The Essential Social Media Marketing Handbook

A New Roadmap for Maximizing Your Brand, Influence, and Credibility

Gail Martin

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781632659118
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing digitale
• Index: Business

It's time to take the fear and frustration out of social media.In today's crowded marketplace, it's harder than ever to rise above the noise and clutter. For millions of businesses, a savvy approach to social media is the secret to creating sustainable engagement with a profitable niche audience. Social media done right can build and strengthen your relationship with your customers, encourage brand loyalty, extend your influence, and expand your credibility.Social media changed the world—and today's social media platforms evolved to meet the world's changing needs. You've got more choices than ever before—online video, web audio, teleseminars, and more—plus new ways to attract prospects, retain customers, and reach a bigger audience. The trick is learning how to put the pieces together to create a powerful social media presence that draws in your ideal clients around the clock and around the world.By using the powerful strategies in The Essential Social Media Marketing Handbook, you will:

• Jump ahead of the competition.
  
• Expand your visibility and influence as a leader in your industry.
  
• Increase your expert credibility and create powerful new ways to collaborate.
  
• Build your brand into a powerhouse.
  
• Maximize your profit-making potential.

— SECTION FOUR —

BEYOND THE BASICS

CHAPTER TWELVE

WHY YOU STILL NEED A
WEBSITE AND A NEWSLETTER

Your Website is your permanent home on the Internet. As wonderful as it is to have a strong presence on social media sites and as gratifying as it might be to have thousands of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter, your Website is your homestead on the electronic frontier.

Likewise, your newsletter subscriber list is an asset you own, unlike the friends and followers you amass on social media platforms. If Facebook or Twitter shut down tomorrow, you would have no way to reconnect with the people who have followed and liked you. But your permission-based opt-in e-mail list is one of your most valuable business assets.

WEBSITES IN A SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

I talked earlier about the choice between having a traditional HTML-based Website that requires expert help to update and having a WordPress-based blog site that you can largely update yourself. That’s an important choice, but equally important is what you make of your own little corner of the Internet with the content you share.

You may or may not sell products and services from your Website, but you most definitely are selling “you.” Your Website should be the nexus of your brand, a place that builds, reinforces, and showcases your credibility, and a one-stop display of all you offer. If someone has heard your name and wants to know who you are, what you do, and what’s so special about you, your Website should answer those questions and more in a compelling manner.

First things first. Choose the URL for your site carefully. Although options have broadened for the extension at the end of your URL (.com, .biz, .tv, .net, etc.), most people are used to typing in .com by default, so if you choose something else, you’re likely to get some lost traffic and confusion. Try to buy the URL closest to your own name as well as the name of your company. That’s easy if you’ve got an unusual name, and harder if you don’t; but even if you have to use a middle initial, you really want to own your name online. (The same is true for your Twitter handle and other online sites, even if you don’t intend to be active right away. Lock up your name before someone else grabs it.)

You can own multiple URLs and have them redirect to the same site. So you can have a main URL that is your name, plus URLs for your products, company, brand, signature event, and so on. Domain names are relatively cheap, so it’s better to own ones that apply to your current and future products rather than put off securing them, only to find someone else has taken the ones you want.

Your landing page is the first page people see when they come to your site and when they follow or type in “YourWebName.com.” Make it conversational and compelling. Video here is great, because it’s like a warm personal welcome to your online home. Offer a gift for signing up to your e-newsletter. Make it clear what your brand is and what outcome you provide. Identify your target audience. Make it easy for people to realize they’re in the right place.

Two important but underrated pages for your site are your “About Me” page and your “Contact Me” page. Your About Me page should be a quick recap of the experience, education, and achievements that prove your credibility, served up in a concise, conversational style. Don’t make people search to find verification of your expert status. Your Contact Me page should give an e-mail address, phone number, and social media links to help people connect with you. I’m leery of just having an e-mail form for people to fill out. Many people balk at those form e-mails, and if your site isn’t working well for some reason, you could be missing out on leads. If you provide an e-mail address, even as an alternate, people who really want to reach you have a way to do so.

Group your pages to make content easy to find. If you serve multiple audiences, group the related products and services by audience to direct users to the right set of items. Look for natural groupings such as “events,” “products,” “coaching services,” “books,” and so on. If you are selling from your Website, that entails a whole different level of expertise than we can delve into here, so be sure to work with a Web design professional who is experienced with e-commerce.

Likewise, “squeeze” pages (direct sales pages designed to provoke an emotional response and build tension culminating in a sale) are also a specialized art. A growing number of “squeeze page generator” software packages are available that help you create and customize templates from proven squeeze page designs. Some of these programs even work with WordPress.

