How to make social media work for your business – Create a strategy!

This site has now been replaced by www.drivingbusinessgrowth.co.uk. Subscribe to new site here http://drivingbusinessgrowth.co.uk/feed/

Read our latest blog at this new site on How to make social media work for your business – Create a strategy! - not to be missed.

Facebook Fan Page – Four Top Tips

Next up in this blog series is Facebook Fan Page. Having a fan page can be a really effective marketing tool for both Business to  Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) type businesses. A large portion of the B2C target market is probably on Facebook. A Fan Page can help maintain constant online engagement with existing customers while helping to find new ones. B2B businesses should also have a Fan Page – the reasons why are explained in the first of the following four top tips for using Facebook as a successful marketing tool.

Top Tip 1: Use a Fan Page to promote your B2B business

Yes, B2B type businesses should have a Facebook Fan Page. We’re often asked if this is the case. There are two main reasons why you should have a Fan Page. Firstly, a Fan Page will help improve the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website. Facebook is highly ranked in search engines, within the top 20 sites. Having a link to your website from a Fan Page provides a highly valued referral link, thus improving your website SEO for free. (The same goes for all social media tools.)

Secondly, it was reported last year that Facebook now gets more hits than Google. As more and more people use Facebook in their daily lives, the more likely it is that they are going to search for websites in Facebook rather than in Google. This recently generated a result for one B2B type business we know. A new client found them by searching on Facebook. You never know which platforms your potential customers are using to find the services that you offer.

Top Tip 2: Use Hootsuite to manage your Fan Page effectively

Hootsuite is a social media client application where you can post messages to various social media accounts like Twitter. You can add your Facebook Fan Page to Hootsuite. This means that potentially when you post to Twitter, you can simultaneously post to your Fan Page. This is a great time saver, especially for B2B type businesses who want to spend a minimum amount of time on their Facebook Fan Page while keeping it active with content.

Top Tip 3: Add 3rd party apps to your Fan Page

To make your Fan Page more interesting, add 3^rd party applications to it. Here’s a few we recommend; Twitter & YouTube tabs from Involver, Foursquare Tab from Place Widget and Blogs Tab from NetworkedBlogs. Using apps like these allows you to cross promote on several social media platforms. This is great for helping potential prospects to find and engage with you on the platforms they like using.  It’s also great for your website SEO.

Top Tip 4: Create a personal profile for work

This tip is more for B2C type businesses where the target market is more likely to be using Facebook. We recommend creating a new personal profile to manage your fan page that you use for work, keeping work separate from your personal life. You can then use this work personal profile to comment and engage on other industry related Fan Pages. Use a soft selling approach when commenting on other Fan Pages – draw attention to yourself and your Fan Page without scaring people off with a hard sell.

We hope you find these top tips useful. For more top tips follow us on Twitter at @cwitservices.

Thanks

Chris

CW IT Services

@cwitservices

Twitter – Four Top Tips

Next up in this blog series is Twitter. Twitter can be used as an effective marketing tool through helping interaction with an online community. Twitter can help you maintain constant engagement online with your existing customers while helping you find new ones. The following are four top tips for using Twitter as a successful marketing tool.

Top Tip 1: Use Hootsuite

Many businesses are still using Twitter.com to manage their Twitter profile, which has limited functionality compared to using social media client applications. The one we recommend is Hootsuite as this is browser based (allowing access anywhere where there is an internet connection) and has several features to enhance using Twitter. The other tool commonly used is Tweetdeck. However this is installed onto the computer itself so cannot be accessed elsewhere and doesn’t have as much as functionality at Hootsuite.

There are two key functions we like in Hootsuite. The first allows you to add other social media accounts like Facebook Fan page and LinkedIN to your Hootsuite account, allowing you to post a message to Twitter and other platforms too. This can be a great time saver. The second is the Mentions and Direct Message columns. This allows you to see at a quick glance if there are key messages you need to respond to – ideal if you don’t have the time to check your home feed that day.

Top Tip 2: Schedule Messages

You’ve been out all day and have a key message to post but it’s the evening and your audience is less likely to be online. Using Hootsuite you can schedule the message to go out the next day when your audience is more likely to be online. Again, this can be used not only for Twitter, but also for Facebook Fan pages and LinkedIn.

