Business Blogging Pros

Social Media: Don't Start With a Strategy

Raise your hand if you've been told that you must have a social media strategy. Good.  And it's true, you need a strategy.  The mistake is thinking that developing a strategy comes first.

Your strategy supports your goals.

Your goal might simply be to boost your Google page rank.  Or your goal might be to energize your most loyal enthusiastic customer and turn them into evangelists for your company. These two goals require entirely different strategies.

Now I hear you saying, "OK, let's set some goals first."  we're making progress here, but we're not ready to set goals yet either.

Know Your Audience

The real place to start is to ask yourself two questions:

1. Who are my customers?
2. What problem do I solve for them?

Who Are Your Customers?

Who are they, really? Not just at a superficial demographic level, understand them at a deeper level.  What is her job like? If your customer is someone in a corporation, what goals is she being measured against during her annual review? Is your product or service and integral part of meeting one of those goals? Or is the problem you solve simply one of those things getting in the way of meeting her goals?

What Problem Do You Solve?

Be able to articulate it in your customer's words, not yours. You want the description to resonate with your future customer on an emotional level. When they read the words on your website or tweet or Facebook page you want them to say to themselves, "Oh man this is it!". 

When someone is using Google to search for an answer to their problem, Google presents them with millions of websites. I know you spend a lot of time and money getting that person to click on your link. Think about this: She is going to spend just a few seconds scanning your website to see if it is the answer to her problem.  Make those seconds count.

If you can't articulate the problem you solve in your customers' words then you are just adding to the noise.

Here are the magic beans: Learn to ask yourself these two questions and you start to understand the real value you bring to your customers.  You begin to see how you are different and better than your competitors. 

When you learn to ask yourself these two questions it will change the way you think about your business. 

The Power of Video

I was reminded again today of the power of a simple video.

You probably know that I am a gourmet chef. Lately I've been toying with the idea of making my own doughnuts.

Here is a link to a great doughnut cookbook on Amazon

Now watch this video:

 

Which one better motivates you to buy the book and/or make doughnuts?

Owning a Hammer vs Building a House

A few days ago, my friend Mark Roberts wrote a great blog post about smores (Social Media Whores). From his comments to me this morning it's obvious that he stirred up something.  It's a topic I feel strongly about so I want to elaborate:    

You may know how to use a hammer, level, and saw but that does not mean you know how to design and build a house.

Gary Vaynerchuk said the same thing using a different analogy at the AZ Entrepreneurship Conference last year:

The Telephone is not a Marketing Strategy.  It's a Tool.

When I started this business - way back before the term 'social media' became popular - a business owner could start a blog almost anywhere, write anything anytime to anyone and he would likely get noticed. Maybe even end up on the front page of the NY Times.  Businesses that blogged were that rare.

It's different today.  Technorati's 2008 State of the Blogosphere says that one million new blog posts are being created every day. "If you write it they will come" doesn't work any more.

As another friend and colleague Dave Cooke says, you must start with a strategy.  Who are your clients?  What does your perfect client look like?  What are the problems you solve for them?  What are their reasons for not buying from you now?  

For example, in my Twitter webinars we talk about using Twitter as a branding tool, but if you don't know what you want to be known for then you've got the cart before the horse.

There are a lot of consultants and 'experts' who only want to talk about the tools. Why? Because tools are cool.  Particularly bright shiny new tools.  Several months ago I mentioned to one of these smores that I was planning to offer webinars.  He immediately replied that I should use XXXXXX for that.  Why did he recommend XXXXXX? Because it was new and it was what he was currently fixated on.  A quick review of XXXXX revealed that it did not fit the needs of my business.  It wasn't even close.

Don't focus on the tools. Focus on the business.

Mark Roberts has some great recommendations for steering clear of smores.  I'll add my own:

Look for someone who starts with, "Tell me about your business".  Questions like "What's your target market?", "Who's your perfect client?" and "What problems do you solve for your clients" tend to indicate that you are taking so someone who understands business and marketing, not just the tools.

When you engage us to create a blog for you, we spend over half of the entire engagement focused on issues like these.  We help our clients answer these questions.  The results is not just a better social media strategy, but a better business strategy as well.

"Nobody Can Show Me that Social Media Leads To Business"

An 'old media' guy said that. 

He's viewing social media through a traditional TV/Radio Advertising lens instead of a Networking/Relationship lens.

I can attribute more than half of my business to referrals from people I am actively engaged with in social media.

Social Media is nothing more than building, nurturing, and maintaining relationships.

That same old media guy can probably rattle off lots of business he's gotten from building relationships at places like Chamber of Commerce mixers and other networking events.  Social Media is the same activity, just in a different medium using different tools.

The most important word in social media is social.  It's about real people, real relationships, and real conversation.

Use Your Blog to Create Landing Pages

Almost everyone needs to create a Landing Page now and then. 

If you are using Wordpress, most themes contain a 'No Sidebar' template and you can use that. For this client we created a special template that removed the theme's extraneous background colors. 

