Is Your Business Lost in the Social Media Crowd?

Build your brand on Facebook. Make sales with Twitter. Earn better page rankings with Google+. Connect with shoppers on Pinterest. Tell your story on Tumblr. Close quicker with Instagram. Are you doing all you can to increase your online sales opportunities?

Or are you doing all you should do to increase your sales online?

Pew Internet recently reported that nearly three-quarters of adults use social networking sites. Which begs two questions:

1. Are we over-saturated? and
2. Is this accurate?

Are You Losing Business Online?

Surprisingly, the second question is easier to answer than the first. See, statistics don’t lie but they are widely misunderstood. We don’t doubt that 72 percent of American adults who were asked said that they are using social networking sites. It’s even a pretty safe assumption that 28 percent of American adults who were asked said that they don’t use social networking sites. But what if the sample was skewed? Or, how was the sample skewed? Because inevitably, samples are skewed.

We’ll leave that for the data-scrubbers to debate, and go back to the first question: Are we overwrought, screen-addicted, convenience-loving, social media-loving American Adults now over-saturated, too?

It will take social psychologists a few months, at least, to sort that out. In the meantime, those of us who spend our days generating online sales will have to move on without conclusive data. (Please don’t mention this to Nate Silver.)

Until someone in social media marketing has All The Answers, we’re going to rely on common sense and a fair dose of self-confidence, plus several decades of business experience, to keep generating sales using every social media platform that makes sense for our clients – over-saturated or not.

The easy answer to both questions is “yes.” Individual consumers struggle daily to deal with the onslaught, as do business owners and their sales and marketing departments. How to cope? Basically, you can –

Social Media Management: Signs That You’re Addicted to Facebook

In 2013, it’s Business 101 stuff. Facebook converts prospects into customers and casual shoppers into brand advocates. But there’s a dark side. If you think you might be spending too much time on Facebook, you probably are.

Is social media managing you?

Be honest. You may have a problem with Facebook if …

Look, it’s not hopeless. You can use social media for to generate leads, to reach new prospects, improve customer service, and increase sales. And then, you can just walk away … and nobody will get hurt. You might even have time to speak to a client – gasp! – in person.

How to manage social media and your business

Need help managing a Facebook addiction? Sorry; that’s not exactly our strong suit. But if you feel like social media is managing you – so much so that you don’t have time to manage your business – yep, we can help. Definitely; give us a call.

Heck, you can even reach us on Facebook. We’d love to be your friend. And if you send us a message, we’ll be sure to get it. (Uh, yeah; we check that often.)

~Diane Stresing

Shareable Content Isn’t Easy, It Just Looks That Way

Face it: Shareable content is more than what you see

If you’ve ever used Adobe’s Photoshop, you know why you have to pay top dollar for a good graphic designer. The tools they use to create even “simple” images are anything but.

So we were amused by – and hundreds of thousands of viewers shared – a “video tribute” featuring “simple” illustrations and animations that represent some of the many faces of Photoshop filters.

Go ahead, take a look.

If you’re really interested, you can visit the Tumblr blog, also created by Barcelona-based Device, the studio responsible for the fetching graphics. It shows all the images as animated GIFs. See what they did there?

By making the images available in different forms, they’ve made them accessible to a wide variety of people, who are interested for a wide variety of reasons. Some Tumblr viewers will think, that’s what I’ve been talking about! We need those for our website! They may call Device for a quote. Other Tumblr viewers will think, cool! Why are my ideas for animations always dismissed in meetings? Those viewers might send their resumes to Device.

Both sets of images are shareable, and sell different aspects of the business to different audiences. But where’s the sales pitch?

If you answered “there is none, ” sorry; try again.

If you answered, “it’s behind the scenes, ” congratulations – that’s where it’s at.

Get Great Content That’s Shareable Online…

…but don’t stop there. When you create great shareable content, you may feel great – but you’re not quite done. What happens when your content is shared, and how well your prospects can connect to you and your product behind the scenes (hello, lead tracking and ecommerce) – that’s the brass ring.

We say, go for it.

Brass rings animation: Sales Renewal Corporation

We Love Local All the Time (Even When You Don’t Have Time)

The majority of small business owners know Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO) brings in business by making their company easy to find on the major search engines. They also know that the many of their local customers look at their business’ online descriptions (aka listings) and online reviews before they decide to walk in their door and spend money. Yet about half of those who initially list their businesses on local business listing sites (like Patch and Yelp) never update their listings. And roughly 100% don’t have time to think about it.

