5 Ways to Use Social Media and Your Online Presence to Drive People Offline
Posted on 15. Feb, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, google places, Groupon, living social, olark, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, yelp
5 Ways to Use Social Media and Your Online Presence to Drive People Offline
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
No matter what your business sells, how it sells it or how and where people buy you it, people are going online to find it, pure and simple. That’s as true for those one of kind hand made earrings as it is for the spa and auto repair shop in their neighborhood.
Explore The Bruce via Flickr
And, it’s increasingly true for the local insurance provider, landscaper, plumber, attorney and tax professional.
So, what does this mean for the local small business? You’ve got to start thinking about your online presence as a central tool for driving people offline and into your store, sales presentation, meeting, demonstration, appointment or evaluation.
Below are five ways to think about your online activity as an offline opportunity generator.
1) Online calls to action
When people do find and visit your site make it easy for them to use your website to get a free pass, coupon or trial product.
Enable tools like click to call or chat from Olark, so they can get in touch right now and get their burning questions asked
Put a tool like GenBook on your site they can find a time and schedule appointment without needing to call.
Make sure that you have turn by turn directions and links to maps so they can find your business and even send the directions to their smart phone.
2) O2O advertising
Most people run ads to get people buy, what if you thought about your online advertising as a way to simple drive people offline – O2O?
Create local campaigns using Google Adwords that drive people to your website to take advantage of the calls to action, such a the free pass or coupon, that I discussed in the previous point.
Make sure that your Google Places page is complete and compelling and consider the coupon and advertising options available for this tool.
Look into Facebook targeted ads for your calls to action. You can target local Facebook folks all the way down to targeting fans of your competitors.
To make your O2O advertising even more effective create local landing pages for each campaign or even neighborhood you are targeting.
3) Networked networking
Offline networking is still a great way to create and build potential relationships, but you can really amplify this tactic when you add some simple online tactics to your networking efforts.
When you connect offline with a prospect at say a Chamber event, move to also connect online and watch how much faster you can build a relationship.
Employ Social CRM tools like Rapportive or Nimble so you can easily connect the social profiles of anyone you meet to their record. This will make it much easier to learn how to connect.
Look at tools like MeetUp that make it easy to create offline events and gatherings using an online marketing system.
4) Local social groups
Most social networks give you the ability to create groups. Some organizations have had tremendous success by creating and facilitating local, special interest groups on networks like LinkedIn.
The key here is to think “interest group” and not something that’s clearly a promotional tool for your business. If you can create an industry group or some other niche topic that allows your customers to explore and expand an interest they have, you’ve hit on a formula that’s very potent.
5) Online and on the go
Increasingly, our prospects are not only online they are mobile while doing so. There are some very creative ways to take advantage of this fact and drive people with great buying intent offline.
First off make sure you claim your location on sites like Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. This way you can enhance the details and make sure people using geo location services can check in at the right place.
Create and test an offer on a service like Foursquare that can help highlight your business when someone checks in at another nearby business.
Look into the group coupon tools like Groupon, Google Offers or Living Social, but make sure you’re ready to capture the leads these programs produce in a way that allows you to turn a low profit sale into a long term customer.
Think about ways to create check-in games that you could use as part of a promotion. Get a group of strategic partners to participate and offers special deals for people that have checked in at a number of your partners on Foursquare of that take a photo of their purchases at a number of partners and posted it to Twitter or Instagram.
As you can see, the way you can employ this kind of thinking is limited only to your imagination, but there’s no denying the importance and effectiveness of this strategy.
Top 5 Content Marketing Articles of 2011
Posted on 27. Dec, 2011 by Joe Pulizzi in angry birds, Blog, content marketing, content strategy, Fun Stuff, Groupon, Klout, Popular, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
It’s been a tradition on this blog to review the best content marketing articles/posts from the past year. To be fair, we do this completely based on traffic to each post.
