I was talking with a client of mine the other day and we were brainstorming ways she could promote a new white paper / product offering and one of the things we talked about was using Social Media as a way to get the word out.  Through the course of our discussion it struck me that there are 4 levels of engagement that small business owners are using when it comes to Social Media and business.

You can find a lot of examples of each of these levels…especially the first one, which is unfortunately the largest of the four.  The remaining 3 tactics are all viable business strategies.  Which one you use will be driven by how much time you can invest in Social Business overall, what your personal style is and ultimately what you’re trying to accomplish.

The 4 levels of Social Business Engagement:

• Non-existent
• Visible
• Educate
• Engage

Let me take a shot at breaking this down into something more meaningful.  Here’s a quick diagram I drew up on my iPad.  The Y axis reflects the value a business owner gets from a particular tactic…higher is better.  The X axis reflects the amount of time spent on each tactic.

Level 1 – Non-existent

Although it’s not a tactic it is sadly the state that most business owners are in when it comes to their Social Business approach.  If you have a half filled out LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page that never gets updated or a Twitter account that was started but only has 2 tweets from last April (one of those being “Trying to figure out what this Twitter thing is all about”), then you are at the  non-existent stage from a Social Business perspective.

When you’re non-existent, you are not getting any value…in fact, you are potentially hurting your cause with an incomplete profile…but at least your not spending any time on anything.

Visible

The next level up is Visible, which is actually a viable tactic for a lot of small business owners.  This approach can provide a lot of value, especially relative to the small amount of time spent.  Being visible means that people can easily find you via search and get more information if they’re interested. 

In order to be visible, you need to pick at least 1 of the major social media platforms and invest a few hours into creating a quality profile.  I’d suggest LinkedIn if you are Business to Business and Facebook if you are Business to Consumer.

A quality profile includes a picture and a clear, interesting write-up on what you do and why someone else should care.  It should have at least a little bit of personality and include some personal information.  It should be easy to further engage with you and learn more – your profile should have a link back to your website.  You should also have a reasonable number of connections (say a couple hundred for LinkedIn…Facebook will vary based on what you’re doing) and you should spend an hour or so a week keeping it updated, posting status updates, answering questions, etc.

Educate

As a tactic, Educate includes everything on the Visible level and also includes regular educational updates across multiple channels. The best way to educate is to create great content…it could be blog posts, videos, podcasts or anything else that adds value to your target market.  With an Educate approach, not only can your prospects and partners find you, they also can see your enthusiasm and expertise – especially as you consistently share great stuff over time.

This approach can be effective with as little as a 2 to 4 hours per week – that would be the time it takes to write 1 blog post and share it in multiple places (and interact as you would for the Visible tactic).

Engage

Finally the Engage tactic is the high end of Social Business strategies.  Engagement is when you immerse yourself into 1 or more social media platforms and consciously and consistently develop your own tribe of followers (Customers, prospects, partners, etc.).  Engagement strategies are often built on education, but there are other successful engagement strategies built on personality, customer service or just being part or leading a community.

If you can successfully Engage in Social Business, you will create a fan base that can dramatically amplify your message and help drive word of mouth and opportunities your direction.  Done the right way, it’s extremely powerful and beneficial.

However…Engagement takes a lot of time and presence (there’s an expectation of real time responses, so you need to be always ‘on’).  Additionally you have to genuinely enjoy the process of connecting with your virtual tribe – if you don’t have the right kind of personality you will struggle to make this work.

How are you investing your time?

Every business owner should at least be at Visible on 1 platform.  It takes a low investment of time, anyone can do it and it will greatly enhance the number of people who can find you…remember if they can’t find you, they can’t do business with you.

Going beyond Visible is a choice.  I’m a big proponent of content marketing and Education, but there are a lot of small business owners who aren’t set up to make an Educate tactic work…and they certainly don’t have the time or effort it takes to Engage.  However it’s not all or nothing.  On the chart the levels show as discrete options, but it’s actually a smooth curve and you can scale your efforts up and down depending on your resources.

Where are you on the Social Business Engagement spectrum?  Does this model make sense?  I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments…Engage with me in the comments below and let me know what you think!

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by JD Hancock

There’s no doubt that growing your business is an uphill battle.  It’s a challenging economy and the rules have changed for marketing and sales.  Gone are the days when you could just run an ad somewhere and expect your phone to ring. 

Effective marketing (and sales) today is a much different game than it was even 5 to 10 years ago.  Interruption tactics (like cold calling, direct mail or blasting advertisements) can still work but they are less effective every day.  Instead you have to find ways to attract your prospective clients – get them to hold up their hand and show they are interested in learning more.  Bottom line?  You have to think through your marketing and approach it strategically if you want to generate leads.  There’s no room for mistakes if you want successful marketing.

That said – here are 5 things that small business owners are doing to sabotage their marketing success in today’s environment.  Do any of these apply to you?

5 Marketing Killers

Not following up or following through

This one is a cardinal sin and it’s so stupid…but you see it happen over and over again.  A potential client expresses interest or a need in your products or services…and they don’t get any follow up or response.  It may not be a guaranteed sale, but interest is interest!

