The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Is your business slow? What do you do to drum up new business in your down times? When the market slows down and you have a deficit in customer relations, do you get proactive? Do you spend money? Here are five ways to turn your slow business into a thriving business during any economic circumstances.

1. Build a new website. There’s nothing that says you should stick with one website. If you have a business with clearly defined multiple markets, build a website for each market. When your business slows down is a good time to start planning for the next wave or upsurge. Put your extra time into something productive.
2. Initiate a PPC campaign. Many small business owners cut back on the marketing budget when business is slow. That’s when you should step up your marketing efforts. PPC is the perfect vehicle since you don’t pay for a click until after you receive it.
3. Make a video. Since you have some free time on your hands, why not create a video. You can put it on your website or distribute it through YouTube and other video marketing channels.
4. Connect with a new audience. Social media engagement can be time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. In truth, you should be engaged through social media even when your business isn’t slow, but what better time to get engaged than when things slow down?
5. Refine your SEO. You can always find a way to improve your search engine rankings. Prowl your website for new SEO opportunities, and take them.

Instead of fretting about your business being slow, take action. Find new opportunities to connect to old customers or go out and find new ones.

Brian Solis wrote an article about social media that I believe offers some real insight into how large brands are being “antisocial” when it comes to using social media marketing tools. The gist of the article suggests that these companies are using traditional marketing tactics in a more interactive way, which doesn’t really inspire online prospects to pursue their products and services. Is it a good point?

I think so.

One of the most important principles for any business person (whether a sole proprietor or the CEO of a megacorporation) to understand is that everything changes. Some things change faster than others, but everything changes. Particularly markets.

So with that in mind, how has marketing changed? In the last 20 years, it has become necessary for any business that wants to grow to engage with audiences online. That means through social media as well as paid and organic search. But the key word there is “engage.”

Here’s a news flash: Pushing your message out to your followers, fans, and friends is not engagement.

Engagement means that you interact, and to interact with your audience you need a human face. Simply tweeting links to your corporate content under an account that bears your company name is not engagement. I offer you these 5 qualities that describe what a truly engaged social media personality has to offer:

1. An engaging social media strategy is personable. That means it not only tries to interact with followers, but it involves a human trying to get to know its followers.
2. It is not self-centered. In other words, you don’t just link to your own content, but you link to other content as well.
3. The strategy seeks to be a resource of helpfulness. That is to say, the content you link to should hold value in your followers’ eyes, not merely your own.
4. The personality behind the account is consistent. You cannot build trust among your followers if you are not there every day. Turning it on and off again will drive people away.
5. You must be reliable. Your social media content must be so valuable to your fans and followers that they come to rely on it.

I’d consider these the five pillars of social media engagement. Do them well and you won’t be antisocial. Do them poorly and you most assuredly will be.

Meetup is a website that allows anyone to start a group around a particular interest, take in members, and manage the group on an ongoing basis. It’s simple, really. Meetup is the platform that allows you to organize the group, but it’s important to point out that all the legwork involved in managing the group is still in your hands.

Meetup does charge a fee to organizers. You, in turn, could charge a fee to your members or meeting attenders, but if you are using Meetup for business purposes, then you might not want to do that. So what is the benefit of using Meetup?

Your primary benefit for using Meetup is that you have a popular platform. People looking for a group that meets around a common interest have been trained to search for such groups at Meetup. That doesn’t mean you can’t use other online sources for promoting your meetings. You can still advertise your meetings on Craigslist, local websites such as your daily newspaper classifieds, and industry websites. But Meetup is very popular and gets a lot of traffic from people who are looking for groups to attend.

Meetup.com is social media at its best. People have not given up on meeting in the real world, but often you will find that they being searching for real world events online. Meetup allows you to advertise your off-line events to an online audience that is continually growing.

Yesterday was Earth Day. I’m sure you heard all about it. So what did you do to show your green side?

You don’t have to go far to be green. Eco-friendly marketing is one of the most important ways a business can prove its commitment to the environment. And anything you do online is eco-friendly.

Got a website? You can say you’re involved in eco-friendly marketing. How about a blog? Call yourself the “Green Marketer.” Using pay-per-click advertising? That’s environmentally friendly too.