I’ve been covering the content marketing industry via this blog since April 26, 2007 (my first post). The title of that post was “Why Content Marketing?“. At that time, most people didn’t even know what content marketing was. Almost 600 original posts later, and the majority of the marketing population is keenly focused on the content marketing revolution. Thanks to each of you for keeping this revolution going, and how we can turn our customers into brand subscribers through compelling and relevant content. Here’s to a fantastic 2012.
And now, your most popular content marketing articles over the past year.
Chief Content Officer Job Description
This original post and the corresponding job description template for the Chief Content Officer position stole the show in 2011, adding more than 10,000 visitors to the ranks. I used the comments from the original post to put together the final crowdsourced description – a valuable tool for any marketer or content strategist. Thanks to everyone for making these posts possible.
LEGO Club Magazine & The Power of Print
Over 4,000 crazy visitors loved this case study on LEGO Club magazine, perhaps one of the greatest all time examples of print content marketing. We still enjoy getting LEGO Club magazine in our homes (even though LEGO decided to shut off their LEGO universe product, which I believe was a horrible marketing decision).
The Angry Birds Formula to Content Marketing
Still one of my favorite “fun” posts, and a game that I still enjoy playing on occasion. We can learn a lot of content marketing magic from paying a bit of attention to Angry Birds. Get your free tips here in this post (well, at least over 3,000 others did).
The Skinny on Groupon’s Content Strategy
How does Groupon create the sheer amount of content they do, in a way that is engaging AND sells more product? Well, search no more. This post, from an analysis of managing editor Brandon Copple’s presentation at the 2011 Confab, tells you exactly how Groupon does it, from staffing to style. Thanks to the over 2,500 who engaged in this little piece of content marketing magic.
Your Klout Score – Why You Need to Care Now
There was probably no other post that was as divisive as this one on Klout. 39 comments and 300 tweets from individuals all over the world…some loving Klout, some hating Klout, and some just not sure. Well the controversy remains, Klout has become a force that all marketers must continue to monitor. Let’s see what 2012 brings.
Thanks to everyone for a magical 2011. I’m looking forward to an even more amazing 2012. And, if you have a chance, be sure to check out these 2012 content marketing predictions from the CMI community. Well worth 10 minutes of your time.
The original post is titled Top 5 Content Marketing Articles of 2011 , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .
Google Finally Weaving Local Strategy
Posted on 21. Jun, 2011 by John Jantsch in Blog, Google Boost, Google City Pages, Google Offers, Groupon, Local Search, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, yelp
Google Finally Weaving Local Strategy
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Google has the money, resources and clout to compete in any market they enter fully. Problem is they also seem to suffer from a focus problem. They tend (or at least it appears to me) to release features without strategy.
Of late, however, it looks like they just might be getting their local strategy together and marshaling a suite new features combined with existing assets to put themselves in position to take a giant leap in the local reviews, local offers, and local social games to go with their strong local search position.
Two barely noticeable moves in the last couple weeks give hint to the this focus strategy. I took note of both and wrote quick updates – The first was the addition of optimized reviews in Places Pages and the second was the addition of reputation management features in Profile Pages. Both of these moved signal a renewed focus on making both Profiles and Places pages more important in their ecosystem and perhaps ultimately in a social network of some sort.
Of course the Google Offers play – their answer to Groupon’s success – has been unfolding for a few weeks, and I had my doubts they would do what it would take to slow Groupon, but hey, it’s Google and you never know.
This week they slyly unleashed what could only be called City Pages – hat tip to the always informative David Mihm for tracking this down – City Pages, like this example for Portland, are a necessary piece in the puzzle if they are to compete with Groupon, but they also further the importance of claiming and optimizing a Place Page, appear to show in the Index and really put the spot light on the reviews. (Only a handful of cities are currently live.)
Business owners are invited to claim their pages, create special offers and try out ad products such as Boost right from the city home page. There’s also an interesting integration of acquisition TalkBin, a tool that makes it very easy for people send SMS messages to any registered business.
The cities chosen for the City Page beta test closely align with the first Google Offers beta tests and can be supported by the local Google sales and support staff. With Google’s ability marry advertising with offers and a local portal this could prove very disruptive to Groupon, but also to many local portals services such as Yelp! and CityPages.
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