change  November 9, 2010

Five Steps to Tweeting Without Being a Twit

Sean Shoffstall, Director of Product Marketing

For many brands today, social media is a touchy subject. Figuring out how to get your message out there (and where) is often a daunting task for marketing departments.

You hear about it from executives: “Why aren’t we on Twitter?” You hear about it from agencies: “For only X dollars per month, we can put you on Facebook!” But what does social media accomplish if you don’t get out the right message, can’t track engagement – or worse yet, make a mockery of your brand in the social media space?

Fear not! Social media can be fun and profitable if you take the right precautions. Follow this easy five-step process as the starting point for your company’s social media success. It all centers on being L.A.S.E.R.-focused.

Listen
Too many companies jump into the social media space without taking the most important step: listening. Social media isn’t about your brand – it’s about your customers. With tools such as ScoutLabs, Visible Technologies, Radian 6, and a host of others, you can listen in on how your customers perceive you and your competitors’ brands. These tools give you instant insight into not only how and where your customers are talking about you, but also the sentiments of those conversations.

Analyze
Now that you have the tools to listen, be sure to analyze who your customers are and when and where they are active. The answers may surprise you. Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only social media avenues – you may find that other platforms make two-way conversations easier. For example, blogs, forums, YouTube, and Flickr might be more appropriate for your audience.

Find your advocates and detractors; see how they lead their networks to learn key messages. This analysis can also reveal new keywords or phrases your customers are using that you can incorporate into your website or marketing campaigns. Look for trends among your key advocates, and don’t forget to do some research on your competitors’ pain points.

Strategize
Now that you know whom to engage with and where, the next step is how. If you really want social media to work for you, you have to work for your customers (are you starting to see a common theme?).

Who in your organization will be part of the social media team? Think outside the marketing box. Look deep in IT, operations, PR, and even among your administrative staff and interns. Create guidelines to help people understand where to engage (but it is not always best to tell them how to engage). For most organizations, it’s enough to provide employees with simple rules such as, “Keep it professional” and “Our brand stands for X,” and to provide them with paths of escalation for when issues are beyond their expertise.

The last step in strategizing is tracking. What are your goals and how do you measure them? Be smart about using URL shorteners such as bit.ly to embed tracking codes and drive people to landing pages or specific content pages. Make sure your analytics system can properly credit social media sites for referrals. Just for fun, here are a few of my favorite social media KPIs: Sentiment, Message Amplification, Number of Advocates, and Employee Involvement.

Engage
Notice that the “E” in L.A.S.E.R. doesn’t stand for Execute. It stands for Engage, because this is a conversation. Prepare to engage your prospects – not just today, but over the long haul. You might start by presenting a contest or commenting on a blog. The key is to offer something specifically for your readers.

You’ll run into detractors. Craft a plan to turn them into advocates. Meanwhile, provide your advocates with tools to carry your message to their followers. Always remember: this is one of the easiest ways for your customers to engage with you, whether you are in the B2B or B2C space.

Report
In the Strategize phase, you defined your metrics and KPIs. Now, see how you’ve moved the needle. Using listening tools and properly tracked URLs, you can gain significant insight into the effectiveness of your social media. Don’t necessarily expect social media campaigns to drive direct sales (although sometimes they do), but see how they increase awareness of your brand. They may surprise you and help reduce your support costs, or they may simply help drive downloads. In any case, report results constantly and update your strategy according to the results you’re seeing.

With a L.A.S.E.R.-focused approach, you’ll not only engage your customers how and where they want, but also be able to understand the value of those interactions. Don’t forget that your customers are your best sales people. Keep them happy and give them the tools to engage with you.

A final thought: While many of us still tend to think of social media as being “out there,” we have ample opportunities on our sites and in our marketing communications to let our customers engage with us. Provide tools (such as forums) that allow two-way communication. On your web pages and event sites and in your marketing communications, give your customers a way to amplify your message through sharing technologies such as ShareThis. Above all, never forget: social media is about your customers, not your brand.

Elodie Bouneau, Ozone Marketing Intern

Ah, the landing page. It’s all too easy to slap one together as an afterthought to a lead generation campaign. After all, if a prospect has gone this far, you’ve probably got him in the bag, right?

Unfortunately, we online marketers often turn off landing page visitors right before they become leads – and then blame our lackluster campaign results on the offer, the list, or some other element.

How can you turn an underperforming landing page into the ultimate lead machine? Here are some guidelines:

Drive Your Prospects Towards Your Offer
Why did you build a landing page in the first place? That’s right: to convince each prospect to take one specific action. You want him to sign up for your newsletter, download a free trial, or buy your product.

