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Aug 07 2016

Let's Play A Game

Sheralyn

Sometimes in this space we talk about communication. Well, ok – usually in this space communication is ALL we talk about!  Occasionally it’s tips and tools, sometimes it is general open-ended advice applicable to any business and today, we would like to share something we do each week in an effort to engage both new and existing customers. It might seem a little self-indulgent but we hope you’ll go along with us and possibly pick up some helpful advice along the way.

There are two things we do each week to engage and interact with our audience. If you’ve never followed the links at the bottom of this post in order to view our business facebook page, I invite you to do so, in order to see what it’s all about. Once there, you might consider how you can adapt the concept to best suit your business.  Perhaps you are hoping to drive more traffic to your website. Maybe your facebook page needs more likes. Either way, we encourage you to consider “having a conversation” with your customer, as a means to potentially increasing your bottom line.  In today’s digital economy, communication often takes on a new and unique meaning. Conversations don’t necessarily take place face to face and in fact, you may never meet your customer or client in person. How do you have a “conversation” without ever speaking a word? Well one of things we do at Writing Right For You is play games and share information!

Each week we play “Wordplay Wednesday”™ and “Fun Fact Friday.”™ Wednesday is an opportunity to engage followers in a challenging exercise usually involving homonyms. We interact with our audience as they attempt to guess the word of the day. Occasionally, a Timmies gift card is the prize. Playing our Wordplay Wednesday challenge drives traffic to our facebook page and website too. We engage and interact with both existing and potential customers in a light-hearted and fun way that involves absolutely no sales pressure whatsoever.  This is followed up each Friday with our Fun Fact word of the day where we share the weird and wonderful world of the English language, explaining the meaning behind such unusual words as “quidnunc.” (Yup, it really is a word!)

Not everything in business needs to be about “the sale.” By engaging customers in new and unique ways however, a sale might just be the end result. Consider what you can do to engage, interact and have a “conversation” with both new and existing customers, without ever picking up the phone. Stop by our page first….increase your vocabulary, share your new found knowledge with your own customers and hey, you might win a coffee while you’re at it!

 

As Owner and Principal partner of “Writing Right For You” Sheralyn is a Communications Strategist – working together with entrepreneurs to maximize profit through effective use of the written word. Looking for web content that works, blog articles that engage or communications strategies that help you get noticed?  Contact Sheralyn today. Sheralyn is also the mother of two children now entering the “terrible and terrific teens” and spends her free time volunteering for several non-profit organizations.

Sheralyn Roman B.A., B.Ed.

Writing Right For You

Communications Strategies that help you GET TO THE POINT!

416-420-9415 Cell/Business

writingrightforyou@gmail.com

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Sheralyn Roman · Tagged: Canadian Small Business Women, communication, customers, engage, entrepreneur, Fun Fact Friday, let's play a game, Sheralyn Roman, Wordplay Wednesday, Writing Right For You

Jun 28 2015

Don’t Feel Overwhelmed By Your Social Media Networks

Aviary Photo_130605261112039905

As a business owner, engaging on social media can often feel quite overwhelming. With continuously changing newsfeeds, tweets and posts, and so little time to go through everything, it is very easy to feel frustrated with real-time online content.

Quite honestly, we’d rather forget about this part of online marketing too. I mean, there’s nothing better than looking out a window, instead of having your eyes glued to a (small) electronic screen. Unfortunately, our ideal job as a professional window gazer will have to wait for now.

Seeing as this is no longer the 20th century, social media networks have significantly changed how we as people communicate and do business. Whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay. No matter how uncomfortable or overwhelming it might make us feel, we have to use it to further maximize our business potential.

So, here are three easy steps to lower your social media anxiety:

  1. Master One Social Media Platform At a Time

Each platform is going to have its challenges, limitations and advantages. It is important to take the time to understand each platform’s functions, as well as the company’s ability to integrate new features to better suit market demands. For instance, did you know that because Facebook is currently gaining ground on Youtube video posts it is ready to promote your video posts over you picture posts? Or did you know that Instagram users are 58 times more likely to like, comment, or share a brand’s post than Facebook users, and 120 times more likely than Twitter users?

Really mastering how to use a social media platform, and understanding its significant tech changes, is important to the well-being of you, your business and your clients. Don’t rush into it, take your time and learn through observation and research.

  1. Scheduling is Your Best Friend

Quality content is Queen when it comes to social media. Have thousands of followers doesn’t guarantee engagement, especially if your content is not relevant, hard to read or outdated. This is why you should take a time or day a week to sit down and research trends, events or news related to your sector or field of business. Combine this with your company’s latest product events and promotions, and you should more than enough material to start scheduling posts for the following week.

