One headline I just saw in my newsfeed was “Is Social Media Right for Your Business? The short answer was “YES.” Their point was that every business MUST have an “online personality” represented on Facebook, Instagram, etc. or they’ll lose to competitors who do.

I immediately pondered and thought, “What about the companies not using social media who win business from companies that do?”

I can think of too many examples including clients and other successful businesses I work with. I just pulled a job from a business swimming in a rich Social Media broth and gladly gave it to one that still uses dialup internet on an as needed basis. Landline phone only. The owner is eyeing a nice retirement soon, BTW.

For good reasons, many businesses don’t want social media and don’t need it, at least for now.

Expert Advice or Sales Pitch?

Despite what you may hear from some marketers out there (who sell social marketing services), having an “online personality” on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other other platform is not a marketing necessity today. You may choose to position your brand in a manner that works better in other media, including online, such as your own great website and a strong trade presence. Maybe a top-notch personal selling organization drives your growth.

Pay the freight or nothing gets delivered.

The truth is, your customers find your business and come to you primarily through channels other than social media. It doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time posting a bunch of quality content on social media unless you pay for people to see it, and have a strong value proposition,  just like any other advertising. Then you may gain sales opportunities from the added brand impressions. You know the advertisers courting you on Facebook if you spend any time there. They’re paying and you’re noticing.

So, unless you plan on budgeting for advertising, think of social media as a sidebar in your overall branding and public relations efforts. You want to keep an eye on it and pay to boost it when you need to see results from it.

Now that some of the dust is settling, we’re understanding Social Media’s marketing limitations and weaknesses as well as its continuously fluctuating opportunities.

One thing I’ve learned as a veteran professional user is never expect anything of great value to come out of free or public media space but expect great results from earned relationships.

The post Is Social Media Dead? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

To get the most out of this article: Embrace all of the questions asked and answer them honestly to yourself. Then perhaps you could ask others in your firm these same questions and have a serious business discussion about your team’s candid answers…

Are you excited by the vibe your company puts out there? Are you certain that people in your target market are talking about you and your company in mostly flattering terms? Are you showing up in enough digital newsfeeds for your brand to remain top-of-mind in your business network or target audience?

What does your social timeline look like should a prospect look through your company’s digital history on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and your blog?

Does your digital report card show a multi-year history of industry leadership, community engagement and growth, in other words, do you get straight As?

Or, are you like many companies that struggle to publish one or two articles a year and have 6 to 18-month gaps in social media posts, earning an F, D or maybe C- in the minds of prospects looking at your business online?

Think of your business social media pages as your company’s public historical records and a current report card, because that’s what they are. What does the record show about your business strengths, your success today and what you did to get here?

If people can easily follow a story of consecutive events and milestones along with insightful discussions on your social media pages and website, you’re obviously doing your homework. You’re studying your market and providing insights and answers to what people are talking about.

Continuing our school analogy, the A students of social media and digital marketing sit up front (advertise and promote), raise their hands (engage with their networks) and turn completed assignments in on time (post high-quality content frequently). And many A-students go for extra credit (write white papers, produce webinars, etc.).

The historical record and content quality of your business’s social media say a lot about your organization, especially to people who don’t yet know you. How is your present digital messaging and your company history looking to searchers and visitors these days?

If you need help in this area, go get some help. With the right approach, you can quickly liven up your online image and show people what you’re really up to today. With the right content and post frequency, you can build your business page timelines to throw off a lively and accurate vibe of how your business is making great things happen. Why hide your knowledge and successes when your customers & prospects are looking for active players to work with?

The post Social Media: Your Public Report Card appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

I was tempted to write the headline, “Is Social Media Dead?” but I’ll avoid sensational hype and stick to real news & commentary. Microsoft’s announced purchase of LinkedIn immediately raised questions about the future of social media. For businesses, it will likely become even more of a pay-to-play medium.

I’d like to advance a discussion about reevaluating our social media marketing strategies to avoid wasting time at the expense of more profitable sales and marketing activities. Social is here to stay but we need to use it better.

Sales is the end game of all business activity. Every CEO cares first about making sales because without customers there is no company. CEOs would do well to reconsider what social media is really doing for them in 2016. Most of us have had enough time and experience, including lots of trial and error, to understand what social media really is and its value to businesses – which will continually ebb and flow. Every platform; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. will develop its algorithms to incentivize or push businesses into paid advertising and premium services – more and more as the startup phases have passed.

