EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s posts gave us insight into how a narrow focus can widen our target market, creating ebooks and sites that helps us gain a competitive advantage in our job search.
Personal Branding Weekly
- Top 3 Reasons Why Lifestyle Businesses Fail by Jun Loayza
- Branding Yourself for A Career Change by Phil Rosenberg
- New Rules for Parties Personal Brand by Nance Rosen
- How to Create the Story of Your Personal Brand by Heather Huhman
- Target to Widen Your Audience Appeal by Elinor Stutz
- 7 Tips for Writing and Publishing Your First Ebook by Roger Parker
- You Gotta Hit the Curveballs by Aaron McDaniel
- Glassdoor.com: Show ’em Your ‘Hand’, They’ll Show You Theirs by Skip Freeman
- 5 Recommendations for New Social Media Pros by Oscar Del Santo
- Hair Rules for TV and Online Video by Manoush Zomorodi
- 5 Tips for Savvy Survival of Office Politics by Kate Marston
- Mind Your Manners: 6 Tips for Writing Thank You Notes by Michael Spinale
- 10 Ways to Not Get Hired by Rebecca Rapple
- Best Way to Brad by Pete Leibman
Upcoming this week, etiquette, follow up and great tips on taking control of your career will keep you at the top of your game! Enjoy!
Your Social Marketing Mix
The idea of marketing mix modeling is fundamental to marketing and is an important concept to professionals involved in business to business marketing. For others not as familiar with this type of modeling, it is simply a method in which values are placed on changes in sales volume resulting from a specific aspect of marketing within the overall mix of marketing tactics. These values are numerical and are gleaned from data gathered over time. These numbers lend themselves well to the use of statistical analysis. Marketing tactics can then be analyzed within the overall marketing strategy of the company and easily compared to other marketing techniques to determine the value they have in increasing sales relative to other techniques.
Professional marketers are forever testing various marketing methods to determine how well each method or particular campaign is doing. The data gathered is analyzed in several ways to determine how well the marketing tactic is performing. These key performance indicators include such things as the return on investment, cost of acquisition, response rates, conversion rates and any other indicators that are important to a particular company.
This, of course, is the traditional marketing work done in a business to business environment, and it is obvious that it is dependent upon using good data. The moment when the professional turns to social media, things can become confusing. It is difficult to quantify the results from social media and it is therefore difficult to go about developing a tactic in using social media that will be effective in increasing a company’s sales.
Successful use of social media is more of an art than a science, and the following advice comes as much from experience as it does actual data.
Personalization of your brand and company is the first step. This is done by knowing specifically who you are trying to reach and who has influence on them.
Once you have identified the proper people within the structure of a business, then you may want to understand how they think and what their needs are. This can be learned from paying attention and listening to what your target audience is saying. Understand the problems and needs that your prospective customer has. Doing the proper research will enable you to use the words and phrases that are commonly used by your target audience. These words and phrases can be used to speak directly to your prospective customer. Speaking in a language that is easily understood by your target audience will enable you to personalize your company and brand.
Gathering data from social media can be difficult, but what is even more difficult is interpreting your data in the right way. It is far too easy to rush this step of the process and not understand exactly what you are looking at. Gathering data can be done with monitoring software, but to get the correct interpretation, you first need to begin with a large enough sample.
Because your first step in using social media will be in selecting the right channel and form of marketing, you’ll need to begin by looking at data from a long enough timeframe to enable you to determine if a particular social media channel is an effective way to reach your connections. Once this is done, you can work to personalize your message to your targeted audience.
Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm. She helps create conversation, connection, credibility, community and commerce around your brand. Maria Duron is co-founder and moderator of #brandchat – a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding that is recognized by Mashable as one the 15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers.
