What does the word social have to do with media? First of all, social media is not the same as traditional media. The term media refers to various means of communication traditionally associated with newspapers, magazines, and television or radio broadcasts. Social media sites have become the platform to combine a wide range of digital spaces into a single package. 

Social media is a marketing tool designed to establish a presence and build relationships with your prospects in a timely and consistent manner. Social media has opened the door to social media marketing (what I also refer to as interactive media marketing), which is the method of using social media to draw traffic to your business. Rather than pushing your message into the prospective customer’s space (as traditional marketing does), social media marketing focuses on relationship development and attracting your target market to learn more about you.

Social media allows people to develop personal relationships with others around the world as needs to have the same mentality as “attending a cocktail party or social gathering.”  How would you talk to others in this environment?  Would you self promote or listen and build relationships?

First, social media can be a tool to see how to fit into the lives of targeted customers. Search both yourself and your company name and see if people are talking about you. Are they mentioning you in passing? It allows companies to get ahead of an angry blog, social media site, or e-mail and handle customer service issues. That little bit of communication can build a rapport online for others to see. It allows people to build personal relationships that may have nothing to do with a company, but that little bit of empathic communication can lead to more business referrals.

Social media opens the door for communication with almost anyone. You can reach out to complete strangers, can get advice, or even share your advice online. These conversations are often stored digitally and made available over time for others to read or participate in. Each of us has probably given or received advice but it may be forgotten after a week or so. Now you can connect with others online and save this information indefinitely. This switch to social media marketing allows us to communicate more effectively and efficiently.

Social media enables users to build relationships in an easier, faster manner. Social media can also be used to draw people to face-to-face events such as conferences and trade shows. Many conference attendees “tweet” or mini blog about the event during the presentation, creating   chatter and relationships that may be built upon long after the event is over. At EXHIB-IT! , we blog at shows and report how the show is going or deliver content that others may want to hear. You can upload a video, images at the show, or interview attendees and post the video and images online and blog about them.

Before you go into the social media environment and start blasting away with information about you, your business and promote a product or service, listen first.  Get involved in groups and community areas so you can hear what is being said and respond to build your confidence.

DJ Heckes, Author & CEO
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com 

Often businesses can feel that integrating marketing (bridging traditional, digital, and social media marketing) can be as enormous as the Grand Canyon if not properly thought out, and can be an expensive process if not properly planned and measured. Yet if done to match the right message with the right audience, the payoff is valuable. Doing so takes strategy and time in the beginning.

I recommend taking a look at what has been done so far in evaluating your company’s overall internal systems and processes and also take a look at the external perceptions of the customers. This can be done by asking each customer how they heard about your company and why they do business with your company.  We do this within our own company and is a process for our employees when someone calls or walks into our showroom. Also using the competitive analysis discussed in earlier blogs will enable your company to gain valuable insight to what you are doing better or not doing well.

Evaluate the company’s Unique Selling Proposition, also known as USP and how that USP relates to what and how things are delivered to the customers. After this is accomplished, determine the best media to reach the target market segments. Is the target audience under thirty years of age? If so, this is the time to delve into social media as a main touch point to reach this target audience. 

If the target audience is between thirty and forty, it is a good idea to focus on digital marketing and social media. If the target audience is between forty and fifty-five, I suggest you use all three methods to reach them. There will be some in this group who appreciate social media, but most prefer the traditional and digital media. If the target audience is over fifty-five, then I suggest you pick up the phone and personally get to know this target audience or use direct mail to reach this customer.

Millions of customers converse on a daily basis in online communities, discussion forums, blogs, and social networks sharing opinions, advice, grievances, and recommendations. Are you listening, connecting, and responding in a way that protects and promotes your brand?

Find out how customers feel about your brand, product, or service – in their words. This is a great opportunity to listen to the customers at a time when there is so much to offer on the Internet. It has been said that traditional media is losing its face value and that the Internet is a fad and digital only applies to the millennium generation. While that may seem true, if you want to stay on the innovative cusp for your business, use both traditional and Internet media marketing. Here are some reasons why:

• Online conversations can power or deflate a company’s brand.  Do you have an online presence?

• Discover specific issues that are being discussed around your company, brand, or organization and create feedback to these issues.

• There may be events, trends, and issues that may be influencing industry and brand buzz that you can respond to online.

• You can measure how your online and offline marketing campaigns resonate with customers. 

• You will be able to leverage word-of-mouth to drive brand credibility, and ultimately sales, if you use face-to-face marketing, Internet marketing, search engine optimization strategy and social media strategy correctly. 