Top Tip 3: Keyword Searches

Like searching in a search engine, you can search in Twitter. This can be a way to find appropriate messages to respond to in order to promote your business. It can also be used for research if you want to track messages containing useful information and articles about your industry. This can be done in Twitter.com but again Hootsuite allows much more functionality and control over this. You can set up several keyword searches and quickly seeing the results in column streams. We know of one business that used searches on Twitter to find people who wanted quotes for the type of services that they offer. By providing quotes in this way, the business acquired a new client they wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Top Tip 4: Build Your Following

Our final top tip is to build your following using Twitter directories There are several available so we’ll just mention two. The first is a free one, Twellow, known as the Yellow Pages of Twitter. Here you can find Twitter profiles to follow by location or industry category. This way you are following Twitter profiles in your target market and the intention is that they will follow you back (this cannot be guaranteed as the action is dependent on them reciprocating). The second one is Tweetadder, which is a paid-for tool where you can automatically follow profiles based on automated keyword searches. This tool can also automatically un-follow those that do not follow back after a few days so that your ratio of followed to followers doesn’t become too disproportionate.

We hope you find these top tips useful. For more top tips follow us on Twitter at @cwitservices.

Thanks

Chris

CW IT Services

Likeminds Autumn 2010 Conference – Day Two

Day Two

“How to Grow your Business in the 21^st Century” by Shaa Wasmund (@shaawasmund) at Royal Clarence Hotel

Another really informative seminar. Sha Wasmund has worked with some top entrepreneurs (http://shaawasmund.com/about/) and I could no doubt spend a day just listening and learning from what she has to say. I would love to hear more about when she worked with Chris Eubank as that boxing era along with Frank Bruno and Mike Tyson stick vividly in my mind. Key points I took from this session included:

• www.smartma.com – free business info from entrepreneurs like Shaa Wasmund.
• What is growth? For me I found the following relevant: where you want to be, tangible/intangible goals, personal fulfilment.
• Own up to mistakes, to yourself and to your team.

o       Allows yourself to learn from your mistakes and move forward from them.

o       Makes it easier for the team to own up to mistakes and learn from them.

• If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
• Take action, just do it. (Or as one of my old bosses use to say JFDI, just f****** do it, in a tongue and cheek way that the whole team adopted whenever we undertook IT project implementations.)
• Work hard, analyse and take risks – all top entrepreneurs have taken high risks at some point to get where they are now.
• Don’t care if they say NO.
• Have a positive view of what you can do, ignore the negative, focus daily on the positive.

o       Don’t dwell on negatives, accept and learn, then move forward.

• Twitter searches could become bigger and more important as they’re real time search results, whereas Google searches in the past.
• There are 3 key things businesses need to focus on; Technology, Collaboration & Flexibility.
• If you want to promote social media events to businesses not yet on social media – understand what they read, where they find info, what their forum is to find events or info.

o       robglover_uk also expanded on this by suggesting to find the trade sector events businesses attend and going along to them.

• One of the delegates recommended amplify.com – allows more than 140 characters.

“Catapulting your business to market leadership in your niche” by Robert Clay

• Lunch with Robert Clay and others at Carluccios
• www.Eventbrite.com – site recommended to promote events online.
• Blogs can help to develop you as authority in your industry. If there are different areas of the business, create individual blogs that focus on these particular markets.
• Don’t just always seek more customers to increase sales. Instead, look at where in the business the existing customer base could be encouraged to spend more, through upselling, product pricing and regular communication.
• Invite to Exeter City football match courtesy of new shirt sponsors Follet Stock – thanks @jonathanlea.

Afternoon Speakers

• Again felt lost with the format. At one point, along with @alexanderlund, we struggled to debate on the media issues around music and video, much probably to @joannejacobs dismay in trying to film us and prompt us with questions. So I don’t think they’ll be showing that video on the website. (How did @robglover_uk escape that one when he was right next to me one minute and not the next?)
• What I really enjoyed was joining in online to the #likeminds feed and #24hrtweet for St Loyes charity. Bring back the lemmings game I say and did anyone pull after looking into someone’s eyes? No confirmation yet on Twitter, so seems unlikely.
• Although I did feel the best was left to the end with the penultimate speaker Andrew Dubber (@dubber) on the music industry. He gave us the shocking statistic that 95% of music is lost in the archives due to the copyright laws, which obviously need changing with the digital age now here. This was followed by the final speaker, Robin Wight (@robinwightuk) from Engine, dressed in a bright purple suit and giving a superb, enlightening and lively presentation on what he tries to achieve with media. He used some great examples, which is what I was looking for from the other afternoon speakers. I’ll be checking out their website http://www.theenginegroup.com/, their blog http://www.theenginegroup.com/news-and-blog/blog and following them on social media platforms.

