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18 Feb

Is Social Media Marketing Worth the Effort?

Growth of Social Media is staggering but are the returns worth the effort?

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months. We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alexa Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period.

But It Does Takes Effort

Effective Social Media marketing does take effort. Why because it involves engaging people, its not about SELL SELL SELL. Its about engagement with interesting content, discussions and even etiquette.

Social Media is just that its social!

Content

People find interesting and informative content appealing. Rarely do they find 100% sales literature appealing. Rather they would rather read or view material that informs, explains or entertains.

Generally blogs provide the interesting content and web sites the more specific sales information. However producing interesting and engaging content articles for your blog does take time and effort. Allowing 3- 4 hours a week to write articles for the blog is reasonable planning guide.

The type of blog articles you write you should be informative, engaging or entertaining not in your face sales. For example, if you are a Party Rental/ Hire Company, write articles about how to plan an event , eg a backyard wedding etc. Or in this case we are writing about social media marketing, not selling our hire and rental business management software that has integrated social media marketing.

One of key point to remember to seed in your key words in to the article. Blogs are also good for using less frequently used words associated with your business as well.

Let People Know About Your Blog Article

This is the social part of social media marketing.

Having written an engaging article you need to let people know about it. This is where Twitter and Facebook really come in to play. However you need to invest time and effort in building up your Twitter and Facebook following. More relevant followers means more people likely to read your post.

However communities take time to build, you need to invest time in listening and responding to what they are saying. That is being a good community member. This can take more than a couple of hours per week probably longer realistically if you are serious.

Effort Versus Return

So let us say you spend four to five hours per week on writing blog content and building your social media following then you need to have a return.

Interestingly Nielson cited that around 17% of time on the internet is now spent on social media.

Cost. The cost of your time is not just the salary on-cost it is also the opportunity cost. That is what else could you have been doing. Also a consideration is your Ad-words spend. Social media may enable you to save this money or at least reduce your spend per month.

Return. The return is dependent on what you objective. For most small to medium sized businesses the primary objective will most often be sales leads. For us it worked, but for your business it may differ.

Our Returns. We found that through this process our Blog (content focused) Unique Visitor rate increased from not much to a few hundred per day. Our web site (product sales focused) increased proportionally leading to an 80% increase in sales leads through the web site.

Key Lessons Learnt

We learnt some critical lessons through our trial, which were:

Have a Plan;
Be Disciplined and above and beyond all else; and
Be Sincere.

We were lucky in that we approached the trial with genuine sincerity in our engagements with our social media community. We went in with the view of genuinely learning from others in our social media community and we have – it has been brilliant.

For us, yes there is a real effort needed but the returns are greater than just an excellent growth in sales leads – we have gained far more from what we have learnt from others.

If you have any similar experiences or even different views please take the time to add your comments – they are most welcome!

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

10 Most Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing and How to Avoid Them (slideshare.net)
Is Anyone Really Listening? Social Media Marketing (freelanceswitch.com)
Poll Result: Most Popular Social Networking Tools for Online … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
Learning How to Start Out in Social Media Marketing (nichetitans.com)

18 Feb

Twitter Spam

Rarely do we make any third party posts, but we recently came accross this one by Bernard Moon on Mashable.Com

It is well worth reading, the link is below

Twitter Spam: 3 Ways Scammers are Filling Twitter With Junk

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18 Feb

Why Communicating With Customers Is Now Harder Yet Easier

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Communicating with customers/ prospects is now both easier and yet more difficult!

Easier because there are more channels available to communicate with customers / prospects such as Social Media.

Yet more difficult because customers or prospects have more choices from which to receive communications and more selective in who they invite to send information.

Note: In this article the term customer is used to cover both existing customers and prospects.

Why Is It More Difficult!

Communicating with customers even five years ago was fairly straight forward. You could communicate directly through email, mail or even the telephone. Or you could advertise in the newspaper, yellow pages or if you could afford it Television or Radio.

But all of these are now less effective than five years ago

You may well have your customers address, email or phone number

but are you actually reaching them?

Traditional Mail

This is not new we have all known this for years. Companies are increasingly using electronic means to communicate and invoice and pay bills. For example according to the Washington Post, the US Postal Service has ..