By using tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social or Buffer, your life will be a whole lot easier. Schedule the time and day for your posts (and in some cases even the perfect target market), and forget about the days  when you wondered if you have the time to post online.

  1. Make Time to Engage with Your Followers

Social media is called ‘social’ for a reason. That’s why I like to recommend clients to set time aside to engage with their followers. Retweet, share or repost followers’ interesting, relevant posts. Interact, connect, follow-back and ask for feedback whenever possible. By doing so, you’re actively building brand-recognition and working towards customer loyalty and trust.

Most importantly, be respectful and have fun while engaging with others online. Give your business that unique voice that only you can give it.

Written by Marisol and Silvia Fornoni, Founders of JDC.

JDC supports socially conscious organizations with finding sustainable ways to tell their stories using visual design, engaging content and non-traditional media. We help you with anything from organizing fundraising campaigns to web design and social media management.

http://www.joint-development.com

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Marisol and Silvia Fornoni · Tagged: advantages, advice, buffer, business, business owner, Canadian Small Business Women, challenges, engage, Facebook, followers, functions, hootsuite, Joint Development Centre, limitations, Marisol and Silvia Formoni, marketing, master, Networks, online marketing, platform, posts, repost, retweet, scheduling, share, social media, Sprout Social, Teach Me Social, time line, tweets, women, YouTube

Dec 21 2014

Social Strategy SOS

SocialStrategy

In the third post in this series, I discussed why you need to consider your customers as “users” and how you go about creating a User Persona to help you target your Content Strategy to your ideal users. Over the next 3 weeks of this series, we’ll finish fleshing out the remaining pieces of the content strategy puzzle, and this week we’ll tackle what is possibly the most perplexing and time consuming part of your digital business: your Social Media Strategy.

Do I really HAVE to have a social media strategy?

Social strategy is complex: there are so many social networks, and sometimes it feels like there is a new one every day.  How does a business owner know which ones to pay attention to, and which ones to ignore?  Engaging in Social Media can be extremely time consuming with little visible return on investment: It can be difficult to clearly see how a social media strategy can help your business.

But social media can also be a virtual goldmine of new customers.  It can be a way that you can develop a relationship of trust with your customers, engage in customer service activities, and even recruit new employees. Social media is here to stay and it is an essential part of every business owner’s sales, marketing, and business development toolkit.   A smart, targeted social strategy can deliver brand awareness, new customers, and even conversions, but it is important to understand why you’re doing it and what exactly you should do, and this is unique to each and every business.

Conversion has changed – forever.

Think about how your customers convert nowadays.  It used to be that customers would become aware of your brand or product through a limited number of expensive and highly controlled channels: perhaps through a television, radio, or newspaper ad, or perhaps through word of mouth.  Their decision to buy was made primarily at point of purchase, that is, when they saw your product on the shelf in the store: the “first moment of truth”, as it was called in the traditional marketing model.

Google has recently described a new model that very accurately captures the new way consumers become aware of, and make decisions to purchase, products and services today, and they call it the Zero Moment of Truth.  The Zero Moment of Truth is all about digital discovery: the extensive searching, recommendation reading, and consulting with Facebook friends that we now engage in before making a purchasing decision.  For products and services big and small, we rarely convert until we have had at least 7 and sometimes as many as 17 digital “impressions” or touch points with a brand.

ZMOTequation

This Zero Moment of Truth is perhaps the most compelling reason that each and every brand, every business selling every product or service, needs to ensure that when the consumer is engaging in this foraging behaviour, that they are there, building trust and clocking impressions that may lead to conversion.  These impressions come from your business website and your social media activities, especially what people are saying with you and about you in social media.

There may be a small segment of the population that doesn’t use social media, but this is a rapidly shrinking segment.  The fastest growing segment of social users is adults 45-54, and more and more seniors come online every day.  In many ways, Social Media IS the Internet, and the Internet IS Social Media.  It’s difficult today to grow your business without a strategy that covers how, for whom, and how often you will engage your customers in the two-way conversation that Social media has to offer as a marketing tool.

So Many Platforms, So Little Time.

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite make it easy to track and control the frequency of your social media communications, and they make it easy to post the same content simultaneously to multiple social platforms.  But while it may be tempting to try and broadcast your messages to multiple platforms at once, it is rarely a good idea.  In his book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”, Gary Vaynerchuck makes a strong argument that business owners should heed: not all social platforms are created equal.  The kind of storytelling that works really well on Facebook for a particular user will not work on Twitter, or Linked, In, or Pinterest, or….

