Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been offering suggestions on engaging with customers using social media. Now, giving advice is easy. Following through on it is the tricky part. So to prove we’re not just hot air at bda, here’s a rundown on our social media marketing strategy:

1. How we engage

As you might have guessed, our primary tool for engaging with social media, and the online marketing community, is through our blog. We publish a variety of posts to share our views, offer advice and give readers some insight into the thinking behind the work we do. The types of articles we write include:

• Discussing what’s happening in the fast paced marketing world
• Sharing the results of marketing surveys and commenting on their significance
• Advice on implementing modern marketing strategies, notably email, PURLs and integrated campaigns
• And the occasional post about who’s pulling the levers at our agency

As well as sending weekly posts to subscribers, we repackage our blog posts into an email newsletter which we send to existing clients. We also occasionally pull articles together to create a ‘Greatest Hits’ eBook, which people can download and share without a pesky email signup box getting in the way.

2. Contributing to our networks

With our blog the engine running our social media marketing campaign, we like to ensure our posts get spread around and shared with as many people as possible. So you’ll often find links to our latest articles featured on a variety of marketing websites, including:

Internet Marketing News Watch

Marketing Service Talk

Business Week’s Business Exchange

Junta42 Content Marketing

UTalk Marketing

You’ll also find the bda team active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook as well as taking part in discussion in a variety of online marketing forums and websites.

3. Earning positive attention

When writing blog posts, we always aim to provide readers with practical advice they can actually use and apply to their own marketing. We also like to offer fresh opinions and to challenge hype (which, let’s face it, can be fairly common in the Web 2.0 marketing world). It’s through being useful and offering practical advice that we earn the positive attention that we do.

With Twitter being the yardstick for measuring interest these days, a couple of recent blog highlights include:

When Social Media Backfires - Tweeted 53 times

Conversational Marketing – Should You Believe the Hype? – 36 Tweets

What someone should tell Tiger Woods about marketing in a crisis – 27 Tweets

4. Gauging success

It’s no secret that blogs are great for improving website rankings and attracting links from other sites. In the month prior to starting to blog regularly our website received 360 visitors. Less than two years later and our visitor numbers have nearly quadrupled to over 1200 a month. We’ve also amassed 212 comments and links from other blogs sharing our posts with their readers.

How these figures translate into sales is a conundrum that’s still baffling social media experts. However, we like to approach its value in the same was as any type of marketing: does it boost our reputation for thought leadership, build credibility in our expertise and make our website a more useful resource to potential clients?

When choosing a marketing agency clients also want to know whether you’re switched on to what’s happening in the marketing world and plugged into the new ways of engaging with customers. We like to think that’s what our social media marketing strategy achieves for us, and helps spread the bda brand name at the same time.

_______________________________

BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Knowing what to do with social media has a lot of businesses scratching their heads: Should you be creating a Facebook fan page? Tweeting? Pasting links in forums? Or not bother with social media at all (because it’s all just hype)?

Well, as my recent experience of buying a tent shows, the fact is that people are sharing opinions on all sorts of products, services and brands online. Someone somewhere might be writing about your business right now, this very second. So you need to be able to engage with the online conversation if you want your voice to be heard.

Here are four steps for engaging with social media:

1. Join the conversation

Rather than go to the library or pick up the phone, the internet is now the first port of call for many people when hunting for information. They want answers to problems, not sales pitches; your marketing can feed this hunger for info. This is one of the reasons why you always hear marketers preaching all the time on why you should be blogging.

Instead of writing about what happened in the office, your blog should focus on providing customers with useful information. This can include product guides, industry insight, case studies and as a forum for answering the questions that regularly crop up when customers place an order.

Similarly, Twitter is another tool you can use for sharing relevant links, product tips and other useful titbits of information.

2. Find your networks

With a bigger population than Russia or Japan, you’d think Facebook was the only social site worth bothering with. But the fact is people are visiting all sorts of forums, review sites and social networks to discuss their shared interests and passions.

The internet is, after all, a vast place. If you imagine the internet is like the sky at night then constellations represent the different groups of websites where your customers might congregate. To track them down, setup Google alerts to notify you whenever your brand, product or service is mentioned. You can then plot a course and zoom into where the most relevant conversations are taking place.

3. Earn trust and positive attention

Once you’ve found your industry’s online community, you’ll need to make friends with the natives. So make sure you’re engaging in a helpful, useful way, rather than assaulting them with sales messages the moment you arrive.

Answering people’s questions, objectively responding to criticism and offering useful advice in an authentic, transparent manner is the only way you’ll become a valued member of the community. The key is to focus on being helpful and contributing to the conversation, rather than tiresome self promotion.

4. Finding success

Some marketers might fear what impact the spread of reviews and opinions will have on marketing when people can sidestep your sales pitch to find out a product’s true value. But there are benefits to engaging with social media.