Thats all folks. Please feel free to post back your own comments or blog links on the Likeminds conference as would love to hear what others gained from this event.

Chris Wood

@CWITServices

Likeminds Autumn 2010 Conference – Day One

Last week I attended the Likeminds Autumn 2010 conference in Exeter. Below are the key points I picked up that I want to remember and apply to my business. They are a combination of what the speakers said and my own thoughts inspired by the conference. I thought I’d share them in case they are of interest to readers of this blog too.

Overall this conference was a superb event organised by #likeminds who did a great job hosting it across Exeter City centre. It was great to see so many people there who had come from so far away. I would definitely consider attending the next conference and would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet been to one of these conferences.

Day One

“How to use Social Media for Small Business” – Joanna Jacobs (@joannejacobs) at Exeter Conference Centre

I found this a really informative seminar which confirmed the extent of my knowledge of social media tools (which was very reassuring). It also highlighted a few new areas where I could learn more, in order to be able to consider the full spectrum of strategic elements with social media. The breadth of the subject always surprises me – every time I think I’ve got everything covered, I discover something new. But that’s what makes it such an exciting and dynamic area to work in. The key points I picked up in this session are:

• Traditional marketing based companies are struggling with the concept of how Social Media can compliment offline marketing. Ultimately social media is another stream or activity of a sales and marketing strategy – something we (with @higherassociates) try to tackle at our Developing Online Sales Strategy seminar.
• The return on social media should be tracked based on what you want to gain from it, not the stats, i.e. not no. of followers or unique visitors. There has to be a valid meaning to the stats to make them relevant to the business or there’s no point in using them, i.e. qualitative not quantitative.
• Social media is ideal for social CRM, alternatively known as VRM – vendor relationship management – as it allows customers to engage with vendors. Dell is a great example of how to do this very successfully.
• Online bookmarking sites are some of one of the most underused tools – see Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious for example. (From my own research these are great for promoting blogs as these tools are ranked within top 300 of search engines.)
• Sites to check out as examples of blog sites, customer engagement sites and forums that companies use to control where negative feedback is placed on the web (away from the corporate website) instead of trying to stop it:

o       www.fastlane.gmblogs.com

o       www.butlersheetmetal.com/tinbasherblog

o       www.facebook.com/vodafoneuk

o       www.facebook.com/devonuk

o       others to check are Starbucks, Disney, Oxfam UK, Exeter leukaemia fund

• Product Development – social media can really help to get customer engagement in developing new products.
• Wiki is good for providing knowledge or for crisis management – get a community to respond to issues and help resolve them or use it as a way of internal communication and rollout strategies for staff (put behind company firewall to keep internal).
• Will Facebook Places replace Foursquare? It was argued that Foursquare is not meeting its goal, that Facebook Places might replace it and be used instead for workflow management by companies. (I.e. A firm managing plumbers across a city can assign them to the most local jobs as they come in during the day.)

o       Interestingly I spoke to a few people about Foursquare in the afternoon and they said they still feel it is useful for venue based businesses and is still at early adoption phase. I guess we’ll find out during the course of the next year.

• Financial Services firms could still consider social media even though they are heavily regulated. See www.facebook.com/hrblock for an example.
• Www.boardtracker.com – access many bulletin boards in one search, great research tool and the potential to engage with customers on their domain.
• Break down time spent on social media into:

1.      Contributing

2.      Listening/researching

3.      Performance monitoring (don’t spend more than 2hrs per week on this).

• More people need to spend more time listening, too many are just contributing.
• www.socialmention.com – Lets you search social media content for keywords, company names etc. The stats are more relevant for identifying negative feedback.
• www.addictomatic.com – was one of the key stats tools I picked out that I’m not currently using. (Here’s a search on likeminds: http://addictomatic.com/topic/likeminds.)
• One SEO consultant lost 30% of work due to businesses using social media to improve their SEO instead. He is now having to use social media himself as one of his SEO techniques for his clients. (I’ve seen the impact of social media on SEO with my own website, where I’ve tracked my website ranking in Alexa. It has gone from being ranked 800,000 to 100,000 in UK search engines in 6 months, largely due to my social media activities.)
• Businesses need to implement a social media policy that covers internal use, linking with the company’s website and external use. Check out Dell’s at http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~section=019
• It was predicted 80% of users by 2014 will be using smartphones, so businesses need to ensure their websites are accessible by smartphones.

