So many of the most effective things we can do in business are often extremely simple. It is easy to be dazzled by all the things that are happening in social media these days, but it is always a good idea to make sure that you do not gloss over the basics. Email marketing is one of those basics, but we can also use the newer technologies and opportunities to improve the things that have been working for us, too. Usually, small changes are going to be the best changes so let’s take a look at how we can use Social CRM to make email marketing that much more effective. We will examine the goals here and find out how these two tasks go hand in hand to drive up our profits.

Taking Good Care of Customers Means Emphasizing Social CRM

Customers want to feel valuable to your company and today, consumers realize that they are actually a valuable part of the economy with the power to choose who they do business with. Competition is fierce in most markets, even small niches, and if you really want to compete then you are going to have to try to get the best possible level of Social CRM and use it effectively. Customer Relationship Management is all about discovering who your audience is, one individual at a time, and also predicting greater trends that are going to affect that market. It may take some time, but if you do things the right way then what you are going to discover is that good Social CRM comes to understand the lifestyle of your customers and helps you to tailor their experiences with you to exactly what they want. This makes your customer service more effective and empowers your sales team to really market to those customers in a very effective way.

Email Marketing Can Help You Improve Your Social CRM Databases

It has been shown time and again that email marketing is a truly effective way to do business that reaches people where it matters to them and convinces them to make a purchase decision. The thing is, you can do a lot more than just sell them things. People love quizzes, surveys and other little interactive activities that can help you gather information about them. This can go straight into your databases and be used in helpful ways when it comes time to market something. You can even do opinion polls or let them help develop better products. Most people like to participate and they are going to do so if you invite them and then let them take part, whether they know it or not, in giving themselves a better experience with your company by informing you of what they like, what they don’t like and the types of things they do from one day to the next. You can use your newsletter to go deep with customers and find out what they are really after. That way, you can make sure you are strengthening your relationship with them to stand the test of time.

Use What You Learn to Give Your Email Marketing More Impact

Once you discover the data trends, you can start letting that have an impact on the way you market. Perhaps people want more tips related to your products and the area of life that your company is all about. Maybe they would appreciate being able to speak out about their experiences and know that others are seeing them and what they do with your products. There are all kinds of great possibilities here so do not be afraid to test and experiment and make the experiences better for your customers in any way that you can. It will definitely end up paying off if you take the time to use that Social CRM data to further your email marketing’s effectiveness.

Divide and Conquer by Leveraging CRM Data for Laser Focused Email Campaigns

Finally, what a lot of companies discover after they start looking at the Social CRM data they collect is that it shows them that they actually have several distinct audiences they are interacting with. If you find this to be the case, you could actually create different email newsletters to go out to different groups of people. This way your customers are getting information and offers that are relevant to them and their lifestyle. What they will not get are the things that may cause them to get bored, be turned off or just plain lose interest in your company. That is a smart way to fine tune your email marketing.

Getting people to respond to marketing is becoming more and more difficult across a number of channels and media formats.

The fact is, people are growing jaded and new developments mean we have to look into new strategies. With the rise of the web, we saw strategies change for the digital era, but as of the past few years, a new era is dawning that takes the web even further: social media sites.

That’s the big game right now and companies or organizations which want to reach out to people have got to learn how to do it in the sphere of online social scenes. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Google Plus and LinkedIn are all places where we can engage consumers, but unless we know the right approach our efforts could wind up coming to little effect. Getting savvy about gamification is one way to boost the effectiveness of any kind of engagement with an audience. Let’s take some time to learn about gamification, what it means and why it is such a revolution in marketing today.

Studies Show Consumers Are Now Blind to Many Traditional Marketing Methods

Study after study shows us that consumers are nearly at their threshold for ad saturation most days of the week. Many people are simply flooded by so many ads, commercials and pieces of junk mail that they have stopped paying attention.

Clever marketing designed to appear as if it is not marketing merely annoys people today once they discover that it is yet another ad. They are tired of ads and tests of web surfers shows that they can literally block out huge portions of the screen mentally in order to tune out ads. That is bad news for marketing and it is why understanding gamification is so crucial for companies and organizations today.

Gamification is the Simple Way to Get People to Respond to Marketing

There are very few types of marketing that really get an immediate response from consumers, but gamification can do exactly that. Instead of being yet another chore for a person to have to do, it is a game – a fun activity. Patrons of any business or social cause organization find that when they get rewarded for activities, it is more fun. Some companies will give out cash or prizes, others give out virtual badges. There are a myriad choices that are possible with gamification, but the main point is to offer the audience something fun to take part in. The web is already viewed largely as a source of unending entertainment so most people are already primed to engage in a free game. With so many brands already using gamification to their advantage, the concept is not one that would appear out of place to consumers nor does it offend or annoy them.

