Are you a small business that is just starting out and needs to know what to focus on most? Of course with opening your own business, you know that there are many important things that you need to put your energy toward. I do not personally own a small business, but I've worked with many small business owners and based off of my own experiences, below are my personal top five marketing focal points for small businesses.
1) Social media platforms
Social media platforms are great; they are free and they are easy. They work well in trying to get out your message in an effective and engaging way. Social media platforms are growing in users and variety and really can cater to any kind of business.
Social media comes with its challenges, however. Although the platforms are free to use, they are not free to run when you take into account your time and effort that goes into them. And yes the platforms are easy, but you must learn the difference between how to run a personal account and how to run a business account!
Networking events are a great way to market your business and yourself as a business owner. Many events have a networking portion where you go around the room to hand out your business card and collect others in exchange. There are also events hosted that are purely for networking; at these events people are asking to be told about your business and how it can help them. Be sure to prep your elevator speech and bring plenty of business cards.
Networking does take time, effort, and a little bit of money, but can pay off quickly when you meet that client that can help take your business off the ground!
3) Purchase a good website
You are going to want to pay a little more to get a website that is fully functional for your business needs, is mobile optimized, and has great SEO. Of course you want to live within your means when purchasing a website, but you want remember to create a website that is easy to use and provides your customers with valuable information. In this day and age, you need to make sure that your website is mobile capable if not mobile optimized. Many customers now access their information on a phone versus a computer—you want to make sure you aren't stopping your customers from doing so! And finally you want to spend at least a little time on SEO for your site. You need to make sure customers can find you via search queries and that you have a high page rank.
Websites can get expensive quickly, so make sure to be prepared for a large total if you are looking to build a large website with all the bells and whistles.
Blogs do many great things for your business and your website. It provides your customers with valuable information in addition to providing a reason for them to keep coming back to your site! If you are consistent on the timing of your blog as well as providing great content, you will attract subscribers and in turn, customers. An extra benefit of having a blog is that it keeps your site active and shows Google you are making updates to your site often, proving that you are a business that does real business!
Blogging does take time and effort to do correctly. You need to post consistently and constantly come up with new topic ideas that you think will interest your customer enough to make them subscribe.
Spend a little extra money and get custom-designed, high-quality business cards. Having these from the start help you to establish your brand and your credibility. Business cards can be used at networking events as well as your place of business; they help to remind your customers you exist!
They can be expensive to get designed, but your business will thank you later.
Of course the marketing tips for small businesses are truly unlimited. Do you own a small business? What marketing tips do you have for potential entrepreneurs?
"Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere." ~Paul Ryan
Posted by
Brian Town on Mon, May 13, 2013 @ 03:31 PM
The Ramblings Of A Michigan Creative CEO
So, I have been getting on my staff to make sure they blog. So, Jessica, our video production manager, (Michigan Creative Video) being the super organized person that she is, put everyone on a schedule. Well, that also meant me. So, here I am, the day of, writing my blog.
I do need to blog more, and I advise every business that has a web site to blog and encourage your employees to blog as well. Blogging is good for many reasons.
1) Writing is always good! It gives you and your staff a chance to express themselves, and sometimes you will find a wealth of knowledge in an employee that may not say it out loud.
2) Blogs are keyword rich content for your website. Google loves content. We find that our blogs battle for the number one spot!
3) It gives you authority on your subject. Customers like to see the CEO and employees blog and share their knowledge and passion for their company.
Now that I gave you all that great advice, I better come up with the most amazing CEO blog that has ever been, right? The pressure...
Even the word CEO seems funny to me. I mean, that is what I am, but we are small, with big dreams...I am trying to get my beautiful wife to call me CEO at home. That is not going so well. She is the CEO there for sure.
We have been operating full time out of the TIC in East Lansing for two years now. We have grown from just me, to six part time amazing people, and six amazing interns. So things are going well. We still have big plans, dreams, hopes, and sometimes trying to stay focused on today, and tomorrow, becomes problematic. My blog today will simply give you some advice; things not to do (that I did), what I learned from them, and what I hope not to do again.
1) Get organized. Today. A very successful Doctor and client of ours told me that. You have to have a place for everything. I have Jessica and Melissa to help me with that, but I have also started folders for every client, to do lists that actually have an order and purpose, and forms, etc etc.