All you have to do to prove yourself eco-friendly in today’s terms is to stop using paper. Instead of printing out all those brochures, create a website. Instead of passing out your business cards at a networking function, take up social media marketing. Instead of buying that full page ad in a magazine, market yourself through PPC advertising. All of these are green marketing trends.

From search engine optimization to video marketing, online marketing is about as green as you can get. It shows that you care about the environment, but it also shows that you are willing to be a citizen of the 21st century.

Companies on the go today seek and find the best ways to market their business that don’t destroy the environment.

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons seems to enjoy being the center of controversy. He’s come under fire for his racy Super Bowl commercials and lost business on account of it. Now, he’s shooting elephants and has a ton of people ticked at him for that.

The issue is, he posted a video of the escapade online. It would have been bad had he gone to Africa and shot the elephant then had it reported on in the news, but he shot himself in the foot on this one. And it doesn’t seem to bother him.

I’m not sure that there is any amount of reputation management that Bob Parsons can do to dig himself out of this hole. He went looking for this controversy and, it seems, he went out of his way to attract it. Now he’s forced to defend his actions by focusing on interviews with media outlets. Wouldn’t his time be better spent doing something else?

He had to have known that posting the video would lead to this much controversy. So is that why he did it? Some people are claiming it is.

There’s a fine line between being controversial for the sake of controversy and making controversial claims to draw attention to yourself in hopes of gaining new business. I can’t imagine anyone seeing the video and saying, “Just what I’ve been looking for – a CEO that loves shooting elephants. Let’s switch to GoDaddy.” Can you?

In fact, many high profile clients are leaving GoDaddy because of the video. This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if Bob Parsons may be a little bit unstable. He couldn’t have thought it was a good thing, or would be perceived as a good thing. Could he have?

Mobile marketing is not something we talk about much on this blog, but I would like to address an emerging opportunity for small business owners. iPhone apps.

It seems that everyone is interested in having their iPhone app now. There’s a good reason for this. iPhones are popular, almost everyone has one, and everyone who has one is tuned in through apps. In the future, iPhone apps are going to be the way many people log onto the Internet for routine business.

Think about this.

• If you own a book store, you could have an iPhone app that lets people put a book on hold – right through their iPhone.
• If you are the owner of an auto parts store, you could let people order their car parts through their iPhone, and even schedule delivery.
• Own a restaurant? Put your menu into an iPhone and take carry-out orders.
• Own a bowling alley? You could have an iPhone app that allows your customers to bowl on their phones, and when they’re not iPhone bowling they can reserve their lanes.
• A gardener can have an iPhone app that reports soil conditions based on weather, time of year, etc.

There’s really no limit to what you can do with an iPhone app. If you have an imagination you can come up with all sorts of things. The time for small businesses to take advantage of marketing and customer service through iPhone apps has come. Are you ready?

Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, you need to take advantage of every marketing opportunity that is available. Email marketing is one such opportunity, and for small businesses it is one that can be conducted on a level playing field. The only advantage that big business may have is in their ability to acquire email addresses. However, over time, and with some clever promotional work, you can acquire a fairly large database yourself.

So why should email marketing be one of your marketing cornerstones? Consider these reasons:

• Email marketing is cost effective. Email marketing can cost as little as $20-$30 per month yet you can send newsletters weekly and/or updates daily (but don’t spam your customers). Compared to most forms of online marketing, email is one of the cheapest.
• Email marketing is easily assessed for ROI. You can easily track email marketing to determine ROI. You can also track email marketing using different formats to determine which produces the best ROI.
• Email marketing produces results. If you follow the double opt-in principle, then those are on your email list because they have some interest in your business, products, or services. This means they are more likely to buy than perfect strangers – and they do.
• Email marketing is social. Readers can respond to your emails, ask questions, and even make suggestions. While this social affect isn’t as public, there are times when you can republish what they have said. A newsletter that is well written feels more friendly than a catalog pushing the latest specials.

Finally, email marketing is very effective at promoting your brand and building your reputation, especially if your newsletter is filled with helpful tips. Of course, use email marketing to flood your customers and it could have the opposite effect, but then, that isn’t effective Internet marketing.