Research Opportunities Abound When You Use Games

One excellent thing about using games to interact with your audience is that you can see who engages back and who does not. This allows you to have a far more intensive look at your audience than you would if you were merely showing them ads and waiting for a response. With games, you can see what they like and watch whether or not they end up spreading the game. When you are seeing what people will work towards in terms of a reward, you can discover what they find valuable. This is information that can be used to improve not only future games, but also the very products and services a company offers. This is far more in depth than past marketing approaches were ever able to be and it really does appeal to consumers at the same time.

Even Organizations Can Benefit From Gamification Today

Nonprofit and other similar organizations are finding that gamification works for their purposes, too. They do end up getting more donations and active participation when they employ games to the benefit of their organization. They may also wind up spreading their message much more rapidly if a particular game or even a fun smart phone app goes viral. There are so many opportunities out there, but there are also opportunities for within a company or organization. Workers have been shown to be more productive, as well as happier, when the work they do undergoes the process of gamification. People are almost always naturally competitive and when tasks within an organization are made into a game, it is easier for people to do them without feeling as if they are being burdened by the process. That concept opens up a lot of exciting possibilities for leaders within many organizations.

Many companies are turning to social media to improve customer relationships.

Social media is a powerful marketing tool that allows businesses to reach out to more customers and have a conversation with them. It enables them to gather more data about customers, including their needs, wants, and purchasing behaviour. Moreover, they can receive feedback in a timely manner, allowing them to address any issues that may arise.

Because social media is interactive and real-time, however, companies cannot prevent negative comments and complaints sent over the internet, which most consumers can access. Given this situation, businesses need to work hard to develop a social media crisis response framework. This framework outlines a business’ plan to deal with any kind of crisis brought about by irate and unsatisfied customers or unfortunate incidents involving the brand.

We’ve all seen how quickly a situation can spiral out of control, and with all the power shifting to the user in this regard, crisis response becomes critical.

Understanding the crisis and the market

In order to solve a crisis, you must first understand its cause. Once a crisis happens, the first thing you have to do is assess the situation and check if the complaints are valid. Determine if the negative comments against your business are made by people who have directly experienced unsatisfactory service or by customers who were merely influenced by other people. List the core issues and come up with a solution to solve them immediately. Do not wait for a long time before addressing an issue to show the customers that you are listening to them and trying to make them as satisfied as possible. When the complaints are found to be valid, you have to quickly respond to them by creating a crisis response team. Do not forget to tell the customers that you are working on the problem as fast as possible. If the complaints are invalid, however, you still have to respond in a modest way, but you can choose not to make a lot of internal changes in your business.

You will only be able to identify the main reason for the crisis if you truly understand the market. You should know where the customers are coming from and why they are making such a fuss about your products or services. You should be able to determine which online communities and individuals have the greatest influence on the issue, as you can use these to your advantage. Moreover, listening is important to understand your market. And so, use every tool and channel in the internet to know what the majority of the market says about your brand. With all this data, you will be able to pinpoint the real cause of the crisis and then eliminate it.

The significance of a crisis response team
Your staff is an important component in your arsenal in dealing with a social media crisis. With the help of the right employees, you can create an efficient crisis response team. The team will be responsible for handling and answering all the customer complaints posted on popular social networking sites and other social media channels. However, you have to carefully choose the people who will be included in this team. You have to make sure that each team member knows how to deal with different kinds of customers. Otherwise, they could just make everything worse rather than put an end to the crisis. Setting up a crisis response team is also a way to keep the conversation with customers going. This will make them feel that you are listening to them and taking steps to improve the situation. Keep in mind that it’s important to stay in touch with the customers while you are solving the issues because a lack of response could further anger them and you might risk losing them. Conversation with the market needs to be consistent and casual, so don’t use jargon and technicalities because they would not be easily understood by the majority.

Transparency and honesty
Always be transparent in the face of a crisis online, whether you are right or wrong — make sure that you acknowledge that there is a problem as step one. Then make sure that you keep your community informed of what you are doing to address the issue and their concerns and what steps are being taken by the company to rectify the problem. People always appreciate honesty, we all make mistakes — just be big enough to own up to them, fix them and move on.

Showing your appreciation
Even if your business is being bombarded by a lot of complaints and negative comments, you should remain appreciative toward your customers. Thanking your customers for their feedback, even if it’s negative, and promising them better service shows that you value them. Respect and politeness are among the values you have to develop and show, especially during a crisis. No matter how hot the situation is, you should not lose your cool or else the situation will just get worse. If you manage to address and end the crisis, do not forget to thank the customers for staying with you through thick and thin.

