Friday 8 November 2013

Growing Your Audience: How to Increase Your Social Following

Do you use social media to build an audience for your business?
Are you wondering how you can convert your audience into customers?
To learn how to grow an audience that wants more and more of what you have to offer, I interview Jeffrey Rohrs for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.

More About This Show

Social Media Marketing Podcast w/ Michael Stelzner
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.
It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.
The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).
In this episode, I interview Jeffrey Rohrs, co-host of the Social Pros Podcast and author of the new book, Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers. He’s also the vice president of marketing insights at Exact Target.
Jeff shares why an audience is so important for marketers.
You’ll learn about seekers, amplifiers and joiners and how these audience types relate to your business.
Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!

Listen Now

You can also subscribe via iTunesRSSStitcher or Blackberry.
Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

Growing Your Audience

Why an audience is so important for marketers
Jeff explains that in his book Audience, he homes in on the concept of proprietary audience development. It’s what people in social media, email marketing and even mobile have been doing, but he approaches it from a different angle.
audience book
Jeff's book, Audience, focuses on the concept of proprietary audience development.
When Jeff talked to marketers about their audiences, which included Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers and email subscribers, they didn’t seem tohave a strategy. In most cases, strategy was an afterthought or the outcome of a momentary campaign.
Marketing was traditionally organized around a campaign. Jeff refers to it as a beginning, a middle and an end, then a cake to celebrate the results and then repeat it.
You’ll discover why audience development is a responsibility, primary to marketing.
Originally marketers delivered the promise via email, but now you have to take that style of thinking into the social and mobile channels. Proprietary audiences will only be there if you build them. If not, you’ll have to pay in the form of advertising.
Jeff’s message is to take a look at everything you do in marketing and try to optimize it to build a proprietary audience, because it gives you a huge competitive advantage.
Before the Internet, creative thinkers only had to worry about great creative. They didn’t have to assemble an audience because mass media did that for them.
mad men amc press
Advertising "Mad Men" found reaching an audience much simpler before the Internet. Photo credit: Courtesy of AMC
The difference today is not only coming up with the creative, but also thinking about distribution and building an audience that belongs to you—one that nobody else has access to. So when you have that great piece of content, you are able to push the button and reach your audience.
You’ll hear Jeff explain why it’s important for businesses to have people in charge of audience development across all channels.
Listen to the show to find out why proprietary audience development is the flipside of the content marketing coin.
The definition of seekers, amplifiers and joiners
Jeff explains that these are the three top-level audiences that marketers have exclusive access to.
1. Seekers
Seekers are people who look for information or for entertainment. For example, you’re a seeker when you turn on your TV and flip through the channels to find something to entertain you.
watching tv
Seekers include people who flip through TV channels looking for something to entertain them. Image source: iStockphoto
You’re also a seeker when you use Google or Google Maps. Search engine optimization is all about the process of delivering seekers to your website.
Seekers are momentary. Once they have their fill of entertainment or find the information they need, they go away without a trace.
You’ll find out what you need to do with this audience type.
2. Amplifiers
Amplifiers are what social media is built upon. It’s where your customers turn into your best form of marketing.
Jeff refers to amplifiers as audiences with audiences. With fundamental communication models, there is usually a sender, a receiver and a message. The sender sends the message and the receiver receives it. However, the communication theory didn’t anticipate that the receivers themselves can then send their own message.
passing the relay baton
The receiver today can now become the person who sends out his or her own message. Image source: iStockphoto
Social media has changed this and has added another layer to it in terms of distribution and reach of these messages.
Amplifiers are the ones you don’t have a direct relationship with. You have no means to reach them directly, unless you convert them into the third group, the joiners. They look for access to information and want to bring their first-to-know experience to their own audience.
You’ll discover how to do well with amplifiers.
3. Joiners
A joiner is somebody who gives you permission to communicate with him or her directly through a specific channel.
Jeff explains in his book that the ultimate joiner audience is the customers, because they purchase from you. Product-related messages open up channels for you to have communication with the customer.
people showing unity
A couple of other joiner audiences are employees and partners. Image source: iStockphoto
When you look at it from a marketing perspective, joiners are subscribers, fans and followers. These are audiences with whom you have a pushbutton relationship. They give you permission to send them an email, as long as you meet their expectations. You are able to communicate through this channel.
You’ll hear why it’s a little different when it comes to Facebook fans and Twitter followers.
Listen to the show to find out why you should think about the longer-term customer value.
How to convert seekers to joiners
Jeff says you have got to look at it as a desired outcome and measure against that goal and objective. Jeff sees companies that implicitly expect to grow their subscriber base, fans or followers, but they don’t have an explicit plan to get there.
One of the first things you will want to do to convert seekers is turn them into email subscribers. The inbox is critically important.
The first thing you need to do is audit your website for the places that seekers come and look at what your capture mechanisms are. You also need to understand how you ask people to join your audience.
You’ll hear about the three critical dimensions of an audience and how you can learn a lesson from social media companies.
Jeff describes how many of us get caught up in creating content that will be popular rather than how it will convert. It’s what he calls “the empty calories of content marketing.”
You’ll hear what Jeff advises people who challenge him on how to measure the value of Facebook fans.
Although Facebook fans aren’t revenue producers for every brand, a company calledPetFlow has used its Facebook page to grow its fan base astronomically.
petflow facebook page
Facebook fans are a huge revenue producer for PetFlow.
The way you market your product, how the market perceives you, your brand and your product all translate into different channels that work in different ways for you. You’ll find out why Jeff calls this the “era of high-bred marketing.”
Jeff’s fundamental belief is that companies that focus on proprietary audience development in the years to come will be at a huge competitive advantage. He has already seen it with some of the bigger brands.
In the coming year, Jeff wants to make sure that audience gets a lot more attention because it’s taken for granted that it just exists, and it comes at a cost. You’ll discover what you need to focus on so you don’t have to pay for expensive advertising.
Listen to the show to learn about Jeff’s definition of proprietary.
How to prove what we do matters
Jeff explains how his colleague, Joel Book at Exact Target, has a favorite saying: “More juice for the squeeze.”
Over time you will start to see better results for less effort. It doesn’t mean you put in less effort, it means you are able to redirect some of the effort it took to get to the first 100 audience members and make it a lot easier to get to that first 100, plus the next 900.
As you build your subscriber base, you touch more people, so when you hit Send on that email, it will impact your sales directly and faster. You’ll learn how to calculate the value of your audience.
Jeff uses an example from the book about Netflix, when they lost about 4-5% of their subscribers. Their market cap went down from around $300 a share to about $60. They lost about 80% of their market cap because of how they handled their audience.
netflix
Netflix's valuation was impacted by how they handled their audience.
Listen to the show to find out how Netflix course-corrected and recovered their stock back to around $360 a share, and what that means for how you manage your own audience.

