Category Archives: Social media

As a Social Media Consultant, Ant gives his insight into the world of Social media and tries to keep you to speed with the fast paced world that it is.

The REAL Key To Successful Marketing – Understanding Your Target Audience

If I could help you understand one thing that would make your marketing really rocket, that would be to know EXACTLY who your target audience is and how to understand their demands and characteristics.

If you are running a business or thinking about setting one up, online as an Internet marketing business or offline as a traditional business, if you understand your audience and target market correctly, all your marketing efforts should go be laid to waste.

Your Target Market? – Isn’t this obvious?

Although that seems a pretty obvious thing to think about, I still see many businesses trying to market and push products to people that are just not interested or simple do not need your product or service. The flip side is that when you work in your own business and have products or services to sell, you can get into the trap of thinking that you have a very small target market so shouldn’t be doing much marketing or advertising.

Let me give you an example of something that I came across recently:

I was working with a website that sells hand crafted birthday cards. The owner of the website thought that only those people who have to wish someone a happy birthday will be the one’s buying her cards. Knowing that the search engines are her main route to her website’s publicity, we started digging for phrases and terms that people might be searching to find her site, and her competitors.

After taking the time to look at these she realised that there was a much bigger audience for her to tap into, and potentially diversify her offering of cards from not just Birthday’s, but to many other occasions and life events.

This then got her thinking more about her target audience and we worked through a number of different things to consider when looking at her marketing activity. We started to look not just at what she was doing in her marketing, but also who she was communicating to.

If you take a step back, look at your target audience that you want to be marketing to by asking yourself questions such as:

Who do you intend to target?
Why you do want to target them?
What makes you think that your targeted audience will listen to you?

With all those questions in mind, you need to then define your target audience in a little more detail. Think about their characteristics:

Demographical Characteristics:
Think about basic factors such as their age, gender, occupation, level of education, monthly income, relationship status, etc.
Geographical and Cultural Indicators:
Different people living in various regions of the world have numerous expectations which might largely differ from one individual to another. These expectations could be influenced by the types of cultures they are accustomed to and affect buying decisions.
Lifestyle trends:
Once you have some idea about your audience, start to think about what they are like, what choices they are expected to make and what their needs are. Are they sporty? Do they stay at home and play video games? Do they have regular jobs or do they work at home? Do they have children?
Needs, Wants and Desires of your Customers:
When people buy something, they generally have a need want or desire. How can your product or service help solve their need or satisfy that desire or want? Survey’s help to understand this more.

With all these characteristics in mind, form a generalised customer profile which will summerise all the factors that you outlined to define your target audience. It will help you connect well with your audience and also help with great customer service.

Work through this and see how well you understand your target market, review your marketing activity and stop using a blunderbuss approach to your marketing. Become a sniper, pick your targets, aim well, use less effort and win the bigger prize.

If I can help at all tweet me @anthodges or call the office for a chat – 08432 894 402 (local rate).

How Important Is Twitter Media for Internet Marketers?

As many of you will know by now, I have been in the IM game for some time.I have played with lots of affiliate schemes, earning my crust there. I have worked with three of the best know product launch guys out there, developing the branding, images, websites and natural SEO campaigns for them. I am now developing my own products to help businesses achieve more through Internet Marketing… it is not reserved for the stay at home bum that wants to earn a living sitting on his couch eating his way through a box of crispy creams. Internet marketing is a serious tool that can be used by the ‘traditional’ business and something that cannot be ignored any longer.One of the tactics that many Internet marketers and, I am afraid to say, some of the other social media fraternity working with businesses like yours too, is that of total follower automation on Twitter. For those in the Internet Marketing game it is all about getting a huge list and blasting sales messages to them. For some it works as they can get many lists, get tiny amounts of ROI out of each and added together they create their wealth. Add this to the traditional business who only wants one Twitter account. Get the same automated following and then the tiny amount of ROI out of it… it isn’t worth it!Internet Marketers and these Social Media Managers who don’t understand what they are doing need to understand what happens when you automate things fully.

What do I mean by Total Follower Automation on Twitter?