By now, it is obvious to anyone in business that the web is an excellent way to market any product or service. However, for those who do not always keep themselves up to the minute on the latest developments in online commerce, you might not realize that things are changing with the rise of social media. Things are much more advanced than the early days of blogs and MySpace. Today, social media is thriving like never before and literally billions of dollars in sales are being made through social media channels each and every year. For those that are interested in finding the way to succeed in social media, here is a brief primer that can help you understand the nature of social commerce today.

The Definition of Social Commerce

Social commerce is essentially commerce that takes place in the social media sphere. This can mean a having customers buy directly from your company the way they would through a Facebook Store or it can mean driving sales through a social media profile. Today, sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and a variety of other major players do indeed drive a great deal of highly convertible, targeted traffic to commerce destinations on the web. If you sell directly over the web, this can be an even more effective way to reach customers than building an email list. The fact is, people enjoy using social media sites and they actually like showing off the things they buy there. In addition, they recommend products and services that they thing their friends ought to buy. This means that for those who want to increase the scope of their brand, social commerce is a very important way to do so.

The Definition of F-Commerce

The term F-commerce is a relatively new one, derived from the term e-commerce. In this case, the F stands for Facebook, one of the largest and most powerful brands on the web today. For those that want to reach out to an audience, Facebook is a great way to do it. Not only do customers check their Facebook frequently, they do tend to click on things more than they would on a typical web site. This means that if you open a Facebook Store, you can sell directly to those who have Friended or Liked your company’s page. Brands are already doing this with a huge amount of success and the dollar amount of sales done through these stores has been steadily, and quite dramatically, rising with each passing year. There are definitely few ways to get products out to customers that are as easy to implement or as appealing to those using the web today.

Is ‘Going Social’ a Profitable Path for Your Brand?

You need to take some time to evaluate whether or not your brand could benefit from a social media presence. If you sell a service, it could be a good idea, but typically products are going to be the best fit at this point in the social media sphere’s development. With products, you can set up stores and use your company’s social media profiles to drive traffic. This makes things incredibly easy for you because if you have done what you can to nurture a good audience, they will often be willing to click and even make purchases. Brands that have strong appeal for consumers do well on Facebook and other sites, especially things that people are likely to share. If your brand is not particularly one that seems ‘fun’, it could take a little work to get your following built up, but intelligence and persistence are what win out in social media. Find a way to make your brand something people want to show off and they will end up doing the rest for you. Keep in mind that getting consultation on how to best make social media work for you is definitely a smart idea if you are struggling right now.

Laying the Foundation for a Solid Social Presence Today

It is important for beginners to realize that just like any other web based endeavor, building a solid social media presence can take time. You will need to set up your profiles, optimize them and then begin reaching out to those who might be interested in what you have to sell. Don’t focus exclusively on advertising your products because that is not what social media is about. People want interaction and if they get it, then sales are likely to follow. Keep at it and success often happens faster than you anticipated.

It’s pretty much of the same thing — we’re all looking for the next big thing, whether its the next big stock pick that’s going to shower us in riches or picking the winning lottery number.

We all want to be one step ahead. Advertising in the digital age seems to have taken a similar approach, with big and bold seemingly better — “out of the box” thinking is all the hype.

It seems that the basics have been forgotten amidst all the over complication of strategy and creative in the digital advertising world.

So much so that Business to Business (B2B) advertisers are actually quite confused as to what the opportunities are out there for them.

In a recent study by eMarketer, these perceptions were validated when B2B and Business to Customer (B2C) advertisers where polled on what digital advertising they are planning, doing or not doing.

We all know that with B2B markets, the sales lead times are much longer relative to B2C environments. The focus is also often on lead generation vs sales as a conversion indicator.

There is also generally much more face to face time in a B2B environment an personal selling involved vs a B2C sales cycle.

B2C advertisers are generally quite focused when it comes to social media — the vast majority are already invested in Facebook and only 7.9% are not present there — yet.

With B2B advertisers, there is a much larger divide with most quite split between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

But even with this split, only 11.7% of B2B advertisers are not active on Facebook.

A point to make is that Facebook is not right for every type of business and just because you’re not there doesn’t mean you should be in that space.

The big picture scenario with the current state of B2B advertising digitally is that there is so much hype around social media and too much of the same thing going around in terms of big idea campaigns that the basics of how to drive value in a B2B environment is often forgotten.

The opportunities are massive for B2B advertisers and there has never been more opportunities to drive value digitally in a B2B environment as we currently have.

From Reputation Management to CRM, Mobile and Social CRM – now is the time for B2B to rise up and take advantage of what’s out there without worrying about the big idea campaigns and sticking to basics.

New data from emarketer shows that companies think its more important to have a presence on social media rather than advertising on social media websites.

