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What is Social Media Marketing?
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The key with social media is a bit like your holidays vs. work days. A nice balance can make a world of difference. Too much will keep you hiding behind a computer and too little - well chances are you won't know what you are missing out on!
As a marketer, I find this topic overwhelms and confuses many business owners. Quite frankly, even in the marketing world - the jury is still out on the trends. But rest assured - social media is not going away. As our children grow up and take over corporate North America, the names of the tools may change, but the overall usage will only become more and more in use.
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Beware of the Numbers Game
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If any of you have ever been so lucky to attend a multi-level presentation or even better a pyramid scheme, you are well aware of the Numbers Game. I always think about it when I recall an old Faberge Shampoo commercial where a women "tells 2 friends and they tell 2 friends and so on and so on and so on". A lot of times with referrals we think that if we have this base of clients and they can refer us, then we will have more clients who will refer us and so on and so on too. But you know this isn't what really happens in your business, does it? If you think about where your referrals have really come from, no doubt a handful of people come to mind (if you are lucky)! So why is it that some people refer us and some people don't? There are many factors that come into play that make someone a good referral source.
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Follow Through or Foul Up
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I admit it. I am a golf-aholic and unfortunately one who has come nowhere NEAR to making it on the pro-circuit. No surprise then, that I was out whacking balls at the driving range the other night trying my darndest to attain some semblance of consistency. It drives me crazy when one goes left, one goes right, one goes a mile and one goes nowhere! So in an effort to find a happy middle ground, I started running through the various components of the swing (and then proceeded to book my umpteenth golf lesson to boot)! Good news...I discovered I was guilty once again of not following through with my swing.
A funny thing happens when you don't follow through with a golf swing. You end up putting all your efforts into the back swing which causes the ball to head in a million different directions inconsistently.
The same thing happens with our marketing. We can put all our money and time into the preparation and stop short of the follow through.
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Are You Delivering?
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As business owners and entrepreneurs we can be our own worst enemies. Firstly, we are overly passionate about what we do, and secondly we are highly critical about what we deliver in terms of our product or service. The first is dangerous because we can be so passionate that we just can’t understand WHY people aren’t buying from us. The latter only adds to the problem, because when they do buy, we are hesitant to ask for customer feedback …. in case we didn’t meet expectations.
The Result - we REALLY don’t know if we are delivering a product or service that is different and exceptional…and if we aren’t providing SOMETHING that is different and exceptional, then guess, what….you can kiss your business goodbye!
Often overlooked as one of the key components of marketing, is the litmus test of whether we really have a product or service that is in demand. The scary thing is, we can spend a ton of money and time on savvy promotional activities and then see only minimal results because we AINT delivering!!
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Are You Guilty of One-Dimensional Marketing?
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Here’s a bold statement. There is no such thing as a bad marketing tool, just bad planning. You can choose skywriting, bus benches, TV or the web and it CAN work, if you know the buying patterns of your ideal client and you don’t fall victim to what I call one-dimensional marketing.
Whenever we start working with clients on building a small business marketing system, we go through a period of discovery. During this phase, one question we like to ask is what the client has done to date in the way of marketing. A common answer goes something like this, “well we tried sending out postcards and that didn’t work. Then we got talked into radio and that didn’t work, then we tried a trade show and that really didn’t work either.”
So if all marketing tools can work, how can this be? Far too often people treat their marketing like a one hit wonder. Someone tells them a certain marketing initiative was highly effective for them and off they go to try the marketing idea of the week. But alas, they don’t get the same result. This is because they are practicing one-dimensional marketing.
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