When starting any sort of new business venture, social media marketing and online promotion have become two of the most important ways for an entrepreneur to get their products outRead More
The post 5 Social Media Mistakes Most Entrepreneurs Make appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>When starting any sort of new business venture, social media marketing and online promotion have become two of the most important ways for an entrepreneur to get their products out to consumers.
While social media is free (for the most part) and easy to use, it is also easy to make mistakes. Getting distracted by all of the bells and whistles that come with social media can keep a budding startup business from true success.
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin (Highlight to Share)
There are a variety of social media mistakes that entrepreneurs make when it comes to marketing their business online. Using social media platforms to communicate is a great format, but only when done properly. We’ve interviewed many authors on social media marketing and I compiled a list of the common social media mistakes most entrepreneurs make so you know what to avoid.
Perhaps you were extremely accomplished in your previous ventures or maybe you have a very strong pedigree. There is nothing wrong with being proud of the accomplishments of your past, but most of your social media followers will not care to hear about them on a daily basis. When you share too much about your past achievements, it is a huge turn off to those who do not already know your work.
Just like anything else in life, talking about your past achievements is best done in moderation. There are instances where your past experiences will come in handy and when they are germane to the discussion, there is nothing wrong with bringing them up.
However, social media users are savvier than ever. They will see through any attempts to call attention to yourself by being boastful and may decide not to use your products or services because of your arrogant social media presence. Even worse, this affects your company’s word of mouth in a negative manner.
Social media is great, because it gives potential consumers a chance to get to know you on a more personal level. This can be a bad thing if you are a person who allows themselves to get swept up in negativity. We all have bad days and personal beefs, but social media is no place to air your sour grapes or complain about the hard times in your life.
Consumers use social media as a means for escaping the drudgery of day to day living, so the last thing they want to be confronted with are the harsh realities of your life. Airing your personal frustrations about the problems that you are having with other people or whining about how hard you life is will lose you social media followers and create bad word of mouth.
Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. Would you want to buy a product from someone who used their social media profile as a place to vent and complain? The answer is usually no in most instances. Before you fire off your negative social media post, take a moment to consider what your customer base will think of it.
Social media is a great outlet to speak intelligently, but it is even more important for you to use it as a place to listen. By using social media to garner consumer feedback, you have the opportunity to collect information that is specifically designed to help you. If a consumer has a complaint, you can rectify it immediately and ensure that you do not lose their business.
You can also use social media to engage with customers on a more personal level, getting to know them better. While it is great to let consumers learn more about you, learning more about them allows them to feel more valued. Speaking to them about matters more important than your latest sales and promotions is pivotal.
The plethora of tools and usages that social media provides for its users can be overwhelming, causing an entrepreneur to lose sight of the ones that are most important. Social media comes equipped with analytic tools that are geared towards measuring the impact of your social media marketing push.
These tools often come free or can be purchased at exceedingly reasonable prices. The tools will show you which of your posts have become most popular and let you know if any of your materials have shown the ability to go viral.
Posts can also be scheduled when you are too busy to get to a computer or smartphone. With so many options available to you, an entrepreneur would be a fool not to at least explore some of them. No matter what goal you are trying to accomplish, there is an analytic tool designed to help.
One of the best parts of social media is its ability to offer you a means of promoting several different products at once. An entrepreneur can easily leverage social media’s reach to gain as many new customers as possible. There are so many possibilities and there are a million thoughts that are probably crossing your mind about how to pursue them. Enhancing your business prospects comes first and foremost.
Be careful about getting caught up in the madness of trying to promote several different products and services at once. Over promotion can fatigue the audience and cause them to pass by your posts when they are using social media. Training your focus on just one venture allows the audience to get to know the product better. It also decreases the the number of distractions.
As a business mentor for MentorMojo, virality expert Emerson Spartz gives some more effective social media marketing tips in detail here:
The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick
Digital Bacon by Alex Rodriguez
Trendology by Chris Kerns
Do It! Marketing by David Newman
A World Gone Social by Ted Coine and Mark Babbitt
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Do It Marketing according to David Newman: Introduction In this episode David Newman takes a deep dive into his book, Do ItRead More
The post A Preview of Do It Marketing with David Newman appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode David Newman takes a deep dive into his book, Do It Marketing, where he shares 77 instant, actionable tactics to boost sales, maximize profits, and beat the competition.