There are many programs and systems out there that you can buy a following on twitter from, automate a follow/unfollow relationship and even set rules up for retweets, thanks you’s, scheduled tweets and try to build an audience that believe you are tweeting all the time.I totally believe in scheduling tweets. If you have content of value that your followers will want to see and you don’t want to spend every day writing and tweeting, you can write a bulk load of content, schedule it on your blog and schedule tweets to it. You still need to engage, but scheduling content is the biggest time saver you can implement into your social media strategy.What I think is a bit off is the automated ‘Thanks for the RT today @….’ and the ‘Great, I work in London too… let’s hook up’ tweets, set up by systems that look at the information on accounts that just followed you the send this kind of a tweet.Real content of value and real engagement will get you true following that will stay engaged, retweet your messages and buy from you. Automate everything and you will sound like a robot!

So How Important Is Twitter for Internet Marketers?

Hugely Important!Follow some of the ways to engage properly as I said above and you will be in the right track.The one thing I would say though, Twitter is a bit hit and miss is you are looking for clicks, sign ups and purchases – instantly. People don;t go into social media to be sold to. They are looking for answers.The mass audiences you can generate with automation software might help you to get the return you are looking for, but you will need a big following doing it all that way. I say this because I have tried both ways.I have two test Twitter accounts that I have been running for just over 8 months now.Twitter account A) with over 20,000 followersTwitter account B) with just over 560 followersBoth of these accounts have been promoting the same Internet marketing PLR download affiliate scheme and website, I totally automate Twitter account A and run B manually.Which one do you think, in the last six months has given me more of a return?Twitter account A = $72.35 in 8 months.Twitter account B = $976.12 in 8 months.Can you see the difference? I know it is not much to some people for 8 months worth of work, but the only thing I use for lead generation on this test is Twitter. Nothing else.Although account A has the huge following and more people that I follow too, it is not engaging enough to get me what I want from it. There are hardly any click throughs, no RT’s and very few mentions.Account B however syndicates content of value that I get RT’d, I engage and say thank you to individuals, I don’t follow everyone back (in fact I only follow 15 people on this account), I get 10 or 11 #FF follow friday recommendation tweets and use a blog to point people back to get the content.Automating your following and hoping that something will happen when you get a mass audience is rubbish. Most of these automated followers are robots (bots), systems or spammy accounts – they wont and don’t buy.All those in the Internet marketing industry have known for years that it is all about valuable content and engagement (nurturing the list)… but now that Google have seen this and finally released the algorithm to include regular content and social networking into the mix. It is now more important for anyone to be involved… either just for SEO purposes or getting a response from followers.See yesterdays blog post on my company blog regarding this new Google update.Stop the automation of your following TODAY and look to engage people on a real level. If you can’t find the time – outsource it! Over at HodgesNet we can help any Internet Marketer with content writing and social media engagement. winrar free version . Check outwww.hodgesnet.co.uk/socialmedia.Hopefully you will see that real engagement is worth it… it is all about your time.Do you think you will stop, or not even start, automating your Twitter following now? Please comment below.

Over Half of Students and Young Professionals Reject Jobs over Social Media Policies

It was reported by Cisco Systems yesterday, who conducted a survey of 2,800 students and young professionals, that they would turn down or ignore a job offer if social media was banned in the workplace.

The survey showed that over half would reject the job offer if social media sites such as Facebook, were banned in the place of work. And it was said that 41% of those young professionals surveyed, took the job based on a ‘friendly’ social media policy.

There is a balance to be said here. On one hand social media for personal reasons is not a right in the workplace – you are there to work are you not? But on the other hand, social media in most cases cannot me totally banned.

After my recent post regarding allowing your HR professional to write your social media policy, a number of things were brought to light for me. Such as

There are certain jobs that you are asked to leave mobile phones in lockers
Some companies don’t even allow staff on computers or the internet during work hours
And some companies even have mobile phone blocking devices and very strict internet gateways

On the radio this morning I heard the DJ say that this kind of thing really annoys him. Students and young professionals should be there to work. I think that in the light of some of these stats and the comments about them shows our students and teenagers to be delinquents and just not up for working in the real world.

How come? Is it not the employers, journalists and DJ’s that are simply out of touch?

Technology is now moving ahead much faster than most companies can keep up with. The banning of social media is shown to have a negative impact on he productivity of staff (As reported HERE by Graham Jones back on February of this year)

“So, the so-called “distractions” of Facebook, personal phone calls and the random Tweet will all improve work performance by allowing staff to concentrate better on the real task in hand. Forcing people to work, work, work actually reduces their chances of being able to concentrate.“ – Graham Jones Internet Psychologist

If companies need a hand developing the right policies around social media then I can help – along with your HR director or consultant. Together we can write a policy and implement training on how your staff should engage in social media for work and how they should manage their personal social media activity better. Banning it will not work in the long run.