Personal example:  I recently needed to hire a caterer for an event.  A friend of mine recommended a local caterer and introduced her to me.  I expressed interest in learning more and received a quick (but friendly) response a few days later suggesting a call for more details. 

I gave her several times I was available for a call.  I received no response. 

A week later, I tried one more time to engage (running out of time for my event) and the only response I got was a phone call on a Saturday several days later during a soccer game.  Not being able to hear while at the game, I recommended a call on the following Monday…and received no response after that! 

Obviously I went with another provider – maybe my business didn’t matter, but Kansas City can seem like a small town and this particular caterer now has a bad reputation for professionalism with me (and others who I might talk to).  If you’re too busy to follow up, then you need to rework your business approach and try something different.

Recommendation – Are you following up (in a timely manner) on all of your potential leads and introductions?  If not – make that your top priority.  Not only are you potentially missing out on business, but you’re burning a referral source as well.

No consistency on marketing activities

Arguably the most important thing you can do for your marketing is to be consistent.  A great marketing message will fail if it’s not in front of people in a consistent way.  An excellent marketing tactic that’s not executed consistently is a waste of time.

How many business owners do you know who have a blog or a newsletter but rarely if ever actually update it or send it out?  Life and your business is crazy with lots of ups and downs, but if you don’t figure out how to consistently apply your marketing, you will never get out of that roller coaster world.

Recommendation – Identify at least a few tactics that you can reasonably achieve and make a black and white commitment to do those activities every week or every month.  Build on that once you’ve got the basics down.

Marketing to Everyone!

“So who do you work best with?”  If your answer is some variation on anyone who breathes, then you have already failed at your marketing and your wasting a lot of time and money.  By marketing to everyone…you are marketing to no one!

We are all getting inundated with literally thousands of marketing messages every single day.  A generic message that could apply to anyone is never going to break through that noise…and is never going to be heard.

Recommendation – Who are your BEST clients?  Carve out a subset of them and get really specific about who they are and what they’re looking for?  Try crafting a message just for that niche and see if you don’t get a much better response.

Not using Content /Educational approach for your marketing

Buyers are looking for solutions to their problems and most of the time they have several choices when it comes to providers.  Who are they more likely to choose – Company A who clearly understands the problem and provides lots of educational materials and helpful ideas or Company B who only has feature descriptions on how cool they are?  Who would you buy from?

Content and educational marketing makes you relevant to the large majority of potential clients who aren’t ready to buy yet.  If you can educate, inform and maybe even entertain someone who isn’t ready to buy yet, you stay in the running and likely top of mind for when they are ready to buy.

Recommendation – Start thinking like a consultant.  What’s the last thing you did to help educate your target market?  What could you create that would add value and establish you as an expert?

Not being found online

Quick – do a Google search on your company’s name.  Is your website on the first page of results?  If not…or if you don’t show up at all, then you don’t have any marketing.  The vast majority of buyers use online search as a key step in their decision process.  If they see your company in an advertisement but can’t easily find you online then you don’t exist and you wasted that ad!

Also do a search on the problem you solve. Does your company come up on the first page in that case? It’s more likely people are searching on problems or outcomes (keywords) than for your business name.  This is a bit harder to solve, but carries a lot more weight.

Recommendation – Quick fix…make sure you and your business have a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook – both are good sources for Google.  Longer term fix – leverage content and education based marketing (blog or articles, whitepapers other content) to address your keywords and the problems your prospects are searching for.

It’s Not Rocket Surgery!

None of the above ideas are rocket surgery…or even brain science!    However most small business owners are failing at least one of the above five ideas and many are missing on 2 or more of them.

How about you?  Are you onboard and in good shape with all 5 of the ideas above?  Anything else I’m missing that’s a critical marketing step?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by Alex E. Proimos

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn.  They have a clear focus on professional business networking and they’ve created an extremely effective tool that every business owner should be using.  In fact if you’re not using LinkedIn, now’s the right time to create a profile and start linking!

One of the things I really like about LinkedIn is the steady pace of innovation they’ve had over the years.  They don’t score a hit with everything they roll out, but they are constantly improving and adding new useful functionality.  Considering LinkedIn is a free site that offers a ton of value for business professionals, that’s a pretty good deal!

Just in the last year or two, they’ve made changes to groups, the advertising functionality and even some minor profile changes, but what you should really check out as a business owner is how they’ve been quietly adding stuff to the Company page functionality.  It started when LinkedIn added the ability to follow companies and more recently they’ve added several other worthwhile capabilities worth checking out.

New Company Page capabilities from LinkedIn

- A Careers tab that allows you to centrally post for jobs at your company along with lots of other customization and capabilities (some of which cost money).

- A services tab which allows you to create detailed descriptions of the services you offer (and allows people to post recommendations / testimonials for those services directly.

- An analytics tab that gives you a breakdown of page views, unique visitors, and a trend on followers.  (We would love to have more followers at Aspire…here’s what our page looks like.  We’re still adding some things to it).

Finally – LinkedIn also just added the capability to do Company Status updates.  Note – you have to edit your company page and specify who is allowed to make an update in order for the field to show up.