In his book Newman gives you concrete strategies, tactics, templates, and tools to regain the clarity, confidence, and control your need to succeed when it comes to marketing your business. The goal of the book is to teach you how to get noticed using the power of 3PR, position yourself as a go-to expert in your field, do social media right, generate a steady stream of referrals, and leverage enthusiastic advocates.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have an understanding of their business and the marketing they need yet fail to see an increase in new prospects, customers, and revenue from their efforts.
My book is really different because it’s a sales driven marketing book.
This book is laid out more like a series of webpages. It’s very graphical, visual, and modular so you don’t actually need to read the book cover to cover.
The whole 280 page book can be boiled down into four words, offer value, invite engagement. Everything we talk about in marketing, sales, and business development is about offering value and inviting engagement.
We start out with the overview chapter and it’s called Marketing Rocks. This chapter is meant to take the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of marketing away. Marketing needs to be easy, effortless, and enjoyable and if it’s not you’re probably doing it wrong.
The second part of the book is about them, not you and the title is It’s About Them, Really. We talk about who are you, who is your business, and your product, services, and programs in the context of your prospects. So learning to speak prospect language about prospect problems is the first big ‘ah ha!’ insight in this second part of the book.
The next part of the book is called Learn to Speak Prospects. In this section we talk about messaging, about what to say and how to say it so that you punch through the noise.
From there we go into Expert Positioning and this really is the core of my work as a coach and a consultant. It’s positioning that business owner or entrepreneur as the go-to expert in their field. This is a combination of what I call your 3 PR game plan. And 3 PR is Personalized Professional Public Relations which is speaking, publishing, and social media. The speaking builds your visibility, the publishing builds your credibility, and the social media builds your share ability. There is a whole section on social media and about how not to be an idiot on social media.
The next part of the book is the S word and the S word is Sales. In this part I talk about an easy effortless sales process, sales tactics and how to have a trusted advisor relationship with your prospects.
In the next couple of chapters I talk about getting better leads and getting better prospects. Because when you break down the sales process so many business owners and entrepreneurs believe that if they can get in front of more people they can make more sales.
We then go into a section about eliminating roadblocks and some of this is your personal productivity, some of it is around your calendar and others is around how to overcome some common objections.
The last couple of section of the book I talk about your business DNA. It’s about really figuring out who is a great fit for you and who is not. We talk about your competition and the fact that many of times we are competing with idiots and the problem is that they are winning.
The section to last chapter we talk about personal success strategies and there we talk about what you need to do as the business owner.
The last section is about taking action and I close out the book with five marketing moves through business success which are move up, move in, move ahead, move aside, and move alone. And then we move to implementation because the last part of the book is the 21 day marketing launch plan. This plan takes all of the ideas that we have talked about and shows you how to implement them.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 6:41
“Action gives you traction.” – David Newman
I run a company called Do It Marketing and coincidentally that is also the title of my book. I work with consultants, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and independent professionals who want to do a better job with their marketing and grow their business. I live outside of Philadelphia Pennsylvania with my beautiful bride of 30 years and two kids. Our son Charlie is 19, our daughter Becca is 22 and life is an ongoing adventure.
It really was founded in my coaching, consulting, and speaking business. So many small business owners, entrepreneurs, and independent professionals are stuck. This is causing so much headache and frustration that a book like this needed to be written.
Linchpin by Seth Godin
Buy Do It! Marketing by David Newman on Amazon today
Visit DoItMarketing.com to learn more about the book and access the free exclusive content
Follow David Newman on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Trendology by Chris Kerns
Digital Bacon by Alex Rodriguez
Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make With Marketing and Branding
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Do It Marketing with David Newman appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Trendology according to Chris Kerns: Introduction In this episode Chris Kerns takes a deep dive into his book, Trendology where he sharesRead More
The post A Preview of Trendology with Chris Kerns appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Chris Kerns takes a deep dive into his book, Trendology where he shares the latest technologies that will amplify your marketing efforts tremendously.
In his book, Kerns gives you an action plan for developing real-time marketing to engage your audience on topics that are trending in the media by using his data-driven approach. The goal of the book is to teach you how to measure the performance of your social strategy, leverage new trends on a daily basis, build a data-driven team and avoid the marketing strategies that don’t work.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a marketing plan in place or are developing one that includes the use of social media and other digital marketing platforms.