To keep your prospect moving towards the goal:

• Don’t give options. If you offer your prospect the choice of buying either the standard or premium version of your product, she may mull it over for a few moments, give up, and leave your site. Instead, offer only one option per landing page.
• Make the offer easy to get. State your call to action at least two or three times throughout your page. Make a big, bright, appealing call-to-action button, and place it in highly visible locations.
• Be brief. If you’re asking prospects to provide contact information, keep the form short enough that they’ll be able to complete it before distractions arise.

Keep it Simple
According to Interactive Marketing, Inc., the largest percentage of landing page visitors leave within 8 seconds. The lesson? It doesn’t take much to turn off a website visitor.

A good offer speaks for itself. So, there’s no need to clutter a landing page with graphics and special effects. Instead, keep things simple, professional, consistent, and easy to read:

• Make sure there’s enough color contrast between your background and font.
• Use no more than two fonts per page: one for your headline and one for your body copy. Also, use boldface and italics sparingly.
• If you’re using photos and videos to engage prospects, keep them professional – and remember, less is more. 
• Keep your header, product name, and first call-to-action above the fold. Most people don’t like to scroll.

Earn Their Trust
Before your visitors pull out their credit cards, they’ll want to know they’re buying a good product from a reputable merchant. Your landing page can build trust by including:

• The logos of any security technologies you use, such as Trust-E Web, HackerSafe, or Verisign
• The logos of your big-name, well-respected partners
• Quotes from third-party reviews of your product
• Brief customer testimonials

Keep Improving
Don’t settle for “good.” Keep shooting for higher conversion rates. To do so, you’ll need to set up a tracking system. Here’s an easy way to get started:

1. Install a unique visitor tracker on your landing page. Then, to calculate your conversion rate, simply divide your total number of conversions against the total number of unique visitors for the same time period.
2.  Use this data to gauge the effectiveness of the improvements you’re making on the landing page.
3. When you’re ready to dive into hardcore testing, try the amazing Google Website Optimizer. The multivariate testing feature lets you test different variables repeatedly so you can identify which ones are working best. Even small tweaks can have a noticeable effect on your results. Where to begin testing? Conversion Rate Experts has written an in-depth guide to using Google Website Optimizer.

Never stop looking for ways to clarify your content, simplify your design, and earn your prospects’ trust as you lure them towards your offer. Your conversion rates will improve – and your bottom line will be sure to follow.

The Creative Director's Perspective

Jon Anderson, Creative Director

In the early days of my career, I stuck to my silo. Creative was my only domain, and the Sales team was a distant afterthought – as distant as the far side of Pluto. After all, I was an Art Director fresh out of design school, and I was completely focused on conjuring up brilliant concepts, winning awards, and getting a job.

As the years wore on, I heard from Strategists and CMOs about their business strategy and realized there was a huge gap between Sales and Marketing. Creative would often present to a room full of executives, and Sales would consistently struggle with creative direction.

It felt as if Sales and Marketing were on different planets.

This is a struggle as old as advertising itself – one that challenges even the best of companies. It trickles all the way down to the creative process. By the time the Creative team presents their work, the Sales team typically has little connection to it. On the other extreme, when Sales has too much influence in the creative process, the result is typically an over-the-top, hard-sell message featuring concepts that would be best served on a toilet paper roll.

The good news is that there's a fairly straightforward way to include the Sales team in the creative process while ensuring the creative product will be sophisticated and savvy. Just follow these steps.

#1 Identify Sales’ pain points
Hold a meeting to find out what Sales’ biggest challenges are and how Marketing might be able to help address them. Now, there won’t necessarily be a Marketing solution to every Sales challenge, but just listening and brainstorming can be amazingly helpful. For example, if Sales is receiving too many unqualified leads, perhaps Marketing can build a better pre-qualification tool into the company’s landing pages.

#2 Get the Creative team involved
The Creative team should spend some time brainstorming and present some ideas on how to address Sales' issues. The results can be surprising: a microsite that has a fun ROI calculator, a Facebook campaign that promotes a new Sales initiative, or a mailer to hot C-level prospects.

#3 Include Sales’ solvable issues in the Creative Brief
This is huge. Assuming there’s a good creative brief for all projects (there should be!), be sure to include Sales’ pain points. Make sure the Sales team signs off on the brief. This will not only give the Creative team insight into Sales’ issues, but will also influence the final creative product.

#4 Refer to Sales’ pain points during the creative presentation
When the Creative team presents their work, be sure to explain how it addresses Sales’ specific issues outlined in the brief, and how it might provide more qualified leads. Now, instead of Sales feeling like a third wheel, they’ll realize they have a stake in the game.

No matter what you do, Marketing and Creative won't solve all of Sales’ problems. But you can make an enormous difference by listening and being inclusive. And once you have a couple of successful campaigns under your belt, you may find that your whole relationship with Sales has changed – for the better.