E-Mail Marketing

One form of social media that can definitely be a pain for consumers and businesses alike is e-mail marketing. Because of such low costs and high reach, many companies use this to attempt to sell to the market, however, many fail to focus on necessary attributes of the campaign to make it as successful as it can be. Although many people don't appreciate e-mail marketing, it often can be a valuable way of reaching potential clients.

Some of the necessary characteristics that a business must keep up with deal with the list of their potential market. Many just have a list and pay no attention to if anyone is receiving the emails. Companies should be watching the bounce rate, or the number of emails that were bounced versus the number that were actually good addresses. By paying attention to the bad addresses, you are able to replace these with new potential clients that can bring in more revenue. Another important characteristic to pay attention to is the open rate. After seeing how many emails are received, you must pay attention to how many are actually opened. This measures how successful and catchy your subject line is.

Another characteristic that is involved in almost all online marketing strategy is the click through rate. Make sure that people are willing to click on the links in your email after they have opened it. You must offer enough value to the potential client for them to want to continue to your website. A good way to make it more interesting to a customer is to make it seem as though the link is a solution to a problem rather than you just trying to sell them a product. Finally, a company must keep track of the conversion rate. This is the overall number of sales and revenue brought in by your email marketing campaign. You should be able to see a measured increase, otherwise something must be changed in the campaign to make it more valuable to the potential customers you are reaching out to. In the end, a company can reach a large potential market for very low costs with email marketing as long as they focus on the strategy and continue to update and make changes.

The Effect of Social Media

In social media, it is important for a company to really understand their target market and their preferences on different platforms. After reading a study done by iAcquire and SurveyMonkey Audience, I learned some interesting facts about people and their behavior on social media sites.

Dealing with search optimization, one fact that may not come as much of a surprise is that 75% of people object to having their private search data shared. A more interesting fact is that over 50% of people don't care about images in search. This makes Google a more important search engine as they focus more on keywords while Bing focuses more on looks and making an attractive search.

In regards to social networks, the study shows that Facebook is more popular among 30 year olds and up while younger users prefer to use other sites. Some of these include Reddit, Github, and Orkut, sites that most companies probably don't focus very much attention on. The most popular social network among older users is LinkedIn, with Facebook and Pinterest tied for second. A fact that is important to many companies is that over 70 of users do not use Facebook Search. This makes it possibly less worthwhile to companies to focus very much social strategy on this particular search type. This may change in the future however due to Graph Search.

Importance of Customer Service

A subject that I find very important in marketing and business in general is customer service. It is a factor that many companies leave on the back burner and simply hope will work it out itself rather than putting a great deal of focus on it. This week I found a great blog article socialmouths.com dealing with the negative effects of bad customer service. Many businesses don't realize just how costly bad customer service can be. More than 85% of customers will stop doing business with a company because of bad customer service and of the customers who have a bad experience, only 4% will let the company know. Businesses need to be very aware of how their service is and should make a consistent effort to ask customers what they think instead of waiting for them to speak up.

Another side of bad customer service is word of mouth. It is shown that a happy customer will tell 9 people about a good encounter with a business, while an unhappy customer will tell 16. This means that the company not only loses out on the business of the first unhappy customer, but also all the people that they will tell about the event. Companies need to understand that now more than ever they must really focus on strong customer service.

One great thing about social media is that is can play a great role in helping a company create a relationship with customers. Social media allows customer service to be obvious to the customer and makes all service public instead of behind the scenes. Businesses need to take advantage of this chance to get good customer service examples in front of customers and potential customers. Understanding the importance of good customer service is only half the battle. Having a competent and friendly staff and really caring about the customer will ultimately lead to greater profit and a more prominent business.