2) A beer and a handshake won’t be good enough. I thought, hey this is new, fresh, we are different and I wanted to be that guy or that company that a handshake and a cold one would be a good enough contract. We got burned on that a few times. Even though you might be an entrepreneur, old business ways still need to be a part of the plan. Write up detailed contracts for your clients; they outline exactly what you will be providing and gives them a neat little place to sign off on it.
3) Get away from the computer and your desk. I say this as I have been sitting here for five hours today doing just that. At first, it will be just you, doing everything. But at some point you are going to hire people, and allow them to handle the brunt of the work. You, as the CEO, the leader, need to have the vision, make connections with clients, meet other CEO’s and business owners. I will sit here for hours, my butt hurts, my neck hurts, and I don’t feel accomplished. But, every time I get out for a walk around East Lansing, or I go to a networking event, or even set up meetings with past clients, I feel great, and usually come back with new business.
4) Stick with it. It is hard. But worth it. I get frustrated, stressed out, worried, but when I am out hunting, or out working on the farm, I know that what I am building is amazing, and I am the only one that can make it work. I also can be the only one to make it fail...but don’t think like that...and if you see me, remind me.
5) Hire great people. This is the single most important thing I did. Of course I do not look forward to pay day like the rest of you. Yes, I have to pay on pay day. I may have more money to myself if I did not have so many employees, but I don’t think that the job would get done right. They are better than me, and that is why I hired them. My favorite quote is, “A great leader makes everyone around him better than he is.” The staff at Michigan Creative makes that easy.
Well, that is it for now. To sum it up, I love my staff, my company, and our city and state. I have made so many mistakes, some twice or more...but I am learning and growing every day. I think the day I stop making mistakes is a good day to retire....
Talk soon.
Brian Town, CEO
*also another tip, get a really big dog, and bring him to the office alot!
I am completing a three-part series on social media platforms for businesses with one blog for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Welcome to Part 3!
I will be highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of using Pinterest based on my own experience; I do social media marketing for almost ten different companies, so I'll be sure to take the best of the best advice to pass on to you!
Let's begin with the advantages of using Pinterest for your business:
1) Pinterest is a visual platform: In general, people are lazy! Pinterest makes it easy to visually share things related to your business as well as your product without requiring the user to do all that much work.
2) It's easy-really easy: Pinterest is basically a digital bulletin board and they make it work exactly as such. It's also very easy to browse content and search specifically for content for your pages.
3) Just like other social media platforms, you don't have to just talk about your business: Let's say you own a flooring company. You can make boards for the wood you sell and picture of houses you've done. You can also make boards of neat home remodel ideas, pin about the town your business is based out of, and even a DIY board for home improvements. The possibilities are endless with Pinterest and it's easy to gain interest just by having interesting content.
4) You can use hashtags and key terms to make your content more searchable: Just like Twitter, you can add hashtags to your pin to increase the reach of your pin.
5) It's good for your SEO: Google indexes Pinterest and can help your SEO greatly.
Pinterest is still new, so some of the disadvantages may be fixed soon. But for now, here are the disadvantages:
1) You can't schedule posts ahead of time: Pinterest does not have an internal scheduling system like Facebook. There are some early developed third party applications that let you "pre-pin", but I have yet to have the time to try to use it.
2) It's easy to create a "flood" in the stream of pins: A flood is created when you pin onto the same board many times over; this give the user a "flood" of pins from that board. This will often cause the user to skip over the entire bunch of pins.
3) It's a little difficult to get users to follow your brand: Pinterest is on the newer side as far as social media goes, so some users are still unfamiliar with the platform. Following company pages and brands is even newer. An added challenge is balancing promotional content with content users are interested in.
4) Watch out for copyright infringement and spam: Sometimes users pin things that they are not supposed to. Always click on the pin and see where it goes to make sure it is what the pin says it is!
Pinterest is new but it is growing quickly! Grab your business name as soon as you can and pin away.
Have you began a business Pinterest page? What do you like to pin for your business?
Until next time!
~Melissa
So I was playing around with jQuery this weekend and wanted to do something fairly simple. A good hour or so later I was finally able to walk away from the computer comfortably with a completed 4 button navigation that upon click swaps the contents of the div. Each div has a close button so you can go back to the normal state whenever you want.