To them, it’s all about sales too! Social Media companies have the captive eyeballs and ears you need to reach. They’ve invested billions to build these networks and engage the masses. They cannot give businesses free space to promote or there would be no space left for real social interaction, and they’d go out of business. I predict that you can expect to pay more as time goes on if you want your social media content to be seen by enough potential customers to get results.

CEO: “Please go sell something!”

Now let’s talk about results. What are you getting out of your social media efforts now that you’ve been using it for years? Anecdotally, I have clients (both retail) who have made numerous direct sales on Facebook and lured dozens of people into stores for special promotions. I have other clients (B2B) who’ve had some success on LinkedIn and virtually zero results from Facebook even as they strive to follow “best practices.”

Is there any wonder about the difference in experiences between consumer/retail and B2B when it comes to Facebook vs. LinkedIn? Remember that LinkedIn was set up for business networking and Facebook was set up for social networking. There is a profound difference between the two even if they meld sometimes.

If your company sells primarily to other businesses, social media can be a confounding puzzle. The conflicting message is “We know we should be using it effectively but we can’t afford to waste time on marketing activities that fail to produce a profitable return.” Perhaps all we really need to do is prioritize social media properly in the marketing mix.

How do you prioritize social media properly in your marketing mix? This will be different for every business, but generally speaking, if you’re in B2B, you need to leave the office and visit more clients, use the phone instead of direct messages, concentrate on your LinkedIn network, and stick to your core value messages in all media.

One of my clients and I are having a serious conversation about their social media component and we’ve made a few key adjustments, shifting more toward great web content, article publishing and direct marketing.

Lastly, I’ll share the gist of what social media has done for my business practice. Many people have endorsed my firm as having expertise in social media marketing and I’ve been at it since about 2006. Here’s a quick summary for my marketing services business:

Focus on the Big 3

LinkedIn – Very effective for extending my business networking online and worldwide. I’ve gained new business directly from LinkedIn, including clients outside my normal geographic footprint. Forget about your LinkedIn Business Page. Your Personal Profile is where ALL of the valuable action is on LinkedIn. I make LinkedIn my professional online hub after my website.

Facebook – I have a large network of friends, including business associates and all of my business related posts are ignored on my personal page. Interestingly, even my best business content is also ignored on my Facebook Business Page. Not so with my retail clients because their customers are mostly having fun when they shop and we engage them in fun ways. For business service customers, “shopping” is mostly work. People are on Facebook for entertainment, not work.

Twitter – I’ve added value to my brand on Twitter as people see, favorite and retweet my messages. I go to Twitter for ideas and to “listen” for trending topics in my business. People and businesses break news on Twitter. It can be a good resource for sales intelligence. I have successfully contacted prospects and sold to them by paying attention to tweets from both the client and my competition.

Other social networks like Instagram, Pinterest, etc all offer potential sales & marketing opportunities but the big 3 for most businesses remain LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Insofar as these platforms help you start face-to-face conversations with interested prospects, you’re using social media successfully for your business.

The post Social Media Marketing or Just Good Vibes? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Social Media

Several months ago I took a sales call from a social media content marketing automation company and the salesman demonstrated excellence in selling skills. He closed me on one call. I reluctantly signed up for the service based in part on the credentials of the company founder – arguably the top social media guru in the world, Dave Kerpen.

Being somewhat of a specialist in social media content, and understanding that it takes serious work to get right, I felt an imperative to learn how a content automation service could work for my business as well as clients.’ How would the quality of output compare with my original, custom (and time-consuming) content development? My initial research is starting to bear the fruits of real data.

My early conclusion is that social media content automation works well for Twitter, but has limited value for Facebook and LinkedIn. I have gained significant numbers of targeted new Twitter followers without even trying. To a small degree, my LinkedIn engagement is up and my Business Facebook Page has remained very quiet, even with all the new content activity. As can be expected, my own personally written posts get more likes, shares and comments in Facebook and LinkedIn. But on Twitter, engagement is about even between the automated tweets and my own.

Twitter is about real-time, high volume, and topic specific conversations. Therefore, higher volume of industry-relevant tweets can gain you some Twitter traction. What about direct new business results? The jury is still out but I believe my brand value is growing nationally as a Twitter result.

