You can define several goals that are consistent with the corporate mission. For example, MotherWoman, a non profit with the mission of empowering mothers to bring positive personal and social change, can use SM to create a social network to support mothers by sharing experiences, resources, and information to empower mothers and build a strong social presence using social media tools. Another goal can be to stay informed about changes in the environments in terms of new grants, new technologies, new research, etc.
The more specific objectives can be to connect with specific number of mothers during specified periods who can benefit from this program, to connect with new donors, increase website and Blog traffic, increase participation of workshop mothers in online sharing, etc.
3) How will Social Media reach its goals?
I recommend what I call the L.I.P. Approach - Listen, Inform, and Participate.
a. Listen: Social media is a powerful tool because it allows a dialog among many people. An essential aspect of dialog is listening. While traditional market research methods like focus groups, surveys, and interviews are still important ways to listen, a more active and continuous form of listening is possible using social media tools like Google Alerts, Facebook, and Twitter. You can now listen to what your customers are saying, people who believe in your cause are saying, learn from other organizations, and learn about changes in your environment. Make a list of people and organizations as well as topics of interest that you should be following and then figure out the channels you will use to follow.
b. Inform: The second powerful use of social media is with respect to informing the relevant stakeholders – like your benefactors, donors, and other organizations – about your services, ideas, and beliefs. Instead of paying millions of dollars to celebrities who have no interest in your product, to be in a ad that is very often blocked out by people, you can now speak from a place of passion and authenticity to people who care. Tools like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and YouTube are becoming very popular to get your message across to people in fun, creative, and yet meaningful ways. Make a list of things you need to get across to the relevant audiences, such as events, new service announcements, any media coverage, new ideas, and volunteering opportunities. And then identify the right channels to communicate the same. This will involve decisions like should you use Facebook Pages or Facebook Groups. Should you be on LinkedIn or MySpace or both?
c. Participate: The third aspect of a good SM plan is to create effective ways to participate. An important aspect of dialog is to reciprocate. If you find an interesting Blog, make comments. If you find an interesting Tweet, make sure to Re-tweet giving credit to the original tweeter. These are ways of recognizing and appreciating the contribution of people in your social network.
4) To whom is it targeted?
The choice of social media channels will depend upon where you think your target audience will be. Where do you think your customers go to connect or learn about the kind of product or service that you provide? Your choice of social media channels will depend upon where you can find potential donors, benefactors/customers, collaborators, and information to help you move towards your goals.
5) Who is responsible for implementing your Social Media strategy?
SM is time consuming but it can be integrated into your marketing strategy in a way that it feels more organic and natural to the people involved. While they may be one person overseeing SM, there are ways to integrate other employees, guest bloggers, customers, community members, and other people passionate about the product, cause, or service that your organization is promoting. Just ensure that you have clear rules around who and in what way each person will be involved.
6. Measuring impact periodically
The good news about many of the social media tools is that you can track some aspects of the impact you are making very easily. For example, in quantitative terms Twitter gives you statistics related to your Tweets on certain applications; Facebook pages gives you statistics; and the sheer number of followers and fans helps to some degree in telling about the response to your efforts. Some applications like stats counter can be added to Blogs to assess visitors. It is good to pay attention to the qualitative data related to your organization in terms of what people are saying about you. Over longer periods of time you can correlate the increase in SM statistics with increase in sales and traffic to better understand which channel is most productive for your goals. Very often, it is a combination of SM tools that will promote your goals and it may be hard to separate the effects of each.
7. What is the opportunity cost?
SM does take time and perhaps money away from what you could be doing with those resources instead. Make sure that your benefits in the long run exceed your costs before adopting a social media strategy. The key is to think long term. SMS Marketing Strategy the Best Communication Tactic
Make SMS marketing the mouthpiece of your business and help yourself in communicating with a greater number of people at a much less time and at a very low price.
