How to get leads from Social Media or why bother at all
A few weeks back I published ‘How to get leads from Social Media‘ over on the Tempero blog. It listed 5 ways to turn your online communities into actual business.
It was a really satisfying post to write because it challenged me to turn all we’ve learned with the online marketing at Tempero into tried and tested practical steps you can take.
Why is this important? Well, I have a worry at the moment that with all the mistakes and old fashioned, badly executed ‘hard selling’ that’s happening on Social Media we’ve gone too far towards the idea that you can’t sell with social media. Of course you can.
I think we need to get more realistic about why we are doing Social Marketing. I too often see briefs that say company X wants to invest Y dollars to’ grow community’ and ‘brand fans’. That’s fantastic. But why? Surely the reason anyone invests money into marketing is to make money in return - the elusive ROI.
ROI can be elusive in Social Media because the reasons for investing are often not stated in advance.
For example, having brand fans isn’t a bad thing of course but it couldn’t hurt to get a little more realistic and say that we want brand fans because they:
- Buy more product, more often
- Promote products and services to other potential customers
Once you break it down like this you realise what metrics you need to put in place to measure success and value in dollars and cents.
The bigger challenge? Working across the business to get the data you need. Lead Generation isn’t just a sales & marketing function anymore. It might take the help of Retail Staff, Customer Service and Product Managers to establish just how the selling part of Social Media is going.
[Image Credit: Images_of_Money]
Blogger Outreach: Diane Shipley
Diane Shipley is a self-described “pop culture-obsessed, slightly solipsistic, feminist freelance writer” who writes prolifically online for sites like The Guardian, books blog Memoir Armoire, and currently the My So-Called Life Re-watched Project.
As both blogger and journalist Diane recognises the writer/PR debate can get very heated so here shares some of her pet hates and tips on getting it right – recognising that a great PR can be a great resource when it works.
Diane Shipley
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
PRs contact me on a daily basis regarding sites I write for, sites I once wrote for, and print publications I contribute to.
Blogger Outreach: Stuart Waterman
The problem with being a blog “influential”
Writer, editor, and one-time Social Media Manager, Stuart Waterman runs music blog My Chemical Toilet. The blog frequently makes it on to “top music influencer” lists in PR circles, yet unfortunately that means many PRs don’t bother to read the site at all. Just 5 mins quality time spent reading My Chemical Toilet would show that the blog has a very clear style and you can’t just pitch in any old music related stuff. Here he takes time out from writing about Naughty Rappers to tell us about PR/Blogger Outreach.
Stuart Waterman
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes.
2. Should they?
Well I do say how they can contact me in my “About” section, so I can’t complain really.
How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing
While everyone’s running around trying to work out how to join up their online with their offline marketing I just want to see marketing which works.
Marketers have lost their way. If you really want to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing it’s probably not what you think.
[Special mention has to go to my compadres Paul Armstrong & Shannon Boudjema who help me in joined-up thinking and will be debating these ideas later in the month at Social Collective 2010.]
Don’t join online with offline marketing
The secret to joined-up marketing isn’t to connect online and offline marketing, but to join marketing with the business’ objectives as a whole.
Somewhere along the line, and despite the constant navel-gazing about online marketing, we’ve forgotten that the whole point of marketing is to make the business money [or, in the case of not-for-profits, ensure uptake of info or services].
Excellence in marketing isn’t about a joined-up strategy, it’s about marketing which works. Marketing ROI is not a metric, it’s a business result.
Joining online with offline marketing: back to basics
The key to joining the channels is to first go back to Marketing 101 basics: who is your customer?
And I don’t mean the lazy “our product could sell to everyone! Teens! Grandparents! Men! Women! All over the globe!“. That’s all well and good but the secret to success of brands like Apple is you know EXACTLY who the iPad is aimed for, right? When Starbucks first opened you know EXACTLY the sort of clientele they wanted to attract (and it wasn’t the mothers with buggies and/or crazy people wanting to use the toilet types you see today).
The biggest brands narrow focus and go after a certain customer. This doesn’t prevent other people from buying their products or services, it just helps them market to a core consumer. Offline marketing isn’t dead, ‘spray and pray’ is.
When you know who your customer is, it’s easy to create a marketing strategy. Online and offline become irrelevant, you’ve just got to market to them in places they hang out.
Joining online with offline marketing: changing channels
Now I’m just guessing but for the majority of businesses out there, they will have customers who spend time online. Fact. It’s up to YOU to profile your audience and then market to them where they will be most likely to see it.
Does offline marketing work? Sure, it’s a no brainer that if your customer listens to the radio, then radio is a valid marketing channel for your business. Likewise TV, giant billboards, painting the sides of buses, and hiring out-of-work actors to give away chocolate bars outside tube stations, works.
Unfortunately, the reality is that marketers are forgetting how much media consumption has shifted to online channels. Desperate to integrate a little online into their marketing strategy, businesses allocate the bulk of their marketing budget to [often more expensive] offline marketing channels and then dump a small proportion of their budget on online marketing – to “test if it works”.