Knowing which platforms to prioritise is perhaps the most difficult part of your social strategy but also the most critical.  You stand to lose a lot of precious time if you prioritise a platform that really doesn’t work for your business, and you can even erode or undermine your brand if you post something clearly inappropriate for that platform: so how does a savvy business owner choose?

There are three factors to consider:

1) What are the various social platforms “good at”?

2) Which of the social platforms do your users tend towards?

2) What is the nature of your business conversion funnel?

1) A Brief Primer on Social Media

There is much crossover between the various major social media platforms: all of them are, of course, social, meaning they are about engaging in a dialogue with others.  But because each one operates in a slightly different way with different rules of engagement, they require different kinds of Storytelling.

Twitter

  • Has over 230 million monthly active users
  • Twitter followers are 60% more likely to recommend you than a Facebook Liker
  • The average age of a Twitter user is much higher than Facebook, at 39 years
  • 70% of Twitter users expect to hear back from a brand, and 53% want that response within the hour
  • Twitter is good for establishing thought leadership, expertise, for sharing news, and for customer service and customer relationship management

Facebook

  • Facebook is the largest social platform in the world: if it were a country it would the third most populated, after only China and India
  • Facebook does have an influence on purchasing behaviour, even if not a direct one. Your Facebook fans are more likely to convert than non-fans.
  • Facebook is great for visibility in social search
  • Facebook is getting into the retail game with Facebook shops if you are selling a product
  • The new killer app on Facebook is the short video

YouTube

  • Has moved from being primarily a video search engine to a powerful social platform where many brands have been born and built. Khan academy, for example, and Justin Bieber.
  • Web videos are a great way to reach out to new and current customers and generate inbound links to your website
  • Because it is owned by Google, embedding YouTube videos on your website gives those pages a double-boost in Search Engine Optimisation

Google Plus

  • Great for local businesses, reviews, and Google search “juice”
  • Ties your business address into a Google Map and ties into other Google services

Linked In

  • The largest professional network, you must have a personal page on LinkedIn; it is far more common to connect with business contacts on LinkedIn than to keep a Rolodex or stack of business cards or emails.
  • Linked in generates 200% more leads than the other social networks

Pinterest

  • The fastest growing as of December 2012
  • Pinterest is very visual, about ‘things’, items they find interesting, but it works even for small businesses that aren’t visually stimulating.
  • Pinterest is good for referral traffic because the source of the pin is a link to your site, especially images you might be posting in your blogs. Even if you don’t maintain a page or presence on Pinterest, installing a “pin it” button on your website pages is a good idea

2) Where Are Your Users Hanging Out?

The short answer is, everywhere.  But you have to narrow that down a little to come up with a feasible strategy.  It’s important to note here that there are multiple social platforms not listed above, many of them attracting niche audiences where you might find a treasure trove of users interested in exactly what you have to offer.  This article outlines 60 niche social networks and it is worth doing a bit of digging to see if any of them resonate with your business goals.  Another tool that you can use is socialmention.com; social mention searches blogs and social networks for topics or brand mentions and can be a good way of finding out where conversations are taking place that align with the kinds of conversations you want to be having with your customers.  And social crawlytics at socialcrawlytics.com can be very insightful, generating a report that will tell you which pages of your website have been shared in social media, where they have been shared, and even by who.

3) What is the Nature of Your Conversion Funnel?

Typically, the more expensive the product or service, the more touch points the consumer will require before purchasing.  What are you selling, and how many touch point’s do you think your customers need before they buy?

Is your product or service more suited to an active discovery process or a passive discovery process?  For example, if I need an emergency plumbing repair I tend to engage in some very active discovery to find one.  I search Google and will probably call the first few service providers I see.  Social Media is better at passive discovery, at marketing products, services, and ideas that consumers don’t need right away or in an emergency.

Do you have a lot of competitors, so will need more touch points or more visibility in the market, or very few competitors?  Are you in the B2B or B2C market?

How much customer service does your product or service require?  And how much brand awareness do you already have in the market?
SocialStrategySOSWorksheetImage

Document the answers to these questions on this worksheet; by indicating on the sliders in the worksheet where your business lands on these various conversion factors will give you some pointers towards which platforms you might want to prioritise as well as the frequency of posting you might want to consider.  Note that the worksheet is more art than science and is intended only as a starting point: they only way to really get good at social media is by doing it, so start small, perhaps with your LinkedIn page, and build slowly using the worksheet as a guide.