Analytics Don’t Lie…

…but that last stat is a total guess. We think it’s pretty accurate, anyway.

What about you? Are you one of those too-busy-to-update-your-listing types? We understand; we hear that from most of our customers. Even medium-sized companies with full time marketing or public relations staff positions rarely have time to manage social media campaigns, create meaningful content, and close on sales leads.

That’s why our unique JointSourcing model appeals to many medium-sized and larger businesses. Their marketing and PR staff members are usually – and necessarily – experts in their respective markets, whether it’s manufacturing, sign fabrication, electronic test equipment, or investment real estate.

We’re experts in sales and marketing – with a decided advantage when it comes to local marketing via social media, search, newsletters and so on. Working together with our clients, we help them shorten their sales cycles and decrease their cost of sales.

Go Local or Go Big

In addition to a recent, small-but-mighty local event we sponsored, we have a good bit of experience utilizing local marketing to drive prospects to your business and increase sales. If you’d like to see what you can do – or what we can do for you – we invite you to review these articles. Or just contact us to see if we should be working together to get you found, more often, in your local market.

Facebook Business Pages Need Friends, Too

So… everybody told you your business needed a Facebook page, but when you created one nobody befriended it? Sorry, it’s not exactly the social media Field of Dreams. When you build it, they don’t always come. (The cold hard truth is that some of those people who said you just have to have a Facebook page don’t know how to use the site themselves.)

Getting people to Like your Facebook business page…

…is a little bit like old-fashioned networking (you know, which people did when we lived in the real world, before the virtual one existed). In other words, people want to like you – but they need to be asked to like you. Take the first step and you’ll be collecting friends before you know it.

Three easy steps to getting more likes on your business page:

Step one: Look at your page’s list of current “likes” and make sure ALL OF YOUR EMPLOYEES “like” your page! (A little shame and embarrassment go a long way.) ((However, don’t make Facebook use mandatory – the EEOC frowns on that sort of thing.))

Step two: You know all those cousins and former neighbors and college roommates on your Christmas card list, in your email address book and on your Facebook (personal page) news feed? They’re great prospects to “like” your page. Contacting them one-at-a-time works best, but it can be a slow process. The faster, easier way is to use the “invite friends” box (on your Facebook page, in admin view, to the right of the Insights box). If few friends like your business page after you’ve tried the easy route, commit to the more personal approach, sending a note to each friend as you invite him or her to check out your page.

Step three: Watch the Likes pile up, and feel extremely popular. No, seriously – there’s a little more to it. You need to interact with those Facebook users who have liked your page to encourage them to stick around. Their engagement may even generate some new friends for your page and your business. Wondering how to engage? Post a status update every few days welcoming those who have recently liked your page. Invite them to comment, post photos, or ask questions. And then, reciprocate – visit their pages and comment on their posts.

That’s it – you’re on your way.

Of course, the next thing you know, we’ll be telling you it’s not enough to be liked – that you have to do something to convert the likers to buyers. But that’s another post. For now, just win friends. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here to show you how to influence people so they become more than friends – customers!

*We’ve heard some people still live there. No kidding. Just to play it safe, we still create sales letters, printed brochures and even direct mail pieces for our clients who need them. Have a trade show or conference coming up? Contact us – we can help you make the most of your sales prospects.

New Site, Fast, Helps Healing Festival Get Off to a Great Start

Our staffers hail from several time zones in the United States, and our clients are even more spread out, but with fully half of the Sales Renewal team located in Boston, the Marathon bombings hit us hard and left us wanting to help in some way. When the opportunity to get involved in the One Family Music Festival arose, we jumped on it.
We’re pleased to report that the May 12 One Family Music Festival was a success – thanks to everyone’s generosity, over $23, 000 was raised for the One Fund Boston. The festival also brought the families of Boston together to sing, dance, create art, and celebrate the strength and beauty of the city. It was a day that allowed many families to begin healing from the pain caused by the tragic events surrounding this year’s Boston Marathon, and to reclaim the city for its children.