“Social media for good” – Tiffany St James (@tiffanystjames)

• Lunch with @tiffanystjames and others at Café Rouge, great roast chicken.
• There is a tweet plugin to potentially tweet as you present using slides – very intriguing – worth considering for the next Developing Online Sales Strategy seminar 18^th Nov.
• www.Socialgo.com – build social media enabled websites – no website knowledge required.
• www.Meetup.com – promote events online.
• @wearetechmap – host social media events

Afternoon Speakers at Exeter Conference Centre

• A bit lost here with format, would have preferred hearing how businesses or people are using media with case studies rather than stats and media conjecture issues, then having to debate the latter. This is a personal preference with no doubt others liking the format.
• Although I look forward to seeing the videos of the debates with @robglover_uk and @mattyoungmedia.
• Of particular interest was Robert Clay (@marketingwizdom) who collated his marketing info library to become knowledgeable on the subject, even though he had a natural knack for marketing.

o       Collating online info in an online tool – http://www.evernote.com/

For Day Two please click here.

LinkedIN – Four Top Tips

Next up in the blog series covering top tips for using key internet and social marketing tools to promote your business online is LinkedIN. LinkedIN can be an effective marketing tool by promoting knowledge through it to your network connections and allowing people to find you, which in turn will help to build trust with them. The following are our four top tips in using LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool.

Top Tip 1: Join In

Did you know that there are discussion groups where you can join in on either within your industry sector or local business area?  This is great for interacting with others online who you may or may not be connected with.  I recently promoted a seminar via a local business network discussion group, where it helped provide new material for the presentation I was working on. I not only responded on a one to one basis through the ongoing discussion, but then added that material to the presentation so that delegates attending the seminar could benefit too. It also helped broker introductions to people who I hadn’t meet at that time but then did so at the seminar event.

This is one area where not only Business to Business (B2B) type businesses can benefit from LinkedIN but also Business to Consumer (B2C) type businesses. We know one online retail business uses discussions groups to help keep up to date within their industry as well as potentially seek out new suppliers.

Top Tip 2: Answers

There are questions you can answer on LinkedIn regarding most industries. This is a great way, along with discussion groups, to promote knowledge and in turn build trust with your online network connections and new potential contacts. This and other activities you undertake within LinkedIN is promoted by them within their weekly email updates. (NB the home page only promotes status updates and discussion group updates, along with people you may know). People who I’m connected with are often picking up through these emails on some of the activities I’m up to via LinkedIn.

Anyway I digress, in answering questions, not only the person who asked the questions will see it but others who participate will do so too. The person who asked the question can also potentially rate your answer as the best one and this promotes you within “This Week’s Top Experts” section of the Answers page on LinkedIN. All this enables you to reach out to a wider audience, and it has been known on the odd occasions to lead to work for some people who regularly partake in this on LinkedIn.

Top Tip 3: Recommendations

Request recommendations from people who you are connected with and have undertaken work for. It is an easy way to collate testimonials in one place, where again these are mentioned in LinkedIN’s weekly email updates. As well as then re-using these recommendations on your testimonial page of your website and other promotional material. I know from people who have given me recommendations that other businesses have checked with them prior to then undertaking work with me.

In addition LinkedIN will list you as a Service Provider on their database so that people could potentially search for the type of service that you offer and then see the recommendations you have been given. It’s a good idea to try and get at least one a month (where possible) to keep yourself towards the top of the recommendation table for your industry sector.

Top Tip 4: No Escaping Twitter

A feature I would like to promote more on LinkedIN is the Tweets application. At the moment it would seem only half my network connections have Twitter profiles. Now some of this will be people without Twitter profiles and the rest will be those not yet aware of the Tweets application you can add into LinkedIN.

By clicking on More then the Application Directory, you will see several useful applications listed (even if you don’t have a Twitter profile still check this out as there may be other applications you might find useful to use instead). Within this list is the Tweets application and by adding this you can see from who your connections are has a Twitter profile. This is a great way to find more people to follow who are very likely to follow you back, as you’ve probably connected with them for a reason.

