Leverage Your Marketing Skills and Become a Professional Marketer
Facebook is approaching the threshold of looking like an overcrowded
marketplace instead of an online backyard cookout with friends and
family.
Friends and Family
Jenny-Erickson-sx-stock-happy-family.jpg
Gossiping in a group or posting on your wall about your recent
vacation or how and where you traveled can inundate your sidebar or
news feed with ads for related travel bargains.
Make an innocent remark, “I won $1,000 playing poker in Las Vegas,
but lost it all back gambling on 21″ and watch the sidebar start
flipping!
Even the most innocent task can bring a revelation!
I recently searched (using FireFox and Google) for a tool to unclog
a frozen drain. Ended up searching in Lowe’s, Home Depot and Ace
Hardware. Never gave it a thought…but I have cookies that target
my local stores so if something is available it will show in stock or
when available.
I finally found the tool in stock at Ace Hardware and called to
verify and requested that it be put on hold for me. Closed my tab,
opened another and clicked on my Facebook sign in reminder so nicely displayed by Fox Fire.
First Like and Comment I made…nothing to do with plumbing…but
the sidebar flipped and here comes an Ad from Home Depot with a
picture of the exact tool I had searched for with the CTA, “click and
pick up in my named local store.”
Shock!
Does this ad just display to me, or because my Facebook
account profile is almost unrestricted, is everything I see visible
to others that I’ve liked and commented on their post when it is in
my news feed?
What if I had a need for adult diapers and searched for them at
Wal-mart, Walgreen’s or even Costco. Would I have gotten the benefit
of an ad about adult diapers?
I know all this operates on cookies in one way or another as a fellow
marketer in another Facebook group explained , but it still left a tingling
in my mind to find out if the “cookie thing” could be leveraged for
marketing.
Define who you are and optimize your marketing efforts.
Since most of us belong to several groups that promote online
marketing it is important to note:
When you visit and comment, you are defining yourself, giving away tidbits of persona and opinion in a way that brands you.
It is has become important to put your actions and reactions into your marketing plan because who you are perceived to be is who you are to your online friends and colleagues.
Learn Some Marketing Skills to Make Your Work Easier
With this in mind, learning a few marketing skills is a “Good Thing”
as marketing Guru Martha Stewart is fond of saying. She is a
marketing Guru because she has branded herself so well that I don’t
need to explain who Martha Stewart is. You know who she is and what she does.
It is becoming more important to include marketing skills in almost
everything you do including liking and commenting on Facebook and
Twitter.
Learn to listen as a marketer.
There are some elements of listening that go beyond being friends.
Marketing requires active analysis of what you are hearing. You are searching for ways to connect with people, to make the most of opportunities and leverage your connections and relationships.
When joining a group, become aware of group characteristics, analyze membership focus and determine what these members are seeking that motivated them to become a part of this group.
While many groups are set up by marketers of a particular product as a “Bonus” it also has the effect of gathering people with similar goals but with different levels of competence at implementing strategies to accomplish their marketing ambitions.
Use your group membership to watch and learn from the members who know what they are doing. Make friends and contacts, not in a self serving way, but share what you learn and be helpful to others. Giving always reaps a return.
Decide What You Want to Leverage by Using Facts & Figures
Leveraging connections and relationships in a group doesn’t work if
done blind without useable data.
You need an overall picture of who is what, what they are really doing and even being able to focus on insights about their targeted goals for connection to a customer base.
Google analytics might be helpful, try using Facebook’s new insights
tool to add the sites you’d like to watch onto one of your Fan pages
so that you get a comparison with what you are doing.
Cut through the guessing and check out the good and the bad.
It will give you a clue if you go look at the sites and determine what is making someones site improve and on the reverse..what caused a site to sink in the rating stats.
In Facebook the rankings seems to be calculated on the number of shares, comments and likes but with unknown values. One reason being that a like can turn into a share from someone who saw the like from a friend, but not where you posted!
Use Statistics
Use as much data as you can assemble and interpret it to make a
decision about who to connect with in order to learn what techniques they are using to optimize their marketing leverage.
This may seem self interested, but it is all part of you striving to develop professional marketing skills.
An easy picture of all this can be illustrated by email list building programs that keep insisting that developing a relationship with your subscribers and treating them well is likely more important than building a list to begin with. The bottom line is you can build a list, but if they unsubscribe…what have you accomplished?
How Do You Connect and Engage Varied Types of People
As a Marketer you come into contact with many types of people.
