In light of this behavior, does your small business marketing plan account for this behavior?  Does your small business take advantage of the opportunities the online media provide for connecting with your target audience?

Take a few minutes to read these tips for online advertising and how you make it work for your small business.

Major companies, including Best Buy, Comcast, and Wells Fargo are using Twitter to address client concerns and rectify customer service issues. For a first-hand account of how this works, check out this article on ATT&T’s use of Twitter for customer service.

While your small business may not have the millions of users these global corporations have, you can still use Twitter to maintain contact with your customers in real time. Twitter is totally scalable, so if only a few hundred of your customers use Twitter, you and your staff can focus on these users. Follow your users; watch their tweets; discover what they’re saying about your brand.

photo by D3 San Francisco

As a small business owner, how often do you assess and adjust the price points of your product or service? Do you wait until someone complains about the competition’s lower prices?  Or have you just maintained the same prices you set when you first started your small business?

If you’re a Starbuck’s drinker, you may have noticed a recent change in price of most of their menu items.  Jay H. Heyman provides some interesting analysis of the adjustment, pointing out that basic coffee shop offerings, like a cup of drip coffee, will likely drop in price (and it has at my local shop), while premium items, like the various versions of the Frappuccino, will see a price increase.

Why? Because consumers expect premium products from Starbuck’s and will (hopefully) be willing to pay the extra few cents. Instant growth of profit margin.

So in light of your small business’ product and service offering, does your pricing strategy fit your customers’ holistic perception of your brand? Are you undercharging because you’re afraid of alienating your customers or clients?  Are there other strategic adjustments you can make to increase your profit margin without alienating customers?

Take some time to think strategically about your pricing strategy and your efforts will literally pay off.

The fact is that businesses who market to other businesses are increasingly using social media as part of their overall marketing strategy.  Social media is here to stay, and small business owners who market and sell to other businesses must learn how to integrate social into their business-to-business marketing plans.

This post offers 10 reason B2B companies should engage their target audience using social media.

But would you use a newspaper ad for your outdoor display?  Would you air your radio spot as a TV commercial?

Interactive advertising provides a near limitless set of choices for a small business that’s advertising online.  This article offers a few examples of how companies are already thinking intentionally about their online advertising campaigns. Small businesses owners would benefit from this kind of approach.

Ivan Misner, one of the nation’s leading authorities on networking, offers 10 Ways to Waste Your Time in a Networking Group on Entrepreneur.com.

The good news is that as companies place increasing emphasis on their online presence, small business owners can take advantage of this wealth of information.

Here are 4 places for finding insight into that company you know can use your product or service.

Target company’s website – the company website will give you an idea of the tone of the company. It is young and hip or classic and reserved? Find the bio pages of executives and board members. Which ones are decision makers and influencers you’ll need to target? Where are they from? What’s their background?

LinkedIn – once you get a feel for the key players in the target organization, continue your market research on LinkedIn. Search by person and by company name. Are any of your connections connected to key people at the company?  Also, research each individual and gather more information on their previous work experience. They may even list a personal website or blog, giving you more insight into what makes them tick.

White papers, reports, and presentation- many companies will develop original research and reports about their products and their industry.  Search their website and on SlideShare to find out what their offering and how they’re doing it.

Annual reports – if your target company is public, have a look at their financial situation to understand how the budget. This will provide you with insight into broad spending and budgeting strategy that will reveal what the company thinks is strategically important.

While ROI is the standard for measuring most marketing efforts, pinning down hard numbers can be difficult when dealing with social media marketing.

But don’t loose heart. There is hope!  Read more about companies successfully tracking their social media ROI.

A central issue is a dwindling trust and reliance on traditional advertising media. Expensive display ads don’t influence the target audience like the used to, so new approaches are necessary.

The great thing about content marketing is that anyone can develop content. The quality of the content is a separate issue, but if you own your own business, you’re probably already an expert in your field.

To get the big-picture of content marketing, read this marketing research.

Uploading Your Social Media Icons

Uploading your social media icons

1. You can find a ton of free social media icons here. Just make sure whichever you choose fits the graphical tone of your blog
2. Once you’ve downloaded your icons and determined which you’ll use, navigate to Media -> Add New in your WordPress Admin
3. Upload each of your icons, keep track of the “File URL” for each image (we’ll use these later in our HTML)

Creating your social media widget

1. Login into your WordPress backend.
2. Navigate to Plugins ->Add New and search for “My Custom Widgets” plugin
   

   Name and add your custom widget

3. The My Custom Widgets plugin will be the first result. Click Install and then click Activate once the install is complete
4. You are now ready to add HTML or PHP to your custom template. Navigate to Appearance -> My Custom Widgets
5. In the example to the right, I named the custom social media widget “sm_links” (the name won’t matter unless you customize the CSS for your widgets).
6. Click on the pencil icon to bring up the editor for adding the HTML
7. Add this code:
8. Make sure to substitute your content URLs of each icon between the ” ” after src= and change href=”" to the links to your own portfolios
9. Once you’re finished, click to icon on the far right to make the widget active

Adding your social media widget to your sidebar

1. Navigate to Appearance -> Widgets
2. In the list of available widgets, you’ll see your custom widget with the name you added in the previous step
3. Now drag your new widget to your desired location on the sidebar, and that’s it!

You now have a custom widget for your WordPress blog that conatains icons and links to your small business’ social media sites.