So Close But Still Miles Out of Reach?
Many Small Businesses Losing Out on Online Marketing Returns
As we’re told repeatedly by media and business commentators, the internet has created a level playing field for small and medium businesses, equipping them with the capability to reach out to new markets and audiences.
A professional website is your storefront to the world and the range of free or low-cost online services and tactics on offer to SMEs offers almost unlimited potential for growth, revenue and customer interaction.
Your audiences are online and they’re not just teenagers and 20-somethings. The potential returns are significant with Facebook reaching half a billion members mid-2010, Twitter reporting a five-fold membership increase in the past year, one in every four minutes online now spent on social media sites, an 82% year-on-year increase in social media uptake and the fastest-growing social media demographics in the 30+ and 50+ age groups.
So it’s ironic that this business sector sees both huge uptake, but a parallel paralysis as we head into the last months of the 2010 year. While many SMEs are rolling out their online, social media and digital marketing strategies, other small businesses, from tourism operators, to retailers, service providers and consultants, ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses and start-up ventures are finding themselves coming up against a fundamental problem…they simply don’t have the time.
Time, not marketing funds, is the biggest cost of both online marketing, whether email marketing, online advertising or the hot world of social media marketing, but for many small business owners, time is a precious resource – one that’s in very short supply on a daily and weekly basis.
The learning curve to researching, creating and executing an online strategy is time-intensive. Once launched, there is the ongoing work of maintaining activity, creating fresh content, updating and upgrading; and measuring your campaign’s results.
Even finding the time to do your homework on the best strategic social media or online channels for your venture is difficult for managers or entrepreneurs, who are often bewildered by where to even start.
Should you consult the experts? The clamour of local and international suppliers and advisors promising to help guide you through the online maze is even more time-consuming and daunting to sift through. Who is telling it like it is and who is pushing their own agenda?
Once you’ve identified where you need to apply effort, outsourcing is an obvious answer, but online and digital marketing agencies and freelance contractors are often beyond SME budgets.
Small business doubled its presence on social media in 2009, with New Zealand trends following the international shift online. In the highly-measurable online world, results are positive, with 73 percent reporting their online efforts are identifying & attracting customers, 56 percent increasing target market awareness, 46 percent using online methods to engage with customers; and 78 percent generating top sales via customer reviews (Source: eMarketer.com).
Judging from attendance and interest at recent online and social media marketing presentations and workshops I’ve given around the country, and the 2010 avalanche of media commentary on social media marketing, NZ businesses want to take advantage of online opportunities and keep up with their competition, who may have leveraged more robust marketing budgets or internet knowledge to edge ahead.
There is a sizeable Australasian audience for local businesses to target, with well-over 1.5 million New Zealanders on Facebook, hot on the heels of our Australian neighbours, who are the world’s heaviest Facebook users. There are north of 350 NZ organisations and 55,000 NZ users on Twitter; while NZ membership is growing steadily on LinkedIn, the world’s largest business network with more than 80 million members.
Heading towards 2011, it remains a frustrating challenge that with their target audiences already online and receptive to marketing messages, many smaller local businesses can’t afford to ignore the opportunity, but will continue to struggle to find the time to get started.
Teri Sawers
Teri is a seasoned online marketing communicator who works on a daily basis across online campaigns and leading social media platforms.
http://communicationsinsights.wordpress.com
“I don’t have the time to set up social media profiles”
The main spend in social media is time, which is in short supply for most of us. Looking at initial shortcuts and approaches that will help you streamline set-up:
Preparation and organisation help keep social media implementation quick and efficient. Given the immediacy of the web and the multitude of other work for businesses of any size to accomplish, you ideally want a well-organised system that fits into daily work routines.
And which can be assigned across various staff members, to share the fun, learnings; and the workload…as you and your team get used to integrating this work into other responsibilities and starts to understand what channels and input will work for you, often with just short sharp bursts of time and energy once or twice daily; or even every second day for 10-30 minutes.
Profile set-up and maintenance is easier if you have everything you need rapidly accessible. You will also be consistent with representing your brand/business and uploading images, information and graphics that complement your various social media profiles.