That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

And nearly half of this is junk mail!

the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivered 153.8 billion pieces of mail, of which 43 percent, or 66.4 billion pieces, were junk mail.

Decline of Email

Email is beginning to decline in popularity, as more communication options become available.

In 2003, people spent 46% of their time online using sites which fall into the “communications” category – that is, sites whose core capabilities are email and instant messaging. By 2009, that usage dropped to 27% or a 41% decline in overall use.

May be spam has contributed to the decline in people’s focus on email as a primary source of communication.

In Microsoft’s latest biannual report on the state of computer security, the company says that in the second half of 2008, a full 97.3 percent of email traffic was unwanted spam (or malicious email like phishing attacks and outright viruses).

Tele-Sales Now Seen As Least Effective

Business to Business tele-marketing or sales is also in decline for a number of reasons, not the least of which are changes in the legislation’s around the world governing tele-marketing practises. Many now view out bound tele-marketing as the least effective option.

90% view Telemarketing as at least as effective as their other marketing mediums.

Decline of Yellow Pages/ NewsPapers/ Television

Even these – the stalwarts of advertising for decades are in decline, see previous post Advertising media types

So Where Are Customers Going

Well it appears they are becoming more interested in Social Media. However social media whilst opening up new channels also poses some interesting problems.

It is Discretionary

Yes you can communicate with customers now by using Twitter or Facebook etc. However it is at the customers discretion as to whether they allow you to communicate with them. Either by adding as a Friend on Facebook or Following You on Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are arguably direct communication social media type but there are more indirect channels.

Common Interest

Many years ago I read the Dale Carnegie Classic – “How to Win Friends and Influence People” . In that book, I remember reading the story of how he (or someone) had tried to make an appointment with a prospect for years – but failed. He then found that they both had a common interest in something. From this he was able to develop a friendship which led to sales.

This can be the same with Social Media!

For example through say Social Book marking sites (eg Digg, Stumble on) you may find that you have common interests in similar articles. Developing relationships this way can lead to either direct sales or them even referring you on to their community or contacts. It also provides a means to commence a discussion leading potentially to being invited to join their discretionary social media sites.

Social Media provides opportunities to engage prospects and customers indirectly, by finding things of common interest.

It Works!

For example, our software is developed for hire and rental companies. One of our major points of difference is integration with the Web and Social Media. We therefore are genuinely interested in both subjects. We write about it (blog posts), we read about it and we comment about it. Through this process we have found similar like minded companies and individuals and built really good communities on Facebook (>350 friends), Twitter (>3000 followers) and also on Digg and Stumble On. It does deliver results for us:

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months. We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alex Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period. See full post – “Is Social Media Marketing Worth The Effort”

Summary

So yes on one hand their are more ways to communicate with your customers yet at the same time it is more difficult. We are entering a period where increasingly customers are gaining control over who, what, when and how they are communicated with. This will pose a both challenges and opportunities to marketing people for in the future.

Interested in more articles on Social Media and Marketing?

Then follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Networked Blogs or Stumble On

About Us

Google Already Indexing Twitter? (techie-buzz.com)
Facebook Guide For Professionals: How To Succeed In A Networked Economy (allfacebook.com)
What Is Next For Social Media? (regulargeek.com)

12 Feb

Thumbs Down – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 18 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week. We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Down I found myself highlighting Google‘s lamo attempt to control the internet and picking out a HUGE problem with Apple‘s new operating system which deletes all user data. Yeah, you read that right – and people whinge about Windows. Gosh.

Haha – Google Wave – Early Impressions: Too Much Effort & Unintuitive http://tinyurl.com/yzhn4st

I’ve blogged before about how I think Google Wave is/will be stupid, worthless and pointless. But don’t just take my word for it, other people are saying it too – as evidenced by this article. Don’t know what Google Wave is? Well, who cares. If you do, it’s supposed to be an email/twitter/instant messaging alternative – replacement, whatever. C’mon Google, you employ 20,000 of the smartest people on earth and not one of you can figure out that most people won’t want to ditch email because they can barely breathe without having access to it. #FAIL

Interesting read, if you’re a geek – YouTube‘s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome to the New Net http://tinyurl.com/yfhcuuv