Women of Social Media

Something that may or may not come as a surprise is that women rule social media. Over 75% of women use social media networks compared to 63% of men. This is interesting to companies as they set up their social media strategy as they should be sure to connect with both men and women, maybe even more focus on women depending on the company and product. Another interesting fact that companies need to keep in mind is that women are more emotionally attached to their social network profiles, making it easier to turn them away with a poor message. Women enjoy spending time on social networks as much as hanging out with friends and dating. Marketers should really focus on creating a relationship with women on social media rather than just promoting their brand. Using the high percentage of women and their high emotional attachment, there is a great potential to reach a high number of influential women. Women on social media are also extremely influential and if you are able to build a strong relationship they can become important brand advocates for your company.

Women of social media are involved on many platforms, from Facebook to Pinterest to Twitter to Instagram and many more. They are also active on other media platforms, including radio, tv, and newspapers, both online and in print. Because of this, companies should focus on connecting with these women on many different platforms, not only through one or two social media sites. Companies also have to think about the different demographics of different platforms and how they need to change their strategy from platform to platform based on the women that are most active on each. Overall, this information is not only interesting but also very useful to businesses that are trying to reach out to women and thinking about how to set up a more effective social media strategy.

Content Marketing

Social Media Strategy is dominated by content marketing. If you aren't giving your customers a reason to follow you online with useful and interesting content, you aren't creating the best online strategy possible. In order to get your brand out there as well as give your customers and followers what they want, you have to really focus on your content. On SocialMouths blog I found an great post about the top types of content marketing. The list held a lot of the standard forms of content marketing such as blogs, photos, and videos, but it had a lot of other things too that many companies probably don't think about when they are creating their content. The list also included infographics and illustrations. Both of these things are more interesting than just a long post about information only using words but they can convey the same messages. Infographics may take time to create but I know that I would be more willing to read information in a more exciting and presentable format any day. Testimonials was also on the list. That is something that many companies may have, but don't necessarily use them in their content. Adding that would definitely help to create a stronger brand image without talking yourself up. An item on the list that I thought was interesting was memes. I have never considered memes to be necessarily good content, but I guess if you can turn it into something relevant it is just as entertaining and useful as anything else you could post.

WikiDo

This week I learned about a new resource for social media on a social media blog. I read a post about a platform called WikiDo. What it does is allows you to create an event and people can search for local events they may want to attend. This type of platform can be used by almost any business, creating events such as sales that customers can "attend," or actual events that can be used to grow your customer base. This type of platform works well with word-of-mouth marketing as many people would hopefully speak to others about events they were attending or maybe ask others to attend with them.

 I really like learning about all the different types of social media and different platforms available. Most people only know about the really big ones like Twitter and Facebook, but its more interesting to branch out and use all resources. One of the best parts about WikiDo is that it is free to use and is ad free so people can use it easily and it will continue to grow. The platform is pretty new, and has only been around for around 4 months so it still has a lot of room for potential growth.

I like this platform specifically for the small training camps business I work for because you can create an event that is a camp that people that aren't in your direct target can find if they are searching for something like it. Its a great new and free way to reach out to a greater audience in a way that is useful to them.

Creating Happy Customers

A new post that I really found interesting on Duct Tape Marketing dealt with the best tool for generating referrals. This tool is a happy customer. It may sound simple and obvious at first but when you think about it but I have never actually thought about that being a main goal of my social media planning. Now that I am going to make that a priority, I can use many of the ideas given on the post. One of my favorites is the idea of a fun surprise. The idea of giving customers something that they weren't expecting is great for making customers happy and at the same time they are much more likely to talk about it rather than just being satisfied with the product. Another idea I really liked was to teach your customers. Make sure that they are in the know about your service or product and that they know exactly what is going on with what they are receiving from your company. That way they feel more involved and are much more likely to refer you to others.

Another idea that I actually feel like I do well already in my social media planning is to appreciate customers. After people attend our camps I always send out thank you notes and make sure they understand that we appreciate them and their business as well as their opinion of our service. One idea that I could definitely improve on is measuring. I don't keep very good track of what customers are saying or thinking about our service and I could probably do this easily by creating a survey of some sort to find out what our customers are thinking. Overall, creating a happy customer has now become the main goal of my social media planning efforts.