Share your own top tips

CW IT services hopes you’ve found these four top tips for LinkedIN useful and interesting. There are many other tips we can give on LinkedIN and we do provide one to one training if you are interested in knowing more. And no doubt some of you reading this probably have some of your own, so please feel free to post them as we would love to hear them and share them with others.

Thanks

Chris

CW IT Services

@cwitservices

CW IT Services have partnered with AME Solutions to provide an Internet and Social Media workshop for businesses who would like help in this area. Click here for details.

We are also co-hosting a Developing Online Sales Strategy seminar with Higher Associates on 18^th November. Click here for details.

Google Ads – Seven Top Tips

Google Ads – Seven Top Tips

 

This is the first blog in a series we have planned for the next few months that will look at “seven top tips” for using key internet and social marketing tools to promote your business. We are beginning with Google Ads – pay-per-click advertising that appears in Google search engine results. If set-up correctly, Google Ads can be a cheap effective way to market your business online. With almost real time tracking of advert performance, Google ads are much more flexible than, for example, magazine advertising. However, unless they are set correctly, they can become expensive to run for the returned gained. The following seven top tips will help you to get the most from your Google ads.

Top Tip 1: Location, location, location

Did you know you can set-up your Google Ad campaign to reflect the location of your target market? For example, if you are providing a local service to Exeter businesses then you might set the location to cover a 20 mile radius around Exeter. When someone uses the Google search engine, Google is able (in most cases) to work out where that person is located from the network address that the broadband provider uses for that location. Google will pick up their location and show adverts relevent to that location.

For example CW IT Services advertises computer support in Exeter and in a 20 mile radius around the city. If someone based in Exeter searches for computer support, they can just enter “computer support” into the search engine and this will show our advert (providing it is active at that time). If the person was searching in Birmingham, our advert wouldn’t appear. This saves us paying for wasted click-throughs from people who will not use our business because they are not local.

The default setting is for the UK. This can be broken down into four separate countries, extended to include other parts of Europe or the world or extended to include all of the globe.

Top Tip 2: Sync with Google Places

You can sync your Google Ad campaign with Google Places so that your location is mentioned with the advert. (Providing you have Google Places set-up – if not do so now as it is quick, easy and free to do!) If the advert appears in the top three slots, it is also shown on a map location when the plus symbol is clicked on. This is a great way to attract people looking for a service local to where they live or work.

Top Tip 3: Include a phone number

Blackberries, iPhones and other similar devices are now being used more and more for Google searches. Google recently enabled their ads to show phone numbers on these devices. This means people searching can simply click on a number and call a business. This conveniently saves them having to remember the number or make a note of it. Don’t miss out on this market by not including your phone number – your competitors might include theirs and get the call instead!

Top Tip 4: Scheduling

Google Ads by default run 24hrs seven days a week but does your business? Set your adverts to only appear when you want to work and when people are most likely to be looking for your product or service. If you are a business to business (B2B) type business, then it’s quite likely you run Monday to Friday, 9am to 5am Therefore you probably don’t want to be advertising on a Saturday or Sunday. If you have a business to consumer (B2C) type business then you may want to advertise seven days a week but you might not want to advertise all day. You could just advertise between 8am and 10pm to maximise the effectiveness of your ad campaign. Tailoring your adverts in this way avoids  wasted click-throughs.

For example, CW IT services customers often want assistance on the same day so we don’t advertise at the weekend when we are unavailable. However we do run our adverts from 8am to 8pm during the week to catch people  starting work early or staying late as we can often assist on the same or next working day.

Please click here to read tips 5, 6 & 7.

Google Ads – Seven Top Tips Continued

Top Tip 5: Negative Keywords

The most important tip of all – if you are going to pick-up just one tip from this blog and implement it, this is the ONE! Negative keywords are used to stop adverts appearing as the result of Google searches on certain words. This avoids wasted click-throughs and preserves our budget for our target market. For example, the keyword “computer support” has approximately 300 related keywords that a CW IT Services advert could appear to in Google search engine results. Some of these we want our advert to appear to, such as “computer help”, “it support”, and “pc support” etc. Others we don’t want it to appear to such as “24hr computer support”, “cheap computers”, “build your own PC”. This is because we don’t offer any of these services or products.

