How to make success of 21st century marketing
In my previous blog article I asked the question: “ Should we use email marketing relay services?”, this was in response to a mass mailing campaign that I and other Iris Exchequer customers received from a CRM Mass mailing vendor, sent out using fear to suggest that we might be blacklisted for sending out marketing emails on our own IP address and should therefore use spamming techniques to target customers with spyware in the emails and pay them lots of money to help achieve this.
It clearly sparks a debate about legitimate email campaigns. We received a number of support calls from worried customers about this flyer, worried that their legitimate emailing would make them targets for spam blacklists! Fear selling tactics are really effective!
At the same time it also raises the question about how we can make a success of modern marketing. In the current economic climate many businesses may become desperate to win new business and will be easily persuaded to part with hard earned cash to resort to what is literally spamming in order to get some new business.
Rather than force ourselves onto the unsuspecting. Why not put ourselves out there and give the punter the choice as whether they find us interesting enough to follow and ultimately engage with? All it will cost is some time and thought!
Twitter is probably the biggest untapped opportunity for ‘FREE’ product and services promotion. A cleverly put together profile will both draw followers and open up leads and opportunities, all the while giving the great public out there the choice as to whether they follow you or not and indeed, if you follow them they have the choice to ‘block’ you and stop you following them.
In early October 2011 we launched a Twitter page and in less than a month we have signed a distribution agreement with Paperless Europe to integrate their document management and business intelligence archive into Iris Exchequer. We have a customer ready to buy the integration, so from simply following us one Saturday morning, and me checking them out and calling their sales team, we have engaged and done business that will lead to significant revenue for both companies.
Did this happen by bombarding one another with unwanted emails? No. We were found, followed and we followed engaged, communicated and in less than a week we were doing training and signed a distribution agreement with customers interested in the outcome not only in the UK, but Europe too! Bearing in mind that Phil Richards from Perless Europe travelled from Malta to the UK to meet us and look at our ExFusion/ExSync solutions.
We can see that from this example there is real opportunity for us to promote what we do, inform our followers of relevant content that may be of interest to them and let them choose us if they find us exciting and innovative in our Tweets.
At all stages they can opt out and we can opt to follow who we like. When our customers start tweeting about the quality of service we deliver and how pleased they are with our products. Then we are really cooking and in an open, transparent arena we can be seen and heard.
I would encourage you to spend that marketing pot in time on new media networking to promote your products and services with information, help and support that your target market will find interesting enough to follow. It will make you richer by keeping the money you were going to waste on email marketers profits, if nothing else. We have gained more from Twitter than thousands spent on other marketing and all it has taken is some time and effort.
- Some info for businesses using Twitter - http://business.twitter.com/
- Need to create a background to match your business/website (links below)
- Add a widget or a follow button to your website to show potential/current customers that they can follow and keep track of business (link below)
- Seek out customers/similar companies – build relationships
- Make tweets personable – conversational
- Use appropriate language for your target audience (no unnecessary market jargon)
- “80-20 rule” – 80% of tweets interacting, 20% promoting (see @cineworld as an example)
- Acknowledge and promote others
- Don’t get too personal or negative
- Find your most active followers who tweet content related to your business, and look through their followers to find new, interesting people to follow (you can also do this with big companies such as @Microsoft and @IBM)
- Consider adding an app to your mobile to tweet on the go, rather than only via PC (links below)
- Keep tweeting – people will unfollow if an account is inactive
Types of tweets:
- What are you doing now
- What you’re going to do
- What you just finished doing
- Share content you like
- Retweet tweets that you like
- Ask a question (try to engage followers)
- Recommendations and reviews
Tools:
- TwitBacks (www.twitbacks.com) TwitrBackgrounds (www.twitrbackgrounds.com), TwitterBackgrounds.org (www.twitterbackgrounds.org), Twitter-Backgrounds (www.twitter-backgrounds.net) – optimise a personalised background to suit most browsers
- WeFollow (www.wefollow.com) – can find tweeters based on interests and keywords – can also add yourself there.
- Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) or similar apps to combine Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn posts
- TwitPic (www.twitpic.com) or Yfrog (www.yfrog.com), to add photos to tweets
- Monitter (www.monitter.com), TweetBeep (http://tweetbeep.com/), TweetScan (www.tweetscan.com), or Twazzup (www.twazzup.com) to gain real time view of what people are saying about areas you’re interested in
- twtQpon (www.twtqon.com) to create special deals/coupons for followers
- Twellow (www.twellow.com) – can add your own listing to it (sort of like Yellow Pages)
- TwitterAnalyzer (www.twitteranalyzer.com), TwitterGrader (www.twittergrader.com), TweetStats (www.tweetstats.com), TweetReach (www.tweetreach.com), Retweetist (www.retweetist.com) – provides stats about your profile activity and performance
- ExecTweet (www.exectweets.com) – good place to see executives of companies’ tweeters, and add yourself.
- SocialOomph (www.socialoomph.com) – has various features, but can also save and schedule tweets.
- Twimailer (www.twimailer.com), Topify (www.topify.com) – received detailed emails about the new followers, including location (if available), following and follower statistics, and most recent tweets.
- Filetwt (www.filetwt.com) – easily upload and tweet files upto 20MB.
- Twtvite (www.twtvite.com) – can invite tweeters to an event and keep track of replies to the invitations
- Localtweeps (www.localtweeps.com), GeoFollow (www.geofollow.com), ChirpCity (www.chirpcity.com) – can search for followers via postcode, location or keywords.
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Exchequer Dynamics Limited was formed out of a project to develop some tools to integrate Iris Exchequer with a customer’s MS SQL server and CRM. We faced huge issues converting the Pervasive data quickly enough to be usable. Dealing with over a million records presented real challenges.
Replies (3)
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Pick up the phone
Thanks for the mention in this article Jason,
Its true, twitter is a great business for connecting and the way you described the process we went through as "We were found, followed and we followed engaged, communicated and in less than a week we were doing training and signed a distribution agreement" is exactly what happened.
But what may need reinforcing here is that you "followed engaged, communicated" ; infact you picked up the phone and we spoke.
I think that is a key point, and one that I tend to forget myself when involved in marketing online; pick up the phone and say hello !
Good doing business with you :)
Phil
-- Accounting the PaperLess way™
To quote BT: "It is good to talk!"
Thanks Phil,
Sometimes opportunities present themselves and we see that with Paperless, Iris Exchequer is crying out for a cost effective and ingenious document management system. All the current options are very expensive and the technology is very 1990's.
Judging by the number of reads this blog post is getting the 21st century marketing is touching a chord.
Jason
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