When it comes to marketing, every option is fair game. Facebook has become a popular social media marketing option for many businesses. Twitter, on the other hand, has not proven to be as successful for many businesses. With only 8% of US population using Twitter, there isn’t a huge market to begin with, especially if many of those users are also using Facebook. So has Twitter been overrated by many in the marketing world?

Frank Reed on Marketing Pilgrim had a few interesting things to say about Twitter following their release of the Top 10 Trends on Twitter 2010. I have to agree the list is quite uninspiring. But then, on second thought, it is a list of what inspired Twitter users in 2010. This then leads to that question as to whether or not Twitter has become overrated as a marketing channel.

The flip side is, when it comes to social media marketing, perhaps we as marketers have lost the plot. Are we trying to force a square peg into a round hole? Twitter has always been primarily the online version of a mobile text message. A short and sweet commentary on what interests users right now. As a marketing channel, it is great to see what is trending right now. As a communication channel, it certainly has its limitations.

Frank Reed observed:

Twitter is getting pretty full if itself when it has the stones to call these results “most meaningful”.

I tend to disagree with him here.  To Twitter users, it is probably a list of what is ‘most meaningful’ in their lives. Just because it doesn’t fit into our marketing picture is really irrelevant since Twitter’s primary goal was never to be a marketing channel. As marketers, our role is to take what is topical today, and to try and use it to our advantage.

The only way you can change that list is to inspire others with your message so that it becomes one of the hot trending topics. But then, that is what every marketer aims for. Twitter is highly successful in some niches, not because it follows trends, but because it offers something of value to those who are interested in that niche.

Is Twitter overrated? Possibly! Have we lost the plot? To some degree, yes!  But then, has the marketing world really got a firm handle on how to use Twitter? Probably not! What are your thoughts?

Oh – and for the record, the top 10 Twitter topics for 2010?

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

What is the second largest search tool on the Internet? YouTube. In fact, there are more daily searches on YouTube than there are on Yahoo!, Bing, Facebook or Twitter – combined. If you target Google for search traffic then you should also consider YouTube and all it takes is a few well optimized videos. Here are 10 essential components to a well optimized video.

1. Valuable Content – don’t confuse value with quality. When it comes to quality, most people refer to sound, lighting and other production techniques. Value in a video is what will make it popular, be it humor, music, or an easy-to-follow how-to video.
2. Keyword Rich Titles – be sure your titles are accurate and keyword rich, they may also appear in traditional search results.
3. Video Tags - use tags that properly identify the videos content
4. Video Description – like the title and tags, be sure to use a keyword rich description that accurately describes the video’s contents. Remember also that the description is your sales line to attract viewers.
5. Categories – accuracy is important with today’s videos so be sure to select the right category for your video.
6. Video Transcriptions – it doesn’t take long now to create a video transcription – Be sure it is well optimized for your keywords and upload it with the video.
7. Captions - the use of captions is becoming popular so use them where they may be appropriate.
8. Geographic Locations - if geographic location is important, be sure to included it in areas such as description and keywords.
9. Annotate And Link -  Use annotations and be sure to link to any other videos you may have.
10. Promote – promote your videos at every opportunity. Refer friends to your new creations and ask them to share with their friends. If you have a Facebook or Twitter profile, share the video link with them as well.

By following those 10 steps, you should have a video that provides some sort of value to viewers, and that is well optimized to appear in YouTube (and organic) search results. Of course, you can always engage a professional video creation team to do it all for you.

Viral marketing is a concept that is hard to pin down. Just what is it?

In a word, viral marketing is any type of marketing that catches on and gets people talking about you. When an idea spreads, either spontaneously or as a part of a planned effort, then it is said to have gone viral. That can happen in a variety of media.

Videos, for instance, can go viral in a number of ways but one very popular way that they often catch on and take a life of their own is through the popular video channel YouTube. Articles can go viral through one of many e-zine directories or on a content website. Photos can go viral at places like Flickr and DeviantArt.

What medium are you using? It helps to know what you have to offer in order to present it to the right people in hopes that it might go viral. Your blog can viral if you get it in front of the right eyes. One blog post can go viral if the right people see it and share it. The key is to get it in front of the right people.