Feedback, and even criticism, can be harnessed to improve product design and find out which areas your services are lacking. The other side of the coin is that superior products, which receive better reviews, will be easier to sell, with customers acting as (dare I say it) ‘evangelists’.

Offering useful content, whether it’s in your blog or commenting in forums, will build closer relationships with your brand. People are inherently inclined to repay generosity, and the brands and businesses offering value in the way they engage are more likely to be regarded as valued members within social media communities and rewarded with increased sales.

_______________________________

BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In this year’s marketing predictions (ours included) there’s no shortage of people preaching on how influence is being plucked away from the fingers of brands. No longer are people settling for what they’re fed in the sales pitch, but are now checking for reviews and real life experiences online. Well, I experienced this firsthand when shopping for a tent to take my kids away on holiday to the Lake District.

In previous years, buying a tent would have involved jumping in my car, heading to the nearest outdoor activities shop and then picking up whatever appeared most suitable. Whatever I chose would have been decided purely by the sales information I found in store.

Not so now. These days you can use the web to track down the opinions of other consumers in minutes, and find out all the nitty gritty details missing from the brochure.

Word of mouth is more trusted

Initially, I’d thought one of the cheaper tents would be adequate. Being relatively warm and, of course, waterproof seemed the only factors I needed to worry about. However, after reading a few negative reviews I discovered that whilst the cheaper tent was waterproof it was prone to leaking at the entrance. Not wanting to wake up with wet feet, I decided based on positive reviews to opt for the more expensive model.

What this brief example shows is just how important word of mouth is becoming in marketing. People are more cynical of marketing than ever; thanks to the web they can sidestep the sales pitch altogether to get the ‘real deal’ on a product’s true value.

This new age of transparency has some marketers worried. But it also presents an opportunity.

Harnessing word of mouth in your marketing

The ease with which people can share opinions means poor products and services can no longer be disguised behind clever copywriting and Photoshop. Complaints and criticism can spread in hours, undermining million pound marketing budgets in the process.

As my example shows, superior products (even if more expensive) will become easier to sell because of people’s trust in real life reviews. Customer feedback can also be incorporated into product design – no amount of testing is going to be as effective as the real life experiences of thousands.

So, as the transparent age approaches, marketers can choose to bury their heads in the sand, and ignore what’s being said about their products, or they can hail the rise of the consumer and incorporate the online conversation into delivering better products and more authentic marketing.

Next week: How to develop a social media marketing strategy

_______________________________

BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Is your marketing aimed at building closer bonds or telling people how wonderful you are? If it’s the latter you might want to head back to the whiteboard. The fact is that consumer mindsets are changing; the ability to share opinions globally, in mere hours, is irrevocably changing the nature of marketing.

No longer can we simply spoon feed people advertising whilst they’re slumped in front of the TV, or carpet bomb messages they’re now adept at sidestepping. People just aren’t listening anymore when there’s so much noise to contend with.

Added to this is the recession tightening purse strings and hardening people’s resolve not to be bullied into buying ‘stuff’.

So what we’ve now arrived at, in 2010, is the rise of the cynical, sceptical and often critical consumer, who’s not shy of sharing their opinions with friends, followers and the search engines. With consumers now less trusting, building more personal relationships will be the key to marketing in 2010.

Here’s a rundown of some of the trends to watch out for this year:

1. Driven by the proliferation of laptops, smartphones and internet enabled TVs, people will be going online more often and from more locations – positioning digital closer to the centre of marketing campaigns, rather than an offshoot

2. Despite what some digital fanboys might say, direct mail still has a role to play. Surveys show that people prefer to receive offers in print. But to help print survive it needs to be supported by email, personalised URLs and mobile to enhance its relevance and impact

3. Digital advertising will become more targeted as advertisers start using data on where visitors have been and what they’re doing. Expect a backlash when complaints on privacy lead to rushed government legislation. You can pre-empt this (and build trust) by making it clear what data you’re collecting and what visitors gain in return

4. Expect more cases of multi million pound marketing budgets being ruined by critical or mischievous consumer generated content

5. Brands will create their own media channels (and sidestep the traditional media) offering consumers valuable content, useful apps and branded live events

6. Search gets social –Tweets and status updates will start appearing in the search results, making customer service more integral to marketing

7. Crisis marketing – the ability to spread negative opinions globally in hours means you must have a plan in place for monitoring what’s being said, and have the tools to respond and be a part of the conversation

8. Social networking will fragment as teenagers abandon Facebook to escape snooping parents and as people form private networks amongst those whose opinions they actually care about. This will make the job of identifying where customers are congregating that little bit trickier – you won’t be able to just slap up a Facebook fan page and tick social media off the list

9. Mobile will come of age as people start buying more than just ring tones. Short code and coupon marketing will become more widespread, and smartphone apps will evolve from mere gimmicks into useful tools

10. 2010 is going to be an interesting year for marketers, and one in which you’ll need to significantly update your job description as marketing becomes integral to everything a company does

_______________________________

BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.