Using Content Marketing to Drive Sales

Social media offers brands a set of inexpensive tools that can quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth and, properly managed, can deliver measurable results.

You can use content marketing to create conversations around topics and social channels related to the need for your products.

Use a two-pronged approach to creating awareness and driving interest and sales

To do this successfully, you need to take advantage of both a top down and a bottom up approach to social media.

Your top down strategy is to create broad awareness and credibility among experts and consumers
Your bottom up goal is to drive consumer awareness and engagement through grassroots and in-market activities

How to spark and drive sustainable conversation and recommendation

Here’s how to spark and drive sustainable conversation and recommendation through social media:

LISTEN: Track and identify key trends, stories, posts and influencers
DEVELOP: Build content that makes it easier for consumers to share and recommend your brand
ENGAGE: Work together with consumer influencers to drive discussion, posts, reviews, give feedback, conduct contests and share recommendations with others
OPTIMIZE: Ensure both new and existing content is tagged to make brand discussions easily searchable and sharable
PROTECT: Establish a protocol for responding to negative word-of-mouth and mitigating damage from competitors and brand detractors
MEASURE: Build-in metric that demonstrate the impact of engagement at each point in the Conversation Engine

The most important step in building your social media foundation is creating a “sharable story”

A shareable story is basically an elevator pitch story with messaging that connects your key points together in everyday, natural language.

The sharable story shapes all engagement to ensure the story you want to tell is infused into all of your conversations.

Become the leading expert, resource, authority and trusted partner in your space

Next, you need to engage leading industry eminents across all relevant vertical channels. Find and engage those individuals who can influence people to consider your category and become interested in your brand.

Screen influencers using rigorous criteria to ensure identifying only the leaders:

Reputation
Reach
Visibility
Accessibility

Remember, these influencers are going to give you credibility so focus on engaging the right online influencers.

Track & identify key trends, stories, posts and influencers

Through either subscription-based tools or through publicly available free tools, develop a daily monitoring routine to identify opportunities, influencers, and key trends.

Create conversations around topics and social channels related to the need for your products

Now you are ready to activate your online social media channels. You want to create conversations around topics and social channels related to the need for your products.

Consider doing this in stages so you don’t overwhelm your team or confuse consumers by creating online content but not having the time or energy to keep it fresh and current. A possible phased approach is to launch on Facebook and Twitter initially.

Once you have Facebook and Twitter up and running smoothly, and the team is comfortable managing and posting content, it’s time to expand to additional channels like Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Google+, etc.

These channels allow you to broaden your content and create additional content that your created and control to help further enrich the consumer education process and provide opportunities to link into your customer websites with rich content.

Your goal is to drive fans and followers with these two sites. Remember, these sites require you to engage regularly. That means you need to manage and moderate daily, especially since you will quickly find consumers using these sites to post customer service, quality or warranty issues.

Don’t worry if there are negative comments. Ultimately your goal is to bury these comments under an avalanche of helpful tips and advice on where and how to buy your brand. It’s this kind of news that will ultimately shape your brand conversations.

Focus on building assets that make the benefits of owning your brand shareable and portable

This will allow you to leverage the full capabilities of online multimedia sharing sites to maximize visibility and reach.

Create checklists for occasions or life events that should include your brand
Build video demonstrations and distribute to YouTube and beyond through services such as TubeMogul
Build photo libraries that illustrate specific benefits of safe ownership and distribute to publicly indexed networks like Pinterest, Flickr and Instagram
Encourage consumer-generated testimonials (stories, videos, photos) – leveraging the capabilities of Facebook and Pinterest for running sweepstakes and contests

A good way to draw consumers to your social media sites is to host contests. It’s a straight forward way to build followers of your brand and ultimately to have them “opt-in” to being open to receiving email offers from you for new products, services or promotions.

Create and share content regularly that engages consumers and encourages them to share, recommend and, ultimately, buy

The final step is to measuring the impact of your online social media efforts. A great way to do that is with a measure call an Earned Digital Engagement or EDE. Earned Digital Engagements are the metric you can use to measure the direct impact of your online social media efforts, independent of natural conversation.

Using an EDE methodology, you’re able to provide a comparable measure of the number of people reached online, but this form of measurement also accounts for their action. The EDE measures the number of people reached through a brand’s social media efforts across channels – from blogs to Facebook to Twitter and YouTube and Flickr.

An earned engagement consists of the number of people influenced by an interaction with your brand that results in a:

Post
Tweet
Photo
Video
Or public Facebook engagement

Forrester Research said it best: “…interactive marketers must move beyond experimentation by making social applications a permanent part of marketing, measuring and demonstrating their value, and integrating them into marketing efforts.”

Are You Following These 8 Basic Steps For Online Success?

Your potential buyers are actively participating in social media every single day. In many cases, they are having conversations about your products or your brand.