So how do you do that?

One mistake that marketers often make is to present their material to all of their friends hoping that their friends will share it and then their friends will share it and so on and so on. But a better way to ensure that your content goes viral is to present it to half a dozen influencers. These are people on social networks like Facebook and Twitter who have thousands of followers. A single tweet or Facebook update can often lead to thousands of hits to your website in minutes if the right influencer likes it.

But simply submitting your link or content to an influencer isn’t enough. You should study the influencers you want to target and learn what they like. Develop a relationship with them. Interact with them and get to know them as a person, let them get to know you.

People, even influencers, respond better to people they know than to random strangers. Get to know the right people and your content will stand a better chance at going viral.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim asks, Would you search for social media monitoring or social media measurement? It’s a good question and it must be pointed out that the two are distinctly different. However, I wouldn’t say either is more important than the other.

His Twitter audience overwhelmingly favored monitoring. Some of the responses were quite interesting:

@schachin monitoring… social sounds like it needs monitoring not measurement like ROI or CTR

Point well taken, but I think social media needs both.

@tonicarr I think I would be more apt to search “social media analytics”, then I would vote for your “social media measurement”

Here’s another point well taken, but not everyone knows to search for a term like “analytics”. But that’s essentially what the term “measurement” implies.

@SurjGish Depends, monitoring & measurement are 2 different things

Let’s see, where have I heard that before? ;-)

@1000cigarettes would depend on my intentions. measurement if i were looking for my own results, monitoring if looking to see cumulative mentions

This is perhaps the most revealing of all the responses. If I was looking for ways to measure and analyze data acquired from social media then I’d search for “social media measurement”. But if I was looking for ways to monitor mentions of my company brand then “social media monitoring” would be the more appropriate phrase.

@jimmyrey Social Media Monitoring is what I search for when looking for people who want to buy it

I’m not sure why you’d search for that term when looking for people to buy, but it’s an interesting response.

@chriskovac I’d search for “”social media monitoring” — “measurement” seems to vague, especially to people that are just now experimenting

Social media measurement is a rather vague term. If you don’t know what it means or you aren’t sure what it might mean then you likely would not search for it.

@EvanKRob social media monitoring. Seems to project a proactive philosophy where measurement suggests reactive.

Here’s another very telling response. I’m not sure that “social media measurement” is reactive. It depends on whether you intend to act on the data you collect.

@KidQuick my vote goes to social media monitoring. But, my 1st search query on that topic would be something else “social media analytics”

Another interesting response that favors “analytics” over either of the other two terms.

Personally, I think which search term you’d use depends on your knowledge and experience of social media marketing in particular and Internet marketing in general. If you’re familiar with the terms then you’d likely search for the term that is most appropriate to your needs. If you’re only familiar with one of the terms then you’d like search for that one. I doubt that anyone would search for any of the terms unless they’d heard them before somewhere.

But Andy Beal’s point shouldn’t be missed. What’s important when marketing to search engines is what people will search for. You may provide social media analytics, but if more people will search for social media monitoring then you should probably include that in your keyword list and target the phrase.

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing your business to a cross-section of businesses within the same niche. You don’t get any real data about any of the other businesses. Rather, you only get a compiled data set of all the other businesses with an average, or mean, for comparison purposes. So what good is it?

Benchmarking does have its place, but it has limitations. First, the benefits:

• You get to compare your business to the average business in your niche and see where you fall
• Any data that can be measured can be benchmarked
• Benchmarking can take place over a short term or a long period of time
• Information you gather from benchmarking can be used to better market your business and position it within the marketplace

Now what are the drawbacks?

• As competitive intelligence, you can’t get any real data on any specific business
• If you don’t know what you are looking for then you can easily misinterpret the data
• You cannot benchmark data that you can not measure in some way

Benchmarking is useful for a specific purpose – it tells you where you stack up against your competition based on industry averages. In other words, if you have 5 key competitors and their average sales is 10% higher than yours then you know that you are 10% behind the average business in your niche. What you don’t know is which competitors are higher or lower than you (there’s other data for that).