In the modern age people doesn’t have much time to wait for a long time to listen or to read the various offers and special offers from different business organizations. They don’t have even much time to talk if it doesn’t seem to them to be much important. Therefore for the various business companies it has become a very difficult task to communicate with their probable customers. Therefore in this case there is the option of SMS marketing. With the help of this process there is no need for the company agents to visit the customers to let them know about the latest special offers and even it is beneficial for the customers also that they need not visit some local office to gather knowledge on some product.
The need to deliver similar messages to multiple people brings forth the need of such a tool that can do the job at the same time at a single instruction. And therefore the SMS service proves to be the best one for this purpose. However, because of its limitation of 160 words it is the best as to the point information and also helps in saving money. Today most of the leading as well as new companies are using this technique. The SMS service is used for varied purposes like; recruiting, marketing, customer care services and various such jobs. Moreover the main feature is that it conveys message at a very fast speed and at a time to a lot of people.
Because of its utility and its cost effectiveness the bulk SMS services are in great demand these days. There are a number of site that provides the facility of bulk SMS. This is the best way to reach the maximum number of people at the same time. All you need to do is to type the message and select the mobile numbers that you are willing to send the message. And with the help of multiple sending option your message would be sent to those numbers within seconds.
Therefore no matter whatever field you are in if you need to promote your product or service that you are providing and get your customers acquainted with the new launches connectivity is the most important. And no other than the SMS marketing strategy is the best to do this at the blink of an eye and that too at a very low cost. And the bulk SMS facility proves to be still better as it saves the time of not only yours but also of your customers. Moreover, unlike verbal communication your customer is not going to get irritated or disturbed at the loss of his time and also if he is interested in your product there is the option open for him to go through the message the second or third time for better understanding. Moreover, it is also a fact that the SMS technology comes at a much lesser cost than phone calls. Therefore it is the most preferred on in the modern day context.
Why Marketing Matters
Developing a better understanding of the diverse functions needed to execute a comprehensive marketing strategy for your small business
Despite the prominence of marketing within firm strategy, few companies truly understand what it entails. In conversations with entrepreneurs, business owners, executives and recruiters, not many outside the field (and arguably not many even within the field) possess a comprehensive understanding of what marketing can do when it is effectively planned and executed.
Individual interpretation of the marketing function appears to be driven by (and rather unfortunately limited to) the realm of the interpreter’s experience. When I am not pitching a client, I frequently hear casual conversations where marketing is confused with sales, advertising, design or other niche function.
A Better Definition of Marketing
The American Marketing Association defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." Many other firms and organizations have similar definitions. But what does this mean for a small business?
Peter Drucker, management guru, defines it quite succinctly when he said "The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous." The idea is that marketing can help a company to understand its customer so well that its product or service effectively sells itself.
To achieve this, we require a number of distinct but inter-related competencies. Having worked with large-cap and start-up clients across multiple industries around the globe, I have found that marketing needs generally fall into the following categories:
- Business planning: developing the idea behind a business, assessing market demand and evaluating the feasibility of the revenue model (Market research and business case development)
- Marketing strategy: building a marketing plan to enter a new market or grow your market share (Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning (STP), pricing, growth strategy and competitive strategy)
- Brand strategy: identifying key differentiators for your company and using them to build mindshare (Corporate identity, logo design, co-branding and product or service branding)
- New business development: building your pipeline and attracting and retaining clients (Sales management and client relationship management)
- Strategic communications: Aligning all internal/external communications to speak to the market with one voice (Integrated marketing communications, direct marketing campaigns and marketing collateral development)
- Media relations: determining how you respond to or interact with all journalists and multimedia channels (Public relations and crisis management)
- Event management: project management and logistics to bring an event to fruition (Event planning and sponsorship management)
- Digital marketing: developing your web presence and taking your marketing initiatives online (Website development, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and affiliate marketing)
- Advertising: sponsored advertisements through multimedia channels (Advertising campaign development and media planning)
- Marketing analytics: measuring and benchmarking the performance of your marketing campaigns (Marketing ROI and decision analysis)
By developing a better understanding of the marketing function and what it can contribute, this will enable your small business to set a more robust marketing strategy. It can aid you in integrating your marketing function and developing synergies that strengthen the effectiveness and coordination of your campaigns. You could use this as a framework to build mutually-supportive marketing objectives, enabling diverse teams to retain a focus on the same endgame. It also enables you to boost your talent development by identifying functional strengths and weaknesses of individual marketing team members. Last, but not least, it helps you to build internal support by helping company insiders appreciate the complexity of the marketing function. Whereas your corporate strategy sets the vision for your company, marketing develops new ways to get you closer to your customer, generate additional sales and build your strategy for future growth.