There are a few books behind real time marketing but this is the first book that looks at the data behind it. It’s about the performance which to me means it’s about the audience and if they want brands to be doing this. And the data is telling you that absolutely they do, they respond in huge ways. They share that content more, they reply to it more, and they engage in conversations with brands.
There are two main parts of the book if you divide it in half. The first half is looking at lots of different types of events and understanding how brands are using Twitter during big and small events. The second half of the book is more around how to bring this into your framework, how to build a team, set goals and how to build a data driven process. And also lots of interviews with industry leaders about where this whole real time thing is headed.
The biggest takeaway that I have seen in all sorts of different forms of what we call real time marketing is that it’s not a winner take all. And that the distribution of success is massive. It’s rarer for you to fail at real time marketing than it is for you to succeed at it.
I begin the book with one of the most popular stories out there about real time marketing and that’s the story about Arby’s and the social media manager there name Josh Martin. This was one of the most successful examples of real time marketing which looked like something that somebody did off the cuff but the whole point of this being the intro to the book is that there is actually a lot of planning and process involved. To be spontaneous in social media sometimes it takes a lot of planning. Then I jump in and I talk about real-time marketing and then I walk through some of the current climate around it.
From there I jump on over into real time. I kick off real time with the thing that most people know about which is big events like the Super bowl, the Emmys and the Golden Globes. Brands have war rooms set up so that when a micro moment happens within that event they create quick content around that. So what I look at is not only how many brands are doing that but how effective is it and what’s the result of brands doing that. And what I found is that it works really well and the audience really likes it.
In the next chapter I take a turn from the big events to the smaller events. This takes two forms; one is smaller events like holidays that you know are coming. When brands are doing social media around those and being relevant to their audience based on that smaller event. And then there are all these quirky little holidays that tons of brands are jumping in on these days. One is called May the 4th which is Star Wars day. I saw a ton of brands jump in on that this year and got a great reaction from the audience. Not only do we look at our brands using this type of content to talk to their audience but also how effective it is. And then I also look at daily trending topics that pop up out of nowhere and brands jumping on those. These are things you can’t see coming at all but they can still give your brand a big lift in your social engagement numbers.
After I walk through all the different times of real time marketing I then pivot the book over to understanding how to build out a team and a process around it. I kick off with how to build a data driven foundation for being more nimble in your organization. I show you the processes you have to have in place and the groundwork as well.
In the next chapter I talk about goals. Social media goals have always been a hot topic around how to set goals and how to revise your goals as you are going. The overall finding that I had around goals is pretty similar to what I’ve always preached with social media which is you should be creating new goals when you’re doing real time. If you are running a business everything you do should be supporting the goals that you have already in place.
In the next chapter I talk about the process. Real time marketing, because it is so quick turn, there can be a lot of confusion and mistakes made if you don’t have the right team, process, and technology in place. I step through all those different ways to make sure that you are managing risk while you’re jumping on the opportunity of real time.
In the final chapter is when I bring in the thought leaders from across the industry that are not only doing real time but are seeing the future of real time.
I am the director of analytics and research at Spredfast in Austin, Texas. We are one of the biggest social marketing platforms out there. We work with large enterprise clients to do everything around social media that they are looking to do. Everything from one on one conversations all the way through finding content that’s out there and amplifying current conversations about a brand. My job every day is around the data behind social media.
Trendology is all about real time marketing but more importantly it’s about how brands are looking at trends and leveraging them on social media. There was a lot of conversation about it which was interesting because I work in social media. But based on my background and what I do the interesting thing to me was that there was no data about it. No one was really look at the performance or asked if it actually worked. That is when I started pulling data and that was the inspiration behind the book. The book looks at the 100 biggest brands in the world and how they work in social media and then jumps into their use of real time and trending topics.
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Buy Trendology by Chris Kerns on Amazon today
Visit TrendologyBook.com to learn more about Chris’s book
Visit Chris-Kerns.com to learn more about Chris
Visit Spredfast.com to learn more about his marketing automation system and company
Follow Chris Kerns on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Digital Bacon by Alex Rodrigues | A World Gone Social by Ted Coine and Mark Babbitt | Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days by Jay Levinson and Al Lautenslager
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make With Marketing and Branding | 5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Trendology with Chris Kerns appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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