This is where social media comes into play. It presents you with a huge opportunity to take part in conversations your potential buyers are engaged in, and offer value by providing information and education.

By doing this, you’ll quickly move your buyers from the “shopping phase” to being “ready to buy.” If you’ve done a good job giving them information they will “like” you, engage with you and be more likely to buy your product.

Here are eight basic ways to become part of the dialog and create awareness of your company and products.

1. Create a Twitter account

There are many companies who are using Twitter effectively as a customer service tool. These companies continuously monitor the “Twitter-sphere” looking for people who have problems related to their products, or who have questions. These companies have dedicated staff to provide answers to their questions and handle issues they may be having.

Another way companies are stepping up is by becoming the expert consumers turn to for answers to questions they have while moving through the buying process. Since potential buyers are turning to the web to educate themselves before they are ready to buy, Twitter is a great platform to give valuable knowledge to these information seekers. You should send out “tweets” containing the most often asked “pre-sale” questions your potential buyers have, and include links to content you have created that contain the answers.

2. Create a Facebook page

Facebook pages are an excellent way to get your message and valuable information in front of a large volume of people. The way the system handles these pages is extremely valuable for businesses since: when there is a post on your Facebook page, it shows up in news feed of anyone who has “liked” your page and is visible to anyone else that may be visiting their profile page.

A Facebook page will also give you the ability to position your company as much more than simply a company that wants to sell stuff. It provides a way to make a connection with your consumers while they are going through the buying process and shows potential buyers that you care about them regardless of whether they open their wallet or purses up … or not.

3. Facebook pay-per-click advertising

Facebook provides an excellent opportunity for you to reach people based on interests they list within their profile. You can create customized image ads based on the target you are looking to reach.

This type of advertising is extremely inexpensive and can be highly targeted. These ads need to have a very compelling call to action or they risk being ignored. If you are simply looking to create top of mind awareness, you can do that by creating a brand focused ad. This type of ad will not receive many clicks, but it will create a high volume of impressions which will create a familiarity of your brand among those targeted.

Image credit: sharedmarketing.com

4. Create a YouTube channel

It is important to understand the way your potential buyers prefer to consume online content, and once you know this, give it to them in that format. Video is a good way to achieve this because most people would rather watch a 1-2 minute video than read pages and pages of content.

Populate your YouTube channel with “user submitted” testimonials, “how to” videos, and any other relevant videos. Fight the urge to place “one way” advertising message videos on the site since nobody cares about that stuff besides you. These videos also need to be highly optimized for your brand so they can come up higher in the results than any negative videos about your brand’s products.

5. Frequent blog participation

If you don’t have one already, you should create a blog for your brand. Be sure to post at least once a week and make sure your posts include valuable content that either educates or entertains readers. If the content is very “corporate” and stiff, consumers won’t return.

The more content you post, the more likely you’ll be able to connect with your buyers through search engines and ultimately on your website. You should also make a point to read other blog content related to your category to identify hot topics consumers are looking to solve. If you feel you can help them and add value …you should post a comment. If your comment has valuable information and stands out, chances are you’ll receive visitors to your website.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Your social media efforts, blogging, YouTube participation, and article creation will help you significantly with your SEO since your main focus should be on building a large number of inbound links. These links are viewed as “votes of confidence” for your site and are used in determining where your site should appear on the search engine results page for specific keyword searches.

7. Reputation Management

Your brand is no longer controlled by you, but rather by what your consumers are saying about you. The internet has created an environment where a company’s reputation can be destroyed almost overnight if they don’t work on knowing what is being said about them online.

You need to address the negative content which resides online and either work on “burying it” through aggressive SEO efforts, address the negative comments head on, or produce a high volume of testimonial focused content. Believing that you can get negative ratings or comments removed or changed is naive.

Regardless of which path you follow, it is critical for you to check the internet constantly so you know what is being said about you and your products. It is no longer acceptable to wait days or in some cases minutes to address negative comments. The “real time” nature of the internet allows for a negative message to spread around the world in minutes and can completely alter your prospective buyers’ perception of your company.

8. Engagement

If you’ve done a good job of “amping up” the awareness of your company and products, and have done an effective job building a solid reputation online, you still have one more step to take. You need to make sure you are engaging the visitors who arrive on your website.

Consumers are turning to the search engines for solutions to problems they are experiencing or education. If your website is simply talking about how great your company and products are and don’t have any interactive mechanisms in place to engage your visitors, they’ll have no reason to return.

Meaningful conversations lead to relationships

The new rules demand that you find out where your potential buyers “hang out” online. You then need to go there, and take part in the conversation. That doesn’t mean you go there and spout off about your great products or try to sell them. It means you need to go there and add value to the conversation. The result will be lasting consumer relationships with your brand and strong demand for your products.

Channel Instincts – A Marketing Blog By Greg Bonsib

Insights to improve your content, digital and trade marketing strategies

Tag Archives: Online Communities