This seems to ignore the facts, for example social networking alone now accounts for nearly a quarter of all time spent on the Internet, and these figures can only grow. If your customer is aged 15 – 24 then for the love of god, throw the traditional marketing plan out the window, they’re not reading newspapers!
Joined-up marketing should take the budget as a whole and allocate spend to the channels most likely to target your customer, irrelevant of whether they’re online or offline.
As for testing if it works, I find it a hell of a lot easier to track if someone clicked through from a Facebook page to buy something on my website than follow someone home after handing them a free chocolate bar. [Disclaimer: I have never knowingly followed someone home after giving them a free chocolate bar.]
Measuring the excellence of your joined-up marketing
So you’ve profiled your customer, you’ve picked your marketing channels, you’ve allocated your budget cleverly across online and offline, what do you tell the boss?
Well, what is the boss telling YOU – is the business making money? It astounds me the lack of business critical data marketers use to inform their marketing decisions.
Is the product selling? If so, to whom (and was it who you thought your customer was)? Where are people buying from? Is anyone tracking any of this stuff in the business?
Many bosses will be happy with what I call ‘Ego Marketing’ i.e. “Check out this super awesome full page wrap around which will be in the hands of every commuter for the whole of today.” But most will settle for making money.
If your marketing strategy is doing that, then you’ve achieved excellence in joined-up marketing. Relax, put your feet up, enjoy that free chocolate bar the attractive young actress outside the tube gave you this morning.
This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.
[Images: apdk, Nina Matthews Photography, striatic, Horia Varlan]
Blogger Outreach: Gemma Cartwright
Don’t be afraid…
Gemma Cartwright started blogging when she was in 16. She joined Shiny Media [R.I.P.] in 2004 to launch their first fashion site Shoewawa.com, going on to become Group Editor of the Shiny fashion network. She’s written about celebrities for The Nod, happy homelife at Domestic Sluttery, geek chic for Dork Adore, and a host of on- and off-line media.
Last year she founded Big Girls Browse, a site aimed at anyone who finds it hard to shop to suite their shape, and has already attracted interest from most of the High St brands including a guest spot editing the Evans blog.
Gemma Cartwright
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes.
2. Should they?
Absolutely. I really don’t mind receiving press releases, email pitches, celeb style IDs, event invitations…anything really. I’m not bothered by a bulging inbox, I can easily delete the stuff I don’t need. That said, I do get a lot of badly-targeted stuff from PRs in the US and my requests to be removed from their lists go unnoticed. If I went to all the events in NY that I’m invited to, I’d have an astounding amount of airmiles!
Blogger Outreach: Amber McNaught
How wrong can PRs get it?
Aside from battling issues of gingerism and the fact people frequently steal her image to use as their own profile pic, she deals with a lot of crazy PR. She spills all below (names changed to protect the guilty)
Amber McNaught
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes! Sometimes dozens and dozens per day (or hour…)
2. Should they?
Yes, absolutely: I’m always happy to hear about anything that might potentially be of interest to my readers, as long as it’s relevant to my sites.
Blogger Outreach: Katherine Hannaford
Not all bloggers hate PRs, right?
Katherine Hannaford is the UK Contributing Editor of Gizmodo. Having cut her teeth as Editor of Tech Digest she then went on to work as News Editor at T3.com before landing a job with one of the world’s leading technology sites. Consequently Kat has experienced many a Tech PR’s first fumblings in outreach – is she a blogger? journalist? professional writer?
Over the years Kat and I have debated and taken different sides over PR/Blogger frictions. She’s recently emerged though as a vocal supporter that the Twitter name-and-shame culture is tired & unbalanced.
Katherine Hannaford
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes, either by email, phone, or snail-mail.
2. Should they?
I’d rather receive all press releases, however irrelevant they may be, rather than receive less and run the risk of missing out on a story. It takes a millisecond to delete a release, but admittedly I do get frustrated with some agencies who just spam me several times a week with clients’ releases that we’d never even dream of writing up. I do wish they’d bother checking our site for the type of content we cover.
Blogger Outreach: Paul Armstrong
Do any PRs really get this blogger outreach stuff?
P
aul Armstrong is… a PR! Now you’ve recovered from the shock here’s his Blogger chops: He was recently nominated as one of the Top 10 most influential people in the digital industry by PR Week (meaning he gets put on loads of “influencer” lists), and has written for Businessweek, Penthouse [Paul, WTF???], Saturday Night Magazine, BPM, Celebuzz, Lost In A Supermarket and Instinct. He currently writes for Wired UK, Le Branche and PR Week and is the guy behind the crazy successful @mediaisdying Twitter account.
Even though Paul is the Digital Director at Kindred he still receives some appalling “blogger outreach”. I asked him to share his thoughts.
Paul Armstrong
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes
2. Should they?
Sure – I don’t say I’ll get back to them or rely on them so I think all’s fair! Looking for betas, new features, the usual stuff – if for mag stuff – high end design, lux, tech/gadgets.
