Digital Strategy By Michael G. Cohen » Digital Business & Marketing

How To Keep A Contest Audience Engaged On Facebook

Michael — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:35:52 +0000

So, your Facebook contest was wildly successful. Congratulations! You have tons of new fans, a fresh audience for your product or service, thousands of potential leads—now what? After the contest wraps up, how do you keep all those folks coming back?The real challenge of running a Facebook contest isn’t handling the logistics of the contest itself, but rather, figuring out how to maintain a connection with all those Facebook followers once the hoopla dies down. Ideally, you want to make your Facebook page so chock full of relevant, entertaining or compelling information that it becomes worth your follower’s while to return again and again—whether or not you offer them an actual incentive to do so.

Providing that kind of value to your Facebook fans can be achieved using a variety of strategies. Here are a few of my favorites…

Start a Conversation - Ask your Facebook fans what they think—of your company, of your product, of your latest advertisement—whatever! Encourage them to share their thoughts and opinions openly, and respond to as many as you can. Foster an atmosphere of honesty and mutual respect by handling criticisms with grace.

Share Tips - Give your Facebook followers information they can put to good use. Share tips on using your product more effectively. Point out features they may have overlooked. Advise them on how to get the most from your service. It will keep them coming back for more.

Host a Poll - Opinion polls are fun for Facebookers and pretty darn interesting for those of us in the back office. While they may not be scientific, Facebook polls offer an instant picture of how your followers feel about a particular issue. It’s a great opportunity to capture your audience’s attention and gain some valuable insight for your marketing team as well. Polls are also inherently interactive so encourage comments with votes and you’ll undoubtedly increase the chance that your polls show up in user feeds.

Show Your Human Side - People love to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Show them. Highlight your outstanding employees, post pictures of the firm’s holiday party, provide a of video-tour of the home office—let your followers get to know the people behind the products they’ve purchased.

Say Thanks - The success or failure of your business lies in the hands of your customers. Make it a point to say thank you. Post a personal message from the CEO. Showcase a “Customer of the Month.” Make it clear that you appreciate every single one of your customers and treat your Facebook followers accordingly.

A Facebook contest is a great way to get people in the door but keeping them around requires that you spend time and effort on the post contest content.

What are some of the best ways that you have seen to keep an audience engaged after bringing them in through a Facebook contest?

Creating A Content Marketing Culture

Michael — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:39:19 +0000

It’s easy to understand the logic behind content marketing—that establishing yourself as a thought leader will build your brand and generate leads. But it’s one thing to appreciate the idea; it’s another to actually create a content marketing culture in a company to enable successful execution of the strategy.

The Content Challenge

Content marketing can take many forms—blogs, white papers, email newsletters, social media postings, You Tube videos, personal appearances, self-published print magazines, and so on. But where does all this content come from? According to a recent survey, this is clearly the biggest problem with implementation—with respondents saying that their greatest content marketing challenges are producing engaging content (36%), producing enough content (21%), and budget to produce content (20%).

Making It Work

The most important aspect of content marketing success is making it a fundamental part of your company’s operations. It can’t be an afterthought if it’s going to pay off. - Mashable.com reports on three success stories here.

The following steps can help you generate content and successfully implement a content marketing strategy:

Have strong upper management support. Management-driven support (e.g., job descriptions, financial incentives, awards, visible enthusiasm) is essential.

Convince employees of the value. Tying content marketing to the personal benefit of all stakeholders is the surest way to get participation.

Provide adequate collaboration support. Most of the content experts in your company are probably not skilled in writing, editing, video production, printing, social media, etc. You need to have employees, resources, and processes that content experts can use to turn their knowledge into useful, publishable material.

Keep control of your brand. You don’t want people producing content that’s not consistent with your branding. Provide editorial guidelines and practical brand-building suggestions.

Develop meaningful metrics to track success. Nothing encourages buy-in more than demonstrable results. Measurement also helps to justify content marketing costs and indicate necessary adjustments.

Include mechanisms for customer input. Content marketing works best when it’s interactive—drawing potential customers into a relationship with your company.

Reuse existing content. You can alleviate the content-supply problem by putting existing material to new uses. Often, it only takes a little modification.

Stay informed. The Web is full of information on content marketing, such as The Institute for Content Marketing’s 10 essential content marketing templates and frequent articles on sites such as techcrunch.com. Executives and marketers should stay on top of content marketing trends and strategies.

As stated extremely well in “Content Rules” you need to speak to your customers and prospects in a way that makes them appreciate your expertise and tells them about the benefits of your products/services not simply the features.

“The inherent tension in marketing is that companies always want to talk about themselves and what their products or services can do. Everyone else meanwhile, only wants to know what those products or services can do for them.”

Good content does not just appear, rather you need to work at it and make it part of the culture of your organization. So start small but ramp up quickly because content based marketing will not only be a key part of your inbound strategy but should be key to generating leads and sales opportunities.