According to Nielson research, TV users watch TV more than ever before (an average of 127 hours, fifteen minutes per month) and these users are spending 9 percent more time using the Internet (twenty-six hours, twenty-six minutes per month) from last year. Approximately 220 million Americans have Internet access at home and/or work with a growing number using the Internet for research and social media.

Online marketing communications are moving toward interactions between individuals as recipients and consumers rather than being directed from a marketing organization to masses of
consumers.  It is now possible for individuals to be just as efficient in broadcasting information, both positive and negative, about a company or individual as it is for larger corporations to
promote themselves such as Comcast, Del and Southwest Airlines.  Companies that are using this form of communication online have been successful in responding to positive and negative cyber space information. The social networking that allows the quick and easy dissemination of information and misinformation is in part a product of change in online communication channels.  These communication channels are in part enabled by such social networking.

Knowing this research, traditional media entertains and communicates to a mass audience whereas digital media entertains, communicates with, and engages the individual. Digital media is known as digitized content (text, graphics, audio, and video) that can be transmitted over the Internet. The benefits of digital media can be highly measurable and marketers can often see a direct effect in the form of improved sales in addition to establishing a direct link with the customer. This can also be cost effective. However, the pitfalls of digital marketing can be that the medium is new, constantly changing, and evolving with results that vary. You often get what you ask for!

By engaging the customer, you can clearly define your audience and determine the best way to engage that audience (both traditionally and digitally). First, examine your budget and deliverables and set goals with measurable expectations. Engage the customers in conversation and always market in a way that truly connects with the customers and answers any questions they may have about your product or service. Use traditional and digital media to reach your mass targeted audience and invite them to be engaged via the Web. Leverage the Web to start conversations. This is where you can lose or gain the attention of your audience if done correctly. Engage the viewer for lead generation.

Some of the emerging issues from online marketing channels are-

1.    Integrated Marketing Communication

The concept of integrated marketing communications, also known as IMC, is relatively new over the past few years.  The general idea is that there are a wide array of media methods and channels for communicating with those outside of a company that a company needs to coordinate and centralize these activities over the long term in order to be effective. By mid-1990s, IMC was being described as an emerging concept and field, but was also perceived as one with a lack of any generally accepted definition or process for precedence. Prior to this time, it was noted that there was little discussion or description of what has now come to be called IMC and this term was considered to be a mere buzzword and now look at the reality.

2.    Social Media

The emergency and popularity of social networking and social media sites has made it easy for an individual to communicate in real time with thousands of total strangers being present online and conversations take place as if with a single close friend. Social networking Web sites have also been a great equalizer, making it just as easy for someone to build or break a marketing brand as for a large corporation-as well as making it easy for a large corporation to mimic a sincere "grassroots" individual who lacks corporate motives. A social networking Web site allows internet users the ability to add user-generated content such as  comments, feedback, ratings, or their own dedicated pages for allowing product users to post ratings, comments, opinions, and full reviews about products.  

Wikipedia.com makes it possible for anyone to edit information about a company or person, enabling a view that is not necessarily the official white-washed company version.

Social networking Web sites make it easy for anyone to spoof a person or company with a fake profile and fake messages with the objective of causing harm to the other party.   This can be harmful to person or company should this happen.

Social networking Web sites also allow anonymous attacks on the character of persons or companies. For example, there was an attorney working for Cisco, a computer networking business, who anonymously posted comments on a blog about a patent attorney.  A civil lawsuit alleging libel and slander was then filed. The patent attorney had been on the opposing side of the patent lawsuit. The Cisco attorney allegedly accused the patent attorney, along with another attorney and a federal clerk, of conspiring to alter a document.  Claims were made to having made the blog post with the knowledge and approval of his supervisor. He ultimately admitted his true identity after someone traced his Internet address and threatened to expose him (LaRowe, 2008).

The damage to the reputation of the recipient of such an attack can be long lasting if such posts are indexed and never deleted, yet the risk, along with financial and reputation cost, to the anonymous party making them is nearly nil. The results of such attacks could also be long lasting even if removed. 

This opens up a lot of ethics when posting things online.  Become familiar with WOMMA.com, which is an online resource that provides ethical leadership to protect consumers and protect your brand.  It has best practices that help you become a better word of mouth “WOM” marketer with standards that improve impact and accountability.  This is a great organization to join.

From a marketing perspective, we are at a pioneering stage in understanding how online marketing works.  If you are new to online marketing, you may want to study how online
communication channels are emerging and how they might evolve in the future.  Some critical elements to become familiar with for online marketing infrastructure are core/technological, competitive/commercial and political/regulatory issues. 

