Pointers for Developing a Savvy Social Media Campaign

It is no small feat to get your message in front of the right people at the right time.

How do you reach a a target audience when your top competitor has a bigger marketing budget, a larger sales force and a major head start in the market? In my basketball career, I learned that the best offense is a great defense. Therefore, I have developed a ten step plan-of-action for small businesses to defend small businesses against the attack of the large corporation.

The following ten tips should create an effective ‘offensive’ strategy:

1. Industry Events: Offer one-on-one demonstrations of your products and/or services. Seed positive word-of-mouth in this ‘grass roots’ form of marketing.

2. Influence Blogs, Forums, Twitter: Participate in blogs by providing relevant, data rich content and comment or respond when appropriate on your own or industry-related blogs. Engage in and share lively Twitter streams.

3. Public Relations (PR): Reach out to local newspaper reporters, editors of print media, radio stations, and bloggers covering your industry trends. Offer newsworthy tidbits that favorably highlight your business and/or employees of your business. Press releases are a great media venue for FREE publicity and can offer the reader an opportunity to connect and become familiar with your business and what it represents.

4. Content Syndication: Drive awareness and generate leads through content syndication. Syndication is a free and relatively easy form of advertising whereby you can make your website content available to other sites by offering RSS feeds, in-the-news updates, blog posts, and forum posts, all with connecting links.

5. Social Networks: Respond to conversations, answer questions and share content in sites that are related to your industry. LinkedIn is a great social networking site that is specifically designed for professional networking. Create your own social network through your blog.

6. Demand-centric website: Showcase your websites content and capture information about your visitors through web analytics and/or registration forms. Survey visitors to your website and seek feedback regarding your website’s performance, ease-of-use, design, content, etc.

7. Newsletter and social opt-in: Invite visitors to your site to subscribe to your newsletters and social feeds. Include optional social contact fields in addition to email addresses.

8. Maintain an e-mail relationship: Stay in touch with auto responders via email. Send promotions and special offers until they indicate an interest or make a commitment to purchase.

9. Telemarketing Sales: As soon as your website visitors request to be contacted, follow-up immediately with a sales call to address any other questions your potential buyer might have. Follow-up the phone call with a second reach-out via Twitter or LinkedIn special offer.

10. Encourage Testimonials: Empower your customers to share their personal experiences and ‘success stories’ online via Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. Always follow-up with your clients after their visit with a brief and easy to complete survey.Online surveys are a powerful marketing tool!

By combining these social media tactics with traditional marketing methodologies you should accomplish the following:

• Discover how to counter your competitors marketing campaigns and sales force.
• Learn how to build a positive momentum for your small business.
• Establish yourself as an ‘expert’ in your industry.

Now, as my coaches also liked to say – get out there and show them what a winner you are!