The HTML:
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="icons">
<a href="#testa"><div id="test1">a</div></a>
<a href="#testb"><div id="test2">b</div></a>
<a href="#testc"><div id="test3">c</div></a>
<a href="#testd"><div id="test4">d</div></a>
</div> <div id="content">
<div id="testa"><p><a class="close" href="#">close</a>
<br />content a</p></div>
<div id="testb"><p><a class="close" href="#">close</a>
<br />content b</p></div>
<div id="testc"><p><a class="close" href="#">close</a>
<br />content c</p></div>
<div id="testd"><p><a class="close" href="#">close</a>
<br />content d</p></div>
</div>
</div>
Pretty simple. A main wrapper to hold the whole thing, an icon wrapper to hold the anchored divs and a content wrapper holding the content divs. One part to pay close attention to is the a's href value in the icon wrapper, for each navigation button the anchor tag is linked to the id name of the class related to that body content.
(EX. <a href="#test1">Link 1</a> and <div id="test1">content test 1</div>) In the example, you will see the links href is the same value as the div's id. Another part to note would be the <a class="close" href="#">close</a> tag, we will talk more about this later. Ok cool now on to..
The Css:
I decided not to post all of the css because I used quite a bit for styling (sizes, colors, etc) all of those are not important and will likely change depending on what you want to use it for. The only really important part is...
#content { position: relative; }
#content div { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; }
What this does is make the content id relative so that we can absolutely position the inner divs on top of each other. These divs that we are stacking are the ones that we will be switching between later, after we finish writing our jQuery.
The jQuery Breakdown:
Finally, the fun stuff. Now, before we jump right in let's think through exactly what we want this to accomplish. First, we want the divs to all be invisible when we load the page:
$(function () {
$('#content div').hide();
});
Then we want switch the div when the icons anchor tag is clicked. We will do this by creating a variable that will hold the string value of the anchor tags href value, then fading that div into view.
$(function () {
$('#content div').hide();
$('#icons a').click(function () {
var contentToLoad = $(this).attr('href');
$(contentToLoad).fadeIn();
return false;
});
});
Cool, but we aren't done yet, because they don't go away when you click on another. So we will need to create a way to know which anchor tag is clicked, let's fix that by adding the class to the anchor tag called "active", this class will have no properties in css (unless you want it to).
Let's start this by checking to see if the class active has been added to the anchor tag that was just clicked and if so end the function, this is to check if that content is already visible and preventing it from trying to fade it in again.
$(function () {
$('#content div').hide();
$('#icons a').click(function () {
if ($(this).hasClass('active') == true) {
return false;
} else {
var contentToLoad = $(this).attr('href');
$(contentToLoad).fadeIn();
return false;
});
});
Close but not quite yet, we still need to remove the active class from the previous active anchor tag and add that class to the new active anchor tag. After that, we will have to remove the old content, then our new content can fade in with no problem.
$(function () {
$('#content div').hide();
$('#icons a').click(function () {
if ($(this).hasClass('active') == true) {
return false;
} else {
$('a.active').removeClass('active');
$(this).addClass('active');
$('#content div').fadeOut();
var contentToLoad = $(this).attr('href');
$(contentToLoad).fadeIn();
return false;
});
});
Awesome our tabs work just fine. Now, remember that bit of code from earlier for the close button? <a class="close" href="#">close</a> Let's get that working. Let's start it off by creating a new function that will work when the anchor tag with class close is clicked, when it is, it will remove the active class and then fade the content out.
The FINAL jQuery:
$(function () {
$('#content div').hide();
$('#icons a').click(function () {
if ($(this).hasClass('active') == true) {
return false;
} else {
$('a.active').removeClass('active');
$(this).addClass('active');
$('#content div').fadeOut();
var contentToLoad = $(this).attr('href');
$(contentToLoad).fadeIn();
return false;
}
});
$('#content a.close').click(function () {
$('#content div').fadeOut();
$('a.active').removeClass('active');
});
});
There ya go, swapping divs with icons and a working close button. This ended up being a little more difficult than originally thought, but a fun exercise none the less.
The JSFiddle:
JSFiddle
I am completing a three-part series on social media platforms for businesses with one blog for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Welcome to Part 2!
I will be highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of using Facebook based on my own experience; I do social media marketing for almost ten different companies, so I'll be sure to take the best of the best advice to pass on to you!
