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.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Referrals
I used the Duct Tape Marketing Blog again this week to understand more about referrals and word of mouth advertising used in small businesses. It is extremely resourceful for companies that aren't looking to spend great deals of money on advertising but actually using happy customers to refer their friends and family. This method kills two birds with one stone as it expands your business at the same time as making sure that customers are extremely happy with our service.
Another post on Duct Tape Marketing that I found interesting was http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2013/01/24/referral-action-plan/. This post was all about all the ways that you can use your company's website in order to create more referrals from your customers. It was really interesting to think about all the different ways that you can interact with a customer through your website and how many different strategies you can use to make them happy. The best way to really start out making a potential customer happy on the website is by offering something from the very beginning. Although that's not necessarily easy in my industry (soccer training camps), it was interesting to think about and at least consider how I could use that. I think the most important thing I learned from this post was how simply interacting with your customers is so useful and common. While interacting, the best way to get a referral is to simply state that in your goal and make them realize that its important to you as well as to put it in their mind. Overall I hope to create more interactive ways to get to our customers and to help them help us find reach more people as well to make sure they are enjoying their experience with our company.
Another post on Duct Tape Marketing that I found interesting was http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2013/01/24/referral-action-plan/. This post was all about all the ways that you can use your company's website in order to create more referrals from your customers. It was really interesting to think about all the different ways that you can interact with a customer through your website and how many different strategies you can use to make them happy. The best way to really start out making a potential customer happy on the website is by offering something from the very beginning. Although that's not necessarily easy in my industry (soccer training camps), it was interesting to think about and at least consider how I could use that. I think the most important thing I learned from this post was how simply interacting with your customers is so useful and common. While interacting, the best way to get a referral is to simply state that in your goal and make them realize that its important to you as well as to put it in their mind. Overall I hope to create more interactive ways to get to our customers and to help them help us find reach more people as well to make sure they are enjoying their experience with our company.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Social Media for the Small Business
Social Media is topic in marketing that is completely relevant and easy to apply almost instantly. For that reason I am really enjoying learning more about it and how I can apply it to my internship. I found a blog today called Duct Tape Marketing and its all about little things that small businesses can do to use social media more productively. The blog has already given me several ideas for what I can do with the company I work with. The post I read today was about 17 tactics to inspire customer love. One of the main ways our company hopes to become successful and more popular is through great word-of-mouth, so this article was very relevant. Some of the tactics that were on the post were pretty straight forward and self explanatory when it comes to making customers happy such as making sure to apologize for any mistakes and trying to fix these mistakes quickly. There were also some interesting points that I hadn't thought about yet on the post. I had never really considered the idea of using Linked In because of the type of business (soccer camps,) however this could be a great opportunity to talk to others in the industry and see how they connect with their customers. I also really liked all the ideas of gifts and word-of-mouth tools on your pages. I am not quite sure how to do that yet but I think it would be worth it to learn and make it easy for our customers to share us and for them to receive a benefit from it as well. Overall I hope to continue to read this Duct Tape Marketing Blog for more tips and tricks on how to really boost the social media of the company I am working for right now!
Sunday, January 20, 2013
First Blog
Attempting to create a blog is definitely something that I have never considered to by one of my strong suits. I don't think of myself as the kind of person that can easily put my thoughts into words, especially without an extremely well defined theme. However, after really starting to look over other blogs focused on the topic of social media I am slowly beginning to realize how important it is and how helpful the idea can be for a company and brand. Since one of the most important things I have learned at Terry about getting noticed in the world of careers is marketing "my brand," I am beginning to see this as a great opportunity to better define myself and what I consider important.
Before I started, I went through many blogs of influential people who have many followers to better understand what I should be focusing on. The more I attempted to learn about social media through blogs, the more I realized just how little I actually know. The subject is so wide and diverse and involves so many more things than the average person thinks of. Most consider social media as Facebook and Twitter, simple ways to connect with others around them and to learn more about the world, but it is really so much wider and more complex. On Heidi Cohen's blog I found an interesting post containing 30 definitions of social media. Every single definition is different and brings in a new perspective of the idea, but they all have the same basic foundation, focused on a series of media platforms and tools that allow people to interact and share information. As simple as that may seem at first, it is clear that there is really so much more to the topic and I greatly look forward to learning more about it.
Although I am still quite a beginner when it comes to social media, I am greatly looking forward to being able to take advantage of all I learn and put it to actual use in my work. Right now I work for a very small sports company that runs soccer camps. I am basically in charge of all marketing for the company, and although it is very new and small, I think that with social media I can definitely help the brand to grow. At this point, the social media is limited to a company Facebook page that I really don't know what to post other than about the camps being offered. With the knowledge from the class and from the blogs I will continue to read, I think I will be able to get a much better grasp of how to use this platform as a way of not only reaching out to current customers, but also to future customers who might be interested in the company. Overall I think that this class could be one of the most helpful and relevant classes I may take while in school.
Before I started, I went through many blogs of influential people who have many followers to better understand what I should be focusing on. The more I attempted to learn about social media through blogs, the more I realized just how little I actually know. The subject is so wide and diverse and involves so many more things than the average person thinks of. Most consider social media as Facebook and Twitter, simple ways to connect with others around them and to learn more about the world, but it is really so much wider and more complex. On Heidi Cohen's blog I found an interesting post containing 30 definitions of social media. Every single definition is different and brings in a new perspective of the idea, but they all have the same basic foundation, focused on a series of media platforms and tools that allow people to interact and share information. As simple as that may seem at first, it is clear that there is really so much more to the topic and I greatly look forward to learning more about it.
Although I am still quite a beginner when it comes to social media, I am greatly looking forward to being able to take advantage of all I learn and put it to actual use in my work. Right now I work for a very small sports company that runs soccer camps. I am basically in charge of all marketing for the company, and although it is very new and small, I think that with social media I can definitely help the brand to grow. At this point, the social media is limited to a company Facebook page that I really don't know what to post other than about the camps being offered. With the knowledge from the class and from the blogs I will continue to read, I think I will be able to get a much better grasp of how to use this platform as a way of not only reaching out to current customers, but also to future customers who might be interested in the company. Overall I think that this class could be one of the most helpful and relevant classes I may take while in school.
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