YOUR NEWSLETTER LIST IS GOLD

There’s a saying in the online world: “Your list is your retirement.” This means that your opt-in, permission-based mailing list is an asset from which you can generate lifelong earnings if built well and handled correctly.

Although you own your URL, even Websites age and need to be replaced. But your mailing list is one thing which is 100 percent your own. Building a list comes down to two key elements: having an attractive incentive and having a good e-mail program.

An incentive is what gets people to hand over their e-mail address and give you permission to remain in touch with them. Just collecting e-mail addresses isn’t enough; in fact, doing that without express permission to remain in contact can lead to hefty fines and big legal trouble. The CAN-SPAM Act is a law attempting to cut down on spam e-mail, and it requires that a user give permission before being added to a mailing list. (The Canadian and European laws about e-mail are even more stringent about privacy than U.S. law, so if you do business there, make sure you know the rules.)

How do you get permission? You tell people up front what they’re agreeing to when they fill out an e-mail form. So whether you’re offering a freebie, enrolling them in a program, signing them up for an event, having them respond to a poll, or drop their card in a fishbowl for a contest, make sure you clearly say that their e-mail address will be added to your mailing list. Let them know they can always unsubscribe at a later date. The “unsubscribe” language is important, because it’s illegal to add someone and not make it possible for them to leave the list. Don’t play games with the disclaimer. Make it very clear that to get what they want, they are agreeing to give you what you want.

Next up is a good e-mail program. There are plenty to choose from: AWeber, MailChimp, Constant Contact, and more. Programs vary in cost and services, but at the least good programs provide templates to make it easy to create a professional-looking newsletter, subscriber lists to manage your contacts, and metrics to measure effectiveness. You do not want to send out a newsletter to a slew of names typed into your Outlook e-mail. Not only is that unprofessional, it violates privacy laws and it can get you kicked off your Internet hosting servers.

If you want to go a step further, use an additional program like ConvertKit to create a sales funnel with autoresponders to make it easy to reward subscribers. “Autoresponders” are a sequence of preprogrammed e-mails that provide content to recipients during a set period of time. They’re a set-it-and-forget-it way to offer something like a free download of a book or article in exchange for subscribing, and then follow up through the next few weeks with additional downloadable “thank you” gifts to rapidly build the like-know-trust element. You can use a program like ConvertKit to provide fulfillment and then export the subscriber e-mail addresses periodically and upload them to your main mailing program.

Make it easy for people to join your newsletter. Have a sign-up on every page of your Website, on your Facebook page, and on your blog. Use your event registration and event prize drawings to add to your list (with proper clear notice). Use gamification to make it fun. Use Rafflecopter to run contests that collect new e-mail names for your list. Do random drawings from new and long-time subscribers for prizes. Run polls on social media and do a random drawing from those who answer and provide an e-mail address.

Use your newsletter to give your readers useful content. That can mean repurposing articles or blog posts on your expert topics, sharing excerpts from your speeches or books, or sharing original musings designed to be of value to your audience. Tell them about upcoming events you’re attending, share new products or services, and include new testimonials and event photos. Don’t be afraid to share the spotlight. Add interest and value by highlighting news about colleagues that might be valuable to your readership. Generosity always pays dividends.

Consider cross-promoting with colleagues who offer products and services that complement but do not compete with your own. Host them for a guest article in your newsletter, and ask them to return the favor. You’ll gain exposure to their list, and if your guest post includes an incentive for readers to subscribe to your newsletter, you might pick up some new people. Have a regular section in your newsletter where you give a shout-out to new products, books, and programs, and let the people you’ve highlighted know about it. One good turn deserves another!

Here’s where you use the power of the social media echo chamber. Post a link to your newest newsletter edition on Facebook and Twitter, just like you do with your blog posts, and encourage your friends and followers to subscribe. Have links in your newsletter to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages, and encourage subscribers to friend, like, and follow you. Separately, each venue is likely to miss some potential readers. Using them to echo each other, you’re much more likely to reach a wider audience.

THE LAST WORD

Don’t dismiss Websites and newsletters as obsolete! Look for ways to reinvent, refresh, and repurpose to bring new power to these tried-and-true means to stay connected and engaged while maximizing your brand, building your influence, and extending your credibility!

NEXT STEPS

1. Review your current e-newsletter. Make sure the layout looks modern and fresh, and check to assure that your unsubscribe notice is easy to find.

2. If you’re not using an e-newsletter program, explore the options and look for one that not only fits your current needs, but has upgrades for additional services you can add as your business grows.

