A few weeks ago I received a call from a prospective client, enquiring about content marketing. Although he had initiated contact, he was really quite sceptical about whether social media could help his business grow. “I’ve tried it before, and seen nothing for it!” he declared passionately. “So I’m not going to put too much…
How can businesses build a connection with prospects online? How can they use mobile to promote themselves? And has social media really changed marketing – or is it just another channel? For the answers to all these questions and more, I spoke to Grant Leboff, one of the UK’s leading marketing experts and author of…
Do you regularly post content for your company online? Are you not sure how writing for the web is different to writing for print? Or how to make an immediate impact on your readers? To learn how to create the most powerful copy for blogs, email marketing and social media, I spoke to Mark Brownlow,…
Do you ever get a feeling of déjà vu on social media? Sometimes it feels like all blog posts have began to look a little similar. Headlines always promise 7 tips that will transform your company – or else threaten 8 mistakes that will destroy it. No one ever promises tips that will make a…
Why does some content go viral – while other, possibly equally good content, languishes unnoticed?
For content marketers trying to get their brands known (and loved) on social media, understanding this process is the holy grail. Unfortunately, while it is usually easy to explain in hindsight why some material was wildly successful, it is quite hard to design it with virality guaranteed.
In his new book Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age, Jonah Berger, associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, nevertheless tries to provide a framework. Ideas which get shared a lot, he claims, contain one or more of the following:
1. Social currency. The product / idea makes people feel that they have special insider knowledge and are ‘cool’.
2. Triggers. There is something in people’s everyday routine or environment that consistently reminds them of your product. (For example, KitKat is now associated with coffee breaks.)
Samantha Bass is a 34-year-old mother of two who has a family history of cancer. As a result, she is obsessive about her own children’s health, making frequent doctor’s appointments, eating well and insisting on family exercise.
Until recently, she had health insurance through her parents, but now they’ve decided it’s too expensive, and she’ll have to take out her own cover.
The catch: Samantha isn’t a real person. She is a ‘buyer persona’ – a fictional representation of an ideal client created for a company selling health insurance.
The company knows a lot about her: what she looks like (she has a profile that includes a picture), what her background is, what she thinks about her family’s health issues, her internet habits and what factors might influence her decision to buy health insurance. Other personas might even have a video profile.
When you have over 99,000 followers on Facebook, could you be doing anything wrong?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes! Even big brands can sometimes (ok, often) do things better.
This week, I happened to visit the Facebook profiles of three big Pharma brands: GSK, Pfizer and Novartis.
While much of the content was genuinely interesting, one thing hit me straight away. On all of the pages, the brands’ names kept on coming up again and again.
GSK was the worst offender. Of 7 posts so far this month, 5 explicitly referred to GSK, its products, history or its research. For example, they directed people to a website on colds and coughs, which they are supporting “through our Beechams and Night Nurse brands”; under an illustration of a floating laboratory set up by their heritage company in 1907 to research neglected tropical diseases, they added, “We continue to carry out research into NTD.”
“We don’t have time for social networking / blogging / Tweeting / Facebook”.
It’s the mantra of many companies that have yet to use social media for marketing, and probably the occasional lament of companies that do.
The reply from social media marketers often goes something like this: Social media does not require a massive investment of time; you can get going in as little as 15-20 minutes a day; and that quarter-of-an-hour will pay off.
Well, this isn’t one of those posts.
Like any other venture that is actually worthwhile, social media takes time to do well. A lot of time.
There are things you can do in 15-20 minutes a day: you can establish a presence. And that is certainly better than nothing – and better than many other companies are doing.
Michael Stelzner is one of the biggest success stories online. Five years ago, he launched Socialmediaexaminer.com, a site dedicated to helping social media marketers promote their businesses on social media. Within two weeks it was ranked by Technorati as one of the top 10 business blogs, and it is now one of the world’s largest social media magazines.
In his book Launch, he explains exactly how he did it – and how other businesses, in all sectors, can copy his model.
His formula for success is this: Great Content + Other People – Marketing Messages = Growth.
The secret is to constantly produce material online that is genuinely helpful to your potential customers, while significantly toning down your marketing messages, so that they feel that you have their best interests in mind – and are not just pushing your product at them.
Good LinkedIn company pages are few and far between. In fact, bad ones are few and far between as well! Most companies simply don’t seem to bother completing the basic information on them, let alone updating them frequently.
It’s a big mistake. LinkedIn has by far the biggest visitor-to-conversion rate of any of the major social media platforms, and a good company page is a terrific way to showcase everything your company is good at. If you don’t have a company page, your business doesn’t exist on LinkedIn (and it doesn’t matter if every employee has their own profile; these are personal pages, highlighting personal achievements, and not about the company).
Take the pharmaceutical industry in the UK. I set out to write a post highlighting three examples of great company pages – but couldn’t find enough to write it!
There are two possible reasons. One is that pharma is generally behind the curve when it comes to social media. But LinkedIn is the one platform where its executives generally do have a strong presence, so one might have expected them to develop their company pages.