Kind of unrelated, but LinkedIn also just added a Classmates feature which helps you find anyone who went to your college at the same time you were there.  There was always a way to do this via search, but they’ve done a nice job giving you information and the ability to filter a lot of different ways.  Check out LinkedIn Classmates

Have you created and updated your Company page lately?  People are looking for you and the more positive information they can find, the better off you’ll be.  What do you think of Company Pages?  Any success stories or concerns?  We’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

As a small business owner, you have lots of people telling you that you MUST be on social media if you want to thrive…or even if you want to survive.  It’s not just Social Media anymore, it’s Social Business. 

I’m sure you’ve heard the statistics:

- 1 out of every 9 people on the planet is on Facebook (750 Million +)

- Facebook now tops Google for weekly online traffic

- People upload 3000 images to Flickr…every minute! (here’s my page)

- 1 in 6 marriages are people who met online (nearly twice the number who met in bars)

- Sadly 1 in 5 divorces is being blamed on Facebook

The reality is that Social Media has arrived…and you do need to be doing something with it for your business…but it’s not a silver bullet.  You have to find an approach that makes sense, isn’t going to overwhelm the business, but still gets you out there.

Here are 4 fairly simple steps that can help you make sure your Social Business efforts aren’t wasted.

1. Recognize that Marketing has changed

The world has changed in the last 10 years, and it’s no surprise that marketing (and sales) have changed along with it.  10 years ago, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube didn’t even exist.  Mobile?  You could kind of get to the internet on a mobile phone, but it sucked and it wasn’t really worth the time or the effort.

Fast forward to today – if a consumer wants to buy something, wants to learn something, wants to get opinions, they will go online and search for it themselves, no matter where they are.  They don’t want and they don’t trust traditional advertising.  So where does that leave us from a marketing standpoint? 

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t”.  Seth Godin

If you want to market your business successfully, you need to be found online (because that’s where people are searching) and you need to attract potential buyers…not interrupt them.

2. You have to have a plan

Just being online isn’t enough.  You’re going to invest time and money to support your online marketing efforts (although probably a lot less than you would have had to invest in traditional marketing).  And since you’re investing, you need to be clear on a few things:

• What are you trying to achieve (drive traffic, generate leads, educate, raise awareness, support customers – all of these might drive to different strategies).
• Who’s your target (and where do they hang out)?  What are they looking for (keywords)?  What do they want?
• What’s your message?  What benefit or outcome are you delivering?  What problem are you solving.  If you can’t be clear on this, you aren’t going to attract anyone.
• What’s your call to action?  What do you want them to do next?  Call you?  Download a report?  Visit your location?  Buy something?  Be clear and keep it simple.

On top of all of that, you need to have a quality website.  It doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy, in fact simple is probably better.  But it does need to be clean and professional.

3. Develop a Social Media Presence

Once you have an idea of what you’re trying to achieve and you have a sense of who your target is, you need to pick a starting point for where to go with your social media presence. 

If you’re selling something to consumers and it’s visual or has an emotional component, then Facebook is probably the best place to start. 

If you’re selling to professionals or other businesses, then LinkedIn is probably your best bet.

Twitter is great is for engaging fans and supporting customers and there are lots of other choices out there that are smaller more niche plays (i.e. Lawlink for Lawyers or Bakespace for people who love to cook).

Whatever makes sense for you, pick one site to start with, set up an account and start listening.  Listen for people who are talking about your industry, your product, your competitors…get a feel for what’s being talked about.  then start using that information to engage with the influencers.

Use Google Alerts and tools like Tweetdeck to setup searches to help you stay on top of things without spending hours every day doing it.

4. Develop Great Content!

Finally – the real secret to Social Business success is to develop great content (and host it on your site).  Content that will especially appeal to the potential customers you’re attracting.  That content could be a Blog, it could be a series of reports or great emails, it could be videos (check out Will It Blend) or even podcasts or webinars.

The point is that you need to create great information that will inform, educate maybe even entertain the people you are trying to attract.  They get to know you, they get to see that you know what you’re doing and talking about and they have enough information to decide if they want to take the next step with you.

On top of all of that, Google loves great content because it drives backlinks to your site and builds out a lot of context for keyword searches…which just means that your Search Engine Optimization will be a lot stronger than if you didn’t have content…always a good thing.

Bottom line – your prospective clients are looking for you online, so if you want a shot at them, you have to be found.  And when they find you, they want to get to know you and understand you.  They want to learn from you, they want to be sure you can solve their problem.  It’s not easy, but if you can do all of that, you will be in great shape in this new world of marketing and social business!

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

  photo by jurvetson

I don’t have a  jetpack yet – but maybe by 2020 I will!

Imagine 2020…1/5 of the way through the 21st century!  It’s only 10 short years from now, but just think about the astounding changes that have happened in the last 10 years! 

Facebook didn’t exist 10 years ago.  Wireless phones could access the internet…kind of…if you were willing to wait a long time and didn’t care what it looked like.  You still had to go out to a video store if you wanted to watch a movie…and it wouldn’t be high def!

But where will you…and your business be in ten years?

Read More…