There are many small and medium businesses (SMEs) that are really getting their heads around pull marketing. They may not demonstrate the polish of the big brands, but are experimenting with online techniques to bring in new business in a way that larger companies sometimes struggle with.

The explanation for this comes from the inherent challenges SMEs face, combined with the special perspective they often have on their sector. SMEs don’t have budgets that stretch very far with traditional push marketing, but they do have expertise in a niche sector that they can share. And as small business owners and directors are often in direct contact with customers on a regular basis, they naturally know the right tone of voice to use. When you look at it like that you realise that SMEs are very well placed to embrace pull marketing, as long as they take the time to establish a good web presence, generate content and engage with the outside world.

I think the real keys to successful pull marketing are to be generous and authentic. That is, be generous with the information you share and in the way you deal with people, and be authentic by being genuine – honest, human and not too corporate or ‘salesy’. SMEs are generally pretty good at this, they’re close to their customers and are not hamstrung by corporate marketing police so can be responsive and understand the right tone to use.

I would argue that pull marketing actually could lead to smaller companies experimenting with push techniques which they would have previously avoided. My theory goes like this. Many smaller companies simply do not have the budget for traditional marketing methods, or they are sceptical of such things. However, pull marketing is something they can get their heads around more easily; most business owners engage in social media on a personal level and those skills can be transferred easily for the benefit of their business. And it is perceived as cheap – though the real cost is in time, something that SMEs often have in favour of budget. So, after experimenting with a blog, Twitter and some whitepapers on their website, for example, the business owner then may have the confidence to progress to more traditional forms of marketing, tied in to their online activity – which is the smart way to do it anyway. Bigger brands could learn from this example.

Of course, not all SMEs are brilliant at pull marketing. And of course big companies have many advantages. One of these is in having the resources to refine the pull marketing process. Small companies really struggle at being good at each stage of the marketing process – online or offline. The owner manager or marketing manager of a small business will often focus on areas they feel comfortable with or can afford. Whereas larger companies can engage in the kind of refinement that is going to distinguish good pull marketing from bad as time goes by. Larger companies have the capacity to integrate search, digital marketing, CRM, analytics and web design. But perhaps it is sheer scale of the big brand marketing machine that allows smaller business to connect online in a more empathic way with their audience.

Article by : Daryl Willcox (iMedia Connection, 2010)

Embracing product reviews

Social media empowers consumers to make product reviews on their own blogs, tumblelogs, or on third party review sites. Smart retailers are embracing this trend and offering product reviews from happy (and unhappy) reviews from their customer base on their own website, as well as embracing and encouraging reviews elsewhere.

If you aren’t currently doing this you are missing out for a number of reasons. Firstly, customer reviews offer you an easy and cost effect way to grow organically by providing additional user generated content to the search engines. Secondly, product reviews offer an additional feedback tool to learn why someone purchased, or perhaps why they wouldn’t again. If you are still not convinced – Bazaarvoice has a large collection of stats on why product reviews matter.

Transparency is the key here- you have to be prepared to suck it up and take the rough with the smooth.

Larger companies like Asos are getting this right – just recently they have launched AsosReviews.com - which highlights the good and the bad comments coming directly from customers via Twitter, and provides a visual gauge to let potential customers to see how they are doing at a glance.

If there’s one thing you can be sure of with social media, it’s that you don’t control the conversation. The conversation controls you.

Be honest and allow negative feedback as well as positive. Address it on your own site when it occurs – or face your visitors taking the negative feedback elsewhere on the web, more often than not to higher profile social sites where a larger audience are likely to see and potentially share it. Lest we forget the Streisand effect.

If haven’t currently got a budget for supplying this review service on your own website, you should be asking your customer base for reviews on various other websites around the web. See point two on this post for some of the places Google are using for data purposes to work out who to list highest in Google product search.

Both map searches, and Google Base (shopping) – are now using reviews as a ranking factor within their algorithm to work out who should get the traffic.

Remember – Consumers are most attracted to a website that provides good advice and reassurance about their purchase, with outfit suggestions (43%), recommendations (46%) and customer reviews (40%) cited as features that consumers most like. [IMRG] – it is possible to tap into these trends through both social shopping sites and using reviews and recommendations.

Social media profiling

As part of your overall marketing strategy you should be asking all of your existing customers the questions to find out how many of them have a social media profile or indeed a blog that you can update within your existing customer database.

