How Can Online Social Networking Increase Sales?

This article will cover:

• The online social networking phenomenon
• How can social networking sites help businesses communicate marketing messages?
• Why traditional interruption marketing is beginning to fail in reaching your target audience
• How non-traditional permission based marketing can help you reach those audiences

Permission Based Marketing

Using online social networks to market a message, product, and service (Social Media Marketing) is permission based. People these days, especially younger generations are blocking out traditional marketing either psychologically or though technology (fast forward through Sky TV adverts, listen to online radio with no adverts, spam filters block email messages, throw leaflets in the bin, etc).

Traditional Interruption Marketing is getting ignored!

If we were selling a fridge, we would use social media marketing to garner interest with an audience who is in the market to buy a fridge, but is not yet decided which fridge to buy and where to buy it from. The content for our social media marketing campaign therefore should be written for people in the market to understand fridges a little better, compare prices and features, but is at some stage before the actual purchase.

There is a large group of people out there who no longer respond to traditional marketing. They aren’t at the stage of wanting to buy, but are using the internet to gather information required to make a decision to buy.

Online social networking is permission based. This means that you provide help and advice when people want and are looking for it. We need to make sure we have a presence online and keep a constant conversation going with audiences so that we will be the first port of call when a decision to buy is made.

Facebook is only one example of how we can interact with this new generation of media users. We can promote videos on youtube, photos on flickr, articles on Digg and much, much more. Write helpful articles or how about an online diagnosis team that searches for people with illness’s on yahoo answers and give them professional advice as to what course of action they should take.

There are many more ways that we can reach more “clients” and provide a more satisfactory service online. The great thing is it can be little work, as you are able to re-use content you have already created in the past, online and offline you are just distributing it in a different way to before and to a much wider audience.

What is Online Social Networking?

Online social networking is very similar to offline social networking. You meet up with acquaintances and strangers either by chance, through a friend or at an event, and converse with them, offering advice and help. Sometimes you will exchange contact details and will open up more opportunities to do business. The more help and advice you give them and the more questions you answer, the more chance they will keep in contact with you and use your services when needed in the future.

Online social networking allows people to converse with strangers from their computers and do the exact same things as offline, but on a much larger and efficient scale.

What can online social networking marketing do for businesses?

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

• Website traffic and user behavior
  
• Conversion and sales tracking
• Page views, ad exposure
• Growing brand awareness (a softer value, takes longer to build)
• Creating a positive brand
• Business development and a broader customer reach
• SMM can help with SEO
• SMM can promote your Blog

Spreading your message across facebook Virally

Over the past year facebook has become very popular and whether you like it or not, what it does mean is that you can now harness this community to get a message out to potentially thousands of people for very little money.

How do I use facebook to advertise my business virally?

facebook has an advertising option called Social Ads.

You make an advert and typically pay whenever someone clicks though your advert. The system is a lot like Google’s Adwords program.

Most people simply send visitors straight to their website; an effective advertising method in itself. But this overlooks an enormous potential to leverage facebook’s ability to spread your message virally.

What you need to do is set up what is called a facebook Public Profile (formerly called a Page). This is like a normal Web Page, but it is integrated within facebook’s system, which means whenever someone interacts with that page, all their facebook’s friends will be notified!

This is very important!

How do we do it?

Here’s an example to illustrate:

The Nags Head pub wants to spread awareness of its new healthy meal options . To spread their message virally, they create a facebook Public Profile.

The facebook page is customised with the Nags Head logo and colours. It also explains some facts about healthy eating, that it is easier than you think to eat healthy.

To get the users to interact with the page, the Nags Head decides to start a competition.

“20 Free ipod Giveaway with a copy of Running Anthems 2008
The best pub in town serving honest healthy grub
Simply Add Yourself as a Fan for a Chance to Win”
All runners up will receive 10% for a year

Winners will be notified by email on the 26th of November 2008”

This would be an excellent way to get users to add themselves as a fan.

How will this message travel?

Lets say Paul arrives at our Public Profile (facebook page) and decides to add himself as a fan – all his friends (typically around 100 users) would be notified. Let’s say Suzie, George and Chris all read the notification and decided to join too; that means all their friends will also be notified. We may have spread our message to around 400 people already and it doesn’t stop, it just keeps going virally.

All that is required to start the viral chain is some initial visitors and that is what we use facebook Social Ads for.

Is facebook advertising really for me?

Although facebook has mass potential, to make a successful campaign one is required to break away from traditional marketing methods.