DJ Heckes, Author & CEO
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com

Understanding customers is so important that large corporations spend millions of dollars annually on market research to gain this knowledge. Although formal research is important, a small business can usually avoid this expense. Typically, the owner or manager of a small business knows the customers personally, which is an added advantage. From this personal
foundation, understanding your customers can be built through systematic efforts. A comprehensive system for understanding is what Rudyard Kipling in his poem, “The Elephant’s Child,” called “I Keep Six Honest Serving Men…” and their names are What, Why, When, How,  Where and Who.

What

Find out the customers’ needs, as the common names of products mean as little to them as the chemical names on the label of a proprietary drug. A sick person’s real need is safety, speed, and
relief. Understanding your customers’ needs enables a company to profit by providing what buyers seek – satisfaction and results. Products change, but basic benefits like personal hygiene, attractiveness, entertainment, privacy and safety endure, as do commercial purposes such as quests for competitive superiority or profitability. Successful manufacturers, retailers, and service businesses produce benefits for which customers are willing to pay. In other words, successful businesses understand the reason for their customers’ buying decisions.

So why is it that so many businesses find it difficult to retain existing customers? Just how many product and service slip-ups does it take to send a customer packing? According to BIGresearch survey results, 17 percent of customers will bolt after a single service slip up. Another 40 percent will jump ship after two instances of poor product or service delivery, and 28 percent more will go out the door after three slipups. That’s 85 percent loss of customers due to service mistakes. So what do buyers really want from you? In order of priority, here’s what customers say:

Knowledgeable and Available Employees
Friendly and Cooperative Staff
Good Value
Convenience
A Fast and Efficient Finish

Why

Determining why customers choose one company over another is challenging. Customers themselves don’t always know. They may think they purchase from a business because the products or services are better than another’s, when in reality it’s something else. Perhaps they know, like, and trust the employee or salesperson that is the company spokesperson. Or maybe their business associate or friend mentioned it to them last week.

The reason customers buy is based on logic from “their point of view.” Understanding customers derives from this fundamental premise. Every customer has unique and individual goals, pressures, and purchase criteria. The astute business deduces and accepts the buying logic of customers and serves their customers accordingly. Sometimes the reasons customers buy are trivial. If customers feel indifferent toward a product or business, the selection is more apt to be happenstance. Perhaps several rival offerings meet all the conditions that a customer deems important. Consequently, minor factors will govern. This explains the rationale of the customer who chose a $28,000 car because its upholstery was most attractive. That’s how I decide between cars…upholstery and dashboard…what I see and feel while in it! Price is not the top consideration. 

The point is to pay attention to details. They may be crucial to customers. Shrewd businesses respect what customers say and pay special attention to what customers do. Just as important as why customers buy is why former customers take their patronage elsewhere. Also, why are qualified buyers not buying? What is keeping them from buying? Can this obstacle be surmounted? Companies should monitor competitive offerings and buyers’ reactions to determine purchase motivators. Informal conversations may also reveal some reasons. Special offers may overcome resistance and boost profits. Many factors affect why a customer will buy products or services from you rather than your competition. They may include:

Awareness
Features and Benefits
Price
Brand and/or Reputation
Convenience
Word of Mouth

When

Many buying decisions from customers are postponed because there is not an emotional motivation for the product or service being offered. Timing is critical for the standard 3 to 5 percent buying cycle timeline for your customer. This is the time cycle percentage when customers are most likely ready to buy. The other 95 to 97 percent of the time, they are just shopping and do not have an emotional buy in.

When customers are ready to buy, be ready. A business must be ready to sell when the buyer is ready to purchase, lest an opportunity be irretrievably lost. Customers buy when they want an offering that is relevant to them and when they have time and money to purchase it. Buying patterns may often be discerned from an analysis of existing customers and their purchases. Look at the history of what existing customers have purchased. 

Many customers have limited time for shopping only during off hours, evenings, and on weekends. The transition from a single breadwinner per family to having all adults of a household engaged in commercial employment has intensified these time restrictions. Astute business retailers adjust their hours, staffing, and availability of merchandise and services to meet customers’ shopping convenience. Restaurateurs and bartenders know that business booms on paydays.

When marketing, timing strategies can benefit significantly from competitive analysis as previously discussed. Companies may want to consider adding and systematically refreshing information that captures what their competitors are offering. It may also be helpful to know when competitors make those offers and to which markets those offers are being made. This data can assist companies in knowing when to adapt the timing and cadence of their offers to either pre-empt or strategically react to their competitors’ offers. But, again, I want to emphasize the importance of not basing everything on price.

