Category: Social Media Marketing

Financial Advice and Social Media

One of the services we offer is Social Media Marketing Consulting. We’ve been speaking with a variety of financial advisors and insurance brokers. Most of them want to utilize social media marketing but they can’t.

Like one (who probably has to remain anonymous or I’ll have to have a three paragraph disclaimer) told me just today, if a volcano erupted today, he could tweet about it next week (after two or three exchanges with compliance).

Just today the Financial Advisor Magazine web site had an article on how financial advisors are complying, or not, with regulations.  The story basically says they aren’t. And who can blame them? When web designers and CPA’s and restaurants and plumbers and just about everyone else can do it, why wouldn’t they be struggling to level the playing field?

How would you handle this? It is a sticky situation but closing your eyes and pretending social media doesn’t exist isn’t going to make it go away. 

Here are some solutions I can think of:

  1. Remove all restrictions and let advisors know their license is on the line – they get caught abusing the rules and they lose their license.
  2. Provide a strict set of guidelines that let’s advisors know what they can and cannot discuss, share, or tweet about.
  3. Create yet another government web site that lays out general guidelines, shares case studies of what is and isn’t appropriate and allow, perhaps via login, advisors to discuss or ask questions about what is OK and what isn’t.

Any of these three solutions would empower and enable financial advisors to engage in social media and provide guidelines about how to do so legally and ethically.

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Be Findable! The Small Business Guide To Location Social Media

EduCyber Presents Growing Your Business on the Internet Series:

Thursday, May 27, 2010
“Be Findable! The Small Business Guide To Location Social Media”

Pay online to reserve your spot >>
Where are you?

That’s not a metaphysical question. Are you and your business findable? Are you being found?

Way back in 2007 Google told us that 73% of online searches were for local goods and services. Sure, you can find out a plumber in South Africa, if you want to. But most folks want to find a local business if they want a plumber, a restaurant, a realtor or even a web designer.

There are many sites that have been created or have adapted themselves to accommodate this need for local search. EduCyber has spent many hours exploring this phenomenon and we will share our findings in a seminar on May 27 from 11:30 to 1:00.

What will you get from this seminar?

  1. Concrete steps you can take to enhance your local presence on the internet.
  2. How to: a) Create local accounts at Google and Bing b) Keep those accounts fresh (and at the top)
  3. Wisdom to make decisions about whether and how to engage in Yelp, FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, BrightKite and other location-based social networking sites.
  4. Your business website will get noticed by more potential customers!

Who should come to this seminar?

Local destination businesses: Restaurants, retail stores, specialty shops, gyms, etc.
Local service businesses: Printers, CPAs, financial advisers, business consultants, etc.
Local tradespeople: Plumbers, Electricians, HVAC, Lawn care, trash removal, etc.

Location: 4251 Kipling St.
(2nd Floor Conference Room)
Time: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm
Cost: $19.95 (includes a light lunch)

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Internet Marketing Through Web Site Design

Lots of folks start their web design with a logo and maybe some colors. Then they add some copy that seems appropriate and figure out how to navigate through the site and they’re done with the design.

After they’ve finished, they’re ready for Internet marketing – maybe they’ll add a search engine optimization campaign or a paid search campaign (like Google AdWords). The more internet savvy ones will even develop a social media marketing campaign.

But the design and the marketing aren’t planned out together.

That’s a mistake.

Build your web site on a firm foundation

You have to start with a firm foundation. What better foundation for a web site design that your marketing goals? Start with the result in mind and you’ll build a solid site that not only complements your business but actually drives it forward.

Three Questions to consider as you build your foundation:

  1. What is the main call to action throughout the site?
  2. How do the various pages flow or drive the visitor towards the call to action?
  3. How can I forget about the features and focus on the benefits  (which is what the customer really wants anyway)?
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Why Internet Marketing Works

While I’ve never been much of a numbers guy, I’m amazed about how easy Internet Marketing is because absolutely everything can be measured. So your goal is to figure out what to measure and then measure it.

And the beauty of it is that small changes can reap LARGE effects. Let’s say that you have a paid search campaign. You want people to rent a tuxedo from your store instead of your competitors. You can set up a paid search campaign – such as Google AdWords – to drive traffic to you site. At Google you identify when your ad will appear based on search words. So you say I want the ad to appear when people search for “prom”, “wedding”, “tux”, or “tuxedo”. Easy enough.

Not let’s say you start running this campaign and you find that for every 100 clicks (and you pay for every click) you get three tuxedo rentals. To make this a profitable venture for you, you determine that you need at least 5 rentals for every 100 clicks but you’d much prefer 10 or more.