Whilst advertising your product right from the advert can work, the campaigns that tend to spread virally:

• Realise that people use facebook for leisure and try to appeal to them through competitions or by providing something fun to do.
• Provide something of value; a reason to interact. In the Nags Head pub example, people may interact because healthy eating is in the news and it is hard to find a pub that serves healthy eating food. They also get the get the chance to win something desirable and get future discounts.
• Up sell from the facebook Public Profile rather than selling straight from the advert.
• Use facebook’s in-built targeting to target people who are most likely to be interested in their advert.
• Realise that they are in fact giving up their brand. They no longer own it, their friends on the social network now does. They can comment (good or bad) on their products and service.

Creating a facebook page

Create a facebook Page

A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with facebook users. Create one in a few minutes with a simple interface.

See the facebook page product guide from facebook for more information

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages#/advertising/FacebookPagesProductGuide.pdf

6 Steps to Social Media Success

1) Create a digital plan

The website should not be considered separate to your blog and your facebook page considered to be separate to your twitter account. The objective is to work alongside your current web developer, and SEO specialist in order for SMM to be an integral part of your online strategy.

2) Observe and create a customer map

Immerse yourselves into the social media and the blogosphere to understand the most influential places within the social web. What are the largest communities? What are they talking about? What is the relevant content? What is being said about the industry and key competitors. Who is creating the most buzz? You need to:

- Looks who’s talking… What is being talked about in the digital world about your industry? Here at the observation stage you will get a handle on the landscape.

- Understand / create a business goal… Within this first step of marketing to the social web, there are a number of research guides that a company should establish:

• Identify and prioritise the company’s needs and goals
• Important dates that will determine when in-market activities will start
• Target audience definitions – whom are we most interested in getting a point of view from?
• Top competitors
• Best practice comparisons – which competitors within the industry are using the digital channels to their advantage
• Keywords for searching the Web

- Define the market and speak their language… Whose point of view is most important to your business? What customer group is your most immediate focus? We can define the target audience by behaviour, demographics, topical interests, or whatever is relevant to the business goal. Look at other products and service which are in a related field or relevant to your business goals.

- Look for best practice examples… Given your business goal and target market, you will want to look at competitive websites with an eye toward identifying best practices in managing digital conversations.

- Select key words and begin to search… Select 10-15 key words, these are the search terms that lead us to blogs, news sites, and communities that are discussing, mentioning, or rating the topics that concern you the most.

3) Evaluate Online Conduit Strategies and create a presence

Who are your customers, where do they hang out lets hang out with them. Research the top blogs, reputation aggregators (Yahoo!, Google, TripAdvisor for example), e-communities, and social networks.

4) Populate with ‘sticky’ and engaging content…

Create a community full of content that will satisfy the community examples are use of photos, videos, chat articles etc… Remember solve problems!

5) Recruit community members

Once people have been recruited to one or more communities, they tend to become impervious to further solicitation through traditional media. Use multiple methods to recruit community members. You can create lifetime customers through twitter, facebook as an example to start offering discounts and special offers and services to fans. A good starting place is to think about the reasons why people join online communities at all. There are a number of reasons to consider:

• Meet people. 78% of people who visit online communities join them to communicate with others
• Entertain themselves. Another 47% join to find entertaining content
• Learn something new. Some 38% join because they want to obtain information about topics that hold particular interest to them
• Influence others. 23% join to express their opinions in a forum where their ideas can be discussed

N.B. These add up to more than 100% because some people participate for two or more reasons.

- Send out invites… With these four reasons in mind, we can then craft an approach to recruiting members to your community. Also consider facebook adverts to boost membership within the first 2 months (once you have created ‘sticky’ content)

- Create community feeling

- Build on existing sites and communities… Use existing communities to add more appeal to the work you are doing within your own SMM plan.

6) Engage communities in conversation

Use the tools available to you within the social media sphere to engage communities in conversation. Use relevant material such as, photos, articles, video footage, blogs, twitter posts to engage the community and start a conversation. Encourage visitors to the site to post their images / comment / start a dialogue start a competition for example best wildlife / action / family photo wins a prize. Give prizes away to winner give discounts / free trials / 1hours consultancy etc to all entrants.

NHS Marketing Survey - Part One

Thanks to those that participated in the study, the www.nhsmarketing.co.uk marketing survey data is in.

The data can be downloaded as a PDF here.

This is a summary of responses collated from 28 respondents across 25 PCTs, 2 Mental Health Trusts and 1 Acute Trust.