How

Customers make purchases to satisfy needs. These may be economic, physical, or emotional needs. Customers may perceive wants and needs to be the same. If customers need something, they want it. If customers want something, they need it. It is important to remember that needs and wants are not always generated by a problem that needs to be solved. Personal preferences and desires of customers play a large part in customer purchase decisions. It has been found that buyers generally behave rationally whenever buying decisions are made. Customers buy to gain the benefits of the products and services they find of interest. Customers usually expect to gain more than they give up. If customers do not think they are getting a good deal, you are not likely to close a sale. Both the buyer and seller have expectations to gain from every transaction. If both the customer and the business are not satisfied, then the sale is not likely to occur.

To sell anything, whether in a retail store environment or on the Internet, you have to understand the typical steps that your customer will take before handing over hard-earned cash.
This process entails four steps:

1.    Recognition of problems or needs
2.     Information Research for a solution to a problem or need
3.    Examination of alternatives and buying decision
4.    Purchase evaluation of decision to purchase

Where

Whatever location is chosen for a company, make an effort to become familiar with the habits, likes, and dislikes of your customers. Find out the median household income or business revenue of the area. These statistics are usually available from a local government agency or you can often find this information on the Internet. Next, find out how many cars visit nearby retail stores or businesses or drive by your location on the major thoroughfare.

Ask yourself questions. “Why do people visit this particular business district? Does it contain businesses that will attract the same customers I am targeting?” Consider a location near a busy
intersection or heavy traffic area.

When choosing a location for your business, demographic information will provide the first clues if you are not familiar with the businesses and culture of an area. Examples of this data could reveal that 40 percent of the businesses in the area have business owners under the age of forty, have been there less than two years, work sixty hours a week, and may earn over $100,000 a year. Or that a large percentage of the businesses around you are in the infancy stage of business and are not your probable customer. Location is extremely important to “captive” buyers. If a company is easy to get to and is well branded for location, a customer will stop by on the way to work, at lunch, after work, or even take part of the day to come visit.

Who

Not everyone is your customer and it is sometimes difficult for small business owners to acknowledge this. However, when they do, they can best advertise and market to their target customer. While you can’t win all the customers all the time, you can win with a certain demographic when you create a unique niche for yourself using decor and special catalog items that satisfy your chosen group of customers.

There are many ways to acquire information and they all involve research. Before you gather information to make your marketing easier, ask questions and really listen to the words and body language of the answers. It is good to know who is buying and why. Understanding people’s motivations makes it far easier to appeal to them with marketing messages and keep
them, and others like them, happy. Train the company employees to ask leading questions and report findings of what customers want. 

Manufacturers and suppliers of your products keep up with the industry and have a vested interest in seeing you grow, so tap into their expertise too. Another consideration in profiling a customer is to understand who influences the purchase decisions. These are the people who will: 

1.    Initiate the inquiry of your product or service
2.    Influence the decision to buy
3.    Decide which product or service to buy
4.    Permit the purchase to be made (Sometimes the decision maker is this person, but the decision maker – like a CFO – will sign the paperwork after other pertinent members of the buying cycle have submitted their recommendations.)

As has been shown, understanding of customers enables a company to increase sales and revenue. This same understanding can equally serve to reduce costs. Higher sales at lower costs inevitably boost profits. A small firm that understands its customers can buy or produce exactly  what they want – and nothing else. The company’s sales effort is efficient because it builds on why its customers want to buy and not on why others buy, or why the vendor wants to sell.

Overall, it may be your service – not your price – that dictates whether or not you secure customers for the long term. If you give customers what they want, the way they want it, when they want it, and follow through with a fast finish in the end, you are much more likely to turn those customers into satisfied repeat customers.

DJ Heckes, Author & CEO
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com

Each of us uses the principles of psychology every day and probably don’t even realize we are doing it. For example, when we get nervous right before giving that big speech, we activate our autonomic nervous system. When we talk to ourselves in our minds, telling ourselves to “calm down,” “work better and harder,” or “give up,” we are utilizing cognitive approaches to change our emotions and behaviors. When a child is disciplined for doing something wrong, we utilize the learning principle of punishment. What is so important about understanding human emotions, behavior, and the mind of what we learn in most required college courses in Psych 101? What advantage does this knowledge lend itself to a business professional?

It is simple-psychologists not only spend their time helping people with their problems, they perform research to better understand why people react and behave the way they do. Industrial-organizational psychologists work with companies and organizations to determine ways to make them more productive and to improve relationships in the workplace. We use the same principles of psychology every day to determine who the target audiences are for our own business. 

Who Are Your Customers, Really?

Here are 5 critical characteristics to help you understand who your customers are.

