Social media and email marketing are two categories that I’ve found most popular among blogs, webinars and topics of discussion. Common questions from those less social media/email marketing savvy are: Is Twitter/Facebook right for my business? Will I be able to acquire customers with social media and an email marketing newsletter? Isn’t this new type of marketing a fad? One of the most important things to remember is that social media and email marketing is not a fad, and although I’ve said it many times before, if you are not moving your business’ marketing efforts at the same pace as the rest of the companies in your industry (and the dozens of other industries) you and your brand will be left in the dust.
Last week I sat in on a webinar hosted by Constant Contact about email and social marketing run by Josh Mendelsohn. I took away a few interesting facts from Josh about B2B businesses, social media marketing, email marketing and what those of us in marketing need to remember when targeting our current and future customers.
Watch What You Say and Do
According to a study presented by Josh, 82% of small businesses have said word-of-mouth is the most successful form of marketing. Word of mouth may not be taking place on social media but what a company says or does on social media will be talked about. Interact with your customers on Twitter or Facebook, listen to their concerns or their praise and acknowledge that there is a company behind an account. If a customer complains to you on Twitter and you ignore their concern, the likelihood that they will suggest your services at the next cocktail party they’re at or coffee meeting is highly unlikely.
Don’t be a Five Minute Tweeter
By this I mean, don’t spend five minutes increments on Twitter throughout the day and only send out tweets during those times. Your followers will notice that you’re not engaging with your audience and instead using Twitter to pump out information at them like an advertisement. Schedule your tweets, using platforms like HootSuite and TweetDeck, to ensure that you’re consistently sharing information throughout the day.
Find Out What Your Audience Wants and Respond to it
At VA Partners, we use Constant Contact for email marketing and have found their reports tool very useful in understanding what are readers are reading and what sparks the most interest. If we see multiple hits for a particular sales blog, we use those analytics to perhaps write a follow up on that blog rather than ignoring useful marketing statistics. Use the analytics from an email newsletter to continue to provide your audience with the information and educational material they’re interested in. Constant Contact also provides an email survey tool that can be used in conjunction with the email marketing tool.
If you’d like to see what VA Partners is doing with our e-mail marketing, sign-up for our newsletter. The newsletter showcases our featured blogs, recommended events to attend, recommended reading list, connection of the month and links to our social media platforms.