The report displays data on marketing trends and evaluations of promotional techniques applied for external and internal communications. The final part of the report lists some qualitative comments made by respondents, which we feel brings up some very interesting issues.

Our intention is to generate interpretations in June and July 2009, which shall be communicated via www.nhsmarketing.co.uk

Of course, with marketing and communications being such as vast area this report merely scratched the surface on a few issues, mainly around promotion. Over the next 6 months we shall be working with partners to further explore some of the more interesting aspects of the study.

Thank you again to all participants and to those of you interested in the findings from this report.

More information is to follow.

NHS Membership Conference

NHS Hull are presenting a conference aimed at helping Chief Executives and senior managers of NHS Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to implement their own membership schemes.

The inaugural NHS Membership Conference is being presented by NHS Hull at the Village Hotel, Hessle, East Yorkshire on Tuesday 9th June.

The theme of the conference is the membership model within a PCT; exploring the impact and development of a membership scheme for people living and accessing local healthcare service.

NHS Hull’s Membership Scheme recently reached a milestone by recruiting over 5,000 members, making them the first PCT in the UK to do so.

The conference issponsored by NHS and marketing agency, eskimosoup.

Speakers represent organisations including: NHS Hull Engagement Team, the NHS Centre for Involvement, Humber Mental Health, and Hull and East Yorkshire Acute Trust.

There will also be keynote address from Mark Britnell, Director-General for Commissioning & System Management for the NHS, England. He will discuss how membership schemes and commissioning can work together to help achieve the NHS goal of World Class Commissioning.

Chris Middleton, Managing Director of eskimosoup said: “We are really proud to be the main sponsor of the conference. We’ve been fortunate to work with NHS Hull as they recruit and engage with their members. Our team see this as an opportunity to prove that we understand how we can really add value to other PCTs embarking on the membership process for the first time.”

eskimosoup are a part of the Ludo Studio group of companies, and have a portfolio of public sector projects in design, web development, and social marketing. The company have also worked closely with NHS Stoke for whom they have developed an online NHS member engagement system.

eskimosoup have developed a website at www.nhsmembershiphull.co.uk which provides additional information about the conference. Places at the conference cost £100, with registration available via the website.

Following the conference the website will be redeveloped to host information and assets, ensuring it is a valuable resource for anyone who has an involvement in membership schemes.

Useful Links

Conference Website www.nhsmembershiphull.co.uk

eskimosoup www.eskimosoup.co.uk

NHS Hull www.hullpct.nhs.uk

Social marketing case studies

I’ll keep this brief, as essentially I’m directing you to another organisation’s work.

In the unlikely event that you work within the area of social marketing and haven’t already used the National Centre for Social Marketing website, you really should check it out.

Over the past few weeks, they’ve added to the site the “first collection of fully-researched case studies to show that social marketing works!”

The "ShowCase" section features successful UK and International programmes, which have used social marketing techniques to achieve behavioural changes. This can be accessed here:

http://thensmc.com/resources/showcase/case-studies-home.html

At one level the value here is in idea generation for key issues such as exercise, alcohol, sexual health, smoking, employment and others.

At another level, this really does show, as it claims, “how social marketing works”.

In a recent meeting I attended with the Chief Executive, Chair and Assistant Director of Public Health at a PCT in the UK, we were discussing some radical innovative social marketing approaches and needed to source some related case studies to give some reassurance that our campaign ideas had substance to them. We were able to source this information, though it did take some digging around.

For NHS employees, external consultants and marketing companies, this provides an easily accessible overview of insights, challenges and critically evidence of sustainable results.

As I say, if it’s relevant to your job role, you really should check this out for regular updates:

http://thensmc.com/resources/showcase/case-studies-home.html

NHS Marketing Survey

We would like to invite those working within marketing-related roles to participate in the http://www.nhsmarketing.co.uk marketing communications survey.

The survey aims to gain an understanding of the levels of adoption and effectiveness of a number of marketing communications methods, as well as trends and priorities amongst an evolving NHS.

It should take less than 4 minutes to complete.

Survey participants shall be given a preview of the report findings and interpretations in full, before an executive summary version is published on this blog.

Those that complete the survey shall be entered into a prize draw. One randomly selected participant will win a night at the movies for two with Odeon cinema vouchers.

The closing date for completion of the survey is Friday 8th May.

We hope very much that you wish to give your thoughts and opinions on marketing communications throughout the NHS and are able to share in our findings to help you understand the context of your role within your organisation.

Follow link to compete the survey:

http://nhsmarketing.co.uk/nhs_communications_survey.htm

Thank you for your time.