Email

Email marketing content subscription services based on your specific industry (IT, retail, home remodeling, architecture, plumbing, accounting, legal, financial planning, etc.) are commonly available. For a monthly fee, they’ll automate and eblast trending articles to your email contacts on a scheduled basis. You simply provide your target audience demographics and product/service category info. They conjure up relevant content for your audience, then blast out third party-produced messages to your email list. It lets you set and forget your email marketing so you can focus on other things.

How well does it work? Ask yourself this. To which are you more likely to respond, a colorful and graphically perfect Hallmark style greeting from a large insurance carrier or a simple piece of critical advice from a local agent you’ve met or heard of?

On the same day of the month at the same time of day, I now receive 3 identical emails from the same large financial services company. The only difference? The individual sender is a different agent for that company. This may be considered sales support but it’s generically canned support. And how supportive can that be?

One of my clients subscribes to a well-established provider of content  for the financial planning industry. What we found after experimenting with email campaigns is that it’s a good service for supplementing our original custom content but could never replace it. The proprietary and personalized articles in our emails proved to be more engaging than the third party-produced materials. Additionally, people found our own email design to be more graphically pleasing than the structured layout offered by the other service. We’ve come full circle with email – full customized messaging with supplemental content from the service provider.

Here’s the best thing about email marketing: When you deliver personal value in your emails, direct replies include requests to do business with you.

Bottom line: Support your own sales efforts with personalized, valuable advice for your prospects and customers! They’ll appreciate you for it and more easily remember whom to call when they need your services.

The post Custom Content or Canned Correspondence? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

You’d end a meeting quickly with anyone who spoke like that, wouldn’t you? Word choice matters when you’re talking about how to boost sagging sales or strategically grow your business. The last thing you want to hear is meaningless talk about some touchy-feely notion of social engagement. So what are we getting at? Here are your bullets:

• What is the real business value of social media engagement? Does it even matter?
• What is a brand impression worth?
• Don’t attempt lead generation on social media.
• Do increase brand value and sell more!

“Engagement” is perhaps the single fluffiest word in the marketing lexicon and has been used as a crutch by early or inexperienced social media marketers. Engagement can be understood as the interactions people have with your social media content, i.e. likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.

Being short on quantifiable sales results, but keeping a strong belief in the effectiveness of the new media, social media consultants have pushed “engagement” as the key metric for their effectiveness in the marketing mix. Engagement is easy to measure, but it has nothing directly to do with sales. Remember that – Engagement has nothing directly to do with sales.

They promise you engagement but what you need are paying customers!

Here’s a key point about engagement, as well as non-engagement, for that matter. Presuming you have done what it takes to build a social media following, some of your clients and potential customers never like or comment on your social shares but they do notice and pay attention. They see your posts or ads in their feed and a brand impression is registered. Every business executive understands that there is some value to a brand impression. Is it worth fractions of a cent, a few pennies or a lot more than that?

Your social media brand impression’s value depends a lot on how clearly your brand is perceived by your target audience; how well positioned it is. The more accurately people perceive your product/service/differentiator, the more impact every impression has on your brand equity in the market, therefore your sales potential. See the relationship?

From the marketing perspective, social media provides far more value to brand building and public relations than in direct lead generation for sales.

There are certainly scores of anecdotes about sales made directly on social media and it happens all the time for retail-consumer businesses. However, if you’re running a B2B enterprise or small business, manage your expectations about how social media engagement ultimately impacts your business.

Patience pays.

A bevy of likes and comments, complete with good feelings, kudos, smiling faces and thumbs up can certainly get your attention and that’s often where it seems to end. Over time, however, all those likes and comments enhance the impressions of those posts. For any of the potential customers regularly fed your social media messages, your brand is moving toward Top-of-Mind Awareness, which is a powerful sales driver.

The post Social Media and Sales – your long distance romance appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

When you think about it, everything positive in your business is the result of a relationship that enabled a transaction or other favorable action. Therefore, everything about your online promotional offers and calls to action should be about strengthening your relationship with customers, prospects and other users of your website.

Google favors websites with more social referral traffic and ranks them higher. This is because people who click shared links in social media are opting to consume the message based on its relevance to their specific interests. Search engines raise your website’s authority as a trusted resource in your category when people recommend or share your page links. Social media provide the easiest and most direct channels for link sharing.