Typepad users may be frustrated because they can't select the template on a page-by-page basis and don't have a way to eliminate the sidebar. Here's the trick but it requires a PRO level Typepad account: Create another blog in the same account. Select the same theme and give it all the same stylesheet customizations. Then select a Layout that contains no sidebars. 

The final thing you should do is to give the landing page it's own short memorable domain name. GoDaddy makes it very easy to forward a domain name to a specific page on your blog.

If I Twitter do I still need a Blog?

Yes!

Pamela Slim (@pamslim on Twitter) and I were having a conversation via Twitter today about the frequency of our blog posts since the advent of Twitter.  The truth is that the combination of your blog and Twitter is very powerful.

For example, I've discovered that the same half-dozen questions about blogging ('Which is better: Typepad or Wordpress?') get asked over and over on Twitter.  I've written blog posts answering those questions.  I continually search - using TweetDeck - for terms like 'Typepad'.  WHen I see one of those common questions come up I send the person an @reply containig a link to the specific post on my blog that answers their question.  They get their question answered and they explore, learning more about me and about blogging.  Many times I not only gain a new Twitter follower and blog reader, I gain a client too.

There are lot's more ways that Twitter and your blog make a powerful conversation.

If you want to attend a webinar about leveraging Twitter in your business click here.

Trust and Credibility

I met with Loni, the Marketing Manager for a local medium-sized building contractor. It was an interesting conversation, both of us exploring ways that blogging could benefit her company.

One of the themes that kept recurring in our conversation was the owner - I'll call him 'Sam'. She told me one story after another illustrating Sam's integrity, devotion to his family, and his willingness to go above and beyond for his customers. Sam was a living example of the phrase:

People don't do business with your company, they do business with you.

Sam is the company. Yet, when reviewing the company website, Sam was nowhere to be found - The company's biggest asset was invisible. Sam's company needs a blog for several reasons, but the biggest is to get Sam out in front of his prospective customers and let them build a personal connection with him.

Here in the Phoenix area, there are a bazillion contractors. When you need a contractor, who do you pick? You pick the one you trust. Certainly you need to use your blog to demonstrate your expertise and develop your credibility, but it is just as important to use it to develop trust.

You develop trust by letting your readers see you are human. Be genuine. Share a little of your personal life. If your son or daughter has a significant accomplishment, brag about it a little. (Who can help but brag about their kids?) Talk about your hobby, interest, or avocation once in a while.

The result is that not only do people start to see you as a three-dimensional human being, readers that share the same interest will feel a connection to you. You have no idea how many people feel connected to me because of my food blog.

The results of that is that your prospective customers learn that you are the kind of person they are comfortable doing business with.

Trust. Credibility. Interest. All three must be present in order for you to convert the prospect into a customer.

Credibility Upon Entry

I was reading a conversation on one of the better known sales forums today about the advisability of 'assuming the sale'. In other words, using language such as:

"what we're going to do for you is..."
"what colour would you like that in?"
"what address would you like that sent to"

Blogs, websites, Google, and the internet in general have fundamentally changed the nature of the traditional sales funnel.

Consider the traditional model:

1. Prospect responds to a print ad by calling/writing and asking for literature
2. Prospect contacts us for more information.
3. Prospect asks for a demo
4. Prospect asks for more information..
...
5. Prospect buys

We could track the prospect on his complete trip through the funnel. This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, we can capture great metrics on the conversion rates for each step, but it is also time consuming.

Things are (or can be) very different today. What if your first contact with the prospect was at Step 5?

We can use our websites, blogs, and other tools to provide the prospect with all the information he/she needs. The prospect LOVES it because he can proceed at his own pace without the perceived 'pressure' from a salesperson. (And there is a side benefit in that you are seen as a more open and friendly company that is easy to deal with.)

I am fond of quoting my friend and sales guru Michael Goodman who says that the three elements that must be present before the sale can be made are trust, credibility, and interest.

Consider the way we buy things today. The first step is usually a Google search. We probably locate a small number of likely candidate firms who appear to offer the product or service we want.

Then we perform some additional research to narrow those candidates down to a single selection. When I bought my Bosch dishwasher recently, by the time I visited the local dealer's showroom I had already decided upon the exact model and that I wanted to buy it from him.

Ideally, by the time you hear from the prospect for the first time, you want him to already know three things:

1. He has a problem/want/need
2. You are supremely qualified to solve his problem.
3. You are the kind of person he feels comfortable doing business with.

Done well, your blog can satisfy items 2 and 3. You can, through your blog, demonstrate your expertise and knowledge so well that you are perceived as an expert. (Of course, when someone refers to me as an expert, I usually reply that an expert is nothing but a former drip under pressure.)

And by sharing bits of your personal side, readers will come to know you as a genuine human being. For example, David Meerman Scott collects Apollo space program artifacts. I am an amateur gourmet chef. Our purpose is to help our readers get to know us. They then relate to us and form a connection. We become the kind of person they are comfortable doing business with. Remember:

"People don't do business with your company,
they to business with you."