Good marketers realize the fact that people have different personality types it is necessary to learn how to approach and engage them based on their own particular likes and dislikes.
Since marketing can be defined as communicating, then tactful skills
must be developed for doing this important job.
There is an old social saying that I often heard from my Grandmother, “don’t say what you are thinking, but think about what you are saying.”
Adding this particular social skill to your professional marketing
tool kit can make a difference. That old adage: Don’t discuss
Religion and Politics in polite society, has stuck around for a reason.
Most of the online people you are in contact with, you never meet
personally and don’t know how involved or passionate they are about either of these subjects, so it is a case of take care!
A timely recommendation is available is from Miss Manners
Leverage your Marketing Assets
Every marketer I have met is on a budget.
Traffic, branding, engaging other marketers, other contacts and potential customers is dependent on your advertising budget.
Since many new start up marketers have a zero budget it is time to become creative.
Using Twitter, bloggers you like and follow, Facebook groups, friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook are assets that can be leveraged without a large cash outflow but at the expense of your valuable time.
Develop your own contact system for getting in touch with people who are on your targeting list.
How you reach them is important as many prefer Twitter or Facebook or even commentors on their blog and are more engaged
when contacted on their preferred medium.
Think about who you connect with in either of these mediums to create an efficient system and prioritize your resources for more results with less effort.
Keep Yourself Up to Date
Don’t hide your head in the sand. Keep up to date with what is going
on in the real world and connect it to your Marketing world. Watch the news, check out what is trending in Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even Pinterest.
Regardless of your intended market, if you just focus solely on that
one area it is easy to become disconnected.
Using popular and current events and information in your communications makes you an interesting and welcome contact.
Just look around Facebook for instance and notice whose posts have large numbers of comments and engagement.
Figure out how or what content or types of pictures the person is using to connect.
Concentrate on identifying what attracts peoples interest or pulls on their “heart strings” so that they keep returning, even if what is posted has been said in a slightly different way may times before.
Just an observation, posting about conquering an addiction, a chronic health issue, or even overcoming a big problem with your hosting company or a technical issue seems to draw in contacts who have or had a similar problem. People love to talk about themselves so give them the opportunity.
Evaluate Your Marketing Efforts on a ScheduleIt is easy to bury yourself in the details of what you are trying to
do, but teaching yourself to look at the overall picture of how you
are leveraging your marketing can be of immense benefit.
Planned haste in doing this doesn’t necessarily make waste, but optimizes your efforts and you become much more effective in your marketing. Schedule a time at least once a month to look at what you are using and doing and what kind of results you are getting.
How Can I Learn How To Do all this Leveraged Marketing?
Below is an excerpt from interesting article I picked up and read at Growth Hackers that focuses on using content marketing in
a different way. It includes some very valuable suggestions for several social marketing mediums and their use for Marketing:
“How to design successful social products with 3 habit-forming feedback loops by Andrew Chen On Twitter I’m @andrewchen.
Connecting content posters and consumers to drive relevance.The way that content consumers participate in the feedback loop is
that they give feedback to content creators. But before they do that,
they need to have a method of picking what content is relevant to them on their home screens:
Picking people (Facebook, Twitter)
Picking topics (Quora, Stackexchange)
Leaderboards (Reddit, Hacker News)
Editorial curation (Medium)
Algorithmic curation (Flipboard, Prismatic)
Location (Foursquare, Highlight)
Anonymously matched (Secret)
… and more to be invented!
All of the above work, with different tradeoffs. Allowing people to
customize their content consumption based on people and topics is the most scalable, but the hardest to get started. “
Access to the rest of the article: http://andrewchen.co/2014/03/17/how-to-design-successful-social-products-with-3-habit-forming-feedback-loops/
Another Way to educate yourself about Marketing:
Find a group that is interested in digital Marketing and join. Do a
search on Facebook and Google for digital marketing groups. Look them over and decide which one is offering what you need to learn.
People love to share their knowledge and techniques.
My recommendation: Growth Hackers, for an extra resource this site is loaded with over-the-top Posts written by extremely knowledgeable people who are sharing.
Growth Hackers is free to join, plus you have the opportunity to make a contribution by posting there.
In Conclusion:Leverage Marketing is a skill that every marketer needs to develop.
Marketing works online in the internet and is still just as effective offline.
Word of mouth, classified ads, magazines, television, bill boards and
radio…the list is endless of ways to market. Each type of marketing
has its own set of skills that are required to become effective at using it.
Decide on your marketing category and develop your skills. The payoff will be worth working for.
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