Discovery of the Week

I’ve discovered a really cool free tool called SEMrush. You can type in the web address of any website, and it provides you with an enormous amount of intelligence in the form of charts and diagrams.
When you click on Organic Research, it tells you exactly how many people have searched for that particular keyword phrase over the last 12 months. It gives you a lot more than just keywords.
semrush results
Organic keyword results for socialmediaexaminer.com.
Keywords can be very valuable because you can go to your competitors that rank higher than you in the search results and you can see what keywords they rank on.
One of the things that I thought was really cool is that it will show you what ads are running. For example, if you have a competitor that you know does Google pay-per-click ads, you can type in their domain name and it will show you all of the advertisements they are running.
From a marketer’s perspective, you can do all sorts of research on what keywords your competitors are ranking on, what they are purchasing and what their ads look like.
I strongly recommend that you check it out. You’re limited to how much data you can see for free, but it’s definitely worth it.
Call in and leave your social media–related questions for us and we may include them in a future show.
Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you.

Other Show Mentions

SMMW logoSocial Media Marketing World 2014 is our physical mega-conference, which is set to return to San Diego, California on March 26, 27 and 28.
The conference features more than 60 sessions on social media marketing, blogging, podcasting and video marketing.
The pure number of podcasters who will be presenting at this conference is impressive: Michael Hyatt, Cliff Ravenscraft, Chris Brogan Pat Flynn, Erik Fisher, John Lee Dumas, Jonathan Fields, Jay Baer, Dan Miller, John Jantsch, Amy Porterfield, Ray Edwards, Marcus Sheridan, Rick Mulready, Cynthia Sanchez, Greg Hickman, Jon Loomer and many others!
This is an incredible opportunity for you to actually meet, rub shoulders with and get to know the people you listen to on podcasts. It’s going to be an amazing conference. If you’re interested, check it out.

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

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What do you think? What are your thoughts on growing your audience?Please leave your comments below.