Now that you have the traffic coming, you need to look at why more folks aren’t converting. With some of the nifty tools Google provides, you can do split testing. So you look at your landing page (the one you direct folks to from Google) and decide to keep the existing page as one version of the test. Then you make a small change – perhaps a differently worded call to action – and set that page as the second version of the test.

Next you turn on the test and then as people click through to your site, you can calculate which call to action is getting more business. Once you’ve got enough data to determine which is better, eliminate the underperformer and use the better one. If you change your conversion rate from 1% of visitors converting to customers to 2%, you’ve doubled your business. Pretty good ROI!

Repetitive Unproductive Practice

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

But don’t stop there.  Like my shampoo bottle says, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” If you’ve found that one call to action gets more conversions, what if there is yet another that will triple your conversions? Build another page to test. And often its not the call to action. It could be the image you use or the attention getting headline or the copy leading up to the call to action.

Since you can measure each step of the process, you can measure your ROI at every step and set yourself apart from your competition.

And that is just with Paid Search. The same holds true with Organic Search and even Social Media Marketing.

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Starting at the Top

To be successful in Internet Marketing or in any endeavor, it is important to think big and to face down the fear of failure. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Hopefully this little story will make sense.
My family plays pitch. We not only play it, we’re very very good at it. The last time we were all together, my brother began teaching the exchange student staying with my other brother how to play. Some members of our extended family play very conservatively and seldom win. They know the rules inside out but when they look at the cards, they only see what is in their hand, not what the possibilities are for their team or for their hand based on what others might have. And as I said, they seldom win.
The way my brother was teaching this young lady was so that she could start at the top. Rather than learning the rules and taking baby steps in learning how to bid, he taught her how to bid aggressively so that she could play a strong hand at a strong table successfully.
I think the same kind of thing applies to business in general and to Internet Marketing specifically. There are many things that go into excellent Internet Marketing but it is not only what you see in your hand. Look at the opportunities available and consider how they fit in with your plan. Where do the synergies lie? How can you capitalize on the strengths of the media you’re using? The goal isn’t to learn how to be an Internet Marketer. The goal is to win at Internet Marketing.
Find the right mentor(s). The exchange student was lucky. Her mentor was teaching her how to win, not how to play. Find mentors that have PROVEN success in their industry. There are dozens of folks out there who claim they are gurus and experts. Ask them for the proof and then double-check it. For example, we’ve been around since 1998 and have been growing nearly every year. We’re ranked high for our key words. We actually get business because we’re found on the search engines. We work hard to practice what we preach.
We aren’t in this to “play the game”. We’re here to help other businesses excel on the Internet.

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Plan for Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing, like any kind of marketing, needs to fit into the bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish. There are three questions you need to ask yourself with any kind of Internet Marketing Campaign:

  1. How does this campaign fit into our overall marketing goals?
  2. How will we measure success?
  3. What step(s) do we want people to take?

ONE: Fitting your campaign into your overall marketing plan assumes you have an overall plan. If you don’t have one, get one. You’ll never get where you want to be if you don’t have a plan to get there. Stop and consider what your business goals are, determine what marketing you need to do to help you get there, and then determine what piece of the marketing pie will be Internet marketing.

TWO: A key component of your success will be determining at the outset what you are going to measure. Long ago I had a customer leave because his web site wasn’t getting him any business. So I asked where he was getting his business from. As it turned out, he wasn’t really tracking any of that stuff so he didn’t really know where his business came from – and therefore didn’t know whether he was getting any business from his site or not. What’s the moral of the story? He didn’t measure anything in his business and he’s no longer in business.

THREE: There are all kinds of measurable steps you can have on your web site. Of course, if you have an ecommerce site, the best step is to make a sale. But if the customer isn’t ready to buy, you can get them to sign up for your newsletter (another measurable step) or click to the next page for more information (this too is measurable). I’m sorry but “The purpose of this page is to educate” is not a step nor is it measurable. If you want to educate them enough that they want to call you or fill out a form, then it is measurable but “educate” is not a step.

Think through these questions with answers backed up with data and you’ll be on your way to success on the Internet.

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Finding the Right Web Design Firm

There are lots of places on the Internet you can go to get a web site designed for less than $100. You get what you pay for however. There are also web sites that will help you with Search Engine Optimization for only $25 or some such nonsense. Again you get what you pay for which in this case can actually be counterproductive to your site. Finally there are some excellent graphic designers out there that learn how to convert their work into html and declare themselves to be web designers. For a modest sum, they will build you a web site. Be very careful in this case also.

