s reading it and what action you want them to take.  In addition, it’s not often the LENGTH of the piece that’s important.  It’s how interesting your treatment is to your target market reader.

According to David Ogilvy, only about 5% of readers will read the body copy.  But, as he points out, if you look at 5% of the full readership of the publication, that’s still a lot of people.

In my experience, the most important thing is that the people who’re ready to buy are interested enough read the copy.

What are some ways you can ensure that they do?

First:
Write a compelling headline:  Using lead-ins like “How to …” “Discover…” “Amazing…”  “New…”
About 5 times as many people read the headline as the rest of the ad.  If you can capture their interest with the promise in the headline, it’ll be much more likely that they’ll read the rest of your message.

Second:
Stick to a single message.  Don’t try to cram everything into a single ad or letter.  Choose the major benefit.  When you want to identify a major benefit, a useful way to do so is to think about the customer as if you’re looking at them in a before photo and an after photo.  What has changed in the ‘after use’ photo once they’ve used your product or service?

Third:
Use bold sub headlines in the body copy.  If you read only the headlines from the main headline through to the last bolded sub-headline,  together, they should tell the story in a nutshell.

1. People make decisions with their hearts, not their heads. It’s important to identify the underlying emotions that your target prospect has that your product or service will satisfy.  By appealing to these emotions, you’ll cut through all the noise of other marketing messages they’re being bombarded with, and you’ll get their attention
2. People like to feel in control of their decision to buy. As a writer, you have to walk a fine line between being compelling and being perceived as being controlling.  You want to present your case from your customer’s point of view.  If you show that you understand their predicament and allow them to relate to you as a friend and advisor, they’re more likely to buy than if you try to browbeat them with logic.
3. Once you’ve made a ‘heart’ connection, then present irrefutable logic that will allow your prospect to justify the purchasing decision they’ve made. In this way, you solidify the decision AND avoid possible buyer’s remorse after the purchase.

Practice using these 3 simple guidelines and you’ll find that your copy converts more consistently and successfully.

Please let me know how it works for you!