This can easily be built in into your newsletter requests, or made an optional query as part of the checkout process. You may even want to reward customers that offer this data freely to you with a once off discount voucher to encourage participation.

For example – if 65% of your customers have a Facebook profile, and 10% have a Twitter profile – then running a Facebook campaign is clearly going to be more beneficial than using Twitter to reach out to them. It also gives you the data you need to run a more targeted email marketing campaign which will tie closely in with each of the audiences.

Data is your friend online, and you have to be smart about what you choose to collect, and how you can use it your advantage, and gain insight into your customer base. Social media profiles are one metric that smart retailers are collecting as part of their overall marketing strategy.

Rewarding social sharing

Ultimately one of your primary goals when using social media to grow your business, and website traffic, should be encouraging the sharing process. There has to be an underlying reason for someone to do so, and without motivation, it simply wont happen. For retailers, this means that the unusual products get the captivating responses – and if you have no quirk, you are just another website. In other words if you are selling just another blue t-shirt, you can’t expect any kind of excitement or buzz to build around your site. Enter reward schemes.

Smart retailers are offering discount and special offers to those customers who are tweeting their products, or sharing them with their friends, running promos directly from within each of these networks to spread their coverage that bit further. Some are monitoring the social sphere and offering a points based reward system for those loyal customers who are referring other customers, via their blogs, or their social media profiles.

To me, its pointless to just put a “share this” button somewhere on each of your product pages and hope to get results – mainly for the reasons stated above. This is something I see retailers doing time after time – slapping a button on product pages because they hear its a good idea without thinking it through. Some even end up damaging conversion rates, depending on how intrusive the sharing implementation is.

Instead of this – offering some bait and reward scheme right at the checkout process which provides an instant discount prior to purchase is more likely to encourage sharing, particularly for items which wouldn’t have otherwise received natural shares.

Blogger outreach

Linkbuilding is hard. However, its the single most important ranking factor in the major search engines’ algorithms. Retailers have one up on the rest of us. Many of the smarter retailers are using their stock (both the difficult to shift, and best lines) to link build, giving it away free of charge in exchange for reviews of the product, or sponsorship of competitions. There are a variety of bloggers who have chosen to niche directly in honest product reviews.

If you hand pick who you give to, you can pretty much guarantee relevant contextual links back to your site – which google will end up paying you with traffic for. Sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate, and blogger outreach can position your brand in front of shoppers, who are often online, and with credit card ready to buy.

Summary

Overall social media offers new and creative ways to reach customers, you just have to take the leap, jump in and get going to realise the benefits.

Article by : Webdistortion, 2009

Just because social media may be a new addition to your marketing mix doesn’t mean email marketing should be eliminated. In fact, social media can help to enhance your email marketing efforts.

Luckily, it looks as though marketers are starting to figure this out. As reported by eMarketer today, in an April 2010 survey by email marketing agency, eROI, two-thirds of US marketers are now integrating social media into their email marketing campaigns. In addition, email marketing and social media marketing solution provider, StrongMail indicated that the percentage of marketers who had integrated social and email (or planned to this year) is 71% worldwide, based on June 2010 research.

Other Key Research Findings:

• 71% of business executives surveyed worldwide indicated they were promoting their Twitter, Facebook or other social media presence in their email marketing messages (Source: StrongMail research).
• 63% of those surveyed said they were enabling email recipients to share email content with their social networks(Source: StrongMail research). In eROI’s April research earlier this year, the survey revealed a slightly smaller proportion of US marketers — 59.1% — using "share with your network" buttons.



• When surveyed about the types of social media tools integrated in email marketing, 91% of marketers incorporating social media into email marketing used Facebook in their campaigns, followed by Twitter at 83.9% and LinkedIn at 48% (Source: eROI research).

Marketers: Use Social Media to Complement Email Marketing

As a marketer, you shouldn’t undermine the importance of email marketing — email is an effective lead generation tool. Instead of dropping email for social media, use social media as a way to complement your email marketing efforts. Without social media, the limit of your email marketing campaigns depends on the size of your email list. When you incorporate social media into your emails, you’re essentially expanding the potential reach of your email campaigns beyond that list. By adding social media, you’re enabling email recipients to share and spread your content to people who aren’t on your email list. How great is that?

Article by : Pamela Seiple (HubSpot Blog, 2010)