Well, I know most of you aren’t geeks and won’t read the article, so I’ll paraphrase here to outline why I thought this article was interesting – basically, Google has a direct optical fibre connection to the core movers and shakers that make the internet connect to everybody (in fact, I read recently that Google accounts for 6% of all internet traffic in the word at the moment, an astounding statistic for a company that didn’t exist 10 years ago), which means that Google don’t need to pay for internet traffic. So, all of those YouTube videos are just beaming out of the place with the computer infrastructure built into the rest of Google’s fortress of computer power, essentially making what most people would think to be an extremely expensive operation in pushing out online video actually cost them basically nothing to run – all those ad impressions are pure profit. This is an amazing contrast to an organisation like Facebook, which spends $1 million a month of infrastructure to make their service super snappy and fast for users. What the article goes on to detail is how Google hold so much power already, that instead of internet providers charging places like Google to have direct access to each other so that company’s internet users their their site quicker, Google are so powerful that they can charge internet companies to have better direct access to them to provide their services faster to their users. In the next 3 years this will be a huge debate in the US as their government is trying to regulate this stuff and don’t really know how to approach it properly. Public outcry ensures. It’ll be an interesting development.

LAME – Google enters the e-book arena http://bit.ly/wFDAM

I’m sure if I stood in a newsagent taking pictures of each page of a magazine so I could read it later without having to buy the magazine in the first place I’d be chased down the street by the shop owner and probably have the cops called on me. Google send people to libraries to scan books digially, build a whole online book store full of inventory and they call it a “business“. This is criminal. That’s all I have to say.

WOW Mac Users should read this – Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data http://bit.ly/10PdGD

So, being the good samaritan that I am, I’ll give you Mac users this tip – don’t allow anonymous logins on your computer. You’ll have your login that you use and just keep using that – don’t switch to another user and use the anonymous feature, as what happens is that you’ll go to log back into your computer as you and everything will be gone. Yeah, it’s pretty awful and embarassing problem. I tweeted this last week and I’m not sure if Apple have patched this problem yet but keep your eyes peeled on the Apple Software Update feature – last I read Apple were looking to put out a 10.6.1 update that addresses this and other problems.

About Us

Confessions of a Google Wave Fanboy (elasticvapor.com)
Weekly Wrapup: Google Wave, Real-Time Web Trends, And More… (readwriteweb.com)
Facebook Wave: Why Facebook Should Clone Google Wave (mashable.com)
VIDEO: Google Wave Gets Explained (mashable.com)

28 Jan

Look To Small Companies For Social Media Innovation

Necessity is the mother of innovation – so the adage says!

The tough times create the business circumstances that foster necessity. Businesses are forced to be both more creative and at the same time more brutal in their decision making. Innovative ideas whether:

market solutions,
business models or
technology will be created.

Whilst many of the ideas in this post are applicable across all business sectors, the focus of this article is on the Equipment Hire and Rental market.

Social Media as Basis of Innovation Ideas

The range of ideas that may be implemented can not be predicted. However it can be confidently predicted social media will form the basis of many innovations, around areas such as:

Revenue Improvement: Marketing areas such as lead generation, customer service, customer retention;
Cost Reduction: In marketing budgets by reducing expenditure on traditional marketing methods
Mitigation of Risk: Such as in areas like Product Damages and Safety through use of YouTube, see post.

At the end of this post is a series of examples of how to use each of the major Social marketing tools.

Where to Look for the Innovative Ideas?

Where will the innovation emerge from, large corporations or small rental or hire business?

Let’s look to what has happened over the last thirty years as an indicator of what may happen. Consider this, that since 1980, Corporations have completely lost their monopoly on new ideas. This change in innovation sources ended the era of IP monopolization. We are no longer in the era when “feudal lords” (i.e., a small handful of large “old economy” companies) controlled all the (intellectual) property and those who were without property had no rights. [1]

In 1980, Corporations accounted for 80% of all innovation (research and development outcome), they now account for under 20%. The beneficiaries have been small to medium sized companies who now account for 80% of innovations.