Keep both a computer and offline folder (for back-up) with:
- Log-in names and passwords (both online and offline)
- Basic corporate information regularly required for online forms, including corporate IDs and abbreviations, tax and GST numbers (if relevant for buying into subscription services, small software/app purchases etc), street address, telephone etc
- All email addresses being used for this project. You can easily use your current emails, but over time, may decide you need 2-3 stand-alone minimum – to keep any social media mail received separate from regular business email
- Images in several sizes and vertical/horizontal formats. From a small square thumbnail of logos for profile pics, to photos and graphics for photo galleries, background Twitter designs, etc. You need variety so visitors don’t see the same single image each time, except of course for your branding and logo.
Visitors online have short attention spans and expect variety and fresh content on repeat visits. Don’t have many images? Get royalty-free suitable pics and graphics from Google Images or an affordable online photo-library.
- A file of any videos suitable for social media, eg. made for YouTube, corporate or promotional videos; and fresh/decent quality user-generated videos by colleagues, contacts, fans and friends.
- Titles, sub-titles and taglines written. Also both short summary descriptions (150 – 200 characters or words) and longer descriptions (1000 – 2000 characters) for use.
- Keywords/Tags list – what are the main keywords that drive visitors to your site? You’ll frequently have to drop these into tags and keyword lists, so have them close at hand.
- Copy of current ‘About Us’ or summary information about your business and what you’re offering new customers and clients – your key selling points and benefits.
Yes it sounds basic, but inventing the wheel every time you have a new field to fill out is hardly good use of your valuable time. Be prepared, as the boy scouts always advise.
How to be found more often? Building your online audience
Like the shampoo ad, ‘it won’t happen overnight, but it WILL happen…’ Building up your online reach doesn’t happen in 24 hours, there is an investment of time, energy, patience and strategy involved.
Some week’s growth will be slower than others, some sites and announcements will be more popular and drive traffic and bookings than others.
Expect results and trends in 2-3 months rather than astonishing growth within the first month… be realistic about growing your social media visibility and fitting into online communities as a new brand and marketing entrant.
As you will hear all over the web, you need to ‘join the community’ and become an interactive regular participant over weeks and months.
- It can take between 15 minutes and approximately up to an hour daily to maintain a successful social media program.
- If different staff take responsibility for a separate component of your online strategy, then the workload is shared across less than 15-30 minutes daily for anyone; and no-one is deluged.
- Everyone also gets to enjoy a slice of ownership of the overall online marketing project and see their efforts turn into wins – and hopefully sales and new clients.
Some days will only involve quick updates or posts, or checks for messages, on others staff will be adding new material to profiles, posting up pictures or videos; or setting up a coordinated campaign across all of your social media sites.
Let people know how to find you online:
- Add your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook badges to your site’s home page. You’ll find them either through your social profile’s account dashboards, or often on the bottom menu bar – Twitter calls them ‘Goodies’ and offers widgets, tweet buttons and badge options, Facebook has both widgets and buttons
- Add your social media links to your Contact Us and home pages, email signature, and wherever appropriate on marketing materials and all of your online ‘touch points’
- Start to think about all appropriate onsite and offsite ways to promote and integrate your social media profiles and activity, eg. the back of your next new business card runs, onsite information; and any promotional information, on brochure materials or flyers etc.
- Share tools – www.Sharethis.com – one of the leading ‘share’ buttons. Install on your site and blog so visitors can quickly and immediately share what they find with others online
- Streamline and scheduling – www.SocialOoomph.com – one of many ‘share’ services and tools to automate and streamline all of your social media and online activity, but a very good one. A suite of services to browse, at varying buy-in and price points
More on paid audience-building tools in another post – on the pros and cons and what’s out there at reasonable rates to help you boost audiences over and above your organic efforts.
Google Instant Search is going to be a game changer
Like half the rest of the online community, going carefully through today’s reviews and analysis of what this will mean for both business and consumers online.
Reading what the tech and social media leaders have to say in their first passes on what’s shifting and changing:
From BNet: http://bit.ly/aDjG4M
Mashable:Google Instant Predictions From A to Z – http://bit.ly/dySazz
The folks @ Techcrunch: http://tcrn.ch/boleUC
The instant capability will have SEO professionals moving rapidly to assess its impact on their advisory to clients, while those clients themselves will be either approvingly or otherwise coming to new conclusions about their search strategies and spend.
Off to do my own research on day one…for those of us on the marketing and communications sides of the SEO equations, it matters just as much that our projects and client sites and social media marketing know how to integrate and work with this major shift.