The Google Keyword Tool is great for finding the keywords related to the main ones we are using. We find it best to export the results to Excel, insert a new column and mark Y/N to each keyword based on whether it is related to the service we offer. We then organise this column by N and copy those keywords that we don’t want our advert to appear to into the Negative keywords area in our Ad Campaign configuration on Google.

Implementing negative keywords could help you save at least a third of your Google Ad campaign costs.

Top Tip 6: Turn off Content Networks

There are two networks that are switched on by default on when you set up a Google Ad campaign. One is Google search engines and the other is Content Networks. These are the places where adverts appear.

Content Networks are other websites that have been enabled to show Google Ads. They’re not as effective for advertising as Google search engines for two reasons. Firstly, when someone searches in a Google search engine they are actually looking for something specific. Therefore they are more likely to be interested in a product or service than if they just notice it on another website they are browsing. Secondly, negative keywords do not work effectively on Content Networks and this can lead to more advert impressions on other websites and in-turn more click-throughs. A higher percentage of these click-throughs will be wasted as people are more likely to be just browsing than to be specifically interested in your business.

CW IT services turns Content Networks off for our own and client advertising campaigns. We also advise when providing training on how to set-up Google Ad campaigns. One of our clients now saves £50 a month by turning this off and it hasn’t led to a drop in sales.

Top Tip 7: Landing Page

This is the page that a person lands on when they’ve clicked on an advert in a Google search engine. This doesn’t have to be a websites home page. For example, if someone searches for computer support and clicks on a CW IT Services advert, the click would lead to our IT support page. We know from their keyword search that this is what they are specifically interested in and it means they don’t have to navigate through our website to find the relevant information. If someone has to navigate from a home page to find the information they are really interested in, they are more likely to just quickly exit the website and try another advert. This is not only a wasted click-through but also a potential customer lost to a competitor.

Implementing the Seven Top Tips

Depending on how many Google Ad campaigns you are running, it can take from one hour to several hours to implement these seven top tips. Google Ad campaigns should also be monitored on a weekly basis to maximise page placements for the adverts, the keyword budget and to gradually introduce new keywords and ads over time. We appreciate that time is money, so if you are worried about how long this would take and would prefer to concentrate instead on what you do best, call in CW IT Services to help set-up and run your Google ad campaigns. We have Bronze, Silver and Gold packages to all suit all budgets. You may even find the money you will save from having these top tips implemented (as other clients have found) will pay for our ongoing services, in addition to driving more new customers to your website. Contact us to find out more.

Share your own top tips

 

CW IT services hopes you’ve found these seven top tips campaign useful and interesting. We think they will help you to minimise wasted click-throughs and to maximise your budget. Please feel free to comment and if you have your own top tips please post them as we would love to hear them and share them with others.

Thanks

Chris

@CW IT Services

CW IT Services have partnered with AME Solutions to provide an Internet and Social Media workshop for small businesses who would like help in this area. Click here for details.

 

We are also co-hosting a Developing Online Sales Strategy seminar with Higher Associates on 8^th October. Click here for details.

Internet and Social Marketing – The End Results

In the last blog we talked about what internet and social marketing is, some of the main tools involved and how you can use them for business. The question we keep getting asked is “What’s the return?” In this blog we are going to cover the results CW IT has seen from our internet and social marketing strategy.

Previously we relied on traditional forms of marketing and found that they just were not helping us attract clients. Face to face networking was the only thing that validated our business model. Using internet and social marketing instead has made a dramatic difference to our business. It has allowed potential clients to find us, instead of us having to find them. We have been able to schedule more work in advance instead of having to wait to react to support calls. In these cases, our clients have come to us with non-urgent IT issues that they would like help in resolving, over time, in order to improve their day to day business operations. As a result, at the moment, we get our work from roughly three sources; internet and social marketing, face to face networking and referrals.

Internet Marketing Strategy

We use Google Ads and Google Places to ensure we have a page one presence on Google for related local industry type searches. This had allowed clients to contact us once they have found us in a prominent position within the sponsored ad section of the search engine results. They have also found us locally on Google Maps.

We also use Google Analytics and Webmaster to understand how our website is performing on a monthly basis. This allows us to understand where visitors come from to visit our website, so that we can further improve our search engine optimisation. This increases our number of monthly visitors and, in turn, the number of enquiries we receive.