3. Read up on the CAN-SPAM Act so you understand e-mail best practices. If you work with customers in Canada or Europe, make sure you know what their laws require.

4. Think about what content you can reuse and repurpose for interesting newsletter articles. What incentives can you offer to attract sign-ups? How can you incorporate a request for sign-ups into your ongoing social media, presentations, and events?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SOCIAL MEDIA, BRANDING,
AND INFLUENCE

Remember that old song “Every Breath You Take” by The Police with the recurring lyric about watching someone? Hum it to yourself every time you’re on social media as a reminder that you’re in a fishbowl.

Financier Warren Buffet said, “It takes twenty years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it.” On social media, that has narrowed to five seconds. One moment of frustration or anger can go viral, reaching the world with no do-overs. It used to be that a momentary lapse, a joke told and later regretted, and a word spoken privately in anger might be forgiven or discreetly not spoken of to others. As we live out our lives increasingly on camera and captured by social media (our own and that of others), that grace period is gone.

Your brand, reputation, and influence are both powerful and fragile. Powerful, because built right and handled carefully, they can be your legacy, outliving you and changing the world one life at a time. Fragile, because one lapse, one misstep by you or your designated people can ruin what you’ve built in ways impossible to fix.

BRANDING

Your brand is a combination of tangible and intangible factors, all of which you can control to some degree (and some of which, admittedly, you can’t). Tangible branding includes your logo, tag line, product design, packaging, delivery method (in some cases), and pricing. Intangible branding includes the promise you implicitly make to your customers about the outcome your product will achieve for them, your reputation, customer satisfaction levels, market positioning, and what your brand represents in the world.

Some brands represent luxury and implicitly promise wealth, sexual attractiveness, fame, and power (think of high-end automobiles, jewelry, and watches). Others reinforce the idea of home, family, friendship, community, nostalgia, and warm memories (Coca-Cola and Subaru excel at this positioning). Still others promise good times with friends and family (beer, restaurants, resort destinations). Then there are brands that take a stand on an issue, like Tom’s Shoes (each purchase triggers a donation that provides shoes and other services in poverty-stricken areas), making their activism an integral part of their brand.

Every action you take online and offline either strengthens or weakens your brand. Do your best to assure that everything you post and tweet reinforces the image you want the world to have of you and your brand. Recognize that you are your brand. That doesn’t come with an “off” switch. It’s a 24/7 responsibility.

If you act in alignment with your branding and provide added proof that what you offer is legitimate, your credibility grows. But if your actions seem out of sync with—or worse, contradict—your branding, customers will react negatively, and the damage to your brand can be deep and long-lasting.

In today’s social media fishbowl, branding extends past the product to the distributors/customer-facing staff and those running the company. Get caught saying something derogatory or unkind, and you’ll see your mistake go viral, costing you customers. At best, your PR people will have to do damage control. At worst, a portion of customers will not believe your apologies and take business elsewhere.

The easiest way around this is to try to be a sincerely nice person. If you can’t do that, keep a lid on your less respectable impulses, and realize that someone always has a cell phone to pick up photos, audio, and video.

REPUTATION

Both you and your company/product have a reputation. When both are in sync, life is good. When there’s a disconnect, problems happen.

Word of mouth has always been crucial to building and maintaining—and ruining—a reputation. In the old days, whispers and rumors got passed from one social circle to another. Now, thanks to the Internet and social media, those rumors reach the world in seconds.

Sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Travelocity, Google Reviews, and Amazon make it easy for customers to share their experiences with products and services. Most shoppers report being at least a little bit influenced by online reviews and many turn first to customer comments before buying. People who are angry are more likely to want to tell the world than people who are happy, meaning that you’ll have to work to encourage satisfied customers to post to sites while upset clients are already motivated.

Good service and a good product matter, but mistakes still happen. When they do, how you respond can make or break your reputation. Be transparent, be responsive and polite, and be visible. Engage with the person making the complaint politely and get the details. Do everything you can to make it right. When you respond like this in a public forum, you can sway the opinions of onlookers even if the original customer remains angry despite your efforts. Sincere efforts to fix a problem and take care of a customer count for a lot, and many people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt when they see proper recourse being taken.

Don’t stonewall or get into an argument. Don’t get hung up on trying to prove who is right or wrong. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Section One: Setting the Course
• Section Two: Building a Foundation
• Section Three: Level Up Your Game
• Section Four: Beyond the Basics
• Conclusion: Imagining the Future
• Resources: Cool Sites You Haven’t Heard Of
• Index
• About the Author