A key trend emerging in the knowledge economy is the change in the sources innovation. Prior to the 1980’s, large corporations dominated US research and development, with over 80% being undertaken by companies with more than 5000 employees. However since 1980, this has completely inverted, with small companies accounting for almost all the growth in R&D. [2]

Hire Rental Industry Innovation

The discussion above may not sound applicable to the Rental and Hire Industry but it is. For example in the 1980’s only the large Corporations could afford the innovation R & D expense of developing computing based management systems. Such rental software or hire software management systems are now powerful and affordable to businesses of all sizes.

Importantly though even more powerful tools such as Social Media are available (in may cases freely) to any business.

Innovation in the use of these tools is not constrained by not having financial resources but more by the extent of the will and imagination of companies.

It is in the area of will that the true constraint may appear. Major Brands have demonstrated in some instances a reluctance to engage in social media for fear of losing control of their brand. This is understandable as the brand is an asset that could well appear on the balance sheet. Hence taking avoiding perceived risks with the brand is understandable. Numerous articles in this subject.

Smaller hire and rental businesses whether though the pressure of necessity or less attachment to a brand are therefore more likely to undertake innovative social marketing ideas.

So if you are looking for new innovative ideas in the equipment hire and rental industry look to the Small business sector rather than corporations – the results may surprise you. Below is a list of how equipment hire and rental can use of each of the main social marketing tools.

About Us

How to Use Social Media Tools

Marketing Problem

[intlink id="246" type="post"]Hire Rental Advertising Considerations[/intlink]
[intlink id="572" type="post"]Why Traditional Marketing Fails[/intlink]
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Creating a Digital Marketing Platform

[intlink id="254" type="post"]Creating a Digital Marketing Foundation[/intlink]
[intlink id="294" type="post"]Hire Rental Web Lead Statistics[/intlink]

Marketing via Twitter

[intlink id="592" type="post"]How Rental Hire Company can use Twitter[/intlink]
[intlink id="607" type="post"]Business Reason to Use Twitter[/intlink]

Marketing via Facebook

[intlink id="990" type="post"]Using Facebook for Business[/intlink]
[intlink id="781" type="post"]They worried about Social Media in the 1930′s[/intlink]

Marketing via YouTube

[intlink id="507" type="post"]How Rental and Hire Companies can use YouTube[/intlink]
[intlink id="481" type="post"]Big List on How to Use Social Media[/intlink]

Marketing via WordPress

[intlink id="641" type="post"]Why Blogs are Effective for Small Business[/intlink]
[intlink id="762" type="post"]Why Small Businesses Should blog[/intlink]

29 Dec

Using Twitter to promote your Hire or Rental blog

Increasingly many hire and rental companies are using blogs as part of their digital marketing plan. The key issue though is how to generate traffic to your blog?

Twitter can be a very effective tool in doing this. The following video offers a great explanation of how you can use Twitter promote your hire blog or rental blog for your business.

Remember HireEzy 2.1 is the worlds leading hire software and rental software – that not only manages your business needs but also has incredibly powerful inbuilt digital marketing tools, such blog and twitter management.

20 Dec

Why Use Twitter for Business

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: Image by nsyll via Flickr

Hire and Rental companies have been slow to adopt Twitter as a marketing tool.

This post points you in the direction of a couple of great articles as well as a free advisory service for Hire and Rental industry companies considering using Social Media marketing.

Hire and Rental companies would benefit substantially from using Social Media as a lead generation tool, starting with Twitter.

How to Use Twitter for Business

5 Reasons Why Twitter’s Growth Cannot Be Stopped

As a service to the Hire and Rental industry we provide a free advisory service to Hire and Rental companies considering using Social Media marketing.

To make use of the service email our Globally Recognized Social Media Expert – Cam Gleeson

[contact-form]

17 Dec

How Rental Hire Companies can use Twitter

: Image by On Stage Lighting via Flickr

Hire and Rental Companies are increasingly finding Twitter as a brilliant lead generation tool.

Specifically in pointing people towards their Web Sites, Blogs or even You Tube sites.

Some studies have shown traffic increases of up to 100% using Twitter.

HireEzy 2.1 – complete hire and rental business software – includes in built Twitter integration which when combined with the fully integrated online web store and blog option, provides hire and rental companies with a powerful simple to use digital marketing platform.

Not sure how to develop your Twitter marketing plan for your business?

Then read this excellent article.

Twitter Launches “Twitter 101″ Step One Of The Business Plan

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