Wednesday 6 November 2013

How to Run a Successful Social Media Sweepstakes

Are you planning to run a social media sweepstakes to make your business stand out this holiday season?
Do you need a guide to ensure that you don’t miss the crucial elements of a successful sweepstakes promotion?
Sweepstakes, contests and giveaways are increasingly popular among marketers who are vying for the attention of their social media audiences. Choosing a prize is the easy part.
Whether you run your promotion on Facebook or Pinterest, it’s easy to overlook something. Making sure you’ve got all your planning, technical and legal “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed is critical to your success.
In this article, you’ll learn the five steps of running a successful social media sweepstakes.

#1: Assess Sweepstakes Objectives

This is where most companies shortchange themselves. How? By focusing on superficial objectives that may not benefit their business.
For example, does it make sense to run a sweepstakes to increase your already-large fan base or do you want to jumpstart your social engagement process?
Here’s a list of potential sweepstakes objectives to choose from:
  • Increase awareness of a new product
  • Increase the number of free trials
  • Collect leads with detailed information
  • Generate customer referrals
  • Increase average daily visitors
  • Increase newsletter subscribers
  • Increase social media followers (Facebook fansTwitter followers, etc.)
  • Increase social media exposure (more repins, more retweets of your message, etc.)
  • Increase sales
  • Generate brand loyalty by delighting existing customers with a chance to win a big prize
  • Increase social media engagement
Her Campus is a good example of a company that’s using sweepstakes to increase their social media engagement.
her campus engagement
Her Campus is an excellent example of using a sweepstakes to increase social media engagement by requiring followers to tweet a picture of their dorm room along with a description of their dorm room style.
Often-Overlooked Objectives
Increase customer micro-insights: For example, tweet to win: “If I win a $500 Visa gift card, I’ll spend it on __________ #ABCgiveaway @yourcompany”. Not only does this increase social media engagement, it also gives you a much deeper understanding of your target market.
Increase customer survey participation: Brick-and-mortar businesses regularly use sweepstakes to increase customer survey participation, but this practice is rare for online businesses.
Hipmunk is a good example of an online business that is successfully utilizing sweepstakes to increase the level of customer survey participation.
hipmunk survey
Hipmunk, a travel booking company, frequently uses small sweepstakes to increase customer survey participation.

#2: Plan the Logistics

This phase can be a lifesaver. If you get this phase right, you’ll be breathing a lot easier during the promotion.
Here are the major steps in the planning phase:
Select a Sweepstakes Tool: This is the most important step in the planning phase because the right tool streamlines and automates your sweepstakes tasks. There are some key features to look for when selecting a vendor for your social media sweepstakes.
  • Automated template generation for sweepstakes’ terms and conditions
  • Multiple sweepstakes entry actions: For example, do they allow you to only collect email addresses or do they also help you conduct surveys?
  • Automation of winner-selection process
  • Ability to host sweepstakes on multiple online platforms
  • Automatic synchronization of email subscribers with email marketing tools such as MailChimpAWeberConstant Contact, etc.
  • Branding of sweepstakes widget with your colors and themes
  • Pricing strategy: For example, do they charge per action or per feature?
  • Are they compatible with mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android?
  • What support channels do they offer and what are their hours of support? This is very helpful if the sweepstakes tool becomes dysfunctional during your promotion.
Comply with sweepstakes laws: It’s imperative to understand the regional and social media platform rules pertaining to sweepstakes. Sarah Hawkins has a series of articles that serve as excellent guides on these topics.
Determine sweepstakes duration: 21-28 days is the ideal duration for a sweepstakes promotion. Two weeks is often too short and more than a month is too long.
Select a prize: It could be your own product or a product that really fulfills your target audience’s needs.
Here’s a good example of this from Dove. Instead of offering a cliché prize such as an iPad, they focused on providing a home upgrade to attract a targeted male audience.
dove sweepstakes prize
Dove attracts a targeted male audience by using a home upgrade as their sweepstakes prize.
Determine sweepstakes location: Where will you host your sweepstakes? Depending on your objectives, does it make sense to host the promotion on your website, Facebook page or some other popular blog? These are not mutually exclusive choices. You can host your sweepstakes on multiple online destinations, but having it in one place often leads to an easier and more efficient execution of the promotion.
Set promotion budget: How much money do you want to spend to promote your sweepstakes? How does that divide across different marketing channels? For example, do you want to advertise on specific blogs to drive traffic to your sweepstakes or does a Facebook ad campaign make more sense?
Often-Overlooked Planning Steps
Associate sweepstakes with an event: Is the sweepstakes being held to celebrate your business’s third anniversary or the joyous spirit of Christmas? Associating your sweepstakes with an event provides context to your audience and makes a deeper emotional connection with them, which increases the chances of your sweepstakes creating a positive buzz in social media.
Here’s a great example of Family.com associating their sweepstakes with Christmas.
christmas event
Family.com associates their sweepstakes with Christmas to connect with their audience on a deeper level and ensure positive social media exposure.
Create a short and enticing viral loop: A big prize attracts attention, but it’s the viral loop that continues the momentum—which is why it needs to be thought out in considerable detail. A viral loop is the workflow that maximizes the probability of one contestant attracting another contestant from their social network.
Here are the key elements in each stage of a viral loop:
Stage 1Activate visitors into contestants
  • Clearly state the action that the visitors should take to enter the sweepstakes
  • Display an attractive picture of the prize
  • Inform the visitors that it is quick and easy to enter
  • State all the relevant information to reassure the visitors that the sweepstakes is legitimate (e.g., end date, winner announcement process, terms, etc.)
Stage 2Remove entry barriers
  • Focus on one call to action
  • Make the Submit button easy to find
  • Reassure the visitors that their information is safe
Stage 3Entice the contestant to share
  • Associate sweepstakes with an event (e.g., Christmas)
  • Award more entries for sharing the sweepstakes via social networks
  • Award a guaranteed gift such as a discount or an ebook for sharing the sweepstakes on social networks
Stage 4Attract new visitors through shared messages
  • Write compelling copy for the message shared by the contestants when they press the Facebook Share or Retweet button. For example, instead of “Enter to win a $500 Visa Card” being shared, modify the copy of your shared message to “Wouldn’t it be nice to go on a Christmas shopping spree for free? Enter to win!”
Make sure every shared message has a link to the sweepstakes.