The problem is that totap into the full value of social media such as Facebook you need to have an advertising strategy. It’s the same as having a retail store, sure having a presence is important but if you don’t tell people about your store and let them know why they should buy at your store, then what good is it to just have a presence?

Social media has come a long way – you now have the ability to slice and dice data like never before, giving fantastic insights into your user base.

This all makes for measurability, accountability and ROI tracking that much easier. With ROI still being a fear factor for most companies operating in this space, its more of a case of ignorance rather than not being able to measure ROI.

ROI is easy to measure if you have clearly defined obejctives and deliverables.

The share of ad budgets continues to grow – showing that whether companies like it or not they will eventually have to start thinking more strategically about their social media advertising.

No words needed

As much as things change they stay the same…pretty cliched I know but when it comes to the state of advertising this rings true.

There are many great advertising agencies and in equal measure there are agencies out there that may not be the most creative, functional at best.

But I’d want to shift focus from the advertising agencies to the clients.

Most companies, it seems, don’t seem to understand not only advertising but the basics of marketing.

It’s not that things have improved but rather become worse in the state of brand building.

The real issue at hand is the caliber of senior marketing executives and managers and many large companies.

In the old days the people that ran the marketing for big brands were cross skilled in a number of areas of the business, many a time these people were founders of their respective businesses and understood how the different levers of the business needed to operate.

Yes, they may not have necessarily been overly innovative but they understood what was at the heart of any brand, its customers.

It seems that today most of the senior marketing people in companies, have no marketing or advertising background, education or experience and most seem to have fallen into those positions either by coincidence, luck or possibly both.

When things go wrong, the first casualties and generally the only casualties – are the advertising agencies.

It’s up to the marketing executives and senior managers to ensure that the brand continues to evolve, innnovate and generate long term sustainable revenues for the business.

The advertising agencies need to work as partners with these brands and not merely be conduits or be present to execute the poorly thought out brand campaigns by their clients.

Until the level of marketing is picked up internally, advertising will continue to suffer and so will advertising agencies just itching to do great work hand-in-hand with the vision of their clients.

Search Marketing has been around for a long time now and is considered by many as a mature online marketing channel, including myself.

From the early days for SEO ranking manipulations and archaic directory listing search engines to the game changing Google algorithm – search has come of age.

With many new ranking indicators now real factor in SEO, such as social media indicators, content farms, Google+ etc…

Google is still the dominant market leader with the gains made by Bing not making a massive dent in overall market share for Google and their Adwords platform driving massive amounts of revenue to companies around the globe, from small one man businesses to multinational companies.

Looking at search as a sum of its parts (SEO and PPC), it still provides pretty much the most bang for your buck.

Yes, social media is emerging as a powerful marketing platform, more so from a customer loyalty and retention perspective – but we have yet to see the maturity of this platform and the bedding down of long term revenue generation and proven value generating techniques from social media.

SEO has become a highly competitive and scientific part of online marketing, old black hat spam techniques and regular on-page optimization will no longer cut it in the ever changing world of Google.

SEO practitioners need to continue to move with the change and look at a multitude of factors when trying to improve website rankings.

With these changes have come massive leaps in the systems that analyse data and we now have a wealth of information on ranking metrics, competitors, strategies etc which make search marketing measurable to the nth degree.

We continue to see cpc rates increasing tremendously on sites such as Facebook, while PPC depending on the keyword remains much more cost effective for direct ROI purposes.

When looking at the bigger picture of integrated digital marketing, search marketing still continues to drive ROI and will continue to do so in the near future.

We’ve heard much talk in the last few months of a new tech bubble emerging and inflated values on companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and the list goes on and on.

Yes the majority of the companies with inflated valuations are generating revenues, but not quite what their valuation picture depicts. to

The biggest issue with all of this is the over hyping of certain startups and new verticals emerging online such as what’s happening with group buying – being driven by the likes of Groupon.

The problem with the group buying model is that its not a sustainable long term business model – not for Groupon or the businesses that they serve.

Facebook for one, has the potential to pretty much make Groupon a has been – that if it plays its cards correctly with the Facebook deals platform.

Groupon is a bit removed from the social graph and removed from the search universe.

Google’s newest foray into the social scene is still in Beta but having garnered over 10 million users already, may just be the golden goose that Google has been searching for to combat Facebook.

If Google gets this right then it can easily integrate a platform similar to Facebook’s deals platform with its integrated locations/places.

These are interesting times for the likes of the Groupons of this world, the other startups such as LinkedIn will probably survive as they carve out a niche in the HR and recruitment industry in the long term.

Groupon and group buying – I’m very skeptical on this one and don’t quite see the future for them.

Facebook and Google – it’s all theirs to loose now, let the battles begin…