Over the past few months, I’ve been traveling around the country giving a presentation on how small and mid-sized local businesses can leverage social media tools to improve the effectiveness of their Internet marketing efforts.
This past week I spoke to a group of about 100 home design professionals at the Denver Design Center. The event was hosted by our magazines, Colorado Home & Lifestyles and Mountain Living.
Internet marketing is a tough nut to crack for local businesses. Build a web site, and then what? While the opportunity is seemingly infinite, the reality is more spare. Your web site will get a natural amount of traffic from people who are searching specifically for your company name, but options are fairly limited beyond that.
Google? You’ll get decent traffic if you are one of the first 3 paid search results, or one of the first 10 natural search results. Each of those take expertise and effort, and the success of both in terms of building your business depends on how well your web site is designed to convert visitors into leads.
Paid listings on local directories? You’ll pick up some amount of traffic, and have the advantage of knowing that your phone number is typically a key element of the business profile. But the traffic isn’t overwhelming.
So, in the end, most local businesses — even those run by younger, techno-savvy entrepreneurs — look at the web as a place that should offer more value to their business than it does.
Social media tools can change that dynamic, I argue in these presentations. With a little bit of effort, and, usually, a change in mindset, a local business can connect with its customers, embed itself in a web of social networks, and create more valuable traffic to their web site by sharing content about things that they are interested in.
You can see a copy of the presentation here. My focus is on placing the challenges of internet marketing in the context of building their business and on showing how they can use social media tools to change the productivity of their internet marketing.
At the Denver Design Center, I got two interesting questions.
The first wondered about the value of having a Facebook Fan Page. The question was posed by a woman who provides services to an upscale clientele with refined aesthetic sensibilities. “I look at what people are talking about on Facebook. ‘I just had a bran muffin,’ they’ll post. That’s not my customer! Why should I be spending my time on them?”
In my response, I tried to address a common misperception about the activity on a social networking platform like Facebook. Some of us, when we follow the mundane details of some of our ‘friends,” wonder their efforts to make the trivial important.
As an acquaintance, that may influence my opinion about the individual. As a marketer, I shouldn’t care. After all, I don’t follow the customers of my business around when they are at the mall, watching to see what they eat at the Food Court, or what kind of things they are buying at Victoria’s Secret. I just want to be sure that my business is top of mind when they think about buying the service that I offer.
The Facebook Fan page is like a storefront in the biggest town square in the world. Facebook has become, for many people, the operating system of their life, where they do e-mail, chat, plan, share, interact….and search, even. As a marketer, you want to be on that town square.
A second question came from a woman who articulated a frustration that is common among businesses that expand their touch points to the consumer.
Illustration by Ton Zijlstra
“When I do some of this kind of marketing,” she said, “I get a lot of responses from people who have a lot of questions. I start to think that they are just looking for free advice, and that they never intend to become customers.”
A number of people in the audience looked surprised at the question. After all, isn’t the point to talk to as many people as you can so that you can find more clients and build your business?
But, for many people who have built a business around a tight network of referrals and a highly-targeted marketing program, the idea of opening up their sphere of influence to include a much wider range of people is discomforting. The time spent answering the inquiries doesn’t feel like it pays off.
The reality is that even if you want to keep your sphere of influence tight, leveraging social media can impact your business. In this instance, I suggested to the woman that she can keep her network of connections very limited, reaching out to key customers and peers in the market on a platform like Facebook. She can use a blog to share content or images that are consistent with the psychographics of her customer base. She can limit the number of ways that people can contact her, driving them primarily to e-mail,for instance. And, those inquiries that she feels are completely unqualified, she can ignore.
If I’m suggesting that she put multiple barriers up around her social system, then when would I encourage her to do it at all? Because the value of connecting with customers and peers that she values will expand the intensity and engagement of her sphere of influence. She’ll experience more qualified leads from her social sphere. And, the people who are included in her community will understand the exclusivity of the inclusion, lending prestige and value to her personal brand.
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The change in participation levels between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008 was striking. However, a core discovery was that a small group of participants were active content creators, and a somewhat larger group were active participants in what Forrester calls Critics, who post comments to blogs, contribute to forums and participate in ratings and reviews.
This activity becomes clear in looking at Facebook’s most recent usage statistics. Overall, the company claims more than 200 million active users around the world, of whom 100 million log onto the service at least once every day. They are spending more than 5 billion minutes on the service every day, up 70% from February 2009.
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