When you want to see where you stack up against the average business in your niche, benchmarking is an excellent marketing tool.

There are two types of competitive intelligence:

1. Battlefield Intelligence
2. Noncompetitive Intelligence

Let’s start with Battlefield Intelligence. I call it this because its purpose is to help you gather information that will lead to stealing market share from your competition. This is the most common type of competitive intelligence though it may not always be the most productive. In order to succeed, your intelligence must be actionable and contain enough information to help you develop better products, better deliverables, better marketing and better customer service. It might even require you to develop new products to match your competition one on one.

Noncompetitive intelligence consists of strategies and techniques that do not necessarily impact your competitive stance. However, they are important strategies and lead to the gathering of important information to help you improve your internal processes.

The second type of intelligence, noncompetitive intelligence can consist of:

• Forecasting and predicting
• Describing your current business environment
• Challenge existing assumptions
• Identify your company’s weaknesses and propose solutions
• Point to strategies that are outdated or that may need adjusting
• Provide information to help you formulate intelligent questions for review and analysis

There are many different sources of information and techniques for gathering it. There are electronic sources of information and manual sources. You have in-house assets as well out external assets that you may be able to query for actionable intelligence. Furthermore, your intelligence gathering initiatives may be ongoing or short term.

One method of gathering intelligence about the marketplace is market research. A market research team can ask consumers what they think about certain aspects of your business environment, including strengths and weaknesses of your product and strengths and weaknesses of your competition’s products.

You can also collect the sales and marketing literature of your competition, which will give you some insight into how they are reaching their market and how they are communicating their own perceived strengths.

Academic libraries usually contain articles and abstracts written by industry professionals. Read what your competition has to say about important issues related to your market.

These are just a few of the techniques available in helping you collect actionable competitive intelligence. The first step is to decide just what you need the information for and what you will do with it once you gather it.

One of the more difficult kind of campaigns to measure the ROI for is a social media campaign. Twitter can be included in that.

One of the things that makes Twitter so difficult for measuring ROI is that there is not analytics program that integrates with Twitter for that purpose. At least, there hasn’t been. Not until now.

Twitter has acquired an analytics company, which should make a lot of social media marketers happy. But until Twitter announces that analytics is available for businesses that want to measure their marketing results, we can’t say how effective it is. It may be something that businesses will have to pay for (remember, Twitter is looking for a monetization plan).

But is it important to measure the ROI of Twitter? Understand that Twitter is a tool and you cannot measure its ROI any more than you can measure the ROI of a hammer when building your house. You measure the ROI of strategies, not tools.

When it comes to Twitter, measuring ROI is as important as measuring ROI for anything else. But to do it correctly, you need to first have a strategy. Do you have a Twitter marketing strategy?

One of the best ways to keep up with the competition is to buy what they’re selling. And if it’s free then it’s really easy to do. Just take that free download and look it over. Can you compete?

It might seem difficult to compete with free, but if you first understand what “free” is then it might not be so free after all.

Most marketers will offer a free download in exchange for an e-mail address or contact information. It’s considered an even trade off. I’ll give you something for free right now if you give me your e-mail address so that I can keep contacting you over and over again to try to sell you something. Of course, we know this works.

But is that the model that you should use? That’s a question that only you can answer, but before you answer it you should see how many of your competitors are giving stuff away for free and what it is they are giving away. If it’s working for them then it might work for you. Consider that.

Marketing Pilgrim writes that even though small business owners are talking about social media marketing, they’re not really running campaigns that are integrated with their other marketing programs. In fact, these marketing campaigns, along with blogs and microblogs, are “in the silo”.

The silo is a term used to describe a marketing tactic that is not a part of one’s overall marketing program. It is in fact standing out on its own.

The obvious question here is, Why are marketers not integrating their blogs, microblogs and social media campaigns into their traditional marketing efforts? Are these programs seen as separate, or different, than traditional marketing? Is it because the small business owners don’t really see the connection?

Whatever the case might be, it is important to consider that your marketing efforts will be much more effective if you integrate your online and your off line marketing rather than put your Internet marketing into a silo. You want your company to speak with one voice. It can’t do that if it’s living in the silo.