Social Marketing Strategy

We use social media platforms to promote our industry knowledge to build trust and customer loyalty. On Twitter we provide daily IT support tips in the morning and internet & social marketing tips in the afternoon. This is helping us build a local, national and international following. Even at the weekends, when we are not tweeting, we have picked up a few new followers by Monday morning. This is because the keyword searches they have in their Twitter client application are picking up our tweets. If they like what they read they decide to follow us.

At the moment our focus is very much on the local market, but we have a long term plan for national and international markets, so it is still worth building up this following. People have followed us first on Twitter and then used our services. Followers have also generated us referrals. Twitter is great for constantly reminding followers about all the services you provide so that you spring to their mind when they know someone else who may require them.

We request recommendations on LinkedIN whenever we do work for one of our network connections. This has allowed other network connections to see testimonials about the work we have done before they use our services themselves. We also regularly try to answer questions and join discussion groups to promote our industry knowledge.

At the moment we have had no direct work through our Facebook fan page as it is not really where our core client base is. A fan page is more relevant to the B2C market than the B2B market. But we still use it as it is a highly valued referral link by Google for search engine optimisation purposes. We have seen visitors click through from our fan page to our website. So if this continues it may lead to some work.

 

Please feel free to comment with your own experiences using Internet and Social Marketing, whether it is working for you or not, what works well for your business, what is holding you back etc. This feedback will be useful as I’ll be presenting at the Exeter Business Network August seminar on a practical overview in how to use these main tools to promote your business online.  So I’ll look to incorporate this and where possible address the issues for what isn’t working well for some businesses.

CW IT Services have partnered with AME Solutions to provide an Internet and Social Media workshop for small businesses who would like help in this area. Click here for details.

 

Chris Wood

CW IT Services

Internet & Social Marketing – Part 4 – Managing your contacts and where to go for help

This is CW IT Services’ final blog about using internet and social marketing to promote your business. We’ve outlined a lot of different ways to build contacts and attract potential customers online. We hope you’ve found them helpful. Now we’d like to outline how you can manage your contacts. We’ll finish by letting you know about the services we offer that can help you try some of the tactics we’ve described. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

CRM systems enable you to store and manage all your contacts in one place. This allows you to organise, automate and synchronise businesses processes (marketing, sales, customer services and support) to avoid duplication of effort. In particular a CRM system allows you to track sales leads through to completion. At the moment we’re in the process of implementing such a system ourselves.

You can send eShots (professional looking marketing emails) to your contacts and track who clicks through to your website, so that you can then follow up with them. This is a good way of making your current clients aware of other services that you may provide that they may not be aware of. We’re planning to send regular eshot newsletters for this purpose. We’ll also include IT tips to promote our industry knowledge and provide recipients with valuable content. Some CRM systems also allow you to link into third party applications like LinkedIN. This helps streamline your introductions when you’ve identified potential new customers.

How CW IT Services Can Help

Now that you’ve read about all these tools and tactics, you may be thinking:

• I am interested in doing something like this for my business but where do I start?
• I’m not IT literate enough to use these tools.
• I don’t have the time for this. (As obviously this can be a lot to take on in addition to your day job.) 

This is where CW IT Services can assist you. We use these tools a lot to promote our own business and we are seeing benefits from having this approach to sales lead generation. We have a good understanding of IT (we provide IT support to small businesses) and this puts us in a strong position to help small businesses like yours get up and running using these tools.

We can provide you with direction about where to start and help you get comfortable with one or two tools before you take on the rest. For example, if you first want to improve:

• Website content… use Website Analytics and Webmaster.
• Search engine presence… use Google Ad words and Local Business Center.
• Online networking… use LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Manage your contacts better and improve your sales leads process… use a CRM system and LinkedIN. 

We can provide training on these tools tailored to your business needs so that you can learn how to use them yourself. This can save you valuable time. We can manage some of the tools on your behalf, to allow you to concentrate on what you do best. Internet and social marketing is an ever changing and rapidly growing world. We are always learning something new (and what to avoid) through using these tools ourselves. Your business could potentially benefit from this knowledge too.

For a free consultation about how CW IT Services can help your business with any of these internet and social marketing tactics, please contact:

Chris Wood
07805 512979
support@cwit.co.uk
www.cwit.couk

IT Support tips every working day at 11.30am Internet & Social Marketing tips every working day at 3.30pm

See CW IT Services at Network Central, The Matford Centre, Exeter,
EX2 8DF – 22^nd April 2010 – Stand 32.