Towards an Integrated Marketing Function
Given the scope of marketing needs and expectations, how can an entrepreneur or small business owner profit from this information?
1. Structure your company with the Marketing lead reporting directly to your CEO (or at least one of the officers in the C-suite).
2. Make marketing the job of your entire company. Your marketing will be more effective if you keep everyone focused on the client and take suggestions on how to improve.
3. Raise the bar and develop higher expectations of your marketing function.
4. Understand that you don’t need to engage in all these activities. As with anything else, you don’t have to do everything on your own. Decide on what to focus on but understand the trade-offs and make an informed choice.
5. Based on your decision, decide which marketing activities to perform in-house and which to outsource (if necessary).
The marketing functions discussed are by no means comprehensive. Instead, they should serve as a springboard for further exploration. The key takeaway is that marketing is more than just sales or advertising. In fact, marketing is more than just the sum of its parts. With a truly effective marketing function, you can keep your customers happy, outperform your competitors and find new ways to grow.
Finding the Best Health Content to Launch Your Products
This article will serve as a guide for finding the best health content to launch health related products.
Health content on the web is almost non-existent. Some people have reported giving in to the temptation of buying from PLR membership sites, which are bad and will only take your money without any regards to the quality of the content. There are many methods for looking for quality health website content online. Finding good content is important for marketing purposes, in which most Internet marketers pull visitors from the search engines to their sites, which leads to people clicking on the ads. Here are some ways to get your hands on quality health articles.
Forums- Forums have always been a major place that writers and webmasters like to exchange services, products and ideas. The most popular forums with the highest page rank would be webmaster forums. This is important since you can also get writers to apply to your writing request from the search engines. Some of the most popular webmaster forums are Digital Point and Webproworld. I would advise all buyers and sellers in webmaster forums to be very careful when exchanging services. Digital Point has a lot of scammers and fraud going on, so you have to play smart.
Freelance Writers- Freelance writers are important to get deals and discounts. Some writers are barely making enough money to pay their bills, so they would be happy to write health content for you at discount prices. I have bought a lot of health articles for $1 a piece in packs! This is really good because I wouldn't have to keep looking for a freelance writer each time I needed a new article. Also, another thing I'm starting to see what writers are doing is; they are selling their articles on a personal blog or sell. This is really good for buyers because most of the time, the seller is using Paypal and buyers are protected from fraud. A lot of people don't like Paypal, but in their defense, they do allow buyers to claim to report if anything such as a scam occurs.
Bargain- Some writers will bargain prices with buyers. At many times, I would usually get $5-$10 off the original price for an article pack. Never take no for an answer and you will see that you can easily purchase 10 quality articles for only $5! Also, make sure to take a good look at the seller's sales page. It will tell you a lot about the quality of the content, such as the article's title, word count, summary and snippet (sample). All sellers should have this on their blog or site if they want to make a sale. Don't be afraid to ask them questions and if they don't have a contact somewhere on the page, do not buy from them. They should have a way to communicate with potential customers.
Experiential Marketing: The Key to Long Term Client Relationships
Marketing seen in more human terms to give people a better idea of the basic concepts behind marketing.
Let’s take a moment and think of marketing in some more familiar terms. Marketing is after all merely a form of abstracted inter-personal human relationships. So let us see marketing in terms of two people, interacting in everyday ways.
Imagine there is someone walking towards you in the street. They walk by and don’t say a word. Are you going to be friends with that person? Perhaps this person was great in every way and you two would really hit it off. But because they said nothing and did nothing, you will never really know. Now what if they asked you for money? Would you give it to them?