Using Triggered Email for Marketing Success

Michael — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:32:54 +0000

Triggered Emails, often called Drip Campaigns or Autoresponders, are a more personalized type of email marketing. Triggered Email Campaigns are messages that are much more personalized than email tactics because they are started by a specific event initiated by the web visitor.While a usual email marketing campaign includes a single message that is sent to a group at the same time. With triggered emailing, prospects receive a different message at a different time based on the actions they took on your website. This makes the emails more personal, relevant and more timely.With a little more planning and research, Triggered Email Campaigns help you to stay in touch with your website prospects and lead them down the sales funnel.By taking some time to layout your sales funnel and analyze actions on your website and creating different emails streams (multiple emails on a specific cadence or with decision trees involved) based on different actions you want the prospects to take.Goals of Drip Campaigns

Best practices for the most successful triggered email marketing campaigns are of course specific to your business but below are a few thoughts on how you can use triggered emails to grow your marketing reach. Based on your specific goal, you may choose to employ these or adjust them slightly based on your needs and audience.

Turn Visitors Into Buyers & Recover Abandoned Carts

A web visitor may give up their email information but then not take any real action on your website, in this case you can have a set message that welcomes them to your site, helps them navigate and gives them information about your company and your best-selling products and services.
When a prospect puts items in the shopping cart and then never checks out, this is an ideal time to engage through a triggered response. Send a friendly and personalized email to bring them back and finish their order. If they do not respond to that initial email don’t stop there, have a triggered stream approach which shoots off another email 5 days later but this time with a coupon or some other incentive.
After an order is complete, the upsell opportunities are endless. You can suggest their next order based on past purchases or even use the social data you have from Facebook to suggest products that their friends are buying. Amazon is a company that is excellent at this. They do not see your purchase as the end of a transaction, rather the beginning of the sales relationship.

Encourage Social Participation

In each of your triggered communications you should make it easy for people to ‘Like’ you on Facebook or ‘Follow’ you on Twitter. In doing so you can then add these channels to their customer/prospect profile and eventually even ask them if they prefer to be contacted by email or through Facebook.

Qualify and Score Leads

By allowing a customer/prospect’s interactions with your website to be the start of the communication stream you will be sending messages that should resonate with your audience and be seen as timely.
From there, you can use these triggered emails and a customer or prospect’s interaction with both your email and the links contained with in it to continue to score that person’s sales readiness.

Ensure your messages are timely and relevant

By using a trigger message based on the “digital body language” of a customer or prospect and is sent only based on actions (or inaction) that they take you should be ahead of the curve when it comes to the timeliness of your email.
Combining the timeliness of your email with what you already know about that customer or prospect (use a good integrated CRM) will further allow you to ensure that your message seems personalized and contains information of relevance to the receiver.
Finally, ensure that you have decision trees and ways to trigger alternative streams of emails based on the actions that your receivers take both with the triggered email and your website.

Triggered emails are a key part of marketing automation and are worth spending time understanding and mapping to your lead generation or sales process. Of course they require a lot of content be created but at the end of the day a properly planned set of triggered emails can really grow your relationship and chance for sales by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Facebook Connect vs. Traditional Logins

Michael — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:30:40 +0000

In a recent survey by the market research firm, Blue Research, nearly half of those surveyed (41 percent) said they would prefer using a social login such as Facebook Connect rather than registering at each individual website.

The survey also found that 77 percent believe it’s a good idea to offer social logins as a registration alternative, even if they might not use social logins themselves.

This data suggests that Facebook Connect usage is likely to continue growing. But is it the right CRM strategy? How does it compare to traditional website logins?

EASE OF REGISTRATION

Facebook Connect’s obvious selling point is convenience.
And that’s by no means a small issue. The survey (conducted for Janrain, a provider of user management platforms for social media) found that 86 percent were bothered by the need to create new accounts at individual websites. Some further quick hit stats from the same survey:

54% noted they would probably leave the site and not return
26% said they would go to a different site if possible
6% would simply leave and avoid the site in the future

EASE OF USE – FORGOTTEN PASSWORDS

A full 90 percent (up from 45% in 2010) said they would leave a website before taking the time to retrieve forgotten login details. Facebook Connect ensures that customers will never forgo a site because they can’t remember their user name or password. They won’t even have to think about it.

EXPOSURE

Facebook Connect allows companies to custom-design their sites to spread their social media presence. Users can easily share “Likes” and recent activity on a site with their friends—building a company’s brand as they do. Traditional website registrations provide nothing comparable in terms of social media marketing.

THE TRUST ISSUE

On its permissions screen, Facebook Connect allows users to manage what information is shared, but some users remain wary of their privacy.

This situation actually presents an opportunity for a company to build trust by being completely transparent. Along with the Facebook permissions, a company-specific page (a topic – “Creating trust with Facebook connect” I wrote about earlier) can be included to explain:

What information will be gathered
How it will be used
How it will benefit people to share this information.