There are three main elements to web design that you need to make sure you’ve got covered:

1)      Good design
Building a good web site means that it needs to be designed to fit YOUR needs. The problem with most do-it-yourself template sites is that you have to customize your needs to  the template rather than having the design customized to your needs. Your site should be visually engaging and should be customized to help you get your message across to your customers.

2)      Search Engine Friendliness
We won’t lie to you. SEO is very competitive and can get quite expensive. But a key part of web design is an architecture that is friendly to search engines. Some key elements to include in the design: using key words in file names and in image tags; naming sub-directories well; and the obvious – using keywords in the written content – but then also placing that written content in the best place on the page. None of these are included in your super-cheap online SEO services but more importantly, many web designers don’t use or understand these principles.

3)      Functionality
I’ve seen some really beautiful web sites but have had no clue what the next step is. Often graphic designers that hang up their web design shingle are the culprits. They design visually engaging graphics that don’t point the user to the next step. A term often used with web sites is “intuitive”. An intuitive web site is one where the user can easily figure out (without having to do any “figuring”) what to do. Navigation, for example, isn’t hidden or difficult to figure out – instead the menu items are clearly menu items and you can click on them to move to the next page.

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Twitter Done Right

Twitter isn’t all fun and games. There’s some serious business happening among the tweets about Tiger and Charlie and what your accountant had for lunch. Business people want to know, “How can I use Twitter to build a following and promote my business?”

Twitter Done Right! is EduCyber’s January seminar that will teach you how to harness the power of tweeting to build traffic for your business. In this fast-moving seminar, host Brian DeLaet will teach you:

  • How to create a plan for promoting your business on Twitter
  • Who to follow and why
  • How to build a following for you and your business and turn that following into customers
  • Real examples of how businesses have used Twitter to explode their sales.

In other words, you’ll learn how to do Twitter right!

Register online at http://www.educyber.com/upcoming-seminars.php

(Space is limited, so call today!)

When: January 28, 2010

Time: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm

Where: 4251 Kipling St., Suite 190, Wheat Ridge, CO 80033
(2nd Floor Conference Room)

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Why Bother With Twitter?

I’m often asked why anyone in business would want to spend time tweeting. That question often comes from the very same people who spend lots of time in meetings and events with local business associations, chambers of commerce and other opportunities to meet new people or make connections with existing contacts.

Hmm . . . is what I think. I’m not sure why people don’t see the value of tweeting to friends, colleagues, vendors and customers (and in fact all of Twitterland). Here are the reasons I find time to tweet:

  1. I can connect with my known circle of friends and tell them about what is happening (remember, don’t tweet about what you’re doing but about what has your attention).
  2. I can read my circle’s tweets and join in the conversation, letting those folks know that I am engaged in their conversation.
  3. I can share my news – typically that I have posted a new blog article but also about things related to my company.
  4. I can meet new people who share my interests, industry, politics, religion and more.
  5. I can connect with potential employees or staff members.
  6. I can stay abreast of what is happening in the world and in my industry (I learned that Michael Jackson had died through Twitter and I learned that Facebook surpassed 350 million users via Twitter)
  7. I can do research on what my competitors are doing

Most importantly, I realize that Twitter is one more way to network but it is unique in the real-time information flow and the method of using it – I often go days without visiting twitter.com but a day very rarely passes without one tweet or interaction on Twitter.икони

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Evaluating your Social Media Campaign

Question 10 of 10 Essential Questions for Your Social Media Marketing Campaign is “How do I evaluate the results?”

If you planned properly this is an easy question. At the outset you should have set a measurable goal and set a time period. So now all you have to do is, when you hit the milestone set, look to see if you reached your goal.

In our first question we talked about setting goals and what those goals might look like. The funny thing about goals though is they often change. And that’s ok. The important thing is to continually set, measure and reset your goals.  If you had said you wanted to get 200 new subscribers to your newsletter over a two month period and you hit 250 after one month, it would be a good idea to evaluate after one month and change the goal to, for example, 700.

If you only had 20 new subscribers after a month but three of them converted to customers, you might reset the goal to 50 and add a new goal of converting 10 of them to customers. But if you haven’t set a goal, how do you know if you reached it or not?

Other things you can measure as a part of your evaluation of a social media campaign include:

  • Number of Facebook fans
  • Number of re-tweets onTwitter
  • Number of profile views on LinkedIn
  • Number of views on YouTube
  • Number of click throughs from any social site to your actual web site
  • Number of new newsletter subscribers
  • Number of new customers

Note that new customers is only one measurement. And it is probably not the most important at first. Of more importance is how you engage and interact with the “friends”, “followers”, “connections” or other social media friends in order to build your network over the long term.

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