Website Design: Speed with Style

Sales Renewal is proud of its role in the festival’s success –creating and running the festival website. Within two hours of being approached for help, we had purchased the One Family Music Festival domain name, hosted the website, and set up a customized skin. 24 hours later, the full 10-page site was up and running, along with a customized Facebook Page that was used to connect the artists, sponsors, and attendees to the site. We kept the site updated as performers were added to the lineup, as videos were created, as special programs were developed, and as sponsor after sponsor came on board with monetary, food, and other donations. We continue to maintain the site today, including the Photos section, which serves as a central location for various photos of the event.

Mobile-friendly Site for Families on the Move

And while the turnaround was quick, quality was not compromised. We chose to use a responsive design for the site, knowing that the majority of our visitors would be young parents looking for festival details on their cell phones. This was a good move, as 46% of website visits in the days leading up to the festival came from mobile devices. We also made sure the site was optimized for search – within one week of the site going live, we were drawing 5% of the visitors from organic search traffic – a percentage that can often take several months!
Of course, the festival couldn’t have succeeded without the dedication of an extremely hard-working group of people who brought all sorts of talents and donations of time, money and expertise. The Sales Renewal team offers its sincere gratitude to everyone who contributed to the successful festival for a very good cause.
To Boston!
– Audrey Trieschman

Yahoo + Tumblr: Keep Calm and Follow Your Sales Plan

Google grabbed headlines last week and sent a wave of worries through the oceans of SEO strategists with its Penguin update. Marissa Mayer made Monday morning mighty interesting (and we thank her for the alliterative opportunity) when she announced Yahoo would purchase Tumblr.

What should you do about it?

Probably nothing.

Since deals between online news/content/media companies are rumored online before they’re announced online and then (over-) analyzed online, it’s easy to watch the deals (online!) and feel left behind.

Here’s the good news: the real world still exists. We have proof that sales, and longterm, lucrative customer relationships, are made in the real world every day.

We’re not in Nate Silver‘s league, but we’ll go out on a limb and guess that the Yahoo/Tumblr deal portends important changes for less than 1% of US businesses.

The rest of you can keep calm and carry on with your sales and marketing plans. That is, as long as you’re following a content program that’s right for you. Not sure? Don’t even have a content program? (gasp!) We can fix that in a flash.

Here’s the really good news: making online sales and marketing work for you – meaning, using basic search and linkbuilding principles to increase your sales and capitalize on ecommerce opportunities – doesn’t require you to have Nate Silver’s statistical prowess or Marissa Mayer’s rockin’ blog animations. Most of our clients have come to us knowing nothing about web design, analytics, or social media. Some of them still don’t – and yet, they’ve all seen their sales go up. That’s the beauty of JointSourcing. You run your business while we handle your sales and marketing – using the most appropriate tools at the most appropriate times. Or, you run your business while you learn how to manage those tools yourself. Either way, it works – because we’re as interested in increasing your sales as you are. Seriously. We won’t freak out on you.

~Diane Stresing

Fun with Charts: Right Content, Right Time

Infographics are cool. So cool they were hard to resist – at first. After you’d clicked on 80 or 100, though, be honest: you realized some of them were a waste of time, right?

Like so many internet trends, infographics look like an overnight sensation, but they’re not new.* In fact, they’ve been around long enough to cause a bit of a rift in the graphic design world. And we’ll admit, we’re not quite ready to dive into the fray and come up with a definitive answer to the question, is it an infographic or an infoposter?

What we tell our clients: it doesn’t really matter what you call it. The point is the right content, at the right time, is what you need to increase your sales.

The Right Content at the Right Time Sells

Good content is essentially worthless if it’s not distributed at the right time, to the right people. Good content, distributed at the right time in your prospect’s decision-making process, will shorten your sales cycle. Good content, distributed regularly throughout your customer relationships, will increase sales to existing customers and will promote referrals and customer loyalty.

And that’s the point of marketing by way of content: to increase revenue.

Got Good Content?

Rather than investing a lot of time and money in the infographics creation business, we spend a lot of time with our clients before we develop any content for them. Our Blueprint process is a thorough getting-to-know-you process, one we take seriously, because it’s an important phase in the process. While we’re working on the Blueprint, we’re developing a better understanding of your business and building a partnership with you and management team.

Once we have that knowledge, we’re ready to create content that’s really good for you. Using what we’ve learned in the Blueprint, we can determine when and where to place that content to most effectively grow your sales.