Something profound for my 10,000th tweet

Yesterday on Twitter I hit a milestone – it was the day that I hit my 10,000th tweet.Many will say that this is irrelevant and playing the numbers game is futile when it comes to Twitter, I tend to agree. Twitter is about engagement and building relationships by helping others, sharing content of value and showing people you are a credible expert in your industry (I’ll get off my soapboax now) …however 10,000 tweets is something I thought I needed to celebrate or commemorate with something profound. I could have just tweeted my view on what Twitter is I guess……but here was my 10,000th tweet:

“Building a relationship with a prospect/lead will bring you more than just a sale. miami painting . It will give you long lasting profits for years to come”

As a loyalty marketing consultant and retention marketing specialist, I truly believe in looking beyond the sales process and moving more towards a process of building long lasting relationships with followers, subscribers, leads and customers.When you live in a sales mode, all you tend to be focussed on is where the next person is going to come from to buy your product or service – this is normally thought to be a new customer and someone that has never bought from you.Having a good lead generation or acquisition marketing plan in place is crucial to the survival of any business and you need to ensure that you have a way of working out this plan. domain name disputes . Having all you focus on this though is not a great idea.A few years ago when recession hit the country very badly, we saw many companies lose out and end up closing. My previous business was one of them in 2009. We lost retained contracts in a time when budgets were slashed and no-one else was buying. We couldn’t get enough new business in to survive. All our efforts were focussed on getting new business, we couldn’t get enough and the business closed. (There was more to it but you get the gist of what I am saying here)

Having a mixed focus on both acquisition and retention marketing will keep the wolves from the door.

You need to ensure you have your lead generation tools all working for you but forgetting to build relationships with, or simply keeping in contact with your existing customers or subscribers, will leave them open to choosing someone else above you.The biggest way that this happens is when they have a problem and someone else presents a solution before you. Keep a communication channel open with them about everything that you do (one message at a time) and you stand a chance of being the first person they will call or refer others to.

Build a relationship with your prospects and leads first don’t rush the sale it, and many more, will come later.

Facebook has Changed… Why are you moaning?

Click to see full size screenshot

To explain the meaning of life is impossible to explain how life works might be easier but one way you could describe life in two words is ‘constant change’.Life and Business is not about standing still and letting the world walk or run past. If you did that you wouldn’t enjoy all that you are supposed to be doing and enjoy a successful business. For the past couple of days, when entering Facebook, I have been presented with moan, after moan, after moan about the new Facebook Timeline and the changes that they have made and even some business people saying ‘I’m not looking forward to the changes to the business pages’ – why?!Facebook is in the top 10 of the top 100 brands alongside the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Coca Cola and others. urine drug test . It it stood still it wouldn’t be there. And besides, the moans are going to do nothing. They wont change back, we just have to get use to it.

Facebook “Timeline”

Mark Zuckerberg presented the new Facebook “timeline” on the 22nd of September at the company’s F8 conference in San Francisco.Many are describing the timeline similar to the old sugar paper scrapbook you had when you were a kids – the most recent and important photos and text that users have shared on Facebook.Mark introduced the timeline as “the story of your life – all your stories, all your apps and a new way to express who you are.”He also mentioned about the infamous ‘like’ button – “We are making it so you can connect to anything you want. Now you don’t have to like a book, you can just read a book,” he said. “You don’t have to like a movie; you can just watch a movie.”For me these changes prove that there can be no real social media expert out there. It changes so fast that you have to be so on the ball – or at least let others be on the ball and learn from them.I have updated my profile as I am listed in the Facebook developers community and help people use Facebook more effectively for work and pleasure. You can set up your profile to look like this too, but it is only available to those that are on the developer platform and will only be visible to other developers till it roles out completely. charlotte acupuncture . Click the preview above of how my profile will look soon.Facebook businesses pages will be next I am sure to have the Facebook Timeline treatment and the new masthead ‘Cover’ image is going to be so good for businesses to be able to brand their page more effectively. This Facebook Timeline change is going to be great!Change is constant. Embrace change and you will achieve more. Stand still and you’ll get left behind.