I'll start with the advantages that Facebook has for businesses:
1) It's easy to use: Facebook works hard to be user friendly; easy to post, easy to see your analytics, and easy to keep track of customer engagement. They also make business pages similar in format to personal pages so it will seem extra familiar to the regular Facebook user.
2) There is a large number of active users: According to Facebook's website, they have more than a billion monthly active users and 618 million daily active users (as of December 2012). This is a huge market to tap into and you don't want to miss out on it!
3) You can schedule content directly through Facebook: Facebook allows you to schedule posts directly through your business page. It lets you schedule posts up to five months out; posts can have links, pictures, videos, and text built right into them.
4) There are analytics built in: Facebook is constantly changing and updating their internal analytics to give you the best view of your business page as possible. It's very easy to see what kind of content or post does well and which does not.
5) It gives customers multiple ways to interact with you: People that like your page can send you messages, write on your wall, write recommendations, like your posts, share your posts, and comment on your posts. This is a large part of building your brand and gives customers an option of how they want to interact with you.
No social media platform is perfect though! Here are some disadvantages of Facebook for businesses:
1) It's difficult to gain and retain "likes" when first starting: Just like with any business as it starts out, a business facebook struggles to gain "likes" when first beginning (*without the use of promoted posts). A new facebook page will struggle with engagement and interaction as not all of your "likes" will see your posts. Once you gain a larger number of followers, you should see a steady increase of approximately 2-7% new "likes" per month (at least this is my experience).
2) It takes time and hard work to do it right: Although Facebook is free, you have to take into account time and effort spent into growing your Facebook "likes". On top of that, you must learn the difference between running a personal account and a business account.
3) Facebook limits who sees your posts: Not all of your "likes" will see every post. Most of my posts see an average of 30-70% of my total "likes" (Of course some get less and some get more). If you pay attention, you'll notice that Facebook limits certain types of posts (like pictures and certain links) to even fewer of your "likes".
4) Facebook lumps third party posts together and identifies where you post from: Yes you can schedule through Facebook directly, but in addition to that, you can post from many third party applications. These are convenient but can hurt the reach on your posts. Facebook may lump your posts together, may limit who sees posts from certain applications, and also identifies where you are posting from (i.e. Hootsuite, Gremln).
Even with its ups and downs, your business must have a Facebook page. With so many users waiting for you, you must not miss out! You have to use and manage it, but it can do wonders for building your brand and serving as a communication tool for your current and potential customers.
Does your business have a Facebook account? What are your favorite and least favorite aspects?
"Move fast and break things. If you aren't breaking things you aren't moving fast enough."
~Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
Part 3 coming soon: Pinterest for Business
I will be doing a three-part series on social media platforms for businesses with one blog for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Welcome to Part 1!
I will be highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of using Twitter based on my own experience; I do social media marketing for almost ten different companies, so I'll be sure to take the best of the best advice to pass on to you!
I'll start with the advantages that Twitter has for businesses:
1) It's easy to gain followers: In my own experience, I see an average month to month growth of Twitter followers between +5-20% for the business Twitter accounts. It's easy to gain followers because (usually) when you follow people, they'll follow you back!
2) Twitter doesn't block your content: Twitter will post everything that you ask it to-whether it's 2 tweets per day or 200. Other social media platforms limit who sees your content based on what they want their users to see.
3) Twitter doesn't block third party post-scheduling apps: Twitter will allow you to post from any third party application (Such as HootSuite and Gremln); it will not block content, nor will it identify where the post is coming from.
4) It makes you think about what you are going to say: Because tweets are limited to 140 characters, you really are forced to think about what you'll say and how you'll say it best. Messages must be concise and straight to the point-you don't risk boring your followers!
5) Following a brand on Twitter increases likelihood to purchase as well as recommend a brand: According to eMarketer, 37% of respondents are more likely to purchase from a brand after following them on Twitter (this is compared to only 17% that say the same about a brand they like on Facebook). Numbers are about the same when asked if they would recommend a brand.
6) Hashtags make it easy to use Twitter like Google: When using hashtags in tweets, you are making it easier for users to find your content. They can use the search bar to look for words like "marketing" or "twitter" and Twitter will pull up every tweet that has mentioned this word via hashtag for the past forever. This is an added way that new followers can find you and discover your content quickly and easily.
Of course, no social media platform is perfect. Here are what I would call disadvantages about using Twitter for businesses:
1) The half-life of a tweet is only two to three hours: Not only do you have to provide excellent and engaging content all the time; you must be careful about when you post your tweets! After just a few hours, the odds of a user seeing a tweet are minimal. It also means you need to post quite a few times each day to get your content in front of your followers.