#3: Launch the Sweepstakes

You’ve done all the heavy planning work. Now, it’s time to execute. Here are the most important steps for a flawless launch:
Conduct a test run: Once you’ve set up the sweepstakes, ask a few of your friends and colleagues to enter and perform every primary and secondary call to actionConfirm that you see their entry in the sweepstakes tool’s analytics; that the messages being shared are not cut off due to character limits and that the sweepstakes links within the shared messages are working.
Contact influencers: Reach out to social media influencers and ask them if they will promote your sweepstakes. The more you convince them that the prize and the associated event of the sweepstakes appeal to their readers, the higher the chance of them promoting your sweepstakes. There is a great list of tools for this purpose in this article written by Jason Falls.
Request listing on sweepstakes directories (with caution): Submit your contest to a sweepstakes directory. This may make sense for some audiences, but not for others. You really need to think through what kind of audience you’re trying to attract, because sweepstakes directories often bring in “professional sweepers” who use fake accounts to submit multiple entries or immediately reverse their entry action; for instance, unlike, unsubscribe, etc.
Determine launch day: Your promotion gets an early boost if you launch your sweepstakes at the right time and the right day of the week. While you’ll have to rely on your own data to determine the best time and day for your audience, these research articles from Marketing Profs and Beth Kanter’s blog will help you get started.
launch date data
According to a study published by Marketing Profs, Sunday evening is the best time to launch a sweepstakes.
Often-Overlooked Launch Steps
Create a support plan: Despite your excellent planning and execution, things can still go wrong, and usually they’ll have to do with technical glitches. If you’re using a third-party sweepstakes tool, make sure you have their phone number and email address handy so you can quickly resolve the technical problems.
Contact Facebook influencers: There’s a lot of focus on finding Twitter or Pinterest influencers, mainly because of the ease of finding influencers on these platforms. Finding Facebook influencers is more challenging, but it’s worth the effort, especially because many of these influencers don’t have their own dedicated websites or blogs.Raven Tools has an informative blog post on how to navigate Facebook’s search feature to find relevant Facebook pages.
facebook search tool
Facebook's search feature is a powerful tool to help you determine the right Facebook influencers for your sweepstakes promotion.