As business relationships are also social relationships, how do you go about nurturing your social relationships with your web visitors? Read the full article on our client’s blog to learn 4 effective ways to make your website social…

The post I know your customers. They’re social! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Marketing and selling on LinkedIn is a big deal for business today. Just about everyone in business is now on LinkedIn (over 300 million users) and most are staring at their screens thinking, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Salespeople who have moved away from cold calling are turning to LinkedIn as a new opportunity for canvassing their markets. It’s a fine prospecting tool for certain, but LinkedIn will not work as a “target rich” environment to pick off prospects. People on LinkedIn are just like you. They want to sell, not get picked off!

I’ll offer you in this article what I’ve experienced using LinkedIn since about 2006. A visit to my profile will inform you of my content, connections and online resume. LinkedIn calls me an “All Star” for whatever that’s worth, and I only have a free account.

My professional network on LinkedIn is among my most precious business assets. I’m connected with most of my identifiable business prospects in my market. LinkedIn is the perfect searchable Rolodex, and when I need to contact someone for any business inquiry, that’s where I go. There’s tip number one! Make LinkedIn your interactive business connection database. Okay, but then what?

How do you grow your business and earn more money on LinkedIn? 

The answer is simply this: Use all of LinkedIn’s features for searching, connecting, networking, branding and publishing. Do you want some bullets? Here they are:

• Brand
• Profile depth
• Content value
• Connections – quality and volume
• Presence and interaction

LinkedIn does its job very well. In fact, it will continually prompt you to be a better user. The rest is up to you. How interesting are your messages to your connections?

Humans behave pretty much the same online, no matter where they are. For example what gets more likes, comments and shares on Facebook? It’s usually family and personal drama, controversial topics, frivolous musings, cool pictures and videos. That’s what gets them buzzing.

People want to be entertained no matter what, and on LinkedIn, some even want to be educated. These are your LinkedIn watchwords for post content: Wise, Fresh, New, Bold, Disruptive and Valuable.

Asking a timely and baffling question will get you more interaction than a technical blog post or sharing a typical business article.

Writing a controversial LinkedIn Pulse post will get people commenting and direct messaging you while sharing your latest newsletter will simply be another brand impression.

It’s fine to post something relevant to your business audience every day and those impressions will only fortify your personal and company branding. Don’t expect the floodgates to be opened, but rather a gradual rise to “top-of-mind” status within your LinkedIn network.

Use LinkedIn like I do and trust me, your messages will be seen and noticed by hundreds and potentially thousands every week! Your brand will be reinforced and you’ll be short listed by your connections when they have a requisition and budget for your services.

Your quality professional network will keep growing as long as you stay active on LinkedIn. You will begin to form relationships inside the minds and hearts of your wider online network without even knowing it.

There’s bad news for those thinking of LinkedIn as a replacement for the telephone which was once a fairly effective “dialing for dollars” machine. Social media including LinkedIn discourage spammy or unsolicited sales messages. Connecting socially and fostering relationships online is the purpose for LinkedIn and other social media.

Look at LinkedIn from the relationship, not sales perspective! Get acquainted with fellow professionals and make friends just as you would on Facebook. Just be authentic about it and remember to keep the tone professional, even when using humor.

LinkedIn is actually a very sociable platform. It’s just dressed for professional life instead of a back yard barbecue. Once you have someone in your network, it will be natural to contact them with relevant, valuable business information. An invitation to lunch through a LinkedIn direct message is more likely to be accepted than a meeting request from an unexpected phone call.

Continuous thoughtful updates and interactions with your LinkedIn Groups and Connections will improve your business development results, without question. It’s not a matter of IF it will work, it’s a matter of spending the time and doing the work to actually generate the results.

The post LinkedIn Does its Job. What about you? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

On March 20, you can learn to save a ton of money for your business! Learn what free marketing is all about.

• Learn how to build a brand…
• Market a company…
• Increase sales…
• All using free tools and methods!

Come to the hands-on single day course: Social Media & Free Online Marketing at Manchester Community College on March 20th!

Register here with CRN # 20774 and Course # NCTD055.

If you have questions about how to register, reply to this email or call me at 603-345-7223.

The post Spend a day, then don’t spend another dime. appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Business development is a hybrid profession that has evolved over the last couple of decades. The very term “business development” seems to me a response to a marketplace that became weary of so many salespeople parading through front doors, entering back doors and prying open every chink in the walls of companies with money to spend. “People love to buy but hate to be sold.” So measures have been put in place to make it hard for salespeople to simply call business people and sell their stuff.