2) It's really hard to respond to complaints in a small amount of characters: If a customer provides a long and confusing tweet complaint, you may have to tweet back and forth several times to ask all of the questions you need to. The character limit may also make your tweets sound cold or "canned", which may upset the user further.
3) Customers expect an instant response: Because Twitter is such an instant platform (many users use it as an instant news source), customers have very high expectations of response rates. I've had a user tweet back within just a few hours that they were disappointed that I "never" got back to them. This can, however, be turned into a positive if you have a great social media manager that is on top of responding to tweets coming in.
4) There aren't any analytics built in to Twitter: Yes, there are third party programs that will create analytics for you, but you have to find which one will work for you. Other social media platforms offer analytics for managers within the platform itself for extra convenience.
5) The larger your follower number becomes, the more difficult it is to manage: This is a good problem to have-people like to hear what you have to say-but it makes responding to questions and tweets that come in extremely difficult. This can make engaging with your customers via Twitter tricky.
I believe that no matter how large or how small your business is, you should have a Twitter account! Yes it does take work to do it right, but it can be a great platform to expand the reach of your business and communicate your message with your customers.
Does your business have a Twitter account? What are the advantages and disadvantages you've run into?
See you for Part 2 and Part 3!
“Twitter represents a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. As such, Twitter is a human seismograph.” – Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks
Posted by
Alli Myers on Tue, Apr 23, 2013 @ 02:16 PM
Ever noticed that almost every single one of your social media app icons on your phone is blue? When it comes to social media sites and marketing, it turns out that the sites themselves put just as much thought into marketing as do the businesses that use them for this purpose! So what does the color blue have to do with marketing? More than you would think!
Blue is calm, makes you feel safe and is often used to represent communication, as it is the color of intellect. Other colors, for example red, green, yellow, etc., are extremely bright and make you feel more alert. When you're looking over your social media apps you're most likely just passing some time or checking out what your friends or up to, so you might not need to be fully alert and focused. Since it is not one of those bright, attention-grabbing colors, blue does not distract you from the page content.
A lot of these blue social media icons are also combined with white. White is simple and does not really add to or take away from the already simply blue color, so it makes for a good combination. Whether it is dark blue, light blue, or somewhere in between, it doesn't matter... blue is blue! You can darken or lighten it as much as you want, but it will always stay blue. Once again we can use red as an example here: if you lighten it too much, it turns pink, etc.
You could also say that a lot of people simply have a preference for blue and, as good marketing companies themselves, social media sites are aware of this fact and use it to appeal to their users. It has been shown, through various surveys and research, that blue is actually the favorite color of the world!
Later!
-Alli
I would like to thank the following sites for providing some great content:
http://www.digibuzzme.com/why-color-blue-is-popular-with-social-media/
http://blogs.terrapinn.com/internetshow/2012/07/04/facebook-popular-social-networks-blue-primary-colour/
http://www.aliciacowan.com/social-media-and-digital-marketing/strategy-and-advice/social-media-giants-branding
So you're a small business and you want to start an email marketing campaign. You know little about this topic except for you probably open very few of them yourself. So you're asking, how can I run a successful email marketing campaign for my business?
A good place to start is a solid list of Email Marketing Dos:
-
Do: Make sure your message is clear and makes sense
-
Do: Provide value to the reader through interesting, relevant, and current information
-
Do: Update your contact list frequently and correct addresses that come back as undeliverable
-
Do: Design your email newsletter with mobile platforms in mind
-
Do: Mail consistently--most suggest at least one email newsletter every 90 days
-
Do: Use short paragraphs and use things like bullet points or dashes to organize your content
-
Do: Create a solid subject line
-
Do: Let readers know about upcoming events
-
Do: Spell check and proof read for confusing content
-
Do: Provide contact information and links to your social media accounts
-
Do: Include links that direct people to your website
-
Do: Provide readers will an "unsubscribe" link
-
Do: Pick an email marketing platform that best suites your business needs
And another great place to start that pairs well with the first list is a list of Email Marketing Don'ts:
-
Do not: Write subject lines or content in all captial letters
-
Do not: Use hard to read fonts or colors or use a distrtacting background
-
Do not: Mail too frequently
-
Do not: Hide your unsubscribe link
-
Do not: Only talk about your company, your sales, and how awesome you are
Overall, the best way to answer your questions about social media is to try things out and adjust from there depending on what works and doesn't work. Just like social media, there isn't an official list of rules when it comes to email marketing; the rules need to be adjusted to fit the needs and interests of a company and its customers.