But it’s still important to provide a traditional option. There are people who will be turned off if they have no choice but Facebook to log in.

QUALITY OF INFORMATION

Facebook Connect can provide valuable customer information that probably wouldn’t be obtained with an individual site registration. On the other hand, Facebook Connect won’t gather information specific to a company—information that may be critical to marketing and customer management. There are solutions—such as welcome emails that encourage further sharing of information—but Facebook Connect can’t directly replace the detail of individual registrations.

It is the additional information that will help you continually personalize your marketing but combined with a good CRM product and some marketing automation software (with dynamic forms), Facebook Connect can be a really strong way to encourage registration at your site.

SUMMARY

While Facebook Connect is not the only social sign-on service, it should be where you start. Then poll your audience and find out if there is another service that they would also like to have as an option. Nobody is restricting you from also using Google or Twitter, it is just with 800 million Facebook members, Connect will probably suffice for most people.

Creating Trust with Facebook Connect

Michael — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:05 +0000

I recently wrote about the amount of information that one can gather about users who register for or become members of your website using Facebook Connect. In continuing to read and contemplate writing on the subject I came across a nice article by Augie Ray in CRM magazine. Augie’s article points out that the majority of companies who are using Facebook Connect to allow consumers to connect to their website are doing so without telling the customer what information they are sharing or how the company will use it.

Customers are becoming wary and savvy about the fact that while connecting to a site using their Facebook ID may be high on the convenience side, they may also be unwittingly sharing more personal information and access to their data with that particular company than they would have if they would have signed up in a traditional manner. In a time where Social CRM is about as hot as any area of social software and where companies are beginning to want to capture and utilize the information available about customers and prospects on social networks it is amazing to me that so many companies would rely on Facebook to communicate what information is being shared through Facebook Connect. Let me explain…

Facebook Connect is a wonderful way to lower the barriers and gate to having people become a member of your website. With well over 600 Million members there is little chance someone who wishes to use your website will not have a Facebook ID. In using Facebook Connect as a signup/signon method for your site by default you get access to a bevy of user information (see the image below) but will actually not have requested permission to contact the user or post to their wall etc…For each of those you will need to request special permission.

While the majority of web users used to just click the “Allow” button and were instantly connected to your site, the amount of privacy concerns specifically surrounding Facebook has made more and more users take a close look at just what personal information they are now allowing the website/company access to by using Facebook as their sign-up/sign-on method.

It is at this extremely critical stage – the point at which you the company are asking the user to trust you and give up their personal information – that I feel companies are really falling down on. In the vast majority of Facebook Connect examples that I’ve seen or used the website/company has just used the default “Request for Permission” dialogue box that Facebook has provided without realizing that at this critical stage of creating trust the company itself could create that feeling and sense of security with just a little transparency.

Yes Facebook’s “Request for Permission” dialogue box is familiar looking to all by now and yes it does give the user details about what personal information and privileges are being shared with the company, but in reality it is nothing more than a blanket statement of information that the company now has access to without any indication as to how or why they will use that information.

In an era where customers want to purchase from and deal with companies that they trust and believe are transparent, replacing the default Facebook “Request for Permission” dialogue with one that actually speaks to the information your company is gathering and how you plan on using it is a tremendous way to create a sense of security, transparency and ultimately trust between the consumer and your brand. Are you gathering the information about a customer’s likes and dislikes from their profile? If so, why are you harvesting the information? What is in it for the consumer? Will you ever sell the customer’s data? Can they revoke access at any time?

While not every customer will care to have all these questions answered each time they sign up for a website, more and more consumers are becoming tuned into the fact that are allowing companies unfettered access to information that may really offer them no discernable benefit when using the website. When you combine this ever growing awareness with the fact that so few companies are actually taking the time to be transparent in the “Request for Permission” stage there exists a real opportunity for your company/brand to set itself apart and be seen as a brand that sits high on the trust/transparency scale for consumers.

The shining example of a company that continues to dominate when it comes to customer loyalty and trust is Amazon and their Facebook Connect Request for Permission dialogue box is no different. Rather than simply rely on Facebook to communicate to consumers what information they were sharing and how Amazon would use it, Amazon has created their own “Connect Amazon and Facebook” page that pops up before (yes an extra pop-up but a worthwhile one) the Facebook Request for Permission and gives a complete rundown not only on what how Amazon will use the user information (while spinning the benefits to the user) but also how they explicitly will not use the information supplied. While there is already a high trust factor for a brand like Amazon, that was certainly not always the case and it is in taking the extra steps for transparency and trust (like this one) that have built the trusted company reputation that Amazon has. Whether your company is a 2 man start-up or has offices around the globe you can take a page from trust leader Amazon’s playbook and instantly create a feeling of trust/transparency when asking people to share their personal information with your brand via Facebook Connect.

What are you doing to create trust with your customers? What other brands can be held up as examples of how to create transparency/trust? What brands should be examples of how to lose that trust?