Good Timing Requires Good Planning

Our SEO, content, design, and sales team meet weekly – and sometimes daily – to fine-tune our content management strategies for each client. In quarterly content review/planning sessions with our clients, we discuss how well various pieces of content performed related to the one thing we care most about: your sales.

We don’t specialize in infographic design, press release production, or newsletter distribution. We specialize in increasing sales. Very often (like, always) that requires delivering the right content to the right people at the right time.

Whether it’s a new website, a good old-fashioned postcard or sales letter, or a six-second Vine video, we’ll do it – if, and only if, we are convinced it will increase your sales.

Good Content or Good Pie?

Creating good content isn’t a piece of cake. When we’re developing a new piece for our clients, they often tell us, “we never would have thought of that, ” and we love hearing it. We try to think of everything when we create content for our clients, because we believe good content has a clear purpose. Sometimes, that purpose is just for fun – and fun is good! But when it comes to our clients, our primary purpose is to increase sales.

For what it’s worth, we’ve found more sales generally lead to more fun. If you’d like to see how much fun you can have with a noticeable increase in sales, contact us.

*File under Internet History: the website Daily Infographic – which you should peruse, when you have an hour to kill – dates to 2010.

Easy, Time-Saving Tip: Schedule Your Facebook Posts

This is a very easy, very valuable tip that we share with our clients who opt for social media coaching (rather than a more comprehensive content management program). It’s a quick lesson in how to schedule posts on your Facebook Page, assuming you are a page manager/administrator.

Ready?

Using Facebook’s Activity Log and Scheduling Feature

Here’s how to use the Activity Log, in three simple steps:

1. Log into Facebook, then select your page using the drop-down menu behind the gear icon in the top right corner of your screen. On the top right portion of the page there are four tabs labeled Edit Page, Build Audience, Help, and Hide.

2. Click Edit Page to see the drop down menu, where you’ll select Use Activity Log.

3. Use the Activity Log to see all Scheduled Posts. You can reschedule or delete them using a button on the top right corner of each scheduled post.

It really is that easy, and it can be a huge time-saver.

An Important Reminder

Automation can be brilliant, as long as there are thinking humans in charge. In other words, scheduled posts can hit some very sour notes when unforeseen events render your previously-planned posts worthless – or worse. Until you’ve mastered the habit of scheduling and truly managing your social media messages, make it a point to log in and look at your upcoming scheduled posts once a day, to remind yourself what “you” are saying that day and that week. Doing so will also help prime you and your sales staff for calls (and social media!) inquiries from prospects.

Are you schedule-ready? Give it a go, then connect with us here or on Facebook, and let us know how it’s working for you.

Is Your Business Beyond the Basics with Social Media?

We find some of our clients are masters of social media. Some won’t touch the stuff. And most are somewhere in between. The one thing they all have in common is too little time. In the initial phase of the Blueprint, we help our clients discover how to better leverage their time and expertise to grow their businesses. Contact us to find out more.

Proud to Support One Fund Boston, Music Festival

We’re glad to wrap up the month with a little good news: Sales Renewal is a proud sponsor of the One Family Music Festival! The event will be held Sunday May 12, 2013, and 100% of the proceeds benefit The One Fund Boston.
The One Family Music Festival will be held at the Exchange Conference Center and Boston Fish Pier, 212 Northern Avenue from 12 noon until 5pm. Card-making and other art activities for kids are hosted by Kidcasso and Catching Joy. (It is Mother’s Day, after all, so some sweet presents are in order.)
We’re most excited that, thanks to a very generous donor and countless awesome businesses and individuals, all of the proceeds from the event will go directly to The One Fund Boston, aiding those most directly affected by the tragic events on the day of the Boston Marathon.
Creating a website for the One Family Music Festival was a small thing, but it was a thing we could do – and when given the chance, it was a thing we had to do.*
The pier is going to be rocking on May 12. There will be laughter and love, loud music and bad dancing. We can’t wait. Will you be there? And even if you can’t be there, will you please donate to The One Fund? Every bit helps.
To find out how you or your business can pitch in to help even more, contact the festival organizers at the One Family Music Festival website. Sales Renewal’s press release is available here.
*Our staffers hail from several time zones in the United States, and our clients are even more spread out, but fully half of our team is located in Boston. And, this is one of those times when zip codes don’t seem very important. Please, if you can in any way, join us in supporting The One Fund Boston.