Marketing and sales have become more interdependent and the trend is that these two functions are becoming intertwined. Sales is still where most of the glory is when it comes to impressing the boss. Sales rules business and always will because businesses live on cash flow and new business is lifeblood to organizations. But sales work has changed to business development (think relationships) and effective business development must utilize marketing principles and tactics to open doors to new business opportunities. Again, “people hate to be sold but they love to buy.” A salesperson must get his message out to prospects who are truly in the market to buy.

Every salesperson’s computer can now be a broadcasting and receiving station, i.e., a media outlet. And guess what? Airtime is free. Paying for a boost with advertising is always an option but one can reach thousands in a target audience by spending only time, learning and using the free tools: Social Media, email and networking. Many thriving businesses have been launched with no marketing budget. 

If you already have a computer, Internet connection, cell phone and car (and who doesn’t these days?) Then you have the infrastructure to effectively grow a business. The only thing else you need is time and willingness to work hard (Oh darn, we had to go there!). It’s really wonderful to implement an effective marketing campaign which makes business development efforts much easier (think warm inbound leads), all with no need to spend media dollars. Those dollars can be invested instead toward product and service improvements which will make your customers the best sales force you could want.

Do you or people you know want to learn how to build a brand, market a company and increase sales using totally free tools and methods? Come to the hands-on single day course: Social Media & Free Online Marketing at Manchester Community College on March 20th! Register with CRN # 20774 and Course # NCTD055.

If you have questions about how to register, simply reply to this email or call me at 603-345-7223

The post Free Marketing Tools – Big ROI appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

There are too many technology walls and filters against traditional sales calls for them to be effective today. Not only that, the buyer mindset has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Cold calls were once respected, even appreciated by many buyers at a time when salespeople offered new product information and comparison shopping opportunities.

There was once, on a certain level, a sense of obligation to respond to the persistent salesperson’s calls. Do you see that sense of obligation working for your selling efforts now? As a salesperson, do you feel it out there anymore?

Voicemail and automated call answering were first, the speed and reliability of the Internet were second, and the cultural shift toward “build a relationship and earn my trust before I will even talk with you” (resulting from the peer-to-peer socialization of business and commerce) is the final nail in the coffin of cold call selling.

Sidewalk canvassing doesn’t even work anymore because many business entrances are locked for security. I remember how awkward it felt ringing a buzzer without an appointment and struggling to offer a valid reason to be let in the door. Welcoming front desks and receptionists have been vanishing as fast as payphones.

Bottom line: Effective prospecting is totally different now and traditional, old-school prospecting methods will mostly fail. We’ve hit that tipping point much to the chagrin of many experienced sales pros who are reluctant to embrace technological and cultural business changes.

So what’s a salesperson to do these days? Here’s what: Transition your energy from making enough calls to make the numbers work, to building enough relationships so your calls are welcomed by enough prospects and they will call you when they need your product or service.

The good news is this works really well. The bad news is the work is just as hard, maybe harder. As B2B is the new retail, networking is the new cold calling. As networking is the new cold calling, content marketing and consultative selling are the new follow up and close methods.

Your B2B prospect has choices at his fingertips and doesn’t necessarily want to be educated on what’s good for him and his business. The business owner and decision maker of today still buys from whom she trusts and especially whom she both trusts and likes. At least that hasn’t changed!

Effective salespeople of today are constantly doing these things:

• attending events where prospects are numerous
• offering valuable information and advice to prospects
• providing leads and referrals to prospects
• building relationships on several social media channels
• writing, producing and sharing blog articles, newsletters & videos
• having coffees and lunches with customers and referral partners
• taking calls from interested prospects
• responding to requests for meetings by prospective clients
• closing new business on first meetings

Sound good? Notice how the bullet list starts with a few tough hurdles and ends with enjoyable, winning activities.

When a salesperson practices most or all of the above on a daily daily basis, he or she becomes like a bright, attractive storefront to the target audience. Buyers of big ticket purchases will be excited to “walk in” to this shiny, merchandise-rich store and get just what they’re looking for. Herein we see the metaphor of the title.

So don’t “go out and sell something!” Instead, go out, makes some friends and be a trusted adviser. Then stay in front of those new friends where they hang out physically and online.

The post B2B Sales is the New Retail appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.