1.    Behavior

These are variables such as benefit sought, consumer attitude, loyalty rate, occasion, readiness stage, user rate and user status,  They include amount of purchase, cost, frequency of purchase, loyalty, time of year, time involved in purchasing decision, and where customers purchase the product.

2.    Demographic

These are the basic identifiable characteristics of individual consumers and organizational consumers and groups of consumers and organizational consumers. Demographics are often used as “segmentation” bases that define groups of people or organizations, with similar demographics that often have similar needs and desires that are distinct from those with different backgrounds. These include: age, education level, family size, gender, income level, marital status, occupation, race, religion, and other pertinent information.

3.    Geographic

This describes the basic identifiable characteristics of cities, countries, regions, states, and towns. One or a combination of these factors such as climate, competition, cost of living, density, growth pattern, legislation, location, media, operations, size, and transportation network may comprise for an identifiable location.

4.    Psychographic

These are any attributes relating to attitudes, interests, lifestyles, personality or values. They are characteristics like experience brand loyalty, family life cycle, innovativeness, lifestyle, opinion, perceived risk, personality and motives, social class, and usage rate that determine how a customer thinks of themselves relative to others.

5.    Linguistic

This is the way language varies in the communities of customers. This is where you look in particular at the interaction of social factors (such as a age, degree of integration into their community, ethnicity, gender, etc) and linguistic structures (such as grammatical forms, intonation features, sounds, words, etc). They also include key words, key phrases, misspellings, along with regional differences in spelling and pronunciation.

How do you know who your target customers are? How well do you really know them? Do they browse and buy on impulse or buy only what they need and want? Does the customer shop alone or with coworkers, friends, and family (who might influence their purchases)? Are they brand loyal? Do they shop online or just research on the Web to find the best price? And how much money do they have to spend? Understanding how your target audience thinks before buying is key. Making money in a small business is important, but truly understanding the customer’s way of thinking will make or break business growth.

How aware are customers of your brand or business compared to your competition? First, identify how the customers know about you. The prospective customer is made aware of your product or service through: 

• Advertising
• Face-to-face marketing
• Reading a review or article of your company
• Referral from a friend or colleague
• Search engines
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more)
• Trade shows and events
• Viral marketing

Over the past decade, Web sites are an integral part of marketing success. Customers visit Web sites to get a sense of what a business is about and learn as much as they can about the product or services being offered. Content on a Web site should build trust or the prospective customer will quickly leave and never return. In doing this, a Web site should answer questions that the consumer has, and have content written for them and not just about who you are, what you do, and how you do it. Having a “call to action” on every product or service page helps visitors know how to proceed to the next step.

If you are offering a reasonably high-priced product or service on the Web site, the prospective customer will make contact with the company by e-mail, live chat (if offered), phone, social media, and text (if offered). This contact may be to get a genuine question answered, but is an important stage for the trust-building process. Customers want to know whether there are real people behind the Web site visited. How quickly will they get a response? How well will their question be answered? Do you understand what they want? Are you listening to their questions and concerns?

Today’s customers are active in and informed about the buying process. They conduct Internet research to see what OTHER people are saying about you, your products or services, and your business. You have no control over what will be found. If the majority of articles, blog posts, comments, reviews and testimonials (written or video), are positive, this will greatly increase the chance of getting a sale.  If the majority of information found is negative, you can almost certainly kiss that future customer good-bye. To be in the race, a company’s Web site with products and services needs to be highly visible on the Internet. The content on a Web site has to build trust with the visitors. If someone visits a company’s Web site, they expect a prompt and courteous response that shows professionalism to all queries. Your reputation on the Internet must be positive and the products or service offered MUST be of quality. These points can be boiled down into understanding how your brand and reputation are created on the Web. The formula is simple.

Web Presence/Credibility + Product Quality + Support = Reputation/Brand

If these three elements are not in place, businesses will struggle to have a long-term future. If they are all in place, along with having a good online reputation, your business can grow rapidly through word of mouth. Finally, the customer has done the research and brings together everything he or she has learned and makes a decision. The choices are:

• Buy your company’s product or service
• Buy a competitor’s product or service
• Buy nothing and stay on the fence about the buying decision which usually means the customer did not get an answer to a need.

Understanding customers is so important that large corporations spend millions of dollars annually on market research to gain this knowledge. Although formal research is important, a small business can usually avoid this expense. Typically, the owner or manager of a small business knows the customers personally, which is an added value advantage. From this personal foundation,  understanding your customers can be built through systematic efforts such as processes in which to respond to customer queries, automated responders that are sent out and a telephone call follow up process in place and the like.

DJ Heckes, Author & CEO
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com