Web design is deceptively simple. You’d think that all you have to do is design something pretty and people will flock to it and click the buy now button. But it isn’t really that simple. There is a lot to think about when designing a website for any business.

No. 1, design issues are just one concern. Not the only concern. Web designers and business owners also need to think about the following concerns:

• Search engine optimization
• Social media marketing
• Paid advertising models
• Driving traffic
• Navigability
• Metrics
• User perception
• Cost of development

Web design is a whole marketing plan, not just a one-time event. You can’t just throw up a web page and forget about it, hoping the world will come to see it. Just as important as design attractiveness are visitor ease of use, search engine optimization, and page-to-page navigation. Just for starters.

When it comes to web design, you can’t afford to leave it to amateurs. Let a professional handle your design work and increase your odds of profitability.

Should you respond to negative comments about your business on other websites? Ideally, you’d want to have those conversations on your own blog. A good strategy to use to get people over to your blog for a conversation about your products and services is to write a blog post that addresses a concern made publicly elsewhere. Then, visit the site on which the comment was made and make a short statement about the comment with a link to your site for the fuller explanation. Your comment might look something like this:

Thanks for addressing that issue. You might be interested in this explanation (and include the link here).

This tells people that you take their concerns seriously. It also tells them that you are willing to talk about it. But it also gets them to your blog to talk about it. By getting the conversation going on your website, you can control the flow of the conversation while giving people a chance to voice their concerns and deal with the issue directly where it makes the most sense to do so.

Call it reputation management. But we call it common sense.

Social media optimization, or SMO, is about more than connecting with others on a social level. Sure, that’s important, but it isn’t the whole story. What SMO is really all about is getting the attention of people you would like to do business with. Strategy is very important.

At the heart of every effective social media campaign is an honest portrayal of who you are and what you have to offer potential prospects. Remember, you are engaged in “pull” marketing, not “push” marketing. That is, you are are drawing people toward you, not pushing your product on them. Television is push, social media is pull.

Pull marketing is much more subtle that push marketing. Therefore, social media optimization is about subtlety. The idea is to capture people’s attention. How do you do that? Here are a few tips that might help you:

1. Speak their language – If you’re talking to teenagers, use colloquial lingo that they’ll understand. If speaking to professionals then try using their business talk. Be sure to speak the language of your prospects.
2. Find out what they want – Don’t just jump out and start selling people stuff. Find out what your target audience is interested in. Offer them that.
3. Show up at the right place – Nothing is as ineffective as marketing through the wrong channel. If your prospective client is more likely to be at LinkedIn then you should be there; if they are more likely to be at Facebook then you should be there.
4. Yes, SEO still works – Just because it’s social media doesn’t mean that SEO won’t work. Social sites are websites. All the same SEO rules apply. They may require a little different implementation, but SMO and SEO do go together.
5. Get your prospect’s attention – In social media you have to lay it on the table. You can’t just hint at something and expect every reader to get it. Make a big splash, but do it appropriately. You are vying against a lot of competition so make sure you attract the attention you deserve.

Social media optimization is about connecting. Do it appropriately, but connect with the right audience at the right place at the right time. That’s true SMO.

Last week we talked about competitive intelligence in a corporate world. It’s an important part of any business whether online or offline.  Competitive intelligence is also important when it comes to marketing. In an online world that competitive intelligence extends to search engine placement as well as online marketing.

How does competitive intelligence relate to search engine placement? SEO or search engine optimization is the process of gaining the best possible place on the search results pages for any search involving your keywords.

The key part of competitive intelligence is the gathering of facts that relate to your competitors.  Some of the information gathered includes:

• Keywords and keyphrases
• Inbound links
• Associated websites
• Partnerships
• Social marketing tactics

The gathering of facts is, however, only one part of competitive intelligence. The most important part is knowing how to filter that data, what to do with the filtered data and finally how to compare it against your own site(s).

Just because a competitor uses a set of keywords doesn’t mean you should as well. In fact, your competitive advantage may be the fact you do use a different set of keywords.

In that situation, your concern should be how to protect your advantage since competitive intelligence is a two way street – yes, they could well be researching you. Whilst worrying how to get ahead of the rest, don’t forget to stay in front of those behind you.