Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
Bloggers are amazing people who add a great deal of value to my life and work – and in my social media saturated work/life, that means a great deal!
Every day I am thrilled to be part of the awesome blogger community, and here’s why you (and your brand) need to love bloggers too:
Successful social media marketing is all about relationships, with the highest ROR (Return on Relationship) coming from relationships with your Brand Advocates — those people who are so delighted by your product/service/brand that they can’t wait to tell their friends and their whole social networks about their experience. Here are 12 ways to build your Brand Advocates to increase your ROR:
1. Focus on the relationship first.
Consumers don’t fall in love with your brand and become Brand Advocates by being pushed into sales; they fall in love with your high quality product, excellent customer service, and a consistently enjoyable experience – all natural byproducts of strong relationships.
Moments of Truth are well-known concepts in the marketing world, from research (Zero Moment of Truth)… to shopping (First Moment of Truth) … to owning/using a product (Second Moment of Truth).
Now, in a recent blog post, David Berkowitz introduces one more: the Infinite Moment of Truth (IMOT), which is all about sharing the experience of any (or all) of the other Moments of Truth. Berkowitz suggests the IMOT is infinite in three ways:
Each of the Moments of Truth provide their own marketing opportunities, but the Infinite Moment of Truth is the one that can harness the full power of social media and start the “moment of truth cycle” again by influencing the choice a consumer makes at the Zero moment of truth.
The consumer purchases a product, uses it, loves it, and shares this experience with their networks… and someone in their network gets to the Zero Moment of Truth and says “I will purchase.”
Google+ is here — what do you need to change about your brand message to leverage this new tool?
Nothing!
Now more than ever, your brand message needs to remain strong and consistent, and your focus needs to stay on building relationships. Don’t let new tools (like Google+) distract you from your brand message! As I continue to say, successful social media marketing is all about relationships, and the tools simply facilitate those relationships. Without the people and connections, the tools are meaningless.
In this new social media marketing world — where it’s less about demographics and more about relationships — one demographic still clearly matters: WOMEN.
Women control 85% of household spending, and (according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch)
in 2011, women’s earning power will recover from the recession far quicker than men’s earning power will.
These numbers are good news for marketers, but they need to come with a strong CAUTION statement: just because women are a strong purchasing demographic does not mean we can pay any less attention to the relationship work required to make and keep our brands highly relevant to women.
Although blogger Zennie Abraham shares some interesting ideas in his post “Social Networking is Really Social Broadcasting”, I just don’t buy it.
I do get his point that social networking has a big “broadcasting” component to it, and I understand his reasoning of trying to place it in that basket so advertisers can see it as the same as other media buys, but in my opinion, that’s just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole simply to make it sell better. It will sell when, and the key word is when, the marketing community wraps it arms around its true value… and not before.
I don’t think “broadcasting” is the right word because it only addresses the most basic aspects of connections and is primarily a numbers game of how many people you can push your message out to.
Social networking, on the other hand, fully uses the powerful sharing aspect of social media (and the social graph) to rely on and build relationships between people. These relationships then provide you the ability to spread a message through your network and into the network of others due to the true value of the message — value that continues to increase simply by the fact that you have approved and recommended it by passing it along.
Take, for example, Twitter. Most in the marketing community misunderstand Twitter …when used wisely, it is not a broadcast tool or a standalone tool for marketing, it’s an enhancement to your marketing strategy and an extremely valuable networking, experimenting and seeding tool. While it allows you to provide a broadcast-like tweet to all your followers, most will never see a single tweet and the real value is that it also allows you to interact directly with one person in plain sight of thousands of people and allows them to pass along to others in their network. Think about how much we learn about someone by watching their interactions with others, and you can understand how this feature of Twitter quickly creates (or destroys!) trust throughout your social network.
Social networking is also different from broadcasting in that it isn’t just a one-time send-out of information. Powerful social networking includes a back and forth exchange between you and your audience (network members), and their audience, giving you more than one chance to make an impression, clarify your message, and most importantly, build trust. Let’s not forget that it’s trust that builds customer loyalty!
Ted Rubin
We’re hearing more and more about “Relationship Commerce” these days – but how many of us actually understand its implications? I’ve spent years in the midst of the evolution of commerce: As traditional commerce shifted into a digital world, through it’s evolution into Social Commerce, and now as we come upon the brass ring – Relationship Commerce.
There are some guiding principals to Relationship Commerce. None seem drastically different on their own; though they seem radically new when applied to the realm of commerce:
Relationships matter. Discovering something you love is great, learning about it from someone you trust is even better.
Buying from someone you like is way more fun than buying from a BIG-BOX robot.
Shopping can be better.
Relationship Commerce is simple yet novel, it’s buying from people you know and trust.
Buyer Persona development may just be the most important element in a content marketing strategy. Having a deeper, more personal understanding of your customers leads to content creation that not only builds trust, but also demonstrates your willingness to spend the necessary time to learn the actual circumstances that affect your customers.
With well-defined buyer personas, your content suddenly becomes for *someone* versus *everyone*. And that makes all the difference when trying to build a relationship with your customers through your content marketing strategy.