#4: Follow-up With Contestants

So you’ve launched the sweepstakes and the entries are rolling in. In this stage, your focus needs to shift to following up to meet your primary and secondary objectives.Here’s a list of the major steps that are needed for a successful follow-up process:
Follow up with autoresponders: Sending a follow-up email adds more credibility to your sweepstakes and dramatically increases the chances of contestants taking the secondary action that you’d like them to take. Schedule automatic follow-ups via the autoresponder features of email marketing tools such as MailChimp and AWeber.
Determine reminder frequency: Your fans and subscribers are really busy and they’ll either forget to enter your sweepstakes or miss your announcements. That’s why reminders are vital to maximizing the number of contestants. To ensure that you don’t annoy your audience, a good rule of thumb is:
  • One reminder email per week
  • One reminder Facebook status per day
  • Two reminder tweets per day
    tweet
    Remind people about your sweepstakes with conservative frequency. Image source: iStockPhoto.
Conduct daily test runs: Technical glitches are often unreported, which translates into fewer contestants. That’s why it’s important for you to enter your own sweepstakes on a daily basis (with a test account) to verify that all of the sweepstakes procedures are working as planned.
Perform weekly modifications: As the sweepstakes progresses, you’re sure to learn a lot and generate ideas on how to make your sweepstakes better. It’s important to set aside some time each week to make adjustments based on those lessons. It could be something as simple as changing the tweet message to make it more enticing, or something as effective as reducing the number of actions required to enter the sweepstakes.
Often-Overlooked Follow-Up Steps
Reach out to contestants on Twitter: At the end of each day, look at who entered the sweepstakes on Twitter, check out their Twitter bio and see if they are the right target to engage with. Breaking the ice is much easier since their sweepstakes entry serves as a starting point for conversation. It’s simple to do and you’ll never know who you’ll find, so why not give it a try?
Follow-up for soft-selling: Sweepstakes draw a lot of traffic and attention. Why not encourage them to buy from you? Here’s a list of things for you to do on your Thank-you page or your follow-up emails to increase your sales:
  • Show contestants your business video and ask them to start a free trial
  • If the prize is your own product, give them a link to where they can buy that product
  • Give entrants a discount code to entice them to buy from you. Here’s a good example from a sweepstakes promotion.
    follow up soft sale
    Use your follow-up emails as a means to soft-sell your product to increase your sales.

#5: Ending the Sweepstakes

You’re almost done. A few more steps and you’ll have the pleasure of communicating with the winner and watching him or her respond to you with joy and disbelief. But before that point, there are still a few things you need to get right:
Send final reminders: Send out final reminders via email and social media about when the sweepstakes ends. Reiterate what the sweepstakes was for and how easy it is to enter.
Select a winner: If you’re using a sweepstakes tool, it should make the winner selection process very simple. Otherwise, export the contestant data into an Excel spreadsheet and upload it to Random.org to help you select a winner.
Remove the tool: Now that the sweepstakes is done, remove the widget from your website and/or your social media pages.
Send winner announcementAnnounce the winner to all contestants via email, blog and social networks.
Contact the winnerSend a separate email to the winner asking him or her to respond within a specific time period. Also ask about the person’s age and location. This step needs to be done within 7-10 business days of the sweepstakes’ end.
Mail the prize: Once you’ve confirmed all of the details with the winner, mail the prize to the winner’s address and let him or her know the estimated date of arrival.
Often-Overlooked Ending Steps
Create an internal assessment report: This is the moment of truth. Did you meet your objectives? What was the return on investment for the amount of money you spent? Would that money have been better spent on direct ads or other PR activities? What worked very well and what would you do differently? Sweepstakes are not a one-hit wonder. They’re supposed to be done with some regularity and these kinds of post-sweepstakes assessments ensure that your next sweepstakes generates even better results.
Share your results: Everyone loves to see stats, a final report card or a set of lessons learned during a promotion. Now that you have completed your sweepstakes promotion, you’re sitting on valuable data. Why not share that data on your own blog or with a different audience through a guest blog post to gain additional coverage of your business?
share results
The contest widget that had the fuzzy image collected 22% more email subscribers than the widget that had big text and no image.
Unbounce has a good article on post-sweepstakes statistics on 8 factors that lead to the best results.
Add Your Tips
These are important steps to follow when running a successful sweepstakes. However, these steps aren’t the only ones. Running sweepstakes is a social activity and there’s a lot of room for creativity.
What do you think? Do you have some tips of your own? What successes have you had with running a sweepstakes? Please share some of your own tips in the comments below.