Until next time!
~Melissa
“I believe if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions, they will be moved to act.”
~ Bill Gates
I'd like to thank the following two websites for helping me out with this content!
I cannot believe the school year is coming to an end in just a few short weeks. In about a month I will be saying Hooroo to Michigan in order to take an internship in Sydney, Australia for the summer.
It seems like yesterday I stumbled into Brian at the Michigan State Unviersity, PRSSA career fair in hopes of finding an internship with my minimal experience. Brian took me under his wing for a wonderful experience with Michigan Creative. Now that I have been lucky enough to intern and work for Brian, I am going to miss the office and our weekly progress with my fellow interns and associates.
Working for a small marketing company has given me a foot in the door as to what I can expect on a much larger scale while I am abroad. I hope to take my social media, writing, public relations, and customer service experience to the next level. I couldn't have done this without the confidence that Michigan Creative has given me, both as a person and as a professional.
I am happy to announce you are looking at the newest intern for Pretty Girl Fashion Group Pty. Ltd. PGFG is a privately owned retail fashion business with four ladies fashions brands; Rockmans, BeMe, W. Lane and Table Eight. Today, PGFG operates just under 400 retail fashion outlets across Australia. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work within the fashion public relations industry to gain more experience in a more corporate environment.
After my 12 weeks of required internship experience, I will be stopping in Hawaii on the way back home for a warm weather vacation before school starts back up in the fall. (It will be winter in Australia when I arrive). It is my plan to also travel to New Zealand and much of Australia while I am away. You can't even begin to imagine my excitement!
As I am preparing for the trip of a lifetime, I think it is important to thank everyone at Michigan Creative Marketing for making my experience at the office a fabulous one. I hope to see you all when I get back!
G'day Mate!
Rachel
Of all things that could happen during a Superbowl that you could possibly be prepared for-injuries, crazy plays, time rivalry-few were ready to react to something as simple as a power outage. Oreo cookie won the fastest-and-most-innovative-response-during-the-Super-Bowl-Blackout prize according to many marketers and judging by its rate of re-tweet (over 10,000 times in the first hour).
This crazy response to such an event spurred a new marketing term: "Real-Time Marketing". The inevitable need for constant monitoring and virtually instant response is wanted by today's population. With the ease of social media and the usually quick response to a text message, people today strive for immediate gratification for their complaint and even their compliment.
This is an incredible challenge for marketing and public relations companies. They are now having to adapt to a 24/7 marketing model and act more like a news room than a marketing firm. Usually the lack of staffing or the inability to staff around the clock gets in the way of running this kind of marketing model.
There have been advancements and tools made to make real-time marketing a little more manageable. Here are just a few that you can use:
-
Facebook allows you to become a manager of as many pages you control. They make it easy to see notifications when you flip between profiles.
-
Applications such as HootSuite, Tweet Deck, and Gremln allow you to manage multiple sites at once and even have "news feeds" right on the pages themselves.
-
Mobile applications for social media platforms such as Facebook, make it easy to access and updates all of the Facebook pages that you manage right from your phone.
-
Social media platforms on their own are information hotbeds, giving virtually real time information updates at the tip of your fingers! Consistent monitoring of news feeds alone will give you updates that you can work off.
There are issues that come with real-time marketing, however. If not done properly, it can lead to negativity about the company or brand that attempted real time data monitoring If your quick response is not well thought out, has a spelling error or has a failed attempt at humor, among other things, your efforts behind real time marketing will be wasted. Another large issue that comes with social media monitoring is the lack of resources to collect data; these can be items such as a social media management data base, man power needed to gather the data, and the time it takes to sift through the overload of information that exists.
So, my advice for real-time marketing is to do as much as you can, but in the end remember: if you don't have anything groundbreaking, crafty, and timely to say, then say nothing at all--you will most likely be better off!
Until next time
~Melissa
“It’s less about being real time and more about being predictive. You can plan ahead, to a certain extent and have content and ideas ready to go if and when you can use them.” ~Unknown Advertising Executive