The biggest question the Content Strategist has to answer is “Do I need a website AND a Social Strategy”?  The answer is yes, for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is the findability of your content in Search.  Next month, we’ll cover Search Engine Optimisation and Influencer Marketing, the two biggest ways you can make your website work for your business.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Christine McGlade · Tagged: Analytical Engine, b2b, b2c, business owner, Christine McGlade, Content strategy, conversion, conversion funnel, customers, digital impressions, document, engage, Facebook, faebook, first moment of truth, gary vaynerchuck, goldmine, google, Google Map, impressions, interest, jab, Justin Bieber, Khan, Linkedin, newspaper ad, platforms, product, puzzle, radio, relationship, right hook, Rolodex, SEO, series, service, social media, social media strategy, social network, social networks, Social strategy, sos, television, time-consuming, Twitter, user persona, virtual, website, word of mouth, worksheet, YouTube, zero moment of truth

Oct 23 2013

Speaking To Groups

Kerry George (1)

Getting the word out about what you do is important. That is why it is necessary to learn to speak to groups of people about your unique offering and to get your message apart clearly.

First of all one needs to select the groups that you speak to with care. There are only so many hours in the day so we must spend our time wisely. I spent 12 years as a Pastor but when I entered into the realm of business I could no longer spend 20 hours a week in front of a church giving out spiritual messages. This was not the demographic that I needed to reach for my business. As a mother I had been part of several women’s groups and organizations over the years, but again these groups of people would not suit my needs. My business was about offering a service to professionals and to entrepreneurs. Where would I find that market?

What is your business? What is your service? What are your products? Who is your target market? Narrow that down. Be as specific as possible. Know your specific demographic. Then craft and create a message around that target market appealing to those individuals. Once you have a message you will want to look at every speaking opportunity asking yourself the question, “Will this group of people consist of the market that I am after?” There is no point in spending many hours at the wrong venues. It is not a worthwhile practice.

Once you are in the right location you must also consider how to bring your message across the most effectively. People have different languages that they communicate in and that effects how they receive information. The main three are kinetic, auditory, and visual. Whenever possible you want to engage all of these people during your presentation and as often as possible throughout your presentation. Here are some quick tips to get you started.

Powerpoint – A powerpoint presentation can engage people who are auditory and visual. It helps you stay on focus with your message but also consider your movements during the event. Are you going to stand in one spot or can your move a bit to keep them focused on you as you talk? How much movement is the right amount? Movement just for the sake of movement can also be distracting. Practice before presenting.

Hand-Outs – Use hand-outs. This gives people a take-away so they feel that they got more value out of your talk and it also gives them a way to reconnect with you later.

An Activity – Stimulate people with some exercise that gets them moving, engaging, or interacting with others. Kinetic people love to use their hands, but you must keep the activity simple for everyone’s benefit. Be aware that not everyone likes to be touched. Think through what the responses may be and do some brainstorming with someone else in your industry to get the best benefit. Activities can cause brain stimulation and cause people to later think back to your presentation with great fondness.

Chocolate – If you are one of several speakers, consider using chocolates as an addition to your handouts. Chocolate stimulates memories that are usually endearing. People remember events and have associations of memory around certain flavors and for most people chocolate brings forth positive thoughts. If you want to be remembered with fondness, consider using chocolate.

One final thought on speaking to groups. Keep in mind your time. If you have 20 minutes then keep it tight to 20 minutes. If you have practiced you know your delivery time. If you have a 40 minute presentation or a day event you will want to break things up to keep people engaged. Remember that the brain can only absorb what the butt can endure!

 

Kerry George is the owner of the Canadian Imperial Business Network which is currently the largest business network in Alberta and rapidly expanding across the country. She is a serial entrepreneur/author and speaker with a zest for life and a passion to help others succeed in increasing their potential and their bottom line. Kerry has several publications and blogs that you can follow and welcomes most interaction online.

Twitter

@createloyalty2U

@CIBNtweets

@yycbiznetwork

Blogs

http://loyal2u.blogspot.ca/

http://calgarybiz.net/blog-3/

http://kidsincowtown.wordpress.com/

http://loyal2u.ca/category/social-media-2/linkedin/

 

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Kerry George · Tagged: Business Woman, Canadian Imperial Business Network, Canadian Small Business Women, engage, entrepreneur, groups, hand outs, power points, speaking, speaking arrangements, stimulate

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