Blogger Outreach: Sian Meades
Why are we still talking about Blogger Outreach?
Yep, this topic is completely over discussed in online PR circles but we, as an industry, are still doing a horrific job at maintaining any sort of good relations with those who write online.
Nothing illustrated this more to me than seeing even Gary Andrews driven to despair last month [PR's Own Goal]. But when I talk to many PRs they simply just don’t believe how badly and how frequently bloggers are being contacted – making us all, quite frankly, look like numpties.
The #fixPR series tries to give the good with the bad, the fix with the gripe, and I’ve come up with a novel way of doing this. I’ve asked some of my favourite bloggers, in their own words, to tell you about blogger outreach from a blogger’s point of view. This will be a series over the next couple of weeks and they all make FASCINATING reading.
First up is…
Sian Meades
Sian Meades is the founder and editor of interiors and lifestyle website Domestic Sluttery and the new fashion blog A Change of A Dress. Not just content with owning the prettiest corner of the web she also writes for Europe a la Carte, Venere.com and Lastminute.com and has previously written for AOL’s personal finance site Wallet Pop.
As you can imagine the sheer number and range of site Sian’s involved with make for quite the Inbox. Over to Sian.
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes, I probably get about 30-50 emails a day from PRs.
2. Should they?
Yep, we welcome the contact and need to know about new (relevant) products and Cool Things. Sometimes it’s mass mailouts (often skimmed through) other times it’s something targeted. I’m not fussed about either, but I’m more likely to pay attention to the latter.
Social Media: Advice to all PR agencies
we can haz comms profeshionils? kthx
Since I started #fixPR back in January I’ve had a lot of feedback on some of the tips I provided but I’ve also been hearing a similar theme in response
“We know we should but…”
I hate to get all Tony Robbins but… knowing and doing are completely different things. How do you help your agency get to grips with social media? Make it compulsory.
I used to be all soft & fluffy on this issue (honest) but it’s 2010 and I’m still seeing PRs uncomfortable with the word RSS. The only thing for it is a shift in agency culture.
Switch the daily ritual of reading the papers to reading online feeds and social bookmarking, create a simple social media policy and insist people use services like Twitter. Make it happen.
You might run into some resistance so I’ve scripted some handy responses:
Excuse 1: “We don’t have time on top of everything else”
Internal Response: FFS. You’ll have all the time in the world in 2 years time when we’ve lost all our clients and are sat round here twiddling our thumbs. Would that be a more convenient time for you?
Actual Response: “Sure, but there’s actually some real time-saving benefits to getting social. For instance pulling in all our mainstream media into RSS readers cuts down on reading time, the team can collaborate more effectively on finding & sharing stories, we can even reduce our heaving Inboxes by using social bookmarking instead of sending links round the company on email.”
Excuse 2: “My client doesn’t want social media.”
Internal Response: Are you freakin’ kidding me? Aren’t you a media consultant? You should be helping them understand where it’s relevant to them and what’s worth doing and why.
Actual Response: “Maybe not today but we need to be educating them and moving them towards it in the future before some groovy digital agency swoops in and pitches them leaving them thinking ‘Why didn’t my PR agency tell me this?’”
Excuse 3: “I’ve read Twitter, I get it, I just don’t want to be using it personally.”
Internal Response: Yeah, that’s what my gran said, unfortunately I wouldn’t trust my gran to consult with clients after having ‘read a few of the twitters’ and I don’t trust you either.
Actual: “Hmm, yeah, I’d argue that as media professionals unfortunately we have to go above and beyond consumer understanding of media and really get to grips with features, etiquette, community etc. You don’t have to share your personal life, you could develop your professional profile online, our social media policy has some guidelines.”
Excuse 4: “We have a specialist digital team working on social media briefs.”
Internal response: Yeah, I saw that digital account exec sizing up your corner office the other day. Good luck with that.
External response: “Sure, and your skills and knowledge are still relevant but with online channels playing a bigger and bigger role in media consumption it would be good if we all had a decent base level of knowledge.”
Excuse 5: “I’m just not techie.”
Internal response: No sh*t. I saw you getting flustered with your Nokia 3310 but I’m sure even you use Google on a daily basis right?
External Response: “That’s OK, you don’t have to understand the techie bit behind how everything works, you just have to know how the average person uses it.”
Ok, so what I’ve written is a bit harsh and bit scary. Don’t get me wrong, no one knows how hard PRs work than me. I think what most PRs do is great and I’m not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater and everything you know is useless. What I am saying is that I want to see you getting to grips with new media, socia media, digital, interactive marketing, whatever it is this thing is called. No ifs no buts, you’re better than that.
[Image credit: captainsubtle]
About:
I'm Darika Ahrens and I help brands develop marketing strategies for Social Media. My background is in Public Relations for companies like Orange, Microsoft, Philips, HTC, Yell.com, and Estee Lauder. I've worked with and trained some of the UK's top agencies.